by Sol Stein
I remembered Louie saying, “Of course there’s a difference between men and women. Who ever saw a woman pissing into the wind?”
That’s what I was doing.
“Please,” I said.
“Please what?”
“Talk to him.”
“Ezra, you know better than anyone. The only person Ben listens to is his father.”
11
Ben
When I read The Best Revenge the second time I suspected the female lead had been modeled by Gordon Walzer after his common-law wife Pinky. A star I knew slightly, Ruth Welch, immediately came to mind for the part. In my Machiavellian head I suspected that the director I wanted, Mitch Mitchell, would be tempted by Ruth Welch, too.
Mitch was zapped by Walzer’s words. And when I mentioned Ruth Welch, Mitch saw right through my attempt at casualness. “Ruth’s a brick shithouse with kettledrum lungs,” he said, laughing. “She scares most men. Talk to her. If you survive, I’ll talk to her.”
“One caveat, Mitch. Ruth works a very narrow range.”
“Ben, that range is this role. Go for it.”
My luck, Ruth Welch was not only in New York but in a play on twofers, its audiences dwindling rapidly. An actress on the rebound, she invited me for a drink at the Waldorf Towers apartment she had subleased, warning me, however, that as soon as her play closed, she was off to her house in Bermuda for a much-needed rest, and I was not to tempt her with any near-term proposition. It was the usual bullshit: Chase me. See if you can catch me.
When I arrived, I started to shake hands but she immediately offered me her cheek, then gave me a hug that hurt. As I sat opposite watching her swirl the ice cubes in her glass, ordering them to melt faster, what I saw was Ruth Welch as a huge female insect with large thighs strong enough to crush a man. If she screamed at orgasm, it had to be an absolute glass-breaker. Perfect for the role.
“Ruth,” I said, “you’re brilliant in the play,” referring to the one whose audience was dwindling, “but the vehicle was a bit Model A, don’t you think?”
“When the audiences don’t come, I don’t look around for someone to blame.”
“I’m sure you would rather have been in Colleen Dewhurst’s play. It was a perfect vehicle for you.”
She seemed to be trying to decide if yes was a good answer to give me. I spared her. “My father used to say that if you take a good look at your neighbor’s yard, you’ll find that her green grass is plastic outdoor carpeting. But go ahead, look, he would say, she won’t see you, she’s busy looking at your grass.”
Ruth laughed. Of course I’d made that story up. There was no plastic carpeting in Louie’s day.
“Is your father someone I should know?” Ruth asked.
“No, he’s someone I should know.” Again she laughed, and I said, “No one famous. Just a father. Ruth, I have a question.” I pulled my chair forward almost close enough for our knees to touch. “What did Duse, Bernhardt, and Vivien Leigh have in common?”
“This a parlor game?”
“Not a game at all, Ruth.”
“I can’t imagine, except that they were all, in their own ways, number one for their time.”
“Ruth,” I said, “you’re an intelligent woman as well as a remarkable actress. What did Duse, Bernhardt, and Leigh do that you haven’t done?”
“Step all over producers,” she said.
I provided her with the obligatory smile. “One more guess.”
“They’re all dead and I haven’t died yet,” she said, a trace of gray in her voice.
“They,” I said, “are in fact immortal to a degree because of something they chose to do that you have not yet chosen to do.”
“I’m waiting,” she said. Her knee touched mine.
“They all made a point of performing verse drama.”
“You’re not doing a Shakespeare revival? I’m too old for Juliet,” she said, her voice ha-ha-ing.
The ground was mine, the nervousness hers. Time to spring.
“Ruth, I’m planning a contemporary play called The Best Revenge that won’t have a limited run like Shakespeare. The female lead is a strong, resourceful woman, not an infatuated youngster. She needs a powerful vocal instrument like yours for words that might just outlive us both and give you the vehicle that will make your ultimate position in the theater secure.”
She bought time by sipping at her drink. Then she put the glass down hard.
“You come on very strong,” she said.
“Not as strong as you come on, Ruth,” I said. “You can hold an audience of a thousand. I can only hold one person at a time.”
“I wanted to go to Bermuda.”
“Bermuda won’t sink into the Atlantic waiting for you, but I will if I have to wait a season for you to say yes to the most perfect role ever created for you.”
“You’d wait for me?”
I nodded, knowing the Almighty also has to deal with actors.
“Is the script in that envelope?”
“Yes,” I said, holding it inches from her hand because I wanted her to reach for it.
*
The audience entrance to the theater was a row of eight glass doors under the marquee, now locked against intrusion, but through which, each evening of a run, a crowd would funnel toward the ticket taker’s inner door, anticipating live actors on a stage. A live play has the power to congeal strangers into a body that laughs not only because of what it sees and hears but because everyone else is laughing too. To the rich unwashed, the theater is a tax-deductible place to take a client or customer. Over the years, while counting the house, I’d learned not to look too closely at the audience.
I passed Fred, the stage doorman, without my usual nod and felt his gaze in my back. I turned to him and said, “Fred, I’m just going to slip in around the back of the house,” at which he touched his fingertips to his forehead, a salute for taking notice of his presence. Ezra says I lack the instincts of a democrat. This is not my century.
I circled around to the back of the dark auditorium and lowered myself into a seat in the last row undetected, or so I thought. The cavern, empty of onlookers, was filled with silence from the stage, as Ruth Welch, standing like a watchtower at stage right, barely visible twenty feet from the worklight, said:
I gave you my better years.
My eyes went to Christopher Beebe, standing stage left, as far from Ruth as possible: You gave no one your better years. Not me and not yourself.
As he spoke, Christopher, shorter than Ruth by inches, was reinventing himself physically for the confrontation.
Ruth said, Where is she?
He: Strike the mirror.
She: I’ll find her.
He: Strike the mirror.
She: I’ll kill her.
He: Strike the mirror, Margaret, before it, in sweet revenge, strikes you.
From the fifth row, Mitch yelled, “Okay, take a break. We’ll run it through from the top in ten minutes.”
He turned in my direction and, though I doubted he could see me clearly in the dark, said, “Hello, Ben.”
I like to get in as much as I can of run-throughs without the actors knowing I’m there. The weaker ones try too hard if the producer is in the house. Mitch Mitchell’s boy, sitting next to him, must have spied me.
The boy, like a page-turner for a concert pianist, kept Mitch’s script always turned to the right page. His thighs were there for Mitch’s hand. When you hired Mitch—and who would not want to hire his brilliance—you hired the nameless boy also, his private gofer and concubine who changed with each production. To me they always looked the same, pretty chickens whose eyes let you know even when they were standing that they were on their knees and ready.
Mitch once said to me, “You take sex too seriously, Ben. Cruisers shop for trouble. I like to go to the refrigerator and find what I’m looking for right there, just like you married types.”
As Mitch moved sideways to the aisle, the boy skittered out of his w
ay. When Mitch got close, I asked, “How’s it going?”
Mitch nodded twice, a response no more serious than my question.
Somewhere in that theater, Louie was saying, Ben, the actors lie to the director, the director lies to you, you lie to the investors. You deserve each other.
“There was a three-piece suit looking for you,” Mitch said, excavating a calling card from a mass of miscellany in his shirt pocket.
The card said only HARRISON STIMSON. No raised-letter thermography, the real rare thing, engraved from a die. No corporate affiliations. No address. If you didn’t know where or how to reach Harrison Stimson, you were not a likely recipient of his card.
“He’s coming back,” Mitch said. “Trouble?”
“No, no, no,” I said. “I wrote to him about The Best Revenge.”
“For Christ’s sake, just now?”
“No, no. Quite some time ago. I guess he’s been away.”
“I thought that guy was a heavy in every one of your productions. I thought he had a big piece of this one. Doesn’t he?”
I didn’t want to be caught.
“Wait a minute,” Mitch said. “When you first pitched me, you said Harrison Stimson was in. You called him the cornerstone.”
“He disappointed me.”
“Ben, sometimes you disappoint me.”
“Maybe Stimson is changing his mind. Why else would he be coming by?”
“Sure,” Mitch said with the same intonation he’d say Fuck you.
“What’s eating you, Mitch?”
“Nobody’s eating me,” Mitch smiled his little joke. “I need that set.”
“It’s supposed to be ready Friday,” I said.
“You talk to Watkins. That son of a bitch told Ruth Welch that he’d stopped building because he hadn’t got the second check. The worst any prick can do is tell an actor. You’d better romance Ruth first chance you get. She says she wanted to go to Bermuda and you roped her into this play, Ben. She’s a wicked backstage gossip.”
“I know.”
“We need her at the top of her form.”
“Yes, Mitch.”
“Please keep Watkins away from the theater.”
Watkins, whose firm had built eleven sets for me, was the kind of businessman to whom even old customers were new tricks who needed to pay before they unzipped. When Watkins built a set, he’d never even buy raw materials until your down payment was in. The bastard must have suspected I was a long way from closing the partnership. He wanted to make sure that even if everyone else got stuck, he’d have his.
“Watkins should have been an astronaut,” I said. “He’d probably like recycling his urine.”
Mitch granted me a tight-lipped smile.
“I’ll deal with Watkins,” I said.
“Of course,” Mitch said, “it’s your show.”
“It’s our show.”
“Yeah, yeah. I got five percent of the never-never. You own this thing. Maybe what you own is zip. Maybe less than zip.”
“Mitch,” I said, “to my knowledge no one has ever replaced you in mid-rehearsal.”
“You bet your ass.”
He turned away and trotted down the aisle, yelling, “All right, everybody, break’s over, let’s take it from the top.” There were a thousand ways Mitch could have got the message to me nicely, but he’s from a different school. If you’ve got an icepick in your hand, stick it in.
I wasn’t going to leave the rehearsal. I was going to stay and see if I couldn’t pull Stimson back in. And in the meantime, I was going to watch this next scene and rivet my eyes into the back of Mitch’s head so he’d know I was there.
I felt a presence, turned, and there was Harrison Stimson looking like Cordell Hull, ready to shatter lesser people with a cough. I shook his hand and learned that mine had been perspiring.
“Hello, Harrison. Heard you’d been here. Want to grab a taxi with me to the office?”
“With your permission, I’d like to see a bit, Ben. I got your letter. I’d like to help, but I hear funny things about this play.”
“Who from?”
A loud voice from stage center interrupted us. It was Jack Feuer, the stage manager. “Quiet, please! We’re about to start.”
“Come on,” I said, touching Stimson’s elbow.
“No,” he said, sitting.
I slid in next to him.
Ruth Welch was saying: Who is she, George?
And Christopher Beebe, turning to her, answered: A Japanese beetle.
She: Cut your clowning, George.
He: Her pheromones won’t leave me alone.
Margaret, when you see a beetle on a leaf
that, on closer look, is two beetles on a leaf
you can be sure of three things: the upper one
is male, he is copulating, and as soon as he stops
he will die.
She: You haven’t yet, George.
He: Ah, my dear larger-than-life,
that’s why I never stop. Fornication
is a way of living, not just for beetles.
She: Do you love your ladies?
He: I make love to them.
She: I said do you love them?
Christopher came as close as he dared to her, lowering his voice so that we had to strain to hear.
He: What I do with others has always been
my means of reaching you.
If there’d been an audience, every couple might feel an elbow’s touch.
Stimson got up. I followed him out, with just one backward glance at Mitch hopping up onto the stage to make a point.
Outside, daylight struck our faces.
“The rain’s stopped,” said Stimson. “Let’s walk toward Fifth.”
I accompanied him, of course. I could see that his limo driver needed no instructions. Slowly, the stretched blue-black vehicle started after us.
“I liked that last bit,” Stimson said. “Quite moving. Bit over the audience’s head, don’t you think?”
“Better over than under.”
Stimson laughed, and his Phi Beta Kappa key moved with his midriff. “Ben,” he said, “today crap sells.”
“Not to everyone.”
“Ben, the Partisan Review can’t sell advertising because it has only five thousand subscribers. It survives on charity, you know that. A class play in verse can’t sell enough tickets to pay for the set. Do it as a hobby, Ben, way off Broadway somewhere, a regional theater.”
“I envy you, Harrison,” I said. “You never let your taste interfere with your business sense.”
“I’d have thought you’d do the same. Cast been paid?”
I nodded.
“’Course they would be. Equity’d scream. Putting it out of your own pocket, are you?”
“Some.”
“The set?”
“I made the down payment. Another’s due. I got in touch with you because I’m still some way from closing the partnership and it’s getting late. You’ve made good money with me on eight shows, Harrison. I was counting on your loyalty.”
“Always liked your candor, Ben. You’re using escrow money, aren’t you?”
“Always have unless the money comes in quickly.”
“Got releases from your investors, have you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Your lawyer lets you spend the money without releases?”
“He works for me, not me for him.”
Stimson chuckled.
“Balls. Real balls. You should have been in oil.”
“Thanks.” I knew he meant it as a compliment.
He’d given some kind of signal I hadn’t seen, for the limo pulled up quickly and the driver was out of his seat and holding open the curbside rear door for Stimson.
“Drop you anywhere?” he asked.
“Thanks,” I said. “I want to get back to the theater. Will you be thinking it over?”
“Have. Great for cultural improvement, this new one of yours. I don’t need the
deduction with all the tax credits flowing from new equipment. Think I’ll skip, but thanks sincerely for asking me. Enjoyed that bit in the theater. I’ll come see the show.”
I felt as if the plug had been pulled on the Atlantic Ocean. I stood in the dry waste, drained. “Phone for house seats,” I said. “Any time.”
Stimson lowered the electric window. “I’ll get mine from the brokers,” he said. “Or from a friend who’s read the reviews. Depends, doesn’t it?”
My last chance at putting an investor’s money into the partnership pulled away. I watched the limo like hope, making its way to Park Avenue, then turning, lost to sight. Blindly I found my way back to the rehearsal, sat in the dark, not really hearing the lines, waiting for Louie’s voice. I was twelve years old, and getting ready for my first magic show for strangers. Louie, watching me rehearse in front of the mirror, said, The next thing you know you’ll be pulling rabbits out of hats.
All my life, Pop. That’s why the hat is empty.
12
Jane Riller
The day Harrison Stimson turned the faucet off, Ben came home late, his brain boiling. He put his attaché down. It fell over on its side. He left it there. When he hung his topcoat it slipped off the hanger to the closet bottom, over the children’s boots. He didn’t pick it up. I didn’t need a news report to gauge the weather in his head.
I have been credited with intelligence, courtesy, reserve, poise, calm, control, and understanding, when my only act was to keep my mouth shut. Jews conceal their vulnerabilities not by silence but by talking too much. Why is my WASP tongue tied? Father had said, Jane, the cat got your mother’s tongue for life. Keep yours. A man in trouble needs a woman’s talk.
Silence is safe.
Not this evening.
“Ben,” I said at risk, “I feel trapped in Manhattan. Let’s drive up to Westchester, maybe dinner at the railroad-car restaurant in Valhalla. Nora will feed the kids. Say yes.”
His skulk declared war on everybody.
I came close enough to run my forefinger around the periphery of his ear. “Please?”
He pulled away and headed for the closet, picking his topcoat off the floor. “Why not? Maybe a truck will hit us broadside.”
“No trucks on the Bronx River Parkway. Change your mind?”