Chapter Three
"The World?
The World?" laughed Yvonne in her thoughts. "By the world, I must mean me...but,
no, I mean the world," she thought, growing maudlin again. "There's got to be a
play. He's got to do it," she thought as she let herself into her apartment.
"And I've got to direct it," she said aloud, once she was in her foyer. And her
parakeet answered brightly from the other room. She threw her trench coat on a
hook, put down her briefcase, kicked off her heels, and went into the livingroom
to let the bird out of its cage. The bird hopped onto the wire threshold.
Yvonne threw
herself into a reclining position on the couch. The bird flew onto her abdomen.
A though played hopscotch on some cells of her brain and Yvonne burst out
laughing. The bird fluttered astonished into the air, then made a landing on
Yvonne's knees which the director had bent to a peak during laughter. "Really,"
she said, "this is all out takes from a Micky Rooney-Judy Garland movie."
"The dialogue here
goes like this, bird: 'Hey, Jimmy, I've got some material, we could make some
swell costumes!' 'And I know my father would let us use his barn!' 'I know where
there's some lumber! Would could build a stage and scenery!' 'And we can get
Felix Lord to print some tickets!' 'And we'll get Adam Adamsky to write the
great American play!' 'We'll save the world!...' sure, Yvonne, sure,
sure."
She
contemplated the parakeet. "I'll name you Judy Garland, maybe," she told the
bird. "You've got the eyes for it." She had had the bird for three years and
never named it. She was for the thousandth time stricken by the little
creature's aesthetics. It was totally beige. That is, it was two tones of light
beigish blue, with a medieval helmet of beigish yellow, and claws and beak of
beigish oranges. The bird was a small, live miracle of pleasantness bought in
Woolworth's. "Or, I know, you be Toto, I'll be Dorothy, Adamsky can be the Tin
Man, Lion and Scarecrow all in one, and Felix Lord can be--who else? The Wizard
of Oz." The little bird cocked its head from side to side like a nervous piano
tuner. "But, truthfully, I dislike that movie, though I sympathize with the
masses for adoring it. All the world loves a messiah. But say, bird, would you
like a steak? Or would you rather have a part in my new play? It's trés
Broadway, darling." Darling was as close to a name as the bird had. Sometimes
pronounced "dahlin'," "da-ahling" or "dahlink," depending on Yvonne's mood or
current play.
The bird sat on Yvonne's
shoulder while she broiled her steak and watered and preened her fifty-seven
plants. "Actually," she mused to the parakeet as she fussed over a philodendron
that had the vegetable analogue of a head cold. "Actually, I was offered three
plays today. Two to direct, one to act in. Mommy Dearest is so overwhelmed,
overextended, overcome, overwrought, darling. Be wise of you not to make one
false move this evening. Or it's curtains." And she made a cutting gesture near
her throat with the trowel.
Other than the Lord/Adamsky
venture, she'd been offered the lead in a revival of My Fair Lady, which
she had turned down without mentioning her reason. She thought the play was a
badly turned Joan of Arc. and she'd been offered a play to direct that
was written by a lover's lover's lover of Tennessee Williams. "Play writing may
be contagious, but writing good plays isn't. I don't mean to condemn out of
hand, but these fourth-generational things are so bad," Yvonne had told the
producer.
"Don't be bitchy, sweetheart," the producer had replied. "Besides, whose lover
are you?" A catty remark, Yvonne had supposed, in some slightly akilter parallel
universe. She hadn't the foggiest notion what it meant in this universe.
After her supper,
Yvonne washed up in the kitchen, took a long meditative bath, dressed for bed,
retrieved her briefcase from the foyer, and she got in bed. First she tried to
read the fourth-generational play, but it had the words "ennui" and "herpes" all
in the first line. So, grasping it by thumb and finger tips, she lazily dropped
it in the waste basket. She tried to the read the "Times," "Time," "The New
Yorker," "The Wall Street Journal," and "People," but nothing caught her
attention until she looked at "Variety" and saw this little item:
Felix Lord, the
eighty-year-old producer and director with such plays to his credit as
Roses and Horses and Cut and Dried Dreams, has bought the old
Paradise Theatre. The theater has been tied up in real estate and tax red tape
for nearly fourteen years. Lord has been in retirement for five years. It is
rumored that Lord has commissioned Adam Adamsky to write a play for the
theater's reopening. Adamsky, prodigy playwright of the above plays, hasn't
been known to write a play in fifteen years.
Upon reading that, she was done trying to read for the evening.
Yvonne submerged
herself in her bed clothes. By the time the newspapers and magazines slid off
her satin comforter onto the floor, her mind had descended into the luminescent
waters of the Lord/Adamsky fairy tale. She lay entranced with visions of great
actresses and actors strutting across the stage of the beautiful Paradise
Theatre. She could not hear the words. But she could hear the tones. Sonorous
and tragic, lilting and whimsical. Underwater music. She had visions of Felix
Lord in the dim, stage-lit wings, knowingly glowing. And she had a vision of
Adam in the wings, worry focused into concentration as he mouthed the words the
actors were speaking.
Now Adamsky's unknown play
became a gallery of oil paintings. The works were not framed or hung. The
canvases leaned in stacks along the walls in a many-roomed vision. Yvonne looked
through the paintings like an all-approving curator, come alone at night to
savor the bright details assembled out of darkness. The vision shifted, became
auditory. Yvonne's bed was like a little boat riding master waves of applause
for Adam's art.
So blind and deaf was Yvonne
with rapture that when the parakeet descended out of the seeming-nowhere onto
her shoulder, she screamed so torrentially that the city-grim neighbors thought
for a moment about calling the police. She was still screaming when the bird,
which Yvonne had batted to its fall, laid stunned on the bedroom floor for many
moments. On her feet and hovering over her attacker/victim, Yvonne felt surges
of fear for the bird's mortality. She picked it up and stroked it as she sat
shaking on the edge of her bed choking down the rest of her screams. When she
felt the bird would be fine, she carried it to the livingroom and its cage.
"It's my fault for not putting you to bed, but you were warned."
Still awash in
adrenaline and other gratuitous substances to do with fright, Yvonne stood in
the livingroom a while and practiced the impromptu exercise of scanning the dark
for bits of light that oozed and leapt from the metals and glass of accoutrement
on shelves, tables and walls. And she thought about the most remarkable set of
phenomena of the day-to-day universe. She thought about Overlap. Overlap was the
tie that binds. The tie that breaks bonds. How when the ties, the bonds, grow
too heavy or decrepit they break away. But always causing new overlappings. The
Overlap Principle was her great theory, her master template. It had to do with
the overlappings of light and dark; sound and silence; life and death;
vegetable, mineral and animal; good and bad; art and mundanity. And the overlap
from categories such as life, light, sound, water, etc. And the way separate
events overlapped in time, and shared elements of mental and physical
qualities.
Yvonne thought about the primitive fear-cum-neurosis that had made her flip out
when the parakeet had surprised her. Then how that fear had been minimized yet
added to when she feared the beige thing was dead. Then she thought back to the
visions of Adam's play before the attack of the bird. The contrasts there of
light and dark, the overlap of art on art with the play form and the paintings.
And she though overall about the quickness of overlappings in the art of
imagination. And then all of that overlapping could so easily be crushed under,
overtoppled by attacks of reality. And then she overlapped all this with the
realization that she had a full-blown obsession under way over the Adamsky/Lord
fairy tale. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and she didn't know whether
it would be over the fairy tale itself, or her obsession with it. But it was
certain that it was now the Adamsky/Lord/Yvonne Yvette fairy tale.
So with her best
Lady Macbeth carriage, she went into the kitchen, took a sleeping pill and
prepared herself a double espresso. The phone range. "No, no, really," she heard
herself saying a moment later to a drunken Greg who was whining into a pay phone
in a bar. "No, I don't know if there's a part for you. It'll be months
probably." What she craved to tell him was that he had his role already and he
was playing it to perfection. that his function was to remind her not to think
too highly of humanity, of herself, and generally not to think too highly. But
instead she played the obligatory phone call scene, she gave it its full measure
of monosyllabic mentality, and did promise to keep an ear open for possible
parts for him.
"Part for him?" she asked
herself after hanging up. "Like hubcaps and pistons?" And she sat at the table
to sip her coffee and let Greg and the phone call drift out of her mind. After a
bit she made herself state the case of the Adamsky situation. "It's that the
loss of anything good or fine or human or young or benevolently potent is
tragic." Really nothing more needed to be thought but she ambled around in
contemporary history and patches of her metaphysics to put Adam into focus. John
Kennedy, John Lennon...many names were invoked. The loss of youth, one's
own youth was cited. Potential. Passion. Life and art lost, the life art gives
lost. All those years Adamsky hadn't written were mourned by the chain-smoking
director sitting in the night.
God, yes. Adamsky's two plays
had been good. The last several centuries hadn't seen a couple of dozen plays so
good. It wasn't just that he'd had potential as a young playwright, it
was that he himself was potential. And it wasn't merely that his plays
had had potential, they were consummate works. As such, they were the stuff of
life, stuffed with potential as mirrored from life. Life, Adam, and plays were
all media. All three have shape and detail. But everything in plays, unlike in
life and people, must lead to a wholeness and yet be tied to the universe
outside of plays where such senses of wholeness rarely are given. Good art
leaves one breathless and full of the breath of life.
But what had happened to
Adam's gift? Had the sweet breathlessness become stale suffocation? "Obviously,"
concluded Yvonne, as she lit a cigarette. "It's too obvious." He'd choked
somehow on details, in the same way little bullets kill whole humans. And fame,
the fame that works both ways, the fame that snatches some up to the top, and
the fame of the world--that is, the greater picture of the great world that
artists and thinkers have--all this fame must have thrown Adam down and
collapsed on him. Yvonne had a vision of the great framework of Adamsky's vision
caving in and the rubble of detail gagging his spirit. She shuddered and the
bellows in her chest grabbed too suddenly for smoke from her cigarette and she
choked and sputtered.
After regaining rhythmic
breathing and smoking, she constructed out of the ashes of her last vision the
first model of madness she had ever achieved. Madness is the failed art of
civilized behavior. An Oswald or Sirhan failed to recognized the middle ground,
the relationships that keep the distances right between the details and the
greater structure of things. An artist invents these relationships anew, she
realized, labeling detail and form by showing proportion. In actuality, detail
and form are ever-shifting and depend upon a fluid middle ground. A work of art
labors toward that fluidity by use of ambiguity, for instance, as a
device.
But
madness presumes that the universe is either too rigid, or all together too
fluid and chaotic. So the mad test proportion, destroy proportion. By shooting
bullets at human ideals, for instance. And killing humans who carry those ideals
around with them. And who also carry with them details such as brain cells and
hearts and blood vessels.
So the mad break things. And
artists break things down to components and structures in order to build them
again. There was a way to posit that old comparison of madness and
artistry!
Anyone would have though, as Yvonne though as she retired again to her bed in
the middle of the night, that that would have been enough revelation for one
night. But the night was a river of profundity false and true that ran into
sleep only as dawn hung the first grey curtains over her bedroom windows. The
night was spent in a contemplation of the creative urge imploding, exploding and
walking around wounded. Spent in turning over questions. Why write? Why make
plays? why even talk? Nuclear bombs stood quivering in silos. The sun is burning
out. The universe is expanding--or contracting, which is just as bad. And the
flesh rots even as we speak.
But finally Yvonne's
consciousness sighed and slept, and some dreams had room to breathe.
Next