Me and Orson Welles (24 page)

“It's a good one. Possibly a great one. It's that you're not an actor, Richard. You're a writer. I told you that before. You're an observer. That's your gift. Look at you, Richard—you sit and you take it all in.”

“I don't want to be an observer.”

“But that's who you are. Actors need to be loved, Richard. You don't need to be loved like that.”

“. . . and what do production assistants need?”

“Power,” she said. “They need to be in a position where no one can ever relegate them to insignificance. Or dismiss them. Not ever. And that's who I am.”

“I want so much to be angry with you, Sonja—but when you're actually here it all seems to dissolve away. I wish you luck, I guess.”

“I won't need luck. I don't believe in luck.”

I looked out at the city. “I don't think I believe in luck anymore either,” I said. “It's kind of a relief not to believe in luck, isn't it? But I think I believe in something . . . I don't know if I could even articulate what it is. The improbable beauty of the world?”

“Of
this
world?”

“Even this world,” I said.
“Though this may not be immediately clear to us.”

She shrugged, uncomprehendingly. “Well, you've got an interesting belief. Whatever it means.” She adjusted her collar. “But, hey, I don't want to keep Mr. Selznick waiting, do I? How do I look?”

“Like a girl who's going to give one blindingly beautiful parting kiss to her
cavaliere.”

She walked over and gave me a light kiss on the side of my head.

“Your hair smells like black licorice,” I said.

 

I thought about showing up at the party.

I didn't.

I just didn't have the stomach to fight anymore that night.

I walked toward Penn Station through the fog, and New York looked like a painting. Perfect and inexpressibly fragile. And even Orson Welles couldn't take that away from me.

“Sherlock Holmes weather!” somebody in a doorway announced as I passed Macy's. Then I stood for a moment and tried to force myself to remember the streetlight and the mist and the adhesive sound of the tires on the wet street. And I thought:
Someday I'll use all this.

I
woke from a restless sleep filled with dreams of a party: Orson Welles standing behind a circular bar, and one by one he pointed a finger at his friends to join him in the center. They were all laughing and celebrating, and still I waited for him to point to me.

The room was airless, and I felt a headache smeared across the left side of my face.

It was five-thirty in the morning. I switched on the lamp and looked at my Playbill from last night—a simple white cover with printed in the center in dark brown.

There on the inside under the “Call for Philip Morris” boy it read:

I touched my name with my finger.

I tossed the
Playbill
on the floor.

 

I sat in the back of Dr. Mewling's Shakespeare class. Kristina Stakuna arrived late. She was dressed in her blue-and-white cheerleading uniform. I smiled at her—just Richard: the old friend who talked to her yesterday when she stole a smoke under the pine trees. Today she didn't even see me.

“Now where were we?” Mewling sat down and took the paper clip off his sheaf of yellow legal paper. “Now don't all overwhelm me. Where were we? We were talking about Shakespeare's chief source for
Julius Caesar
, which was—don't all shout it at once now—Plutarch's
Lives
, that's correct. Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's
Lives.
”

I stared out the window in misery. It was really getting to be winter out there. The trees in the courtyard were black etchings against a wash of gray.

And I suddenly realized how tired I was. So much had happened—the train rides, the rehearsals, the arguments, Joe Cotten on the stairs telling me I was fired, Sonja in her raincoat on the roof. My arms ached. My feet hurt. I wondered how anybody could keep up that pace? Who could live like that—day after day?

Mewling placed a page of his notes on the bottom of the pile and continued talking to himself. “Perhaps if I read an extract from Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's
Lives
aloud it will make this all clear. Plutarch writes that, quote, when it was told to him that Antony and Dolabella were in a plot against him, he said he did not fear such fat, luxurious men, but rather pale, lean fellows, meaning Cassius and Brutus, unquote. Now does this Plutarchian passage parallel any important
lines
in the text we were discussing yesterday? Come on, not everybody at once; we discussed this yesterday. Not
one
single person in this class can tell me the lines which parallel that passage? It occurs in act one, scene two; take out your books, ladies and gentlemen. Act one, scene two. We read this yesterday. Mr. Samuels, do you really expect to find the answer out the window?”

“It parallels Caesar's speech to Antony,” I said without taking my eyes from the window, “which goes: ‘Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much, such men are dangerous.' ”

“Excellent,” said Mewling.

I could hear Joe Holland's voice perfectly in my ear, and I went on reciting. “ ‘He is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men. He loves no plays as thou dost, Antony; he hears no music. Seldom he smiles and smiles in such a sort as if he mocked himself and scorned his spirit that could be moved to smile at anything.' ”

“Impressive,” said Mewling.

And still I went on. “ ‘Such men as he are never at heart's ease whiles they behold a greater than themselves, and therefore are they very dangerous.' ”

“May I ask how you know the text so well?” asked Mewling.

I looked at him. “I was in the play once.”

“Oh,
really?
And when was that?”

“Last night.”

 

Caroline was now sitting at the Black Crow lunch table. She and Stefan weren't even hiding anything now. I sat at the far end of the table, and I listened.

The final performance of
Growing Pains
was taking place that night in the auditorium. Caroline was excited; everybody was talking about the huge party they were going to have afterwards at Kristina Stakuna's.

Then Stefan tried to pull me in by telling everybody at the table that he and Skelly had seen me on Broadway last night—but before he could even finish, he had turned the story into how they had yelled “Black Crow!” during the show. This immediately steered the conversation into an earnest discussion of who was buying beer that night. Then somebody farted, and Stefan cried out: “He who smelt it, dealt it!” And Caroline laughed so hard the milk ran out her nose.

 

I walked toward home, then changed my mind and walked to the library. I read all the daily reviews for
Julius Caesar.

Move over and make room for the Mercury Theatre . . .
Brooks Atkinson began, and there followed a nearly unqualified rave.

I didn't know what to feel.

Nobody mentioned my performance. I hadn't really expected they would.

Maybe I should call the theatre, I thought.
Right now.
Maybe there was still time. Maybe Welles had changed his mind . . . .

I headed home. I imagined Cotten pleading with Welles. “Come on, Orson, you
have
to give him the part back. I'm
begging
you, Orson.”

“For you, Joe, and only for you . . . .”

When I got home I picked up the phone, but the vital energy to actually dial it seemed to have evaporated. I only stared out the window. A beat-up looking robin was walking carefully along the lawn. Then I dialed Mr. Goldberg at the Rialto Theatre, and I asked if I could come back to work on Saturday.

“Richard,” he said, then turned from the phone and sneezed violently. “I'm so glad you called.”

I sat on my bed and traced my finger along the wings of the eagles printed on the wallpaper. The radio was tuned to Martha Deane. Woolcott Gibbs was the guest. “I've discovered there are two ways of doing Shakespeare,” he said. “The old way and the good way. By the old way, I refer to what Tallulah Bankhead is doing over at the Mansfield. By the good way I mean what Orson Welles is doing over at the Mercury.”

I switched it off.

 

“I quit,” I told my mother.

“Good.”

“I took your advice. I mean, they weren't paying me.

They weren't even giving me train money. What did I need that for?”

“You finally made a smart decision. Your father will be proud of you.”

 

Simply to get out of the house that night, I walked to the high school.

I sat in the audience, surrounded by somebody else's parents, and watched
Growing Pains.
Somebody yelled “Black Crow!” from the audience. Somebody wolf-whistled at Kristina Stakuna. I felt stuck in an old place, filled with an old sadness.

I left after the first act.

Then I came home, listened to the radio. At ten o'clock WEAF broadcast
The First-Nighter
with Les Tremayne and Barbara Luddy. “Tonight's special guest,” said the announcer, “is the star of the Mercury Theatre production of
Julius Caesar,
Orson Welles, in a specially transcribed broadcast of Anthony Wayne's ‘A Late Edition for Love.' ”

I
thought I should at least try to put the pieces of my Westfield life back together. I dressed, grabbed an apple, packed my snare drum in my bike basket, and pedaled down to the fieldhouse on Rahway Avenue. I got there so early the place wasn't open yet, so Korzun, the trumpet player, and I stood outside, and for laughs every time a pretty girl walked by I played a stripper's drum beat, and Korzun played this really lewd warble with his mute—bu
du
budu
wahhwahh!

It was pretty funny.

 

The bleachers were wet; the turnout was lousy. The rain and wind had intensified by one o'clock. Umbrellas had been blown inside out. The cheerleaders hid in the fieldhouse until they absolutely had to come out.

Skelly and Stefan were both playing, but football didn't interest me much. It never had. There was a girl on the Plainfield side who looked sort of lonely. She wore a man's hooded plaid raincoat, and I spent most of the game watching her.

Caroline and Kate Rouilliard and all their girlfriends sat together under their umbrellas. When Westfield finally moved the ball a few yards they all stood up and shouted:
¡Mucho bueno!

My shoes were soaked. I could feel the cold rising up through my feet. People were leaving at halftime to listen to the Yale-Princeton game.

Somewhere near the last quarter, I told Korzun that I had a bad headache and had to leave.

“I don't blame you,” he said.

I stashed my drum in the fieldhouse, turned up my collar, and bicycled over to the train station.

I knew I was punishing myself, but there I sat, watching the towns roll by, slouched in my seat.

At least the sun was coming out.

 

I walked up Fifth. There was Saks, Rockefeller Center, the Vanderbilt house.

My sadness seemed to be lifting a little.

Maybe I could write to Welles. Sonja had said I was a writer . . . .

He could still change his mind.

The double-decker buses rode past the embassies; the tourists took pictures of the bronze statue of Atlas.

I ended up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, back with the mummy cases and the Greek vases and the soft light and the water gurgling through the radiators. I thought about maybe never returning to Westfield High School.

Somehow a bluebird had flown into the museum, and it was darting wildly around the ceiling. A museum guard stood frozen in the center of the floor with an upraised broom in his hand, staring up at the bird, and for one crazy second it looked to me as if
he
belonged in a museum, as frozen as the Greek vases—
Security Guard with Broom, late 1930s.
I noticed that most of the people in the museum weren't moving either, and it seemed as if the whole museum were an exhibit itself, and all of us, if you could look at this moment with enough distance, were the enchanting curios of some long-dead time: each of us unique, each worth preserving—fabulous mannequins in our stitched shoes and our white shirts and our pocket handkerchiefs. Just the light and the color and the
detail
of it all seemed astonishing.