A Bright Ray of Darkness

by Ethan Hawke

  My gift was an unwrapped, unfinished scarf that she had almost finished knitting. I had been watching her knit the scratchy thing for the past two weeks. She gave it to me and I laughed.

  “You’re not serious?” I asked. “You’re giving me that scarf? That’s my present?”

  * * *

  —

  The car ride home was spent in a royal silence. I imagine even Steve felt trapped. As we got closer to our house, I finally confessed, “I thought you bought me a Shelby Cobra I saw on set today, for my birthday. It’s stupid and I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m just going nuts here in L.A. with nothing to do. You’re so busy doing what you love and that’s great. But I’m drowning. I thought you noticed and bought me that stupid car to say to me that you understand how hard it’s been, and that you don’t judge me for the ways I’ve failed. That you bought it for me to say you see the ways I’ve tried…And, in truth, I’m glad you didn’t buy the car, ’cause it really is too much money, for Christ’s sake. And, ultimately, I would be just as lost with the cool car—well, maybe not as lost, but you know…”

  I tried to smile as the zooming L.A. freeway lit up our faces.

  “What is a Shelby Cobra?” she asked.

  * * *

  —

  As I was walking back down the empty backstage halls, my feet fell silently on the tile floor.

  Mary was never coming to see my play. Why would she? I was the bad guy.

  Then my imaginary wife, Lady Percy, stepped out of her dressing room. She was on her way to make tea before her between-shows nap. She always did that. On two-show days, she would use the downtime to sleep. Beauty needs rest more than food.

  The actor who played Lady Percy was married to someone else, and this was the wrong moment to be left alone in an empty theater with her. I needed to clean my bandages and regroup. Her bare feet gently treaded over the tiles of the greenroom. I glanced and saw her dressed in only a white lace nightgown, with no bra, no underwear, and her back to me.

  “Help me make some tea?” she spoke quietly. “Do you mind? I’d love to talk with you for a hot second.” She poured steaming water over two jasmine tea bags into two teacups without ever turning around. Instantly, the hallway smelled like it belonged only to her.

  Lady Percy was without a doubt the most elegant American actress I’d ever come across. She was like finely blown glass; that’s what made her sexuality so particularly bewitching. I was almost afraid of her. She was a year older than me, and I imagined her most physically alluring years still lay ahead of her. There was nothing cheap or passing about her beauty. Her green eyes and bell-like voice were already the makings of a legend. Age was never going to touch her—at least it seemed that way. She had long, light red hair and her skin was paper white. I always felt timid in touching her. It was hard to imagine you were clean enough. In Act 2, scene 3, she wore a translucent gown as we rolled around a pile of hay like farm animals. Eight times a week we did this. The big trouble with actresses, Ezekiel would say, is that they are pretending to be women. I had to avoid Ms. Percy in an extremely delicate way. If I were ever too curt or too distant, it would affect our chemistry onstage. It just would; there was no way to avoid it. Also, truth be told, I admired her and wanted her respect. She had to feel I was avoiding her because I was too attracted to her, and too respectful of her real husband. That was the only way our onstage chemistry could work. It had to be clandestine.

  “Are you brave enough to come into my room?” she said coyly and turned, looking at me, “or do you want to continue avoiding being alone with me?”

  I knew the dangers of a dressing room. Boredom is a great aphrodisiac.

  “I ain’t scared of you,” I said, affecting a little false swagger. I was in trouble; I could tell from her demeanor. I had been in the doghouse with Lady Percy since New Year’s Eve. I had kept her at bay through these weeks and months of rehearsal and performing by flirting and insinuating that we would get together on New Year’s Eve. So, by the time December 31 rolled around, she’d put a great deal of effort into arranging things so that we might fall into one another’s arms unobserved by her husband, the cast, the hoi polloi, and the paparazzi. Her husband was an up-and-coming hotshot theater director from Montreal. He was taking their child to Canada for the holidays to visit his family, so she would be alone when the clocks struck midnight.

  She arranged for the whole cast to be invited to a New Year’s gala at the National Arts Club. It was a black-tie affair. She rented a van to pick us up at the stage door; that way everyone could change in their dressing room, and head straight to the party. There were six bottles of chilled champagne in the van, plus she carried a purse full of ecstasy. A playlist was prepared for the ride downtown. Everything was perfect.

  We arrived as a group and had a seriously great time. I wasn’t doing any drugs, but I didn’t tell her that. The tuxedos, the gowns, the Tiffany glass—all succeeded in transporting us to another time and place: a grander, more perfect New York City. When the New Year struck, Lady Percy winked at me and made a very public gesture of kissing one of her girlfriends, Shannon (an actress featured in the tavern scenes), romantically on the lips.

  No one knew of the secret contract between us. We were to surreptitiously exit individually and then rendezvous back at the Mercury. That was our plan, but then out of my mouth, when I was speaking to about half the cast, popped “Hey, why don’t we all come back to my place at the Mercury and play guitar, sing some songs, and hang?”

  The gang erupted in unanimous approval: that was a grand idea.

  She never came. In the splitting up to get into the various cabs, she disappeared. And just like that, I was in the doghouse with my real wife and my imaginary one. When I found myself alone with Lady Percy in the dark, candlelit, Chanel No.5–soaked dressing room, she said, “So what’s going on with you? What’s the matter that you have such a February face?”

  I lifted my shirt and showed her my wound.

  “Oh my God, William!” she shrieked. “What the hell?” She began rubbing her hand gently around my stomach and studying the wound. “Sit down and take your shirt off.”

  I did, explaining how I came to have an abdomen stained in blood.

  “Lie down,” she said softly, nodding as if she understood. “Let me clean you off.”

  She went into her little bathroom and I could hear her soaking a washcloth with warm water. I lay down on the soft single bed inside her dressing room. I was so tired.

  “I know that I scare you, William, and that I came on too strong the other night and that I have been acting a fool ever since we started this run. I want you to know that I understand why you have avoided being alone with me.” She was speaking from the bathroom. “And it makes me like you more.” When I opened my eyes, I could see only the shadow of her face under her long strawberry hair.

  “You’re like a deer who runs away if someone comes on too directly. I get it, but I don’t want anything from you. And someday, you’ll have to learn how to let yourself be loved.” She turned around and walked towards me.

  I lay there silently as her white hands pressed the warm washcloth over my skin. It felt good. The muscles in my neck eased.

  “I know you respect my husband”—which was true, I did. I had had enough exchanges with him to recognize that he was an intellectual heavyweight. “And that, too, makes me like you. I know you don’t want to get involved with me. But we are involved, you know?” She lifted her wet washcloth and stepped back to the bathroom for more warm water. “I mean, we have been thrust into one another’s path for a reason—and, believe me, we are not responsible for what is happening.”

  What’s happening? I asked myself. I closed my eyes and decided that I must try to be stoic; I didn’t want to get involved with this married woman. There were only three and a half weeks left to this run. We had another show in
an hour and a half, for Christ’s sake. I could make it.

  “Don’t fret, little deer, I’m not going to show up crying at your hotel door,” she said from the bathroom. “I love my husband and I will never leave him, nor will I ever let him leave me. He cheats on me and sometimes I do wonder what that must be like.” She walked back over to me but didn’t immediately continue cleaning my skin. Instead, she held the warm wet cloth in one hand and caressed my hair with the other.

  “When my husband and I fell in love it felt like we were one person. In every alley in Montreal, backstage, onstage, we tried to become one—if you know what I mean. And the passion we felt when I was pregnant is an unbreakable titanium bond. We are forever linked. But that doesn’t mean rolling around in the hay with you eight times a week is without its challenges. I love my husband and I feel love for you. I watch you free from your marriage and wonder things, things I don’t want to wonder. You can understand that, can’t you?” she asked, slowly cleaning my belly again, her warmth slowly circling around my wound.

  I closed my eyes like a cricket caught in a spider’s web. What was coming felt unavoidable.

  “I can feel how nervous you are—but see, I think sex is like a prayer. I do. We all understand in some animal way our interconnectedness to everything—that all life is somehow bound together. And sex can be our expression of that bond.” She let the warm water drip on my belly. Then wiped me clean. “Yes, of course, it can be something else—something violent or something neurotic.” Now she washed me some more, getting so damn close to the most tender area of my belly that I could barely breathe. “But at its finest, it’s something healing.”

  She leaned over me and kissed my forehead. It was a chaste kiss; her lips were wet.

  “I know you can feel it when we are onstage. It feels like we are safe underneath a mountain hiding from a storm, doesn’t it?” She was whispering. She unbuttoned my pants to ease the pressure around my stomach and brought the washcloth dangerously lower and lower—away from the pain.

  “And I know Shakespeare felt it too.” She stood up one more time and walked back to the bathroom and rinsed the cloth again. I breathed again. She turned off the bathroom light so her dressing room was black except for the flicker of three small sandalwood candles.

  I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say or what possible excuse I could use to get out of this room.

  “I don’t understand when people say actors don’t have a real job; that actors’ lives are foolish or something…” I could feel her shape moving in the darkness near my feet but I could see nothing.

  “No, the only true vocation for me is a complete and whole lifelong dedication to the performing arts.” She began to take off first one of my boots, then the other. My feet slid free.

  Next, she grabbed a dry towel and laid it across my naked chest and belly, absorbing the wetness. “Truth?” she whispered. “A few weeks ago I got on my knees in this dressing room and prayed. I did. Prayed for us. I confessed I wanted to devour you. To be wholly devoured by you. And I heard, clearly, a voice ask, Who will that be helping? And it was obvious, in that moment, you do not need a lover. You need a friend. I don’t need a lover; I have a husband. This feeling we share—this feeling is not love. It’s like love, but it’s called something else…”

  I was out of my league and closed my eyes tight. She blew out one candle at a time. The smoky smell of sandalwood filled the room.

  “Sex,” she whispered. “Is our only healthy vice. Whatever source created me is the same one that created you. And while touching your hair like this”—and in the dark she did exactly as she described—“doesn’t bring us necessarily closer to that divine source, it makes us feel not so alone and forsaken, you know?” She was leaning over me, looking at me in the dark. She rested her hand on my solar plexus. My chest lifted and fell. Her hand danced delicately and dangerously close to the red-hot pain that still cooked near my belly. Her lips came out of the darkness and she kissed me full on the mouth for the first time. Just for a moment.

  “I know you were hurt when the kids applauded out there this afternoon. I know you were. But don’t be so predictable. Go out there and be the bad guy. I like you bad.” She ran her finger over my nose and lips.

  “I just don’t…,” I began, half-attempting an effort to talk. She put her hand over my mouth.

  “Stop worrying. Let’s pray,” she said quietly from above me.

  I could hear her breathing in the dark for a long time. She didn’t move. When I woke up—she was gone. I felt rested for the first time in a dog’s age.

  * * *

  —

  On my dressing room door, the anonymous quotes continued. T. S. Eliot, on the theater, the hollow rumble of wings, the movement of darkness, and the stillness of light.

  * * *

  —

  Once more with feeling. The evening performance that Wednesday began brilliantly. I was bent on proving to the King that seeing my shadow hadn’t scared me. The rose was still in bloom. I was fully capable of playing this role even better than I had before. No good guy, no bad guy, just the truth.

  Act 1, scene 3: My first scene with the King. I let ’em have the good stuff, unleashing the same blistering rage, but now with a sprinkle more “You old limp-pricked, saggy-necked motherfucker.”

  “My liege, I did deny NO prisoners!” I began.

  He matched me.

  Turning to his knights all around him, he gestured to me and said, “Yet he doth deny his prisoners but with proviso and exception, that we at our own charge shall ransom straight his brother-in-law, the foolish Mortimer.” He gave a huge burly mocking laugh. “Shall our coffers, then, be emptied to redeem a traitor home?”

  “Revolted Mortimer!” I asked incredulously. “He never did fall off, my sovereign liege, but by the CHANCE OF WAR!” This last bit I hammered home. Asshole.

  At this exact moment, the King got up into my grille, as he often did, spraying Shakespeare’s verse in my face. “On the barren mountains, let him STARVE!” The skin of my face almost peeled off as the old man showed me who had more gravitas.

  “Thou dost belie him, Percy, thou dost belie him!” He cursed again. “Art thou not ashamed? Send me your prisoners, or you shall hear in such a kind from me as will displease you!”

  On this particular night, he was sensing my thrill. I was proving to him that I had lost nothing, and now he, too, was giving it a little extra. His face was crimson, his temper flaring in his nostrils, his eyes purple. He continued, “My blood hath been too cold and temperate! You tread upon my patience, but be sure I will from henceforth rather be myself.” The King paused for effect and then silenced the theater with the closing phrase, “Mighty and to be fear’d!”

  The King’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, his tongue began to hang too far out of his mouth like that of a dead cow, and then he fell. He fell the way a watermelon falls off the back of a truck—with a loud, broken smack. I stood above him, center stage, staring down at the off-kilter position of his body.

  The audience didn’t understand that this was not what was supposed to happen. So completely does an audience give themselves over to the reality of the stage that they could witness a man die right in front of them without so much as a wince. They all wore small, blissful smiles. There was a sea of humans in front of me. I looked at them and was stunned. They were loving it. They were perched extra-high in their seats.

  I stood motionless, gut-struck. The rest of the cast—the whole ensemble of Act 1, scene 3, the King’s Court scene, was standing twenty yards behind me, watching. Mutely I stared at the house for what felt like eternity. One audience member locked eyes with me. He was an Asian man in his forties, very handsome in a sleek suit. I said to him in an extremely muffled voice, as if a sock were over my mouth, “Is there a doctor in the house?”

  No one heard me. I remember t
hinking, Be careful, William! Don’t freak out and blow your voice. A man was dead at my feet—a friend, a mentor, a fucking saint-hero, a king! And instead of crying out for help, I quietly hummed to myself and looked blankly up into the lights, hoping the stage manager would do something. This is the moment I chose for prudence?

  “IS THERE A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE? WE HAVE AN ACTOR DOWN. I THINK HE’S HAVING A HEART ATTACK.” Ezekiel stepped forward. And finally, like a dark spell being lifted by the strength of Ezekiel’s voice, I too could speak.

  “Turn on the houselights,” I spoke up to the booth. “IS THERE A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE?” I repeated. With two of us talking directly to them, the audience seemed to wake up from a dream.

  The nicely dressed Asian man stepped up onto the stage apprehensively. “Let me see him,” the man said softly. “I’m a doctor.”

  We walked over and looked down at Edward. The houselights came up and the stage manager’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE ARE TAKING A SHORT BREAK, PLEASE STEP OUTSIDE.”

  No one moved. It was obvious to me that Edward was dead. His whole color and everything about him was simply wrong. His chest was not moving. His gray tongue lay languid and released on the stage floor.

  The prop guy, David, stepped up and started pounding on Edward’s chest. I wanted to say, “Stop it! He’s dead,” but so many people were now crowding around the royal robes in which his body was wrapped that I let myself be pushed back. The ushers were trying to move the audience out the exits, but the crowd of more than a thousand stood listlessly, shifting in place. No one took their eyes off the stage, but the King had left the building.

  ACT V

  If Wishes Were Horses

  The darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light.