WANDA: What do I have to do after all this time to prove to you that I’ll never betray you?
STONE: I know; I know. But seclusion under such pressure must lead to difficulties. I am so frightened —
WANDA: You’ll simply have to trust me.
STONE: I do; I do. But I’m not a machine. I tell you, I am not merely an actor, I suffer.
WANDA: Of course you do.
STONE: You could hardly imagine the reach of my passion were you not living with me. Consider what I have taken upon myself. The burden of a nation. The lost Keeper. All of that.
WANDA: Sure.
STONE:, I’m no martyr; my uses are concentrated into the fact of my humanity. You do believe in the reality of my quest, don’t you? (Anxiously) You share, don’t you?
WANDA: Always, George. Anything at all.You really should rest now. You’re being overanxious again. Everything will be just fine when Piper comes, you can be sure of that.
STONE: (Cunningly) What’s in it for you? WANDA: Huh?
STONE: Surely there’s something in it for you, isn’t there? A fat contract. Notoriety. A contract for your memoirs. Even if national guilt weren’t so terrible, you’d say it wonldnt you?
WANDA: I don’t know how you can say that of me, George.
STONE: Oh, it’s easy; I’ve lived in the world a long —
WANDA: I’m really insulted that you think so of me. In fact, I think I’m going to bed., Good night.
STONE: Wanda —
WANDA: You’ll feel better in the morning, George. (Exits)
STONE: She’s as guilty as the rest of them.
My little closet drama. Wanda is suspect as well, of course, but happily enough, I do not care; a fine and grotesque mutuality, this: conceived for purposes as limited as they are relevant. And, as always for the jester, things voyage to a conclusion now. Nothing is eternal — not even Wanda’s delights — and this will end after all. We have outlived our possibilities, she and I. Perhaps my intentions were misguided. But I needed someone … an assistant, we shall say. I shall always need someone so terribly. Piper.
Wanda is coming in now.
Later: time for metaphysical notation. For I am sick, sick of metaphor; Wanda fed me and combed my poor, tumbling hair and pressed my hands to tell me that Piper was coming tomorrow, tomorrow with equipment and technicians. The broadcast will be tomorrow night. There is no time, then, for constructions; we must go to the heart of the issue. For I will tomorrow kill the Keeper, and the last that can be asked is that you know who I am. Curse you, Piper, but I have my notes. “He, finds the whole concept fascinating, George,” she said to me. “Particularly this feeling that the national guilt must be purged He agrees With you there.” I bet he does. Fortunately, Wanda has been intermediary from the first — I will have nothing to do with minor relationships, and everything is worked through her, my bland familiar — and the rich implications of Piper’s agreement, viz., national guilt need never be explored. Only exploited.
There is so little left to me. Twenty-four hours from now, then, where will I be, after Piper’s machines have wrung me through? I must do it now, now, I must make it clear; I must somehow trace the origin to the roots, past the trickling, brown earth and the green stems into the gnarled, poisoned bases of life themselves, the liquid running thick in them, bubbling and choked like blood.
I first learned that genocide existed in Europe when I was 10. My mother, a husky tart named Miriam — but we won’t get into that, not here, not Ever — told me that l might as well face facts beyond the neighborhood: Jews were being killed in Europe by the millions while she hustled and I froze, and someday, if it and the Jews lasted long enough, I might find myself, some day, interceding for them. This news shook and grieved me for days; I wrote a long one-act play about an abstract, persecuted Jew; obscurely, I felt my mother responsible since, after all, she had broken the news.
But not long after that, I met for the first time two of the participants in my mother’s vigorous scenario … a mixed pair of Schwartzes, who tenanted and barely ran a gloomy candy shop on a nearby corner, put up a sign in the window announcing that they were members of a refugee organization, displayed scars which, they stated, were caused by beatings administered by the milder bigots, and generally made concrete Miriam’s whispered injunction.
I was not moved at all.
I wasn’t moved; I didn’t give a damn. They were two raddled Jews; they raised prices in the store by a fifth, which was hardly justified by their curiously bland and self-indulgent tales of horror; even the exemplification was drab. The worst things had happened not to them but to people they had heard of. So one day, in a capitalistic outpouring of patriotism, I overturned the candy counter directly on Schwartz-pater’s thigh, and ran. And I took my business elsewhere.
Was that the first inkling of my condition?’
Call the Keeper.
Well, this then: once I took an acting course in a great university: I was 17 and wanted to understand why I was gripped by what has always possessed me. (As my obituaries will remind you, I left the course and the university at the end of the fourth week, but that is not the point. Nor is Miriam’s reaction relevant.) The instructor warned us in an early lecture that the act of drama was but this: that it began in the particular and moved toward the general; originating as it did in the passion and moving later to the implications. We listened well; we took notes. Remember, he said, when a role is acted, don’t worry about what you mean; think about how you feel. Find an image and work from that. Leave the meaning to the professionals. Just feel, feel.
Ah, yes. Is there some way I can inform the gentleman that my most stunning roles — moving through the decades of my greatness and culminating in the Lear of Denver, the greatest and least human of all Kings, they called me — emerged from the most intricate, the least applicable convolution? Is there?
Does that inkle to my condition?
I call the Keeper.
And this too: I took a wife. The year was 1953. Her name was Simone Tarquin. She was a designer in that repertory on the coast of Maine.She was 22, she was accomplished, she was lovely, my darling, in the rocks and curling waters. How she rose to greet me —
We met in July; I thought I loved her. She knew (she said) that she loved me in June, in all the springs of her life, and that was good enough for me; quickly, quickly, we chose to marry; I had had no time for women in those twenty-five Struggling Years; there was too much to do and too much to flee, and the conceit of having one of my own, at last, to play with for as long and lavishly as I chose was a pretty, pretty, pretty one. In the fall I had a contract at a university theatre; Simone would undertake graduate design on the other side of the country. So, our maddened lover’s plans went like this: she would telegram . her resignation and join me in the Midwest to type or file in a reconverted barracks; in the night we would build and fondle until a summons came from the East, saying that our time was up; we had transcended suffering. We might even have a child during the struggling period, just to fill out ,the picture. That was the way it was; we had it figured out. Ah, God.
I have not said that I was a virgin in those days; so I was, but she was not. Solemn confessions were traded during the premarital experience, and agreed to be of no consequence at all. But we decided to defer consummation; after all, there was no reason to further dishonor her (my thoughts). One Saturday, license in hand, we were married before the cast and crew; we said farewell to them and with noisy enthusiasm went straight to the nearest motel, a gloomy, shabby structure four miles from the barns themselves. We parked the car. We removed our luggage. We checked in. We entered our room. We placed down our luggage. We undressed. We had at one another.
And, yes, I can block the scene; yes I can dredge through the channels of memory for the perfect, frozen artifact; yes, it is there like a horrid relative, ready for resuscitation on all necessary occasions and sometimes unbidden between. Yes, yes, yes, it happened this way:
SI
MONE: Well, here we are.
STONE: Yes.
SIMONE: Naked, too.
STONE: Indeed.
SIMONE: So come here.
STONE: Yes. One second.
SIMONE: What’s wrong with you, anyway?
You look kind of funny.
STONE: (Opening windows, inhaling deeply, fanning himself and knocking a fist against the wall) Kind of warm in here, wouldn’t you say?
SIMONE: Silly. They have air conditioning. (She hugs herself.)
STONE: Probably isn’t working.
SIMONE: Anyway, there’s plenty of air now. Why don’t you come here?
STONE: One minute.
SIMONE: What’s wrong? You seem kind of cold all of a sudden.
STONE: Nothing is wrong. Nothing.
SIMONE: (Showing herself) Don’t you like me?
STONE: What a question …
SIMONE: (Some unprintable, if not untheatrical gestures) Well?
STONE: Of course I like you. I low you. You look lovely.
SIMONE: So then …
STONE: So, I love you.
SIMONE: Why are you lighting that cigarette? Stop it!
STONE: Well, it’s already lit, so that’s that. Might as well finish it now. Be right with you. (He puffs grotesquely.)
SIMONE: (After a pause) I don t like this, George. What do you think I am, the blushing virgin? I told you, I’ve been around. I’m no teenager and I know what’s going on. Now either get that miserable cigarette out or …
STONE: (Trying to be cheerful) It’s almost done now.
SIMONE: What’s wrong?
STONE: Don’t be dramatic, Simone; I’m the actor here. Nothing’s wrong. I love you. I’m just a little warm — I meant to say cold — in here.
SIMONE: Then come here. (More theatrical gestures)
STONE: I’m, coming. Coming now. (Disposes of cigarette) See?
SIMONE: Closer.
STONE: Like that?
SIMONE: Not quite. More like this. And this.
And this.
At this point our curtain falls chastely for some moments or hours; the scene behind is as predictable as it is monolithic and dull but there are limits to this playwright’s gift for metaphor, and one has been reached now. Of course, one could do this scene in mask and symbol, showing Simone gripping a large, earless rabbit, but such is too tasteless even for that commedia dell’ arte the sensibility likes to play in the vault in that noon of dreams. No, no: better to let the curtain fall. After some period of time — perhaps allowing audiences to think about matters and even to do some experimentation of their own — it rises.
SIMONE: (In a state of some agitation, twisting to her side of the bed, holding the sheets closely around her and looking wildly toward the corners of the room) What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong?
STONE: Ah —
SIMONE: Oh boy, do I see it now!
STONE: Ah —
SIMONE: It figured. Goddamn, did it figure! STONE: (Really speechless; this ingratiating and benevolent presence unable to make connection with his audience for one of the few times on record.) Ah — now, look Simone. Ah, Simone —
SIMONE: Actors! You keep away from me! ,
STONE: (He can respond to that.) You bet I will.
SIMONE: Are you crazy? What’s inside there?
STONE: I don’t know. Nothing’s inside, all right? Nothing. Is that what you want to hear?
SIMONE: I want to hear nothing from you.
STONE: You won’t! You won’t then! But the others will. Everybody will hear of me. I’ll fix them. (He is distraught.)
SIMONE: Wow. Wow!
STONE: Let’s get out of here.
SIMONE: I’ll buy that. I’ll just buy it, friend. That’s the ticket.
STONE: Go — ah — go into the bathroom and dress. SIMONE: Turn your back. (He does so and she exits hurriedly stage left, gathering garments as she does, exuding a faint mist, tossing various parts of her body.) And I want you ready to leave, by the time I come out.
STONE: I’ll be ready.
SIMONE: Good; good for you.
STONE: I’ll be ready; I’ll be ready. I’ll be so damned ready you never saw anything like it in your whole life, you bitch!
The curtain falls. Or, it does not fall — for somewhere, right now, it is yet open, the actors staggering through the banalities; in all of the rooms of the world, the mind, it goes on right now. You as well as the jester have lived through it all too many times; all have dreamed its horrid possibilities on wedding eves;, speak to me not, then of divisions in lives. For as it ends, it yet goes on, leaving nothing more to play: I have no interpretations, nor shade, nor form to all of this, nor perspective against which to place it: it is done but it is undone, for at this moment it is going on, it goes on right now; it goes on …
Does that abate my condition?
Call; call the Keeper.
Only this, only this must be said, which is: that I wanted all women that night but not this woman, that I wanted all flesh, but not that flesh, that I wanted the mystery but not the outcome, and in touching that flesh — in touching Simone’s breasts, those wonderful abstractions which had dazzled and goaded and seized me with groans as their clothed representation glided past me so many times — that when I touched them, I found those breasts tough, resilient, drooping bags empty of mystery and redundant of hope; they were flesh, mere flesh freed of that which entrapped it: say too that I found her arms of stone, her thighs of wood and her lips, like clay, mere clay; and pressed against her, holding her like a tumbled doll, I knew that by wanting everything, I had taken nothing; by being possessed of the totality, I had lost the elements; by seeking God, I had lost my soul and that in the dream of all flesh, I had lost my flesh.
And so, I too had had a dream: I dreamed that in the wanting of the fullness; I had lost the oneness, and that entering the cave of time, I had lost, the lamp of self and that the light, all of the light, was one. Light, light, give him some light give the old King some bulb of hell.
But there was more, too: it took me a long time to see that there was something else as well,and in the years to come, I learned; I learned by dint of cunning to enter and haunt their channels; I learned with Wanda how to do it and I did it; I did it with luck and skill (by closing my eyes and making pretty pictures); and now, as I lie with Wanda again and again, I lie, afterward, shaken and empty beside her and wonder how, it would have been with Simone. Because the secret was all in the pictures; once you knew how to make the pictures, everything else would fall into place.
Suppose I had done it with her, then; suppose I had found the way and had. taken Simone shuddering in our night: would I then have found a fullness in the oneness, instead of the oneness outside this fullness? Would I? Would I?
Where are you now, Simone?
Where are you, my darling, absolved, annulled these many years and never to. be seen again? I dream you then to be in a cave by the sea or in a paneled kitchen staring absently for the Time; perhaps you have become a dressmaker’s doll, but it does not matter; it does not matter for you are gone and gone. Gone, gone; lost, lost.
It is done. Could you have saved me, Simone? Could you have rescued me through your flesh, through your wholeness from the noisome spaces of this tenement; the shape of my days, the flow of my disaster? Could I have held you, could I have found salvation in you? Could I?
Could I? What could I have done? What there was to do I did not; what I did I should not have done. Is there anything ever done that would make any difference at all? Oh God, sometimes, dear, I think that I cannot bear it any longer; this filthy slut, this horrible life, these raving notes, this pointless re-enactment: oh, the twisted plans and the despair and the rage, I am so sick of it, I am so. sick, listening to my tinny, tiny voice reverberating in the chambers of self; my own voice imploring, wheedling, ranting, going to periods of cunning, apologizing, searching, … I cannot bear it anymore.
Oh God, to live
through it again with Piper; to implode with him in the reach of the Eye, and to be done with it, to be no more, no more.
Call the Keeper, I want the Keeper, give me the Keeper. Where is our Keeper? We have lost our Keeper.
Death to the Keeper, death to the Keeper.
Call the Keeper and give him death. Call the Keeper and give him dread. Let him know; let him know.
Let him know love.
Know love.
Love, love, love.
Death, death, death.
Love, love, love.
Death, death, death.
PIPER: That evening, on the INVESTIGATIONS format, George Stone, representing himself as the image of the fallen Keeper, re-enacted the assassination, thereby seeking to purge his country of “national guilt.” The dismal outcome, of course, made necessary the publication of his journal.
I am so sure that his journal establishes beyond controversy the sole responsibility of the actor for the grievous events of today, and the complete victimization of Piper that I will say no more about it; no more; no more. Only one last irony remains: Stone felt that his act would purge us of “national guilt.”
Purge us? One can only say, from this lamentable aftermath, that the precise opposite was accomplished. The attempt upon the person of the present President was disgraceful, and the ragged shouts of the fanatics scurrilous as their leadership was damning, should convince us of the opposite. Certainly, there are things which should not be meddled with.
Say I; says Piper: if there is poison on the shelf leave it there; leave it sit, fester, mold for the spaces of eternity; do not touch it for once touched, if the poison runs free, it becomes the communal blood and riots and danger and sedition trials and trouble with the press and loss of great sums of money and then they all go out to get you just like they’ve been wanting to get you for thirty years but this time they have the chance and so the rotten stinking bastard sons of bitches never give you a moment’s peace but Piper doesn’t care because Piper has the truth and as long as man tells the truth he will be free — that’s what I say to them, the hell with them, the hell with all of you, just get off my back before I get you in real trouble, Piper knows, Piper thinks, Piper functions.
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 14