There I was in this situation, standing near the corner of her desk, and although I remember standing there I also remember watching myself stand there, thinking about repetition, and death, and instead of doing something obvious, instead of yelling at her or attacking her or howling at her, the thing I felt like doing was to hold it all inside. To feel like howling and not. That’s what a serial killer would do, and that’s what I felt like doing, and I watched myself, very slowly, approach her. I was whispering something, not to her but to me, to the serial killer that Steve had morphed into, and although I was hiding it, a certain amount of havoc must have been seeping out. I must have looked as if I might break the civilized constraints of our little “audition” and do something crazy. I won’t go into what I was imagining doing to her but it was crazed and deranged and from her look I could see that she was actually frightened. Of me. And that’s when she told me she’d seen enough. “That’s great,” she said, and I looked away.
I was still standing by the corner of her desk. I was letting the anger, which had been liberating, dissipate.
“Very nice,” she said.
And it took a while. My heart, I realized, was still beating away, and it took a minute before it slowed down to normal and the regular everyday Steve came back into my body.
She nodded, said something like “Well, I’ll be keeping you in mind,” and when she stood up to shake my hand it wasn’t awkward, but there was still some lingering tension between us. Which was good for getting a job, but as I rode down the elevator, and as the lighted numbers above the door moved from right to left, I noticed that the part I’d been temporarily playing, just moments ago, didn’t seem to want to go away.
Brecht had begun writing his Life of Galileo during the rise of fascism, but I think the play, at least partly, refers to any ideology that tells people what they can and cannot be. And by ideology I mean especially the personal ideologies that we use to “believe in life” or “give meaning to life,” or make it possible to “be yourself.”
Brecht came to America around the time of the Second World War, when the United States, which had been basically an innocent country, found itself with an ideology. Suddenly American soldiers were passing out cigarettes to European orphans. Suddenly power had been transferred to a culture that wasn’t used to power, and didn’t have the experience of power, and to the émigrés it seemed like a possible utopia. At least it did to Brecht, who came to Los Angeles because of the safety and because of the climate, and also because of the movie business. He had friends in the movie business who kept telling him there was money to be made. But Brecht had seen enough repression in the world, and the ideology required to support that repression, and although the abundance of Southern California must have been intoxicating even to him, he knew that protest was necessary.
This was around the time the atomic bomb made its debut in Hiroshima, and as Brecht and Laughton worked together on the translation of Galileo they talked, in broken English, about theories of acting and theater, and also politics. Brecht tried to instill in Laughton the idea that repression demanded protest, and that acting could be a form of protest. And although Laughton respected Brecht, and although he was aware of repression and the falsity fostered by repression, whenever he tried to protest he got stuck. It always seemed to be a protest against himself. Even thinking about it made him anxious, and every so often he would say something like “Ich muss ein break getaken,” and shuffle over, past the grandfather clock, and sit on the white sofa. Brecht, in his journal, remembers him reposing, “legs crossed so that his Buddha-like tummy was visible.” I picture them in a large library, with a fireplace, a grand piano, cigar smoke swirling in the air, and Laughton declaiming the lines of Shakespeare’s not-quite-human Caliban.
You taught me language, and my profit on ’t
Is, I know how to curse.
One morning, while Jane and I were lying on her bed, in her room, in the morning light, Rex wagged his way into the room. We were relaxed and warm and wound around each other, and she kicked off the comforter. She got up, fed Rex, made coffee and toast and blueberries with yogurt, brought it to the bed on a wooden tray and we talked about where we wanted to go that day.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I’m still hungry,” she said.
It was after noon by the time we finally got up and made lunch.
I chopped watercress and she made an omelet, which ended up being more like scrambled eggs, and after we ate I was ready for a nap. She said she was ready for a nap, but she’d been neglecting Rex. Rex had been wagging his tail all morning and she felt guilty, so we leashed him up and headed for the park he loved. I loved it too. It was another cloudless day, and we took a different route than the last time, and this time we stopped at a playground area with swings and pull-up bars. We took off our shoes and she stepped on my cupped hands, reached the highest bar, and immediately began doing some Olympic routines. That’s what it seemed like to me. She was able to swing on the bar, building up enough momentum so that when she sailed off the bar she landed on her feet.
“Impressive.”
“I was a gymnast.”
“You’re tall for a little gymnast.”
“Little?”
“I thought gymnasts were little.”
She rolled up the cuffs of her cotton pants and did another trick, and this time when she landed I deducted points for her dismount. She said she’d nailed the dismount, and then she pushed me and I pushed her and we stayed in the sandpit, playing around the bars, and then we played a game in which I was supposed to catch her, which I did.
The effort of being Steve didn’t seem necessary anymore. It was happening on its own, and when she began swinging on the swing, I started pushing her, thinking the whole thing was very romantic, like a Watteau painting but without the greenery and the flowing petticoats.
“You’re a boy I knew in grade school,” she said.
“I remind you of someone.”
“No. At this moment, you are him.”
“Was he big?”
“You have an obsession with size, I think.”
“Do you picture him as an adult, or as a twelve-year-old?”
“You’re spoiling my reverie,” she said.
I liked that word, reverie. “You know what my reverie is?”
I paused to savor the air and the distant sounds of traffic. The metal swing was almost singing as she swung.
“This,” I said.
We put our shoes back on and walked up the grassy hill where she pointed out a Japanese garden with pools of water. There was a chain-link fence separating us from the camellias and cypress trees and pristine pine trees. Orange fish were swimming in the almost rippleless pools.