Yvonne saddened deeply.
She sat still and silent alone in
the dining room, her short term and long term tirednesses savaging her nerves
syncopatedly. She combated sadness by becoming angry. She raged soundlessly at
Adam's foolishness. In this city of plays, there were maybe hundreds of
thousands of scripts begging for stages and actors and lights. There were
closets and suitcases and drawers and shoeboxes and file cabinets and lockers at
the bus stations, train stations, and airports full of plays that could never be
produced. And some lesser or greater number of these were worth being produced
but could never be gotten along the right channels to the right people at the
right time. And here was this idiot! This fool Adam Adamsky! He had a producer
and a theater, both of which he could call his own, and he couldn't get off his
bullshit and come up with a play. And she raged at herself for throwing away the
Ruth play. And she raged at herself for believing in the Adamsky play. For
chasing a chimera. For being this idiot! This fool Yvonne Yvette! She who was so
practical, so cunning. Then suddenly she realized that she could in fact do the
Ruth play, that she had only planned to throw it away. She could even still
re-manipulate Greg out of the picture. "Oh, Greg, I'm truly sorry," she could
tell him. "I hadn't realized that Hal Howard had the play completely cast." And
she could suffer through his abuses; the initial abuse where he would attack her
for getting his hopes up, the later abuse after he would find out through the
grapevine that the play was cast after her lies. She could handle it, but it
made her sick to even think about it. And she could handle the continued
involvement with the Hal-Alex-Maggie soap opera, the professional compounding
the personal. And of course she was stuck with the personal anyway, which made
her nauseous now just to think of it. And the very marrow of her bones slumped
now when she remembered that Maggie would be staying with her soon. It all just
made her miserable. And the sadness that hadn't left despite the pavement of
ragings and contrivings, resurfaced and engulfed her.
She suddenly dozed. In a brief
sleep she forgave Adam and herself, made some sort of deal with the sadness, and
resolved irrevocably to not do the Ruth play. She woke with a start, her head
having nodded, but thinking that Felix had wakened her by coming into the room.
But he was still on the phone, she surmised. "Where the hell is he?" she said.
"This is my time with him." She yawned and stretched and settled for a bit into
a sleepy reverie. It became clear in this state that the two plays had nothing
to do with each other at all. It wasn't a choice between them. It was that she
chose not to do the Ruth, would have done the Adamsky if it had existed. And she
could quite pleasantly do no play at all for quite a while. With that thought
she rose to throw off sleepiness.
She made the circuit of the art gallery dining room. The Picasso dazzled the
passions, Yvonne's glands gave a quick wash to their precincts of flesh like
attendants at busy gas stations do windshields. Then the Renoir soothed her like
a pink tranquilizer absorbed optically. Now she was stimulated and sedated. When
she came to the Da Vinci on the third wall, she was profoundly awake. The fine
solemnity of the painting somehow enabled her to articulate the wants and needs
that were caught in the sadness like a fly in amber. "I'd love to have spring
fever," she thought. "I'd love to have all the stale old perceptions and
scenarios and habits packed away--at least until the next psychological ice age.
I'd like to not be so fucking knowing and so goddamned manipulative. I'd like to
be in love. I'd like to be the great fool, just so all the new days could array
themselves before me in the beauty of their peculiarities. I'd like to see the
world, instead of this opaque overlay, this paint-by-numbers life of mine."
This clear prayer took her on to
the fourth wall where she stopped and studied the Jerod Randal painting. It was
of a young man lying in a bed near which a race horse stood. There were bouquets
of red roses lying on the white comforter. Though Yvonne had seen this painting
three hundred and sixty-five times in seven years of Tuesdays, she didn't
realize until now where she had seen it before ever coming to these rooms. This
was the painting from which the first posters for Adamsky's play Roses and
Horses were made. When the play had moved to Broadway there was a new poster
used. This was the poster master for the Paradise. Bending near the portrait on
the painted pillow, she stage whispered, "My god! It's Adam!"
Like change of life writ small,
she felt cold and then hot and sank into a chair as if fevered. She suddenly
could remember the sensations of youth. She remembered both with her mind and
her body having seen Roses and Horses on Broadway when she was
twenty-one. She remembered weeping--and tears came now to her eyes--when the
four brothers and two nephews carried the white coffin carrying the body of the
young suicide across the stage. And she could hear the Rabbi on the stage set
like a tiny Jewish cemetery. He could barely speak. Choked Hebrew sang so solemn
and tearful from him that Yvonne's throat had throbbed with the actor's like one
string of an instrument vibrates in sympathy with another. The high music of
deep grieving arched fifteen years and Yvonne's throat throbbed now.
"It's too bad, though," thought
Yvonne, "how much one grows attached to the world. At least to bits of its
garbage. This epidemic neurosis of attachment is a love of the ugly. Because
beauty can't be hung on to. Maybe it is best to die young." She cursed herself
for having thought this, with her own son just twenty. And she could feel the
silky and steel remnants in her body of being that young. She could remember in
her muscles the way walking home from the production of Roses and Horses
had felt. The way the sidewalk and neon and the crowds and the past and the
future and the present were all solid dreams full of energy and promise and
mystery and negotiable facts and immutable truths.
"But what has become of that
now?" she asked the painting. "What has happened to the way time glittered and
shimmered?" Certainly life was no more certain now, though still solid with its
hard facts and brickwall moments, still it was and is all dreams. The dreams
were no longer so large, so undefined, so untried, so full of fluid light. "It's
become a case of cut and dried dreams," she thought, and chuckled because by
half-accident she had used the title of Adamsky's second play. Cut and Dried
Dreams, a comedy, was about a fifty year old married couple who discover
they are in love despite thirty years of posturings to the contrary, posturings
devised as efforts to grow up. They find they are not grown up, that there is no
such thing, only gathering of knowledge and suffering. Yvonne marked what
extraordinary plays these were for a nineteen or twenty year old to have
written. It occurred to her that in a way, Adam, like the young man in Roses
and Horses, must have died after the plays were written; his dreams were all
cut and dried then. "Poor Adam!" she commiserated with the painting.
But then she had an inspiration.
They could revive Adamsky's early plays at the Paradise! Then perhaps he could
take up the thread and go on and write more plays. She went eagerly to tell
Felix. When she opened the kitchen door, Felix's presence caused her to shudder
slightly. He was standing with his back to the door, across the room, phone to
his ear, nodding almost imperceptibly, and not speaking. Yvonne cleared her
throat. Felix turned and lifted a finger in the air, asking for patience by the
gesture. He smiled a smile that combined with his dark skin and dark hair had
the effect of the Milky Way shattering against an ebony night. Yvonne's face
became an involuntary parallel galaxy. She withdrew and wandered off to Felix's
livingroom, giggling, "Paradise Regained!"
"Geez, that really is a living
room," she thought, peering through a pane in the French doors that led to the
garden zoo. "A room that lives." She let herself in. The temperature was exotic
and her sweat clothes were immediately too hot. But the color of her outfit,
purple, adapted her visually to this Gauguin setting. And her high clunky
leather boots put her on an appropriate safari footing. "All I need is a
lavender pith helmet, or a leather pilot's hood with goggles," she thought. It
well seemed to her, gazing around the vast, lush room, that here she might
stumble on Amelia Erhart, Dr. Livingston, the Lindbergh baby--anyone, so long as
they were exotic, mythic. This was her first time alone here. She planned to use
the solitude on details, but without her escort she felt unguided.
The trees riffled with bird
behavior and clattered with bird voices, and space was colored here and there
for a few seconds as various birds cut various planes of flight through the
enormous room. There were mysterious munching sounds coming from half a dozen or
a dozen or more foliage-obscured locations at levels from the floor to far above
Yvonne's head. The waterfall sounds came from twenty or so madly bubbling
aquaria. The light from windows and many lamps of various kinds splayed through
the aquaria, dabbing bubble-jostled water colors around the room, painting
especially the pale tips on the brush-like palms.
A pygmy goat sucked on her purple
shin, tugging the pant leg from her boot. She gently pulled her sweats free, and
giving the goat a cookie she'd brought from the dining room, she told him, "If
Felix's theater is paradise, this must be the Garden of Eden, Randy." And she
wondered why Eden didn't stink. She took a deep sniff, and a second, identifying
scents. First she smelled the aroma of burnt Marlboros that went with her
everywhere, then her constant Chanel, then rich earth, then tropical
flowers--the delights of which had been the dominant aroma since she'd entered
the room, just as their orange and purple rounded triangulations had dominated
visually. But there was just a small spicy whiff of dung and feathers and
organic whatnot insinuated in with the rest.
Assured that the room was at
least in the same neighborhood as reality, she decided to move more deeply into
it. There were two problems: One was that, as always, she was uncertain how to
walk on the floor, which was a polished black tile, but which seemed to call for
the walk one walks on soil, given the rest of the milieu. The second problem was
that, although the trees and plants were of greatly varying heights and widths
and distributed to give senses of sculptured openness, travel in a straight line
was only possible for a few feet in any direction. So Yvonne wandered in sprung
figure eights. A rooster rumpled out from under a bush and stalked indignantly
across her ginger path. A monkey with chicken feathers in his free hand hobbled
by erect, hanging on to the tail of a miniature stallion, making a loop opposite
Yvonne's. She stopped at an oasis where five iguanas lounged on a pile of rocks
beneath a blaring, naked bulb hung from a small, flowering guava tree. She was
just penetrating the outer mystique of the reptile soiree when all around in the
trees above the clearing, a horrible, primitive row broke out among the birds.
Terrified, Yvonne sprang up, having settled on her haunches. Her heart pounded
and a scream rose in her throat. She stood with her hands opening and closing at
her sides. In a half minute more, with calm deliberation she picked her way back
toward the door, sorting through the tangles of her panic as she stepped. "Felix
is insane," she said to a small shark in an aquarium as she neared the door.
But a miniature baby goat, the
size of a stuffed toy, tottered from between two pots of bamboo. Yvonne was
stopped in her flight by cuteness, that most effective of muggers. She picked up
the white baby, not more than a day or so old she reckoned, and kissed its frail
skull. Disdaining the half dozen plastic covered Victorian settees, one of which
was close at hand, she sat cross-legged on the floor and held the kid to her
heart.
"Oh, lambkin; Felix Lord
is our producer. Yea though we walk through the valley of city animal ordinance
violations, we will fear no primal fears. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow
us like Mary's little lamb, and our plays shall dwell in the theater of Felix
Lord forever. Or at least a good long healthy run." The baby sucked the sleeve
of her sweatshirt as she rocked and though of Adam's plays. She was casting and
blocking them, running back and forth between them in her mind. The baby goat
bleated. "No milk? Awww. Go-a-find-a-you-a-mama, bambino," she said in her best
Chico Marx. The goat obeyed.
As
she watched the land quadruped go, she first sensed and then located the monkey
who was watching her. He gazed down when he saw her eyes on him. Then he
approached, eyes still averted, extending a dwarf banana in one hand as he
crossed the two-yard distance between them. "For me? How very thoughtful!" she
said. The monkey sat on the floor facing Yvonne. She peeled the banana, gave the
meat to the monkey, and put the skin on the dirt in a pot. "Max," she asked him.
"What was that line from Roses? A holiday of angels...? The angels'
holiday? Something about forgetting for a day that you're flesh, dust. Excuse
me, Max. I've got to go." She rose and left the livingroom. The monkey followed
her as far as the door, and pressed his palms and nose against the glass.
Yvonne looked into the kitchen
again, but Felix was still there, on the phone, so she went to the room that was
a library where she looked for copies of Adam's plays. But she couldn't
understand the shelving system, couldn't find Adam's works. So she took a
Shakespeare instead with a sigh, and went to the room with the chair.
Lolling deep in the chair, she
read from here and there, found this--
If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep,
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand:
My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne;
And all this day an unaccustomed spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts--
then she put the book on
the floor beside the chair and slept.
She dreamed in that translucent,
especially quick way of day sleep. She dreamed she was a chimpanzee in a space
capsule strapped in a seat. She dreamed she landed on a green planet and
evolved. She dreamed she was her own granddaughter by a thousand generations.
She dreamed she was walking one day in a garden and came upon Adam naked,
sleeping on a fallen log covered with moss. And then she woke with a soap bubble
pop.
That is, her mind woke; her
eyes slept for a moment. Through her eyelashes she could see someone framed by
the window, framed by a sun that was setting greyly behind a cloud cover. Adam?
Adam Adamsky? She called in her dreamy mind. Her heart pounded. The man lifted
his arm. Yvonne opened her eyes fully. It was Felix, his back to her, sipping
tea and looking out the window. Yvonne felt foolish.