by Adam Braver
“Here he comes.” Max explained the issue to the waiter, whose fat, round face burst red in a combination of discomfiture and rage at the notion of his guest’s disappointment. He was truly and terribly sorry and hoped that this would not disrupt her morning. It would only be a few minutes, but was there anything else that he could bring in the meantime? And he started to back away, unable to distract his attention from Sarah’s face, the chapter-and-verse definition of starstruck. “Oh,” he paused, “would the gentleman also like a fresh plate? Is it not warm enough either?”
“Well, Molly?” Sarah asked. “We are all waiting to know the answer.”
Max shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Please,” he said. “Please.”
“I wouldn’t have figured it, Molly. I’d have thought you as stubborn as me.”
“That’s why I’m in charge, Madame. The very reason why.”
The waiter stood by the table. His eyes trained on Sarah. “I believe that was a yes, dear,” she said to him.
“My apologies.” He looked flustered. “It’s just that…One moment, please.” He began to back away from the table.
“Pardon me.” Sarah spoke again. “Are you going to remove the plates?”
“Oh dear, indeed,” he said, reaching over to scoop up her plate, then placing Max’s on top, smothering hers, bacon tips peeking out the side. “Your presence just startles me.”
“I will trade you a signature for a hot plate of food. Is that fair? My trusted Max will find a cabinet photo for you that I can deface with my scribble.”
He nodded twice and backed away, looking at her the whole way.
“See, Molly, that was not so hard. Everybody understands that it is better to have things served hot. Endurance and longevity. Almost inevitably more important than talent.”
“And speaking of, we have to get the show in order.”
“Oh here we go.”
“Sarah, you will have had nearly a week between shows. Even you must admit that makes the potential for some sloppiness. But a brief run-through is all we need. It is not necessary to tax the actors so much.”
“They need more than to just familiarize themselves with the set.”
“The set is a whole other matter.”
“What we need to figure out is Marguerite’s relationship to her consumption. Does it control her? Is it the impetus to give her more conviction? Does it make her love Duval stronger, or more distant? When I was younger I saw that disease as part of her strength. That the contradiction of it empowered Marguerite to take on the world with more passion. Again, I am not certain. I am not even certain of the motive of the disease. But to expect that Armand Duval reacts to Marguerite the same no matter how she envisions herself is ludicrous. It alters the emotional staging of the entire play. It is not just about blocking, and making sure that all the props are in place, in order to save cuddle time with the promoters.”
Sarah and Max turned around, expecting to see the waiter but instead saw Abbot Kinney. He smelled of the cleanliness of fine soaps and imported cologne, and his demeanor announced a diligence for perfection. He was both manners and forceful drive. He stood politely with his right hand speared through his trouser pocket, the other fixed at his side. “I have just heard about your breakfast. And I hope to adequately convey the embarrassment of the entire staff by offering this apology. But rest assured, your meals will be arriving shortly. And if they are not satisfactory, then we will crack every egg between here and Mexico until we are certain that you are fully content with your breakfast.”
“Quite all right,” Max said.
“Or I could just go catch some sea bass,” Sarah added. She was the only one who laughed. Kinney looked away. Max stared hard at her.
Kinney gripped the back of a free chair. “Do you mind if I join you for a few minutes? As there are some matters facing the day.” He pulled the chair before the formal invitation was issued, setting himself between Max and Sarah. “Your crew is due to arrive midmorning. Is that right?”
“Both the actors and the crew,” Max corrected.
“And you’ll begin working in the theater today?”
“That is our plan. A solid run-through.”
“I am genuinely elated at the notion that my theater will soon be transformed into the Parisian stage. Genuinely. Now is there anything I can do? I intend to be there during the day to help, and make myself available.”
Max glanced quickly to Sarah.
“Anything?” Kinney asked.
“The only thing that I am concerned about besides getting Madame’s car down to the pier,” Max said, trying to gain the upper hand, “is in making sure that we have a spotlight that is ready and working. I believe in the contract you said that you would furnish the necessary supplies for the lime light.”
“And remind me of those again.”
“We have the equipment, but we asked you to supply the calcium carbonate.”
Kinney reached for a pad and pen from his breast pocket. “Now let me write this down. Calcium carbonate.”
“Lime,” Max said. “It’s the name for lime.”
“I do remember now. I have one of my staff on it, in fact. For some reason he has had some difficulty in locating it, but last I heard there was hope with a builder in Pasadena. Is it absolutely necessary?”
“It will not work without the mineral. And yes, it is absolutely necessary to staging the show. Madame Bernhardt”—he spoke as though she were not there—“is fully committed to the aesthetic of selective realism. The entire play is designed around the stylized set that suggests the essence of the era and location. She sees it as another character.” Max continued to explain the importance of the concept, no doubt posturing to gain the respect and position of Abbot Kinney, and then he launched into the science of the calcium carbonate (lime, he kept clarifying, in order to reinforce his expertise) and the oxyhydrogen torch, and how the heat creates the incandescence, continuing on with all the nuances that only the most skilled craftsmen could truly master.
Sarah drifted in and out of the conversation, not wishing to involve herself in the power struggle that was playing out in front of her. She laughed to herself at the notion of someone who barely understood science explaining it to someone also equally ignorant, and how their mutual nescience seemed to oddly bond them. Max didn’t talk like this when they had gone to visit Thomas Edison during that first tour of America. In fact, Max didn’t speak a word, equally terrified at being seen as gay as at being identified as simple. They had been playing La Dame aux Camélias in New York, and that particular performance had extended nearly an hour. Seventeen curtain calls after the third act. Twenty-nine after the fifth. New York has always appreciated her. And somehow in the midst of all this, the promoter Jarrett had arranged for Sarah to meet Thomas Edison at his home in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Jarrett had clearly thought that there were some good photos and press to be had, and he basically hoodwinked both parties into the summit, convincing each megastar that the other wanted to have the honor of the meeting. Max had been opposed from the start (given they had to leave New York in the morning for Boston), but even then he was especially afraid of contradicting a promoter. So out they rode in the middle of the night, wearing tomorrow’s traveling clothes (just in case), with the snow falling, and the carriage sliding almost sideways the entire trip, the tread barely catching the ice.
They finally reached his home at some unusual hour, and she remembered seeing it lit up on the hill, the incandescent lights glowing, showing off the white of the multistory home and making the dark shutters look even darker. The carriage pulled through the picket fence with the opening curiously at the house’s side. When they got out, Edison and his wife, Mary, were both waiting on the porch, alongside a newspaper reporter and some other local dignitaries. Mary had been fairly gracious, almost speechless when faced with the stage star, but Edison, in contrast, had appeared to be cold and stiff. He politely took Sarah’s hand and respectfully shook Max’s, but h
is diffidence was loud and clear. It’s not like Sarah had really wanted to be there either. She had just come off one of the shows of her life and would have rather celebrated the success in a Manhattan nightclub than on a carriage bound for New Jersey. But there she was. And there he was. Younger and not quite as thoughtful-looking as she might have imagined.
It was clear from his expressions and lack of conversation that Edison had been expecting a host of idiotic questions about his inventions followed by a few smiles and quotes for tomorrow’s papers. She knew it by his eyes. She understood the feeling of being trapped in a room with people who know what you do but have so little understanding, and then think a few basic questions and a twenty-minute tête-à-tête will make it all clear. It displayed little regard for the intellect and training and practice and study that were all labored over for years and years; instead it was concocted into a final product that appeared so basic in its shamelessness.
Question: How do you do it?
Answer: Well, how do you breathe?
Edison had been so prepared for the bombardment that he didn’t consider he was facing someone who experienced the same issues.
At one point in the evening, after many of the guests had gone, Sarah had been wandering the house and ended up in her host’s study, tracing titles on the bookshelf. She felt a presence behind her and turned to see the inventor. “I was just admiring your collection of Shakespeare,” she had said. “I am impressed and intrigued by the fact that you have five different volumes of Hamlet.”
“When I finish reading it, I go out and buy another,” he explained. “That way I never feel like I am rereading it. It is always a fresh book. Each time I am so moved by his indecision, by the crossroads of emotion and reason.”
“I have played Hamlet countless times, and I understand exactly what you feel.”
“I envy you. I would do anything to have the opportunity just to feel what it is like to suffer Hamlet’s indecision.”
“Perhaps you could invent it.”
With that Edison laughed. His shoulders had relaxed, and for one moment he opened his eyes wide enough to appreciate that he was in the presence of someone who understood. “Would you like to see my lab?” he asked. And then he took her hand and guided her out a side door, away from the social farces, out into the snow and down the road to his compound of invention. They trudged across the fresh pack, past the office library and into the lab, just in front of the machine shop that bordered the railroad tracks that he said ran toward Mine Gully. He twisted a switch, and light spilled through the room from the incandescent lamps attached to the inverted T-shaped gas fixtures from the ceiling. It was almost a Provence glow, made soft by the streaking sheen along the slatted wood ceiling and matching floors. Then she saw rows of tables with dining room legs, topped by test tubes, wires, stray bits of glass, and rows of tools that all looked like variations of tweezers. In the back of the room sat a pipe organ, whose glowing brass pipes ascended on the right until the final tube nearly touched the ceiling. The room smelled sweetly of grease and oil, and the intangible fragrance of passion and intellect.
“I am honored,” she said.
“Over here.” He motioned her to the front table. His eyes both charming and mad. “Sit here.”
Before her sat a beautiful base of polished wood, and balanced across the top was a brass-looking cylinder with two mismatched ends, one jutting out like the wide barrel of a pistol, and the other squat and mechanical. A masterwork of sculpture. “This is your phonograph?” she asked with awe in her voice.
He merely smiled, then touched his bent fingers to the apparatus and worked the small machinery. He looked up at the ceiling while his recorded voice, distant and mangled, was heard singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” through the open-mouth cone.
Sarah let out a laugh. A glorious freeing laugh from all the pressures and expectations and loneliness that had accompanied her magnifying glass tour. Tears formed in her eyes as she felt the beauty and imagination of possibility that was singing to her in a shaky off-key voice. It was all she could do not to hug him. “Thank you,” she said, once the song had ended. And never before in her life had the words innately carried the gratitude that their true meaning intended.
“Now may I ask a favor of you?” His voice had the quivery quality of the recording. He looked down at his brown shoes that tapped the floor. “Would you recite something from Hamlet for me?”
“It would be my honor.” She moved between the row of tables and stopped before the organ. She looked to her audience of one, a lone figure of appreciation with the mind of a thousand, and recited Hamlet’s soliloquy from the third act To be, or not to be and when she finished Be all my sins remember’d she stayed in character and then rerecited the speech in French, Etre ou ne pas être. When she finished she saw Edison’s eyes filled by tears—almost miraculously the same ones that had been in hers. He looked at her with a sadly joyous smile and nodded his head, as though it were a standing ovation.
She walked off her imaginary stage and they met in the middle of the room, joined by a passion that was not sexual, but rather of the beauty of dedication and belief. And he took both her hands and held them in honor, and she swore she felt the electricity that he had sent into those lightbulbs travel along every nerve ending in her body.
“I suppose that we should go back,” she said. “It is getting late, I’m sure.”
“My wife will keep them entertained. Unless you are getting tired. Two performances in one night. We should do three—and record the third. How about a monologue that combines English and French. Is that possible?”
“It is a long trip back to New York, right?”
“You would be lucky to be back at your hotel by midnight in this weather. You might as well stay and enjoy the evening. You are out here already.” He walked up to the organ and opened the seat. He removed a book of sheet music and then produced a small brown bag. The bench slammed shut as he walked back to the table where Sarah was waiting. He crinkled the top of the bag into a funnel and poured a fine white powder along the surface. “Have some so you can enjoy the rest of the night.” And together they both inhaled the cocaine, tasting the bittersweet powder on the backs of their tongues, before it clogged their throats and fully awakened them.
The hit freed Sarah like a claustrophobic from a closet. She felt her body lift from a solid form. Breath flowed through her mouth and straight through her pores, as though there were no need for lungs, but instead for a cleansing. And with that her chest turned hollow and light, her breasts inverting and disappearing until her essence of femininity had graciously stepped aside, liberated by a sexless purity. She realized how tight her body had been. Her neck muscles gripped in one last squeeze before fully releasing themselves. Her eyes felt softer, and the inside of her head buzzed in liberation, as though some other extra being had taken up residence there. And when she looked up at the ceiling, she swore that she saw the world-famous Divine Sarah Bernhardt floating freely, throwing back the occasional reassuring smile, letting her know that all was okay.
“What is it like,” Edison asked, “to be a woman playing Hamlet?”
“The theater, like much of the world, is obsessed with difference. No matter what the essence of the art is, the issue is always turned back to novice aesthetics. Can a woman play a man? Can an old woman play a young girl? Critics have the audacity to compare my Hamlet to Booth’s—bit by bit, male versus female—and he hasn’t played it for fifteen years. They would never have done that with another man. Art is always being judged without ever considering the art.”
“Even machinery must be critically interpreted, it appears. And most people seem unwilling to accept the unexpected.”
“Please.” She dropped her head back and laughed. “They are still talking about it. I have never seen anything like it. Face the truth. Everybody, whether they care to admit it or not, is sick and bored with the usual Booth Hamlet, played by both Edwin and his father before him. S
trong, yet melancholy. Shy, but romantic. Gravely serious with every reaction. Hamlet was a boy, barely a man. And they played him as though he were weighted by the souls of a thousand lifetimes. I make him a boy. Impetuous. Curious. Give him some humor. I make him real.”
“What do you do to bring out the childishness?”
“Little things. When Polonius wants to sit beside me, I kick my feet up on the chair to keep him away. I don’t do the old school scooting away in gentle cowardice. This is now a deliberate boy. I run. I jump. I skip. I make even the most frightening moments for Hamlet filled with wonder.”
“Your Hamlet is happy?”
“Of course not. He is sad. It is tragic. But still he is impulsive, and reacts like a boy would. He plays at revenge. He does not mastermind it. He is a sad, sad boy. But he plays with every situation like a toy to try to make himself feel life. It is nuance that speaks loudest.”
The room carried a strange haze that discolored the black, only clearly visible in waving plumes across the electric lights.
Edison stared up at the ceiling. Smiling to himself, before drawing a stern but thoughtful expression. And though his skin was still taut from youth, his face looked old, as if the ghosts of wisdom and hardship had laid permanent rest. He was fragile and worn. Something that there is always beauty in. “This age of invention,” he began, “is not so much different. We take inanimate objects, and through manipulation create meaning. Right? We place a needle into a wax cylinder, and the friction that is created we accept as music. Or the incandescence of filaments and electricity as sunlight. We have to choose to believe our interpretations. Otherwise, there is only a needle grinding into wax.”
“This is what you think about in your workshop?”