Celebrity Chekhov (7 page)

Chapter 14
A Classical Student

B
EFORE SETTING OFF FOR HER AUDITION
, L
INDSAY
L
OHAN KISSED
all the movie posters. Her stomach felt as though it were upside down; there was a chill at her heart, while the heart itself throbbed and stood still with terror before the unknown. What would she get that day? An offer? A callback? Six times she went to her mother for her blessing, and, as she went out, asked her sister to pray for her. On the way to the audition she gave a homeless man five dollars, in the hope that the five dollars would atone for her ignorance, and that she would not forget her lines or what her character was feeling.

She came back from the audition late, between four and five. She came in and noiselessly lay down on her bed. Her freckled face was pale and looked even thinner than usual. There were dark lines beneath her eyes.

“Well, how was it? What did they think? Was the director there?” asked her mother, Dina, going to her bedside.

Lindsay blinked, twisted her mouth, and burst into tears. Her mother turned pale, let her mouth fall open, and clasped her hands. The magazine she was reading dropped to the floor.

“What are you crying for? You've failed, then?” her mother asked.

“They said it was fine and that they'd be in touch, but I know what that means.”

“I knew this would happen! I had a dream last night,” said her mother. “God! How is it you can't get real roles? What is the reason? What kind of movie was this again?”

“A teen comedy based on Shakespeare. I knew the lines perfect, but when they asked me to explain them, I froze up. I was reading from the scene where I come out of my bedroom in the middle of the night, and I don't feel well because of this murder I did, I mean my character of course, and there's a doctor standing nearby. I thought I would try something different, and go to the doctor for help—not the real doctor, but the doctor in the play—but it turns out my character is sleepwalking and I'm not supposed to know, she's not supposed to know, that the doctor is even there. I think they thought I didn't understand. I am miserable. I was working on this all week.”

“It's not you who should be miserable, but me. I'm miserable. I've finally had enough. This is the last straw. I have been taking you to auditions since you were a little girl. I've broken my back for you. This is a role that should be a breeze to get. Why can't you just try harder?”

“I . . . I am trying as hard as I know. I'm up until three or four every night practicing. You've seen it yourself.”

“I prayed to God to take me, but He leaves me here to suffer from you. Other people have children like everyone else. I get pleasure and comfort from your sister but none from you. I'd beat you, but where am I to find the strength? Mother of God, where am I to find the strength?”

The mother hid her face in the folds of her blouse and broke into sobs. Lindsay wriggled with anguish and pressed her forehead against the wall. Lindsay's sister Ali came into the room.

“So that's how it is. Just what I expected,” Ali said, at once guessing what was wrong, turning pale. “I've been depressed all afternoon, while you were out at the audition. There's trouble coming, I thought, and here it is.”

“No comfort! Where can I find the strength? God damn it.”

“Why are you swearing at her?” cried the sister, turning upon the mother. “It's not her fault! It's your fault! You are to blame! Why did you start taking her to auditions? You want to be rich? You're rich. It's not like you're going to turn into an aristocrat. You should have sent her into business, or made her work for a real company. Sure, she had some success, but she'll drop out of view for long stretches in years to come. And you are wearing yourself out, and wearing her out! She is thin. She coughs constantly. Just look at her!”

“No, Ali, no! I haven't beaten her enough! She ought to have been beaten, that's what it is!” The mother shook her fist at her daughters. “You want a flogging, but I haven't the strength. They told me years ago when she was little, ‘Whip her, whip her!' I didn't heed them, and now I am suffering for it. You wait a bit! I'll flay you! Wait a bit.”

Dina shook her fist, and went weeping into the other room, where her houseguest was sitting. The houseguest, Jesse James, was sitting at a table, reading Shakespeare, of all things. Jesse James was a man of intelligence and education, though he sometimes concealed it. When he was alone, he spoke through his nose, and washed with a soap that made everyone in the house sneeze. He was forever on the lookout for women of refined education.

“My good friend,” began Dina, dissolving into tears. “If you would have the generosity to thrash my girl for me. Do me the favor! She failed another audition, that one! Would you believe it? A failure, again. I can't punish her, through the weakness of my ill health. Thrash her for me, if you would be so considerate! Have regard for a sick woman!”

Jesse James frowned and heaved a deep sigh. He thought a little, drummed on the table with his fingers, and, sighing once more, went to Lindsay.

“You are being encouraged,” he began, “being given a great opportunity, you revolting young person! Why have you done this?” He talked for a long time, made a speech. He alluded to science, to light, to darkness, to democracy.

When he had finished his speech, he took off his belt and took Lindsay by the hand.

“It's the only way to deal with you,” he said. Lindsay knelt down submissively and thrust her head between the houseguest's knees. Her prominent pink ears moved up and down against his new trousers, which had brown stripes on the outer seams.

Lindsay did not utter a single sound. At the family council in the evening, it was decided to send her into business.

Chapter 15
Terror

M
ICHAEL
D
OUGLAS ACTED FOR YEARS, BUT AT SOME POINT IN
his sixties retired to run a series of coffee shops: not just to own them and to oversee them, but to work in them. This endeavor was fairly successful, and yet it always seemed to me that he was not in his proper place, and that he would do well to go back to Hollywood. When tired, fingers stained, smelling of coffee, he waved to me from behind the counter, and then later on the street seemed almost entranced by his own fatigue, I saw him not as a businessman or a barista, but only as a worried and exhausted man, and it was clear to me that he did not really care for coffee, but that all he wanted was for the day to be over.

I liked to be with him, and I used to stay in the shops as long as I could. I liked the big one on Maple Street, and the small one on Oak, and the one that shared space with a bookstore—and I liked his philosophy, which was clear, though rather spiritless and rhetorical. I suppose I was fond of him on his own account, though I can't say that for certain. He was an intelligent, kindhearted, genuine man, and not a bore, but I remember that when he confided to me his most treasured secrets and spoke of our relation to each other as friendship, it disturbed me, and I was conscious of an awkwardness. In his affection for me there was something inappropriate, tiresome, and I should have greatly preferred commonplace friendly relations.

The fact is that I was extremely attracted to his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones. I was not in love with her, but I was attracted by her face, her eyes, her voice, her walk. I missed her when I did not see her for a long time, and my imagination pictured no one at that time so eagerly as that young, beautiful, elegant woman. I had no definite designs in regard to her, and did not dream of anything of the sort, yet for some reason, whenever we were left alone, I remembered that her husband looked upon me as his friend, and I felt awkward. When she came to talk to me about Arabica beans or told me something interesting, I listened with pleasure, and yet at the same time for some reason the reflection that she loved her husband, that he was my friend, and that she herself looked upon me as his friend, intruded. My spirits flagged and I became listless, awkward, and dull. She noticed this change and would usually say:

“You are dull without Michael. We should go get him.”

And when Michael Douglas came in, she would say:

“Well, here is your friend now. Aren't you happy?”

So passed a year and a half.

It somehow happened one July Sunday that Michael Douglas and I, having nothing better to do, drove out about twenty minutes to a bakery that was making what people insisted were the best muffins in the world. They were in fact wonderful, and we stayed and tried their other baked goods as well, and when the sun set the evening came on—the evening which I shall probably never forget in my life.

After sampling cranberry and blueberry and chocolate-spice muffins, we realized it was nearly dinnertime. We had left the car, Michael Douglas's car, at a body shop for an extremely minor repair, and so we walked a short distance to a diner to get a sandwich while we waited. A few tables away we saw someone we both knew, a man named Gary Busey. He watched us carefully. Gary Busey had worked for me at my electronics store, though I had fired him for drinking, and after that he had worked for Michael Douglas, and been fired for the same reason. Gary Busey was dissolute, in look and in character. He had been a film star, and so had belonged to the privileged class; but however carefully I scrutinized his exhausted, respectful, and always perspiring face, his red beard now turning gray, his pitifully torn jacket and his red shirt, I could not discover in him the faintest trace of anything we associate with privilege. He had bright eyes and a bright smile that made as little sense as the rest of him.

Gary Busey spoke of himself as a man of education, and used to say that he had been in graduate school but had not finished his studies there, as he was expelled for smoking; then he had sung in a band and lived for two years in a monastery, from which he was also expelled, but this time not for smoking but for his weakness. He had walked all over two states, had been effectively banished from both the movie industry and the music industry. At last, being stranded in our state, he had served as a night watchman, as a groundskeeper at a park, as a manager at a dog kennel, had married a cook who was a widow and rather a loose character, and had so hopelessly sunk into a menial position, and grown so used to filth and dirt, that he even spoke of his privileged origin with a certain skepticism, the way you'd speculate about a mythological beast.

At the time I am describing, he was hanging about without a job, calling himself an independent contractor. His wife had disappeared months before with one of her coworkers from the restaurant.

From the diner we went to the park and sat on a bench, waiting for the car to be ready. Gary Busey had followed us out of the diner; he stood a little way off and put his hand in front of his mouth in order to cough in it respectfully if need be. By now it was dark; there was a strong smell of evening dampness, and the moon was on the point of rising. There were only two clouds in the clear starry sky exactly over our heads: one big one and one smaller; alone in the sky they were racing after one another like mother and child.

“What a glorious day!” said Michael Douglas.

“In the extreme,” Gary Busey said, and he coughed respectfully into his hand. “How was it, Michael Douglas, you thought to visit these parts?” he added in an ingratiating voice, evidently anxious to get up a conversation.

Michael Douglas made no answer. Gary Busey heaved a deep sigh and said softly, not looking at us: “I suffer solely through a cause to which I must answer only to my Lord. No doubt about it, I am a hopeless and incompetent man; but believe me, I am hungry and worse off than a dog. Forgive me, Michael Douglas.”

Michael Douglas was not listening, but sat musing with his head propped on his fists. The park bordered on a river, and in the distance we could see the river as it left land behind, the water meadows on the near side of it, and the crimson glare of a campfire about which black figures were moving. And beyond the fire, farther away, there were other lights, another park much like the one in which we sat. There was singing there. On the river, and here and there on the meadows, a mist was rising. High narrow coils of mist, thick and white as milk, were trailing over the river, hiding the reflection of the stars. Every minute they changed their form, and it seemed as though some were embracing, others were bowing, others lifting up their heads as though they were praying. Probably they reminded Michael Douglas of ghosts and of the dead, for he turned to face me and asked with a mournful smile:

“Tell me, my dear fellow, why is it that when we want to tell some terrible, mysterious, and fantastic story, we draw our material not from life but from the world of ghosts and of the shadows beyond the grave?”

“We are frightened of what we don't understand.”

“And do you understand life? Tell me: do you understand life better than the world beyond the grave?”

Michael Douglas was sitting quite close to me, so that I felt his breath upon my cheek. In the evening twilight his face seemed paler than ever. His eyes were sad, truthful, and a little frightened, as though he were about to tell me something horrible. He looked into my eyes and went on:

“Our life and the life beyond the grave are equally incomprehensible and horrible. If anyone is afraid of ghosts, he ought to be afraid, too, of me, and of those lights and of the sky. If you think about it, all of that is no less fantastic and beyond our grasp than apparitions from the other world. Hamlet did not kill himself because he was afraid of the visions that might haunt his dreams after death. I like that famous soliloquy of his but it never touched my soul. I will confess to you as a friend that in moments of depression I have sometimes pictured to myself the hour of my death. I've invented thousands of the gloomiest visions, and I have succeeded in working myself up to an agonizing exaltation, to a state of nightmare, and I assure you, it didn't seem to me more terrible than reality.

“What I mean is, apparitions are terrible, but life is terrible, too. I don't understand life and I am afraid of it. I don't know; perhaps I am a morbid person. It seems to a sound, healthy man that he understands everything he sees and hears, but that seeming is lost to me, and from day to day I poison myself with terror. There is a disease, the fear of open spaces, but my disease is the fear of life. When I lie on the grass and watch a little beetle which was born yesterday and understands nothing, it seems to me that its life consists of nothing but fear, and in it I see myself.”

“What is it exactly you are frightened of?” I asked.

“Of everything. I am not by nature a profound thinker, and I take little interest in such questions as the life beyond the grave, the destiny of humanity, and, in fact, I am rarely carried away to the heights. What chiefly frightens me is the common routine of life from which none of us can escape. I am incapable of distinguishing what is true and what is false in my actions, and they worry me. I recognize that education and the conditions of life have imprisoned me in a narrow circle of falsity, that my whole life is nothing else than a daily effort to deceive myself and other people, and to avoid noticing it; and I am frightened at the thought that to the day of my death I shall not escape from this falsity. Today I do something and tomorrow I do not understand why I did it. I entered acting, did it for years, and one day felt it was separate from me. I began to work with coffee but feel that separating from me as well. I see that we know very little and so make mistakes every day. We are unjust, we slander one another and spoil each other's lives, we waste all our powers on trash which we do not need and which hinders us from living; and that frightens me, because I don't understand why and for whom it is necessary.

“I don't understand men, my dear fellow, and I am afraid of them. It frightens me to look at most people, and I don't know for what higher objects they are suffering and what they are living for. If life is an enjoyment, then they are unnecessary, superfluous; if the object and meaning of life is to be found in economic struggle and unending, hopeless ignorance, I can't understand for whom and what this torture is necessary. I understand no one and nothing. Kindly try to understand this specimen, for instance,” said Michael Douglas, pointing to Gary Busey. “Think of him!”

Noticing that we were looking at him, Gary Busey coughed deferentially into his fist and said:

“I was always a good worker and often a good man, but the great trouble has been spirits: those I have had to drink, those I have seen floating around me. If a poor fellow like me were shown consideration and given a place, I would do right by that generosity. My word's my bond.”

Gary Busey was speaking passionately, and a man walking by stopped to listen. Then his cell phone rang and he turned away to answer it. That gave Michael Douglas occasion to look at his watch.

“It's seven,” said Michael Douglas. “Time to get the car and go. Yes, my dear fellow,” he sighed, “if only you knew how afraid I am of my ordinary everyday thoughts, in which one would have thought there should be nothing dreadful. To prevent myself from thinking, I distract my mind with work and try to tire myself out that I may sleep sound at night. Children, a wife—all that seems ordinary with other people; but how that weighs upon me, my dear fellow!”

He rubbed his face with his hands, cleared his throat, and laughed.

“If I could only tell you how I have played the fool in my life!” he said. “They all tell me that I have a sweet wife, charming children, and that I am a good husband and father. They think I am very happy and envy me. But since it has come to that, I will tell you in secret: my happy family life is only a grievous misunderstanding, and I am afraid of it.” His pale face was distorted by a wry smile. He put his arm round my waist and went on in an undertone:

“You are my true friend; I believe in you and have a deep respect for you. Heaven gave us friendship that we may open our hearts and escape from the secrets that weigh upon us. Let me take advantage of your friendly feeling for me and tell you the whole truth.

“My home life, which seems to you so enchanting, is my chief misery and my chief terror. I got married in a strange and stupid way. I must tell you that I was madly in love with Catherine before I married her, and was courting her for two years. I asked her to marry me five times, and she refused me because she did not care for me in the least. The sixth, when burning with passion I crawled on my knees before her and implored her to take a beggar and marry me, she consented. What she said to me was: ‘I don't love you, but I will be true to you.' I accepted that condition with rapture. At the time I understood what that meant, but I swear to God I don't understand it now. ‘I don't love you, but I will be true to you.' What does that mean? It's a fog, a darkness.

“I love her now as intensely as I did the day we were married, while she, I believe, is as indifferent as ever, and I believe she is glad when I go away from home. I don't know for certain whether she cares for me or not—I don't know, I don't know; but, as you see, we live under the same roof, call each other ‘thou,' sleep together, have children, our property is in common. What does it mean, what does it mean? What is the object of it? And do you understand it at all, my dear fellow? It's cruel torture! Because I don't understand our relations, I hate, sometimes her, sometimes myself, sometimes both at once. Everything is in a tangle in my brain; I torment myself and grow stupid. And as though to spite me, she grows more beautiful every day, she is getting more wonderful. I fancy her hair is marvelous, and her smile is like no other woman's. I love her, and I know that my love is hopeless. Hopeless love for a woman by whom one has two children! Is that intelligible? And isn't it terrible? Isn't it more terrible than ghosts?”