I Shudder

by Paul Rudnick

  It helped enormously that Kelly was very pretty, with the flawless, lightly freckled skin and the spiky, naturally blond hair of a four-year-old. Kelly had many things in common with a four-year-old.

  Candida enjoyed Kelly’s antics. “I’m not sure if she’s a genius or a doorknob,” she told me, “but she might be on to something, and she’s fun to watch.” One evening Kelly draped a floor lamp with a saffron-colored scarf, to filter the light, and she filled a large tin washtub with water. Then she directed Candida and me to kneel beside the washtub with our hands behind our backs, as she dumped fifty tea bags into the tub. We weren’t allowed to speak, and Kelly watched us intently for an hour, as the tea spread through the tepid water. Then, with a knowing smile, she left us alone. The instant we heard Kelly shut her bedroom door, Candida and I plunged our hands into the washtub and furiously ripped all of the tea bags to shreds.

  “Yay!” we both yelled.

  “The tea is dead!” I shouted.

  “We killed the tea!” said Candida.

  “What are you doing?” asked Kelly, returning, horrified. “I can’t believe you!”

  “The tea kept looking at us,” Candida explained.

  “The tea was asking for it,” I agreed.

  “I’m so disappointed, in both of you,” said Kelly, with disgust, shaking her head. “If you hadn’t given in, if you’d resisted your urge to destroy the tea bags, you would’ve kept that tension for the rest of your lives. You would have felt a balance, between chaos and desire. But because you were so weak, you ruined the whole piece. I hope you’re happy.”

  Candida and I knew that we should be deeply ashamed. We looked down at our damp, tea-stained hands.

  “Actually, I feel pretty good,” Candida concluded.

  “I feel great!” I said.

  Kelly soon became a member of a therapy cult that mandated that its members blame everything bad that had ever happened to them, or to the world, on their parents. The appeal of this strategy was obvious. If Kelly was caught outside in the rain, she’d turn to the sky and mutter, in all seriousness, “Thanks, Dad.” If she ran out of milk, she’d shove the empty carton into the trash, griping, “My fucking mother.” Kelly also became affiliated with a sort of theater company that was linked to Robert Wilson, the gilded emperor of all things conceptual.

  Wilson was world famous for creating theatrical events, usually onstage at the opera house of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and these shows could last up to twelve hours and beyond. And right now, I just have to say something: Nothing, no matter how pleasurable, should ever last for twelve hours. Sex shouldn’t last for twelve hours. A car trip through the south of France shouldn’t last for twelve hours. Even a family-sized bag of peanut M&Ms couldn’t possibly last for twelve hours. Here’s the rule: art should never require more than one bathroom break. Ever.

  Still, everyone said that Wilson was a genius, and I wanted to keep an open mind, so I bought a ticket for one of his silent operas, or futurist epics, or whatever the critics and graduate students were calling them. I took my seat and saw an empty stage with a foggy gray and purple backdrop. After a while, a woman in a long skirt appeared, and she began to move, with deliberate, painstaking slowness, from one side of the stage to the other. After fifteen minutes, she’d moved about twelve inches. After half an hour, she’d gone about a yard. After an hour and forty-five minutes, she’d hit mid-stage. This struck me as an achievement only for someone in a nursing home. I wanted to run down the aisle, jump onto the stage, grab the woman by the elbow and scream, “GET GOING ALREADY! LET’S SEE SOME HUSTLE!”

  The evening went on for many, many more hours, as a few more people did things like sit on a chair, or spin in a circle, sometimes to the accompaniment of an electronic thump, but all at dead-tortoise speed. At one of the several intermissions, I overheard people saying things like, “It’s hypnotic,” “It’s mesmerizing,” and “It’s so moving.” I wanted to yank these people and shake them and say, “Maybe it’s moving, but it’s not moving anywhere FAST.”

  I was never clear on exactly how Kelly’s friends were associated with Robert Wilson, but most of them were working on a variety of his projects, and they all worshiped him. They were like the Jonestown Drama Club. One morning, Kelly told Candida and me that she pitied us, “because you’re both so aesthetically unaware.” To help us improve, she asked us to participate in a conceptual dinner party that her group was holding in Brooklyn. I don’t know why so many conceptual events take place in Brooklyn; maybe it’s a form of quarantine. Kelly’s dinner party was going to commemorate the Russian Revolution, and she told us that “During the dinner, all of the guests have to change their gender and their social class at least twice. Do you understand?”

  “Will there be a pony?” I asked.

  “Or a clown?” asked Candida.

  “You have to take this seriously,” said Kelly, “or you can’t come.”

  “Will there be a Russian pony?” I asked, as Kelly practiced her yoga breathing, to stop herself from hitting me.

  Candida and I decided that this party sounded, at the very least, entertaining, so we started making plans. Our friend William, who was both a monarchist and a theater designer, supplied us with costumes, although he warned us, “I hope that you’re not going to make fun of the Tsar. He was doing just fine until the Communists ruined everything.”

  “But weren’t the Communists trying to help people,” I asked, “at least in the beginning?”

  “Excuse me,” said William, “under Communism, everyone’s supposed to share everything, which means that everyone gets to be dirty and smelly and have a potato. Communists don’t really want freedom and equality, they just want ugly brick walls and folding chairs.”

  On the night of the party, Candida and I bundled all of our preparations into garment bags and pillowcases and took the subway to Brooklyn. The party was being held in a spacious, raw loft, and by the time Candida and I arrived, things were already under way. There were about thirty guests, all wearing jeans or gauzy skirts with vague historical touches, like striped, double-breasted vests, ear-flapped fur hats, or scraps of battered military gear. Candida and I went into a side room and put on our costumes for our first incarnations. Candida emerged first, wearing a bustled, purple moire satin gown with a hoopskirt, black lace, elbow-length gloves, dangling, jet earrings, and a towering wig that resembled a prizewinning pumpkin made of human hair. Candida had no problem donning even these elaborate women’s clothes, as long as people knew she was in costume. Candida and I had sketched out our dialogue on paper before the party, so the following re-creation is pretty much verbatim. And remember that both Candida and I were amateurs, and idiots.

  “Gudt evenink!” Candida exclaimed, to the other guests. “I am de Grand Duchess Olga Maria Despolenta! Andt zis ees my dewoted ladies maid, pliss velcome—Babushka!”

  I entered behind Candida, groveling. I was of the peasant class, in a full burlap skirt and a rough linen blouse, packed with soccer ball breasts, with my head swathed in a humble turban made from a brown corduroy bedspread.

  “Tank ju, my meestress,” I said, on my hands and knees, kissing the hem of Candida’s gown.

  “Pliss do not feed her,” Candida cautioned the guests, regarding me.

  “Um, what are you doing?” asked one of the guests, a hippieish looking man wearing a black, all-purpose cape.

  “Tell dem!” I insisted, to Candida, “Tell of jour voe!”

  “My vat?” asked Candida.

  “Jour voe!”

  Candida then strode to the head of the long dinner table and slammed her fists onto the tabletop, rattling everyone’s china and glassware, as I scuttled behind her.

  “De Cossacks!” Candida howled, now pounding her bosom. “Dey are comink, andt dey are takink everytink! Dey are takink my home, andt my aneemals, andt dey are takink my cheeldrens to be solchers!”

  “Her cheeldrens!” I repeated, weeping.

  “Dey are takink my
dotter, Anna Constancia Magdalena,” Candida continued, “andt my son, Mikhail Horacio Diploma, andt my babee, my leetle Tina Irina Farina Margarina!”

  As Candida sobbed loudly, I comforted her with a lurching hug. “Eet veel be alright, my meestress!” I assured her. “I am lyink,” I whispered to the other guests.

  “I cannot tell de story!” Candida said, “I cannot go on!”

  “But ju must!” I thundered. “Ju must tell of jour hardsheep!”

  “I still haf sheep?” Candida asked, perking up.

  “Hardsheep,” I corrected.

  “But, vhy are my sheep hard?”

  “Tell dem!”

  We went on like this, sharing the sweeping epic of how the Grand Duchess fell in love with and married an American fighter pilot named Bud Dorn, and then moved, along with Babushka, to a suburban ranch home in Bel-Air, California. The tale ended with Candida proclaiming, “I am no longer de Grand Duchess Olga. Nyet. My name ees…Meesus Bud Dorn!”

  With that, Candida collapsed, with her head in the salad bowl, as I wrapped my bulky, devoted frame around her. Raising my head, I saw that everyone at the table was staring at us, in horror, shock, and confusion. They had all been making mild remarks about the Red Army and the Tsar’s Winter Palace, and there’d been bursts of recorded gunfire from speakers near the windows. But the Grand Duchess and her Babushka seemed, well, beyond conceptual.

  Candida and I had a history of misguided public behavior. Candida once had a yen for a girl who was attending music school, an oboist. Candida wanted my opinion, so she invited me to her crush’s end-of-term recital. Some of the students, including Candida’s favorite, were very talented, but then a guy came onstage with his guitar. He was musically cutting edge, so he never tuned or even strummed his instrument. He hit it. He sat on a chair, repeatedly smacking the wooden body of his guitar with the open palm of his hand, harder and harder, as if the guitar had misbehaved and he was spanking it. As he kept slapping away, for quite some time, I turned to Candida and whispered, “Bad guitar. BAD guitar!” Then we couldn’t stop laughing and had to run out into the front hallway, to pull ourselves together, so we could later tell Candida’s soon-to-be-girlfriend that she was terrific and that her fellow students were “so interesting, really.”

  Back at the Brooklyn loft, Candida and I would not be daunted. After appearing as the Grand Duchess and her staff, we retreated to a side room and changed our clothes. Candida then returned to the dinner party, calling out, “Bonjour! Bonjour, mes aimés!” She had now waved and center-parted her own dark hair, which was complemented by a sprightly, waxed, and curlicued stick-on mustache. Her black velvet jacket, with braided frog closures, matched her black velvet knickers, her black silk hose, and her Cuban-heeled dancing shoes.

  “Bonjour!” she trilled, with a valiant French accent. “I am Monsieur Serge-Pierre DuFlessix! And I ’ave come all ze way from Paree, to become ze dancing instructor, to His Royal Highness, ze twelve-year-old Crown Prince of All Ze Russias, please welcome—Tsarevitch Nikolai Alexandrovitch Romanov!”

  I entered, proudly, a royal vision in a Prussian blue tunic bisected diagonally, from shoulder to waist, with a heavy pink satin sash, pinned with medallions, commemorative brooches, and rhinestone crosses. My white trousers were tucked into my gleaming, thigh-high black boots, and I clicked my heels with military precision.

  “Good evenink, everybody!” I cried as I gave a royal wave. “Good evenink to all my devoted pipple. Excuse me a moment.”

  I then dabbed at my nose with a white lace hanky, which was instantly drenched in blood, because, as any student of Russian history knows, the little prince was a hemophiliac. Candida and I had mixed up buckets of stage blood, using red food coloring and Karo syrup, to fill small plastic bags, which we’d tucked inside my royal attire. As I surreptitiously stabbed myself with a fork, the blood now oozed from my collar, and spread across my sash.

  “Mais non!” Candida yipped, as I swooned, teetered, and gradually collapsed onto the floor. She knelt beside me and cradled my head.

  “Ze leetle prince is dying,” Candida told the appalled partygoers. “And do you know why? Because not enough people, zey do not believe in princes.”

  We had based this part of our routine on the second act of Peter Pan, when Tinkerbell’s twinkling light goes all but dark. “What ees wrong wiz zees world?” Candida pleaded. “Why can we not believe? Look! Wiz every breath, ze leetle prince, he grows weaker!”

  As I struggled to stay alive, Candida shoved her hand inside my tunic, and pulled out a medium-sized, blood-soaked satin pillow in the shape of a heart. As I gurgled, she held the heart aloft, and made it throb. “Eet ees his heart! Eet ees almost silent. He weel die. Unless…”

  Through slitted eyes, I checked out the room. Against all of their better judgment, the guests were now riveted.

  “Unless what?” someone asked.

  “Unless we all show heem zat we believe!” said Candida. “You know, maybe, just maybe, eef we can all put our hands togezzer, he weel hear us. Please, I am begging you, eef only everyone who believes in ze leetle prince weel clap zere hands, zen maybe ze leetle prince does not have to die!”

  The guy in the cape began to clap. Then another guest joined in, and another, until pretty soon the whole conceptual collective was stomping its feet, whistling, cheering, and applauding wildly.

  I raised myself up on one elbow, just a few inches off the floor, and I tried to open my eyes. I fell back. The ovation quadrupled.

  “Oui! Oui! Eet ees working!” said Candida. “Because you believe in ze leetle prince, he LIVES!”

  Candida always encouraged me to do potentially humiliating things, so I’d meet many different sorts of people. She once had us wear matching shiny red polyester satin shirts with knitted waistbands, which she thought were festive, and she took me out dancing, at an after-hours club in midtown. The DJ was playing some of the lushest, most seriously throbbing music I’d ever heard, and the place was packed. As we danced it dawned on me that I was the only white person there; people often think Candida is a Latina, so she didn’t count. As an extremely Caucasian idiot in a ridiculous shirt, I started to get nervous, but then Candida shot me a don’t-be-an-asshole look, and I ended up having a wonderful time.

  Sadly, Kelly hadn’t been able to attend the Russian Revolution event, but she’d heard all about it. “I still don’t think that the two of you really understand our process,” she sniffed.

  To this day, Candida’s process remains very much her own. She’s become, among other things, a major political activist, an event planner, and a drug counselor, but she still loves adventure. Once we were both invited to a formal dinner party at the home of a very WASPy fellow, and there were framed hunting prints on the deep green walls. After dessert, Candida corraled me and insisted that we investigate our host’s bedroom. We were awestruck by his closets, which were inhumanly tidy, and I cherish the image of Candida staring at the apartment-owner’s many belts, which included a few with tiny embroidered whales, and which were hanging full length in perfect rows, from a wooden rack. “Look at his belts,” Candida said. “You can tell that, in just a few years, he’s going to kill someone.”

  I Hit Hamlet

  The ad in the Times real estate listings said “medieval duplex,” which was tantalizing, unless “medieval” referred to the plumbing. I was apartment hunting, so I arranged to meet the broker at a brownstone just off Washington Square. The apartment was four steep flights up, and the walls of the final landing were a rough stucco, with an oddly shaped, high niche, for a candle or a skull, just outside a rounded, rough-hewn door with elaborate ornamental hinges.

  The apartment consisted of the full, narrow top floor, and I was smitten. The theatrical plasterwork continued throughout, and there was a bay window with a window seat, flanked by additional portholes of thick, leaded, Mediterranean blue stained glass, all overlooking the leafy corner of Washington Square Park where fanatics play chess. There was a mi
cro-kitchen, one tiny closet, and a cramped, 1970s-vintage bathroom, but none of this mattered, thanks to a vaulted skylight, a fireplace, assorted archways, and a hidden winding staircase. The stairs led to the roof, where I found a deck, with a six-foot-high, sun-bleached oak ship’s wheel, leaning against the outer wall of a hobbit-scale, one-room cottage, with a beamed ceiling. The broker was delightfully old-school and chatty, and she mentioned that the apartment had once been the home of John Barrymore.

  Here’s how long ago this was: I didn’t fearfully snap up the place on contact but told the broker that I’d phone her the next morning. That night, I called my agent, Helen Merrill, and told her about the apartment. She remarked, in her German accent, “Perhaps you vill find my hairpins.” It seemed that Helen, thirty years earlier, had conducted an adulterous affair on the premises with Barrymore’s son-in-law, an erstwhile actor married to the troubled Diana Barrymore, whose mother was a poetess aptly named Michael Strange. Helen recalled the apartment, if not the son-in-law, in fond detail, and the karma became overwhelming. The next day I met with Winston Kulok, the charming and affable owner of the town house, who occupied the first two floors with his family, and the lease on the Barrymore place was mine.

  As I settled in, I researched my new home. Barrymore had taken up residence in 1917, just before he began performing his legendary Hamlet uptown. His film career at that point was limited to locally shot silent movies, including an early take on Moby-Dick, which may have been the source of the ship’s wheel. Barrymore had remodeled the apartment as a gothic retreat, christening it the Alchemist’s Corner. He had installed all the false beams, monastery-inspired ironwork, and stained glass, which made his lair resemble a stage set for an Agatha Christie whodunit in summer stock. The rooftop had been his masterpiece, and had at one time included a garden, with cedar trees, a slate walkway, and a reflecting pool. Tons of soil had to be hoisted up by pulley, and eventually caused a collapse into the rooms below. Of Barrymore’s vision, only the cottage remained; he’d likened it to a roost overlooking the spires of Paris.