by Ann Beattie
“That’s a pretty cynical way to look at the situation,” I said.
“Look at the guy,” he said. Bob shrugged. “Mark my words,” he said. “If not money, something else.”
The play began again: the final act—the act in which Nora could no longer deny the truth, and spoke it. By now, Dara’s costume, which had at first seemed romantic and out of place, seemed conspicuously wrong—the dress an elegant, feminine lady would wear, not something the increasingly pragmatic Nora would have on. Her hair was dishevelled. Nora looked wrong within her own body.
NORA: You have never loved me. You have only thought it pleasant to be in love with me.
HELMER: Nora, what do I hear you saying?
NORA: It is perfectly true, Torvald. When I was at home with papa, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls. And when I came to live with you—
Dara was utterly convincing because Nora’s anger at being an extension of a man happened to be the current reality of Dara’s life. It was the reason she wanted her own room—and why she kept it locked. And when she spoke so sternly to Tom, it was her desperate attempt to influence things. Her wildness was a way to temper her anger. Her ambivalence about her engagement was because she was in conflict with herself, not with Tom Van Sant: she wanted her own career, her own space, yet she couldn’t bring herself to leave Tom’s house. She couldn’t make a break, so she was letting the situation in Georgia play itself out. His devotion to Bernie meant she might ultimately lose him. And if that was the case—I had long ago stopped listening to Nora and Torvald’s exchange—playing the role of the newly self-righteous Nora must be a catharsis for Dara. Acting the part of a woman who took a stand must seem inspirational. As the play concluded, Nora’s power was palpable. The curtain closed. When Edward Quill jumped to his feet and shouted “Bravo!” it was well deserved: Dara, in all her complexity, and Nora, with her hard-won new resolve, had merged, resulting in a weird hybrid, a creature larger than life.
I wanted to wait to see Dara after the play, but Bob said he’d had a long day. I knew he hadn’t liked it. Torvald’s role hardly presented men in a good light. I imagined there might be quite a few couples who would quarrel on the way home after such a charged performance by Dara and the other actor. I didn’t see Edward Quill in the lobby, or anyone else I knew. I held Bob’s hand, and he walked us quickly toward the exit. A sharp breeze was blowing as we went through the door.
“She really got off on that role,” Bob said. We were walking down Bow Street to the street where the car was parked.
“She was amazing,” I said.
“I wouldn’t say she was amazing,” Bob said. “She was good. She’s just an averagely talented actress performing in a small theater in New Hampshire, you know.”
“What does the location of a theater have to do with a person’s talent? It would be a pretty sad comment on the way things are if excellence can only be perceived in sophisticated places. By sophisticated people,” I added.
“For Christ’s sake, that wasn’t a criticism of you,” he said. “I just have a different opinion. If you think she was amazing, then you think she was amazing.”
“You’re biased against her, Bob, to state the obvious.”
“Did you know that one time she slept with Frank?” Bob said, turning the key to open the car door.
It was the last thing I’d expected him to say. I knew it was true, but it surprised me that Bob knew about it.
“Oh?” I said.
“Actually,” Bob said, getting in his side, starting the car, and pulling out of the parking place, “I already know that you know that, because Frank told me you did.”
He said nothing else. It was as if he’d said it was a nice night. We drove in silence for a minute or two. “Then why do you bring it up?” I said.
“She scared the hell out of Frank,” Bob said. “Enough so that he told me about it, and we don’t exactly confide in each other. Maybe because there’s usually not that much to confide,” he said. “Does Janey know?”
“You’re asking so you can tell Frank?”
“Actually, yes,” he said.
“I think she assumes it. Yes.”
“It’s over,” Bob said. “For what it’s worth, you can pass on the word to Janey that it’s kaput.”
We drove past the enormous pile of salt behind the brick walls on our right—the mountain of salt that would be spread on the roads when the snows began. It was surreal: a white mountain banked on asphalt.
“What did she do that scared Frank?” I said.
He looked at me. “I know you think she’s quite something,” he said. “But I’d be careful, if I were you.”
“Stop acting so superior,” I said.
“Big bad Torvald,” Bob said.
“You know what I mean,” I said. “Come on—it’s not fair to bring up something like that and then not tell me what happened.”
“She wanted to have a suicide pact with him.”
I had imagined something kinky; something not quite imaginable—at least to me—that would also have flipped out Frank. I thought back to the day Frank borrowed the drill, saying, “I am Superman.” I remembered the moment in which he knew that I knew. But what did I know?
“She’s depressed. You have to worry about what people who are that depressed might do,” Bob said.
“She’s depressed?” I was doing it again: my old habit of echoing.
“I don’t remember the details,” he said. “Something about checking into some hotel by a bridge. Fucking, and then going off the bridge together.” He looked at me. “I take it she hasn’t indicated great despair to you.”
“No,” I said.
“She won’t sit in a restaurant with her back to the door,” he said. “Have you noticed that?”
“No,” I said again.
“And the reason she won’t is because all her life she’s been afraid of being taken from behind. Does that sound normal to you?”
I didn’t answer the question.
“Frank told me that, in case you were wondering. Must have been pretty comical: pulling out the chair for the lady and her having an anxiety attack at the mere thought she’d have her back to the room.”
“If he was so afraid, why did Frank continue to correspond with her?”
“He stopped,” Bob said. “It wasn’t exactly blackmail—he thought, at first, that there was no harm in it. She told him she was desperate—that if she had notes from him, letters, whatever, she could use them to calm down. She acted like his letters were some sort of mantra she could repeat to herself, and maybe they were, but she also wrote back, and he didn’t know how to respond to what she wrote him. She sort of entrapped him, I think.”
“But she didn’t do anything when he stopped writing, did she?”
“No. By then she was involved with Van Sant. Messing up his life with Bernadette.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “She was a little more frightening than she needed to be in that role, didn’t you think? I know you like her, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”
I thought about it. Jealousy, on Bob’s part? An overreaction, because he loved Frank, and Frank had been hurt? Or simply the truth—at least, the truth as he saw it.
Everything he said had been so disquieting that, although I would never have admitted it to Bob, I was glad I had a protector from the shadows, from the dark. I wanted to be convinced that what he was saying was untrue, but Bob was a straightforward person: he had only been telling me what Frank had told him.
Naturally, when I saw her next, I would observe her more carefully. She had, indeed, been extremely impassioned onstage. In the role of Nora, she had given the impression of being truly uncontainable.
Edward Quill’s courtship of
Dara began in earnest halfway through the run. He had arranged for a producer friend from Newburyport to see her performance, and the man had liked her so well he had immediately suggested a second production with his company the following summer.
That same week, Edward Quill invited Dara to Blue Strawbery for dinner. Tom had returned from Georgia, and things seemed better between Dara and Tom since a lawyer had been brought in to set up financial arrangements for the unborn child; unlike most people I knew, the two of them had only praise for the lawyer, in spite of his fees. Dara tried to make the dinner a foursome, with Tom and James Kames, the lawyer, joining them, but Edward Quill made it clear that although he could change his plans from dinner to drinks, he would appreciate her undivided attention. She met him alone at eight o’clock, driving my car—what had been my car—and wearing my alpaca jacket that she often borrowed.
What Quill proposed, during the dinner, was that Grace Aldridge’s book be adapted for a one-woman show—with Dara, of course, playing Grace Aldridge. He and his friend the producer would collaborate on the adaptation, he said, though nothing would be done without Dara’s approval. He was considering the possibility that it might be interesting to add some other voices: some people who had known Grace well might speak to one another briefly before the monologue began—or perhaps someone should take the various roles of her husbands…he himself might possibly, if he could overcome his misgivings that it would be immodest, say a few words about how he and Grace had once planned a life together. This might happen near, or at, the end. He saw it primarily as a one-woman show, and he was so sure Dara would be perfect that he was about to propose it to the board on the weekend, when they had their first planning meeting for the next season. If Dara was willing, she might record just a bit of the text—read something from the as-yet nonexistent script: a sort of auditory aid to help him make the best pitch possible.
Naturally she was flattered. Naturally she said yes. Naturally she also had to protest a bit first, though, and naturally she could also not laugh and say that she’d seen the book, and that if something captivating emerged from that text, it would, indeed, be a credit to her abilities as an actress.
She and I walked along the beach the day after her dinner with Quill. She’d asked to borrow my carbon copy, and I’d brought it to her during my lunch hour. It was one of the three days a week I was working in Cape Neddick. The lawyers didn’t care how long I took for lunch, but I didn’t tell her that.
The beach was almost empty, except for two women and their small children. The women sat in folding chairs and talked while the children played with buckets and shovels. An elderly man walked quickly through the surf, blue weights fastened around his ankles. Beside him, a cocker spaniel raced ahead, then circled back, jumping slightly in the air in an attempt to get the man’s attention.
“You seem subdued, sweetie,” Dara said. The canvas bag containing the script dangled from one shoulder. Her elbow held it tightly clamped to her side.
“I’ll be honest with you,” I said. “Frank told Bob that you two had had an affair. I don’t care if you did or you didn’t, but that wasn’t the way you presented it to me.”
Almost nothing I said was as true as it might have been: I did care; I’d omitted mention of how offended I’d been when Bob had attempted to sound me out so he could tell Frank how things were going; I said nothing about her ostensible thoughts of suicide, which was the part that bothered me most.
“Oh,” she said, kicking a little sand. “You’ve got every right to be put out with me. I misled you. I know I did. I was more lonesome than I knew for a while before moving in with Tom—and so Frank played footsie with me, and he and I had a very unremarkable one-night stand, and that was it.” She kicked more sand. “Except for the letters,” she said. “And in fact, I’d like to give him back his letters. It was stupid of both of us, but it didn’t really mean anything.”
“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” I said. “It was just that you presented it differently.”
“Well,” she said, “I didn’t lie a second time, did I?”
In fact, she hadn’t. It really wasn’t any of my business. And I had started to feel uncomfortable about having put her on the spot.
We walked awhile in silence. Finally, Dara said: “I’m so excited about next summer. I’m not too excited about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but after all, what was my training for? It’s a challenge. To become Grace is definitely a challenge.”
We turned around and began walking the other way, going in the direction of Pogg’s Neck Inn, on the cliffs above the beach.
“What do you say to my buying us coffee at the Inn?” I said.
“I never decline caffeine,” she said. “But isn’t the Inn a little chichi?”
I shrugged. “I’m a working woman now,” I said. “Of sorts.”
“I’ll bet Bob is glad you’ve got a job,” she said. “I’m living in fear of the same idea dawning on Tom. I’ve been so happy in my little nest, reading plays all day, taking notes, dreaming of how I’d play the parts. If I didn’t need money, I would be an absolute layabout. With not the slightest sense of shame about it either.”
“Do I dare ask if the situation has quieted down with Bernie?”
“Poor Bernie. You’d think she was the first woman who had ever gotten pregnant. There is a woman who’s played it for all it’s worth.”
“She still doesn’t feel better physically?”
“It’s all in her head. Maybe a little morning sickness truly crept in, but the blacking out is pure hysteria.”
“How’s Tom?”
“Oh, you know, Tom is a very busy man. Tom is racing around doing things at his business, and he’s having tête-à-têtes with the lawyer, and then he’s digging in the yard to plant bulbs the squirrels will dig up. He’s been buzzing around my door like a fly. I just turn off the ringer the second he goes out and return to my own room, where I guess I’ll now try to project myself into the rather unfathomable mind of Grace Aldridge.”
She walked up the steps ahead of me, hands plunged into the pockets of the alpaca jacket. It was unbuttoned. The walk had made us warm. What a notion: Grace Aldridge, played by stylish Dara.
The hotel bar overlooked the beach. We took a table by the window. A few people were finishing lunch at a table nearby, but it was two-thirty, and no one else was in the restaurant.
“Two coffees,” I told the waitress. “Pastry?” I said to Dara.
“As long as you’re buying,” she said.
The waitress recited the desserts. Dara chose bread pudding with currants. I ordered strawberry sherbet.
“You know why I’m not sympathetic? Because I went through it once. I told you about that. Big Bernie’s a grown-up. She’s up to it. I wasn’t. I didn’t know what hit me when those labor pains started. My prenatal care hadn’t been the best either. I’d—.” She looked at me. “Don’t be so shocked, darling. I survived.” She fiddled with the sugar packets, flipping through them, tilting them forward and backward. “The worst of it was living in this awful house I’d been sent to—my aunt’s house. I’m surprised they didn’t march her into the delivery room with me. Lest we forget, such things were unheard of in those days, or my aunt would have seen to it.”
“My God,” I said.
“God wasn’t anywhere near the delivery room sparing me any pain, I can tell you that. Or I should say: she was otherwise occupied, watching over her fellow Chinese.”
“You started to tell me about this once before,” I said.
“It was back in the days when I was still little Darcy Fisher,” she said. “Before I legally changed my name as a further way of distancing myself from them. It happened when I was too young, and poor little Franny who was never up to much—they lectured us both and punished us both. If someone in our family had been a soldier, my parents would have taken that opportunity to have Franny go off and witness a war. My mother didn’t love me, but at least she admired
me for having a will of my own. She hated Franny. I think she tried to abort her, and it didn’t work. I think that she was so crazy she was punishing Franny for that in some way when she made her go with me to my aunt’s.”
I shuddered. I knew what she must have felt like, because I, too, had had to go somewhere by default. But Dara and Franny’s case was different than mine; at least, Dara had put herself at risk, while my parents had put me at risk so they could go to a wedding.
“Parents get overwhelmed,” I said. “I’ve always been afraid I would. Get in over my head, I mean. Want to ditch the kid.”
She looked at me. “It was only for a while,” she said. “I could have gone back afterwards, but I was too proud. Maybe it didn’t have that much to do with me. Maybe any child could put any parent in that state.”
“I wasn’t trying to say that what happened to you wasn’t awful,” I said.
“Don’t be so quick to placate,” Dara said. She spoke quickly; her words were at once kind and emphatic. I felt sure that when she spoke again, there would be no italics—that her voice would continue with the same strangely un-Daraesque tone with which she’d first spoken. “It probably was the way you say,” she said. “I might have been the one who was so unforgiving.”
The waitress returned and took two desserts off the tray, then placed a pot of coffee on the table. She took a dish of unwrapped sugar cubes off the tray, and a little pitcher of milk. “There you are, ladies. Anything else?” she said.
“This is fine. Thank you,” I said.
“It’s more than fine. And I offer a toast to telling the truth,” she said, raising her empty cup.
I thought nothing, at that moment, about the cup’s being empty. I had no reason to think she was at all peculiar about how she sat in the restaurant, because all the tables for two were parallel to the windows. What I did wonder was who else knew this—whether she had confided in Tom, as well as Frank. If she had, that would certainly explain why they treated her gingerly. Perhaps why Tom quickly accepted the fact that she needed her own room. I looked at Dara, who was fighting back tears. A person didn’t stop distrusting adults just because that person became one, I thought.