Only Love Can Break Your Heart

by Ed Tarkington

  “Maybe she shimmied up the columns and swung up from the gutters,” he said. “She’s light enough not to pull them out or bend them.”

  “That sounds a little—I don’t know—acrobatic,” I said.

  “People with Leigh’s kind of problems have been known to pull off extraordinary feats,” he said.

  I imagined Leigh in her nightgown, scrambling up the columns like Spider-Man.

  “Maybe she is possessed,” I said.

  Paul shot me a withering glare.

  “What was she doing over at the Culvers’ anyway?” I asked.

  “She said she was going over to return Charles’s ring. I thought she was over the whole Charles business,” he said, “but I guess it’s natural for her to get a little upset when she heard the guy went and got married without even telling her.”

  I nodded.

  “What’s going to happen to her?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I expect they’ll just observe her for a day or two. Change her medications. Then again, that asshole Bowman might decide to ship her back to the nuthouse for good this time.”

  The sky was overcast. Twin Oaks loomed over the pasture, silent and still. I pictured Leigh on top of it, a silhouette on the pale sky behind her, her arms arching up, grasping at phantom shapes in the empty air.

  “This is all their fault,” I said.

  “Who?” Paul asked.

  “The Culvers,” I said. “Their hands have been on every bad thing that’s happened to us since that first night when you went into their house.”

  Paul appeared to consider my argument as he finished his cigarette. He dropped the butt to the ground and extinguished it under his heel.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “The Culvers will get theirs yet.”

  21

  I HAD BEGUN to think I would never find a way to get past Cinnamon’s string of bass players and shady-looking older dudes with their leather jackets and motorcycles and tacky little sports cars. Just when I was about to give up and accept that I was destined to be no more than “just a friend” to her, the allure of the spotlight and the persuasive rhetoric of Rex LaPage presented an opportunity too serendipitous not to seem like fate.

  I was frankly a little shocked when Cinnamon anxiously informed me that she was planning to audition for LaPage’s spring production—a play called Equus. She’d yet to show any great promise as an actress and was apparently so cynical about almost everything that I doubted her capable either of the necessary earnestness or of accepting the risk of humiliation inherent in any kind of live performance. When Mr. LaPage approached her outside class, however, flattering her and all but guaranteeing her a part, she’d taken the bait. He’d done the same with me, but I’d begged off, largely because I thought Cinnamon would think it uncool, particularly compared to playing bass in a hard rock band.

  “You’re really doing it?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “Thought I’d give it a try,” she said. “For kicks.”

  Instantly I visualized hours of rehearsals with Cinnamon, who would have no time for shady-looking bass players with tacky little sports cars. I pictured us running lines together in the dimly lit house of the theater. Or backstage. Alone. At night.

  “Me too,” I said. “For kicks!”

  In retrospect it boggles the mind to think that even Rex LaPage would have been reckless enough to stage a play like Equus at little old Randolph High School in Spencerville, Virginia, smack-dab in the cradle of the Moral Majority. A repressed, impotent psychiatrist becomes infatuated with one of his patients: a teenage boy who has blinded a stable full of horses with a hoof-pick. As the play progresses, the psychiatrist unearths the boy’s history of psychosexual and religious torment at the hands of his well-meaning but ludicrously inept parents, whose violent arguments over sexuality and religion (the mother is a devoutly puritanical Christian; the father, an atheist) warp their troubled son’s mind into forming an erotically charged religious obsession with horses. In a scenario I found eerily familiar, the boy ends up taking a job at a stable, where he is seduced by a fairly aggressive and much more experienced girl, who shortly persuades the boy to join her for a tryst in a hayloft above a stable full of horses.

  At this point the story deviates quite significantly from my experience: the boy hears the horses’ stamping and snorting beneath and mistakes it for the jealous anger of his self-invented horse-god. In a futile attempt to hide his imagined betrayal, he stabs the horses’ eyes with the hoof-pick before going catatonic, subsequently ending up in the psychiatric hospital where the play begins.

  All this backstory is revealed in flashbacks, staged on a platform that doubles as the psychiatrist’s office. Furthermore, on stage, the horses aren’t horses, or even models of horses, or imaginary horses, but rather boys in tight black spandex with horse-head “helmets” designed by students in the art department. This bit of stagecraft lent the whole proceeding a blunt homoeroticism that could be overlooked only by the willfully obtuse—a description that fortunately fit most of the theatergoing audience in little ole Spencerville, Virginia.

  It was all astonishingly edgy for a high school where Jesus Christ Superstar was considered avant-garde. Hence there was an air of tense excitement around the whole proceeding that one wouldn’t find in auditions for Bye Bye Birdie or West Side Story. The small throng of hopefuls shifted nervously in their chairs, waiting for their names to be called as Mr. LaPage put pairs of aspiring thespians through their paces.

  After half a dozen auditions ranging from mediocre to pathetic, LaPage called me and Cinnamon up together.

  “Page twenty-three,” he said. “Cinnamon, you read Jill; Richard, you read Alan.”

  “Where should we start?” Cinnamon asked.

  “Start at ‘You’ve got super eyes.’ ”

  The scene consisted of a flirtation in a stable between Alan Strang, the boy who blinds the horses, and Jill, the girl who helps him get a job as a stable boy and unwittingly sets in motion the events leading up to his violent breakdown.

  “I love horses’ eyes,” Cinnamon said, throwing her hair and tossing her hip in a gesture meant to look provocative.

  I almost forgot Cinnamon was there. In those brief pages, Alan Strang was nothing more than me—a horny boy who’d been a little fucked up by his domineering father and his reserved, hyperreligious mother, being offered the unexpected gift of casual sex and finding himself confused about what to do with it. I had never much liked horses, but I understood very well the power of their presence and the deep, vaguely tyrannical, watery luminescence of their eyes, which seemed at once impassive and full of stern disapproval. The role had practically been written for me. Furthermore, for the first time in years, I felt the urgent need to perform—something that had once come so easily to me but had been filed away and forgotten after Paul had disappeared.

  Mr. LaPage posted the cast the following Monday. There, next to “ALAN STRANG,” was my name, as I somehow already knew it would be.

  The role of Jill had gone to Betsy Mayhew, a curvy, ginger-headed junior. Cinnamon would play Alan’s mother, Dora Strang. At least she had a role, I thought. She wasn’t much of an actress.

  “No more playing it safe,” Rex proclaimed at the first read-through. “We’re going to blow the audience away, people!”

  Marcus Vaughan, the boy cast to play the psychiatrist, Dysart, was stunned and delighted to learn that Mr. LaPage wanted him to smoke cigarettes during his monologues, as instructed in the stage directions. The love scene between Alan and Jill would have to be censored and some of the more explicit language amended, but otherwise, as LaPage insisted, we were to be “true to the text.”

  The role of Nugget, the lead horse, was to be performed by Blake Burwell, a tight end on the football team with a terrific build and the kind of technically handsome but still somehow bland good looks of a catalog model. Blake had never acted before; Rex had asked him to come out. Having somehow acquired
the false impression that theater girls were desperate to be laid by guys like him, Blake gamely agreed. He spent most of the rehearsals flexing his arms and torso and mugging at Betsy Mayhew.

  “Dude,” he would say to me between scenes, “is she looking at me?”

  “I don’t know,” I’d say, or “I can’t tell.”

  “Gonna be hittin’ that, bro,” he’d say, as if it were a prescheduled event, like prom or graduation. “Red up top, fire in the hole.”

  Several scenes required me to climb onto Blake’s back and straddle him, or to stroke his chest and be nuzzled by the horse mask constructed out of wire by Cinnamon and her cohorts from art class. This didn’t seem to bother Blake—on the contrary: he thought it would be a real “turn-on” for Betsy Mayhew.

  In rehearsals, Mr. LaPage didn’t behave like a teacher. He was touchy. He used salty language. He balanced explosions of raging temper with tender, beseeching encouragement. He called everyone “honey”—boys and girls alike. We were all terrified of his wrath and desperate for his approval.

  Since Marcus was allowed to smoke in the play, everyone else felt entitled to do the same. Mr. LaPage never said a word. Therefore a constant fog of cigarette smoke hovered in the air over the set. Before long, we were all behaving as if we were members of an experimental theater company in Paris or Greenwich Village instead of small-town southern teenagers with homework and curfews, putting on a school play.

  I was surprised at how happy it all made me. Back onstage for the first time in years, I rediscovered my latent narcissism. The role was full of the kind of histrionic melodrama high school kids really buy into. I basked in the admiration and envy of my peers and the effusive flattery of Mr. LaPage. Moreover, when I wasn’t onstage, I was in the back of the theater or out on the loading dock with Cinnamon Kintz.

  AS OPENING NIGHT neared, rehearsals shifted over from afternoons to evenings. Paul dutifully ferried me back to Randolph and was waiting for me when we came out.

  On the third night, rehearsal ran late. We were scheduled to finish up at nine; at ten thirty, LaPage showed no sign of abating. It was typical of him to lose track of time, but that night was excessive even for Rex. The rehearsal had been a disaster. It was as if all of us—Mr. LaPage included—had suddenly realized that before long we were going to be performing this play in front of our parents. This latent anxiety fed a contagion of mistakes, from flubbed lines to missed lighting cues to forgotten stage directions. Rex should simply have given us a pep talk and sent us all home; instead he blasted every error from his director’s table at the center of the house and made us start over again, from the top of the act.

  Finally, at around 11 p.m., one of the horses’ mothers stormed onto the stage. After brusquely informing Mr. LaPage that it was a Wednesday and therefore a “school night,” she led her mortified child off the stage by the bridle of his steel-wire horse head.

  “All right, all right,” Rex said, sighing. “Go home, people.”

  Exhausted, we gathered our things and went outside. All the cast and crew disappeared until only Cinnamon and I remained. Paul was nowhere to be seen.

  “Do you think he left?” I asked.

  “If my ride left,” she said, “he isn’t coming back.”

  “Paul would come back,” I said.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m not, I guess.”

  She lit a cigarette. We sat down on the edge of the loading dock.

  “Your brother told me all about you,” she said.

  “You and my brother,” I said. “Should I be jealous?”

  “Maybe I should be jealous of you,” she said.

  “Because of Paul?” I asked. “You should have known him ten years ago.”

  I was sure that if Paul were ten years younger, Cinnamon wouldn’t trade the chance to ride around in the passenger seat of the old purple Nova for all the bass players in the world, no matter how often Paul left her waiting in the dark after play practice.

  “Paul and me,” she said, “we’re just alike, that’s all.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We just are. We’ve both done the commune thing, for one. My parents spent most of my childhood drifting from one ‘intentional community’ to the next. They tried four or five different religions and about a million tabs of LSD. You know the type.”

  Unless Paul and Leigh counted, I didn’t know anyone like that, but I nodded anyway.

  “And then we ended up here,” she said, “in the dullest place on earth.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said.

  “You’ve never been anywhere else.”

  This was mostly true.

  “As soon as I graduate, I’m gone,” she said. “My sister lives in California. Runs a tattoo shop on Venice Beach. She’s got the most amazing sleeves you ever saw. Do you have any tattoos?”

  “No.”

  “I just have the one,” she said.

  She pulled up her jacket sleeve to reveal the ornate butterfly above the tiny blue veins at the base of her wrist.

  “It’s kind of dopey, I know,” she said. “I was just fourteen; I wanted a butterfly. So that’s what she gave me. What would you get?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing, I guess. My mom would kill me.”

  “When I get to California,” she said, “the first thing I’m going to do is start getting some sleeves like my sister’s. I’m designing them myself. I’ll show you sometime, if you want.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Cool.”

  She lit another cigarette.

  “You’re lucky to have a brother like Paul,” she said.

  “You’re the first person in history to hold that opinion,” I said.

  A blue fog of smoke funneled out of her nose and drifted up over our heads.

  “If you ever met my brother, you’d understand.”

  “Where does he live?” I asked.

  “No clue,” she said. “When he turned eighteen, he joined the Marines. People like Paul rebel against their parents by running off to join a hippie commune. People like my brother join the Marines.”

  “So he’s, like, overseas?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Got busted for DUI and dishonorably discharged. Then he was back home, smoking crank, stealing from the house, and bringing home his sketchy friends. Those losers were always trying to fuck me, and he didn’t even care. My dad finally got sick of it and kicked him out. He took off, and we haven’t seen him since.”

  “He kidnapped me once, you know,” I said. “Paul.”

  “I know,” she said. “He told me.”

  “I think he was going to leave me to die. Did he tell you that?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, he nearly did it,” I said. “But he lost his nerve.”

  “And you still love him, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “I do.”

  “That’s how I feel about my brother,” she said.

  I looked at my watch. It was almost midnight.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Where the heck is Paul?”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve been ditched,” Cinnamon said.

  “Paul can give you a ride,” I said. “If he ever shows up. Man. My mom’s gonna kill him.”

  “Are you sure?” she said. “I live out in Holcomb Falls. Near the parkway.”

  “Far out,” I said.

  “Little Rocky, with the hippie lingo,” Cinnamon said.

  “Quit making fun of me,” I said.

  “I think it’s cute.”

  I didn’t want to be cute. Not to her.

  About ten minutes later, Paul’s red truck pulled into the parking lot and sped up to the curb. We hopped off the loading dock and strolled down to him.

  “Jesus,” Paul said when I opened the door. “Take your time, why don’t you.”

  He looked haggard.

  “What’s your big hurry?” I said
. “You’re an hour and a half late.”

  “Just get in the fucking truck, brother,” he said. “I’ve got to get you home before Alice calls the cops on me.”

  “Cinnamon needs a ride,” I said.

  He peered out at Cinnamon.

  “Where do you live?” Paul asked.

  “Holcomb Falls,” she said. “Look, if it’s a problem, I can call my dad.”

  “It’s not a problem,” I said. “Is it, Paul?”

  “No,” he said. “No problem at all. But I’m taking you home first, Rocky.”

  “No way,” I said. “I’ll ride with you.”

  “Just do what I say for once, will ya?” he snapped.

  “Jesus, Paul,” Cinnamon said. “Fine. Just chill the fuck out already.”

  We huddled into the cab. Cinnamon sat between us, her knees tucked over toward mine to make room for Paul to work the stick. I let my palm fall onto her thigh just above the knee. She placed her hand over mine. I breathed in the smell of cigarettes on her breath. All my nerve endings seemed to lead from the small, vibrating spot where the soft swell of her breast rested against my arm.

  Paul paid no attention. He smoked nonstop, flicking his ashes out the cracked window. The tape deck played Music from Big Pink. Paul turned the knob over to full blast on the creepy organ solo at the beginning of “Chest Fever.”

  “Why are you so late?” I shouted.

  “I got held up,” he said.

  “Where?” I persisted.

  “At Rayner’s,” he said. “Catching up on old times.”

  “I bet Rayner’s wife was thrilled about that,” I said.

  “What?” Paul said.

  Cinnamon reached up and turned the volume down sharply on a hard pop of the snare drum, which seemed to echo in the cab when the music was silenced.

  “What’s your problem?” Cinnamon said. “Are you drunk?”

  “No,” Paul said. “Maybe a little. Rayner kept feeding me booze. I lost track of the time.”

  “Maybe I should drive,” Cinnamon said.

  “He’s fine,” I said. I didn’t want her to move from where she was, pressed up against me, holding my hand.

  “That’s right,” Paul said. “I’m fine.”