“She doesn’t mind,” says Brian.
“How do you know?” says his father.
“Oh for Pete’s sake,” says his mother.
Pauline slides out of bed as soon as she’s awake every morning, slides out of reach of Brian’s long, sleepily searching arms and legs. What wakes her are the first squeaks and mutters of the baby, Mara, in the children’s room, then the creak of the crib as Mara- sixteen months old now, getting to the end of babyhood-pulls herself up to stand hanging on to the railing. She continues her soft amiable talk as Pauline lifts her out-Caitlin, nearly five, shifting about but not waking, in her nearby bed-and as she is carried into the kitchen to be changed, on the floor. Then she is settled into her stroller, with a biscuit and a bottle of apple juice, while Pauline gets into her sundress and sandals, goes to the bathroom, combs out her hair-all as quickly and quietly as possible. They leave the cottage; they head past some other cottages for the bumpy unpaved road that is still mostly in deep morning shadow, the floor of a tunnel under fir and cedar trees.
The grandfather, also an early riser, sees them from the porch of his cottage, and Pauline sees him. But all that is necessary is a wave. He and Pauline never have much to say to each other (though sometimes there’s an affinity they feel, in the midst of some long-drawn-out antics of Brian’s or some apologetic but insistent fuss made by the grandmother; there’s an awareness of not looking at each other, lest their look should reveal a bleakness that would discredit others).
On this holiday Pauline steals time to be by herself-being with Mara is still almost the same thing as being by herself. Early morning walks, the late-morning hour when she washes and hangs out the diapers. She could have had another hour or so in the afternoons, while Mara is napping. But Brian has fixed up a shelter on the beach, and he carries the playpen down every day, so that Mara can nap there and Pauline won’t have to absent herself. He says his parents may be offended if she’s always sneaking off. He agrees though that she does need some time to go over her lines for the play she’s going to be in, back in Victoria, this September.
Pauline is not an actress. This is an amateur production, but she is not even an amateur actress. She didn’t try out for the role, though it happened that she had already read the play. Eurydice by Jean Anouilh. But then, Pauline has read all sorts of things.
She was asked if she would like to be in this play by a man she met at a barbecue, in June. The people at the barbecue were mostly teachers and their wives or husbands-it was held at the house of the principal of the high school where Brian teaches. The woman who taught French was a widow-she had brought her grown son who was staying for the summer with her and working as a night clerk in a downtown hotel. She told everybody that he had got a job teaching at a college in western Washington State and would be going there in the fall.
Jeffrey Toom was his name. “Without the B,” he said, as if the staleness of the joke wounded him. It was a different name from his mother’s, because she had been widowed twice, and he was the son of her first husband. About the job he said, “No guarantee it’ll last, it’s a one-year appointment.”
What was he going to teach?
“Dram-ah,” he said, drawing the word out in a mocking way.
He spoke of his present job disparagingly, as well.
“It’s a pretty sordid place,” he said. “Maybe you heard-a hooker was killed there last winter. And then we get the usual losers checking in to OD or bump themselves off.”
People did not quite know what to make of this way of talking and drifted away from him. Except for Pauline.
“I’m thinking about putting on a play,” he said. “Would you like to be in it?” He asked her if she had ever heard of a play called Eurydice.
Pauline said, “You mean Anouilh’s?” and he was unflatteringly surprised. He immediately said he didn’t know if it would ever work out. “I just thought it might be interesting to see if you could do something different here in the land of Noel Coward.”
Pauline did not remember when there had been a play by Noel Coward put on in Victoria, though she supposed there had been several. She said, “We saw The Duchess of Malfi last winter at the college. And the little theater did A Resounding Tinkle, but we didn’t see it.”
“Yeah. Well,” he said, flushing. She had thought he was older than she was, at least as old as Brian (who was thirty, though people were apt to say he didn’t act it), but as soon as he started talking to her, in this offhand, dismissive way, never quite meeting her eyes, she suspected that he was younger than he’d like to appear. Now with that flush she was sure of it.
As it turned out, he was a year younger than she was. Twenty-five.
She said that she couldn’t be Eurydice; she couldn’t act. But Brian came over to see what the conversation was about and said at once that she must try it.
“She just needs a kick in the behind,” Brian said to Jeffrey. “She’s like a little mule, it’s hard to get her started. No, seriously, she’s too self-effacing, I tell her that all the time. She’s very smart. She’s actually a lot smarter than I am.”
At that Jeffrey did look directly into Pauline’s eyes- impertinently and searchingly-and she was the one who was flushing.
He had chosen her immediately as his Eurydice because of the way she looked. But it was not because she was beautiful. “I’d never put a beautiful girl in that part,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d ever put a beautiful girl on stage in anything. It’s too much. It’s distracting.”
So what did he mean about the way she looked? He said it was her hair, which was long and dark and rather bushy (not in style at that time), and her pale skin (“Stay out of the sun this summer”) and most of all her eyebrows.
“I never liked them,” said Pauline, not quite sincerely. Her eyebrows were level, dark, luxuriant. They dominated her face. Like her hair, they were not in style. But if she had really disliked them, wouldn’t she have plucked them?
Jeffrey seemed not to have heard her. “They give you a sulky look and that’s disturbing,” he said. “Also your jaw’s a little heavy and that’s sort of Greek. It would be better in a movie where I could get you close up. The routine thing for Eurydice would be a girl who looked ethereal. I don’t want ethereal.”
As she walked Mara along the road, Pauline did work at the lines. There was a speech at the end that was giving her trouble. She bumped the stroller along and repeated to herself, “ ‘You are terrible, you know, you are terrible like the angels. You think everybody’s going forward, as brave and bright as you are-oh, don’t look at me, please, darling, don’t look at me-perhaps I’m not what you wish I was, but I’m here, and I’m warm, I’m kind, and I love you. I’ll give you all the happiness I can. Don’t look at me. Don’t look. Let me live.’ ”
She had left something out. “ ‘Perhaps I’m not what you wish I was, but you feel me here, don’t you? I’m warm and I’m kind-’ ”
She had told Jeffrey that she thought the play was beautiful.
He said, “Really?” What she’d said didn’t please or surprise him-he seemed to feel it was predictable, superfluous. He would never describe a play in that way. He spoke of it more as a hurdle to be got over. Also a challenge to be flung at various enemies. At the academic snots-as he called them-who had done The Duchess of Malfi. And at the social twits-as he called them-in the little theater. He saw himself as an outsider heaving his weight against these people, putting on his play-he called it his-in the teeth of their contempt and opposition. In the beginning Pauline thought that this must be all in his imagination and that it was more likely these people knew nothing about him. Then something would happen that could be, but might not be, a coincidence. Repairs had to be done on the church hall where the play was to be performed, making it unobtainable. There was an unexpected increase in the cost of printing advertising posters. She found herself seeing it his way. If you were going to be around him much, you almost had to see it his way-arguing was dangerous and exhausting.