A few months later, Peter moved near Milwaukee and took a job doing dinner theater, and our lunches became less frequent. In late November 2005, almost a year after The Day of Which We Tended to Speak Obsessively, we sat by a window in the Berghoff and watched the year’s first snow collect in the street. He told me about his new role as Bob Cratchit in something called Let’s Sing a Christmas Carol! The director wanted British accents from everyone. Peter could do a perfect one, of course, but not without sinking further into the hollow cadences, the glazed eyes, the strangling sense of the ridiculous.
“Most of them sound southern, it’s terrible,” he said. He was on caffeine today or something worse. He was literally bouncing on the springy seat of the booth. “The eleven o’clock number is, I shit you not, called ‘God Bless Us Every One.’ Jesus Christ, you should hear it, it sounds like Scrooge drops by Tara for pecan pie.” Every time I saw him he talked faster, as if he were running out of time. He still flashed the smile, but perfunctorily, as if displaying his incisors for the dentist.
When our food came, he finally asked me a question so he could stop talking and eat his schnitzel. “How’s life in phone-a-thon land? Are you giving away thousands of tote bags?”
I was the special events coordinator for Chicago Public Radio, and for several years before we officially reconnected, Peter and I would run into each other in the restaurants of the monstrous tourist trap on Navy Pier where Chicago Shakespeare and WBEZ both live. Once, after we’d drifted apart for a few months, our lunch parties at Riva joined together, and when someone introduced us and said we might hit it off, we started laughing so hard Peter dropped his wineglass.
“We’re doing better than last year,” I answered.
“I’ve been telling everyone in the Land of Moo about the Republicans trying to shut you down. I’m going to assemble an army of cheeseheads for your defense.”
“Thanks, Peter. That’s thoughtful.”
He started mixing all the food on his plate: schnitzel, potato, creamed spinach, kraut.
“So, what about trying my shrink?” I said. “She’s good. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
The old Peter would have cued up his German psychiatrist impersonation, drawing the attention of everyone around, but the new Peter just stared at his mixed-up food. “She might be good, but how far is she from Kenosha, Wisconsin, the epicenter of the theatrical world?”
“She’s here in the Loop, and that would be good for you.”
He agreed to call her and then told me about his great-uncle, who, after undergoing electroshock, became obsessed with licking copper objects. I wanted him to ask about me, to ask about Carlos, who was moving out of my apartment in gradual increments and breaking my heart in painful slow motion, leaving me for the jazz singer we used to go see every few weekends at the Back Room until I finally realized the guy’s bedroom eyes were directed not at the whole room but at the seat next to mine in particular. I’d have to find someone else to complain to.
“Listen, though,” said Peter, “I’m on the mend. If I had more serious roles again, that might do it. I mean, I was never a comedian, and that’s what they’re asking me to do.”
As much as I didn’t believe his optimism, I was glad he wasn’t giving up. I constantly pictured him hanging himself from the closet rod of his cold little apartment, or drinking something medieval and poisonous. Maybe I’d just watched his Romeo too many times.
“I’ve got an offer for you,” I said. I’d thought about it in the car on the way there, and decided I couldn’t ask him. I decided it several times, in fact, but now here it was, coming out of my mouth. “I want you to do some work for me.” He nodded, eyes wide, as he mashed his food and listened to me explain the project: In cooperation with the Art Institute, we’d commissioned twenty local poets and authors to write short works relating to the museum’s crown jewels — a mystery writer casting Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles as a crime scene, a Pulitzer-winning poet extolling Picasso’s man with the blue guitar in sonnet. Richmond Barthé’s sculpture The Boxer got a prose poem that shattered my heart, one I wanted to frame and wear around my neck. The writing would hang beside the art, and my job was to find actors to read a few of the pieces aloud at the gala opening and then record them all for NPR and for the museum audio tour that people could rent with headphones. My brilliant idea had launched a yearlong nightmare of collaboration with a hateful little man I’d come to call Institute Steve, the only unlovely person on the entire museum staff. “It’s December thirtieth, if your show is done. The thing is,” I said, grabbing for the only available out, “the other actors might be people you knew.”
“People I know, Drew.” His face stilled itself long enough to shoot me one of his complicated, devastating looks: part annoyance, part sarcasm, part glee that he’d caught me saying what I really thought. “I’ll do it, if you don’t think I’d embarrass you.”
And so the die was cast.
He walked out with Dr. Zeller’s business card in his pocket and both of our leftovers in Styrofoam boxes. He was eating plenty despite his meager paycheck because he got free food at the dinner theater, but every night he had to choose between chicken à la king and Lake Superior whitefish.
I stayed behind to pay the bill, and as I waited for the busboy to come back I pressed my cheek to the dirty, cold glass of the window beside me. I felt like I needed to wake myself up. I had just risked my career on his ability to be Peter again, to jump back into himself, and I strongly doubted he could do it.
The next time we met for dinner was before the Art Institute event. I had more important things to do, but I’d been in earlier to see that my interns were on task, and I wanted to make sure Peter was ready and calm. The Berghoff was right around the corner, and I knew neither of us would get a chance to eat the shrimp and strawberries at the reception. He’d been down two weeks earlier to record at the studio, and I’d been relieved how good he was, at least without an audience. I’d invited him over then for dinner with Carlos, who was still hanging around to see what further damage he could inflict on my psyche, but Peter had an audition in Milwaukee with the Kinnikinnick Players for Night of January 16th. He hadn’t gotten the part.
Tonight Peter looked skinnier and pale and had a soft stubble he might have been growing for insulation, the way he sat there in his coat and hat, his jaw shaking against the cold. To put it delicately, he looked like a few friends I had in the early 1990s who are not with us anymore. I got the waitress to bring us some tea as soon as we sat down. He held the cup, letting it warm his hands, but didn’t drink any. It was all over the news that the Berghoff would be closing in a couple of months. We’d stood outside in the cold for forty minutes just to get a table. People around us were taking pictures, touching the menus as if they were the faces of dying lovers.
“I went to your shrink,” he said. “Twice. You didn’t tell me she was beautiful. Like Juliette Binoche. And we’re very hopeful.” He was warming up enough to lay his woolly hat on the table.
“Great,” I said. I couldn’t keep from staring at his brow and cheekbones, which stuck out sharply from his face, his skin stretched over them, shiny and translucent. He went on and on about the therapy, about opening himself up to pain, about locating his core. I barely listened.