The Fourth Wall (23 page)

Who else's words would I use? “The first play,” I said carefully, “is about myth making. The second is about this country's emergence as a nation of thieves.”

They all looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to go on.

“That's all,” I said. “The plays are not meant to liberate anybody or to expand anyone's consciousness or the like. They're meant simply to make more visible two aspects of American life that concern me.”

There was a silence. A
long
silence.

Finally Simon (or Peter) spoke: “Gestalt for gestalt's sake—I see, I see. Intriguing.”

“Behaviorism as life style?” asked Peter (or Simon). “I think we've got a very real possibility there, yes, very real indeed.”

“
If
we proceed with caution,” said Simpson. “We're getting into a gray area where an antiseptic, homogenized middle-America euphoria rules. Revolution is no longer relevant. We'll need a new attack metaphor, something to assert the value of nihilistic experiment.”

“Something that strikes at the very heart of tribal ritual,” nodded Sandy.

By now my mouth was hanging open, but I shut it firmly and kept it shut. A writer who'd worked with Simpson a couple of times had once told me that Simpson and his minions rarely remembered all the nonsense they spouted during the early planning stages of a production. The trick was not to remind them of what they'd said. The writer's advice had been to say as little as possible the first couple of days, to let Simpson use up all his clichés, run out of steam.
Then
step in with suggestions.

“The second play offers marvelous lighting opportunities,” said Simon/Peter. “I thought we'd light one side of the stage in red, the other in blue. A total juxtaposition of our pioneering sensibilities. Stage left—the red side—kinetic, demanding. Rebounding from the blue—the sobering influence, the counterbalance necessary to all dynamics.”

“Intriguing,” said Simpson.

“And then when the last line of the second play is spoken, we bathe the entire stage in a harsh, white light—Brechtian light, department store lighting. We remind the people that what they've been watching is not so-called real life at all, but a
play—
realer than real. It'll work not just for the second play, but for the entire theater evening. Red, white, and blue light—a way of shocking the people into a negativistic consciousness. Remember the white light is to be
after
the last line is spoken.”

The other three were all nodding agreement.

“Of course,” said Simon/Peter, “this will put an extra burden on Brian. It's the director who has to teach the performers the difference between extraverbal methodologies such as rhythm and gesture and the subverbal metaphor of the text.”

“Don't worry about that,” Simpson said firmly. “Brian Simpson is not afraid of a challenge.”

“Peter, it's brilliant,” breathed Sandy. (Aha! Peter.)

Peter smiled modestly. “It's just an idea.”

“Cast men in the women's parts and women in the men's parts,” suggested Sandy.

“No,” said Simpson. “We did that two years ago. With
Tartuffe
.”

“You cast a woman as Tartuffe?” I couldn't help saying.

“Or costume the characters in the thieves play as animals. Wolves and lambs.”

I cleared my throat. “Speaking of casting. You know Jay Berringer played the lead in both plays in the Pittsburgh production.”

Sandy and the boys exchanged glances and looked to Simpson. He put on a kindly-grandfather expression and spoke to me as if I were a child. “Abby, please try to understand what I'm going to tell you. We've all talked it over very carefully and we're agreed we don't think Berringer is right for these plays. I know Jay Berringer is one of your favorite actors, but all along I was afraid he didn't have the
soul
these plays require in an actor. He has technique, I'll say that for him, but sometimes technical proficiency just isn't enough. I sent Sandy to Pittsburgh to get her opinion, and she agrees with me.”

Sandy nodded. “He doesn't have the
soul
for these plays,” she announced as if Simpson hadn't just said the same thing.

“Trust me,” Simpson said. “I have a right instinct in these matters. Berringer just doesn't belong in
Double Play
.”

“Well, if you're sure …”

“I'm sure, Abby.”

I yielded gracefully.

It went on like that for another hour. My attention began to wander. If they didn't start talking sense soon, I'd withdraw the plays. It had been a long day and I was tired. Simpson and company were still at it when I excused myself and called a cab to take me to the hotel. I ordered dinner sent to my room; I'd leave Fisherman's Wharf for tomorrow when I might be in a more touristy mood.

I worked on The New Play a little and went to bed.

The next day Brian and his bunch were a little more subdued. They were all tired, for one thing, and for another half their attention was on the current production they were trying to mount. Subdued they may have been, but daunted—never. We were deep in a serious discussion of whether the cast of one of the plays (I forget which one) should perform blindfolded or not, when a young woman appeared in the doorway.

“Excuse me, are you Abigail James?” she asked. “You're wanted on the phone. New York.” I remembered the last time I'd been summoned to the phone in a strange theater. Then it had been John Reddick, telling me Sylvia Markey's face had been destroyed.

This time it was Lieutenant Goodlow. “It's bad news, Ms James. Are you sitting down?”

“Yes,” I said, rising.

“Your place was broken into yesterday and vandalized. I don't know how to tell you this, but I'm afraid everything has been destroyed.”

My ears started to ring. “My papers and books?”

There was a pause. “Everything.” I didn't answer for so long that Lieutenant Goodlow said, “Ms James?”

“I'm here.”

“I'm sorry. There's nothing left. Same sort of thing that was done to the
Foxfire
set—ripping and breaking and paint thrown everywhere. There's nothing left that you can use again. Your furniture—”

“I don't care about the furniture,” I interrupted. “My notebooks? The file cabinets? Surely
all
my books—”

“All
of them, Ms James. Try to prepare yourself for what you're going to find. You can't even see the floor, there's so much paper everywhere. Pages ripped out, paint over everything—there's no place to walk. He's hit you where it hurts, and I'm sorry as hell.” I don't remember what I said to that, but then Lieutenant Goodlow was talking again. “I want you to get the first flight back here that you can. Call me back when you have your flight number and I'll see that someone meets your plane. Will you do that?”

I told him I would and hung up. Something warned me not to let the news through to myself yet, to stave it off for a while. Zombielike I went back to the conference room looking for Brian Simpson, couldn't find him, returned to the office, wrote him a note, called the airport, called Lieutenant Goodlow, called a cab.

In my hotel room the first thing I did was check to make sure The New Play was still there.

8

Even Lieutenant Goodlow's cautionary words hadn't prepared me for the havoc that awaited.

I'd had to take an overnight flight back; and of all the people Lieutenant Goodlow could have sent to meet me, it was Leo Gunn who was waiting at Kennedy. I'd hesitated when I saw him, but Leo, God bless him, came straight to me and gave me a warm hug. He muttered something of a consoling nature and steered me to a cab. On the way into Manhattan, I tried to find out more about what had happened.

“It's a mess, Abby,” Leo shook his head. “I went over after the performance last night—it was on the six o'clock news. That's something else you're going to have to face. Those blood-sucking reporters are all over the place. Lieutenant Goodlow chased 'em off, but some of them got pictures. They'll be after you.”

“Are they there now, do you think?”

“I expect so. Is there a back entrance?”

I said yes, but there was no way to get to it except by going around the building from the front. Leo nodded and told the cab driver to look out for a phone booth. “I promised Ian Cavanaugh I'd let him know when you got in.”

“Call from my place,” I said, not thinking.

Leo looked away. “Your phone's not working.”

Oh.

The main entrance to my part of the brownstone was at the side of the house, at the head of an exterior flight of stairs and recessed into an alcove which offered protection from the weather. The back entrance opened on to a fire escape. As the taxi pulled up I could see two camera crews waiting. Leo took my suitcase and hustled me through a crowd that had gathered and up the side stairs to the main entrance where a policeman stood guard. There I stopped and stared at the door.

The lock trick had worked; all five locks were solidly in place. The invader of my home had simply taken an ax and hacked his way through.

I stepped into an ankle-deep layer of paper and refuse and stopped again. The first thing I saw was the paint—angry blood-red splotches, so many of them the room looked diseased. Next I saw the broken pieces of furniture sticking up at odd angles—a table leg here, a chair arm there. Then I stared for a long time at the layers of paper everywhere. Horrible!

Whoever had done this hadn't just pulled the books off the shelf and poured paint over them. Pages were torn out, some ripped in half; he must have spent hours just tearing up books. An oil portrait of my grandfather lay ripped to shreds. The stereo system was a heap of battered metal; all the records had been removed from their jackets before the paint was dumped. A small desk I'd used for paying bills had been reduced to a pile of rubble. An antique bookcase with glass doors—the only valuable piece of furniture I owned—was splintered almost beyond recognition. Sofa, dining table, china cabinet, chairs, drapes. Even the bookshelves hadn't escaped—they'd all been smashed, one at a time.

And over it all like a curse lay the smell of hatred—vicious, vindictive, insane hatred. A madman had invaded my home and told me what he thought of me. How could anyone hate me
that much?

“The paint's dry,” Leo said. “You can walk on it.”

I picked my way through the paper litter and looked over the rest of the floor. Bedroom, spare room, bathroom, hallway, kitchen, storeroom—all were a total wreck. One blood-red room after the other. Unreclaimable. I steeled myself and climbed the stairs to my workroom.

Lieutenant Goodlow and two other men were in the workroom, but I couldn't talk to them. All my notebooks, years of writing, outlines for future work, years of correspondence, manuscripts, years of
work—
all lay in shreds like so much garbage. As if someone had walked through my mind and threw away what he found there.

And the books.

I dropped to my knees and began to sift through the mess. Samuel French editions of individual plays, hundreds of them, in little bits and pieces. The cover of one volume of Glynne Wickham's
Early English Stages
. A page of Flaminio Scala's
Commedia
scenarios. A few pages of the Mermaid edition of Philip Massinger's plays, its pages yellowed and uncut when I'd bought it. Oddest thing: for some nonsensical reason I sat there on my heels in the midst of the chaos thinking about the clerk at Dauber and Pine who'd sold me the two-volume set, how she'd insisted on pronouncing the playwright's name Massin-
jay
instead of
Mass
-ing-er, as if he were French.

I don't know how long I'd been sitting there before I became aware of a hand shaking my shoulder. Lieutenant Goodlow was saying, “There's nothing you can salvage, Ms James. Believe me. Please get up. Come on, now.”

I stood up and blinked at the Lieutenant. His face was lined and heavy, as if he'd never smiled in his life. He started talking in a flat, airport-dispatcher voice to discourage any tendency to hysteria I might have. “What we think happened was this. The married couple who occupy the first two floors both work—whoever did it waited until they'd both left so he'd have the house to himself. Then he must have tried the side door first but couldn't get it unlocked. That alcove would have kept him hidden from the street.”

“As if anyone would notice,” one of the other policemen muttered.

Lieutenant Goodlow frowned at him. “Then he must have tried the back. Same results. He got in by breaking a window in the back. That's how we knew about it—one of your neighbors, a Mr. Goodwin, spotted the broken window and called us. He'd seen you leave with a suitcase the day before. So this guy got through the window, but he still couldn't get either door open, not knowing which lock was the trick one. So rather than haul all his stuff through the window, he just chopped down the door.”

“His stuff?”

Lieutenant Goodlow puffed out his cheeks. “A sledge hammer. A light hammer or two. Couple of knives. An ax. Gallons and gallons of paint. He must have had goggles to protect his eyes from splintering glass. And certainly work gloves.” He looked around at one of the other men. “Anything else?”

“An ice pick,” the man said. “Some of the gouge marks couldn't have been made by a knife.”

“Quite a load,” said the Lieutenant. “And we've found someone who saw him. A Dr. Vollmer was driving by and saw a workman carrying paint up those outside steps. He didn't see his face, he just saw a workman wearing coveralls.”

“So how is that going to help?” I asked dully.

“If one person saw him, then someone else could have seen him too. We're still checking. Look, Ms James, why don't we go downstairs? I don't think you should stay up here. Besides, there's something in the living room I want to show you.”