Trust Exercise(65)
And everything, and everyone, cooperated to help Martin supersede Martin. Everyone smiled and agreed, without being so crass as to put it in words, that the scandal reported in the Bourne Courier-Telegraph must not have occurred. Mr. Kingsley, who’d once thrown Martin out of his house, came to rehearsal all smiles and pumped Martin’s hand. Martin was normal, delightful, as most people are if you give them a chance, and it felt good, I’ll fully admit, to take part in his normalization, to drift with prevailing currents, to not be the sore loser or lone crazy history buff. It felt good and I let it feel good. I enjoyed rehearsal—I enjoyed the permission it gave me to not think about Martin. Running lines with Martin, being “seized” by Martin “in a violent embrace,” joining Martin and the others at The Bar afterward, I finally stopped thinking about Martin for the first time in years. He finally got out of my head and went to sit across the room with his ferrety smirk and his yellow fingertips and his knobbly knees and his shaggy hair, and although I saw him sitting there, his reality didn’t disturb me.
* * *
WHEN SARAH’S BOOK had first been published, the previous year, David got manic-crusader about it, as if he’d written it himself or perhaps more accurately as if he’d had a child, who had turned out to be incredibly precocious and possessed of all the qualities of David’s own that David loved and none of the ones that he hated, and this child, this sort of genius-distillation of David, had written the book. David’s first campaign was to get CAPA to feature the book on their marquee, where the mainstage productions were usually announced; in the big glass display case just inside the front doors; and on the brand-new still-under-construction website. You’d think this was a fool’s errand, given Sarah’s depiction of CAPA, which some would have called negative and yet others a whitewash, a difference we will not pursue, but as it turned out the administration at CAPA was apparently too dazzled by its association with a Published Author to even read the author’s book and make up their own minds and so David succeeded. Next David went on a campaign to get the Trib and the Examiner to not just review Sarah’s book but do big splashy front-of-the-section feature articles about it. David might have been a guy who drove a car with a black plastic trash bag for its driver’s-side window but he was also a shrewd self-promoter who’d developed, over the years, very useful relationships with the arts editors at both papers and in this campaign he also succeeded. You might have thought Sarah had hired David to do freelance publicity but in fact David and Sarah had not seen each other since high school, any more than Sarah and Karen had seen each other since high school, or Karen and David had seen each other since high school, until Karen moved back to their hometown and found David there. It was from David that Karen first learned about Sarah’s book. He’d yanked it out of his backpack and thrust it at her with that smirk on his face—lips tightly compressed, face twisted in an unsuccessful effort to conceal wicked glee—he always wore when vindicated. About what did Sarah’s book vindicate David? Her writing “talent,” which perhaps he thought he’d discovered, or encouraged? His importance to her, as measured by the number of pages devoted to his fictional self, and the far fewer number of pages devoted to fictional others whose real analogues might have been thought to rate more coverage? Karen assumed that it must be the latter, but later to her great surprise David told her, one night after rehearsal, that he’d never even read Sarah’s book. This was a full year after the book had been published, and just a few days before Karen surprised Sarah on Sarah’s paperback tour. David seemed surprised that Karen was surprised. “I’m not a reader,” he reminded her, as if she should know better. “I read plays and I read the newspaper.”
“But you were so proud and excited about it. You, like, harassed people to give it publicity.”
“Of course I did. It’s Sarah’s book. I’ll do the same for you, whenever you fulfill whatever your huge ambition is.”
“I have no huge ambition.”
“Bullshit. I got you out to auditions!” As usual David steered the conversation back to his accomplishments, his self-satisfaction coexisting with his insecurity and self-hatred. It had to be the insecurity and self-hatred, Karen felt at first, that accounted for his not reading the book. Only the dread of a humiliating discovery could be powerful enough to counteract the burning narcissistic curiosity David must feel knowing Sarah had written about their CAPA years and so presumably about him. Yet it turned out he did not even know that the humiliating disclosure he might have feared, had he had any real self-awareness, had been spared him by Sarah for reasons which Karen will not try to guess. Even had the disclosure been there, Karen still could more easily see David devouring his portrayal than just taking a pass.
“Don’t you want to know how you come off in it? Don’t you want to see how she depicts you?” Karen asked.
“It’s not me. It’s fiction.”
“My turn to call bullshit. That whole thing about fiction not being the truth is a lie.”
“So I’m guessing you read it.”
It made no difference to this conversation that Karen had read only half. The point was that disciplined Karen had failed to resist, while impulsive David had succeeded. “Of course I did,” she snapped. “I’m still shocked that you didn’t.”