Stages Page 3

  On that day, a little after four in the afternoon, Mike Lange came of age. In the company of a silent man whose eyes he had followed into the bushes.

  It was as if the glass bubble of the stage beneath which he’d been living suddenly had opened up to reveal a lush, exotic world, one of tickling leaves and urgent sensations.

  After this first experience, Mike frequented the Fens almost every weekend. Every time he went there he found eyes that wanted him. There were those he didn’t want, though. The fat, older men. And the lisping, giggling ones who were built like wrist corsages.

  One older man who was slender rather than fat had stalked Mike almost every Saturday. He had a nervous twitch, and he used a cigarette holder. Mike always tried to avoid him. But the thin man persisted, and like many people who fail at seduction, he took up spying. Knowing that this wisp of a creature was watching him again eventually became as annoying to Mike as the buzz of an invisible mosquito.

  However, in the middle of the summer, the thin man abruptly disappeared. Mike was relieved. He assumed that he’d been beaten up or arrested, or that he’d simply moved away.

  A little over a year later, in September, Mike left home for college, full of uncertainty. He hoped that it would be better than high school had been. But if it wasn’t, at least there was a theater.

  His first day on campus, Mike discovered that nobody used Vitalis. He threw away the bottle he’d brought.

  By his third day on campus Mike had figured out that the flaxen-haired, prep-school-style sophistication of Blake’s student body was a facade that concealed an almost universal—and a very anxious—need for acceptance. Knowing that he could be sure of that in but one arena, Mike headed for the Hubbard Theater at an hour when most of the guys in his dormitory were getting ready for that evening’s mixer.

  The theater was mostly empty, but there was a bulletin board with a notice of tryouts on it. As Mike copied down the time and place in his pocket calendar, a figure emerged from the gloom of a backstage corridor.

  It was the thin man. Cigarette holder and all.

  He blinked at Mike. Then he slipped into an office.

  Mike wondered whether or not he should make a run for it.

  Then he saw, behind a counter with a coffeemaker on it, a young woman. From the expression on her face, it was clear to Mike that she had been watching.

  “Who was that?” he said hesitantly.

  “Why, that was Mr. Cherry,” came the reply. “He’s the tech director.”

  “Here?” said Mike, sounding aghast.

  “What’s the big surprise?”

  “Oh…nothing,” Mike replied. “It’s just that…I’ve seen him around before.”

  “Around here?”

  “No. Just…around.”

  The young woman gave him a knowing look, which for some strange reason did not make Mike feel uncomfortable.

  “Mr. Cherry gets around,” she said. “In the past ten years he’s worked at four different colleges. What I’ve heard is that he stays around just long enough…to find somebody he can leave with.”

  “Oh really,” said Mike.

  “Mm-hm… And I would say…that if you wanted it, you could get yourself a nice set of matching luggage. To match Mr. Cherry’s little carpetbag, that is.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mike said with a smile. She was obviously a freshman like himself—but one who knew a lot more than the rest of them, with their class of 67 beanies on their heads. He was at ease with her in a way he’d never been at ease with a woman before. It was as if she knew all about him, and what she knew didn’t make the slightest bit of difference to her.

  “You want some coffee?” she asked, indicating with a glance a top-heavy stack of Styrofoam cups.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Mike replied.

  “The pot’s almost ready,” she said. “But I don’t suppose there’s any hurry, is there? It’s going to be a long four years.”

  “They say they go by fast,” Mike replied.

  “The first couple of days certainly dragged,” said his newfound friend. “Until I ditched my faculty adviser. He’s the one in the English department with the Brooklyn accent and the harelip.”

  “How did you find out about Mr. Cherry so fast?” Mike asked.

  Smiling, his friend coolly surveyed the wall of posters from past productions.

  “It’s not that this school is so great,” she replied. “But they’ve got a good theater program here. I mean, it’s legitimate—not just a bunch of stage-struck high school kids.”

  “I see. I guess,” Mike said. “You know show business well enough to know what somebody like Mr. Cherry is all about.”

  “That’s Theater one-oh-one. I think the coffee’s ready now.”

  As she handed him his cup, Mike said, “By the way, I’m Mike Lange.”

  “Melanie Chisolm.”

  5

  Nobody in her family ever dreamed that Lauren Holland would go to college. Her father was a gas station attendant, and her mother worked as a waitress at a Dunkin’ Donuts. Lauren had three brothers and two sisters. They and their parents were packed into a house in Chelsea, Massachusetts, that was partitioned like an egg carton. Driveways exactly the width of a car separated the houses in the Hollands’ neighborhood. Some of the front yards held rosebushes swarming with blossoms, and statues of the Virgin. One neighbor, an Italian whose yard was crowded with roses, a Virgin, and tomato plants, had torn down his garage and replaced it with a small vineyard. From it he produced a wine that Lauren’s father had labeled “guinea red.”

  His disdain for the neighbor’s plain brown bottles was a matter of taste: for years Lauren’s father had cultivated bourbon. Lauren’s father drank like a grandee and dressed to complement his self-image. After going on one of his weekend benders he would reappear at home on a Monday or a Tuesday unshaven and still wearing his racetrack tout’s outfit—a yellow-and-black-checked sport jacket, a paisley vest, a tie striped with what looked like a child’s crayon scrawls, and a jaunty hat with a pheasant’s feather in it.

  Usually he would come home broke and dejected, because he had left his heart in Kentucky—not the state itself but a spiritual condition mixed up with bourbon and the track.

  Lauren’s father had been known to take the bus down to Aqueduct or a plane to Hialeah. He paid for these excursions with the supplemental income he had made booking at the gas station. Virtually everything else had to be covered by Lauren’s mother’s income, which was meager.

  Although he tended to be autocratic with the rest of his children, Joe Holland adored his youngest daughter. He called Lauren “Princess” and thought her much more worthy of the title than Robert Young’s daughter on “Father Knows Best,” whom he described as a “tub of lard.”

  Joe Holland’s boss was a Kiwanian, and every year his club would sponsor at the local high school a children’s talent competition known as the “Starlet Show.” When Lauren was six her proud father entered her. He had given up a few days a month of the sporting life in order to pay for her tapdance lessons, and for a solid week before her debut he helped her to put together an act. It was a song-and-dance routine brimming with cuteness, the centerpiece of which was Lauren’s recitation of a poem entitled, “When You Go to Fairyland, You Must Do As the Fairies Do.” This admonition she was coaxed to deliver in a voice as imitative of Shirley Temple’s as possible, and for added emphasis her father wanted her to shake her white-gloved finger at the audience.

  The competition turned out to be light, so Lauren’s triumph was a complete one. That evening, right before her enchanted eyes, the whole world turned into Christmas morning. When her mother finally took off her rhinestone tiara, she cried. Lauren had wanted to sleep with it on.

  She spent much of her childhood trying to recreate the sparkle of that one magical night. But in doing so she became more aware of the general grubbiness of things, sights like that of her brother Ray rubbing his ankle until he rolled out a string of dirt that looked like mouse shit.

  In self-defense Lauren turned to whatever pageantry her schools could provide. When she was nine Lauren had already found her remarkable voice: her recitation of the Gettysburg Address moved a woman school superintendent to tears. Which was remarkable because she was a sixty-year-old spinster who had devoted her life to getting children to pronounce distinctly their final t’s.

  As Lauren grew, so did her distance from other children. She was tall for her age, and she wore her hair long, which made her look even taller. But where another girl might have felt awkward, Lauren felt regal, and she carried herself that way, while her sisters were slouching toward part-time jobs at Dunkin’ Donuts.

  Lauren proved to be an inspiration to her high school’s drama coach. Because of her he did Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Visit. All of Lauren’s teachers were a little in awe of her, and if her course work was only fair, as it was in math, they tended to suspend judgment, whereas a C given to another student merely underlined the inevitability of his entrance into the working world.

  When the time came, Blake University’s admissions office responded enthusiastically to Lauren’s application, which was three pages of outstanding achievement and one of dire need. She was awarded a full scholarship.

  With her worn denim jacket and peasant skirts, Lauren was something of an exotic on the campus. She looked world weary. She looked as though she had spent a year in France. She always seemed to be gazing at the crowd below from some great height: the top of a grand staircase, a balcony, the scaffold.

  No one guessed, not even David Whitman, that she was a virgin.

  6

  The afternoon of the first tryouts for Lear David ran into Kathy and Paula just outside the student union.

  “So my mother’s had the whole house redone entirely in white,” Paula was saying. “Jean Harlow would be right at home in it—if we weren’t still living in Queens.”

  “Your mother hasn’t made it to Great Neck yet?” David interjected.

  “Oh Gawd,” said Paula as she heard his voice behind her back. “He’s starting in on my family again. I never should have told him a thing about them.”

  “Why do you two have to be squabbling all the time?” Kathy asked.

  “You’ll never understand, Kath,” David replied. “’Cause you’re from a German Jewish family.” In an aside to Paula, he added, “They never argue in those families, they analyze—and if they’re having a dinner party and the conversation dries up, the old man has a list of fresh topics up his sleeve. And they eat their salads after the main course.”

  “If you’re trying to accuse Kathy’s family of being bourgeois, I think you’ve got one hell of a nerve,” Paula said. “What’s your family?”

  “Kathy’s parents aren’t bourgeois, they’re Viennese,” David replied. “Which means that they’ve gone through so much Freudian analysis that they think you shouldn’t feel guilty about smearing a little whipped cream on your pippick.”

  “Oh, you stinking stinker,” Kathy yelled. Grabbing the ends of David’s flowing scarf, she began to strangle him with it.

  “Go get ’em, kid,” Paula urged. “Yesterday he said we have the same nose. Hah! His nose is more like my elbow.” As a group of engineering students stood gaping, Kathy wrestled David to the ground. She was about to rub some stale snow in his face when Paula looked at her watch.

  “Hey, cut it, you guys,” she said. “It’s past three. If we don’t hurry up, we’re going to be late.”

  Muttering, “Demonstrative girl,” David got up off the ground and rearranged his scarf. Then the three of them walked rapidly down the hill, their footsteps accelerated by the incline and the nervous anticipation that always accompanied tryouts. To cover his own nervousness David began to banter about Riddiford’s middle-age spread, speculating that he might wear one of his usual white oxford shirts for the mad scene—with a button popped.

  Paula was only half listening. She was aware that Kathy was going to these tryouts knowing that there was no part in Lear that she could possibly play. She was too short, too Jewish, and too much of an earth mother for any of the female roles—two vixens and a wimp. Yet here she was gamely going along for the ride anyway, when there was no reason in the world to go through the stress of an audition in order to work on costumes or run props.

  Running props for a show was something David would never do. If he couldn’t act, he wouldn’t dirty his hands working in the wings. One of Paula’s daydreams was that one fine day, at the Academy Awards, someone making an acceptance speech would almost but not quite forget to thank David—for his work on key grip, preferably.

  As they entered the theater, Paula, Kathy, and David saw that Riddiford had lit the place for maximum effect. He was sitting, amid the general gloom, at center stage, with the spots hitting the pages of King Lear, which he’d pasted into his director’s loose-leaf notebook. He was still making notes on the script, and thoughtfully sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

  The theater was nearly half full. That was unusual for a tryout; it was seldom that more than two rows of seats would be occupied, and they’d always be full of familiar faces. But for this production of Lear, it seemed as if half the campus had shown up.

  “Look at all the weird beards,” David muttered. “And it looks as though a few of them brought along their girlfriends, with the little beards under their arms.”

  Her face distorted with repressed laughter and involuntary affection, Kathy elbowed him.

  Paula wondered how they’d ever gotten along together, even for six months. She’d only been able to take David for one night. Paula was not one for sleeping around, and the few precious moments of lovemaking she’d known she had held closely to her breast, like pearls. David had managed to scatter the whole string of them on the floor, and she, on her knees in a way, had crouched there trying to pick them up while he sat with a cigarette, wondering aloud if any of them would ever really make it in show business. Then he’d started pacing up and down, pausing by the moonlit window that overlooked the creek into which the gutters drained. He’d said to Paula, with as much contempt for himself as for her, “What makes you think you can act, anyway?”

  Without thinking, she’d replied, “I got you to come, didn’t I?”

  Later, in bed with her eyes wide open, she’d thought about how she’d wound up spending all her time at the Hubbard Theater. Perhaps it had all been just a natural extension of her childhood. Her father had had a friend in the Shubert Organization who was able to get him house seats, and she and her brother had gone into Manhattan to see all the shows as routinely as other people went to the movies. Paula would learn the scores to the musicals and sing them while her brother accompanied her on the piano. When they saw The Miracle Worker, she and her brother learned sign language and used it to communicate around their parents at the dinner table.

  So as long as Blake had a theater, of course she’d want to be in shows. What was she supposed to do, go to tea parties with a bunch of goyishe sorority girls?

  She had gone too far when she’d let David get her into bed with him, though.

  As his body turned restlessly there beside hers, Paula at least had the satisfaction of beginning to understand his problem. Being an actor was not the role in life that his family had in mind for him; he had been expected not to perform but to produce, and certainly not to produce plays. So all David’s performances, including his sexual ones, had become in his own mind inadequate, because he wasn’t competing with his father the way he knew he was supposed to.

  Yet somehow Kathy had been able to endure him. She’d told Paula that while they were together she would go out every Sunday to the one kosher deli in town and come back with bagels and fresh bulk cream cheese, so they could have a real New York breakfast. Then David would sit, wondering what it would be like to show up for cattle calls if you couldn’t get an agent or to wait on tables if you couldn’t get into one of the soaps.

  It had occurred to Paula that David had split with Kathy because he felt Long Island closing in: the presence in his life of one of the people of whom your parents say, This one will do just fine. David was not about to settle for that quiet continuity of family that’s supposed to be one of the consolations of everyday lives. At least not right now.

  For the time being David was planning on being a different man than his father had been. But one day he’d let it slip to Paula that his father had bought a new silk dressing gown a week after the Norwegian au pair arrived. You better watch out, Paula had thought, or you’re going to wind up that way.

  It was partly the uncertainty of her own destiny that made Paula interested in what was going to become of David. For almost without noticing it she had cut herself off from the ready-to-wear options that her mother had laid out for her. While David had at least an idea of what he’d be up against in the near future, Paula could not even imagine what she’d be doing after graduation. In her mind, her future was, literally, a blank. And though she could discern not even an outline of what she was heading for, she still felt herself being pulled toward it inexorably.

  Riddiford was asking David to read Kent. Big surprise, Paula thought. And just as predictably he asked Melanie to read Goneril. Then Paula heard her own name called for the part of Regan. As the two of them were climbing up to the stage, she exchanged a glance with Melanie.

  Paula was handed her copy of the script by Peggy, the perennial stage manager. Looking up from his notebook, Riddiford asked Lauren to read Cordelia. Paula saw Melanie’s eyes widen.

  What is he, nuts? Paula thought. She’s too tall. She’d have to wear flats, and Melanie and I would have to wear heels.

  Riddiford sighed. His shirtfront expanded in the spotlight, and he told Lauren, “Take it from, ‘Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,’” and the reading began.

  While Lauren was delivering her line, Paula noticed that Melanie had on her face a suspicious look that might or might not have been acting.

  “‘So young and so untender?’” Riddiford, as Lear, responded, in a voice of adult pleading that Paula would later think of as pitiful.