“You’re awake,” she said.
“Oh yeah. Courtesy of our friends the birds.”
“Who won’t have us missing a single moment of this exciting new day.”
“Not to mention Bat, who’s been in here at least twice already, demanding to know why his food’s not been replenished.”
“Or the pneumatic truck collecting curbside garbage.” Grunting and sucking air through pursed lips, slamming hands against wall and headboard, she did a great take on bad brakes, tailgates, whirring pickup motors.
“Ah, civilization.”
“Not just Twelfth Night and Faulkner, is it, Lew?”
“Or Ricki Lake.”
“Point taken.”
Then: “Got some good points there yourself.”
“Hard little buggers, aren’t they? Anytime I have my period I get horny-you know that, right?” Her free hand moved down, rested on my stomach. “Sleep okay?”
“Mostly. I had this dream that seemed to go on and on all night, though I’m sure it didn’t. Couldn’t have. We were getting ready for a trip, fitting things into the car. Two friends (in the dream I knew who they were, even if I’m clueless now) had these old coins with distinctive dates, dates that jumped out at you, nickels I think. They kept putting them down in front of us, wherever we were. We’d be drinking coffee, one of them would come along and slap down a nickel there between cups. Standing on queue at a movie premiere-you looked quite wonderful, by the way, wearing one of your crinkle skirts, low heels, a sleeveless sweater, long earrings-there they were again with the nickels.”
I turned towards her. We made necessary adjustments, tugged at covers.
“Damn cold, isn’t it?”
“Houses just aren’t built for it.”
“Neither are we.”
We lay there quietly for a time.
“Play going okay?”
“Way better than I have any right to expect. Turned into something of a marvel last night, actually. Everyone felt it at the same time. Suddenly the play wasn’t us: we were the play.”
“That’s good.”
“It’s what you work for. You never know if it’s going to happen.” Moments later she added: “Most of the time it doesn’t.”
Doors slammed shut and dogs barked outside. A car alarm racketed on. Cans and bottles rang together as a neighbor emptied trash. From open windows in a third-floor apartment across the street, Mahler fought his way up through strings and brass to a deafening crescendo.
“Time for us to put the nickel down, Lew?”
Whatever the nickel was.
Chapter Seventeen
Obviously this man has come to and found himself onstage. He looks about him, off to the wings, out at the audience. Then back to the wings, where a prompter reads him a line. He repeats it. The stage crew comes on and begins carrying off parts of the set, a chair, a screen, a table, as he speaks, looking back and forth from prompter to audience. Then a second person steps out and begins speaking. Their stories, we soon realize, interweave. And now there’s a third….
Something familiar, too, in what they’re saying.
I recognize lines from Suddenly Last Summer just as Deborah leans towards me to whisper: Ionesco. The crew reappears, lugging yet another character in its wake, and goes back offstage bearing further bits and pieces of the set, a bookcase, a teapot, leaving this new character behind. Like the first, he looks about, disoriented. Then lines of Sartre spring from his lips, not The Flies, I think, something a bit more obscure.
Moliere, O’Neill, Ben Jonson and Vian soon follow.
Gradually we come to realize that these are characters left over, as it were, from other plays, secondary characters, supporting roles-all those to whom, in whose stage lives, nothing much happened.
Afterwards at a coffeehouse on Magazine, as I watched powdered sugar from beignets drift in a blizzard onto her dress and cafe au lait’s breath struggle up from the cup, Deborah was quiet.
“I miss it, Lew.”
“Theater, you mean.”
“It’s as though something’s been torn from me. As though there’s this huge vacant lot in the middle of my life, buildings all around.”
“So plant a garden. Take back the lot.”
“It can’t be that easy, can it, Lew?”
And of course it wasn’t. In the weeks following, Deborah began play after play, at length abandoning them all.
“It’s gone,” she said, weeping against me in the deep of night. “How do people live without passion, without that one bright blue light? How do they go on without something central in their life?”
We were agreed on the idiocy of good advice, that only a fool would give it, a greater fool accept it. That night, three in the morning with Deborah’s body shuddering against me and wind padding predatorily about outside, was no different.
“That’s what people do,” I said. “They go on.”
Chapter Eighteen
I wasn’t looking for him, you understand.
Long since an adult, he was equally capable of making his own choices and declining to make them; he’d never hedged at accepting the fallout from either. Nor could I plead to having had much impression or influence on his life, not having been around to offer understanding, a sympathetic ear, least of all an example. I knew something, myself, about not making choices.
So as I rummaged the city, touching down with beer-drinker fishermen at their ordained posts on the levee off Tchoupitoulas, benching myself to reminisce in a statue-guarded, pie-slice park on Magazine, prowling Decatur with its shoulder-narrow sidewalks and balconies like shrugs above, wading across river-wide Canal down Esplanade to the Faubourg Marigny and rising back up through the Quarter past Simple Suzies, Eds and Professor Bills, past lean-to missions with tureens of watery soup and hope, past the library and City Hall, Leidenheimer Bakery, wooden stoops and swayback cement stairways, shipwreck islands of storm-tossed furniture, cable spools and milk crates on the neutral ground, I wasn’t looking for my son.
For something within myself, rather. At some level that’s what all our searches are about, of course.
“Can’t help you much, Lew,” his mother said that morning when I called. “Far as I knew, everything was going well. Last heard from him-I’d have to check to be sure-four, five weeks back? One of those trademark postcards of his, where the message starts off in regular script and becomes ever more crabbed, final sentences squeezed in sideways at the margins or asterisked in between lines.”
“No sense of what was going on in his life?”
“You’re kidding, right? You know what those cards are like. Sometimes he’d touch down, sure. Bring up some play or movie or concert he’d seen, string together bits of overheard conversation, remark that both of you’d taken to hanging around the house too much. Mostly, though, he just wrote about what he saw at his job. People he got to know there, their stories, where they lived, how. Hang on, I’ve got to pull something out of the oven.” Two, three minutes later she was back. “Been a long time since we’ve talked, Lew.”
“True enough.”
“No reason for that, you know. You have my address, you could write from time to time, even do something outrageous like send the occasional Christmas or birthday card. Scrawl a satirical line or two in there if it made you feel better, whatever space’s left. A quote, maybe, something appropriately snarly. Swift, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Bernhard, like that. It’s always Serious Friday somewhere.”
Serious Fridays had begun as a joke when David and his friends were students, all of them casually bohemian. No television, parties, dumb movies or other mindless escapism allowed on Fridays, the screed read. Exalted conversation only. High-end jug wine. Smelly, mysterious cheese. Books tucked underarm, coolly they’d stroll towards bars and ethnic restaurants, skirling intellectual happy hours like bullfighter’s capes about them out there in a hot world.