Me and Orson Welles (12 page)

I was feeling more and more like an outlaw.

The bells rang for a fire drill, and the whole school shuffled outside to the sidewalk. I met up with Kate Rouilliard and her sunburned ankles.

“Richard, I'm sorry. I put you on the list. I forged the note about the proctologist. I thought that would be safe.”

“Thank you.”

“I don't know why they checked.”

“So much for my credit. I've got three detentions, and I can't possibly serve them. Kate, I
have
to get out of here today.”

“I can't forge another note.”

The bell ran to return to class.

“Kate,” I said, “remember you once told me that you wished there was something you could do for me?”

She frowned.

“I want you to call from that pay phone.” I pointed to the phone booth outside the school. “I want you to call right now and tell them you're my mother, and that I have to come home instantly. There's been a death in the family. My Aunt Minnie had a stroke. You're picking me up immediately.”

“Oh, Richard, I can't—”

“You said you wanted to do something for me.”

“I can't sound like your mother.”

“Yes, you can.”

“Richard, this is stupid.”

We borrowed one of those cheerleader megaphones from a girl who was passing by. (I thought it might disguise her voice a little.)

“Now you've just got to practice saying this,” I said.
“It's no use.”

 

I rolled along toward the city feeling like some old-salt commuter. (Kate's performance had worked perfectly. “Water off a duck's back,” she'd shrugged as she'd replaced the phone. “But don't ever ask me to do this again. We're
even.
”) I knew all the stops on the train; I knew how to sit on the aisle with my ukulele next to me so I could keep a double seat until the last possible moment; I knew the right staircase to descend at Newark and exactly how much time I needed to make the connection.

Rehearsal had been called for noon, and I used the hour I had to spare to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I somehow felt connected to the armor and the mummy cases and the old Greek vases.

I sat in a quiet corner eating a bag of peanuts and staring at those fragments of ceramic that once had mattered. I liked the soft sounds of the museum, too: the whispering, the footsteps on the stone stairs, the class trip of seven-year-olds giggling and shrieking somewhere just out of sight.

As I listened, I became aware of a girl wearing wire-rim glasses and a floral print vest, her hair pulled back in a George Washington, standing before one of the painted Greek vases. She held a mailing envelope in her hands and was reciting something under her breath. I suddenly remembered who she was.

“ ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' ” she said. “ ‘Thou foster-child of silence and slow time—' ”

I called out. “Gretta?”

She jumped, and she put her hand to her heart.

“I met you in the Gaiety,” I said. “You were playing Gershwin on the piano. We talked about—”

“Oh, right, the
actor
,” she said, nodding, and she gave me a genuinely warm smile.

“I'm even more of an actor now. I'm starring in—well, I'm sort of
standing
in the Orson Welles production of
Julius Caesar
.”

“I'm sure.”

“I can probably get you tickets if you want.”

“You're not kidding me?”

“I'm playing Lucius!”

“Are you serious?”

“Later. I'll tell you the whole thing. What were you reciting before?”

She glanced back at the Greek vase. “ . . . Keats.
Ode on a Grecian Urn,”
she said a little self-mockingly. “How can you
not
think of that poem when you're here?”

“You know, I was thinking the very same thing.”

“That's the odd feeling you get in museums, isn't it? The sense that time's stopped? Keats was obsessed with that—how certain objects defy time in some way. Like this vase. Civil wars and plagues and a thousand years, and still this vase is around. ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time.' God, isn't that wonderful? That an object which manages to make it through time is a
foster-child
? An
orphan.
To have survived, but without your parents, without your world.”

“Have you had lunch yet? I want to tell you the whole—”

She continued quoting: “ ‘When old age shall this generation waste / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man—' ”

“ ‘Cause I know this pretty good roast chicken place around the block. I mean, if you like chicken.”

“I shouldn't even be here,” she said, and she touched the small of her neck with her fingertips. “I'm supposed to be working on my play. I haven't done my three pages today. Or yesterday. According to my time table, I'm now 108 pages behind. But I finished a short story since I saw you last.” She held up the mailing envelope. “Finished it last night at 3:20 in the morning.”

The envelope was addressed to Harold Ross, the
New Yorker.

“I've got my self-addressed stamped envelope folded up inside,” she said. “I'm all ready for rejection.”

“What's it about?”

“This museum! It's called ‘Hungry Generations,' and it's just this sort of funny piece about this girl who goes to the museum whenever she's blue.”

“And what happens?”

She looked confused. “What do you mean ‘what happens'? Nothing happens. Why does something have to happen?”

“No, I meant—”

“The whole story is what I told you. It's a John Cheever kind of thing. You know, mostly
mood.
The girl goes to the museum feeling blue. She thinks about time and eternity, and then she feels a little better.”

“Oh . . . .”

She got defensive. “There's no
action
in it, if that's what you're looking for. God, can't you just be walking down the street, and suddenly you're happy—or you're having coffee somewhere and suddenly the distance to the door seems impossible? Seems the longest distance in the world? Hasn't that ever happened to you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, stories can be like that, too. Why does everything have to have a big
plot
? All that melodramatic garbage?”

“Hey, I'm on your side, Gretta,” I said. “I agree with you.”

“Now you've got me feeling that the story's stupid, and that they're going to reject it because there's no action in it.”

“I didn't say that.”

“Isn't this ridiculous? You give me one sour look, and now I feel the whole story's worthless. God, what's the matter with me?”

“Listen, Gretta, I'm sure it's a brilliant story. It's
exactly
the kind of story the
New Yorker
loves. You know,
subtle.
Delicate. And there's this girl I'm friends with at the Mercury Theatre—she knows practically
everybody
in New York. She told me she's got a friend in Ross's office. I bet, if I asked her, she'd get this friend to submit your story personally. “

“Would she do that for me?”

“If I asked.”

“You're serious; she'd do that? And you're really going to give it to her? You're not just going to throw it in the garbage can when you leave here—or steam it open and make fun of me?”

“You're nuts.” I took her envelope. “I want to help you. Look, do you want to get some roast chicken or not?”

“You know, I came here because I thought these urns would be lucky. I'm
so
stupid. I wanted to touch the envelope on one of these urns. I really thought it would help me get the story accepted. God, they should just lock me up.”

“If you believe in it, then let's do it!” I said, and I ran under the velvet rope and smacked the envelope against a large Greek vase.

“Hey!” called the voice of a guard.

I laughed, grabbed Gretta's hand, and we ran down a staircase and out the entrance, practically falling down the stone steps, and out into the sunshine.

She looked around and said, “Wouldn't this make a great scene in a story?”

 

She told me about the play she was working on, I gave her the shorthand history of the Mercury Theatre, and it was one of those breezy casual mornings, in the company of a girl, that make just about everything seem possible.

I promised her tickets for the show as soon as I could get them.

She was reluctant to give me her phone number, and I didn't push it.

It was ten to twelve. I said, “Let's meet again, O.K.?”

I thought: Maybe it's true. Maybe if you're just yourself, then you don't have to try so hard. Maybe the loves and friends and miracles just come blowing your way.

At the Mercury, Welles was still working on the Cinna-the-poet scene. “I'm going to stage it like a movie,” he said. “Like one of those German horror movies.” And that theatre was
dark
. He'd extinguished every light in the place including the exit signs, and he'd lit one tiny bulb flush along the blood-colored brick wall—just a smear of light picking out the irregularities in the stone. The stage looked like an alleyway now, the ghost of some security light filtering down through a closed-up factory.

Lloyd entered in a shabby black coat and tie, completely back-lit—you saw only his silhouette, and you could barely make out a sheaf of white papers in his hand.

Then, one at a time, the faces appeared. The really scary part was that you couldn't see anything clearly—just the shoulders and the hats, the occasional pale smudge of a sweaty face.

Epstein, at the Hammond organ, held a menacing low note rumbling under the scene. It got your heart beating faster.

Lloyd spun around now with increasing desperation, searching for a way out of the net, and it suddenly seemed as if there were fifty people around him, shuffling in from the shadows, rising up the ramp to swallow him.

Cotten stood in his military uniform on the step above Lloyd, his face set hard and merciless.

“ ‘Where do you dwell?' ”

“ ‘By the Capitol.' ”

“ ‘Your name, sir?' ”

“ ‘Truly, my name is Cinna. I am Cinna the poet!' ”

Somebody grabbed his poem.

Somebody knocked the other poems to the floor.

Lloyd was screaming now, backing away. “ ‘I'm Cinna the poet!
The poet!
Not Cinna the conspirator!' ”

Heavy footsteps beat on the platforms: the shadows rushing in around him, swallowing him.

The bass note on the organ swelled.

Then
complete blackout
—the bass note cut—and the silence was filled instantly with one terrible scream:
I'm Cinna the poet!

Then the organ crashed out a horrible, dissonant chord—like a fist smashed down on the keys—and that sound held, held, held until your eyes narrowed from the ugliness of it.

Then the organ stopped.

Welles's voice boomed out from the audience. “My God, what a scene! Again! Again! Let's see it again!”

 

I drifted up to the third-floor dressing room—a large open room that smelled like cigarettes. I had been thinking a lot about Sonja that morning: fine, noble, dignified thoughts that focused in near photographic detail on the unhooking of her warm brassiere, and the imagined smell of black licorice pouring off her naked neck and shoulders.

The dressing room looked as if it had once been a dance rehearsal studio: coat racks, folding chairs, some cracked wooden-framed mirrors on wheels. On the walls were phone numbers and signatures of the entire original cast of
The Melting Pot
from 1902! A deck of cards had been abandoned mid-game.

I picked up a box of matches from a table and did that trick where you make a matchbox stand up in your palm by pinching some flesh inside it.

I lit a few matches to amuse myself—thinking of the fire I had caused in my backyard. Hanging from the ceiling were some old sprinkler fittings. I wondered if they were even still connected.

Then I stood on a chair, and tried to see how close I could hold a lit match to one of the sprinkler fixtures before anything happened.

Nothing. I held it closer.

Nothing.

Still closer.

A
pop
—a creak of the old pipes. The nozzle was dribbling water—then a fizzle of an air bubble, and suddenly it was
pouring
down water on me, not just from the sprinkler I was standing under, but from all four sprinklers that ran along the ceiling.