light—everything looked that way, buildings, people, earth, sky—but he could not tell if they were the fireworks of patriots or of radicals. It was a carnival, and its theme had been the war in Europe. No. It made no sense. People would not be celebrating carnage and horror. Perhaps it was not supposed to make sense . . .? Why did he wish anything to make sense? He of all people! He went back down the stairs and into the theater and stood at the railing of the little balcony. The stage was now full of people. His people. “Friends.” They were arranged in small groups and engaged in discussions. Some of these conversations were calculated, their subjects free of apparent context or even forthrightly nonsensical, their objectives contrived and variable, delivered with courtly animation from angelically bright faces—this was a vision of hell. The other conversations were conducted in dusty darkness, or at least away from the pools of light, by nearly immobile and featureless figures, and this was heaven.
Charles breathed evenly and slowly though he could feel his heart pounding in his fingertips and teeth, and he smiled faintly as these visions appeared and disappeared before and below him. The feverish light did indeed seem to determine the quality of life, as he had always suspected. He had read, in an account of the Indian wars, that one great and defeated chief had weighed his options and declared that heaven was no place for a man and he wanted nothing to do with it—and yet his place, Charles thought, was so clearly here on the border of heaven and hell that he could not help but feel some relief at the sight of it.
An actress he hoped might prove suitable for the big roles sat wrapped in mummy-like winding sheets approximately in the center of the little theater, under its chandelier, which hung from the underside of a shallow dome painted with peacocks, owls, a buck deer and doe, vines with berries and flowers, and a wizard with a flask out of which streamed a banner with the words eamus quesitum quattuor elementorum naturas.
Her name was Vera.
Vera K., born of Russian parents in Muscatine, Iowa, where she had worked in a button factory.
Muscatine was the Button Capital of the World.
He picked up a sheaf of papers from the seat next to him, riffled through them until he found the page he was looking for, then read it aloud but not loudly, looking down at her. She probably couldn’t hear him, but would she turn round, look up?
“What is for you the greatest unhappiness?”
“I sometimes, too often, think I am no longer competent to live in the world.”
“In what place would you like to live?”
“The world.”
“What is your ideal of earthly happiness?”
“Forgoing happiness.”
“For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence?”
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘fault.’”
“What is your principal fault?”
“Ah: my recurring inability to believe I can live in the world.”
“What would you like to be?”
“Oh! What all the young women have said to you goes double for me: the star of your shows!”
“What is your favorite quality in a man?”
“A fine critical apparatus focused on whether or not I am kidding.”
“What is your favorite quality in a woman?”
“A fine critical apparatus focused on whether or not I am kidding.”
“What is your favorite occupation?”
“Acting truly.”
“What is your present state of mind?”
“A nearly overwhelming feeling of joy that I can live in the world after all.”
Vera, alone in all of histrionic San Francisco, had been worthy of the Polite Parlor Questionnaire. In her presence, as she answered the questions slowly and eloquently, he had not been able to feel like anything but a prince in a fairy tale.
He stared down at her intensely, imagining taking her sheet off and finding her naked beneath it, moving his hands over her neck and shoulders and breasts, kissing her deeply but languidly—and falling again under the spell of imagination, believing for a moment that he could cause the seduction to happen simply by staring down at the woman with his remorseless will.
It had happened before, and more than once.
Of course he would hold and kiss her in coming rehearsal many times, but the emptiness of those experiences would confound her completely—he would see it in her big glistening brown eyes—and throw so profoundly the question of the nature of pleasure into terrible doubt, that he would be forced to refuse to acknowledge those embraces as in any way representative of what he hoped to accomplish. He supposed that he was compensatorily cold to her. And the nature of what he “hoped to accomplish” was decaying swiftly too, anyway, after some ridiculous failures in New York that winter—from what had seemed at first simply a case of ceasing to neglect the pursuit and seduction of women, as he certainly had, in favor of the cultivation of artistic vision, to a struggle with physical impotence, the staving off of something pathological.
He was quite sure she could not act, and had cast her—the others as well—precisely because he was sure she could not act. The skills usually acknowledged as essential to or at least encouraging of dramatic presence, when they had been displayed for him, to him, for his approval and pleasure, only made him uneasy. It was like he had said to Little Joe ten years earlier: he would rather watch the stagehands. If such displays went on too long, they began to fray his nerves. That she made him feel like a prince had nothing to do with anything.
Because one of the plays they were rehearsing was Romeo and Juliet (the other two were August Strindberg’s The Spook Sonata and Henry James’s The American), swordplay had broken out on the stage and in the auditorium. Swordplay often broke out if Charles was even momentarily absent, because actors were like children and directors were like forbidding fathers. Most of the group of fifteen were the legendary friends or friends of friends from Berkeley, if he could be said to have friends, but there was no mistaking it: a father and his children.
With the probable exception of Vera in her grave shroud.
Two duels were taking place, one in exaggeratedly slow motion that seemed Oriental in its precision, the other fast and awkward and accompanied by a great deal of laughter, yelps of pain, and shouted apologies. Five other young men were trying to sort out the fundamental moves of a brawl, made uneasy by Charles’s suggestion via Sir Edwin Carmichael that choreography was the antithesis of violence, that a fight was ugly and embarrassing, and that all attempts to make it a pleasing dance must be in vain. The different son of a different plumber and one of his older brothers were clacking lengths of doweling with each other. Charles, to no one’s surprise, had been schooled in fencing since he was old enough to wave a small toy sword, and was in fact the ensemble’s Romeo, but was concerned that hour with The American and so was armed only with monocle and walking stick. As he watched and breathed and was content—for a moment—to feel the blood pulsing in his extremities, over the din of mock-fighting and outside the theater, he thought he heard more firecrackers going off.
There was a release of light somewhere over his shoulder and a withdrawal of it and a faint clap, followed by the shushing of heavy fabric over the carpeting of the balcony’s center aisle; he could just barely hear it over the voices below. Then came the cloud of smell: stale tobacco and fresh burning leaf, alcohol on the breath and in the cloth, some kind of ammoniac solution, and an alarmingly bracing body odor. This was the theater’s artist in residence, Sir Edwin Carmichael. He was visiting from Verona, where he had his own theater and school of design, named after its principal funder, Lord Howard de Walden. He had acted with Henry Irving and designed sets for Konstantin Stanislavski. He had designed and directed a production of Dido and Aeneas that had almost single-handedly revived interest in the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell—which was where Mother had come in.