Then again, few are as Machiavellian as I. The police, for lack of other evidence, have declared it a fire started by accident—with the file marked for the arson squad, in the event other questionable cases like this occur. In other words the Scottish verdict. It’s the end of that, but I keep my suspicions.
Meanwhile the obvious parts of the battle continue apace. The mayor’s party has started to do what is necessary to get a town referendum on the issue. If they get the referendum on the ballot (likely), and win it, then all our legal maneuvering will have been in vain.
I try to remain sanguine about it all. And I have assuaged my grief in the loss of Nadezhda by associating more with Fierce Doris. Yes, yes, just as you say, growing admiration and all that. She is still as hard as her bones, but she is sharp; and around here a little waspishness is not a bad thing. I have entertained her by taking her to see some of my more arcane pursuits, and behaving like a fool while engaged in them. Always my strong suit when it comes to pleasing people, as you know.
Doris responded in kind by taking me to see her new lab. Yes, this is the way her mind works. This was high entertainment. She has gotten a new position with a firm much like Avending, “but ahead in just the areas I’m most interested in.” So, I said, her great sacrifice in quitting Avending was actually naked self-interest? Turned out that way, she said happily. Her new employer is a company called SSlabs, and they are developing an array of materials for room temperature superconducting and other remarkable uses, by making new alloys that are combinations of ceramics and metals—those metals known as the rare earths or lanthanides, I quote for your benefit as I know you will be interested. What do you call it when it is partly ceramic and partly metal? “Structured slurries”—and thus the company name. Exact elements and amounts in these slurries are, of course, closely guarded industrial secrets. Great portions of the lab were closed to me, and really all I got to see was Doris’s office and a storage room, where she keeps rejected materials for use in her sculpting. Seeing the raw material of her art made me understand better what she had told me about allowing the shapes of the original objects to suggest the finished sculptures; the work is a kind of collaboration between her and the collective scientific/industrial enterprise of which she is a part. The artist in her stimulated by what the scientist in her reveals. Results are wonderful. I will enclose a photo of the piece she gave me, so you can see what I mean.
… Romance here has gone badly awry for my friend Kevin, alas; his beloved Ramona has returned to her ex the mayor, leaving Kevin disconsolate. I have seldom seen such unhappiness. To tell you the truth I didn’t think he had it in him, and it was hard to watch—somewhat like watching a wounded dog that cannot comprehend its agony.
Because of my own experience with E in the last year in Chicago, I felt that I knew what he was going through, and although I am not good at this kind of thing, I determined to help cheer him up. Besides, if I didn’t, it seemed uncertain that my house would ever become habitable. Work on it has slowed to a remarkable degree.
So I decided to take him to the theater. Catharsis, you know. Yes, I was wrong—there is theater in Orange County—I discovered it some weeks ago. A last survivor down in Costa Mesa, a tiny group working out of an old garage. It only holds fifty or sixty people, but they keep it filled.
Kevin had never seen a play performed—they just aren’t interested here! But he had heard of it, and I explained more of the concept to him on our way there. I even got a car, so we could arrive in clothes unsoaked by sweat. He was impressed.
The little company was doing Macbeth, but only by doubling and even tripling the parts. Kevin had heard the name, but was unfamiliar with the story. He was also unfamiliar with the concept of doubling, so that in the first two acts he was considerably confused, and kept leaning over to ask me why the witch was now a soldier, etc. etc.
But the way he fell into it! Oh Claire, I wish you could have seen it. This is a society of talkers, and Kevin is one of them; he understood the talkiness of the Elizabethans perfectly, the verbal culture, the notion of the soliloquy, the rambling on—it was like listening to Hank or Gabriela, it was perfectly natural to him.
And yet he had no idea what might happen next! And the company—small in number, young, inexperienced, they nevertheless had that burning intensity you see in theater people—and the two principals, a bit older than the rest but not much, were really fine: Macbeth utterly sympathetic, his desire to be king somehow pure, idealistic—and Lady Macbeth just as ambitious, but harder, hard and hot. The two of them together, arguing over whether or not to murder Duncan—oh it crackled, there was a heat in their faces, in the room! You really could believe it was the first time they had ever made this decision.
And for Kevin it was. I glanced over at him from time to time, and I swear it was like looking at a dictionary of facial expressions. How many emotions can the human face reveal? It was a kind of test. Macbeth had taken us into his inner life, into his soul, and we were on his side (this achievement is necessary for the play to succeed, I believe) and Kevin was sitting there rooting for him, at least at first. But then to watch him, following his ambition down into brutality, madness, monstrosity—and always that same Macbeth, still there, suffering at the insane choices he was making, appalled at what he had become! Fear, triumph, laughter at the lewd porter, apprehension, wincing pain, disgust, pity, despair at the skyrocket futility of all ambition: you could read it all on Kevin’s face, twisting about into Greek masks, into Rodin shapes—the play had caught him, he watched it as if it were really happening. And the little company, locked in, absorbed, vibrant, burning with it—I tell you, I myself began to see it new! Thick shells of experience, expectation, and habit cracked, and near the end, when Macbeth stood looking down at Birnam Wood, wife dead, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, I sat in my chair shuddering as much as Kevin. Then Macduff killed him, but who could cheer? That was us, in him.
When the “house lights” came on Kevin slumped in his seat beside me, mouth open—pummeled, limp, drained. The two of us left the garage leaning against each other for support. People glanced at us curiously, half smiling.
On the drive home he said, My… Lord. Are there more like that?
None quite like that.
Thank God, he said.
But several of Shakespeare’s plays are in the same class.
Are they all so sad?
The tragedies are very sad. The comedies are very funny. The problem plays are extremely problematic.
Whew, he said. I’ve never seen anything like that.
Ah, the power of theater. I blessed little South Coast Repertory in their little garage, and Kevin and I agreed we would go back again.
…I don’t know whether to tell you about this or not. It was very odd. I don’t know… how to think of it. The things that are happening to me!
One night I went out into the backyard, to pick some avocados. Suddenly I had an odd sensation, and as if compelled I looked back into the house. There under my lamps sat a couple, both reading newspapers, one on the couch, the other in my armchair. The woman had a Siamese cat in her lap.
I was startled—in fact, terrified. But then the man looked up, over his spectacles at the woman; and I felt a wave flow through me, a wave of something like calmness, or affection. It was so reassuring that all of a sudden I felt welcomed, somehow, and again as if impelled I went to the glass door to go inside, unafraid. But when I slid the door to the side, they were no longer visible.