She settled herself at the phone and began to dial Michael’s number in New York, and even before she’d finished dialing she was afraid he wouldn’t be there: he might have called Laura from any of a million phone booths, anywhere.
But he answered on the first ring. “Oh, Lucy,” he said. “Oh, I knew you’d call back. I knew you wouldn’t let me down. Listen, can you stay on the phone a minute? I mean can you just sort of stay on the phone a minute?”
“Michael?” she said. “Can you tell me what the trouble is?”
“What the trouble is,” he repeated, as if the question had helped to clear his head. “Well, I haven’t had any sleep for about five – no, about seven – shit, I don’t know how many days. I keep watching the sun come up over Seventh Avenue and then I turn around half an hour later and it’s the middle of the night again. And I don’t think I’ve been out of this place for a week – or maybe it’s more like two or three weeks now. There are paper bags full of trash standing all around this room, and a couple of ’em have fallen over and spilled. Are you getting the picture, Lucy? I’m scared. I’m scared shitless, you see. I’m scared to walk out the door and up the street, because every time I do I see all kinds of people and things that aren’t even fucking there.”
“Well, wait, Michael, listen. Do you have a friend I could call? Someone who might come over and sort of look after you?”
“A ‘friend,’ ” he said. “You mean a girl. No, there isn’t anybody like that. Oh, but don’t get me wrong, sweetheart: I’ve had a whole lot more than my share of girls since you threw me out of the house. Jesus God, I’ve been having pussy for breakfast, pussy for lunch, pussy for—”
“Come on, Michael,” she said impatiently. “Listen: let me call Bill, okay?”
“—pussy for dinner,” he was saying, “oh, and plenty of pussy for leftovers at midnight, too. Bill who?”
“Bill Brock. He might be able to come over and—”
“No. That’s out. I won’t have Brock walking into this place. He’s been wallowing in psychoanalysis for years. He’ll sit here trying to psychoanalyze me, and the point is I may be crazy but I’m not that crazy. Oh, Jesus, Lucy, try to understand. All I need is sleep.”
“Well,” she said, “perhaps Bill can get you some sleeping pills.”
“Ah, yes, ‘perhaps.’ Tell me something, Lucy: How come you always say ‘perhaps’ instead of ‘maybe’ when you’re in this Miss-Purse-the-Nurse frame of mind? You’ve always had about six artificial, affected ways of speaking, you know that? Your whole personality changes to suit the occasion. I noticed it way the hell back in Cambridge, but I thought it was something you’d outgrow. Only you never have, so now I guess you’re stuck with it for life. And I guess it comes from being a millionaire girl among ordinary people, because I mean you feel you’ve gotta be up there on stage all the time, right? Playing one fucking role after another? Gracious Lady Bountiful dispensing favor? Well, that’s exactly the kind of horseshit I came to find very, very tiresome over the years, Lucy. And do you want to know something else? For most of the time we were married I was in love with Diana Maitland. Never had her, never came within a mile of her, but, oh, Christ, I could’ve died for that girl. Ah, I used to wonder if you knew what I was going through, but then I’d figure it didn’t matter anyway because you were probably in love with Paul – or if not with Paul then with Tom Nelson, or else with some romantic abstraction of a man who’d turn out to be about twenty-nine times stronger and better than me. Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn’t that the God damndest thing?”
She told him they had better get off the phone now, so she could call Bill Brock; then after hanging up she took a minute to comfort Laura, whose eyes were still round with fear.
“Listen, this is going to be all right, baby,” she said. “You’ll see. Promise not to worry now, okay?”
“Was he making any sense this time?”
“Well, it was a little confused at first, but after we got to talking he was – yes. He was making very good sense.”
Bill Brock sounded as though the phone had awakened him, and she pictured some sleepy girl in the bedclothes beside him – she had never been able to imagine Bill without a girl.
“Well, sure, Lucy,” he said when she’d explained the trouble. “I’ll get over there right now. I can bring him a couple of my own sleeping pills – they’re very mild, but they might do the job – and I’ll stay there with him until it’s time to call my shrink in the morning. And I mean this shrink of mine is a good, solid man – you’d like him, and you’d trust him, and I’m pretty sure he’ll have a few ideas. Then I’ll call you back when I can. So listen: Don’t worry, okay? This is no big deal. These things happen to practically everybody.”
“Well, Bill, I can’t thank you enough,” she said, and then she chewed her lip because he was someone she’d disliked for years.
“Ah, honey, don’t be silly,” he told her. “This is what friends are for.”
She had barely put the phone back in its cradle before it rang. It was Michael, and she thought he was convulsed with laughter until she realized he was in tears.
“… Oh, Lucy, listen, I didn’t mean any of that,” he was saying as he struggled to control his voice. “I didn’t mean the stuff about Diana Maitland or any of the rest of it, do you understand me?”
“It’s okay, Michael,” she said. “Bill’s on his way over now. He’s bringing some medication, and he’s going to stay with you.”
“Well, but listen. I may never have another chance to tell you this, so please for God’s sake don’t hang up on me.”
“I won’t hang up.”
“Okay. This is something I want you to remember, Lucy, and I think it’s probably the last chance I’ll ever have to say it. There’s only been one girl in my whole life. There’s only been one shining, splendid—”
“Yes, well, that’s nice,” she said dryly, “but I think I liked the first version better.”
He seemed not to have heard her. “… Oh, baby, do you remember back on Ware Street? Remember when we were both so young we thought anything in the world was possible – when we thought the world itself stopped turning every time we got laid?”
“Well, Michael, I think that’s about enough, don’t you?” she said. “Just be quiet now, and stay there, and wait for Bill.”
There was a long silence before he spoke again, and then it was hard to believe he’d been crying only a minute before: his voice was as terse and flat as that of a soldier acknowledging orders. “Right. Gotcha. Got the message.” And he broke the connection.
She went upstairs with Laura and tucked her into bed with as much care as if she were four or five instead of ten and a half.
And it wasn’t until she was alone in her own room, taking off her dress, that she remembered the underwear and stockings strewn on Jack Halloran’s floor.
As soon as she’d left him, Jack might easily have gotten up and pulled on his pants and opened the door again and said “Julie? Can I offer you a beer?”
And that shy, talented girl might easily have come in to sit on the cot beside him while they talked about her brilliant future. She would have told him, breathlessly, that she knew she could never have “found” herself this summer without his help, and he would have insisted that her achievements were all her own.
Oh, he probably hadn’t made a lunge for her right away – Jack had an impeccable sense of timing – but while listening to her talk he would almost certainly have taken the key from his pocket, gone to the door one final time, and locked it for the night.
Bill Brock called back in the morning, well after Laura had left for school, and his voice betrayed a striving for command.
“Listen, it’s gonna be okay, Lucy,” he told her. “Michael’s safe, and he’s in good hands, and he’s getting treatment.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, good. Was your – doctor able to help, then?”
“No, tha
t part of it didn’t work out. Look, I’ll tell you exactly what happened, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Well, when I got over there last night he was pacing around and talking steadily – talking compulsively. Sometimes he’d be coherent for five minutes or so, and then he’d get all unfocused again. All irrational. Diana Maitland’s name kept coming into it: he kept trying to tell me a whole lot of disjointed stuff about Diana Maitland, and I figured that was just because he still associates her in his mind with me. You know.”
“Sure,” Lucy said.
“Oh, and the place was a wreck, Lucy: I don’t think he’d taken out the trash for a month, and I’ve never seen so many cigarette butts in my life. So I straightened up the bed for him and I got him to take the pills I’d brought. But they didn’t work – I told you they’re a very mild prescription – and after a while he started saying he wanted to go out for a walk. Well, at first I tried to talk him out of it, but then I began to think it might not be a bad idea: I thought the physical exercise might help him sleep. So we started walking up Seventh Avenue, and all the way up to about Fourteenth Street he was fine: very quiet, very docile, not even talking much. Then all of a sudden he got manic.”
“Got ‘manic’?”
“Well, he kept getting these terrific bursts of energy, and he kept getting away from me, and there wasn’t any way I could control him. He’d go running out in the street, right into the traffic and everything, as if he was trying to kill himself, and I knew I couldn’t deal with the situation alone. So I got this cop to help me – and I know you may not like that part of it, Lucy, but there are times when you really need a cop – and the cop called a police ambulance and we got him safely over to Bellevue.”
“Oh.”
“Well, look, Lucy: we’ve all heard stories about Bellevue, and I suppose it’s true that he won’t be getting much rest there for the first few days, but you have to remember it’s a thoroughly up-to-date facility. Some of the finest psychiatrists in New York are consultants there, and those guys know their business. I had a long talk with the admitting physician – this very nice, very bright young guy out of Yale Med School – and I really wish you could’ve talked to him too because he was very reassuring. He said Mike’ll probably only be in there a week, or two weeks at the most, and he said he’ll be given the best available medications, stuff that’d cost him a fortune if he were getting it under private care. And then I called my own shrink first thing this morning, because I wanted to check all this out with him, and he said it sounded to him as if I’d done the right thing.”
“Sure,” Lucy said. “I mean I’m sure that’s what he would – I’m sure that’s probably true.”
“So I’ll keep you posted, Lucy, okay? I’ll be going over there again as soon as they have visiting hours on Mike’s ward, and I’ll find out how he’s doing and everything, and I’ll let you know.”
Lucy said that would be fine, and she thanked him again. She even said “Thanks so much for your help, Bill,” and “Thanks for everything.”
But she could hardly wait to be rid of his voice.
And she had indeed heard stories about Bellevue. Crowds of men, barefoot and in wretched pajamas, were made to walk the filthy floors of locked and airless wards in there all day – made to walk to a wall and turn, walk to the opposite wall and turn again, because that was the easiest way for the hulking Negro orderlies to keep an eye on all of them. Some of the men would shout or scream and others would fight, and the punishment for each disturbance was the same: the man would be forcibly injected with a heavy sedative and locked alone in a padded cell.
She could picture Michael trudging along with his head down in that dreadful parade, or sprawled in humiliation on the stained canvas mats of a cell, and she knew he would find it all impossible to believe. None of this could really be happening to him, because he was – well, because he was Michael Davenport, and because all he had needed was sleep.
When Jack Halloran arrived at the house to take her down across the road for rehearsals, he said “What was the trouble last night? When Laura called?”
“Oh, nothing much. She got a little upset about something – mostly just about being alone, I think – so I thought I’d better stay with her. She was fine this morning.” Lucy hardly ever told lies because they always made her feel she might be turning into somebody else, but this time there was clearly no point in telling the truth.
The day would be as hot and windless as yesterday and the day before. They were walking down Ann Blake’s driveway now, and Lucy was careful to wait until they were almost at the foot of it, until there were no other members of the company in sight, before she turned on Jack with a bright artificial smile.
“So,” she said. “Did you and Julie have a good time last night?”
His face looked so blank, and then so honestly puzzled, that she felt a tentative sense of relief.
“I think you’re out of your mind, Lucy,” he told her.
“Maybe I am. Maybe picturing the two of you on that damned little cot is enough to drive me out of my mind.”
They had come to a stop, facing each other, and he took hold of her shoulders with both hands. “Lucy, will you cut this out?” he said. “My God, what kind of a slob do you take me for? You really think I’d bring some other girl into my room the minute you’ve left it? That’d be like something out of a French farce, for Christ’s sake, or like something out of a dirty joke.”
So she allowed him to lead her out across the warm asphalt road and along the far side of it toward the theater.
“And besides,” he said as they walked, and he put his arm around her. A short lock of his black hair was lifting and falling attractively on his forehead with every step. “Besides, I don’t even want Julie Pierce. Why the hell would I want Julie Pierce? She’s way too skinny and she hasn’t got any tits at all. And she may be talented as hell but I think there’s something a little cracked upstairs. So can I just please get started on the day’s work now, sweetheart, without taking any more of this crazy shit from you?”
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “Oh, I’m sorry, Jack.”
“Hey, baby?” he asked softly, a few nights later. “You awake?”
“Yes.”
“Be okay if we sit up for a minute, and talk?”
“Sure.” She knew he’d had something on his mind for hours, even for days, and she was glad of the chance to find out what it was.
“Want a beer?”
“Oh, I don’t care. Sure, I guess so.”
And then he came out with it. “You used to do some acting, right? Up around Harvard? In a couple of your husband’s plays and things like that?”
“Oh, well,” she said, “sure, but that was just – you know – that was just college-girl stuff. I never had much training or anything.”
“Well, the thing is I’d really like to work with you,” he told her. “I’d like to see what you can do, and I’ve got a feeling you’d do very well.”
And she was about to protest, or to laugh it off, but she kept still because a slow sense of pleasurable expectancy had begun to rise in her chest.
Jack wanted something big to close the season with, he explained. He wanted a final show so powerful that nobody sitting out there in the New Tonapac Playhouse would ever forget it. He had given this a lot of thought all summer and he knew the play he wanted, but now he wasn’t sure if he could cast it. Had Lucy ever seen A Streetcar Named Desire? “Oh, my God,” she said.
Michael Davenport had taken her to the original Broadway production, on a weekend trip to New York soon after they’d met, and she would always remember the stunned, enraptured look on his face as they left the theater. “Know something, sweetheart?” he’d said. “That’s the greatest fucking American play ever written. This guy Williams makes O’Neill look empty.” She had hugged his arm and told him she’d loved it too – loved it; loved it – and a month later they’d come all the way back from Boston just to see it a
gain.
“… And the trouble is I’ve worked the hell out of Julie all summer,” Jack Halloran was saying. “I’m getting a little concerned about her nerves. Besides, she’s not old enough for Blanche Dubois. I suppose she could play Stella, but then that’s a very demanding part too; might be better to use one of the other girls. Still, the main problem is finding somebody who’s right for Blanche, and that’s why I thought of you. Now, wait; listen” – and he quickly held up one hand to ward off her refusal – “before you say no to this, dear, let me tell you something. There’s plenty of time; you won’t have to worry about that. We’ve got two whole weeks.”
And he explained that the play wouldn’t be going into rehearsal until a week from tomorrow; that would give them seven days for what he called preliminary coaching. The two of them would meet alone on the stage every afternoon, when the regular working day was over and all the kids were gone, and he’d take her through her part line by line until she was “comfortable” with it; until she’d “gained enough confidence” to begin rehearsing with the other members of the cast. Did that sound fair enough?
“Well, Jack,” she said, “this is certainly a – certainly an honor” – here she had to glance at his face to make sure he wouldn’t think “honor” was a silly word – “and I’d love to try. But you’ll have to promise me one thing. If it turns out that you don’t think I’m good enough, promise to tell me right away, okay? Before it’s too late?”
“Well, sure; of course I’ll promise that. And listen, it’s great that you’re willing to do this, Lucy. It’s really a load off my mind.”
From under his bed, where the beer was kept, he pulled out a cardboard box packed with copies of the play. She could take one home and read it, and make notes in it; then she’d be ready for the first of their working sessions.
“Who do you have in mind for the man?” she asked him. “For what’s-his-name? Stanley Kowalski?”
“Well, that’s the other thing,” he said. “I know there are two or three kids in the group who could probably handle it, but I’ve really come to miss performing – the hell, this’ll be the last show, right? So I thought I’d do it myself.”
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