by Lee Upton
For at least five musicals and two farces he had reviewed her and suffered.
It was queasy-making just to watch her. No matter where Roger Dillingham sat in the theater, she seemed close to him, and intimate with him, and he felt manipulated. Afterwards, when he got back to his apartment and fired up his word processor, he atomized her faults until the fug dissipated.
Why couldn’t the theater ever put on a meaningful production for charity—something on the order of Mother Courage, or a stage version of The Battle of Algiers?
It was no wonder that Roger Dillingham felt compelled to praise John Fostergarth. The rumor was that Fostergarth vomited in a towel before performances. He was the perfect foil for Molly Crane. He was far worse than she could ever be. And the costume designer, the abominable Mary Achtenberg. Well, if Roger Dillingham didn’t praise anything in the production his editor would think he was being unfair.
Roger Dillingham rested on a chaise lounge, his legs stretched out before him while the turquoise waters of the swimming pool ricocheted light. When he looked up from his novel, he saw Molly Crane.
A boy with a beach ball walked behind her and she swiveled. Why was she here at the Circle of Health in her yellow swimsuit, her hair flattened on the back of her head like a pancake?
Roger himself wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t been hoodwinked by his aged parents, who agreed to donate to three charities an amount equal to that of a ten-day stay at the Circle of Health. Given that Roger had so little money and was proud of it, they paid for his airfare too. His mother came to his apartment and stepped over the tottering cascades of charity brochures. She stood before him in a gypsy peasant dress, a thick, bullish old woman whose long-practiced aversion to anything but her family’s physical comfort and aesthetic enjoyment stunned him. Rather than agree to donate out of the goodness of her heart to any number of worthy causes, she struck a deal. “You yourself are a worthwhile cause,” she said. “You yourself are a charity case.” She and his father were perfectly content to plunge all their energy into interior decoration, long-term upscaling of the arboretum, and the mass-marketing of bonsai. Roger could never make up for his parents’ profligate ways, their studious avoidance of reality. They were the products of their own fantasies. They would never let him ignore them. They were two elderly cases of arrested development. And now here he was, sunk in a hub of self-infatuation, of fatuous overindulgence: a health complex.
But why should Molly Crane be at a health resort, her legs thicker at the thighs than he expected, laid out on her own chaise lounge? Why should she need to restore her undeniably good health? She could bounce through five matinées and four supper shows a week.
Roger twisted about to get a better view of her, just as her own head snapped around and he was caught staring. Her bangs were plastered to her forehead like a Roman centurion’s. Her eyes were almost purple, as if dipped in some strange planetary gas. She knew him. He knew she recognized him. He ducked.
Someone must have pointed Roger out to her one night at the theater, and now she had at least two choices: snub him or confront him. She reached into her straw bag and drew out her sunglasses, swung her legs over the side of her chaise lounge, grabbed her straw bag, and slung her towel over her arm. He had seen her enough in the theater to know she was about to call out to him. There it was: that grim thrust to her jaw. Her broad mouth opened slightly, gasping with concentration.
Oh God save me, Roger nearly cried aloud. But he could thank his stars: she had a knot of teenagers to make her way around before she could reach him. Roger didn’t even bother to pick up his detective novel. He rose, and then, with deep embarrassment, for he hated the thought of Molly Crane seeing him in his swimming trunks, he turned and fled. He could imagine what he looked like to her from behind: the landslide of his backside muscles.
He wound his way between metal tables and nearly tripped over one whining toddler as the walkway curved. He passed a stretch of bungalows and a patch of young women who stared at him unselfconsciously.
He knew Molly Crane’s type: she wanted to get him alone, out among the banana palms, and give him a very loud piece of her mind.
His chest felt ready to explode, but his hotel room was well beyond the gift shop, and he doubted he could keep up his pace and make it to his room. When his breathing grew even more labored, he paused and looked back. At least twenty yards separated him from her, but she was still heading toward him, the black ovals of her sunglasses glinting.
A couple in swimsuits and thongs blocked his way. What now? A tiki shed rose to his right, unoccupied. Fronds crisscrossed near him in a Polynesian tableau.
He was practically running when, suddenly, he was sure he was alone. He couldn’t see Molly Crane in any direction. He had come full circle, back to the gate of the pool.
Once more he stretched out on the same chaise lounge he had vacated. He picked up his detective novel. He couldn’t remember who the victim was, but the top of his head and his arms were burning, and his breathing wasn’t yet under control, and he was staring into the pages of his book trying to make the words stay still when she sat next to him, lowering herself into a chaise lounge.
Molly Crane shifted her weight and took off her sunglasses, and it occurred to Roger that she no longer intended to speak to him but to bully him with her gummy physical presence, her thick thighs and long calves and tiny ankles where he thought—the sweat kept running into his eyes—he could see a pulsebeat. She made his own body look like a burst sausage, like a big useless sack that he was stuck in. He despised himself for hating his body, for allowing himself to feel any concern for his body when there were so many more important things to think about in the world. Virtually anything. Anything was more important.
When he could look up, Roger saw that a couple were stirring themselves into the whirlpool near the tiki shed. Even Molly Crane wouldn’t follow him into the close orbit of a pair of lovers in a hot tub. She wouldn’t go to such a length. She couldn’t berate him over the noise of the spray jets. A woman like that demanded to be heard.
And, anyway, if he could catch his breath maybe he would be the one Molly Crane should worry about. Maybe he would be the one to start shouting. Maybe she would be the one to be terrorized. Maybe she would be the one who was afraid to be torn apart. He could eviscerate her and pull out her voice box and send all her bodily organs floating in the whirlpool like so much dim sum. He could show her what this world is all about. Because, Molly Crane, I want you to know it’s not made of musical romances for unhinged women—and then, his breath catching, he vividly recalled watching her sing onstage, full-throated, her dreamy eyes gazing upward. What was she so emotional about? She was singing “Hello, Young Lovers” to a plank of plywood in the upper balcony.
Molly Crane was sure it was him. Dang! She was practically jogging to keep him in sight after she discovered him at the swimming pool. She had thought she lost him for a while there. But then she was smart enough to work her way around the pool past the white metal tables with their giant umbrellas, and she trotted right up to his chaise lounge, right up close to him, letting her shadow fall onto his paperback.
Maybe she had only imagined that he was running away. He might not even know who she is—looking like this, out of stage makeup and no longer in one of those ridiculous wigs that Mary kept insisting she wear.
She couldn’t believe it: Roger Dillingham. Dang!
Here was the man who made her want to crawl and die after every opening night at the playhouse. Yes. Roger Dillingham, the man John referred to as the MOB—Mean Old Bastard.
If only she could get Roger Dillingham to stop being so harsh. His harshness was inhibiting everyone—Neddy, Alfred, Germaine, Christopher, Margaret, Barney Kim, John. They were all depressed. Poor John took it hardest. By the end of any opening night he was throwing up air. And John had been through so much. He was the best brother in the world, the sweetest, the kindest. Their father used to joke: any closer and you’d be twins.
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But why was Roger Dillingham standing up now? Stay, she wanted to beg him. Stay. If she could only get up the nerve to talk to him, really talk to him, and convince him how hard she tried. She was even going to be taking lessons in Macon from a woman who had worked on two soap operas. You can be put through nearly every emotion in a soap opera: all those funerals and weddings and kidnappings and electrocutions and courts of law. And Molly was going to try so hard to learn how to act. She was. She was the first to admit she couldn’t imagine what she was good at on the stage—unless it was playing a woman older than herself. She was twenty-three years old and Roger Dillingham kept writing about her as if she were ancient. But she had gone through things, so he must be intuitive. She was a widow, after all. Even if she wasn’t good at being a widow. She hardly had begun to love her husband enough—but that was because John was so much in the way. There. She admitted it. John was in the way.
She watched, stiffening with anxiety, as Roger Dillingham padded off—until she saw that he was aiming for the whirlpool. So. He wasn’t avoiding her after all. The back of his head gleamed above the pool’s rim.
In the name of her brother John, in the name of poor wonderful John, Molly Crane dropped her towel and sprinted after Roger Dillingham. Any musical is no more believable than the contents of a snow globe, she told herself, but you have to believe, you have to give your spirit to it. And she couldn’t help but want better things for the playhouse, and for John. She imagined that Roger Dillingham’s eyes would harden with dislike if he recognized her. But surely this was because he couldn’t see into her heart.
A nice-looking couple were vacating the pool when Molly began to lower herself just two jets away from her reviewer on his side of the curve.
Dang! Infernal whirlpool heat! My loving God! Dang!
Molly breathed steam into her lungs. What if her skin slid off her bones like a boiled chicken’s?
All right. She would live.
And couldn’t the heat stimulate a conversation? Surely she could start a conversation with Roger Dillingham about the heat. She could say: Excuse me, do you believe you have any skin that’s not parboiled? The suction too—the suction. She had heard of people sucked to the bottom of whirlpools. Years ago someone had warned her: Never duck your head under the water. She could start up a conversation about the suction. She couldn’t help but imagine John’s comment if he were here: You can tell Roger Dillingham he really sucks.
She took another breath, and another and another, and then the heat didn’t feel bad at all. She closed her eyes and leaned backward and felt the sun play against her eyelids. She had a little time to get up her courage. Roger Dillingham wouldn’t have submerged himself up to his neck if he didn’t intend to stay and get a good soaking. A good soaking could only blanch out bad feelings, and Molly hoped a good soaking would leach away her own faults: my pettiness, she thought, my resentment, my small-mindedness. God, make me your vessel.
She trained her eyes away from his. It was worse than being in an elevator. You couldn’t let your eyes linger. You looked up or out to a tiny point just lower in space than a man’s armpit. Otherwise your eyes were violating him. You held yourself back as a courtesy. At most you might make a comment about the weather—language that meant, We won’t harm each other. John. John sometimes used an old expression of their mother’s: “Don’t worry. They can’t eat me.” Not that John believed such wisdom.
It would take a little longer and she would loosen up, that was all, and start a conversation. She didn’t have to accost Roger Dillingham at once. She didn’t have to give him the impression that she was stalking him. She could make it look as if the realization of his identity came upon her slowly, here in the churning waters under a burning sun. The recognition shouldn’t appear forced. She knew her face was as wet as a seal’s and flushed, and that even if she introduced herself, it would take him a minute to connect the name with the face.
How bad could Roger Dillingham be? He liked John after all. In his reviews he was always praising John more than anyone else, except for Mary. That was because he understood how remarkable John was. When not even three specialists could figure out what was wrong with John—that’s when John wanted to act at the playhouse. And who could say no to him? Everyone thought he was dying—all through My Fair Lady, all through South Pacific, all through A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. But then right during the second week of The Fantasticks there was the miraculous transformation. But even then he was still dependent on her, afraid of every little thing and of everyone but her. And then he invested his entire inheritance from their parents into the playhouse.
“You know you’ve made it when they hate you,” John said about the reviews. But if Molly could get some constructive criticism, if she could find out why she was held in contempt by Roger Dillingham, the only person who ever reviewed community theater in the county . . .
Although she feared his answer: she wasn’t convincing as a woman falling in love. And she knew why: she couldn’t love—not in the normal way. She couldn’t initiate the emotional progression. John didn’t die, but her husband did, and she wasn’t there for him. She hadn’t been there for him or seen his death and hadn’t begun to love him maturely, no, and now she could never love again. Except for John, who was at this hour up in their room napping, because he was so skinny, and he needed so much rest before he met with the acupuncturist. And somehow she was sure Roger Dillingham sensed how distanced she was from mature love, from the desires of the women she impersonated. And she worried now that her own love for John was harmful. It kept John from a real life, so that he was a dandy at the racetrack or an ambassador of the British empire every weekend when he could be finding someone to love him now that it looked like he was going to live a lot longer. You can’t stop people from wanting love. And Molly knew she had hardly brought her love to bear before Anthony left the house and got into their car and never came back again and then there was his body at the funeral parlor. Unrecognizable because of the accident. Like a dummy body.
She and Anthony had been kids in some ways. Married for less than a year. What she had to give Anthony had only begun to chirp inside her. It was nothing compared to what she would have given him if they had been together for even one more year. Because it takes time, because it’s a risk to love someone so much, it’s a discipline, and she was weak. She was as miserable at being a wife as she was at being an actress. She was only now beginning to have the heart to admit it, almost to relax into the horrible truth.
John, she thought suddenly, John could learn to relax more too. “You’re so anxious,” she said to him only this morning right before they checked into the resort. “But anxiety’s so funny,” he said.
She knows that John doesn’t feel like an alien at the resort—already she knows this. She felt a change in him even as they waited for their luggage. He complained about being tired. That was to be expected, but there was something else, some flicker of withheld excitement mixed in with his anxiety. She would have to steel herself against the pressure he would put on her to change her life again for him. He couldn’t imagine her outside his life anymore. Even though they both were young. Young and stunted, she thought.
A weight struck Molly Crane’s neck. Roger Dillingham’s head nestled into her neck, and without thinking, with only instinct to guide her, she said, “No, you can’t stay, sir.” His body turned heavily and his legs must have folded because he began sliding down her shoulder. She pushed at his shoulder and raised her knees to try to keep his big head from going under the water, and then she shouted and knew she was shouting loudly, more loudly than she had imagined she could before the water stung up high into her nose and the sounds of the bubbling whirlpool jets and the children’ voices echoing from the swimming pool came to her distorted curiously as if everything around her was pushing her head down under the water, for here Molly was, going under with the mammoth slippery head, even while another part of her was calmly considering th
e situation and gathering one clear thought: Thank you, God, for my vocal training.
She lurched forward and wrapped her arms under Roger’s arms, but she was sliding again and Roger was suckered onto her. The jets gushed and pulsed into her ears. She was losing her footing, and foamy water was splashing just as the lifeguard—a muscular, orange-haired woman—ran up blowing a whistle, and another lifeguard ran off blowing a whistle in the opposite direction—and Molly thought of Anna of The King and I who whistled a happy tune to disguise fear, and Molly thought it’s no good, whistling only annoys people, only annoys people, only annoys people. But then the lifeguard was pulling Roger Dillingham off Molly Crane like he was a great big octopus. And Molly, gasping, said, “I’m okay, I’m okay.” She flipped her body onto the cement and told the lifeguard—who at last drew Roger Dillingham’s body onto the cement too and worked over his flesh and began flagging—“He’s a good man, you can’t give up, he couldn’t be a better man.”
The lifeguard threw her hands in the air and clenched her fists and bent to her task again, pummeling Roger Dillingham’s chest with desperate new energy. She pumped at Roger’s chest as if she knew he couldn’t be a better man . . . as if she could save his life and with it his world, his unforgiving world that had never once satisfied him since he was a boy, never once since the days when he hadn’t yet learned to read but liked to sing and do little pretend-magic tricks and even teach a dog how not to snap at a pork chop for a count of three while his mother laughed and said, “You are an imp. You are a pill. You are everything, everything, everything I ever dreamed of.”
Will Anyone Ever Know Me
What did she know? What had been done to her?
The woman woke in the night and asked her husband, “Is she here?”