Saturday came, and with it a letter from Don, post-marked LA. It came from out of the blue and was welcome in spite of its content.
Dear Whoever-is-living-in-my-apartment:
I have made a fortune submitting to malaria experimentations while vacationing on Devil’s Island. But now that the mosquitoes have gone back to Capistrano, I find myself a little short on blood and cash. So if you can send either we might at least save the kid. Seriously, folks—I am working in a small TV studio—as a tube, learning to be a director. To date I have directed two 15-minute children’s shows which, though mercifully forgotten, did earn me credit—on camera. I hope to move on to dogs and then, with any luck, fish. Meantime, as mentioned above—help! I am at the Montecito Hotel where all unemployed showfolk hang out, and I will remain here through the end of the month. After that, Schenectady is a good bet—if they’ll have me.
Ginnie, if you are still there, please send me $100. Enclosed is my marker for same which can be honored anytime after July, 1980, at 8% per annum, a good deal you will admit. If you are not Ginnie and not anyone to whom I am known, then just send $50 and there will be no hard feelings.
Where is Ben Webber? The world wants to know. I wrote to him three times for money but I have never heard from him, perhaps because I never had the courage to mail the letters.
I am unhappy to have to write such a letter but there is a gun to my head and the hand that holds it is mine. If you are generous, you will be rewarded a thousand times over. (Remember Jack and the Beanstalk?) Only don’t send seeds, when it’s shekels what I need.
Yours in dire straits—
The Heart Fund,
Don
We laughed and cried at Don’s letter, glad to hear from him but saddened to learn that he was barely hanging on. It was all a little strange in that both Ben and I knew Don so well yet neither of us had known the other when last in Don’s company. We sent the money, of course (my check), along with a letter explaining how we were living together in sin and joy; and we put Don’s marker in the drawer, not one day to collect on, but one day to laugh over.
It was time for rehearsal and Ben went with me, like a trainer sending his boy in against Gargantua. We took a cab part of the way and walked the rest of the distance to Rockefeller Plaza and the NBC Studios.
At the studio we had an on-camera run-through, blocking everything out and setting our marks so that the director and technical director could pick their shots. Then we ran it for music and it was astounding, all that sound. I felt as though we were dancing inside a tuba. It was also kind of stirring and show-bizzy and I danced well, responsive and strong, great in “Sing, Sing, Sing,” fantastic in “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
Monty was there, to bolster Florrie who was suddenly so nervous and fidgety that she made me feel like Anna Pavlova. Monty took Ben aside and castigated him for going with Jewish girls. (Me?)
“Benny,” he said. “Benny, mine feller, you should get yourself a cute shiksa because shiksas are good for what ails you even if nothing ails you. What are you messing around with that Ginnie Mazeltov?”
“She makes great chicken soup,” said Ben, trying dopily to hang in there with the master.
“Is that an answer coming from a sound mind? Did you ever fuck chicken soup? Feh! All those feathers, all that rice. The only thing better to fuck than a shiksa is a blintze. And that is only to a point. Because once you fuck a blintze it wants to marry you. But not a shiksa. A shiksa will be happy if you give her a plot of land in Palm Beach and keep your mouth shut. But woe be unto the Hebe who knocks up a shiksa because the father of every shiksa is a nine foot, eight inch tall farmer what can hit you over the head with such a cow you’ll see milk the rest of your life.”
And so on, with the hours ticking away and the show drawing closer and all of us growing more anxious. Ben and I sat off in a corner, holding hands so sweaty that they kept falling out of one another. We had a lunch break but couldn’t eat, choosing to stay there and watch the cast run through the rest of the show. Joey Magnuson and his distaff sidekick, Mara-Jayne, were hilarious, their timing flawless, their sketches foolproof. “What the hell do they want with a crummy dance act?” I said to Ben, suddenly wanting to be in Seattle and going west.
“Too much of that stuff is too much. They have to break it. Sobel’s very smart.”
“Explain.”
“So much of that stuff is verbal. Joey’s dialects, the silly lines, the foreign movie sketch. It’s all very funny but it comes so fast and so unrelieved that the ear needs a rest. Television is a visual medium. If you just fire words at your audience, you wear ’em out. They need something for the eye to concentrate on and enjoy in an hour-and-a-half show, otherwise their ears are going to fall off.”
“Where’d you learn that?”
“I didn’t. I made it up.”
“Sounds right.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Ben was right. That’s why the show needed the Pickering Trio. To relax the tourniquet. The trick, though, was for us to be good. Otherwise, more than being relieved, the people would be going to sleep.
As usual, Ben was reading my mind. “Don’t worry. You’re going to be good.”
I was beginning to understand the essence of Ben Webber that even he would require more time to comprehend. I was only a kid but I was in love, and love, I still believe, gives insight to instinct and power to purpose. Ben had an ability that would always cause him to be on fire. He could, and always would, arrive at the core of something long before he’d know he had. And like a genius infant who had yet to learn the dynamics of speech, he would be unnerved by it and frustrated, throwing tantrums and sponsoring rages because if he did not yet understand what he understood, how could he tolerate others never understanding at all?
He had a nose for a scene. Even in the little sex skits we worked out on the spot—it was Ben who set the characters and the situation, and Ginnie who sang the Trilby. And he had an innate sense of what was dramatically correct, a born awareness of the size and shape of a moment, a feeling for the form of an action long before it took substance. Others might acquire that talent, but Ben had it going in and, damnit, he would always have it. All of that I knew to be true because I loved him and felt it. And even allowing that love can be blind, then cannot it also be tactile? How else can it survive?
He sat beside me, holding my hand in both of his, as if to keep the wounded bird from flying off prematurely. And he looked foolishly young and naively “Army” in that brushcut of a haircut that so unflattered what once had to have been a bumper crop of Scotch-brown hair. And huddled in the back of the theatre, knees drawn up and shivering in my tights, I had a quick flash-forward to the time when Ben would have arrived, when all of his natural forces would be given full play, when offstage he’d be more powerful than those onstage and onstage they’d know it. And if that didn’t describe a playwright then, fuck it, Shakespeare never writ.
And I thought, lovingly, maybe, just maybe, my clacking at that horror of a typewriter, making words out of his alphabet soup boil—maybe that would make me as important to Ben as Boswell had been important to Johnson. It was a good moment and I swam in it, right through the dress rehearsal and up to ten minutes before air time, at which point, wouldn’t you know it, I cried.
Florrie saw me and went ape, coming more apart even than me, flying off and all over like a triggered grenade, screeching that it was no time for me to get hysterical, yelling that I should remain calm. Monty had to shoot her down and get her out of there. Poor kid, the pressure was getting to her.
Next, Richie Pickering tried to console me, substituting logic and experience for Florrie’s blaring panic, advising me to trust my body because my body knew what to do, that my muscles had memory, that if I just went out and went on all would go well automatically and as predicted. I could hear his calm words but I wouldn’t let them into my head, for he sounded like Daddy teaching me how to walk, and I fell
many times in those days—everytime he let go of my hand.
Then Noah Sobel came over, peering into my eyes as if to see into my soul. Then he stepped back and sighed and began to look around as if to say, “Call Sullivan and see if he’ll give us Hogan’s Dogs.” I was slipping away, I knew it, a whimpering fog of former girl, dissolving before their eyes—and wouldn’t that be an act, no?
It was Ben to the rescue, taking my hand and pulling me like a blind mule into Mara-Jayne’s dressing room which that lady graciously vacated because she had seen that kind of thing before and knew that it could not be contended with if crowds were looking on. Ben closed the door, sat me in a chair, and proceeded to get very nervous, pacing about, looking at the ceiling, hitting the wall, showing an emotion more akin to frightened truculence than to bubbling anger. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
“What?”
“Let’s sneak out, get a cab, and go get a beer. This is ridiculous! Working a month, like a slave, just to go on for what—four lousy minutes? Don’t do it! It’s crazy! Do something else! Be a nurse, a fireman, sell table-clothes at Macy’s! But not this! Ginnie, not this!”
“What?”
“You don’t need it! A hundred years from now, who’ll care? No one’ll remember, least of all you because you’ll be buried somewhere near a babbling brook—‘Here lies Virginia Troppenheimer.’ And on the stone it’ll say: ‘I won’t dance, can’t make me.’”
“Troppenheimer?”
“Yes, Jedidiah Troppenheimer. Nice man. Raised pigs. Married this girl, I forget her name—it was a hundred years ago. Nobody cares.”
“You don’t care?”
“A hundred years from now? You kidding? Fuck it!”
“Troppenheimer?”
“Something like that. Might have been Doodlemunger—it was so long ago. He married this gypsy. Nice girl but all she was ever good for was farm work. She had nine kids and tits down to here. Breast-feeding’ll do that, to any cow.”
“I was going to do the show. I just wanted to stop off for a little cry.”
“Okay, you’ve had it. Now what do you want to do? Do you want to go on or do you want to go home?”
“Fuck you with your psychology! I’m onto you, you bastard! Doodlemunger?”
“Could have been Schepplebinder.”
“Sure it wasn’t Findleburger, you sonofabitch?”
“No. Findleburger raised horsies. This man raised pigs.”
“Findleburger didn’t raise pigs?”
“Move your ass, Swan Lake, you’re on.”
“Keep a cab waiting. We may be leaving quickly.”
“Okay, but a hundred years from now, who’ll care?”
“Tits down to where, you quack?”
“Move it, move it.”
I came out of Mara-Jayne’s dressing room reborn and just fine. They were all looking at me, waiting for me to explode, but I outfoxed ’em. Virginia Troppenheimer was going on.
I looked over at Ben, just to get one last look at him in the event I died onstage and got buried beside a babbling brook. He stuck his tongue out at me, gave me the donkey’s ears and the hee-haw that went with it, and finished it all off with the finger. I countered by crossing my eyes, giving him the old half-arm “fuck you” and showing him my ass. Everyone had to think we were obscene deaf-mutes, but I was going on. All I had to remember was not to trip on my tits.
Music up. Lights up. Titles crawl. And we were on, standing before the big eye for a quick stand-up intro, an invisible announcer booming, “And the Pickering Trio, sophisticated dance troupe.” That almost busted me up because if there was anything we were not it was sophisticated. I held my pose just long enough, laughing till I coughed once we got off. Florrie would have nothing to do with me, and Richie had nothing left he could say to me. So, I was alone, waiting.
At the twenty-two-minute mark, the Pickering Trio went on. “Sing, Sing, Sing.” The music thundered and the beat was wicked and our three adrenalines pumped so forcefully that we never did it as well. All the percussion that Lucas Harrison had woven into the arrangement came pulsing out, driving the number like a locomotive down a ski slope, to the point where I had the distinct feeling that the orchestra was struggling to keep up with us. The studio audience went slightly nuts as we jumped around in our red and yellow baggy sweaters, twirling our dumb derbies, springing up and down in our white sneakers like three bunnies on a hot plate. It all worked. Smasho-boffo.
We came off to big banana smiles from everyone and skipped our way to our dressing rooms because we had over a half hour in which to rest up for our second number. Ben was there and hugged me and was still hugging me when Florrie tore us apart, reminding me that I had a costume change, which I made, getting into my froufrou “Sweet Georgie Brown” outfit, with a little help from Ben. Christ, his hands on my body—I could have outleapt Nijinsky.
Florrie wanted to take a nap, Richie, too. Bless ’em, I had no objections. But I was still on the crest of that marvelous high, still glowing five hundred watts. So Ben and I took a little walk, outside, where it was more June than February. We walked without talking, just holding hands, me in my Gypsy Robe because I had yet to give it up as tradition demanded. I wore it over my “Georgia Brown” costume but it was debatable which was the more bizarre.
Have you ever walked with someone you loved after something wonderful had just happened? If not, too bad. You’ve never been alive. Because all you have to do is touch and it does away with all need for words; the communication just flowing, one circulatory system whizzing through both bodies, one thought shooting through both heads. We were never closer, Ben and me. Not even in our most passionate craziness were we ever more a part of one another. Nor was there ever a time in my life when I had a greater self-awareness, my brain uncurling and setting everything I knew right out in front of me, so clear that I could touch all my knowledge, all my memories and potentials, all my tendencies and trepidations—which is why I knew I was pregnant.
It hit me all at once, like a saint’s revelation. I wanted to mention it to Ben but held back, thinking that by merely holding my hand he’d know it, too. And if he didn’t, then why spoil the moment with accusations of insensitivity? I felt the budding life in me—a boy. A most beautiful, wonderful little boy.
We kept walking until one of the stagehands came running up to us, panic smeared all over his face, sweat on his brow, blood in his eye. “You crazy! You’re on in three minutes!”
Running, running. Back to the theatre. People getting out of our way. Mostly because I looked like a flapping aberration in my blossoming Gypsy Robe. We dodged cars, sideswiped drunks, side-stepped lampposts, and got back to the stage door, where pandemonium awaited me like a process server.
Florrie was screaming again, fluttering about almost in feathers. She was getting good at it, had it down pat. Richie was, for the first time I had ever seen, undone and indelicate. “You stupid cunt! What the hell’s wrong with you!”
“I’m having a baby!” I said, in self defense, and Ben almost fell on the floor. “I am!” I said, turning to him, still trying to shuck off the Gypsy Robe which fought my escape with flashes of static electricity. “Ben I am! I’m pregnant! Look at the—electricity!”
“It’s okay as an encore,” he said, gently getting me out of the robe. “But first, let’s see you do ‘Sweet Georgia Brown.’” I guess he figured I was flipping again. Well, I thought, he won’t feel that way in nine months, I warrant.
Someone shoved me on and I danced, only later I didn’t remember. I do remember hearing the music, though, Lucas’ arrangement, fairly bonging with rhythm, jungle and jazz, half cha-cha, half Dixie one-step. I had an umbrella and pantaloons and high heels and an ice-cream cake of a hat that was topped with a three foot feather—everything white except the feather which was scarlet. And I knew it was going alright because all of me was moving with that prior knowledge that Richie had spoken of—muscle memory, so ingrained with total input that I danced as i
f mothered by Terpsichore and fathered by a computer.
When we finished, the audience went berserk, standing and cheering. I flew into Florrie’s arms and hugged her like mad, only she wouldn’t hug back. She just pushed me away, large tears in her huge eyes. “You are out of your fucking mind! Stay away from me!”
I turned to Richie and he was staring at me as though I had returned from the dead after he had paid for the funeral. “Just be around for curtain call, okay? Can you do that?” I nodded and he walked away, shaking his head. He certainly seemed bothered and I wondered why.
Up until the curtain call, I tried to figure out why everyone had turned weird. After curtain call, even as the studio audience was applauding itself down to its wrists, I looked for Ben. Ben would tell me. Ben was my friend.
I saw him, leaning against some rigging like a French sailor, so cute I could have devoured him where he stood. I walked over to him and hid in his arms. “Please tell me what happened?”
“A hundred years from now no one’ll remember.”
“My tits fell out!”
“No.”
“My ass split!”
“No.”
“What?”
“Funniest dance since Salome stuck her finger in the socket.”
“What?”
“Come on. Let’s take a walk.”
It went like so, according to Ben. Florrie and Richie were doing the number to perfection, but not me. Me was staggering around, trying to catch up. It was an old routine, as old as vaudeville, but Ben assured me that it had never been done better.
“The audience loved it. They couldn’t stop laughing. You were Nancy Walker and Martha Raye all at once. Greatest piece of comic timing since Buster Keaton.” So much for Richie Pickering and his fucking “muscle memory.”
There Should Have Been Castles Page 29