“Are you great?” she sniffled.
“What?”
Freida pointed at The Hovel. “I– I meant, were you great. In there. Onstage. Were you great?”
“No,” said Jeremy. His voice was hard. “I sucked.”
As he said this, Jeremy felt a chill inside himself. It was a cold, new rage of some sort. It was painful, but somehow good. It made him feel capable of startling feats, like bludgeoning his grandfather.
“I’m Jeremy Jax,” said Jeremy. He was practically shaking. “I’m terrible.”
Freida shivered. She wiped her face, took the hand of the furious young man.
“I’m Freida,” she said. “Come on.”
They went to Freida’s dorm room. In what seemed an implicit, mutually understood gesture, Jeremy removed Freida’s clothes. He did so violently, as Freida expected. Then they lay down.
Jeremy stared deep into Freida’s eyes as they screwed. He wielded his body into hers, taking a certain vengeance on the night. Freida made awful noises that weren’t so different from the awful noises she’d made at The Hovel. When it was over, they lay there. Jeremy’s hands shook at his sides. Freida’s eyes were closed. Jeremy tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t. So he got up, dressed, and left.
~
When he was twenty-three, Jeremy Jax returned to Manhattan. He had, by that time, a degree in Russian literature, a head of graying hair, and an Upper West Side apartment. He also had a job as assistant to the director of the Lucas, a theater on 51st Street that he admired for its history.
The Lucas was a dying theater. It had ruled Broadway in the 1930s, staging the world premieres of several famous productions, including Hunter Frank’s Killing Me Lately and Dazzle MacIntyre’s Eight Boxes. These plays and the Lucas itself had been renowned for their raw, aggressive candor. Killing Me Lately, in fact, had been investigated by the New York City Police Department in 1938 because the character of the murder victim was played by a different actor every night, after which that actor vanished from the cast. The owner of the Lucas at the time, Sebastian Hye, claimed it was merely a gimmick to fascinate the bloodthirsty. New Yorkers, of course, took the bait and bought tickets in droves.
By the early 1990s, when Jeremy Jax started work there, the Lucas had fallen from the grace of its early decades. The physical plant was in disrepair. The black plush seats needed reupholstering and the ceiling was full of echoes. Also, Michael Hye, the current owner and director of the Lucas, no longer wanted to produce sensationalist, frightening plays.
“Satire, fine,” said Michael. “Irony, great. But no existentialism. No amorality. No ennui.”
Michael was in his office, speaking on the phone to the playwright of the Lucas’ latest show. Jeremy Jax sat in his cubicle outside Michael’s office, eavesdropping.
“Now then,” said Michael, “there are flaws in Of Mice and Mice.”
Jeremy sighed. Of Mice and Mice, the Lucas’ new show, was scheduled to open in one month. It was a departure from traditional Lucas fare. It was a play in which all of the actors were dressed as giant mice.
“Act one is fine,” said Michael. “It’s act two. What’s driving the mice in act two?”
Jeremy sighed again. Since its birth, the Lucas had been owned by the Hyes, a famous Manhattan theater family. The Hyes had always served as the producers and directors of the shows, and sometimes even as the editors of the playwrights. It was an unusual relationship, but Lucas Hye, who founded the theater in 1890, had been unusually wealthy and could afford to be overbearing. The contemporary Hyes could afford it, too.
“Fine,” said Michael Hye into the phone. “I want the revised script by tomorrow.” The phone clicked.
Jeremy sighed one final time.
“I heard that,” called Michael. “What’s your problem?”
“Nothing,” muttered Jeremy.
Michael appeared in the doorway. He was six feet tall, like Jeremy, but pudgier and fifty years old. He had muttonchops and halitosis.
“Let’s hear it, Jax,” said Michael.
Jeremy had no love for Michael. However, Michael gave Jeremy good money, and decent hours, and when Jeremy sat in on rehearsals, Michael often asked him what he thought.
“It just sounds,” said Jeremy, “like you’re trying to make Of Mice and Mice funny, and it’s not supposed to be funny.”
“Question,” said Michael. “Is Jeremy Jax the expert on funny?”
“No,” said Jeremy.
“Question,” said Michael. “Was Ionesco’s Rhinoceros funny?”
“Well,” began Jeremy.
“No,” insisted Michael. “I saw it in London in seventy-nine. There were twenty people on that stage dressed as rhinoceroses and there wasn’t a chuckle in the house.” Michael put his hands to his hips. “The mice aren’t funny. The mice are dire.”
“Whatever,” said Jeremy. “Forget I mentioned it.”
In college, after his disastrous audition, Jeremy had turned his back on comedy. He found a home in Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. Russian writers, Jeremy felt, understood melancholy. They could be wry, but they believed in the Devil, and you didn’t have to like black clothes or coffee to get their darkness. In what he considered a kindred Russian spirit, Jeremy had embraced the darkness he’d discovered in himself during that night years ago, his one night with Freida.
They’d never had a relationship, Jeremy and Freida. They’d come together once, as failures, and fucked each other as failures, and avoided each other thereafter. Jeremy remembered Freida as a ragged, tragic figure, like a doomed Karamazov or a Faust. He thought of her sometimes after work when he walked down Broadway to Cherrywood’s Lounge, his late grandfather’s haunt.
Jeremy drank Cutty Sark at Cherrywood’s, sitting at the bar, glaring at the stand-up comedians who tried to take Robby Jax’s place on the stage. The comedians were male, in their mid-thirties, with thinning hair and decent suits. They rolled their eyes and quibbled about women.
“Comedians aren’t men,” said Jeremy Jax. He was speaking to his old Hobart roommate, Patrick Rigg. Patrick was on Wall Street now. He was famous for his handsome bones, and he carried a gun.
“Russians are men,” said Jeremy.
Patrick shrugged.
“Look at this guy.” Jeremy nodded toward the stage, where the comedian was making baby sounds in the microphone.
“He’s doing a bit about dating,” explained Patrick.
Jeremy sucked ice and Scotch. He sucked till the cold hurt his teeth.
“He’s mocking idyllic romance,” said Patrick.
Russians, thought Jeremy, do not do bits.
It was on an ordinary Wednesday that Jeremy Jax became Fourth Angry Mouse. It happened quickly, and if Jeremy had had time to consult the darkness within him, he probably would have refused the role. But he was groggy from lunch when Michael Hye ran into the office.
“Call an ambulance,” panted Michael. “Fourth Angry Mouse is down. Unconscious.”
“What happened?” said Jeremy.
Michael shook his head. “He was berating First Kindly Mouse, and he collapsed. Hyperventilated or something.”
Of Mice and Mice had eight characters, four Kindly Mice and four Angry Mice. All eight actors wore almost identical mouse outfits, but the mice were distinguishable by the colors of their trousers and their habits of movement. Second Kindly Mouse, for instance, was partial to softshoe. Third Angry Mouse rode other mice piggyback.
It turned out that things were serious. Fourth Angry Mouse, a habitual smoker, had suffered a collapsed lung.
“Jeremy.” Michael pulled Jeremy into the office. It was four o’clock, still Wednesday. The ambulance had come and gone.