“Fututi pizda matii!” Tibor roared. “It’s the Puli-tzarina!” A baby started crying in the next room.
“Oh shit!” Reshma said, as a wet stain began to spread over her T-shirt by her left nipple. “Pardon my Swahili and pardon my hungry monster. Won’t be but a minute.” And with that, she disappeared through another door.
“She follows me everywhere!” Tibor lurched around the room looking for the remote. Cristina continued to talk calmly to the vice president with authority and the charming scalpel of her Rumanian accent. I was happy to have her in the room with us, even if I could understand Tibor’s annoyance. Cristina had a way of looking through the camera and making you believe you were her sole audience. Nevertheless, I reached behind the TV and pulled the plug.
I got Tibor out of the flat and into a mini-cab by Regent’s Park before Reshma finished breakfasting her infant. Back at the hotel, I poured coffee and scrambled eggs into Tibor and tucked him into bed. He began to snore immediately. I cancelled my Cambridge tutor and the rest of my Monday and pieced through the hotel room Tatlers and Vogues. Cristina was mentioned five times in the magazines, Tibor only once and then as “husband of …” I thought about calling Cristina but remembered Tibor’s reaction to her appearance on TV. She follows me everywhere. I remembered her appearance just a few weeks before on the forecourt of Trinity. Was Tibor jealous of Cristina’s success?
Was that why she warned me?
Was he warning me?
I thought about Reshma and her baby. I thought about the night Tibor had spent in her depressing flat. I thought about why I had followed Tibor’s instructions and given her the address of the Studio. I didn’t think about the bottle of Absolut.
Tibor woke around 4 p.m. He sat up in bed. He had no idea where he was. He reached out with his left hand and hit a pillow. He reached out with his right and knocked over the over-designed bedside lamp. I stood above him and handed him his glasses. He tweaked them over his ears and looked up at me.
“So.”
I offered to call up some food. I handed him a glass of water.
“Go away.”
“Can I call you later? See if you’re okay?”
“I’m okay. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Are you sure?”
He looked up at me again and blinked. Twice. Thrice. I don’t know if Cristina ever got that look from him. But I understood her warning.
In the morning, Tibor was downstairs in the lobby of the hotel waiting for me. There were no signs of the previous day’s adventure. If anything, he seemed more energized than he had a week earlier before the first rehearsal. As we walked through Trafalgar Square and across Hungerford Bridge to the South Bank, he talked about how the time had come to begin to unveil the new concept for Antigone. It was a concept he had been considering for over twenty years, since his first days in Rome.
And that’s when he mentioned your name.
“Malory will understand.”
I had no idea who you were, or whether the name Malory referred to a man, a woman, or a Rumanian experimental theater company. I didn’t ask. But then, I didn’t ask a lot of things on that late-morning walk to the Studio, and if I had, a clarification of the name Malory would have been low on the list. I was glad that Tibor was mobile. I wanted to forget our lost Monday. It was Tuesday, the beginning of a new week. We would show our passes at the stage door, take the lift to our well-lighted rehearsal room, listen to our week-two benediction from our glorious leader, and set off on the next episode of our journey towards genius.
“Oc-TAY-vya!”
It wasn’t just the sight of Reshma outside the stage door. It was the sight of Reshma and five other women — Asian, Latin, African, Polynesian, and Eskimo — all yoo-hooing Tibor in ways that told me one thing. Monday hadn’t been the product of Tibor unwinding at the end of a long week by drinking a bottle of Absolut and picking up an Indian prostitute. Tibor had been doing this every night since we began rehearsal. He had been going out in London with a bottle of Absolut and looking for women. A new bottle every night, a new woman every night.
“My concept,” Tibor said, as he stirred the six new women into the murmuring mix that was his disconcerted company, “is that Antigone will be played not by one woman, but by seven women. Antigone is not just white, not just black or yellow or …” I could have supplied Tibor with the names of the seven colors of the rainbow more easily than figured out the reasoning behind his coalition.
“But why?” It was the Welsh girl, the original Antigone who asked the question. Entirely reasonable. Entirely within character, both as a Welsh girl and as Antigone.
“You should know, Antigone.” Tibor smiled a dangerous smile, the warning of imminent attack. “Your Uncle Creon thinks there is only one right side to any battle, one right answer to any question, one nephew, one hero who can be buried. But you …”—and Tibor laid a comforting palm on her shoulder—“know that sometimes there is more than one answer, more than one hero, more than one heroine.”
“Perhaps …” she began.
“Tell me,” he said, smiling again. “How many boys have you fucked in your life?” Before the Galahads in the company could raise their voices in defense of the poor girl, Tibor held up his hand. “I don’t really want to know. I suspect the number is more than one. But I’m sure you’re looking for the one guy to settle down with, the one man — or maybe woman, I’m easy — to spend the rest of your life with. Aren’t we all?”
The murmur dwindled to the silence of general confusion.
“On the Other Side, where I was born, One was the only number. One party, one president, one way of living, of thinking, of eating, drinking, shitting, and, when it came down to it, one missionary position for making love. I have been fighting a battle against One since I escaped from the Other Side. It is a battle I have tried to describe and explain. And now all of you — and I include our six new, professional colleagues — are here to give life to that battle. To prove once and for all that life is full of answers and origins. There are more Big Bangs, more explanations, more ways to tell where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and why we’re taking the trouble. As many, Dante would say, as the fireflies a peasant sees on a summer’s evening, when he lies on his back on a grassy hill after his work is done. And you, my pilgrims, are going to bring the light of all these fireflies to the world!”
The company was made up of professionals, people who had been in the business, some of them for more than forty years. I was impressed how many of them followed Tibor’s concept for the first day or so. Many of them had worked in the political sixties and seventies with non-professional actors — Kentish farmers and farriers in reenactments of Wat Tyler’s Rebellion or Hackney undertakers reliving the Great Plague of 1666. And they all had grown up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the theater where the Director was the One.
The problem was not the National Theatre. The problem was not Reshma and her international friends — for whom I acted as agent and intermediary with staff, and secured a pretty tidy compensation package. I suspect that at least one Antigone was keeping the Director company on St. Martin’s Lane. The problem was Tibor. He was drinking — at least that one bottle of Absolut a night. And even though every morning when I picked him up, he was showered, shaved, and stable enough to walk the twenty minutes to the Studio, it was clear that he was stumbling in rehearsal. I became both lightning rod and the handkerchief for the individual and collective anxieties. As I waited in the lobby for Tibor on the morning of the sixth day of the second week, I rehearsed again the speech of concern I had been writing all night.