“I am honored,” she said.
“Over here.” He motioned her to the front table. His eyes both charming and mad. “Sit here.”
Before her sat a beautiful base of polished wood, and balanced across the top was a brass-looking cylinder with two mismatched ends, one jutting out like the wide barrel of a pistol, and the other squat and mechanical. A masterwork of sculpture. “This is your phonograph?” she asked with awe in her voice.
He merely smiled, then touched his bent fingers to the apparatus and worked the small machinery. He looked up at the ceiling while his recorded voice, distant and mangled, was heard singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” through the open-mouth cone.
Sarah let out a laugh. A glorious freeing laugh from all the pressures and expectations and loneliness that had accompanied her magnifying glass tour. Tears formed in her eyes as she felt the beauty and imagination of possibility that was singing to her in a shaky off-key voice. It was all she could do not to hug him. “Thank you,” she said, once the song had ended. And never before in her life had the words innately carried the gratitude that their true meaning intended.
“Now may I ask a favor of you?” His voice had the quivery quality of the recording. He looked down at his brown shoes that tapped the floor. “Would you recite something from Hamlet for me?”
“It would be my honor.” She moved between the row of tables and stopped before the organ. She looked to her audience of one, a lone figure of appreciation with the mind of a thousand, and recited Hamlet’s soliloquy from the third act To be, or not to be and when she finished Be all my sins remember’d she stayed in character and then rerecited the speech in French, Etre ou ne pas être. When she finished she saw Edison’s eyes filled by tears—almost miraculously the same ones that had been in hers. He looked at her with a sadly joyous smile and nodded his head, as though it were a standing ovation.
She walked off her imaginary stage and they met in the middle of the room, joined by a passion that was not sexual, but rather of the beauty of dedication and belief. And he took both her hands and held them in honor, and she swore she felt the electricity that he had sent into those lightbulbs travel along every nerve ending in her body.
“I suppose that we should go back,” she said. “It is getting late, I’m sure.”
“My wife will keep them entertained. Unless you are getting tired. Two performances in one night. We should do three—and record the third. How about a monologue that combines English and French. Is that possible?”
“It is a long trip back to New York, right?”
“You would be lucky to be back at your hotel by midnight in this weather. You might as well stay and enjoy the evening. You are out here already.” He walked up to the organ and opened the seat. He removed a book of sheet music and then produced a small brown bag. The bench slammed shut as he walked back to the table where Sarah was waiting. He crinkled the top of the bag into a funnel and poured a fine white powder along the surface. “Have some so you can enjoy the rest of the night.” And together they both inhaled the cocaine, tasting the bittersweet powder on the backs of their tongues, before it clogged their throats and fully awakened them.
The hit freed Sarah like a claustrophobic from a closet. She felt her body lift from a solid form. Breath flowed through her mouth and straight through her pores, as though there were no need for lungs, but instead for a cleansing. And with that her chest turned hollow and light, her breasts inverting and disappearing until her essence of femininity had graciously stepped aside, liberated by a sexless purity. She realized how tight her body had been. Her neck muscles gripped in one last squeeze before fully releasing themselves. Her eyes felt softer, and the inside of her head buzzed in liberation, as though some other extra being had taken up residence there. And when she looked up at the ceiling, she swore that she saw the world-famous Divine Sarah Bernhardt floating freely, throwing back the occasional reassuring smile, letting her know that all was okay.
“What is it like,” Edison asked, “to be a woman playing Hamlet?”
“The theater, like much of the world, is obsessed with difference. No matter what the essence of the art is, the issue is always turned back to novice aesthetics. Can a woman play a man? Can an old woman play a young girl? Critics have the audacity to compare my Hamlet to Booth’s—bit by bit, male versus female—and he hasn’t played it for fifteen years. They would never have done that with another man. Art is always being judged without ever considering the art.”
“Even machinery must be critically interpreted, it appears. And most people seem unwilling to accept the unexpected.”
“Please.” She dropped her head back and laughed. “They are still talking about it. I have never seen anything like it. Face the truth. Everybody, whether they care to admit it or not, is sick and bored with the usual Booth Hamlet, played by both Edwin and his father before him. Strong, yet melancholy. Shy, but romantic. Gravely serious with every reaction. Hamlet was a boy, barely a man. And they played him as though he were weighted by the souls of a thousand lifetimes. I make him a boy. Impetuous. Curious. Give him some humor. I make him real.”
“What do you do to bring out the childishness?”
“Little things. When Polonius wants to sit beside me, I kick my feet up on the chair to keep him away. I don’t do the old school scooting away in gentle cowardice. This is now a deliberate boy. I run. I jump. I skip. I make even the most frightening moments for Hamlet filled with wonder.”
“Your Hamlet is happy?”
“Of course not. He is sad. It is tragic. But still he is impulsive, and reacts like a boy would. He plays at revenge. He does not mastermind it. He is a sad, sad boy. But he plays with every situation like a toy to try to make himself feel life. It is nuance that speaks loudest.”
The room carried a strange haze that discolored the black, only clearly visible in waving plumes across the electric lights.
Edison stared up at the ceiling. Smiling to himself, before drawing a stern but thoughtful expression. And though his skin was still taut from youth, his face looked old, as if the ghosts of wisdom and hardship had laid permanent rest. He was fragile and worn. Something that there is always beauty in. “This age of invention,” he began, “is not so much different. We take inanimate objects, and through manipulation create meaning. Right? We place a needle into a wax cylinder, and the friction that is created we accept as music. Or the incandescence of filaments and electricity as sunlight. We have to choose to believe our interpretations. Otherwise, there is only a needle grinding into wax.”