Trust Exercise(62)
The four other actors arrived first and chatted awkwardly with Karen. All were under twenty-five and nervous of Karen, whose position in the acting pecking order they did not understand. Karen could not have cared less to explain. Karen could have chatted with them in her sleep. To her as to this story and the play they were completely peripheral. They intrude on this paragraph only because David was late; David had asked them to come at seven thirty while he and Martin, David had told Karen, were coming at seven, because David was eager for an unimpeded observation of Martin and Karen’s reunion. But David was late without realizing, as always. He came into the vast black dusty space with his self-conscious saunter which always advertised, even through a twilight murk, his awareness of his role as impresario, his keen pleasure and anxiety in making things happen—in this case, the reunion between Martin and Karen. The result might be discomfort or delight but either way he’d made it happen and he’d plow it into the play and make more happen. This was David’s typically self-centered and not totally wrong point of view, that the moment was all about him. His point of view suited Karen. It kept her invisible.
“Hey hey hey, look who’s back in the U S of A,” David said as Martin, strangely small, hands crammed in pockets, shoulders overly shrugged, kept pace, a triangular smirk on his face in the corner of which drooped a cigarette. David saw the actors. “What the fuck are you guys doing here?”
“You told them seven thirty. It’s a quarter to eight,” Karen said.
“Is that Karen?” Martin exclaimed with the extreme emphasis of delight. He snatched the cigarette out of his mouth. He stopped dead in his tracks but the rest of him seemed to lean toward her, his grin most of all. However, his eyes contradicted. There had been flash and flutter in there. Panicked survey of options, swift choice of Enthusiasm. David, his glance bouncing back from the actors, entirely missed it.
“It is,” Karen smiled.
“Aren’t you looking fucking fantastic!” Martin said.
“Thank you.” Karen accepted this tribute with the extremely dignified truncated condescension she’d once observed in an actress playing a member of the British royal family in some Masterpiece Theatre thing. Karen’s mother had adored Masterpiece Theatre with the slavish adoration of somebody who thinks she’s cultured but in reality is turned on by the clothes. For years Karen had scorned her mother’s slavish adoration and yet kept on watching the shows, her mother in her gut like a worm. Then one night she saw an episode with an actress playing a member of the British royal family who looked down her nose at some man and said her stingy “Thank you” in response to whatever his compliment was. She said it as if she were holding her nose and also as if she were giving the man a great gift and was going to be embarrassed if he showed gratitude. There was such a complicated tender hatefulness in the way that she said it, and Karen, who was probably in college at the time, had thought of Martin, yes indeed she had. She’d thought of his British Difference and wondered whether there had been codes she had not understood. And now here she was actually saying the prim little “Thank you” to him and watching for a response. What did she see? His gaze was flying around like a game of Ping-Pong. He seemed to know that the exits weren’t easy to find. Karen’s nervousness changed from something boiling and popping its bubbles to something cool, stiff, and glossy. You might call the new thing confidence, from the Latin confidere, “have full trust,” and who among us hasn’t noticed that people with confidence tend to inspire it. Martin’s gaze was ping-ponging; he had every reason to be on his guard—after all, he had come Trailing Scandal. But he also had every reason to crush his own instincts and to seize grounds for confidence where he could find them. Of course Martin wanted to normalize. What criminal doesn’t. And Karen’s dazzling little “Thank you” was so full of knowing contempt it seemed somehow flirtatious, and you could see she was smiling. Karen watched Martin get it together and give her his weasel/rake smirk in response. Even David, tuning in a beat late, thought there was a frisson between them and was happy. Frisson is a French word meaning “shiver or thrill,” and it wasn’t much used in this country until the late 1960s. Then, once the sexual revolution came, people needed it or wanted to need it. Karen’s mother, of the negligee as daywear, adored the word frisson.
Karen, still smiling, let Martin peck both her cheeks, which he did while keeping up a nervous scolding of David. “You didn’t bloody tell me we’d be seeing Karen!”
“Did he tell you I’m playing the part?”
Hearing this, Martin had to act so much more Enthusiastic he practically shot through the ceiling—but that was his nervous confidence convincing him that actually, Karen was flirting with him, that actually, it was All Right. This was how Karen was able to see that in fact, despite all her worry and doubt, Martin’s story, and hers, were the same.
Equally pretending this wasn’t the case they sat down and told each other piles of pointless lies about the past dozen years of their lives while the young actors deferentially supplemented the pitcher of water with several pitchers of beer.
Then, everybody sat down and they did the read-through.
“Doc hardly talks in Act One,” David observed afterward, “yet the audience has to form an opinion about him—that gets exploded.”
“Given it’s my own bloody part I could gladly give myself more bloody lines,” Martin said, provoking laughter from the young actors.