Stages (7 page)

“I think I have a problem with Cordelia,” Lauren began, her blue eyes steady and radiant.

“Oh, and what’s that?” said James, his own eyes seeking out a shelved book on Christopher Marlowe that had put him to sleep when he was a graduate student.

“Why doesn’t Cordelia do anything to help herself?” Lauren asked. “Why doesn’t she just say something like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Father, I must have misunderstood you,’ and then throw in a little flattery?”

“Maybe because, in her way, she’s as proud as her father is,” James replied. Lauren was leaning across his cluttered desk now, her intensely lit eyes studying
him
. James was afraid to let his hands light anywhere, even for a moment, afraid she would see him tremble and know how weak she’d made him. He folded his arms across his chest. He felt his right eye twitching. Quickly removing his glasses, he squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingers.

“Then maybe I should try to read some of her lines with just a hint of indignation,” Lauren said. “Maybe even a little self-righteousness.”

In the opaque glass of the office’s door, a shadow appeared, paused, and then went away.

James knew that all he would have to do to draw her into his arms was look straight at her.

His heart shuddered.

Raising his head, James said, “Lauren, just be yourself as Cordelia…and the audience will love you.”

Then he added in a very faint voice, “Like I do.”

Lauren’s lower lip began to quiver. Her eyes closed, and she shook her head. And James saw tears running down her cheeks.

“Lauren,” he said, stricken.

In an instant he got around the barrier of his desk and was holding her, feeling her heart pounding, the snatches of her breath, and then her lips hurrying across his neck.

They kissed frantically, achingly.

Without a word they slipped down onto the sofa. James’s hands caressed the skin under Lauren’s sweatshirt. She could feel his erection against her thigh. She wished that with a flick of her hand she could rid herself of her jeans, her sweatshirt, her bra, her panties. She wanted to toss off all her clothes, cast away everything that had ever covered her, and be naked before this man, because he knew her and wanted her, and she wanted to be found out by him, touched by him everywhere.

She got her jeans and panties halfway down, and then he entered her. She covered her mouth with her hand, but still she could hear herself moaning.

Again a shadow lingered in the opaque glass.

James was trying to slow himself down, but he was going faster than he ever had before.

He’d hurt her, but only for an instant, and then the pain had softened and grown warm. Then for Lauren there was only warmth, a candle in the fist of her feeling, unbearably bright and glistening and hard.

The door’s handle turned, and the door began to open.

Frozen in the instantaneous and sickening realization that he hadn’t locked the door, James heard Anderson’s voice saying, “Hey, Jim, you gotta hear this!”

In the fraction of a second between James’s heartbeats, the door slammed shut again and he heard someone shouting, “Professor Anderson! Professor Anderson! Look! I’ve done it. I’ve finally written my act two!”

Sounding as if he were being dragged away, Anderson called out, “Jim! Jim, I’ll be right back.”

Two minutes later, Lauren, dressed and smoothing her hair, walked out of James’s office and hurried along the corridor to the stairwell. She did not notice that the door of room 320, the classroom opposite James’s office, was ajar.

Fifteen minutes later, Anderson returned to James’s office with a new aria of his opera. The marvelous thing about it was that Anderson had hit upon the idea that it should be sung to a single red rose.

Five minutes after that, Melanie tiptoed back into room 320, where Paula and Kathy were huddled waiting for her. Paula was fanning herself with her hand.

“I don’t know how you ever pulled that off,” she whispered.

“Talk about timing,” Kathy added.

“The tough part was thinking up a new act for Anderson before we got to his office,” Melanie replied. “You know how I hate that playwriting class of his. But I just happened to think of a plot twist from a story in a Katy Keene comic book that I read when I was about nine years old, so I used that. And he loved it.”

“If only Lauren knew, she’d be grateful to you for the rest of her life,” Kathy said.

“Or she’d resent us for spying on her,” Melanie said. “Anyway, it was Riddiford’s ass I really saved. The worst that could have happened to Lauren was that everyone would have known beforehand that she was going to graduate with departmental honors.”

10

During the run of
King Lear
Lauren and James were able to be with each other twice. Both times they used one of the motels along Route 1 north of Boston, a strip of Polynesian restaurants and fiberglass dinosaurs with golf balls dribbling between their legs. Their motel’s rooms smelled of stale cigarettes, and cockroaches emerged regularly from the fissures between the bathroom tiles. Yet for James, the king-size beds where he alternately tussled and lounged with Lauren, as if they were alone on a deserted beach, were truly dreamland. Some days in his office, when he was edgy with desire for her, he would extend the limits of his dreamworld all the way to London. If his Fulbright came through, and then, if he could get her into a drama program over there…

They would have a whole year together.

For her own part, Lauren was willing to let James lead her anywhere. Giving up her virginity to him, she had become, in her own mind, a woman more mature and surer of herself than the others in the demi-monde of the Footlights Society. She knew that all of them were aware of what was going on between her and James, and she knew that they were commenting on her performance.

Kathy said that she felt sorry for Riddiford’s wife. Melanie wondered aloud if Lauren was one of those women who simply couldn’t be alone, who had to have somebody, if only for the security. Paula said that the worst thing you could do was latch on to somebody at the last minute, because once you graduated you’d have to come home to that guy, or have him coming home to you, every single night. And what if the relationship started to feel like one of those trips back to your old high school, when you have to face the fact that you’ve completely outgrown it?

David and Mike couldn’t have cared less about Riddiford and Lauren’s affair. Lately they were spending half their time worrying about the war, and about losing their student deferments. David, in conversation, would create elaborate scenarios allowing the U.S. to get out of Vietnam while still saving face. Mike said that he was like one of those chain smokers who count on them coming up with a cure for cancer before their own lungs are affected.

As it happened, one day after the closing of
King Lear,
the real world, the one in which all of them would have to live after graduation, made its first dramatic appearance. It proved to be a place, as Kathy would later say, that wasn’t so much a planet with gravity as it was a ball of yarn unraveled by God’s kitten.

It was she, Kathy, who would get scratched first.

Nobody expected anything to happen at the cast party—only that Lauren and Riddiford would leave early.

And indeed they did. It was an unusually warm Sunday in mid-April. The party began with a brunch at the theater, after which everyone had decided to go to Nantasket Beach. Naturally Lauren and Riddiford did not join the caravan of cars that left for the seashore around two.

Peering out from the rear seat of Mike’s Volkswagen at the theater, where the lovers had remained, Melanie said, “I can’t imagine those two ever getting married. It’s too bad that when people have affairs, they just can’t end sort of bittersweetly, like summer friendships do. People really do need to have the month of September come around in their lives. I bet if September came twice a year there’d only be half as many lawyers working.”

“It’s hard to be married,” Paula mused. “Harder still to do what you have to do to stay married.”

“What’s that?” Kathy asked.

“Look the other way,” Mike replied.

Although he was shifting the way his 1961 Volkswagen had to be shifted, one notch at a time, Mike was still managing to keep up with the pack. The outskirts of Boston rolled by: the gasoline storage tanks, the hill with the huge cross on it that Melanie said looked like what you’d have to hold up in front of the Hollywood sign to make L.A. go away.

“Will you miss it? This place?” Kathy said to the backseat. She was wearing her Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm face, and bib overalls to match it. Melanie and Paula answered her question by looking like subway riders spoken to by a weirdo.

“I guess you won’t, huh?” Kathy said. “How about you, Mike?”

“Don’t forget, I grew up around here,” Mike replied. “A kid I used to know took the bus out to L.A. the summer he turned sixteen. He was in this picture in
Life
magazine, of a crowd of kids hanging out on the Strip. I’m twenty-one now. It’s taken me a lot longer than it took him, but at this point I know I want to be wherever they’re taking pictures. And that won’t be anywhere around here.”

“Where will it be?” Melanie asked. “Saigon?”

“You’re confusing
Time
with
Life,
”
Mike replied.

“I think that may be Lauren’s problem,” Melanie said.

“When do we get to the beach?” Paula asked.

“I remember that line from when I stayed with you that weekend last summer,” Kathy piped up. “That’s what everyone from Queens says when they’re stuck on the Long Island Expressway.”

“You’re not going back to Queens, are you?” Melanie asked Paula.

“I don’t know,” Paula said. Her eyes flickered.

“Well, I know I’m not going back to Marion,” Melanie said. “I know that I’m going to New York. I’ve always thought that if you’re going to have any kind of a life for yourself, you have to be willing to make some decisions that are really final—sort of like jumping off a cliff. Not that I’d ever think of killing myself. But I am willing to jump if I have to.”

“I may go back to Queens and stand on a ledge for a while,” Paula said.

They arrived at Nantasket around three.

It was one of those working-class resorts that spoke of good times that might have been had in the thirties and forties, but sometime in the fifties the bright lights had been strung elsewhere. So when the tide was out, as it was that Sunday afternoon, the town looked as drained as its gray sand, and from the marshes nearby there arose an odor of ill health.

Shortly after the cast and crew of
King Lear
spilled out of their cars, a brisk, clarifying sea breeze came up, reminding everyone that it was still emphatically April, not July. In a few minutes, the temperature had dropped about ten degrees. It was much too cool for sunbathing, so after breaking out the beer, the group decided to have a softball game. Two ragtag teams took to the sand. Melanie and Paula were to lead opposing squads of cheerleaders. In independent huddles both squads decided that the usual high school gymnastics would be foregone for the sake of obscene gestures and a show of behinds.

David appointed himself captain of the Artful Dodgers softball team, while by acclamation Kathy would lead the Ankle Sox.

Pitching for the Artful Dodgers, David gave up six runs in the first inning. After that he began throwing at the hitters’ privates.

“Foul!” Melanie and her cheerleaders shrieked.

“He’s going to be an
agent,
”
somebody yelled.

Mike was called in as a relief pitcher.

“Comic relief!” Melanie yelled.

“What do you expect?” Mike called to her from the mound. “I was a conscientious objector to gym class.”

However, he pitched surprisingly well. By the end of the third inning, the score was 48 to 43, in favor of the Ankle Sox.

“Okay, guys, just because we’re a little ahead, we can’t start relaxing,” Kathy told her team. “We’ve got to keep hustling.”

Then it was her turn at bat.

Mike decided to walk her. But as the fourth ball came in high and wide, she stretched to every inch of her modest height and bunted. The ball sailed over Mike’s head. The second baseman went after it, but it came to rest right beside a dead horseshoe crab, and he was too disgusted to pick it up. Meanwhile Kathy had rounded first. By the time the ball skimmed by the third baseman’s shoulder, she was on her way to home plate.

“Slide, Kathy,
slide,
”
Melanie screamed.

Closing her eyes, Kathy threw up her arms and dove. The ball was hurtling toward the catcher’s outstretched glove. Eric knelt for it, and his knee caught Kathy in the middle of her forehead.

There was a crack like the sound of a golf ball being hit.

Kathy and the shortstop lay sprawled in the sand.

He picked himself up.

She didn’t.

“Kathy!” Paula screamed.

Everyone rushed up at once.

A large, purplish bubble was distending Kathy’s forehead. Her eyes were half open, but she said nothing, nor did she move. Putting her hands under Kathy’s head, Paula yelled, “Somebody give me a coat or sweater to make a pillow for her. Roll it up. And for God’s sake put something over her to keep her warm.”