“PURVEYORS OF BOMBASTIC NONSENSE!” shouted Sir Edwin who was apparently on his knees in the first row of the balcony, for only his head could be seen, catching a little light from below, over the parapet.
The company looked up at him as one. He waved, waggling his fingers next to his monstrous head.
“We are nothing,” Charles said, stifling incipient laughter, fearing Sir Edwin might think he was being made a fool of and hurl himself into the orchestra pit. The theater was so small and so steeply raked that he could conceivably land onstage and perhaps kill one of his actors along with himself. “Nothing without gesture and without an authentic desire, need, love for our properties. Have you not noticed how compelling a scene it is when two of our stagehands carry lumber across the stage, bang with their hammers, rip back and forth with their saws? When the plumber lights his oxyacetylene torch? When our stage manager confers with me about a problem in our schedule? These are ‘real actions,’ you will say, and must therefore have a kind of ordinary gravitas we perforce cannot have, because we are only pretending to act. But you will also say that we usually take no notice of these actions. We do here only because they move in such stark contrast to what we do. We who mince and blubber and wail and gesticulate, or stand helpless and stiff as ramrods, in the belief that our ridiculous fakery is exactly what the customer has bargained for and indeed delights in. Further, it seems apparent that the more ridiculously we behave, the greater their delight. But that is not so. Instantly—instantly—as soon as you step out onstage like some mechanical contraption, flapping your arms, grimacing with childish drollery because, oh, oh, the theater brings out the child in everyone, running on a teaspoon of steam that’s hissing out your asshole, barking your tragic or witty lines or striking a pose like you’re trying to plug your asshole, they will know that they have been had. When they throw rotten fruit and vegetables at us? Know why they do that? Not because they see how fraudulent we have been, but when they see how bad we are at being fraudulent! Le geste est tout! Everything in the world of the act, all communication is sung, or perhaps hummed is the better word, the humming accompanied by helpful gestures that people see instinctively and immediately as dance. Or if not immediately and as dance, then without much delay or doubt as something the woefully misunderstood and discredited Delsarte believed was ‘the direct agent of the heart. the revealer of thought and the commentator upon speech.’ The artist, and make no mistake, we are artists, should have three objects: to move, to interest, to persuade. We interest by language; we move by thought; we move, interest, and persuade by gesture. Speech is an act posterior to will, itself posterior to love; this again posterior to judgment, posterior in its turn to memory, which, finally, is posterior to the impression. HAVE I GOT THAT RIGHT, SIR EDWIN?”
“Yes,” he said, barely audible from the balcony. “Do carry on.”
“Which is to say, everything lies static and helpless in the brain until we can figure out how best to present our show to everything that we perceive to be outside our brains. Our audience.”
Vera began to clap, but nobody picked it up, and she stopped.
Three days later, Charles arrived at the motorcycle shop, devoted still to the idea of taking her to Sutro Baths, to, generally speaking, picking up where they’d left off with the appearance of Warren Farnsworth.
“You said something about a bad year?” asked Charles.
They were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for a jitney driven by a friend of Vera’s.
“Yes,” she said. “Last year.”
“What was it,” Charles asked, “if you don’t mind my asking, made last year so bad?”
“The free press became markedly less free.”
“Did it indeed?”
“Indeed it did!”
“Beg your pardon if that sounded—”
“Not at all.”
“—ironic. Life is ironic and I make it a principle to be simple and straightforward whenever possible to maintain a clear and useful distinction.”
“Not at all, not at all! Clearly and usefully distinct!”
“Even more simply and straightforwardly I must admit I hadn’t noticed—”
“No, of course not, you were looking at the surface of the newspaper. The repression was—is—being worked below the surface.”
“Of course. I have no difficulty believing you. That is in fact why I am apologizing: that I should have been caught out staring at the surface. Me! It’s absurd. I feel like an—”
“Well, you mustn’t!”
“Very well. Thank you. Now please allow me to ask you how you yourself were able to see below the surface.?”
“I defended the press in the basement. I gave over a good deal of myself to it, in a fanatical, Russian-style defense of the secrecy of the location of this press. For the sake of its freedom. A great deal. And I lost that great deal. I wasted it. Only three people knew the press was here, and because I was its minder, its drone, because I volunteered, I felt very deeply responsible for it, and I stayed there, in that room, for a year. I’m not kidding. A year. Never went out. They brought my meals into me, and yes, some books. What was I so afraid of? In the land of the free and the home of the brave? Isn’t the freedom of the press secured in the Constitution? Who cared that we were printing what we were printing? You may ask all those things and be only reasonable. Maybe my fear was unreasonable! But let me tell you, this was a question — the location, the existence, of a certain kind of press, an uncontrolled press, one that was in truth free—that had already had, believe it or not, grave consequences attending its answer! Your father will never see a speck of evidence to back up my claim, but let me assure you, Mr. American, it is true.”
Vera stopped, removed her glasses, and cleaned them. Holding them in her hand, she resumed her speech in a quieter voice. “Then I had a little bit of a collapse, my consciousness collapsed into a pool of tears, and you know, they got me out of here, took me to Sutro Baths and so on, but I didn’t like being outside. I felt I was transparent. Almost.”
Wildly in love with her, thinking just that, Charles said nothing.
“There’s no way that can make sense. You give your life over to spreading the news, you know, letting people hear what’s really going on, but at the same time you are yourself some kind of terrible secret that must never get out. Like I say, I was already pretty Russian around the edges, and I was reading Nechayev’s Revolutionary Catechism. You know what I mean, I think. ”