When Yvonne had gotten into the Jaguar and it had pulled away from the
Paradise Theatre, Adam had mourned her loss. He was not angry at being left
alone as he had been earlier when the anonymous crowd had left him when he had
gotten off the bus. Now he felt a soft sadness. Too, he was pleased at a tender
grief. It was softer than any pillow to have a gentle emotion, and he wished to
rest there for a long time after what seemed like years of rip-saw
emotions.
But, then, of course, Adam decided that Yvonne had been a beige apparition. Or
at the very least, he'd been mistaken, the woman in the trench coat hadn't been
as she had seemed, and he'd projected his own ceaseless inventions of
characteristics and nuanced fine things onto her. And then, for literally the
hundred-thousandth time, Adam asked himself why there was so goddamn much detail
everywhere. And yet he seemed to miss the whole world. This started his heart
pounding. He stopped breathing. He began to drown in his own blood. The world
reeled. He gasped, closed his eyes and told himself to be quiet. Told himself it
was an anxiety attack and he wasn't going to die.
Just then the door to the
Paradise opened. "Adam! How long have you been out here? It's cold. Why don't
you come in?" Adam opened his eyes. Felix Lord stood smiling at the threshold of
the theater. The anxiety attack, to Adam's irritation, had been erased. "What
power this Felix Lord has," thought Adam, and he hunched his shoulders a bit,
and more or less dove past Lord and through the doorway.
Two things occurred to Adam
as Felix Lord steered him by the elbow through the lobby and into the theater:
One was that the Paradise was as warm as a fine summer day. The furnace was
cranked up high. The other thing was an ancient impression that once through the
doors of the Paradise, the rest of the world evaporated. That the rest of the
world was a dream in a gaseous state ever escaping to the outer perimeters of
the universe. That the Paradise was the world. The center of the universe. The
universe itself. The home of the free. The land of the brave. My theater 'tis of
thee. Land where I was born.
Felix Lord pushed open one
leather bound door and propelled Adam gently through into the theater proper,
explaining, "This particular plaster sets best at eighty degrees." The main
plastering and painting were done. Adam was bedazzled. The theater was washed
mainly in white paints, and every light in the house was on full blast. There
were additional work lights along the boxes around the upper back wall of the
theater. Adam and Felix passed under craftsmen on scaffolding who were applying
gold leaf to the flourishes in the ornate plaster that clung like continuously
repeated alabaster swallows' nests where the walls met the ceiling. Adam turning
at mid-house to examine what the men were doing. It took a moment for the
pattern to resolve in Adam's eyes. In the plaster were carved five kinds of
flowers: roses, violets, irises, forget-me-nots, and lilacs. The blooms of these
were painted in extraordinary shades of purples, from deep red for the roses to
a lavender-blue for the lilacs. The leaves and stems intertangled in an
organization of gold inlay--at least the white greenery was gold for a few feet
where the craftsmen worked. Though the blooms all were painted, the gold had yet
to be done around the rest of the theater's perimeter. Adam envied the craftsmen
their long orderly task.
Adam turned in a slow pivot
examining the flowers in the plaster that held to the roof and walls at a
forty-five degree angle and for a leaning yard of plaster face. Just as he
finished the tour, and his eyes came to rest again on the craftsmen, one of them
began whistling sweetly. The other one came in and whistled the lower part of
the cantata and the air in the theater became bitter sweet. As Adam's eyes
lowered to Felix's face, he could smell the generations of mold and must as well
as the sweetness of hope in the pungency of paint and lacquers. The sharp
chemical edges criss-crossing the air were the healing knives of industry,
artifice, craft. "This is the passion," Adam wanted to say to Felix who was
smiling wonderfully. this was the bitter and the sweet. The labor and idea
joined. Detail and ideal married. Adam was nearly healed in this instant. But
his eyes slid in the compulsive downward progression slipping from Felix's face
to the rows of theater seats that surrounded them. The undertow of
frissonmetaphysique all but shattered Adam's spine.
He was in a graveyard. Not on
a visit, but under the ground where he could see a hundred thousand bones as if
they were held in place in levels of invisible soil. The skin and flesh, the
velvet and stuffing, had been stripped from the theater's seats. And the white
steel springs like so many skeletons grinned forth staring dead at the
stage.
Two
things steadied Adam. One was that the slick leather soles of his loafers
shifted when he shuddered and he could feel the plush new carpet under his feet.
This gave him the sense of being grounded, gave him a foundation as he instantly
knew that the seats had been taken out and put back so carpet could be laid.
Reconstructing the logistics of the refurbishing served somehow as horizontal
hold, if Adam had been a television. Vertical hold came with Felix's steadying
hand on Adam's shoulder. "The back row of seats is reupholstered," said Lord
gently, and the old producer ushered the playwright to the last row. It pleased
Adam and further stabilized him to note that the velvet of these seats and the
carpet and the curtains on the stage were three of the shades of purple shared
by the flowers in the plaster.
When they were seated, Felix
said, "So?"
Adam's heart leapt and he began a fast defensive whining in his mind's throat.
But he killed that. And he merely looked at Felix beseechingly and had to cast
his eyes downward in a rage of sadness to keep a sob out of his real
throat.
"There's no play, Adam?"
"No. Yes. I mean, no, not
yet. I will...I will write one. I...this theater...!" And he could now
distinguish the nattering roar that lay behind the silence and just beneath the
frail cantata the workmen were whistling. It was the past. Great laughter. It
would trickle to a titter and The King of Giggles would tell a joke. Or Adam's
father's father would say the last line of an epilogue. And great silence. And
great applause. Being in the theater was like falling into a conch shell. That
was another thing Adam had done in that parlor full of uncles and father that
day when he was five, he was remembering now. He'd put a conch shell to his ear
and heard the ocean waves. Now in this conch shell of a theater, white and
purpled gently and full of light, Adam was drowning in waves of remembered
applause. In the spiral ocean of time, remembering his life was causing him to
drown. As usual, the child prodigy who had become a childish adult had things
backwards. The usual pattern is that all of life passes before the eyes of the
drowning. With Adam, he was drowning because all of life was passing before
him.
"This
theater, Felix..." He wanted to express its cluttered graciousness, its
complicated emptiness. But he had a facility suddenly for his limits. He knew he
wasn't up to expressing paradox. "You've made it beautiful."
"Yes, it's good," Lord said,
with such a fierce arrogance that it was neither fierce nor arrogant, but plain,
exquisite fact. "Is there anything more indestructible than flowers? Flowers are
the bravest, strongest soldiers."
"Soldiers?" Adam laughed.
"What are they at war with?"
"Nothing. Everything," Lord
said. "They are at total peace. And yet they battle everything. They battle
there not being flowers. They battle the dearth of flowers in everything that is
not a flower."
"By that same logic, you'd
have to say that nuclear arms combat there being no nuclear arms," reasoned
Adam.
"Oh,
no!" said Lord. "Do atom bombs bring spring? Or keep summer going? Can you buy
an atom bomb in a shop or see a picture of one in a book and make things
brighter and warmer in the dead of winter? But let's talk about your
play."
"Felix, we might as well talk about flowers or war or anything else. There is no
play. We can't talk about nothing. Let's talk about...about... You... I..." Adam
faltered and looked around the theater suddenly seething with hatred for it. The
hatred was so great that in only a second it depleted the ability of his nerves
to fire. But in a bit he said, "I shouldn't have come. There's no play, and
there won't be any. None, no plays. I've written my share. I...I can't write. I
can't write more than a sentence or two. I haven't written in all these years.
Just a file cabinet full of papers with disjointed sentences."
Felix laughed. Adam didn't
know what the laugh referred to, but he answered, "No, really. A file cabinet
full of sentences. There must be hundreds of thousands of sentences."
"No
paragraphs?"
"Yes. A thousand or so, I suppose. Some poems. The poems are the only thing that
make me feel like I'm not totally insane. But poetry is insane. I have a
couple dozen pages of prose. A short story. Two unfinished stories."
"I've called
several times over the last months. Your roommate said each time that you were
working and couldn't come to the phone."
"My roommate? You'll have to
forgive him. Jamie protects me." Jamie. His roommate. James John Goldsmith. His
last friend. Jamie was an old gay guy who was hopelessly, romantically,
touchingly in love with Adam. They were the oddest couple. Adam in his
relatively dignified, long-lived adolescent, ever-abloom nervous breakdown,
forever reaching new heights, new lows. And Jamie, some sixty years old, in his
occasional feathered dressing gown looking like a Chinese chicken, stinking of
Chanel No. 19 and sweat from his constant exercise regime, and resigned to
Adam's heterosexuality. And Adam would drop whatever was in his hand from time
to time, coffee cup or book, and Jamie would come clucking and pecking and
picking up after him when Adam would have what Jamie called Saint Francis
Seizures. And Jamie had a talent. He had an accounting firm. Five mornings a
week he'd arise and put on one of his many handsome suits and hesitate at the
apartment door before leaving and say, "Well, I'm going to go count in an
unaccountable world."
"Jamie's different," Adam
told Felix now.
"How quaint," said
Felix.
When
Adam had stumbled back from Hollywood two years before, he'd been penniless
except for the allowance from his father's estate. He had turned up soaked,
semi-legally robbed by accountants, agents and studios who had manipulated Adam
like a balsa wood puppet and ruined his plays in their celluloid incarnations.
But there Adam was, like a baby dog, waiting for his old friend at Jamie's
doorstep one evening.
Jamie was furious and
forgiving in turns that Adam wouldn't be lovers. Jamie had a conga line of young
studs come through the apartment for two months after arrived. This to make Adam
jealous. To demonstrate the unceasing joys of homosexuality. Adam had lain in
the sofa bed listening for night after night, and for the first several nights
had had an erection and contemplated release. But after the first two weeks the
cacophony ceased to stimulate.
And after two months of this
behavior that was not the norm for Jamie, the accountant came down with viral
pneumonia, almost died in the hospital. When Adam brought him home and for two
months afterwards, Jamie was a wraith who needed tending to almost
constantly.
Then one day, Adam stood by Jamie's bed with a tea cup the patient had drained.
Suddenly Adam remembered that John Kennedy was dead, and so he dropped the cup.
Though he stared at the broken cup, what he saw was the pink pill box hat and
suit Mrs. Kennedy wore in the open limousine, saw Johnson sworn in on Air Force
One. He saw the blood from Ruby's bullet spread over the stomach of Oswald's
sweater. It was 1983, but Adam was freshly amazed.
Jamie hopped out of bed,
shouldered Adam onto a chair, bent to pick up the pieces of the cup, saying,
"Well, if you won't fuck me, there's only one role left. I'll have to be your
mother, for god's sake." And the sweet, sixty-plus year old queen, and the
talented, tender psychotic, the best friends laughed until their sides hurt and
Jamie's lungs burned.
"No, I mean Jamie is really
different, Felix," Adam said.
"I know he is. I know him.
He's my accountant. And you're forgetting I directed him in Roses and
Horses." Jamie was an actor as well as an accountant. "You and I both met
him the same way, through your father. Remember?"
"But why haven't you called
me, Adam? If I'd known what an agony you were in over the play I could have
helped you."
Adam searched Lord's face for signs of sarcasm. Finding none, he searched for
signs of irony. Finding non, but having learned in the search that the face of
sincerity is anything but bland, is remarkably beautiful, Adam came up feeling
petty and so said, "I didn't call you because I wanted to see just how indulgent
you'd be with this fairy tale. The checks every week. And no so much as the
prologue to a play from me. Not in ten months. Couldn't you guess there was no
play? There's just the fairy tale, Felix." Of course, the woundedness flew
across Felix's face. And, of course, Adam's words cut back into him as if he'd
tossed them at a mirror. And, of course, the words shattered within him, and, of
course, the physiological reflection of grief was that every muscle in his body
mortified for several moments. "God, Felix, it's warm enough in here to
cultivate African violets," said Adam after a bit by way of apology.
"The theater is
real enough," said Felix by way of acceptance. "Who wrote the fairy tale,
Adam?"
"Oh,
because of what I said at that party? To buy the theater and commission me to
write a play? Come on, Feel. It's too silly. I haven't written in ages and I
never dreamed you'd go for it. Besides, I was drunk. It's too silly. This isn't
how the world works."
"It isn't?" said Felix,
smiling demurely. "How does the world work then?"
"In god awful ways."
"So, write a god
awful play."
"For this lovely theater?" said Adam.
"I think you thought the
seats were go awful a minute ago."
"They'll be upholstered,"
said Adam.
"They're furniture."
"How profound," said
Adam.
"A
play doesn't need upholstery."
"How profound," said
Adam.
"A
good play's not for comfort."
"Who said," Adam screamed in
a whisper, "that I could write a good play? Or a play at all? I only said
commission me. It was a goddamned joke. I never said I could deliver. I thought
you were retired."
Just then, Adam and Felix
looked up to see the craftsmen who'd been on the scaffolding now pulling on
their jackets in the aisle. Felix introduced the Angelini brothers and Adam. It
was five o'clock and the Angelini's were leaving for the day. Then Adam and
Felix were alone. "You needn't write the play," said Felix after many moments of
silence during which Adam debated the pros and cons of whether or not to be
embarrassed at having hissed at Felix within the hearing of the Angelini
brothers. "There are other plays. Maybe Our Town. Some Chekov. Maybe some
Shakespeare. There are a lot of young playwrights..."
Felix pulled what looked like
a pocket calculator from his inside breast pocket, rose and stood in the center
of the aisle, and pushed a few buttons. The mighty velvet stage curtains parted.
Adam's head tilted slightly back and an atavistic smile slipped onto his face.
Adam was one of those physical types that drove athletes and doctors crazy. He
could sit around as he had for two years, doing nothing more vigorous than
opening books, lighting cigarettes, and taking trips to the bathroom, and yet he
had what it took to dash down the aisle, take a Superman hop when he was almost
out of orchestra pit, grasp the edge of the stage and pull himself onto it. Not
the least out of breath, he stood on the stage like a man reborn. His head was
slightly back, the smile was yet on his face. When he had been seven, his older
cousins had shown him that they could get on the stage that way. He had worked
at it until he had succeeded at ten. After that he'd scarcely used the
stairs.
Felix Lord, still standing at the back of the theater, pushed two series of
buttons. The house lights came down, the stage lights came up. Adam strode the
stage. "These are the same boards, Felix! I know every sound!" The horrible
pseudo-Victorian wall coverings were gone from the theater. The lighting and
ornamentation were new and incomparably done. But the groans the stage boards
gave out as he crisscrossed them were the same as the music he'd heard in his
pacings there as a child. "Dear old Paradise!" said Adam. "Good work, Felix!"
Felix pushed some more buttons, timing his manipulations so that he caught the
pacing Adam center stage in a spotlight. The rest of the stage was dark. Adam
halted. He closed his eyes for a minute while he silently worked his mouth. He
opened his eyes, reworked his posture slightly, held out a hand palm up, and
spoke:
I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire--why, it appeareth no other thin to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.