Celebrity Chekhov

by Ben Greenman

  When she had seen the last of the boy, she returned home, contented and serene, brimming over with love; her face, which had grown younger during the last six months, smiled and beamed; people meeting her looked at her with pleasure.

  “Good morning, Nicole Kidman. How are you, darling?”

  “The lessons are not difficult, but they load the students down with homework,” she would relate at the market. “In the first class yesterday they gave him some algebra and also Spanish. You know it’s too much.”

  And she would begin talking about the teachers, the lessons, and the school books.

  At three o’clock they had dinner together. In the evening they learned their lessons together and cried. When she put him to bed, she would stay a long time murmuring a prayer; then she would go to bed and dream of that faraway misty future when the boy would finish his studies and become a doctor or an engineer, would have a big house of his own, would get married and have children. . . . She would fall asleep still thinking of the same thing, and tears would run down her cheeks from her closed eyes, while the black cat lay purring beside her: “Mrr, mrr, mrr.”

  Suddenly there would come a loud knock at the gate.

  Nicole Kidman would wake up breathless with alarm, her heart throbbing. Half a minute later would come another knock.

  It must be a telegram, she would think, beginning to tremble from head to foot. The boy’s mother is sending for him. Oh, mercy on us!

  She was in despair. Her head, her hands, and her feet would turn chill, and she would feel that she was the most unhappy woman in the world. But another minute would pass, voices would be heard: it would turn out to be Brad Pitt arriving for one of his short stays.

  Well, thank God! she would think.

  And gradually the load in her heart would pass off, and she would feel at ease. She would go back to bed thinking of the boy, who lay sound asleep in the next room, sometimes crying out in his sleep:

  “I’ll give you a piece of my mind! Get away! Shut up!”

  Chapter 8

  Hush

  EMINEM, A WRITER OF HIP-HOP RECORDS, RETURNS HOME LATE at night, grave and anxious, with a peculiar air of concentration. He looks like a man expecting a police raid or contemplating suicide. Pacing about his rooms, he halts abruptly, ruffles up his hair, and says in the tone in which Laertes announces his intention of avenging his sister: “Shattered, soul-weary, misery on my heart, and then to sit down and write. And this is life! Nobody has described the agonizing pain in the soul of a writer who has to amuse the crowd when his heart is heavy or to shed tears on command when his heart is light. I must be playful, coldly unconcerned, witty, but what if I am weighed down with misery, what if I am ill, or my child is dying?”

  He says this, brandishing his fists and rolling his eyes. Then he goes into the bedroom and wakes his wife.

  “Kim,” he says, “I am sitting down to write. Please don’t let anyone interrupt me. I can’t write with children crying or cooks snoring. See, too, that there’s tea and bacon or something. You know that I can’t write without tea. It’s the one thing that gives me the energy for my work.”

  Returning to his room, he takes off his coat and boots. He does this very slowly; then, assuming an expression of injured innocence, he sits down to his table.

  There is nothing casual, nothing ordinary, on his writing table, down to the smallest trifle, everything bears the stamp of a stern, deliberately planned program. Little busts and photographs of distinguished rappers, heaps of paper filled with scribbles, part of a skull by way of an ashtray, a sheet of newspaper folded carelessly, but so that a passage is uppermost, boldly marked in blue pencil with the word “disgraceful.” There are a dozen sharpened pencils, so that no accidental breaking of a point may for a single second interrupt the flight of his creative fancy.

  Eminem throws himself back in his chair, and closing his eyes concentrates on his subject. He hears his wife shuffling about in her slippers and lighting the burner beneath the teapot. She is hardly awake; that is apparent from the way she fumbles the knob of the stove. Soon the hissing of the teapot and the spluttering of bacon reaches him.

  All at once Eminem starts, opens frightened eyes, and begins to sniff the air.

  “Is that gas?” he groans, grimacing with a face of agony. “That woman will kill me yet. How in God’s name am I supposed to write in such surroundings, kindly tell me that?”

  He rushes into the kitchen and breaks into a theatrical wail. When a little later his wife, stepping cautiously on tiptoe, brings him a glass of tea, he is sitting in an easy chair as before with his eyes closed, absorbed in his lyrics. He does not stir, drums lightly on his forehead with two fingers, and pretends he is not aware of his wife’s presence. His face wears an expression of injured innocence.

  Like a girl who has been presented with a costly necklace, he spends a long time posing to himself before he writes the title of the song. He presses his temples, he wriggles, draws his legs up under his chair as though he were in pain, or half closes his eyes like a cat on the sofa. At last, not without hesitation, he stretches out his hand toward the paper, and with an expression as though he were signing a death warrant, writes the title.

  “Can I have some water?” he hears his daughter’s voice.

  “Hush, Haley!” says his wife. “Daddy’s writing! Hush!”

  Eminem writes very, very quickly, without corrections or pauses. He scarcely has time to turn over the pages. The busts and portraits of celebrated rappers look at his swiftly racing pencil and, keeping stock-still, seem to be thinking: You really are at it!

  “Sh!” squeaks the pencil.

  “Sh!” whisper the rappers, when his knee jolts the table and they are set trembling.

  All at once Eminem draws himself up, lays down his pencil, and listens. He hears an even, monotonous whispering. It is Dr. Dre, who furnishes him with many of his beats. He has come into the house and is speaking softly to Kim.

  “Dre, come on!” cries Eminem. “Couldn’t you please speak more quietly? You’re preventing me from writing!”

  “Very sorry,” Dr. Dre answers. “But maybe you should close the door if you don’t want to hear people.”

  “But then how would you hear me?”

  “That wouldn’t be important,” Dr. Dre says. “You wouldn’t need to speak to me. You wouldn’t even know I was here.”

  “Why are you here?” Eminem says. “It’s almost midnight.”

  “I wanted to see if I left a key-chain drive here yesterday. It has some work I was doing for Snoop.”

  After finishing two more songs, Eminem stretches and looks at his watch.

  “Three o’clock already,” he moans. “Other people are asleep while I must work!”

  Shattered and exhausted, he goes, with his head on one side, to the bedroom to wake his wife, and says in a languid voice:

  “Kim, I need some more tea! I feel weak.”

  He writes till four o’clock and would readily have written till six if his subject had not been exhausted. Making the most of himself and the inanimate objects around him, far from any critical eye, tyrannizing and domineering over the little anthill that fate has put in his power are the honey and the salt of his existence. And how different is this despot here at home from the humble, meek man he secretly believes himself to be.

  “I am so exhausted that I am afraid I won’t sleep,” he says as he gets into bed. “My work exhausts the soul even more than the body. I had better take a pill. God knows, I’d like to one day be done with this. To write to make a release date that someone else has set? It is awful.”

  He sleeps till twelve or one o’clock in the day, sleeps a sound, healthy sleep. How well he would sleep, what dreams he would have, if he could somehow entrust others with the writing of his albums!

  “He has been writing all night,” whispers his wife with a scared expression on her face. “Shh!”

  No one dares to speak or move or make a sound. His sleep is something
sacred, and the culprit who offends against it will pay dearly for his fault.

  “Hush!” floats across the house. “Hush!”

  Chapter 9

  An Enigmatic Nature

  ON A GRAY LEATHER SEAT IN THE FIRST-CLASS PORTION OF AN airplane, Oprah Winfrey sits half reclining. She has a blanket spread over her legs, her overhead air turned on, and a book in her lap that she opens now and again, pages through, and sets down. She is greatly agitated.

  On the seat next to her is a budding young author who has published one novel about a young boy growing up in the nineteen-eighties and is beginning work on a more ambitious project about the life and death of an American city. He is gazing into Oprah’s face, gazing intently, with the eyes of a connoisseur. He is watching, studying, catching every shade of this exceptional, enigmatic nature. He understands it, he fathoms it. Her soul, her whole psychology, lies open before him.

  “I know who you are,” he says. “But I don’t mean it the way you think.” He has been drinking, and he touches her elbow. “Everyone sees a certain thing about you, but I see a sensitive, responsive soul. You show it, but you can’t really show it. The struggle is terrific, titanic. But do not lose heart. You will be triumphant!”

  “Write about me,” says Oprah with a mournful smile. “My life has been so full, so varied, so checkered, so perfect. I should be happy. I tell everyone to be that way. I teach everyone to be that way. And yet I suffer. Reveal that soul to the world. Reveal that hapless soul. You are a psychologist. We’ve only been on the plane an hour together, and you have already fathomed my heart.”

  “Tell me what you mean,” the author says.

  “Listen. It starts in Mississippi. My parents were never married. My father had a good heart and was not without intelligence, but the way things were then . . . he worked in a coal mine, cut hair . . . I do not blame my father. My mother—but why say more? She left to move north and find work, and I stayed behind with my grandmother. I got beaten. I got educated. I went to school dressed in burlap. It was awful! The challenges! The sense of hopelessness! And the agonies of losing faith in life, in oneself! You are an author. You know us women. You will understand. I have always had an intense nature. I looked for happiness—and what happiness! I longed to set my soul free. Yes. In that I saw my happiness!”

  “That’s exactly right,” murmurs the author, touching her arm just above the elbow. “I have heard this told, or read about it, but it is so different to hear it directly from you.”

  “Oh, I longed for glory, renown, success, like every—why affect modesty?—every nature above the commonplace. I yearned for something extraordinary, above the common lot of woman! And then, I was seized by the radio business, and then by television. It is not too much to say that the opportunity took me violently. I sacrificed myself to that life as much as any woman ever sacrifices herself to a husband or a lover. You must see that! I could do nothing else. I began to see some money, to make a name for myself. There were moments—terrible moments—but I was kept afloat by the thought that one day I would lift myself even higher, that I would control the process that had controlled me!”

  Oprah returns to her book, turns a few more pages. Her face has fallen into sadness. She goes on:

  “There was a point where I sensed I might be done with it all. I was hosting Dialing for Dollars in Baltimore. Things were coming to a close. I thought I’d have my freedom. That was the moment I should have left definitively. But then came Chicago, and my morning show. It started as a half hour. It went to an hour. It went into syndication. It went national. It went worldwide. What could have been my freedom was my captivity once again. Don’t misunderstand me. It is a wonderful kind of captivity, but it is also wretched. The things I have seen, the things I have not let myself feel. How ignoble, repulsive, and senseless life is. I dated John Tesh. I have recently been thinking about freedom again, but again there is an obstacle in my path, and again I feel that my happiness is far, far away. It is anguish—if only you knew.”

  “What stands in your way? Tell me! What is it?”

  “It is success. It is fame. It is the need to do good for others, to offer the full power of my assistance. This cycle never ends. It cannot end, because it is the correct thing for me to do, and yet there are times when I cannot bear it any longer.”

  The book conceals her face. The author props his chin on his fist and ponders with the air of a professional. The engines of the plane thrum on either side of them as the glow of the setting sun fills the window.

  Chapter 10

  Not Wanted

  BETWEEN SIX AND SEVEN O’CLOCK ON A JULY EVENING, A CROWD of summer visitors—mostly fathers of families—burdened with suitcases and shoulder bags, was trailing along from the ferryboat dock. They all looked exhausted, hungry, and ill-humored, as though the sun were not shining and the sand was not white for them.

  Trudging along among the others was Alec Baldwin, a broad, round-shouldered man in a cotton coat and khaki pants. He was perspiring and gloomy.

  “Do you come out to your holiday home every weekend?” said a man in salmon-colored pants, addressing him.

  “Not every weekend,” Alec Baldwin answered sullenly. “My wife and daughter are staying all summer, and I come here when I can. I don’t have time to come every week; besides, it is expensive.”

  “You’re right there; it is expensive,” sighed the man with the salmon pants. “You coming up from the city? They used to run a boat directly from there to here, but when they did, they charged through the nose for everything. Chips were like six dollars. Now you have to go by train first, then by boat, and that has its own set of costs. Or you can drive the whole way, but to feel better about driving, you’ll want to rent a nice car, or to take your own car, but either way it just sits in the lot all week. It’s all small potatoes not worth worrying about, but over the course of the summer it adds up. Of course, to be in the lap of Nature is worth any money—I don’t dispute it, perfect peace and all the rest of it; but of course, on my salary, every dollar has to be considered. If I waste a penny I lie awake all night. You know what? I’m sorry, I haven’t asked your name. I receive a salary of almost a hundred thousand dollars, I smoke cheap cigars, and still I don’t have a dollar to spare to buy myself the whiskey I like.”

  “It’s altogether abominable,” said Alec Baldwin after a brief silence. “I maintain that summer holidays are the invention of the devil and of woman. The devil was motivated by malice, woman by excessive frivolity. Mercy on us, it is not life at all; it is hard labor, it is hell! It’s hot and stifling, you can hardly breathe, and you wander about like a lost soul and find no refuge. Back in the city there is no food and no drink at home. Everything has been carried off to the summer place: you eat what you can get; you go without your coffee because there is no coffeemaker; you can’t even take the shower you want because the shampoo and the washcloth is gone; and then when you come down here into the lap of Nature you have to slog through the heat and the humidity! Unbelievable. Are you married?”

  “Yes, three children,” sighed Salmon Pants.

  “It’s horrible. It’s a wonder we are still alive.”

  At last the bus came. Alec Baldwin said good-bye to Salmon Pants and boarded. In twenty minutes he was standing outside his house. He could hear nothing but the distant ocean and the prayer for help of a fly destined for the dinner of a spider. He went inside. The windows were hung with sheer curtains, through which faded flowers showed red. On an unpainted wooden wall there was a large fuzzy caterpillar. There was not a soul in the hallway, the kitchen, or the dining room. In an upstairs room that had no name, Alec Baldwin found his daughter, Ireland, a little girl of ten. Ireland was sitting at the table and breathing loudly with her lower lip stuck out. She was engaged in cutting up the jack of diamonds from a deck of cards.

  “Oh, it’s you, Dad!” she said, without turning round. “You’re here.”

  “I am. And where is Mom?”

  “Mom?
She went over to Mary and Ted’s. They’re organizing some kind of show. A benefit. It’s this weekend. She says I can go. Will you go with us?”

  “When is she coming back?”

  “She’s supposed to be back pretty soon.”

  “And where is Jenny? Isn’t she supposed to be your babysitter?”

  “Mom took Jenny with her to help her carry some things back. Dad, why is it that when mosquitoes bite you they don’t get too fat to fly?”

  “I don’t know. They must be strong fliers. So there is no one in the house, then?”

  “Just me.”

  Alec Baldwin sat down in an chair and for a moment gazed blankly at the window.

  “Who is going to get our dinner?” he asked.

  “There isn’t dinner. Mom thought you were coming tomorrow. She is going to have dinner over there, I think.”

  “Oh, thank you very much; and you, what did you have to eat for lunch?”

  “I had some chocolate milk and a sandwich. And chips. Dad, do mosquitoes mix our blood with their own?”

  Alec Baldwin suddenly felt as though something heavy was rolling down on his liver and beginning to gnaw in it. He felt so angry, so pained, and so bitter, that he was choking and tremulous; he wanted to jump up, to bang something on the floor, and to burst into loud shouting; but then he remembered that his doctor had absolutely forbidden him all excitement, so he got up, and making an effort to control himself, began whistling.

  “Dad, does an actor ever forget who he is for real?” he heard Ireland’s voice.

  “Oh, don’t bother me with stupid questions!” said Alec Baldwin, getting angry. “Kids stick to you like a leaf in the bath! Here you are, ten years old, and just as silly as you were three years ago. Why are you ruining those cards? What if I want to play solitaire?”