The interviewer walks on the garden of my reverie, all unknowing: “Were you just taking classes then? Not acting professionally yet?”
“God, no!” Happy memories bounce me around on the slate like a beach ball. “Making the rounds, trying out for parts. Trying to be a real actor! Incredible!”
Flashback 4
The theater was small, with black walls and only simple efficient lighting on the stage. Twenty James Deans lurked and posed and fixed their hair in the main auditorium, while another James Dean, script in hand, went through a scene on stage, playing opposite Miriam Croft, a famous older actress, a one-time beauty who was now most frequently called “well preserved.” Miss Croft, working without a script, her manner imperious and demanding, said, “I am your mother, and I do love you.”
“You don’t love me,” the James Dean read, passionately. “You never loved me. You never loved anybody. You don’t know how to love.”
“All right,” called the director from the front row. A tall, thin man with a thick black mustache and waving hands, he was known for his impatience. Of the half-dozen people watching from the front row, he was the only one without notepad or clipboard. “Thank you very much,” he said to the James Dean on stage. “Next.”
The James Dean shrugged and walked off into the wings and Jack entered smiling like someone who wants to be helpful. Jack carried no script. While Miriam Croft watched him, noncommittal, he stepped to the center of the stage and faced front.
An assistant, seated to the left of the director, clutched her clipboard and pen and called, “Name?”
“Jack Pine.”
“Do we have your résumé?”
Easy, confident, self-deprecating, Jack spread his hands and said, “Such as it is.”
The director, edginess in his voice, said, “Where’s your script?”
“Oh, I’ve been hearing the scene,” Jack told him. “I know it now.”
The director shook his head, waved his hand. “Then go right ahead.”
Jack turned to look at Miriam Croft, and at once he altered, he transmogrified, he became someone else. He was taller and thinner, both more closed off and yet more vulnerable. He was cold, mistrustful, in pain. Miriam cocked an eyebrow, watching him.
Jack’s voice seemed nearly closed, half strangling him, when at last he spoke: “Mother...”
Irritably, the director called, “The line is, ‘Mother, I can’t stay.’”
Miriam, quite serious, watching Jack unblinking, said, “He knows the line, Harry.”
The director reared back. “Well, excuse me.”
Amiable, helpful, his former self, Jack smiled pleasantly at the director, saying, “Are we ready now, sir?”
Miffed but professional, the director said, “Of course. Go right ahead.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jack said, and turned back to Miriam, and again underwent that transition to the other person, the unhappy defeated son: “Mother... I can’t stay.”
“But I insist, darling.”
Jack turned, twisted, a caged animal searching for a nonexistent door. “You... stifle me. There’s no air in here, I can’t breathe.”
Miriam’s eyes were fastened like cargo hooks on Jack’s face. “I only want what’s best for you, dear. I am your mother, and I do love you.”
The words were wrung from Jack, blasphemies he was helpless not to pronounce: “You don’t love me. You never loved me. You never loved anybody. You don’t know how to love.”
Miriam smiled.
I smile. The sun slides free, looks down on me. The sun, methinks, looks with a watery eye. But which of us was Titania, which was Bottom?
The interviewer says, “That was your first professional role.”
True. True.
“And Miriam Croft was a great help to you.”
“We were a great help to one another,” I say, and I laugh. But it hurts to laugh. I seem to be nothing but broken ribs from neck to crotch when I laugh, so I stop laughing. I smile. “We helped one another in so many ways,” I say.
Flashback 5
At night, the view from Miriam Croft’s bedroom window was of a magnificent swath of dark, twenty-seven stories below, pinked with warm and creamy lights; the stretch of Central Park extending from in front of her building on West 59th Street two and a half miles north to 110th Street, flanked by the bright towers and armed fortresses of Manhattan. The George Washington Bridge was a jeweled necklace in the far upper left of the view, a number of neoned corporate logos made glittering brooches at the throats of nearer buildings, and now and then a slow-moving hansom cab became briefly visible as it passed through the illumination of a park light far below, hinting at a gentler and more romantic age.
A magnificent view, but at this moment Miriam Croft was not observing it. At this moment, Miriam, her contact lenses out, was blurrily observing her bedroom ceiling, while Jack, atop her, performed like mad. “Oh, my Gaaaa-aahhhhd!” Miriam cried out, and Jack raced to catch up, and they crossed the finish line together, spent, panting, their two hearts pounding as one. “Oh,” Miriam said, her arms gripping him tightly around the back. “Oh. Oh.”
“Mmm, Miriam,” he murmured, smiling against her perfumed but crapen neck. Gradually he permitted more and more of his weight to rest on her, until she would want him off; at last she did, releasing him, sighing with long contentment, sliding her long-fingered hands from his back.
Then he lifted himself, rearing up on extended arms, beaming down at her, delighted in them both. “Well, well, Miriam!” he cried. “You are all right!”
Irony, briefly lost, had returned to Miriam. Stroking his cheek, smiling, she said, “The workman is as good as his tool, dear.”
“You can teach me so much!” Jack cried.
Miriam’s smile turned acid, became cold amusement. “And the first lesson, dear,” she said, “is don’t be too eager.”
“But I am eager, Miriam,” Jack cried, laughing at the truth of it. “I’m eager for everything, I’m eager to be, to be used!” Rolling off her, sitting up tailor-fashion, resting one hand on her lowest rib, he said, “I am a good actor, aren’t I?”
She nodded, slowly, solemnly, treating it as a serious question. “Probably better than you know,” she said. “And you aren’t even afraid of it, are you?”
“Why should I be?” he asked, astonished. “It makes me happy!”
“And you are going to make me happy,” she told him. “And there are no dangers at all in the world.”
“Not in our world,” he said.
How the years collide! And here I am, after all, while the past bounces and rattles away like tools left in the trunk of a car. How can I describe this to my friendly neighborhood interviewer? I cannot. I will not. These are my memories. “Ah, Miriam,” I say.
“Miriam Croft,” the interviewer says, and I can hear him imperfectly hide his disapproval. But who asked for his approval? He says, “She must have been forty years older than you.”