Trust Exercise(75)
“Are you excited to be having a baby?” Karen asks Sarah when rehearsal is finally over and everyone is leaving while also talking, milling, smoking, and drinking.
“I don’t know,” Sarah says. “I felt like I had to have one.”
“You felt that you had to have one? Or you thought that you had to have one? Thoughts are often false. A feeling’s always real. Not true, just real.”
“I thought I had to have one,” Sarah says after considering briefly. “I really don’t know what I feel.”
“I had one,” says Karen. They’re back outside now, getting into Karen’s car, on their way to The Bar, where Sarah will pretend to pay attention to Karen while only paying attention to David, and David will pretend to pay attention to everyone while only paying attention to Sarah. Is this why Karen lets slip her secret—because she wants to break into this circuit of David and Sarah, and seize attention, at last, for herself?
No. She lets it slip because she does. Don’t ask her Why now? Ask her Why not every moment up to now?
They have the car between them. Sarah looks across its top at Karen, perhaps meaning to pretend to have misheard, as people sometimes do to buy time, when they think that what matters is how they respond, and not that the thing has been said. How to tell them their response doesn’t matter, in fact isn’t wanted? “Please don’t say anything,” says Karen. Her own voice sounds harsh in her ears, and clearly startles Sarah even more. Well, so be it. Karen watches Sarah struggle with her unwanted position—no way to prove her goodness and caring, no way to disprove her discomfort and guilt. They look at each other so long across the top of the car that the other actors and Martin and David and the tech people come babbling onto the sidewalk, and the moment is taken away, it doesn’t end so much as stop. And that is satisfying to Karen, because nothing ends as in “completely to shut” from the Latin conclaudere. Nothing does that.
* * *
I ALWAYS LOVED opening nights. When I was little, before my parents split up, my mother and Kevin and I would go to opening nights at the outdoor theatre in the park and sit on a blanket eating peanut butter sandwiches and exclaiming in excitement every time something happened onstage that my father had done. If a flat glided in from the flyspace, or a set piece rolled in from the wings, or even if a pool of light appeared, if it was something he’d worked on we clapped as if the show’s star had made an entrance. We hardly paid attention to the actors or the story. The whole production seemed to be a coded message to us from my father that confirmed our importance, our special place on the hill that formed most of the theatre’s seating, its grass mashed flat from all the other blankets and all the other picnic baskets spread out under the pinkish night sky.
Ever since then I’ve been looking for that same secret message, that same confirmation that I matter most to whoever is sending the code. I’m sure all of us look for that message, although some people seem to receive it so early they don’t recognize it’s a message. They don’t wonder who sent it. Their own importance is that well-established to them. But I’ve never been like that and doubt that I’ll ever be like that. Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.
The bar/performance space’s women’s dressing room was a janitor’s closet with a bare lightbulb in it, but even though only I used it, because I was the only woman in the cast, when I opened the door and turned on the bare lightbulb and found a bouquet in a vase, I didn’t think it was for me until I read the card. I had no friends in this town where I’d been born and raised. The only people I knew were involved in the show. I’d told my father I was David’s props master, not that I’d be acting onstage, because I didn’t want him to come see the show. Having someone in the audience who knows who you are is a certain reminder you’re acting and I hadn’t wanted to know I was acting.
The note on the bouquet said, “To lovely Karen from her lucky leading man. Break a leg, Martin.” Reading the note, I knew that Martin had never forgotten. Over the past several weeks I’d convinced myself that he’d forgotten everything that had happened between us, but now I knew he hadn’t, and that was harder somehow to digest than the thought that he had.
They were gorgeous flowers, actually. Karen put her face in them, and closed her eyes. It was a very self-conscious gesture she’d seen actresses do on TV and in movies but never had the chance to do herself. Then Karen put on her costume, the dingy jeans and hoodie of a runaway, and did her makeup, which was a lot of grayish powder to make her look starved and unhealthy. But she didn’t feel starved, she felt full. She was already acting. She stayed in the closet as long as she could because she didn’t want to see anyone else. She wished that she could do the play alone.
Somebody knocked on the door. It was Sarah. Sarah squeezed in and shut the door behind her. Sarah had made herself glamorous for the opening night of this show in which she served as a backstage dresser for the space of one minute. Just like when they were young, Sarah had glamorized herself painstakingly in the style of someone who has not made an effort. She was wearing stovepipe jeans with big rips at the knees, motorcycle boots, a slashed and draped top made of hoodie material that fell off one shoulder to expose her bra strap like the outfit in Flashdance, and gigantic bohemian earrings. Her hair was parted far to one side so that a lot of it fell in her face. Maybe her outfit was an homage to the eighties. She looked just like she’d looked in high school, except better, because the bones of her face had become more defined. Karen hoped David hadn’t seen her or he’d be passed out drunk in the light booth before intermission.