42

Author’s Reading

It was a lovely morning, warm for May, but not too warm by the sea. But then, they always told you that the weather was never really hot in Southern California. It was largely one’s imagination when one thought that it was warm. Jeffrey could imagine everyone in Los Angeles and its suburbs looking at the blue Pacific sky and saying it was a lovely morning. It was only ten o’clock, but the glare from the water and the white sand of the beach made it necessary to lower the Venetian blinds of Marianna’s living room, and the voices of the early bathers beneath their sunshades on the beach and the cars on the highway in back of Marianna’s house were like incidental sounds offstage. Breakfast had been cleared from the glass table and Wong and Jessica had driven to town to shop, leaving the whole house quiet just as he would have wanted it. The living room seemed to have been arranged deliberately for the reading of that play. There was no one in the room but Marianna on the wicker chaise longue near the window and Jeffrey himself seated near her in a wicker armchair that creaked gently whenever he moved. No one but Marianna, and yet Jeffrey felt as conscious of an audience as an actor must feel when he cannot see the theater through the footlights. He wished he could get it out of his mind that the reading of his play was dramatic in itself and represented a “turning point.” Perhaps he was attaching undue importance to it all, but he felt certain that anything he might do in the future was peculiarly involved with it.

“Don’t look so tense,” Marianna said, and she laughed. “You’re only reading it to me.”

He was about to read the play to her but he was also about to read it to his conscience or to providence, or whatever it was that had allowed him the time to write it. He recalled that remark of Alf’s wife—that God was in the numbers—and he would be reading that play to whatever ordered force there was that moved numbers and moved lives.

“Of course,” he said, “it’s a first draft, Marianna.” And he was saying exactly what other people said who had read plays to him. “It’s just for the general effect.”

He realized that he was excusing himself already, trying to protect his ego, like everybody else.

“Go on with it,” Marianna said, and she laughed again. “Settle down—curtain.”

He cleared his throat.

“All right,” he said, “curtain.” And he raised the script and focused his eyes on it. “The curtain rises on a cold New England parlor in a small town in about the year 1910. The threadbare neatness of this room is what first impresses the audience. There is a fire laid in the fireplace, center, with a paper fan in front of it. On the mantel is a waxed flowerpiece, under glass. In front of the fireplace is a round woven rag rug—to the left, a horsehair sofa. A kerosene lamp stands on a Victorian table to the right. A Boston rocker is beside the table. The lamp has glass prisms around it. The globe is green and painted with pink roses.…”

He felt better, now that he was reading. He had always believed in giving an accurate description of a set and as he heard his voice he knew that he had not done it badly. He knew that those first few moments, just as the curtain rose, were very vital. Before a word was spoken they could indicate the whole spirit, the atmosphere, and as often as not, the theme, and he could see the set as he was reading. Curiously enough, he had not realized, while he was writing, how accurately he had been describing the parlor at Lime Street. Reading aloud something which one had written could give it values which one might not previously perceive.

As he grew more conscious of his own words, he could almost forget that Marianna was listening. He seemed to be alone there, listening to another voice reading what someone else had written. He was intensely interested in this other work, intensely anxious to see all that was best in it, and his critical faculties were very wide-awake.

“She enters from right,” he read. “Her hair is done in that ugly pompadour of the period. It is tied in back by a large bow ribbon. She is wearing a brooch watch on her white shirtwaist.…”

The first awkward minutes of the act were over, that difficult business of setting the character and the mood, and with the succeeding minutes, his own mood was changing. He was thinking that he was caught there in a sort of justice of his own contriving. He was thinking that he knew too much. There was no way of stilling the analytical sense which he had developed from examining other people’s work, and now that part of his mind was examining his own work remorselessly. It was an exquisite sort of retribution. He could see exactly what that other part of him, the submerged creative side of him, had been trying to do. The self-revelation of it was painful, but he had to face it. It was not that it was bad—he found himself wishing that it might have been frankly bad. Instead there was a veneer of accomplishment about it, a perfunctory sort of smartness, which made it worse. There was a veneer over the dialogue, a certain specious cleverness, but there was no conviction or emotion. The play he was reading had the plausibility and the coldness of a mechanical toy pirouetting on the sidewalk at Christmas time.

If it had been really bad he could have stood it—but he was too technically competent for that. His voice was running smoothly. He was reading rather well. He could feel himself unconsciously trying to add a value which it did not have.

Once when he had been with Madge at Monte Carlo he had watched a man at the tables, and Jeffrey was like that gambler, versed and wise in all the combinations. He was a gambler who was playing safe, who did not put his chips on a number, but continually straddled the columns and the odds and evens, who was losing always just a little and was never making much. There was no brilliance and no creative daring, and yet he knew that he had possessed both once. They had been there long ago, in the first things he had written, and now they were gone, he could not imagine where.

It must have been in the middle of the second act that he thought he could not go on, and he paused for a moment. He did not want to look at Marianna, but he heard her voice.

“Go on,” she said, “don’t stop.”

He was reading again, but perhaps it would have been better to have left it there because it had nothing to do with his thoughts. All his life—at least all of his artistic life—floated before him and still Jeffrey kept on reading.

It was like running a race, simply to get through with it, but he was not aware that his voice showed it. He read the last page slowly and then he straightened the pages and put a clip on them. He did not want to look at her, but he had to.

“Well,” he said, “that’s that.”

Marianna was sitting up straight. Her hands were clasped tight on her lap. She was a good actress, but he knew her too well, and he could read her eyes. There might have been a moment of some sort of hope, because of course no one could be sure of oneself, but in an instant he knew he was right. It made a lump rise in his throat, because she was so kind. He could see her trying, with all her loyalty and affection, to evade the truth.

“It’s—” she began, and all her inflections were right and all her words—“it’s swell, darling. It’s awfully swell.”

Perhaps ten years ago he might have done it. There was no way of telling, but it was too late now. He was smiling at her. He stood up and tossed the manuscript on the chair. His anxiety was gone because everything was gone. He was thinking that he could get the Chief that afternoon and change at Kansas City, if that was the place to change, for Fort Sill, because Jim was at Fort Sill. Ten years ago it might have been different, but it was too late now.

“Nuts,” he said, “it’s lousy.”

She was an actress and she knew what he was thinking—she was very quick that way. She stood up very quickly as though someone had pulled her to her feet and her voice was almost harsh.

“No,” she cried, “no, no. It isn’t. It’s swell. It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful.” And then she was clinging to him and sobbing in his arms. “I loved it,” she sobbed. “I loved it all. Please don’t say it’s lousy.”

“Nuts,” Jeffrey said, “it’s lousy, dear.”