The whole thing shimmered, changing again and again before our eyes-at once brilliant, prosaic, unheralded, obscene, chaotic, challenging, comforting, silly, obvious, disturbing.
A man in a three-piece gray suit and red smiley-face mask stood at the back of the hall and, claiming to be the play's author, confirming the disappointment he'd anticipated even from its inception, demanded that the production immediately be shut down.
Another, an emissary (he said) from the Arts Council in Washington, mask remaining blank, a form, praised free expression in America in drumlike manner.
One rose and, having brought a hush to the house with an imploring wave of his hand, wearing no mask at all, simply stood weeping.
Finally the cigarette vendor threw a kimono over substantial shoulders. Stepping back onstage, he said, 'The rest is silence. Unless…'
He paused.
'… I have a higher bid?'
And the curtain fell.
To resounding applause.
My own not the least, once I'd shaken myself loose from the spell. Even to move, I felt, somehow would violate what I'd just experienced, bring mundane life crashing back in.
'Too pretentious, isn't it?' Deborah said beside me. 'I knew it. I don't know why I let them-'
When I told her it was among the most powerful moments of theater I'd seen, she shut up and sat staring at me. All around us people stood, easing back into ordinary lives.
'You're desperate, Lewis.'
Of course. But that was hardly new.
Still in his kimono, heels exchanged for platform slippers, the cigarette vendor came out with a dozen red roses for Deborah. She ducked her face into them.
'How embarrassing.'
But couldn't escape standing to acknowledge the applause when it didn't stop.
When she did stand, swaying, I thought again, as I'd thought when I firstsaw her, of willows.
Afterwards, then, we repaired to Rue de la Course, there over French roast, Earl Grey and biscotti to speak of grand ideas, ambition, disappointment, highrent and sleeping alone, ghosts, phantoms, demands of the past.
This part of town had just begun to crawl out from under years of abandon and disrepair as firstyoung people, then investors, bought up the old Humpty-Dumpty houses and started putting them back together again. Even now, this late at night, a crew was at work across the street on a swayback Colonial double, portions of which had been painted dull silver, like aircraft models. Three men on ladders, spotlights directed up towards them as they scraped, sandpapered, sprayed, and hammered.
Deborah sat watching them. 'You sure it wasn't too pretentious?'
No. Want another tea?
Why not.
I went inside. When I came out balancing full mugs, the workers across the street had stopped and begun packing everything-wire brushes, sanders, paint, ladders, toolboxes, toolbelts, lights-into trucks and hatchbacks.
'Thanks,' Deborah said. She drank. 'What part did you like best?'
'Intellectually?'
'Whatever.'
'Okay. I have to tell you: I found the guy wandering around nude in the audience a realturn-on.'
'Yeah. Me too. Youreadyto go, Lewis?'
O yes.
17
Years ago a New Orleans friend named Chris Smither wrote a song called 'Love You Like a Man,' a fierce, intensely physical encomium detailing what his woman needs, what she's not going to find elsewhere and what he can do if she'd only give him the chance; these days, Chris says up in Boston where he lives now, he performs it chiefly as a nostalgia piece.
However we might laugh it off, over time our lives' landmark days become more commemorative than celebratory. Passing yearsfind us able to care passionately about less and less. Less becomes what we're capable of as well, physically, emotionally-andfinally what we hope for, what we believe still possible.
No: not the precis of another heady discussion with Deborah O'Neil, though it might have been. And though Deborah was directly responsible. For as I came to spend more and more time with her, within myself I sensed all manner of rumblings and unsettlings, felt systems I'd thought shut down for good start kicking over again.
Lights flare, dim, dim further still-and finally catch. The survivors let out a long breath.
The long-disused engine turns over once, again, stalls with power surging audibly towards it before stuttering into full bloom. The castaways will be able to escape after all.
It's alive! spectators cry out in horror films.
Holy words.
Somehow we go on being given new chances.
— What I was thinking Sunday night (or Monday morning, whichever shore you watched from), having left Deborah's a little after one. Lying with body exhausted, mind chugging away, in a bamboolike shaft of moonlight.
Late that afternoon I'd come home and, on my hurried way towards a shower and new clothes, gone into the kitchen for a bottle of water only tofindrefrigerator, pantry and shelves stocked for the firsttime in years. With no one to cook for, I'd long ago given it up. I ate out or nibbled at plates of cheese, crackers, sausage, raw vegetables.
A note scrawled in huge printed letters across three sheets of 8 V amp; X 11 paper, taped to the refrigerator door like a child's school drawings put up on display, read:
I FRIED YOUR LAST EGG FOR BREAKFAST.
IT WAS RIPE. THEN AS YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED I WENT SHOPPING. SOMEONE HAS TO. FIGURE SINCE I DON'T HAVE A JOB I'LL TAKE UP A HOBBY AT LEAST AND GET DOWN TO SOME 60URMET COOKING. ALWAYS MEANT TO. NOTICED HOW THE GUTTERS ARE ALL CHOCKFULL BY THE WAY. THEY AND MOST OF THE SHUTTERS DONE PULLED WAY FROM THE WALL. FIGURE I CAN FIX THAT THE NEXT DAY OR TWO IF IT'S OKAY WITH YOU. THERE'S SOME OTHER STUFF TOO. WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT. PROBABLY NEVER TOLD YOU, BUT MY OLD MAN WAS A CARPENTER, HANDYMAN, UP ROUND TUPELO. I WAS ALWAYS KIND OF ASHAMED OF HIM WHEN I WAS A KID. I'LL BE OUT LOOKING FOR WORK WHILE YOU'RE OUT WORKING. LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU'LL BE HOME AND THERE'LL BE A HOT MEAL WAITING. THANKS, ZEKE P.S. I STARTED THE NOVEL THIS AFTERNOON, I'D JUST WATCHED ZEBRAHEAD ON TV. AMAZING, ALL THIS CABLE CHANNEL STUFF. CALLING THE GUY IN MY BOOK LEW GRIFFIN FOR NOW. THAT OKAY?
Of the six messages on my answering machine, the most important was from Tulane, basically Hello? hello? is anyone there? Like a message launched blindly into space.
I would have called back right then, but nobody'd be around on Sunday afternoon. I'd missed, what, one class? It seemed like more. This week had been all over the damn place. Felt as though I needed a map and one of those time-lines-of-history charts.
'So many things happen to us,' Deborah said, arm passing into light from the window as she gathered the pink cotton blanket loosely about her. She sat, knees drawn up, against the headboard. 'How are we ever supposed to know which are the important ones, which ones matter?'
'We're not. Maybe the ones that matter are the ones we decide matter.'
'I'd love to believe we have that much control over it.' She sipped white wine from a tulip-shaped glass. 'You never drink, do you?'
