“Let them wait.” Dean Tupper grimaced. It took a tough man to run a university these days. But he was a tough man. He clutched at the bronze football displayed on his desk, and took the call from Dina Sue Ludd.
Chapter 5
A Bell Rings
The poets’ persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and not stories what have been.
—Sidney, Apology for Poetry
“Son, get me a preacher!” shouted the playwright, zipping up his jeans and pulling a half pint from the green suede vest he wore over an aquamarine T-shirt with the logo of his flopped play, Out of Bounds, on it.
“Jesus, not on my porch, Ford! Not on my flowers!”
Rexford took the last swig from the little bottle, shook it, flung it up in the air, and mercifully caught it in the Chicago Cubs cap he wore. “I’m old, cowboy, but I can aim,” he protested.
Theo looked around. “I’ve got neighbors!” Neighbors who had in fact already complained about the playwright.
“Theo! Say hello, dammit!” Ford replied.
It was somewhat peevishly that Theo shook hands with the man who, in Norman Bridges’s prediction, could give him “a national reputation.” “Hello. How’s your collarbone?”
“Perfect.” The playwright had recently broken it falling off his balcony.
“I expected you tomorrow,” Theo uselessly added. “Does Rhodora know you drove over here?”
A sheepish chuckle. “The Dead Indians took her to Gatlinburg to play some hillbilly roadhouse gig tonight. That woman’s too good for those dumb ugawugs.”
In other words, no, Rhodora didn’t know where Ford was. And his sky-blue eyes had that red-streaked, muddied look of having traveled beyond the two-drink limit. Now he stared with pleased awe at his hands, then wriggled the fingers. “Isn’t it something, Theo, how everything on the vast majority of us works to start with and goes on working?” He pointed about his body. “Eyes see; ears hear; lungs go in, out, in, out; heart goes lub dub, lub dub. Look at you—ten movable fingers, ten movable toes. Look at me—absolutely more or less the same…I think.” He took off one boot and sock.
Theo jerked his bike up onto the porch. “Yes, Ford. Go inside, will you? The provost’s secretary’s over there staring out her window at you.”
A mistake. Rexford swung out from the porch rail and squeezed his crotch at her. Quickly unlocking his front door, Theo nudged the older man through it ahead of him. “Go!”
The old millhouse of whitewashed stone in which Theo Ryan lived was only a few blocks from the university, yet open to hills in the back where a wide creek reached to rising woods beyond. Across the street, however, he faced a drab fifties split-level and two ersatz Victorians. Even as he kicked open the door, he glimpsed Buddy Tupper’s malevolent secretary, who lived in the green pseudo-Carpenter Gothic, staring down at them from her upstairs window like Judith Anderson in Rebecca. “Inside!” Theo hissed.
Only saints stay heroes to their biographers. Any awe felt by the young professor for Rexford had long ago been driven off, dragging deference after it. In fact, Theo was often pushed by the playwright’s behavior into emphatic, even overt orders. He had noticed other people taking the same exasperated peremptory tone with the man (Rhodora, for example, sounding like a sour schoolmarm when she forbade her lover to drive his own car). Theo often wondered if Rexford didn’t encourage this treatment by others, thereby freeing his mind from the time-consuming chore of running his own life.
Rexford stomped into his boot as he hopped through the small, neat rooms back to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and stuck his head in. “What’s the matter with you?” he yelled.
Theo set down his briefcase where he always did on his bleached pine floor beside his desk and examined his white-walled and sunny house; everything arranged just so in the open-beamed rooms. He squared a stack of books on the oak chest. Good. Everything in its place. (Once, the playwright had broken in and roasted extremely greasy sausages in his fireplace.)
“Tortellini and prosciutto salad,” shouted Rexford. “It’s handwritten on the package, with circles dotting the Is, I swear! Plus some Hanoi-type goo, yogurt on a stick, and endive! I want food! Food!”
Refusing to be hurried, plumping a back pillow on the green rocker, straightening an old signed photograph of Ginger Rogers on the wall, pushing in a chair as he passed the dining room, Theo walked to the doorway of the kitchen. It was narrow enough for him to touch both walls with his arms outstretched, and he did that now as if to reassure himself of the room’s stability. “What are you looking for, Ford? A possum leg? Bobcat liver?”
“I’m looking for something a man has to do some work to chew,” Rexford growled as he handed Theo a beer. He took a can for himself, swilled down two aspirins with it. “Rhodora’s so right. Stay off the hard stuff.”
“Then why don’t you listen to her?”
The playwright shrugged; unwrapping a chicken breast, he washed away the sesame sauce under the faucet, and tore off a chunk with his teeth as he headed back to the living room.
“So, how are you, son of Do-the-Duck Ryan?” The playwright executed that song’s buttocks-quivering backslide with which Theo was all too familiar, and then plopped down in the old upholstered reading chair next to the open hearth. “How’s life?”
“Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,” said Theo.
“Yeah, you are lookin’ pretty sickled o’er with the pale cast. I’ve got to get you out of this damn college a while.”
“Ford, you just don’t like academics.”
“Are you kidding? Without academics, I’ll be dead as a doornail in another hundred years.”
Theo sank into the rocker across from him. “I’ve had a bad day.”
“Well, get over it! Assume an antic disposition, and it will soon be yours. What are you wearing all black for? You’re young, it’s spring, follow your dick.” Rexford waved his arm out stiffly, like a diviner’s rod. “It’s gonna fall off if you don’t use it soon.”
“Ford, I’ve been in a faculty meeting for two hours. I’ve got thirty term papers on tragedy to grade.”
While chewing, Rexford grinned. “That’s your life? You’re right; that’s flat. Well, how’s my life then?”
Theo stretched out his legs to the rug fringe. “You’re about to leave Sicily and invade Italy.”
“Have I killed those two Krauts that trapped me in the barn?”
“Two Krauts?” Theo rubbed the cool beer can on his temples. “You said it was an Italian deserter who trapped you in that barn. You said he made you hand over all your rations. You were in there with that Australian nurse from the medics’ unit, remember?”
“Eleanor…Christ, she had gorgeous feet. An excellent thing in a woman. Big, but perfect.” Rexford nostalgically stuck out his own boots, sucked at the chicken bone, then pointed at Theo’s dirty tennis shoes. “My God, talk about big feet!”
Theo looked at his stretched-out legs. Their length continued to surprise him. He had grown into his own big-boned frame so quietly and so late in his adolescence that he kept forgetting that he was, in fact, distinctly large. He pulled his feet under the chair. “Eleanor? I don’t recall your mentioning any Eleanor before. This nurse’s name was Agatha.”
“Was it?”
One of the reasons the Official Life of Rexford was taking so long to write was that the poor biographer never knew which version of any episode to include in it, or indeed, which to believe. Over the years, Theo had variously decided that Ford Rexford was forgetful to the point of senility, a perverse practical joker, or a creature with so porous a membrane between fact and fiction that he simply didn’t know the difference between what had happened and what could or should have. He indiscriminately mixed characters in his plays with people from his past whom he’d turned into characters in his plays. He never told a story the same way
twice. Outside confirmation was not only necessary, it was usually a shock. When Theo had met Ford’s first wife, he’d been staggered by her…ordinariness.
The publisher of the biography—the renowned Adolphus Mahan of Mahan and Son—was—well, perhaps “frantic” was too strong a word for so well-groomed a man—was eager to have the manuscript in hand so that the presses could roll when demand was highest; that is, the minute Ford Rexford dropped dead, an event Mahan saw as imminent (even desirable, he admitted without remorse) given Rexford’s rowdy habits, both physical and social. The publisher’s impatience was forgivable, considering that the book had been originally signed up ten years earlier as an autobiography to be written by the playwright, who had conned Mahan into a sizable advance for it, confessed six years later that he hadn’t written a word, and then had conned Mahan and Theo both into having Theo write the book instead as a biography. “All you would have gotten from me was a bunch of bullshit anyhow,” he’d predicted with annoying candor.
But Theo had come to wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to, as it were, sort through the debris of The Life after the hurricane had passed, rather than while the gale blew and the gates, windows, and signposts were still flying around in air, memories and fabrications slammed in splinters together. After Ford Rexford returned to his Maker, then in the quiet of the archives, then perhaps Theo Ryan could better reconstruct the playwright’s story.
As for that “Maker,” that melodramatist God, that reckless, unruly creator of improbable characters like Ford Rexford, God obviously had no respect for the unities, not the slightest regard for Aristotle’s peripeteia or for Freytag’s pyramidal structure, could care less about the orderly progression of rising action, complication, crisis, reversal, and resolution. God didn’t write well-made plays. Now, in the mess of life, Theo was obliged to ask, “What do you want a preacher for?”
“Rhodora,” said Ford, and threw the chicken bones into a wastebasket across the room. “I want to marry her.”
Theo felt a surprising weight sink through him. “You want to marry Rhodora?”
“Sure do. But she won’t have me. Lived with me three years—”
“You’ve only been here two.”
“—and won’t marry me.” Ford popped up, wiped his hands on his jeans, and started pawing through a built-in bookshelf of drama journals, play collections, and volumes of theater history.
“She won’t?” Actually, Theo wasn’t all that surprised to hear it. Plenty of young women might be found who would marry a world-famous millionaire (at least, in his will, worth millions) who was forty years their senior and on his last legs. Rhodora Potts wasn’t one of them.
Theo was very fond of Rhodora. He thought of his fondness as friendship; at least he tried to, but he had several times dreamed of sleeping with her. He knew she was fond of him too, as well as considering him “a good influence” on Rexford. With her smoky voice, long straight black hair, lithe figure, and astonishing sexual self-possession, Rhodora Potts was extremely attractive. She was also bright and a talented singer. She had an aggressive nihilism about most of the modern world that appealed to Theo because it never stopped her from acting on things; whereas his own melancholia could erode his will until he vacillated over even the choice of toothpaste. But Rhodora never hesitated; she was gritty and blunt—like a rural Barbara Stanwyck, if such a paradox were possible.
No, it wouldn’t be Ford’s age that would hold her back from marriage; besides, though by his own admission now “beat to gook,” in his youth the man had been famously good-looking, and must still have some kind of physical appeal. Even if only a tenth of his lurid recollections were true, women had hurled themselves at him all of his life. Theo had often been embarrassed by the way Rhodora slid a hand inside Ford’s shirt, or slipped down in her chair to reach out her leg and rub her bare foot against his thigh as the writer sat narrating tall tales about his life into the tape recorder.
“Did she say why she won’t?” Theo asked. His own mind crowded with answers too impolitic to pose: Your drunken binges? Four previous wives? Shabby health? Foul mouth? Rotten temper? Lousy driving? “Did Rhodora give any reason?”
“Yeah.” Ford flipped through two thin paperbacks, both recent plays, and threw first one, then the other on the floor. “Those plays are bullshit. Don’t waste the space.” He pulled out a third volume, kissed it, and put it back. It was, Theo noticed, a rather obscure drama by Gerhart Hauptmann, which might mean that Ford had read it and might not.
“And?” Theo prodded.
Ford punched the wall. “I’m down on God.”
Theo was surprised. “What in the world does that mean?”
“Rhodora says, ‘Ford, if you won’t go to a shrink, why don’t you go talk to a preacher? Then find a church that’s willing to put up with you long enough for us to say, “I do,” and then maybe I’ll marry your dumb ass.’”
“Rhodora’s a Christian? But she’s so…cynical.”
“Her and God both…So, Theo—” Ford turned and slapped the younger man on the shoulder. “I want you to find me a fuckin’ preacher in these calvinistical mountains who’s not going to send me to hell, ask me for cash, or shove my hand down in a bucket of rattlesnakes and expect me to blabber at him in Babylonian. Let’s go.”
“Let’s go?” Rexford’s request was even more surprising than the revelation that Christianity was apparently exempt from Rhodora Potts’s sardonic worldview. Why, whole doctoral theses had been written on Ford Rexford’s hatred of organized religion. Theo’s own colleague, the Freudian deconstructionist Jane Nash-Gantz, had a piece in her fifth collection of essays, The Father Devoured, entitled “Phallocentric Feud: Castration Anxiety in Rexford’s Preacher’s Boy.”
Theo combed at his rust-gold mustache with his fingers, a nervous habit. “Ford? You want religious counseling?”
Suddenly the playwright threw out his arms and moaned, “Oh gentle Proteus, Love’s a mighty Lord.” (While always at pains to parade himself before the public as an illiterate redneck rube, Rexford sometimes slipped up and exposed an extraordinary familiarity with the literary classics he derided as the Oldies but Moldies.) “But I don’t need God. That woman is my salvation. I am born again. I can write again, I can fuck again, I can shit again! Saved, and not a decade too soon!” He dropped like a plumb line to his knees, hands waving. “Praise her!”
A throb pulsed in Theo’s heart, and looking away from Rexford, he turned to the photo on his wall of Ginger Rogers, immortal in black and white, smiling, leaping free of the tug of gravity. He’d loved Ginger Rogers. And Vera Ellen and Leslie Caron, and other airborne dreams. But love on the ground was what Theo wanted now. And here he was in his dull, safe life with ecstasy, marriage, blood, bliss, all untasted. And here on his knees in the earth was this greedy old glutton Ford Rexford, this unslakable great gulper of life, starting in on wife number five!
Theo looked back at the playwright still swaying as he knelt, arms wriggling. Here was Ford Rexford unbroken, bucking off the past, kicking the world into chaos, then starting in again, and again, and again, racing gleefully around the course of time, when the man’s scrawny legs should have broken and his fatty heart burst decades ago from misuse; while Theo felt that he himself was still, at thirty-five, trapped in the starting gate.
As Theo’s therapist, Dr. Joan Ko, often noted, he had a problem with these seizures of low self-esteem. In such moods, he fell into depressions over inadequacies both real and imagined, hating the procrastinating way he would let possibilities—pleasures, rigor in his work, honesty in his relations—just slide, slide out of his life. In such moods, he dismissed himself whole-cloth as a stupid, envious, and cowardly second-rater, finding intolerable the very sound of his voice in classrooms, hating even the shape of his ears—whereas he had won the Cavendish Distinguished Teaching Prize only last spring, and he had perfectly attractive ears; indeed, as Dr. Ko tried to po
int out, he was a perfectly (in fact, some might say unusually) attractive, intelligent, appealing young man. “I notice you didn’t say I wasn’t a coward,” Theo, in such moods, would mutter. “And an observant man,” smiled the therapist.
All right, maybe he judged his flaws a bit too harshly, but good God, wasn’t that better than the blind self-acceptance of the Ford Rexfords of the world (not, thank heaven, that there were any others like him)? Why, thought Theo, if he had Rexford’s warts of character and blemishes of behavior, he’d hang himself!
“Sorry. I don’t know any preachers,” Theo tersely said.
Ford returned to the bookshelf by the desk, yanking things out, just stuffing them back helter-skelter. “Maybe Rhodora would go for a rabbi.”
Theo said that he knew little of either the Jewish or the Christian faith for he had been raised by his parents in the church of The-Show-Must-Go-On. “Synagogue was out for Mom because of Saturday-night curtains, and mass was out for Dad because he was getting ready for the Sunday matinee.”
The playwright ran his spotted hand down a row of books. “Well, fuck. I haven’t been in a church since my s.o.b. papa kicked my ass down the steps of Bowie’s first Pentecostal and broke my goddamn collarbone.”
“He didn’t kick you down the steps; he knocked you into a choir stall and fractured your jaw.” Theo glanced at his watch. “And you married your second wife in a very fancy church on Park Avenue.”
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