“ ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness,’ ” she said. “ ‘Thou foster-child of silence and slow time—’ ”
I called out. “Gretta?”
She jumped, and she put her hand to her heart.
“I met you in the Gaiety,” I said. “You were playing Gershwin on the piano. We talked about—”
“Oh, right, the actor,” she said, nodding, and she gave me a genuinely warm smile.
“I’m even more of an actor now. I’m starring in—well, I’m sort of standing in the Orson Welles production of Julius Caesar.”
“I’m sure.”
“I can probably get you tickets if you want.”
“You’re not kidding me?”
“I’m playing Lucius!”
“Are you serious?”
“Later. I’ll tell you the whole thing. What were you reciting before?”
She glanced back at the Greek vase. “ . . . Keats. Ode on a Grecian Urn,” she said a little self-mockingly. “How can you not think of that poem when you’re here?”
“You know, I was thinking the very same thing.”
“That’s the odd feeling you get in museums, isn’t it? The sense that time’s stopped? Keats was obsessed with that—how certain objects defy time in some way. Like this vase. Civil wars and plagues and a thousand years, and still this vase is around. ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time.’ God, isn’t that wonderful? That an object which manages to make it through time is a foster-child? An orphan. To have survived, but without your parents, without your world.”
“Have you had lunch yet? I want to tell you the whole—”
She continued quoting: “ ‘When old age shall this generation waste / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man—’ ”
“ ‘Cause I know this pretty good roast chicken place around the block. I mean, if you like chicken.”
“I shouldn’t even be here,” she said, and she touched the small of her neck with her fingertips. “I’m supposed to be working on my play. I haven’t done my three pages today. Or yesterday. According to my time table, I’m now 108 pages behind. But I finished a short story since I saw you last.” She held up the mailing envelope. “Finished it last night at 3:20 in the morning.”
The envelope was addressed to Harold Ross, the New Yorker.
“I’ve got my self-addressed stamped envelope folded up inside,” she said. “I’m all ready for rejection.”
“What’s it about?”
“This museum! It’s called ‘Hungry Generations,’ and it’s just this sort of funny piece about this girl who goes to the museum whenever she’s blue.”
“And what happens?”
She looked confused. “What do you mean ‘what happens’? Nothing happens. Why does something have to happen?”
“No, I meant—”
“The whole story is what I told you. It’s a John Cheever kind of thing. You know, mostly mood. The girl goes to the museum feeling blue. She thinks about time and eternity, and then she feels a little better.”
“Oh . . . .”
She got defensive. “There’s no action in it, if that’s what you’re looking for. God, can’t you just be walking down the street, and suddenly you’re happy—or you’re having coffee somewhere and suddenly the distance to the door seems impossible? Seems the longest distance in the world? Hasn’t that ever happened to you?”
“Sure.”
“Well, stories can be like that, too. Why does everything have to have a big plot? All that melodramatic garbage?”
“Hey, I’m on your side, Gretta,” I said. “I agree with you.”
“Now you’ve got me feeling that the story’s stupid, and that they’re going to reject it because there’s no action in it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Isn’t this ridiculous? You give me one sour look, and now I feel the whole story’s worthless. God, what’s the matter with me?”
“Listen, Gretta, I’m sure it’s a brilliant story. It’s exactly the kind of story the New Yorker loves. You know, subtle. Delicate. And there’s this girl I’m friends with at the Mercury Theatre—she knows practically everybody in New York. She told me she’s got a friend in Ross’s office. I bet, if I asked her, she’d get this friend to submit your story personally. “
“Would she do that for me?”
“If I asked.”
“You’re serious; she’d do that? And you’re really going to give it to her? You’re not just going to throw it in the garbage can when you leave here—or steam it open and make fun of me?”
“You’re nuts.” I took her envelope. “I want to help you. Look, do you want to get some roast chicken or not?”
“You know, I came here because I thought these urns would be lucky. I’m so stupid. I wanted to touch the envelope on one of these urns. I really thought it would help me get the story accepted. God, they should just lock me up.”
“If you believe in it, then let’s do it!” I said, and I ran under the velvet rope and smacked the envelope against a large Greek vase.
“Hey!” called the voice of a guard.
I laughed, grabbed Gretta’s hand, and we ran down a staircase and out the entrance, practically falling down the stone steps, and out into the sunshine.
She looked around and said, “Wouldn’t this make a great scene in a story?”
She told me about the play she was working on, I gave her the shorthand history of the Mercury Theatre, and it was one of those breezy casual mornings, in the company of a girl, that make just about everything seem possible.
I promised her tickets for the show as soon as I could get them.
She was reluctant to give me her phone number, and I didn’t push it.
It was ten to twelve. I said, “Let’s meet again, O.K.?”
I thought: Maybe it’s true. Maybe if you’re just yourself, then you don’t have to try so hard. Maybe the loves and friends and miracles just come blowing your way.
At the Mercury, Welles was still working on the Cinna-the-poet scene. “I’m going to stage it like a movie,” he said. “Like one of those German horror movies.” And that theatre was dark. He’d extinguished every light in the place including the exit signs, and he’d lit one tiny bulb flush along the blood-colored brick wall—just a smear of light picking out the irregularities in the stone. The stage looked like an alleyway now, the ghost of some security light filtering down through a closed-up factory.
Lloyd entered in a shabby black coat and tie, completely back-lit—you saw only his silhouette, and you could barely make out a sheaf of white papers in his hand.
Then, one at a time, the faces appeared. The really scary part was that you couldn’t see anything clearly—just the shoulders and the hats, the occasional pale smudge of a sweaty face.
Epstein, at the Hammond organ, held a menacing low note rumbling under the scene. It got your heart beating faster.
Lloyd spun around now with increasing desperation, searching for a way out of the net, and it suddenly seemed as if there were fifty people around him, shuffling in from the shadows, rising up the ramp to swallow him.
Cotten stood in his military uniform on the step above Lloyd, his face set hard and merciless.
“ ‘Where do you dwell?’ ”
“ ‘By the Capitol.’ ”
“ ‘Your name, sir?’ ”
“ ‘Truly, my name is Cinna. I am Cinna the poet!’ ”
Somebody grabbed his poem.
Somebody knocked the other poems to the floor.
Lloyd was screaming now, backing away. “ ‘I’m Cinna the poet! The poet! Not Cinna the conspirator!’ ”
Heavy footsteps beat on the platforms: the shadows rushing in around him, swallowing him.
The bass note on the organ swelled.
Then complete blackout—the bass note cut—and the silence was filled instantly with one terrible scream: I’m Cinna the poet!
&
nbsp; Then the organ crashed out a horrible, dissonant chord—like a fist smashed down on the keys—and that sound held, held, held until your eyes narrowed from the ugliness of it.
Then the organ stopped.
Welles’s voice boomed out from the audience. “My God, what a scene! Again! Again! Let’s see it again!”
I drifted up to the third-floor dressing room—a large open room that smelled like cigarettes. I had been thinking a lot about Sonja that morning: fine, noble, dignified thoughts that focused in near photographic detail on the unhooking of her warm brassiere, and the imagined smell of black licorice pouring off her naked neck and shoulders.
The dressing room looked as if it had once been a dance rehearsal studio: coat racks, folding chairs, some cracked wooden-framed mirrors on wheels. On the walls were phone numbers and signatures of the entire original cast of The Melting Pot from 1902! A deck of cards had been abandoned mid-game.
I picked up a box of matches from a table and did that trick where you make a matchbox stand up in your palm by pinching some flesh inside it.
I lit a few matches to amuse myself—thinking of the fire I had caused in my backyard. Hanging from the ceiling were some old sprinkler fittings. I wondered if they were even still connected.
Then I stood on a chair, and tried to see how close I could hold a lit match to one of the sprinkler fixtures before anything happened.
Nothing. I held it closer.
Nothing.
Still closer.
A pop—a creak of the old pipes. The nozzle was dribbling water—then a fizzle of an air bubble, and suddenly it was pouring down water on me, not just from the sprinkler I was standing under, but from all four sprinklers that ran along the ceiling.
What the hell?
The pipes creaked and shuddered again, and I hoped maybe it was over, but the water just seemed to increase in pressure. It was falling on the floor, the newspapers, the ashtrays—four fountains pouring down like lawn sprinklers nailed upside down on the ceiling.
Oh, Christ.
I looked around for some kind of shutoff valve. There was nothing. The pipes simply disappeared into the masonry.
I ran into the hallway looking for a shutoff. Nothing.
Now the sprinkler on the staircase was sputtering and firing.
Get out of here, Richard!
I headed downstairs at a run.
It was raining on the second floor as well.
People were hurling by me on the stairs.
“What the hell’s happening?” somebody shouted.
“I don’t know!” I yelled. “I’m soaked!”
I hit the stage still running.
Holy God.
It looked like some Radio City extravaganza!
Huge ballooning fountains of water were cascading down from the ceiling. The stage, the wings.
Hot light bulbs were exploding overhead.
“ ‘I’m Cinna the poet!’ ” shouted Lloyd, who was already soaked.
Somebody screamed and fell through one of the open traps.
“I’m Cinna the wet poet!” shouted Lloyd.
“Cut the power!”
“Cut the goddamn power!”
More bulbs hit the stage in an explosion of glass and water. Pools of water were already forming on the floor.
“Keep the water away from the board!” somebody was screaming.
Suddenly every light in the place went out. But the water kept on coming. You could hear it. You could feel it.
“Somebody shut it off!” yelled Welles. “Shut the goddamn water off!”
Another scream—somebody else went down a hole.
I could hear Leve yelling in his thick Jewish accent. “I think there’s a cutoff in the basement! But I can’t see anything!”
“Turn it the hell off!” Welles shouted. “Turn it off! And put the goddamn lights back on!”
“We’ll blow the board!”
“I said put the goddamn lights back on!”
“I’m not touching the board!”
“The board’s gonna blow, Orson!”
Still it rained.
“Will you turn off the goddamn water!”
“I can’t find it!”
I could hear ropes creaking. Lights lowering.
Somebody cracked his head against something hard and cried out.
Then someone had opened the steel fire doors out to the alleyway, and there was finally some light.
Then there was a great creaking and shaking of the pipes, and air bubbles sputtered through the sprinklers.
The deluge ended.
The sprinklers hung dripping over the shattered lights. The soaked floor. The back wall darkened with running water. The actors stood with their hair and costumes soaked.
“Look at this shithouse!” yelled Welles. “How in goddamn hell are we going to open Thursday?”
Leve came up from the basement, dripping in his white shirt. “I found the shutoff,” he said.
I stepped out into the alley, where some of the actors were trying to dry themselves off with their handkerchiefs. Don’t say anything, Richard, I kept repeating to myself. You can’t tell even one person on earth about this. This had nothing to do with you.
I commiserated and laughed with the others. I made a great show of drying myself. Inside you could hear Welles screaming: “Clean this toilet up!”
They’re going to find out and I’m fired. They’re going to make me pay and—
“Welcome to the Mercury pool party,” said Cotten.
“Buckets and rags!” came Welles’s voice from the stage.
And I could hear the actors around me:
“Who started it?”
“Leve says the lights were hanging too close to the sprinklers—we’ve got to lower the whole light bar by two feet.”
“And re-aim all the lights?”
“We’ll never open on time,” said Coulouris. He wiped his face with his handkerchief.
Now lights were coming back on inside.
“The only way we can clean this up is if everybody gets on his knees!” Welles was shouting. “Anyone not on the ground with a rag in his hand in two minutes will be fired. We’re under martial law! Clean the theatre seats first! Come on, you no-acting sons-of-bitches! The first two rows got wet. Jesus, that’s all we need—a dozen critics with wet asses! And somebody get more goddamn rags.”
I grabbed a rag and disappeared under the first-row seats.
There’s no way anybody can pin this on me. There’s no—
Suddenly Hoysradt was standing center stage calling for Welles, holding something in his hand. “There was a chair pulled under the sprinkler on the third floor,” he announced loudly, grandly. “These were on the floor next to it.”
In his hand was a box of matches.
The place went silent.
Drip. Drip.
“Sabotage!” spat out Welles. He walked center stage, his face red with fury. Of course, with Welles you never knew how much was genuine emotion and how much was just an actor relishing a star turn. “It’s not enough that I work without sleep in this theatre, pour every dollar I make into it! But now this. Sabotage! Someone deliberately and maliciously attempting to wreck my show. All right, I want to know who is responsible! Whoever did this—front and center!” He pointed to the stage. “Front and center, right this second!”
No one moved.
“Treachery!” shouted Welles. He pointed out into the darkness. “Whoever did this will never work in New York again. Never! I will call police detectives. I will fingerprint this box of matches. I will fingerprint every single person in this company. I want his name, and I want it now!”
No one moved.
My hands were shaking so hard I stuffed them in my pockets.
“It couldn’t have been us,” said Cotten. “We were all onstage. It can’t be anybody who was in the Cinna-the-poet scene. And that’s everybody.”
“Who else uses that dressing room?” asked Welles.
> “Nobody except . . . .”
“Except who?”
“Nobody.”
“Anybody could have gone up there,” said Lloyd.
“Sure,” said Cotten. “There are chairs and matches all over this goddamn theatre, Orson.”
“Leve says it’s the lights,” said Vakhtangov. “We’ve got to lower the light bar.”
“This is sabotage!” insisted Welles.
“Leve says it’s the lights.”
“What the hell does he know!” said Welles. He was storming toward his dressing room when his gaze fell on me. He nailed me with his finger. “And where were you during all of this, Junior?”
I couldn’t speak.
“You weren’t onstage. You weren’t in the scene. You use that dressing room up there, don’t you? You did this! Confess it or I’ll beat it out of you!”
“I was outside.”
“You did it!”
“No, I was outside . . . ”
“Confess it!”
I searched blankly around, my heart hammering.
Then I met his eyes. “Maybe . . . ,” I said, “maybe this is just the Bad Luck Thing.”
Silence.
Drip. Drip.
Welles lowered his finger. I could actually hear him breathing. “Wait a minute,” he said. He looked around at the dripping stage. The lights. The platforms. The soaked actors standing almost frozen where they stood. “The Bad Luck Thing,” he repeated softly.
Then he nodded as if convincing himself of something.
“Thank you,” he said.
Thirteen
Welles was shouting. “Faster. Jump on your cues, for Christ’s sake!” Blackout. Music. Duthie calling out from the back of the house: “ ‘Caesar!’ ”
“ ‘Peace! Bid every noise be still . . . I hear a tongue shriller than all the music cry—’ ”
“Faster!” yelled Welles.
“ ‘Goodnight, my lord,’ ” said Gabel—his last line in the show. He made a gentle bow of departure.
“Lose the bow,” said Welles, “ ‘and goodnight, good brother.’ ”
“I like the bow.”
Me and Orson Welles Page 9