Trust Exercise(61)
“If he can come from England, I can make it from New York. I have to. I’ve never seen a single one of David’s shows.”
“Would you really?” Karen marveled. “We open in less than three weeks.”
“Really,” Sarah said. She glowed like a lantern, as if already absorbing David’s stunned adoration at her unexpectedly attending the play. “Write down the dates on this napkin. I’ll book a flight when I get back to my hotel.”
“But are you serious?” Karen persisted.
“Of course I’m serious! I can’t not. David’s show? That you’re in?”
“Because—if you’re serious—”
“What?”
“No, it’s crazy.”
“Just tell me!”
“I just had this crazy idea—don’t be offended. Just, remember all those times on costume crew? So my character has just one change. It’s not even a quick one.”
Sarah clapped one hand over her mouth, barely muffling a squeal. She had to take the hand away to speak again. “I’ll be your dresser! I’ll dress you!”
Do mothers iron anymore? Or should we say, Do people iron anymore? But admit, it was mothers, not people, who ironed. Even Karen’s mother, trailing around in her ruffle-necked robe and her wedge bedroom slippers, had ironed. The ironing board permanently set up on its X-leg, wearing its silvery cover drawn tight by elastic. Lying on the floor under the board, Karen had been reminded by that elastic gathering of her own diapers, which in this memory were in the recent past. Karen must be two or three, lying under the ironing board, gazing up at the puckered elastic that holds the smooth, silvery fabric in place. Kevin must be an infant, kicking in a playpen or napping in his crib. Karen’s father still lives in the house and Karen’s mother is ironing his shirts. She sprays on the shirts from a can, the same way she sprays in a pan right before she cooks dinner, but the smell of the spray starch cooked hot by the iron makes Karen more hungry than does the smell of any actual cooking. The iron, coming down on the patch of damp starch, seems to be eating it, with a crackle and gratified hiss. And her mother, dreaming her way through the menial task as if nothing could be more romantic, is the mother whom Karen expects, the mother she’ll always be trying to find. In the costume shop at CAPA, when Karen rediscovered hot spray starch, the sound and the smell of it kept her content all those shows that she did the costumes, that she dressed someone else for the stage. Hot spray starch sedated her. It recalled the ancient safety of her lost childhood. And it bound her and Sarah together, into a harmony, ironing costumes. Now those afternoons they spent in costume shop that at the time had given Karen nostalgia for being a child are themselves an ancient childhood memory. Nostalgia is a “sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past.” It comes from the Greek nostos: to return home, and the Greek algos: pain.
* * *
ALL THOSE YEARS after he first arrived, Martin returned. He was picked up at the airport by David, who was hosting Martin in his terrible apartment. Karen knew such arrangements were de rigueur in the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts but she still wondered how much Martin would enjoy David’s sofa bed after Mr. Kingsley’s guest suite. Karen herself, indispensably helpful, hired a cleaning service to fumigate and sanitize David’s apartment before Martin’s arrival, as usual earning David’s abject gratitude. Karen also booked Martin’s travel, filed the paperwork for a visiting-artist grant from the state, drafted the press release announcing the production, and updated the theatre’s website. In connection with none of these tasks did Karen publicize the fact that the Visiting Artist arrived trailing scandal. Among no one in David’s theatre company was the scandal discussed. So far as Karen could tell, apart from David and herself and Mr. Kingsley, no one knew. Martin’s alleged crimes didn’t follow him to this American city where he’d spent time more than ten years before. But they didn’t need to, Karen thought—the author would like to indulge in an adverb and write—serenely. Yes, Karen felt serene thinking of Martin, preparing for his arrival. “Serene” means “calm, untroubled, tranquil” and often refers to conditions at sea. Martin crossed the sea, whether in serene condition or not we have no way of knowing. When met by David at the airport Martin might have been shocked by David’s physical transformation. David at thirty could have been mistaken for a man nearing fifty. David was bald, his brow and jowls and shoulders drooped as if they were subjected to enhanced gravity, he couldn’t clear his face of stubble fast enough, he’d gotten thicker all over and had the pallor of a chain-smoking drinker whose only time outdoors is the time he spends getting into and out of his car. Martin might have felt, seeing David, that the past was further past than he’d thought. Would he feel this way seeing Karen? Would he recognize Karen?
The play was being staged in a former warehouse building which now held a bar in the front half and a “performance space” in the rear half, indicated by poorly built risers and pipes hanging on chains from the faraway ceiling to which were clamped an assortment of secondhand stage lights with frayed wiring and wrinkly gels. Black moth-eaten stage curtains salvaged from some ancient extinct theatre had made the enormous dusty warehouse into a sort of maze of spaces that had to be connected at their edges but you couldn’t tell where. People were always getting lost trying to find the bathroom or trying to find their way back outdoors. People got so tangled up in the black stage curtains that seemed to mark an exit or an entrance but didn’t that sometimes they had to be rescued after crying for help. The bar was a huge plywood horseshoe with almost no seating. For some reason there were only a handful of barstools, each with some hunchbacked uncommunicative drinker permanently attached. Otherwise there were armchairs and sofas, obviously rescued from the garbage, strewn around the concrete floor. The night of the first read-through, the night of Martin’s first full day in town, Karen arrived early and made a circular arrangement of furniture, rounded up some ashtrays, even got the bartender to give her a pitcher of water and glasses. Okay, she was nervous. No longer serene. But it was an expected and manageable nervousness. Its source was clear and its duration would be short. We never know, when life reunites us with someone, how closely our stories will match. By contrast with the first time they’d met, when she had felt herself so old but in fact had been so young, Karen now actually was old enough to understand that for Martin, there might have been no story at all. There might have been—for this person who’d not merely touched but deformed her—no sensation of contact at all. He might not recognize her. If he did, he might not recall a single detail of their past relationship. If he did, he might not recall the same details. If he did, he might not recall them in just the same way. But Karen required very little to gauge the disjuncture and make her adjustment.