Somewhere in the deep backstage, the carpenter who’d been battening a piece of twenty-four-gauge sheet iron to make a thunder sheet, dropped it; the ensuing crash of thunder caused the troupe — most of whom appeared to have been chatting but who were actually practicing the ancient commedia skill of grammelot, or nonsensical speech — to fall silent, just as they would have for the real thing.
“Very WELL!” shouted Charles. “I am HUPLISS!”
Because his Russian accent was funny, and because he had been experimenting with makeup techniques that were supposed to make him look twenty years older but which actually made him look like something halfway between a Minoan god-king and Rigoletto, a court jester with painted wrinkles and a square, curly beard pasted on his jaw, and finally because the conversations that had been interrupted had been intense but meaningless, his temper tantrum triggered a hilarity that was almost unnatural in its duration. But at its close he too was wiping tears of joy from his eyes. He felt he had learned something of great value. He was at least at home in this world, and it was possible that he “loved” it, loved everything about it, including the crazy, stinking Sir Edwin, making believe, and his own stage fright.
They would open in three hours.
He sat slumped and ill in a low broken chair in the green room. His knees rose up before him, so low and broken was this chair, and because they were so prominent, he tapped first one and then the other and then the first again with his diamond-studded walking stick. After a few minutes of this, he rearranged himself, the stick now between his legs, bearded chin and dove-gray gloved hands resting on the pearly knob. He appeared to be listening to something or someone, but no one in the cramped little room was speaking. His knees had brushed his chin when he walked up the smoky staircase the night of the fire — why had he felt so calm then, and so sick now?
There were six others: Teddy Blair, whose demeanor was unassuming but whose voice was both explosively large and exquisitely controlled, got up to look like a portly older man, perched on one arm of my chair, smoking pensively a cigarette in a very long holder; two young women, Vera dressed to suggest a princess of the Second Empire, the other, the shockingly pretty Mary Girdle, a social-climbing bohemian trollop, both staring at, alternately, themselves and each other in a big but cracked mirror framed with electric light bulbs which gave them looks of stark madness; another young man, a dandy from the Philosophy Club, Eugene Woodcock, playing a charming ne’er-do-well, who appeared to be praying, his eyes closed tightly, his hands clasped, and his mouth trembling with the shapes of words; also from Berkeley and the P. Club, a much older man not associated with the university, Leonardo Garagiola, playing a very old man; and a plain, athletic middle-aged woman only recently arrived from Michigan, Margaret Stensrud, playing an ancient dowager, who, with Leonardo, was peering intently at her game of solitaire.
There were others but he had lost track of them. He had never known them and he did not want to know them now.
Suddenly the old man broke away and walked briskly to the doorway of an adjoining room — one of the spaces of the theater that had been burned and only hastily repaired — where the others had silently chosen to sequester themselves. He looked in at them and rubbed his hands together as if in eager glee. Small, distracted chuckles could be heard for a moment from within. Then Vera, very much the princess, Claire de Cintré, suddenly shouted, “No, no, no, you look just right! You look perfect, you really do! It’s the stupid play that looks wrong! You look alluring. You look wonderful.” And the other threw herself into her friend’s arms. They hugged and kissed and withheld makeup-smearing tears with desperate care.
Beyond the little rooms somewhere, the continuo group, augmented for opening night with a wind band, began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Charles laid his cane across his lap and bent forward, pale and sweating now, until his head was between his legs. They could hear the audience now too, singing along lustily. One of the plumber’s surviving little sons stuck his head in the room and called out that the house lights were going to half. Charles dropped his cane with a clatter and vomited.
Little notice was taken. He himself was too exhausted to care. The Marquis de Bellegarde lifted his foot away from the splatter and said, “They start singing the national anthem and Chuckles throws up!” He stood and adjusted his false belly. “I’ll get you a glass of water, bud.”
“Here’s a rag!” whinnied the dowager in her stage voice. “Poor dear!” She hadn’t looked up from her game, however.
“How very ironic,” the old man concluded, shooting his eyes comically left and right.
“Ironic?” murmured the dowager.
“That Chucky should vomit at the sound of the anthem when he’s—”
“Mmm.? Oh yes. Yes, I see what you are — MY GOD I WISH THEY’D STOP THEIR CATERWAULING!” She wiped her eyes. “It’s like a church service.”
Charles stood uncertainly, then drew himself up with a deep breath. To polite applause, he announced that he was all right and that he felt better, none of the diamonds had been dislodged from his incredibly expensive prop cane, everything, he was sure, was going to be okay. The dandy and the trollop left the room. The marquis said that it sounded as if half of San Francisco were out there.
“How many seats have we?” he asked.
The princess replied that he knew perfectly well how many.
Everyone was now on edge and eager to show it with any kind of clamped-down hysteria they could find.
The dowager swept the cards from her little table with a cry of outrage. “But I don’t, dear!”
“One hundred and thirty-seven,” Charles said, accepting the glass of water.
The plumber’s son poked his head around the door again and said they’d sold fifty standing-room-only tickets as well.
“No!” cried the very old man.
“Yes they did,” insisted the little boy.
Charles let the rag drop to my feet. The vomitus was actually little more than bile and saliva, and he toed the rag back and forth in it, soaking it up. When he stopped, he looked up to find everyone in the room watching him.
“Where,” inquired the marquis, “is one’s valet when one has need of him?”
“Fuck you,” said Charles, without real conviction, rehearsing.
“Fuck me?” asked the marquis, equally wanly. He stood and adjusted his sash. “Fuck you.”
Charles stooped and quickly brought the smelly, dripping rag to the marquis’s nose, who scrambled out of the way, bumping into the very old man, who in turn sat down in the lap of the dowager, who had picked up her cards and dealt herself a new game. They all laughed.
“I’ll beat you all with my diamond-studded cane,” offered Charles.
“Oh yes, please!” they all moaned and jiggled.
“Places,” hissed the stage manager, who appeared out of nowhere. “What on earth is the matter with you people?”
“You have upset my game,” said the dowager coolly. “Goddamn you to hell.”
She and the princess crossed themselves, the princess suddenly pale and crazy-looking, her deep voice even deeper now with dread. “Here we go,” she said, as if from the tomb.
The dowager went to pieces again. “We are just not ready!” she shrieked. “I can’t believe you’re going to force us out there like this! To just. throw us out there! To the, to the. to the dogs!”