by Ethan Hawke
Lit only by the headlamps of his car, he shouted, “Peachy, can you ever forgive me for being so bloody stupid and so bleedin’ arrogant!”
I tried to answer through my screen window, “That I can, and that I do!” but I didn’t say it loud enough for him to hear me. My voice was too emotional. He drove away.
* * *
—
In my Mercury bedroom, I began getting undressed, habitually humming to check my voice, running Hotspur’s lines in my head, and wondering if I would be able to sleep. I remember thinking, Is my relationship with my children going to become as complicated as my relationship with my parents?
Then my mom walked in, dressed in an entirely new outfit.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going to go see a friend.” She winked.
“It’s one in the morning,” I said.
“Sorry, Dad, am I not allowed to go out?” she said sarcastically, imitating the voice of a teenager.
“I thought you were going to spend the night here with me and the kids,” I said.
“I changed my mind. You don’t need me anymore.” She smiled. “The kids need alone time with you. Besides, there’s no way I’m going to fall asleep. And I lied about the coke being finished.”
“Who are you meeting?”
“None of your business,” she said with no expression and walked out the door.
* * *
—
As the sun came up on the morning after the first preview, I walked the puppy and bought donuts. I was already panicking again about my voice. The kids were watching cartoons alone. It was freezing outside and the wind didn’t help my throat any. My phone rang.
It was my wife. My blood stopped moving. I picked up.
“Hello,” I said, fighting the wind.
All I could hear was the sound of the woman I’d promised to love forever uncontrollably sobbing on the other end of the line. She couldn’t form a word. She just sobbed, caught her breath, and wailed more.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I love you so much,” I said. It sounded like she could barely breathe.
I said it again, “I love you so much. I’m so sorry.”
She hung up. I called back but she didn’t answer. My hands were freezing. I wondered where she was and how she came to find herself awake and wailing at 7:43 a.m.
When she had been pregnant with our first we’d gone camping and woke up to this same kind of freezing autumn air. We watched the sun rise on a small lake in the Adirondacks. Four black bears were on the other side of the lake staring at us: a mother, a father, and two cubs. We could see their breath as they drank and played in the water. Mary and I held hands, warming our stiff fingers. We dubbed ourselves the Animal Family.
* * *
—
Back in the Mercury I sat by my piano and played Scott Joplin’s “Crush Collision March.” I thought about my wife’s phone call while our son tinkered around with army men at my feet, donut jelly on his hands and face. Our daughter danced along to my poorly pounded rags in the hallway of the hotel with a long black feather boa draped around her shoulders and her nightgown stained with donut icing. That banana bread was crap. My little girl was spinning, round and round in imperfect pirouettes. It struck me that things were very much like they had been when I was little. After my parents’ divorce, I would play under my father’s piano while he rattled out this exact same song. I remember telling my dad that Scott Joplin was my favorite “singer.”
“Someday you’ll like your own music,” he answered.
“No, I won’t,” I said.
* * *
—
Now, almost twenty-five years had spun by and all the elements were precisely the same: the divorce, the music, the smell of stale cigarettes, the Native American rug, the empty coffee mugs, beer bottles in the garbage; even the little plastic toy army men were exactly the same. The only real difference was that there were two kids instead of one.
And people say the universe isn’t expanding.
ACT III
Firing the Vainglorious Rocket
Scene 1
When the morning of opening arrived, I felt OK, if a snake with a fork through his head feels OK. It was a Thursday. Big-time openings are always on Thursday. That way, the review hits the Friday paper. Apparently, that’s the one everybody reads. The night before had been Halloween, and after our final preview I’d walked home. Mary’s outfit from the video for “Piss on Your Grave” was the number one costume of the year. I remember hiding my head as I moved through the crowds that last evening of October, passing more than a dozen drunk women wobbling in their heels dressed as my estranged wife. Trash blew across Sixth Avenue as cops took apart the remains of the Halloween parade border structures. One young woman, dressed as my ex, walked straight towards me and stopped me in my tracks. Clearly high, her eyes on the other side of Jupiter, she looked at me, burst out laughing and singing my wife’s hit single:
I thought you were my next of kin,
But your mind was wrapped in sin,
You want me to be your slave?
You want me to behave?
She imitated the drum solo, “Boom chicka boom. I’ll piss on your grave.”
Then as if in a dream she danced her way through fallen candy wrappers, empty cans of Red Bull, and spilled beer.
* * *
—
The kids had been with me at the Mercury all week while Mary was in San Francisco for an intimate, sold-out stand at the Fillmore, continuing her sensational press for the new Piss on Your Grave Tour. She was coming back on the red-eye and wanted to meet after I’d dropped the kids off at school. She’d sent an email saying it was imperative we meet. Not from her assistant, from her. It was all very top-secret, mysterious, and exciting. I’d been home from Africa now for six weeks of rehearsal and four weeks of previews, and we had barely spoken since the first few days. There was a riptide pulling us apart. My free trial month at the Mercury was over. The rent on the room was now astronomical. Old Bart had played me beautifully. As I dressed the kids that morning, it was hard to tell why my hands were trembling; opening my Shakespeare play on Broadway, or breakfast with my estranged wife.
There was some good news on the horizon: I’d discovered that I’d forgotten to throw out the bag of little blue pills that accompanied Dean’s blow. I have no idea what they were—quaalude, Xanax, oxycodone—but I had begun chopping them in half and taking one before each show. They were helping. Short term, anyway. With the pill, I was hurting my voice less and the high-pitched trill of anxiety running up and down my spine calmed to a frequency I could bear. I had two left. When the kids were distracted, I took half a blue pill with a bite of Cheerios and bananas. We dropped my daughter off at kindergarten first and then I walked my son over to his preschool.
“What do you think is cooler, Dad,” he asked, holding my hand as we waited for a light to turn, “whistling or snapping?”
“Hmmmm,” I said. “I’d have to say whistling is cooler.”
“Yeah, I thought you’d say that.” He shrugged. “I think snapping is cooler.”
There was a long pause as we walked across the street before he confessed, “But I don’t really know how to whistle.”
“Snapping is cool too,” I added.
“Yeah,’’ he said, defeated.
“What do you think is harder,” he began again, “to blow a bubble with your gum? Or not swallow it?”
“They’re both tough,” I answered.
“Do you think policemen have birthdays?”
When we got to his class, I put his lunch box in the fridge and helped him hang up his jean jacket in his cubby. As I hugged him, I said, “So, who do you think is the best dad in New York City?”
“You just want
me to say you—but I don’t know any other dads,” he said flatly.
I looked at him and adopted a British accent, “Ahhh Peachy, can you ever forgive me for being so bloody stupid and so bleedin’ arrogant?”
He looked at me confused and then ran away to his friends. I wouldn’t see him again until the weekend after next. Saying goodbye to him, and his sister, was like swallowing poison every time. It never got easier. I took the other half of the blue pill at the little kiddie water fountain before I left his classroom. One left.
Near the school was a café named Tea & Sympathy, where I was to meet Mary.
She was coming straight from the airport. What was she going to say? My birthday had come and gone—so that wasn’t it. The stage manager and cast had given me a sad little carrot cake at the theater; the nanny had the kids call, but Mary didn’t get on the phone. Maybe she felt bad and was going to give me a birthday/opening night present? I didn’t know. I just sat in the café and waited.
The longer I looked at my life, the more it appeared like one of those elaborate western film sets, Main Street of Dodge City. At the first glance, it all seems vintage, authentic, full of mystery and possibility. Fresh pine dust, the old wooden swinging doors, the wavy and misshapen glass, the hand-painted signs—all promise adventure. But when you walk inside: it’s not a badass saloon with old cowboys playing poker and blushing, tragic whores who secretly love you; it’s an empty plywood building. There’s a craft service guy next to a space heater fixing up some tomato soup, eating a snatch of gummy bears and handing out vitamin C. Nothing’s happening at all, just some people standing around, hoping for a latte.
Mary appeared for our scheduled breakfast meeting at ten past 9:00 a.m. There was no hint of the vulnerability I had heard when she’d sobbed into the phone weeks earlier. She was wearing a long gray fur and wraparound black shades, and wasn’t carrying any presents. Her jet-black hair was pulled back in some elaborate number, and her carefully moisturized skin shimmered. She didn’t seem to even know that the play hadn’t opened, or that my birthday had come and gone. Her driver was waiting outside. She walked in and sat across from me with makeup still left on her skin from the previous night’s concert. Looking into her sunglasses while listening to the things she told me, I learned one thing immediately: I was an idiot. We were already a million miles away from one another. I barely recognized her. When had we grown so far apart? I couldn’t figure it out. We had been in marriage counseling for more than three years, fighting and bickering, and had been generally miserable with one another—but all the while I still felt we knew one another. We discussed weekends, Thanksgivings, spring breaks, Christmas Eves, all the kids’ movements in a very civilized manner. Then we discussed how much money I should be paying her, and a litany of other surgical shit. I’d felt closer to women I’d known an hour. She had a piece of paper with a twenty-point bullet list of things I should go over with my lawyer (whom I still had yet to acquire).
Why wouldn’t she take off her sunglasses?
We’d loved each other. We wrote our marriage vows naked in bed. We went apple picking. She had baked me a homemade pie and her hands tasted like brown sugar.
She told me I looked terrible, that the Internet was abuzz with rumors I was a junkie. She ordered me a protein health shake. Eventually, Mary got around to the point of our meeting and why it had been necessary for us to be face-to-face, today. Calmly, she mentioned she was in love with another man. She wanted me to hear it from her first. She’d made it just in time. Apparently, news of their love affair was already on the CNN scroll.
* * *
—
After stumbling into the theater, still holding my protein, strawberry, banana smoothie, I tried to take a quick nap in my dressing room before Ezekiel arrived. I had a good four hours before our final rehearsal. There was another quote taped to my dressing room door. I sat in the darkness and read it. It was a Huck Finn quote about whippoorwills, leaves, and the sound a ghost makes when it’s grieving and can’t make itself understood.
* * *
—
“Are you nervous?” J.C. asked the company a few hours later in his concluding notes session to the cast. “You should be.”
We were all seated, jittery and excited in the house of the Lyceum Theatre. It was our last rehearsal. Opening night curtain would go up in approximately four hours. The cast still had their coats on and some were sipping tea in thermoses. Edward, our King, sat still, quietly reading the paper. Prince Hal was getting his back rubbed by Lady Percy. It didn’t bother me. They were friends. The weather had turned cold and winter was on the way. We were expecting an opening night confidence builder—something to drown the butterflies.
“Anything could happen out here tonight,” J.C. began. “A forty-pound light could fall from the rafters on your head. Your scene partner could forget her lines. You may forget yours. Your costume could tear and your ass could be exposed for all of New York’s finest to mock and relish for the rest of the year. So much could go wrong tonight.” He paused. “Anyone have family here tonight?”
About half the cast nodded.
“They may hate the show, you know? Everyone may hate it. We could get terrible notices. What I do know?”
There was a long pause as he mutely asked us all to sit still by staring into our eyes.
“Well, actually, there is one thing I know with absolute certainty.” He turned and began to pace across the stage. “And this is it: There is a great deal to be nervous about. So, if you feel hummingbirds banging around in your stomach, or your hands start to sweat and shake; if you accidentally put on two pairs of socks; if you spill tea on your script pages and burn yourself; if anything like that happens—absolutely nothing is wrong.”
He paused.
Edward was the only actor among us not riveted by our director. The King was still reading the science pages—the rest of us were disciples at the feet of our master. Even Virgil was paying attention.
“You are nervous because you care about what you do and because what we do up here matters. Let your hands shake. Let your mouth be dry.”
Nobody knew much about J.C., nobody but Edward. They had been friends for forty years. J.C. had been an assistant director when Edward played Romeo in Stratford. But for the rest of us, J.C. was an incredibly difficult man to get to know. When you were alone with him, he was almost too direct. His eyes were so penetrating you felt he was handling your mind. From the stage, often I could feel him nudging and prodding me—faster, slower, be patient, stop pushing. I have no idea what he was like on Christmas morning with his family, sisters and brothers and all his nieces and nephews, maybe very different—but for us, he had cut a very deliberate profile of himself and we only saw what he wanted us to see.
“Tonight, the show is yours,” he continued, addressing the cast, pacing back and forth across the proscenium’s edge. “Don’t push it. Let it go up all by itself. Don’t put anything on this stage that isn’t felt. Yelling, crying, screaming…Those kinds of dynamics are only effective if they are supported by genuine emotion. Real anger. Real laughter. Don’t fake it. It doesn’t help.”
He paused and looked around. The houselights were up and there were still stagehands working all around us. The lighting designer and set designer were having a conference at a makeshift table built over the chairs in the back. Painters were finishing some touch-ups. The stage manager was reviewing safety concerns with the fire engineer.
“I am proud of you all. I feel so lucky each of you chose to be a part of this endeavor and I am grateful to our producers for putting their money where their mouth is and giving us everything we need and not a penny more.”
This was pure politicking. Our producers were standing in the back talking to the house manager. They were two men and a woman, and in unison, they nodded to J.C. We didn’t know the details but th
ere had been some behind-the-scenes scuffles over the budget. There was a battle scene, the one in which I was so unjustly murdered, for which J.C. had wanted the entire stage to be on fire. They settled on three-quarters on fire.
“And tonight, I give the show to you.” J.C. said this and sat down at the edge of the stage. “It’s your opening night present. Until now, the show has been, in many ways, mine…to tweak and press. We’ve been partners, yes, but I have been your captain. It’s been an honor. Now, it’s yours.”
He looked around at us.
“Listen to me now: None of you are exempt from the collective. Not you, Edward—or you, Virgil—or any of you. Nobody is alone out there. This is a three-hundred-fifty-horsepower play. Everyone wishes their part were bigger, Ezekiel. Everyone.”
Ezekiel, my roommate, was caught momentarily looking down at his phone, unsure why he was singled out. J.C. had directed Othello several years earlier in a much-heralded production in Chicago, with Zeke in the titular role. He, like many in our production, was wildly underutilized—but that is what was beginning to make our show feel so exceptional. Everyone on our stage was capable of holding the center spot.
I was sitting in the back, feet up on the seat in front of me, wearing a red lumberjack flannel and my old high school football jersey underneath. Number 13. Lucky. I looked over at our Juilliard-trained Prince Hal. He was no longer getting his back rubbed. He looked at me and smiled. He rode his bike to the theater every day and carried a packed lunch. He had two kids and a social worker wife. They lived in Brooklyn. He read politically relevant books and was a better actor than I was, and no matter what The New York Times might end up saying, I already knew that. Under the lights, when he spoke onstage, a gentle cloud would leave his mouth—not some gross spit flying from his mouth like the rest of us, but it looked more like someone misting an orchid. He was in complete control of his voice. He could scream and cry, but never once would it crack or break like mine. He could sword fight for days. I could feel the audience adore him.