25

It’s good, Asquith thought, to be more than alive.

It’s delicious to be more than human. He closed his eyes and drew hard on a cigarette, just as he had years ago between acts, the fellow actors declaiming, the words reaching his ears translated by distance and the heavy drapes into something not heard at all but remembered.

“He’s beginning to guess,” she said.

“As I expected.” He yawned. How delicious this cigarette was. How could half-decayed leaf taste so full of life?

“He’s digging up the grave,” she was saying, “just as you said he would.”

He closed his eyes against the smoke, as he had years ago, listening to Speke read what he had just written. “I am so pleased,” said Asquith. He didn’t bother to tell her that he had watched Speke plunge the spade into the rocky ground, just as he watched so much else that took place here. He lifted his hand to touch her hair and she flinched, and he made a little kissing sound of reassurance because he wanted her to know how well she was playing her part in this finest theater.

“It’s all going the way you wanted, isn’t it?” she asked.

“With your help, my dearest, the play unfolds.”

He had come in from the woods to avoid the heat. From the trees, from the dusty pastoral backstage, he had been able to watch everything.

“You’re not unhappy,” she said, in a tone that was half question.

His poor sister. So afraid of what he might do. “It’s going so well. I’m so proud of you, my little actress. You would make a magnificent Ophelia.”

She did not meet his eyes. “You won’t really hurt anyone, will you?”

Out of love, Asquith thought. Only out of love, the loyal compassion he felt for each one of them, even the man he did not know, the stallion to Sarah Warren’s mare, the journalist. Even he drew a special tide in Asquith’s soul.

He made his voice a purr. “All these months we have worked on this delight, and you still need to ask.”

“You’re changing.”

“From what to what?”

“It’s wonderful, in a way, Timothy. You’re becoming the way you used to be. When you were happy.”

“Oh, happy.” He pressed out the cigarette carefully, and waited while she opened one of the skylights to dilute the smoke. “Yes, I do recall being happy.”

She wiped the ashtray carefully. “I only want to be sure that you won’t go back on your word.”

“No,” he said, luxuriating inwardly with the lie. “Of course not. I won’t hurt any of them.”

“He’s not a bad person, really.” Then she would say no more, because he turned to eye her. The studio had that tang of pine and the florid stains of her art. He felt the walls confine him, closing in. He sat, sipping soup she had stirred up for him on a hot plate, but he missed his little camp beside the spring.

She added, “I know he was unfair to you.”

“Worse than you can imagine,” he breathed. Was he so unfair, though, Asquith wondered. Had Speke really stolen the essence of his life? There was little question that Speke had typed late into the night, paper scattered over the kitchen table, but he had always been happy to stop and listen to one of Asquith’s stories, or to applaud as he improvised an improved version of Turandot. Why did such a lovely opera have to be so dull? Asquith couldn’t recall the details, at this point, but his new version of the opera was an astounding improvement. Speke would listen and laugh approvingly, and then continue into the dawn, his typing two-fingered but powerful, hammer punches that worked the typewriter sideways on the table so it was always about to fall off.

Perhaps, in the cosmic view, it didn’t matter how much of Speke’s work he had inspired. What did it matter how much of Hamlet’s dissemblance was written by Shakespeare and how much by an assistant or a colleague, or even miswritten by the memory of an actor? An actor can improve a line, as Asquith knew, and besides, there is that other factor in the writing, the life of the work itself, the power of the man playing Hamlet for the eighty-second time to ad-lib a quip more deftly than the poet, even though the half-phrase might be ever forgotten in the joyous white noise of the applause. The work works its way, a tree uttering its leaves.

But Asquith did not find himself quite capable of taking the cosmic view. This was no longer a battle for possession of the plays. That was a swamp without a passage, a Grimpen Mire, death to even hounds. Now he knew only great love for Speke and his household of stalwart cheer. Great love, and another sort of feeling, a dark intention much more powerful than any form of human affection.

“I know he deserves to suffer,” she continued.

“But you’ve come to like him, haven’t you? Go ahead, admit it. Everyone likes Hamilton Speke. Animals, children—the world was made for Speke and his like.”

Her voice was uncertain. “He’s been kind to me.”

“Of course he has.”

Of course Speke was kind, kind as the rain, kind as the rolling summer wind. Such vitality could only be admired. And envied. Envy was the desire to possess amidst a certainty that possession was unlikely. Asquith would, in time, master this estate. He was embarked on a play to catch the sanity of the King. He could not win Speke’s love. He would win his life, his soul. Such theater was starlight itself, or rather the light of those invisible stars, the ones imploded to the point that time itself collapses in their cores.

This little theater past, he would move into the second and third acts, make love to the beautiful, capture the hope of the King of this sunny land and blow it all out, out like the little candle flame it always was.

Such a long shadow they cast, the celebrated, their images coined and emblazoned beside chocolates at the checkout line. The televised semblance, broadcast across a continent, parts its lips and shows its teeth and millions of picture tubes on televisions beyond imagining show teeth, a sea of incisors, a vast, many chambered fly’s eye of manly joy.

Did Lucifer feel the injustice of it all, that eternity carried the children of God and merely washed the breakwaters of others? Did Lucifer regard with an even calm the unfairness of the sky as it rained life on some and half-lives on others? The hawk banks, lifts a cry. The scorpion scuttles.

But Asquith was kind, and even knew himself to be wise. All inside him was night, and no one beyond his sister had ever loved him. He wanted only to let the day see how truly it misjudged the dark. Public preening over one’s future is not the best form of eloquence, and commerce with the unseen millions was not the only grasp on hope.

Hush, gentlemen players. Listen: the crowd in the pit, the rump-fed and the lousy both, fall still. The Actor steps across the boards, mastering the light. The light plays upon him, warms him, but does not go beyond the skin, which itself is merest lubricant and paint.

Within is the dark from which all art proceeds. And this dark loves what it sees, these frail ignorant, these poor citizens of the day.

This is all to be mine, says the Artist. The shadow turns upon the victor, the real shadow, the darkness within, and begins the battle, the endless one, the war it always wins.