Dark Benediction

“You’re doing fine, Thorny, just fine!” Jade told him, because there was nothing else she dared tell him during a performance. Shock an actor’s ego during rehearsal, and he had time to recover; shock it during a performance, and he might go sour for the night. He knew, though, without being told, the worry that seethed behind her mechanical little smile. “But just calm down a little, eh?” she advised. “It’s going fine.”

She left him to seethe in solitude. He leaned against the wall and glowered at his feet and flagellated himself. You failure, you miserable crumb, you janitor-at-heart, you stage-struck charwoman—

He had to straighten out. If he ruined this one, there’d never be another chance. But he kept thinking of Mela, and how he had wanted to hurt her, and how now that she was being hurt he wanted to stop.

“Your cue, Thorny—wake up!”

And he was on again, stumbling over lines, being terrified of the sea of dim faces where a fourth wall should be.

She was waiting for him after his second exit. He came off pale and shaking, perspiration soaking his collar. He leaned back and lit a cigarette and looked at her bleakly. She couldn’t talk. She took his arm in both hands and kneaded it while she rested her forehead against his shoulder. He gazed down at her in dismay. She’d stopped feeling hurt; she couldn’t feel hurt when she watched him make a fool of himself out there. She might have been vengefully delighted by it, and he almost wished that she were. Instead, she was pitying him. He was numb, sick to the core. He couldn’t go on with it.

“Mela, I’d better tell you; I can’t tell Jade what I—”

“Don’t talk, Thorny. Just do your best.” She peered up at him. “Please do your best?”

It startled him. Why should she feel that way?

“Wouldn’t you really rather see me flop?” he asked.

She shook her head quickly, then paused and nodded it. “Part of me would, Thorny. A vengeful part. I’ve got to believe in the automatic stage. I… I do believe in it. But I don’t want you to flop, not really.” She put her hands over her eyes briefly. “You don’t know what it’s like seeing you out there… in the middle of all that… that—” She shook herself slightly. “It’s a mockery, Thorny, you don’t belong out there, but—as long as you’re there, don’t muff it. Do your best?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“It’s a precarious thing. The effect, I mean. If the audience starts realizing you’re not a doll—” She shook her head slowly.

“What if they do?”

“They’ll laugh. They’ll laugh you right off the stage.”

He was prepared for anything but that. It confirmed the nagging hunch he’d had during the run-through.

“Thorny, that’s all I’m really concerned about. I don’t care whether you play it well or play it lousy, as long as they don’t find out what you are. I don’t want them to laugh at you; you’ve been hurt enough.”

“They wouldn’t laugh if I gave a good performance.”

“But they would! Not in the same way, but they would. Don’t you see?”

His mouth fell open. He shook his head. It wasn’t true. “Human actors have done it before,” he protested. “In the sticks, on small stages with undersized Maestros.”

“Have you ever seen such a play?”

He shook his head.

“I have. The audience knows about the human part of the cast in advance. So it doesn’t strike them as funny. There’s no jolt of discovering an incongruity. Listen to me Thorny—do your best, but you don’t dare make it better than a doll could do.”

Bitterness came back in a flood. Was this what he had hoped for? To give as machinelike a performance as possible, to do as good a job as the Maestro, but no better, and above all, no different? So that they wouldn’t find out?

She saw his distressed expression and felt for his hand. “Thorny, don’t you hate me for telling you. I want you to bring it off O.K., and I thought you ought to realize. I think I know what’s been wrong. You’re afraid—down deep—that they won’t recognize you for who you are, and that makes your performance un-doll-like. You better start being afraid they will recognize you, Thorny.”

As he stared at her it began to penetrate that she was still capable of being the woman he’d once known and loved. Worse, she wanted to save him from being laughed at. Why? If she felt motherly, she might conceivably want to shield him against wrath, criticism, or rotten tomatoes, but not against loss of dignity. Motherliness thrived on the demise of male dignity, for it sharpened the image of the child in the man.

“Mela—?”

“Yes, Thorny.”

“I guess I never quite got over you.” She shook her head quickly, almost angrily.

“Darling, you’re living ten years ago. I’m not, and I won’t. Maybe I don’t like the present very well, but I’m in it, and I can only change it in little ways. I can’t make it the past again, and I won’t try.” She paused a moment, searching his face. “Ten years ago, we weren’t living in the present either. We were living in a mythical, magic, wonderful future. Great talent, just starting to bloom. We were living in dream-plans in those days. The future we lived in never happened, and you can’t go back and make it happen. And when a dream-plan stops being possible, it turns into a pipe dream. I won’t live in a pipe dream. I want to stay sane, even if it hurts.”

“Too bad you had to come tonight,” he said stiffly.

She wilted. “Oh, Thorny, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. And I wouldn’t say it that strongly unless”— she glanced through the soundproof glass toward the stage where her mannequin was on in the scene with Piotr —“unless I had trouble too, with too much wishing.”

“I wish you were with me out there,” he said softly. “With no dolls and no Maestro. I know how it’d be then.”

“Don’t! Please, Thorny, don’t.”

“Mela, I loved you—”

“No!” She got up quickly. “I… I want to see you after the show. Meet me. But don’t talk that way. Especially not here and not now.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Please! Good-by for now, Thorny, and—do your best.” My best to be a mechanism, he thought bitterly as he watched her go.

He turned to watch the play. Something was wrong out there on the stage. Badly wrong. The Maestro’s interpretation of the scene made it seem unfamiliar somehow.

He frowned. Rick had spoken of the Maestro’s ability to compensate, to shift interpretations, to redirect. Was that what was happening? The Maestro compensating—for his performance?

His cue was approaching. He moved closer to the stage.

Act I had been a flop. Feria, Ferne, and Thomas conferred in an air of tension and a haze of cigarette smoke. He heard heated muttering, but could not distinguish words. Jade called a stagehand, spoke to him briefly, and sent him away. The stagehand wandered through the group until he found Mela Stone, spoke to her quickly and pointed. Thorny watched her go to join the production group, then turned away. He slipped out of their line of sight and stood behind some folded backdrops, waiting for the end of a brief intermission and trying not to think.

“Great act, Thorny,” a costumer said mechanically, and clapped his shoulder in passing.

He suppressed an impulse to kick the costumer. He got out a copy of the script and pretended to read his lines. A hand tugged at his sleeve.

“Jade!” He looked at her bleakly, started to apologize. “Don’t,” she said. “We’ve talked it over. Rick, you tell him.”

Rick Thomas who stood beside her grinned ruefully and waggled his head. “It’s not altogether your fault, Thorny. Or haven’t you noticed?”

“What do you mean?” he asked suspiciously.

“Take scene five, for example,” Jade put in. “Suppose the cast had been entirely human. How would you feel about what happened?”