Billy was shaking his head. “Imagine that,” he said. “You conned me right out of my jock.”
“Yes, I know.”
“What a sucker.”
“Yes, it was lovely. You were wonderful. Now will you take me out for a sandwich? I missed dinner waiting for you.”
“Sure. But first get busy with the douche bag. And I’m gonna watch. I’m not going through this noise again.”
“Ah, Romeo,” Angie said, massaging Billy’s crotch.
Eleven
Martin, thinking of his father, of Charlie Boy, of Noah, all spread-eagled on their beds, of Melissa spread-eagled naked in fatigue on the floor of her suite at the Hampton Hotel, failed to sleep. He faced downward and leftward into the pillow, a trick he played on the fluids of his brain that generally brought sleep, but not now. And so he faced upward, rightward. He closed his eyes, fixating on a point just above his nose, behind the frontal bone, trying to drive out thoughts as they appeared.
But this also failed, and he saw the lonely, driven figure entering the wholly darkened tunnel, so narrow no man could survive the train should it come roaring through before he reached the far exit. He would be crushed by the wheels or squeezed to juice and pulp against the wall. The figure reached the trestle that spanned the bottomless canyon and began to inch across it on hands and knees, fearful of falling, fearful the train would come from beyond the forest curve and bear down on him at mid-trestle. No chance then for backward flight, no chance to sidestep, only to hang from trestle’s edge by fingertips. Would vertigo then claim him? Would his fingers hold him?
He sat up and lit the bedside lamp and began to count the ceiling panels again, eleven horizontal, twelve vertical. He multiplied. One hundred and thirty-two panels, including fragments. He counted the sides of the dresser, the number of edges on the six drawers: twenty-four. He counted the edges on the decorative trim on Mary Daugherty’s closet. He totaled the edge count: two-seventy-eight. He counted the edges on the ceiling molding. He counted the backs, fronts, and sides of books on his dresser. He lost track of the total.
He could never contain the numbers, nor did he want to. He usually counted sidewalk cracks when he walked, telephone poles when he drove. He remembered no totals except the eighteen steps to the city room, twelve to the upstairs of this house, and remembered these only after years of repetition. If he miscounted either staircase, he would recount carefully on the return trip. He once viewed the counting as a private way of demarcating his place in the world, numbering all boundaries, four counts to the edge of a drawer, four to the perimeter of a tile, an act of personal coherence. On the day he awoke and drawer edges were worth three, tile perimeters five, he would know the rules of his civilization had been superseded.
He switched off the lamp, closed his eyes, and found a staircase. He climbed it and at the turning saw the hag squirming on the wide step, caught in an enormous cobweb which covered all of her except her legs. Beneath her thighs, two dozen white baby shoes were in constant motion, being hatched.
I don’t like what everybody is doing to me, she said.
The hag reached a hand out to Martin, who fled up the stairs in terror, a wisp of cobweb caught on his sleeve.
He plucked himself from the scene without moving and felt panic in his heartbeat. He said the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Confiteor. Deliver us from evil. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Mea maxima culpa. He had not prayed in twenty-five years except for knee-jerk recitations at funerals, and did not now believe in these or any other prayers. Yet as he prayed, his pulse slowly slackened, his eyes stayed closed. And as he moved into sleep, he knew that despite his infidel ways, the remnants of tattered faith still had power over his mind.
He knew his mind had no interest in the genuineness of faith, that it fed on the imagery of any conflict that touched the deepest layers of his history. Years ago, he’d dreamed repeatedly of hexagons, rhomboids, and threes, and still had no idea why. He understood almost none of the fragmented pictures his mind created, but he knew now for the first time that it was possible to trick the apparatus. He had done it. He was moving into a peaceful sleep, his first since the departure of Peter. And as he did, he understood the message the images had sent him. He would go to Harmanus Bleecker Hall and watch Melissa impersonate his mother on stage. Then, all in good time, he would find a way to make love to Melissa again, in the way a one-legged man carves a crutch from the fallen tree that crushed his leg.
The fountain cherub, small boy in full pee, greeted Martin as he walked through the Hall’s foyer. Psssss. The Golden Bowlful, by Henry Pease Lotz. Martin remembered seeing Bert Lytell here, the Barrymores and Mrs. Fiske strutting on this cultural altar. He saw the young Jolson here, and the great Isadora, and when he was only thirteen he saw a play called The Ten-Ton Door, in which a man strapped to that huge door was exploded across the stage by a great blast, an epic moment.
“So you made it,” said Agnes, the hennaed gum chewer in the Hall’s box office. “We expected you last night.”
“I was up in Troy last night,” Martin said, “walking the duck.”
“The duck?”
Martin smiled and looked at his ticket, B–108 center, and then he entered the Hall, a quarter century after the premiere that never was. Edward Sheldon’s Romance premiered here in 1913 instead of The Flaming Corsage, and Sheldon’s reputation blossomed. But when the priests and Grundys killed Edward Daugherty’s play, calling it the work of a scandalous, vice-ridden man, they made Edward a pariah in the theater for years to come.
In 1928, a bad year for some, Melissa set out to convert the play to a talking picture in which she would star as the mistress, her long-standing dream. She wanted Von Stroheim to direct, appreciative of his sexual candor, but the studios found both the play and the scandal dated, and dated, too, Melissa, the idea of you as a young mistress.
Aging but undauntable, Melissa turned up then with something not so old: Edward Daugherty’s journal from the years just before and just after the scandal, full of the drama and eroticism of the famous event, in case, chums, you can’t find enough in the play. Still, no studio was interested, for Melissa was a fading emblem of a waning era, her voice adjudged too quirky for talkies, her imperious and litigious ways (when in doubt she sued) too much of a liability for the moguls.
And so The Flaming Corsage continued unproduced either as play or film until the Daugherty renaissance, which began with an obscure New York mounting of his 1902 work, The Car Barns. George Jean Nathan saw that production and wrote that here was a writer many cuts above Gillette, Belasco, Fitch, and others, more significantly Irish-American than Boucicault or Sheldon, for he is tapping deeper currents, and superior to any of the raffish Marxist didacticists currently cluttering up the boards. Was this neglected writer an American O’Casey or Pirandello? Another O’Neill? No, said Nathan, he’s merely original, which serious men should find sufficient.
The Car Barns revival was followed by The Masks of Pyramis, Edward Daugherty’s one venture into symbolism. It provoked a great public yawn and slowed the renaissance. The Baron of Ten Broeck Street followed within a year, a play with the capitalist as villain and tragic figure, the protagonist patterned after Katrina Daugherty’s father, an Albany lumber baron. Reaction to the play was positive, but the renaissance might have halted there had not Melissa’s need to see herself transfigured on stage been so unyielding.