THE DRAMA HALL. GILLIATT was taking a group of nine guests through the exercise. He sat on the stage with a prompt book open on his lap. It contained the crucial information about each of them. God knows what the Academy’s guests thought when confronted by this lean, elegant Negro whose slouching body, aristocratic face and supple voice were capable of all styles indicated: indifference, hostility, boredom, impatience or sheer snottiness. The Southerners, in particular, were often an amusing study.
In the orchestra Max prowled around like a cat whose one eye could record reality. Jewel sat frozen in her white costume, watching. Barbara stood at the side of the Hall feeding the guests one by one onto the stage. They were silent. Except for the whirr of Max’s hand-held movie camera, the Hall was quiet.
I sat down next to Jewel. She looked at me. Instead of a smile (smiling means death through aging wrinkles) she arched her eyebrows in a visual greeting I remembered well.
“I have to talk to you,” I whispered.
“Not now, Wolf,” she said.
Gilliatt had pressed a button and on a screen above the stage appeared the words: Lewis Griswold—farmer—age seventy-one—cancer. Long ago the Academy had decided that no one valid “reason” for suicide could ever be isolated. Thus all reasons were equally valid. The official in charge—today it was Gilliatt—could choose any one of the many possibilities offered by a guest.
“Why not now?” I said to Jewel.
She gestured toward Max who was crouching in front of the stage.
“Are you afraid of pain?” Gilliatt asked the farmer who sat before him. His tone was gentle.
“You got something there,” the farmer said. “You know it was more the arthritis that brought me here.”
“I’ll get rid of Max,” I said.
“Not when he’s filming,” Jewel said. “You couldn’t touch him.” On the screen appeared different words: Fred Jarvis—Marine lieutenant—age thirty—homosexual.
Gilliatt was brutal. “Were you a fag before you joined up?”
“The Service is a very anal-oriented life,” the lieutenant said.
“Shit!” Gilliatt said. “You’re a freak. You were born a queer.”
“I was seduced … by an older man …”
“Tell it to the Marines!”
Jewel stared at me in the semi-darkness.
“It’s always been done,” I said. “Since long before I came here.”
“Strange …” she murmured.
“Jewel,” I said. “Please.”
Carl Walkowitz (the screen said)—translator—age forty-one—concentration camp survivor.
“Do you have fantasies of revenge?” Gilliatt asked.
“Let’s just get on with it,” Walkowitz said.
“Do you feel you deserve more sympathy than other people?”
“I am other people.”
Max was training his camera at the side of the Hall. It looked to me as if it were Barbara who was drawing his eye and his focus. She stood straight and still as a zombie, moving only to usher each new guest onto the stage opposite Gilliatt.
“I dreamed about you last night,” I said.
“I’ve dreamed about you sometimes. I wake up sad.”
“You were singing,” I said. “A Fauré song.”
“Did I sing well? It’s not what I do best. God, remember my dreams of singing glory?”
“It’s not that I’ve missed you. I haven’t.”
“Oh?” She opened her eyes wide in mock surprise.
“You don’t miss people here. It’s not that kind of place.”
“I see.”
“But I kept hearing you singing the word reviens, over and over. Reviens.” Her face gleamed whitely at me.
The words on the screen said: Joseph Graubart—Rabbi—age thirty-eight—Faith depression. Gilliatt at work, I thought. As senior, as my assistant, he could have his choice in making up a group.
“Are you Orthodox?”
“Reform,” the Rabbi said.
“Do you wear a fringed garment all the time?”
“No.”
“When you pray?”
“No.”
“Did not God require of Abraham that he do only two things: circumcise male children on the eighth day and wear a fringed garment as a sign that God had set him apart from other people?”
“There is evidence that this portion was added at a later date to the Books of Moses …”
Gilliatt interrupted with a burst of laughter. “Even here the Jew is disputatious. Devious to the end.”
Barbara walked across the front of the auditorium, stately as an absent-minded swan. Slowly Max swung his camera from the activities on the stage to follow Barbara. I got up and walked over to Max. I said, “She’s just one of the guides.” He grunted something.
“I mean—you don’t want her for this film.” Max straightened up and clicked off his camera. “Dammit, Wolf,” he said, “I don’t make films. I accept what comes to my camera.” Something in the way his eyes moved away from Barbara gave me an idea. A diabolical one, worthy of Gilliatt himself. I knew Max’s weaknesses, or one of them. “She’s unattached,” I said. “Her name is Barbara.” He grinned at me, taking the bait. “A wild idea,” he said. “Here, of all places.”
When he was gone, I returned to my seat next to Jewel. Both of us sat still, oblivious to what was taking place on the stage. Jewel stirred, restless, in her seat. Then she turned to me. I caught some scent of light perfume—perhaps only the natural freshness of her skin; it came to me embedded in the flesh of hundreds of evenings of sitting next to each other. The sheer quantity of contact overwhelmed me with memory. Nothing particularly unusual: a sudden bout of lovemaking after returning from a movie, an argument in Washington Square Park. Just the brute, mindless repetition of experiences taken together—any experiences: afternoons of boredom, anger, seemed at that moment to have bound us together, forever.