Stages Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  The Cast of Stages

  Stages

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

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  24

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  30

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  37

  38

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  40

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  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

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  53

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  60

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  Stages

  By Donald Bowie

  Copyright 2015 by Donald Bowie

  Cover Copyright 2015 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1987.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the Publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Also by Donald Bowie and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cable Harbor

  Station Identification: Confessions of a Video Kid

  www.untreedreads.com

  The Cast of Stages

  Melanie… She survived by making commercials, until love lured her into the dissolute world of a rock and roll band. But when the party was brutally over, a sudden inheritance gave her a new shot at fame….

  Lauren… A tall, unapproachable beauty, awakened by an older man’s lust. Her husband’s wealth was staggering, but she really needed his love—and her undying dreams of Broadway….

  Paula… Despite her classic looks and singular talent, auditions left her dry-mouthed and shaking, staring in terror at the stage door….

  Mike… From sizzling Greenwich Village nights to the hushed, expectant silence of Off-Broadway theaters, he was a lover, a warrior, a prince, a fool—anything but himself….

  David… As a high-powered movie producer, he was the first to taste L.A.’s success. But a rival’s revenge sent him spinning out of control….

  Kathy… Once she shared David’s bed and his ambitions. How she poured her passion into a dangerous new cause—and only a heartbreaking betrayal would set her free….

  Stages

  Donald Bowie

  Prologue

  To All Members of the Footlights Society:

  As you surely know by now, the highlight of this year’s graduation week will be the dedication of the new, ten-million-dollar Wilson Center for the Performing Arts. We Footlighters who are still undergraduates are especially grateful to those Society alumni whose generous contributions helped to make the Center possible, and we hope to see as many of them as can make it here during the week of June tenth, which will be an occasion to celebrate for us all.

  We’re thrilled to be able to announce that Veronica Simmons will be postponing work on her new film for a few days in order to accept the honorary degree that the college is awarding her. We have asked her to talk to us informally at the Center the day before graduation, which she has very kindly agreed to do.

  We know that it will be especially enjoyable for those of you who worked with Miss Simmons as undergraduates to see her again now that she’s one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, an Academy Award winner, and, needless to say, the Footlights Society’s most famous member.

  Please make your reservations early for the banquet following the dedication.

  And please make a special note of this: due to Miss Simmons’ enormous popularity, admission to her talk at the Center must be by ticket only.

  We are allowing two tickets for each member of the Society who will be attending the graduation week ceremonies. Sorry, but we can’t make any exceptions. So get all your reservations in soon!

  Yours in the Business,

  Julie Axelrode,

  Secretary

  Copies of this letter were sent to the four hundred and thirty-one members of the Footlights Society for whom the college had current addresses.

  One of those addresses was a loft building in lower Manhattan; an actor’s workshop had recently opened on the fifth floor of this building. The managing director was a woman of forty who could have passed for thirty. From the look of her clothes, you might imagine that gypsies had stolen her and kept her in a painted wagon for a few years, hidden from the aging process. She wore bandannas and Indian shawls embroidered with tiny mirrors and a large round earring in one ear.

  The morning the invitation from the Footlights Society arrived, the workshop’s mail had not been picked up. Its managing director had spent five exhausting hours getting a twenty-two-year-old, apple-cheeked lacrosse player just out of college to be believable, to himself and a dozen other young actors, as the consumptive Edmund in Long Day’s Journey.

  It was six-thirty that evening before she’d thought of the mail.

  As she rode up alone in the wooden freight elevator sorting her letters, she saw one from the school. The college she’d graduated from nearly twenty years before. Assuming they were looking for money again, she opened that envelope last.

  Yours in the business, she thought. Oh, come on. Give me a break.

  She laughed out loud. Veronica Simmons! And that line, “due to Miss Simmons’ enormous popularity…”

  Oh, brother.

  She had known Veronica Simmons by another name. She, and the rest of them.

  She wondered if any of them would bother to show up.

  Suddenly, she realized that she would.

  Why the hell not?

  Standing by one of her loft’s big windows, she watched the sun setting over the Hudson River. A tugboat plowed stolidly along, its bo
w parting the gray waters. Only a little while ago the river had been mottled with floating ice.

  And only a little while ago they had all been college seniors, acting in that final production. King Lear.

  Then they’d started that long migration upstream that was being “in the business,” as Julie Axelrode would say. Little did she know.

  How deep and cold the water is, how you have to push and shove and wiggle your little tail just to stay afloat.

  How you have to learn to live for those few moments when everything is right with you and the world—and the waters part for you. As the curtain rises.

  1

  March 1967

  Where they were not covered with theatrical posters, the cinder block walls of Melanie’s room looked like gallon slabs of coffee ice cream. And the single window in those walls admitted little drafts like the ones you feel when opening and closing a refrigerator.

  So Melanie was doing something to warm herself up.

  It was one o’clock on a Saturday morning. Sitting in her folding director’s chair, Melanie was playing strip poker with her date. And he had lost every hand but one. On her bed Melanie had stacked her winnings: a green crewneck sweater, an oxford shirt, a pair of basketball sneakers, a pair of sweat-socks, and a belt with a nautical-looking brass buckle.

  A half hour ago Melanie had lost one of her black Capezios, but then she’d won it back in the next hand.

  Curt, her date, who was now gambling the pockets on his ass, was the captain of the college’s swimming team. He’d met Melanie in an American literature course, while they were reading Tender Is the Night. The professor, whose ties and jackets were always twisted, as if he’d just emerged from a spin cycle, made Nicole Diver come alive in a way that drew Curt’s attention to Melanie: there, he thought, was a girl with the same restless sexiness, and (with luck) a capacity for booze to go with it.

  He hadn’t figured her for a card sharp, though. Nor had he ever dreamed that she would be able to hold her liquor better than he.

  Barefoot and bare-chested, he looked at the hand he’d drawn this time and felt chilly, embarrassed, and horny all at the same time.

  He hesitated as long as he could.

  He had two pairs.

  Melanie had four kings.

  She’d won his jeans.

  Curt felt his cheeks prickling. From looking at her half-unbuttoned blue workshirt and her tongue that played around her lips as she arranged her cards, he had given himself an erection. Trying to conceal it, he stood up crookedly.

  “Hey, isn’t this game about over?” he asked as he unzipped his fly.

  “I dunno,” Melanie replied. “We’ll see.”

  He took off his Levi’s and tossed them on the bed. There was no hiding it now. His shorts were being run up the flagpole.

  “Oh,” Melanie said in obvious disappointment.

  In a moment of terror for his ego, Curt thought that she meant his erection.

  But then she said, “I don’t think I want to bother playing for those boxer shorts. The stakes aren’t high enough.”

  “What are you sayin’?” Curt asked in a voice that was as shrill as a boy soprano’s.

  “Oh, it’s just that I think boxer shorts are so dull,” Melanie said. “I like briefs better.”

  “What’s my underwear got to do with anything?” Curt squealed.

  “It’s all in the way things are served to you,” Melanie replied. “A hot dog should come in a nice pair of bun huggers—not in a bed of…cotton lettuce.”

  “Why, you little…”

  “Uh-uh,” said Melanie, halting his advance with a waving finger. “There’s something I want to discuss here, first. Tell me. Those Speedos you wear when you’re swimming in a meet. Do you ever wear them on the beach?”

  “No, I don’t. They’re too…”

  “Too revealing?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact. It’s gross for guys to wear bikini bathing suits.”

  “But not girls?”

  Impatient and emboldened, Curt replied, “Girls don’t have nuts and a dick to stick out.”

  “But they do have their boobies, don’t they?” said Melanie, sticking out her chest. “Honest to God. You guys. You want to see everything we’ve got, but everything you’ve got is strictly privatesville. What do we ever get to see? Two hairy legs stuck in the curtains of the Metropolitan Opera.”

  Narrowing his eyes, Curt said, “Okay, you wanna see somethin’, I’ll show ya somethin’.”

  He yanked off his shorts and stood before Melanie naked, his erection batting the air like a feline paw.

  Melanie said, “Now I think the poker playing is over.”

  Sticking a long red fingernail inside her workshirt, she tugged, releasing her breasts, which turned outward like a show of empty hands.

  Curt made his move. As he pressed his body against hers, he felt her stroking him.

  “Oh. Oh God,” he moaned. “You don’t…you don’t…go down, do you?”

  He sounded as if on every date he’d been praying for this miracle.

  “You mean will I French you?” Melanie said. “Of course. But only if…tomorrow you go out and buy some French bikini briefs. I’m not giving head to any…Joe Palooka.”

  “Oh, my God,” he murmured. “My God. Okay…okay, it’s a deal.”

  *

  Across the campus was a room nearly as theatrical as Melanie’s, but the posters on the walls were of campus productions in which the room’s resident had acted—except for one large poster of the Marx Brothers. That had been altered by pasting a likeness of Karl Marx over Zeppo’s face.

  In the darkness the voice of a young woman was sighing, “Oh, I love your beard. It’s so rough.”

  The young woman’s name was Amanda. She was a freshman. The senior making love to her—so passionately, as she would write in her diary the next day—was David Whitman.

  She had loved his room almost as much as she was now loving his beard. Seeing it, she had said to him rapturously, “Are you as enchanted with the theater as I am?”

  She was rubbing her cheeks against the hair on his face in as giddy a frenzy as that of a parakeet with a cuttlebone.

  David kissed her, letting his tongue loll around in her mouth.

  “Oh, I love your tongue,” she breathed. “Oh, it’s so rough.”

  And his dick was so slick.

  While he was humping her, Amanda let out little groans—with a rhythm that threw his own rhythm off.

  His erection flagged a little, and fucking her became almost work. He started wondering if she sandpapered her legs instead of shaving them—for the added roughness.

  After he came, after she had fallen asleep and David had gently lifted her arm off his chest, he lay there in the dark thinking.

  In a few months he’d be out of school. Then what? Would he go to New York? Was he going to be able to get out of the draft? Was he going to make it as an actor? In the hallway, a door opened and closed. Then, from what seemed a great distance, came the wail of a toilet.

  David was filled with a nervous energy that even when he was in bed threatened to run away with him. He had not yet learned that this restlessness, this constant anxiety, was not a product of his ambition. He hadn’t made the connection between the reasons why people go to bed together with the reasons why they go on stage—the attention, and the love.

  2

  David had a small but distinctly Semitic nose, a carefully trimmed black beard, and brown eyes as attentive as a cat’s. Stroking his beard, as was his habit, he inevitably created an impression of slyness, just as some people will appear contemplative when they put on eyeglasses. David was twenty-one years old, but he looked closer to thirty, and crossing the campus that burly March afternoon, his long scarf stuffed inside his Harris tweed jacket, he also looked like what he was: an actor.

  A serious actor. Earlier in the day, while David was standing at a urinal, an idiot student politician who couldn’t relieve himself witho
ut trying to be ingratiating had said to him, “Hiya, Dave, don’t see you around much lately. You in another show?”

  “We’re having tryouts for one this week,” David replied. “Riddiford has decided to do King Lear.”

  “Shakespeare, huh?” was the response. “I suppose you’ll disappear for another couple of months. Christ, that theater’s almost a frat house for you guys. It’s a whole way of life, isn’t it?”

  That observation struck David as a triumph of the obvious. And not simply because the theater was his life, which indeed it was, but because in light of the theater, everything else about college was tedious, trivial, and irrelevant.

  It was ten past three now, and David was late, delayed for fifteen minutes by a boring lecture that had run overtime.

  Adding to David’s outrage over the delay was the fact that he was late for a workshop at the theater, which was being conducted by a Method actor from New York. And Broadway waited for no one.

  The Hubbard Theater Arts building was located at the bottom of the hill that most of the campus clung to. It was a converted gym, and it seemed like an outhouse beside the rest of the school’s architecture, which had been constructed in the typical Georgian style of academia, with ivy aspiring up the brick walls.

  The school’s priorities being what they were, the Hubbard Theater had floors that creaked so badly that, during a performance, when members of the cast were backstage, they had to tiptoe about in their stocking feet.

  During David’s freshman year he had heard a lot of enthusiastic talk about the new theater that was in the works, but he soon learned that this project had been rumored for the past five years. Now he was a senior, and the ground had been broken only by the frost of four winters. The same frayed green sofa was in the lounge off the lobby, as was the coffee table, a sort of wooden doormat embellished with ballpoint ink. The same battered upright piano, perpetually out of tune, stood opposite the box office.

  Only the sets had changed. The theater itself was a constant, a jury-rigged hulk of beams and boards painted black in order to present, when the lights came up, the illusion of a smooth surface.

  Opening the stage door, David felt, even in his haste, the familiar tingle that he’d first experienced as a freshman coming to the tryouts for Death of a Salesman. The theater always created in him an excitement that was almost sexual, but without sexual insecurities—something like the arousal of old sensations of warmth that he felt when he was going home for vacation.