Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(12)

And Pilates, she’s strongly urging Pilates. She’s already lined up a girl Pilates instructor who’s willing to give him private sessions, contrary to her usual practice, because she admires his work. This idea is dismaying: having some estrogen-plumped babe a quarter of his age contort his stringy, knobbled limbs while comparing the dashing protagonist of his earlier poems, replete with sexual alacrity and sardonic wit, to the atrophied bundle of twine and sticks he has become. Look on this picture, then on this. Why is Reynolds so keen to hook him up to the Pilates torture apparatus and stretch him upon it until he snaps like an outworn rubber band? She wants to know he’s suffering. She wants to humiliate him and feel virtuous about it at the same time.

“Stop trying to pimp me out to all these groupies,” he tells her. “Why don’t you simply rope me into a chair and charge admission?”

The park was pullulating with activity. Kids played Frisbee in the background, babies yowled, dogs barked. Gavin pored over the program notes. Pretentious crap, as usual. The play was late starting: some spasm in the lighting system, they were told. The mosquitoes were gathering; Gavin swatted at them; Reynolds produced the Deep Woods Off. Some fool in a scarlet unitard and pig’s ears blew a trumpet to get them all to shut up, and after a minor explosion and a figure in a ruff sprinting off in the direction of the refreshment kiosk – In search of what? What had they forgotten? – the play began.

There was a prelude showing a film clip of Richard the Third’s skeleton being dug up from underneath a parking lot – an event that had in fact taken place, Gavin saw it on the television news. It was Richard all right, complete with DNA evidence and many injuries to the skull. The prelude was projected onto a piece of white fabric that looked like a bedsheet, and probably was one – arts budgets being what they were, as Gavin commented to Reynolds, sotto voce. Reynolds dug him with her elbow. “Your voice is louder than you think,” she whispered.

The soundtrack led them to understand – over a crackling loudspeaker and in lousy iambic pentameter Elizabethan pastiche – that the entire drama they were about to see was unfolding post-mortem from inside Richard’s battered skull. Zoom to an eyehole in the skull, and then right on through it to the inside of the cranium. And blackout.

Whereupon the bedsheet was whisked away and there was Richard in the floodlights, all set to caper and posture, to flounce and denounce. On his back was a preposterously large hump, decorated in a jester’s red and yellow stripes – like Mr. Punch, the program notes had explained, who himself was derived from Punchinello; for the director’s vision was that Shakespeare’s Richard was modelled on commedia dell’arte, a troupe of which had been playing in England at the time. The largeness of the hump was deliberate: the inner core of the play (“As opposed to the outer core,” Gavin had snorted to himself) was all about the props. These were symbols of Richard’s unconscious, which accounted for their enlargement. The director’s thinking must have been that if the audience members were staring at outsized thrones and humps and whatnot and wondering what the f*ck they were doing in this play, it wouldn’t bother them so much that they couldn’t hear the words.

So in addition to his gigantic, varicoloured, metonymous hump, Richard had a kingly robe with a sixteen-foot-long train attached to it, carried by two pageboys wearing outsized boar’s heads because Richard’s coat of arms had a boar on it. There was a huge butt of malmsey for Clarence to be drowned in and a couple of swords that were as tall as the actors. For the smothering of the princes in the Tower, performed in dumb show like the play within the play in Hamlet, two enormous pillows were borne in on stretchers like corpses or roasted suckling pigs, with pillowcases that matched the motley of Richard’s hump, just in case the audience missed the point.

Death by hump, thinks Gavin, eyeing the approaching pillows borne towards him by Reynolds. What a fate. And Reynolds as First Murderer. But that would be fitting, all things considered; and Gavin does consider all things. He’s got the time for it.



“Are you awake?” says Reynolds brightly as she clacks across the floor. She’s wearing a black pullover with a silver and turquoise belt cinched around her waist and tight jeans. She’s getting a little flubber on the outsides of her thighs, which otherwise have the heft and contours of a speed skater’s. Should he point out those pockets of flubber? No; better to hold them back for a more strategic moment. And maybe it isn’t flubber, maybe it’s muscle. She works out enough.

“If I wasn’t awake before, I would be now,” says Gavin. “You sound like a wooden railroad.” He dislikes those clogs, and he’s told her so. They do nothing for her legs. But she doesn’t care what he thinks about her legs as much as she used to. She says the clogs are comfortable, and that comfort trumps fashion as far as she’s concerned. Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds – who used to be a passionate Yeats fan – is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different, and in actual fact Yeats is dead.

Reynolds tucks the pillows in behind Gavin, one behind his head, one at the small of his back. This pillow arrangement, she claims, makes him look taller and therefore more impressive. She straightens the plaid car rug that covers his legs and feet, and which she insists on calling his nap blanket. “Oh, Mr. Grumpy!” she says. “Where’s your smile?”