The Night Listener and Others (7 page)

“Somewhere along the line it started getting kinky. While we were having sex, she’d call me by another name, or tell me about something sad she’d remembered, anything to get different reactions, different rises out of me. Sometimes…” He looked down, drained his drink. “Sometimes I’d…come and I’d cry at the same time.”

The waiter was nearby, and I signaled for another round. “Why did you stay with her?”

“It wasn’t…she didn’t do this all the time, like I said. And I
liked
her. It got so I didn’t even mind it when she’d pull this stuff on me, and she knew it. Once she even got me when I was stoned, and a couple of times after I’d had too much to drink. I didn’t care. Until winter came.

“I hadn’t been doing much after the summer. A few industrials here in town, some voice-over stuff. Good money, but just straight song and dance, flat narration, and no reviews. So the beginning of December Harv Piersall calls me to try out for
Ahab.
The musical that closed in previews? He wanted me to read for Starbuck, a scene where Starbuck is planning to shoot Ahab to save the
Pequod
. It was a good scene, a strong scene, and I got up there and I couldn’t do a thing with it. Not a goddamned thing. I was utterly flat, just like in my narration and my singing around a Pontiac. But there it hadn’t mattered—I hadn’t had to put out any emotion—just sell the product, that was all. But
now,
when I had to feel something, had to express something, I couldn’t. Harv asked me if anything was wrong, and I babbled some excuse about not feeling well, and when he invited me to come back and read again I did, a day later, and it was the same.

“That weekend I went down to St. Mark’s to see Sheila in an OOB production—it was a new translation of
Medea
by some grad student at NYU—and she’d gotten the title role. They’d been rehearsing off and on for a month, no pay to speak of, but she was enthusiastic about it. It was the largest and most important part she’d done. Papp was there that night, someone got Prince to come too. The translation was garbage. No set, tunics for costumes, nothing lighting. But Sheila…”

He finished his latest drink, spat the ice back into the glass. “She was…superb. Every emotion was real. They should have been. She’d taken them from me.

“Don’t look at me like that. I thought what you’re thinking too, at first. That I was paranoid, jealous of her talents. But once I started to think things through, I knew it was the only answer.

“She was so loving to me afterward, smiled at me and held my arm and introduced me to her friends, and I felt as dull and lifeless as that poet I’d seen her with. Even then I suspected what she’d done, but I didn’t say anything to her about it. That next week when I tried to get in touch with the poet, I found out he’d left the city, gone home to wherever it was he’d come from. I went over to Lincoln Center, to their videotape collection, and watched
King Lear.
I wanted to see if I could find anything that didn’t jell, that wasn’t quite
right.
Hell, I didn’t know what I was looking for, just that I’d know when I saw it.”

He shook his head. “It was…incredible. On the tape there was no sign of the performance I’d seen her give. Instead I saw a flat, lifeless, amateurish performance, dreadfully bad in contrast to the others. I couldn’t believe it, watched it again. The same thing. Then I knew why she never auditioned for commercials, or for film. It didn’t…
show up
on camera. She could fool people, but not a camera.

“I went back to the apartment then, and told her what I’d found out. It wasn’t guessing on my part, not a theory, because I
knew
by then. You see, I
knew.”

Taylor stopped talking and looked down into his empty glass. I thought perhaps I’d made a huge mistake in going to the bar with him, for he was most certainly paranoid, and could conceivably become violent as well, in spite of his assurances to the contrary. “So what…” My
so
came out too much like
sho
, but I pushed on with my question while he flagged the waiter, who raised an eyebrow, but brought more drinks. “So what did she say? When you told her?”

“She…verified it. Told me that I was right. ‘In a way,’ she said. In a way.”

“Well…” I shook my head to clear it. “…didn’t she probably mean that she was just studying you? That’s hardly, hardly
stealing
your emotions, is it?”

“No. She stole them.”

“That’s silly. That’s still silly. You’ve still got them.”

“No. I wanted…when I knew for sure, I wanted to kill her. The way she smiled at me, as though I were powerless to take anything back, as though she had planned it all from the moment we met—that made me want to kill her.” He turned his empty eyes on me. “But I didn’t. Couldn’t. I couldn’t get angry enough.”

He sighed. “She moved out. That didn’t bother me. I was glad. As glad as I could feel after what she’d done. I don’t know
how
she did it. I think it was something she learned, or learned she had. I don’t know whether I’ll ever get them back or not, either. Oh, not from
her.
Never from her. But on my own. Build them up inside me somehow. The emotions. The feelings. Maybe someday.”

He reached across the table and touched my hand, his fingers surprisingly warm. “So much I don’t know. But one thing I do. She’ll do it again, find someone else,
you
if you let her. I saw how you were looking at her today.” I pulled my hand away from his, bumping my drink. He grabbed it before it spilled, set it upright. “Don’t,” he cautioned. “Don’t have anything to do with her.”

“It’s absurd,” I said, half stuttering. “Ridiculous. You still…show emotions.”

“Maybe. Maybe a few. But they’re only outward signs. Inside it’s hollow.” His head went to one side. “You don’t believe me.”

“N-no…” And I didn’t, not then.

“You should have known me before.”

Suddenly I remembered Kevin at the audition, and his telling me how funny and wild Guy Taylor had gotten on a few drinks. My own churning stomach reminded me of how many we had had sitting here for less than an hour, and my churning mind showed me Sheila Remarque’s drunk, drunk, perfectly drunk Blanche DuBois earlier that afternoon. “You’ve had…” I babbled, “…how many drinks have you had?”

He shrugged.

“But…you’re not…showing any
signs
…”

“Yes. That’s right,” he said in a clear, steady, sober voice. “That’s right.”

He crossed his forearms on the table, lowered his head onto them, and wept. The sobs were loud, prolonged, shaking his whole body.

He wept.

“There!” I cried, staggering to my feet. “There, see? See? You’re
crying,
you’re
crying!
See?”

He raised his head and looked at me, still weeping, still weeping, with not one tear to be seen.

When the call came offering me Mitch, I took the part. I didn’t even consider turning it down. Sheila Remarque had, as Kevin, Guy Taylor, and I had anticipated, been cast as Blanche DuBois, and she smiled warmly at me when I entered the studio for the first reading, as though she remembered our audition with fondness. I was pleasant, but somewhat aloof at first, not wanting the others to see, to suspect what I was going to do.

I thought it might be difficult to get her alone, but it wasn’t. She had already chosen me, I could tell, watching me through the readings, coming up to me and chatting at the breaks. By the end of the day she’d learned where I lived, that I was single, unattached, and straight, and that I’d been bucking for eight years to get a part this good. She told me that she lived only a block away from my building (a lie, I later found out), and, after the rehearsal, suggested we take a cab together and split the expense. I agreed, and the cab left us out on West 72nd next to the park.

It was dark and cold, and I saw her shiver under her down-filled jacket. I shivered too, for we were alone at last, somewhat hidden by the trees, and there were no passersby to be seen, only the taxis and buses and cars hurtling past.

I turned to her, the smile gone from my face. “I know what you’ve done,” I said. “I talked to Guy Taylor. He told me all about it. And warned me.”

Her face didn’t change. She just hung on to that soft half smile of hers, and watched me with those liquid eyes.

“He said…you’d be after me. He told me not to take the part. But I had to. I had to know if it’s true, all he said.”

Her smile faded, she looked down at the dirty, ice-covered sidewalk, and nodded, creases of sadness at the corners of her eyes. I reached out and did what I had planned, said what I had wanted to say to her ever since leaving Guy Taylor crying without tears at the table in Charlie’s.

“Teach me,” I said, taking her hand as gently as I knew how. “I’d be no threat to you, no competition for roles. In fact, you may need me, need a man who can equal you on stage. Because there aren’t any now. You can take what you want from me as long as you can teach me how to get it back again.

“Please. Teach me.”

When she looked up at me, her face was wet with tears. I kissed them away, neither knowing nor caring whose they were.

“Yore Skin’s Jes’s Soft ‘n Purty,” He Said (Page 243)

It was a land where a man could be himself, where none of the feebly voiced restrictions of society were to say him nay. The mountains, the winding trails, the arching blue sky alone were the only judges of a man’s mettle. Here in the West a man could be a man, and a
woman
a woman. She knew that now, knew it with all the implacable truth of nature and of the West.

He turned his face toward her as his horse galloped into the dawn.

Eustace P. Saunders shut
The Desperado
with a delighted shudder, sat for a moment, his languid eyes closed, then opened the book again and looked at his illustrations, finding the smooth plates easily, sweet oases of images between the chunks of text. But dear God, what
wonderful
text. Here was romance, here was adventure, here was balm for the soul jaded by the tired and stolid fictions of society life. His gaze hung upon the frontispiece, wherein Jack Binns, the desperado, sat by the midnight campfire with Maria Prescott, the Eastern heiress, touching her hand with wonder. Eustace didn’t need to read the caption below—

“Yore skin’s jes’s soft ‘n purty…” he said.

—and below, the page number on which the illustrated scene appeared.

Again he blessed Arthur Hampton at
Harper’s
for giving him the assignment. Not that he had needed it from a financial standpoint, for he was far busier than he had ever been, regularly doing illustrations for
McClure’s, Leslie’s Weekly, The Century,
and
The Red Book,
as well as books. Indeed, even though pictures bearing the signature of E.P. Saunders had appeared in the popular magazines since 1883, these first few years of the new century had been more rewarding than ever, artistically as well as financially. The black and white washes he had done for last year’s new Robert Chambers novel had been among his best, as was the gouache work he had done for the F. Marion Crawford short story collection. And then…
The Desperado
!

Arthur, God bless him, had seen something in Eustace’s work that he felt might complement M. Taggart Westover’s first book. It still amazed Eustace that Arthur had not gone after an artist who had already proven himself competent with Western-themes, like Keller, whose work for
The Virginian
had been so fine. Still, Arthur had thrown down the gauntlet, and Eustace, welcoming a change from the crinolines and frock coats of contemporary city novels, took it up, but with more than a touch of hesitancy.

Still, the final results were admirable. Arthur called them Eustace’s best work ever, and Eustace had to agree. It was because he worked them in oils, he felt, and also because he gave them his soul.

He had originally intended to do them in gouache, but, upon reading the book and falling utterly in love with it, decided to work in oils instead, even though the reproductions would be monochromatic. There was more color in this book, he thought, than any other he had illustrated, indeed than any other he had ever read. Then too, the fact that they were done in oils made them easier to repaint when they came back from
Harper’s
.

For repaint them he did, placing his own face and form over that of one of the main characters. It was not Jack Binns, the desperado, whose visage vanished beneath layers of paint, but Maria Prescott, the heroine, for Eustace P. Saunders was a mental practitioner of what he considered a Secret Vice, referred to, when it was done so at all by people of breeding, as The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name. Only in the case of Eustace P. Saunders, it was so secret that Eustace had never practiced it, save in the darkened boudoirs of his imagination. It was not that he had never had the opportunity, for he suspected that a number of his colleagues shared the same predilection, and had even received a proposal of an illicit, illegal, and societally perverse nature from one of the younger illustrators who was as open with his brush as he seemed to be with his longings. Eustace, out of fear of exposure, had tactfully refused. Indeed, Eustace had been chaste with both sexes for all of his forty-three years, and had intended to remain thus until
The Desperado
seduced his mind and turned his fancies to outdoor love of a most healthful and manly nature.

He placed the book down upon his reading table with a sigh of regret that he had finished it once again, then brightened as he realized that its grand adventure could
begin
again as well. All he need do was turn to page one. Dear God, what a place—the West, where a man could act as he pleased without fear of polite society’s repercussions, where his fancies could come to blazing, lusty life, a land where the pseudo-life of his paintings could exist in total reality.

Eustace stood, sipped another few drops of sherry, and climbed the steps to his studio, where he turned on the lights, illuminating a number of paintings and other works sitting neatly on easels or drawing tables. He walked to the closed door at the end of the long room, withdrew a key from the pocket of his lounging jacket, and unlocked the door. Inside was a small chamber ten feet by eight, with paintings and drawings both framed and unframed leaning against the walls. Eustace drew a white sheet from half a dozen large, unframed canvases, wrapped his spindly arms about them, and carried them into the studio, where he leaned them against a table, drew up a chair, and sat down.