A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  Frank smiled wistfully to himself as he stepped out into the middle of the stage, shooting a look over his shoulder to invite Joel to join him. It was a peculiar moment for Joel stepping into the centre of the stage. Frank’s grin had given way to a full-blown smile as he watched Joel absorb the feeling. Their shoes echoed through the room as they walked out.

  “I was King Lear here,” Frank told him proudly. “And Dr. Dysart, and Willie Loman and Ajax.”

  Joel scanned his friend for traces of regret, of melancholy, of anything really, but all he saw was happiness.

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Of course I do,” Frank told him as he stepped away from the centre and made for the short stairs down into the audience. “But maybe I’m not done. Maybe The Unfortunate End of Joel Monroe will be on stage someday. Maybe when whoever bought this place is finished, it’ll be an even better theatre than it was, and I’ll get another shot.”

  “Or maybe it’ll be a shopping mall.”

  “There you go again, glass half empty.”

  “What’s the cost of a building like this in a city centre? Couple of million? You think the gang that have that kind of money to throw around give two hoots about old theatres?”

  “We live in hope,” Frank told him airily as he sat down in one of the old battered seats. “You look good up there, you know.”

  Joel realised he was still centre stage with his audience of one smiling up at him. He shuffled quickly off to make his way to his friend and accidentally kicked something. It was small, and he wouldn’t have noticed it if it hadn’t skittered across the stage so loudly. His back and all his joints protested all at once as he stooped over to pick it up. A little button. With a pin on the back. A badge. “Save the Royale,” it said. That he had picked it up from the ruined stage of a very much unsaved Royale seemed a little sad to him. Another aging monument that someone had once loved allowed to fall to ruin because not enough people cared. He pocketed the badge, and made his way down to take his seat next to his friend, the two of them staring up at the dimly lit stage.

  He imagined Frank up there, his voice rising and dipping in that way that only he could, his big booming laugh filling the room, hitting the back wall. Joel didn’t know who Dr. Dysart or Willie Loman were, but he imagined Frank would have been perfect for them.

  “You know, I wish I’d seen you. One of those times that Lucey and me went to the movies, I wish I’d gone to the theatre instead, and seen you do a play.”

  “Go on,” Frank told him, “you’d have been bored out of your mind.”

  He was mocking, but there was a little catch in his voice.

  “No, really. I wish I had. Wouldn’t that have been something? If the two of us were sitting here and you could say that you were Dr. Loman or whatever and I’d say, oooooh, I remember that, that was excellent.”

  “Dr. Loman?” Frank asked, amused.

  “Or whatever,” Joel told him dismissively.

  “I wish you’d seen me too, my friend. It’s a funny old thing…”

  He started, and then paused. Joel watched him carefully. No de Selby mask now, pure Adams, and a new look on his face, one Joel hadn’t seen before. An expression both hard and vulnerable all at once. He was clearly fighting to keep the emotion under control.

  “Go on,” Joel almost whispered.

  “I had so many friends. So many. Friends all over the world. I performed in New York, in London, in LA, in Paris, in Dublin. I was everywhere. And they loved me, Joel, I mean they really did. And now you, my dear old cranky man, are all I have.”

  His voice cracked again, something itching to get out of him. Joel felt his eyes sting as tears welled up unannounced, unwelcome.

  “They loved me, but I never loved them back. I wanted to. I truly did.”

  He couldn’t stop the tears now; they burst out in between words, fracturing his fixed smile as he tried to keep looking happy. As he tried to keep performing.

  “But I always felt that they loved me for what I showed them, you know? A sort of a comic version of me. Never really me.”

  “De Selby,” Joel whispered again, “not Adams.”

  Frank seemed to ponder it for a moment, his new face flickering as he fought to keep the smile on.

  “You’re a remarkably clever man sometimes, Joel,” Frank told him with a laugh, though he wiped a little tear from the corner of his eye as he said it.

  Joel squirmed at the compliment and tried not to show his own tears.

  “A thundering idiot other times of course, but now and then… Yes. I think you’re right. I never liked Adams myself, so they got de Selby, and they loved him. So I was him. But de Selby can’t love anyone because he’s not real.”

  He was still gamely trying to keep his smile on, a new type of smile, not the de Selby one, something else. It didn’t seem to want to stay on through his tears.

  “Why didn’t you like Adams?” Joel asked.

  “I don’t know the answer to that, my friend. I wish I did. I wish I knew it fifty years ago when it would have done me some good. I let a beautiful man get away from me because I was afraid to hold his hand in public. I didn’t want to kiss him where other people could see me. Then he’d come along to the parties after the shows and watch de Selby in his element and wonder why I couldn’t be that with him. I missed out on so much.”

  The new face crumbled with the effort of trying to smile through his tears. It struck Joel why it was such a new face. It was Adams, but for the first time it was Adams not trying to hide from himself.

  “I cheated myself, Joel,” he sobbed. “I cheated myself out of a life. I think I do hate Liam after all. Isn’t that funny? I hate him because he has what I never had. He’s so comfortable in himself. He’s so willing to be himself. He’s brave and I’m a coward. Have been all my life.”

  “You’re no coward,” Joel growled through his tears. “You’re no coward, Frank Adams. You’re one of the kindest people I’ve ever known, and I won’t have you say that about yourself. I won’t have you say that about my friend.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m never like this.”

  “You be whatever you want to be. Whatever. Don’t mind me.”

  “I try so hard not to be like this,” he sniffed through gritted teeth, still trying to control his emotions.

  Joel gripped Frank’s shoulder hard as though he could communicate his feelings through the strength of his hand.

  Frank’s shoulders shook under the grip.

  He wasn’t crying, though. With something close to shock, Joel realised the man was laughing.

  “Well, what on earth is so funny?” he asked angrily.

  “I don’t know,” Frank told him, still laughing, sniffling and wiping his tears. “I don’t know actually.”

  Joel’s anger at the sudden change of pace gave way to confusion, and his face must have shown it as Frank’s laughter redoubled.

  “I’m sorry again,” Frank told him, now laughing and still sort of crying.

  The confusion gave way to mirth as Joel found himself smiling at the absurdity of his friend crying and laughing simultaneously.

  Frank looked at him with his vulnerable Adams face, laughing and crying at once, and Joel found a little laugh creeping out of him, too.

  Once he had started it was a dam breaking, and he couldn’t stop.

  His laugh bellowed out of him, not like the suppressed laughter in the car with Eva the week before, but a release of tension that seemed to liberate them both. The laughing echoed off every wall in the old abandoned theatre and bounced around the stage and back at them so they heard themselves laughing. Frank gripped on to Joel’s arm as he doubled over.

  “You there!” the voice shouted at them from behind. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

  The two men turned in their seats, surprised, but not enough to stop laughing. All they could make out at the top of the aisle was torchlight bobbing at them as the carrier descended toward them.

  Joel trie
d to sputter the word “sorry” at the man, but it came out as a strangled laugh which caused Frank to laugh harder.

  “Saving the Royale,” he tried again, but it came out as “saying to boil” in his mirth.

  “What’s the meaning of this? You can’t be in here!” the voice told them from behind its flashlight.

  Joel tried to say sorry again, and for the second time in the night wondered if he might die of laughing before he had the chance to kill himself. The two old men shook, trying to compose themselves as the torch bobbed impatiently at them.

  “I mean,” the voice said, now all over with confusion, “I expected junkies or something. I didn’t expect…”

  He didn’t expect two overdressed elderly gents laughing themselves to death in the aisles.

  “I’m sorry, young man,” Frank eventually said, standing and composing himself. “We were just going to be on our way.”

  “How did you even get in here?” the torchlight asked.

  “We’ve always been here,” Joel piped up. “We’re ghosts.”

  “Now, now, old boy,” Frank chided. “There’s no need to frighten the man.”

  Joel couldn’t see the face as the light had obscured his vision, but a little part of him liked the idea of frightening whoever it was. Two ghosts laughing it up in the theatre. He expected it was the kind of thing that Frank might like to write about.

  “All right, all right,” Joel told them, hauling himself out of the seat. “You’ll show us out?”

  They were escorted back out to the main entrance and found themselves back where they had begun. Frank looked lighter on his feet now. The moment of melancholy apparently over.

  “I’m terribly sorry about that, old boy,” he said as they walked, his de Selby mask firmly in place. “Sometimes that place gets the best of me.”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine,” Joel told him. He wanted to say more. He wanted to tell Frank that it was okay. That he was here for him. That he valued him, that he was glad to know him.

  He didn’t say any of that, and cursed himself for his cowardice.

  He was going to kill himself at some point, the words would have sounded hollow anyway, but for all of that he wished he had said them anyway.

  “Shall we have a drink?” Frank asked with an easy smile.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  They settled themselves in the first pub they passed, a newly decorated place, designed to look old, with overhead lighting that belonged in an age even before theirs. Frank smiled at the room as he walked in. It had once been a watering hole for theatre makers and actors and various other creative types. The kind of people Joel had never known. It had a history for Frank, a swirl of memories and faces that had come and gone from his life over his seventy-nine years. It was fitting that he’d come back to this place on this auspicious occasion. Fitting that they should be here after they’d been in the Royale.

  For Joel it was a blank slate. Like so much of the new experiences and new feelings that he had found himself swimming in since his decision that his own life was better off ended, this was one that Joel felt he had missed out on, something that he had allowed to pass him by, and for a moment he cursed himself for missing out, cursed his own rigidity, his own damned stubbornness. His own deliberate exclusion. He delved into his pocket for his pin, and stuck it to his chest. “Save the Royale,” it said. He thought some of them might get a kick out of it.

  The bar itself hummed along nicely with patrons moving here and there. They grabbed a spot by an empty raised table and levered themselves up into the tall bar stools. They were still both a little sore from their escapades. It had been a long time since either of them had run anywhere, and being used as a stepladder was a first for Frank. They ordered their drinks and sat themselves down in the bustle and hubbub and smiled at each other.

  Outside of town someone would be looking for them. Somewhere in the city there was consternation at their absence. It no longer bothered Joel the way it once had. Instead he studied his friend as they waited for the drinks to be delivered. Frank was still looking here and there, still smiling. Joel checked for signs of the melancholy that had overtaken his friend but didn’t see it. Instead he felt something new between them. Something special.

  He knew what it was.

  He had seen the real Frank Adams. Joel felt an enormous pride in that. Frank had shown him something that he rarely showed to anyone at all. He smiled at his best friend.

  “Happy birthday, pal,” Joel told Frank, raising his glass.

  His friend smiled back at him as he clinked his glass.

  “I’m almost positive Liam saw us,” Joel told Frank as they sipped their pints.

  “He didn’t see us, you dolt, or he’d have stopped us.”

  “I’m damn near positive about it,” Joel retorted. He remembered seeing Nurse Liam look their way as they crept into the undergrowth.

  “Make up your mind, will you? You hate him, you love him, you hate him again.”

  “Rich coming from you. All things considered. You should just admit it to yourself. You’re in love with him.”

  “I am no such thing,” Frank spluttered indignantly, adjusting his scarf.

  He had removed his suit jacket, and it dangled on a hook under the bar, but the scarf stayed on, twisted and tied in a rather delicate manner. Joel was again struck by what a pretentious ass his friend was, and how fondly he thought of him.

  “Well, you fancy him a bit anyway,” Joel persisted, sipping again.

  “Look at you, all urbane and cool. Two weeks ago you couldn’t say the word for fear of catching it off me, and now you’re telling me who I fancy.”

  It was Joel’s turn to bristle now. Mostly in embarrassment. He had behaved like a top-quality ass when Frank had told him.

  “Ask you a question?” Joel proposed, trying not to be embarrassed.

  “Jesus. This is going to be rough already. I can tell.”

  “What was with the ‘thank you’ thing you guys did the other day?”

  “What ‘thank you’ thing?”

  Joel gave him the look as hard as he could.

  “I continue to underestimate you, Joel. You really are smarter than you look. Almost have to be, really, wouldn’t you?”

  “Thanks,” Joel told him drily.

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try me.”

  “He was just, sort of telling me that he knew.”

  “That you fancy him?”

  “No, you colossal dolt,” Frank replied. He got tremendous mileage out of the word colossal. “That I’m…”

  He hesitated.

  All that was Frank Adams was in that hesitation. The de Selby mask could wear scarves and tell jokes with strangers and shake the hands of the theatre makers and poets, but underneath it lurked Adams, and Adams couldn’t even say the word gay.

  Joel wanted to know, he wanted to understand that part of Frank’s world, that little slice of who he was that made him so miserable that he made a new name for himself to wear so that he could cover it up. He wanted to, but he didn’t want to also.

  Joel reached an arm out and patted his friend on the shoulder, comfortingly. He was as awkward as ever, but in the true spirit of friendship Frank recognised the gesture for what it was, one of Joel’s few means of communicating support and love and consolation. He had inherited his father’s uncanny ability to botch affection. Frank smiled back at his friend, a wan, weary little smile, but grateful nonetheless.

  “Enough of that,” de Selby said, shaking it off and reaching inside his jacket for the notebook. “Tell me all about The Unfortunate End of Joel Monroe?”

  Joel had been thinking on it, reading ancient plays and newer ones, searching for the right way. He had ideas.

  “Death by Cop,” he told Frank.

  “Go on.”

  “You star heavily in this one,” Joel told him.

  “I like it better already,” Frank replied.

  It wasn’t an overly comp
lex idea, but it had a lot of moving parts. Joel fancied that some part of his suicide would have to have a religious component. He had been raised with it all, the church, Jesus, eternal damnation, confession, nuns, vicious priests, kind priests, Sunday mornings, beatings from his father, the word sinner ringing in his ears.

  He had wandered away from it after Lucey died. Not a conscious, deliberate thing, but in the lethargy that had grabbed a hold of his life after her, he had simply let it all slide. By the time he started to contemplate it again, it seemed so useless to him. So vague in places, so bizarrely specific in others, like a manual for how to live your life that doesn’t tell you how to live with yourself. As his anger had grown, so had his disgust, until he had arrived, unhappily, at the conclusion that he had been lied to.

  The religious component for the new idea was that it would take place in a church. He’d go in one day and he’d take a “hostage” with him. The role of hostage was to be played by legendary soap opera actor Frank de Selby. Joel would rig himself out with a fully fake suicide vest, or some form of false-looking bag of explosives. They’d be rigged to look real, but actually be stuffed with confetti.

  When the police arrived to get him, he’d make a list of demands. Among them, that society must care for its elderly in a more sincere and reasonable manner. That loneliness and isolation and treating senior citizens like second-class citizens must stop.

  They’d give him a platform, and opportunity to address the nation. He’d be all over the news, word would get out. And when the moment was right, he’d make a final charge.

  He pictured himself in slow motion, bursting out the front door of the church with an animal roar, his finger on the trigger of a fully fictional bomb or gun or something threatening. They’d empty their clips into him, and he’d drop stone dead. As his corpse hit the ground the confetti bombs would detonate, and the whole place would be showered in it.