Pat was luckier, they were kinder to her. Always had been. “Patricia Ryan as Daphne Martin had a role which called for temperament, and did she have it? Plenty. She did some fine acting as she wheeled in and out of the room, always in a semi-rage. Richard Nixon had a small part but carried his assignment well.” No smaller than hers, goddamn it. That was from the Whittier News in its review of that play we were in, The Dark Tower, the one where we met. It was about actors in the big city. An evil man’s possession of a young girl’s mind. Murder. I was the playwright, Barry Jones, “a faintly collegiate, eager blushing youth of 24,” a small-town greenhorn outsider among these snide and pompous Easterners, a rare part for me since I usually played old men. Pat played the part of Daphne Martin, “a tall, dark, sullen beauty of 20, wearing a dress of great chic and an air of permanent resentment,” in short, a hot-pants actress on the make, tough and lethal. In the play we ended up going off to get married, but it was meant as a kind of cynical joke. “Jones & Martin, card tricks and sex appeal.” It wasn’t an altogether pleasant part to play. All the way through the thing, they made fun of me, whether I was onstage or not, made fun of my open-faced self-confidence, my naïveté, my youth, my name, my piano playing, my writing, my taste, it probably put Pat off me for months. Even as she and I made our final exit, Pat slipped back onstage to tell the real hero: “Listen — as soon as he’s tucked in his crib I’ll call you up!” But they all forgot one thing. I wrote the play that was the title of this play, the play within the play — or perhaps the play that embraced the play. The Dark Tower was mine, and they all lived in it….
“Eh? Stole what?”
“Stole second, Mr. Nixon. That’s how him and Sammy White scored when Umphlett singled, see…”
“Oh. Yes, I see…” I realized John had been talking for some time. Trying to tell me about that mad 17-run inning. “A good move…” While John talked, I turned to the entertainment pages, looking for some place to go Sunday on our anniversary. Washington was out, the National was closed, getting ready for Guys and Dolls, nothing on but Man and Superman and Show Boat. Some good boxing matches, but she’d probably never go along with that. Maybe the new Cinerama or one of those 3-D movies like House of Wax. I’d feel silly wearing those goddamn cardboard glasses, though.
“…So with the bases loaded, Jim Piersall singled and Dick Gernert homered, so that was seven runs in…”
“Izzat so?” I smiled. I’m generally very good at these one-to-one relationships.
“The pitcher come up and singled and they started the whole lineup over again. Sammy White…”
There was a new Dr. Seuss movie premiering in New York about a boy who hated piano lessons, but it looked a little childish. Mary Healy looked like she had big boobs, though. And another new one with Sylvana Pampanini in it called O.K., Nero—wasn’t that the guy who used corpses as torches? A little heavy maybe for the season. To tell the truth, the idea of going to a movie bored the hell out of me, boobs or no boobs. I recalled the days when I was investigating the Hollywood Ten with HUAC, that proximity to the stars — in fact, I was surprised how ordinary they seemed. There were Bogart and Bacall out there, pushovers for the Reds. Cooper was a hopeless dope, I haven’t been able to sit through one of his pictures since, even if he was on our side, and guys like Menjou and Disney and McCarey weren’t much better. Then came the stoolies, guys like Parks — whoo…. Made me angry in a way. Of course, having lived near Hollywood all my life — and even married, as it were, into the industry — I’d never been really star-struck like other people. And besides, there was my father’s eccentric habit of naming all his cows after movie stars — after you’ve milked Lillian Gish and remarked on her swollen blue teats, slapped Greta Garbo on the rump, and cleaned up Mary Pickford’s shit, it’s hard to be romantic about them.
“No kidding!” I said, since John seemed to have paused in his story.
“Right, so they bring in another pitcher, the third one this inning — and he can’t get the ball across the plate! He walks one guy, filling the bases, then walks Gernert, forcing a run in! And then the pitcher comes up and gets another single…!”
One thing I wanted to do was go in to New York and see Arthur Miller’s The Crucible after all I’d heard about it, but we couldn’t risk giving it any kind of official sanction, and besides, Edgar was probably photographing the audience for his files. Could go and denounce it publicly, maybe. Should get a headline or two. Protocol-wise, though, the smart thing would be to take her to that film of the British coronation ceremonies which was such a surprise box-office smash. England had spent five and a half million dollars to crown the Queen and now they were going to get it all back in film royalties. Make history, make money…
“Say, uh, how much longer is this going to go on, John?”
“It’s wild, ain’t it, Mr. Nixon?” he laughed. I rattled the paper impatiently. “Well, so Gene Stephens singles, see, and that’s his third hit of the inning, a new all-time record. Umphlett comes up and he singles, and Sammy White comes in, scoring his record-breaking third run of the inning. The next guy walks, filling the bases—”
“My God! Listen, I tell you what, John…”
“But then finally Kell flies out to retire the side.”
“Ah. He probably got bored and did it on purpose.”
“How’s that, Mr. Nixon?”
“I said, sometimes that’s how the ball bounces, John, we all have to live with our victories and defeats, only teams that believe in themselves can rise to their challenges.”
“Oh yeah. I see what you mean, Mr. Nixon…”
There was a summer ice show, “Scents and Nonsense,” on at the Hotel New Yorker, I noticed. Pat might like that, she used to be hot for ice skating before we got married, I busted my head more than once trying to keep up with her, never did get the hang of it. She was a real time-waster, dancing, skating, gadding about, it was a relief to get married and get all that over with. Better skip the ice show, she might get ambitious again. It occurred to me that I had been living with Pat for nearly thirteen years, thirteen years this Sunday, and yet in a real sense she was a complete stranger to me. Only when she was chewing me out did she become somehow real, but the rest of the time…well, it was almost as if I’d married some part of myself, and Pat was only the accidental incarnation of that part. Do we all do this? Is this what marriage is all about, finding fleshly embodiments of our ghostly selves, making ourselves whole?