The Fourth Wall (6 page)

“And nobody knows who this acid-throwing freak is?”

“The only ones who saw it happen were this couple getting out of a car parked next to Loren's. They said it was dark and it happened so fast they never did get a look at the guy.”

Just then a young girl appeared to tell Jay he was wanted on stage, and I made my way back to the auditorium. I didn't even try to concentrate on what was happening on the stage. I liked Loren. He was a relaxed, confident man who knew exactly what he wanted in a design and how to go about translating it into terms of light and paint and canvas and scene projections. He was imaginative and original. And blind.

I waited long enough to see the set for the second play and then left. A taxi took me to a newsstand that carried out-of-town papers; I got a
Los Angeles Times
and went back to the hotel.

New York stage designer Loren Keith spoke with police today for the first time since being blinded in an incident Monday night in the parking lot of the Quick 'n' Easy Food Market in the 2700 block of Ventura Blvd
.

Keith told Lt. Horton Bowles of the LAPD that the man who threw carbolic acid into his eyes had been wearing a ski mask. The only description Keith could provide of his assailant was that of a male slightly shorter than himself. The designer is six foot two inches tall
.

Keith had been working on the Universal Studios film “Beyond Antares” when the incident took place. He is listed in serious condition at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica
.

So the last thing Loren Keith saw in his life was the mask hiding the face of the man who blinded him. I reached for the phone and got hold of St. John's in Santa Monica. An East Indian voice told me Loren's condition was stable, which told me nothing at all (a
corpse
's condition is “stable”). The switchboard operator said no calls were being put through to Mr. Keith and gave me the hospital's address when I asked for it. It took an hour to compose a brief letter a nurse would have to read to Loren. What consolation can you offer an artist who's lost his ability to see?

5

I'd had trouble falling asleep, and I had to force myself to get out of bed at seven the next morning. Visiting playwrights are invariably expected to address a group of eager or not-so-eager listeners at least once during their sojourn. Claudia Knight had asked me to speak to one of her classes at the drama school connected with the Three Rivers Playhouse. I was scheduled for the ungodly hour of nine o'clock that morning so as not to interfere with rehearsals.

Some of the students, Claudia had said, had already tried their hand at writing plays as a result of taking courses in playwriting. So they would be interested in any tips I might give them. I had never taken a course in playwriting, and I didn't have the foggiest notion what went on in such sessions. All I could tell them about were the problems I'd encountered in writing my own plays and how I'd tried to solve them.

At the theater Claudia was waiting for me, dark circles under her eyes.

“What time did you finish?” I asked.

“Four-thirty,” she said. “And do you know, I don't remember a thing that happened after two o'clock.”

I knew the feeling. Claudia took me into a building adjoining the theater and into a classroom.

Claudia Knight turned out to be one of those teachers who think people learn better sitting in a circle. The room was lined with students and had a big empty space in the middle. I hoped I wasn't expected to stand
there
and deliver my talk, arena-style.

I wasn't. Claudia and I found places in the circle, and after her introduction I stood up and began to speak.

All playwrights have their own ways of working, I said, but I always tried to avoid starting with a character, or even a group of characters, and letting the action grow out of the characters. Instead I started with some kind of movement, a going from one point to another point.

Since this was a semi-academic situation I was in, I figured I could risk using a word like “Aristotle.” Aristotelian tragedy was long gone, of course, but the procedure Aristotle described was still the best plan of attack I'd ever found. So that was about what I tried to do: find a movement, invent a plot to demonstrate it, then develop the characters necessary to make that particular plot work. The action determines the characters, not the other way around.

One night several years ago I'd sat with some friends watching a fireworks display. It was fun; I liked those glorious bursts of color that so quickly faded into nothing but still managed to leave an impression on the retina long after they'd disappeared. All that brilliance—heralding its own extinction. Brilliance existing only in potential until it is ignited, which then flares briefly and dies. Could that be the movement of a play?

The result was
Foxfire
. Foxfire is the phosphorescent glow produced by fungi on rotten wood. My play was about a woman who even in the process of disintegration gives off a brighter light than the people around her.

I went on in this vein for another twenty minutes, drawing examples from plays I thought the students were probably familiar with. I admitted I always had trouble writing exposition. If they, as future playwrights, had the same trouble, all I could suggest was that they study the ways other writers handled the problem. I told them to look closely at the opening of Harold Pinter's
A Slight Ache;
it was, in my opinion, the best exposition to be found in a contemporary drama.

The students paid polite attention all the time I was talking, some of them even taking notes. When I finished Claudia Knight asked me if I was willing to answer questions. Yes, indeed, I said.

Then came the first question: How do you go about getting a play produced? Followed by: What percentage do you get of the box-office receipts? Is
Foxfire
going to be made into a movie? Is Sylvia Markey hard to work with?

I fielded these profundities and a few more like them the best I could until Claudia Knight sort of waved her hands and announced that we had to get to rehearsal.

The rehearsal, however, wasn't scheduled to begin until eleven, so we had a little time to kill. Claudia took me across the street to a cafe. Over coffee she stared at her cup and said, “I want to thank you for talking to the kids the way you did—I mean, for saying the
kind
of thing you said. I know they were able to follow you, in spite of what you might think. Thank you for taking them seriously, for taking us all seriously.”

Well. She'd finally found the right way to flatter me.

I looked at her closely. Claudia was tired, really tired, with the kind of tiredness that makes your ears ring and the room go round. She kept playing nervously with her cup and saucer; she was embarrassed that her students hadn't made a better showing.

She sighed. “Some of them are bright, they really are. But even the bright ones can be so
dumb
you wouldn't believe it.”

“Do you like teaching?” I asked her.

“It pays the rent. But there's so little to show for all your effort.”

It was the kind of admission a rested and careful Claudia would never have made. “I know,” I said. “I've had more than a few of those jobs myself. Sisyphus work.”

We talked a while longer, and eventually the conversation got around to Loren Keith. Claudia had never met Loren, but Jay Berringer had told her about the blinding.

“Is Loren Keith the sort of person who arouses strong feelings in other people?” she asked.

That surprised me; most people would have asked if he had many enemies. “No, not at all. In fact, Loren is one of those
accepted
people. Who belong wherever they are, whatever they're doing.”

She nodded. “Could it have been a mistake? Maybe the acid was meant for someone else.”

Maybe. Probably we'd never know.

Back in the theater the cast was assembled for rehearsal. This time I sat with Claudia so I could hear what she said to the actors. She summarized the points I had made the day before and managed to convey the impression that it was time for the cast to wake up and begin acting like actors. Then she gave detailed instructions to the individual performers, and rehearsal began.

The two little open-mouthed actresses did everything Claudia told them to do and did it with much more animation than they'd shown before. My opinion of them rose about a hundred per cent. They took direction far better than Jay Berringer did.

In one scene Claudia told Jay four times to stop edging toward the center of the stage; he was upstaging the actress with whom he was playing the scene. Claudia directed him to hold onto the back of a chair, to anchor himself in position—an insulting direction to give to a professional, by the way, but it washed right over Jay. He'd place his hand on the chair as instructed, but soon his fingers would start drumming and the hand would slip away—and there he'd be, upstage center. Claudia finally told the actress to sit down and face the front—and deliver all her lines directly to the audience. This of course frustrated Jay's center-of-attention posture, so he started moving about the stage, adding business for himself, even waving his arms once or twice. He wasn't going to give up without a fight. But the more Jay flailed about, the more statuelike the actress became. A funny thing sometimes happens in a play; the audience may find itself watching the quiet person on stage, perhaps as a rest from all that other busyness. In this case I think I'd call it a draw.

In spite of these shenanigans, however, I had to admit the play was looking a lot better. We were taking a break when the secretary from the front office came down the aisle and told me I had a phone call.

It was John Reddick. “Abby, something terrible has happened. Someone put acid in Sylvia Markey's cold cream. Half her face is eaten away.”

6

“Abigail James?”

“Yes.”

“I'm Sergeant Piperson. Sorry you had to wait. Come in, please.”

I followed him into an office, wondering if Sergeant Piperson's first name was Tom. We were at Midtown Precinct South on West Thirty-fifth, only a few blocks down the street from where I lived. Sergeant Piperson had asked me to come in for a talk. Sylvia Markey was still in critical condition and wasn't able to speak.

Inside, the Sergeant said, “Have a seat, Abby.” So he was one of those policemen who call strangers by their first names. An unusual-looking man: he had a five-sided face. Straight across the top, straight down both sides to the tops of the jaw, which angled in from both sides to meet in a knobby little chin. His features appeared curiously flattened. He was about my age, forty; and so blond his eyelashes were invisible.

“I saw your show,” he said. “I liked it.”

“Thank you.”
Play, not show
.

“You were out of town when Sylvia Markey had her accident?”

I noted the euphemism. “Yes, in Pittsburgh.”

“I have to ask you this, Abby. Can you give me the name of someone who saw you there on the twenty-seventh?”

I gave him Claudia Knight's name and told him which hotel I'd been staying in.

“All right,” he said, making notes. “Now for the obvious question. Do you know anyone who would want to see Sylvia Markey disfigured? A stage rival, perhaps, or someone she'd hurt in the past?”

I shook my head. “No. You know about the vandalism and the cat? Someone who's obviously sick likes to hurt her. I don't know who that could be.”

“But she must have had enemies. First, nobody rises to the top of a profession—any profession—without stepping on a few toes along the way. And show business is even more dog-eat-dog than most, isn't it? Second, from what I understand from the other people I talked to, Sylvia Markey was a bit of a bitch. No one really liked her.”

“You're talking about her in the past tense,” I said to the Sergeant.

“Am I? Didn't realize. She's very much alive, and I'm making sure she stays that way. I've posted a guard in the hospital. Let's go at it from another direction. D'you know anybody who's close to her?”

“Just her husband, Jake Steiner. Sylvia doesn't make friends easily. Sometimes I think she's deliberately off-putting, to prevent people from trying to get too close.”

“‘Intolerant, condescending, imperious, egotistical,'” Sergeant Piperson read from a file folder. “Everyone seems agreed that Sylvia Markey is not a nice lady. Yet nobody will name names or tell me who might have a grudge against her. What's this all about? You sticking together to protect a member of your little group?”

Sylvia Markey wasn't the only one who could be condescending. “Look, Sergeant,” I said, “you've got the wrong idea. Nobody in our ‘little group,' as you call it, is trying to protect anyone. Personally, I want this maniac found and the sooner the better. What I'm trying to tell you is that Sylvia never hurt anyone, not really. Oh, she hurt a lot of feelings, sure—but she never caused any serious harm.” How to explain? “Actors and actresses are under a tremendous strain—a special kind of strain that's impossible to understand unless you've gone through it yourself. They put themselves on the line every night, risking rejection and even ridicule. Every once in a while they have to blow up, let off a little steam—”

“Sure, sure,” the Sergeant interrupted impatiently. “I know all about temperamental stage people. But—”

“But Sylvia Markey doesn't have temper tantrums, I'm trying to tell you. Beneath her dignity. Instead of blowing her top once in a while the way other people do, Sylvia lets out her frustrations in a series of
little
acts—the dig, the snub, the cutting remark. What you're trying to make out to be the cause of these attacks on Sylvia is simply her way of handling pressure. That's all.”

Sergeant Piperson was totally unconvinced. “But someone hated her enough to want to end her career. Someone who could take the snubs and the digs only so long before putting acid in her cold cream—”