Stages (3 page)

To Paula, he explained a lot about Melanie. Why she dressed and made herself up and talked like a divorced woman of forty, for instance.

An only child, Melanie had arrived late in her parents’ lives. Three years after she was born, her mother had died of pernicious anemia.

Melanie had grown up as her father’s dinner companion. She’d sat at one end of the table, and he’d sat at the other. The table was twelve feet long, and it was surrounded by tall chairs with backs the same shape as windows in a cathedral. Sitting as a child at that table, while the maid came and went in a hush, Melanie would cast her eyes upward at the gessoed ceiling. The ceiling was painted with garlands and cherubs. Melanie would dream of cavorting naked with these happy creatures, all ringlets and big toes, in some giddy, cloud-upholstered place where there were no chairs that kneed you in the spine.

As a high school girl Melanie found a substitute for that place in the dramatic club. She played Puck in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Wrapped in gossamer, she bounded across the stage night after night. She had emerged from the hard, dry cocoon of her childhood with wings on, but those wings were not just for flight. Melanie quickly learned to wrap them around her body so she could resist the adolescent cold and damp that all her friends felt.

Oberon, who was sixteen and lanky, asked Melanie out. In the back of his car, he went fishing in her clothes with his hands.

After five minutes of his explorations, Melanie, raising her head, said, “God, do you ever
sweat.
”

The summer she graduated from high school Melanie’s father sent her on a trip to Europe. In Zurich she met a French ski instructor. He was twenty-six, and had a smile that breathed on Melanie’s heart.

But of course he was French, and his recipe for involvement was high heat followed by a whisk.

By mid-August Melanie knew she would be returning to the States, and to American men, with their bathing suits as bulky as her father’s Brooks Brothers boxer shorts. She thanked God that she’d been accepted by a college with a theater program.

In her three and a half years at Blake University, Melanie had—as a sideline to her involvement with the theater—slept with six more men, two of them graduate students and one a professor of English. The professor was of course the sweatiest. He was married.

Sleeping with David Whitman had been a big mistake, though. He seemed to want to sleep with women in order to prove something, which was a common enough urge among men, Melanie knew. But then he would lapse into this terrible postcoital depression, as if all the banging had worn away the crust of the earth, to reveal a vast, empty cavern beneath the bed. Acting wasn’t enough for David, and sex wasn’t enough, either. Melanie didn’t care to think about what it was that he wanted and needed, and couldn’t seem to get, because when she turned her mind in that direction she would feel a vague sense of vacuum from a place in her chest close to her heart.

It was better for her head to ignore such sensations and just go on with the show.

Melanie was happy that she and Paula would very likely be playing Goneril and Regan in this, the last show of their undergraduate careers. They might have been rivals, for they were the same height, about five-six, and they had essentially the same hair, a changeable auburn, and of course they were the same age. But something about Melanie always landed her the older parts, while Paula was given the younger roles.

This would be the first time they’d be playing sisters instead of women a generation apart. They’d finally be recognizing onstage a comfortable kinship that had been there all along.

Supposedly Riddiford was pressuring Morris from the English department to try out for the role of Gloucester.

Morris was the professor Melanie had slept with.

If she was to play Regan, she would be gouging out his eyes, every night for a week and a half.

That, Melanie thought, was truly show biz.

Eventually she and Paula and Kathy organized themselves unofficially into a League of Women Actors. The league’s mission was to promote a sense of civic responsibility—to making life as theatrical as possible.

To this end, the members of the league carried on most of their conversations in stage whispers and scrambled their clothes closets until every outfit came out as a costume. Instead of idling away hours in the student union or the library, the three young women entertained themselves by creating dramatic moments, as they did the time Melanie insisted that they spy on one of the practices of the men’s swim team.

That command performance took place on a Wednesday evening in the winter of their junior year.

When the league entered the gym, most of the college’s students were still at dinner or already studying. But Melanie, her sharp eyes brimming with slyness, was leading her two friends along the darkened corridors with a penlight.

“What if a janitor or somebody comes and sees us?” Paula said.

“They all quit work at four-thirty,” Melanie replied. Ahead was a trophy case and a pair of doors with a light shining in the crack between them.

They crept stealthily toward their goal.

Melanie looked through the crack first,

“Ah,” she said.

“Lemme look,” said Paula.

She took a peek. Her eyes widened and she covered her month.

“Wanna see, Kath?” Melanie offered.

Kathy poked her head under Paula’s shoulder.

Then she said, “Oh, aren’t they cute?”

“I told you,” Melanie said. “They always practice in the nude.”

“What incredible bodies they have,” Paula said. “Look at the one with the curly blond hair.”

“I am,” said Melanie. “Isn’t this too delicious? If they only knew. We’re committing sacrilege, you know. They’re so-o-o sensitive about their privates. They think their pubies are sacred.”

Looking through the crack again, Paula said, “Ooh, that blond one, I just can’t imagine a guy being self-conscious about having one as big as—”

“All American men are self-conscious about their bodies,” Melanie replied. “Just try to imagine an American man on a nude beach, like St. Tropez.”

“God forbid,” Paula said. “I’m sure if some of the men I see at Jones Beach ever started walking around in the nude, I’d lose my appetite for Chilly-Willies.”

“Nobody’s body is anything to be ashamed of, whether it’s good or bad,” Kathy insisted.

“You can say that because you’re in the theater,” Melanie told her. “Actors don’t care if they’re in sequins or skin.”

“What are you saying? That if you’re an actor you have to be an exhibitionist?” Paula asked.

“No,” said Melanie. “What I’m saying is that if you’re an actor who’s any good, when you’re on stage you’ve got nothing to hide.”

“You’re right,” Kathy agreed. “When I’m acting, it’s as if I’m talking about all my innermost hopes and dreams—in other people’s words.”

“It’s different for me,” Paula said. “I can’t turn myself inside out emotionally like you can, Kath. I’m not sure who I am when I’m acting. Only that I’m somebody who is definitely
not
my mother.”

Turning her attention back to the long and narrow peephole, Paula added, “If only my mother could see this. My mother…and David’s mother.”

“They’d probably flip out,” Kathy said.

“No…no, they wouldn’t,” Paula replied. “They’d do something like this.” She pressed her fingers into the bridge of her nose and snorted as if her sinuses were blocked.

“What’s
that
?”
Melanie asked.

“My mother doing a yoga exercise,” Paula replied. “To clear her mind of men’s bodies.”

4

Mike Lange hid behind the characters he played. Even as a child he had been aware of his homosexuality, and so concealment became second nature to him. His sexual interests he kept hidden close to his chest, like the little magazines with pictures of nude men that in his teens he would buy and bring home secreted under his shirt.

Mike had a Nordic face and curly, reddish-blond hair. Although he was not overweight, there was an air of chubbiness about him, which, combined with an expression that made him look always on the verge of tears, martyred him in gym class until he entered high school.

In high school Mike joined the dramatic club. Sheltered by that organization’s talkative girls, he blossomed.

As a character in a drama, Mike was untouchable and invulnerable. His cheeks, which in other circumstances flushed so easily, were cool beneath the greasepaint. His voice was always steady because it was never his own: he was a clipped British assent, he was a muddy-mouthed old man, he was Peter Lorre in
Arsenic and Old Lace.
But the real Mike Lange was neither seen nor heard. He was a hermit crab slipping unnoticed from shell to shell.

He remained bottled up in high school showcases until the spring he turned sixteen.

In May of that spring Mike went reluctantly with his father to a baseball game at Fenway Park. A business associate had given him two free seats, and Mike’s father, who was a workaholic, had no one but his son to go with.

Mike watched the game the way he would have observed the activity of an anthill. After it was over, he and his father walked back to their car, which was some distance from the field, by a line of meters that bordered a park.

The park was the Fens, an overgrown Frederick Law Olmsted project that rambled away from the traffic circle Mike and his father were crossing.

As they stepped onto the sidewalk, Mike noticed two men talking animatedly. Both of them were elegantly dressed, in blazers and striped shirts, and one was wearing bright pink socks.

Instinctively Mike knew what these two men were.

“If she doesn’t get back from New Orleans soon,” he heard one of them say, “she’s going to turn into a real queen.”

He thought he saw another man, who was partly concealed by a bush in the park, staring at him.

At that moment he felt exactly the same way he had in New York, at thirteen, when his church group traveled there for a weekend and he saw, in a Times Square newsstand, a pocket-size magazine with a man on its cover, a man who was not even wearing a bathing suit, only a pale blue pouch held up by a string.

His father had noticed nothing. Almost trembling as he got into the car, Mike promised himself that he would return to this place. He would make up some story and take the bus in.

The following Saturday, he did.

On that day, a little after four in the afternoon, Mike Lange came of age. In the company of a silent man whose eyes he had followed into the bushes.

It was as if the glass bubble of the stage beneath which he’d been living suddenly had opened up to reveal a lush, exotic world, one of tickling leaves and urgent sensations.

After this first experience, Mike frequented the Fens almost every weekend. Every time he went there he found eyes that wanted him. There were those he didn’t want, though. The fat, older men. And the lisping, giggling ones who were built like wrist corsages.

One older man who was slender rather than fat had stalked Mike almost every Saturday. He had a nervous twitch, and he used a cigarette holder. Mike always tried to avoid him. But the thin man persisted, and like many people who fail at seduction, he took up spying. Knowing that this wisp of a creature was watching him again eventually became as annoying to Mike as the buzz of an invisible mosquito.

However, in the middle of the summer, the thin man abruptly disappeared. Mike was relieved. He assumed that he’d been beaten up or arrested, or that he’d simply moved away.

A little over a year later, in September, Mike left home for college, full of uncertainty. He hoped that it would be better than high school had been. But if it wasn’t, at least there was a theater.

His first day on campus, Mike discovered that nobody used Vitalis. He threw away the bottle he’d brought.

By his third day on campus Mike had figured out that the flaxen-haired, prep-school-style sophistication of Blake’s student body was a facade that concealed an almost universal—and a very anxious—need for acceptance. Knowing that he could be sure of that in but one arena, Mike headed for the Hubbard Theater at an hour when most of the guys in his dormitory were getting ready for that evening’s mixer.

The theater was mostly empty, but there was a bulletin board with a notice of tryouts on it. As Mike copied down the time and place in his pocket calendar, a figure emerged from the gloom of a backstage corridor.

It was the thin man. Cigarette holder and all.

He blinked at Mike. Then he slipped into an office.

Mike wondered whether or not he should make a run for it.

Then he saw, behind a counter with a coffeemaker on it, a young woman. From the expression on her face, it was clear to Mike that she had been watching.

“Who was that?” he said hesitantly.

“Why, that was Mr. Cherry,” came the reply. “He’s the tech director.”

“Here?”
said Mike, sounding aghast.

“What’s the big surprise?”

“Oh…nothing,” Mike replied. “It’s just that…I’ve seen him around before.”

“Around here?”

“No. Just…around.”

The young woman gave him a knowing look, which for some strange reason did not make Mike feel uncomfortable.

“Mr. Cherry gets around,” she said. “In the past ten years he’s worked at four different colleges. What I’ve heard is that he stays around just long enough…to find somebody he can leave with.”