Trust Exercise(72)

“I saw her last month in LA. We thought it would be fun if she helped with the show,” Karen lied, clumsily. David was sitting up slightly too straight, staring down the length of his nose and holding his cigarette out to one side. When David was affronted, you were reminded of how dangerously handsome he’d been at the age of eighteen. His eyes flashed out as if to remind you that you shouldn’t have forgotten about it.

“Sarah’s never seen a single show I’ve done.”

“That’s why. She felt like she had to see this one and even help in some way,” Karen continued to deceitfully improvise, really disliking this situation of her own creation in which she had to prop up a pretense of Sarah, to mollify David. Once again Karen was reminded of the suffocating self-regard of Sarah and David, who never failed to see themselves as performing some extraordinary drama even when they’d been completely out of touch for almost thirteen years.

“Why this one? Because you’re in it?”

“No, just because she realized it was about time she saw one of your shows. It’s just an extra point of interest that I’m in it.”

“When did you get back in touch with her? The way I remember, toward the end of high school you weren’t even speaking.”

“We were in high school,” Karen said dismissively.

Maybe it was unfair of Karen to see Sarah and David as twin narcissists, each fixated on the other’s ancient image and seeing in that hapless teenage lover some lost part of themselves that they still wanted back. Maybe it was unkind of Karen to see Sarah and David this way because the feeling-state attendant was one of impatience, resentment, and scorn. Karen had no room for other people’s unresolved emotions because she had no room for her own lack of generousness. Karen suffers, herself, because she wants to be empathic and she can’t. The best she can do is maintain healthy separation, and oftentimes she can’t even do that. Karen’s failures in the empathy department are so acute she finds that she can’t look at David and Sarah, when David, getting out of his piece-of-shit car, and Sarah, getting out of Karen’s car, confront each other on the broken stretch of sidewalk outside the bar/performance space where the first dress rehearsal will finally happen tonight. Picking Sarah up from the airport, Karen had let Sarah do all the work—grin strenuously with excitement, unhesitatingly hug, chatter and marvel nonstop—while in the privacy of nonparticipation Karen coldly dissected every pop and pulse of Sarah’s tireless efforts. But as Sarah faced David across the expanse of smashed pavement, Karen found herself looking away. What passed between them in an instant smote Karen. She felt ashamed, witnessing it.

Then the instant passed and David, his old lope still visible beneath his new weight, crossed the space between them and grabbed Sarah into his arms in an overly hearty, hail-fellow-well-met way and Sarah gave a strangulated laugh, exaggerating the strangulation for humor, and said, “Careful! Don’t squeeze too hard. I’m pregnant,” and David stepped away as if he’d been burned.

“I found out right after I saw you in LA,” Sarah said to Karen. “My hangover the next day was—well, it lasted a lot longer than usual.”

“I guess that answers the question of what I can get you,” said David. “I mean, there’s a bar in the space.”

“Oh! Water or juice would be great.”

“Great! Okay,” David said, and turning on his heel he strode across the street and into the building as if Sarah had ordered the drink to be brought to her there on the sidewalk.

“Congratulations,” Karen said as they walked in.

“I’m only eight weeks. I didn’t mean to say anything but I just sort of blurted it out. I was afraid I might blurt something worse.”

“I’m sure David would have forgiven you. He’s been thrown up on a lot in his life,” Karen said.

Inside David was nowhere to be seen. Karen left radiant Sarah to be fawned on by Martin and made her way through the maze of black curtains, across big dark hidden reaches of the warehouse, and out the back door onto the old loading dock. David was there, sitting on the dock with his back to the wall, smoking and staring at the toes of his boots.

“Are you okay?” Karen said.

“I’m not,” David said. “In fact I’m not okay.”

Karen sat down on the dock next to David, which she hadn’t intended to do. She’d intended to go inside and leave David alone. Telling herself to not think about it too much she put her arms around David and at her touch he slumped heavily and then jerked back to life with a terrible sound like an animal caught in a trap. His whole body heaving and jerking made him hard to hang on to. Karen guiltily wanted to stop, but only had to admonish herself a few times before he shrugged her off of his own accord, without anger, to get at his cigarette pack in his pocket. Before lighting up he scrubbed the loose-stretched hem of his ancient T-shirt roughly over his face.

“We’d better do this fucking rehearsal,” he said, standing up.

Sarah watched Act One sitting alone in the fourth row while David went about the business of running rehearsal. But it was still there, Karen observed: that tension, like a wire strung between them that if you weren’t careful you’d trip over it. Karen wondered how it could still bother her. Because it excluded her? Because it made such a claim for itself, to be a more important human condition than anyone else’s? David was constantly on the move, stamping up the risers to the lightboard or climbing onstage or sitting in the outermost seats to check sight lines, the whole time trailing cigarette smoke and slopping suds from his beer on the floor, but no matter where he moved he kept his eyes away from Sarah so that you knew he’d grown eyes in the back of his head, or on the outsides of his shoulders, wherever they needed to be to keep that wire running the most direct path. It cut the room to pieces and the rehearsal was a disaster of missed cues and misspoken lines and tech glitches and no one, except possibly Karen and Sarah and David, knew why. Once the second act started and Sarah was out of sight backstage with Karen’s costume the last shreds of David’s focus disintegrated and he shambled around with his fourth or sixth beer like a sleepwalker. “David, David?” the lighting designer was saying. “Is that the cue you wanted?” “David, David?” the sound designer was saying. “Which song did you mean?” “David, David?” the set designer was saying. “Should Doc yank down the blind?” Karen had brought the loaded blank gun in for the first time and she realized the blocking of the silhouetted shooting was going to have to change again; holding the Beretta nose down with her fingers well away from the trigger she went out onstage and squinted into the lights. “David!” she said and felt the whole chaotic room of milling-around people who’d lost their leadership suddenly snap to attention. “Whoa, don’t shoot,” someone said, and a shiver of laughter broke out.