A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (2 page)

F. Scott Fitzgerald schlepped here . . .

There was a break in the second act where Peter got a chance to go outside for a breath of air—not
fresh
air, outside air. Just after the scene where he has to make a quick cross from stage left. As “Penny” ends her patter song about all the men she's had in her life he breaks in with a line—something about the mileage on a used car—that usually got the house laughing. Tonight it just nose-dived into the orchestra pit. Not a chuckle, not even a cough. An audience is like that: a thing unto itself—a single creature with a mind of its own. Like a beehive.

So when his chance came Peter Abbott wasted no time in getting to the stage door and out on the steps to take a few deliberate, deep breaths—closing his eyes and doing what you're supposed to do: the relaxation response, or whatever it's called. It was one of those hot midsummer nights and with Ed's cigarette sticking out from under his fake mustache—Ed played Penelope's recently jilted lover—and the diesel fumes from the tour buses lined up along Kellogg waiting for the show to end, he was beginning to wonder whether the deep breathing was doing more harm than good.

The air started to churn all of a sudden and the dense sky out over the state capitol building started flashing to the steady rumble of thunder off beyond the horizon. Then the rain—huge drops of it exploding on the cars in the parking lot. The hiss of traffic over the wet pavement was like crashing cymbals.

“‘The Mother Nature Show'—that's what I tell the kids—‘Let's go outside and watch the Mother Nature Show,'” one of the tour bus drivers was saying above the racket, the sudden storm and the shelter of the stage door entrance confederating them all against a common enemy. He was telling anyone who cared to listen how he entertained his kids on a stormy night like this—he liked to take them out on the porch and show them the lightning. “I know all about lightning. It makes your hair stand on end—not many people know that; it's the
current
—the electrons, whatever, flowing up, not down. If you're out on a golf course, say, and you start to feel your hair stand on end, you're gonna get hit.”

One of the dressers came out then, saying she just heard over the radio about a tornado warning for the Twin Cities area, that one or two had touched down already out near
St. Cloud. The announcer had made it plain that it wasn't a “watch” but a “warning,” which meant they should all take cover. She stood there for a second or two blowing her new smoke out into the rain along with Ed's and now the bus
driver's
—he had opened his coat and was lighting the cigarette in the cup of it. It was as if all of them were trying to ward off this new threat with an old one they understood. Lung cancer.

Peter couldn't figure out smoking. He'd tried it once when he was twelve or thirteen, somewhere round there—a cigarette he'd taken out of his aunt's purse. The smell of them in the package was like coffee or smoked meat—that kind of appeal. But setting fire to it destroyed all that. And sucking in the smoke just burned his throat and made him want to throw up.

The bus driver pointed to where he lived on the other side of the river, where all the thunder and lightning was
happening
—flashbulbs at a rock concert—just as the siren began to wail, the air-raid siren that was supposed to be a tornado alert telling everyone to find a solid basement wall away from plate glass windows. But it was like car alarms going off—a nuisance. At best, just another part of the “Mother Nature Show.”

They all went back in for the rest of the second act and when he came outside again at the end of the show Peter had forgotten all about tornadoes. Andrew, the guy who played “Howard,” had tripped over something and pulled a hamstring; a missed lighting cue had thrown off the stagehands bringing down a fly. It occurred to Peter that it would have been a good night for a tornado, looking back on it now.
Deus ex machina.
It probably would have saved tonight's perfor
mance; every performance. A show about Howard Hughes and the
Spruce Goose
needed a tornado in there somewhere.

Two performances left to go and they'd be out of there. A three-week hiatus and then on to Denver. Peter wondered if they would have gotten paid for a performance interrupted by a tornado, whether the fine print of his contract made allowances for such things.

The rain had stopped and the audience crowd filing along the street seemed mystified by the cool air. The women clutched at their programs and hunched their shoulders under suit jackets; their men in shirtsleeves whistled to themselves and refused to be cold. Every now and then Peter, dressed up as himself—after a Sunday matinee, say—would walk through the crowd on purpose and eavesdrop on what they had to say about the show; he wondered sometimes whether all that applause and the standing ovations were part of the act too, something people thought they were expected to do. The crowd always had a sweet smell about it—a
conflation
of best clothes and aftershave; good grooming and new
leather
—that always reminded him of his grandmother, the times she used to take him to the theater when he was a kid.

Back when the voices were still with him. It suddenly occurred to him how he took the silence for granted now. Over the years Peter had learned to shut out the voices, smells, and images he picked up in crowds of strangers—like now, walking along the sidewalk against the flow with people brushing past him. He had grown another set of eyelids, somehow—if that was the word for it; he couldn't think of a better one—eyelids for his internal eyes, ears, and nose. And he'd learned to keep his hands away from things he had no business touching.

Other cast members were coming out the door now: women
in leggings, baseball caps, and baggy shirts, the dancers with wet hair from the shower, dressed down next to the milling audience, which was the effect some of them were looking for.

One of the cars out in front of the stage door steps had that dark, luxurious, hired livery look about it. Muzak-bland, blue-black, neutral interior, definitely nothing hanging from the mirror, the engine running of course, and a guy standing beside the driver's side, nice double-breasted—young, no more than twenty-five, twenty-six. Not unusual in itself—to see a limo like this one. Most of the leads took cabs, but Sandra (the woman who played “Penny”) being who she was, or thought she was, insisted on a stretch; so her dogs had “room to breathe,” she said, after a long night in her dressing room.

Ed came out and slapped Peter on the back. Sandra was with him and as he flashed by he looked at Peter for a meaningful moment and raised his bushy gray eyebrows twice in quick succession. Ed with scrawny, mouthy Sandra. Her two little yappy dogs were nowhere to be seen. For a fleeting moment Peter pictured them swirling in a shaggy helix up into the sky on their way to Kansas. Part of the “Mother Nature Show.”

The driver opened the back door with a certain professional flourish. (It was the kind of thing actors were supposed to watch for and analyze and afterward mimic in front of a mirror.) He had it right down: a subtle but deferential
briskness
. But at the same time he didn't let go of his dignity; he held it high across his shoulders. Maybe he
was
an actor. A “
chauffeur
/actor” hoping one day to become an “actor/chauffeur.”

Peter was in for a less eventful night than Ed: a meeting with a couple of people from an outfit called Calliope. They'd
called a few days ago and arranged to meet him after the show at the St. Paul Grill in the hotel near the theater. They wanted to talk to him about a job. A job that had nothing to do with show business, the man on the line had said; and after a night like the one he'd just had Peter was ready for something like that.

He suddenly realized how little he had to show for the ten years of his life he'd spent trying to make a go of it as an actor: a few spots on second-rate TV dramas and game shows; a clutch of demeaning commercials; the sporadic and frenetic hare of an income that would never catch up to the relentless tortoise pace of his day-to-day expenses. The tortoise would win in the end, just like in the old fable.

He walked around to the front of the Ordway Theater and crossed the street into Rice Park. It wasn't much of a park really, a patch of trees and grass the size of a city block with a fountain in the middle and a few park benches; and it occurred to him that if he were to be mugged as he made his way to the St. Paul Hotel his assailant would probably piss himself laughing when he looked in his wallet—the twenty bucks in fives and ones; his credit-depleted MasterCard; and tucked behind his driver's license, a crumpled clipping from
The New York Times
: “Peter Abbott provided us with a more than passable ‘Mercutio,' even though his talents would better lend themselves . . .” etc.

He was directed to a booth in the corner, and at first glance the people he was supposed to meet looked like adoring fans, a couple from the audience, people with money from one of those big houses up on Summit Avenue, where F. Scott Fitzgerald had lived for a while. He noticed the woman first—she
was young, attractive, and wearing a red dress—which made him think of his ex-girlfriend; she had been wearing a dress very much like it the last night they had been together. A “celebration,” she had called it—the night she had told him it was over—a celebration of what, he still had no idea. Something about the future, he remembered her saying, and some shit about how it was going to open doors for him instead of lock them tight.

Her companion, an older man with short gray hair and the beginnings of a wattled neck, stood up as Peter approached and said, “This is Ms. Franklin and my name's Thornquist. Elijah Thornquist. Most people call me ‘Eli,' by the way.” He extended his hand and Peter shook it. Ms. Franklin did that little hop thing women do as she slid over to make room for him.

“Well, it's good to meet you at last, Mr. Abbott,” Thornquist said. “I really enjoyed the show. I've never been to one of these mega-musicals before and I must say I was quite
impressed
—your character, if you don't mind me saying so, was a little over the top—”

“Mr. Abbott was only doing his job, Eli—‘Peter.' Can I call you Peter?” Ms. Franklin turned in her seat to look straight at him. In the overhead light he could see a glint of scalp between the cornrows of her braided hair. There was a tiny cultured pearl in each of her earlobes.

“Pete,” he said looking down at her hands; she had the program from the show in front of her. It was open at the page with his bio on it. She—or maybe Thornquist—had underlined some of the text.

“‘Pete,' then. We'll call you Pete.” Her chin came up as she said it, making it sound like the moss, peat moss, the way the
“t”-sound came out. It made him think of the Irish—how all the ends of their words came out finished, sharp edged. Or it could have been just the notion of peat. Bogs and peat fires in stone cottages that overlooked the crashing Irish Sea; a glass of tepid Guinness in a smoky Dublin pub.

They made small talk about the show: the stuff people always asked about—the size of the cast, what “Penny” was really like. Thornquist was curious about the special effects, how they got the
Spruce Goose
to look as if it were really flying.

The waitress brought them their drinks. Ms. Franklin had ordered a martini with something in it—cranberry juice maybe—that made it go with her dress. Peter's beer matched the dark wood paneling. Thornquist was still waiting for his decaffeinated coffee.

“It's the weekend for you now, isn't it, Mr. Abbott?” Thornquist said, taking a small notebook from his breast pocket. “A ‘dark day,' isn't that what you call it? When you get a whole day off?” He placed it on the table where his coffee cup should have been.

“No, not this week. Two shows tomorrow and that's it for St. Paul.”

“Well, when you're free we'd like to fly you out of here if you don't mind. Someplace quiet. Warm.” He said this as if Minnesota in the middle of July wasn't warm enough. “That's if you like what we have to offer you of course.”

. . .
fly you out of here;
that was probably supposed to impress him. Peter was sick of flying. He was planning to take Ed's new Saab to Denver for him. He was looking forward to a leisurely drive along back roads between cheap motels.

“Something about a job, you said on the phone.”

“Yes, a job. A very good one. Starting—” He actually
looked at his watch. “Immediately.” There was a slow, tight-jawed drawl to his voice, a sort of a Boston, William F. Buckley thing that in a younger man might have marked him as gay. “We're putting together a team of people much like
yourself
—a team of
sensitives,
for want of a better word—psychics, I guess, clairvoyants—we have a dowser or two on the short list, I think—”

“Are you sure you've got the right person? Sounds like you're putting together some kind of a—circus act.” He was tired all of a sudden; he wanted nothing more than to get home, kick off his shoes, and fall asleep under the blare of marginal television.

“Maybe we should start at the beginning,” Ms. Franklin said, giving Eli a look that said
Let me give it a shot.
Her voice was an alto milk shake. “Calliope's main focus is private investigation. We work for multinationals—mining interests, insurance cases, bank fraud—things like that. We deal in information, basically. The way we go about it is a little
unorthodox
but—”

Eli shifted in his seat and folded his arms, noisily breaking in with “We're sort of the Pinkerton's of the twenty-first century, if you know what I mean.” His eyebrows went up after that one, then the little smile, as if he'd studied tapes of
Firing Line
till he got it just right.