That sense of relief was leaving him already. He was going over the first act again in his mind.
“I can tell you,” Marianna said.
“Yes,” he answered, “I know you can,” and the knowledge made him feel doubtful. “That’s why I’ve waited, so that I could read it all to you. You’ll know whether it’s lousy or not, you’ll know better than anyone else.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked.
“You’ll know,” he said. “We’ll both know, and I want you to tell me the truth. Promise to tell me the truth.”
“It’s going to be all right, Jeff,” she said, “of course it’s going to be.”
“Will you tell me the truth?” he asked her.
“I can’t do that,” she said, “because I’ll think it’s good, whether it is or not.” And then she smiled at him, and he smiled back.
“Anyway,” he said, “I’ll know.”
He looked at the pages on the table and picked them up and gathered them together.
“You see, I’ve got to know,” he said. “If it isn’t any good, I’ll know I can’t write a play. That’s something.”
“Jeff,” she said, “everyone feels just the way you do—everyone. It’s the reaction.”
“Maybe it’s too late,” he said. “Maybe I’ve done too much else too long.”
“Jeff,” she said, “Jeff, don’t say that.”
“It’s what I told you,” he said. “It’s like doing something that I should have quite a while ago. No matter what happens, I can’t thank you enough for it. You know that.”
“No matter what happens?” she repeated.
“I don’t mean that exactly,” he answered. And he repeated what he had said before. “It’s like doing something that I should have done and there’s been so much else.”
There had been so much else without her—so many years, so many other people, so much of life, and the words seemed to stand between them. She must have known what he meant because suddenly there was a queer sort of suspense. It would have been better—he was always sure of it later—if he had spoken of it definitely.
“Jeff,” she said.
“What?” he asked her.
“Do you want to read it now?”
“No,” he said, “not now. Tomorrow morning.”
He could tell himself that he was tired, but his anxiety to put it off came from something much deeper.
“Suppose,” he said, “that we just think I’ve read it and that we both know it’s good. Let’s forget it. Let’s think of it that way until tomorrow.”
He could hear the waves on the beach. It was still all right to think of it that way because he had not read the play aloud and he could tell nothing about it himself until he had. He could still live for a little while in that world with Marianna which was so far away from everything and believe that it might be possible to stay in it, but he did not have much time.…
42
Author’s Reading
It was a lovely morning, warm for May, but not too warm by the sea. But then, they always told you that the weather was never really hot in Southern California. It was largely one’s imagination when one thought that it was warm. Jeffrey could imagine everyone in Los Angeles and its suburbs looking at the blue Pacific sky and saying it was a lovely morning. It was only ten o’clock, but the glare from the water and the white sand of the beach made it necessary to lower the Venetian blinds of Marianna’s living room, and the voices of the early bathers beneath their sunshades on the beach and the cars on the highway in back of Marianna’s house were like incidental sounds offstage. Breakfast had been cleared from the glass table and Wong and Jessica had driven to town to shop, leaving the whole house quiet just as he would have wanted it. The living room seemed to have been arranged deliberately for the reading of that play. There was no one in the room but Marianna on the wicker chaise longue near the window and Jeffrey himself seated near her in a wicker armchair that creaked gently whenever he moved. No one but Marianna, and yet Jeffrey felt as conscious of an audience as an actor must feel when he cannot see the theater through the footlights. He wished he could get it out of his mind that the reading of his play was dramatic in itself and represented a “turning point.” Perhaps he was attaching undue importance to it all, but he felt certain that anything he might do in the future was peculiarly involved with it.
“Don’t look so tense,” Marianna said, and she laughed. “You’re only reading it to me.”
He was about to read the play to her but he was also about to read it to his conscience or to providence, or whatever it was that had allowed him the time to write it. He recalled that remark of Alf’s wife—that God was in the numbers—and he would be reading that play to whatever ordered force there was that moved numbers and moved lives.
“Of course,” he said, “it’s a first draft, Marianna.” And he was saying exactly what other people said who had read plays to him. “It’s just for the general effect.”
He realized that he was excusing himself already, trying to protect his ego, like everybody else.
“Go on with it,” Marianna said, and she laughed again. “Settle down—curtain.”
He cleared his throat.
“All right,” he said, “curtain.” And he raised the script and focused his eyes on it. “The curtain rises on a cold New England parlor in a small town in about the year 1910. The threadbare neatness of this room is what first impresses the audience. There is a fire laid in the fireplace, center, with a paper fan in front of it. On the mantel is a waxed flowerpiece, under glass. In front of the fireplace is a round woven rag rug—to the left, a horsehair sofa. A kerosene lamp stands on a Victorian table to the right. A Boston rocker is beside the table. The lamp has glass prisms around it. The globe is green and painted with pink roses.…”
He felt better, now that he was reading. He had always believed in giving an accurate description of a set and as he heard his voice he knew that he had not done it badly. He knew that those first few moments, just as the curtain rose, were very vital. Before a word was spoken they could indicate the whole spirit, the atmosphere, and as often as not, the theme, and he could see the set as he was reading. Curiously enough, he had not realized, while he was writing, how accurately he had been describing the parlor at Lime Street. Reading aloud something which one had written could give it values which one might not previously perceive.
As he grew more conscious of his own words, he could almost forget that Marianna was listening. He seemed to be alone there, listening to another voice reading what someone else had written. He was intensely interested in this other work, intensely anxious to see all that was best in it, and his critical faculties were very wide-awake.
“She enters from right,” he read. “Her hair is done in that ugly pompadour of the period. It is tied in back by a large bow ribbon. She is wearing a brooch watch on her white shirtwaist.…”
The first awkward minutes of the act were over, that difficult business of setting the character and the mood, and with the succeeding minutes, his own mood was changing. He was thinking that he was caught there in a sort of justice of his own contriving. He was thinking that he knew too much. There was no way of stilling the analytical sense which he had developed from examining other people’s work, and now that part of his mind was examining his own work remorselessly. It was an exquisite sort of retribution. He could see exactly what that other part of him, the submerged creative side of him, had been trying to do. The self-revelation of it was painful, but he had to face it. It was not that it was bad—he found himself wishing that it might have been frankly bad. Instead there was a veneer of accomplishment about it, a perfunctory sort of smartness, which made it worse. There was a veneer over the dialogue, a certain specious cleverness, but there was no conviction or emotion. The play he was reading had the plausibility and the coldness of a mechanical toy pirouetting on the sidewalk at Christmas time.
If it had been really bad he could have stood it—but
he was too technically competent for that. His voice was running smoothly. He was reading rather well. He could feel himself unconsciously trying to add a value which it did not have.
Once when he had been with Madge at Monte Carlo he had watched a man at the tables, and Jeffrey was like that gambler, versed and wise in all the combinations. He was a gambler who was playing safe, who did not put his chips on a number, but continually straddled the columns and the odds and evens, who was losing always just a little and was never making much. There was no brilliance and no creative daring, and yet he knew that he had possessed both once. They had been there long ago, in the first things he had written, and now they were gone, he could not imagine where.
It must have been in the middle of the second act that he thought he could not go on, and he paused for a moment. He did not want to look at Marianna, but he heard her voice.
“Go on,” she said, “don’t stop.”
He was reading again, but perhaps it would have been better to have left it there because it had nothing to do with his thoughts. All his life—at least all of his artistic life—floated before him and still Jeffrey kept on reading.
It was like running a race, simply to get through with it, but he was not aware that his voice showed it. He read the last page slowly and then he straightened the pages and put a clip on them. He did not want to look at her, but he had to.
“Well,” he said, “that’s that.”
Marianna was sitting up straight. Her hands were clasped tight on her lap. She was a good actress, but he knew her too well, and he could read her eyes. There might have been a moment of some sort of hope, because of course no one could be sure of oneself, but in an instant he knew he was right. It made a lump rise in his throat, because she was so kind. He could see her trying, with all her loyalty and affection, to evade the truth.
“It’s—” she began, and all her inflections were right and all her words—“it’s swell, darling. It’s awfully swell.”
Perhaps ten years ago he might have done it. There was no way of telling, but it was too late now. He was smiling at her. He stood up and tossed the manuscript on the chair. His anxiety was gone because everything was gone. He was thinking that he could get the Chief that afternoon and change at Kansas City, if that was the place to change, for Fort Sill, because Jim was at Fort Sill. Ten years ago it might have been different, but it was too late now.
“Nuts,” he said, “it’s lousy.”
She was an actress and she knew what he was thinking—she was very quick that way. She stood up very quickly as though someone had pulled her to her feet and her voice was almost harsh.
“No,” she cried, “no, no. It isn’t. It’s swell. It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful.” And then she was clinging to him and sobbing in his arms. “I loved it,” she sobbed. “I loved it all. Please don’t say it’s lousy.”
“Nuts,” Jeffrey said, “it’s lousy, dear.”
43
You Can’t Do with Them—or without Them
Madge had been telling Jeffrey for the last three years that he would have to do something about Mr. Gorman. If Jeffrey did not want to do anything else, at least he should have a frank talk with Mr. Gorman. Jeffrey had told Madge that she saw only what Mr. Gorman didn’t do and didn’t appreciate what Mr. Gorman did do, and Madge usually replied that there wasn’t anything to appreciate because every year Mr. Gorman did less and less, and Jeffrey was always soft about it. There was the cow the year before last, but when Jeffrey had called in Mr. Gorman to go over the matter, he and Mr. Gorman had ended up by telling each other jokes. Then there was the time the pipes had burst in two bathrooms, and the repair bills had amounted to one hundred and eighty-five dollars. Mr. Gorman had explained to Jeffrey that the plumber who had installed the plumbing had cheated Jeffrey and had done something mysterious with the shut-off valves. Mr. Gorman had worked on those shut-off valves for hours and hours until he had thought he had them licked. Mr. Gorman felt as sick about it as Jeffrey did and he had told Jeffrey to come right down cellar and see the shut-off valves himself. But Jeffrey had been soft about it. Jeffrey had not gone down cellar to see the shut-off valves and Madge had said that Mr. Gorman had a reason for everything.
Last winter Mr. Gorman had not taken the screens off the windows or the porches, and Mr. Gorman had a reason for that, too. He said it got the screens loose, taking them on and off and the estate superintendent on the Haskell place, who was a personal friend of Mr. Gorman’s, had told Mr. Gorman that Mr. Haskell never took his screens down and everything had gone much better. Then the cook said that Mr. Gorman never brought in vegetables and Mr. Gorman told Jeffrey that Mr. Wilson knew what women were like, didn’t he? You couldn’t do with them, and you couldn’t do without them. Then there was the apple orchard on the hill. For two years Mr. Gorman had not been able to get it sprayed, but Mr. Gorman had taken that up, too, with the Haskells’ estate superintendent. The Haskells’ estate superintendent had read somewhere in a book that there was nothing better for an apple orchard than to let the bugs and caterpillars at it for a couple of years. This gave the trees resistance. Furthermore, it seemed that after the bugs and caterpillars had really got at it and were not expecting anything, why then you could spray them with a new type of poison which cost a dollar a gallon, but which was worth it, and you had them all cleaned-up for good. Mr. Haskell’s estate superintendent had tried it and Mr. Haskell’s apples were doing fine.
Then there was the matter of mulching the flower garden. Mr. Gorman was frank to say that he never got around to the flower garden as much as he would like to, because the women in the house were always hollering after him to fix that lock on the bathroom door, but Mr. Gorman loved flowers and Mr. Wilson knew he loved them. It was simply that there were two ways of thinking about flowers. Mr. Gorman felt they were stronger in the spring if they weren’t coddled and cuddled in the winter. The ones that died in the winter wouldn’t be worth anything in the spring if they’d lived, in spite of what Mrs. Wilson said. Those ladies at the Garden Club were just being worked on by seed and fertilizer salesmen. Mr. Wilson knew that you couldn’t get on with women or get on without them.
Then that summer Mr. Gorman had let the front lawn go. He was danged if he had ever seen grass grow so fast, and he didn’t want Mr. Wilson to think that it had got ahead of him, even if Mrs. Wilson thought so. He had let it get ahead of him because it did lawns good to be let go for one summer. The grass got rooted and you could make a real project of it in the spring. It was the same way with weeds and the paths out back and the driveway by the garage. That was what farming was: let the weeds take hold and then do a blitzkrieg on them. There wasn’t any use just pecking at them. When you got good and ready, go at it, all at once.
Madge told Jeffrey that Mr. Gorman was doing less and less, but Mr. Gorman had a different story. Mr. Gorman said that all the time there were more and more things to do and he was busy as a one-armed paperhanger. When he got going at one thing, the next would come up and when the next came up, the women would holler to him from the house. He was working like a one-armed paperhanger and if Mr. Wilson wanted to have the place like Mr. Haskell’s, why he could do it with five or six men under him, like Mr. Haskell’s estate superintendent, but he knew that Mr. Wilson didn’t want to have the place like Mr. Haskell’s. Mr. Wilson wanted to rest there and not to worry. Mr. Gorman knew that Mr. Wilson didn’t want a show place but a farm, like the farm where Mr. Gorman worked when he was a boy; and the main thing about farming was to take it easy and not let it get you down. If it weren’t for the women, he and Mr. Wilson would have a good time on the place with husking bees and clambakes and barbecues and—oh-oh—hard cider.
Several times that summer Jeffrey had told Madge to let him handle Mr. Gorman, that Mr. Gorman was all right, but as the summer had gone on, Jeffrey began to believe, as he looked about the place, that there might be something in what Madge said; and finally Jeffrey had told Madge that he would have a talk with Mr. G
orman.
Then for several weeks he and Madge had talked about that talk he was going to have with Mr. Gorman. It seemed to Jeffrey that sometimes he was Mr. Gorman and sometimes Madge was. Madge had told him that he must be perfectly firm with Mr. Gorman and at the same time that he must not lose his temper. The thing to do, Madge said, was to call Mr. Gorman into the house just casually and then have a list of questions on a piece of paper which he could ask Mr. Gorman in a perfectly casual way. If Jeffrey did not want to do it, Madge would write out the list herself. What had happened about spraying the apple trees? Why was the cow dry during the few months the family was there? Why were there so few eggs when the hens were laying? Why was it there were never any vegetables in the garden? Why was it they seemed to use two hundred gallons of gasoline a month? Madge would write down all those questions and Jeffrey would simply ask them, and then Mr. Gorman would know that Jeffrey was not completely simple. Jeffrey had told Madge that this was not the right way to go about it. In the first place, Mr. Gorman would know very well that she had written out those questions. He knew Gorman, and he could handle Gorman. He would simply call Gorman in and tell him to sit down.
“And then you’ll give him a cigarette,” Madge said. “And then you’ll go soft and you won’t tell Mr. Gorman anything.”
“I won’t go soft,” Jeffrey said. “It’s hard to get a good man, Madge, and Gorman is a good man, and I can handle Gorman.”
Jeffrey said that he had always handled Gorman. All he needed to do was to call Mr. Gorman in and say, Look here, Mr. Gorman, the place was a little run-down this year, and what was the matter? It was perfectly true that Mr. Gorman would have a good reason and Jeffrey would simply listen to the reason and then he would say something bitter, something about not being Mr. Haskell and that Mr. Gorman was not Mr. Haskell’s estate superintendent.
So Little Time Page 53