Trust Exercise(50)
“For fuck’s sake, only a tap dancer says, ‘I’m an awful tap dancer.’ You were good. Remember when we all had to sing ‘Razzle Dazzle’? You killed.”
“He didn’t cast me.”
“He never cast me either.”
“And now you’re a director and I’m your accountant. All is as it should be. You don’t have to tell me I’m an undiscovered star just because you can’t pay me.”
“You had a dark energy onstage—don’t roll your eyes! I remember. You didn’t have a stupid Mentos smile.”
“Stop.”
“From the point of view of directing I can’t fucking believe the deficit of talent in our class. Of course our estimation of our talent was completely overblown, but even if you adjust for that, we had a deficit. If you look at the school over time, there’s only one person in its entire history who’s ever become a global celebrity, and she went to the school for less than three weeks so we can’t really claim her. But there’s the handful of people who have been on a billboard over Sunset Boulevard once or twice in their careers, and we’ve produced one of those let’s say twice every decade. Then there are the people who’ve managed to pay the bills as working actors—sometimes you see them on TV although they never break out. There’s one of those maybe every two years. Then there’s the people who should have made it at least as far as getting regular work, but they had shitty luck. There’s a few of that type every year and I cast them in my stuff, all the better for me. But our class had no one even in that final category—except you.”
“You’re putting me in the shitty-luck category? I’d rather be in the talentless category.”
“Come to auditions next week. Come on. Why the fuck not?”
I might have given a dry bark of laughter, or made a wry face, by which I would have meant, You’re ridiculous, or I’m ridiculous, and either way I’m not taking this seriously. I would have shoved off the barstool unhurriedly, paid my tab, said good night. In high school, despite being members of the same graduating theatre class, David and I had never been friendly. Our shared connection to Sarah was more like a wedge than a bridge. But now that we both lived in our hometown again, conversations like this happened often between us. David was obsessed with the past, and not just certain parts of it. All of us, I think it’s fair to say, fixate on things from our past, maybe wanting them back the way they were, maybe wanting to go back and change them. Either way, this fixation on parts of the past seems pretty common. David took the tendency to an extreme. The whole of his past obsessed him. The past was like the country he was exiled from, and any vestige of it, even me, was fas cinating to him. David seemed to have decided, very early in life, that the best of his life was already behind him, and all his present achievements with his theatre company interested him only because they gave him a connection to his past. I interested him only because I gave him a connection to his past. I gave him the opportunity to talk about his past, even parts of his past that hadn’t interested him at the time but that interested him now. And so he would remind himself of this or that thing I’d done, or talk about my unacknowledged talent, because it gave him the thing he most craved: a doorway, however indirect, to his past. He would have done it with anyone out of his past. In fact, he did. I often heard him engaged in the same sorts of conversations with other relics of those years who had rotated back into town.
These conversations about the past always happened at a bar we called The Bar—everyone called it The Bar—although it had a proper name. Our town had plenty of bars, so there wasn’t an obvious reason this comfortable but ordinary bar would be known as The Bar. It wasn’t a place we had gone to in high school, although it had existed then, giving off the same vibe of friendly, predictable after-work watering hole it gave off now, the difference being that then this vibe seemed inappropriately dull and now it seemed appropriately dull. In this one way, at least, David had broken with the past. It was The Bar, not one of the bars he’d drunk at in the past, where he liked to sit around and talk about the past.
Unlike David, I spent very little time at The Bar. To be clear, I spent very little time with David. The volunteer grant-writing, the tax-fiasco fixing, the dropping in once in a while to a gala to not be recognized by Mr. Kingsley, the conversations about my unacknowledged talent at the bar of The Bar, were things that happened maybe every couple months and made up a tiny fraction of my life. Most of my time I spent working for clients who paid me, or working on the house I’d bought. I also went to therapy, and started training as a therapist. I didn’t drink. I’d never drunk much and then there was a time in my life when I eliminated things, some because I couldn’t tolerate them, and some because I didn’t require them, and drinking was a thing that I didn’t require. I called my brother most nights to check in, and often ate my dinner while I listened to him talk. I sometimes watched a movie. I read a lot: History and Self-help are my categories. I’ve always liked being alone.
Some nights, though, I liked the thought of being with people, and then I’d drive to The Bar, usually with a book, although I rarely got to read it, because David was usually there. We almost always had some actual business, some organizational task I was helping him with, that would cause him to turn from whoever he’d been drinking with. David always had someone to drink with, often a small crowd. There was usually a woman riveting her attention to David like she thought there would be a quiz later, there were usually members of the theatre crowd and members of the broader arts crowd and members of the even broader drinking crowd, orbiting David, placing him at the center of things. Even when David was alone at the bar of The Bar, as he sometimes was because he’d gone into a State that held people off just as effectively as if he were swinging a spiked club around, he was still at the center of things. By which I mean that even when he pushed people away they kept their eyes on him, from the far side of the room, anxious to find a way back to his side, to regain his attention. When we were young, David had clumsy charisma; he knew he was attractive, but he didn’t know in what way or why. More than a decade of dedicated self-abuse had ruined his looks and when he was tired or drunk, his face looked like a ball of molding clay that had been thrown against a wall. Yet his charisma, which you could no longer confuse with his looks, was more noticeable. It almost seemed independent of him. The physical David would sit slumped at the bar staring into his glass while his charisma stalked the room, pushing some people away, pulling some people close. Karen was always pulled close, on account of her usefulness to him as a loyal unpaid employee and her status as Link to the Past.