“Well, you know, their life is very curious. Their affection for each other isn’t very great, and yet they’re devoted.” He paused. “I suppose we were something like that.”
“Well, everybody is.”
“How have you been?”
“Oh, not bad. And you?”
“I’ve often been tempted, really innumerable times, to fly over.”
“Well, Viri, I mean, the idea is lovely, it would be good seeing you, but it wouldn’t… Well, you know, we’re past that.”
“It’s hard to keep reminding myself.”
“It is, I suppose.”
She answered his pleas with wisdom, it always stunned him. He wanted to cling to her to hear what she would say.
“You know, you’re going to be forty-four in a couple of weeks,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry to miss your birthday.”
“Forty-four,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to look it.”
“The easy part is over.”
“It was easy?”
“We’re entering the underground river,” she said. “Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes, I know.”
“It’s ahead of us. All I can tell you is, not even courage will help.”
“Are you reading Alma Mahler again?”
“No.” Her voice was even and knowing.
The underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows wet, the water rushes into darkness. The air becomes damp and icy, the passage narrows. Light is lost here, sound; the current begins to flow beneath great, impassable slabs.
“What makes you say that courage won’t help?”
“Courage, wisdom, none of it.”
“Nedra…”
“Yes.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Of course.”
“No, really. Nedra, you know, I always… I’m here.”
“Viri, I’m fine.”
“Are you happy?” he asked.
She laughed. Happiness. She meant to be free.
6
IT WAS MARINA TROY WHOM NEDRA was drawn to when she came back at last. She even stayed with them for a while. The saint of the theater at that time was Philip Kasine. His plays were not announced, the news of them was passed by word of mouth, one had to search, to find them like a voodoo ceremony or a cockfight. The man himself was inaccessible. He had a thin nose, bony as a finger, a city accent, emanations of myth. He would not talk on the telephone. A sense of self so great that it was taken for selflessness, the two had merged. He was a source of energy rather than an individual. He obeyed the laws of Newton, of the greatest of suns.
The night they went to his theater it was in an old dance hall. The audience had to wait in line for an hour on the stairs. Kasine did not appear, though someone said later he had been the man sweeping the stage while everyone was being seated. At last there was an announcement; the performance that evening was named. Silence. An actor walked out. He had the face of someone not to be trusted, a man who has tried everything, whose hunger is great enough to kill. His movements had the intensity of a maniac’s, but above all Nedra was struck by his eyes. She recognized their power, their derision; they belonged to someone who was her brother, the self she envied but had never been able to create.
“Who is that?” she whispered.
“Richard Brom.”
“He’s extraordinary.”
“Do you want to meet him?”
She did not understand the play, but it did not disappoint her. Whatever its meaning—it was all repetition, anger, cries—she was won by it, she wanted to see it again. When the lights came up and the audience clapped, she rose almost without realizing it, applauding with her hands held high. In her unashamedness, her fervor, she was clearly a convert.
Backstage was like a grocery that stays open all night. The lights were ancient and fluorescent; a number of badly dressed people who seemed to have no connection with the acting company were wandering back and forth. Brom was not there.
“Come to the party,” someone said.
They drove in a cab. The dark streets jolted by. “Did you like it?” Marina asked.
“It’s so overpowering. Not the play, but the performances. They don’t seem to be acting—at least, that’s not the word for it.”
“Yes, it’s some kind of slow-motion madness.”
“There’s a fantastic power in the way they seem to just turn themselves inside out. I was simply overcome. Does one man teach this?”
“He has a place in Vermont that was given to him,” Marina said. “Everyone goes there, they work, they discuss. Everything is done together.”
“But is he the teacher?”
“Oh, yes. He’s everything.”
They rode in a creaking elevator. Other people were already there. Among them was Brom. He was dressed in ordinary clothes.
“Your performance,” Nedra said, “was the greatest I’ve ever seen.”
His dark eyes stared at her. He merely nodded, still lifeless, still spent. She did not know what he thought or felt. Like all great performers, he stood in a kind of unconcealed exhaustion, like a bird that has flown too far. There was nothing to reply.
She was given a drink. Everyone was friendly. They laughed, they talked softly, they were the most congruous people she had ever seen, they accepted her. She listened to stories of Kasine. His gifts were prodigious. He was an extraordinary teacher; he knew instinctively where the difficulty was, like a healer.
“I went to him every day for two months at the same hour. We talked, that was all. I learned everything.”
“What did you talk about?” Nedra asked.
“Well, it’s not that simple.”
“Of course not. But, for example…”
“He always asked me the same thing: What did you do today?”
They were content in a way she envied but could not fathom. It was like meeting the members of an orthodox family, all of them different but firmly joined.
“I would like to study with him,” she said. She made no apologies, no conditions.
He had once taught an actress how to speak in only four hours. “What do you mean, to speak?”
“To use her voice. To make people listen.”
She wanted to meet him. She looked around like St. Joan; she wondered if he might be hiding among them.
“You must come to Vermont,” they said.
The hours passed without her noticing. Standing near the window later she realized the night was gone. The fragment of city below was silent and gray. She looked up. The roof of the sky was blue, a blue that was descending, as she watched, to earth. The trees in the street unfolded their leaves. As if in sympathy the lights in the room were turned off. Now it was clearly dawn. Outside were a few birds, the only sounds of nature; beyond that, stillness. She was not tired. She would have liked to stay. Her hands were cool and unused as she pressed in farewell the hands of those near her. She slept; she had never slept so well.
Ten or twelve pupils a year, that was all he took. They lived together, worked together. She wanted to be one of them, to shed all diversion, to study one thing and one thing only.
“Do you think it matters that I’m not an actress?”
“You are,” Marina told her.
“They have such strength, all of them. Such naturalness. It’s as if you’re seeing life for the first time. Come with me,” Nedra urged.
“I’d like to. I can’t.”
“Gerald would let you.”
“No, he wouldn’t.”
She asked Eve. They sat in a booth at dinner, long menus in their hands. “Do you think it’s foolish?”
“Everyone I know wants to study with him.”
“Really?”
“Did Marina introduce you?”
“Well, I haven’t met him,” Nedra said.