Yvonne shifted in the chair.
Felix turned to her, smiled, and handed her a warm cup of tea that he had set on
the window seat. He said, "Adam's got a play. There's an outline and a first
act."
"Was that he on the phone?"
"No. That was a friend of his,
Jamie. He read the first act to me. Sorry I was so long."
"No, no. I had a good time. Tell
me about the play. Why'd the friend call? Why didn't Adam?"
"Well, Adam's come down with
scarlet fever. He tried to destroy the play in some kind of fit. He was too sick
to see it was good. He was too sick to see he could go on writing when he's
better. Anyway, Jamie managed to save a copy of it."
"Our hero! Scarlet fever? I
thought that was for children. I thought it was obsolete. So the play is
good?" Yvonne asked, and then she drank her tea in a few rapid gulps.
"Mostly children get it. It's a
severe strep infection. Antibiotics have stopped it from being a killer. The
play is good, from what I heard..."
"Killer! Is Adam in danger?"
"No, no. He's very ill right now,
but taking antibiotics. The play..." Felix tried again.
"But he's stopped writing?"
"It'll be alright. In a few days,
next week he'll be well, Jamie will give him the play back and he'll feel like
writing.
"But listen; the play: I
think Adam's got a play. I think we've got a play. It's a Hamlet thing. About
narcissism and identity. The first act's a Pygmalion thing, until the last
scene, and then there's a twist. The play spills deeper into questions of
identity and family in the following acts. Also, there's a thread of a theme in
it about passions and madness underlying profession. There's some King Lear in
it, too. Bloody murder, too."
"Yeah," Yvonne said, confused and excited by this second hand description. "So
we've got a little drawing room comedy to do."
"Yes," laughed Felix. He pointed
to the book on the floor next to the chair. "Well, I'm certain that next to
Shakespeare's nightmares, his tragedies were light comedy."
"Oh, I have no objection to
tragedy. At least tragic plays have symmetry, unlike nightmares and tragedies in
life." Then she rose and pointed to the chair. Felix sat down in the chair,
smiling cherubically, and Yvonne sat on the window seat, frowning tiredly.
"Well, taken alone dreams haven't
any symmetry. But I've been thinking lately that a collection of dreams with
overlapping themes and symbols and language from several people would make a
play. Plays are assemblages somewhere between real events and real dreams."
"Like myths are sort of
democratic dreams?" Yvonne suggested.
"Mmmm. Artists are sort of like
senators, representing the dreams of the many, putting the dreams forth in the
senate, the theater in this case."
"But what are you calling
dreams?" Yvonne asked.
"Oh, all
sorts of things are dreams--I'm using all of them collectively when I talk about
this. I'm talking about actual dreams had in bed asleep--or asleep anywhere," he
said, pointing to the arm of the chair. "Or little daydreams, little fancies
painted on daylit air. And little fleeting thoughts and impressions. And also
political, religious, ideological yearnings. Philosophy, speculation, and
madness.
"So a playwright has to
take the language of these things, all the fragmentary nonsense and make it walk
and talk on a stage. Plays are dreams, too. Disclosed dreams. The private dreams
that the playwright shares with most others given a shape and form, a sustained
story, and then made public. So these disclosed dreams are a relief, among other
things, to the audience. There it is on the stage! Their dreams!" Felix smiled
and sat back satisfied.
"You
always make me feel as if this is a noble profession. But it is, isn't it? I
mean, there are plenty of ignoble people in it, and it's as rife with ignobility
as any profession--at least I think it must be--I only know this one. But the
thing is, when theater rises to its ideal heights, and it does so quite often,
then it's quite grand and fine in the scheme of things human...
"Take Paul's new play. That play
is better than he is. I don't mean just that it's better than Duck, Duck,
Goose and the plays he wrote before that. I mean that those plays don't even
account for what's in the Ruth thing. I mean, his life doesn't account for the
play, the hours in front of the typewriter don't account for it, the research,
the pondering, the note taking, not the years at his craft. I mean, you can
break art down to its components, systematize art, but there's no accounting for
the creation of a work.
"It
is a noble profession. Noble and magical. It takes guts and faith to peek
under the daily masks, under the day-to-day ideas and bring back what's there
and put it on a stage. Make the unbearable seemingly bearable because the actors
are going through it and the audience has some distance. But unlike the news and
its tragedies, a tragic play does just that: It plays with the tragedy. It scans
the full breadth of it, lets the details breathe. An audience gets to see the
best and the worst of themselves played out. All the grand and dirty secrets of
being human walking around in the person of actors. All the dreams wakened in
this controlled place and time. And..." But Yvonne stopped and laughed. "God,
this is sophomoric!"
"Mmmm. The
old truths are sophomoric. Truth is young and strong and silly, earnest and
exaggerated with the sophomore because of a lack of details. The sophomore, the
twenty year old is a much maligned creature. No one's any smarter than a twenty
year old. Oh, some maturing occurs, of course, but mostly it's a question of
gathering common disguises after that point. And learning to systematize
irresponsibility and passion. That's where we get most of what's on TV. It's
system, not art. And Washington, Tel Aviv, Moscow--all those places of adult
power are places of massively systematized irresponsibility and passion. It that
what you'd be? What you'd do?" asked Felix, as close to angry as she had ever
seen him.
Yvonne looked down
drowning in guilt over her politicking ways and her sexual compartmentalization.
"Of course you're sophomoric.
You're an artist. Isn't it thrilling? And you're a mature artist. You're in
touch with the fires of a twenty year old, and yet you have craft. You can make
the details catch fire from the great ideas."
"You know, Felix, plays don't fix
everything. Neither do dreams."
"Oh? Don't be so sure. Everything that's ever been fixed has been fixed first in
some sort of dream. But you're right, dreams and plays can't fix everything. But
neither can doctors. No profession can fix everything, not even everything
within its province. Art has a very large province--all of reality and dreams
are in it. It's a parallel world."
"Mmmm," Yvonne said. She looked
out the window, saw the afternoon had grown ancient, felt as though she had too,
and so she rose and announced that she must go home. "I've got to call Paul, but
first figure out how to get out of Ruth gracefully. And I'm exhausted.
And Julian is supposed to call tonight. And all I really want to do is think
about Adam's play."
"My word! You
are a busy girl!" Felix laughed.
"It's not easy running the world, you know."
"Oh, how well I know!" agreed
Felix, and the two friends giggled all the way to the front door. At the door,
Felix held back Yvonne's briefcase after he had helped her on with her coat.
"Didn't you have some poems?"
"Yes I do. Imagine me forgetting I have poems!" and she took out her pages and
gave them to him.
"And another
thing," he said, walking her down the hall to the elevator, "you haven't said
anything about Julian in weeks."
"Ah, Julian. He's fine. Don't you read the papers? No, I don't mean that like it
sounded. I'm just confused by my lack of motherly pride in his success. But it
all confuses me, the whole entire motherhood thing. He calls, but I still don't
feel in touch with him. I have no affect on him. I know lots of parents who feel
that way after their kids leave home, but with Julian, it's been that way since
he was born."
"Is he happy?"
Felix asked.
"Who knows with him.
He's so Byronic with the rock'n'roll tantrums, and then cool and quiet the rest
of the time. I saw him on one of those entertainment magazine shows last week
for a minute. The interviewer asked him how it was that he was so shy off stage.
You know what the kid said?"
"Tell me," Felix said.
"He told
the interviewer--and millions of TV sets--that when he was a little boy he
didn't have a backyard and never had a chance to dig a hole to China. So when
he's on stage, he said, that's what he's trying to do, dig a hole to China. And
the rest of the time, when he's off stage, he said, he's actually in China
mentally, but his body's got to stay in LA because that's where his accountant
is."
"On TV, huh?"
"Yeah! Isn't he wonderful? My
son, the sophomoric Zen-child rock star."
"See what I told you? He sounds
more like a Zen master to me. He said that on TV?"
"Mmmm," Yvonne said, remembering
at last to give the elevator button a push. "Right over the tube. I mean, no one
in the whole country says cryptic funny things anymore. Except for my son.
Everyone else just talks about how much happier and more together they are now
than they used to be...
"Felix,
what if they ruin him, the world? What if the world kills him?"
"The world will," said
Felix. When agony darted into Yvonne's eyes and her lips parted in protest and
pain, he said, "Doesn't it ruin everyone? Kill everyone?"
The elevator came, Yvonne kissed
Felix on the cheek, and got in. His Milky Way galaxy smile was framed for a
moment, then gone when the elevator doors closed like theater curtains. "End of
act," Yvonne thought as the elevator dropped, and she leaned against the wall.
On the street there was a
sadistic wind. In one of the visually least conducive settings for happiness,
standing on the curb while the doorman hailed a cab, Yvonne was an epiphamatic
conduit. The salient epiphany was that it didn't matter whether or not she loved
Julian, or whether she took typical pride in him. What mattered was that he was
hers. That the worst thing that could happen to her was that something bad
should happen to him. Other than taking care of practical needs, that was
plenty. At last there was a cab which hissed like a snake and tootled like a
piccolo. She laughed at the comedic cab, got in and wrapped herself in her mink
epiphanies.
When she got to her
apartment, the phone was ringing. It was Paul.
"Where have you been?" he yowled.
"Hal called. It's not as bad as she says. She thinks it is, she wasn't making it
up. She thinks it looks more lopsided than it is. Hal says he's seen lots worse
in leading ladies, which is to say slightly akilter. Of course Maggie does have
that extraordinary face...And she has a keen sense of how faces ought to be...
"Hal says it's a local and a few
stitches to make the repair. He's seen it before after facelifts heal. Very
common. The swelling's not all the way down before they leave the clinic and the
problem's not noticed for another week. It's not even a case for a malpractice
suit. Just that Maggie didn't pay attention when she was advised of the
possibilities."
Yvonne, who was
very grateful that Paul was talking in paragraphs, undoubtedly rattling off
every detail so he wouldn't forget, asked more about Maggie so she could
continue working out quickly while he talked what she would say about
Ruth. "But how's Maggie's head, as differentiated from her face?"
"She thanks you for sending Hal.
I don't know, Yvonne, I think maybe she ought to have some therapy, ya know? I
think maybe this is beyond us, ya know? I can't handle freakouts. I mean, I get
the impression she really is suicidal."
"Yes, therapy, definitely."
"She goes on and on about
Gabriel, Hal says," Paul said. Yvonne groaned. "Is that normal, Yvonne?"
"Normal!? Normal, Paul!? What do
we know from normal. She's grieving."
"But you said she was cracking up
over Hal."
"It's all the same
stuff. She's grieving life in general. It's a terrible burden. She's not
especially adept at the big questions, you know. They sweep them out of
Bloomingdale's every morning before the customers arrive. Seriously, it's all
one package on one level, Hal and Gabriel. She lost both of them all in one fell
swoop. She accused Gabriel of..of...ah, of losing Hal to you for both of them.
So she drove Gabriel away. And he died. And now she blames herself, no doubt,
for everything."
"None of it's
anybody's fault," Paul said impatiently.
"Oh, I don't know. You and I
might be blamed, and Hal." She heard Paul gasp, then continued. "But no, really,
it's nobody's fault. But there is flaw all the way around."
"It's an imperfect universe,"
Paul sniffed.
"Amen," sighed
Yvonne.
"No really," he said
earnestly, and repeated what he said like a much nicer person. "It's an
imperfect universe. I told you I can't handle this freakout stuff."
"Some dramatist!" she laughed.
After a silence he said, "I told
Hal that Maggie can stay here." Yvonne closed her eyes with joy, almost falling
asleep as she listed to him delineate his reasons and conditions, none of which
had to do with her. Suddenly she heard his voice change vocal gears from one
type of anxiety to another. "Did you read the play? I waited all night and all
day to hear from you."
"Paul, I
read it and I love it," she said in a rush, making him wait no longer. "It's the
best thing you've ever done. In fact, it's one of the best plays of the last ten
years. No. I'll say it: It's the best. It's really beautiful. And the
Ruth role! My god! A gem! A plum! A gold mine!"
"Yes, but do you like it?" asked
Paul, only half jokingly.
"Yes!
Yes!"
"So what do you want, the
Ruth role?" he asked.
"Can we
talk about it in a few days?" she whimpered.
"You got something else going?"
"What's the rush? You got
somebody else?" Silence as articulate as full disclosure came from Paul's end.
Yvonne's eyes again closed in joy, but sprang open immediately when joy was
superseded by feeling hurt. Oh, well, she thought, at least I was first choice.
And of course there would have been backup choices. These are professionals.
They know what they are doing, as Felix had pointed out. To Paul she said,
"You've got someone to direct? You have someone for Ruth? Both?"
"Let's talk about it in a few
days," he answered.
Just then,
the operator broke in, saying there was an urgent call for Yvonne, would they
hang up. "Quick, Paul. I want a favor whether I do anything with the play or
not."
"Okay, it's Paul Gives His
All week, anyway. Name it."
"Give
Greg a part in Ruth."
"That asshole! What the hell. Jesus, Jesus. Oh, okay! We better get off."
They hung up. The phone rang.
"Hello, Yvonne," said Julian.
"Sorry to break in but I have to catch a plane."
"No, no. Break in any time. I
have a phone primarily for your voice to come across. Where are you going? In
fact, where are you?"
"I'm in LA.
I'm just going to San Francisco and then up the coast for a few days. I'm going
to watch the whales migrate."
"Typical rock star high jinx," she laughed.
"Mmmm," he said.
"Julian, ask about your
daughter."
After a silence he
asked, "How's Jillie?"
"Beautiful. She wrote a song. Well, she dictated it to me. I'll send it to you."
"Sure. Listen, Yvonne, Hilary
sent me a letter saying she wanted to put Jillie in ads or in movies. Are you
behind this?"
Yvonne was
breathless. Julian never talked about Jillie. She managed to say no.
"I don't want her in the
business, okay? Not until they crank up the world and screw new brains in
everyone's heads, okay?"
"Yes,
Julian, certainly. Are you alright?"
"Sure. Just make sure Hilary
doesn't pull a fast one."
"Of
course. I'll get right on it tomorrow."
"Thanks, Yvonne. I've got to go."
"That's it?"
"Okay...But this has to be quick.
The stories in the papers are true."
"About...which stories?" There
were so many.
"The ones about
Beth Gottfried."
"The actress?
You're getting married? The papers know before your own mother?"
"Wait, wait. We only decided
today. We'll come there next week or the week after. You want to handle the
wedding? If we do get married, that is."
"Of course! Of course! Mazel tov!
Is she Jewish?"
"I don't know.
She's white."
"Very funny!"
"I've got to go. The plane is
loading. I'll call you in a couple of days."
"Are you in love?"
"Oh God yes! It's grand!"
"Oh God, I'll bet it is!"
"I've got to go. I'll call you."
"Julian, wait. I love you."
"I'll call you soon, Eve," he
said.
"No, wait. Tell me you love
me."
"Yvonne!"
"Say it. I'm your mother, I love
you, now say it. Say 'I love you'."
"Yvonne, I've got to go! I'm not
in the habit..."
"Say it. I'm
your mother and I'm ordering you to say it. I'm ordering you to either say you
love me or to call me mom. Now. I want to hear it. I deserve it. What if a whale
eats you? I'll never hear it."
"Are you alright?"
"No, I'm not.
I've had a horrendous week and I want to feel loved. If you can be in love with
Beth, genuinely in love, you can act loving toward your own mother."
There was a silence full of
airport intercom, and then Julian said, "I love you...Mom."
"Thank you. Now have a nice
trip."