“No, she’ll be grateful whether she knows it or not. It makes her tense, having me around. Besides, somebody has to take care of you. I bet that lawyer isn’t any use.” Outsiders interfered with Jilly’s storybook vision of her father and me. She’d be horrified if she knew about Q. She also had no idea how hopeless Ev would have been with illness. He’d have managed to get sent to Peru to cover El Sendero Luminoso rather than act as nurse.
“He does what he can.” I told her how Tim rescued my bumper but she seemed unimpressed.
“Okay, we’ll figure out the details later. I’ve got to go. That’s Call Waiting.”
The sea. A month with Jilly. A future that mirrored the past. Would I be able to swim or take long walks or ride a bike as we did in our early days? Ev taught Jilly to ride the waves. I taught her to float in the salty bay. We watched the tides move in and out in their comforting motion, always the same yet always slightly different, an inexhaustible range of nuance as in a dance—same steps and pattern but each performance unique, depending on the breath and energy of the dancers and the mood of the air embracing them. I’d watch the tides again, this time without imagining my future mysteriously contained in their patterns, unknown and thrilling, sometimes frightening. That future was the past now.
I could work up there, gather data for the book about Ev’s town. It wasn’t coming to me at all here in New York, but on its home ground it would invent itself, from the taste of the air and roll of the water, the history and the hills. Like the Samurai creed in the book the Tai Chi teacher gave me: “I have no design; I make opportunity my design.”
An eerie stiffness crept up my arms and legs, as if they were slowly sinking into a granular state. I pictured the inner landscape, its clotted waterways. Not quite stone. Pre-stone. Sand. I tested each arm and leg to make sure they still moved. Yes, but they were astonishingly heavy. A sandbag woman, body on its way to stone.
The phone rang again. What now?
Laura, my love. Did I wake you?
Q.
It’s been bedlam here at Peter’s. That’s why I’m calling so late. I’m sorry if I scared you.
He’d been in town for three days, working, staying as usual at his ex-brother-in-law’s place in Chelsea, and he had an excellent excuse for not having called sooner—only a venial sin on his permanent record card. Chaos and grief filled the apartment. Peter’s lover, Arthur, was in the hospital, dying.
It’s dreadful, Laura. I mean, Arthur, of all people. I’ve known him so long. He and Peter lasted longer than Susan and I did. I knew he was HIV positive—remember, I must have told you—but he’d been okay for years. . . . Then it hit all at once.
That’s awful. Is this really the end or can they keep him going awhile?
I doubt it. I haven’t seen him, they’re not letting visitors in, but Peter says he won’t be coming home. He’s in a wild state. He says he can’t bear the apartment without Arthur in it. He found a place a few blocks away and he’s packing madly. Maybe it’s a way of avoiding his grief.
Oh, the apartment. I always thought of it as ours—I mean years ago.
I know, said Q. I can’t imagine not having it to go to either. But maybe we could get used to the new one. He cries while he packs, and hurls things around, you know, photos, mementos, stuff like that.
It doesn’t sound like avoidance.
I guess not. In between packing he goes to the hospital. He’s neglecting the store. When I come back at night I have to hold him in my arms while he cries some more. It’s very unlike Peter. You know how he is.
(Yes, I do. Close-mouthed. Prim, the pair of them. Over the years I’d run into them when rendezvousing with Q. Not often, though. Peter owns a rare-books store and Arthur was an editor at a business magazine, so that Q., when he visited, had the place to himself most days. Still, we were careful. When they turned up we managed to be drinking tea in the living room, conversing decorously. Only once was there a close call. Shit, I forgot, said Q. as we tore off our clothes with one hand each. Peter’s coming home at four. Oh, I said. And what time is it now? He climbed over me to pull a watch out of the night table drawer. Twenty to four. We’ll manage, I said cavalierly. But Laura, he moaned, it takes time to get dressed and make the tea. About six minutes, I said. He set upon me, laughing and grunting. He’ll be here in ten minutes, he moaned. Peter’s compulsively prompt. So what? I said. The door is closed. I’m shy about these things, said Q. I was married to his sister, remember. And he’s so proper. Don’t rush me, I said, giggling, it sets me back. Less is more, as in art. Oh, shush, Laura. Basta. This is no time for intellect. Think porn.
(At four o’clock Peter found us in the living room, dressed and reading from a script. There hadn’t been time to make the tea. We often read. I would be Q.’s straight man as he went over his lines. Happy Days, I believe it was, in which Beckett, though it was surely not his primary intention, captures the essence of latter-day marriage: the women is buried up to her neck in sand and the man seems not to notice.)
I can’t describe what’s been going on here the last few days, said Q. Friends are in and out. Plus the movers, giving estimates. But listen, Laura, come tomorrow. No, wait. Not tomorrow. Susan is coming to see Peter. You don’t want to meet up with her. The day after.
I’ll have to call in the morning and let you know if I’m up to it. I can’t say definitely.
Please say definitely, Laura. I need to see you and my dance card is getting all filled up, as it were.
Your dance card. Your dance card! Are you telling me you’re going to have to fit me in?
It’s just an expression. Come on, don’t get on your high horse. I’m dying to see you.
You can just die then, and they can bury your dance card with you.
Jesus, you’re touchy. More than ever. What’s wrong? Are you sick?
I’ll tell you when I see you.
Tell me now.
No.
All right, forgive me, then. It was an unfortunate remark.
I forgave him. I knew his needs. Like a giant doomed to eat damsels, Q. must fill a vast daily quota of attention and adulation from varied sources. In a small town he might run out of people, but by keeping in constant motion, he’s in no such danger. The only danger is to those suppliers of attention who expect some continuity of response, who fail to understand that for Q. people are an inexhaustible natural resource for his sustenance and delight, like air or water or sunshine. You are my sunshine, he sang to me in jovial moments; not for a long time did I realize he meant it literally.
Okay, then, you’ll come. Because I must tell you about this movie I’m in. It’s silly but fun. I play a righteous cop. Can you imagine? I never played a cop before. I have to get into a cop mentality. You can help me.
Me? I’m no expert on cops. Just because of—
No, no, I didn’t mean because of that. I mean you’re strict. You have principles. That’s a start.
2
Q. threads through my life like an unusual color in a tapestry or a swatch in a cape of many colors. Or I might say Q. is the wild card in an otherwise ordinary deck. Or, with Q. I lead a life parallel to my visible one, of another order of reality, metaphorical, where people do not speak in quotation marks but fluidly, tongue to tongue, no translation required.
Q., as you know, is an actor. Not a star, but familiar to people who care about the theatre and remember the actors. Years before I met him, he played bit parts and picked up money as actors do, working as a tour guide, a carpenter, a bouncer. Fortunately his wife, Susan, was a kindergarten teacher with a steady income. Since we met, he has rarely languished for want of work. He thinks I brought him luck by some witchy power, and also watered his talent, but I make no such claims.
Anyhow, if I called him by his complete and multisyllabic Italian name, you might recognize it and I don’t want that. To his friends he’s Quinn, which is his middle name and his mother’s family name. He was born of the highly volatile combination of an Irish mo
ther and an Italian father who met in Milan, where his mother was studying opera. She had a splendid voice, Q. tells me, and he’s inherited a musical bent, though his voice is not splendid, only large and serviceable. His father was in the diplomatic corps (Q. has inherited the diplomatic gifts, too) and was posted to Washington when Q. was about ten. There they remained. When he’s angry at the government for its aggressions and intrusions, he’ll say he’s not really American and wants no part of it, but it’s not true—anyone here over forty years is part of it.
His mother was often traveling with small opera companies and his father was busy with whatever diplomats of friendly, comparatively powerless nations find to do in Washington, so Q. considers that he brought himself up as well as his younger sister, Gemma. For all his diplomacy and charm, he does have the improvisational behavior of the self-taught—mobile, adaptable, a relativist. I call him unreliable. He says he lives in the moment.
He speaks English like no one else, and that uniqueness is one of the traits which kept me spellbound. You can’t quite call it an accent; English is, after all, one of his mother tongues, his mother’s tongue. But there’s a hint of a brogue along with a slight foreignness, not in the pronunciation of words but in their cadences. He’s rarely at a loss for words, but when he’s very tired, or very passionate, a wisp of an Italian accent will creep in, ghost vowels hovering around the edges of the audible syllables. With such fluidity he can do any sort of accent, which directors appreciate.
I like calling him Q. as I write, not simply because Q. stands for question and in my life he has always been a question in the sense of a riddle or something unfinished. He’s also a question in the sense of an issue. More vulgarly, he’s a questionable character; his behavior is questionable and by association, mine has been, too.
But his success: why, when so many actors are out of work, is Q. always working, aside from any spells I unwittingly wrought? Talented, no question about that, but no more than dozens of unemployed actors. The answer is that Q. can turn himself or be turned into nearly anyone. He’s big and tends toward the beefy—good for fathers, businessmen, royalty, workmen—but he can slim down at a week’s notice to become a romantic hero or sober schoolteacher or earnest politician. Delicate and fey, no. Never Richard II. Bolingbroke, yes. He’s dark but not too dark, with large assertive features (they can be toned down with makeup). His coarse hair, once chestnut, is peppered with gray, but that’s easily fixed. He can be made to resemble most any ethnic type (Othello, Zapata, Lopakhin). He has an antic disposition and can do farce—Vladimir in Waiting for Godot—more naturally than tragedy, but Lear is his dream. He sings and dances. Buffalo Bill in Annie Get Your Gun, a cowboy in Oklahoma, though Poor Judd would have been more in his line. In grade-B movies he’s frequently a gangster, a bartender, or a lawyer in an expensive suit who’s fought his way up from the slums. He’s been a surgeon, though not, I think, very persuasively, as well as a ship’s captain, a union organizer, and once a priest. Enough, you get the idea.
I wanted to be on the stage, too. I was twenty-five, avoiding my own words by speaking the words of others. This, to his eternal credit, Q. pointed out. He was the lead in a Noël Coward-like comedy; I wore a uniform and carried in a tea tray and probably wouldn’t have gotten much farther. I didn’t like him—too loud and insistent—but he won me over. Plied me with cups of tea. Phoned at all hours. Wooed. He taught me how to say my lines and how to move and carry the tray. Endlessly, in my walk-up apartment in the Village, he demonstrated my small role, transforming himself into an Irish maid while I laughed. But he was right, he knew exactly how it should be done. I was grateful. I fell under his spell. And finally, finally, when I was wondering if he’d ever get around to it, he kissed me. I never dreamed he was married; he had all the time in the world, never dashing home like some married people in the cast.
I was the woman he had always dreamed of without knowing it, he said. We were halves of an egg. He loved to hear me talk, he said. Plus he had to tell me everything that happened to him. (This he still does.) It would be agony, he said, but he would leave Susan. Don’t think a person can’t love two people at once, he said as we lay in my bed, exhausted, as many surfaces touching as possible. There were no questions, then. We were tied together, like the performance artists experimenting with boundaries. It was as if I had waited all my life for the rope. Except we touched. How we touched. It kills me to remember. Not because it was a crazy way to be—what do I care for craziness? Because I had that once and lost it.
Under his spell I understood that this would be my last little part in a little play. I started writing. Because of what he showed me, he is mine forever. I can forgive him almost anything.
And what did I do? Freed him, he said. From what, for what? If that’s true, then it was a bad piece of business I did.
He would leave her. But it couldn’t be done crudely, abruptly. No, ever the gentleman, a prince of a man. There were the children, too. Four, good grief. All girls. Teenagers, for he was old, at least he seemed so then, pushing forty. I didn’t care about them. What were children? I cared only about having him.
He would leave her. But not when her younger brother was drowned in a boating accident. And not when Carla was going through drug therapy or Jessica was applying to college or Renata, only fifteen, needed an abortion. For two years he waited for the right moment until one day I hit him. I need my life, I said. You’re holding on to it so I can’t use it. Get out, I screamed, I never want to see you or hear your name again. He didn’t hit back. He went, skulking like a whipped dog, closing the door very silently. I felt my heart crack but paid no attention. How could I have loved that contemptible creature! Get that dog out of my life.
I made an ill-considered marriage, as might be expected. First of all, he was much too thin. That thinness or sparseness was the clue to what was wrong about our marriage. There wasn’t enough of him. Enough for him on his own perhaps, but too meager to give any away. It was as if what was missing, the weight needed to flesh out the bones, was somewhere in the ether waiting to be summoned into material existence. Very thin people make me suspicious. I suspect an unwillingness to absorb and assimilate what life offers. Though literally speaking, Ev ate enough; it just didn’t seem to add to him. I didn’t think much about any of this when I married him. It was like making an investment on a hunch that the stock will grow, because you’re eager to start the money working for you. Then the hunch turns out to be mistaken. I really didn’t think at all and married out of desolation and spite.
It was at a party held to celebrate my first book that I noticed Ev, a party I couldn’t enjoy because my heart had broken. I knew the precise moment it cracked, the way a rib or an elbow cracks—when I threw Q. out and he skulked away, shutting the door behind him ever so quietly as if he were afraid to increase my wrath. The crack occurred at the sound of the door softly clicking into place. So at the party I was moving gingerly: the two halves of my heart, which I pictured as the jagged halves of a greeting-card Valentine, would hold together only if I was careful not to jolt them. Still, I intended to pursue my life. I was, twenty-seven, far too young and strong to retire on a broken heart. I gazed around and spied a man whose head rose above the others so that I thought at first he might be standing on a chair. He was pale and gray-eyed and bearded. Good, different from Q. Though like Q. he seemed fired by energy, a convoluted energy, directed inward.
“Who is that tall man?” I asked my editor, Gretchen, a curly-haired motherly woman known for her austere and exacting literary tastes. She kept bringing me little bits of cheese and broccoli on cocktail napkins and urging me to enjoy myself.
“I don’t know but I’ll find out.” She scooted away and returned in three minutes. “His name is Everett Acosta. He used to write for the Boston Globe and is supposed to be very good. Just moved to New York. He’s married”—she gave an exaggerated pout—“but recently separated from his wife,” and she smiled goofily. “He’s here because J
oe Barton is courting him. Wants him to do a book about Cuba. He’s covered El Salvador and Nicaragua. To these boy editors, El Salvador, Cuba, it’s all the same.”
“How did you find all this out so quickly?”
“Nothing to it. Want to meet him? Come along.”
I left the party with him and we had dinner, one of those long, late, slightly tipsy dinners when intimate details flicker unexpectedly like fireflies on summer nights, glimmering, tantalizing. Everyone knows it’s easy to confide in a stranger you may never see again. If it happens that we do see the stranger again, that we even make him a friend or lover, it’s just as well to have gotten some secrets over with early, when we’re less likely to be blamed or judged for them. I think now that Ev was offering a few easy confidences so he wouldn’t have to offer much in the future, if there was a future, and could coast comfortably onward. For the rest of his life, as it turned out. That first dinner might have been our most intimate time together.
He seemed a sad man. He instinctively bent his head at the doorway of the restaurant even though it was high enough to accommodate him. Yet attractive, too, as sad men can be. I assumed he was sad because he had separated from his wife only three months earlier and left two young children, a girl of four and a boy of ten. He smiled seldom and when he did it was a rueful half-smile, but speaking of his children he smiled, at last, without the aroma of rue. That was a point in his favor. I was already totting up points and hoping he would come out with well above a passing grade.
I did, at that first dinner, what women invariably do and will no doubt do forever, regardless of feminist theory. I got him to talk of what he cared about. Sometimes this takes some groping, but with Ev it was easy. Politics. He described his trips to Central America. “You get used to seeing children in uniforms guarding public buildings with machine guns at their hips,” he said. I was impressed. I romanticized it—not the children, but Ev’s familiarity with such sights. I imagined that from getting used to such sights he had deep knowledge. He did, of a sort. Of politics, that was all. Nothing romantic.
The Fatigue Artist Page 5