by Marc Acito
AL: Good.
(Still more silence.)
Finally, I can’t stand it and start to fill up the Pinteresque void with rapid-fire screwball comedy dialogue. How I’m a big, big hit with La Vie de la Fête Productions, the toast of the town with the crème de la crème. If Marian Seldes were listening, she’d say, My little bird, you’re pushing too hard. You’re avoiding your feelings by barreling over them with an avalanche of words.
Of course I’m avoiding my feelings, I’d say to her. Who wants to experience bad feelings?
Actors, she’d say.
She’s right, even though she’s just a figment of my imagination. I can hear in my voice how much I want my father’s approval. I don’t understand why. The man is everything I don’t want to be, with his dese, dem, dose and his “dreams only come true in dreams.” If I met him at a party, he’d be the last person I’d want to talk to.
Yet I still want him to be proud of me.
Damn him.
We don’t say anything for the rest of the ride, the silence filling the empty space like rising water. We drop off Natie, I hop in the front, and we head to my aunt Lydia’s.
But at the first red light, Al turns to me and says, “We need to talk.”
Nineteen
Why do people start conversations with the phrase We need to talk? It only makes you assume the worst, like they have cancer. Better to start off casual and ease into it, like, “Hey, a funny thing happened on the way to work today—I got cancer.”
Al shifts so he can look at me, the seat belt cutting into his belly like the string around a pot roast. “Milagros is pregnant.”
It takes me a moment to figure out who he’s talking about. “The domestic?”
“Yeah.”
I’m not sure why the personal life of the woman who cleans my father’s house is any of my con…
“No,” I say. “How?”
Al winces, like I’m a splinter. “How do ya’ think?”
In the time-honored way, I suppose. The lord of the manor creeps up behind the saucy scullery maid as she, I don’t know, sculleries?
“Is she going to keep it?”
His nostrils flare. “Of course she is.”
“Okay,” I say. “Don’t get all Vatican on me.”
Al grips the steering wheel, his simian brow drooping over his eyes. When did he get so old? He could use a pair of shoes to go with those bags.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“Whaddya think I’m gonna do?” he says. “I’m gonna marry her.”
Ay, caramba.
The next day, while Natie and I take the train into Hoboken for the Coup d’État Group’s first rehearsal, he offers a financial analysis of the coup occurring in mi casa:
“You’re fucked.”
“Really?”
“Think about it,” he says. “How old is this Menudos?”
“Milagros. I don’t know. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight.”
“Right. So when Al dies, all his money goes to her. And since women live longer than men, you can kiss your inheritance good-bye.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, my mom’s real upset.”
“About my inheritance?”
“No. She just lost the best housekeeper she ever had.”
The rehearsal is held at the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Hoboken, one of those parishes you hear about from time to time, the kind where a much-beloved priest suddenly disappears because he’s been trying to anoint the altar boys with massage oil. Things have improved greatly, however, since the arrival of Paula’s cousin, Father Angelo, a scholar so stuffy he wishes everyone would take the holy host by hand. “All those tongues,” he says, shuddering, “like frogs eating flies.” According to Paula, whatever sexual urges her cousin has he sublimates into a passion for opera.
Since Father Angelo’s idea of a good Mass is the first act finale of Tosca, I’m not surprised to find the actors rehearsing in the sanctuary. Marcus has assembled a cast of ten: the blind Marian, the deaf Harold, and eight others whose only handicap is their misguided faith that this idea can work. They sit in the front pews, all wearing black. It’s like a funeral for a very unpopular person.
“I’ve chosen to rehearse in a church,” Marcus says, “because an actor is a kind of priest.”
Actually, Marcus chose to rehearse in a church because it was free. But he makes a good point.
“Since the Greeks, whose plays were a part of religious festivals, the theater has been a sacred space. And the church,” he says, gesturing to the stone arches and stained glass windows, “is a kind of theater.” He holds up a worn copy of Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre. “The Coup d’État Group rejects the spectacle of bourgeois entertainment. Theater cannot, should not, will not compete with film and television. We need to strip away anything that isn’t necessary and focus on what’s essential—the relationship between the actor and the audience.”
I read somewhere that jaguars kill their prey by biting through their skulls, slaying them instantly by ripping into their brains. That’s how it is with Marcus. Sure, he’s combative and humorless. But there are times when he grabs hold of my mind and just shakes me until I’m helpless to the ferocity of his beliefs.
“Okay,” he says, “let’s warm up. Ten laps around the church.” The cast leaps to its feet and jogs around the perimeter of the sanctuary, as if the stations of the cross were an Olympic event (Jesus falls, Jesus rises, Jesus falls…). Bringing up the rear are Paula and Willow, both of whom give wan waves at me and Natie, like they’re Abbott and Costello drafted into the army.
A tickly, carbonated happiness bubbles up inside me. I’m so excited to be at a rehearsal again. When you’re rehearsing, everything is possible. There is still a chance to get it right. The Germans call it die Probe, the French la répétition. And therein lies the pleasure: to probe repeatedly. To hearse again and again, from the Old French hercier, to rake or harrow.
And this rehearsal certainly is harrowing.
After a series of truly gruesome facial exercises, it becomes abundantly clear that Marcus’s concept is also Brechtian, which is another way of saying it’s dark and pretentious. Brecht believed that an audience should not get emotionally involved in a play, that a cathartic experience clouds the audience’s reason and leaves it complacent. I guess if I were writing as Hitler came to power on a wave of emotionally manipulative propaganda, I’d be cranky, too. Still, it’s unnerving to watch Marcus stage “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little” by having the four women beat the blind singer while the men read copies of the New York Post. I don’t care if the song is about character assassination. If the purpose of Brecht’s “alienation effect” is to alienate the audience, then we’ve got a hit.
The scene gets even more surreal when, from a side door, Father Angelo enters the church with his mother, otherwise known to the world as Aunt Glo.
Aunt Glo.
Her apple-pie face warms with recognition as she spots me and Natie, crying “The LBs!” (As a MOP—Mother of Priest—she refrains from saying Little Bastards in church.) Paula, who’s busy assaulting a blind woman, responds with an aggressive shh, which only causes Aunt Glo to call more attention to herself as she does a silent-movie tiptoe up the aisle, genuflecting before she enters the pew, then thrusting her plump arms around me. Her hug feels like home, as if she’s trying to make up for all the mother love I may have missed. She beams at me, her globular eyes overflowing with tears, like two cups filled above the brim. To Aunt Glo I’ll always be a star.
Her son slips in behind us, giving me a pious nod.
Father Angelo makes me uncomfortable. For starters, he’s way too good-looking for a priest, his dark bedroom eyes and athletic build arousing exactly the kind of impure thoughts you’re supposed to go to church to get rid of. What’s more, two years ago Aunt Glo got me a job here as a soloist and I kind of flaked out. In my defense, it’s hard for anyone to hold down a job while attending Juilliard. It�
�s like boot camp for actors. I try to concentrate on the cast rehearsing “Wells Fargo Wagon,” which, for reasons having to do with Reagan cutting taxes for the rich and driving the national debt sky-high, requires that the citizens of River City writhe with orgasmic pleasure as they list the items they’ve ordered, doing Fosse-esque pelvic thrusts every time they say the wagon is “a-comin’.”
It’s not the kind of scene you want to watch with an old lady and a priest.
When the cast takes a break, Aunt Glo says, “Y’know, my Angelo here wanted to be an actor, just like you.” She turns to her son. “What was that show you did in high school? The one with the carousel?”
“Carousel.”
“That’s it. So beauteeful, his voice.”
“Oh, Ma.”
Willow comes over to say hello to Aunt Glo, who gives her a hug and calls her Wilma.
“What do you think of the concept?” Willow asks.
Before I can answer, Aunt Glo says, “Y’know, I saw Ken Berry do The Music Man at the Paper Mill Playhouse.”
Willow nods like this makes sense, which, being Willow, it very well might. “I think Marcus is really onto—the problem with most experimental theater is that it doesn’t reach—but here, my God, they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, look, it’s The Music Man’…then WHAM, right between the eyes. Like Lillian Hellman. Are you familiar with her work?”
Aunt Glo shakes her head. “No. But I love her mayonnaise.”
Paula brings the deaf Harold Hill over to meet me. Gavin is a slender reed around thirty, with shoulders like a coat hanger and the drooping posture of a gooseneck lamp, as if someone had punched him in the chest. He wears a T-shirt reading GAY MEN’S HEALTH CRISIS, and shakes my hand with both of his. “Thanks for helping me.”
I’m shocked at how well he speaks. You’d never know he was deaf.
He’s also exceedingly appealing, with tendril curls that flop over soft, doleful eyes set just a little too far apart. With his plump, fleshy mouth, he reminds me of the koi I exterminated in my fish-killing sprees.
“Angelo helped me with the rhythm,” he says, “but he insists I need a real singer for the notes.” A bemused, secret smile spreads across his face, like he’s in on a joke I don’t get.
Father Angelo clears his throat. “Gavin’s deaf dance troupe rehearses here.” Even though he’s speaking to me, he faces Gavin, presumably so he can read his lips.
Gavin and I retreat to the back of the church, Gavin moving with the wan, spectral tread of someone who slept in an airport. Not exactly what you’d expect for a thundering, outsize role like Harold Hill, but a production paying the actors with Aunt Glo’s homemade cannoli can’t be too picky.
“SO,” I say, trying to look at him and walk at the same time. “YOU. READ. LIPS.”
“You don’t have to work so hard,” he says. “I’m deaf, not blind.”
“Sorry.”
“Here,” he says, stopping. “Let me show you.”
He turns and faces the front of the church, where Paula and Natie are engaged in a conversation I can’t hear.
“Paula’s telling that little red-haired guy that now’s not a good time to talk to Marcus,” Gavin says. “She says he gets frightfully irritable when he’s rehearsing.”
“Wow,” I say. “You should work for the CIA.”
“I can’t. The other ushers at the Eugene O’Neill depend on me.”
“You’re an usher?” I say, far more music-theatery than I intend. He’s an usher; I’m a gusher.
“The theater is my life,” he says, with a grand Master Thespian gesture.
Marcus gives an irritated shh from the altar that Gavin can’t hear.
I like him.
The plan is for Gavin to talk his way through all of Harold’s songs, which will probably work better on some than others. Not that Marcus cares. “Enjoyment is a bourgeois indulgence,” he says. But Gavin is determined to sing the last few lines of “Till There Was You.”
“Come over here where there’s some light,” he says, leading me to an altar to Saint Jude. From the plaque, I learn that Saint Jude is a) a man; and b) the patron saint of lost causes, not a good omen. Gavin positions me facing him, close enough that I can feel his breath on my cheek.
Then he reaches into his pocket, his jeans slipping down his narrow hips, and pulls out…a condom.
Mama said there’d be gays like this.
Giving me that same enigmatic smile, he tears the package open with his teeth, hands me the wrapper, and proceeds to blow the condom up like a balloon, tying it off with a knot.
“Balloons are a natural amplifier,” he explains. “I forgot to bring one, but I never go anywhere without a rubber.”
He takes the balloon, which is ribbed for our pleasure, and tucks it under his chin. Then, placing his hands on my shoulders, he guides me closer until the condom is against my throat. Our faces are now inches away from each other.
Gavin reaches up and places his long, sinewy fingers on my neck. “Okay,” he says. “Go slowly.” I can feel the vibration of his words through the rubber. I check the first note on a pitch pipe—not an easy thing to do when you have a condom balloon under your chin—and start to sing:
There was love all around,
But I never heard it singing…
Gavin laughs. “Well, duh.”
He asks me to sing the first note again, then attempts the seemingly impossible task of matching a pitch he can’t hear. It’s painstaking, frustrating work. Words like higher and lower don’t mean anything to him so it’s totally trial-and-error, with me saying no over and over while his reedy fingers grope my face and neck to memorize the position of my larynx, my jaw, my mouth. All the while I’m singing “Till There Was You” into his wistful hazel eyes, watching his fleshy lips wrap around the words. Now I understand why Father Angelo didn’t want to do this task.
Still, Gavin is a tireless pupil, having had rigorous speech training. While we break for Aunt Glo’s homemade lasagna, he tells me that he lost his hearing from measles at the age of three and that the teachers at the school for the deaf taught him to speak by flicking him on the tongue with their fingers every time he got something wrong. He also tells me how he didn’t find out until he went to college that farts made noise.
We work the rest of the evening this way, note by note, each a hard-won victory. But since the first three notes repeat three times, at the end of rehearsal Gavin is actually able to stand before the cast and sing:
There…was…looooove…
All…a…rouuuuuund…
But…I…neeeeee-ver…
It’s like watching a baby take his first steps. For all its hesitancy, his voice already has a croony, caramel quality, like a 1940s band singer, perhaps a young Sinatra. He even uses a vibrato. If I hadn’t heard it with my own ears, I wouldn’t have thought such a thing possible.
Paula turns to me, tears streaming down her dove white cheeks. “He sounds just like you.”
I swell like a condom balloon and leave the church feeling a kind of good I’ve not felt before. For the first time in I don’t know how long I’ve thought about someone else, done something worthwhile. Rather than obsessing about what’s going to happen to me, me, me, I think about what’s going to happen to him, him, him.
I bask in that good feeling all the way home, exhausted yet exhilarated as Natie and I climb the four sticky flights to our apartment. I slide my key in the lock, eager for a good pee and a satisfying sleep, when panic goes off inside me like a car alarm.
The door is unlocked.
Twenty
I turn to Natie.
“Did you forget to lock the door?”
He shakes his head. Of course he didn’t. There are three locks.
Faced with the probability of an intruder in his apartment, any moron would head down the stairs and call the cops. But I am not any moron. I am an über-moron, the moron to end all morons. If stupidity were a sport I would letter in it. So, despite Natie u
rging me downstairs by pulling on my sleeve and whimpering, I push open the door, calling, “Hello?” because I am, as I’ve already established, a total cheesehead. I’m sure if you put your head up against my ear, you could hear the ocean.
To my surprise, someone within responds.
“Eddieeeee? Is that you?”
“Who the hell is that?” Natie asks, flinching like the Cowardly Lion.
I’m not sure. The voice is female, and childlike, and the only female child I know is…
“Lizzie!”
She looks up from the couch, where she’s reading Eddie Sanders’s diary. “Is this yours?” she sneers. “It’s gross.”
I advance on her. “How did you…I mean, ’ow did you get in ’ere?”
She grins a barbed-wire smile. “I picked the locks.”
“Wot? ’Ow?”
She holds up a small kit. “Marcy and I bought ’em at Spy City on Fourteenth Street.” She raises her chin with smug, know-it-all satisfaction. “You must be Nathan Nudelman. I saw your textbooks.”
“She’s good,” Natie says.
“Listen, Nancy Drew,” I say, “you cahn’t break into people’s apartments. I mean, flats. It’s illegal. And immoral. And scary.”
Natie looks at the lock-picking kit. “How much did this thing cost?”
“Twenty bucks.”
“That all?”
“Natie!”
Lizzie stretches out on the couch, putting her feet up on the coffee table. “So, who’s Edward Zanni?”
“Wot?”
“There’s a credit card application for someone named Edward Zanni. Who is he?”
I feel a Strange Interlude coming on:
(anxiously)…Who is Edward Zanni? Who knows?…That is a question for the dark night of the soul….
“Awlright,” I say, “that’s enough. You. Out.”
“But—”
“I mean it. Stop followin’ me around or I’ll call the cops. Or your mother.”
“That’s not fair. I just—”
I grab one of her twiggy arms and yank Lizzie off the couch. “Now!”
Note to self—there are some dangerous things you should not touch: hot stoves, live wires, and thirteen-year-old lunatics. Remember Linda Blair in The Exorcist? Compared to Lizzie, she’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.