Page 97 of Playworld
“Of what Shakespeare is trying to say.”
“I don’t…We don’t really talk about it like that.”
“How about this: What do you think ofyourcharacter? What do you see as his function in the drama? Certainly you’d have to have some idea of that in order to do your job.”
“Well, he sort of explains everything,” I said. “Like in Freytag’s Pyramid—”
“Yes, but whatmotifsdoes he introduce? What plot levers does he pull?”
“I’m only in the first act,” I said.
In what remains one of the most intimate gestures I have ever seen, Dr. West pointed his remaining speared olive at Tina, and she, without hesitation, plucked it from the toothpick with her teeth.
“It sounds to me,” he said, “as if you don’t even have a rudimentary grasp of the play’s rhetorical architecture, let alone its plot. Which is sad, when you think about it, at least”—he starfished his hand against his chest—“to me. I mean, here you are, memorizing important literature, the most important literature there is, really, but you have no context for it whatsoever. You’ve got your part down cold, as it were, but no idea of the whole. You come onstage and say your lines, and then off you go. Like a dolphin miming human speech.”
“Daddy,” Amanda said.
“No,” Dr. West said, “this is crucial.” And then to me: “When you perform next week, maybe keep in mind that it’s Charles who not only provides essential exposition to the audience but also supercharges the word ‘fall’ with meaning throughout the entire play. Whether it’s tosuffer a fall,as in lose one’s stature—which Charles literally will do when Orlando stuns him with his wrestling victory—orfall in love,as Orlando and Rosalind do so suddenly and completely before the match transpires. And as Touchstone and Audrey will upon their arrival in the forest of Arden. And Phoebe with Ganymede. True, I’ve often thought it’s nearly a deus ex machina that Duke Frederick falls in love with God toward the play’s end, his religious conversion seems so entirely out of character. And, of course, there’s the punfall on one’s back,which introduces the play’s anxiety about everything from cuckoldry to premarital sex. Andfalling out of love,which stands in for the play’s greatest anxiety—one which all the characters suffer—which is the passage of time.Time,which either ruins or changes everything—even a love well begun. And which, as Jaques notes in his ‘seven ages’ speech, none escape—its passage, I mean. But we are all alwayswrestlingwith that one.”
Dr. West raised his eyebrows and smiled. The waiter appeared with the wine bottle. He went through his elaborate ritual. As he filled thesecond glass and tipped the bottle toward the third, Amanda held her stem with one hand. With her other, she took mine beneath the tablecloth and squeezed my palm comfortingly. While I, thoroughly enjoying her secret attention, smoldered with determination. Because I was officially sick and tired of not being in the know.
—
Not that this spurred me to change. At least, not in the way one might think. Later, back at Amanda’s apartment, her mother gone for the evening, I soon forgot Dr. West’s dressing down, having, as I did, Amanda to myself. Between her bedroom’s twin beds there ran a strip of blue painter’s tape, her brother’s unoccupied bed, by her mother’s decree, remaining right where it was, and the room divided evenly, Amanda explained, should he ever drop in for a visit or decide, one day, to finally come to his senses (these her mother’s words) and move back in with them. Between the headboards there was also a small table with a record player atop it and sleeves of forty-fives and albums in the cubby below. While we talked, we listened to the Commodores’ “Three Times a Lady,” Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “September,” and John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels.” At the far end of the bedroom was a bookcase, and on its shelves Amanda had a couple of pictures. One was of her father, standing before a body of water, somewhere coastal, a red house also in the background, holding both his children’s hands. Amanda was maybe four years old in the photograph, towheaded, wearing a white dress with cornflower trim; her brother, Eric, a couple of years older, in a jacket and bow tie; and Dr. West, in what for all intents and purposes was the same outfit as tonight, with the exception of sunglasses, which gave him a more forbidding, inscrutable appearance, perhaps also because he wasn’t smiling. Her brother, Amanda remarked, was, in temperament, exactly like her mother, blunt at his worst, honest to a fault at his best. She had no idea how father and son tolerated each other, seeing as her mother and father could barely get through a conversation without fighting. When I asked her if she was more like her father, she said no, she was more like her grandmother, of whom there was also a picture, whose frame she handed to me and then joined me on her brother’s bed to regard (in the reflection of its tiny square of glass we were briefly framed), this of a womanon a deep-sea fishing boat, harnessed in the fighting chair, rod bent but secured in its gimbal, clearly some immense creature on the line. She was wearing a long skirt and blouse and fine shoes, as if she were headed to a summer cocktail party at a country club, shouting, happily, at the sport of it all, and she looked—this was the first thought that came to my mind—like Grace Kelly might on such an expedition: drop-dead gorgeous and perfectly overdressed. More precisely speaking, there was a clear lineage, appearance-wise, from grandmother to father to Amanda. Apparently, her grandmother had been a very wealthy woman, a socialite and art lover. If I’d grown up at the Museum of Natural History with my mom, then Amanda had spent hers wandering the Whitney and Guggenheim with her grandmother. She had apparently squandered her fortune on four marriages (the photo was taken on the boat of her second husband, a Cuban hotelier), and when I asked Amanda why she was more like her, since serial monogamy and heartbreak didn’t seem like something to which one might intentionally aspire, she finally answered her father’s question: “Because I’m a romantic too.” Amanda replaced these photos on their shelves and continued to DJ (“Get Down Tonight,” “Night Fever,” “Give Me the Night”), and while we, like an old couple, lay in our separate beds, I could not help considering the photos further—they seemed traced in light to me, they branded my memory such that I was aware, in that moment, that they’d leave a mark, this a minor mutant ability I was just becoming aware of then and have since learned to trust, when an object or person seems limned in vividness, close to a camera’s flash, an afterimage I know I’ll contemplate later. It was only years hence that I came to consider those two photographs as the poles of Amanda’s personality—and that I was here, in her life, to supply her with a measure of safety: I was harness and fighting chair while she angled for the elusive and mostly absent prize to thereby heal the suppurating wound of her departed father; that she, having learned that this was how the sport of love was played, would set that hook deep, as she’d done with me, as her grandmother had in that photo, but that she was determined to land that fish this time, and I could be damn well sure she’d stay rich to boot.
Not that I thought any of this at the time. I still believedIhad an angler’s chance. Which is why here is a good time to mention that Rob called just as Amanda placed “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” on theturntable. “Hi!” she said, so ringingly it was clear all was immediately forgiven, even before he apologized for standing her up at dinner and explained he’d come home from Vassar early to make it up to her, could they get together tonight? And to my heartbreak I watched Amanda, beside herself with excitement, freshen her makeup in her bedroom’s mirror and then offer to share a cab with me downtown (Rob was paying), dropping me off on my street before continuing on to Studio 54. I didn’t bother to mention to Amanda—the both of us, by that point, having had enough of her dad for the evening—that out the cab’s window, I spotted Dr. West and Tina walking down Broadway, her arm slipped through his, something that, back then, didn’t strike me as especially odd, so well groomed was I by that time, so desensitized, up and down the food chain, to such behavior.
—
My own dad managed to come to opening night ofAs You Like Itthe following week, along with Oren and Mom. Amanda, who sat separately from them, was also in attendance. I spied them from the tiny theater’s single wing just before curtain: my family seated front row center, Amanda in the back, alone. Suddenly I was something I never was in front of any camera: nervous. My scene with Duke Frederick went well, although I had to make it a point not to look at Oren, who was crossing his eyes at me. Before my bout with Orlando, I strode onstage to the audience’s applause, milking the moment with a deep bow. I removed my tunic, as did scrawny Orlando. Suddenly, with Amanda and my father present, I was also something I never was before any camera: self-conscious. Orlando and I clasped (Damiano had asked me to do the fight’s choreography), I shrugged his neck and chin under my forearm and, with my other upraised, triumphantly walked him about the stage, which got a laugh and elicited from Amanda the same beaming expression as when I’d first performed for her. When Orlando wriggled free, he ducked between my legs and then cuffed the back of my head—“O excellent young man!” shouted Rosalind—in response to which I charged him. He got me in a headlock and hip-tossed me to the ground, where I landed with a great bang, right in front of my father’s seat. Orlando was victorious; I was “unconscious.” Before a pair of Duke Frederick’s men dragged me offstage by my wrists, I peeked at my father. He wasfrowning and, whether he was aware my eyes were on him, slowly shook his head in disapproval.Why,he seemed to be saying,are you wasting your time doing this bit part?
After curtain calls, there was a reception in the front hallway. Having never really been a member of the cast, I stood on the perimeter of the crowd. When my parents found me, Oren, with a plate of cheese and grapes, complained that if he’d known I was only in the show’s first act he wouldn’t have sat through the entire play. Dad, nodding at the passersby, spoke in his big voice, leaning into his truisms: “It’s a very,veryimportant comedy,” he said. I was, he also noted, clearly the only pro in the troupe, though he had to grant the actors playing Rosalind and Orlando had “terrific chemistry,” the girl who played Celia was “quite lovely, in fact,” and then Amanda appeared.
She wore a sleeveless blue dress and high heels, as if this was opening night on Broadway, and she congratulated me and then handed me a present: “I made you a banana bread,” she said. It was wrapped in tinfoil and plastic and had a ribbon tied around it. I introduced her to my family, and Mom said, “You must be the young lady Griffin had dinner with last week,” and from that point forward, something remarkable happened: my father went quiet. There was some small talk, none that I made, or Dad either—even Oren gave Amanda all his attention as she and Mom chatted. I occasionally spied my father looking at Amanda with an expression that was, at the time, entirely unrecognizable to me. I might have called it approving, but there was something bittersweet about it, a wistfulness that was oddly reverential. It was so uncommon for him to be this watchful, and in that interval, I also noticed him watching me watch Amanda, since it was my chance to do so, secretly. At these moments, when we caught each other’s eye, he smiled at me, warmly—the closest I could come to naming what his face conveyed was pride. But even that wasn’t quite correct. There attended this attention a kind of generosity. It was a Thursday, a school night. Mom asked Amanda where she lived and, when Amanda told her, Mom said they’d driven the car uptown. “Shel,” she suggested, “why don’t you and Griffin take Amanda home, and Oren and I will take a cab.”
When Oren asked, “Why wouldn’t we all just drive together?” Momreplied, “Because I said so.” She told Amanda it was lovely to meet her and then led my brother out the door.
This quiet that had settled over my father persisted during the drive. Amanda and I sat in the back seat and talked about the play. I caught Dad glancing at me in the rearview mirror now and again. He nodded, pleased.
“This is my building,” Amanda said to my father.
Dad said to me, “Why don’t you walk your friend to her door?”
Amanda said to him, “That’s okay, we’re right here.”
Dad said, “I insist. Griffin, see the young lady upstairs. Amanda, it was lovely to meet you.”
Inside, we boarded the elevator. Two feelings struggled for dominance. The first being relief that Amanda and I were finally alone. The second being the conviction that I’d have done a whole semester of performances just to have a moment like this. I smiled, warmed at these thoughts. I glanced at Amanda, who was smiling at the indicator lights as they brightened and then turned to smile at me. Here, once more, I heard the clarion call to action but did not obey. And then the lights went out and the car jerked to a halt.
“Oh no,” Amanda said in the pitch-darkness, although she did not sound scared. “This happens sometimes.”
“What do you do?”
“We wait,” she said. “It’s usually only for a minute. Though I was once stuck in here for three hours.”
We stood in the blackness. Amanda’s dress crinkled, as if it were alive.
“What would we do for three hours?” I asked. When my question’s suggestiveness occurred to me, I was glad she couldn’t see me blush.