Valerie Martin

by The Confessions of Edward Day (v5)

  This was my dream. It was so odd that in the morning I wrote it down, so the details are exact. Madeleine and I entered a bedroom that looked a bit like a stage set. The furniture was oversized and crowded together; there were two doors, stage right and left, and upstage a heavy maroon curtain covered the entire wall. The bed was unmade, the sheets rumpled, a wadded quilt, resembling a dead body, hung over the foot. Madeleine turned to me and we kissed. I was eager to get her into the bed, but enjoying the deep openmouthed kiss too much to break it off. At length she pulled away and said, “Are you hungry?”

  I knew then that I was famished. “Yes,” I said. She stepped behind the curtain, reappearing almost at once with a plate of roast turkey balanced on one open hand, a knife, fork, and white napkin in the other. All this she arranged on the dressing table, motioning me to take a seat on the poufy stool in front of it. “I have to get ready for bed,” she said. “Eat this and I’ll be right back.”

  I settled down to the repast. Dream efficiency supplied a glass of cold white wine. As Madeleine went off behind the curtain, I took up the knife and fork and began to eat. The turkey was superb; I was certain I’d never had better. It was tender and moist, warm and flavorful. It’s not easy to cook turkey this well, I thought. It’s usually dry and stringy, like chewing a wrung-out mop, but this meat fairly melted in my mouth. Sleeping or waking, I know I’ve never come across a better bird.

  As these cheerful observations passed through my brain, and the turkey disappeared down my gullet, I heard a shuffling outside the stage-right door. I put down my cutlery and stared at the door’s reflection in the mirror of the dresser, moved by a dim premonition of what was about to happen. Abruptly the door flew open and Guy Margate stepped in. “What?” he exclaimed, observing me on my pouf. “You here?” Our eyes barely crossed in the mirror. He went to the bed, pulled his sweater off and tossed it on the floor. Then he did the same with his T-shirt, belt, pants, socks, and underpants. I watched him in the mirror as I finished the remains of the turkey. It made me uncomfortable, especially the girlish grin he sent me as he stripped off his underwear and dropped them, with a flourish, onto the pile, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of ruining my meal. Naked, he fell to rearranging the pillows, straightening the sheets, shaking out the quilt. Then he slipped under the covers and turned his back to me.

  I drained my wineglass. I could hear Madeleine behind the curtain, running water, brushing her teeth. “I’ll be right there, darling,” she said. Guy didn’t move. The curtain rustled and she appeared, dressed in a scrumptious negligee, her hair falling loosely over her bare shoulders. She passed me without speaking and climbed into the bed, scooting close to Guy and pressing her lips against the nape of his neck, his back. “Darling,” she said.

  She thinks he’s me, I thought.

  Guy flipped over like a fish tossed on a dock, kicking off the quilt. Madeleine screamed. She jumped up on her hands and knees and crawled to the side of the bed. At last she saw me, my back was to her, and I watched her in the mirror as she swung her legs over the edge, covered her face with her hands, and burst into sobs. Guy, very still now, eyed her coldly. It struck me as funny; I don’t know why. I laughed and Guy laughed. We laughed together at poor Madeleine, who wept inconsolably I woke up.

  What a ridiculous dream. I didn’t even get to have sex with Madeleine; all I’d managed was a kiss. And why the turkey? What was the significance of the turkey?

  I don’t put much credit in dreams, but Madeleine always did. When we lived together she liked to hear my dreams and to speculate about the meaning of their random components. I have such odd ones—sometimes they’re more like stories and I’m not even in them. Madeleine had a book she’d picked up somewhere, a dictionary of dream symbols, which gave the ancient prophetic interpretations of an astonishing array of terms. Once I’d had a dream in which I struggled with an enormous piece of tree bark. “Tree bark,” Madeleine read. “A danger-go-slow warning in regard to the opposite sex.” We both shouted with laughter, for it was the night after she’d moved her records and books into my apartment. “Too late,” she said. “Poor Edward, it’s too late to go slow now.”

  Another night I’d spent my dream time trying to warm myself by a cold radiator. “Remorse over an alienated friend is signified in a dream of a cold radiator.”

  “What could the ancients possibly have known about radiators?” I scoffed.

  “The Romans had hot water,” she correctly observed. “They had steam heat.”

  Thus my memory of Madeleine on the stair provoked a foolish dream and now the dream led me to recollections of daily life with Madeleine. I sat up in the bed and regarded my impressive erection. The erotically charged atmosphere of the dream had not yet dissipated: the kiss, then the turkey, then Guy’s surprise entrance. He’d taken my place in the bed, but it didn’t do him any good because it was me Madeleine wanted. The sight of him made her scream.

  To act or not to act; that was the question.

  My eyes fell on the Chekhov script I’d left atop my clothes piled on the floor. You’re a sly one, Astrov says to Elena, when she quizzes him about his feelings for poor, plain Sonya. You beautiful, fluffy little weasel … you must have victims. I picked up the script and turned to that confrontation. Was it “you beautiful weasel” or “a beautiful weasel”? It was a. At the end of the speech Astrov folds his arms, bows his head. I submit, he says. Here I am, devour me! It’s a declaration rich with irony, he’s teasing her, but it’s not entirely a jest. Astrov is a sensible man, a doctor, and a botanist; he cares about what future generations will think of his generation. He has little hope that the destruction of the local environment can be stopped, but he has to try, so he plants trees. His attraction to Elena, a lazy, selfish, desperate, beautiful siren who enchants him from the first moment he sees her, is serious. He knows this passion could be the wreck of him, yet he can’t resist it.

  I put down the script and stood up, thinking of myself as Astrov and Madeleine as Elena. How would she play her response to my plea to be devoured? Her line is simple: You are out of your mind! Does she believe that? It would depend on what I gave her. I crossed my arms and announced to the dresser: “I submit, here I am.” I dropped to my knees, opening my arms, offering my naked plea: “Devour me!”

  Then I got up, felt around for my slippers, and padded off to the bathroom. “Elena, you vixen,” I shouted. “Your Astrov is coming to save you.”

  That was how I reached my decision—lightly. Playfully, as an actor, not as a friend of one or a lover of the other, not in defiance or in anger, but as one who is offered a prize and reaches out to take it. The audition was the following afternoon. I had purchased a bottle of dye to add silver at my temples and a tin of shadow to darken the light creases under my eyes. As I applied it, I thought of how much older Guy appeared than me; his looks, like Astrov’s, were ruined. I raised my eyebrows to bug my eyes out like his, but that wasn’t right. Astrov was exhausted, not tense. I recalled the stoop of Guy’s shoulders, his tic of correcting it. I’m tall; I carry my shoulders back and low. I practiced at the mirror, trying out various degrees of slouch. I discovered it wasn’t only at the shoulders; it started at the diaphragm. The belly was slack. I stepped back from the mirror to get a longer view. Years, I thought with satisfaction. It added years.

  I read with the stage manager, a compact middle-aged matron who fed me my lines crisply, like sugared wafers. The director asked me a few personal questions. I was lucid and friendly, like Astrov, ironic and curious about the world around me. I got the callback the next morning. This time I read with Rory Behenny, a fine actor who had just finished a successful run at the fledgling Brooklyn Academy of Music. Rory was the reason our director had decided to take on the play. We did the scene in which Astrov and Vanya argue about a missing bottle of morphine. Vanya is suicidal; Astrov scoffs at him. Rory was like a quick fox, daring me to catch him. We had a lively skirmish and at the end our little audience of prof
essionals gave us a lusty round of applause.

  Barney called me the next morning, sounding glum. “Well,” he said, “they’ve cast the Chekhov.”

  “And?” I said.

  There was a pause, but I didn’t hang on it; I was that confident.

  “Rehearsals start Monday,” he said.

  Yesterday, as I was cleaning out the attic of our house, I came across a box of Madeleine’s books. It had been hastily packed for the move from Philadelphia to New York, unpacked in the East Village apartment where Guy and Madeleine briefly lived, then packed again, by me this time, and shipped to Connecticut. At first I imagined that Madeleine might ask for her books, but it soon became clear that she was unlikely to do that, so the box became a disheartening reminder of all that I had lost, and I stowed it away. It wasn’t a large box. It occurred to me that there might be something in it of use in composing this memoir; at least it would refresh my memory of what Madeleine was like then, what she chose to take with her on what was to be a harrowing trip to oblivion. I brought the box to my crowded study under the eaves and cut the tape with a utility knife. One by one I unpacked the books. A dictionary, a Bartlett’s quotations, a complete Shakespeare, a complete Chekhov, three plays by Ibsen, a stack of the bright-yellow scripts Madeleine had collected for auditions, or just because she was curious about something new and a script was cheaper than a ticket. Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, several nineteenth-century novels, Hardy, Eliot, Middlemarch—she loved Middlemarch. Shurtleff’s Audition—every actor had that one then and I’ve noticed it’s still in print. The collected poems of Yeats and Blake, and, of course, the Dreamer’s Dictionary. Serendipity! I’d just been writing about it. I took it up and flipped through it gingerly, with the creepy sensation that someone was watching me. A musty odor arose from the pages, long cooped up and eager to interpret those vagrant dreams. All right, all right, I thought. What have you got for turkey?

  Honestly, I didn’t expect to find anything; turkey is a New World bird, after all, but there it was, a longish entry between “tunnel” (an obstacle dream) and “turnip: see vegetable(s).” For all you dreamers of poultry, here’s the entire scoop on the gobbler that was beat out by the eagle for the role of our national bird. If you see a strutting turkey in your dream it portends a period of confusion; a flock of turkeys predicts public honors; if you kill a turkey, expect a stroke of good luck; if you cook, dress, and serve the bird, you’ll enjoy a period of prosperity. However, if you do what I all unknowing did, if you eat the turkey, “you are likely to make a serious error of judgment, so be very careful regarding any important matters which may be pending.”

  I snapped the book closed and dropped it back into the box.

  I admit, as prophecy, the turkey dream isn’t exactly Birnam wood, but as I piled the other books back on top of the malevolent dictionary, I had a sense of my fate having ambushed me with a spitefulness I could never have anticipated.

  Not much happens at a first rehearsal, but the atmosphere is fraught with tension. The action largely consists of what un-clever people call a meet and greet, followed by a reading of the play Our Vanya cast assembled at a rehearsal stage at the Public Theater, a large room with low ceilings, bare white walls, and a polished wooden floor. A few straight-backed chairs were scattered around, an upright piano loomed in one corner. There was a side table set up with coffee urn and pastry tray, and, at the center, a long rectangular table on metal trestles with ten green plastic chairs drawn up to it, the setting for our first run at Anton Pavlovich Chekhov.

  Repertory actors have an easy time; they’re like a team of draft horses accustomed to pulling heavy loads in tandem. They just want someone to point out the road and off they go. They may even genuinely like one another. But a cast of actors chosen through auditions are more like chickens in a coop, each actor strutting the length and breadth of the limited territory, secretly terrified yet determined to appear nonchalant. We have our parts; that’s not the problem. It’s the pecking order that needs establishing and that’s going to be up to that big, mysterious rooster, the director, who grins and grins as we come in one by one, his eyes like black beads in which we see ourselves reflected in ludicrous miniature. A consistent first-rehearsal behavior I’ve observed over the years is this: if there is a window in the room, within fifteen minutes of arrival every actor will meander to it and stand looking wistfully out.

  I arrived in turmoil. I knew it was going to be impossible for me to concentrate on anything but Madeleine, and I was vexed that this public setting was to be the scene of our first meeting in so many years. I had hoped that she would call me, that we might even manage a brief meeting, but no such luck. Now I would be forced to make lighthearted, self-aggrandizing chatter with my fellow actors and pretend I was, like them, absorbed in the business of the first read, when all I really wanted was to get Madeleine alone and talk to her. Seriously. I just wanted to talk to her.

  When I joined the company she hadn’t yet arrived, so I had a few minutes to take part in the jovial introductions. Here was Gwen Post, a mad, wild-eyed bag lady who would play Marina, our dear old Nanny; here was a gloomy, intense collection of outraged nerve ends named Sally Divers, who was our Sonya, the girl who cherishes an unrequited passion for Astrov. Rory Behenny, the eponymous Uncle Vanya, who had read with me at the audition, ambled among us, dressed in a bizarre outfit, part tuxedo and part tracksuit. He pumped my hand and announced to all that he hoped I’d remember to bring the morphine. My enthusiastic response was without pretense; Rory was a truly gifted actor. He died a few years later of pancreatic cancer, which meant the stealth attack of lethally reproducing cells was probably under way as we stood in the rehearsal room joking about the pressing need for morphine.

  Peter Smythe, our director, a combination of sprite and gremlin, with milky-blue eyes and bright-red hair cut in a bowl like the early Beatles, moved among us making introductions and encouraging us to help ourselves to the refreshments. Anton Schoitek, a hulk of a Russian with a head like a wild boar, perfect for the part of the faithful retainer Telyegin, came in with a roar and lifted Peter off the floor, hugging him to his massive chest and growling “Peter, Peter, Peter.” As we were laughing at this spectacle, the door opened again and Madeleine slipped into the room.

  One by one the company focused on her. Peter slid down the front of the Russian, announcing her name. I was leaning on the piano, not directly in her line of sight, and I watched as her eyes passed among the others and lit at last upon me. Lit is the correct word; I felt as if I was standing in a single spot, with the rest of the stage and all the people on it cast into darkness. Peter, running through the names, arrived at mine. “Ed Day,” he said. “Our good doctor Astrov.”

  “We’ve met,” Madeleine said, smiling modestly.

  Rory, who was next to me, sent a sharp look from Madeleine to me and back again, making a show of being caught in an electric charge. “I’ll say,” he said, and everyone laughed.

  I’m an actor; I don’t get caught out by my emotions, but it took a conscious effort to hold myself in check. My impulse was to cross the room and fold Madeleine in my arms, and I could have done it, in actor-display mode. No one would have thought a thing about it. But I didn’t move. Nor did she. Our eyes met and I drank in her presence, detecting the subtle changes in her that only I could see. She was a little thinner, which made her seem taller. Her abundant hair was tied back; the front cut short, curling over her brow cherub-style, which contrasted interestingly with her high un-cherubic cheekbones. She was wearing a lavender sweater that shifted her changeable eyes toward gray. Her eyes were different. That was what kept me from moving. The brows were drawn slightly down and together. She regarded me from farther away than the actual distance between us. Indeed so defensive was her expression that her head was drawn back on the pale column of her neck. Her upper lip lifted slightly, revealing the line of her teeth. In the next moment she blinked and turned her attention to our director who directed her
to consider the delights on the refreshment table. But I knew what I’d seen in her eyes, and it unnerved me: it was fear. Why should Madeleine ever be afraid of me?

  Another actor arrived, I don’t remember who, and then another, and then our company was complete. We were invited to carry our coffee and rolls to the table where the business of the play would begin. Peter assigned our seats and asked us to take out our wallets, a request I thought very odd, but it turned out to be an introductory exercise in which each of us chose something we carried with us, a photo or card or memento, and told a little story about why we kept it with us. I remember little about this process except that I had nothing more personal than my Equity card, a fact I described as “sad” to the amusement of the group. Only the Russian came up with less. He had nothing in his wallet but a twenty-dollar bill. “This is America,” he said. “Who cares who you are, only money counts.”

  What was it that Madeleine always carried with her? I don’t remember. The afternoon passed in a blur of distraction. My brain came up with various clever ways to disguise the fact that I wasn’t entirely there. Peter wanted a cold reading, which was a relief. I couldn’t have interpreted a nursery rhyme. Madeleine was sitting two chairs down from me so that I couldn’t see her. Her voice, so rich and so familiar, vibrated in my ear. It was music, and I closed my eyes to take it in.

  At last it was over and we were free to pull on our boots, coats, hats, scarves, and gloves and go out into the cold. I sidled next to Madeleine and waited for her to finish an exchange with Rory, who had worked with the director of a play she’d done at Yale. He asked if she shared his opinion that the guy was impossible.