Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  The words were, “Scottie Smith.”

  Theo’s coffee splashed. “Excuse me? Scottie Smith? The Broadway director?” Maybe he’d misheard; maybe Norman, whose face had turned into that of a leering python, had lost control of his lips.

  But no, there was no mistake. The cheerful fiend hissed on, repeating a name that had curdled Theo’s stomach for four years. “Yes! Yes! Scottie Smith. He’s in the magazines all the time. I think he’s only like thirty-two or so, about your age, but famous. He does all those high-concept interpretations? Othello as a minstrel show and Lady Windemere’s Fan at Attica prison.”

  “I know who he is. Dean Tupper wants to offer him a job here?”

  “And tentatively he’s said yes. Can you believe it? That was the phone call I had to take just now! I wasn’t at liberty to mention it before; it seemed so unlikely he’d agree. But he said he’d love it!” Bridges’s round pink face metamorphosed into that of a bloated pig as he talked on and on. “Says he can turn Cavendish into a combination Spoleto and Cannes. Scottie Smith! And he’ll have an appointment in English. He’ll be the third Ludd Chair. An incredible feather in our cap!”

  Theo sputtered, “But we didn’t vote for him.”

  Bridges brushed this airily aside. “Oh, the department will be thrilled. Besides, otherwise, the French get the chair. Still, I need you, Theo, as, you know, our other theater person, to make sure everybody understands what a remarkable catch Smith will be. Isn’t it remarkable?”

  Theo made a sound somewhat similar to speech.

  “What?”

  He tried again, gave up, and shook his head.

  Bridges leaned across the table. “Of course, we’ll make sure Smith won’t step on your toes, Theo. I mean, you’ll be doing your theater lecture courses like always. You can work it all out. He’ll do a playwriting workshop or something. Creative-type thing. Type of thing that doesn’t interest you…”

  “Scottie Smith said he’d come to Cavendish?”

  “Tentatively. Of course, there’re salary questions. Fall after next…Theo? I hope this hasn’t upset you.”

  Theo said, “No, of course not,” but it didn’t come out right.

  Bridges took on a defensive, truculent tone. “You said you weren’t interested in the Spitz…”

  Theo jerked himself back into focus. He stammered that he was fine, surprised, that’s all. He’d have to think about Smith. Yes, a star was needed if what they wanted was a performing arts center. But Smith? Yes, to become the Southern Yale Rep would be a coup for Cavendish. But Smith?

  “Why do you keep saying ‘but Smith’? Do you know something about Scottie Smith? I realize you know the theater, Theo.”

  “Let me think,” said the drama professor. And he pleaded an evening engagement with Ford Rexford.

  Bridges fawned at the name. “You’ll tell Rexford about Smith, I hope?”

  “I certainly will.”

  Relieved by these assurances, Bridges walked the younger man to his bicycle, patting his arm from time to time along the way. The bike was chained in front of Ludd Hall. Among the clutter of fluttering posters stapled to the kiosk, there was one announcing auditions tonight for the Cavendish Faculty Drama Club’s spring musical. Guys and Dolls. Theo winced at the sign. As a child, he must have sat through a half-dozen productions of Guys and Dolls. Dr. Bridges winced too, because his wife always played a role in these productions, leaving him during the weeks of apparently nonstop rehearsals to eat his way through an international series of microwave gourmet dinners.

  Before pedaling off, Theo agreed to pass on to Ford Rexford an invitation to join the Bridgeses for dinner on any date that suited him. Then the chairman waddled away to search for his station wagon, which—despite its distinctive virginia is for lovers bumper sticker glued there by his wife—he always had trouble locating.

  As Theo biked furiously back home, he reminded himself that, after all, Norman Bridges was innocent, that Norman had no way of knowing that some years ago, Theo Ryan had spent his summer in a playwrighting workshop in the Berkshires, where for five unresting weeks he’d rendered his heart and cleaved his soul into the form of a three-act play about Walter Raleigh which he’d called Foolscap. Norman had never seen the frayed manuscript in Theo’s bottom desk drawer, had never deciphered the short red scrawl of the workshop’s celebrity teacher that bled across the final page.

  Nice moments, but not ready for prime time. Americans shouldn’t try this sort of thing anyhow.

  Best of luck, Scottie Smith

  How many times had Theo heard the words shriek from the page? He heard them now in the weak screech of his bike chain as his legs, deadened weights, heavily pushed at the pedals. He heard them in the grating chitter of birds in ugly trees and in the whine of car tires on the pale street as he climbed the long steep hill toward home.

  There is a far-off sound as if out of the sky, the sound of a snapped string, dying away, sad. A stillness falls, and there is only the thud of an axe on a tree, far away in the cherry orchard.

  Thought Theo.

  {The curtain slowly descends.}

  Chapter 3

  Flourish

  What is our life? A play of passion.

  —Sir Walter Raleigh

  When Hamlet met the Ghost, the kingly specter said, “Mark me.”

  And the Prince of Denmark said, “I will.”

  When Theo Ryan met Joshua “Ford” Rexford, the great playwright said, “You’re damn big for a Jew.”

  And Theo replied, “Well, to tell you the truth, I thought you’d be a whole lot bigger.”

  Rexford grinned at him. He said, “I am.”

  “I know,” nodded Theo.

  “How’s that?”

  “I teach your plays.”

  “That’s a damn funny thing to do to plays—teach ’em.”

  The two men met because Cavendish University was near the once-fashionable mountain resort of Tilting Rock, North Carolina. And in Tilting Rock was the hunting lodge to which America’s most famous living playwright had suddenly retired for a rest. A lanky, liquor-gutted man with bowed-out legs, gray hair, and droopy-lidded, very blue eyes, Ford Rexford appeared, at first sight, to need a rest. He barely resembled at all the young tousled Texan playwright in jeans who’d squinted out from a 1949 cover of Life—as gorgeous as a cowboy movie star. Theo had for years kept a framed copy of that Life cover on the wall of his study; and there was no denying he was disappointed by his first sight in the flesh of the four-time Tony, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

  It was Theo’s parents who had arranged his meeting with Rexford. The Ryans, native New Yorkers—convinced that their son would wither from loneliness down in the southern wilds—were always culling their vast Rolodex for anyone who might know somebody crazy enough to move anywhere near Rome, North Carolina. They had never “played those hills”—was there even anything besides that outdoor pageant about Daniel Boone down there to play?—and they imagined their only child living on the set for Tobacco Road.

  For years, the Ryans had known a man named Bernard Bittermann, whose father had done character parts on the Borscht circuit. As it happened, Bittermann was Ford Rexford’s business manager. So when the Ryans mentioned that Theo was now a drama professor living only thirty miles from his client’s retreat, Bittermann gave them the great man’s phone number. Knowing they couldn’t trust Theo to “follow up” on this opportunity (they were always telling him to call on strangers and he never did it), they phoned the playwright themselves, describing Theo lavishly as a passionate worshipper of every word of Rexford’s work. To their delight, Rexford had said he was already an admirer of their son’s book on Shakespeare’s clowns, and he’d immediately invited the young professor over to Tilting Rock for a dinner of bootleg alcohol, turnip greens in fatback, squirrel stew, and peach pie.

  That first evenin
g, Theo (unused to 200-proof grain alcohol) did things that caused him at five in the morning to leap out of his bed hyperventilating. They were the very things that started Ford Rexford thinking about the young scholar as his authorized biographer. First of all, Theo, drunk before he knew it, recited a soliloquy from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, then put on a Fred Astaire record and tap danced (which he hadn’t done since last on stage with his parents—in a stock company production of George M!). At midnight, Rexford drove him to a bar named Cherokee’s, where Theo was cheered for his rendition of “Blue Bayou.” At 2:00 a.m., they went waterskiing out on a lake where the playwright broke his arm. It was the kind of evening that was known to appeal to Ford Rexford.

  Over the next year, their relationship (despite Theo’s subsequent sobriety) deepened. Rexford consoled him about the loss of the art historian, or at least suggested she was no real loss. Eventually, the playwright began writing a new play about a young drama teacher. Eventually, Theo began writing the playwright’s life, and two years after their first meeting, he had finished four hundred pages of this “official critical biography.” Even so, he had only reached the year 1944, when his subject was still a nineteen-year-old grunt in World War II filching scotch from his C.O.’s footlocker in Palermo, with few thoughts about writing so much as a one-act. In fact, according to the playwright’s lurid recollections recorded by Theo on five dozen tape cassettes, in his youth Ford Rexford hadn’t shown the slightest intimation that he’d ever think about a thing in his life except (as the great man had phrased it for Theo the day they met): “Hooch, cooze, and rhythm ’n’ blues.”

  No denying, Theo had been disappointed by that original meeting, by what he’d seen, and by what he’d heard burbling out of the mouth of the nation’s Chekhov. It had been difficult to connect this scatological sot, who indiscriminately slurred gentiles, Jews, women, men, children, and animals, with the author of sixteen wise, large-hearted three-act plays, and dozens of wonderful one-act plays, glorifying them all. At that first meeting, Rexford had looked spent and shrunk, too battered a vessel to hold ordinary good sense, much less any wise-hearted insights. Two years later, he didn’t look much better. Still, he was only sixty-six, and while, in his phrase, he’d “packed a shitload of boogying” into those three score and six, and indeed did seem as decayed as a compost heap these days, he had, he said, no intention of really retiring. He fully expected to make a comeback and “wipe his worn-out backside on Broadway” once again.

  “Retire” was merely Rexford’s euphemism for run away. He’d run away to the mountains from his producers, who wanted their large advance back; from his psychiatrist, who wanted to have him committed to a sanatorium after collecting from him seventeen thousand dollars for more than three years of triweekly sessions (half of which the playwright had failed to attend). He’d run away from the police, who wanted to question him about shooting his fourth (now ex) wife; and from his fourth ex-wife, a mediocre actress with remarkable physical assets, who wanted to “sue the redneck s.o.b.” for shooting at her.

  Rexford’s hunting lodge near Tilting Rock was one of the many retreats his frazzled business manager, Bernard Bittermann, had bought him over the years as a tax dodge (some of which he then had been forced to sell fast because of yet another of the writer’s sudden cash-flow emergencies—like that bad roulette run in Reno in ’63 or that palimony suit in ’79). Sometimes, Bittermann would sit up nights in the kitchen of his brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and add on his machine the millions of dollars squandered by “the ignoramus” (as he called the man the MacArthur Foundation called “the finest genius of the American theater”). The, yes, millions squandered in forty years of indiscriminate profligacy—all gone, including the generous grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Sometimes, staring at those figures would make the Republican C.P.A. toy theoretically with the notion of justifiable embezzlement.

  In the sixties alone, Rexford had earned $12,543,768.22. After all, as Bittermann explained with leaden sarcasm to his wife, when you have four hits running on Broadway simultaneously, at 6 percent of the box-office gross, you earn over fifty thousand a week from one city alone; when you then sell all four of those plays to theaters in every city in the world civilized enough to have a theater, and to book publishers in every country in the world literate enough to have publishers, and to Hollywood, well, you need a lot of lodges for tax dodges.

  “Bernie! You made a rhyme!” gaily said Bittermann’s wife, but the C.P.A. scowled at her. He preferred numbers to words. And as far as he could tell, Rexford had no head for numbers, or much else in the “real world.” The writer had even had to call in the middle of the night to ask where exactly this particular hunting lodge of his was located. At the same time, he’d warned Bittermann—under hazard of his returning to New York to “saw your cojones off with a hoof-file”—not to tell another soul where he’d gone, including his mother-fucked, head-diddling, bull pizzle of a shrink, and the fart-bloated, slab-brained cops.

  “Including your wife?” asked the C.P.A.

  “That central sieve of the city’s sewers!” said Rexford, and slammed down the phone. Or dropped it.

  Packing garbage bags with manuscripts and Wild Turkey, the playwright had then driven nonstop to North Carolina in a rental car, a new deluxe Lincoln Continental, which he’d neglected to turn in for so long that the business manager was obliged to buy it outright for him (the rental agency didn’t want it back anyhow, considering what it looked and smelled like by then); Bittermann also had had to pay off speeding tickets impressively collected from six separate states within a seven-hour span.

  Ford Rexford’s first sight of the natural landmark for which the town of Tilting Rock was named, as it suddenly loomed out above the highway when he rounded a curve, scared him into thinking he had the D.T.s again. (That’s when the Lincoln had suffered the most severe body damage.) The discovery that he had moved to a “dry county,” an expression he wasn’t familiar with, was even more terrifying. All one could buy in public in Tilting was beer and wine; and Rexford drank beer and wine only when he was on the wagon. He almost turned around and drove straight back to Manhattan.

  Instead, the writer had passed the evening at Cherokee’s, a local roadside dive where he’d been introduced to the first of the three solaces which soon proved so pleasant he’d settled into a bucolic contentment that had now lasted for two years. It was the longest he’d ever stayed anywhere since he’d run away from home at fourteen after seducing a married choir singer in the Pentecostal church where his father was the minister.

  That first solace was a beautiful and strong-willed twenty-five-year-old woman named Rhodora Potts, lead singer with a honky-tonk combo playing at Cherokee’s called the Dead Indians. The second was Rhodora’s brother, T.W. Potts, who manufactured excellent whisky in his cowshed. The third solace was Theo Ryan.

  Between them, Theo and the Potts siblings carried the jaded writer back to the simple days of his childhood in rural Texas. With their help, he moved into his yellow pine lodge in the hollow of a pretty little mountain he appeared to own, and which he renamed Rhodora in Miss Potts’s honor. There he slept under patchwork quilts, rolled his Bull Durham, clogged at the V.F.W. Post until he broke his ankle, raised his own chickens until they ran off, and sat up nights on the porch watching owls eat mice. T.W. Potts took him hunting for deer and bear, and kept him (after the initial binge had subsided) down to a half pint a day. Theo took him to his writing desk. Rhodora took him, he said, to paradise and back.

  Best of all, from Rexford’s business manager’s point of view, he wasn’t spending any money; there was not much to spend it on in Tilting Rock. Back in Manhattan, Bittermann and three lawyers were able to buy off the psychiatrist and stall the producers by claiming Rexford was locked up in a sanatorium working night and day on his best play ever. They were able to get the assault charges dropped, and to settle out of court with their client’s ex-wife number four by po
inting out that she’d stabbed Rexford with a letter opener before he’d shot her (which was true) and by threatening to tell the police about her cocaine habit. They’d also agreed to a generous alimony settlement, including all foreign royalties on Desert Slow Dance, and the penthouse. On the phone to Tilting Rock, Bittermann had offered the writer the choice between the penthouse and letting Mrs. Rexford have the lead in the upcoming London production of Her Pride of Place. Rexford said he’d rather lose the apartment. He added, “But if I ever write a one-woman show for a douchebag cocksucker, tell her she can come try out for the part using a rusted muffler off an old Chevy truck.”

  Unlike Theo, the business manager no longer paid much attention to his famous client’s foulmouthed badinage; once it had offended him; now it just sounded like Rexfordese, the way other clients sounded Japanese or Bostonian. So all he said on the phone then was, “Well, you better think of writing something, Ford. And soon. I’m doing my best, but you don’t—”

  “Don’t shit a shitkicker, Bernie. Been socking my dough away in Switzerland all these years, is that it? Been off snorting cocaine, off muff-diving for poontang?”

  The manager, who had spent a good part of all those years trying his best to keep Ford Rexford out of bankruptcy and/or jail, took a deep breath and let the air boil out the sides of his mouth. “At your current rate, and without any sudden additional expenses, you’ll last six months—”

  “Whoa! A goddamn minute ago, Paramount wanted to buy Bunches of Roses.”

  “True.” Bernie Bittermann, a man of discipline, went on adding numbers as he talked. “But, Ford, you don’t own Bunches of Roses. Your first wife owns Bunches of Roses. Your sister Ruth owns Maiden Name. Your third wife owns The Valley of the Shadow. Your agent owns Preacher’s Boy. Your son Pawnee owns The Long Way Home, or did until he sold it. As I keep endeavoring to make clear, you own very few rights to very few of your plays. You have bribed with, made gifts of, bartered away, or sold off almost everything you’ve ever written. Can you understand that?”