Our Country Friends(95)

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The Actor had moved into the international children’s summer camp down the road, a camp he and Dee had once explored for weeks, finding new and inappropriate places for their lovemaking. This was the test. He had to live among the “happiest” memories of his life and then find a way to substitute for them. He had to take his sacred ground with Dee and trade it out for himself and his art. He had to embrace the absence that would always be at the center of his life, for he had already been claimed. Not by Dee, not by Elspeth, not by some lousy commercial algorithm. There was a stage here, by the side of the road, the stage they had used for their first tussle. Its wood was warped and it was covered in condoms and half-mauled Nerf footballs, but that made it even more important. It was not a stage, but a summons.

In the deepest of night he would forage. He would crawl up to the House on the Hill with his duffel bag, figuring out ways to avoid the automated lights by Dee and Ed’s bungalows. In the kitchen, by the light of his torch, he would fill the bag with Ed’s pork chops and sardines, his charcuterie and cornichons, until it was swimming in grease. The colonists were always coming in to help themselves to leftovers. A somnolent Masha once had to be avoided as she stood in the pantry eating the challah bread he was about to steal amid the Saturday dusk. He curled up beneath the long country sink, listening to her mumble in her language.

    Back at the camp, he would eat the cold excellent food with his fingers, then sleep contentedly through most of the hot late-summer days. He reclaimed all their lovemaking spaces. The overgrown tree house by the main road, the Japanese-style bell tower that would once ring in the meals for the international youth, the tennis court with its sad droopy net and burning tar, the spiderweb-coated Jack and Jill bathrooms that still stunk of humanity after all these years of disuse, the floor of the Music Cabin with its decals explaining how the tango was to be danced by aspiring Argentinians. He had stolen a pillow and a complicated-looking Soviet comforter from Masha’s closet (the latter might well have been used in spaceflight) and turned them into an ad hoc sleeping bag, finding a new place to close his lids every night, a place to rebuild the world with an absence of her, an absence of everyone he no longer needed. Now he could go back to who he was. A summoned, serious man.

On the stage, in the dark of night, after some middle-aged local couple sliding up in a Korean sport utility vehicle had abused the stage with their pornographic sounds, leaving behind prophylactic evidence of their crime, after the commando-style foraging in Senderovsky’s kitchen, but before the meal he served himself as a reward, he would go through his roles, from the high-school stage manager of Our Town to college Iago, to the all-too-redeemable skinhead of München am Hudson and the misunderstood Karen-grade evil genius of Terabyte, his last flop. He strode the stage, his voice booming, the coyotes up the hill duly reproached, until he found himself whispering instead of projecting, shuffling along instead of claiming the stage as possession. Everywhere he turned, the new absence greeted him, and when he looked down at his body, or caught his face in the mirrors of the Jack and Jill bathrooms, he saw the way his appearance had substituted for the work and therefore for the truth.

Was he good from the start, or was his rise a fluke? He needed imagination to take on the work he did, but had he overly relied on charisma and magnetism? And was it the magnetism that had won out in the end? He reprised his role in Morning Glories, when he had been just eighteen years old, dancing half naked in that stupid hat, clowning around. There was no imagination involved, just a need to captivate. He was no more than an expensive avatar. He was a way out. Senderovsky’s daughter was maybe seven or eight. But all she cared about was that Korean boy band, because that’s what it would take for her to escape her mother’s reactionism. He didn’t want to be an escape for others. He wanted to be supple. To move through this world like a nobody, like a woman in regional sales gliding through airport lounges in the previrus era, always moving, always herself. That’s what acting was. You did not need to capture an audience, you needed to be captured yourself.



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    The black truck appeared a week into his exile. It moored itself like a boat on the opposite side of the road, next to an Egyptian-style obelisk that listed some of the countries the former campers called home. The driver killed the engine, and the Actor silenced his Hamlet mid-Yorick while regarding the silent intruder. After he finished, after Hamlet was no more, the truck flashed its beams once, twice, then turned around and departed for the state road.

The truck came every night, always in the middle of a performance, always when he had discovered something true about the role he was playing. At first, the Actor resented this interruption, but then he learned to regard it as naturally as he did the soft palaver of grass in the nightly wind. Because this was an act of communication, there had to be an audience. And his audience was the owner of a sad ugly truck, a desperate soul who headed out each night in search of him. He—something about his vehicle spoke of a stunted masculinity—parked so far away that even with the windows rolled down he could not hear the Actor perform. He must have seen the Actor as no more than a small figure on a crumbling stage. And then he flashed his beams twice when the performance was over, not applause, merely an acknowledgment. Once, twice. Thank you, good night.

The Actor had started out with the moon waxing, providing enough natural light for him not to fall off the stage, but when the moon waned, the driver put on his lights, beamed them not directly at the Actor but across the broken tarmac of the country road. And the Actor was silently grateful. He thought he could see the occupant in the truck’s cab now. Sometimes he appeared young and pockmarked, a high-school kid at best, and at other times bald and pinch faced and official, the local excavator or part-time town councilman. He was all of these things to the Actor, a projection, a substitution, and when the time came for the Actor to leave the summer camp, when Dee had been expunged and he reconstituted, he walked toward the high beams with his hands up in a formal surrender.