Adam took on the role of
playwright. "Oh good!" he said. "Are you an actor?" he asked the visitor. Jamie
viewed the silly confrontation amusedly. Adam glanced at Jamie and in the
instant they shared wry masks, glimpsed the akin glints in each other's eyes.
"Oh, let me introduce myself? I'm Adam Adamsky? The playwright?" Adam felt a
wave of nausea upon calling himself a playwright, but kept to the social front
at hand. "I'm afraid I've barged in. I wanted to hear Jamie read aloud from my
new smash play. As long as you're here, would you mind helping?"
"Oh, wow. Yeah? God!" said the
visitor, tripping over himself like a gay Li'l Abner, rising from his chair to
take some pages from Adam. But he drew back his hand suddenly and said, "I mean
I'm not an actor."
"No kidding?"
Adam said.
"You want me to read,
though? Is that what you were asking me?"
"Yes, please. Here. You be the
wino. Read the parts by where it says 'Jack'."
"Not very glamorous," pouted the
upstart actor.
"Well, what d'ya
want? Glamor or art?" the playwright mock-sighed quasi-philosophically. "Read.
Here, Jamie. I'm putting your ass in a cast. You read this part and I'll take
the other two. You two can share that copy? I'll use this one."
So Adam listened to his play. He
gave his two parts over to Jamie and the friend, though, after a few pages so he
could hear the whole thing from a distance. Besides, his throat hurt terribly
when he spoke. He felt as though he had a dead dry red autumn leaf caught in his
craw.
"Jamie reads beautifully,"
Adam appraised to himself as he listed. "How long has it been since he's done
any acting? Maybe since I've done any writing. Maybe Felix and Yvonne could use
him as the wino." His throat hurt worse and he felt nauseous again with the
thought of the play actually going into production. He broke out in a little
sweat with the fleeting pre-impressions of putting his play before Felix and
Yvonne. "A lot of nerve," he thought. "A lot of misplaced vanity." So in this
negative frame he settled into listening to a long speech the visitor was
reading. "Jesus the kid's bad. Bad. But my lines ring right anyway. how can that
be? Because the writing's true. It is good."
Jamie shared these good
impressions of the play. He saw how the scenes he'd read the day before while
Adam was in his bath had been somehow both filled out and yet cut to the bone.
The act was powerful and very nearly polished. The scenes mounted in strength
one upon the other. But there was an ebb and flow to intensities that would let
an audience rest and accumulate energies to take on the next wave of dramatic
purpose. Tears were in Jamie's eyes when the act was done. Adam was in a brown
study.
"How was I?" asked the
visiting stranger.
Jamie burst
into laughter, splashing tears into the hand he had raised to his eyes. "Fine!"
he choked, patting the visitor's knee. Jamie thought he would go mad with
laughter. All the years of Adam's agony were caught, dispelled and transcended
by what was written in the act, by what was promised to be written. And this
punk was asking if he had read well! But Jamie pulled himself together. "Fine,"
he said to Adam, managing to get gravity, love, coddling and a certainly finely
tuned prodding all into the one syllable.
Adam came to in response to
Jamie's controlled voice. Adam's expression leapt to a bright, broad smile. He
excused himself, took all his pages, got some Chloriseptic spray from Jamie's
medicine cabinet, and retired to his apartment.
Again he wrote all night. when
Jamie came in the morning, Monday morning, dressed for the office, he saw "Act
II, Scene II" titling the computer screen. "Pushing it too hard?" fretted Jamie
to himself. He put the breakfast tray down on the desk and told Adam to eat and
then sleep soon. He said goodbye to Adam, told him he was going to work, and he
left. "I'm going to go count in an unaccountable world." Adam nodded in response
after the door closed.
After Adam
choked down some poached egg over a granite ledged throat, he erased his night's
work. He destroyed everything back to act one.
Though not for long, Adam did
sleep then on the couch bed, dreamlessly and in no way medicinally. Mostly it
was the crisis with the second act preventing rest. But also the drapeless room
and a great glorious spring day of sun shoveled massive quantities of slabbed
light with rocky edges into Adam's mind and body. And the light was somehow full
of an elemental noise. The whole effect was that of coal, already ablaze,
rumbling through Adam who would be dreaming he was a furnace if he were dreaming
and not just fractionally asleep. Another serious problem was that Adam's body
could not decide if it weighed five hundred pounds or nothing at all.
Ponderousness and weightlessness seemed to be using his molecular structure as a
test site in rapid fire time-sharing. For another thin, his throat plain
old-fashioned hurt. He managed one tiny dream in which his neck was bound in a
towel tourniquet. Something about the light and voice.
And not only these things but the
doorbell was ringing. It was the grocer to stock Adam's kitchen. Adam sat on the
edge of his bed listening to boxes and cans being put away. Apples and oranges
were bumping into the vegetable bins before Adam realized this wasn't an
automatic service, that Jamie must have ordered the delivery.
Adam was chewing baby bites of a
banana and working on the play again when the drapers came. He chose a beige
fabric and then tried to work while the man and woman measured windows and
remarked in a half-dozen ways each that the apartment was lovely. And how did he
like his word processor? And was he a writer? And how wonderful to be able to
write! And when they left, Fred the elevator man came with a box of china Jamie
had ordered from a department store. By the time the phone person came and went,
Adam was furious and called Jamie at the office.
"Goddamn it! Who or what else is
coming?" Adam rasped into the phone.
"I'm sorry, Adam. I never dreamed
they'd get there today. Only the groceries. I swear. Everything came? Dishes?
Drapers? The phone? Who'd ever dream the phone people'd give same day service?
That's it. That's all. Go back to sleep."
Adam slammed down the phone, but
was sorry for it before the bang even. He lumbered to the bed and tried to
sleep. the pettiness of the plastic bang haunted the room. His body was pain
sliding now electrically, now gravelly from limb to limb to torso to head. He
was too exhausted to sleep. Sleep was for other sorts of organisms than he.
But mostly it was the play. It
damned sleep. It scampered and screamed and laughed at him. It ran around the
room prancing arhythmically like a hellish monster. It peered with its gargoyle
face into Adam's closed eyes.
He
had pulled a Michelangelo. He was in possession of a wonderful white marble
obelisk. There was a statue in it. A work of art. A play. An image of humanity.
Mosaic wonder and power and awe and terrible beauty dwelt unborn in the marble.
Having a first act and an outline
was only analogous to Michelangelo having conceived of a statue; having cut the
block with the stonecutters at the quarry at Carrara; having helped with the
harnesses, ropes and pulleys and lowered the block to the wagon; and having
nursed the load along the road to Rome. Now the stone stood in Adam's studio.
Now the true work began. Now the chisels and hammers waited to soothe Adam and
his stone, to make cruel and delightful demands on Adam's hitherto neurotically
crippled hands. Now he had to break into the great mute beauty of the stone and
create the living, human, exquisite monster of Mosaic expression.
"Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not.
Thou shalt not," throbbed at Adam's temple like a prime pulse. With his very
heart and blood he was a prisoner to his fevered analogy.
The play, the stone pale and
lovely, hoar frost on fire, pure darkness inside, uncut light, cut a hundred
thousand times over the years in Adam's head, stood in the center of his room,
the center of his studio, the center of his rome, the center of his renaissance.
The great cut he must make cleaved him. He thought all of his blood would rush
out and wash the desk and the computer and the first act out of the window and
onto the wild scatters of the city. He gazed through the crazily billowing veils
of his fever at the unblooded desk, the platform holding the monster stone
waiting to be cut. Waiting to let Moses out. Waiting to let law's beauty loose
on a savage land pocked with herds of golden calves. Waiting to let art loose on
a medieval world. Waiting to let light loose on a dark age.
It was an awesome responsibility
he--or perhaps something other than he--had created. But Adam rose to it. His
cock rose. He was full of powers. Abilities. Humility. Hope. He could do it. He
would do it. He would set the matriarchs and the patriarchs and the pentateuch
free with his play. And the light. And the law. And the humor. And the delight.
And the horror. Because these were simple matters, but strongly magnetic and all
the world's confusions and complications clung there like ugly, common,
deceptive masks made of iron filings. Adam's duty was to take away the debris.
He sighed like a baby. He knew he would let the art and beauty and truth out of
fifteen years of stony, stuttering, ponderous, silly, overwrought suffering and
studying. Then he sighed again sweetly, twice.
Then blissfully Adam was dozing,
lying on his stomach, his arms over the edge of the foot of the bed, his ten
fingertips resting on the hardwood floor. The gargoyle of the unfinished play
slunk off to sulk in a corner.
When the doorbell rang, Adam's sensory reaction was that he thought the floor at
his fingertips was marble. Then he thought it was the stage of the Paradise
Theatre. Then he thought it was the keyboard of his word processor. Then he
jerked awake when the doorbell rang again. It took a few beats to wrench his
fingers from the floor and then a few more to tear his body from the bed.
Ordinarily, there would have been one close knit, fluid series of motions from
pulling hands off the floor to rising, but Adam's fever put hinges in his
actions.
It was a bed at the
door. Or, rather, it was Fred leading two delivery men carrying pieces of a bed.
Adam was too weak and asleep to be angry. He told them where to put the bed. He
paid them to assemble it in the sleeping alcove off the livingroom. It was an
excellent replica of a 1790's pencil post bed. Adam liked it a lot. After the
delivery men took trips to the truck for mattress and box springs and left for
good, and Adam made this first real bed he had slept on in several years with
the sheets and blankets from the couch bed, and when he got in the bed, he
adored it. Despite the fact that his bacteria-wracked body was a sensory model
of an old set of bedsprings with its coiling chillblains and creaking dehydria,
the new mattressing gave him a post-orgasmic peace.
As he rode the new bed down into
sleep, he saw the new apartment anew, this time in concentric cubic layers. It
was the white apartment full of light. Inside of that was the interior of the
white block of marble. Inside of that was the white interior of the Paradise
Theatre. Inside of that he found a white box made of a sleep full of a goodly
light. And at the core f this he found his play. And so he dreamed the play.
Adam's play went something like
this in plot:
John, a renowned sociology
professor at a fine university, has a several million dollar government grant to
head a study of the wino population in the United States. He stumbles on a wino
who happens to be his father. It has been thought until now that the father was
dead since World War II.
The
sociologist's mother, who is a great voice in the play recounts the story of how
she had been an anthropology doctoral student and on a dig in some Mayan ruins
in Mexico in the 1930's. That she was madly in love with the professor in charge
of the dig, but that he had used her and discarded her. Along came this soldier
of fortune, the man who is now a wino, and he swept her off her feet. of course
the deed was not difficult because she was on the rebound. They had honeymooned
in Havana and returned to her home in Boston. Her family threw them out, scandal
that it was that she had married an Italian. She was Irish. So she lost her
inheritance and her fellowship. And she had three babies in three years. But
after the soldier of fortune ran off to a gold strike in Honduras, she crawled
back to Boston, crawled back to her family who took pity and took her back. At
the play's beginning, she has never yet recovered and is a broken little old
bird. But during the play, she rises to wise and strong matriarchal heights in
contrast to John's growing madness.
John's wife is the chair of the
theater department. She is producing "Pygmalion" for the university. themes from
that play echo through the first act of Adam's play, "The Acts of a Man". John
brings the wino/father home and tries to make him over. But the old man is
riddled with cancer. And when the old man needs a transfusion, it is discovered
that John can't possibly be his son because of the simple blood typing when John
wants to donate. But the wino is father to John's brother and sister.
John has made his siblings come to the hospital to donate blood even though they
want nothing to do with their father.
During a terrible, ruthless
interrogation by John, his mother theorizes that she could have been pregnant by
the archeologist who pushed her away in Mexico. It would have made her pregnancy
with John eleven months long, but such things are possible and he had been ten
pounds at birth. So in a father-finding frenzy, John rushes to confront the
professor who is semi-retired but still titular head of the archeology
department at the same university where John and his wife are professors. By
political leverage, John blackmails the old professor into having blood tests,
first simple typing which is inconclusive, then elaborate tests which prove the
two aren't remotely related. In fact, John's mother isn't his mother, these
three-way tests prove. The tests are the sort used in organ donor situations.
By now, John's wife has left him,
he has lost chairmanship of the federal study, his brother and sister--who are
not his brother and sister--are not speaking to him, the wino has died, and the
archeology professor has undermined John's important projects at the university
by way of revenge.
Now John
searches the records at the hospital where he was born in Ohio, and finds two
families to whom babies were born on the same day John was born. He persuades
everyone to have blood tests. In fact, of these two families, the family that
turns out to be John's genetic family cares so little about the matter that he
has to pay them before they will submit to blood tests; the other family is
launched into a crisis state because the son in that family who shared John's
birthday had died in Vietnam. The only resurrection they get upon the results of
the blood tests is freshened grief.
As it turns out, John is a
fraternal twin. The same doctor who delivered John and his twin delivered the
baby that the soldier of fortune had fathered. John and that boy were
accidentally switched because the doctor and nurses were scrambling to save
John's twin brother who weighed only three and a half pounds. All three boys
were born within a few minutes in adjoining delivery rooms. John and his
changeling had both been about ten pounds at birth, both dark. In fact, the
changelings, now grown, look remarkably alike. John is German and Greek now, not
Italian and Irish. He had been genetically born to a poor, uneducated family. He
makes the people in his born family miserable with themselves by trying to
instantly educate them and trying to make them passionate about the drama of his
birth and his wonderfulness.
Though Adam hadn't been dreaming the play particularly consecutively, he dreamed the last scene last before waking:
The mother who has raised John
comes to Ohio ostensibly to meet her real son at John's behest. Her real purpose
is to rescue John from his madness and take him home to Boston. the scene
consists largely of the two mothers, the rich and the poor, sitting in a kitchen
while John's genetic mother peels potatoes. They talk of many things while John
intermittently pops into the impoverished kitchen saying insane fragmentary
things about genetics versus environment. The two women talk of motherhood, men,
love, and girlhood. The poor woman gives the rich woman back the money that she
and her husband made John pay before they submitted to blood testing. "I thought
he was some kind of crank," says his poor mother. "He is a crank." says
his rich mother. "He's a product of his environment. His father--I mean, Jack,
my husband, running off when John was three. And me mooning over the great
romance of it all. And John logical and obsessed about society and social
behavior to compensate."
The rich
mother suggests that she take both John and her natural son back to Boston
saying that she could get the Ohio son a job. John's changeling has been laid
off for three years. But the poor mother doesn't think it's a good idea. John's
twin, who has been mentally crippled since oxygen deprivation at birth, is
emotionally dependent on the changeling. Just then John backs into the kitchen
through the swinging door, saying, "What are you doing? I'm your brother! I'm
your own brother! I shared our mother's womb with you!" And the mentally
deranged twin walks into the kitchen with a shotgun and kills John. The twin
says, "He wasn't my brother. I know who my brother is. He was making me crazy,
so I killed him. Now I can know who I am."