There’s a knock on the door; it opens a crack, and Lisa’s face fills part of the crack. She’s wearing the famous purple top hat, her curly brown hair pouring out from underneath. Her face is sprayed-on tan and buttery. We can hear her tap, tap, tapping her cane against the outside of the door, which we know she does when she’s about to go on and is nervous. But she doesn’t look nervous: she smiles at us reassuringly, as though we’re still child actors who need to be reassured. “Five minutes ’til curtain,” Lisa says, then leans a little farther into the room and peeks around the door at the doctor. “Hello, you,” she says, still smiling, then turns and closes the door behind her, leaving a waft of her aggressively masculine cologne—somewhere between musk and metal shop—as befits a woman who is playing a man who is trying to make the audience, and for that matter, her fellow cast members, believe she is a man, and not a woman playing a man. So far, we’ve heard no complaints from the audience and we have no complaints ourselves. Lisa isn’t Mr. Wilder, but she’s not bad. And for some people, we know she’s more than just not bad. The doctor stares at the door with soft eyes, as though the door has just said the sweetest thing to him. He looks at the door the way we looked at Mr. Wilder, the way we want someone to look at us.
“She’s something special, isn’t she?” we ask him.
He doesn’t take his eyes off the door. “I don’t think I know what you mean,” he says. But we think he does.
THIS ALL HAPPENS on the Ohio River Lady Queen, a four-story steam-powered paddleboat that in the golden age of four-story steam-powered paddleboats (we’re quoting directly from the Ohio River Lady Queen Players’ program) hauled its passengers and their steamer trunks from Cincinnati to Memphis to New Orleans and then back again. Now the Ohio River Lady Queen is docked in the Port of Cincinnati, where each summer it hosts a nightly dinner theater. Five years ago, we’ve been told, it was like any other summer dinner theater held on any other boat docked on any other river. Five years ago, the nowhere-near-capacity audience paid their thirty dollars to eat their prime rib or vegetarian lasagna or broiled cod while watching just-graduated theater majors from the local state college refine their Conrad Birdies and Blanche DuBoises. Five years ago, the only difference between this floating dinner theater and any other was that aboard the Ohio River Lady Queen, each show ended with a song from Big River, whether or not the show was a musical, which it usually was, and whether or not the show had anything to do with the Ohio River itself, or water at all, which it usually did not.
That was five years ago, before the theater and boat were bought by a former Cincinnati mayor, who, having been impeached after paying a lap dancer with a city check, became obsessed with his second act. And his second act, it turns out, was to establish a floating dinner theater that produced updated theatrical versions of famous movies and plays (all of which he wrote himself, with the help of his former team of speechwriters) featuring the grown-up child actors who’d starred in the originals. It worked, too. The theater has been sold-out for four years running, five nights and two matinees a week, every July and August. The only public hitch was the first year, when the kids from Swiss Family Robinson: Back in Civilization began to sing a song that wasn’t in the script—the show wasn’t even a musical—a song sung in tongues about, apparently, how the whores, boozers, and jewelers of Zurich would burn in hell and how very sorry they’d be to miss out on the Rapture. That’s when the doctor was hired, to watch out for the cast, to talk to us in between shows, to make sure we get whatever is in our system out of our system before we get onstage. That was four years ago; the doctor has been on board ever since. Every afternoon, before every show, we meet in group, as required by our contracts. Every night, the doctor sits in the front row, watching the show, as required by his contract. There hasn’t been a problem in all that time, until now.
AFTER THE SHOW but before Lisa drowns in the river, we do what we’ve done after every show for the month we’ve been on the Ohio River Lady Queen: we retreat to the room next to the boiler, get on our cell phones and call home—our children, our ex-wives and ex-husbands, our on-and-off girlfriends and boyfriends if we have them, our parents if they’re still alive, whomever it is we have who we can call home when we call home—and tell them about the show: about power-mad and despotic Charlie and about the solidarity of the formerly downtrodden and now unionized Oompa Loompas—their strike songs, their placards, their hatred of the scabs who are supposed to be shorter, more desperate Africans imported by Charlie from an even more obscure, more desperate part of Africa. We tell them about the other four of us, no longer gluttonous, greedy, violent, voracious, all of us reformed except for our costumes, which are adult-sized versions of what we wore thirty years ago, summoned by Wonka—who has come out of retirement, tanned from self-imposed exile in The Islands (the script doesn’t say which ones)—to the factory to show Charlie the error of his ways and to rediscover the true spirit of candy, which, of course, in the grand finale he finds with the help of the song “The True Spirit of Candy.” We tell them about how the kids playing the scabs—four- and five-year-olds all, except for an especially runtish six-year-old or two—are too young, too inexperienced to be in a show of this caliber, how they flub their lines and bang into each other during the choreographed numbers, how they actually fall and get trampled in the strike scene in which they’re supposed to pretend to fall and get trampled. We tell them about our little triumphs: how we ad-libbed and spit into the vat of milk chocolate instead of “looking evil” as the script told us to do, how we performed seamlessly during the dance scenes, how the audience just marveled at how unified we were, not individual actors but a group, not five “I’s” but one “we.” We do not tell them how the audience gasped when they saw us, saw the thirty years that had passed since the last time we’d been seen and how completely different we looked except for our costumes. Instead, we tell them Lisa did fine, was perfectly adequate, even though she of course was no Mr. Wilder, that of course there is no Mr. Wilder except for Mr. Wilder himself. And then they tell us, before we can ask, because they know we will, that no, Mr. Wilder hasn’t called to say he’s heard about the show (the adult stars are never asked to be part of the Ohio Lady Queen Players, because they are too famous, or too old, or too dead) and to offer us his congratulations. “That’s OK,” we say. “He’s probably busy.” “Probably,” they say. And then: “Have you gotten paid yet?” We say that we get paid at the end of the week and we’ll send them money soon, because—as we don’t need to tell them, nor they us—we haven’t worked in a while, and the alimony and child support payments and the mortgages on our condos in the desert (we all live in condos in the desert) are overdue and overdue again. “Promise you’ll send us money,” they tell us. “We promise,” we promise. Then, whoever we call when we call home hangs up, and we’re left with each other.
All of us except for Lisa. She’s younger than us by twenty years (that’s another part of the show—how Wonka gets younger and the children get older—that the script doesn’t attempt to explain). After the show, she doesn’t call anyone. Is she too young to have someone at home? When she was even younger, did she have her own Mr. Wilder to think about for the rest of her days? Is it possible that she didn’t? Is it possible that not everyone has their own Mr. Wilder, that it’s only us? This is something we talk about all the time in group: Are we normal? Are there others like us? Is everyone like us? Or are we all alone? Lisa isn’t part of group because, of course, she wasn’t a child actor, just a niece of the big boss with some experience in community theater, who isn’t as brilliant as Mr. Wilder but isn’t nearly as terrible as maybe we want her to be.
In any case, Lisa waits out in the hall until we’ve been hung up on by whomever we have at home. Then, she comes into the boiler room, her bottled tan streaked a little, her pretty curls dented and flattened by the purple top hat.
“Great show, guys,” she says, because she calls us “guys.” She has an open bottle of champagne in ea
ch hand. Past casts have been forbidden by her uncle to drink at all, but not us: we’re not the kind of cast with a drinking problem, and so we can drink a glass or two of champagne after a show without the big boss or the doctor having to worry about what will happen to us, or the show, or the ship. But not between the matinee and the evening show; never between the matinee and the evening show. Lisa raises both bottles above her head and shakes them party-hearty style, which is the universal dinner theater actor symbol for “trouble.” “You guys were really great,” she says.
“Thank you,” we say. “You were pretty good, too.”
“Thank you,” she says, her face pinched, obviously a little wounded by the “pretty good,” which is what we intended.
“Where’s the doctor?” we ask her.
“I don’t know,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “Who knows where he is?”
“Who knows?” we repeat. Maybe tonight she really doesn’t know where he is. But on every other night for the past month, Lisa would have known where the doctor was, and so would we: he would have been somewhere on the boat, waiting for her. Picture it. Every night, we’re in our cabins, trying to sleep, listening to the river gently rocking and splashing the boat, listening to the chugging of the coal barges, to the tooting of the tugboats, listening to the moaning and creaking of the old Lady Queen herself. But still, even over all that racket, we can hear the doctor and Lisa. We can hear them in the boiler room; we can hear them behind the smokestacks on the upper deck; we can hear them backstage; we can hear them the way we can hear Mr. Wilder and ourselves from thirty years ago. They think we can’t hear them, but we can. They think we haven’t seen them, but we have. They think we don’t know, but we do.
“You think we don’t know,” we tell Lisa. “But we do.”
WE MET THE doctor’s wife only once, our first day on board the Ohio River Lady Queen, at the party when the cast was to meet the crew for the first time, etc. She was pretty enough, pale but not sickly, with long straight blonde hair, and wearing that sort of shapeless sundress that pregnant women wear when they don’t want people to know they’re pregnant, or that nonpregnant thin women wear when they don’t want people to know they have bodies that someone might want to look at. She was clearly the latter. When we first saw her, across the boat’s upper deck, she was standing next to her husband, the doctor (we hadn’t met him yet, but we knew he was our doctor because we’d had many other doctors and they all looked like him, he like them), who looked bookish in his blue corduroy jacket, his salt-and-pepper beard, his chewed-on pens sticking out of his shirt pocket. She looked bookish, too, the sort of woman who, when she got older, would wear bifocals around her neck on a chain. They were standing next to each other, close but not actually touching. The doctor kept leaning toward her, just barely, and the doctor’s wife kept leaning away from him, just barely. Once, twice, three times, the doctor walked away to talk to someone else—someone from the crew or administration he’d known for four years now but probably someone his wife didn’t know at all—and each time, right before he left, her look changed, almost imperceptibly except we perceived it, and it said, Why don’t you go? And when he came back, her look said, Why have you come back? These are exactly the kind of things we tend to notice. For us, the world is divided between those who long and those who are longed for, those who are defined by their longing, and those who are totally oblivious to it. When the movie wrapped, we spent weeks crying in our bedrooms; we once in a while stopped crying long enough to write long, rambling letters to Mr. Wilder, telling him how much we missed him and how great the sequel would be once he agreed to be in it. You will agree to be in the sequel, won’t you? we asked in the letters, and then we started crying again, letting our tears stain the letters before we put them in the mail. We have no idea if he got them or not. Mr. Wilder apparently went salmon fishing in Alaska with some buddies after we finished shooting. We never even got a postcard. There was never any sequel, until now. We’ve never seen Mr. Wilder again, except on television, in the movies, on the cover of his memoir, just like the rest of you.
When the doctor left his wife for the fourth time—to go to the bathroom, to get a drink, to talk to an old friend or make a new one—we went over and tried to talk to her ourselves.
“Your husband is our doctor,” we said to her.
“I’m his wife,” she said back.
We shook hands with the doctor’s wife, said how nice it was to meet her. She said it was nice to meet us, too. After that, no one seemed to know what to say. The doctor’s wife kept looking over and around us to see where the doctor was; when she wasn’t looking for her husband, she looked at her watch. These two things seemed to be the only things she knew how to do. Finally, after who knows how long we spent standing there, watching her do these two things, we said, “You don’t want to be here, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“With your husband,” we said. “We saw the way you kept leaning away from him. The way you looked at him.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
We didn’t say anything back to that. We knew all about denying the obvious truth. For years, we’d denied that we missed Mr. Wilder. We denied that he was anything to us at all. That’s why we got married, as soon as we were able to, at sixteen: to prove that he no longer mattered to us, that we’d moved on. When our friends and families pointed out that our new wives and husbands looked like Mr. Wilder, we denied it. When our new wives and husbands said, “You know, people say I look a lot like Gene Wilder,” we said that it wasn’t true. So, when the doctor’s wife said that she had no idea what we were talking about, we knew all about it; we knew that there’s no talking to a person like that, because we’re that person and there’s no talking to us, either.
“Just tell my husband I went home, will you?” she said. A waiter came by with a tray of cheese cubes, and she grabbed a handful and started popping them in her mouth like peanuts.
“We will,” we said.
“Why do you talk like that?” she asked.
“Like what?” we said.
“We,” she said. “You refer to yourselves as ‘we.’ Why?” And then, before we could tell her why, she turned, walked down the stairs, and was gone. We went to the railing—we were on the ship’s upper deck—and watched her walk down the gangplank, into the parking lot, into her car; we watched her car climb up, up, up, away from the river and into the blinking hills of Cincinnati until it was gone. And we never saw her again until we saw her on the news, running past the cameras, refusing to say anything about her husband except that pretty soon he wouldn’t be.
Then we turned and faced the rest of the party. The doctor was on the other side of the boat, talking to a middle-aged man and a young woman. The man was wearing a blue blazer and a black polo shirt, and glasses that were meant to make him look twenty years younger but instead made him look like a middle-aged man who was wearing glasses meant to, etc.; the woman was wearing a dress that was barely one, just strips of white fabric somewhat covering the important places. This, as it turns out, was the big boss and his new wife, who once upon a time had been the lap dancer he’d paid with a city check. They were both very tan, and their teeth were very white. We introduced ourselves to the boss (we’d talked to him only once, on the phone, when he’d offered us the job and we’d accepted), and to his wife, and then to the doctor we said, “We’re your patients.”
“Good to meet you,” he said, shaking hands with each of us.
“Your wife told us to tell you that she went home,” we said.
“What?” he asked, and we repeated what she told us to tell him. The doctor closed his eyes, lowered his head, and rubbed the bridge of his nose for a little while. Finally, he opened his eyes again, said, “Will you please excuse me?” and then, as his wife had a done a few minutes earlier, he disappeared down the stairs. We all stood there for a while, looking at the place where the doctor had just been, until the big bo
ss’s wife said, “Those poor kids. They’ve stopped thinking about their ideal moment.”
“Their ideal moment?” we said.
“Their ideal moment,” she said. “Something you think about all the time, an ideal moment you work toward achieving, even if you never actually achieve it. Every couple has to have one if they’re going to stay together.”
“They do,” we said, seriously considering this, just as we have seriously considered other things over the years—hypnosis, insulin shock treatments, hyperbaric chambers, Outward Bound—anything to help us forget, or to help us remember but in the right way, or to help us do whatever it is other people do to make them different from us.
Price of the Haircut : Stories (9781616208240) Page 14