Lost and Wanted(10)

“When did this happen?” I asked Jack, and then reframed it, because his grasp of time is still evolving. Sometimes he’ll say “yesterday” to refer to something that happened recently. When he was four, “yesterday” meant anything that had happened in the past; sometimes to distinguish one day from another, he would say, “that other yesterday.”

    “Was it when you were in first grade? Or before that?”

Jack looked frustrated at my inability to understand. “It was now.”

“Now?”

“Last week.”

“I think you might have imagined that, Bug.”

But Jack had gone back to the catalog. I thought later that it might have been better to explain, then and there, why it was impossible for him to have seen Charlie the previous week, in our home, what it meant that she was dead. But something prevented me from doing this, and I said nothing. And so I have to conclude that a good deal of what happened later was my own fault.





7.


I spent one evening going through boxes of old photographs in my closet, until I found the one I was looking for. It was a shot of me and Charlie at her wedding. She had worn ivory chiffon, a sleeveless column with a high, pleated neck, the kind of dress only Charlie could pull off. I was wearing a sage-green, strapless dress she had helped me choose. My expression is giddy—I was more than a little drunk—but Charlie is staring into the camera in a serious way. Maybe it’s the contrast in our expressions, but looking at this photo, now framed on my desk, I have the strange feeling that something in it is alive. Charlie seems to look through time, as if she knows what’s going to happen and has something very urgent to say, if only I could concentrate hard enough to hear it.

By the time we graduated, Charlie maintained that she couldn’t stand the smugness, the insularity, or the poverty of the academic lifestyle, and that she’d always known she was going to L.A. This might have been true, but it was also true that if Charlie had wanted to apply to the Yale School of Drama, or the Henry Fellowship at Oxford (things she had claimed to want up until that point), it would have required a letter of recommendation from her thesis advisor, the man we referred to as “Pope.” With his heavy eyebrows, long nose, and dark, wavy hair, Charlie said he resembled the black-and-white engraving of the eighteenth-century satiric poet Alexander Pope reproduced on her handout from Comp Lit 96: Cross(pollinat)ing the Channel: Poetry of the Augustan Age. Professor Pope was a great lecturer, the most famous professor in Harvard’s Comparative Literature Department; like her mother, Charlie was a Francophile, and she took Pope’s seminar on French female writers of the Enlightenment—Du harem, aux salons, à la Révolution—the following year.

    Honors-track students in the humanities had a one-on-one tutorial every year after their first; most junior tutors were graduate students, although full professors would sometimes accept an especially promising student, if their research interests dovetailed. Charlie had decided to apply for a junior tutorial with Pope on the eighteenth-century playwright and epistolary novelist Fran?oise de Graffigny, whose work she read in the original. She told me privately that she hoped she could continue with him as her senior thesis advisor. The fact that an academic career, whether in theater or physics, would require at least one powerful mentor was clear to us even as undergraduates. Pope was the one who had told Charlie about the Henry Fellowship—whose recipients spent a year at Oxford, furthering their studies in their chosen field—because he was one of three people on the nominating committee.

All of this worked out as Charlie had planned, and it wasn’t until well into the first semester of our senior year that Charlie confided in me about her problems with Pope. Even then it was with characteristic world-weariness that she told me her professor had literally gotten down on his knees one day during their tutorial in his office and confessed his uncontrollable attraction. At this point she was deep into her thesis about Choderlos de Laclos’s novel, Dangerous Liaisons. Charlie had chosen Laclos in part because she already knew she was playing Mme. de Merteuil in Christopher Hampton’s play; when race was not a theme, student directors at least seemed to feel more comfortable with what was then called “color-blind casting.” Her thesis was about the ways that twentieth-century dramatic adaptions of the novel reflected the cultures in which they were produced.

    By the time we were seniors, Charlie had been paying her dues in the Dramatic Club for three years, waiting for a starring role in the annual student production on the mainstage at the Loeb, which normally housed the American Repertory Theater. She had played Lucienne in Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear and Miranda in The Tempest in smaller Harvard venues. The big show our junior year had been Six Degrees of Separation, and Charlie had read for both Tess and Ouisa, the part Stockard Channing played on Broadway and in the movie. The director, a friend of hers, later confided that her auditions were excellent for both parts, but that casting her in either would have been “too confusing” for the audience. Charlie told me this in a matter-of-fact way, and went on that semester to play the stepdaughter in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, in the smaller black-box theater attached to the mainstage. The difference between the two shows was in degree, not in kind, she joked, and didn’t make a big deal about it. Even if she were thinking it, she could hardly have been the one to suggest to the director that a student production might make its mark with this kind of unconventional casting, or that there might have been something productive about confusing the audience in this way.