by Carol Anshaw
No. I do think about that. But she’s more the seductress in this than I. And for my part, it’s such fun bringing romance to someone who hasn’t had much of it before. I think she’s surprising herself. And—
HAROLD
And—?
VITA
Well, I suppose part of my attraction to her is that she’s a big silver fish. A prize.
Lauren interrupts from the third row. “Gladys. You’re reading that line as though you mean it, which Vita doesn’t. She’s thirty, beautiful, titled, a popular author of her time, more popular than Virginia. So let’s go over that line, and give it a reading that’s blithe and slightly insincere.”
Lauren knows exactly how she wants every line read. She wrote them and can hear them in her head. The cast is filled with terrific actors; the only weak link is Gladys, whenever called on to act queer. Which is kind of a big problem, in that she’s the lead. The next day, Cate gets up some nerve and asks Molly if she and Lauren have a minute, that she has a small idea.
“Of course. We encourage our people to come forth with better ideas.” The tone in which she says this indicates they never encourage this. That no idea could be better than theirs and that if it were, they wouldn’t want to know about it. But now Cate is out on a limb and there’s no way to scurry back down the tree.
Surprisingly she isn’t put off to another time. They all three sit down on the red velvet sofa.
“The quick scene in the basement, where we project that flirty note above them? ‘So I’ll see you tomorrow, in the basement, and I’ll be nice to you and you’ll be very nice to me, won’t you?’ What I was thinking was maybe the scene could be played without dialog. There’s only a couple of lines before they kiss, and having total silence in that small space might increase the tension. Then Virginia, who wants this more, just moves her hands inside Vita’s open coat, like you already have her doing, but neither of them says anything. They start to move in. Then, just as their lips are about to meet, the lights fade to black. The audience never sees the kiss. They’re left in a state of anticipation, which is something like arousal, isn’t it? The tiny pause just before something delicious.”
Molly looks at Lauren in a telepathic way, then says, “Interesting idea. We’ll try it out.”
Cate is not accustomed to elation. She almost doesn’t recognize it. At first she mistakes it for indigestion.
Later in the afternoon, she gets a glimpse of how Lauren and Molly finesse suggestions that don’t interest them. She is in the wings, working with two stagehands, packing a large trellis with fake white roses and five boxes of plastic greenery. Onstage, a read-through of a revised patch of the first act is happening at a collapsible (and slightly collapsing) table. Gladys is pitching a small, muted fit. She can’t feel the line she is supposed to say at this point; she thinks the line is unnecessary.
“Would Vita directly tell Virginia she’s busy with Mary Campbell? Wouldn’t she couch something that would be so upsetting?”
Lauren says, “Yes, well, we all have our jobs here. You especially, your job is to be a perfect Vita. Mine is to write as near-to-perfect a script as I can. You are Vita as I wrote her, not as the person who lived. You’ll need to keep that in mind as we move forward. Now, can we start with that line and go from there?”
Cate hopes to never be scolded like this.
* * *
Ty Boyd walks her back to her latest hotel. This one is plaid-free, but goes wrong in another direction. Two really old guys—visible through the door—are asleep on the lobby sofa.
“They must’ve cropped them out of the TripAdvisor photos,” he says. “You can come back home with me. I have one of those blow-up beds.”
“Thanks. I’ll just take an Ambien and block out the room.”
“You have my number if things get hairy at three a.m. Like if the walls start dripping blood. I know this play isn’t happening at a good time for you, but life is so wily, so always out-of-order. Your situation is a lot like everyone else’s, just kicked up a few notches. And you’re doing fine here; Molly and Lauren are crazy about you. Sometimes a newcomer has the advantage. New York theater is a tight community, but sometimes a breath of fresh air is welcome exactly because of that. Sometimes we’re all a little weary of each other.
“If you’re interested, there’ll be more work here for you. Even though you’re a murderer. Maybe because you’re a murderer. I think that gives you a certain stature. You’re a little scary.”
Cate senses she and Ty are at a tipping point. He appears to be pursuing a friendship. She has by now been to his apartment (a quietly dramatic scheme of gunmetal gray and Chinese red filled with hard-to-find pieces of low-end Americana—in other words, a temple in her religion); met his cat, Chris; eaten what he says is his best dinner offering, fish tacos. From here, the next steps would be small, then larger personal revelations, trust, a gossipy alliance. But she can’t do it. She is by now too far outside almost everything and too low on social energy, and is not looking to be let in anywhere new.
“I’d better get up to my lovely room and hop on eBay,” she tells him as a way of slipping free of their conversation. “I have some accessorizing ideas for Vita’s living room.”
* * *
She thought this hotel—slightly above her price range—would be better than the plaid hotel, but it’s really just a different spin on awful. Everything in the room has either a scary sheen or a burnish. The color scheme (flamingo pink, gray, and mauve) and artwork (pinky-orange sunrise, or possibly sunset; it’s hard to tell) suggests modulated grieving. The bedspread is a slippery grayish beige. Greige. She has folded it and put it in the closet.
She sits cross-legged on the bed with her laptop and a small plastic carton of couscous salad and shuts out the room around her. Instead she pushes her thoughts inside the play, which is the best thing she’s worked on since Adam died. Once in a while, despite the antiquated nature of theater—all the fakery happening in the same room as its viewers—a really good piece can use this propinquity to intensify the audience’s experience, make them forget where they parked their car. This is that play. Vita’s serial womanizing could easily have been played for laughs, a sexual farce, but that’s not what Lauren had in mind. Vita is just a vehicle for the confusion that comes from not being able to firmly stake an identity. And the pain that comes for those who lend their emotions to a shadow that lengthens, then recedes. This is not the story of damage done by a reckless lover, but by a society with ignorant, vigorously enforced conventions.
* * *
Once the furniture was loaded onto the sets today, Cate could see that Vita’s living room—the biggest set, using both sliding platforms at once—could benefit from a few more details underlining who she was. A substantial stack of manuscripts, books by writer friends. Souvenirs from globetrotting. Definitely Persian cushions on the sofa. A hookah. A cheesy painting of the Grand Canyon, where she set one of her novels. An ashtray and cigarette caddy on the coffee table. She texts these to the prop master to see what he has, what they have to order. She is so grateful for something preoccupying to work on just now. Her thoughts these days are not her friends. Which doesn’t keep them from stopping by, particularly at night when she is too tired to fight them off.
A text coin drops in. Maureen.
start spreading the news…
(followed by an emoji of can-can dancers). Today Maureen has been firing off lyrics. It’s a sort of thing she does.
you’re leaving today…
Cate types, hoping a single reply will end this small dialog. She’s too tired to get perky and creative just now, which isn’t to say she doesn’t appreciate the contact. Early on, their calls developed a hollow ring. Texting goes better. With texts they can steer around what Maureen clearly finds an unpleasant subject. She is beginning to tire of Cate’s PTSD. (“I hate that you suffer from something that already has an acronym.”)
And Cate can’t really blame her. Enough repetition can flatten even a harrowi
ng narrative. Maureen wasn’t in the kitchen. She’s sorry it all happened, of course, but mightn’t it be time to move on, particularly with their relationship, which Maureen probably still hopes is spreading strong, sturdy roots beneath it? On this matter, she has moved a step or two beyond Cate. Sometimes Cate likes this. Other times she wishes she could stop Maureen until she’s had time to catch up.
The texting does offer a jaunty flavor to the bad place in which Cate still too often finds herself. Sometimes, like tonight, she wakes up at two-thirty barely hanging on to a slippery rung above a space narrow and bottomless, where she finds, usually, an already-worn memory, but sometimes a whole, fresh, stinking scene being served up to her consciousness for the first time.
she’s down on the floor, making the call to 911, at the same time trying to wipe blood off neale’s face, which is already starting to swell, particularly around her left eye. she notices her own hands, the right in particular. the side of it along the thumb is caked with blood. the skin looks rusted. her palms are shiny and raw with a web of small cuts. half of one of her fingernails is torn off; she can’t look at that. she goes very still, listening for the possibility that the woman is still somewhere in the house. she gets up and pulls a knife out of the block on the counter, then crouches next to neale, waiting for whatever comes next.
She pulls out of this, but can’t lose its oily, metallic aftertaste. She calls the one person with whom she still (ludicrously) feels an open connection.
“Let me go back to the storeroom. We’ve only got one customer. A gentleman who has mistaken my restaurant for Starbucks. He’s been on his laptop for an hour now. One cup of coffee.” Then a few footsteps and the squeaky hinge of the swinging door to the kitchen, then its rubber flaps thwacking behind her, and she’s back. “So, black thoughts again?”
“You think I only feel powerful. But I also feel smeared by the contact with him. Like now I’m soiled.”
“I think it’s probably hard on a person, being a killer. If you’re a regular human, it pushes you out of any space you’re used to. And probably into a space the people around you are uncomfortable with.” She stops to take a drink from a bottle of water; Cate can see this exactly, the way, when she’s finished, the bottle drags away, tugging at her lower lip. Then, “Honestly, I think all this drift will eventually go away. But in the meantime you should definitely keep talking with me about it. You really can’t call me too much.”
martinis
Cate backs up to get a distance perspective on the overstuffed bookcase flat. Looking good. She pulls on her down jacket. She goes out by the stage door, leaving only the ghost light on. The ghost light is never shut off, an old, old tradition, to give the ghosts who inhabit the theater light to put on their own shows.
She lets the metal door slam shut behind her, then looks both ways up and down the alley. She no longer moves into any new space without calculation. She checks directions on her phone and heads out to the bar. She’s been summoned by Molly. The bar is called Dean Martini. It’s not particularly close to the theater or to Cate’s hotel; there’s an Uber ride involved. Odd-hour phone calls have been part of her job description for the past couple of weeks, but until now, late-night drinks have not. Tonight Cate is in New York, and Molly needs someone to talk to. She and Lauren have batted something around too many times. They need an outside opinion; can Cate meet her?
* * *
Molly sits still as a Buddha in a red leather booth near the back of the bar, under a blowup of Dean Martin in a tuxedo with his black tie undone. He’s rakish. He’s on the sound system singing “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” She is sitting behind the remains of a straight-up martini, wearing some delicious cologne that smells like lilac and woodsmoke. Cate had kind of forgotten about cologne. She might have to revisit that. Molly does older well—stylish but with little old-fashioned touches. Her watch is a rectangle with a dark yellow face, brown leather band about to tear at the buckle. Very 1940s. Of course, just wearing a watch at all is pretty twentieth century.
She makes a swishing motion for Cate to slide in across from her, then orders for both of them by signaling the bartender with two raised fingers. Cate’s not much of a hard-liquor drinker, but the martini moment seems to be at hand. When drinks arrive, Molly takes her speared olive and drops it into Cate’s glass. A flirty gesture, but inconsequential. Cate supposes Molly has dropped olives into the martinis of many women along her way. In forward motion, she seems much younger than her seventy-plus years. She’s a dynamo. But at the end of what has been a long day directing, she is weary. Her color is slightly drained, her cheeks sag into slight pouches at the sides of her mouth. This makes her more human, definitely less iconic.
“Houston,” Molly says, “we have a problem.”
“Gladys.” It’s not a wild guess.
“In almost every respect, she’s doing a great job. She’s commanding, but also blockheaded. Her Vita is totally heartless and oblivious. But when sex comes into the picture, well, you can see she’s playing Vita like an old letch. I actually caught her wiggling or whatever her eyebrows. Like Groucho Marx. She just needs a cigar to wag. Wiggle and wag. How do I make her stop? I can’t just bully her. I think of all those tickets bought on the basis of her presence in the play. I can’t afford to have her leave in a huff.”
Cate takes a sip of her martini: it’s vaguely but not unpleasantly medicinal. She thinks for a few beats. “Gladys is straight. It might be simply that she’s not a good enough actor to imagine herself into the role and doesn’t have a model for the kind of seduction Vita was wielding. Assertive but not aggressive. Maybe you could ask her to think about removing testosterone from the equation. Also to think about sex between two people who already know what’s in the offing, who don’t have a gender wall they can hide tricks behind. They have the rabbit and the hat, not the rabbit in the hat.”
“That’s good. That’s very good. That might be a path. All this reading I’ve been doing, I’m starting to think Vita was more concerned with flowers and houses than humans. That fucking country house. Three hundred sixty-five rooms and a deer park. Why did her ancestors need all that space? Maybe they had a lot of company?”
Cate says, “They didn’t want to have to haul out the blow-up bed in the family room.”
“The house was her true obsession, but it went to her cousin Eddy. First male in the line. But really, couldn’t he have given her maybe fifty rooms and her own entrance? She could have mowed the lawn in exchange? Okay. So. Gladys. Tomorrow after rehearsal you should take Gladys out for drinks. I’ll tell her it’s going to be the three of us, then I won’t show up. I’ll text you that my thumb is sore, or my dog is puking. Then you’ll be alone with her and roll into your argument about the difference with same-sex seduction—”
“My argument is definitely brilliant, but I think you’re the one who’s going to have to make it. I’m the set designer. I can order a longer sofa because Gladys’s legs are overhanging the chaise. But you’re the director. So I’m afraid you’re the one who has to direct her out of her misery.” Cate loves that she can talk to Molly like this. “Just tell her she can lean back a little. Her Vita will still get the girls.”
Molly’s thoughts move on a little. “I’m more than a generation older than you. My coming out was made quite difficult by the general ignorance that prevailed back then. Some of it happened in dyke bars that still had peepholes in the door. You know, knock three times. A lot of dykes hid for their whole lives inside marriages of convenience to men. Or shared apartments and their lives with roommates. I came into my sexuality in shadows that were dissolving, but they were still there. Shadows of shadows. Vita was even farther back, my grandmother’s generation. She was bold, but she still had to toe the line. She was an aristocrat, she had a small title and a famous garden. She had the Queen Mother over for wine and truffles, for crying out loud. I hate that this conversation with Gladys falls to me, but Lauren’s wary of busting her chops anymore. And you, yo
u turn out to be a total chickenshit.”
It is kind of satisfying to see that even when you are Molly, you have to deal with people who are more arrogant than you are. It’s something to keep in mind. Cate watches her drain her martini. Her eyes water a little as she does this. The gin has entered her central nervous system. But also, Cate can see, the two of them are inching toward a camaraderie.
Molly says, “By the way, how are you doing?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, didn’t you just kill someone in Chicago?”
polka favorites
Graham puts a finger to his lips as Cate comes in. He points—dot dot dot—to his phone and computers and the ceiling; she always takes the last to mean the satellites roaming the stratosphere, scooping up private data. Cate isn’t impervious to his paranoia. By now she has a tiny paper circle taped over the camera in her laptop. She texts with an encrypted app.
He puts on a new CD—Polka Favorites—to white out whatever conversation they’re about to have. He seems alarmingly alert today. He’s wearing a gray gas station suit like the ones on the characters in the play he’s writing.
“How’s it going in here?” A question Cate feels obliged to ask but is afraid to hear answered. Most striking, he’s cut his hair. It’s basically gone, except for a military, flattop buzz cut. She tells him, “I’m having trouble processing your hair. I’m going to need a little time.”
He doesn’t want to talk about hair. “Do you remember, in 1984, how Winston Smith can only escape the camera in his apartment by slipping into a far corner of the living room and that he can’t stay there, out of sight, for very long or he will draw suspicion? That’s where we’re heading. A few years ago we thought, Oh cool, all the information in the world at our fingertips. How easy, how convenient! We can trace the movements of criminals, find our high school friends, do a little light stalking of old lovers, store our credit card information, get the results of our latest cholesterol test. We were so innocent and happy. We weren’t thinking about the reciprocity, that we were also giving ourselves over to whoever was interested. And I think some people don’t mind that, and most people mind a little but have no idea how to shut off the spigot and a few people, like me, are a lot bothered by it and are looking for ways to short-circuit the worst of the prying. And finding a place to be unwatched. A place bigger than the far corner of the living room that the camera can’t see.”