The Daredevils (19 page)

“Well, yes, it's—”

“Let me finish. Everyone knows we're not saying what you think, we're just repeating the lines you memorized, and we're doing something we practiced over and over again. And everybody knows that we do and say the same things night after night, but
they don't care because it's a dream.
At least it is if we're good. If we're bad, it isn't anything at all like a dream. It's ridiculous and pointless. As you said so many times in your impassioned provocations to the company. It makes a person feel
bad
to watch it, rather than strangely
happy.
I'm not very smart, certainly not in your league, anyway—”

“I'm not smart,” he said urgently. “Please don't think I'm smart. They teach you how to make speeches after dinner and I can fake everything, even being smart, I spent four years studying the classics, but I'm really just a fool.”

Vera paused to consider her new lover in the lamplight and ended by smiling at him mysteriously. She then continued her thought.

“I'm not thinking this stuff up originally,” she said. “This all comes from a friend of mine, Jules's wife, who died three years ago, Rosemary—”

“I don't believe you. I'm sorry your friend died, but I don't believe you're simply parroting—”

“—and she said it much better than I do. I'm just agreeing with her because I think it's true and important. I think that all good actions have a dreaminess to them that you can't describe or deny. If you do something and it doesn't feel right, you know it's the wrong thing to do. And the harder you push it, the more wrong it feels. When you do something and it feels right, you know it too. And the more right it is, the more like a dream it is. The more you look like you rehearsed your lines, the more like you practiced your movements. It's like nothing happened before you started to set you up, or cause it, and the future doesn't matter, either. The effect is for someone else to think about. And when you're done, you can almost hear the applause. Even though you know there's no one out there. That's why I came to you. I have always wanted to act, and then I came up with these other ideas that . . . I don't know . . . made it imperative.”

“I often dream,” Charles said after a brief but thoughtful, and somewhat tense, silence, “that I am about to go onstage, and not only can I not remember my lines, I know I never learned them in the first place.”

It was as if the ground had now been carefully prepared: Vera pushed him backward on the bed, unbelted and unbuttoned him, and commenced the kissing of his swollen cock. He could not have been more astounded by this abrupt and unprecedented action. He was, in a sense, dismayed. The idea, he thought, was merely fashionably dissolute in his leading lady, a venting of sexual energy that was common in the theater; but with Vera it was work of another order, and he felt, despite the incredible pleasure of it, faint at heart and unequal to the challenge. He thought how terrible it would now be if he lost her. Now that he loved her. Needless to say, he felt fraudulent because he did not understand what love was and when the body followed the mind in a perversion of the proper method of the sane and effective actor, when he lost his focus and became impotent, he could only sigh and say, “Now you know the real me.”

“Nonsense. But you've got to go. Warren has promised to kill you. He won't, of course, but we can all save ourselves so much trouble if you just quickly go
now
.”

Attendance numbers remained high and the crowds wildly enthusiastic as July 4
^th
approached. Charles continued to be nauseous before every performance and to wave a little flag during curtain calls. Amelia fell from her horse while chasing Durwood Keogh on the beach but was lucky enough to have broken no bones on the soft sand. Laughing and crying at the same time, she allowed herself to be carried by Keogh to her limousine. The Reverend Thomas Ruggles was in Washington, DC, and so was unable to do the carrying. As he was leaving, Keogh said, “Your brother is becoming pretty well-known, isn't he. And well-liked.” But as she wasn't sure what he meant by the remark, she merely looked at him in frank but patient disdain, which seemed to please or at least amuse him. She told her brother about it, wanting to warn him that if she was allowing Durwood Keogh to pick her up and carry her about and coo over her tenderly, then scandal, ruin, and catastrophe would follow as surely as the oxcart follows the ox or however it was he liked to put it . . . but no, no, no, it was worse, it was that if she was allowing Durwood Keogh to seduce her, the poison was very deep and it was far too late to do anything about it, the whole family would die or was already dead and just didn't know it, that was the way Amelia saw things and if Charles had once been willing and able to discount it, he surely and sorrowfully could do so no longer. She tried to tell him traps were being laid and if he thought he could merely continue his policy of being blithe about it in public, ecstatic for his theater-folk, and contemptuous in his soul, he was wrong wrong wrong. He was a fool and she had never before thought that of him. She wanted desperately to return to selfless toil in miserable hospitals but could not. She did not know why. She tried to tell him, to ask him, but he was feeling too charismatic and powerful to even listen, much less reply. She feared he would shake her hand and murmur, “Good of you to say so.” She wanted to make fun of him and for the two of them to laugh, but she could not, they could not. Something was over and while many things remained possible, many things had become impossible as well. He found it hard to think of anything but sexual relations with Vera—even to the point of hardly recalling his bizarre impotence. He wanted desperately to love, to be in
love and to love, and if the shadow of death hung over the stage, well, he did not understand death very well, either. Father certainly had tried to see to that, but Charles had been neither bright nor willing about Stoic sensibility.

After inquiring politely in Jules's office, he made his way across the gallery and down the stairs into the shop, then across that room, passing men he now knew by and large to be other than what and whom they appeared to be, walking swiftly but awkwardly with a self-consciousness that was like a great weight on his shoulders, his legs strangely stiff, his face suggesting an errand the goal of which he could not keep straight from the one thing he must avoid at all costs. He made his way around the glass display case and walked past the cash register to the dirty red curtain, which he parted clumsily and carried with him one or two steps down the aisle of spare parts. He walked with an air of complete freedom that was thoroughly but incompetently, amateurishly feigned through the back rooms until he found a way, a way different than the one Vera had used the first time, down into the cellar and through its milky, oily darknesses to the door of the room that held the press.

This door hung slightly but heavily ajar, the seam a less oily, more milky light than that in which he stood. He pressed against the door carefully but firmly and heard the sound of weights being transferred by gears and pulleys, and, not incongruously, that of water being poured from one container to another.

And there they were, the snow-gray jug and basin, Vera with her back to him but her face visible in the tiny cloud of the mirror. On the washstand stood a large full bottle of whiskey. Its cork lay on the floor and the burned smell of the whiskey made its own invisible little fountain over the bottle. The smell of ink and naphtha and damp paper was otherwise so strong in the milk and oil glowing around the lamp that he thought he could see particles of ink and paper floating as if in solution, microscopic bubbles of ink and motes of paper debris.

It was all a little too vivid. They began to make small talk.

“High grade of white,” said Charles, fingering a sheet of paper in the press tray.

“Cost a fortune,” said Vera.

“Smooth finish.”

“It's lovely paper.”

“What made you choose Vera as a pseudonym?”

“Vera,” said Vera, “was chosen in honor of two Russian women.”

He smiled in friendly anticipation of an anecdote, but felt a sensation something like that of hearing a drip from a leaking roof strike the pot set below it faster and faster.

“One Vera killed the governor of Petersburg. A General Trepov, I was told. A terrible tyrant, had a man flogged for failing to remove his cap. You know the kind of asshole. Vera sat in his waiting room with, I don't know, a hundred other petitioners, half of them dying, the other half wishing they were dead, and when he came up to her and asked her what her complaint was, she said, ‘You are, General Trepov,' withdrew a pistol from her cloak, and shot him dead. Then she sat back down. That's the part I like best. Sitting back down. Twenty-four January, 1878, seventeen years to the day, as it happens, believe it or not, of my birth, in Muscatine, the Button Capital of Iowa. The other Vera was a leader of The People's Will. She participated in some of the various attempts made on the life of Alexander II, you know, rolling a bomb under his carriage and having it roll out the other side before it exploded, stuff like that. But they got him in the end, never fear.”

“You really know your business,” said Charles. Vera looked at him skeptically, and he said, “I mean your history.”

Vera burst out laughing. “My business, yes indeed!” She stopped laughing rather suddenly. “Rosemary taught me everything I know. Via Jules, who had all the books in the first place. I would be a frustrated dolt without them.”

He nodded as if he knew this to be so, strangely, because it was not flattering to Vera and he had not meant to do it. Then he turned to the press. “It's beautiful.” He glanced at Vera in a way that suggested he was talking about her and not the press. “It's like William Morris's.”

“Yes. Didn't I say so . . .?”

“Oh yes, you, it's—yes. Have you read
News from Nowhere
?”

“No.”

“Well it's a good novel if you ever have some time on your hands,” he said, a little combatively. Did he want to replace Rosemary and Jules as her tutor? He seemed so absurd to himself that for a second he thought he might jump up and run away.

Then she was hanging in his arms and crying and they were kissing ferociously; she smelled of tobacco and tasted of salt and as they moved around the press to the bed he saw a white ashtray full of crushed and burned butts, black sprinkles of tobacco, blacker smears of tar. He became ravenous, ravening, for other deeper riper smells and slicker textures.

Afterward he accepted a drink of whiskey. He had drunk before, but not much, had never been drunk, a little wine at table that he had to admit enlivened him rather ominously—but never drunk. Drunkards were unknown in the family and avoided publicly. It went down hard but flowed smoothly into every vein and artery of his body and at once both warmed and cooled him so that he felt satisfied and lustful, depraved and magnificent, languorous and on fire, all at once. He fumbled wanly with a cigarette and came to think that he had been wrong about alcohol and tobacco. All he needed now was a firearm—which of course were not proscribed but only easy to lay his hands on up at the ranch. Vera gave him another drink and then put the bottle out of his comically flailing reach, telling him sternly that further drinks would place his erection in jeopardy. He laughed with derisive abandon at the thought of impotence.

Everything that had happened to him had happened long ago and far away.

There was in fact a revolver beneath the bed but Vera kept this information to herself. In the exhausted peace that followed what seemed like a never-ending cycle of dazed orgasm and reawakened lust, in stinking
darkness of the little room, in the quiet glugging of whiskey from the bottle and smacking of lips, he felt he had come to an earthy and practical understanding of everything he hadn't been taught in school, in books, sermons, talks with Father, Mother, Alexander, Andrew. Plato and his
Statesman
were particularly, grievously, wrong. A hero was born to ascend the heights of human courage and ecstatic selflessness but just as surely to descend to the hell of vice, sin, squalor, and barbarism. Not to dwell there, nor strictly speaking to enjoy it, but to save good people and punish bad people. No, not even that: simply to know. It was so simple, and he glowed with gold and iron certainty of it. The lamp hissed and sputtered, the light evened and faded and died, and at some point he understood Vera had risen to shut and lock the door. Then she was beside him again and he slept for what seemed like years, dreaming of many small groups of people, all of whom seemed to know and respect him, even to look to him for guidance, as they made a serious but pleasant journey, on foot, through a hilly forest. The sound of their footsteps was somehow the most remarkable feature of the dream. Then an electric light was turned on and blinded him. He had not known there was an electric light in the room, and he was unable to think beyond the strangeness of it, certain only that he was no longer dreaming.

It was a light for corpses, not living people.

In the dream he felt blind and possibly dead. He became frightened. He turned his head and saw Warren Farnsworth staring at him from the doorway. The look on Farnsworth's face was one of inscrutable grievance and Charles's immediate reaction was to be annoyed. That was when he knew he was awake. It was, however annoying on the surface, a look he would never forget. When had he stood up? Was he naked? Farnsworth swung a blackjack high and hard into his temple, and he went down.

If he thought that Jules would be a source of support as well as enlightenment in this new situation, he was made immediately to understand otherwise. He sat on the edge of the little bed and Jules stood over him, his finger leveled
angrily at Charles's face. This finger hovered just this side of focus and it irritated him a great deal. Jules meanwhile was trying not to shout, trying not to sputter. He had no trouble with what Farnsworth had done! He would have done the same thing in his place! A woman Charles did not know, who was wiping the blood from Vera's face with a rag and hot water, looked up at this. She looked angry or disgusted or defiant, and yet said nothing, returning carefully to Vera's brow, which was split open. It was Charles, Jules said, still not quite shouting, thrusting the finger even nearer, that he had all the trouble with. He did not know what the fuck Charles was doing there. Vera, with difficulty around the rag, said that he was there because she had invited him. Jules had to wonder then what the fuck she was doing there as well. Vera stared at him, aghast, around the woman's hands and the bloody cloth.