Trust Exercise(76)
“Mr. Kingsley is on the comp list!” Sarah said in outrage, as if even he should have ceased to exist once she’d pretended to write about him.
“He always comes to David’s shows. They’re good friends.”
“How is that possible? How can David even speak to him? ‘I won’t rest until you cry’—remember that?”
“He said that to David, not you.”
“That doesn’t make me less angry about it.”
“He was trying to help David get in touch with his emotions, and maybe it worked. David became a director, and he’s really good at it and loves it. I’ve heard him call Mr. Kingsley a mentor.”
“You’re the last person I would have expected to drink the Kool-Aid.”
“What Kool-Aid is that?” Karen said, because she can play dumb just as well as the next girl, particularly when discussing the person here called “Mr. Kingsley.”
Sarah gave Karen a Look. “Mr. Kingsley is part of what happened to you,” Sarah said, as if Karen deserved to be scolded for not holding the past to account.
“And here I thought he was part of what happened to you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sarah said after just a slight pause.
“Did you really expect me to go along with your revision? With David it’s one thing. He never knew in the first place and somehow still doesn’t. But come on. ‘Take five, sweetie’? That’s rich, how you kept that and added a bow tie.”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” repeated Sarah, who never could act her way out of a bag. By contrast, Karen knew she was going to be good. She could feel it. Tonight was her opening night.
“Five minutes!” someone called from outside, knocking sharply on the closet/dressing room door.
“Get to your place,” Karen dismissed Sarah, turning away.
Nothing feels safer than watching a show from the wings. You might think it’s a matter of upbringing, of Karen’s childhood in the theatre that she mentions so much, but anyone can be made to feel safe hidden in the wings, watching the spectacle sideways, from outside the circuit the actors and audience make. The warmth of that circuit warms you but asks nothing of you. Karen loved her very late Act One entrance for how long it let her be a watcher in the wings, but she’d never felt so disembodied and free as she did tonight, ready to step out onstage and until then a being of pure curiosity shining her light on the darkened unknown. All these weeks of rehearsal she had willfully ignored the fact that Martin was the author of the play but now the play spoke to her in his voice and she understood something about him. Why, asked the actors onstage, had their friend killed himself? And why not? asked the others who argued with them. It was his Self to keep or destroy. Why should customs or, God forbid, laws interfere with the ways we dispose of our Selves?
Because we’re none of us alone in this world. We injure each other.
Why should another be injured by choices I make for my Self?
You’re choosing for another when you make choices. We overlap. We get tangled. You can’t help but hurt.
That’s a load of BS! Anyone tangled with me got that way by a choice of their own. If I shoot myself, they had fair warning.
What warned them?
The plain knowledge that I wasn’t them.
The world is me and not me, Karen’s therapist said. It’s a difficult lesson to learn. Even over her therapist’s voice speaking inside her mind Karen heard her cue spoken and walked onstage into the light. Her body was a wire bringing shock to the actors onstage just as much as to the audience out in the house. She did it. She felt the air crackle, and felt a curiosity to answer her own. That electrification took place that can happen in shows when the Selves in the room overlap and deliver their shocks across spaces of air. The act ended and backstage as if under a noiseless glass dome Karen loaded the blank gun and set it in place. Sarah came backstage glittering and gesticulating with her fingers and moving her mouth in ways associated with eagerness and excitement but whatever it was she was saying Karen chose not to hear. Karen had no need to speak to her dresser. The lights went down when intermission ended and came up again at the start of the act and the scenes that led up to her scene came and went and then Karen stood gazing at Martin through the eyes of the Girl who stood gazing at Doc, and Karen understood the injury that bound them together and knew that Martin understood it. Martin/Doc “seized her in a violent embrace.”
Through the door, staring sightlessly out as the audience cringed from the stormclouds that formed on her face. Door shut, Martin in his chair, Karen on her marks, hot light throwing their shadows against the drawn blind. Shadow play. Karen raised the gun, sighted, and fired. With a strangled bellow and shriek Martin fell from the chair with his thighs and his hands tightly clamped at his crotch, and kept screaming and writhing once hitting the floor. Karen opened the chamber, looked in the cylinder, pressed the chamber back into the frame, took aim and fired again. Now Sarah was onstage with them in Doc’s “room” behind the scene flat and screaming also, if not in the same way as Martin. “Oh my God!” Sarah screamed, and, “Doctor! We need a doctor—” Sarah’s usual smoky murmurousness was now shrill and high-pitched while Martin’s usual jagged singsong had gone moaning and low. From the house, scraping chairs and stamping feet and disputing voices and David, briefly flinging open the set door and looking at them before he went shouting away.