I am too talented for my own good. What would you do in my shoes? Business or theater? It’s a hard choice. I walk into a room and people know. I am not nothing! I’m someone important. Someone of value. And you know why they know that? Because I’m a positive—”
“Wait. Stop. Go back.”
“What?” said Toby.
“Why did you do that?” asked Frank.
“Do what?”
“Shout the line?”
“Which line?”
“‘I am not nothing.’”
“I didn’t shout it.”
“You did.”
“I didn’t.”
“All right,” Frank conceded. “But you overemphasized it. Made it too important.”
“But you said it was important.”
“Yes, but—” Frank took a deep breath. “Never mind. Let’s not argue. We just need to find a way to make this scene work.”
They stood in the big, half-bare living room on West 104th Street. Frank had come straight from the office and still wore a shirt and tie. Toby wore his usual loose jeans and dark T-shirt, his chest stamped ABERCROMBIE. They were working on his monologues and had come to the fourth one, where confidence falls apart and fear bursts into view. Patience was running low.
Toby shook his head. “Sorry, Frank. I’m in a real crappy mood today. Life sucks. But I need to forget Toby and focus on ‘Toby.’” He made quotation marks in the air with his fingers.
Frank agreed the problem was there. The hardest role for almost any actor to play is him- or herself. You play yourself anyway, whether you’re Lear or Seinfeld, but you can usually be more accurate when you are pretending to be someone else.
“All right. Let’s try it again. Wait. Let me—” Frank turned on the lamp by the television. It was only six, but the sky had been clouding up all afternoon, threatening rain without ever delivering. The rooms had grown dark and gloomy. Nobody else was home. Allegra was out, and the others were off at a big catering job.
“And carry this,” said Frank, taking his sports coat from the chair. He disliked it when actors hid in props, but they needed something here. “And put this on.” He took off his necktie, and Toby knotted it around his neck—it hung like a red-striped candy cane over his T-shirt. “Now pretend I’m Chris. I’m going to sit here like Chris. And I want you to come in and convince me that you have the most wonderful fucking life on the planet.”
Frank sat in front of the TV. Toby came around the corner.
“Hey, hi. What’s on? Boy, did I have a great day. Had a great audition. And an excellent job interview…”
Frank listened closely. But there was no change, no growth. The monologue was as wooden as ever.
“How about a break?” he said. “Do you know if there’s any juice or soda in the fridge?”
Toby followed him into the kitchen. “I’m sorry, Frank. I got a grip on the other scenes—I think. But this is the important one, and I have a block about it. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m afraid of expressing too much.”
“Better too much than too little. We can bring it down later.” Except Toby’s “too much” really was too much.
“I wonder if I’m feeling too rejected to ‘play’ rejected. Because I really am bummed out this week. I’m overdosing on no.”
“Here.” Frank handed Toby a glass of orange juice. He disliked mucking around in real emotions—this was theater, not group therapy—but he decided to listen to Toby, on the off chance that he might hear something he could channel back into the monologue.
“I’m told I’m too white-bread for one part. Or too faggy for another. And then I get dumped by the man I love. New York just chews you up and spits you out. I don’t know why I even moved here. I should have stayed in Milwaukee. They have good regional theater. But if you’re famous in Milwaukee, who are you? You’re somebody who’s famous in Milwaukee.”
The boy was so naked, so needy. Why would anyone this vulnerable expose his ego to the acid bath of theater? But Frank knew why. He’d been there himself.
“I’m sure glad I don’t have to be famous anymore,” said Frank.
Toby stared. “But you never were famous.”
“No. But I thought I needed to be famous. Before I could be happy. And then I found I could be happy without fame.”
Was he happy? He waited for Toby to challenge him there, but the boy only nodded obliviously.
“Well, I don’t have to be famous,” said Toby. “But I won’t turn up my nose at it. It’d make Doyle see how wrong he was.”
Maybe here, thought Frank. They might find Toby’s missing key in his experience of love gone wrong. “It’s rough,” he said, “being dumped by someone you love. Let’s go back to the living room.”
Toby followed him. “I saw Caleb this morning. Big mistake. I just dropped in. I should have called. But he hardly noticed I was there. Like I was last week’s laundry.”
“Uh-huh. So what do you feel when you tell people things are fine, even though you’ve just been dumped?”
“But I don’t tell anyone things are fine. Because they’re not.”
“Right.” Frank paused to think of another approach.
“I don’t know what I did wrong,” Toby argued. “It’s like he doesn’t want to be loved. Like he thinks he doesn’t deserve it. You’re seeing his sister, right? Is she fucked up, too?”
They had Doyles in common, didn’t they? “Oh, Jessie is—complex. But I wouldn’t call her fucked up.” And Frank would never claim that she deserved his love.
“The whole family’s twisted. They can’t love anyone who’s actually there. In the present, in the now. Caleb’s still in love with a dead guy. Isn’t his sister divorced or something?”
“Yes. Only she never talks about her ex.” Frank had his own theories about Jessie, but he was not going to share them. “They’re an odd pair. Special. Different. And different from each other too.” He thought of Jessie now not as an image but as a sound: her sharp, witty laugh. “She’s smart. Practical and funny. And pretty. But she’s not ready to love anyone at the moment. Which is her prerogative.”
“Sounds like her brother,” Toby said nastily.
Frank lifted an eyebrow at Toby. “Maybe Caleb isn’t rejecting love. Maybe he’s just rejecting you.”
He said it as a joke—he pretended it was a joke, anyway—but Toby looked insulted.
“No! Absolutely not!” Toby recovered with a scornful laugh. “No way. He accepted me when love was new. When it was fun. But then it turned serious and it put him off. Because he has intimacy issues.”
“But his play just went down in flames,” said Frank. “He might not have all that much love to share these days.”
“Uh-uh,” Toby insisted. “He has intimacy issues. It’s a gay thing. You can’t understand, you’re straight.”
He knew Toby only wanted to shut him up, but Frank hated hearing this line from gay friends. It was even more annoying than when they said, “Just how straight are you?” after Frank made a good joke. But the truth was that Frank didn’t understand gay men. In particular, what did they see in other men? What did women see in men for that matter? Men are so ugly and unlovable. Frank sometimes wondered if a hetero male were simply a self-hating man.
“What time is it?” said Toby. Almost seven. “Good grief. I have to be midtown at eight.”
“I thought you were free all evening?”
“Since it was just me, I thought we’d rehearse only an hour or two. So I made, uh, plans.”
“You can’t call and tell them you’ll be an hour late?”
“No, because—Because I can’t, that’s all.”
Frank was actually relieved their sticky one-on-one was almost over. Even so: “I wish you’d told me. I could’ve made other plans.”
Such as getting together with Jessie. He knew that she loomed large in his thoughts only because they’d been talking about Doyles. But it was too late now. And it was a weeknight. There is nothing more unromantic during the first weeks of a relationship than seeing your beloved on a weeknight.
“All right, Toby. One more time then?”
They went back to the beginning. Frank became Chris again. Toby came out and launched his first speech. And it went better. Toby was in a hurry, which often helped. Then they came to the final monologue.
“I walk into a room and people know I’m not nothing. I’m someone important, someone of value. And you know why they know that? Because I’m a positive person.”
The speech raced like water over a flat rock of uncertainty. It was alive. Yes, that’s what the scene needed, real fear. Had Frank frightened Toby with the idea that Caleb was not rejecting love, he was rejecting Toby? Frank didn’t care so long as it worked.
Toby delivered his last line, “Everything is fine. Everything is great.” He stood there, exhausted, blank. And Frank had an impulse—either as himself or Chris, it didn’t matter—but he got up and set a timid, sympathetic hand on Toby’s shoulder.
And Toby seized him, hard. He threw both arms around him and held on tight. Frank had never guessed the boy was so solidly built, like a refrigerator.
But it felt right. It felt good. It felt so good that Frank feared it might not be acting. Here they were, two men in love with a brother and sister, sharing a bear hug of panic.
“Blackout,” Frank whispered in his ear.
Toby released him. Frank could breathe again.
“What do you think?” Toby asked nervously. “Did it work?”
“Definitely.” So the boy had been acting. Good. An acted emotion is easier to repeat than a real one.
“It felt right to me too,” Toby admitted. “I’m getting there. I think I have a handle.”
“Want to try it one more time?”
“I can’t. I need to shower and shave for my—thing. But tomorrow. Okay? I have a handle now. I’ll be even better tomorrow. With the others here.” And he hurried down the hall to his room.
Fine, thought Frank. See if I care. But it was good to stop here. They could work on the scene tomorrow.
Frank was glad to finish early. He could go home to Hoboken. He was glad to have a free night ahead of him. He could watch television, he could listen to music. He needed to save Jessie for the future, when his plate wasn’t so full.
Besides, it looked like it was going to rain.