Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  She hooked a heel over the rung of a stool, leaned against the makeshift bar, pushed her shoulders back, offering cleavage and a glimpse of lace beneath her dressing gown’s plunging neckline. Damien—Beau—held the Jim Beam bottle by its neck. “Of course I’m going to be hitting bars,” he said. “Picking up other women.” His hand shook as he filled his shot glass. Maud held hers out, but he ignored it. “I mean, look at you. You’re a joke. You keep telling me you’re leaving, but all you do is sit around all day in your fancy underwear.”

  Maud tipped her glass and then her chin up, and in testament to Emma Bovary, flicked her tongue to gather the last drops coating the bottom of her glass. Her lips decorated the rim with a semicircle of Flamingo Red. Her fingernails were painted a purply red, the color of new blood. She crossed her legs and let the robe fall open, revealing, just as she’d planned, a stretch of shiny thigh.

  “I couldn’t remember what came next,” she told Driver. “All I knew was when he shouted I was supposed to turn over the coffee table. I don’t know what lines I dropped before that.”

  Damien yelled. A puff of white feathers waved at her from the tops of her heeled slippers. She stood, and wobbling on three-inch spike heels, watched red fingernails on what appeared to be someone else’s hands disappear under the edge of the coffee table. She lifted, shoved. Magazines slapped to the floor. The thump of the table followed.

  Damien grabbed her arm and pulled her to him. Minuscule drops of sweat beaded the muscled planes of his bare torso, the wings of his nose, his upper lip. Maud wondered if the bronze of his skin was the product of a tanning booth and then shook her head, concentrating on the heat of the Delta outside, the buzz of mosquitoes, the smell of gardenias, something that would anchor her before she floated away.

  “You ain’t goin’ nowhere.” He held her by her upper arms too tightly, but she could use that. “Beau. Honey-darlin’, you’re hurting me!” She writhed a little, trying to escape.

  He turned her into the curve of his arm. They stared out. On the fourth wall, against the yawning dark of the auditorium, they had placed a window. During rehearsal they’d agreed the panes were dirty and the curtains yellow. Maud locked her eyes on the space where the valance would be, glad that the bright lights glaring down at them from the back and sides of the theater kept the faces of her classmates invisible. Nothing, however, could keep her awareness from floating towards Nikos, sitting in the front row. The light spilling from the stage caught his white Reeboks. He bent to scribble something in his notebook.

  “You make me laugh,” Damien’s lips moved against her ear. “You’ll never leave. A woman never leaves when she’s gettin’ it good.” He slid his hand into the top of her dressing gown.

  It was time for the moan. She’d worked on it endlessly. “Ooooh,” she’d tried. “Aaaah.” Over and over, alone in her car on the freeway, when she was in the shower and the noise of running water would drown her out, when Miles was working on a song in his study with earphones on. “Oooaaah.” In spite of her efforts, Miles had several times asked, “What? Maud, did you say something?”

  She closed her eyes and dropped her head back on Damien’s shoulder. “Oooooh,” she breathed, trying to convince the audience, convince herself, when all she felt was the pull of Damien’s damp hand across her skin. “Ooh, honey.” His fingers touched, backed away from, the edge of her bra. “Beau, don’t.”

  He pulled her closer. “You’ll never find what I got, babe. Not what I give you, huh? Not anywhere else.” Hand along her jaw, he pulled her face towards him. Her neck twisted, awkward with the effort to get her mouth into a position where he could reach it with his. His lips gleamed, then pressed against hers. His eyes stayed open for a moment too long, staring into hers, glazed with fear.

  “Go on, go on,” he muttered. He pulled her around to face him, so her back was to the class, and supported her as her hands slid down his chest. She knelt in front of him. She moaned again, feeling inutterably foolish.

  “Go on,” he said.

  Maud pulled at the leather belt, its sudden erect flap slipping out of the buckle. The false fingernails she’d applied for the scene made it awkward to draw down the zipper of his fly. Silence hung over the stage, over the auditorium. She knelt there, staring at the triangle of his red silk underwear until he took a breath and said, “End of scene.”

  “Jesus,” Driver said. “Sexy stuff. Is that the sort of thing people usually do in an acting class?”

  “Not at all. Nikos had asked me to work on revealing myself. So that’s what I was concentrating on. It was awful. He got us up on stage and made us try it again.”

  The wood of the stage beneath the lights was warm against her bare feet as she walked towards Damien and placed herself inside the niche of his arm. An acrid scent rose from him, a smell of poisoned sweat, a smell of fear. In a high voice Damien said to Nikos, “You want me to do that part where I feel her breast again and everything?”

  Nikos’ eyebrows swarmed across his forehead like large antennaed beetles. He raised them, pushing his head back to examine Damien. “You don’t need to hide your sexual preferences from us, Damien. Or protect them. But what we’re doing here is called acting. So act.”

  Maud tapped a finger against Damien’s hand where it lay beneath hers, although she felt in no position to give reassurance.

  “And you, Maud.” Nikos shook his head. The leko lights above the stage highlighted the white woven in among his black hair. “What am I going to do with you, Maud?”

  Maud swallowed. She would not cry this time.

  “All this stuff.” Nikos reached out and pinched a bit of the gauzy gown between finger and thumb. “When I suggested you find a scene in which you could work on revealing yourself, I wasn’t talking clothing.”

  Driver’s belly moved against hers as he laughed. He raised his head to look at her and shook his head.

  “Exactly,” she said. “It’s so obvious. What was I thinking? And yet the costume had been the only place I could think to begin.” She did not fill Driver in about her choice of underwear. She’d worn a flesh-colored thong, so she would look naked beneath the silk robe. A saleswoman had helped her find a bra with underwiring and padding. “Now that’s nice,” the woman had told her, head cocked to one side, assessing. “Your breasts look pert. He’ll like that.”

  She’d never shown Miles, to see if he’d like her breasts pert or not. And the bra had stayed behind, in the top drawer of her dresser in L.A.

  She had even painted her toenails for the scene. The drop decorating her little toe stared up at her.

  “Maud?” Nikos waited for her to look at him. “Hanging out over the abyss, getting out on that limb, revealing your guts, turning your insides out for others to see, is something you must demand of yourself. It’s what this is all about.” His gesture took in the stage, the auditorium, the lights overhead. “We are working—so hard! It takes so much work!—to create a moment that is gone, poof, the instant it is created. But the reason we work so hard, Maud, is so that moment will live.” He tapped his head. “Up here, in their minds, where anything worthwhile stays. Yes?”

  Out in the theater the heads of the class bowed. Maud heard the scratch of pencil put to paper. She wanted to be out there, writing these words of wisdom down, instead of standing up on stage resisting them. She had written so many things in her own notebooks: petitions, prayers, invocations, to entice the work that didn’t come. These mental excursions and epiphanies, these promises and resolutions, had not worked. She had thought perhaps a padded bra and a fleshcolored thong might provide the answer.

  “Okay. Take it from your line, Damien. This time, Maud, let me feel him turn you on. Let me feel a throb between my own legs, you know? That little sound you made, first time through, was like you’d found gum in your hair or something.” Nikos made his way down the stairs and sat. “Let’s have it.”

  “You’ll never leave—” Damien began.

  “Take a breath,” Niko
s said. “Find zero. Start again.”

  “You’re never gonna leave . . .” Damien sounded as if he expected interruption.

  Nikos tipped the bottle of Evian to his lips. Maud dragged her eyes away from him, forcing herself to concentrate on Beau, on the narrow life of her character, delineated by sex and booze and the stench of garbage in the cobbled streets of New Orleans.

  “A woman never leaves when she’s gettin’ it good.” Damien lowered his hand into Maud’s bra, this time, for the first time, pushing his fingers all the way under the lace and curving them around her breast. His fingers trembled. She wanted to cry with how much she loved his bravery—she had a good idea just how hard this was for him.

  And yet it was all so absurd. She tried her moan.

  “Again,” Nikos said.

  She moaned again.

  “Breathe, Maud! Think back to your last orgasm. This cry comes from your belly, your G-spot, clitoris, solar plexus, belly chakra, what-ever it takes, Maud, give it to us! Please! Let us have some of what I know you’re capable of.”

  Tears rose. She resisted them, breathing, breathing. The moan came out breathy, false, absurd. She wanted to die.

  “Again, Maud. Give an erection to every man in this room.”

  She felt her mind grinding on several levels: the one that processed that command and tried to do something with it, and the one that wondered what the ability to give every man an erection had to do with revealing herself. Or for that matter what it had to do with acting. Or with life. Or with anything she wanted to do with her life. But she tried the moan once more. Her voice caught in her throat. Damien’s hand twitched a little, his fingers damp against her breast.

  “I don’t know what else—” Maud said. “I can’t—”

  Nikos stomped back up the stairs. Damien slid his hand away. “Get out of your head, Maud!” Nikos said.

  Maud breathed in and then out as slowly as she could, blinking. She wanted to put her head back and howl, and knew Nikos would respect her if she did exactly that. Instead she sucked in her cheeks and held them with her back teeth.

  “Maud,” Nikos said, “you’re looking confrontational.”

  “I’m feeling confrontational.”

  The class laughed, a loud, spontaneous gust of sound that swept like a cleansing wind through the room. A movement of Nikos’ arm stopped the sound dead. It was a parody of a king’s sycophants: laughing on cue, hushed on command, but she too responded to the downward slash of Nikos’ hand. She let her cheeks out from between her teeth and straightened her head.

  “You’re paralyzed, Maud. Stuck.”

  Nikos talked on, but all she heard were synthesized words, words put on reverb through a piece of Miles’ recording equipment. Stuck-uck-uck. Paralyzed-alyzed-yzed . . .

  “Paralyzed with fear.” She caught up with what he was saying. “That limb I was talking about. You’re nowhere near it. You’re clinging to the trunk of the tree so hard you can’t move.” He held his hands in front of him, palms up, pleading. “You’ve got all the tools. The intelligence, the face, your hair, the body—” He stopped. “Maud.”

  “No tits.” She got the laugh she wanted from the class.

  Nikos raised both fists in the air and shook them. “Zeus!” He got an even louder laugh. He turned to the class. “She’s asking for a rant on the stupidity of the average American audience, how you pander to them, allow their idiotic obsessions to become your own. But I’m bored of this subject. Get out of here. Ten minutes. Maud, you stay.”

  “Uh-oh.” Driver lifted his head to look at her. “Now you’ll get it. Sounds like a graduate seminar, teachers letting you know what a moron you are and how smart they are, insisting on their pet crackpot theories.”

  Maud shook her head. “He said we could rework the scene, bring it back in a month or so. Or we could drop it, work on something else.”

  Nikos crossed his arms, muscular, covered with black hairs, over his chest. “But these things, I think, are not the answer.”

  She looked at him, feeling sulky, recalcitrant.

  “You need to examine what you’re doing here.”

  “In this class?”

  Nikos pursed his lips, a moue of distaste. “Maud. Don’t turn literal on me. Usually you are one of the few who understand my metaphors, although ‘reveal’ seems to have passed you by.” He waited to see that the compliment landed, then reached a finger to flick the lace of the bra that, Maud knew, peeked above the edge of the dressing gown. She found time to wonder how such an invasive gesture could be so kind.

  “Do you know why you’re doing this?” He picked up one of her hands, examined the fingernails, the polish. “You don’t like this, Maud. You don’t feel good about doing it. Why put yourself to the trouble? If you like to act, or if you love theater, it is for reasons other than this.”

  The tears pushed forward; Nikos’ face blurred.

  “Look at that. Look at that. I’ve said something that is either very right or very wrong.”

  Maud held a sleeve of the dressing gown to her eyes.

  “It is not your talent, dear heart, that is in question.”

  His Reeboks squeaked as he disappeared between two high black velvet curtains. Maud heard the pneumatic stage door sigh open, then closed.

  Driver seemed to have fallen asleep. His weight was beginning to grow uncomfortable, though it kept her warm. She looked past his shoulder, above the curve of the kiva’s top edge, to the stars that pricked the sky, thinking of Mercutio’s lines to Romeo about Queen Mab: This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs, that presses them and learns them first to bear. So many meanings an actor could jam into that one word, bear. And the Nurse, too, to Juliet: I am the drudge, and toil in your delight, but you shall bear the burden soon at night.

  She slid her hips from beneath Driver’s weight.

  “And where do you think you’re going?”

  Where did she think she was she going? And why? What was it, exactly, that had made her pull the first dress from its hanger, wrap a wineglass in newspaper? She saw herself talking to the plaid shoulder of the cameraman while Tucker played baseball in Chicago. Picking her sweater up from the floor in the Cheesios audition. Billy’s You’re just going to leave? Summer’s voice on the telephone: Are you dead, Aunt Maud? As she’d driven Highway 10, then 5, her car had turned into a cartoon of speed—a lopsided trapezoid, lines sparking off its rear end—in her desire, once she had made the decision, to get out.

  “Don’t go.” Driver burrowed in beside her, pulling the blanket around them hard. After a moment he groaned. “Do you believe in the drought theory or the invasion theory?”

  “Drought?”

  “That drove the Anasazi into cliff dwellings? Or do you subscribe to the alien theory?” His voice had gone hard again, cold. “Maybe it was fear of little men in spaceships that made them live at the tops of ladders?” He stayed quiet for a moment, groaned again. “I don’t want to think about this. Tell me another story. Are you a famous actress?”

  Maud laughed. “Very famous. The last part I had I was onscreen for a total of five minutes.”

  She told him about the Tucker’s Larks episode, leaving out the argument with Miles that had followed. She told him about talking to her mother on the telephone, about crying so much that she could dampen an entire dishrag with tears and snot—

  “About what?” Driver asked.

  “About the fact that it’s too late for me to have what most women have by now. That I can never catch up.”

  She told him about the postcard her father had finally mailed from Sydney, Australia, where one of his think tanks had been meeting. Buck up, and printed in his firm hand beneath this, the motto of the Maxwell clan: Despair is base.

  “Buck up,” Driver said. “Pretty sympathetic.”

  That led to telling him about the acting technique of Michael Chekhov: find the right action and the emotion will follow. As Nikos said: “Having a hard time getting angry? Pound the table
and see what happens.” She told him other wisdoms of Nikos: “Think about the last fight you had with your loved one. Was it really about what it was about? Really?” He’d waited for chuckles of recognition. “This idea is what you must bring to your scenes. A good scene is always about much more than what the dialogue says they’re about.”

  “This way of thinking makes life complicated,” she said to Driver. “Everything is always about something else and something more. Unstated, hidden.”

  But he was asleep. Gray light hovered above the canyon. The fire was out. She had used her jean skirt for a pillow, and its metal button pressed against the back of her head. She folded back the blanket. For a moment Driver looped a leg over hers, then let her go. “You like my excavation?”

  “I do.” She slid into her skirt and pulled on Miles’ T-shirt, missing him suddenly, acutely. Her underpants were back in the Airstream.

  Driver rolled himself into the blanket. In the pale light he looked doleful. Maud was tempted to put a hand to his cheek. But she got to her feet.

  “So,” he began, but didn’t finish this thought.

  She fastened her sandals and swiped with the jean skirt between her legs at the leak of come. As she moved towards the ladder she was aware of Driver watching from his cocoon of blanket.

  “What if we made a little half-breed?”

  She turned to look at him. “It isn’t likely.”

  “Because if we did, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  She shook her head. “Just about the time I begin to think you might be sort of all right—”

  “Well, I don’t.” Driver sat up. “There are enough mongrels in the world. There is enough watered-down blood.”

  “Oh, go sit in your excavation. Cliff dweller.”

  His eyes gleamed with humor, quickly extinguished. “So I’m a cliff dweller. You’re a past-dweller.”

  Stung, she started up the ladder.

  “You’ll stay in the past until you figure out why you’re in the present,” he said. “Believe me, it takes one to know one. But I liked your stories.”