The Tao of Humiliation

by Lee Upton

  Oliver laughed and stood. “It’s only a wonderful coincidence,” he said. “But I do hope that we’re all good friends. Stay a little while. If you had the seven dwarves for your own, what tasks would you allot them?”

  “Yes, please, sit down. This is Oliver’s favorite game,” Connie said.

  Shana was flooded with sympathy for Connie—and confusion. If she didn’t accept Oliver’s invitation, Shana felt that in some obscure way she would be hurting Connie, as if Connie needed her. Shana gathered her strength—the way she did whenever some new act came to the cultural center, some new set of brittle egos.

  “Oh no. Do our answers constitute a secret autobiography?” she asked. She accepted the chair Oliver offered, setting down her tray. “Well, my favorite is Doc. I guess it makes him sound like he has a medical degree. But you have to wonder about all of them. In Disney, they have names on their beds. So they don’t forget who they are—”

  “And get into the wrong bed,” Connie said.

  How creepy, Shana thought. Still, she tried to normalize the conversation. “They don’t look like they’re related, do they?” she said. She told herself that soon she’d never have to see this couple ever again.

  “Wasn’t there a dwarf named Gruesome?” Rachel asked.

  “Ah—we love you,” Oliver said, raising his glass. He looked as if he knew the dwarves were getting nowhere, especially with Rachel. He turned to Shana. “Do you think of your body as a project?” he asked.

  Shana looked at Oliver uncomprehendingly.

  “Answer me truthfully,” Oliver said. “So what is it? Do you think of your amazing, unforgettable body as a project?”

  “Why are you being so invasive with Shana?” Rachel said.

  “I think you’re misinterpreting an innocent question. I was only trying to be attentive. Projects. We all have goals.”

  “I’m not interested in projects,” Shana said. “I’m on vacation.”

  “Oliver, I want you to answer Rachel’s question,” Connie said. “Why are you troubling Shana?”

  “I’m hoping for some sort of response. I’m getting agitated by the number of people here who treat their bodies like projects. Like paint-by-number kits. I’m only asking for a fresh point of view. It’s ugly—the way people treat their bodies.”

  “And this depresses you?” Connie asked.

  “It doesn’t depress you?”

  “No. It reveals a certain amount of practicality,” Connie said. “The body is the one area where people can have some control.”

  “You would think the sheer number of treatments here—mud, milk, massage—” Shana began.

  “You’ve got the m’s down,” Oliver said.

  Shana tried again. “You’d think the treatments would make everybody look like walking bruises. Except for maybe the salt baths. Acupuncture all over the place. People getting plugged full of holes.”

  Connie and Oliver exchanged a glance and laughed. Shana felt it in the air—some agreement had been made between them.

  “God, I love morbidity,” Oliver said. “I knew we’d all get along. Except for Rachel. You can’t stand me, Rachel, can you?”

  Shana’s impulse was to stand up and leave, but Rachel wasn’t moving. It was almost as if Rachel wasn’t listening at all. But then, she was from a large family. She probably had a lot of practice ignoring people.

  “That’s one of the mysteries,” Oliver said. “Instant antipathy.”

  “Oliver has that effect,” Connie said. “I wanted to murder him after I first met him. It took me about five minutes to decide he ought to be destroyed.”

  “Like a rabid dog,” Oliver said.

  “Yes, you ought to be put down,” Connie answered him.

  “If Rachel would give me a chance—” Oliver said.

  “Really, Oliver,” Connie interrupted. “There’s hardly time for a chance. Why should she spend her vacation catering to an imperfect stranger?”

  “You’re right. As always. Thank goodness Shana at least tolerates me.”

  Shana was rescued by steel guitars. On the stage near the potted palms a woman in a bushy skirt turned in a spotlight. “Ouch,” Oliver said. “Ouch.” He thrust his head forward and backward as if the rotations on stage were aimed at him. Shana felt such intense irritation that she pushed her chair back. But now Rachel was gone—nowhere in sight. Rachel was only interested in her own escape. She hadn’t even signaled Shana, as if Shana could take care of herself. And of course I can, Shana thought.

  She looked at the nearby tables for the boy from the lake and felt almost giddy relief that she didn’t see his innocent face again. She probably should apologize to him. She should tell him that she didn’t mean to make him unhappy, that it was a mistake. But then, he was so young he wouldn’t know what she was talking about. He wouldn’t even know why he had suddenly been scared and got out of the water. He had good instincts. Anyway, why hadn’t she discovered rum earlier in her life? Who first discovered rum? Or could you really discover rum? Wasn’t it more like an invention? The rum she was drinking was remarkable. No, it was more than remarkable. It was marvelous—as if you could distill the garden of Eden, all those flowers and fruits.

  At some point Connie left, silently, except for leaving a pyramid of money, enough for all their drinks and a tip. Wasn’t Connie always to be in attendance? Wasn’t she Oliver’s handler? Weren’t Oliver and Connie the most artificial couple Shana had ever met? Some of the most unwholesome people?

  “Oh, darling, nothing to fear from me,” Oliver said, as if reading her thoughts came naturally to him. He smiled a full, breath-taking smile. “Stay here with me for about twenty more minutes,” he said. “Just enough to keep Connie waiting.”

  “She leaves you alone with women you hardly know? Is that an agreement between you?”

  “Now that you mention it, it should be. I ought to negotiate for the right to be left alone to have rum punch with young girls and then make them want to crouch in the bushes with me. The instant I laid eyes on you I told Connie: she’s the one.”

  “The one what?”

  “The right one.”

  The morning sunlight was sweeping away all evidence of a light rain. The courtyard was alive with rustlings in the miniature palms. Shana and Rachel were sitting on the balcony outside their suite. Shana told herself that last night was nothing she would ever enter into again.

  She remembered images most—the flash of the bedroom as she stumbled out of the suite, and Connie looking old and wizened in an aqua nightgown, her legs folded under her. And Oliver, his withered face hanging upside down.

  “Was it sickening?” Rachel asked. “It had to be sickening.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “They probably didn’t even give us their real names. But it’s your life,” Rachel said. “Did they ask you what dwarf you wanted to be?”

  “We didn’t get that far.”

  Shana could see it again: Connie on the lumpy bed and more drinks on a table and then Shana saw herself as if she hovered above her own body: she was vomiting on the rug’s circles. Then she saw her head plunging against the carpet and then she saw thick yellow carpet fibers. Oliver’s hands were on her waist. He wanted to move her into another room, but Shana was trying to stand, and stumbling, swinging her arms, pushing him away and lurching out the door and through the corridor to the exit and down the shrub-lined path before she made herself stop, the dawn spinning around her. It took all her effort to stay on her feet, as if she were leaning over a cliff. She heard a padding sound behind her. A jogger passed in a sizzle of nylon—too close—almost brushing her shoulder.

  Below Shana and Rachel’s balcony a couple were already soaking in the whirlpool. They lifted themselves out of the water, both of them pink and steaming, the color of shrimp, with tattoos on their legs, at the upper thigh of each, at her right thigh, his left.

  “My little brother—the youngest, the one you met last month—called last night,” R
achel said. “He can’t wait till we get home. He kept asking about you.”

  Shana was glad that they would be going soon—glad to leave their suite, which was cramped with its small, fussy circles on the wallpaper and the rugs and the bedspreads. She wanted to have time to think, and she could think better when she was alone.

  So far she had arrived at only a few conclusions: what some people wanted was for other people to stop thinking. People like that imagined you were just like them, that you understood that they were proposing a game and that you were in on the game. That’s how everything started: people believed you were playing a game like their game and punished you for ruining the game, or else you learned how to punish yourself for them.

  Nevertheless, there was some lesson she kept avoiding or missing. She just had to be careful. And no more pretending.

  No more pretending to feel something when she didn’t.

  No more pretending not to feel something when she did.

  No more pretending to be helpless, witless, accommodating, eager, small, young.

  The Undressed Mirror

  An actor is an undressed mirror

  reflecting an audience’s light.

  The audience must never know

  the mirror is what they see—

  and that is why the mirror rises before them undressed

  as an ordinary creature of

  ordinary flesh,

  yet casting silver light.

  —Yanis Karlotz, trans. by Eavan Liss

  I hadn’t been able to renew the lease on my apartment, and that was the least of it. It was a miracle when Jocelyn called and asked if I would watch over The Blue Oyster while she was in Ghana for three weeks. The hotel would be closed during her absence, but she still needed a caretaker. The woman Jocelyn had hired for the purpose bailed.

  All this was arranged over the phone. Jocelyn’s warnings and recommendations grew so complex that I began taking notes. I wished then that I could talk about the entire situation with my mother. I still regularly have the urge to phone her until I remember. No calling her. No hearing that voice ever again.

  Had Jocelyn known she was saving me? When I was a kid I seldom entered Jocelyn’s quarters behind The Blue Oyster’s reception desk—not into the tiny rooms dank with humidity, including the miniature kitchen. Instead I spent a lot of time in the foyer where Jocelyn and my mother drank vodka with lime and reminisced until they bored my brother Robin and me, while hotel guests came and went.

  And now I was, once again, after all those years, looking around the foyer, relieved that I had somewhere to live and wouldn’t hear over the phone Robin’s relentless stock advice and my sister-in-law’s nervous questions. Everything in the foyer looked eerily preserved: the dried pampas grass in jade urns, the mahogany buffet, the liver-colored marble fireplace shadowed with decades of soot. Even the afghans on the foyer couches were the same as I remembered, except that their orange yarn was faded to pale sherbet.

  I was the changed one. No more stage work. No more even trying to call myself an actress. Eamon used to correct me: You’re an actor. Say actor, not actress. I never minded being called an actress. It rhymes with distress, progress, regress, undress, I told Eamon.

  I had been lucky in actors, Eamon being my favorite. I had almost worked as well with Esther Wilno-Medi who could unfreeze most actors, thaw and remold instincts—who even turned a switch on Paulie Matheres, who went on to survive on standup comedy alone. But in the end neither Esther nor Eamon could work magic for me.

  It was Eamon who had to walk me offstage, Eamon who took my arm and drew me away when I was unable to speak another word in the second act of a play that should not have given me any trouble whatsoever.

  One of the tasks I set myself at Jocelyn’s hotel: cleaning out the lost and found room. Fifteen years of accumulated junk. Jocelyn asked me to keep anything I liked but to give away the rest or to dispose of what couldn’t be saved. In the first box I pulled out five hooded jackets and three negligees with butterflies, twelve socks, and at least twenty pornographic magazines. Within four hours I had cleaned only half of the room—enough to fill twelve boxes for the Clauden Charities, ahead of the annual jumble sale advertised in the bulletin that turned up on the hotel’s doorstep that morning.

  After another half hour of sorting I was making quicker progress when, at the bottom of a collapsed cardboard box, a filmy square of cloth slipped between my fingers. I shook the fabric into the light. A dress, its fabric so fine it could have been spun from thistledown. The stitching looked done by hand, and the material smelled faintly of lavender. You were lost and now you’re found, you beautiful thing.

  I hung the dress behind the door of my room where in a draft the featherlight fabric rose like a pale Titania.

  “Are you in your car?” I asked.

  Eamon’s phone gave out an eerie echo. “No. I’m at home. With soup. Maybe you’re hearing me eat soup?” I thought of the astonishingly limber way Eamon could cross a stage on his knees. That night he would be in another dinner-theater mystery beneath his talents. There were pirates. “Yesterday, someone—five minutes in—shouted, correctly, that my character was the murderer,” he said. “No one believed her. Plus, we changed the ending. At intermission we had Amanda Watts ad lib a confession. It made no sense, but everyone loved it. Amanda most of all.”

  His voice sounded strange before he finished talking, as if he regretted mentioning anything connected to acting. Not for the first time the thought occurred: for how long would Eamon respect me? We had worked together in drafty former barns, the wooden beams above us pitted by termites, dust burning in our throats. Caspar’s Wedding was enough to make me believe we’d pressed a lifetime of quarrels, heartache, stupefaction, and panic into one run-through. And in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Demetrius he had spurned me as an addled Helena (“I am your spaniel”). I had loved the role—the desperate, lovesick woman, willing to betray even her closest friend for a man who didn’t want her. As far as women are concerned, the play should be a tragedy. But Eamon—my deepest friend in the art—what did he think of me now? How long could he keep on, kindly dealing with what I had become when it was incomprehensible to us both?

  I asked him what else he was working on, and when he spoke again his voice relaxed. “I’m resurrecting ‘The Undressed Mirror.’ A ten-minute piece. You remember—it’s based on that poem about actors being undressed mirrors.”

  “Instead of undressed people.”

  “I’m working on a few things, but I don’t want to give up on, you know, nakedness of any sort.”

  “Have you seen Sofie’s movie?” I asked.

  “I don’t think it’s opened yet. And I don’t think she’s working right now. That can be dangerous.”

  “Her last movie—she did well with that,” I said. “At least it opened in theaters.”

  “She won’t be in the sequel unless they raise the dead. But at least there’s this new movie. I’m looking forward to that. She told me she’s going to invite herself over to the hotel. She’s probably the last thing you need.”

  It was then that I asked the question: “Eamon, what was it like for you?”

  “What was what like?”

  “When you had to take me off the stage. Audry Alains said I looked like a ‘leftover zombie.’ That’s a direct quote. What did it look like to you?”

  It was impossible for me to understand what happened when Eamon led me away while the audience applauded out of pity and confusion. And I could not understand why it happened again the next night. And then the next. After that I wouldn’t allow anyone to talk me into performing again.

  The phone was full of windy spaces. Eamon hesitated before he said, “Do you remember that Christopher Durang play The Actor’s Nightmare? The guy thinks he’s in Hamlet then he’s in—what?—Blithe Spirit?—maybe. Then it’s A Man for All Seasons—and then the actor is beheaded and can’t take his curtain call? Claire, you turned the evening experimental. As for
that zombie description by Audry. It doesn’t work. Except: remember this: remember, zombies are popular. Really popular. They’ll never not be popular. Just blow through it. Listen. You must have looked great to the audience. A total emptying out of personality and will. You were like a statue there—and a lot of people must have thought it was just part of the play. Galatea turning back into marble or something.”

  I could hear him breathe again. Trying to breathe for me.

  Sofie attempted to call me while I was talking to Eamon. She left a message: “Don’t tell me there’s no room at the inn. Not when you live in a hotel. I’m not sure what time of day I’ll get there or when. I’ll let you know—soon. Hah! Very soon. Don’t worry. About entertaining me. I’ll entertain myself. I certainly can’t entertain anyone else these days. When it opens be sure to skip my movie, promise? It’s eerie and stupid. It will bore you. Skip it. Promise me you’ll skip it. Speaking of eerie, you’re aware that I’m coming to cheer you up, right? So we’ll see each other in Clauden—at last.” It was a long message and it wasn’t over. She began recounting her week’s schedule, which involved three consecutive parties with actors we both had worked with.

  When I called her back, Sofie said, “Your life sounds like The Shining meets Nights at Rodanthe. Or like one of Eamon’s plays. Have you heard about his Alfred Hitchcock comedy? With a chorus.”

  “I thought it was about a woman in a haunted hotel.”

  “He’s not going to profit from your freaky situation. His play’s haunted by Hitchcock’s movies. Not the crappy ones. He’s not going to put anyone through Topaz. It’s a collage—montage—whatever. There’s some Rear Window sampling. It’s like this giant apartment complex, and there’s the Marnie window with this superheated sexually suggestive scene. A nude fox chase. He needs more of those. And then there’s the Vertigo window where people keep falling off stepladders. It’s a fantasia on suspense. I bet that in Eamon’s fantasies you’d work with Hitchcock. You’d be perfect. Like Tippi Hedren. Not Kim Novak. Even less like Eva Marie Saint.”

  “I’m not blonde.”