The Daredevils (7 page)

Charles breathed evenly and slowly though he could feel his heart pounding in his fingertips and teeth, and he smiled faintly as these visions appeared and disappeared before and below him. The feverish light did indeed seem to determine the quality of life, as he had always suspected. He had read, in an account of the Indian wars, that one great and defeated chief had weighed his options and declared that heaven was no place for a man and he wanted nothing to do with it—and yet his place, Charles thought, was so clearly here on the border of heaven and hell that he could not help but feel some relief at the sight of it.

An actress he hoped might prove suitable for the big roles sat wrapped in mummy-like winding sheets approximately in the center of the little theater, under its chandelier, which hung from the underside of a shallow dome painted with peacocks, owls, a buck deer and doe, vines with berries and flowers, and a wizard with a flask out of which streamed a banner with the words
eamus quesitum quattuor elementorum naturas
.

Her name was Vera.

Vera K., born of Russian parents in Muscatine, Iowa, where she had worked in a button factory.

Muscatine was the Button Capital of the World.

He picked up a sheaf of papers from the seat next to him, riffled through them until he found the page he was looking for, then read it aloud but not loudly, looking down at her. She probably couldn't hear him, but would she turn round, look up?

“What is for you the greatest unhappiness?”

“I sometimes, too often, think I am no longer competent to live in the world.”

“In what place would you like to live?”

“The world.”

“What is your ideal of earthly happiness?”

“Forgoing happiness.”

“For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence?”

“I'm not sure what you mean by ‘fault.'”

“What is your principal fault?”

“Ah: my recurring inability to believe I can live in the world.”

“What would you like to be?”

“Oh! What all the young women have said to you goes double for me: the star of your shows!”

“What is your favorite quality in a man?”

“A fine critical apparatus focused on whether or not I am kidding.”

“What is your favorite quality in a woman?”

“A fine critical apparatus focused on whether or not I am kidding.”

“What is your favorite occupation?”

“Acting truly.”

“What is your present state of mind?”

“A nearly overwhelming feeling of joy that I can live in the world after all.”

Vera, alone in all of histrionic San Francisco, had been worthy of the Polite Parlor Questionnaire. In her presence, as she answered the questions slowly and eloquently, he had not been able to feel like anything but a prince in a fairy tale.

He stared down at her intensely, imagining taking her sheet off and finding her naked beneath it, moving his hands over her neck and shoulders and breasts, kissing her deeply but languidly—and falling again under the spell of imagination, believing for a moment that he could cause the seduction to happen simply by staring down at the woman with his remorseless will.

It had happened before, and more than once.

Of course he would hold and kiss her in coming rehearsal many times, but the emptiness of those experiences would confound her completely—he would see it in her big glistening brown eyes—and throw so profoundly the question of the nature of pleasure into terrible doubt, that he would be forced to refuse to acknowledge those embraces as in any way representative of what he hoped to accomplish. He supposed that he was compensatorily cold to her. And the nature of what he “hoped to accomplish” was decaying swiftly too, anyway, after some ridiculous failures in New York that winter—from what had seemed at first simply a case of ceasing to neglect the pursuit and seduction of women, as he certainly had, in favor of the cultivation of artistic vision, to a struggle with physical impotence, the staving off of something pathological.

He was quite sure she could not act, and had cast her—the others as well—precisely because he was sure she could not act. The skills usually acknowledged as essential to or at least encouraging of dramatic presence, when they had been displayed for him, to him, for his approval and pleasure, only made him uneasy. It was like he had said to Little Joe ten years earlier: he would rather watch the stagehands. If such displays went on too long, they began to fray his nerves. That she made him feel like a prince had nothing to do with anything.

Because one of the plays they were rehearsing was
Romeo and Juliet
(the other two were August Strindberg's
The Spook Sonata
and Henry James's
The American
), swordplay had broken out on the stage and in the auditorium. Swordplay often broke out if Charles was even momentarily absent, because actors were like children and directors were like forbidding fathers. Most of the group of fifteen were the legendary friends or friends of friends from Berkeley, if he could be said to have friends, but there was no mistaking it: a father and his children.

With the probable exception of Vera in her grave shroud.

Two duels were taking place, one in exaggeratedly slow motion that seemed Oriental in its precision, the other fast and awkward and accompanied by a great deal of laughter, yelps of pain, and shouted apologies. Five other young men were trying to sort out the fundamental moves of a brawl, made uneasy by Charles's suggestion via Sir Edwin Carmichael that choreography was the antithesis of violence, that a fight was ugly and embarrassing, and that all attempts to make it a pleasing dance must be in vain. The different son of a different plumber and one of his older brothers were clacking lengths of doweling with each other. Charles, to no one's surprise, had been schooled in fencing since he was old enough to wave a small toy sword, and was in fact the ensemble's Romeo, but was concerned that hour with
The American
and so was armed only with monocle and walking stick. As he watched and breathed and was content—for a moment—to feel the blood pulsing in his extremities, over the din of mock-fighting and outside the theater, he thought he heard more firecrackers going off.

There was a release of light somewhere over his shoulder and a withdrawal of it and a faint clap, followed by the shushing of heavy fabric over the carpeting of the balcony's center aisle; he could just barely hear it over the voices below. Then came the cloud of smell: stale tobacco and fresh burning leaf, alcohol on the breath and in the cloth, some kind of ammoniac solution, and an alarmingly bracing body odor. This was the theater's artist in residence, Sir Edwin Carmichael. He was visiting from Verona, where he had his own theater and school of design, named after its principal funder, Lord Howard de Walden. He had acted with Henry Irving and designed sets for Konstantin Stanislavski. He had designed and directed a production of
Dido and Aeneas
that had almost single-handedly revived interest in the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell—which was where Mother had come in. The man wrapped his cloak more tightly around his frail and trembling body, trapping the stench of himself but allowing the fabric to send eddies and gusts from its folds. He was an artist's artist and his black, bloodshot eyes were in no way diminished by the shadow of his great slouch hat. He was shivering in the wretched cold of the peninsula's
summer, but all he could think to say to his young hero was that his dinner disagreed with him; he was digesting it poorly—belly inflated like a medicine ball and shooting fireworks at the back of his throat—and could not think straight. His breath was unbearably laden with garlic and deeper evidence of the indigestion, and Charles leaned away. That Sir Edwin could not think straight, and yet was up to admitting it, this was a confusing sign in his experience: too much steam building up in a kind of self-conscious engine already starting to shake and rattle its bolts. Sir Edwin claimed to be a futurist, but Charles was hard pressed to understand what such an identity entailed. More specifically, but even less clearly, he was a vorticist—that was to say, not Italian, but something “like a futurist” from “the vortex of London.” He preferred “found sound” to composed and performed music—but was an acknowledged influence of the Second Viennese School—and was very much in favor of the war: war was “the one great art,” and the only way civilization had to remove the more “festering and stinking of humankind's many gangrenous limbs.”

Charles and Sir Edwin watched the rehearsal, its director absent but lurking, disintegrate: acrobatic silliness, exaggerated, mask-like mimicry of primary emotional states in ridiculous contexts, and the kind of mincing mock-violence that had actors chasing each other around tables with very small steps, furiously waving their arms and puffing their cheeks out, not knowing what to do once, for instance, one character succeeded in getting his hands around the neck of another character, whom he ostensibly wished to throttle to death. The plumber's sons broke off their swordplay, and Sir Edwin suggested to Charles that even the children found it all unbearably childish.

“I would rather you tried, all of you, really tried to hurt each other. This waggling of fingers and chasing someone whom you clearly do not want to catch—it's appalling! Don't you think so, Charles? I mean, really. It's insulting unless your audience are children eating birthday cake. You know how to use a sword.” It was true that he was able to fence dramatically well; and while fencers perforce show each other the slenderest profile, Charles often
found it possible to drop the point of his foil to the floor and advance, spine straight and shoulders square, one, two, even three long arrogant strides directly into his opponent's range. “Go down there,” commanded Sir Edwin, “and shove it up someone's arse, why don't you.”

“My position, Sir Edwin, is that somersaults and comic faces are delightful.”

“They make me want to vomit.”

“The thought of attempting to wound someone—”

“Yes, but that's just it! The thought of the attempt—precisely!”

“—to wound a brother or a sister is abominable, maestro.”

“Stop and think a moment while your fluttering little heart becomes a piece of pumping meat again.”

“I find it directly opposed to the nature of the theatrical enterprise.”

“That is not only sentimental horseshit but the foundation of everything that is infantile in the arts.”

“Maestro, this may in fact not be a heaven fit for heroes, but I find I do not much care. I wish only to examine the nature of the real via actions of obscure delight.” Charles had done a great deal of debating in the course of his superb education—and was uncomfortably aware that he did not actually know how he felt. He was uncomfortable as well with his facility in the face of such an absence or ignorance.

“You're simply naïve,” said Sir Edwin, apparently able to read minds.

“Maybe I am,” Charles admitted.

“You are wrong.”

“Maybe I am.”

“You could not be more wrong. That actors should feel delight at behavior so remote from actuality, from consequentiality, from truth, is almost unforgivably wrong. The urge to wound, to really and truly wound, is the only force that can actually animate lifeless words and weary gestures—the only force, at least, that an audience will sit still for.”

“They seem to be willing to sit through just about anything.” Charles surprised himself with this remark: Was it a truer self at last beginning to emerge?

“Do not confuse desire with pleasure.” Edwin spoke with muted passion.

“I must beg your pardon, maestro. Your meaning is obscure.”

Both of them were acting, not altogether happily, but evidently unwilling or unable to leave off, to break into sincerity and earnestness.

“Do not confuse
desire,
I tell you,
with pleasure
.” It was possible Sir Edwin was frustrated, annoyed. His vehemence was pitched uncertainly. He was either in the grip of something, or pretending to be. As he was a drunkard, it would never be certain.

“Having still no actionable clue as to what you are talking about, I will nevertheless promise you that if it is ever within the scope of my immature intellect to distinguish the two, I will do so. I will attempt to do so, at any rate—for no other reason than that you have said so with such clear strength of feeling.”

“
Goddamn you
.” Suddenly Sir Edwin was no longer acting. It was a gift.

“Goddamn me.”

“Goddamn you.”

“All right then,” Charles said, still game, but inwardly beginning to shy. “Goddamn me.”

Sir Edwin turned away in disgust and Charles saw that though he had not exactly missed the man's inscrutable and alcoholic signs and crucial but murky inflections, he had, once again, ignored them, and was now, consequently, imperiled. Sir Edwin was panting with stifled rage.

“I tell you to go down there and act like a man, to grab those infants by the scruffs of their necks and shake them until it's clear they are no longer in their playpens—and you simper like the rich parlor fucking smart ass that you incontrovertibly are and will always be. I tell you it's nauseating and you become a pale imitation of Oscar Wilde. I CAN'T STAND IT ANYMORE!” The last was a shriek and he was now very nearly in tears. “Over and over and over again—do you not, do you
really not,
are you
incapable,
completely FUCKING INCAPABLE of understanding what we are struggling against? Conformation to the etiquette of the stage, to its infantile rules and bourgeois complacencies—it's like fucking
a corpse. It's loathsome. Or it would be if it were real. It is merely ridiculous, merely embarrassing.”

Sir Edwin sat down and pulled his cloak around him so that not even his eyes could be seen. He hunched forward and appeared to be weeping, but made no sound. After a short while, he seemed to relax. He sat back and the cloak fell away from his face. He breathed deeply and evenly.