Over the years, as the magazine flourished, there were some infrequent letters exchanged between the two, as well as an occasional encounter at a party. Finally a letter came from Brodkey in which he proposed, for whatever reasons, that they might resume their friendship. Sonnenberg wrote back civilly that he preferred not to, he didn’t want to be in a state of watchful cordiality, he said.
The play of mine that originally brought us together eventually had a staging in an avant-garde theater converted from a church. The director was a bantam of a man with bold Celtic charm. John Beary was his name. His father had trained horses for Aly Khan, who in fact was Beary’s godfather, recalled as strolling through sunflecked mornings near the track, My Old Man mornings, in casual clothes, the kind one carries wood in, Levi’s and a worn sport-coat.
Beary was passionate, articulate, and somehow lonely, though he was married. Domesticity he described as “the other life — the child, home, all of that.” He meant it in contrast to life in the theater, art. I remember his stories which were the true pay for the years he had spent, his great love affair once with a leading actress. The night she played at the Abbey. The affair had passed its zenith, and at the reception she was with another man, a pathetic figure, someone to be detested, Beary said. They were bickering and suddenly she tired of it and left.
Beary followed her to her room. In the darkness she said only, “Well, then. You’ve come,” and heartened, he lay down beside her. In the midst of things the door flew open and in came the rival, his arms filled with bottles from the reception. He was drunk.
“Why don’t we have a drink?” he cried, standing there.
“Why don’t you throw that stuff right out the window?” Beary, sitting up, growled.
There was a pause and the man went to the window, pushed it open, and the bottles crashed in the street. Within minutes the hall porter was up, banging on the door. He threw them all out.
The theater is unto itself, artificial and grand, trailing a magnificent pedigree like a fur coat behind it on the ground, extravagance, pretension, little biting lives. Tyranny abounds. Beary, himself, was arbitrary in many of his actions, probably because he so rarely had the chance to be. One actress he chose on the spot, the audition having lasted less than a minute. “The role is yours,” he said grandly. I suspected it was because of her good looks. He was sure she could act.
The play, “the best thing you’ve ever done,” as I was told, was too ambitious, with some startling moments but weak in structure. It was called The Death Star and focused on the vain belief that the death of a legendary military figure, a repentant one, could still the human urge for war. Those days will return, it said, the chaos.
There were more than thirty roles, played by twenty actors, some talented, and Beary, in a state of nerves, alternately praised and nipped at them through the rehearsals. The stage manager, a cooperative girl, he had in tears. She seemed to thrive on it. Plainly, he knew more than I.
The evening of the first performance arrived. From the lighting booth I could see faces I knew pass below. In the crowded dressing room there was excitement. One of the actors, I noticed, a strange man with a hyphenated name, seemed almost drunk. Playwrights, I knew, often were. I drank nothing, however. It was too late for anything except resignation. I was fearful and attempting to be calm.
From the earliest moments, when the curtain was raised, I saw it was wrong. The mood in the theater is something one can feel like heat or cold. Everything that had gone before, the preparation, the belief, was suddenly of no importance — the play was like a ship put to sea; whatever mattered before did not matter now. Before the indifference of the audience, the many people seated and silent, the whole enterprise was transparent, as if x-rayed. My stomach was turning over. I was in literal pain. There was a moment at last when the play came to life, the attention rose to meet it, there was a swell, like being brought up by a wave. A powerful speech — Kevin McCarthy delivered it — closed the act.
I lay on the floor in a small upstairs room, alone in the dark, for fifteen minutes.
The second act was better. McCarthy, in his closing lines, was chilling, a glimpse of what might have been. The play had an epilogue. As it was being read, a lone remorseful figure appeared behind the speaker, head down, ashamed. It was the drunken actor.
I was too embarrassed to be seen afterwards. Finally I went down the back stairs. I was greeted by enthusiasm and beaming faces. They had loved it, the power, “I’d buy a ticket anytime.” I did not believe them. I was more inclined towards the comment of a friend that he had liked it better when he had read it. The two scouts from the Public Theater had left during intermission, along with a couple of black whores who had wandered in from the street, probably for warmth, and then sat bored. They were the hard-hearted audience I coveted.
Sonnenberg telephoned the next morning. “Well, how does it feel to be famous?” he asked. “All the actresses calling?”
“Not really.”
“How did you feel about the play?”
I said I thought it wasn’t too bad. How did he like it?
“I didn’t like it,” he said simply, “not at all. All the directorial choices were wrong, casting, staging, everything. It was much too slow and certain actors”—he named the girl Beary had instantly picked—“were hopeless.”
—
Sonnenberg’s illness, which proved terrible beyond description, had first showed itself in the most trivial way: the toe of a shoe caught for an instant in a sidewalk crack. I did not see that, but I watched the cane slowly become more than an item of dress and then change to two canes as their owner struggled to emerge from a taxi and shuffled slowly towards the door of a restaurant. Inside he fell across one of the tables. A waiter and people sitting nearby tried to help him to his feet but he grimly declined.
“Is it a matter of balance?” I asked when we had sat down.
“Yes, largely.”
“Do you have feeling down there?”
“Yes. It’s just that the nerves won’t control,” he said calmly.
It was multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacked the nerve sheathings. It progressed relentlessly. He lost the use of his hands. At the bottom of typed letters was a scrawl — he could barely sign his name. The pleasure of food was gone, so much of it had to do with the satisfaction of cutting, the holding of utensils, and so forth. He mentioned this at dinner at his apartment — more and more rarely did he go out — and, as if to prove it, spilled a glass of water over himself when he tried to drink. Pieces of food had fallen around his plate, dropped from dead fingers.
He appeared not to notice. His calm behavior, his lack of complaint, were a kind of scorn. He was proud of the torment, as if it were part of the price of the expensive clothes, the girls he had known, the exotic names. Stupidity and death must not alarm you, he seemed to say. The illness was a mark of superiority like his faint, forbearing smile. The useless fingers, the disobedient limbs, were a sign of aristocracy. We who did not have them were inferior.
Year by year it grew worse. The New Year’s birthday parties were abandoned. The magazine, in which I had been published a number of times, was gone. He was reduced to the inexhaustible, the life of the mind, but without relief. Memories, yes, but from the rest he was removed except as people came to tell him of it, the city that lay all around in dawn and darkness, the traffic floating at night on the streets below, the crowds, the avenues and shops, women with their daughters in department stores, long elegant noses, tumbling hair, the floor of cosmetic booths with scores of salesgirls, cheeks smoothed with color, white smocks, bright mouths, beckoning, counseling, smiling. He had known all this in the days when, as someone said, the life of reason was not in itself sufficient. Now he had stoicism, essential but useless. I think of the plea of Sonnenberg’s father when he was ill and dying, which echoed something my own father had said near the end. “If you have a son,” the old man said, “teach him to shoot.”