I Loved You Wednesday (27 page)

“I “

“WHAT?”

“I . . . need you.”

Oh, shit! What did I do to deserve this? “CHRIS? JUST WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?”

No answer.

“CHRIS?”

“I’m ... so tired . . . forgive me.”

“WHAT’D YOU TAKE!?”

“Huh?”

“WHAT’D YOU TAKE?”

“... Oh ... not much ... honest... come home, Steve... I miss . . . you.”

“WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?”

“Nothing ... I was scared. . . . Please come back.”

“CHRIS! THE CURTAIN GOES UP IN TWENTY MINUTES. I CAN’T LEAVE NOW!”

“But ... I need you . . . I’m lonely.”

“LISTEN TO ME. DON’T TAKE ANYTHING ELSE. I’LL CALL MARIE AND SEE IF SHE CAN LOOK IN ON YOU.”

“Okay . . . I’m frightened, Steve. . . . I . . . don’t feel well.”

“I KNOW. DON’T WORRY. EVERYTHING’LL BE FINE. STAY RIGHT THERE!”

Click.

I hang up and immediately dial Marie, who keeps me from eventual cardiac arrest by being home. I tell her what Ithink is going on upstairs and ask her to hurry there to see how Chris is and then to call me back at this number as soon as she can.

Click.

“Fifteen minutes, everyone. Fifteen minutes to curtain!”

I run upstairs, back to my dressing room, to finish getting ready. I fashion a fast, uncomfortable knot from my tie, throw my suit jacket on, take one last look around, making sure I’ve got everything I need to go on, and then run back downstairs. And as I run back into the Green Room, completely out of breath, I find this old-timer there, talking on the phone.

After pacing around the room frantically for a couple of minutes, waiting in vain for him to end his conversation, I finally say to the old man, “Listen, I hate to interrupt you, but I’m expecting an emergency call to come through on this phone. If you could just get off for a few minutes, you’d be doing me a really big favor!”

The old man looks me up and down a couple of times, quite slowly, saying nothing to me, but projecting great mistrust, before casually saying back into the receiver, “Hey, Martha. Feller here says he needs to use the phone.

I’ll call ya back in a few minutes. What’s that? ... Yeah....Afew minutes. ... All right. . . . Bye!”

Click.

“Thank you very much. You’re quite nice. Believe me, I wouldn’t’ve asked if it weren’t important.”

“TEN MINUTES, EVERYONE. TEN MINUTES TO CURTAIN!’’

I pace the room several more minutes while the old man sits on a couch, watching me marching back and forth, back and forth.

“FIVE MINUTES, PLEASE. FIVE MINUTES, EVERYONE. FIVE MINUTES TO CURTAIN!”

“I’m sorry, young feller. I’ve got to finish my call and get to my light switches before the curtain goes up. I can’t wait anymore.”

“Please don’t!” I beg him. “Isn’t there another phone you can use? Please! This is really important!”

“I’ll just be a moment. Have to tell Martha where to meet me after the show.”

He goes for the phone, and just as he’s about to reach for the receiver, it rings.

“HELLO?” I roar after grabbing the receiver out of the old man’s hands.

“It’s okay,” says Marie. “She’ll be fine. Just got a little hysterical and was mixing downs with some vodka.”

“She’s okay?”

“Sure. A bit druggy and incoherent, but sobering up. I’ll stay with her a couple of hours. Sit here till she falls asleep.”

“Marie, you’ve saved my life! I can’t begin to thank you.”

“Yeah, I’m a regular Clara Barton. Don’t worry. Hey, don’t you have a performance tonight?”

“PLACES, EVERYONE! PLACES, PLEASE!”

“Yeah. I’ve got a performance tonight. I’ll call you in a few hours.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Thanks a million.”

“PLACES!”
announces the stage manager again, with great authority. “
PLACES, EVERYBODY. PLEASE!”

I’ve heard that announcement all my life, and it has always meant one thing. For the next few hours nothing else matters; everything else stops. The show is now all. So, like a Pavlovian dog, I instinctively walk to the wings to prepare my entrance. Carefully shutting out the past half hour, I’ve no choice but to focus all energies on getting through this performance. The last thought, in fact, I remember Steve Butler thinking as I start sinking into character, is a small pang of guilt for having got annoyed at Marie several days ago when she gobbled up most of the caviar. That and a fleeting image of Chris, down, out, alone back in New York. Something desperate, almost pathetic about it . . . but the image is swift and soon gone. Pushed miraculously somewhere to the back of my brain, filed away for later on, as this new person, Paul Brater, assumes command, taking over all controls.

And so, as Paul Brater, I arrive at the wings.

There’s a great deal of scurrying about. The lights in thebackstage area go out as the lights onstage come up. The stagehands stop hammering, the propman stops issuing orders, the electrician stops cursing at his assistant, and the leading lady playing Corie, a seasoned veteran of some seven television soap operas, walks past me, patting me on the backside, tossing off, “
Merde
, kiddo!”

“Thanks a lot,” I answer.

A few other members of the cast and the managing director also come up to me and whisper their best wishes.

The murmur of the audience coming from the other side of the curtain seems to rise to a peak and then suddenly drops off, sending a light jolt of adrenalin through my system and a battalion of butterflies dancing in my stomach, as I know the houselights must be dimming.

As the audience settles down, getting more comfortable and less audible, a voice suddenly comes over a microphone. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. AT THIS PERFORMANCE THE PART OF PAUL BRATER WILL BE PLAYED BY MR. STEVE BUTLER.”

Well, friends, the tone of hostility, the sense of anger, the moans of disappointment, the trauma of outrage vibrating out there, sifting over the footlights, through the curtain toward me, is almost enough to make me turn around, chuck the whole thing and return to Gotham at once.

You’d think, from their reaction, these sophisticated theatergoers had just been told Marlon Brando would not be doing
A Streetcar Named Desire
at this evening’s performance.

At last the uprising ends, and the audience quiets down. For the shortest of moments, absolutely nothing can be heard. Then the curtain rises, and the stagelights immediately flood out into the orchestra, illuminating at least the first twelve rows of the house.

The audience takes in the set, reacting with soft ahs and ohs and scattered polite applause.

After a few beats, the actress playing Corie bursts through the door onstage and runs through her small new apartment, surveying it with great vigor.

Standing there watching her, I realize I’m totally relaxedand removed from all goings-on in New York and that’s good and the audience seems most responsive so far, applauding Corie’s entrance and that’s good, and she gets a laugh or two on her first couple of pieces of business and that’s good, and I start reviewing my entrance coming up in a couple of minutes, my approach, my climbing the stairs, my motivation, my blocking, and as I’m doing this, it slowly dawns upon me that I have absolutely no idea what my first entrance line is and that’s not so good.

Panicked, hostile and manic, I dart over to the stage manager’s desk and, practically pushing him aside, frantically leaf ahead a few pages in his script to my entrance cue.

PAUL:
It’s six flights. . . . Did
you know
it’s six flights?

Whew! Of course. It all comes back now.

Cavalierly brushing aside the doubting looks of the stage manager, who is probably now reprimanding himself for not having gone ahead and taken that tranquilizer so as to be able to manage this evening’s performance, I return to my place in the wings.

Eventually, my offstage cues come up. I shout them out to Corie onstage as I pretend to be walking up the many flights of stairs to our apartment.

At last, on cue, appropriately out of breath, I walk onstage.

“It’s six flights. . . . Did you know it’s six flights?”

Which is greeted with the warm reception of three people clapping. My fans are everywhere.

And this means if there are three people out there polite enough to be giving me a chance, I’ve only got, by my calculation, another two thousand, three hundred and ninety-seven to charm. And, in case you’ve never done it, don’t harbor any illusions that there aren’t plenty of easier things to do in this world than convert a theater full of down-in-the-mouth patrons challenging you to dare be good enough to get them over their initial disappointment that you’re not who they thought they came to see in the first place.

The happy truth, however, is that everything goes surprisingly smooth. It’s not quite the old cliché of the Star

Got Sick and I Was Told to Go On in His Place so I went out there an
unknown
but came back a
STAR!

But in all due modesty, working under such pressure and managing to overcome all that early antagonism, ultimately getting them to like me, so thrills this truly surprised audience, they really let me know their appreciation when I come out for the curtain call.

And standing there, bowing, being greeted and warmed by all that affection cascading across the footlights, wave after wave after wave, is, like exceptional sex, the most exhilarating feeling of power, excitement, satisfaction, acceptance and accomplishment imaginable.

And it is at the peak of all this attention being lavished on me, as the rest of the cast turns to me, joining the audience in their tumultuous applause, that I realize it’s perhaps the quest for this very rare and most anonymous mass love that probably motivates at least part of me to be able to put up with all the hostilities and disappointments and rejections and bullshit it takes to stay in there, fighting, sacrificing most anything to find work.

The curtain falls for the last time, and most of the cast and crew come over, offering congratulations.

The stage manager then announces that everyone’ll be going over to the Broken Drum, the local hangout, for drinks and supper and asks me to join them. I gladly accept.

Walking back toward my dressing room, still flushed with the narcotic of the performance pulsating through me, I realize Paul Brater is leaving and Steve Butler fast returning. And with the return of Steve Butler, of course, comes the return of his problems. Or, more specifically, his problem: Chris.

Whirling around, I rush into the Green Room and place another call to New York.

“Nothing to worry about,” says Marie. “Everything’s fine now. She’s calmed down and sleeping like a baby. I’ll stay with her a little longer, make sure she doesn’t wake up frightened again.”

“I don’t know what I would’ve done without you, Marie.”

“Don’t be silly. How’d the show go?”

“Well. Very well, I think.”

“Good.”

“All right. Tell Chris I’ll call tomorrow.” “Will do.”

“And thanks again.”

“Talk to you soon. Congratulations.”

As I replace the phone, I’m suddenly assaulted with a massive attack of exhaustion. It’s as though all the tension and lack of sleep over the past two days have stretched my tolerances as far as they are capable, and suddenly, like a dam bursting from too much water, everything begins to sag.

Slowly dragging myself back to my dressing room, I can’t even summon the wherewithal to remove my makeup. So I just crash there on the couch as is and sleep until awakened several hours later by the night watchman who wisely suggests I’d probably be more comfortable sleeping in my hotel room.

But when you’re exhausted, even eight hours’ sleep isn’t enough. I get up the next morning, still fairly beat, though seething mad.

Now that the hysteria of yesterday’s emergency has passed, I can only look back and regard it with distaste. What a cruel and totally selfish thing for Chris to have done. That ridiculous stunt. That neurotic bid for attention. Not half an hour before curtain. And she’s an actress, for God’s sake. She should know better than to pull something at the last minute like that.

I’m furious. Plain and simply livid. And make the foolish mistake of calling and telling her so.

“Steve! Hi, darling.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Much better. Wasn’t all that silly?”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

“I don’t know what came over me. I suddenly got so frightened and lonely without you. It won’t happen again.” “Fine. Well, I’ve got to get over to the theater for notes. I just wanted to see how you were.”

“Much better, thank you.”

“Good.”

“Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“How’d the performance go?”