Charles sidled quietly over to the princess and told her that he was in love with her. He had clearly said it as Christopher Newman, but he had said it in a place where Christopher Newman did not exist. And saying so gave him an erection — he couldn’t understand it: it was not something that would happen to Christopher Newman. Refusing to turn her face to Charles, Vera glanced at him with a kind of calm but insane expectancy.
“Do you love me?” he asked, not knowing what else to say, and having no time to think about it.
“No,” she said, swiveling her eyes back at him. “No, Charles, I do not. But I will suck your cock after our first scene.”
“You will?” he asked.
“Yes. I will.”
“All right.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” she wailed in sudden terror. “Give me a thousand dollars and I’ll do it.”
Theater was happening and nobody could stop it.
Charles felt suddenly defeated. “It won’t work. Never mind. If you need some money I’ll give you some.”
Sir Edwin stood in the doorway, rubbing his hands just as the very old man had done. Never before had he seemed so completely depraved a monk as he did then. Charles saw now only looks of panic and frank hatred on those faces that had beamed only the day before, the hour before, with childlike devotion and the most intimate trust in his mystic vision, and so was not surprised to see their Mad Englishman gone from the doorway when he looked back.
He walked from the green room to the nearest wing, still sipping his glass of water, and examined the scenery-flat flying ropes knotted to the pin rail. The knots, he believed, looked secure and well tied. He climbed up to the fly gallery: shipshape here as well. He was no longer ill, no longer afraid; he was in fact utterly oblivious to his surroundings. As if he were a casual bystander, he looked out onstage, at the “shabby sitting room on a small Parisian quatrième,” sparely suggested by odds and ends of furniture collected from the theater’s patrons — from people, he marveled, like Durwood Keogh. He loathed Keogh, of course, but could not say why, not precisely, in that moment anyway, and was stricken with gratitude at the gifts of furniture. The curtain was still down, but he could feel the force, the weight of nearly two hundred expectant people just beyond it. He felt curious and intrigued: it trembled, whatever it was out there, a faint wave that rippled from one end of the curtain to the other, as if the breathing of the audience had taken on the properties of a breeze. The idea that they were not individuals, but rather one great thing, was not new to him, or theater folk in general, but he felt it now — not in his guts, where it had just finished making him nauseous, but in his heart, where it made him not brave but fearless: he didn’t care. He didn’t think he cared, anyway, didn’t feel that he cared. And wasn’t that how daredevils felt? It was only one thing and he didn’t care what one thing might think or say about him, or even directly to him. It knew nothing of him, after all, if it thought he was not part of its own “one-thingness” and its judgment would perforce be poorly constituted, superficial, beside the point if not altogether contemptibly mean-spirited. He was now a little angry, and when he realized it, was surprised at himself. He wanted to be calm again. Not caring was not an acceptable alternative. He wanted to be serene and helpful. But that was not how he had been trained to enter the scene.
“They will get the show they deserve, eh?” whispered the marquis, plumping his belly.
“We had better be good,” Charles whispered, his heart suddenly pounding.
“Yes,” agreed the marquis. “They will tar and feather us if we aren’t.”
The curtain rose in voluminous, screeching jerks, and what had only seemed a polite silence was now terrifying condemnation. A man in the balcony cleared his throat.
Would the balcony collapse?
The footlights, which still ran on gas, snapped and quivered behind their mesh grating. The dandy chased the trollop, Noémie, around the stage. They scampered and minced in a way that made his heart sink. Noémie then stopped in her tracks and the dandy nearly collided with her: it was slapstick. It would be all right because slapstick was foolproof. She held up an imperious finger and said, “I declare that if you touch me, I’ll paint you all over!”
And the audience, unaccountably, roared with laughter.
“What do you know,” whispered the marquis. He and Charles exchanged an incredulous but pleased look; the laughter was infectious.
He couldn’t wait now to get onstage. The first scene was interminable and then there he was, striding languidly, confidently, handsomely, richly, “the American,” into the limelight. He approached a painting around which Noémie coyly fluttered. He stared and stared for what in a theater seemed a very long time, a dangerously long time — but it was working, he could feel it and he liked it — and then he judged it. He pointed with his fabulous walking stick.
“That’s just what I want to see!” he said with clear, carrying warmth.
The audience knew he was a man for whom people would wait, for whom they would wait. They wanted to wait for Christopher the American. They wanted to know what he thought and why he liked the painting so much. They wanted, in that strange and almost perverse turning of the table that sometimes happens in show business, his approval.
Charles’s approval.
Noémie contrived to appear indifferent. “I think I’ve improved it,” she said of the painting, looking not at it, but at Charles. She could feel the audience’s wish to participate in his world, and saw that she could bask in their love if she played her cards properly. She quietly let her admiration become apparent as he let a good deal more of his character appear.
“Well,” he said, “yes, I suppose you’ve improved it; but I don’t know, I liked it better before it was quite so good! However, I guess I’ll take it.”
He was neither, strictly speaking, himself nor Christopher Newman, and his agonized, neurotically observant introspection seemed vain and peculiar to him now, in that moment. He was acutely aware of employing himself to create the illusion of Christopher Newman, and confident that nothing could be more natural than to do so. “He” was a decent and amiable but shrewd and relentless man who’d made a fortune after the Civil War and who had come to Europe to spend some of it, a lot of it, “learning about beauty.” When the beauty turned out to be visible to him solely in the face of a young French widow, and he was confronted with the absurd strictures of the ancient families of the aristocracy — who were eager to bathe in the rivers of his cash but who could never allow him to marry one of their own — his quiet outrage and candid determination to have his reasonable but passionate way filled the theater. He loved the sad and lonely Claire with all his great and open heart, and he would be damned if he could not make the world work the way he wanted it to work.
The one great thing took him in, amplified him a thousandfold, and sent him back to himself in wave after wave until at the end it all seemed to be crashing on the stage. They were already cheering and whistling and stamping before he could say his last lines: “Ah, my beloved!” and kiss Claire’s hand, causing her to cry — she who had been so remote and resigned to despair for three solid hours—“You’ve done it, you’ve brought me back, you’ve vanquished me!”
Just before the curtain-closing kiss, he shouted, bellowed really, in his superb opera-quality tenor, as it was now quite hard to hear, “THAT’S JUST WHAT I WANTED TO SEE!”
The orchestra played a Sousa march throughout the rainstorm of applause, while the cast, bowing repeatedly and smiling broadly, waved little American flags. The only cloud of truth that passed between himself and the audience was his glimpse of Sir Edwin in the wings. Neither smiling nor frowning, seeming neither pleased nor relieved, he watched Charles demonstrate his gracious ease, his graceful courage, in Neverland — and of course Charles watched him. He had not the faintest throb of an erection: dead dead dead. An erection was, he had decided, the only sure indication he was alive. Millions of souls, swiftly and easily replaced, every time he came. So yes, he was troubled even as the packed house cheered and cheered and cheered him.