The Confessions of Edward Day (21 page)

He shrugged off the garment, glancing about for a place to put it.

“There’s a hook on that screen,” I said.

“It’s bitter out there,” he said, hanging up the coat. He’d developed a slight stoop, as well as a corrective habit of lifting his shoulders and rolling them back and down.

“How did you know I was here?” I asked.

“Teddy told us. We saw him last night.”

“But Madeleine didn’t come with you.”

“She’s off with Mindy somewhere.”

“Did she know you were coming to my show?” The water was bubbling and I handed him a stained mug with a tea bag in it, which he looked into ruefully. “It’s just tea stains,” I said.

“No. She doesn’t know I’m here,” he said. He held out his cup. As I filled it with boiling water, the old familiar distrust and physical revulsion was aroused in me, sharp and pungent as a scent, and I drew away from him.

“How is she?” I asked.

Guy pulled out a stool and propped himself upon it, letting his long legs splay apart and cradling the warm mug between his hands. His pants legs hiked up over the top of his well-worn boots. Horrific argyle socks clung to his thin shanks. I looked away. “She’s good,” he said. “Well, you know Maddie, she’s good and she’s not good.”

“You call her Maddie.”

“She doesn’t mind. She likes it, actually. You were wrong about that.”

“So what’s not good?”

“Her nerves. She’s working a lot. Her career is really taking off. In fact, I’ve pretty much had to put my own on hold because even though she’s working, she’s not making much
money, of course, she’s an actress, and we have to live somewhere and we have to eat and someone has to put food in front of her or she won’t eat.”

“So you’ve got a day job.”

“At a bookstore. I’ve been there a few years. I’m a manager now.”

I didn’t entirely buy this tale of husbandly self-sacrifice. Rumor had it that after the Broadway disaster Guy had tried out for a lot of roles in New York and Philadelphia but no one had any use for him. There was a particularly cruel bit of gossip, put out by an actor who should have known better, that a playwright impressed by Guy’s audition was warned by the director, “Forget it. What you just saw is all you’re ever going to get.”

This vicious tidbit came to mind as I watched Guy sipping his tea. “Well, that’s good,” I said.

He swallowed, craning his neck and doing the thing with his shoulders. “Really,” he said. “What’s good about it?”

“Well, that you’re a manager.”

“I’m killing myself,” he said. “Managers don’t get overtime and work twice as many hours. It’s a trap.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I have to do everything, the shopping, the cooking, pay all the bills, keep Maddie calmed down. I never sleep.”

I recalled the arduous business of keeping Madeleine calmed down. “But her career is taking off.”

“Regional stuff, but solid roles. Shakespeare, she did Desdemona last year. Rave reviews. She went up to Yale this fall
and did a new play. There was a write-up in the
Times;
you probably saw it.”

“No,” I admitted. “I missed it.”

“He said the play was a bomb but Maddie was a star.”

Every time he called Madeleine “Maddie” I flinched and he noticed it. I had the sense that he was doing it on purpose to irritate me. I imagined how persistent he must have been to wear her down to the point where she accepted this diminutive, because I knew she hated it.

Guy sipped his tea, watching me over the rim. What was he up to? What did he want from me? Was it money?

“You’ve been doing OK, I hear,” he said.

Money, I thought. “I’ve been working. I don’t get paid much, but I scrape by.”

He took this in without comment. I pulled out a stool and sat facing him. “So, what’s the audition?”

He rubbed his chin between his thumb and forefinger, pulling the flesh in to a wedge. “Bev thinks it could be the turning point for her,” he said. “I do too. She’s got a good shot at it. The director saw her at the Yale thing and liked what he saw.”

“What’s the part?”

“It’s Elena in
Uncle Vanya
. A new production at the Public.”

“Wow,” I said.

“She would be fantastic in that part.”

“She would indeed,” I agreed. My heart rate increased to keep up with my careening brain. Madeleine as Elena, me as
Astrov, it would be a triumph of casting. The electricity would dim the houselights. The play depends on the audience’s apprehension of the intense physical attraction between these two characters. Elena is a difficult role. She’s a prisoner of her own beauty, she has no ambition, no life force, but she drives everyone around her to the limit of endurance. Psychologically she’s opaque and she’s made a decision no one can understand; she’s married an old man and not a rich old man, either. Madeleine had just the right quality of unexamined stubbornness. The role would be a natural fit for her. And she was so lovely and she was so hot. As I sat there, with Guy’s eyes probing me, I was filled with such a physical craving to see her, to be with her, that I got up, pretending I needed to refresh my tea. Other anxieties crowded in, one of which was the copy of the script I’d left on the coffee table. I didn’t want Guy to see it. I didn’t want him to know. When my back was to him, I shot a glance at the table. Yes, there it was and I had laid it facedown.

“It’s a great play. A difficult play,” Guy observed.

“Chekhov is always a challenge,” I said, pouring water into my mug. Why should I tell him? After all, I might not get the part. A piquant moment of silence passed between us.

“I know you have an audition for Astrov,” Guy said.

So that was it.

“Who told you?”

“A little bird.” He said this slowly, mocking me.

“Teddy?” But I knew I hadn’t told Teddy. I hadn’t told anyone.

“I don’t have to say.”

“Well, it’s true,” I said. “So what.”

“So I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“I’ll certainly take that into account,” I said.

“I think you should,” he said, giving me a meaningful look.

“OK, I’ll bite,” I said. “Why is it not a good idea?”

“Maddie’s feelings about you are complicated,” he said. “Now is not the time for her to be forced to … explore all that. There’s too much at stake for her in this project and she’s going to need all her concentration to get through it.”

“Bulletin, Guy,” I said. “Madeleine is an actress. She’s a professional. And so am I. That’s what we do.”

“You like to talk to me as if I don’t know anything about acting,” he said. “You’ve always done that. I may not be working right now, but I’m an actor.”

“Then act like one,” I said. “Or better yet, act like a man.”

“I’m acting like a husband,” he replied. “And one who cherishes his wife. You haven’t given Maddie a second thought for six years, but I’ve spent every minute of that time taking care of her. She’s a talented, brilliant actress, there’s nothing she can’t do, but she’s fragile, she’s a fragile woman.”

Everything about this eruption of drivel offended me, but particularly egregious was the assertion that I’d given no thought to Madeleine over the intervening years. I thought of her all the time. I was like the guy in the Dylan song, I’d seen a lot of women, but Madeleine never left my mind. I felt I knew her better than Guy, and I was sure she saw right through his absurd posturing which was designed to disguise the obvious fact that she could act circles around him. At that moment I felt Guy’s presence in my dressing room was an outrage against her. What would she say if she could see him, suited up as Guy the
Protector, with his bulging eyes and his ultra-earnest manner? I rapped my mug down sharply against the counter. “My God,” I said, “she must be sick of you.”

This surprised him. “That’s not true,” he said. “Maddie loves me.”

“You’re so fucking insensitive you call her by a babified name she hates and you tell yourself she likes it.”

“You know nothing about it,” he countered. “You’ve never had a loving relationship with anyone. All you think about is yourself; you can’t be relied upon for anything, and believe me, no one knows that better than Maddie.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t pretend you care about her. You used her when it was convenient, and when it wasn’t, you couldn’t be bothered.”

“Did she say that?”

“She doesn’t have to say it. I was there.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You were there and that’s why I never got a chance to do anything. You took over, that’s what you do. You butt in where no one wants you and you take over. That’s what you’re doing right now. If Madeleine knew you were here, she’d be totally humiliated.”

He blinked at me as if he couldn’t focus, rolling his shoulders up and back. “So you insist on doing the audition,” he said.

“Relax,” I said. “I might not get the part. Or she might not. You’ve got odds, if you can figure out what they are.”

“I think I have a fair idea of what the odds are,” he said.

A heavy odds-calculating silence fell between us. Guy got
up, slid his mug onto the counter, and sat down again. I ambled over to the couch where, just to irritate him, I picked up the bright-yellow script and stood solemnly leafing through it. I was a bit young to play Astrov, the only thing I had against me. Astrov is thirty-seven. He fears his life is over, he’s lost his looks. I’d have to feel forty. Madeleine was actually a little old to play Elena, but I didn’t think that would be a problem, not with her slim figure and flashing eyes. Of course I hadn’t seen her in six years, in which time her husband had lost half his hair. Guy sat pressing his fingertips to his eyes, rubbing hard. “I’m just exhausted,” he said.

“Why don’t you take sleeping pills?”

“I do, but they don’t work for me.” He dropped his hands to his lap and took in a long, slow breath, such as one takes before the commencement of a disagreeable task, a breath in which I sensed the drawing out of a tide between us. He exhaled through his nose, pressing his lips together and meeting my eyes coldly. “I should have let you drown,” he said.

Here it comes, I thought. “I didn’t ask you to save me,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say. Guy pounced on it. He flashed his predator smile and then he did something profoundly unnerving: he flung his arms into the air and cried out in my voice, “Help, help, don’t leave me.”

It wasn’t just my voice, it was my inflection, my manner, my peculiar combination of actuated facial muscles, my eyes wide with terror, my mouth trembling with fatigue, it was me, drowning, but only for a moment, and then it was Guy again, chuckling at his own cleverness.

“Very funny,” I said.

“Very funny,” he echoed. It was eerily like looking in a mirror.

“So you think you should have let me drown, but you didn’t. What should I do, kill myself?”

“I’m not asking you to kill yourself.”

“Not yet.”

“Though in some cultures I do have that right.”

“You’ve been doing research.”

“I have. In the Eastern view, I’m responsible for you. Because I saved your life, I’m required to look out for you. But here in the West, you owe me your life. Basically, you belong to me.”

“Any place where it’s just a happy accident not necessitating a further relationship?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I think a case can be made for it.”

He looked thoughtful. “I’m afraid not. It’s universally understood that our relationship is special. It’s mythic, actually. You were supposed to die that night, you were a goner, and I had to rob death to save you. At some personal risk, I might add, though you seem to discount that for obvious reasons.”

“I don’t discount it,” I said quietly. He’d brought it all back with his cruel impression of me and his talk of robbing death. I remembered how I had struggled with him in the water, how certain I was that death had a grip on me and there was no escape, yet how desperate I was to be saved. I had no lucid thoughts, only terror and a belligerent conviction that I was too young, too vital, that it was unfair. How could death be
indifferent to the injustice of it? And not just indifferent, but avid, pulling me down again and again, gagging me with gallons of water, wearing my will down to a fine thread of naked resolve. It was just at the moment when that thread snapped, when the waters closed silently over my head and I gave in to my fate, that Guy thudded into me in the darkness, his arms tightening around me, lifting me, while I squirmed and sputtered, dragging me back into the world.

“This seems like such a silly demand,” I said. “It doesn’t have enough gravity. I mean, it’s serious, I really want to do this audition, but why would you insist on something so … I don’t know, so personal? It doesn’t seem fair.”

Guy emitted a series of breathy clicks through his nose which I took to be laughter.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with Madeleine, does it?” I asked. “That was just a cover.”

“It was a test,” he said. “And you failed.”

“So if I back out of the audition because I think it’s best for Madeleine, I pass the test, but since I failed the test, I have to give up the audition because you saved my life.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“It’s crazy,” I said.

He stood up, shaking down his pants legs over the appalling socks. “I know you got good reviews for this Strindberg thing,” he said. “But I just don’t get it. You’re way off, there’s no subtlety, it’s a totally wooden performance. Everybody says you’re up and coming, but Astrov is a complex role. It’s not like this nasty valet thing. You’re not ready for it; that’s what I’m worried about. And Ed, you don’t want to flop at the Public in
an important role, take my word for that. It could be the end of your career.”

“Jesus, Guy,” I exclaimed. “Where are you from? It’s hell, isn’t it? It really is hell.”

He wrested his coat from the hook, wrapped himself inside it, and fussily fastening every button, turned on me a sympathetic smile. “You’re hysterical because you know I’m right. Think about that.” He ambled to the door. “I’ve got to meet Maddie,” he said. “Thanks for the tea.”

“W
ow,” Teddy said. “He really worked you over.”