Though we were still playing The Red Mill with the new escape scene and Cass Brewster had left town, there was no delaying in getting into rehearsal for Tea and Sympathy. Most of the scenes were with Estelle Anderson, but I hadn’t gone near the one small one that I had to do with Graham, playing the school headmaster. I had been nervous about it. I don’t think we had actually ever been alone together.
He had his hands full with Nina’s mother and her son and her son’s girlfriend and then his cousin coming to visit. That was almost more than anyone could handle, even if they weren’t appearing in a play.
But the show was opening in ten days and we were having our first run-through the next day. I felt it was time to get the rehearsal underway.
I had a few hours available that afternoon, so on my way out in the morning to the café, I rang the bell to Nina and Graham’s. Graham answered.
“We must find a few minutes to rehearse our scene,” I said. “What’s cooking this afternoon?”
“Nina’s mother is going to babysit Theo so Nina can take a nap. And I’m available. Strangely enough. I think I’ve got the lines down pretty well. Where shall we meet?” Graham said, lounging against the doorway. It was impossible for him to make any kind of move without looking sexy.
“How about under the big Cedar of Lebanon right on the Abbey lawn?” I said, gesturing toward the tree immediately on the other side of the hedges across the street. Outdoors would be good, I thought. No wild fits, screaming accusations, or sudden fucks there.
We met right after lunch and did the first run-through with scripts in our hands. Then we put the scripts down on the grass and ran it off book. Off book. That means no looking at the script. Since the scene was played with both of us standing we didn’t need any props or anything. The people who passed in and out of the gate and along the gravel walk ignored us. Watching actors rehearse was old stuff for everyone now.
I just had to keep it in my head that Graham’s character was old enough to be my father, and that I was still a teenager. I’m pretty good at slipping into another phase of my own personality. I can conjure that up pretty well. How to move. The level of my voice tone. Things like that.
“I think it’s going well, Hugo,” Graham said. “Let’s take a little break. Am I moving too much? I’m a little taller than you are, and I don’t want to appear threatening.”
“I don’t think that’s coming across. But one of my teachers once told me not to move and deliver lines at the same time. I actually like to walk across the stage talking, but maybe the audience is watching you move instead of listening to you when you move. Is that a useful comment?” I said.
“Let me see.” He jumped up. “If I’m here, and I move over here while you are speaking . . . Yes, that could be better.”
“Don’t move too much while I’m speaking. They’re all going to want to look at you anyway. I think schoolmasters as handsome as you are rare in those cold, lonely boarding schools.”
Graham plopped down again. “I was thinking of playing this as though I was attracted to you. I know it wasn’t written in that way. But I thought we could modernize it a little bit that way.”
I said, “That’s great. Estelle is obviously somewhat older than you are. So you are a younger, maybe-gay, man who married an older woman. Who is headmaster in a school for boys because he consciously or unconsciously wants to be around them. And while a teenage student is unjustly accused of being homosexual, the older man is there seething with lust for him. And the older man’s wife sleeps with the student so he can be reassured about his own sexuality. I like it.”
“It makes a little more out of the plot, don’t you think?” Graham said.
“Let’s run it that way. I am going to be entirely unconscious of your secret longings. But let’s see what happens,” I said.
It was very good. And Graham was very good. Perhaps many of the people in the audience wouldn’t get it. It was subtle. But there were little outreachings of hands. Snatching them back. A very false throwing of one arm across my shoulders. Sudden heartiness in the voice. It made you realize that the way jocks interact with each other is very artificial. A kind of masking of their real feelings. Which might be a lot of things: dislike, sexual attraction, boredom. But it is the masking of real feelings. Graham got it. He was a better actor than I had given him credit for being.
We sat down again.
“That was really good, Graham. It will make a big difference in the play. It makes your character and Estelle’s much more three dimensional,” I said.
“Everyone knows a lot more about sex than they did when this play was first done. We don’t want the characters to be caricatures,” he said.
“You’re smart about relationships. Tell me this,” I said. “It’s really none of my business, but since we all had dinner the other night, I’ve been wondering why women like Nina and my mother fall in love with and want to be with men like my stepfather and yourself. You’re kind of similar couples.”
“We met. We fell in love. Is it more complicated than that?” he said.
“But you didn’t meet. Nina went looking for you. And found you with Edwina’s help. They told me that. Do you think she knew you were supposed to be together? And what about the gay thing?” I said.
“Is your stepfather gay?” he said. “No more than you are. But we were lovers before he married my mother.”
Graham cocked his head in surprise. “This is a lot of news for one little rehearsal period. Do you think that was his way of marrying you?”
“I never thought about that. If you mean, to be near me. Definitely no. We haven’t slept together again, and we aren’t going to. If you mean that he thinks my mother and I are a lot alike, there may be something to that. But they have something very solid together. They don’t see much of me. What I was thinking of more was that men like Glenn Elliott and you move through life like big pirate ships and women like your wives have to board you and capture you and take over the helm.”
“I’m not so sure they take over the helm. I hope not. I’d like to think that we’re on a course together,” Graham said.
“But what about the sex thing?” I said. “I saw you fucking Steve. What about that?”
“I guessed you’d found out about that,” he said.
“Steve didn’t tell me. I just happened to open the door at the wrong moment. I could easily have never known it.”
“It was something crazy. He came in. We were alone. I just had to do it. It was as though I was a mass of iron filings being pulled by a giant magnet.”
Graham was sitting looking down at his feet. Good-looking feet in rubber go-ahead sandals, cross-legged in front of him. Everything about him was good looking. Graham has no faults. Physically, at least.
“I felt I had betrayed you in some way. More than Steve in some way. We were becoming good friends. Nina loves you. And there I am fucking your boyfriend. On your bed,” he said. His voice was low.
I reached over and touched his knee. “Steve and I didn’t have any understanding at that time. I’m not sure we do now. It just seemed so . . . unromantic somehow. Like something that had to be done.”
“It was sort of like that. I needed to do it.”
“It could have been me,” I said.
He looked up at me sharply. “It could have. But I don’t think I could have pretended that it was nothing very important afterward.” The ice felt very thin beneath our feet suddenly. I didn’t want to go on in this direction.
“Look, Graham. It’s all part of this fate, fate, fate thing that seems to be happening right now. The sun, the moon, the transit of Venus in Mercury, or whatever it is. If you hadn’t slept with Steve, if it had happened to be me that had wandered in when you were alone, who knows what would have been disrupted. Upset. Torn apart. I’m not in love with you. I probably could be, but I’m not.”
I moved a little further away from him, “What I want to know is what about this bisexual thing? I just read about these tests that were done with three groups of men. One group said they were completely heterosexual. One group said they were completely homosexual. And a third group said they were bisexual. They showed them porn films of both heterosexuals and homosexuals having sex and had them all wired up for heartbeat, penis arousal, all that stuff.”
“So what happened?” Graham said.
“The heterosexuals were really straight. No interest in gay porn. The homosexuals, the same thing. If it wasn’t gay, they didn’t want to play. But the bisexuals weren’t really bisexual. Two thirds of them got woodies when they saw gay porn. The other third were only excited by the heterosexual stuff. There was no middle ground. Nobody got excited by both things. The scientists concluded that there wasn’t any such thing as bisexuality. What do you think? I’d hate to think that my stepfather isn’t really interested in getting it on with my mom. Or you with Nina.”
Graham said, “I can assure you that I am sincerely interested in ‘getting it on,’ as you so charmingly put it, with Nina. When you make love to someone you really love, it’s quite a different thing than just responding to pretty flesh. And you have to realize that Nina is an element in the lovemaking. It isn’t just her body lying there. It’s her. We don’t even know what we are going to do. We just grab each other and begin. We want to be as close to each other as we possibly can be. We want to be one person. Fucking strangers is no substitute for that.
“But when I see beautiful men like Steve. Like you. Even like your stepfather, Glenn, I feel something. Is it competition? Do I want to prove I’m handsomer, stronger, sexier? I don’t know. It’s nothing at all like sex with Nina. It’s apples and oranges.
“You know, Hugo, there’s not much to me. What have I done with my life? Here I am, lost in a foreign country. I don’t really earn any money. I had sizeable savings from the porn work. It’s pretty well gone. I have a private life I think is pretty rare. But my life out in the world is pretty sad. Doing this part for Cranston Muller restores my confidence a little. I can act. That had nothing to do with how I look. But I can’t pursue my acting career here. Even if I could rise above my porn star reputation. It’s hard. I feel pretty torn up much of the time. Particularly here when I see all you young guys starting out toward what could be major careers.”
“Come on, Graham. Let’s go,” I said, standing up and brushing the grass and twigs off my jeans. “Who knows? This may be the turning point,” I said. Toca Sacar was coming across the grass.
“How’s it going?” he asked. “I’m really sorry that Cranston took Tea and Sympathy from me. I think you both are going to be great in it.”
“Come have coffee with us,” Graham said. “We’ll tell you what we’re thinking for this little scene of ours. You can coach us.”