Trust Exercise(52)

Unlike Karen, David had never expected to hear from Martin again. David hadn’t spent much time with Martin for those two months, fourteen years ago. They’d never been in touch after Martin and the others had left. But Martin, in his letter, seemed to know all about David’s success. Maybe Martin had actually heard about David somehow, and been reminded he knew him. Or maybe he’d remembered David, and for whatever reason decided to look him up and see if he’d made something of himself. You couldn’t tell from the letter, which he’d sent to the company’s post office box.

“Do you have the letter with you?” Karen asks, interrupting David’s lengthy dissertation on the letter from Martin, in a possibly over-sharp tone. Karen would much rather see this letter herself, hold the thing in her hands, than hear David describe it. But of course David has misplaced the letter already. It doesn’t matter, he reminds Karen in response to her outright annoyance. He remembers its words perfectly. When David and Karen were in high school, David tortured his classmates with recitations of the skits of Monty Python and the songs of Bob Dylan. He’s always had a flawless memory for words that coexists in some way with a totally fragmented grasp of his life. This is a psychological or neurological phenomenon that perhaps has a name Karen might someday know if she goes into clinical practice.

“He congratulated me on everything with the company,” David says. “He was really nice about it. It seems like he’d looked up reviews. And then he said, ‘It’s about bloody time someone shook things up in that starchy little burg you call home. I was sorry that it couldn’t be Candide but I’m delighted it’s you! Give the righteous moralizers a smack—you might knock their eyes open.’ And then he said, ‘Perhaps you’ve heard I have some troubles of my own with the morality crowd. It’s the usual thing—if they can’t find immorality to scold they make it up and it works just as well.’ Then he talked about how he’d finally found the time to finish writing a play, and made arrangements to stage it, both directing and playing a principal role, but then ‘here came this witch hunt in which, most regrettably, I am the witch.’ And then he pretty much asked me if I’d stage his play. The one he’s had to cancel.”

Not understanding what “morality troubles” and “witch hunt” might mean, David had, first, forgotten about the letter for a few days while he dealt with his own theatre projects and created and recovered from hangovers. Then he saw Mr. Kingsley at a meeting or somewhere and asked him what he knew these days about Martin. Mr. Kingsley made a face—the sort of face a nun makes when the doings of the wicked are too regrettable to even discuss. Sitting at The Bar with Karen, his palm lying on top of the envelope in which he’s put the article that Karen wants to keep looking at but will not admit wanting to look at, David makes his version of the face, which reminds Karen that David didn’t fail at acting because he didn’t know how. At least he can put on a face. Drunk as he is—or maybe because he’s so drunk—he does a very good nun. A face hung on a hook and dragged low by a weight—the weight of wickedness that’s too regrettable to even discuss. Mr. Kingsley had declined to discuss it. He’d made the face, and a couple days later—today—he’d dropped the news clipping by David’s office. But who are the wicked Mr. Kingsley declined to discuss? Are they Martin, or Martin’s accusers?

Although she’s not known for promiscuity or a sense of humor—in fact, people probably think she’s both celibate and unfunny—Karen often points out in certain public situations that she has never slept with David. Let’s say Karen happens to be at The Bar the same night as some person from David’s broadest circle, aka his drinking circle, whom she has never met and doesn’t want to meet because she and this person have nothing in common. In such situations David without fail will insist upon introducing Karen to this random drunkard of his vaguest acquaintance. David without fail will describe Karen using such hyperbolic phrases as “one of my oldest friends in the world” or “goes back further than anyone” or “knows where all my skeletons are buried.” Karen without fail will quip, “I’m the only woman in this bar who hasn’t slept with him,” or, “I’m the only woman he’s ever known for more than a week who hasn’t slept with him,” or, most impactfully, “I’m the only woman in this town/county/greater metropolitan region who hasn’t slept with him.” David without fail winces visibly when she says this. It’s as if his reputation as a guy who’s irresistible to women—except Karen—is somehow undeserved, or unpleasant to him. Karen has never understood David’s relationship to his sexuality, which like his charisma seems to stalk the world independent of David’s intentions, doing whatever it wants. And Karen herself, whenever she makes the comment, without fail also winces, but on the inside, because the comment is compulsive and she never means to make it and wishes she didn’t. It possibly suggests sour grapes, as if she wants to sleep with David, when she doesn’t. Or it possibly seems mean-spirited or superior toward other women. And however it seems, it is unnecessary. Yet she always says it, always wincing; and David always gives her the opportunity to say it, always wincing. Why? What compels them?

Until the night David showed her the clipping, Karen would have said that David always introduced her because of his obsession with his past. And she would have said that she always made the comment because she was annoyed by his obsession with his past. But on the night of the newspaper clipping, Karen wondered whether the whole thing had to do not with the past, the thing David always brought up, but with sex, the thing Karen always brought up. Maybe Karen’s insistence that she had nothing to do with David’s sex life meant that Karen, in fact, had some ax to grind about David’s sex life, its epic quality discussed by everyone, as if David were the star of some hit TV show that Karen had been watching for decades with no option of turning it off.