Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  The other sucked ice from his glass, then spit it back. “A pro. There’re no pros anymore.”

  “I don’t call these people today stars.”

  “Me either.” They watched in silence.

  Theo couldn’t remember the names of either of the men, which seemed to be the gist of their general beef with “the business.”

  The first one said, “So anyhow, I schlep to this reading. Four flights up. Place is a rat’s nest. So anyhow, we start with this turkey. An hour later, we’re still in Act 1. The writer’s fucking agent gets up and walks out. Act 2, it’s midnight. His fucking wife leaves. Two a.m., we’re still not done. I’d told him to cut the thing, we all did.”

  “They don’t listen.”

  They watched Katharine Hepburn fall on her face.

  “Beautiful,” said the first. “Open audition for that Morris Schwinn piece of shit tomorrow. I hate those cattle calls. Be two thousand there easy.”

  “Easy. Who needs it?”

  “Who needs it? You going?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yeah. Look at the reaction shot.”

  “Flawless. God, when it’s good there’s nothing like it, is there?”

  “Nothing.”

  Theo backed quietly away from the door. “Show biz,” he said to himself. “Why won’t you just admit that you love show people?” he heard Dr. Ko asking. “It’s who you are. It’s in your blood.” Right, like a lot of other fatal diseases. It was true. No sooner had he escaped his parents than he’d taken up with Ford Rexford. Why couldn’t he learn?

  In the foyer, Theo’s only real uncle, Arthur O’Ryan, the professional game show contestant who’d ended up in jail, leaned against the foyer wall by the breakfront, reading Shakespeare’s Clowns: Improvisation and Textuality. “By Theodore S. Ryan., Ph.D.,” he said benevolently to his nephew.

  “Hi, Uncle Arthur. Thanks for reminding me.”

  Arthur was flabby of build, and his greenish white skin seemed never to have lost its prison pallor. “Long words,” he said, patting the book.

  “Yeah. You don’t want to read that.”

  “Hey, bud, it’s a habit. In the pen, I read books two, three times, never got a handle on what the guy was talking about. Sigmund Freud, Carl Young, I read ’em. Lots of ’em. This one’s about Shakespeare, hunh? Clowns? Milking laughs, comic bits, adding on business, that type thing?”

  Theo said, “Exactly.”

  Arthur scratched his hair, a thinning washed-out replica of his younger brother Benny’s. “I played Shakespeare once, twice. Should of stuck with legit, kept out of the TV racket, think? Take my advice, bud, don’t ever go to prison. All right?”

  Theo nodded. “All right.”

  “I was lucky, getting out before this AIDS thing. I’d be dead otherwise. I guess that’s lucky. I still got nightmares from the Spics tearing up my ass.”

  It was no surprise that people tended to avoid his uncle Arthur at parties. Queasy, Theo said, “So you played Shakespeare?”

  “The Forrest in Philly. Good story. They don’t write ’em like that anymore. Played this guy that this hunchbacked king hires to bump off some little kids. His own nephews. Like me bumping you off.”

  Theo said, “Richard the Third.”

  “Yeah, Richard. Real nasty guy. Met a lot like him in the pen. One—big, mean one from Albany—used to claim he’d killed thirteen the cops didn’t even know about.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  Arthur set the book down beside the Yale diploma and the bronze tap shoes. He bared his teeth. “You know why these are false?” Theo shook his head. “He’s why. Guy from Albany.”

  Theo said, “Gosh, I’m sorry…Well, good to see you again, Arthur.”

  His uncle tapped the diploma. “What’s this teaching deal like? Interesting?”

  Theo thought. “Yes. It’s interesting and kind of peaceful, compared to show business.”

  “Peaceful’s good. Not much dough though?”

  Theo explained that nowadays many academics, even in English, earned substantial salaries, some in the six figures.

  “How ’bout that!” Arthur picked the book up again, leafing through it. “I was a kid, I used to think about being a teacher. Funny, hunh? Kind of sounded like it’d be nice.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Theo touched the man’s shapeless elbow. “I guess I inherited my vocation from you, then.”

  The sweetness of Arthur’s smile was a weak version of Theo’s father’s. “Think so?” he said. “That’s a nice thought.”

  Above the musical racket, a woman screamed. It didn’t sound like a joke. Theo heard people running in from the kitchen, and wondered if the portly man had fallen out of the window. He hurried toward the sound, and Arthur returned to Shakespeare’s Clowns: Improvisation and Textuality; no doubt he’d heard worse screams back in the pen.

  Ziti Klein was hopping up and down in the middle of the living room; her stretchy red bodice was pulled down to her midriff, her capacious breasts wildly jiggling. “Okay!” she shouted. “Where’s the fuck put this rubber mouse down my dress?”

  About ten people shouted in unison, “wally!”

  Even Benny Ryan felt moved to judge. “Wally, come on now, that’s a little much!”

  “Wally? waaallyyyyyy!” A general search ensued. Only Steve Weiner (transfixed by the Klein bosom) and Bette (asleep on the rug) failed to join in. But the magician in the red dinner jacket was nowhere to be seen.

  “As usual, he’s disappeared,” announced Theo’s mother finally. “Ziti, pull up your goddamn dress. Wally’s gone.”

  “What an exit line,” called the portly man from the window ledge.

  “Speaking of exits,” Lorraine said bluntly, “it’s past three in the morning. Stay if you like, folks, but I’m heading for the wings.”

  Benny hugged her from behind. “Nooooo. Dance with me. Come on, Rainie. Dance with me. Jack, play our song.”

  Bette’s father ran to the piano and started beating out “Do the Duck.”

  “Funny,” trilled Lorraine.

  Benny did his tight-lipped Bogart snarl. “You know the one I mean, Jack. If she can take it, so can I. Play it, Jack. Play ‘Prom Queen.’”

  Everyone shouted, “‘Prom Queen’!”

  “Come on, Rainie.” Benny Ryan danced toward his wife—sweaty and warm and sweet—smiling the smile that for a year or two long ago had caused young girls across the country to scream and tear at their hair.

  “Leave me alone.” Lorraine Page spun away from him.

  “You’re my dreeeeeam.”

  “Oh, okay, okay, for God’s sake.”

  Everyone happily whistled as the sugary chords swelled into the familiar crescendo, and Theo’s parents danced among their large noisy family. Benny sang to his wife:

  You’re my dreeeeeeam.You’re my queeeeen.Most beautiful girl The world’s ever seeeeen.Da da deeeee. Da da deeeee…

  Theo nodded at Steve Weiner, who was urgently waving his watch. He thought about interrupting his parents’ dance, he thought about waiting until it was over. But good-byes were never easy. Benny would cry, Lorraine would rage between accusation and despair. For a moment, he stood in the hall by the door, bags in hand, watching the two of them circled by “the family,” seeing in their smooth and graceful, practiced turns, like a slow spiral of superimposed pictures, all the years of their dances together, seeing himself at three, at thirteen, at thirty-five—standing outside their circle, watching, as now.

  Theo raised his hand quietly and waved good-bye. Their heads touching, black on gold, they didn’t see him.

  You’re my dreeeeam. You’re my queeeeen.

  And everything was the way it had always been.

  part four

  {scene: London, and Other Parts of England}

 
Chapter 20

  Enter the Messenger, as Before

  This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land.

  —Richard II

  England was parched. It steamed under a scorching sun that bleached the sylvan green from Windsor Forest and turned the famous fields of Tilbury as dusty as a mesa in Taos. Theo Ryan had not been comfortable since his Iceland stopover. Not that he’d been particularly comfortable then, for they’d sat for hours, forbidden to leave the plane while unspecified mechanical difficulties were investigated (and perhaps solved?). Nor could he have easily dislodged himself from the miserable seat anyhow, wedged as he was between a twitchy fat woman who drooled on his shoulder as she slept and a teenaged boy, hair shaved to a stubble, casually traveling abroad in neon green shorts and a Grateful Dead tank top. At Gatwick customs, eager dogs swarmed all over this boy’s knapsack, and he was led by a policeman out of the lengthy queue where they all stood waiting to be eliminated as Irish would-be terrorists trying to sneak into England with explosives or Third World would-be immigrants trying to sneak in with DNA bearing no familial relation to that of successful immigrants already living on the crowded island. An American woman in front of Theo expressed indignation at this Tory screening policy—less from liberal principles than from impatience at the length of the line, as far as he could tell.

  Later, Theo was to think back with nostalgia on the frigid interior of that plane and with envy on the neon shorts of the underdressed drug smuggler. He himself, advised by such authorities as Frommer’s and Jonas Marsh and by a hundred films in which the sun never appeared to rise on the British Empire, had packed for drizzle and nippy fogs with sweaters, thick socks, his father’s Burberry, and his mother’s six-foot Aran Island scarf. All these he had now lugged for three weeks from one unair-conditioned, historically resonant hotel to the next, as he moved about London in pursuit of cross-ventilation and significant sights.

  For three unrelieved weeks, temperatures in the high nineties had hung upon the great city like a vast mildewed wool blanket. Londoners claimed that the heat wave wasn’t a heat wave at all; quite the contrary, it was quite a pleasant run of sunny weather; certainly nothing to get in a bother about—particularly if compared to the sticky summer of 1517 when, after a drought that had lasted from September to May, fifty thousand Londoners had died of the sweating sickness. Admittedly, 1517 did sound worse as summers go. Still, to Theo Ryan, three weeks of filthy haze and sodden humidity qualified as something that would send New Yorkers screaming into the streets with hatchets. He could almost forgive the elderly Viennese Josef Buzzy Middendorf for having left the country, abandoning his literary agency for an indefinite holiday.

  For Theo had learned (when in a wilted, jet-lagged daze he had finally located the offices of Middendorf, Ltd.) that Rexford’s agent had suddenly (as his young receptionist wistfully expressed it) “flown off, don’t you know, to the Isle of Capri?” Nor had Mr. Middendorf left behind any manuscript from Ford, just the message that Theo must realize he was not the rightful owner of the play Principles of Aesthetic Distance, if in fact he had it. All Theo could do, then, was to keep pestering Middendorf’s office until the agent returned and confessed Rexford’s whereabouts. If in fact he knew them. Theo deduced that at any rate, Adolphus Mahan’s wife, Amanda, the future producer of Aesthetic Distance, did not know where Ford was, or more to the point, where his manuscript was, since she’d obviously flown across the ocean to try to track it down; the receptionist had indiscreetly mentioned that Mrs. Mahan was at Claridge’s and telephoning Middendorf, Ltd. twice a day, asking if they’d heard from Ford.

  So there was nothing to do but wait and see. Theo, despite his threats to Bernie Bittermann, was not about to go randomly wandering in this heat through all of Cornwall in the hope of someday running into Ford and Jenny Harte by chance. At least, let such a desperate strategem be a last resort. Besides, maybe they too had left the country to escape the weather. Ford’s tolerance for discomfort had always oscillated; at times he’d complain as bitterly about hammertoes and gingivitis as if he were dying of pancreatic cancer, but there had also been times (or so he’d told his biographer) when without a murmur he’d crawled through jungle brambles until blood glued his eye shut or climbed over icy rocks until frostbite numbed his hand. Besides, maybe to a Texan this endless stretch of blank sky and blazing sun held all the comfort of home.

  While Theo waited, he passed the time looking at London and suffering its relentless sun. Whenever he was homesick for a familiar face, he found one at the Reading Room of the British Museum, where in the summer the long wooden tables were always three-quarters filled by American academics, a few of whom he could inevitably count on recognizing. In fact, the first day, when he went there to see the original of Walter Raleigh’s wife’s Notebook, he’d run into Vic Gantz. From Vic he’d discovered that Jonas Marsh was hiking with a friend through the Hebrides in emulation of Dr. Johnson, but would be back, as he’d put it to Vic, “in a fortnight, or bloody well near.” Theo and Vic speculated about the identity of this “friend” (for frankly they hadn’t thought of Jonas as the “friendly” sort) as they ate lunch together in an air-conditioned Indian restaurant near Russell Square. They were surrounded by other American scholars, all congratulating themselves on being in London where there were so many real bookstores and so much legitimate theater (a woman from L.S.U. raved, ironically, about a revival at the National of Rexford’s Her Pride of Place), and all complaining about London’s dreadful food, rudimentary plumbing, intimidating snobbery, high prices, thin mattresses, weak coffee, and rude crowds of (other types of) tourists.

  Londoners themselves appeared impervious not only to these complaints from foreigners, but to the heat as well, bustling about their business in suits and ties, dresses and hats, with their pale freckled faces lifted joyously to the brutal sun. At lunch hour, they lay down in the city’s sweltering public parks as if on the beach at Blackpool. Even when the novelty paled and the sun did not, they carried cheerfully on, properly clad, indifferent to discomfort, ignoring pearls of sweat beading their lips—and all without so much as an ice cube in their scotch or a window fan in their airless offices. The only thing that appeared to distress them about the drought was the rationing of water for their flower gardens. Theo overheard many ingenious schemes for avoiding the scrutiny of Water Patrols who circled the city in helicopters in search of telltale sprays, swooping down to slap hefty fines on anyone caught with hose in hand. He noticed a Middendorf clerk siphoning H20 out of the office water cooler into plastic jugs and secretly succoring pots of geraniums. He saw his hotel manager, who’d complained bitterly about the American obsession with bathing, hosing down his terrace shrubs at three in the morning. Londoners would apparently give up their bathtubs before they gave up their roses. Otherwise, the weather seemed not to affect them. Their sangfroid amazed Theo, who lay naked and comatose each night under soaked towels in his hotel bed—with chairs braced in the sills to hold the windows open—as he listened, appalled, to crowds of merry Londoners below him, milling about outside pubs and wine bars.

  Still, Theo was enjoying himself. To the young literary scholar, being in London was like walking around inside his own head, like living in a great sprawling book of all the poems and plays and novels he’d spent his life reading. Fiction was up every alley, history around every corner. Theo paced Raleigh’s walk along the battlements of Bloody Tower. He stood where Raleigh had died, and placed his hand against the cold stone marker of the headless grave.

  The first week, not even a brief faintness from heat stroke while climbing Hampstead Heath to Keats’s house could dampen Theo’s enthusiasm; nor the sight of Scottie Smith’s name on the marquee of a West End theater. The second week, neither a bee sting in Blenheim, nor the theft in Stratford of his camera—deftly snipped from his shoulder at the very altar rail of the church where Shakespeare was buried—could keep him indoors (particularly given the stifling cond
itions of his room). But then, as he began his third week, exaltation started to flag. The London Underground abruptly called a general strike; in sympathy, all the buses stopped where they were, and the high cost of taxis quickly played havoc with the academic’s careful budget. Walking the hot streets, as his nose and his feet blistered and sweat soaked his shirt, gloom fell upon Theo’s spirit.

  He knew no one to call. He had had no answer to the note he’d written Dame Winifred Throckmorton. Jonas was still away, presumably tramping in handsewn shoes through the Highlands. And Vic Gantz had flown to Monte Carlo to catch a glimpse of his wife, Jane, who was there (with their son Nash) speaking on some phallocentric thing or other at the Joyce Conference. He’d had no mail except a long letter co-signed by his parents and a long letter from Adolphus Mahan (enclosed with the manuscript of the Rexford biography and eight pages of—actually, very helpful—comments on it). The letter said that if he would “just run it through the typewriter one more time, it really will fly as Part I of a Major Life. Very well done, Theo. It’s alive. A high compliment. Do a last chapter, send me the revised draft, and the second half of the advance is yours. Take your time. Hope the play problem with Ford is resolving as well.” (Mahan also wanted him to “give Amanda a ring at Claridge’s.”)

  A third letter Theo had opened greedily; it was from Rhodora (still subletting his house), but inside was only a Visa bill forwarded with a four-line note in which she described herself as “busy with the music thing,” the weather back in Rome as “great,” and which she signed, “Love you lots.” Theo felt lonelier and lonelier.

  The hearty refusal of Londoners themselves to be hampered by the transportation strike (as they boated, biked, hiked, skated, and even pogo-sticked their way through the city) just made it worse. Although accustomed to solitary meals, his sojourns to unfamiliar restaurants had begun to make him melancholy. Finally, exhausted by the blur of stimulus, by the anonymity of so many thousands of strangers pressing around him, worn out by his own lack of heartiness, he retired to his small dark hotel room whose cracked wall was masked by terrible cardboard prints (one of a matador and one of gamboling springer spaniels), and whose thick, flowered, maroon wall-to-wall carpeting was ominously gritty to the feet. He spent an entire day there, lying on his bed drifting in and out of sleep. Then, as he was headed to the toilet at the end of the hall, he stopped at a small bookcase filled with mostly grubby paperbacks, presumably left behind by decades of earlier guests. There, between Valley of the Dolls and Italian Made Easy, he saw an old mildewed copy of a book he knew well: Fortune’s Favorite: A Life of Raleigh, by Winifred Throckmorton. It was she who had brought Walter Raleigh so vibrantly to life that Theo had decided to write Foolscap. He took the discovery for a sign, and steeling himself to fight off his diffidence about imposing on strangers, he put through (after the loss of several ten-p coins to the bewildering pay phone in the hall) a trunk call to Barnet-on-Urswick in Devonshire. “Dame Winifred Throckmorton, please?”