In the Neighbourhood of Fame

by Bridget van der Zijpp

  There is the commercial aspect, of course. A positive review will escalate the bookings immediately, and a thorough rubbishing will have the opposite effect, but over the years you’ve learnt that this is something you have no control over once the show has started, so lately you’ve been able to read the reviews with slightly less personal investment than you used to have. And it’s a rarer thing than it used to be, receiving a printed review, with the thinning papers now showing a dwindling interest.

  The review for last night’s debut is terrible, one of the worst, and your composure is jolted, although you don’t immediately let Floyd see that. You understand your role as the manager here is never to make the others feel they are part of a failure, because failure is a kind of contagion that can jinx the next piece that’s coming along.

  Like all newly commissioned works, this play hasn’t come into the theatre cold. There’s been at least one constructive rehearsed reading, followed by a series of workshops, and then a full six-week rehearsal period. Some writers are so defensive they won’t or can’t acknowledge that certain words are dying on the lips of actors, but the young writer of Into the Vacuum had burned with desire for the play’s success, and worked with the director, adapting and refining until every scene seemed to sparkle.

  The play, about a family struggling with their son’s obsession with vacuum cleaners, has been nicely staged, so that it’s possible for the audience to experience that world, as the boy does, with a sense of rushing, mechanical musicality. And also to feel the exasperation of his family as if the boy were their own son. You’d found the trip down inside the belly of the 1968 Electrolux Model Z89 particularly charming, and funny too, with the dogmatically descriptive dialogue juxtaposing nicely with the whimsy of the set design and the demented effect created by the huge wind machine. The play’s metaphor about mental disorder was not overwrought – or at least when it was, it felt as if it was meant to be – and the dialogue never slipped into mawkishness but left the audience feeling positive about the accommodation of difference. The penultimate scene where the vacuum cleaners were ‘tuned’, alongside the boy’s school orchestra, to perform Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ was delightful. At the play’s conclusion the applause had been warm and long, so you’d left the theatre last night convinced you had a quirky little hit on your hands.

  By mid-morning Connor, the writer, comes into your office with the look of a person who is contemplating shooting himself in the head. He’s accompanied by his grandfather, George R. Vest, a well-known local character actor, who has a part in the play and whose face is now contorted with dismay on his grandson’s behalf. Floyd solicitously follows them in and says, ‘I’m so sorry about this morning’s paper. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Who is this guy anyway?’ George demands, the huge rattle of flesh under his chin, often employed to good comic effect on the stage, now trembling with loyal outrage.

  ‘He’s new,’ you tell them.

  ‘Listen to this …’ Connor picks up the paper. ‘This is the writer’s first work for the stage so it is no surprise, then, that the work is raw and lacks originality. Some members of the audience might have loved the treacly triumph of the autistic kid’s genius, or fallen for the contrived artifice of his obsession with vacuum cleaners, but really haven’t we seen the audacious savant before? Where are the truly fresh ideas, the challenging futurist perspective? This play would have been better if some apocalyptic event, like an alien invasion, had intervened mid-script. At least I wouldn’t have been so bored … And then he goes on to call it a desperately domestic construct …’

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘Arsehole.’

  ‘I really object to it being called a treacly triumph,’ Connor says. He seems to be fighting back tears. ‘And desperately domestic! I mean it’s not as if it’s really about vacuum cleaners. It’s about the obscure pleasures of a focused obsession, and I don’t think the ending was at the expense of the whole story, and I mean, I don’t think the perspective is completely unoriginal, is it?’ He has soft brown insightful eyes that now land on you beseechingly. He’s very intimately attached to this: his younger brother was the inspiration.

  You’d found the play quite affecting, but then that might be because, now you think about it, you’d felt it so personally. Seated in the audience, it had occurred to you that everybody in your life – your brother, your son, your husband Jed – was particularly singular and quite conceivably somewhere on the spectrum. You’d even been reminded that in the early days Jed sometimes used to wake in the morning and tell you about melodies that had come to him in his dreams in mathematical formulas. Afterwards he would spend an obsessive few hours, days sometimes, trying to recapture them.

  You can hardly bear the pleading in Connor’s eyes, but also can’t allow him to collapse under the weight of his humiliation, so you spend a few minutes running through the multitude of reasons you liked his work, breaking it down to specifics. The intensity in the way he focuses on your every word makes you feel an involuntary powerfulness. ‘I think that piece says more about the reviewer than the play. For whatever reason, he refused to be moved by it,’ you conclude. ‘I don’t think that was the audience’s experience.’

  Connor shifts in his seat and cheers up a little.

  You’d met the reviewer, Jean-Jacques Peller, at the opening. Dressed in black, with perhaps some eyeliner, his demeanour had immediately suggested he was quite impressed with himself, his down-sloping mouth conveying obvious disdain for what he saw as a conventionally mainstream environment. You’d wondered about the possibility of a French accent, but there wasn’t one.

  ‘What can we do? How do we repudiate this rubbish?’ George asks.

  ‘That’s difficult.’ This isn’t the first time in your life you’ve had a conversation like this.

  ‘Let’s ask the editor for an opportunity to print a response,’ George suggests.

  An audible sigh escapes you. After all these years in the business, he might know better. ‘I hate to say it, but it doesn’t really work that way. You can try, for example, contacting the editor and outlining your case, but I’m afraid it’s never very effective. And if it is printed you can come off seeming petulant and pissy.’

  ‘But surely this … this … muppet can’t just print bally crap like this that ruins, I say ruins, the play.’ George has developed a line of sweat on his forehead and he flaps the front of his shirt, much like Jed’s stepmother does when she’s having a flush. In his old age he is allowing himself to slide dangerously close to a caricature of a fruity old man.

  ‘It’s overdoing it, George, to say it ruins the play. Yes, it may have an initial effect on bookings but I’m sure word of mouth will be good.’

  ‘Look … you got a good review on this theatre review site,’ Floyd coaxes, tapping the laptop keys, then turning the screen towards them.

  ‘Yes, but how many people read that?’ Connor groans.

  ‘A lot, I think. It’s the go-to site. I’ve sent the link to our entire database this morning, so all our subscribers will have a chance to read it, and all our followers are linked in to it, and you can do the same with your own networks, and see this—’ he taps some more keys ‘—there is quite a buzz going on Twitter …’ Floyd relies almost entirely on the influence of social media, but a review line from Twitter doesn’t have much gravity in the publicity, so you’re privately lamenting the days when the print media took an active interest in openings and could draw the attention of the only casually interested.

  ‘But if you google it, guess what comes out on top … with that headline … “Into the Yawning Vacuum”.’

  The really bad news for them is that the online version of this review will live on, looming like an ominous shadow over any future dates for the work. It’s become noticeable these days that reviews often contain taints of those that have preceded them – that’s the slippery power of Google.

  ‘The trouble with this new guy is
he doesn’t seem to have learnt yet the difference between criticism and critiquing,’ Floyd says earnestly. ‘He’s gone to town to show how clever he is, and he doesn’t seem to have an inkling about the awful impact he might have. He’s made no effort at all to point at what was good about the play, what worked.’

  George slumps in his seat. ‘I don’t know why I even bother anymore. Already the world is full of Muppets. This is the Muppet generation who think culture is all about what So-and-so wore to the Oscars, and who they can shoot down in bally Grand Central Auto …’

  ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ Connor corrects him.

  ‘And along comes this bloody lad,’ George continues, ‘who goes around turning people off the theatre so that a whole generation will grow up without even an inkling about the transformative power of drama, or the way …’

  ‘Sorry,’ you say to Connor, standing to end the meeting. ‘I’m really sorry this has happened to you, because it’s a great piece of writing and it deserves an audience. We’ll do what we can, and I hope this doesn’t put you off.’ You’ve seen it before. Those who are so hurt by the brutality of bad reviews that it takes them years to recover, if at all. Jed, for example.

  After seeing Connor and George off, Floyd comes back into your office and exclaims, ‘What are we going to do about that pretentious twat? It will be terrible if all that stupid paper’s reviews are going to be like this.’

  ‘Well, hopefully he won’t last long. But Floyd, even if the worst comes to the worst and he stays on to write this kind of crap, the readership will quickly begin to see him as the slimer he is.’

  ‘You’re right, I suppose. But how long will that take? And remember you’ve got the quarterly board meeting next week. It couldn’t be a worse time for this. What are you going to say to them?’

  ‘Well, we could always take a contract out on him,’ you joke.

  ‘If only we could,’ he replies, his black eyes glittering darkly, giving him a look that suggests he is hazily speculating putting the call out to some distant avuncular Triad.

  And only because Floyd looks so disturbed, and experiences the powerlessness of this situation so feverishly, you mention, as if kidding around, the possibility of drafting a false-name letter to the editor along the lines of ‘I was in the audience and I felt your review was unfair …’

  On the walk home you begin to think about the reviews Jed got for his second album. Is it possible to say that they were unfair? People had been excited about it pre-release, its originality, but somehow he struck a public mood that wasn’t inclined to see it favourably. It essentially came down to one big review in one of the major dailies, one reviewer who set the tone that others followed. That’s the problem with being notable in New Zealand – it’s different from being notable elsewhere in the world. The population is so small, and the opportunity for over-familiarity so great, and really, it only takes one unbeliever. But would that have worked back then? ‘Dear sir, I’ve listened to that album and I felt your review was unfair …’ If only.

  You can’t sleep. You lie in bed. The night wears on. It’s quiet and calm, outside the window. Your husband, who never has trouble sleeping, slumbers on his pillow as if the world doesn’t have any concerning matters.

  You get up and wander down the long upper corridor of the house, looking through the gloom into Jaspar’s room, and then into the spare bedrooms, thinking it is an uncommon privilege to have so much space, to have rooms with no particular purpose. But also to love a house as much as this one is loved can be a curse, an obligation, a reason not to regard life with much sense of engagement. And if you were born to it, as Jed was, it might be possible to come to think of engagement as something difficult that happens elsewhere, outside these tall seducing walls.

  You find a place to lie down on the big old sofa in the upstairs back bedroom where you can’t be seen from the door. Mostly this room is used to store stuff that is too useful to keep in the downstairs back office, which is a hell-hole of dusty junk going back three generations. You don’t like opening the door to the back office because there is that feeling that history is slowly disintegrating in there, in all those things that date back to when this was the original farmhouse in the area. It’s probably irresponsible to leave it all to the nibblings of mice and moths and silverfish, but possible not ever to think about it unless you open the door.

  The junk here is, by comparison, reasonably recent. Things that might still have purpose are stacked against the wall in such a way that, if necessary, it could still be possible to locate them. Boxes of unsorted family photos, some redundant furniture, disused toys, but mostly Jed’s music things – his framed gold records, his abandoned recordings, his old four-track reel-to-reel, some weird percussion instruments, broken mics, cartons of exercise books with scribbled lyrics beginning with his earliest, pre-teen efforts. There’s a storm going on in our house / Dad’s ropeable and I don’t know why /She’s in a stink too /Keep waiting to get some kind of blame / Turns out I’m not even in the game. In this room, small balls of hair and dust scuff along the skirting boards like vaguely alive creatures, and you choose to do nothing more arduous than ignore them.

  You’d never had much of a relationship with the upstairs back bedroom until a few weeks ago, when you happened to be passing and were drawn to a sudden movement of clouds outside the window. They parted, allowing a shaft of sunlight to pool down onto the floor. You went in and pulled the old dining-room sofa across to the window, so that it collected up the sun’s rays, and then lay down, immediately dropping into a memorable dream in which every piece of clothing you’d ever owned was in that room – every favourite tee-shirt you’d had as a child, every dress you wore to every school dance, those dungarees you’d self-dyed a patchy forest green – and on that afternoon this became your favourite escaping place in the house. It is a good place, you have decided, to think about your marriage.

  ‘He’ll leave you broken-hearted,’ Terri, your old flatmate and now lost friend, predicted years ago when you first packed your bag to go off on tour with him.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re risking your degree like this for the sake of a man, a musician,’ Rita said. ‘What about our exam on Friday?’

  What might your life have been like if you’d listened? Overnight you’d decided you believed in huge romantic risk. Your first night with Jed had completely flipped you. He was not the first person you’d ever slept with, but he was the first to charm and delight you, and he made it seem worthwhile, essential even, to risk a considered future.

  Jed had told you that the only reason he came over to talk to you and your friends was that he could see you from the stage, propped up against the back of the bar, with looks on your faces like you were waiting to be impressed. In that sea of fawning undergraduates, you stood out for what you were – three music snobs, with free tickets from the student radio station you volunteered for, scornful of the student union for booking such a commercial act and waiting to have all your preconceptions confirmed.

  ‘There is something of the gallant pirate king about him,’ Rita conceded. ‘It’s the hair, I s’pose.’ But you saw much more than that.

  Watching him sing ‘Captain of the Rules’ for the first time, you realised that it might not be quite the rallying call to stupidity you’d first thought it was. You could sense the undertone, that the words came out of somewhere, from frustration or obstruction, or some other deep well. Those rampaging lyrics were probably not written with the same stonking sentiment they were received with. Most people there didn’t feel the need to look any further than the cocksure wattage of this one song’s chorus, stomping and shouting out the words. And he was playing their game, could inhabit the buffoon if need be. In part, that’s what made his impromptu offer, chanced in the rumpled aftermath of post-gig sex, so appealing – you’d already come to believe you were one of the few who really got him.

  ‘Mmm, you are the nicest-smelling person I’ve ever met,’ Jed had murmured into
your armpit that first night, and the next day you had no words to explain to your two friends how amazing, how flattering this had felt. ‘Come on tour with us,’ he’d suggested as you’d clung to each other, twisted together in the motel bed, unable and unwilling to sleep. ‘If you don’t mind seedy low-rent accommodation, and travelling in a van full of offensive man-smells.’

  When the sun started to come in through the courtyard window you checked that he really meant it: ‘Do you say that to all the girls?’

  ‘All what girls? You were my first, you know.’

  ‘First today?’

  When you’d gone on that tour with him, sleeping in scuzzy motels, watching how easily the other band members picked up girls for the night – wondering if you were little more than one of them – it seemed inconceivable that, after so much rapt attention radiating towards the stage, any of them would ever sleep alone. For most of that tour you wondered who Jed had been sleeping with before you came along. And every night you wondered who the lyrics – you’re a bad habit I’m sticking to / pulse raging / like a drugged fool – were written about.

  Oh, of course you don’t regret it. None of it. Although maybe you should have found a way to go on his very last tour, that Australian tour – travelling with that Scottish band, that bass player with the long, slutty fringe always flopping in her eyes. When he got back you’d wanted to ask him why you could never get hold of him, why was he never in his own room late at night? And for a few days you’d been utterly terrified because there was something so different about him. He couldn’t look you in the eye.

  Was it because that tour hadn’t been a success? He would only perform songs off his new album, refusing to play ‘Captain’, but crowds still demanded it. You’d hear about how he was sometimes bailed up afterwards by those who were left unfulfilled. He was having to come to the slow conclusion that his new album wasn’t getting the recognition he’d hoped for, and you’d worried about how he was consoling himself. When he came back, you avoided confirming any assumptions. You couldn’t afford to. You were still enslaved by your addiction to him, and Jaspar was such a tiny, needful baby.