Ella Dale was a naturally attractive woman; which means that, potentially, she was a beautiful one. Her fine eyes were large and clear; her mouth small; the line of her jaw strong with a hint of masculine stateliness. Her hair was a shade lighter than brown, and in the sunlight it glinted with copper highlights. She was neither fat nor skinny. Her body was a good, solid, well-shaped one, with staunchly attractive hips and thighs; and she walked with a sway that was seductive precisely because it was unconscious and unaffected. Yes, she was very pretty, with a natural beauty. The pity of it was that she seemed to do everything in her power to abase the graces nature had bestowed on her. She seldom wore makeup, and so as a matter of course her fair countenance always looked a little washed out. Her eyes, which were a soft hazen, might have been magnificent with the addition of a little mascara, and her lips never got beyond their fine slender shape for want of a tint. Her hair was cut into no flattering style but hung limply down to her shoulders. As for her good solid body, which men liked so much, it was a rare day when any of it showed, for though she did, now and then, wear short skirts (and when she wore them men could not stop looking at her fine legs), she preferred to wear old overalls, as though she were a carpenter. Rather than a handbag, she carried about a worn canvas shoulder bag, and her shoes were almost always chunky-heeled and heavy-looking. In short, there were so many ways that Ella could have improved her appearance, and with such a minimum investment of time or money, that her indifference to this matter seemed explicable only by her inability to perceive it. This was the more ironic because she considered herself to be an artist―and yet nothing is more foreign to the aesthetic temperament than to prefer the plain to the pretty, the indifferently bland to the attractively polished.
She was not from New York City―the prettiest women never are any more―but from a small town in Vermont. Her father was a lawyer there, with a practice which, in the rural setting in which he lived, was comfortable and impressive. Hers had been the childhood of an upper middle-class family. As a very young girl she had always had plenty of toys, plenty of new clothes, and the excitement of yearly family vacations; and when she got a little older, her parents had indulged her with a new car as soon as she was old enough to drive. In school she had been a good student with above-average grades, and had been active in student affairs. She had sat on any number of “student committees,” and when she had not been planning a dance, a pep rally for the football team, or helping to design a yearbook, she was receiving the attentions of the most popular boys.
She had also been a member of the “Drama Club.” It was here that she had gotten her first taste of acting. The plays and vignettes put on by the Drama Club happened to coincide with her maturing sense of social order and of the adulation and material benefits that were bestowed on famous movie stars. She came to see that the most famous of them were really no prettier than she was; that acting itself was comfortably within her capacity; and that therefore she had as much of a right, or at any rate as much of a chance, of becoming as rich and famous as any of those actresses who were the darlings of the mass media. This was the basis of her ever-increasing passion for that art, though she did not know it herself; certainly, she always spoke of acting in purely ethereal and idealistic terms.
Her parents had indulged her all her life, but they were less than enthusiastic in their support of her desire to become an actress. Her father especially tried to convince her of the fatuousness of basing a life, a livelihood, on the unlikely chance of success in such a field. “For every one who makes it,” he would tell her, “there are ten thousand who don’t. No, no, dear, you don’t want to do that. That wouldn’t be a smart thing to do.” He tried to persuade her to set her sights on more realistic goals, suggesting that she become a lawyer, like himself, or a doctor, or a teacher, or even, barring any conventional profession (for he was even willing to indulge any shortcoming of indolence in her), of waiting till she should meet the right young man—the “right” young man being, of course, either himself comfortably ensconced in a lucrative profession or coming from a family of means. But all these mature, considered, and commonsensical counsels fell on deaf ears. And it would have been odd had it been otherwise. For Ella was only twenty years old, and spirited young people at that age often have definite ideas about an ideal Purpose to life, and the conviction that their Purpose in particular is especially laudable and imperative. Besides, immaturity is necessarily optimistic about grand schemes, for it has yet to experience the abundant disappointment the world invariably has in store for it not only in great things but in small.
Ella went to four years of college the way young people in some countries might fulfill the duty of military service: not wholly willingly, yet obediently and maintaining her morale with the constant thought that it would soon be over. Partly out of deference to her parents, but mostly because no “practical” academic courses interested her, and one was therefore as good as another, she majored in “finance and marketing.” She paid enough attention to her professors and assignments to get moderately good grades. But her heart was not in it. The only things she was really interested in were her drama classes and the annual play put on by the college theater. When she was not studying or acting, she was watching movies or reading plays. No sooner had she fulfilled her parents’ demand to get her education, and had gotten the degree that meant nothing to her (and not much more to prospective employers), than she asserted her majority and announced that she was going to pursue acting in New York City.
“You know we don’t approve of that, Ella,” her father said.
“I know. But it’s something I want to do. At least I want to try.”
“And what are you going to live on?”
“I’ll get a job. I’ll find something. That’s what I went to college for, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is; but if you get a job you’ll be expected to commit yourself to it. When are you going to act—on weekends?”
“I’ll find something,” Ella said, vaguely but with determination; knowing already that she would never take a job that did not give her time to pursue her dream.
Her father knew his daughter well enough to perceive that any argument he used to dissuade her from her ambition would only strengthen it, and yet he felt he would have been remiss if he did not inject some gloomily practical elements into her calculations.
“You know,” he said, “your mother and I aren’t wealthy people. If you really want to go to New York, Ella, we might be able to help you a little, to help you move there and get set up; but after that, you’d be on your own. It’s not like around here, you know, where it doesn’t cost so much to live. New York’s expensive. We could help you a little—but we’re not made of money. We just don’t have it.”
But the young woman had never expected her parents to underwrite her ambition, and having, like all young people, long anticipated living on her own, the last thing she expected or even wanted was to maintain those financial ties that so much more than any others characterize one’s minority and dependence. She told her father that the last thing in the world she expected was for him to “help her out”; and that she hardly needed it anyway. She would get along on her own, thank you. She would work, like everyone else. She would make her way, just as the rest of the world did. Why should she be any different? Even if she didn’t get an important or especially well-paying job in the business sector, she could always fall back on some clerical position: she was intelligent, literate, she could type—she could be a secretary or some sort of administrative assistant. Yes, she would always find a way to make a living. And so she went to New York City and added by one to the tens of thousands of actresses there.
Though her parents had not supported her decision to pursue acting, they helped Ella find her first apartment. They applied to a real estate agent who found her a place on the Lowest East Side, in a section that was not especially good but which (they were assured) was “up and coming,” and would in only a few years be as fashionable an address as those a dozen blocks northward. Ella’s father paid for the first six months rent, as a “gift” to his daughter. The rent was so high and the area so shabby that he was secretly certain Ella would eventually be become discouraged, come to her senses and come home, and plot out some better, more likely course of life. But in this he had forgotten the naïve pliancy of youth.
In her first years in the city she worked as a secretary. Her ability to type had stood her in good stead. She worked for various businesses through temporary agencies. Her “assignments” might last for weeks or months; in one case it lasted for two years. None of these jobs ever made use of her business education, but she didn’t care because the work was not difficult, paid fairly well, and enabled her to maintain herself. Most important of all, they were not full-time positions and she was thus able to schedule auditions and be in any play she might happen to get a part in.
In those first years the city was a dazzling excitement to Ella. Not least of this was owing to the many artists she came into contact with. While growing up in Vermont Ella had been led to believe—who knew where she had gotten such a foolish idea?—that artists were uncommon creatures, indeed a rare variation of the human species. But New York had taught her that, on the contrary, they were as common as grains of sand on a beach. They filled the city by the thousands, by the tens of thousands; in some neighborhoods even apparently outnumbering those with no such pretensions. How delightful it was to be in the midst of so many people with the larger vision required for valuing and entering the arts! She felt as though she had finally found her spiritual home. Perhaps people here in general weren’t so friendly as they were back home, but even this aloofness, she convinced herself, was part of the cool urban savvy by which New Yorkers protected themselves from the incessant stimulations of the city, which would otherwise overwhelm them, and which was at any rate so much more sophisticated than the open-hearted rusticity she had grown up with.
She was in New York no more than five months when she got into a play put on by a small theater on 11th Avenue, on the far West side of Manhattan. It was a small role but it was a start, it introduced her to people, to the life she had yearned for; and it seemed a very exciting life indeed. In those days she had not only not minded but had actually reveled in the fact that many of the productions she acted in had inexpensive or extemporaneous trappings: that the props might be a few old metal chairs, or a crudely-painted, or rather bedaubed, background, or even some broken furniture that had been rescued from the sidewalk, where it had been left for pickup by the sanitation department. This slapdash way of doing things was for her part of the excitement of an unstructured, free-spirited artistic life. But after only two years this novelty had worn thin, and she came to regard each instance of imperfect stagecraft as embarrassingly amateurish. It was about this time also that the first inkling of something “wrong” about her career began to insinuate itself into her consciousness. Month after month, year after year, play after play, it began to crystallize into something more definite and dispiriting: namely, the understanding that for all her effort and sacrifice she was no closer to reaching her goal of becoming a renowned actress than on the day she had come to the city.
That dream of discovery was for her, as it is for every anonymous artist, the Holy Grail of life, the Objective toward which all efforts, dreams, and goals tend. There was always the hope that as she played some small part in an obscure theater, someone in a back row would be watching, would see her talent, and would turn out to be more than just an anonymous patron, but rather some director for a large, prestigious theater, or perhaps even a Hollywood agent, and that he would come backstage, inquire after her, compliment her on her acting, and offer her some wonderful opportunity―her “big break.” But after so many years of anonymity this hope had begun to waver and collapse. She could no longer deny the evidence of her own experience, not to mention that of other actors who had been acting longer than herself in independent and small productions.
And yet it was only now, when she was thirty-two years old, that other, more portentous signs of failure began to loom in her mind. She could not ignore the fact that over the preceding ten years a whole new generation of beautiful young actresses had appeared in movies, on television, or on the popular stage, even while she, and every other actor she knew, was still scrambling to get into anonymous productions staged in remote buildings and playing not to some public at large but (almost invariably) to small audiences of friends or fellow artists. This fact was especially brought home to her whenever she watched television. Every year, there they were, the new beautiful young faces starring in some new situation comedy or dramatic series. Where had they come from? How had they gotten their roles? Surely they could not have had more experience than she had, and from what she could see they certainly were not better actors than she was. Of course, over the years she had heard about how this or that now famous actor had played at this or that small theater which she herself had visited, and which had been as unassuming as the places she herself performed in. But in all those years she had never known another actor for whom that dream of recognition had come true. Moreover, she was aware that for her the chance for recognition was passing quickly. She was still young and pretty, but she would not be young and pretty for many more years, and she knew that youth and beauty were among the most important assets of an aspiring actress. This accurate sense of having no more time to waste was never more frustrating than when she went to an audition and knew (for by now she had developed a sixth sense about such things) that it would be another small-time, anonymous production over which she and the rest of the cast would worry and exhaust themselves for a two-week run that a month after its closing would be entirely forgotten about. She could not waste her time with that any more. The small voice within her, which had always confidently heartened her with promises of recognition and wealth, now whispered of things far less glamorous: of continued struggle to make a living, of never having quite enough, of having grossly miscalculated about the nature of show business; of having, most of all, thrown away the best and most vigorous years of her life―years which, had she pursued other, more practical goals, might at least have resulted in her financial security.
For the matter of money had over the years come to consume her soul. Her father had been right about New York: it was tremendously, criminally expensive. After paying for rent, utilities, groceries, and the essentials of life, she found herself at the end of the month with a very few dollars left over. Here she was, in a city offering almost everything in the world, and yet she was unable to partake of any but a fraction of it, and that the cheapest fraction, for want of any substantial expendable income. This was just another reason for her to have come to dislike New York, and indeed she sometimes found herself longing for what several years earlier she would never have thought she would want again: a home in the country—a real home, like the one she had grown up in, surrounded with lawns and trees, and flowers in the summer. The irony of her life now was that such a dream of was even more beyond her means than her life in the city, for if she was struggling to pay for an apartment, the expense of buying a house and an automobile (outside of a city, of course, one couldn’t get around without that), would still be more onerous.
In an effort to help defray the largest of her expenses, she had had roommates. Most of them had been actresses and she had had a bad experience only with one of them, a girl from Kentucky who had, after the first two months, always found an excuse not to pay her share of the rent. After an awkward and ultimately ugly confrontation (they had come down to shouting at each other, to hating each other), Ella had sworn to herself that she would never have another roommate again; but her rent went up every year—her income did not keep pace with it—and she felt all but forced to find someone else. That was when she had met Grayson. They had met during an audition and had taken an instantaneous liking to each other. After some conversation, during the course of which they lamented their excessive rents, they proposed the possibility of moving in with each other into a “nicer” apartment than either of them then had. Grayson said she knew about a “great deal”—a two-bedroom apartment on 110th Street, which was just out of the reach of her single income. Ella agreed to look at it, and though it was hardly new or in an especially good neighborhood it had at least the attraction of two bedrooms. And so they started their lives together.
Grayson Ritzlerhof was just two years older than Ella. She was thirty-four. Like Ella, she did not come from New York. She had been born and bred in Indiana. Nor did she have so fortunate a background. Her parents had been lower middle-class people—the working poor. Fortunately for her father, he had lived in rural America. He did not have much money; but then no one else did either; and so his slender financial circumstances did not detract from his legitimacy as a mate to the woman whom he courted. She was a local beauty, and she encouraged his advances purely on the basis of his merits as a tall, strapping, handsome man. And so they had, these two attractive people, married.
A year later Grayson was born. She was a beautiful child, for beautiful children come from beautiful parents as surely as ugly children come from ugly parents. About her it could be said that whatever fate had denied her in the way of material benefits it had more than made up for with physical beauty. The features of her face were as fine as it was possible for human features to be. The cheekbones were high, the lips slender and wide, the nose straight and narrow, the eyes blue, long-lashed, and overarched with gracefully curved brows. No hair was more golden and no complexion could be fairer; her cheeks, especially in the winter, having about them a faint, pink blush conveying an impression of freshness and health. From her earliest years in school she had always been popular among her agemates, for children possess as well as adults the instinctual perception of human beauty, and are as attracted by it as they are repulsed by its opposite. Thus, she had never wanted for friends or envious attention, and this kind of general yearning for her—this eagerness to know and be with her—fortified her pride and sense of self-worth.
It was this popularity that in part had prompted her to consider becoming an actress. As a child of eight or nine she would watch television and movies and be aware that the pretty girls were always admired, just as she was; and to her childish mind it seemed a natural progression in life for anyone who was like her to become a movie star. “I want to be an actress!” she had told her mother and father when she was ten years old. They had humored her girlish dreams. “Why not, darling?” they had told her. “Why not?” But even when she had become older—when she was a teenager and could more seriously consider her future—they did not discourage her dream. On the contrary, her parents had always been proud of her beauty, and they knew that this could not but be a great advantage to her in show business. Moreover, they knew too well the rigors of poverty and were inclined to encourage their child in the pursuit of a career that might result in great wealth. “Who knows?” her father once told his wife, when they were discussing what had turned out to be their daughter’s inveterate intention. “She might get lucky. That’s all it is, you know—luck. It could happen for her. If that’s what she wants to do, she should try it. Besides, you have to take a chance in life, especially when you’re young. When are you going to take it? When you’re old? It’s too late, then.” And so they encouraged and nurtured her enthusiasm, always speaking to her about it as though it were a reality within her grasp. They went to her high-school plays and, sincerely, praised her performances. When she entered community college and majored in “Dramatic Arts,” they shared their enthusiasm over her progress in her courses; and when she graduated with a high-sounding but entirely useless Associates Degree in “Theater History,” they congratulated and fawned over her as though she had just completed her medical internship. Soon afterwards, Grayson moved to Indianapolis, some sixty miles from her hometown, to become involved in the theater there. But she was only there a year when she realized that New York was the place to be.
She came to the city with a thousand dollars and a credit card, and found through a local newspaper a roommate with whom she shared her first apartment in Queens. It was a small, one-bedroom apartment in an unclean building a hundred years old. Only her general awe with the city itself enabled her to overlook this substandard housing. She often told herself that it didn’t matter how bad things were “now” anyway. Any inconveniences were just temporary—just stepping stones to be used on her way to success. Over the years she had had any number of jobs: assisting a photographer, selling cosmetics behind a counter in Macy’s, even bartending; but for the last few years she had been waiting tables at a small, fashionable, rather expensive restaurant in Soho. Even here her stunning good looks helped her. The men tipped her very well indeed.
Both Ella and Grayson had the same misgivings about their acting careers, but it was Grayson whose misgivings were most insidiously and frustratingly doubtful. For all her disappointments and lack of success, Ella could still be hopeful about her future because she believed in her talent, whereas Grayson had come to believe that “talent,” at least when it came to acting, was not the first ingredient in success. In one sense it was odd that this should be so, for she had acted in many more plays than Ella had been in; she had even done a few bit parts in a soap opera—once playing the role of a reporter, and in another instance the part of a nurse. But both “roles” had amounted to no more than a few seconds of camera time, and though she had been thrilled to get the parts, in soberer retrospect she realized that such “opportunities” could give no substantial impetus to an acting career. And if nothing had come from those parts, which had at least given her national exposure, how much less likely was anything to come of acting in another obscure Manhattan-bound play? Years of adversity and disappointment had made her hard-headedly practical. “I’m never going to get anywhere with things like that,” she would tell Ella, referring to some offer she had to perform in some obscure, off-off Broadway play, the like of which she had been in fifty times before. “It’s just a waste of my time.”
“But if you don’t try, nothing can ever happen,” Ella would say in return.
But Grayson would shake her head. She knew that she knew better.
She was often depressed―never more so than when she came home from work, exhausted and hopeless to think it would always be this way. How many more years could she wait on tables, after all? Every day, every hour of the day, she heard her biological clock ticking—the seconds of her youth and beauty, which she knew constituted so much of her acting capital, petering away. How much longer could she wait?
Given the extraordinary odds against anyone making a living in the arts, the wonder is not so much that artists should so often suffer from depression as that they should ever be free of it. For it is a terribly hard thing to love and live passionately for one thing, but to have that one thing above all beyond one’s grasp? Grayson increasingly turned to alcohol for relief. A few drinks in the evening went a long way to ease a sense of failure. After the third glass of wine, or the second scotch on the rocks, her lack of success as an actress seemed essentially unimportant and she could begin to count—and to count with genuine appreciation—her blessings: she was young, healthy, attractive, working, etc. etc. etc.; and certainly by the fourth glass of wine, or the third scotch, she could become downright “philosophical” and believe that worldly ambition was the foolishest of all things and that it didn’t matter to her whether or not she waited on tables for the rest of her life. She would think of the plays that she had been in, the people she had known—all those silly or scheming or stupid people; and she would laugh to herself, thinking how ridiculous they all were, herself included for having been among them. At such times she would map out a whole new plan for her life. She would go back to school, take courses in business, and get a good-paying job in something like banking or accounting. In her personal life, she would go out more, and not to the local watering holes, where, increasingly, the crowd was getting a bit too young for her, but to better, classier places, where she was likelier to meet a man who was well-established or had a good future in front of him. Yes, everything would change, she would think, as she drank, and the room around her began to blur a little.
But the next morning, with sobriety and a hangover, she had to face again unabated reality and her spirits sank. She saw clearly again how fatuous her resolutions of the night before had been. Change the course of her life now? Go to school for some business training—become an accountant, a banker, a “marketing representative”? It was too ridiculous for words. She didn’t care a fig about any of those things, and just the thought of them filled her with vague revulsion, as though she should expend the increasingly precious time left her to fulfill her one ambition in order to achieve things in which she not only had no interest but even regarded as contemptible. Like so many artists, Grayson could not get over the conviction that she was meant for better things than anything offered by the workaday world. The workaday world was a great bore. Anybody with a head on her shoulders or a heart in her chest merely tolerated it for the sake of money, and even then tried to have as little to do with it as possible in order to pursue something meaningful. What, was she now to become like the prim and proper “career women” she saw so much of in New York and whom she despised for their corporate un-stylishness and their air of self-importance because they could spend twelve hour days cooped up in an office shuffling papers sent to them by people as tedious as themselves?
Both Ella and Grayson were examples of what happens to young people who commit themselves to an artistic life before they understand its incompatibility with the real world. They are certain that the world of art is a meritocracy—that the best will rise above their less-talented fellows and that talent, dedication, and steadfastness will in the end be recompensed with at least enough recognition to live an artistic life. And, of course, in rare instances this does happen. But in the overwhelming majority of cases it does not happen, and can not—can not because the value of recognition lies precisely in its rarity, and a commodity so valuable is bound to be jealously guarded. It is shared only out of self-interest or when a freak of popularity overwhelms the forces of jealousy and envy. Most of those who have made it to the inner sanctum of fame, especially in the world of acting, have done so because their paths to it were smoothed by nepotism, or because they happened to appear before the gates just at the moment when the guards standing before it, ordinarily so vigilant and determined to exclude, were slipped by unawares.
―All of this was something that both Ella and Grayson, after years of fruitless effort and innumerable disappointments, had begun to see for themselves. Each knew from experience that she was unlikely to fulfill her dreams. Both had reached a point in life where, if they continued to think of themselves as actresses, it was merely out of a kind of inertia―because they could not and did not want to think of themselves in any other way. But each of them, in the deepest depth of her heart, was aware that it was almost too late for her, and that if “something” did not happen soon she were destined to be a failure.
II Avant Garde
The Documentation Department of Studder Skamm Barret—one of the biggest investment banks in the world—was populated by employees who, if one had asked them what they “did,” would have mentioned almost anything other than the thing they made their living at. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them were artists of some kind or another. Most of them were actors, but there were also playwrights, painters, and musicians, not to mention those who proclaimed themselves practitioners of still arcaner arts such as calligraphy or mosaic—for which one could hardly imagine much of a market even in so diverse a place as New York City. The point was that these people would have insisted on an infinitely wide gap between what they did here in the office and what their “real” lives were like. Though from morning to night, five days a week, they typed letters, or tracked job orders, or time-stamped interoffice mail, or did some equally dunderhead and un-artistic thing, they would have dismissed it all with a wave of the hand and insisted that it all had nothing to do with who and what they really were. It was at any rate ironic that so dense a population of artists should have been found in this place, just as they are found in dozens of places like it: that they should find the means to survive in the very bowels of the corporate culture they despised and never lost an opportunity to assail.
Ella had been working here as a word-processor for five years. She was still a temporary employee. The employment agency through which she had found the job had told her it was a “long-term” position, though she had never, back then, suspected just how long term it would turn out to be. One would have thought that by now she would have been asked to become a real, permanent employee; and in fact over the years she had been asked several times to “join the team” and so partake of company benefits, such as health insurance, paid vacations, and a retirement plan. But always she had refused. The graciousness with which she did so concealed the fact that the very offer had made her uncomfortable, but the only reason she stated was that she needed a “flexible” schedule so that she could pursue her acting career—to take off from work, on a day’s notice, in order to go on an audition; and this was something only her temporary status would enable her to do. She worked only four days a week, Monday through Thursday. As it was a busy documentation center, she was, by the end of the day, mentally exhausted from forcing her attention on a computer screen, and by the end of the fourth day she was physically exhausted as well; but at least she could then look forward to three days of glorious freedom—three days in which her thoughts could be her own, her spirit could revive, and she could go on auditions or rehearse more fully for any play she might happen to be in.
She became especially friendly with one of her coworkers, Carolyn Thompson, another word processing operator who was also an actress. Ella often sat next to her as they worked. Carolyn had come from Detroit, but had lived in New York for ten years. She was a pretty woman, a bit on the short side, with hair dyed a rather too-bright red, and who looked younger than her thirty-six years. She was currently involved with what she always referred to as an “avant-garde” production company. She had just gotten a part in a play curiously titled Fish Have No Feet, and, as she explained, the proper inquiry to make about the production was not “What is it about?” so much as “What does it mean?”
“Well, what does it mean, then?” Ella asked.
“It means different things to different people,”
Carolyn said, speaking as she typed the handwritten text on a stand beside her computer. “That’s what’s so great about it.” And she went on to speak of rather nebulous things: “man’s quest for peace in the universe,” “random character clashes in today’s urban environment,” “self-possession in the midst of technological chaos”—all very intelligent-sounding but unfortunately leaving something to be desired in the way of real meaning. Nor was this the first time she had felt it necessary to explain a play with so abstruse a title as Fish Have No Feet. Her hearers would take these explanations at face value, nodding often as though they understood perfectly well what she was talking about; and they were the likelier to have this respectful and impressed reaction if they were themselves artists, for then they feared that an inability to fathom such high-sounding phrases might bespeak a want of artistic understanding in themselves.
In order to advertise her part in Fish Have No Feet, Carolyn spent some time at work printing up cards by which to advertise the play among her fellow employees. The card displayed the name of the play in large white letters, with, below this, the sketched outline of a goggle-eyed trout. The names of the principal players, her own included, were listed at the bottom right-hand corner, while at the bottom left was the name and address of the theater. She produced about a hundred of these cards and handed them out to her coworkers. She also left a small stack in the pantry, so that people who were getting themselves a cup of coffee might pick them up.
“I hope you’ll be able to make it to the play,” she told Ella.
“Of course I’ll be there!” Ella said. She sounded enthusiastic, but she was not. Over the years she had gone to see, gone to “support,” a hundred such performances of friends and acquaintances, and the charm of these productions had long ago worn off for her. With rare exceptions, they never seemed to be very good, and even when they were, they did not seem so good as to justify the inconvenience of attending them; taking place, as invariably they did, in out-of-the-way and sometimes dangerous neighborhoods. But when one is an actor, one of the liabilities of having actor friends is what might be called the “Principle of Reciprocal Attendance”: they have come to see you, and so you are obliged to go and see them. Unless one is a total dolt, one comes in time to regard this principle as a ridiculous pretense for eliciting uncritical applause, since it goes without saying that one’s “friends” are not going to tell you after the show that the play was a bore and your performance a blot and blunder. And so Ella never received an invitation from one of her actor friends without the sense that it was an imposition. She could not help saying, “Oh, I’d love to see it!”—but would at the same time begin conjuring up plausible excuses she might give for not having shown up.
And yet, as every actor knew, showing support was very important. Small theaters didn’t have budgets for glitzy newspaper ads or radio spots by which they might advertise and draw a crowd, and their actors did not have the attraction of celebrity. No, a theater company had to rely on word-of-mouth and on direct, personal invitations. The members of the cast had to ask everyone they knew to attend. Only in this way could be avoided the dreadful situation of playing to an empty house. Thus, in the weeks before her play was to open, Carolyn incessantly promoted her play. She assured everyone she knew that they would have a great time, that the theater was a cinch to get to, that there could be no real excuse not to attend, unless it were the reprehensible one of cheapness or laziness;—for she was not above a gentle intimidation.
A few said outright that they would not miss her play for all the world; and they meant it. An equally small minority informed her that they had no interest in such things; and they also meant it. But most people, after listening with apparent interest to her puffing, said that it sounded very interesting and they would “try” to make it; and they did not mean it. Ella usually fell into this latter category. But how could she not go to Carolyn’s play? She worked with the woman almost every day; they sat side-by-side; they talked constantly; they were friends. She was obliged to go.
The theater where Fish Have No Feet was playing was located on West 39th Street, all the way over on Twelfth Avenue, in a rather deserted area of Manhattan. An area largely of warehouses and garages, it was, even during the day, relatively quiet; but now it was a ghost town. The streets here were dark and the alleys reeked of cheap wine and urine. When Ella got out of the cab at the address of the theater, she felt some alarm as she looked about her. It was not a street where anyone, much less a woman, could feel safe even at so relatively early an hour as 8 PM. A couple of homeless people were sitting on the sidewalk, their backs leaning against a wall. One of them sat next to a shopping cart full of plastic bags filled with old clothes, old bottles, old food, and whatever other items he had, in his demented state of mind, regarded as valuable enough to lug about with him through the streets of New York. The other was smoking a cigarette (one wondered where he got the money for them), lifting it to his lips with filthy fingers, and inhaled the smoke only to blow it out with heaving, liquid coughs. They both watched Ella as she got out of the cab, paid the driver, and tried to ignore them. Almost at once they accosted her, putting out their hands and asking her if she had any “extra change.” Ella didn’t look at them; she acted as though she hadn’t heard them; and quickly scanned the nearby buildings for the number corresponding to that of the theater’s address. When she found it, she hurried inside.
The building had probably housed a factory or goods exchange when it had been built a century before. The lobby was large, sparse, and empty except for a folding table that served as a “front desk” and some old wooden chairs set against the heavily scuffed and soiled walls. A young man was sitting here. He was about twenty-five years old. Tall, lanky, nice-looking, he had a slight beard, long hair, and wore jeans and a t-shirt stenciled with a picture of Marilyn Monroe. The bicycle on which he had come to the theater leaned against the wall behind him.
“Here to see the show?” he asked, when Ella walked up to him. She nodded, yes, and he blurted out, “Great. It’s ten dollars.”
On the desk before him was a small metal box, its lid open and containing various crumbled $5 and $10 bills. He collected the $10 admission charge from Ella and bade her enter the theater through the door behind him.
The theater itself was a large room, the walls of which were painted black, and the ceiling of which, also black, was a network of wires and spotlights. At the back of the room, bleachers rose some six tiers high and provided seating for almost two hundred persons. At the front of the room a low stage had been built. It was nothing more than a large, raised rectangle of plywood, twenty feet in length and eighteen feet in depth. At the moment it upheld a few props: a couple of female manikins, outlandishly covered with what appeared to be aluminum foil; a full-length mirror; a couple of floor-standing lamps;—an odd assemblage of things. Also, a ramp lead up to the stage from the aisle that ran alongside the bleachers.
There were already about forty persons present. The audience was composed completely of young people—no one over thirty-five years of age. Ella glanced over them in order to see if she knew any of them, for it sometimes happened that she ran into people whom she had acted with; but these were all strangers to her.
In the next half hour another ten persons showed up, so that, in all, the audience reached a population of fifty. The show was already a half hour behind schedule.
Then the lights dimmed, a spotlight shone on the stage, and the director came out to greet the audience, who applauded his appearance. He was about twenty-eight years old, slender, casually but neatly dressed with light brown slacks and light blue shirt with an open collar and sleeves folded midway onto his forearm. His hair was straight, dark, and parted on one side, and he wore a goatee perfectly trimmed. He stood before the audience with a confident, eager smile and an air of authority.
“Thanks, thanks for coming!” he said. “This is our fourth night of Fish Have No Feet, and before we start I just want to thank you for making this play possible. It took a lot of effort and teamwork to get this production going. We were fortunate enough to get a really interesting review in the West Side Spectator, which you might have read. Before we start, there are a few people I’d like to introduce. I’d like to start with the playwright, Josh Krassman.” He put out a hand to the playwright, a young but heavyset man sitting in the front row. He stood up, turned to face the audience, and gave a nod at their applause before sitting down. “This is Josh’s fourteenth play in two years. He’s probably one of the most prolific playwrights currently working in the city. I’d also like to introduce the costume designer, Nancy Packwood. Nancy,” he said, putting out a hand toward her and waving her to stand up, “c’mon, show yourself!” She did. Somewhere in her thirties, wearing glasses with outlandishly thick frames and a quirky purple and gold jacket of her own making, she dared to turn to the audience a single second before quickly resuming her seat. “She’s so shy!” the director said. A few in the audience laughed. “And finally there’s our sound person, Janet Dunkle”—and he pointed upward, toward the back of bleachers, where, in a booth there, a woman could be seen wearing headphones. She was dimly illuminated by the greenish light arising from the electronic console before her. She smiled and nodded in acknowledgement of the light applause for her sake. The director continued: “So, once again, thank you for coming by. We all hope you enjoy the show.” He walked off the stage, to another round of applause.
The spotlight went out; all the lights did. For about twenty seconds the entire theater was cast into darkness. A moment of uncomfortable anticipation filled the atmosphere. Then a soft blue light suffused the stage, and the play began.
Precisely what it was about would have been hard, if not impossible, to say. Certain people came out (among them, Carolyn) dressed in ragged clothes and spoke lines that had no context. Carolyn herself recited a monologue about crowded highways, air pollution, and the difficulties of commuting to work; then she stamped her feet, ran to each of the four corners of the stage and looked out with hand-visored eyes to the darkness around, before spinning around, falling to the floor with a shriek, then getting up and running off stage. Various cast members succeeded her. Some of them spoke things, some of them sang things, but they all, during or after speaking or singing, moved erratically: spinning, hopping, or (as in one instance) cart wheeling this way or that. Usually as they said their piece the other members of the cast on the stage held a frozen pose with an odd face, standing next to and becoming, as it were, one of the manikins. Between these monologues or outbursts (for some of them really were no more than shouted expletives), a soundtrack was played: trumpeted fanfares blared; sweeps of tiered violins trilled; a bass drum thumped with a dolorous consistency. Then a succession of actors came out dancing a kind of ballet, and just as they reached to an intimate, quiet, and romantic culmination (the boy gently, gently taking the wispy girl into his arms for a kiss), a scream erupted from one side of the stage and an intense spotlight blazed out onto aisle beside the bleachers. The eyes of the audience, which had grown accustomed to the dim lighting, closed against the brilliance. An old woman strapped into a motorized wheelchair came rolling down the aisle. She rolled up the ramp leading onto the stage, in the middle of which she spun her chair around a few times before stopping. She sat there with a bowed head, her gray grizzled hair looking like in the spotlight like a cloudy haze around her pate. Then, slowly, she looked up. Heavily applied makeup and strategically drawn lines exaggerated her age so that she looked positively ancient, and her lips had been made up in such a way as to look like a ghastly frown. For a whole minute she merely sat there, looking out into the darkness of the audience, with unblinking eyes and air of unutterable woe. Dancers appeared behind her and started dancing, or rather hopping about, in silence as though they had found themselves stepping on hot coals in a soundless vacuum. Then the old woman budged. She placed her hands on the arms of her wheelchair and rose with great effort. When she was finally standing, she took a deep breath, raised her head in an attitude of supplication, and shouted in a disturbingly pathetic old-lady voice: “What does it all mean? What does it all mean? Can someone out there tell me—what does it all mean?” She fell back into her wheelchair, as though the effort she had used in making this inquiry had divested her of her last ounce of energy, and began moving off the stage as music came up and grew in intensity and the spotlight following her dimmed.
For the next hour scenes like this one succeeded one another. At times one of the actors did something, or said something, that evoked a bout of laughter from some of the audience, who apparently had such developed powers of understanding that they could extract meaning from the ostensibly unintelligible. Even during what seemed to be the most cacophonous, most disjointed parts of the play, the audience sat mesmerized as though every incoherent shout, unprovoked slap, and sudden jig or hop had a distinct meaning or message. Ella was a little uncomfortable to think that she was not sophisticated enough to understand what seemed to be transparent to everyone else, and so when the others laughed, she did also, and when the others sat up to watch with especial attention a particular actor, she did the same; and when the play ended—when the lights of the room came up, and all the actors appeared together for a common bow—she also clapped enthusiastically. And yet despite clapping as though she appreciated the play, she was really something more than disappointed: she was a little angry and felt as though she had been conned out of ten dollars and her time.
After the house lights had gone up, and the audience filed out of the bleachers in order to congregate in the aisles and talk, those involved with the play also came out from backstage in order to mingle with the audience. Many of the people here knew one another; many in the audience had been friends or acquaintance of the actors. When Carolyn saw Ella, she rushed over to her. “I’m so happy you’re here!” she said, giving her a hug.
As though by reflex, Ella complimented Carolyn on the play. “You were wonderful,” she said. “Just great!”
“Oh, thanks! You have no idea how nervous I was! I’ve been doing this play for almost a week now and I still get so nervous!”
“You were fine,” Ella assured her.
“Actually, I did flub a few lines,” Carolyn confided, with a rather roguish laugh. “I’m sure Jerry caught them!”
“Jerry?”
“The director. He’s such a pain in the ass! He insists on everyone speaking their lines exactly the way they’re written. He’s friends with Joshua, that’s why—you know, the playwright. And he!—he acts like every word he writes is gold.”
Despite Carolyn’s apparent contempt for Jerry, the moment she saw him she called out to him in a cheerful, friendly voice, and waived him over to herself and Ella. He approached with a wide smile, having over the last few minutes reaped any number of compliments on his production, and therefore having his high opinion of himself confirmed. Carolyn introduced him to Ella.
That Jerry, at his young age, was already the director of a theater would at one time have seemed very impressive to Ella. And it still would have impressed her, had the theater of which he was the director been anything substantial. But his theater was just another one of those out-of-the-way places—another converted warehouse or hastily-appointed floor of a commercial building—which none but a few actors knew about, and which was likely to disappear the moment the landlord decided to raise the rent a few dollars more per month. His air of satisfaction therefore aroused in her an amused contempt, but she gave no indication of this; she generously deferred to his unfounded sense of himself; and heeded him as attentively as she have done someone of indisputable accomplishment. After Carolyn had introduced him to Ella, and he shook her hand, he asked if she had liked the play.
“It was very interesting,” Ella said, in quick, appreciative tone of voice.
“Well, if you think this one was good, wait till you see the next one.”
Carolyn turned suddenly to Jerry and asked him, excitedly, “You’ve decided to do Joné’s play?”
He nodded, with a knowing smile. “I think it would be good for the company,” he said.
“Oh, that’s wonderful!” Carolyn said. “Have you told her?”
“Yep, I called her this morning. She was happy about it.”
“Oh, it’s going to be great!” Carolyn exclaimed.
“What is it about?” Ella asked.
“It’s called Rolling Pin,” Jerry said. “It’s very avant-garde. And yet it’s conventional, too—wouldn’t you say?” he asked, turning to Carolyn.
“There’s definitely a story line,” she said, nodding.
“It’s quite unusual, actually,” Jerry continued, turning back to Ella. “It’s about this woman who has this handicap—kind of. But it’s not a physical handicap. It’s really a mental thing. You see, she won’t walk.”
“She can’t walk?” Ella asked. She wasn’t sure why a play about a cripple could in itself be exciting.
“Oh, no,” Jerry said, shaking his head, “she can walk. But she won’t. She refuses.”
Ella shook her head. “I don’t get it.”
“She’s got this idea in her head that whenever she walks someone she loves dies, or people get hurt, or earthquakes happen, or … oh, I don’t know: just terrible things. It’s like a phobia or something. So she refuses to walk.”
“And so she has to roll everywhere,” Carolyn interjected.
“Everywhere,” Jerry reiterated, with a decisive nod. “No matter where she goes, she has to roll there. If she goes outside, she has to roll out of her apartment. If she goes into the subway, she rolls down the steps. If she goes shopping, she rolls into the store. Everywhere. And so she gets this nickname in her neighborhood: everybody calls her ‘Rolling Pin.’”
Ella laughed; she had never heard anything so ridiculous in her life. But as she did so, both Jerry and Carolyn regarded her with the strained smiles of vague disapproval—the kind of expressions one might expect to receive from having inadvertently offended one’s interlocutors by having attempted to arouse mirth at the expense of their deeply held beliefs. Ella was too couth not to notice this at once and to amend her demeanor: she stopped laughing and said rather apologetically, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know—it’s a serious thing, then?”
“Well of course it is,” Jerry said, now quite serious himself.
In an instant, Ella had sobered up completely. “It sounds interesting,” she said, hoping that by the gravity of her demeanor she would make up whatever esteem she had lost by her former light-heartedness. She also hoped that Jerry, in keeping with the interested tone of their conversation, would not regard her comment as a nice usage of language meant to avoid telling the lie of a clear compliment. For it seemed to Ella that such a play, such a premise, really was ridiculous and couldn’t square with any reasonable notion of drama.
“We’re going to start auditions next week,” he said. “I need a rest after Seals—it took a lot out of me.” Even as he said these words he displayed his fatigue with a certain slump in his shoulders and an exhausted expression, as though he had been doing hard labor for sixteen hours a day.
“Ella, why don’t you try for it?” Carolyn suggested.
“Try for what?”
“For Rolling Pin.”
“You’re an actor?” Jerry asked, pleased as punch that she might be. And when Ella confirmed his hopes with a modest nod, he continued, “Would you be interested?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I’d have to know more about it.”
“Are you in anything now?” Jerry asked.
Ella shook her head, no; and hoped he wouldn’t inquire into her last performance, since she had not acted in almost a year and feared he would interpret so long a hiatus from theater as a mark of her insincerity in pursuing her art.
“Then you ought to try out for it. Come to the audition. Seriously!”
Ella shrugged a little and merely as a politeness responded, “Maybe I will.”
One of the cast members called out for Jerry, who looked away for a moment, then turned to Ella and Carolyn and excused himself. He sailed off, shaking hands and exchanging cocktail kisses along the way.
Carolyn mentioned that the cast intended to get something to eat at a late-night diner and that Ella was more than welcome to come along. But Ella declined, saying that she was tired and had to get home. Besides, she had to work tomorrow.
When she returned to her apartment she could hear the sound of the television in the living room. It surprised her that this should be so, since it was now past one in the morning, and her roommate Grayson, at least during weeknights, rarely stayed up so late. Sure enough, there she was, sitting in the corner of the couch, clutching a pillow the way a little girl might clutch a doll, and staring, a little bleary-eyed, at the screen.
“You’re still up?” Ella asked, as she entered the foyer and turned to lock the door.
Grayson didn’t answer. In her pajamas, her golden hair swept back from her face and bound at the back of her head, she merely looked over to Ella and gave a half-hearted, tired smile.
Ella walked over to Grayson and plopped down beside her on the couch, kicking off her shoes as she did so. She caught a whiff of alcohol from her roommate, and at once her inclination was to inquire reprehendingly into it. For in the last year or so Grayson had been drinking a lot. Usually she waited till weekends, when she would buy a bottle of vodka or scotch, and then, right after dinner, “settle down,” as she liked to refer to it, with a “few cocktails”—the few always winding up to be, after several hours, a quarter of a bottle, and sometimes even more. At first she had drunk openly, indifferent of Ella’s presence; then, noticing undoubtedly her roommate’s unspoken concern, she had become more conscious and furtive about it, and, as though to elude criticism, would drink in the nonjudgmental privacy of her room. More than once Ella had mentioned to her that she was forming a bad and potentially dangerous habit, but Grayson had brushed off the comment with a smiling, easy-going, “Oh, believe me, it’s just a few drinks! It doesn’t mean anything! I have more than this when I go out, for God’s sake!” Now, surveying the coffee table and seeing neither a bottle of booze nor an empty glass as the remnants of a binge, Ella told herself that it was best not even to mention the drinking; not this time, anyway.
Grayson had been watching one of those entertainment news programs in which Hollywood movie stars are interviewed and clips of their latest movies are shown. At this moment the “correspondent” of the program was sitting in the luxurious home of Angelina Rourke, the supermodel-turned-actress, who had just married the well-established actor, Greg Andrews, though he was almost thirty-years her senior. Angelina looked absolutely beautiful as she answered the questions put to her. Laughing lightly now and then, she played with her hair (incidentally showing off her huge diamond engagement ring) and spoke of what hard work it had been to make her most recent movie, Champion Run. In it, she played a Chicago detective who almost single-handedly takes on the Russian mafia. A film clip of the movie came on. It showed her carrying a high-powered pistol in each hand and breaking into a secret meeting of drug lords. She wreaked havoc as she eluded the gunfire of a dozen automatic weapons suddenly fired in her direction: jumping behind posts that exploded with bullets, then quickly peeking out from behind them in order to take perfectly-aimed shots that knocked off her opponents one by one as though they were sitting ducks in a shooting gallery. In the space of fifteen seconds she did a platoon’s worth of destruction, shooting, taking cover, shooting again, never taking a bullet, but only pumping her own into others; and throughout this most desperate and energetic episode maintaining all the glamour of a world-class supermodel. “I insisted on doing my own stunts,” Angelina explained; and went into a mini-dissertation on why it was important for an “actor such as myself” to maintain a film’s credibility by doing her own action scenes whenever possible, “even though sometimes you’re really risking your life.”
“How was the play?” Grayson asked, staring at the television.
“Don’t ask.”
“That bad?”
Ella blew out some air. “Let me tell you something, it was so bad it was …” She didn’t finish the sentence. She was too tired even to search an appropriate adjective or simile. “Anyone call?”
Grayson shook her head, negatively. And in that moment Ella perceived or sense some unhappy strain in her roommate.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Gray?” Ella asked.
“Oh, sure,” Grayson said, smiling a little and glancing up with eyes that seemed to affirm her statement. “Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s kind of late for you to be up, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, well … I’m going to sleep soon. I just wasn’t too tired tonight, that’s all.”
“Well, I’m going to sleep. I’m exhausted.”
Ella got up from the couch, bending down to pick up her shoes and carry them with her.
Grayson clutched the pillow to her chest a little more tightly and stared at Angelina Rourke, who was talking about the Cannes Film Festival and how excited she was to be going there this year.
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