Attack of the Theater People (13 page)

Eighteen

Paula slips off
her shiny silver flats. “It all started that night we went bowling.”

This is how Paula tells a story. Ask her what she did last weekend and she’ll say, “Well, first dinosaurs ruled the earth….”

She pulls a pair of socks out of the Prada knockoff she bought on the street. “You remember how upset Marcus got when Kelly insisted
The Music Man
was a play? Well, he positively
fulminated
on it for days; he truly can be impossible. As it was, we’d been fighting over what to call his company. He wanted to name it the Death to the Patriarchy Players, then got absolutely
incensed
when I said that might make it hard to get funding. Then we came up with the Public Play Project. But if you say that too fast it sounds like Probably Profit, which sort of defeats the purpose. We finally settled on the Coup d’État Group, which at least has a Continental flair, and started planning to perform
Waiting for Godot
in an elevator in Penn Station. But then we went bowling and Marcus decided he had to do
The Music Man
?”

“
The Music Man
?” I say.

“That’s right,” Paula says, “with the question mark. He’s deconstructing the text based on the principles of Brecht’s alienation effect and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.”

“With
The Music Man
,” I say.

“No,
The Music Man?
It’s ironic.” She throws her feet onto Natie’s lap, wiggling her fingers to indicate he should lace her up. “Natie, I need you to talk some financial sense to him. Marcus refuses—simply
refuses
—to accept any money from his mother, because she’s an opera singer, and opera is part of the elitist power structure.”

“Then how’s he gonna pay for the rights?” Natie asks.

“He’s not. He says that’s contributing to the commodification of the arts.”

Natie whistles through his teeth. “The publisher ain’t gonna like that.”

“I
know
,” Paula says. “I’m positively bereft.”

“What about me?” I ask.

“Well…” (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth…”) “…Marcus has cast a blind woman as Marian the Librarian and a deaf man as Harold Hill. Don’t roll your eyes; it’s a
brilliant
concept, underscoring the way we’re blind and deaf to the corruption of the Reagan administration.” She glances at the Persians huddling nearby, then whispers, “You know he sold weapons to Iran?”

“It’s okay,” Natie says. “These are the people who escaped.”

“Oh, it’s so confusing. As far as I can make out, our government sold weapons to Iran, our enemy, to make money for the Nicaraguan contras so they could fight the Sandinistas because the Sandinistas are sympathetic to the Soviet Union, which is also our enemy. Honestly, what’s the point?”

I could ask the same thing about Marcus’s concept.

“Anyway,” Paula continues, “we need you to coach the Harold Hill.”

I see the glitter of crashing cymbals. And hear the thunder of rolling drums. The summer I was fourteen I played Harold in the Wallingford Summer Workshop production of
The Music Man
and my performance was compared to Kevin Kline. Granted, it was by Paula’s Aunt Glo, but I’ve seen the video, and I must say I was damn good. After all, I was the youngest one in a cast that included graduating seniors. Still, coach a deaf actor?

“I don’t speak sign language,” I say.

“Gavin reads lips,” Paula says. “And speaks
perfectly
. He just needs to learn how to sing.”

“Sure,” I say. “And when I’m done, I’ll teach the blind how to paint. Then heal the sick and raise the dead.”

“Don’t be negative,” she sniffs. “It doesn’t suit you.”

As always, she’s right. And, in the following weeks, I try to keep a positive attitude, even though I continually come up with nothing that fulfills Chad’s vision of us getting filthy fucking rich. The fact is, after two months, I’ve already had it up to my kishkes with bash mitzvahs. There’s something inherently creepy about flirting with prepubescent girls, not to mention middle-aged women starving themselves to look prepubescent. Likewise, I’m growing tired of watching thirteen-year-old boys take off their ties and wrap them around their heads.

I’m no longer impressed with the sumptuous surroundings, either. I’ve come to expect round banquet tables with gold bamboo chairs, gold charger plates, and centerpieces that look like the female guests, with enormous heads propped precariously on stalky bodies.

Natie and I hold out hopes for my gig with Pharmicare, the Jersey-based pharmaceuticals giant, which is holding its corporate retreat the weekend before Thanksgiving in Atlantic City. Natie drills me like he’s Henry Higgins readying Eliza Doolittle for the embassy ball. Except we don’t have a chorus of servants in their bathrobes coming in to tell us to quit. He quizzes me on the names of the people in R & D (which, I learn, stands for research and development, not rhythm and dance); he reads me passages from
The Art of War
(“All warfare is based on deception”); and teaches me trivia about Eddie Zander’s native Oklahoma (soon to be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the shopping cart, invented in an Oklahoma City Piggly Wiggly in 1937).

Even though I’m Eddie Zander for this party, my tasks are closer to those of Eddie Sanders, requiring that I flirt and dance with neglected wives, which kind of bums me out. There’s already something inherently depressing about Atlantic City, with its tattered remains of broken dreams being bulldozed over for the glitzy promise of quick cash. And I can’t help feel for these women whose husbands won’t dance with them. I don’t get it. The middle-aged women I meet at these parties are almost uniformly vivacious and attractive, yet most of them are married to paunchy, dull men. What is it about being heterosexual that makes so many men boring? Monotony is so prevalent among straight men it’s practically an epidemic.

They remind me of my mother, these women, and, as I hold a particularly lonely wife of an R & D executive in my arms, I feel the weight of her life against me. She tells me that her husband is a stranger, that he’s been working eighty hours a week for months, and I wonder if that’s why there are so many boring straight men—they’ve had all the magic whacked out of them. I lean in, holding her closer, vowing never to become that man.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “What could he possibly be working on that’s so important?”

She glances around us then says, “I really shouldn’t tell you this….”

Thanksgiving morning
Natie and I take the train out to Wallingford, still giddy from my Pharmicare coup.

Natie pulls out a spreadsheet he’s written on graph paper—such a Nudelman thing to have. “Okay,” he says, clicking a ballpoint, “how much have you managed to save these past two months?”

“Four hundred bucks.”

“Not bad. Plus the hundred we just got from Chad. So that’s five hundred.”

“Yeah,” I mumble.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I’m bummed that Chad didn’t make a bigger deal about my news. I mean, Pharmicare is developing a new diet pill that allows you to eat what you want without absorbing the fat. That’s
huge
, pardon the pun. Who wouldn’t want to take that pill? The woman in Atlantic City told me that it’s scheduled to be approved by the FDA in just a few months. You’d think information like that would warrant a celebratory dinner. Or some mutual masturbation. Instead Chad sends cash without even including a note. It makes me feel like a hooker. Without the benefit of getting laid.

Natie hands me an open envelope. “Plus you got this credit card application.”

“You opened my mail?”

“How else was I gonna read it?”

“That’s a federal offense.”

“Blah, blah, blah.” He pulls the application out of the envelope. “Look, you qualify for $1,000 worth of credit. Once you receive your card, you can take out a cash advance and invest $1,500.”

“But won’t I owe the credit card company the money?”

“At a minimum monthly payment of twenty bucks.”

“But that’ll take me…let me see…twenty bucks a month is $240 a year…
four years
to pay back a thousand bucks.”

“Actually, it’s longer, because you’re charged interest.”

“And this is a good idea because…?”

“Because you’re borrowing the money at sixteen percent interest, but you’re investing it for much more.”

“How much more?”

He hands me his spreadsheet and pulls out the
New York Times.
“Let’s see. Pharmicare stock is currently selling at $30 a share. So, with $1,500 you can buy fifty shares. If the stock goes up to $60 a share—”

“Can that happen?”

He looks at me over his glasses. “Eddie, they’ve got a pill that prevents your body from absorbing fat. Sixty bucks a share is conservative.”

“So, if the stock doubles, does that mean we double our money?”

He takes back the spreadsheet.

“Sure, but you can do way better if you buy options. With options, you don’t buy the stock at $30; you buy
the right
to buy it at some later date, in this case at $35.”

“Why would I want to pay more?”

“You don’t. Because the option only costs
$2
per share. So you take your $1,500 and buy seven hundred and fifty shares instead of fifty. Then, when the stock doubles to $60, you’ve contracted to buy it at $35, so you immediately sell it for $60 and pocket the difference.”

“How much is that?”

He scrawls in the margin. “Well, $25 profit per share times seven hundred and fifty shares equals $18,750.”

I stare at him, stunned.

“Profit,” he says. “Plus, you get back your initial $1,500.”

My heart flaps its wings.

“That’s…$20,250. That’ll pay for two years of college.”

Natie’s glasses fog. “I think I’m gonna cry,” he says.

Al pulls up to the station
in a boxy burgundy Volvo the size of a Brinks truck. Citing carsickness, Natie claims shotgun, an irrelevant argument when you consider we live two miles from the station. The ensuing conversation is like a Pinter play—minimal dialogue with lots of silence filled with incomprehensible subtext.

ME:
What happened to the Corvette?

AL:
I traded it in.

ME:
How come?

AL:
Ah, y’know.

(Incomprehensible subtext-filled silence.)

AL:
So, Nathan, your mom says you switched majors to business.

NATIE:
Econ.

(More incomprehensible subtext-filled silence.)

AL:
Good.

(Still more silence.)

Finally, I can’t stand it and start to fill up the Pinteresque void with rapid-fire screwball comedy dialogue. How I’m a big, big hit with
La Vie de la Fête
Productions, the toast of the town with the crème de la crème. If Marian Seldes were listening, she’d say,
My little bird, you’re pushing too hard. You’re avoiding your feelings by barreling over them with an avalanche of words.

Of course I’m avoiding my feelings
, I’d say to her.
Who wants to experience bad feelings?

Actors
, she’d say.

She’s right, even though she’s just a figment of my imagination. I can hear in my voice how much I want my father’s approval. I don’t understand why. The man is everything I don’t want to be, with his
dese
,
dem
,
dose
and his “dreams only come true in dreams.” If I met him at a party, he’d be the last person I’d want to talk to.

Yet I still want him to be proud of me.

Damn him.

We don’t say anything for the rest of the ride, the silence filling the empty space like rising water. We drop off Natie, I hop in the front, and we head to my aunt Lydia’s.

But at the first red light, Al turns to me and says, “We need to talk.”

Nineteen

Why do people start conversations
with the phrase
We need to talk
? It only makes you assume the worst, like they have cancer. Better to start off casual and ease into it, like, “Hey, a funny thing happened on the way to work today—I got cancer.”

Al shifts so he can look at me, the seat belt cutting into his belly like the string around a pot roast. “Milagros is pregnant.”

It takes me a moment to figure out who he’s talking about. “The domestic?”

“Yeah.”

I’m not sure why the personal life of the woman who cleans my father’s house is any of my con…

“No,” I say. “How?”

Al winces, like I’m a splinter. “How do ya’ think?”

In the time-honored way, I suppose. The lord of the manor creeps up behind the saucy scullery maid as she, I don’t know, sculleries?

“Is she going to keep it?”

His nostrils flare. “Of course she is.”

“Okay,” I say. “Don’t get all Vatican on me.”

Al grips the steering wheel, his simian brow drooping over his eyes. When did he get so old? He could use a pair of shoes to go with those bags.

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“Whaddya think I’m gonna do?” he says. “I’m gonna marry her.”

Ay, caramba.

The next day,
while Natie and I take the train into Hoboken for the Coup d’État Group’s first rehearsal, he offers a financial analysis of the coup occurring in
mi casa
:

“You’re fucked.”

“Really?”

“Think about it,” he says. “How old is this Menudos?”

“Milagros. I don’t know. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight.”

“Right. So when Al dies, all his money goes to her. And since women live longer than men, you can kiss your inheritance good-bye.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, my mom’s real upset.”

“About my inheritance?”

“No. She just lost the best housekeeper she ever had.”

The rehearsal is held at the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Hoboken, one of those parishes you hear about from time to time, the kind where a much-beloved priest suddenly disappears because he’s been trying to anoint the altar boys with massage oil. Things have improved greatly, however, since the arrival of Paula’s cousin, Father Angelo, a scholar so stuffy he wishes everyone would take the holy host by hand. “All those tongues,” he says, shuddering, “like frogs eating flies.” According to Paula, whatever sexual urges her cousin has he sublimates into a passion for opera.

Since Father Angelo’s idea of a good Mass is the first act finale of
Tosca
, I’m not surprised to find the actors rehearsing in the sanctuary. Marcus has assembled a cast of ten: the blind Marian, the deaf Harold, and eight others whose only handicap is their misguided faith that this idea can work. They sit in the front pews, all wearing black. It’s like a funeral for a very unpopular person.

“I’ve chosen to rehearse in a church,” Marcus says, “because an actor is a kind of priest.”

Actually, Marcus chose to rehearse in a church because it was free. But he makes a good point.

“Since the Greeks, whose plays were a part of religious festivals, the theater has been a sacred space. And the church,” he says, gesturing to the stone arches and stained glass windows, “is a kind of theater.” He holds up a worn copy of Jerzy Grotowski’s
Towards a Poor Theatre
. “The Coup d’État Group rejects the spectacle of bourgeois entertainment. Theater cannot, should not,
will not
compete with film and television. We need to strip away anything that isn’t necessary and focus on what’s essential—the relationship between the actor and the audience.”

I read somewhere that jaguars kill their prey by biting through their skulls, slaying them instantly by ripping into their brains. That’s how it is with Marcus. Sure, he’s combative and humorless. But there are times when he grabs hold of my mind and just shakes me until I’m helpless to the ferocity of his beliefs.

“Okay,” he says, “let’s warm up. Ten laps around the church.” The cast leaps to its feet and jogs around the perimeter of the sanctuary, as if the stations of the cross were an Olympic event (
Jesus falls, Jesus rises, Jesus falls…
). Bringing up the rear are Paula and Willow, both of whom give wan waves at me and Natie, like they’re Abbott and Costello drafted into the army.

A tickly, carbonated happiness bubbles up inside me. I’m so excited to be at a rehearsal again. When you’re rehearsing, everything is possible. There is still a chance to get it right. The Germans call it
die Probe
, the French
la répétition
. And therein lies the pleasure: to probe repeatedly. To hearse again and again, from the Old French
hercier
, to rake or harrow.

And this rehearsal certainly is harrowing.

After a series of truly gruesome facial exercises, it becomes abundantly clear that Marcus’s concept is also Brechtian, which is another way of saying it’s dark and pretentious. Brecht believed that an audience should not get emotionally involved in a play, that a cathartic experience clouds the audience’s reason and leaves it complacent. I guess if I were writing as Hitler came to power on a wave of emotionally manipulative propaganda, I’d be cranky, too. Still, it’s unnerving to watch Marcus stage “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little” by having the four women beat the blind singer while the men read copies of the
New York Post
. I don’t care if the song is about character assassination. If the purpose of Brecht’s “alienation effect” is to alienate the audience, then we’ve got a hit.

The scene gets even more surreal when, from a side door, Father Angelo enters the church with his mother, otherwise known to the world as Aunt Glo.

Aunt Glo.

Her apple-pie face warms with recognition as she spots me and Natie, crying “The LBs!” (As a MOP—Mother of Priest—she refrains from saying Little Bastards in church.) Paula, who’s busy assaulting a blind woman, responds with an aggressive
shh
, which only causes Aunt Glo to call more attention to herself as she does a silent-movie tiptoe up the aisle, genuflecting before she enters the pew, then thrusting her plump arms around me. Her hug feels like home, as if she’s trying to make up for all the mother love I may have missed. She beams at me, her globular eyes overflowing with tears, like two cups filled above the brim. To Aunt Glo I’ll always be a star.

Her son slips in behind us, giving me a pious nod.

Father Angelo makes me uncomfortable. For starters, he’s way too good-looking for a priest, his dark bedroom eyes and athletic build arousing exactly the kind of impure thoughts you’re supposed to go to church to get rid of. What’s more, two years ago Aunt Glo got me a job here as a soloist and I kind of flaked out. In my defense, it’s hard for anyone to hold down a job while attending Juilliard. It’s like boot camp for actors. I try to concentrate on the cast rehearsing “Wells Fargo Wagon,” which, for reasons having to do with Reagan cutting taxes for the rich and driving the national debt sky-high, requires that the citizens of River City writhe with orgasmic pleasure as they list the items they’ve ordered, doing Fosse-esque pelvic thrusts every time they say the wagon is “a-
comin
’.”

It’s not the kind of scene you want to watch with an old lady and a priest.

When the cast takes a break, Aunt Glo says, “Y’know, my Angelo here wanted to be an actor, just like you.” She turns to her son. “What was that show you did in high school? The one with the carousel?”

“Carousel.”

“That’s it. So beauteeful, his voice.”

“Oh, Ma.”

Willow comes over to say hello to Aunt Glo, who gives her a hug and calls her Wilma.

“What do you think of the concept?” Willow asks.

Before I can answer, Aunt Glo says, “Y’know, I saw Ken Berry do
The Music Man
at the Paper Mill Playhouse.”

Willow nods like this makes sense, which, being Willow, it very well might. “I think Marcus is really onto—the problem with most experimental theater is that it doesn’t reach—but here, my God, they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, look, it’s
The Music Man
’…then WHAM, right between the eyes. Like Lillian Hellman. Are you familiar with her work?”

Aunt Glo shakes her head. “No. But I love her mayonnaise.”

Paula brings the deaf Harold Hill over to meet me. Gavin is a slender reed around thirty, with shoulders like a coat hanger and the drooping posture of a gooseneck lamp, as if someone had punched him in the chest. He wears a T-shirt reading
GAY MEN’S HEALTH CRISIS
, and shakes my hand with both of his. “Thanks for helping me.”

I’m shocked at how well he speaks. You’d never know he was deaf.

He’s also exceedingly appealing, with tendril curls that flop over soft, doleful eyes set just a little too far apart. With his plump, fleshy mouth, he reminds me of the koi I exterminated in my fish-killing sprees.

“Angelo helped me with the rhythm,” he says, “but he insists I need a real singer for the notes.” A bemused, secret smile spreads across his face, like he’s in on a joke I don’t get.

Father Angelo clears his throat. “Gavin’s deaf dance troupe rehearses here.” Even though he’s speaking to me, he faces Gavin, presumably so he can read his lips.

Gavin and I retreat to the back of the church, Gavin moving with the wan, spectral tread of someone who slept in an airport. Not exactly what you’d expect for a thundering, outsize role like Harold Hill, but a production paying the actors with Aunt Glo’s homemade cannoli can’t be too picky.

“SO,” I say, trying to look at him and walk at the same time. “YOU. READ. LIPS.”

“You don’t have to work so hard,” he says. “I’m deaf, not blind.”

“Sorry.”

“Here,” he says, stopping. “Let me show you.”

He turns and faces the front of the church, where Paula and Natie are engaged in a conversation I can’t hear.

“Paula’s telling that little red-haired guy that now’s not a good time to talk to Marcus,” Gavin says. “She says he gets
frightfully
irritable when he’s rehearsing.”

“Wow,” I say. “You should work for the CIA.”

“I can’t. The other ushers at the Eugene O’Neill depend on me.”

“You’re an usher?” I say, far more music-theatery than I intend. He’s an usher; I’m a gusher.

“The theater is my life,” he says, with a grand Master Thespian gesture.

Marcus gives an irritated
shh
from the altar that Gavin can’t hear.

I like him.

The plan is for Gavin to talk his way through all of Harold’s songs, which will probably work better on some than others. Not that Marcus cares. “Enjoyment is a bourgeois indulgence,” he says. But Gavin is determined to sing the last few lines of “Till There Was You.”

“Come over here where there’s some light,” he says, leading me to an altar to Saint Jude. From the plaque, I learn that Saint Jude is a) a man; and b) the patron saint of lost causes, not a good omen. Gavin positions me facing him, close enough that I can feel his breath on my cheek.

Then he reaches into his pocket, his jeans slipping down his narrow hips, and pulls out…a condom.

Mama said there’d be gays like this.

Giving me that same enigmatic smile, he tears the package open with his teeth, hands me the wrapper, and proceeds to blow the condom up like a balloon, tying it off with a knot.

“Balloons are a natural amplifier,” he explains. “I forgot to bring one, but I never go anywhere without a rubber.”

He takes the balloon, which is ribbed for our pleasure, and tucks it under his chin. Then, placing his hands on my shoulders, he guides me closer until the condom is against my throat. Our faces are now inches away from each other.

Gavin reaches up and places his long, sinewy fingers on my neck. “Okay,” he says. “Go slowly.” I can feel the vibration of his words through the rubber. I check the first note on a pitch pipe—not an easy thing to do when you have a condom balloon under your chin—and start to sing:

There was love all around,

But I never heard it singing…

Gavin laughs. “Well,
duh
.”

He asks me to sing the first note again, then attempts the seemingly impossible task of matching a pitch he can’t hear. It’s painstaking, frustrating work. Words like
higher
and
lower
don’t mean anything to him so it’s totally trial-and-error, with me saying
no
over and over while his reedy fingers grope my face and neck to memorize the position of my larynx, my jaw, my mouth. All the while I’m singing “Till There Was You” into his wistful hazel eyes, watching his fleshy lips wrap around the words. Now I understand why Father Angelo didn’t want to do this task.

Still, Gavin is a tireless pupil, having had rigorous speech training. While we break for Aunt Glo’s homemade lasagna, he tells me that he lost his hearing from measles at the age of three and that the teachers at the school for the deaf taught him to speak by flicking him on the tongue with their fingers every time he got something wrong. He also tells me how he didn’t find out until he went to college that farts made noise.

We work the rest of the evening this way, note by note, each a hard-won victory. But since the first three notes repeat three times, at the end of rehearsal Gavin is actually able to stand before the cast and sing:

There…was…looooove…

All…a…rouuuuuund…

But…I…neeeeee-ver…

It’s like watching a baby take his first steps. For all its hesitancy, his voice already has a croony, caramel quality, like a 1940s band singer, perhaps a young Sinatra. He even uses a vibrato. If I hadn’t heard it with my own ears, I wouldn’t have thought such a thing possible.

Paula turns to me, tears streaming down her dove white cheeks. “He sounds just like you.”

I swell like a condom balloon and leave the church feeling a kind of good I’ve not felt before. For the first time in I don’t know how long I’ve thought about someone else, done something worthwhile. Rather than obsessing about what’s going to happen to me, me, me, I think about what’s going to happen to him, him, him.