Trust Exercise(73)

“There needs to be more space between Martin’s head and the gun. Once I’m standing on my mark, take a look from far left and far right to make sure the shadows line up the right way.”

“I thought it was a blank gun.”

“It is, but it still has a cartridge with gunpowder in it. That’s what makes the shot noise, and it makes a shock wave. So no one fool around and put this against your head or even point it at someone. I’ll point away from Martin’s head at an angle for safety, but the shadows should look like I’m aiming at him. Tell us if they line up.”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Martin said, “am I in any danger?” Martin had come out onstage to play this question for humor.

“Just don’t piss Karen off!” someone said.

As the humorlessly responsible firearms person, Karen ignored this. “Even though there’s no projectile in this weapon, the safest way to handle a blank gun is to pretend that it’s real. I’m firing toward stage left, so I want no one stage left during the scene. There’s no need for anybody to be there. Costumes are stage right, props are stage right, all the actors make their final entrances from stage right. Okay? Nobody hangs around stage left.”

“Listen up!” David said.

Because so much of the bar’s back room would be visible through the open door, and also because David insisted, the set designer had furnished the room with a little shelf of yellowed paperbacks, a full ashtray, a filthy manila folder with the neglected paperwork of an ailing small business sticking out the sides, a hot plate with a tattered cord, a few cans of soup, a pair of gray socks with large holes in the toes hanging over the end of the cot. Inside the drawer of the rickety table, which not even the front row could see, half-empty matchbooks, chewed pencils, hoarded change, a tattered old Playboy, and a pocket sewing kit. It was the sewing kit that pierced Karen when she opened the drawer to look in. It seemed like her own lonely, unloved competence hidden in that scratched plastic box.

Martin sat in Doc’s chair at Doc’s table; Karen stood to his side; the lighting instrument clamped to a pipe poured its hot light on them and threw their shadows on the closed window blind. Holding the Beretta with her trigger finger lightly balanced on the trigger guard, Karen pointed the gun. She stood to Martin’s right. Martin sat facing front; at the sound of the shot he would tumble sideways, to the left. David shouted to Karen to step inches this way or that way, angle her arm up or down. Karen’s arm was quivering and burning from being extended so long. She shouted to David that her arm would fall off and at last David said that it worked. One of the stagehands came out from the wings and taped around the chair’s legs, Martin’s feet, and Karen’s feet, and taped an X on the inside hidden wall of the set while Karen sighted down the barrel. If she and Martin and the chair all stayed inside their marks and she sighted at the X, the shadows ought to line up from every seat in the house. “Let’s do it!” called David, and Karen, setting the Beretta back on the table and rubbing her shoulder, went back out onstage, passing Sarah, who grabbed onto her hand.

“You’re so good,” Sarah whispered when Karen looked at her questioningly.

“Shoot it this time for real,” David said.

“Somebody should tell them up front in the bar that we’re shooting a blank gun,” said Karen.

A good idea, all agreed. Someone went.

In the brief pause someone said, “It’s a good thing we’re out in the sticks where nobody can hear.”

Someone else said, “In the sticks … no one can hear your blank gun.”

Someone else said, “In space … no one can hear your bad jokes.”

Then they were ready and began. For the first time, doing the scene, Karen felt a panic-pressure building inside, as if her rib cage was about to blow apart. Far away in the depths of a pit her mouth was speaking her lines but she couldn’t hear what she was saying, she didn’t know which line was next. She’d had bad dreams like this. She must have said them all; Martin/Doc “seized her in a violent embrace” and for the first time although they’d done this countless times she felt his body, scrawny and aged and hot with effort and forceful, and her own body bristled and rippled all over.

Then they’d gone through the door, Karen pausing as the Girl inside the doorframe so that the audience, when they had one, would be able to see the resolve coming into her face like a bank of stormclouds. David had said that about the stormclouds, weeks ago. He’d said he wanted the audience to know that the Girl had decided, even though the audience didn’t know what the decision was. His comment had reminded Karen that David thought in metaphors. David had originally wanted to write his own plays and direct them, not direct plays that other people had written. Again Karen felt panic-pressure from the inside out, straining her ribs, and she didn’t have any idea whether she’d conveyed the stormcloud-of-decision while standing in the doorframe. She didn’t know whether she’d shut the door so that the window blind/screen was in place. She didn’t know whether she was standing inside her taped box with her arm at the correct height and angle while she sighted at the X sightlessly and, from somewhere outside her body, pulled the trigger, jerking back from the force and the noise which was so much louder and more startling than the noise of an actual gun. Martin fell sideways out of the chair like a sack of potatoes, and the lights blacked out. The gun fell out of Karen’s hand onto the floor.