Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  He slid the desk key under an ornate oriental figurine that looked suspiciously like solid jade. “An extraordinary forgery is naturally more valuable than an ordinary original. Of course, just imagine what it would be worth if there really had been a Scots Gaelic epic by a bard named Ossian.” The man’s dark eyes glittered. “Or imagine if A Man for All Seasons had been Shakespeare’s lost play about Sir Thomas More, instead of just some twentieth-century costume drama!” Marsh placed a long slender foot on the rung of his library ladder and flicked a speck from the burnished leather of the wing-tipped shoe. “I wonder,” he smiled, “if it ever occurred to Robert Bolt to write A Man for All Seasons that way instead? I mean, as if it were contemporary with its period…Interesting.”

  Theo considered inviting Marsh home to dinner with him tonight, of talking more about such things, but after watching the elegantly dressed man race his ladder in a frenzy back and forth in front of the bookshelves, charity failed him. Probably Marsh would have declined anyhow. Still, it seemed to him that the Restoration specialist looked lonely as he left him there in the otherwise deserted Ludd Hall, crouched atop his mahogany ladder, brushing dust from his beautiful books with his ivory white handkerchief.

  Chapter 12

  A Trumpet Sounds

  sneer: The devil!—did he mean all that by shaking his head?

  puff: Every word of it. If he shook his head as I taught him.

  —Sheridan, The Critic

  Both lonely and without privacy, the only child of chaotic parents, Theo had begun at age three to carry around with him talismans of domestic stability. The first thing he did when deposited in a new hotel suite or an unfamiliar dressing room was to unsnap his heavy brown suitcase and place in order on bureau or shelf his iconic home—a ratty Winnie the Pooh bear, an old Madame Alexander doll that looked to him like his mother, a cardboard figure of his father doing the duck dance, a blue plastic telephone. Every place he traveled, this ritual of routine was his first, invariable habit. As he grew older, the objects changed, but not the impulse to impose continuity on change. Never a collector in Jonas Marsh’s league or of his inclination, Theo’s icons remained few and profoundly personal. Now, of course, that he had lived alone in the same house for years, disorder never disturbed his careful arrangement of his treasures. Or almost never.

  But when he returned home this afternoon, he found Ford Rexford in his bed asleep, covered with sheets of paper, wearing muddy sneakers. The framed Popova sketch of a Chekhov set for Moscow’s Meyerhold Theater had obviously been carelessly used as a lap desk, and was now on the floor. The drawing had been his grandfather’s. Cigarette butts floated in a coffee mug that sat on top of his (rare, 78 rpm) Helen Morgan record album. Helen Morgan’s voice on the old recordings—high, plaintive, sure as a bird’s—Theo had loved as he’d loved Ginger Rogers’s brisk, earnest dancing, as he’d loved Simone Signoret’s world-weary eyes, and the line of Vivien Leigh’s neck. He owned all these actresses’ signed photographs, and kept them not as collectibles but like romantic tokens, intimations of the beloved to come. Now his photograph of Jeanne Moreau lay on the floor.

  “Ford!” Theo snatched up the objects more in horror than rage, and placed them on his dresser. “Ford! Wake up.”

  The grizzled playwright bolted to his elbows and blinked in confusion. Then he reached up, pulled Theo onto the bed, and rolled him back and forth in a warm, sinewy, scratchy embrace, strongly smelling of tobacco, bourbon, wood chips, and roses. There were in fact, Theo saw, crushed red rose petals and pencil shavings all over his white down comforter.

  Rexford growled in his ear, “Where you been! You son of a bitch!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You sneaky bastard! This thing is good, it’s damn good!”

  Bewildered and frankly terrified, Theo fought his way free of the hugging arms and legs, and scrambled off the bed. It was then that he realized that the papers strewn all over the place were the pages of his play, Foolscap. His heart knocked wildly at his chest. “My play?”

  “Yeah, your play. I’m not going to shit you. I didn’t expect it.” Rexford sat up, legs crossed, and rubbed his gray hair. “I mean, I knew you could write, but I wasn’t sure you could write write. Well, babe, you can!”

  “My play is good?”

  “When I saw the thing was set in the Jesus Christ sixteen hundreds, and you got Sir Walter Raleigh a Jesus Christ old man in the Tower the night before he gets the ax, and he’s in there making up new endings to the play of his life, well, fuck…I said, ‘Don’t even read this, Ford. It’s gonna hurt.’ But Theo, I’ve been at it for two days now, and it works, by God. It plays!”

  Theo’s knees buckled, and he sat on the edge of the bed. “It does?”

  “Almost.” Rexford crawled around, gathering pages; they were scribbled all over with penciled marks. “Go get me a drink. Legal pad, and got a corkboard?”

  “What? Do what?” Theo began spinning on the floor, picking up the rest of the paper, his hands shaking.

  “We need a big table.” Ford was already on his way out of the room, Theo so close behind that he stepped on his heel. “First thing,” said the older man, “start here on page three. This opening’s shit. You don’t need it. Somebody should have told Will Shakespeare it sucked every time he did it, too. Next scene—” he turned and smacked his lips—“perfect, beautiful, don’t touch it.”

  “Don’t touch it.”

  “No, wait, cut the last line. Last two lines. Redo this whole speech, let’s get some iambs working for us now and then, undercurrent. Da dúm, da dúm, da dúm, break, ‘the wrecks of time.’”

  “More iambic there.”

  “Now, big things. What you need—save Elizabeth, don’t bring her on so fast. Hold her back, build it. She’s gotta strut in on that cloak right next to the trip up the Amazon.”

  “In the dream sequence, Orinoco next to Elizabeth.”

  “Her and the treasure hunt. Back and forth, bing, bong, bing, bong. The old stud’s two great golden maidenheads. God, I love this guy! I envy this guy!” Rexford threw the pages on the dining room table. He gestured as if he were spinning a rope overhead, hurling it, climbing it hand over hand. “Now, listen, you throw the hook into the next scene, you pull through it; you don’t push, you pull. You’re headed someplace, right? You’re not just cruising around hoping you’ll bump into the fucking road.” He tore off pieces of paper and starting writing numbers on them, I, 1; I, 2; I, 3. “You’re not just whacking off in the dark. Okay, wait a minute, where’s the little bit with his drowned brother, Gilbert—”

  Four hours later, Ford Rexford had gone through—lightning fast—a pound of salami, five beers, and Theo’s play. The young man had touched nothing, but he felt drunk. Rexford, with all his tales of Texas brawls and Broadway smut, had never talked to him like this before. In four hours, Theo learned more about writing plays than he’d known after thirteen years of studying and teaching them, and the awful weeks with Scottie Smith were no more than a speck of dirt that in his eye had caused terrible pain, but once washed out was too small even to be found. The truth of what the old playwright said stunned him. “Right,” he whispered again and again, staring at the corkboard tacked with dozens of scraps of paper.

  “Do you see?” Rexford kept asking.

  “Right. I see.”

  Not that he saw through Rexford’s metaphorical microscope, which remained largely scatological (“Clear out this steaming pile of shit.”) or sexual (“Kid, you gotta come right here. You got about twenty minutes ’til curtain. You can’t go on rubbing it with a fuckin’ feather. Get it in. You get in there, that woman’s gonna take you to paradise. Pump, pump, pump, come!”). Indeed, Theo was sure that Jane Nash-Gantz, having written so vigorously on Rexford’s castration anxieties, would love to bring her tools of Freudian deconstruction to bear on his image of art as vaginal penetration. But what Theo
saw, through Rexford’s lens, was Foolscap coming to sharp, quick life.

  For three days, they worked together in this way on Foolscap, with Theo rushing home from classes with beer and chiliburgers to find Rexford at the computer in his dirty clothes, impatiently typing up the finished scenes from the morning session. For three days, he appeared in no hurry to go back to Tilting Rock: Rhodora, he said, was away with the Dead Indians in Nashville playing a week’s gig and talking to record producers. He appeared not to want to work on his own play, about which he would say only that it was “stuck.” (If there was, in fact, a new play at all—no one had ever seen it.) Each night after Theo returned from Guys and Dolls rehearsals, Rexford would give him notes for revisions and then leave—for where he didn’t say, but Theo would hear him stumbling in through the front door at dawn, yelling, “Back to work! Rise and shine, Ryan. Let’s do it!” He appeared to be intensely determined that they should “do it” until it was done. Theo had never worked with such concentration before in his life.

  “Okay,” growled Rexford on the third evening. “Give me a new ending line.” He tore off half the last page.

  “Me?” Theo rubbed at his reddened eyes.

  “Is Marlowe in the kitchen?”

  “Last line?”

  “What? Am I asking you to blow me? Give me the line.”

  Theo gave him a line.

  “No.”

  “So the book can be closed—”

  “Rhythm’s off. You don’t want da da dúm, da da dúm. We ain’t waltzing here, we’re getting our fuckin’ heads chopped off.” The playwright beat the table with his palm. “Dúm da. Dúm da. dúm, dúm. Dúm, pause, dúm. Funeral beat, see. Give me the line.”

  “Shut tight the book. Now…night…calls.”

  “Better.”

  Theo stared into the fireplace, tried again.

  “Almost.”

  Theo walked to the kitchen and came back with a line.

  “Okay, that’s it! Write that down. Let me kiss you, you big Jew s.o.b.” And Rexford grabbed his head, pulled it down, and nuzzled in the tawny hair. “That’s it. That’s a play.”

  Theo struggled to speak, then blurted out, “Ford…”

  “You’re right. You can’t thank me.” Scooping up the pages as they came from the printer, Rexford stacked together the script, slipped it into a manila folder, and stuffed it into his old leather jacket on the chair back. He began to talk about his intentions to express Foolscap to this agent, to call these producers, and he jabbered on about how Theo should plan to be in New York all next year, because while New York was a rank fetid cesspool where only sharks and trashfish survived, New York was Alpha and Omega, Parnassus and Sinai. It was the Great White Way to theatrical glory. There was no other true Mecca, even for those who died there of neglect. To live elsewhere, even richly, was not fully to live.

  “New York,” the young man mumbled. “I don’t know…” Since childhood, Theo Ryan had responded only after, in his quick, impatient mother’s words, “mulling and mulling and more mulling!” He’d lived in a dream world his mother had said (an odd criticism from one who made her living playing make-believe), and she had frequently rapped her fist in front of his forehead, calling, “Anybody home at Pooh Bear’s house?” So Theo was still trying to assimilate the changes in his play while Ford was tearing through his future like someone throwing clothes into a suitcase.

  Slowly, the younger man repeated, “I don’t know. I can’t just take off. I mean, I have to earn a living. And I’ve promised Adolphus Mahan the draft of your biography—”

  “Oh, fuck me!” Rexford flung a beer can in the vicinity of a wastebasket. “Stop writing my life and go live your own.” The playwright pulled off his lumpy sweater, revealing white hairs above a sleeveless T-shirt.

  “Don’t finish the biography, Ford?” Theo tightened his large hands on the chair back.

  “Let ’em wait ’til I’m dead. Let Nash-Gantz finish it. She’ll have a field day when she finds out I was cornholed by my drill sergeant.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Who knows?” Rexford threw open his bare stringy arms. “And, babe, who cares?”

  The telephone shrieked at them. Theo looked around, realized it was black night outside, looked at his watch, and burst out, “Oh my God.” He ran to the kitchen, fumbling for the receiver in the dark.

  “Theo!” It was Jorvelle Wakefield. “Where are you? It’s eight-fifteen. Iddy’s hopping!”

  “I’m coming! Oh my God! I’m sorry!”

  Theo Ryan had been raised by his parents to believe in a number of inviolate truths—among them the Bill of Rights, the Democratic Party, the primacy of blood relations, and grafted deep, deep in the bone, the Law of the Theater: you never miss a performance, even should you break your leg while leaving your mother’s deathbed. And even in a subway strike in a blizzard during a nuclear attack, You Are Never Late to Rehearsals. And only three rehearsals away from Opening Night, too!

  “You Are Never Late to Rehearsals. You Are Never Late to Rehearsals,” throbbed like a great gong in Theo’s head as he skidded back into the dining room, grabbing his sheet music off his stereo as he passed it. “Ford, I gotta go! I’m an hour late to rehearsal! Lock up!”

  “I’ll drive you!” Rexford snatched up his jacket, groped for his car keys. “You forgot a rehearsal?”

  Two minutes later, they were bouncing over the speed bumps on Campus Drive, glimpsing as they flew by, a noisy swarm of students waving torches and placards on the green in front of Coolidge Building. “I thought the big rally was tomorrow,” Theo said.

  “Let ’em torch it. It’s scary when the young don’t want to torch the old. The world fills up with crap. Like me.” Rexford pounded his chest. “Where’s somebody to do to me what I did to O’Neill and Williams?”

  “You’re as far from old as it gets, Ford.”

  “That’s not far enough…” Rexford sighed.

  “Did you see Maude this afternoon?” Theo asked him.

  Ford squeezed his hairy shoulders up to his ears. “I can hack just so much of that sweet Jesus baloney, even from a radical activist.”

  “Well, don’t you figure as long as you show up at the church, Rhodora’ll take the rest on faith?”

  “Rhodora deserves better,” Rexford snapped, as if she were to blame for it. “Rhodora’s something else, kid. She scares the shit out of me.”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “Yeah? She’s fucking real, Theo.” Ford ran his hands up and down the steering wheel. “You know, I’ve gotten rich and famous off acting up, wild and moody, hard to handle. America loves that kind of adolescent assholery from its ‘serious’ artists, and ambitious boy that I was, not to mention authentically out of control, I gave it to them. But it never much appealed to Rhodora. With her, bullshit’s got no room to glide. Hell, I don’t know.”

  Theo glanced nervously at the way Ford was swerving the steering wheel (and therefore the car) from side to side. “You don’t know what?”

  “A lot.” Ford shook his head. “Listen, babe. Let’s worry about you. I want you to find yourself somebody to love.”

  Theo looked over at him curiously. “I’m trying to. I can’t seem to get anywhere with Maude.”

  “Because Maude’s not the one. You need a spitfire; big passive-aggressive guy like you needs a ball-buster.” Rexford shook the young man’s long sturdy thigh, then slapped it. “We both know who the one is, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rexford leaned over and squeezed hard on Theo’s leg. All he said was, “You wrote a good play.” The battered Lincoln skidded onto the curb at the Spitz Center. Theo jumped out and ran around the front of the car. “Go on,” the playwright said, sliding out the door.

  “See you later,” Theo yelled over his shoulder.

  “Knock
’em dead, kid. I love yah.”

  Theo turned halfway up the steps and waved the rolled baton of sheet music down at Ford Rexford. Spotlighted by the street lamp, the playwright looked white and frail as he leaned against the gold car, shivering in his rumpled sleeveless T-shirt. Theo watched as he slipped back into the front seat and reached over to the glove compartment for the hidden pint of amber whiskey; he held it out the window in a brief twinkling salute.

  Theo was always sorry he hadn’t said anything then about his belief that Ford was better than O’Neill and better than Williams, and that without writing another word could make a real claim to be the best playwright in America. He was sorry that he hadn’t at least called out one more “Thank you” for Foolscap, even though Ford Rexford was to disappoint him so painfully, certainly was never to make phone calls or to express manuscripts on Theo’s behalf, was to do far worse, was in many ways to betray him.

  Still, a part of Theo was always sorry, remembering that the great playwright’s last words to him had been I love you. Da dúm da.

  Chapter 13

  Thunder and Lightning

  He that outlives this day and comes safe home,

  Will stand a’tip-toe when this day is named.

  —Henry V

  So sincere was young Ryan’s apology, so earnest and obedient had been his behavior throughout the weeks of rehearsal, that Thayer Iddesleigh was disposed to forgo the blistering sarcasm he’d sketched out to inflict on his leading man for his tardiness, particularly as the director hadn’t yet reached a scene with Sky Masterson in it tonight.

  Iddy had started strong at seven, but, as was his fate, he’d been slowed down. Slowed down by Harry the Horse’s need to explain why he’d had to bring his hyperactive seven-year-old, Nash Gantz, along, and why he’d have to bring him every night from now on. By Costume’s need to say why she wouldn’t be treated anymore like an insect to be stepped on by the stage manager. By Set’s refusal to rebuild the Havana nightclub front so that it wasn’t shorter than the people who were sitting outside it. By Mrs. Fruchaff’s burning a hole through “A Bushel and a Peck.”