“KAREN” STOOD OUTSIDE the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author. Her old high school classmate, the author. Was it assuming too much, to say “friend”? Was it accepting too much, to say “Karen”? “Karen” is not “Karen’s” name, but “Karen” knew, when she read the name “Karen,” that it was she who was meant. Does it matter to anyone, apart from “Karen,” what “Karen’s” real name is? Not only does it not matter to anyone else, but the fact that it matters to “Karen” will probably reflect badly on “Karen” in the same way that so much about “Karen” reflects badly on “Karen.” So “Karen” won’t insist on providing her real name or anyone else’s, although she’d like to say, for the record, that she can see right through the choice of “Karen” for her designation. With apologies to actual Karens, “Karen” is an unsexy name. It’s too recent to have retro chic and not recent enough to feel fresh. It’s a name without snap. It gives you a plain feeling but not plain enough, like “Jane,” which is such a plain name that the phrase “Plain Jane,” in contradiction of its meaning, has snap, it rhymes and suggests a romantic plainness, the phrase “Plain Jane” makes people smile. “Karen” has no such associations. “Karen” isn’t pretty, or smart, or deceptively plain until she takes off her glasses. “Karen” is a yearbook name, filler, a girl with a hairstyle like everyone else’s and a face you’ve forgotten. My name isn’t and never was Karen, but I’ll be Karen. I’m not petty. See: I’ve taken off the quote marks.
Karen stood outside the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author.
She wasn’t petty, she has never been petty, has never had enough self-possession, or possessed enough self, to afford pettiness, because petty is a way people are who have something to spare. Still: she’d like to say for the record that the choice of her name, this name Karen to which she’s resigned, is not the only thing she can see through. She can see through a lot of the rest of it too, as easily as drawing a line from a column of things on the left to a column of things on the right, making crisscrosses like suture marks stitching the columns together. Remember, from when you were a kid? The column on the left might be pictures and the column on the right might be words but the matching pairs aren’t side by side, they’re mixed up, and you have to match them. It’s not hard. If you knew me—if you knew Karen—or any of them, you could do it. In fact, the scheme is almost too simple—out of respect for the “truth”? From a failure of imagination? Is it better or worse that the code is so easy to crack? Sarah and David are the people they must obviously be, only their names have been altered, and not even altered that much—the new names are in the right spirit, they’re true to their objects, in fact they’re so apt they’re unnecessary, their divergence from the truth is so inconsequential that they might as well be the same truth they’ve replaced. Mr. Kingsley, too, is the person Mr. Kingsley must obviously be; his new name, too, is in the right spirit. If certain colorful revisions of his character have been undertaken, they don’t serve to disguise the historical person, though they do disguise something. That something, however, isn’t Karen’s to unmask; she’s not here to expose without warning. Pammie, unlike Mr. Kingsley, is not a historical person but the way in which Karen’s Christianity was found laughable. Julietta is the way in which Karen’s Christianity was admired. Joelle is the intimacy between Karen and Sarah, disavowed and relocated onto a historical person very much like Joelle with whom Sarah did not have an actual friendship. Why give the pain of broken friendship to Joelle, why take it away from Karen? The reasons might be psychological. Why make Karen non-Christian, while making her laughable Christianity Pammie, and her admirable Christianity Julietta? The reasons might be artistic. All this is just speculation; Karen isn’t the type to pretend to have superior insight into people she knew as a child and then turned her back on and then used as she wished for her personal gain. Not to finger-point. That would be petty.
Karen stands outside the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author. Karen is thirty years old, the same age as her old friend the author. She hasn’t seen her old friend the author since both were eighteen. In the dozen years since, much has happened to Karen. Much of what has happened has been therapy, and the rest of what has happened tends to be described in terms drawn from therapy. This is a tendency of which Karen is aware and about which she isn’t apologetic. At least she knows where her language comes from. If, however, Sarah—for example—were to ask what she’s been up to the past dozen years, Karen would avoid therapy-speak in her answer as carefully as she used to avoid Jesus-speak. She would do this to be taken seriously by a person devoid of belief. Despite Karen’s not just disliking but disrespecting this person devoid of belief, that ancient shame would creep over her belief, her need for belief—her belief in belief—like a stain and Karen would, now as in the past, pass herself off as a person who didn’t believe. That much hasn’t changed. Oh, this and that, she would say. I’ve mostly worked as an office manager, personal assistant, personal organizer, stuff like that—you probably never knew it in high school but I’m highly organized [laughter]. It’s kind of a curse, I can’t see something without making it more efficient. I think it’s a reaction to my mother [laughter]. But it’s nice, in terms of making a living. People hire me to organize their stuff, I can pick and choose my clients, I can set my own hours. It pays well. It leaves me lots of time to travel. My brother and I—I don’t know if you remember, I have a brother—just took a trip to Vietnam and Laos. Yeah, it was amazing. Beautiful.
Saying these things, if she says them, Karen will be aware of the deceptively offhand way she puts the most enviable aspects of her life in the foreground. She will be so aware of this effort to cultivate envy, and the effort to conceal the effort, that it’s going to be hard to believe Sarah isn’t equally aware, despite the ample evidence of Sarah’s inability to grasp her, Karen’s, feelings. Synonyms for “ample” include “bounteous,” “copious,” and “plenteous” but not, according to this particular thesaurus, “voluminous,” which in its entry lists synonyms including “big,” “huge,” “roomy,” “capacious,” and … “ample.” Sometimes synonymousness only travels one way. The dictionary tells us that “voluminous” travels out of the past from the Latin word voluminosus, meaning “having many coils,” which travels from the Latin word volumen, a roll, which, reversing direction again, travels to the Middle Ages to become a word in English, “volume,” which means a roll of parchment that’s been written on. Anybody can look these things up. A given person’s facility with words is not in fact their knack, gift, or talent; it only means they own a thesaurus and a dictionary. The way we were raised—by “we” I mean me and Sarah; by “raised” I mean given the ideas that most mattered to us, and it wasn’t our parents who did this but our teachers and friends—talent was the only religion, the only basis for belief that wasn’t mocked. Talent was a divine thing embodied in humans and you either had it or you didn’t, you were blessed or you weren’t. Either way, you worshipped it. If you were blessed with talent, you worshipped it by using it, and no sin was worse than letting talent go to waste. If you weren’t blessed with it, you worshipped it by serving the people who had it. You had better be joyful, not jealous. Karen and Sarah, you girls know without you we could never do mainstage, you girls are a pair of wardrobe wizards, lucky us that you’ll run costume crew! Did Sarah audition for mainstage every year despite having the range of a toad when she sang? Yes, she did. Did Karen audition for mainstage every year, she who soloed with her church choir? Yes, she did. Was either of them ever cast, even in a bit part, even once in four years? No, never. They were permanent members of that mysterious majority, the talented enough to get into the school but not talented enough to serve as its stars. They must serve as the background against which the stars shined. They must feel joyful to do this and never resent it, although admission to the school had seemed like a promise that each passing year was remade and then broken again. Every year one of the seemingly permanent losers was unexpectedly cast in a lead, which both kept hope alive and increased the humiliation. Senior year it was the guy we’ll call Norbert. Norbert. By then, Karen had returned to her childhood world of dance with a vengeance, though instead of ballet she took modern and pretended to look down her nose at acting. She’d chosen acting as a fourteen-year-old: a mere child, she had chosen an art meant for children. Senior year she was gracious about it, happy to lend a hand with the costumes so that all the Theatre children could have a good time. Of course they should know she’d be studying modern in college. Sarah struck much the same pose, but with writing. Scribble, scribble, scribble went Sad Sarah in her Solemn Notebook. The only difference being that Sarah succeeded, having aimed lower and chosen a talent anybody could fake with the right kind of tools. Try and fake dance: you can’t do it. True arts require discipline, they require that you sculpt muscle and bind it to bone. I haven’t danced since college because I’m a realist and I understood early enough that I wasn’t going to be a professional dancer any more than I was going to be a professional actor, because although I’m really lean I’m too short and too wide. I maybe should have been a swimmer but anyway. Anyway, Karen hasn’t danced in a decade, but strangers still see at a glance that she used to dance seriously, they see it in her posture, that’s how ingrained she made it, how much work she put in.
The hard work of herself, on the hard muscle and bone of herself. Nobody else’s stuff dragged in to make something seem ample, bounteous, copious, plenteous, or voluminous.
I’d come to the bookstore fully intending to sit down in the audience. I imagined Sarah seeing me, maybe as soon as she stepped to the mic or maybe after she’d already started to read. Either way, I imagined her recognition of me would have the same sort of effect on her voice that bumping into the turntable had when we used to play records. Her needle would jump and then fall back again and she’d pretend to keep going, but there would have been that little break, that flaw in the smoothness. Maybe only she and I would notice, but I didn’t need other people to notice, in fact I didn’t want other people to notice. I wasn’t after some public moment, with the crowd as my tool. When we were children, or students, or whatever we were at the place we’ll refer to as CAPA, we were taught that a moment of intimacy had no meaning unless it was part of a show. The ways we liked and hated and envied and bullied and punished each other never seemed satisfyingly real unless Mr. Kingsley put them onstage during Trust Exercises, and he chose very few of our moments. Sarah and David, it should be obvious to anyone, were envied by all of us for the attention they got. In fact, that was their stardom, a different kind of stardom than being cast in a lead but in the long run more potent. Being a legit star at CAPA was a Pollyanna enterprise requiring that you have straight white teeth and be able to sing and to fit a whole set of ideas about life that we were too young at that point to recognize as ideas or as you might say a belief system. Unlike most of us I’d been raised in a religious belief system but even I didn’t recognize at that age that CAPA stardom was also a belief system, and not just the way that life was. David and Sarah’s different stardom gave the clue to some alternate universe where everything was reversed, and instead of discovery and love and success were distortion, disconnection, and failure. That was the show they starred in. The exercises Mr. Kingsley made them do, it occurred to me many years later, were a kind of pornography. I only meant to say that I decided to not surprise Sarah in front of an audience. I didn’t decide this out of kindness to her. I just didn’t want to give her the moral high ground.
One more thing, before Karen and Sarah’s reunion. In her story, Sarah takes the actual friendship between Sarah and Karen, and turns it into a friendship between Sarah and Joelle. She also takes the actual end of that friendship, and turns it into a show that was watched by their classmates, a Trust Exercise. But it wasn’t. The death of our friendship was private. The dying took place at a distance, but at the instant of death we were face-to-face without anyone else. It was my first day back at school after a break. I’d spent the fall and winter of my junior year at a Bible school and I hadn’t seen Sarah since early that summer. Sarah had spent the summer in England with her much older lover. She had gotten to do this by driving her mother’s car, without her mother’s permission, away from a fight with her mother over her mother’s refusal to give her permission to travel to England, through a red light and into an oncoming truck, totaling the car and receiving nonfatal but impressive-enough injuries. As soon as she was discharged from the hospital and her passport was ready, she left for England and didn’t come back until the day before school started. I knew these details because my mother had given rides to Sarah’s mother all summer, to the grocery store and the doctor, because Sarah had totaled the car and Sarah’s mother couldn’t afford to replace it. Sarah’s mother was disabled, which for some reason Sarah’s story doesn’t mention.
I had gotten to school early my first day back so I could park in the front lot, where there weren’t many spaces, because I wanted to avoid everyone I knew and they parked in the back. It was January and the air was actually cold, its dampness was cold, and the cold damp made a haze that in my memory softened the light so that I felt hidden and somehow alone, as if I was actually going to succeed, and get through the first day of school without having to see anybody I knew although it was a small school and all the same people every year and there was no way I’d even get through an hour without seeing them all. But even a few minutes without seeing them all would have made a difference. There were teachers’ cars in the front lot but it wasn’t half full. My plan was to sit in the smokers’ courtyard, which opened off the cafeteria through a set of glass doors, so it wasn’t a good place to hide but at least you could see people coming. I knew there was nowhere to hide and the best I could do was to see people coming, but then I pulled open the heavy front door of our school and there was Sarah. She seemed to be coming out. It was seven forty-five in the morning, forty-five minutes before the first bell. There was no one else, no other sound; all the adults were in the main office or locked in their classrooms.
Sarah was wearing some kind of punk outfit that was supposed to look uncaring—punk—but instead shouted effort. The effort of all those months working her bakery job to earn money, the effort of totaling her mother’s car to make her mother too frightened to try and control what she did, the effort of crossing the ocean to spend the summer with a much older man, the effort of navigating Carnaby Street and choosing just the right clothes without knowing what any choice meant. The outfit was Doc Martens boots and shredded black fishnets and bleached cutoff jeans and a white, black, and red T-shirt with a spiky-haired guy sneering “Oi!” Her hair was short and she’d drawn thick lines around her eyes. Inside the lines her eyes didn’t look larger, as she probably hoped, but sunk in from the rest of her face, like she’d put on a mask. From under her eyeliner mask she saw me, the person she’d most hoped to avoid, just as she was the person I’d most hoped to avoid, so that, thinking and acting the same way, our efforts canceled each other. And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.
I don’t know what she saw in my gaze. Her story doesn’t show my gaze, or depict it through somebody else, or maybe it does and I’m so self-deluded I don’t recognize it. That’s possible. What she should have seen was pure accusation, which doesn’t take long to transmit. We looked at each other for just long enough. I don’t think we stopped walking, me in, and her out, the same door. Everything we’d felt for each other, which had been dying down throughout the summer almost naturally, how a candle’s flame slowly dies out when you cut off its air, flared and changed all at once into something else, instead of expiring. But our friendship was over.
KAREN STOOD OUTSIDE the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author. Her old friend the author had arrived at the bookstore by car about fifteen minutes before, and had stood outside the store in the same spot where Karen was now standing. Her old friend the author had glanced into the store and then glanced at her watch, as if waiting for someone or something, or as if concealing a hesitation by pretending to be waiting for someone or something. Then, as if the someone or something had arrived or the hesitation ended, she went into the store. During this time, Karen watched from a café across the street. At the café, Karen had also been waiting for someone and something, and also hesitating. She had been waiting for her old friend the author, and for whatever sensation it would give her to see her old friend the author again. The sensation had been precise and satisfying. It had been a sudden pressure on the sternum, a pressure that meant excitement, and dread, and anticipation, and reluctance, all rolled together, but with an emphasis on excitement and anticipation. Karen was very good at parsing and naming her feelings. She’d been practicing this skill for many years. The sternum-pressure sensation had also been like hunger, a demand for action, unlike other similar sensations which despite being similar were completely different, not demands for action but warnings against it. Karen’s hesitation had been waiting for this signal and once she had it her hesitation was over and she got up and paid for her coffee and crossed the street to go into the bookstore but before she had done this a new hesitation came up, the hesitation about sitting in the audience. As already discussed, Karen had intended to sit in the audience if she went to the reading at all, but standing in front of the bookstore, looking through the big windows at the other early arrivals milling around browsing the shelves, Karen had all those thoughts mentioned above about audiences and power trips and moral high grounds and decided not to sit in the audience but to stay outside on the sidewalk where she wouldn’t seem out of place because it was lively for an LA sidewalk as this was one of those rare “walkable” neighborhoods LA is so proud of. Karen had lived in Los Angeles for a period of several years which had ended several years ago, but her brother still lived here, she still wound up here a couple times a year, she still felt at home here. She was still on her own turf, you might say. Karen had browsed in this bookstore before but she hadn’t bought anything. She leaned casually against the plate-glass window, cupping her palms around her eyes to make the inside of the store visible. The sun was setting, its fiery light pouring from the café side of the street, painting the solid parts of Skylight Books’s storefront gold while turning the window into a blinding mirror and throwing huge golden rectangles into the store, across the concrete floor and up the bookshelves standing all over the place at artsy angles to each other to form a sort of maze. Karen knew that because of the light behind her she could press her face to the window and be just a dark shape to a person inside. That was an advantage she hadn’t expected. She could see, through the maze of bookshelves, to the part of the store where the readings were held. A lectern faced several rows of folding chairs. Some people were starting to sit in the chairs, while others continued to wander. Some of the wanderers pensively held stacks of books they’d already discovered, while others pensively gazed at the slender signs hung on the walls, describing the books that were shelved underneath. Art. Humor. Essays. Reference. Fiction. The words on the signs formed a system implying that people who shopped in the store all agreed what the different words meant. The day before, the day she’d arrived in LA, Karen had gone to a drugstore and among the signs on the aisles describing what each aisle contained—“Hair Care”; “Cough and Cold”; “Cosmetics”—was a sign that read “Personal Intimacy.” “Personal Intimacy” was the way certain items were categorized in that drugstore. “Art,” “Humor,” “Essays,” “Reference,” and “Fiction” were the ways certain books had been categorized in the bookstore. “An author of fiction” is the way Karen’s old friend the author categorizes herself. A category is a way to define, while a definition, according to the dictionary, is a statement of the exact meaning of a word. The dictionary tells us that fiction is literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people, is invention or fabrication, as opposed to fact. The dictionary tells us that the imaginary exists only in the imagination. Logic tells us that what exists only in the imagination does not exist in reality, or actuality, which the thesaurus tells us are the same thing.
After the sun had dipped under the opposite buildings, the inside of the store looked brighter, and Karen could see all the way to the lectern and chairs without standing too close to the glass. Now she stood leaning on the streetlight, again knowing that this way she couldn’t be seen from inside, where, finally, a pale thin man with a curtain of hair in his face came to the lectern, spoke briefly, and slumped out of view. Then Sarah came to the lectern. A curtain of hair fell in her face also; her hair was smooth and dark like an expensive piece of furniture. In high school, Karen and Sarah had done everything to their hair they could think of except take care of it. They had bleached it, shaved it, permed it, dyed it, as girls do when vandalizing themselves seems the best way of proving their bodies are theirs. Sarah seemed to have learned that expensive self-care also proved that her body was hers. Every inch of her surface was polished. It couldn’t be an accident that her side-parted hair was just slightly too short to remain anchored out of her face every time her right hand, in a demure little movement, tucked it behind her right ear. She tucked; and it fell out, eclipsing her face. She tucked; it fell out. Karen wondered if this tic was as conspicuous to the people inside, who could hear Sarah reading, or if the sound of her voice made the gesture less noticeable.
In time the sound of applause was faintly audible through the glass. Then apparently there were questions. Sarah stopped tilting her head toward the lectern and looked straight at her audience so that the curtain of hair kept itself to one side and didn’t need to be tucked anymore. Sarah listened intently, nodded, spoke, and smiled a few times. She looked less self-conscious and pretentious, more relaxed and intelligent. Her smile, which had always been one of her best features, also seemed somehow improved, like her hair. Sarah had one of those faces that, when she wasn’t making a particular expression, tended to look preoccupied, worried, or mad. You couldn’t know what, if any, thoughts were storming across her brain at any given moment, but a lot of the time it seemed as if you could see them, and that they were hostile. Back in high school certain teachers, the ones with thin skins and quick tempers, had always been telling Sarah to wipe that look off her face, which seemed to startle Sarah or injure her feelings—her eyes would widen and sparkle as if they were wet—so that you wondered if “that look” possibly stood for nothing, not hostile thoughts but no thoughts. When Sarah smiled, all this uncertainty about her thoughts disappeared. But she didn’t smile often or at least didn’t used to.
After a second burst of applause people started leaving their chairs and milling around again. The pale thin man led Sarah to a table that was covered with a white cloth and tidy stacks of books and Sarah sat down behind the table with a self-conscious attitude of being very closely watched doing this ordinary thing of sitting down and so trying to do it as if she wasn’t in fact being watched, which only made her seem more as if she was performing—performing modesty, just as when she kept tucking her hair. Someone handed Sarah a Sharpie and a line formed in front of the table of people who wanted their book to be signed, and Sarah vanished from view behind the line of people awaiting their moment with her. At this point it might make you impatient to hear me change my mind again, but the truth is that after deciding not to sit in the audience I had never decided quite how to approach. I guess I’d thought of her leaving the store the same way she’d gone in, and the two of us there on the sidewalk. The sun had finally gone down, it was night and the sickly orange glow from the streetlight made the sidewalk feel private and maybe too private. I hadn’t planted myself in her audience. I hadn’t broken the fourth wall for my own satisfaction, but the line was a different arrangement. It promised each person a private encounter, but under the rules of encounters in public. Such as, everyone smiles and nobody runs. All these thoughts made up a lengthy hesitation during which everyone in the bookstore who was also hesitating about getting in line, or who was buying a book before getting in line, had now gotten in line so that when Karen entered the bookstore and got in the line, she was last. For a moment the store’s brightness, blinding after the sidewalk’s dim glow, made the decision to come inside seem like an error. Often the experience of our simplest perceptions, for example the feeling of blindness that comes from walking into a very bright space after standing for an hour in the dark, leads to an inaccurate thought—I’ve made a mistake—which leads to a feeling—anxiety—which reinforces the thought. One of Karen’s favorite authors, because although Karen doesn’t really read fiction, or much of anything that a store like Skylight Books stocks, Karen reads all the time and possesses some real expertise in a handful of favorite subjects, wrote a book that, once Karen had read it, enabled her to analyze her feeling-states as clearly as if they were passing through prisms, that didn’t just make them visible but broke them down into all their components. Once you can do that, it’s a challenge to not view other people as blind. Previous experience with the condescension of religious belief helps somewhat in correcting overestimations of yourself. Categorizing in ways that make sense from the gut, putting like things with like, helps somewhat, and being able to do that is why Karen’s good at her job. While waiting in the line, which was completely made up of people pointed intently at Sarah, people who refused to even glance at each other because they didn’t want to believe there might be someone else who had the same special connection with Sarah they’d formed just by reading her book, Karen had plenty of time to get out her own copy of Sarah’s book. It still had Karen’s bookmark stuck in it at page 131, commemorating the point at which the end had come, in Karen’s opinion. If Karen, as the reader will learn, had no problem closing the door on her mother when her mother attempted to visit, Karen certainly had no problem closing the covers on a book that featured her mother but purged Karen in most ways that mattered.
As the line inched forward, a young female employee of the bookstore worked her way back. She handed each person a single Post-it Note, and if needed, a pen. “If you’d like Sarah to sign your book to you, please write your NAME on the Post-it exactly the way that you’d like her to write it, and then please use the Post-it to MARK THE PAGE that you’d like her to sign on. The title page is what most people choose. If you want her to sign just your first name, PLEASE ONLY WRITE YOUR FIRST NAME. If you want her to sign it to somebody else, PLEASE WRITE THEIR NAME. If this is for a birthday or some other occasion, please write BIRTHDAY or whatever the occasion on the Post-it. Thank you! Does anybody need a pen? No, you keep the Post-it. Use it to mark where you want her to sign. That way she can open right to it. It’s your choice, but the title page is what most people choose. Does anybody need a pen? Oh, look at you—so organized!” While the time-saving system was being explained over and over again to every single member of the line, Karen had removed a block of Post-its and a pen from her briefcase, written “Karen” on a Post-it, and posted the flag on the edge of the title page. And yes, I used quotes on the Post-it. I wanted Sarah to use them when signing.
“I had my own Post-its,” Karen told the employee, who wore a name tag that read “Emily.” Emily’s strenuous effort to save Sarah perhaps half a minute per signing demonstrated that Emily’s own time was worthless to her.
“Ooh, you have the hardcover,” Emily said. Karen being the last person in line, there was nobody left who required a Post-it or who needed the system explained. Emily loitered with Karen as by tiny degrees they approached the white table. Karen didn’t do anything to encourage this loitering. “I love the hardcover design,” Emily went on, as if it had been Karen who designed it. “Well,” Emily wanted to clarify, “the paperback’s really nice too. It’s just a gorgeous book inside and out. Have you already read it?”
“I have,” Karen said, interpreting the question broadly, without guilt. But there didn’t seem to be an easy way to leave it at that. Emily seemed to be hanging on Karen’s every word. Emily seemed to intuit some kind of special relationship between Karen and the book, or maybe this was just Karen having another inaccurate thought. “Very closely,” Karen added, to make up for a meaningless half-truth of which Emily would never be aware. This made Karen think about the historical problem she had of tending to try to please other people, even strangers, for less than no reason. She’d always hoped that making this problem historical—acknowledged and documented—would leave it behind in the past, but so far that hadn’t worked out.
“Oh, wow!” Emily said, gratified. “A real fan!”
“Oh my God.” Sarah’s voice, up to now mellifluous and artificial and vague as white noise, abruptly fell into a lower register, as if in the middle of singing inanely, she’d burped. For the second-to-last person in line had turned away, like a curtain pulled aside, revealing Karen. It was the moment Karen had been waiting for, and, distracted by Emily the bookstore employee, she’d missed it. Or rather, she’d missed seeing it. She had heard it. But she’d wanted to see it. She had wanted to see Sarah exposed in a moment of panic. Instead she saw her quickly rising from behind the white table, unleashing the rarely seen dazzling smile. By “dazzling” we mean extremely impressive, beautiful, or skillful, and we also mean so bright as to cause temporary blindness. It’s a frequentative of the verb “daze,” by which we mean to make someone unable to think or react properly. In high school, the man we’re calling Mr. Kingsley assigned us, as fifteen-year-olds, the song called “Razzle Dazzle” as the audition piece for our production of Chicago (music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb). Sarah, who never could sing, embarrassed herself at auditions. Karen, who could sing, nailed the song but apparently lacked some other quality required to be cast in the show. “Razzle Dazzle” is a cynical song about getting away with murder. Sarah rose up from behind the white table, dazzling with her rarely seen megawatt smile, and before Karen could step back, Sarah hooked her arm around Karen’s shoulders and pulled her in for a hug, with the table between them, while the person named Emily squealed, “I should have known you were an old friend of hers!” Despite being a former dancer with excellent balance, Karen almost lost her footing while this awkward hug, which you’d almost think had been done for that purpose, was happening. Almost losing her footing, Karen was almost unable to think or react properly. She almost felt herself at a disadvantage. But that was an inaccurate thought.
I ALWAYS KNEW I was one of the ones who would leave. Whether it was talent or just willpower, something would get me far from my hometown. How likely you were to leave town after graduation was another way CAPA ranked people. Everyone assumed the stars would leave. Everyone assumed the people in the background would stay. Sarah was the exception to the rule, actually. Sarah was a bad actress, a worse singer, and a nonexistent dancer, but we could tell she would leave, rejected and depressed as she pretended to feel, with her self-destructive habits that were her best stab at acting, and her shredded punk clothes. Our senior year, when she went shrieking down the Theatre hall waving her Brown acceptance letter, no one was surprised. It was when I got my acceptance to Carnegie Mellon that everybody was shocked. But I’d known I was getting out somehow, while so many of the stars who were supposed to, Melanie who’d stood smiling in her own private dream while I crawled around on the floor buttoning her My Fair Lady shoes with a hook, or Lukas who’d thrown his Music Man shirt on the dressing room floor every night because he knew I’d pick it up and iron it, ended up boomerangs. The farther they hurled themselves out, the more quickly they landed back where they’d begun.
I wasn’t a star dancer at Carnegie Mellon, but when I gave up dance I didn’t run home, I did the opposite. I went to New York anyway, just when all our classmates who’d gone to NYU and even Juilliard were leaving. New York was “too hard, too expensive, too lonely,” but I’d never expected New York would be easy or cheap or a place I’d have friends. I’d never been a star and I didn’t expect to be treated like one. I did well in New York. I had a job, I had a place to live on my own. And then one night I opened the door of my apartment and there was my mother, in a brand-new ankle-length faux-fur coat that some man had bought her to keep her southern self warm in the cold New York weather. She’d gotten some man to get her to New York and she was grinning like a naughty little girl at how clever she was, actually hopping up and down on my doormat. I left immediately and moved to LA, where my brother was finishing school. It took our mother three years to unhook from the man from New York and rehook to a man from LA; by the time she caught up, an unexpected change had come over me. I wanted to go home. I loved it and missed it. I’d only wanted to leave in the first place because my mother lived there, and she no longer did. So I told her in no uncertain terms what would happen if she followed me again, and told my brother to do the same thing, but he couldn’t. My mother had always forgotten about him, raising him with the sort of benign neglect that left him wanting more of her instead of realizing she was a toxin. My mother and brother still live in LA, while I live in the city all three of us think of as home. When I visit my brother, he doesn’t tell our mother I’m coming. When he visits me, he doesn’t tell her he’s going. He pretends that he’s traveling on business. And though I’m sad that this saddens my brother, what would happen if my mother had contact with me would be worse than his sadness, and both of them know this.
After I moved home, I often ran into the person we’ve been calling David. His boomerang flight had been longer than Melanie’s, shorter than mine. He’d been back in our town for two years. He’d started a theatre company which put on the darkest, most disturbing plays David could think of in the same sorts of places where we’d gone to hear music in high school, the rusty ice houses or the abandoned warehouses or the seedy dance clubs. David had failed at acting at Northwestern and he’d switched to playwriting and failed at that because he never finished the plays he started and he’d switched to directing and turned out to be very good at it. People came to see the plays he put on, despite their being dark and disturbing and staged in weird inconvenient locations. The person whom we’re calling Mr. Kingsley became a regular audience member, and then a regular donor, and then, as David’s company started getting its shit together and applying for nonprofit status and grants, even a member of the advisory board. When you saw Mr. Kingsley and David standing around at one of David’s fund-raisers, Mr. Kingsley drinking whatever red wine was on hand from a clear plastic cup, David drinking whatever showily cheap “blue-collar” beer was on hand from a can, the two of them talking intently as if they were completely alone in the loud, crowded room about whatever dark and disturbing play David was currently staging, you saw two members of the same Elite Brotherhood of the Arts.
Mr. Kingsley, when we were his students, never explained this Elite Brotherhood in the way that he was constantly explaining the idea of stardom, through everything he tried to teach us, and all the ways we didn’t measure up. The idea of stardom, of honing your talent and unleashing it on the world, organized everything that we did—but what he never told us was that the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts organized the stardom. Mr. Kingsley was clearly a member. And now David was clearly a member. That was strange and even funny only if you stood apart and noticed that it was a brotherhood, with membership and rules, and not a God-given Order of Things. During the period when David’s company got its shit together to apply for nonprofit status and grants, Karen lent them her organizational skill set, in case this hasn’t already been guessed. She was the getter-together of the company’s shit, though she never sought credit or even a paycheck. She was happy to make that contribution to David’s success. So few of their peers had succeeded, so few had found stardom—but of all people, cynical David had made a place, right there in their hometown, for surviving ambition. Now the Theatre kids went straight from CAPA graduation to David’s auditions, and Mr. Kingsley employed David as a “visiting artist” to teach the “master class” in directing. Karen donated her evenings and weekends to the company’s “office” and “books” and its near fatal, before she intervened, unpaid-tax fiasco. David, in gratitude to her, insisted she come to a fund-raising gala, at which he dragged her over to Mr. Kingsley, who beamed and nodded and chitchatted with her while gracefully if not successfully trying to hide the fact that he had no idea who she was.
Karen was content, she told David, with having given up performing. She was just as content as he was. But David, perhaps because over the years he’d developed a sort of ardent artistic flattery as the only currency with which he could pay all the people he owed money to, refused to believe this. “Come on,” he said. “You got into Carnegie Mellon. Unlike me you can actually sing. You can fucking tap-dance.”
“I’m an awful tap dancer.” This was true. The limitations of body type, mentioned above, made tap dancing an imperfect fit. In tap as in ballet you want lanky; only modern can accommodate the dancer who’s built like a swimmer.
“For fuck’s sake, only a tap dancer says, ‘I’m an awful tap dancer.’ You were good. Remember when we all had to sing ‘Razzle Dazzle’? You killed.”
“He didn’t cast me.”
“He never cast me either.”
“And now you’re a director and I’m your accountant. All is as it should be. You don’t have to tell me I’m an undiscovered star just because you can’t pay me.”
“You had a dark energy onstage—don’t roll your eyes! I remember. You didn’t have a stupid Mentos smile.”
“Stop.”
“From the point of view of directing I can’t fucking believe the deficit of talent in our class. Of course our estimation of our talent was completely overblown, but even if you adjust for that, we had a deficit. If you look at the school over time, there’s only one person in its entire history who’s ever become a global celebrity, and she went to the school for less than three weeks so we can’t really claim her. But there’s the handful of people who have been on a billboard over Sunset Boulevard once or twice in their careers, and we’ve produced one of those let’s say twice every decade. Then there are the people who’ve managed to pay the bills as working actors—sometimes you see them on TV although they never break out. There’s one of those maybe every two years. Then there’s the people who should have made it at least as far as getting regular work, but they had shitty luck. There’s a few of that type every year and I cast them in my stuff, all the better for me. But our class had no one even in that final category—except you.”
“You’re putting me in the shitty-luck category? I’d rather be in the talentless category.”
“Come to auditions next week. Come on. Why the fuck not?”
I might have given a dry bark of laughter, or made a wry face, by which I would have meant, You’re ridiculous, or I’m ridiculous, and either way I’m not taking this seriously. I would have shoved off the barstool unhurriedly, paid my tab, said good night. In high school, despite being members of the same graduating theatre class, David and I had never been friendly. Our shared connection to Sarah was more like a wedge than a bridge. But now that we both lived in our hometown again, conversations like this happened often between us. David was obsessed with the past, and not just certain parts of it. All of us, I think it’s fair to say, fixate on things from our past, maybe wanting them back the way they were, maybe wanting to go back and change them. Either way, this fixation on parts of the past seems pretty common. David took the tendency to an extreme. The whole of his past obsessed him. The past was like the country he was exiled from, and any vestige of it, even me, was fascinating to him. David seemed to have decided, very early in life, that the best of his life was already behind him, and all his present achievements with his theatre company interested him only because they gave him a connection to his past. I interested him only because I gave him a connection to his past. I gave him the opportunity to talk about his past, even parts of his past that hadn’t interested him at the time but that interested him now. And so he would remind himself of this or that thing I’d done, or talk about my unacknowledged talent, because it gave him the thing he most craved: a doorway, however indirect, to his past. He would have done it with anyone out of his past. In fact, he did. I often heard him engaged in the same sorts of conversations with other relics of those years who had rotated back into town.
These conversations about the past always happened at a bar we called The Bar—everyone called it The Bar—although it had a proper name. Our town had plenty of bars, so there wasn’t an obvious reason this comfortable but ordinary bar would be known as The Bar. It wasn’t a place we had gone to in high school, although it had existed then, giving off the same vibe of friendly, predictable after-work watering hole it gave off now, the difference being that then this vibe seemed inappropriately dull and now it seemed appropriately dull. In this one way, at least, David had broken with the past. It was The Bar, not one of the bars he’d drunk at in the past, where he liked to sit around and talk about the past.
Unlike David, I spent very little time at The Bar. To be clear, I spent very little time with David. The volunteer grant-writing, the tax-fiasco fixing, the dropping in once in a while to a gala to not be recognized by Mr. Kingsley, the conversations about my unacknowledged talent at the bar of The Bar, were things that happened maybe every couple months and made up a tiny fraction of my life. Most of my time I spent working for clients who paid me, or working on the house I’d bought. I also went to therapy, and started training as a therapist. I didn’t drink. I’d never drunk much and then there was a time in my life when I eliminated things, some because I couldn’t tolerate them, and some because I didn’t require them, and drinking was a thing that I didn’t require. I called my brother most nights to check in, and often ate my dinner while I listened to him talk. I sometimes watched a movie. I read a lot: History and Self-help are my categories. I’ve always liked being alone.
Some nights, though, I liked the thought of being with people, and then I’d drive to The Bar, usually with a book, although I rarely got to read it, because David was usually there. We almost always had some actual business, some organizational task I was helping him with, that would cause him to turn from whoever he’d been drinking with. David always had someone to drink with, often a small crowd. There was usually a woman riveting her attention to David like she thought there would be a quiz later, there were usually members of the theatre crowd and members of the broader arts crowd and members of the even broader drinking crowd, orbiting David, placing him at the center of things. Even when David was alone at the bar of The Bar, as he sometimes was because he’d gone into a State that held people off just as effectively as if he were swinging a spiked club around, he was still at the center of things. By which I mean that even when he pushed people away they kept their eyes on him, from the far side of the room, anxious to find a way back to his side, to regain his attention. When we were young, David had clumsy charisma; he knew he was attractive, but he didn’t know in what way or why. More than a decade of dedicated self-abuse had ruined his looks and when he was tired or drunk, his face looked like a ball of molding clay that had been thrown against a wall. Yet his charisma, which you could no longer confuse with his looks, was more noticeable. It almost seemed independent of him. The physical David would sit slumped at the bar staring into his glass while his charisma stalked the room, pushing some people away, pulling some people close. Karen was always pulled close, on account of her usefulness to him as a loyal unpaid employee and her status as Link to the Past.
Tonight, then—a night in late January, many months before Karen’s reunion with Sarah at the Skylight bookstore—David is seated alone at the bar, in a funk, when Karen enters wearing her jean jacket buttoned all the way up, a tasselled scarf wound several times around her neck, a pair of gloves, and a hat pulled low over her ears. It’s as cold as it gets in their town, which is plenty cold for Karen, who hates to admit that she never got used to the cold in New York, but whimpered beneath its onslaught just like her mother, except without her mother’s ankle-length faux-fur coat. From outside, as she hauls on the frigid door handle, Karen can’t see The Bar’s interior, only the glow of its lights, through the big windows which usually put the people at the bar of The Bar on display to the sidewalk outside, but which this night are frosted with condensation. But Karen isn’t surprised, on entering, to find David immediately inside the door, on the right-most barstool, his usual place. When David isn’t in rehearsal, he sometimes occupies this stool from three or four in the afternoon until two or three in the morning. It’s David who takes an extra beat to notice Karen, maybe because of the hat and the scarf. As she pulls these off and steps up to the bar to order a Coke, David sees her. “The fuck,” he says. “I was just thinking of you. Remember Martin?”
Karen finds this an interesting, excellent question. Like all her favorite questions it seems so simple and obvious that for David to have asked her seems idiotic at first. Does she remember Martin? But now the different layers of the question start to peel apart. Remember in what exact way? The dictionary tells us that “remember” means “to call something to mind, recall something forgotten.” Well, Karen has never forgotten Martin, so in this sense she doesn’t remember him. The dictionary also tells us that to remember is to keep something in memory. Without going down the rabbit hole and looking up “memory,” let’s give this one a check mark: yes, she does keep this something in memory. We also have, in this particular definition, “keep somebody in mind”—yes—“give somebody a gift”—you might say so, depending on “gift”—“send somebody greetings”—not lately—“commemorate somebody or something.” Commemorate: remember something ceremonially. This meaning is suddenly very appealing. It sticks in Karen’s mind, the way a lot of things do. David, who has his own share of problems, one of which is being too smart for every situation he puts himself in—he is too smart for his work life, his sex life, and definitely his life as a drunk, which takes up the biggest part of his time—would probably enjoy this little lecture on the meanings of “remember,” but Karen wouldn’t enjoy giving it, so she only says, “Sure, I remember Martin.”
“Check this out,” David says, and lays a news clipping flat on the bar. Bourne Courier-Telegraph, October 4, 1997: “Top Teacher Dismissed Amid Allegations.” Beneath the headline are two short columns of print and one short column of a black-and-white photograph of a man with a narrow ferrety face, light hair fringing over his eyes and his ears, a narrow gap between his teeth, oversize glasses that weren’t fashionable even ten years ago, a jacket and tie that he probably borrowed and that don’t really fit. Even without the benefit of color you can tell that his skin is too white and his teeth are too yellow. The photo looks more out-of-date than it is, the way official photographs—Karen supposes this is the yearbook photo, the “Our Faculty” wall-of-the-main-office photo—never look like the day they were taken but like the day when their dingy backdrop first began to be coated with decades of dust. The man, of course, is the man we’re here calling Martin. He looks just like and not at all like the Martin that Karen remembers. Karen can’t even tell, staring at the dated photograph, whether the Martin it shows is older or younger than the Martin she knew. The Martin of the photo and the Martin Karen “keeps in memory” look exactly the same, and at the same time they look totally different. Now Karen can no longer tell them apart. She wonders whether she does remember Martin at all, or whether she just made him up, looking down sightlessly at the utterly weird, unrecognizable photo that looks exactly like Martin. She’s been staring so long at the photo that when David asks, “Are you done?” she doesn’t realize he means finished reading the words. The words she has not even started.
“I’m done,” she says, meaning something different than what David’s asking. He picks up the clipping and puts it away. His fingers seem to be trembling. He seems to be having difficulty, now that the clipping is safely away, lighting a fresh cigarette. David is completely freaked out, which is the flip side of being a jaded unshockable guy; it’s the soft inner lining his jaded unshockable costume is meant to conceal. Undetected by him, Karen puts on David’s jaded unshockable costume. She’s going to have to get the article at the library: she’s careful to remember, to “keep in memory,” the name Bourne Courier-Telegraph. She’s going to have to pore over the article later, however much she would like to pore over it now. But she doesn’t need to pore over it now to have the basic idea. She has that already.
“Where did you get that?” she asks.
“From Jim,” David says, by which he means Mr. Kingsley. So freaked out is David he doesn’t even remember that this business of calling the person we’re calling Mr. Kingsley a chummy first name, for our purposes “Jim,” is only for the Elite Brotherhood. “But first I got this letter from Martin,” David says. David’s urgently waving the bartender over, he’s so desperate for fortification to get this explained, to the point of not even realizing what’s happened to Karen. He doesn’t notice his jaded unshockable costume slip off Karen, at this mention of getting a letter from Martin. He doesn’t see Karen yank the thing back into place, and so misses the chance to tempt her to confess that when she moved back to town, although she swore to herself not to do it, she finally drove to the house of her childhood and knocked on the door, because some crazy part of herself imagined, a long time after it was expected, a letter from England arriving there for her, but—thankfully no one was home at her childhood home, and she never went back.
Unlike Karen, David had never expected to hear from Martin again. David hadn’t spent much time with Martin for those two months, fourteen years ago. They’d never been in touch after Martin and the others had left. But Martin, in his letter, seemed to know all about David’s success. Maybe Martin had actually heard about David somehow, and been reminded he knew him. Or maybe he’d remembered David, and for whatever reason decided to look him up and see if he’d made something of himself. You couldn’t tell from the letter, which he’d sent to the company’s post office box.
“Do you have the letter with you?” Karen asks, interrupting David’s lengthy dissertation on the letter from Martin, in a possibly over-sharp tone. Karen would much rather see this letter herself, hold the thing in her hands, than hear David describe it. But of course David has misplaced the letter already. It doesn’t matter, he reminds Karen in response to her outright annoyance. He remembers its words perfectly. When David and Karen were in high school, David tortured his classmates with recitations of the skits of Monty Python and the songs of Bob Dylan. He’s always had a flawless memory for words that coexists in some way with a totally fragmented grasp of his life. This is a psychological or neurological phenomenon that perhaps has a name Karen might someday know if she goes into clinical practice.
“He congratulated me on everything with the company,” David says. “He was really nice about it. It seems like he’d looked up reviews. And then he said, ‘It’s about bloody time someone shook things up in that starchy little burg you call home. I was sorry that it couldn’t be Candide but I’m delighted it’s you! Give the righteous moralizers a smack—you might knock their eyes open.’ And then he said, ‘Perhaps you’ve heard I have some troubles of my own with the morality crowd. It’s the usual thing—if they can’t find immorality to scold they make it up and it works just as well.’ Then he talked about how he’d finally found the time to finish writing a play, and made arrangements to stage it, both directing and playing a principal role, but then ‘here came this witch hunt in which, most regrettably, I am the witch.’ And then he pretty much asked me if I’d stage his play. The one he’s had to cancel.”
Not understanding what “morality troubles” and “witch hunt” might mean, David had, first, forgotten about the letter for a few days while he dealt with his own theatre projects and created and recovered from hangovers. Then he saw Mr. Kingsley at a meeting or somewhere and asked him what he knew these days about Martin. Mr. Kingsley made a face—the sort of face a nun makes when the doings of the wicked are too regrettable to even discuss. Sitting at The Bar with Karen, his palm lying on top of the envelope in which he’s put the article that Karen wants to keep looking at but will not admit wanting to look at, David makes his version of the face, which reminds Karen that David didn’t fail at acting because he didn’t know how. At least he can put on a face. Drunk as he is—or maybe because he’s so drunk—he does a very good nun. A face hung on a hook and dragged low by a weight—the weight of wickedness that’s too regrettable to even discuss. Mr. Kingsley had declined to discuss it. He’d made the face, and a couple days later—today—he’d dropped the news clipping by David’s office. But who are the wicked Mr. Kingsley declined to discuss? Are they Martin, or Martin’s accusers?
Although she’s not known for promiscuity or a sense of humor—in fact, people probably think she’s both celibate and unfunny—Karen often points out in certain public situations that she has never slept with David. Let’s say Karen happens to be at The Bar the same night as some person from David’s broadest circle, aka his drinking circle, whom she has never met and doesn’t want to meet because she and this person have nothing in common. In such situations David without fail will insist upon introducing Karen to this random drunkard of his vaguest acquaintance. David without fail will describe Karen using such hyperbolic phrases as “one of my oldest friends in the world” or “goes back further than anyone” or “knows where all my skeletons are buried.” Karen without fail will quip, “I’m the only woman in this bar who hasn’t slept with him,” or, “I’m the only woman he’s ever known for more than a week who hasn’t slept with him,” or, most impactfully, “I’m the only woman in this town/county/greater metropolitan region who hasn’t slept with him.” David without fail winces visibly when she says this. It’s as if his reputation as a guy who’s irresistible to women—except Karen—is somehow undeserved, or unpleasant to him. Karen has never understood David’s relationship to his sexuality, which like his charisma seems to stalk the world independent of David’s intentions, doing whatever it wants. And Karen herself, whenever she makes the comment, without fail also winces, but on the inside, because the comment is compulsive and she never means to make it and wishes she didn’t. It possibly suggests sour grapes, as if she wants to sleep with David, when she doesn’t. Or it possibly seems mean-spirited or superior toward other women. And however it seems, it is unnecessary. Yet she always says it, always wincing; and David always gives her the opportunity to say it, always wincing. Why? What compels them?
Until the night David showed her the clipping, Karen would have said that David always introduced her because of his obsession with his past. And she would have said that she always made the comment because she was annoyed by his obsession with his past. But on the night of the newspaper clipping, Karen wondered whether the whole thing had to do not with the past, the thing David always brought up, but with sex, the thing Karen always brought up. Maybe Karen’s insistence that she had nothing to do with David’s sex life meant that Karen, in fact, had some ax to grind about David’s sex life, its epic quality discussed by everyone, as if David were the star of some hit TV show that Karen had been watching for decades with no option of turning it off.
That night at The Bar, as they began to talk about the “witch hunt” against Martin, it didn’t take long for Karen to suspect that David wasn’t shaken by the thought of Martin being a predator. Rather David seemed shaken by the thought of women lying about Martin, a person whom David, all these years later, viewed as a role model and sort of spiritual colleague, an example of how David thought a working theatre artist should be. In the fourteen years since David and Karen had seen him, Martin had remained teaching at the same school. He’d remained that irreverent, exemplary teacher, always winning the awards and always almost getting fired. He’d remained the guy students called “the biggest influence on my life” or “the only person at that school who connected with kids” or other such hyperbole. He’d taken his students not just to CAPA that long-ago time, but all over the world, offered them opportunities they’d never imagined, broadened their horizons, taught them to believe in themselves, and so on. All this information came out of the article, which David seemed to view not as one possible version of a possibly unknowable reality but as a simple window onto the life of someone David barely knew, whose past magically touched upon his—in other words, a sacred person. Karen knew David had always viewed the cancellation of Candide as proof of the hypocrisy—or, to use Martin’s word, “starchiness”—of this “little burg” David and Karen call home. Karen further guessed the cancellation of Candide had played its role, alongside Beckett and Northwestern, in the way David viewed himself now: theatre rebel, proud discomfiter of paying audiences. Martin having paved the way, the article must seem to David like evidence of a world gone mad, in which the vengefully lying were rewarded and the truth-telling teacher and artist destroyed.
“Do you not believe he slept with his students?” Karen finally asked. Karen had realized there was nothing she could say, at this moment, that wouldn’t shred the jaded unshockable costume she was still somehow wearing, that wouldn’t shred it into rubbery strips. At moments like these, a most useful technique is to ask the other person a question. It shouldn’t be a leading question, but Karen’s question, we admit, had some slant. All we can say is, the room had some slant. I was trying to stay on my barstool. I was trying to remain an old, dear friend of David’s.
“I’m sure he slept with his students. I’m sure they slept with him. They knew what they were doing! We knew what we were doing. Remember what we were like?”
“We were children,” Karen said carefully, as if it were David who ought to be handled with care, David who might be injured by the conversation. But apparently, despite taking precautions, Karen still caused offense. David gave a scornful laugh.
“We were never children,” he said.
THE ATTENTIVE READER might wonder, What ever happened to Manuel? Will Karen reveal his fate to us? I wondered this myself. After reading what I read of Sarah’s book, before seeing her at the Skylight bookstore, I went to my bookshelf and pulled down my high school yearbooks. Yes, reader, I kept them. They were quality items, those yearbooks. Their title was Spotlight! With the exclamation. It is not without care that I turned the stiff, glossy pages. Few inscriptions marred the endpapers. What effusions the few did contain didn’t reveal anything unexpected. No writer had claimed space with a colored Flair pen who did not find the yearbook’s owner “a sweet girl,” “so nice!” destined to other than an “awesome future.” Turn the page, then; pass the frontispiece of none other than David glancing over his shoulder, wearing the last of his hair and a Mao jacket. Pass through Administration with a pang; those office ladies took more care of you than your own mother did. Pass through Dance and Music (Instrumental and Vocal), through the Winter Ballet and The Jazz Ensemble Takes Manhattan! Theatre is the headliner here. It not only comes last but has the most pages. Study them all: four classes of Theatre students each year for four years, and there’s still the strong chance that “Manuel’s” DNA includes chromosomes from another department. We’re seeking the fate of Manuel in his various origins, for though I won’t claim there was no Manuel, I guarantee there was no one Manuel. Of clear sources I count at least three.
The first Manuel was a Theatre student, “Hispanic” as the forms say, who lacked all discernible talent. No more could C. act than dance, no more sing than drive nails into wood. He could not even glue feathers onto a hat. What was he doing there? It isn’t my puzzle to solve, but whatever the reason, it didn’t expire. C. was our classmate all four years. He departed as he came, unremarkably. He neither achieved prominence nor prematurely disappeared. Although he never had a girlfriend or boyfriend while we were in school, last I heard he’d gotten married, gone into business, had a couple of kids, and was doing just fine.
The second Manuel was a Vocal Music student, also “Hispanic” as the forms say, whose name you may know if you listen to opera. He is one of the school’s biggest success stories, and his voice, like Manuel’s in the surprising audition, truly conjures the ranks of the angels. He never came out as gay while at our school but he certainly is. However, P.’s talent wasn’t discovered at our school but years earlier in his childhood. Nor was he a protégé—or more—of Mr. Kingsley’s. P. was the pride of the Vocal department, so consistently booked in professional opera from the age of thirteen that he never even deigned to audition for the school mainstage. He continued from our school to Eastman, and a stellar career. I saw him perform once, as Sharpless in Madama Butterfly, when I lived in New York. Afterward I briefly considered waiting for him at the stage door with the handful of starry-eyed others all cradling bouquets. But I had no claim on him. I’d known of him but he’d never known me. I decided against and went home.
The third Manuel is not a person but an observation. Is not a salient aspect of this character his special relationship with Mr. Kingsley? Does not this relationship so anger Sarah that she inflicts an unspeakable wound, a strange sort of revenge?
The attentive reader might also wonder, What did Karen know about Sarah’s strange act of revenge? Again, I wondered this myself. Had I seen things I’d not understood? Had I known things I’d somehow forgotten? To the first question, Doubtful. To the second, No way. I never forget anything. But Sarah’s reconstruction in her book of the lighting and set and backdrop were so true to my memories, I kept blaming myself that the action seemed unfamiliar. How completely Sarah transported me back to that costume shop, with its overtaxed garment racks poorly divided by signs made of wilting shirt cardboards. The iron, the ironing board, the hats left on the floor. Yes, exactly. All that, just like that. Enough to make me think the unfamiliar action must be equally true and I just hadn’t noticed. But no: no one inexplicably disappeared from our theatre class—except me. And no one had a very special, perhaps too special, perhaps so special as to unleash in Sarah a thirst for revenge, relationship with the man we’ve agreed to call Mr. Kingsley—except Sarah.
But you’ve heard all about that very special relationship already. Or have you?
Two terms my therapist used that I liked, among many, were “projection” and “restraining force.” I liked those terms because they were so concrete in the therapy context and so broad in the context of life. Projection: even if you don’t do therapy yourself, you’ll agree that for all its bad rap, projection is creative. It puts something, or rather someone, out there, that person supposedly having those feelings that are actually yours. While restraining force is creation’s true opposite, not destruction but creation’s cancellation. Not-thinking, not-feeling, not-doing. Projection or Restraining Force: Something or Nothing. The bald lie, or the stark truth that never gets told. There is no Manuel, or there are several. Sarah did nothing like that, or she did everything, even things she attributes to others. Karen knew nothing, or she knew everything but the form that the story now takes. Sarah tells this story to reveal a hidden truth—or to hide the truth under a plausible falsehood, scrambling history unrecognizable with the logic of dream.
Does Sarah think the story makes her out as a good or bad person? Looked at one way, she’s a selfish, hurtful bitch. Looked at another, she might imagine she’s rescuing someone.
But the truth or falsehood of Sarah’s story, the purity or taint of her motives for being truthful or false—these aren’t ours to determine or speculate on. We apologize for the digression.
NOT LONG AFTER that night at The Bar with David, Karen went to the main branch of the public library and obtained her own copy of the article in the Bourne Courier-Telegraph. After reading it she found her belief in Martin’s guilt completely vindicated. Strangely, she could also grasp how David’s belief in Martin’s innocence might be completely vindicated. The article was one of those that used a local controversy to investigate the broader “culture wars.” At the well-regarded high school in Bourne, Martin had won teaching awards year after year for his theatre program while also fending off rumors that he engaged in “behavior unbefitting an instructor.” None of the rumors had ever been proved. Receptivity to them seemed to vary according to one’s view of the utility of arts education. Conservative parents who viewed the theatre program as so much time-wasting twaddle called for investigation and accused the school’s principal, an arts champion, of shielding a sex criminal. Progressive parents who viewed arts funding as being under siege called for the defense of Martin and the denunciation of a witch hunt in which, most regrettably, he was the witch. The difficulty of knowing which side had it right was made worse by the students, who almost always declined to speak out and the rare times they did, disagreed with each other. Finally, the previous year, a sixteen-year-old Theatre student at the school had told her parents that she and Martin shared a loving and consensual sexual relationship and that she was expecting his child. Martin denied being other than the girl’s instructor. The girl’s parents hired lawyers and demanded that Martin submit to paternity tests. Martin refused and was fired—but not charged with a crime, as the student retracted her claim. While the age of consent in the UK has been sixteen since the late nineteenth century, the article said, it is an offense for any person aged eighteen or older and who holds a position of trust (for example, a teacher) to engage in sexual activity with a person aged eighteen or under, as such activity abuses the position of trust. The school, perhaps in penance for its prior inaction, put out the word through alumni networks that it was seeking other victims of Martin’s alleged abuse. Lest this sound too judgmental, the article concluded with a quote from a theatre colleague of Martin’s: “Here’s a person of incredible talent who’s devoted his life to the teaching profession, and this is what he gets: fired from his job, his reputation destroyed, all on the basis of hearsay. And you wonder why talented people won’t teach.”
Not long after reading the article, Karen obtained a copy of Martin’s play, which he had been hoping to produce, star in, and direct, until his witch hunt interfered, and she read it with the same interest she’d brought to the newspaper story. She got the copy of the play from David. David, after being shaken and shocked by the news about Martin, and then affronted and outraged, had turned finally sardonic and crusading. The sardonic crusading took the opposite form of the shocked shakenness, which played out at The Bar, an ideal location for sitting, drinking, and scolding the world for being “fucking insane.” The sardonic crusading played out on the stage of David’s theatre. This progression, from being shocked on a barstool to crusading onstage, was in fact David’s cycle, the way his wheel always turned. First, David would passively suffer his shock. Then after a certain point, as if the suffering charged him with power, David would unleash a crusade to shock others, and make them suffer in turn. Then, exhausted or remorseful or both—because he always, in his crusading phase, attacked people and made them upset—David would feel shocked again and passively suffer. Rinse, wring, repeat. If I ever actually become a therapist, and David ever has money, I’d like to treat him. He interests me. He interests everyone, which is more than you can say about most people. I once heard an intoxicated commentator at The Bar opine that David did well with women because he was so unpredictable, but this was a drunk person’s observation. David is completely predictable. Half the time he’s in a funk and half the time he’s ferociously active. Half the time he suffers and half the time he causes suffering. I’ll leave it to a mental health professional as to whether this is textbook bipolar disorder or something more nuanced but for our purposes you only need to know that David’s sardonicism—a real word, look it up—about the treatment of Martin led to his crusade to put on Martin’s play. David recovered the letter Martin had sent him, mashed onto the floor mats of his car or in his bedsheets or underneath his coffee maker. He wrote to Martin fulminating against the idiocy and insanity of the world and asking for a copy of the play. You can easily believe that when Martin got this letter, he was gratified. So began a transatlantic correspondence between these long-separated members of the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts.
Karen was in David’s office on the day the play arrived in the mail. You could say that she’d been staking out that play, stalking it, the same way she’d been keeping herself abreast of all the David/Martin developments: David’s shock evolving into his crusade, David’s recovery of the letter, etc. Karen had kept herself abreast by making herself indispensable to David, which was always very easy to do. David always needed some administrative favor and was always quick to accept someone’s help, without asking why that person would offer. David, I believe, suffered from low self-esteem yet never had any difficulty believing in the singular importance of his work. This is a distinguishing trait of members of the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts. David also had no difficulty believing that this belief—in the singular importance of his work—was shared by others. When proposing to dedicate hours of your life to some project of David’s, you were never in danger of David asking why you wanted to do that. David had recently relocated his office due to an unfortunate misunderstanding of the fire code, and Karen offered to unpack and overhaul his filing system, which she herself had created several years earlier, but which no one had ever maintained. In this way Karen was able to keep herself abreast of the David/Martin correspondence, and to read Martin’s play, at her leisure. There were no surprises in the correspondence but there were some surprises, at least to Karen, in the play.
The first surprise was that the play was good. At least, to Karen the play seemed to be good. She’s never claimed to be an expert on plays. But she read through it quickly. That seemed like a sign of a good play. Also, how much she thought about it afterward seemed like a sign of a good play. The play had startled her, yet seemed strangely familiar. That was the second surprise, that the events of the play seemed so familiar, as if they had happened to Karen—but in a different life, a life she hadn’t known she’d lived, so that the play was a sort of dream-version, all jumbled but retaining some reminder, like a smell or a stain.
The play was set in a pub, and though it was full of English people drinking English drinks and saying English-sounding things, the setting might have been The Bar. It was the same sort of every-night place. The owner and bartender, “Doc”—the character Martin intended to play—is a taciturn figure. In the opening scene, the patrons argue about an acquaintance who’s drunk himself to death, and whether this should count as suicide. The patrons try to get Doc to weigh in but he won’t. Then a girl enters, seeming to want a handout. She’s dirty and sexless—the audience should even think that she might be a boy—and also small and frail-looking. In spite of that, her arrival gets Doc riled up. For the first time, he says more than a couple of words. He yells at the girl, and kicks her out. Everybody else is uncomfortable but gradually things get back to normal, and the argument resumes. The scene ends.
Then come a lot of scenes about Doc and his patrons illustrating social ills and moral conundrums. They are well done if in no way original. Karen read these with absorption but felt no need to reach for the Post-its. Hence I’ll skip to the almost-last scene.
The bar is dark and deserted, closed for the night. A clock shows that it’s four in the morning. But then we hear a key turn, and Doc enters. And, surprise, with him is the Girl. Before, it seemed as though they were no more than enemy acquaintances, business owner and street hustler. Now it’s clear they’re something more. In the dramatis personae, neither character is given an age. Doc is described as “past his prime; a different life might have left him less stooped, less scowling.” The Girl is described as someone who, “however long she lives, will never cease to look the waif.” She is supposed to be indistinguishable from a boy in her dirty jeans and T-shirt, which means she’s breastless and hipless, but does that make her ten, twelve, or twenty? The Girl sits at the bar while Doc moves around behind the bar and in and out a door through which we now see a pathetic back room, all peeling linoleum, bare lightbulb, and cot. This is apparently where Doc lives. Doc puts a plate of food in front of the Girl, and she eats. They seem to pick up a conversation from where they left off. Doc is angry at the Girl for how she lives. The audience should realize that concern, not accusation, was the subtext of his yelling at her earlier. The Girl says Doc might as well be angry with himself. Doc says, “We all make our own choices.” The Girl says, “Do we?” Doc says, “We do when we can but you know that I can’t.” The Girl says she can’t make Doc’s choices either; no one can make another person’s choices. Here Doc “collapses; whether physically, morally, or both” (to quote stage directions). It’s a moment of reckoning—but for what? “Don’t you see?” Doc says to the Girl. “Don’t you see that I’m trying to repay you?” “Selfishly, as always,” says the Girl. “Please, baby,” Doc says. “Please do this for me.” No blocking is provided, but the Girl apparently finishes her food and stands up. Doc apparently comes around from the back of the bar, or the Girl goes around from the front, because Doc “seizes the Girl in a violent embrace” (to quote stage directions). Is Doc the Girl’s father, or lover, or both? The play doesn’t answer these questions of Karen’s.
Doc and the Girl exit to the back room, the door shutting behind them.
A shot rings out, offstage.
The Girl comes out from the back room and exits.
But the play isn’t over. The lights come up one last time. It’s a memorial. The bar is draped in black bunting, and there’s a framed picture of Doc, and a vase of wilting flowers. All the same patrons, all wearing cheap-looking jackets and ties, are sitting around drinking and talking, just as in scene one, but now the suicide they’re debating is Doc’s. They all have different theories about why he did it, and make different pompous statements about the meaning of life. Suddenly, silence. The Girl has entered. She’s better dressed, in clothes appropriate for church, although they look secondhand and don’t fit. Despite her changed appearance, her evident intention of paying respects, all the patrons attack her. “Get outta here, you little whore!” and “Fuck off, you sticky-fingered bitch,” they variously say. The Girl has no lines in response, but nor does she seem to exit. The play seems to end with her standing there. She enters; she’s assailed by insults; and the word
end
is all that remains.
But Karen, reading that word, could see the end clearly, as Martin, writing that word, must have seen it clearly. Martin was a director as well as a playwright. What might seem missing, from a reading point of view, was actually something bestowed, on director and actors. Karen was once an aspiring actor. She remembers how to fill in those blanks.
In the trance that overtook her while reading, Karen was not sure how much time had passed. She remembered Mr. Kingsley once telling them that if they simply read Shakespeare at the same rate that actors performed it, they’d be able to read entire plays in a couple of hours. This was the sort of putatively encouraging but actually critical and discouraging advice Mr. Kingsley had constantly given them despite his never having, Karen would bet, read an entire Shakespeare play in two hours or even an entire Shakespeare play in his life, yet it was a piece of advice that had stuck in her head ever since. It had given her the obviously flawed idea that reading time and staging time must be similar when most times and certainly this time that wasn’t the case. It seemed to have taken her minutes to read through the play, and yet the play took up one hundred plus pages and was stuffed full of invisible silence, and not just the kind that takes up time onstage. There was copious onstage silence, that might take minutes or hours to enact, but there was also a silence of meaning, a refusal to spell out the facts. This refusal Karen felt as a challenge, although it took her some time, of having feelings and trying to name them, before she hit on the name for the feeling. Challenge. Very personal challenge. This isn’t to say that Karen felt the play was a personal challenge to her in the sense of a message from Martin, that letter he’d promised, belatedly sent. Karen isn’t crazy. She doesn’t hear the lampshade talking, or read messages in her eggs. This is to say that she felt, from herself, to herself, a strong challenge to enter the play’s silences and to utter their meaning.
MANY WORDS ARE both nouns and verbs. Present/present. Insult/insult. Object/object. Permit/permit. A list of such words, compiled for the business traveler not fluent in English, is pinned to my bulletin board. It’s meant to illustrate not just the words’ versatility but the fact that in each word the emphasis shifts the same way, from the first syllable to the second, with the sense shift from object to action. “I have a PREsent to preSENT to you.” “The stapler is an OBject to which I hope you won’t obJECT.” “This PERmit perMITS me to fire you.” These example sentences are of my composition. I like the list of words because it’s like a monotonous poem and also because the “rule” it represents applies only to those words and is otherwise useless. “Audition” is also a word that is both noun and verb, but it always sounds the same. It’s a word that means, literally, “the power of hearing,” or “a hearing,” as well as “to perform an audition,” a circular definition that is actually the first under “verb” in my dictionary. In the verb form most true to its source (audire: to hear), the action belongs to the listener: David is auditioning actors for roles in the play—he is “hearing them out.” But actors, poorly educated egomaniacs though they may be, understand about power. They’re the reason the circular verb definition—audition: to perform an audition—has become the most popular one: I’m auditioning this weekend, I auditioned for that, I auditioned for him, etc. “Audition” dramatizes the struggle between subject and object, between doing and being done to.
My hatred of actors and my resistance to including myself among them complicated the resolve I had made, after reading the play, that no one else but me would play the Girl. I wanted to act without being an actor, and definitely without having to act like an actor. But no less than I hated actors I also hated people who thought they were so good they just asked to be given a role. And so in the days leading up to auditions I never told David I was coming nor simply asked him to give me the part, never chose a piece, never rehearsed it, never reconciled myself to being auditioned—and never reconciled myself to not auditioning.
The morning of the auditions I printed out a monologue but I didn’t learn it. I didn’t even look at it. I drove to the club David used as a theatre, and sat outside in my car until I knew they were just about done—because I’d helped with the schedule, as usual making myself indispensable about these auditions that David had never suggested I come to, having almost certainly forgotten our long-ago conversation about my great talent because he’d been drunk at the time. Sitting in the car I was surprised to have no idea what I would do. I tried to audition myself. I listened hard and heard nothing. Then as if she’d been given a cue, around the time Karen sensed they were finished she got out of the car and walked quickly inside where a very young, petite, pretty actress was in conversation with David who’d clearly just auditioned her or perhaps relinquished subjectivity and allowed her to do the auditioning, from the looks of his slightly flushed face. Karen knew auditions made David anxious as if he were the one who had something to prove. Maybe that knowledge emboldened her. Grabbing a chair she sat down just across from him, shoehorning in on his conversation with the actress, who faltered and smiled and finally went for her bag while David’s assistant director picked up his clipboard and flipped pompously through sign-up sheets that Karen had printed herself. “David’s just about done if you’d give us a second,” said the assistant director but Karen disregarded him and only focused on David. “You don’t think I can do this,” she said.
“Do what?” David said.
“You don’t think I can do this,” she said again, just the same way. David clicked.
“I don’t think you can do this,” said David.
“You don’t think I can do this,” said Karen.
“I don’t think you can do this,” said David.
“You don’t think I can do this,” said Karen.
“I don’t think you can do this,” said David.
“You don’t think I can do this.”
“I don’t think you can do this?”
“You don’t think I can do this,” she confirmed, because you don’t fucking listen, you have no audition, you have no sense of hearing at all.
“I don’t think you can do this?” David said angrily.
“You don’t think I can do this!”
“I don’t think you can do this?”
“You don’t think I can do this!”
“What the fuck is going on?” cried David’s assistant director.
“Shut the fuck up, Justin! I don’t think you can do this!”
“You don’t think I can do this?”
“The purpose of repetition,” Mr. Kingsley once said, “is control of context. People cry, scream, grab each other’s crotches, rip their clothes off … repeating the same set of words…”
Karen and David didn’t grab each other’s crotches, or rip off their clothes. They did scream, with increasing gusto. Karen did cry, a bit, but only once she had gotten back home. REpeat/rePEAT weren’t on Karen’s noun-to-verb list, but they ought to have been, since they work the same way: an action, event, or other thing that’s done over again/to say something again one has already said. “You don’t think I can do this,” repeated, also means, “There are things I would like to do over.”
I’VE SAID THAT David interested me. Not Sarah. Sarah obsessed me. I don’t use the word lightly. Remember that the two words don’t represent differences of degree. The dictionary tells us that to be interested by someone is to feel “attentive, concerned, or curious.” Curiosity is a friendly emotion and even a moral position. Those whom we make the objects of our curiosity we don’t prejudge or condemn. We don’t fear and loathe them. My therapist, in our time together, often urged me to “stay curious” and it was a nice thing for him to try and make me do, unsuccessful as he was, because curious is a nice way to feel.
Being curious toward, interested in, David made me feel like I’d bought into him, made a choice. By contrast, being obsessed by Sarah was a form of enslavement. “Obsess” comes from the Latin obsessus, past participle of obsidere, from ob- (against or in front of) + sedere (to sit) = “sit opposite to” (literal) = “to occupy, frequent, besiege” (figurative). When we say we are obsessed, we say we’re possessed, controlled, haunted by something or somebody else. We are beset, under siege. We can’t choose. I was obsessed with Sarah, meaning obsessed by her, deprived by her very existence of some quality I needed to feel complete and in charge of myself. If you’d asked Sarah, however, she would have said she’d done nothing to me. That’s how it is with the people by whom we’re obsessed. They’ve obsessed us, they’ve transitive-verbed us, but no one could be more surprised than they are.
So who makes it happen—obsession? Unlike the things that I did blame her for, I didn’t blame Sarah for this. I didn’t blame either of us. Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she’s a ghost. I knew Sarah was my ghost, but she’d forgotten I even existed.
Karen and Sarah, her old friend the author, went from Skylight Books to an expensive and stylish Mexican restaurant made out of huge white sheets of linen like the caravan of some sultan, if sultans ate Mexican food. The fact that it never rains in Los Angeles is most impressed on visitors by those business establishments that don’t bother having a roof. Potted palms, white banquettes, service kiosks for the staff glittering with stemware and steak knives, all sat out under the orangish night sky with its one or two faint fuzzy stars. Aircraft cable crisscrossed overhead to form a grid from which hung fairy lights and bloated paper lanterns and the vast white linen sheets which were supposed to divide the night air into “private” dining regions so that the feeling, for a person who was sober, was of being surrounded by some giant’s drying laundry. Karen could see Sarah was nervous. Even Karen’s most attentive, private-practice-ready “listening face” couldn’t downshift Sarah into some lower gear. Sarah was almost at the bottom of her daiquiri and Karen, as Sarah talked, gestured to the waiter to bring another daiquiri and another of what Karen was drinking, a fancy nonalcoholic limeade full of what looked like lawnmower mulch. Because the perspective of a nondrinking person seems to be unique, especially among people who read, allow me to break in again and observe that in my experience people who drink never don’t when they find themselves with a nondrinker. In fact, they drink more. Nondrinkers make drinkers uncomfortable. The situation they’re afraid of—getting drunk in the presence of someone who’s sober—is exactly the one they create.
“But enough about me, what about you?” Sarah cried, at the end of a long recitation of unexpected things that had happened to her on her book tour, none of which could have been more unexpected than one of her characters turning up, in the flesh, to invalidate all Sarah’s memories of her. “What have you been up to the past dozen years?”
“Oh, this and that,” Karen said, smiling to show that she didn’t feel that this question came too late to be polite and that it might not even be sincere. “I’ve mostly worked as an office manager, personal assistant, personal organizer, stuff like that—you probably never knew it in high school but I’m highly organized.” Their shared laughter came right on cue. Just as she’d imagined, Karen told Sarah about her recent trip to Vietnam with her brother, in this way illustrating her carefree and well-funded life.
“Oh my God, your brother!” Sarah said, exulting in the fact that she remembered this person’s existence. “How is he? What is he doing?”
Karen answered Sarah’s questions in the same way she’d speak of her brother to any random stranger, citing all the most expected, least remarkable facts, that might belong to anyone. Single, lived here in LA, worked in corporate law. Karen’s brother, with whom she shared a face, and many other less visible things. Karen knew that Sarah couldn’t even pretend to find these unrevealing facts about Karen’s brother to be exactly what she’d expected, or the last things she’d expected. Karen’s brother had been so far beneath Sarah’s notice, back in the past, that Sarah struggled now to fit him in the picture, and even seemed to think Karen would marvel at the sound of his name. “Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, oh my God,” Sarah harped, as if Karen’s brother’s name were a piece of obscure trivia. “I remember … oh my God! He had this razor-blade necklace he thought was so cool, do you remember that thing?” Did Karen remember it? Did Karen remember every granule of the childhood landscape she shared with her brother, in which the razor-blade necklace, believe it or not, was not such a major landmark? Still, Karen nodded and smiled as if she and Sarah were keeping pace down Kevin Memory Lane, as if the razor-blade necklace turned and gleamed enormously above them like the sun.
How many rooms house the past? In their hometown, space came cheap. Even poor people’s houses were flabby with space; they were just cheaply made. The apartment Sarah shared with her mother, Karen and Kevin’s house that they shared with their mother, were crappy structures full of water bugs and mold, faucet handles and doorknobs that fell off, windows and doors that wouldn’t open or wouldn’t stay shut, but they were never cramped, there was always space, dank space, more than you could decently fill. Karen and Kevin, before and after their parents’ divorce, always had their own rooms: enormous rooms with low, stained ceilings, dirty matted shag carpet, accordion-style closet doors that had come off their tracks, sliding windows in aluminum frames that stuck and shrieked and developed a weird, whitish rust, like salt deposits, that came off on your hands. One room like that was bad enough, but two was killing. All through their childhood Karen and Kevin had continually migrated into one room or the other, they resisted each having a room of their own, they understood in their bodies, if not in their minds, that two bodies in one room defeats the room, but one body in one room is defeated. And so each kept sneaking into the other one’s room—sneaking, because throughout their childhood there was always someone holding the opinion that they shouldn’t share a room, whether stating it directly or not. Before the divorce, it was their father and grandmother who held this opinion. After the divorce, their mother for a while had a boyfriend who held this opinion. In high school, it was Sarah who held this opinion—not consciously, because Sarah did not even know that Karen frequently shared the same room with her brother. It was just that Sarah would have found it bizarre that Karen, in a house with four bedrooms and three inhabitants, might share a room with her brother. And so Karen and Kevin, for the sake of not seeming bizarre to Sarah, withdrew to their two separate rooms. Kevin, Karen understood, had shared Karen’s grim determination not to spook such a friend-prize as Sarah. It was possible that Kevin—twelve the year Karen met Sarah, still requiring “husky” jeans, soft and pale and pudgy and awkward and unappealingly bashful—felt that grim determination even more. Kevin gawped at Sarah from behind the doorframes. It was possible that Kevin had purchased the laughable razor blade on a chain, with saved allowance, from the head shop in the mall, in the hopes of winning Sarah’s approval.
So, yes, in Sarah’s version of Karen’s childhood, Kevin barely existed, while in Karen’s and Kevin’s versions of their childhood, Sarah loomed. Sarah had impressed herself by remembering Kevin, while Karen knew it was too much to hope Kevin might forget Sarah. When Karen booked her current trip to LA, she deliberately failed to tell her brother that she was coming this particular day to intersect Sarah on Sarah’s book tour. She didn’t trust him not to want to come along. She didn’t trust him not to challenge her vision of Sarah, which was the product of so much analytical labor, with his own vision which was sealed in the amber of a childhood crush. But at least Kevin had a vision of Sarah, unlike Sarah’s nonvision of him, in which her drunken recollection of his name was another of the unexpected things that had happened to her. “Kevin! Oh my God. So did you guys move to LA together? That’s so sweet. I remember you guys were so close.” Yes, they were, but no, she didn’t. She remembered no such thing. Karen, ordering Sarah a third daiquiri, smiled again.
“We were both living here for a while, and I really enjoyed it. But now I’m back home.”
It took Sarah a moment. “You mean our hometown?”
“Home sweet home.”
“You’re living there?” Sarah’s high-gear voice dropped an octave. She’d finally forgotten herself, and that sardonic quality of knowing—not necessarily caring, but knowing—that Karen remembered so clearly, returned. Sarah had always seemed to know. Not you, but something you wanted to know. Now she seemed to see their town, dumped over a neighboring table like so many dirty guacamole bowls. “I never imagined you’d live there. I’d sooner imagine I’d live there, and I never imagined I’d live there. How is it?”
“It’s great. It’s not the same place we lived when we were kids. I mean, that place is still there, but I don’t spend much time there.”
“I hated living there so much. I always felt so powerless.”
“We were kids. We weren’t supposed to have power.”
“You had power. You had that car.”
How Karen’s crappy high-school car loomed for Sarah! It was one of the things that fascinated Karen about Sarah’s book, this grievance about Karen’s car. It was one of the things that kept Karen curious about Sarah, and not just enraged. If Karen wandered off in Freudian directions, a guilty pleasure, she might conclude there was, in addition to the obvious penis envy (phallus-envy? Karen’s Freud is pretty rusty, please remember she majored in dance), also some obvious father envy going on, Karen’s car representing Karen’s father’s role in her life, which while minuscule was larger than Sarah’s father’s role in Sarah’s life, since Sarah never saw her father and didn’t even know where he lived. Here we might understand “father” as meaning any form of masculine care. See, for example, Sarah’s special friendship with the man we call Mr. Kingsley, and that friendship’s mysterious end. See, for another example, Sarah’s thing for David’s car. That phone he failed to answer, that mess in his passenger seat. That orgasm Sarah gives herself, masturbating, because David’s not there. Everything about the car represented David’s broken promise to take care of Sarah, as if David was more—or should have been more—than just another fucked-up teenage kid. Why was David responsible for her? What about the adults in their lives? As if on cue, Sarah said, “Do you see anyone?”
And by “anyone” Karen knew Sarah meant David, and felt the satisfaction of the night arriving just where she’d intended, like a train pulling in right on time.
“I see David a lot. In fact, we’re working on something together.”
Another of Karen’s observations about people who drink is that their drunkenness doesn’t steadily accumulate like snow building up. It has valleys and peaks, of confusion and relative clearness. Although the confusion gets steadily worse, and the relative clearness gets steadily cloudy, there keep being these moments of reaching a peak, where the drunk person thinks she can see. She feels certain she isn’t that drunk. That’s where Sarah was, as the subject of David came up. Sarah was no longer high-pitched and hyper, she was no longer churning out fake excitement, she was tenderized down to her bones. She must have felt steady and safe in her own fortress walls. If it’s possible to see a person’s self-absorption clash against her curiosity, to see her inwardness and outwardness collide, then I saw it in Sarah. I saw her craving to talk about David meet her craving to learn a new David, from me. Before, she’d forgotten herself. Now, for him, she set herself aside.
“Tell me about him,” she said.
ONE OF THE challenges I’ve faced in therapy is my total recall. All my life I’ve had a flawless memory. All my life people have noticed, no one more than my mother. When I was very young, my mother paraded my memory. There was the lighthearted way she’d use me grocery shopping instead of a list. Imagine me at four or five years old, Kevin a fat toddler stuck in the shopping-cart seat. Aisle by aisle I’d rattle off our kitchen shortages down to the teaspoon. We were out of milk and bread, we had three eggs, we had a frozen chicken breast in the freezer, the baking soda box was empty, there was only one sleeve of saltines. She’d ask me questions about the sugar bowl’s level or the state of the lettuce when other people were in earshot, always hoping they’d make some comment, and when they did she was off to the races. “Believe me—she also knows how long it’s been since I vacuumed the carpet.” [Appreciative laughter.] “Believe me—it’s no fun when your kid won’t forget that you promised her ice cream—last summer!” [More appreciative laughter.] There was the less lighthearted way she deployed me in wars with my father or, later, her boyfriends. “Are you sure you want to say that to me? Karen’s listening.” “Karen, please remind Paul what he promised to do.” As I got older, though, my mother stopped parading my memory. She stopped bragging about it or hitting her enemies with it. Instead, she started running it down. My memory had been the ultimate proof of any points that she wanted to make, but it strangely disproved any points of my own. I might remember some incident, sure, but I did not understand it. Anybody whose brain was so cluttered with dull trivia like the approximate number of ounces of toothpaste left in the tube didn’t actually know what things meant. My mother first exploited my memory, and then insulted it, but the conclusion I reached didn’t change. My memory was my innermost self and I had to protect it.
Therapy can seem like revision of memory. It can seem like you’re saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one. It can seem like therapy won’t get its goddamn grubby mitts off you. At best therapy demands uncomfortable humility from the person with total recall, and at worst it can remind me of my mother—the difference being that therapy wants the emotional truth, while my mother runs screaming from any emotion or truth that’s not hers. Was Sarah the same, as I’d always assumed? One thing I’d known about Sarah since high school was that her memory was well below average. She forgot things all the time, in every category. She forgot where she’d placed her bag, her jacket, or her lipstick the instant whatever it was left her hand. She forgot what assignments there were, or whether she’d done them. She forgot why she’d fought with somebody, and what had been said. The result of her forgetfulness—or the reason for it?—might be her “imaginative gift” for rewriting the past, but did this mean she was more, or less, likely to perceive someone else’s emotional truth? If she forgot my emotional truth—assuming she’d ever known it in the first place—was she now all the more on the lookout for it? Or would she just lend me hers, like my mother would do, and ignore a bad fit?
Karen would have thought the latter—or she would have thought that she thought the latter. But as Sarah embarked on her fourth daiquiri, Karen realized that something had changed. It wasn’t just Sarah’s blood alcohol level. Sarah, who had been so obviously shocked and terrified in the bookstore when Karen appeared—who had been, at that moment, and whether accidentally or not, perfectly in touch with the emotional truth of the situation, which was that Karen despised her—had now nestled into a new, fraudulent understanding, of Karen’s creation, with all the unquestioning trust of a baby. That new, fraudulent understanding was that Karen and Sarah had never ruptured. They had always been friends. They had never stopped loving each other, simply drifted apart. And Karen realized that she, Karen, had known all along that Sarah, for all her charisma and beauty and knowingness, which is different from knowing, was fundamentally forgetful, insecure, untrusting of her instincts, and anxious for praise and acceptance. And Karen realized that she had known all along that Sarah, if given the chance, would ignore Karen’s emotional truth if she was offered an emotional falsehood that made her feel better. And Karen realized that this weakness of Sarah’s was something she, Karen, had been counting on. For all her self-deprecating misgivings about having come to Skylight Books without a plan, Karen let herself admit she’d had a plan all along.
“I’d have loved to see his face when you showed up at auditions,” Sarah said eagerly. By now she had heard about Martin’s new play—minus Martin’s witch hunt—and David’s production of it—minus David’s crusading—and Karen’s saucy, fun-loving decision to take David up on his bogus invitation to audition for him, if not the form the audition had taken. Karen had made Sarah laugh about David’s shrewd use of his charm as a method of payment. Oh, yes, Sarah remembered this well. David’s gift for making you feel only he saw your gifts. Despite the cool night Sarah was flushed, with alcohol but more substantially this memory of David, and the pleasure of talking about it. Although, in her new happy trust in her friendship with Karen, she didn’t neglect to insist Karen was talented. “I mean, David’s right, you are good,” she said, “but I think you’re right also—that he told you to audition because he loves pretending he’s this great, supportive guy. That’s why I love that you went. So what happened?”
Karen did a look of comical surprise—she hadn’t mentioned already? “I got it.” Sarah shrieked and threw her arms in the air.
“After all that BS about my unacknowledged talent I guess he had to cast me,” Karen said. This was false modesty. Remember that the part—the only female part in the play—was written for a woman who “however long she lives, will never cease to look the waif.” Remember that the character is slight enough to be mistaken for a boy. Karen is petite and in excellent shape but she’s never since she turned ten years old “looked the waif” or been mistaken for a boy. That pretty young actress whose audition Karen wiped from David’s memory—she’d been a waif. But David wound up casting Karen, to his own great surprise, and no more from pity than guilt. Her un-ideal physique was the proof that she had something better. “Didn’t you and Martin have a thing?” David had asked Karen at The Bar, after telling her he’d given her the part to his own great surprise. Karen had lowered her lids at him, as if she hadn’t expected the question—she had—and also found it in very poor taste. “Fine,” David said, “but just do me a favor. Don’t get in touch with him before the first rehearsal. I want to see the look on his face. I bet we’ll be able to use that, for when the Girl first comes into Doc’s bar.”
“So he’s Doc?” Karen confirmed casually.
“Fuck yeah. I told him that I wasn’t going to do it if he didn’t play Doc. I can’t wait to see his face when he sees you.”
“Me too,” Karen said.
At the open-air Mexican restaurant, Karen didn’t go into these details with Sarah, not even the detail of Martin’s casting. But when Sarah asked, “Do you think there’s any chance Martin might come see it?” Karen said, “David seems sure that he will,” and watched Sarah first withstanding, then submitting to temptation.
“If he can come from England, I can make it from New York. I have to. I’ve never seen a single one of David’s shows.”
“Would you really?” Karen marveled. “We open in less than three weeks.”
“Really,” Sarah said. She glowed like a lantern, as if already absorbing David’s stunned adoration at her unexpectedly attending the play. “Write down the dates on this napkin. I’ll book a flight when I get back to my hotel.”
“But are you serious?” Karen persisted.
“Of course I’m serious! I can’t not. David’s show? That you’re in?”
“Because—if you’re serious—”
“What?”
“No, it’s crazy.”
“Just tell me!”
“I just had this crazy idea—don’t be offended. Just, remember all those times on costume crew? So my character has just one change. It’s not even a quick one.”
Sarah clapped one hand over her mouth, barely muffling a squeal. She had to take the hand away to speak again. “I’ll be your dresser! I’ll dress you!”
Do mothers iron anymore? Or should we say, Do people iron anymore? But admit, it was mothers, not people, who ironed. Even Karen’s mother, trailing around in her ruffle-necked robe and her wedge bedroom slippers, had ironed. The ironing board permanently set up on its X-leg, wearing its silvery cover drawn tight by elastic. Lying on the floor under the board, Karen had been reminded by that elastic gathering of her own diapers, which in this memory were in the recent past. Karen must be two or three, lying under the ironing board, gazing up at the puckered elastic that holds the smooth, silvery fabric in place. Kevin must be an infant, kicking in a playpen or napping in his crib. Karen’s father still lives in the house and Karen’s mother is ironing his shirts. She sprays on the shirts from a can, the same way she sprays in a pan right before she cooks dinner, but the smell of the spray starch cooked hot by the iron makes Karen more hungry than does the smell of any actual cooking. The iron, coming down on the patch of damp starch, seems to be eating it, with a crackle and gratified hiss. And her mother, dreaming her way through the menial task as if nothing could be more romantic, is the mother whom Karen expects, the mother she’ll always be trying to find. In the costume shop at CAPA, when Karen rediscovered hot spray starch, the sound and the smell of it kept her content all those shows that she did the costumes, that she dressed someone else for the stage. Hot spray starch sedated her. It recalled the ancient safety of her lost childhood. And it bound her and Sarah together, into a harmony, ironing costumes. Now those afternoons they spent in costume shop that at the time had given Karen nostalgia for being a child are themselves an ancient childhood memory. Nostalgia is a “sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past.” It comes from the Greek nostos: to return home, and the Greek algos: pain.
ALL THOSE YEARS after he first arrived, Martin returned. He was picked up at the airport by David, who was hosting Martin in his terrible apartment. Karen knew such arrangements were de rigueur in the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts but she still wondered how much Martin would enjoy David’s sofa bed after Mr. Kingsley’s guest suite. Karen herself, indispensably helpful, hired a cleaning service to fumigate and sanitize David’s apartment before Martin’s arrival, as usual earning David’s abject gratitude. Karen also booked Martin’s travel, filed the paperwork for a visiting-artist grant from the state, drafted the press release announcing the production, and updated the theatre’s website. In connection with none of these tasks did Karen publicize the fact that the Visiting Artist arrived trailing scandal. Among no one in David’s theatre company was the scandal discussed. So far as Karen could tell, apart from David and herself and Mr. Kingsley, no one knew. Martin’s alleged crimes didn’t follow him to this American city where he’d spent time more than ten years before. But they didn’t need to, Karen thought—the author would like to indulge in an adverb and write—serenely. Yes, Karen felt serene thinking of Martin, preparing for his arrival. “Serene” means “calm, untroubled, tranquil” and often refers to conditions at sea. Martin crossed the sea, whether in serene condition or not we have no way of knowing. When met by David at the airport Martin might have been shocked by David’s physical transformation. David at thirty could have been mistaken for a man nearing fifty. David was bald, his brow and jowls and shoulders drooped as if they were subjected to enhanced gravity, he couldn’t clear his face of stubble fast enough, he’d gotten thicker all over and had the pallor of a chain-smoking drinker whose only time outdoors is the time he spends getting into and out of his car. Martin might have felt, seeing David, that the past was further past than he’d thought. Would he feel this way seeing Karen? Would he recognize Karen?
The play was being staged in a former warehouse building which now held a bar in the front half and a “performance space” in the rear half, indicated by poorly built risers and pipes hanging on chains from the faraway ceiling to which were clamped an assortment of secondhand stage lights with frayed wiring and wrinkly gels. Black moth-eaten stage curtains salvaged from some ancient extinct theatre had made the enormous dusty warehouse into a sort of maze of spaces that had to be connected at their edges but you couldn’t tell where. People were always getting lost trying to find the bathroom or trying to find their way back outdoors. People got so tangled up in the black stage curtains that seemed to mark an exit or an entrance but didn’t that sometimes they had to be rescued after crying for help. The bar was a huge plywood horseshoe with almost no seating. For some reason there were only a handful of barstools, each with some hunchbacked uncommunicative drinker permanently attached. Otherwise there were armchairs and sofas, obviously rescued from the garbage, strewn around the concrete floor. The night of the first read-through, the night of Martin’s first full day in town, Karen arrived early and made a circular arrangement of furniture, rounded up some ashtrays, even got the bartender to give her a pitcher of water and glasses. Okay, she was nervous. No longer serene. But it was an expected and manageable nervousness. Its source was clear and its duration would be short. We never know, when life reunites us with someone, how closely our stories will match. By contrast with the first time they’d met, when she had felt herself so old but in fact had been so young, Karen now actually was old enough to understand that for Martin, there might have been no story at all. There might have been—for this person who’d not merely touched but deformed her—no sensation of contact at all. He might not recognize her. If he did, he might not recall a single detail of their past relationship. If he did, he might not recall the same details. If he did, he might not recall them in just the same way. But Karen required very little to gauge the disjuncture and make her adjustment.
The four other actors arrived first and chatted awkwardly with Karen. All were under twenty-five and nervous of Karen, whose position in the acting pecking order they did not understand. Karen could not have cared less to explain. Karen could have chatted with them in her sleep. To her as to this story and the play they were completely peripheral. They intrude on this paragraph only because David was late; David had asked them to come at seven thirty while he and Martin, David had told Karen, were coming at seven, because David was eager for an unimpeded observation of Martin and Karen’s reunion. But David was late without realizing, as always. He came into the vast black dusty space with his self-conscious saunter which always advertised, even through a twilight murk, his awareness of his role as impresario, his keen pleasure and anxiety in making things happen—in this case, the reunion between Martin and Karen. The result might be discomfort or delight but either way he’d made it happen and he’d plow it into the play and make more happen. This was David’s typically self-centered and not totally wrong point of view, that the moment was all about him. His point of view suited Karen. It kept her invisible.
“Hey hey hey, look who’s back in the U S of A,” David said as Martin, strangely small, hands crammed in pockets, shoulders overly shrugged, kept pace, a triangular smirk on his face in the corner of which drooped a cigarette. David saw the actors. “What the fuck are you guys doing here?”
“You told them seven thirty. It’s a quarter to eight,” Karen said.
“Is that Karen?” Martin exclaimed with the extreme emphasis of delight. He snatched the cigarette out of his mouth. He stopped dead in his tracks but the rest of him seemed to lean toward her, his grin most of all. However, his eyes contradicted. There had been flash and flutter in there. Panicked survey of options, swift choice of Enthusiasm. David, his glance bouncing back from the actors, entirely missed it.
“It is,” Karen smiled.
“Aren’t you looking fucking fantastic!” Martin said.
“Thank you.” Karen accepted this tribute with the extremely dignified truncated condescension she’d once observed in an actress playing a member of the British royal family in some Masterpiece Theatre thing. Karen’s mother had adored Masterpiece Theatre with the slavish adoration of somebody who thinks she’s cultured but in reality is turned on by the clothes. For years Karen had scorned her mother’s slavish adoration and yet kept on watching the shows, her mother in her gut like a worm. Then one night she saw an episode with an actress playing a member of the British royal family who looked down her nose at some man and said her stingy “Thank you” in response to whatever his compliment was. She said it as if she were holding her nose and also as if she were giving the man a great gift and was going to be embarrassed if he showed gratitude. There was such a complicated tender hatefulness in the way that she said it, and Karen, who was probably in college at the time, had thought of Martin, yes indeed she had. She’d thought of his British Difference and wondered whether there had been codes she had not understood. And now here she was actually saying the prim little “Thank you” to him and watching for a response. What did she see? His gaze was flying around like a game of Ping-Pong. He seemed to know that the exits weren’t easy to find. Karen’s nervousness changed from something boiling and popping its bubbles to something cool, stiff, and glossy. You might call the new thing confidence, from the Latin confidere, “have full trust,” and who among us hasn’t noticed that people with confidence tend to inspire it. Martin’s gaze was ping-ponging; he had every reason to be on his guard—after all, he had come Trailing Scandal. But he also had every reason to crush his own instincts and to seize grounds for confidence where he could find them. Of course Martin wanted to normalize. What criminal doesn’t. And Karen’s dazzling little “Thank you” was so full of knowing contempt it seemed somehow flirtatious, and you could see she was smiling. Karen watched Martin get it together and give her his weasel/rake smirk in response. Even David, tuning in a beat late, thought there was a frisson between them and was happy. Frisson is a French word meaning “shiver or thrill,” and it wasn’t much used in this country until the late 1960s. Then, once the sexual revolution came, people needed it or wanted to need it. Karen’s mother, of the negligee as daywear, adored the word frisson.
Karen, still smiling, let Martin peck both her cheeks, which he did while keeping up a nervous scolding of David. “You didn’t bloody tell me we’d be seeing Karen!”
“Did he tell you I’m playing the part?”
Hearing this, Martin had to act so much more Enthusiastic he practically shot through the ceiling—but that was his nervous confidence convincing him that actually, Karen was flirting with him, that actually, it was All Right. This was how Karen was able to see that in fact, despite all her worry and doubt, Martin’s story, and hers, were the same.
Equally pretending this wasn’t the case they sat down and told each other piles of pointless lies about the past dozen years of their lives while the young actors deferentially supplemented the pitcher of water with several pitchers of beer.
Then, everybody sat down and they did the read-through.
“Doc hardly talks in Act One,” David observed afterward, “yet the audience has to form an opinion about him—that gets exploded.”
“Given it’s my own bloody part I could gladly give myself more bloody lines,” Martin said, provoking laughter from the young actors.
David talked more about the subversiveness of Doc, and Martin interrupted him with comments like, “Isn’t he just a pathetic sod?” shrewdly disguising from the admiring young actors and David his neurotic need for limitless compliments on the complexity of his character as false modesty dressed up as jokey self-deprecation. It was a virtuoso feeling-state lasagna and everybody ate it up and gave Martin back just what he wanted: more laughter, along with protests that his character wasn’t a “sod” at all but an Everyman and maybe even a Jesus.
In addition to dissecting Martin’s high-level bullshit, which had the welcome effect of making her feel less ashamed of her youthful past self that had found him so brilliant, Karen entertained herself by trying to guess how long it would take any of the men to notice her sitting there, not contributing a word to the conversation. But they were all drinking beer, and she wasn’t, so they weren’t even on the same clock. “I think we ought to see the gun in Act One,” she interrupted. “Like Chekhov says. If we’re going to hear a gun in Act Two we’ve got to see it in Act One.”
“Actually, he says that if we see it in Act One, it’s gotta go off by Act Two. But, same difference. That’s a cool point, Karen.”
“I can imagine Doc, like, digging around for something under the bar at some point and just slapping the gun on the bar to get it out of the way,” one of the actors remarked.
“All bar owners keep a handgun,” said another.
“Is that true?” Martin said. “So bloody American. It’s not true in England.”
“Welcome to Bloody America.”
“Maybe he takes it out when the Girl first appears, sorta slaps it on the bar like, Scram, or else?”
“I like that,” said David. “We’ll need a prop gun, but we needed one anyway. Recorded gun noises are lame.”
“I’ll take care of it,” said Karen.
The four young actors planned to linger to see a band that was coming on later so David and Martin and Karen walked out as a trio onto the ruined street of cracked concrete slabs sprouting weeds and other former warehouses that hadn’t yet turned into bar/performance spaces. A few blocks away were railroad tracks on the literal wrong side of which the whole area sat; on the right side, a few miles away across total wasteland, you could see the tidy shape of downtown sticking up, where the traffic lights worked. David might have parked anywhere, there was nothing but parking, but he’d parked directly behind Karen on the desolate street so that, going back to their cars, they were walking together. David’s sports car, with the phone, was long gone. The driver’s-side window of his current vehicle was a black plastic trash bag. Karen’s much envied convertible was also long gone. She drove a practical unblemished car that David recognized only because he’d seen it so often. The shattered sidewalk and desolate street stretched away to an unseen horizon. Black infinity stretched overhead. Out here, on the literal wrong side of the tracks, there wasn’t enough light pollution to lower the salmon-orange haze that was their city’s night sky over them like a comforting blanket. David parking behind Karen was a companionable gesture, in the way of herd animals sidling up to each other at dusk, to less feel the darkness and cold. It made Karen wonder, as they unlocked their cars, whether he was less confident of his judgment than he’d pretended. “Even if he was fooling around with his students,” David had said just a few nights ago, “it’s not a fucking crime. Our standards have gotten so overreaching. We can’t drive without wearing a seat belt and can’t fuck unless the government says it’s okay? We know they all consented.”
“How do we know?” Karen asked in her I’m-not-arguing-just-curious tone.
“He says they did—and sue me, but so far no one’s shown me one good reason not to believe him. Now they say that they didn’t consent, years or a whole decade later. Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t prove that they’re lying.”
“Well what about you? Whatever your thing was with him, you weren’t some helpless victim. You gave him the keys to your car. He moved into your house.”
“All true,” Karen said.
“You weren’t some helpless victim,” David persisted. There was a strange fervor in his voice when they talked about Martin. “You could have walked away—you could have kicked him out! Mr. Kingsley kicked him out—and you took him in. If anyone was helpless, it was Martin.”
“I’m not arguing with you,” said Karen. No, she was not some helpless victim. It wasn’t David’s business to decide this, but it happened to be true. Still, that evening he had wanted to prove something, and this evening, as they unlocked their cars, Martin standing there dragging on his cigarette for dear life and pretending to admire the hideous view, Karen sensed David feeling unsure that he’d succeeded in proving it. And when David was feeling unsure, he wouldn’t rest until extracting reassurance.
“Coming to The Bar?” David said with poorly hidden insistence.
“The cost of soda’s too high. Heading home,” Karen said.
“Do come, Karen, we haven’t had a proper chat,” Martin said with poorly faked insistence, so obviously wanting her to leave that she almost stayed just to spite him. But no.
MY FATHER WAS a carpenter. “Like Jesus,” to quote him. Also like Jesus, my father had a lot of other skills. Electricity, plumbing. Anything you need to know to build a house, my father knew how to do. After he split from my mother he’d still come back to our house on the weekends, to do big things and small, reshingle the roof, clear the gutters, rewire the ceiling fan, unclog the toilet. Even that, my mother couldn’t do herself. Once my mother had Ron, the first in a series of boyfriends, my father stopped coming, not that Ron knew how to fix anything. But my mother didn’t want Ron to feel shown up by my father’s grim competence. The things that got fixed were the things that I’d learned how to fix, by watching, but I couldn’t keep up with the house’s deterioration. By the time I was in high school, the house was returning to a state of nature. The grass was waist deep in the yard and there were oak trees taking root in the gutters. At the same time as our yard was taking over our house, my father’s house was taking over his yard. He’d added a deck and a kitchen extension, turned his two-car garage into a television room, and built a giant carport to shade his driveway. On our weekends, I’d drive my beater over there and work on it with him. There was nothing he didn’t know how to do: engine work, body work, he’d even salvaged leather seats for the interior. We didn’t talk much, share feelings or thoughts. My father and I—this is the story I tell myself; who knows how his story would go—are too much alike to be close. We’re both extremely competent, we both like to be left alone, we both had a weak spot for my mother and hate ourselves for it. Again, it’s possible that if you asked my father about him and me he’d say something completely different, though it’s more possible he’d say nothing.
When I was little my father supported us by doing carpentry and handy work, but at some point early on he started building sets and doing lighting for the opera, and got himself into the stagehands’ union. That’s what kept Kevin and me fed and clothed, my father’s union job and his decency toward us even though my mother, then as now, barely worked and spent her alimony on her boyfriends. My father worked rock concerts and film shoots, pretty much anything that used lighting, but his most steady paycheck remained the opera, the downtown theatre, and summer stage in the park—all the middle-of-the-road, status quo stages that David despised. David, who’d grown up with more money than anyone else in our school, burned with contempt for those places, which he would say offered cultural diversion for the self-regarding rich. On the other hand my father, who grew up poor and never went to college, would have scorned David’s rabble-rousing plays if he could have been bothered to know about them, which he couldn’t. When I told my father, who knows every union prop master in town, that I needed a gun that shot blanks for a show of David’s, my father made the huffing sound that lets you know he’s laughing. “What’s the show, The Marxist Revolution? Every time I see that kid interviewed in the Arts section he’s insulting rich people, but I notice he’s fine about taking their money. He’s got his angels like everyone else.” Although my father is Christian, by “angel” he didn’t mean a messenger of God. He meant a rich person who donated money to keep David’s theatre going.
“Yeah, it’s a conundrum. Anyway, I was thinking that Richie could help me.” Richie was a prop master friend of my father’s.
“A prop gun or a blank gun?”
“A blank gun. It gets fired.”
“So use the prop gun and a good sound effect.”
“Dad, I’m not the director.”
“I wouldn’t trust this person with a blank gun. Who’s his prop master? How do you know that they know what they’re doing?”
“I’m his prop master. And I know what I’m doing.”
“Just because there’s no bullet, it’s still dangerous. There’s still the cartridge and gun powder. No screwing around. That’s how Bruce Lee’s kid died.”
“That gun had a squib load in it.”
“Because the prop crew were morons. You’ve got to know what you’re doing.”
“I do, Dad.”
“Sure you do. It’s the morons I’m worried about.”
“Well, I won’t let them touch it,” I said.
I decided to take both a prop and a blank gun from Richie—for safety, we agreed. I even got two different models, so you couldn’t mistake them. The prop gun was a Colt replica with a wooden hand grip. Like any prop gun, it was a real-looking toy that did nothing. The blank-firing gun was an all-black Beretta. I didn’t even bring it to the warehouse until the full dress. It was the prop gun we used in rehearsal, the prop gun I held when, offstage, Martin and I acted out what the audience would hear but not see. Martin sat in a chair and I stood beside him, the prop gun in my hand, pointed down and angled away. I’d suggested blocking our movements backstage for safety and it was just the kind of detail David loved and believed in for the authenticity it would somehow convey. Doc sinking into his chair, the Girl taking position beside him, stepping her feet apart, bracing herself.
From that vantage, standing beside seated Martin, her gaze always fell on the same thing, Martin’s skull where it sprouted his ear. The connection between skull and ear seemed a little too loose. She’d lost the original Martin, who’d previously been preserved by her total recall down to the yellowish grooves of his nails. The night of the read-through, when he’d come slouching in next to David, for an instant the two Martins shimmered on top of each other, more alike than different but still marking the time from the past until now. It was the slightness of the difference between Martin Now and Past Martin that made it so strange. It was the thorough difference of Karen Now from Past Karen, the shocking difference of David Now from Past David, and the only slight difference, a connoisseur’s difference, between the two Martins, that made it so strange. Strange enough to make you think that you hadn’t known Martin at all in the past. The original Martin, already so hard to attest to, was absorbed by the Martin of Now, and even Karen with her total recall couldn’t get him back out.
And everything, and everyone, cooperated to help Martin supersede Martin. Everyone smiled and agreed, without being so crass as to put it in words, that the scandal reported in the Bourne Courier-Telegraph must not have occurred. Mr. Kingsley, who’d once thrown Martin out of his house, came to rehearsal all smiles and pumped Martin’s hand. Martin was normal, delightful, as most people are if you give them a chance, and it felt good, I’ll fully admit, to take part in his normalization, to drift with prevailing currents, to not be the sore loser or lone crazy history buff. It felt good and I let it feel good. I enjoyed rehearsal—I enjoyed the permission it gave me to not think about Martin. Running lines with Martin, being “seized” by Martin “in a violent embrace,” joining Martin and the others at The Bar afterward, I finally stopped thinking about Martin for the first time in years. He finally got out of my head and went to sit across the room with his ferrety smirk and his yellow fingertips and his knobbly knees and his shaggy hair, and although I saw him sitting there, his reality didn’t disturb me.
WHEN SARAH’S BOOK had first been published, the previous year, David got manic-crusader about it, as if he’d written it himself or perhaps more accurately as if he’d had a child, who had turned out to be incredibly precocious and possessed of all the qualities of David’s own that David loved and none of the ones that he hated, and this child, this sort of genius-distillation of David, had written the book. David’s first campaign was to get CAPA to feature the book on their marquee, where the mainstage productions were usually announced; in the big glass display case just inside the front doors; and on the brand-new still-under-construction website. You’d think this was a fool’s errand, given Sarah’s depiction of CAPA, which some would have called negative and yet others a whitewash, a difference we will not pursue, but as it turned out the administration at CAPA was apparently too dazzled by its association with a Published Author to even read the author’s book and make up their own minds and so David succeeded. Next David went on a campaign to get the Trib and the Examiner to not just review Sarah’s book but do big splashy front-of-the-section feature articles about it. David might have been a guy who drove a car with a black plastic trash bag for its driver’s-side window but he was also a shrewd self-promoter who’d developed, over the years, very useful relationships with the arts editors at both papers and in this campaign he also succeeded. You might have thought Sarah had hired David to do freelance publicity but in fact David and Sarah had not seen each other since high school, any more than Sarah and Karen had seen each other since high school, or Karen and David had seen each other since high school, until Karen moved back to their hometown and found David there. It was from David that Karen first learned about Sarah’s book. He’d yanked it out of his backpack and thrust it at her with that smirk on his face—lips tightly compressed, face twisted in an unsuccessful effort to conceal wicked glee—he always wore when vindicated. About what did Sarah’s book vindicate David? Her writing “talent,” which perhaps he thought he’d discovered, or encouraged? His importance to her, as measured by the number of pages devoted to his fictional self, and the far fewer number of pages devoted to fictional others whose real analogues might have been thought to rate more coverage? Karen assumed that it must be the latter, but later to her great surprise David told her, one night after rehearsal, that he’d never even read Sarah’s book. This was a full year after the book had been published, and just a few days before Karen surprised Sarah on Sarah’s paperback tour. David seemed surprised that Karen was surprised. “I’m not a reader,” he reminded her, as if she should know better. “I read plays and I read the newspaper.”
“But you were so proud and excited about it. You, like, harassed people to give it publicity.”
“Of course I did. It’s Sarah’s book. I’ll do the same for you, whenever you fulfill whatever your huge ambition is.”
“I have no huge ambition.”
“Bullshit. I got you out to auditions!” As usual David steered the conversation back to his accomplishments, his self-satisfaction coexisting with his insecurity and self-hatred. It had to be the insecurity and self-hatred, Karen felt at first, that accounted for his not reading the book. Only the dread of a humiliating discovery could be powerful enough to counteract the burning narcissistic curiosity David must feel knowing Sarah had written about their CAPA years and so presumably about him. Yet it turned out he did not even know that the humiliating disclosure he might have feared, had he had any real self-awareness, had been spared him by Sarah for reasons which Karen will not try to guess. Even had the disclosure been there, Karen still could more easily see David devouring his portrayal than just taking a pass.
“Don’t you want to know how you come off in it? Don’t you want to see how she depicts you?” Karen asked.
“It’s not me. It’s fiction.”
“My turn to call bullshit. That whole thing about fiction not being the truth is a lie.”
“So I’m guessing you read it.”
It made no difference to this conversation that Karen had read only half. The point was that disciplined Karen had failed to resist, while impulsive David had succeeded. “Of course I did,” she snapped. “I’m still shocked that you didn’t.”
“And how did you come off in it? How are you depicted?”
You’ll be surprised that she had no immediate answer. She herself was surprised. All those years of work naming her feelings, climbing down the dictionary definition’s ladder into the dark dusty tomb of a word’s origin, yet she couldn’t lay hold of one word to give David. “Incompletely,” she said after so long a pause David must have forgotten the question. He laughed with too much amusement, as if she’d been witty.
That night in the Mexican restaurant-caravansary Karen told Sarah about David’s manic campaigns on behalf of her book, which she hadn’t intended to do. As already stated Karen hadn’t known, arriving that night at Skylight Books, what exactly she would do, apart from stimulate herself with the reunion and respond accordingly. Still, much as she hadn’t known what she would do, there were things she’d felt sure she would not do. She certainly wouldn’t stoke Sarah’s belief in the superior dramatic arc of her life by describing David’s manic devotion to publicizing her book. Yet no sooner had they agreed that Sarah would be Karen’s dresser than Karen said, “I think it’ll mean a lot to David that you’re involved in one of his shows. He was so excited when your book came out, he acted like it was his child. He got it put on the CAPA marquee.”
“He did?” Sarah said, looking queasy. Another item on her list of crazy things that had happened to her on her book tour: unwanted proof that this place that she’d written about actually existed.
“‘READ the critically acclaimed novel by a CAPA alum, available at bookstores everywhere!’ Yeah, he went all out. He didn’t tell you? I would have thought he’d have written to you.”
“I had no idea. No, I never heard from him. I was hoping I would.” This did not sound convincing.
“You could have written to him.”
Sarah grimaced like a child. She was certainly drunk, her anxiety and illogical pleasure burning brightly in her cheeks. She dreaded to hear about David but longed to hear more about David’s devotion. “Scared,” she said, in a little-girl voice, of the prospect of writing to David.
Karen gave her a don’t-be-silly look. “Why?”
“That maybe the book pissed him off.”
What could have? The book’s revisions and excisions seemed designed to spare David’s feelings. But Karen didn’t say this, let alone reveal that David had not even read it. “Are you kidding? He’s so proud to be a fictional character.”
“So he liked it?”
“He loved it. If there was anything he didn’t like about it, it’s that you didn’t write about him even more.”
Sarah’s laughter trailed off; there was no more evading the subject. “And what about you?”
“Me?”
“I worried that it might have felt weird to you, reading that book. Too familiar.”
“You worried about that?” said Karen, in tones of amazement. “Did you really?”
“I did. I mean, I do. I mean, I’m worried right now.” Nervous laughter erupted from Sarah again.
“Well, it didn’t feel at all familiar. I mean, you changed a lot. Wouldn’t you say? If you were worried that I’d recognize myself in your book, I didn’t.” Did Karen here lie, by omitting some facts? She merely spoke literally. I’ve said I recognized myself in Sarah’s story easily: recognized as in “identified” myself. I didn’t recognize to “acknowledge validity of.” I didn’t recognize to “accept.”
Sarah failed to recognize the kind of recognition I meant, as I knew that she would. Sarah’s face bloomed with relief. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am,” she said.
MEANWHILE, AMONG the girls, surprisingly it had not been Joelle’s house but Karen Wurtzel’s that became the headquarters. Notice how, unique among all the CAPA kids, all the English kids, and even in contrast to Martin and Liam, Karen gets a last name. An ugly one, that sounds like German food. It has the effect in the story of making her seem unfamiliar and distant, not invited to the party. Aside from “Wurtzel,” though, the sentence mostly is true, with some lies of omission, like the bulk of what Sarah has written. Likely it matters to no one but Karen that it was her own mother who turned their house into a crash pad, not just with permissiveness but a hard-fought campaign. She’d started with Karen’s official guest, whose designation, like the others, we won’t bother to change back from Lara, prying her away from Karen with confidences and cigarettes and staying up all night watching TV. Once the other English girls began coming around, the mother we’re fine to call Elli—it captures her well—kept it going by keeping the fridge stocked with wine coolers and cookie dough. Elli doled out advice on love and sex, loaned her makeup, hair accessories, and clothes. Astrological signs were explained. The Tarot was consulted. Soon Karen’s bedroom was hosting a nightly slumber party at which her mother was the guest of honor and Karen the least welcome. Karen went to sleep in Kevin’s room, which earned her the girls’ mockery and contempt. And so Karen took extra shifts at her job after school, set her alarm for extra early in the mornings, was simply gone, disappeared, every time the English girls needed a ride.
Elli tried to smooth it over by driving the girls to school in the morning on her way to her job, but she couldn’t take off work to pick them up when the school day was done. A hodgepodge of people—David, miscellaneous Juniors and Seniors the English girls started going out with, even a creep of a cabdriver Elli strung along who did her countless favors in the hope of getting laid—got the girls from school to wherever they went after school, and from there to Karen’s home at the end of the night. It was a pain in everyone’s collective ass, it pissed everyone off, because Karen with her adequate car could have always driven the girls where they needed to go if she hadn’t been such a sulky hypersensitive bitch.
This was where things stood when Karen, one day toward the end of her shift, came out from the storeroom and saw Martin standing there on the far side of the fluorescent-lit case. She was thoroughly surprised and embarrassed. She had seen plenty of Martin at CAPA but she had never yet spoken to him, marginal as she was, socially unnoticed as she was. She was mortified that Martin should know she spent afternoons here, pumping excrement-resembling fro-yo into stale waffle cones. The previous year, when she’d just turned fifteen, Karen had gone to a “lock-in” at church and made out with a boy who ground his crotch against her bare thigh so hard he abraded her skin, and afterward a girl ridiculed her for having “carpet burn” in the wrong place. That was Karen’s sexual experience to date. Coming out of the storeroom and seeing Martin, Karen assumed he was there by coincidence. She assumed he must like frozen yogurt. When he said he was there to see her, she might have literally let her mouth hang open from shock. But then, all was made clear. “The girls put me up to speaking to you, about how you won’t give them rides,” he said. Karen hadn’t even finished flushing with confused pleasure that he was there to see her when all her blood had to change gears and instead flush with angry humiliation.
But then he yanked the lever in the other direction. “I told them to sod off. You’re not their bloody chauffeur. I told them, ‘If you can’t even stay in the houses where you were assigned, you can’t throw a fit about not getting rides.’”
“You said that?” exclaimed Karen.
“I very nearly didn’t bring them on this trip. Should’ve known they’d be terrible guests. So this is your country’s best yogurt, is it? Should I try some?”
Just like that he brushed off the girls and put himself on her side. Karen served him a cone of the fro-yo, which she had subsisted on her first weeks on the job and which now made her gag even when she just smelled it. She waved him off when he tried to pay for it. By now her co-worker had come from the back, tying his apron in place. Her shift was over. “How did you get here?” she asked when they walked out together. He’d already finished the cone. The crumbly little strip mall parking lot was empty apart from her own and her co-worker’s cars.
“I walked.” Martin shrugged.
“You walked? Nobody walks.”
“I did. It took a long time, too. I hope I don’t have to walk back.”
“So now I’m your chauffeur.”
Martin grinned, roguish. “Gives me a clever idea. I’ll tell the girls you can’t drive them because you’ve got to drive me. That way they can’t be angry at you.”
“I don’t care if they’re angry at me,” Karen lied.
“But I care.”
Skip ahead. Imagine Karen made witty, by the attention of this witty man who assumes that she somehow is witty, like him. And she is! Or at least, with him, believes herself to be. Imagine the driving around. Day after day there are hours and hours of driving around. Avoiding the vengeful girls, her outmaneuvered mother, is a game they automatically win, just by forming a team. Karen shows Martin all the places in her town she thinks are special. Martin does not make her feel naïve at her failure to notice that every one of these places is located in a corporate park. It’s that kind of town, possessed of only artificial beauty, manmade “ponds” spanned by poured-concrete bridges underneath which the water glows a blinding ghastly green from spotlights magically submerged but somehow not electrocuting the resident ducks. Topiaries cut into the shapes of the letters which spell out the name of the multinational conglomerate whose headquarters are surrounded by these hedges and ponds cast impenetrable shadows on the closely clipped, comfortable grass. Overhead, at the top of the corporate tower, a beacon swings in circles, all night long, as if there were a coast somewhere within a thousand miles, and ships to warn. Beneath Martin’s body, Karen’s body comes alive the way it never has before, not at the “lock-in” when the boy scraped the skin off her thigh with his denim-clad hard-on, not under the covers while reading the dirty parts in The Thorn Birds and poking herself. Possibly it would have made no difference if it had been Martin or if it had been her yogurt-place co-worker whose name history fails to preserve. Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached. Martin, retrospection shows us, was scrawny, smelled and tasted like an ashtray, and had yellow nails, yellow teeth, and yellowish whites-of-the-eyes. Inside his underpants, where Karen’s hand was urged, a single clammy mushroom thrived. Even in the nearly total darkness of the topiary shadows, Martin’s penis seemed unwholesomely pale and wet. But this was love, a crazy clamor to receive recognition. Did it matter that the person who unleashed Karen’s floodgates was much older—even older than she knew? Did it matter that he was a liar? Did it matter that he had practice, and she had none? Did it matter that after he opened Karen’s floodgates Karen’s “lake, river, reservoir, etc.” never refilled, to stick with the floodgates metaphor? Karen has thought about this, believe her. She knows she’s not a special kind of victim, for having gotten shown the ropes by a much older man who, it turned out, did not care about her. She knows this is perfectly common; just look at all the stories/plays/movies about it. She wanted him. In her ignorance and inexperience she thought he was handsome, worldly, earnest, and reliable, and now, with her knowledge and experience, she can see that he was ugly, provincial, duplicitous, and untrustworthy; even cruel. The fact remains that she wanted him. Her wanting him means that she chose. She doesn’t have a case here, she’s fully aware; this would be why she’s kept her mouth shut and kept her problem to herself. Martin’s “witch hunt” is made up of women who insist they have a case, but what’s different about them, exactly? Karen’s attitude toward them is violently mixed. She might defend them to David, but in her bowels she scorns them, these young women who made a bad judgment and now want to blame someone else.
In Sarah’s story, Karen and Sarah barely know each other. Sarah winds up in Karen’s car, Karen’s home, and even Karen’s mother’s bed essentially by accident. In the ethics of friendship this means that she owes Karen nothing, because they’re not friends; but in reality, as already revealed, this wasn’t the case. They were friends. Sarah was the best friend Karen ever had, while Karen was, at the time, the only friend Sarah had with a car, not to suggest this was Sarah’s reason for maintaining the friendship. In Sarah’s story Karen resents Sarah’s involvement with Liam, regarding it as an intrusion. There is likely some psychological truth to this. Girls are complicated. They rarely love each other without also hating each other. They often react to differences of situation with envy even if the difference, the thing their girlfriend has that they don’t, is a thing they never wanted in the first place. When Sarah began dating Liam—the way it really happened being so much simpler and more inevitable than the way it unfolds in Sarah’s story, because Sarah and Karen were always together, and Martin and Liam were always together, so that Sarah was almost obligated to get together with Liam once Karen was together with Martin—Karen did suffer a pang. Liam was, at a glance, better looking than Martin. And Sarah always had some intrigue or several, while Karen never had any. But the pang was fleeting. First of all, Liam was not so good-looking as Sarah’s story suggests. It’s true he had nice eyes and interesting bone structure. But his teeth were bad, as all their teeth were bad, and his Adam’s apple stuck out too much. As depicted in fiction he had a very weird vibe. In the matter of Liam’s weird vibe please refer back to Sarah. On this point she’s flawless, unsparing, she practically admits that Liam was a rebound/placeholder because her more prestigious/precocious intrigues had collapsed. So Karen suffered a pang, because she’d enjoyed, briefly, being the one with intrigue, but the pang didn’t just pass, it was wiped out, erased, by the greater pleasure of this best-girlfriends-double-dating situation. Not just willingly but happily did Karen drive herself and Martin, Sarah and Liam, around in her car. Not just willingly but happily did Karen, with Martin, watch Sarah, with Liam, saunter off into the topiary shadows of the corporate park.
As they drive home their last night from the corporate park Karen’s outfit is ruined by grass stains and her vision is blinded by tears. In the morning, without the originally planned school assembly featuring the principal you’ve met as Mrs. Laytner thanking them for “sharing their art across oceans,” the English People will finally leave. Mr. Kingsley will put them into three taxicabs and send them off to the airport without so much as a wave, though he might produce his tight-lipped, white-lipped smile. Parked outside Mr. Kingsley’s house on this departure eve, Martin hugs Karen’s head in his arms and strokes her hair with his nicotine-stained fingertips and says, “Oh, my sweet girl.” This romantic comment remains a landmark of Karen’s sexual life. The next day Karen and Sarah, conscious of their tragedy, skip school. Instead they go to a US passport office downtown. Because they are sixteen years old, “parental awareness” of their passport applications is “required” but incredibly easy to fake, far easier than faking the credentials for buying a beer. What a strange, neither-here-nor-there position for the government to take. Karen’s mother isn’t just aware of Karen’s plans, she’s ecstatic. She almost ruins it for Karen with her excitement. Sarah’s mother is the opposite of ecstatic but we’ve mentioned this already. Sarah pays for her own ticket, Karen’s mother helps Karen with hers, warning her to keep this escapade a secret from her father. Departure is six weeks away, as soon as the school year ends. In that time Sarah receives letters from Liam almost every other day. The letters are enthusiastic and stupid, like the letters of a dog. They sprawl across pages and pages, detailing such events as a car driving into a hedge and the driver having to climb out the back door because the front door was stuck on a branch. When not detailing such incidents the letters natter on about how pretty Sarah is and how much Liam is dying for their reunion. With each new letter Karen can see Sarah’s interest in Liam declining further. Even Karen, who initially scoured the letters for mentions of Martin, can’t bear to skim them anymore. Meanwhile Karen receives very occasional, jocular postcards from Martin that don’t seem to track with her letters to him although it’s clear he’s received them. “Hi there, Karen! Thanks for the tape. Super mix. How’s everybody in the US of A?”
In the days leading up to their flight, Sarah lives with Karen. She says her mother’s kicked her out, although Karen doubts it. Given Sarah’s mother’s disability it’s easier for Karen to believe that Sarah simply walked away. Sarah’s mother calls the house constantly, Elli pulls the phone into her bedroom and closes the door but Karen doesn’t need to hear to know what’s being said. Elli is playing the fellow adult, commiserating with Sarah’s mother about how stubborn girls are, promising Sarah’s mother she’ll bring Sarah around. As soon as Elli hangs up the phone she forgets all about Sarah’s mother until the next time the phone rings. All Elli cares about is helping them pack. She calls in sick to her receptionist job at a realtor’s office to take them shopping for the things they still need. One good scarf: they should both have one really pretty silk scarf to tie their hair back or to tie around their necks. Karen has never in her life worn a pretty silk scarf. And one cute light jacket, because it gets cold there, it’s not like here, remember when the English People brought all the wrong clothes? By one cute light jacket Elli doesn’t mean Karen’s ratty jean jacket, she means something like Sarah’s man’s blazer with the maroon silk lining that shows when you roll up the sleeves. Sarah has a vintage style that Elli adores; for hours Sarah and Elli try on Sarah’s clothes, put together different outfits, weigh the advantages of one item over another, the blazer, the old-man cardigan, the plaid kilt, the funky khakis from the Army Navy store. Just one suitcase, girls: sophisticated travelers travel light. Elli has never been out of the country. It’s possible she’s never traveled on a plane. Karen doesn’t know where Elli’s gotten these rules about silk scarves and traveling light. Karen herself has never been on a plane. Right after her parents first got divorced, Sarah flew to see her father a few times before he disappeared for good. “All by yourself?” Elli cries.
“They just put you with a stewardess. I don’t even remember the flights.”
“Lucky you to be traveling with someone experienced,” Elli tells Karen.
At the airport Sarah shows she’s taken this idea of being the experienced traveler to heart. She’s insufferable, explaining things like how Karen shouldn’t lose her boarding pass and how she has to make sure she has her makeup in her carry-on bag because she won’t be able to get to her luggage before they’ve landed in London. Looking back, Karen’s willing to acknowledge it’s possible Sarah was nervous, just as nervous as Karen. It’s possible Sarah’s nervousness took the form of bossy condescension toward her friend, telling her friend the sorts of things even non–English speakers could have figured out for themselves at the airport, and then, once the plane was airborne, telling her friend things about London which she herself only knew on the basis of postcards. “Carnaby Street is where all the punks hang out. There’s a Hard Rock Café and then there’s Piccadilly Circus which is totally cool. I don’t care about Big Ben—it’s just a clock.” The plan was for Liam and Martin to meet them at Heathrow—“Heathrow” was the name of the airport but you never said “Heathrow Airport” only “Heathrow,” experienced Sarah informed inexperienced Karen—and for all of them to stay at a youth hostel, whatever this was, perhaps not even Sarah was sure, and once they were done seeing London they’d take a train down to Bournemouth, the city where Martin and Liam both actually lived. What would happen after that remained obscure.
Karen, seated next to the window, presses her face to the glass. The glass is icy cold, its touch makes her eyes water. She sees a total blackness of night she’s never even imagined, back home where the night sky is always hazed out. The plane vibrates and roars as it flies, which alarms Karen because it seems like it’s working too hard. She will not seek reassurance from Sarah. She won’t give Sarah the satisfaction. Sarah is smoking, listening to her Walkman, pretending to read. Gazing down on them from the future, on Sarah self-consciously holding her book in one hand, cigarette in the other, like a woman three times her age; on Karen chewing off the corner of her thumb while unaware of the red circular mark on her forehead from where she keeps compulsively pressing her forehead against the cold window, my heart goes out to them. Like a ghostly flight attendant floating in the aisle I gaze down at the two teenage girls, at Sarah who doesn’t love Liam, and at Karen who is not loved by Martin, and I’m filled with melancholy that’s almost compassion. It’s sad the same way. But in the moment, staring into the darkness which she can’t keep her eyes off in spite of how frightening it is, Karen feels only resentment of Sarah. Because in the days leading up to their departure, Karen hasn’t heard from Martin at all, not even a jocular postcard. There’s no way he doesn’t realize she’s coming, she’s sent him the details more than once, and Liam knows she’s coming, and Martin knows whatever Liam knows, and Sarah treats her plans with Liam as also being Karen’s plans with Martin, and aren’t they? Karen believes it, because Sarah does. Sarah believes it, because Karen does. Karen has given Sarah no reason not to believe it, she hasn’t mentioned the silence from Martin. Karen has let Sarah have this mistaken impression, and now she hates and even blames Sarah for it, which of course isn’t fair, but Karen is afraid and embarrassed and also their friendship, at this moment of greatest shared risk, has gone wrong. It’s sick, out of whack. In fact it’s been like this for weeks but Karen wanted to think it was Elli who made things feel wrong but now Elli is gone and the wrongness remains. An hour into the flight Karen clambers over Sarah without explanation, crashes into the phone booth–size bathroom and vomits all over the ashtray-size sink. Karen stares at her greenish-gray face in the mirror. It takes her all the paper towels in the holder to clean up the vomit. She stuffs the vomit-covered towels in the toilet, presses the handle, then jumps back with fright as a sucking roar tells her she’s opened a hole in the airplane and her vomit has fallen into the sea. Retrospection streamlines the nine-hour trip and also inflates all the portents of doom. Did sixteen-year-old Karen really know, on the flight, what would happen? Did she and Sarah really sit side by side in cold silence, aware that their friendship had come to an end? Probably not. There were ideas that gave rise to feelings, and feelings that gave rise to ideas, but there was also lots of giggling, smoking, scribbling in journals, and sharing of the Walkman. We almost never know what we know until after we know it. The night rushed past the little round window and when the line of fire showed in the east Sarah pressed close to Karen, her coarsely permed hair tickling Karen’s cheek, and they watched the sun rise until the light was so bright they could no longer look. The last hour of the flight was spent solemnly doing their makeup.
At “Heathrow,” once they’d stood in all the lines and had their passports stamped—that’s a thrill nothing has ever undone, Karen can feel it again to this day, the knowing she’d just made her life forever larger than her mother’s; if she could just avoid falling behind, if she could just keep on moving, she’d always be that much ahead—an alarming crowd shouted and waved signs from behind a long railing. And there was Liam, the telegenic handsomeness he sometimes had under stage lights, or in photos, totally erased by his fish-belly paleness, his pimples, his flailing limbs like a spider’s, and his over-pointy Adam’s apple like a hard-on in his throat. And he was looking left to right frantically and waving a square of cardboard that said SARAH and when he caught sight of the person who went with that name his body froze and his mouth fell open with amazement as if he’d never believed she would come. He looked like a little child who’d just been offered candy. His joy was that unembarrassed and pure. And although the technology for reading minds has not yet been discovered, to quote a witty therapist Karen once knew, Karen was willing to bet, at that moment, that Sarah’s thoughts were so preoccupied with what an unhandsome dork Liam was despite his eyes and bone structure, and with how far he fell short of the romantic ideal she’d tried to believe that he was, and with how little she wanted to let his tongue into her mouth, that she couldn’t even see that pure joy on his face which she’d caused. Which is too bad, because a lot of us never get looked at that way.
In the first confusing moments, going out through the gate in the railing and struggling to get to Liam through the crowd, it wasn’t obvious that Martin wasn’t there. It still seemed possible that he was parking the car, or getting a coffee, or returning from a trip to the men’s room. Liam grabbed Sarah around the waist while jumping up and down so that they banged clumsily into each other, and then Liam got his tongue in Sarah’s mouth until Sarah pushed him off to arm’s length. “Wait, wait! Let me look at you!” she said, as if she wanted to gaze in his face and not get his tongue out of her mouth. That was when Liam caught sight of Karen, it seemed for the first time.
“Oh wow, Karen! You came!” Liam said. “I thought Martin wrote you, about his big part? He got a summer stock part—”
“You mean he’s not here?” Sarah said. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“He told me,” Karen said before planning to say it. “I mean, he said he was up for a part. Probably his letter saying he got the part is still on its way to my house.” Karen felt Liam looking at her in confusion. Clearly Martin had gotten the part, if there really was a part, a while ago. But Liam was too stupid to know she was lying. He was even more stupid than Karen.
“It’s so cool you came anyway!” Liam said earnestly. “We’ll all have a great time—”
“But where’s Martin,” Sarah demanded. “Can’t Karen go where he is?”
“He’s touring, Sarah. I can’t just go along on his tour!”
“He really told you he might be on tour? How come you never told me? You came all the way here and he’s not even here?”
“I’m sure my mum won’t mind if Karen stays too,” Liam tried interrupting.
“Your mum?” Sarah said.
It was interesting, actually, how everyone’s primary feeling-state at that moment was disguised as a different emotion. Sarah’s repulsion at being reunited with Liam took the form of outrage at Martin. Liam’s passion for Sarah took the form of concern for Karen. And Karen’s unbearable humiliation, which she had always expected and never expected, took the form of emotionlessness and not caring. “I still want to see England,” she said to Sarah angrily. “Stop making such a big deal about it. I have to go to the bathroom.”
In the bathroom Karen threw up again, but since she’d felt too sick to eat on the plane, all she threw up was smelly clear slime. She hadn’t made it into a stall and she could feel the eyes and hear the feet of Heathrow travelers as they steered clear of her while she heaved and gagged over the sink and splashed cold water on her face. Did Martin somehow know? She’s always wondered. Despite his obvious defects of character he’s persisted in her psyche as a weird joker-god, malicious and omniscient. Karen finally left the bathroom. Her eyes felt scrubbed with salt. An endless punch was landing in her gut.
Karen, Sarah, and Liam went to the youth hostel where in a room like a prison cell Karen lay in a bottom bunk facing the wall with her suitcase on her feet so she could feel if someone tried to steal it and slept a feverlike sleep while Sarah and Liam did whatever they did, had whatever adventure they had, made whatever postcard pictures in Sarah’s mind part of her life. Later Sarah would be someone who referred to Trafalgar Square and U2 in Cardiff and bangers and mash. Later Sarah would go home with Liam to Bournemouth and meet his mum who watched the BBC and spread Marmite on toast and waited hand and foot on Liam as if he were a king and on Sarah as if she were his new wife the Queen and who seemed to have no idea that Sarah was still in high school, and later Sarah would learn that Liam had been “on the dole” for his entire adult life and was perfectly happy about it, and later Sarah would break up with Liam and go back to London alone and live in the hostel again and somehow get a job at a nightclub as a cocktail waitress, and later Sarah would meet a guy at the nightclub who took her with him on a train to see U2 in Cardiff and whom she lost in a stampede for floor seating in the arena, and later Sarah would stop sending Karen these updates, each one so flashily stamped with different-color silhouettes of the Queen, because Karen never wrote back. Karen never even read the letters until many years later and still isn’t sure why she read them at all. In London Karen lay in the bunk in the prison-cell room in the hostel, and knelt behind the door down the hall labeled “Water Closet” gagging over the toilet, and sat in the grimy vinyl chair in the hostel office while a robotic guy from Germany figured out how to place an international collect call for her. Bunk bed, toilet, telephone. That was London.
Karen and Elli had succeeded in keeping the escapade a secret from her father yet when he answered the phone he wasn’t as surprised or confused as you might think to learn his daughter was in London and that she was sick, broke, and alone. The sound of his voice, unemotional but not exactly cold, drawling a little in a way she’d somehow never noticed before, coming out of the phone into her ear as she sat in the chair in the hostel in London, marks the beginning of Karen’s true adult life, if these things can be marked. Karen hopes they can. She finds that sort of historical clarity helpful. At the time Karen couldn’t have explained her decision to call her father and not her mother but it was part of that beginning of true adult life, paradoxically since it was a decision to make no more decisions, to seek out superior judgment, to acknowledge there was such a thing. Karen’s true adult life began when she recognized she was a child, and remembered that, unlike her mother, her father viewed her as a child as well. Calling her father meant doing things his way, but at least he had a way. At least he had a way, and the will to stick to it. Karen put herself into his hands. All the way back to America, Karen remembered nothing, she kept nothing in mind and called nothing to mind. Now she was an expert traveler: she did it all with a mind that was totally empty. Her father was waiting in the airport for her with his belly buttoned into his work shirt and his big hairy hands gripping each other in front of his crotch. Elli sometimes called Karen’s father “a fucking hick” with great scorn but Karen’s father had command of the resources. That first night he said nothing to her, just let her sleep in the small, sad room that was always reserved for her and Kevin’s rare visits and that wasn’t decorated with anything but their school portraits, every single year but one (Kevin first grade/Karen third grade—Elli had forgotten to order the packets), framed and lined up on the wall. Paneling on the walls and shag on the floor Karen’s father had nailed up and tacked down himself. Military-style bedsheets Karen almost couldn’t wedge herself into, they were tucked on the mattress so tight. Then their strong detergent smell gave her a headache and kept her awake. This kind of thing had never bothered her before. The next day, the trip to the doctor. Back home again Karen’s father tanned her bare butt with his belt the way he’d done when she and Kevin were very little, before the divorce. All of this had been expected and hoped for. Karen’s father let her get back in bed afterward, brought a folding chair in and sat on it, watching his knuckles until Karen stopped crying. Eventually he said, “Who’s the guy.”
“Just some guy who was visiting from England.”
“Does he know?”
“No.”
“And you couldn’t find him when you went over there?”
“No.”
“Any other ideas where to look?”
“No.”
All this was just a formality. Karen’s father didn’t want to deal with the guy any more than Karen did. “The place is an hour drive from here. They have classes to keep you at grade level. And church, obviously. It’s a God-centered organization. They’ll handle everything. And the adoption.”
“Okay,” Karen said.
“It isn’t fancy but it’s safe and it’s clean. You don’t need a hotel.”
“I know,” Karen said.
“It’s not cheap but it shouldn’t be cheap. For the sake of the babies. It’s not a vacation.”
“I understand. I’m sorry,” Karen said, which she was.
In a strange way it was the perfect place to say goodbye to God. At some point, without noticing, Karen had stopped believing in God. So there was something sweet and sentimental for her about living someplace where no one could shut up about him. “Thank you so much, Karen, for the unconditional love you’ve shown in seeking God’s will for the future of your child” was the kind of thing everyone from the math tutor to the caseworker to the janitor said every chance they got. And though she understood this was people euphemistically kissing her ass for not getting an abortion, it was still pleasant to be thanked and praised all the time, as if you were really “God’s gift,” another popular phrase. As her father said it wasn’t “fancy” but in fact it was a lot more like a hotel than anywhere else that Karen ever lived. There were vases of real flowers, and soothing Jesus music, and more vegetables and fruits than Karen had known existed. She had her first kiwi fruit here, for example. Years later—in fact, recently—Karen came to understand that she’d been pampered so much at the home because the home was a farm for growing White Christian Babies Without Health Defects of the type that’s so rare and in such high demand on the adoption market now. Even if she’d realized this then, she wouldn’t have enjoyed the time less.
Exactly a month after Christmas, as everybody from the OB to her caseworker noted, as if Karen had been extra clever this way, Karen had her baby. The baby was female. The feeling-state of labor can’t be kept in mind or called back to mind, although the final slippery escape, like a fish coming out, does turn out to be memorable. When her baby was clean, warm, and dry and all wrapped in a blanket Karen held it and smelled it and thought to herself, I will never remember this smell, and she was right, she has never remembered it. It’s always just out of reach, like a dream. Later on there was a prayerful ceremony in which Karen was praised some more, for her selfless Christianity in having chosen life. Then her baby was taken away to be united with her Forever Family, whoever they were.
Two weeks later Karen transferred back to CAPA. She drove her old car to school, arriving early so she could park in the front lot, where there weren’t many spaces. She wanted to avoid everyone that she knew and they parked in the back. It was cold and damp and the dampness made a sort of light haze that in her memory softened the light so that she felt hidden and somehow alone, as if she was actually going to succeed, and get through her first day back at school without having to see anyone. But it was a small school with all the same people every year and there was no way she’d even get through an hour without seeing them all. But even a few minutes without seeing them would have made a difference. There were teachers’ cars in the front lot but it wasn’t half full. Karen’s plan was to sit in the smokers’ courtyard, which opened off the cafeteria through a set of glass doors, so it wasn’t a good place to hide but at least you could see people coming. She knew there was nowhere to hide and the best she could do was to see people coming, but then she pulled open the heavy front door of the school and there was Sarah. Karen and Sarah looked at each other for just long enough. Neither stopped walking, Karen in, and Sarah out, the same door.
THE WAY MARTIN had written his play, the Girl doesn’t have a quick-change. If you’ll remember, in the penultimate scene the Girl and Doc go offstage, into the back room which we’ve previously seen through the propped-open door, and know to be Doc’s squalid home. Doc and the Girl close the door behind them, there’s a pause, the shot rings out, the lights go out; then the lights come up again on all Doc’s regulars sitting in the bar memorializing him, and only after they’ve said a few lines does the Girl appear, in her funeral clothes. It’s a quick-change for the set: in the blackout the actors playing the regulars get to their marks, the stagehands put the portrait of Doc and some wilted flowers and black bunting on the bar, etc. The Girl has more than enough time, between going through the backroom door with Doc, and reappearing, to do her own costume change. So Karen’s invitation to Sarah to be her dresser, in addition to being an inspiration of the moment, was also an idiotic gaffe. Karen did not need a dresser and Sarah would not need help realizing this. But in the weeks after Karen saw Sarah at Skylight Books, and before Sarah arrived to take up the sentimental task/have the funny old-times’-sake experience which Karen had offered despite it not existing to give, the staging of the play went through a series of evolutions that would almost make you think Karen had supernatural powers. First, David’s set designer created a window in the bar’s backroom door with a roller blind pulled over it, so that when Doc and the Girl went in the back room and closed the door, a spotlight threw their shadows on the blind, and the shooting could be seen in silhouette. Second, David decided that when the lights came back up he wanted the Girl already onstage, dimly visible to the audience if not to the regulars, so that when she stepped forward into the light, the regulars would realize she’d overheard them. This meant Karen couldn’t start her costume change until the lights went out, and had to complete it before they came up again. It would be a quick-change. “You’ll need someone to dress you,” said David. Karen waited for the nightly post-rehearsal at The Bar to tell David that Sarah would do it. “Sarah’s coming?” cried David.
“I saw her last month in LA. We thought it would be fun if she helped with the show,” Karen lied, clumsily. David was sitting up slightly too straight, staring down the length of his nose and holding his cigarette out to one side. When David was affronted, you were reminded of how dangerously handsome he’d been at the age of eighteen. His eyes flashed out as if to remind you that you shouldn’t have forgotten about it.
“Sarah’s never seen a single show I’ve done.”
“That’s why. She felt like she had to see this one and even help in some way,” Karen continued to deceitfully improvise, really disliking this situation of her own creation in which she had to prop up a pretense of Sarah, to mollify David. Once again Karen was reminded of the suffocating self-regard of Sarah and David, who never failed to see themselves as performing some extraordinary drama even when they’d been completely out of touch for almost thirteen years.
“Why this one? Because you’re in it?”
“No, just because she realized it was about time she saw one of your shows. It’s just an extra point of interest that I’m in it.”
“When did you get back in touch with her? The way I remember, toward the end of high school you weren’t even speaking.”
“We were in high school,” Karen said dismissively.
Maybe it was unfair of Karen to see Sarah and David as twin narcissists, each fixated on the other’s ancient image and seeing in that hapless teenage lover some lost part of themselves that they still wanted back. Maybe it was unkind of Karen to see Sarah and David this way because the feeling-state attendant was one of impatience, resentment, and scorn. Karen had no room for other people’s unresolved emotions because she had no room for her own lack of generousness. Karen suffers, herself, because she wants to be empathic and she can’t. The best she can do is maintain healthy separation, and oftentimes she can’t even do that. Karen’s failures in the empathy department are so acute she finds that she can’t look at David and Sarah, when David, getting out of his piece-of-shit car, and Sarah, getting out of Karen’s car, confront each other on the broken stretch of sidewalk outside the bar/performance space where the first dress rehearsal will finally happen tonight. Picking Sarah up from the airport, Karen had let Sarah do all the work—grin strenuously with excitement, unhesitatingly hug, chatter and marvel nonstop—while in the privacy of nonparticipation Karen coldly dissected every pop and pulse of Sarah’s tireless efforts. But as Sarah faced David across the expanse of smashed pavement, Karen found herself looking away. What passed between them in an instant smote Karen. She felt ashamed, witnessing it.
Then the instant passed and David, his old lope still visible beneath his new weight, crossed the space between them and grabbed Sarah into his arms in an overly hearty, hail-fellow-well-met way and Sarah gave a strangulated laugh, exaggerating the strangulation for humor, and said, “Careful! Don’t squeeze too hard. I’m pregnant,” and David stepped away as if he’d been burned.
“I found out right after I saw you in LA,” Sarah said to Karen. “My hangover the next day was—well, it lasted a lot longer than usual.”
“I guess that answers the question of what I can get you,” said David. “I mean, there’s a bar in the space.”
“Oh! Water or juice would be great.”
“Great! Okay,” David said, and turning on his heel he strode across the street and into the building as if Sarah had ordered the drink to be brought to her there on the sidewalk.
“Congratulations,” Karen said as they walked in.
“I’m only eight weeks. I didn’t mean to say anything but I just sort of blurted it out. I was afraid I might blurt something worse.”
“I’m sure David would have forgiven you. He’s been thrown up on a lot in his life,” Karen said.
Inside David was nowhere to be seen. Karen left radiant Sarah to be fawned on by Martin and made her way through the maze of black curtains, across big dark hidden reaches of the warehouse, and out the back door onto the old loading dock. David was there, sitting on the dock with his back to the wall, smoking and staring at the toes of his boots.
“Are you okay?” Karen said.
“I’m not,” David said. “In fact I’m not okay.”
Karen sat down on the dock next to David, which she hadn’t intended to do. She’d intended to go inside and leave David alone. Telling herself to not think about it too much she put her arms around David and at her touch he slumped heavily and then jerked back to life with a terrible sound like an animal caught in a trap. His whole body heaving and jerking made him hard to hang on to. Karen guiltily wanted to stop, but only had to admonish herself a few times before he shrugged her off of his own accord, without anger, to get at his cigarette pack in his pocket. Before lighting up he scrubbed the loose-stretched hem of his ancient T-shirt roughly over his face.
“We’d better do this fucking rehearsal,” he said, standing up.
Sarah watched Act One sitting alone in the fourth row while David went about the business of running rehearsal. But it was still there, Karen observed: that tension, like a wire strung between them that if you weren’t careful you’d trip over it. Karen wondered how it could still bother her. Because it excluded her? Because it made such a claim for itself, to be a more important human condition than anyone else’s? David was constantly on the move, stamping up the risers to the lightboard or climbing onstage or sitting in the outermost seats to check sight lines, the whole time trailing cigarette smoke and slopping suds from his beer on the floor, but no matter where he moved he kept his eyes away from Sarah so that you knew he’d grown eyes in the back of his head, or on the outsides of his shoulders, wherever they needed to be to keep that wire running the most direct path. It cut the room to pieces and the rehearsal was a disaster of missed cues and misspoken lines and tech glitches and no one, except possibly Karen and Sarah and David, knew why. Once the second act started and Sarah was out of sight backstage with Karen’s costume the last shreds of David’s focus disintegrated and he shambled around with his fourth or sixth beer like a sleepwalker. “David, David?” the lighting designer was saying. “Is that the cue you wanted?” “David, David?” the sound designer was saying. “Which song did you mean?” “David, David?” the set designer was saying. “Should Doc yank down the blind?” Karen had brought the loaded blank gun in for the first time and she realized the blocking of the silhouetted shooting was going to have to change again; holding the Beretta nose down with her fingers well away from the trigger she went out onstage and squinted into the lights. “David!” she said and felt the whole chaotic room of milling-around people who’d lost their leadership suddenly snap to attention. “Whoa, don’t shoot,” someone said, and a shiver of laughter broke out.
“There needs to be more space between Martin’s head and the gun. Once I’m standing on my mark, take a look from far left and far right to make sure the shadows line up the right way.”
“I thought it was a blank gun.”
“It is, but it still has a cartridge with gunpowder in it. That’s what makes the shot noise, and it makes a shock wave. So no one fool around and put this against your head or even point it at someone. I’ll point away from Martin’s head at an angle for safety, but the shadows should look like I’m aiming at him. Tell us if they line up.”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Martin said, “am I in any danger?” Martin had come out onstage to play this question for humor.
“Just don’t piss Karen off!” someone said.
As the humorlessly responsible firearms person, Karen ignored this. “Even though there’s no projectile in this weapon, the safest way to handle a blank gun is to pretend that it’s real. I’m firing toward stage left, so I want no one stage left during the scene. There’s no need for anybody to be there. Costumes are stage right, props are stage right, all the actors make their final entrances from stage right. Okay? Nobody hangs around stage left.”
“Listen up!” David said.
Because so much of the bar’s back room would be visible through the open door, and also because David insisted, the set designer had furnished the room with a little shelf of yellowed paperbacks, a full ashtray, a filthy manila folder with the neglected paperwork of an ailing small business sticking out the sides, a hot plate with a tattered cord, a few cans of soup, a pair of gray socks with large holes in the toes hanging over the end of the cot. Inside the drawer of the rickety table, which not even the front row could see, half-empty matchbooks, chewed pencils, hoarded change, a tattered old Playboy, and a pocket sewing kit. It was the sewing kit that pierced Karen when she opened the drawer to look in. It seemed like her own lonely, unloved competence hidden in that scratched plastic box.
Martin sat in Doc’s chair at Doc’s table; Karen stood to his side; the lighting instrument clamped to a pipe poured its hot light on them and threw their shadows on the closed window blind. Holding the Beretta with her trigger finger lightly balanced on the trigger guard, Karen pointed the gun. She stood to Martin’s right. Martin sat facing front; at the sound of the shot he would tumble sideways, to the left. David shouted to Karen to step inches this way or that way, angle her arm up or down. Karen’s arm was quivering and burning from being extended so long. She shouted to David that her arm would fall off and at last David said that it worked. One of the stagehands came out from the wings and taped around the chair’s legs, Martin’s feet, and Karen’s feet, and taped an X on the inside hidden wall of the set while Karen sighted down the barrel. If she and Martin and the chair all stayed inside their marks and she sighted at the X, the shadows ought to line up from every seat in the house. “Let’s do it!” called David, and Karen, setting the Beretta back on the table and rubbing her shoulder, went back out onstage, passing Sarah, who grabbed onto her hand.
“You’re so good,” Sarah whispered when Karen looked at her questioningly.
“Shoot it this time for real,” David said.
“Somebody should tell them up front in the bar that we’re shooting a blank gun,” said Karen.
A good idea, all agreed. Someone went.
In the brief pause someone said, “It’s a good thing we’re out in the sticks where nobody can hear.”
Someone else said, “In the sticks … no one can hear your blank gun.”
Someone else said, “In space … no one can hear your bad jokes.”
Then they were ready and began. For the first time, doing the scene, Karen felt a panic-pressure building inside, as if her rib cage was about to blow apart. Far away in the depths of a pit her mouth was speaking her lines but she couldn’t hear what she was saying, she didn’t know which line was next. She’d had bad dreams like this. She must have said them all; Martin/Doc “seized her in a violent embrace” and for the first time although they’d done this countless times she felt his body, scrawny and aged and hot with effort and forceful, and her own body bristled and rippled all over.
Then they’d gone through the door, Karen pausing as the Girl inside the doorframe so that the audience, when they had one, would be able to see the resolve coming into her face like a bank of stormclouds. David had said that about the stormclouds, weeks ago. He’d said he wanted the audience to know that the Girl had decided, even though the audience didn’t know what the decision was. His comment had reminded Karen that David thought in metaphors. David had originally wanted to write his own plays and direct them, not direct plays that other people had written. Again Karen felt panic-pressure from the inside out, straining her ribs, and she didn’t have any idea whether she’d conveyed the stormcloud-of-decision while standing in the doorframe. She didn’t know whether she’d shut the door so that the window blind/screen was in place. She didn’t know whether she was standing inside her taped box with her arm at the correct height and angle while she sighted at the X sightlessly and, from somewhere outside her body, pulled the trigger, jerking back from the force and the noise which was so much louder and more startling than the noise of an actual gun. Martin fell sideways out of the chair like a sack of potatoes, and the lights blacked out. The gun fell out of Karen’s hand onto the floor.
“Jesus!” said Martin from down on the floor. “Is that the gun you just dropped?” Karen felt she’d crashed back in her body the same way the gun had crashed onto the floor.
“Yeah, sorry,” she said, snatching the gun off the floor as the lights came back up.
“Let’s do it again with the quick-change!” called David, which meant, That was perfect, let’s keep the fuck going and finish.
“I need to reload it to do it again,” Karen said. “I’m only loading one blank at a time. For safety.”
Everyone stood around the props table watching as she opened the cylinder to confirm that the chamber was empty, loaded the new cartridge, pressed the cylinder back in the frame. Doing these things she’d done many times before and had total confidence doing Karen’s hands felt shaky and unruly and she wished they wouldn’t watch her so closely. She wasn’t performing fucking brain surgery. To distract attention, theirs and her own, Karen talked through the steps the way Richie had done. “You always have to confirm the cylinder is clear after each time you use it. Basic safety. Your finger should be nowhere near the trigger and nowhere near the trigger guard until you’re ready to shoot. Never point the gun at anyone, even if it’s unloaded. Never squeeze the trigger, even if it’s unloaded. The safest thing in our situation is if no one touches this blank gun but me. I’ll bring it to and from the show, I’ll move it to and from the props table, I’ll load it and clean it. No one else should touch it at all, even if they’re just trying to help. That’s how accidents happen.”
Then Martin and Karen and the gun all returned to their marks. Karen as the Girl again stood with Martin as Doc on the stage with the lights blazing on them. They spoke their lines again. They did their seizing embrace again. Through the door, stormclouds, door closed, find the marks, pick up the gun. Martin clapped his hands over his ears.
“What’s that?” David called from the house. “Why are you doing that? We can see it, man. Doc’s supposed to be waiting for death!”
“It’s bloody loud, are you hoping that I should go deaf?”
“I think he’s right,” Karen heard herself saying. “We’ve done it once and I know how it feels, let’s go back to ‘bang’ for the rest of rehearsal or we’ll all end up deaf.”
David was unhappy with this. He came up onstage, opened the set door, and stood scowling at them. “You’re the safety expert. Seems to me like you should get used to shooting it for real in rehearsal. It’s gotta go perfectly in performance.”
“I am used to it. It will go perfectly. We’ve got the angle, I’ve felt the recoil. It’s less safe to shoot the thing off every time we rehearse.”
“You didn’t think so before.”
“I hadn’t thought it all through.”
“Well. You’re the one holding a gun.”
“Then let’s take five so I can unload it again.”
“For fuck’s sake!” David said.
After that it mattered even more that the quick-change go smoothly. Karen remembered the quick changes she’d done years ago when they all were in school, the cold intimacy of pulling open Melanie’s zipper, yanking down her dress to a pool at her feet, pulling the doughnut of the new dress swiftly over her head and her arms while she stepped out of the old dress, dropping onto all fours to grab her feet one at a time, push them into her shoes while she did up her buttons, all breathlessly fast in the dark. It was all business, it was not sexy, you were not meant to feel excited or strange as you roughly handled someone else’s body and clothes as if they were a doll you didn’t love. Yet it was sexy, exciting, and strange, or maybe only Karen felt that way, back when their feelings were so sternly policed that you got in trouble if you didn’t feel one way on command and also in trouble if you felt another way that had not been commanded. And now it was Sarah grabbing hold of Karen’s body in the dark, tugging her jeans down and holding them flat to the floor so that Karen could quickly step out, Sarah casing Karen’s body in the tight dress, swiftly zipping it up with the flat of one palm running up Karen’s back so the zipper does not bite her skin. Shoes, bag, a tiny light-up compact that Sarah snaps open so Karen can put on lipstick. The lipstick transforms the waif-Girl into something sharper and harder when she reappears onstage minutes later. Sixty seconds and Karen has sprung to her bit of glow tape. They’ve done it, first try. Karen even has time for her heart rate to settle back down.
During the quick-change something else has changed. It’s happened just as quickly and just as wordlessly. Whether because they shared a task, or because they did it well, or just because they had to touch each other’s bodies too efficiently to leave time to think, somehow the static between Karen and Sarah is gone. It’s as if someone turned off a white-noise machine Karen hadn’t remembered was on. While David gives notes, Sarah comes out from backstage and drops down in the chair next to Karen, and she isn’t sitting opposite to Karen, haunting or besieging, she’s just sitting there. She looks tired and slightly green beneath her permanent tan. Karen tries to recall her obsession with Sarah but can’t retrieve the feeling-state. Losing that is like losing a limb. She feels light, not a lightness of heart but the lightness of being cut loose and set adrift in a void. At last, says Karen’s inner therapist, so much more cost-effective than a real one. At last you’re done crawling around inside Sarah, measuring all of the ways that she wasn’t a good friend to you.
“Are you excited to be having a baby?” Karen asks Sarah when rehearsal is finally over and everyone is leaving while also talking, milling, smoking, and drinking.
“I don’t know,” Sarah says. “I felt like I had to have one.”
“You felt that you had to have one? Or you thought that you had to have one? Thoughts are often false. A feeling’s always real. Not true, just real.”
“I thought I had to have one,” Sarah says after considering briefly. “I really don’t know what I feel.”
“I had one,” says Karen. They’re back outside now, getting into Karen’s car, on their way to The Bar, where Sarah will pretend to pay attention to Karen while only paying attention to David, and David will pretend to pay attention to everyone while only paying attention to Sarah. Is this why Karen lets slip her secret—because she wants to break into this circuit of David and Sarah, and seize attention, at last, for herself?
No. She lets it slip because she does. Don’t ask her Why now? Ask her Why not every moment up to now?
They have the car between them. Sarah looks across its top at Karen, perhaps meaning to pretend to have misheard, as people sometimes do to buy time, when they think that what matters is how they respond, and not that the thing has been said. How to tell them their response doesn’t matter, in fact isn’t wanted? “Please don’t say anything,” says Karen. Her own voice sounds harsh in her ears, and clearly startles Sarah even more. Well, so be it. Karen watches Sarah struggle with her unwanted position—no way to prove her goodness and caring, no way to disprove her discomfort and guilt. They look at each other so long across the top of the car that the other actors and Martin and David and the tech people come babbling onto the sidewalk, and the moment is taken away, it doesn’t end so much as stop. And that is satisfying to Karen, because nothing ends as in “completely to shut” from the Latin conclaudere. Nothing does that.
I ALWAYS LOVED opening nights. When I was little, before my parents split up, my mother and Kevin and I would go to opening nights at the outdoor theatre in the park and sit on a blanket eating peanut butter sandwiches and exclaiming in excitement every time something happened onstage that my father had done. If a flat glided in from the flyspace, or a set piece rolled in from the wings, or even if a pool of light appeared, if it was something he’d worked on we clapped as if the show’s star had made an entrance. We hardly paid attention to the actors or the story. The whole production seemed to be a coded message to us from my father that confirmed our importance, our special place on the hill that formed most of the theatre’s seating, its grass mashed flat from all the other blankets and all the other picnic baskets spread out under the pinkish night sky.
Ever since then I’ve been looking for that same secret message, that same confirmation that I matter most to whoever is sending the code. I’m sure all of us look for that message, although some people seem to receive it so early they don’t recognize it’s a message. They don’t wonder who sent it. Their own importance is that well-established to them. But I’ve never been like that and doubt that I’ll ever be like that. Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.
The bar/performance space’s women’s dressing room was a janitor’s closet with a bare lightbulb in it, but even though only I used it, because I was the only woman in the cast, when I opened the door and turned on the bare lightbulb and found a bouquet in a vase, I didn’t think it was for me until I read the card. I had no friends in this town where I’d been born and raised. The only people I knew were involved in the show. I’d told my father I was David’s props master, not that I’d be acting onstage, because I didn’t want him to come see the show. Having someone in the audience who knows who you are is a certain reminder you’re acting and I hadn’t wanted to know I was acting.
The note on the bouquet said, “To lovely Karen from her lucky leading man. Break a leg, Martin.” Reading the note, I knew that Martin had never forgotten. Over the past several weeks I’d convinced myself that he’d forgotten everything that had happened between us, but now I knew he hadn’t, and that was harder somehow to digest than the thought that he had.
They were gorgeous flowers, actually. Karen put her face in them, and closed her eyes. It was a very self-conscious gesture she’d seen actresses do on TV and in movies but never had the chance to do herself. Then Karen put on her costume, the dingy jeans and hoodie of a runaway, and did her makeup, which was a lot of grayish powder to make her look starved and unhealthy. But she didn’t feel starved, she felt full. She was already acting. She stayed in the closet as long as she could because she didn’t want to see anyone else. She wished that she could do the play alone.
Somebody knocked on the door. It was Sarah. Sarah squeezed in and shut the door behind her. Sarah had made herself glamorous for the opening night of this show in which she served as a backstage dresser for the space of one minute. Just like when they were young, Sarah had glamorized herself painstakingly in the style of someone who has not made an effort. She was wearing stovepipe jeans with big rips at the knees, motorcycle boots, a slashed and draped top made of hoodie material that fell off one shoulder to expose her bra strap like the outfit in Flashdance, and gigantic bohemian earrings. Her hair was parted far to one side so that a lot of it fell in her face. Maybe her outfit was an homage to the eighties. She looked just like she’d looked in high school, except better, because the bones of her face had become more defined. Karen hoped David hadn’t seen her or he’d be passed out drunk in the light booth before intermission.
“Mr. Kingsley is on the comp list!” Sarah said in outrage, as if even he should have ceased to exist once she’d pretended to write about him.
“He always comes to David’s shows. They’re good friends.”
“How is that possible? How can David even speak to him? ‘I won’t rest until you cry’—remember that?”
“He said that to David, not you.”
“That doesn’t make me less angry about it.”
“He was trying to help David get in touch with his emotions, and maybe it worked. David became a director, and he’s really good at it and loves it. I’ve heard him call Mr. Kingsley a mentor.”
“You’re the last person I would have expected to drink the Kool-Aid.”
“What Kool-Aid is that?” Karen said, because she can play dumb just as well as the next girl, particularly when discussing the person here called “Mr. Kingsley.”
Sarah gave Karen a Look. “Mr. Kingsley is part of what happened to you,” Sarah said, as if Karen deserved to be scolded for not holding the past to account.
“And here I thought he was part of what happened to you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sarah said after just a slight pause.
“Did you really expect me to go along with your revision? With David it’s one thing. He never knew in the first place and somehow still doesn’t. But come on. ‘Take five, sweetie’? That’s rich, how you kept that and added a bow tie.”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” repeated Sarah, who never could act her way out of a bag. By contrast, Karen knew she was going to be good. She could feel it. Tonight was her opening night.
“Five minutes!” someone called from outside, knocking sharply on the closet/dressing room door.
“Get to your place,” Karen dismissed Sarah, turning away.
Nothing feels safer than watching a show from the wings. You might think it’s a matter of upbringing, of Karen’s childhood in the theatre that she mentions so much, but anyone can be made to feel safe hidden in the wings, watching the spectacle sideways, from outside the circuit the actors and audience make. The warmth of that circuit warms you but asks nothing of you. Karen loved her very late Act One entrance for how long it let her be a watcher in the wings, but she’d never felt so disembodied and free as she did tonight, ready to step out onstage and until then a being of pure curiosity shining her light on the darkened unknown. All these weeks of rehearsal she had willfully ignored the fact that Martin was the author of the play but now the play spoke to her in his voice and she understood something about him. Why, asked the actors onstage, had their friend killed himself? And why not? asked the others who argued with them. It was his Self to keep or destroy. Why should customs or, God forbid, laws interfere with the ways we dispose of our Selves?
Because we’re none of us alone in this world. We injure each other.
Why should another be injured by choices I make for my Self?
You’re choosing for another when you make choices. We overlap. We get tangled. You can’t help but hurt.
That’s a load of BS! Anyone tangled with me got that way by a choice of their own. If I shoot myself, they had fair warning.
What warned them?
The plain knowledge that I wasn’t them.
The world is me and not me, Karen’s therapist said. It’s a difficult lesson to learn. Even over her therapist’s voice speaking inside her mind Karen heard her cue spoken and walked onstage into the light. Her body was a wire bringing shock to the actors onstage just as much as to the audience out in the house. She did it. She felt the air crackle, and felt a curiosity to answer her own. That electrification took place that can happen in shows when the Selves in the room overlap and deliver their shocks across spaces of air. The act ended and backstage as if under a noiseless glass dome Karen loaded the blank gun and set it in place. Sarah came backstage glittering and gesticulating with her fingers and moving her mouth in ways associated with eagerness and excitement but whatever it was she was saying Karen chose not to hear. Karen had no need to speak to her dresser. The lights went down when intermission ended and came up again at the start of the act and the scenes that led up to her scene came and went and then Karen stood gazing at Martin through the eyes of the Girl who stood gazing at Doc, and Karen understood the injury that bound them together and knew that Martin understood it. Martin/Doc “seized her in a violent embrace.”
Through the door, staring sightlessly out as the audience cringed from the stormclouds that formed on her face. Door shut, Martin in his chair, Karen on her marks, hot light throwing their shadows against the drawn blind. Shadow play. Karen raised the gun, sighted, and fired. With a strangled bellow and shriek Martin fell from the chair with his thighs and his hands tightly clamped at his crotch, and kept screaming and writhing once hitting the floor. Karen opened the chamber, looked in the cylinder, pressed the chamber back into the frame, took aim and fired again. Now Sarah was onstage with them in Doc’s “room” behind the scene flat and screaming also, if not in the same way as Martin. “Oh my God!” Sarah screamed, and, “Doctor! We need a doctor—” Sarah’s usual smoky murmurousness was now shrill and high-pitched while Martin’s usual jagged singsong had gone moaning and low. From the house, scraping chairs and stamping feet and disputing voices and David, briefly flinging open the set door and looking at them before he went shouting away.
“What really pissed me off about what you wrote,” Karen tried to tell Sarah as Sarah knelt screaming by Martin, as if Sarah had just one stage direction but was going to do it for all she was worth, “is how you wrote so much just like it happened, and then left out the actual truth. Why even do that? Who do you think you’re protecting?”
“Oh … God…” Martin was keening, curled like a fetus on the floor, a fetus turning like a wheel. The way he was writhing in pain had him somehow rotating in place.
“What have you done to him?” Sarah screamed. As usual, not listening.
“You won’t die,” Karen reassured Martin. “You just won’t be the same.”