Then we went downstairs and Wong announced that dinner was ready, and it was a Szechuan shrimp dish with scallions and those little black peppers that it is a terrible idea to bite into. Wong’s shrimps had very little in common with the ones I had been feeding to our fish. He’s a fairly sensational cook, and never seems to make the same thing twice.
I stayed around long enough to win a few games of chess. Then I went downstairs and said polite things to Consuela and Carmelita and Maria and some other girls whose names I didn’t know, and let Juana the Madame pinch my cheek, which I wish she would stop doing, and then I started walking downtown.
The Cornelia Street Theater was located in a basement. You can probably guess what street it was on. There was a banner outside at street level announcing that they were doing Uncle Vanya, by Chekhov.
Maybe you know what the play is about. If not, I’m not going to be much help to you. I paid two dollars for a ticket and sat fairly close to the stage. (Actually, there were only about fifty seats in the house, so it wouldn’t have been possible to sit very far from the stage.) Maybe thirty of the fifty seats were empty. I sat and watched the play without paying any attention to it. I don’t know whether it was good or not. I just couldn’t concentrate. I would drift off into thought chains and just let my mind wander all over the place, and once in a while Kim Trelawney would appear on stage and I would take some time out to look at her, but she didn’t have many lines and never hung around long, and as soon as she went off I went off myself.
I guess the show must go on, although with this show I couldn’t quite see it. I mean, anybody could have played Kim’s part that night, for all she had to do up there. And it wasn’t as though an audience of thousands would have killed themselves if they didn’t see Uncle Vanya that night. The way she had acted at the funeral, obviously taking it all hard, I hadn’t really expected her to show up for the play.
There were two intermissions, and each of them drained a little of the audience away, so by the time the final curtain went down there were only about a dozen of us there to applaud, and not all of us did it very enthusiastically. The cast tried to take two bows, but by the time the curtain came up a second time everybody had already stopped applauding and people were on their way out of the theater. It was sort of sad.
I managed to get backstage and meet Kim. She blinked a little while I introduced myself, and when I said I was a friend of Melanie’s, she nodded in recognition. “I saw you at the funeral,” she said.
“I’d like to talk to you, if I could.”
“About Melanie?”
“Sort of.”
“I’ll meet you out front,” she said. “Just give me a few minutes.”
She took about four of them, and came out wearing jeans and a peasant blouse and carrying a canvas shoulder bag in red, white and blue. She suggested we have coffee at O’John’s, a little place on the corner of West 4th.
“Gordie’s going to meet me there in a few minutes,” she said. “He doesn’t like me walking home alone.”
We got a window table and ordered two cups of coffee. “Gordie’s a little overprotective,” she said. “Sometimes it bothers me. But sometimes I like it.”
“Was Gordie the fellow you were with this afternoon?”
“Yes.” She smiled suddenly, and instantly reminded me very much of Melanie, the way her entire face was so immediately transformed by her smile. “I haven’t known him very long,” she said, “and I don’t really know him very well. In certain ways, that is. He’s very different from the type of boy I usually go out with.”
“How?”
“Well, you know. He’s not educated; he dropped out of high school and went right to work on the docks. Sometimes I have the feeling that we don’t really have very much to talk about. And his ideas about women, I mean they’re very old-fashioned. He believes a woman’s place is in the home and everything, and he doesn’t really think very much of my being an actress. He’s proud when I get a part and stuff like that, but he thinks it’s just something for me to amuse myself with until we get married and start making babies.”
“And you don’t feel that way?”
She gnawed the tip of her index finger. “I don’t know exactly how I feel, Chip. From the time I was a little girl I wanted to be an actress. It was what I always wanted. After one semester of college I knew I had to get away from classrooms and spend all my time around theaters. But it’s so hard. You can’t imagine.”
“I guess it’s very hard to get started.”
“It’s almost impossible. You saw how many people we had in the theater tonight. Maybe thirty.”
“If that.”
“I know. It was closer to twenty, and most of them were friends who didn’t pay for their tickets. And the actors didn’t get paid anything, we’re all working for free in the hope that somebody important will see us on stage and have something else for us, and—”
She told me a lot more about what was wrong with trying to act for a living. And then she said, “Sometimes I think I should just forget the whole thing and marry Gordie. That’s what he wants me to do. It’s a temptation, you know. Just give it all up and have babies and enjoy life. Except I worry that I would wake up some day years from now and wonder what I had done with my life. It’s very confusing.”
She looked straight into my eyes during this last speech and I felt as though I could see clear through to the back of her head. I found it easy to understand why Gordie was overprotective. There was something about Kim that made you want to put your arms around her and tell her everything was going to be all right. Even if it wasn’t.
I was just about to reach across the table and take her hand when something changed on her face. She raised her eyes over my shoulder, then waved a hand. I turned, and of course it was good old Gordie.
He pulled a chair up and sat down. He did not seem overjoyed to see me there. (Which made it mutual, actually.) Kim introduced us, and I found out that he had a last name, McLeod. Then he found out that I was a friend of Melanie’s and some of the suspicion left his face. Not all of it, but some.
“You see the play?” I admitted that I had. “Saw it myself a couple of times. Rather catch a movie myself. All these people just talking back and forth. What did you think of Kim?”
“I thought she was very good,” I said.
“Yeah, only good thing about the play, far as I’m concerned. She’s very talented.”
I said she certainly was, or something equally significant.
“But I don’t like the people she has to hang around with. It’s a well-known fact they’re all fairies in that business. A well-known fact. Still in all, as a way for her to pass the time until she settles herself down—”
He went off on a speech that Gloria Steinem would not have enjoyed. I have to admit that I didn’t follow it too closely. It was already becoming clear to me that Gordie McLeod and I were never going to become best buddies. I was noting Kim’s reactions to what he was saying and trying to figure out just what it was about this ape that attracted her. I had no trouble figuring out what it was about her that appealed to him.
“Well,” he said, “it’s gettin’ to be about that time. Nice meetin’ you, guy.”
“There was something I wanted to discuss with Kim,” I said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“About Melanie,” Kim said.
He settled back in his chair. “Well, sure,” he said.
“It’s a little public here,” I said. “Could we go somewhere more private?”
“What for?”
“So that we could talk in private.”