The Emerald Light in the Air (3 page)

Then she reeled away across the green. Billy and I watched Carol lurch around a corner and disappear behind Lunbeck Hall; then we turned, flustered and embarrassed, two men sharing a burden of humiliation, and walked together in the opposite direction. Rain was in our faces and our hands were buried in our pockets. Wind and water forced our eyes downward. Our shoes squished. Puddles were everywhere.

It was Billy who spoke first. “I doubt if I could run like that if I'd just barfed.”

This comment made me like young Valentine immensely. I told him, “You should have played Puck.”

This was said not so much to avoid the subject of Carol, her outburst and her vomiting, as to assuage feelings of guilt and shame by making an offering of some kind, however small and meaningless. Billy replied, in the right spirit, “Demetrius rocks.”

“I'm glad you feel that way, Billy. Do you have any more of that good, strong dope?” I asked, dripping.

“No, sir. Not on me.”

“That's too bad.” For reasons I could not name, I went on: “When I was younger, I figured I'd grow up and get married and have children. But now years have gone by, and I'm not young.”

“That's cool,” said Billy. And he said, “Anyway, you shouldn't marry someone with a drinking problem.”

“You're right about that.”

“Mr. Barry?”

“Reg.”

“Reg, do you think she knows about my father?”

“Knows what? She wasn't talking about your father. She thought I was your father, and you were our son that we never had, and you were growing up to be like me.”

“That's crazy.”

“Yes,” I agreed. But it was true that I'd had the same notion as Carol. “See you tomorrow, Billy.”

“Later, Reg.”

Rehearsal, however, was not to be, not the next day, or the day after that, or the afternoon following. The storm worsened over the course of the first night, causing trees to fall on power lines, disabling phones and cutting off electricity to homes and college buildings. Classes were canceled. By morning of the second day, Tuesday, the thunder and lightning had stopped, though the sky remained gray, pouring heavy rain. The country around here is veined with creeks; these grew into deep, fast-moving rivers. The college, safe on high ground, operated minimally on generators. A party spirit prevailed. New couples would subsequently date their union to the week of the flash flood. The disaster occurred on Thursday, when natural dams in the nearby hills gave way, releasing torrents of water derived primarily from melted winter snow. The water crashed down into the valleys, washing away roads, trees, cars, and about twenty people. The National Guard and the International Red Cross landed helicopters on the Wm. T. Barry Gymnasium parking lot. Student volunteers collected cast-off clothing, canned food, blankets, etc. A short time later, it was learned that Harrison P. Mackay, a chemistry professor with forty years at the college, had been a flood casualty. The professor, not well known to me except as a red-faced personage wearing a bow tie, was found lodged in an embankment near the town of Chesterford. An emergency meeting of deans and the president convened; sadness was expressed and a few important memories were recalled. After the meeting, President Farnham took me aside and said, “Reginald, I want you to do that play if the weather clears. Right after our service for Harrison. We're all going to need cheering up.”

It was in this way that we came to perform
A Midsummer Night's Dream
on a wet field before an audience of mourners wearing black.

“We're going to have a tough house,” I said to my young company on the evening of the show.

Folding chairs were set up on the mushy ground. Organ music, a gloomy Episcopalian dirge, drifted in from the church at the college green's distant end. Harrison's memorial, under way. Skies remained partly cloudy, and a light breeze blew from the south. Together we stood, cast and crew, in a circle around Puck's hole. We weren't holding hands, though we should have been—there was a noticeable feeling, in the group, of apprehension, a communal dread and excitation only partly attributable to normal stage fright. The hole, in the wake of the week's rains, was a muddy pond. A duck, possibly blown far from home in the high winds a few days earlier, paddled on the surface. Fallen leaves looked like twisted miniature lily pads. These elements—water, duck, vegetation—combined to create a disturbingly powerful scene, a vastly reduced water vista that stood in relation to actual lakes as an artist's easel studies do to fully realized, complex paintings. It was, in other words, an excellent stage-set pond, not at all unlike a classical folly from an English garden, scaled down, deceptively simple, unreal enough to seem mysterious, primordial, sad.

The funeral music was not helping my mood. Jim Ferguson, our sexually aggressive Oberon and a zoology major, pointed out, “That's a female mallard. She's injured. Look at her—she's all crooked.”

It was true. The duck listed in the water. Jim explained, “Ducks are vicious when they're hurt. They host human influenza and other dangerous viruses.”

“Duck?” asked Martin Epps, waving his cane, straying precariously near the water's edge.

I told him, “Don't worry about the duck, okay?” To the cast in general, I said, “I'll need a couple of volunteers to lower Martin into the water when the time comes.”

“Water?” said Martin, splashing with his cane, poking to find the hole's bottom.

The duck paddled weakly. All around me, kids in little groups stared down at it and smoked in that self-consciously erotic way—the dramatic puffs and the stagy, side-of-the-mouth exhalations blown upward into the air like steam escaping so many hot engines—that seems to be an advertisement for the carefree life. I couldn't take it. “Do you kids think you're going to live forever?” I shouted at these innocents. “Do you think life is some kind of
holiday
? You think that one day you'll stop being depressed! You won't
ever
stop being depressed! No matter how much
sex
you have!”

As if on cue, bells rang out from the chapel spire. Big wooden doors were flung open, and the first few mourners emerged from the church.

“Places!” cried Danielle.

Faeries tossed away cigarette butts and Royals crouched behind bushes while Mechanicals popped open their first-act beers. Billy Valentine passed Mary Victoria Frost an enormous joint. Martin Epps alone remained before his watery lair. “Billy, Mary, give me a hand with Martin,” I said. “One, two, three.” Up went the blind boy. He was light for a fat kid. He entered the water and said, “Ahhh.”

“Stay put and don't piss off the duck,” I directed him.

Billy and Mary and I crawled beneath the stage-left shrubs. Billy was about to stash the joint when I stopped him. “Hey, don't put that away. I need a hit.” Fireflies blinked on, off, on. The audience settled into seats. Sounds of weeping rose from the house. I peeked up and could see, above me, faeries' legs dangling from platforms in trees, pair after pair of young legs.

“Good dope,” I whispered to Billy.

Then Danielle gave the signal, and Greg Lippincott walked onstage and exclaimed, “Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace; four happy days bring in another moon.” Who can listen to that kind of stuff? A moment later came the cue for the young lovers to stumble out and stand before their elders. There was not much ground to stand on, only slippery grass beside the hole, where Martin was sunk in black water to his chin. The crooked duck regarded Martin with crazed eyes. “Full of vexation come I, with complaint against my child, my daughter Hermia,” growled Egeus, as faculty, alumni, and a few undergraduates and parents wept tears for Harrison Mackay. Understandably, I felt the need to get a laugh. “The course of true love never did run smooth,” I proclaimed morosely, and at that instant the duck began flapping its maimed wings, and Martin waved his cane wildly, and a gust of wind blew in like a sneeze from God, shaking the trees and blowing hats off heads in the audience. I looked for Carol among the mourners. Where was she? Did she truly love me enough to have a child with me?

“It's going pretty well, don't you think?” I asked Billy when we came offstage at the middle of act one. We listened respectfully as Helena rattled off her famous speech about being sexually unattractive; and then Bottom and his men took over, rushing out and tackling one another and flubbing their lines—but it didn't matter what they did, because these characters are probably the most indestructible comic team in all of English literature, and, sure enough, when Bottom crunched Lion in the windpipe with his weight belt the audience let out its first decent belly laugh of the night. Billy and I hid behind the backstage trees and waited to run out, lie down to sleep on the cold ground, get drugged by Puck, wake up with our hard-ons, and begin chasing each other and/or Mary Victoria Frost and/or Sheila Tannenbaum through the haunted woods. Billy whispered, “Can I talk to you, Reg?”

“Call me Lysander during the show.”

“I didn't want you to think, after the other day, you know, that I don't love my father.”

He seemed maudlin, not at all like a happy comedian eager to chew the scenery. “I didn't think that. I'm sure you love your father very much,” I assured him.

Saying this made me sad. Billy told me, “My father is not a bad man, no matter what people say.”

Night was falling; the air had grown cold. Puck on his stomach crawled up the bank of his pond, then splashed back down into the water. Faeries on platforms jumped up and down noisily. Mary and Sheila, one tree over from me and Billy, adjusted costumes and each other's hair. Up Puck came again, covered in mud. His glasses had slipped from his head, and now his sightless eyes stared wildly; he could not have realized how afraid he looked. “I'll put a girdle. Round about.
Earth
—” he sputtered as, suddenly, the duck attacked. Martin howled and grasped at the mud and the grass, reaching for a handhold on dry land. It was too late. The duck blasted off the pond and came down hard in a spray of foam on Martin's pudgy, naked back. Webbed feet slapped the boy's white skin as the duck gave the coup de grâce with a thrust of her bill into Martin's neck.

“Thanks for talking, Lysander,” Billy exclaimed. He bolted from behind our oak tree. Sheila Tannenbaum leaped out of hiding and ran after him. “I love thee not, therefore pursue me not,” the boy yelled at the girl.

What is more exciting than kinetic, technical theater, the impeccable orchestrations of pratfall farce? I say this in consideration of the fact that audience members were leaving their seats and sneaking close, the better to gawk at Puck in his hole. As is always the case during productions of the Bard, a few carried paperback copies of the script. Sticklers. I watched them thumb pages back and forth, no doubt searching for references to a vengeful mallard. I have no objection to the public encroaching on the players—during Shakespeare's time, spectators sat on the stage and became, to a limited degree, implicated in the theater experience—but in this instance a participatory audience was a safety hazard. Billy, Mary, Sheila, and I had to dodge and weave throughout the better part of acts two and three. Darting barefoot and more or less naked around people wearing formal clothes had, as an activity, a distinctly anarchic, rebellious aspect—rebellious in the sense that it created, for me at least, the kind of sweaty excitement that comes with dangerous play. I felt free and young. I should say that I felt myself backsliding to a younger state of mind. It's hard to say what this feeling consisted in—panic and hope, disappointment, shame. I was wearing torn Barry Bears gym shorts and feeling like a teenager and running fast, and my feet sank into the earth, and mud splashed my legs. What is more awful and disorienting than adolescence? How had I become so lost and alone? What had persuaded me that I could play a young man's part? Was Billy pursuing me? Was I pursuing Billy? The bereaved came forward into the fray with heads bowed, and I stumbled through a puddle and narrowly missed crashing into President Farnham. “Reginald! This is criminal! Criminal!” the man shouted after me. Then: “Up and down, up and down, I will lead them up and down; I am fear'd in field and town: Goblin, lead them up and down,” Martin Epps sang out magnificently, beautifully, before, at long last, he slid through ooze and disappeared, cane and all, beneath the water.

Bubbles, then silence.

Women and men wearing black lined the banks of the wine-black lake. They appeared, I thought, to be enjoying the show. It must be said that Shakespeare's genius lies partly in his plays' ready adaptability to the kinds of high-handed, decadent concepts guaranteed to astonish playgoers and offend the critics. Theater artistes often speak of their disregard for the audience, and it's a badge of integrity among some in this business to ignore the ostensible needs and desires of that inexpert class the ticket holders. But I think this is a rotten attitude. I'm in favor of putting on a show people will remember and talk about.

Who cared if it was too dark out to really see anything? Who noticed that Mary Victoria Frost was whacked on pot and dropping her best lines? What did it matter if Mustardseed and Moth had stripped off their G-strings in order to sixty-nine atop the tree-house stage set? Puck had sunk, and the important middle acts were nearing conclusion, and this meant it was time for me to cuddle on the grass with Sheila Tannenbaum.

There she was. She looked darling in her black-and-orange cheerleader's outfit and her mesh tights. She was my Helena, and she came toward me, smiling her awkward smile; and we settled on the wet ground and held each other in the night.

It was time for sleep. Sheila, the Lady Bears basketball star, snuggled warmly in my arms. She made a surprisingly good fit. She rested her head on my shoulder, and we kissed, lightly, and I looked up at trees and saw naked children.