A small crowd of ticket buyers had gathered around the box office window. Charles parked his Studebaker at the far end of the block and removed his goggles. He was much too preoccupied with Vera’s sudden transformation in his mind — from what to what, it was hard to say, beautiful young woman to daredevil, dangling herself high above the city to declare an era in which no one need be afraid? From somebody he wanted to fuck to somebody he wanted to worship? Much too amazed to care about the crowd, and they appeared to be cheering anyway, more cheering knuckleheads waving signs — but it was hard in the deepening twilight to tell. He moved unsteadily down the alley toward the stage door, his stomach rising and falling and percolating its acids. He put his hand on the railing that led to the door and prepared himself to see his nausea through, to, as it were, stick a finger down his throat and be done with it, bear the grave responsibility before him, do the ridiculous and false thing they expected him to do, or brave and true, depending on your mood and point of view, enter into the nightmare time and space of the stage and humiliate himself in an ill-conceived and awkwardly played-out bit of fraudulence, then emerge from it, miraculously relieved to find it had been worthy and real, bursting finally with gratitude and love of life, wryly amused at his earlier childish torments and wading into the riotous esteem of his fellow San Franciscans. Yes, that was how it was — or could easily be seen to be.
He went down a dark corridor that still smelled of sawn wood and fresh cement and hot metal, crammed with old clothes from centuries, even millennia, past, odd props the use of which could not be guessed at, and junk, plain junk, that had been accumulated in the drive for funding, seeing no one, hearing no one and nothing, and entered into the dressing room where the other actors sat slumped and stinking of paints and creams and anxiety and indigestion before streaked and spotted mirrors throwing back hideous made-up masks. The princess’s understudy looked up at him. “Aren’t you the daredevil,” she enunciated.
They were all, he realized in a surge of bile, looking at him through the predatory safety of their mirrors, two banks of them on either side, three apiece, six faces, a gauntlet. but rather than plunging him into a deeper vomitous misery, it, to his great surprise, emboldened him.
“What,” he demanded, “is the matter with you children now?”
They looked away, six different moues of sarcasm, bored, it now seemed to him, with their anxiety and his late arrival. Then the old man, Garagiola, stood up and told him to go soak his head. He used his old Brooklyn voice, a sign that all was not well, and that he was feeling peevish. “Aw, go soak yuh head,” he said with a small dismissive flip of his liver-spotted and veinous old claw of a hand.
“Relax,” said Teddy Blair, rubbing his false belly. “For Christ’s sake.”
The electric lights went off and on, and the old man squeaked with annoyance. “Now what the hell was that?” shouted Blair.
“That’s just what I wanted to see!” Charles said, striding confidently onstage, but it was clear that something had happened and whatever he was pretending to see was not what the audience or his fellow actors were seeing. He felt quite alone. The city was ruined. The vast schematic in his mind diagramming all the points of warmth and assurance and connection seemed no longer to apply, though he moved from one to the next and the next as if they still did, feeling perhaps a faint tingle or echo at the climax of each moment. He seemed somehow onstage and yet not in the play. He was neither Christopher Newman nor Charles Minot — which, after all, was part of what he’d been playing at all through rehearsals. The context, though: it had changed. He did not know in what way it was changed, nor exactly how the change had come about, but it was no longer, in any way, a positive environment. He was in some way he suddenly understood very well, nobody. But nobody where and in the service of what? Whenever the audience laughed or drew in their breath, or when he touched another actor, when he, for instance, embraced the false princess, the non-Vera, and kissed her with the by-now-lifeless facsimile of passion, he felt as if he were watching someone else. He no longer felt safe. He knew in the back of his mind that this was no way properly to act, and he consequently became frightened. It was not the simple if nauseating and paralyzing anxiety of stage fright, but a kind of pathological anomie — if in fact it was pathological to see things as they were, to feel isolated and disoriented and friendless. But he broke off the kiss at just the moment he always had done, the audience began to applaud as they always had done, the curtain surged across the stage and swept back and the audience continued to applaud, though not quite thunderously now, he noted, and saw as well that the house was not quite full.
“That wasn’t so bad,” murmured Teddy, holding his false stomach before him as if it were disgusting. No one replied, cleansing themselves as quickly as they could and dressing for home or for nightlife — which was not, Charles mused from his terrible distance, out of the ordinary at all. And then they were gone. The hands and the manager made noise for a while and then they too were gone. He went back onstage. Where was Sir Edwin? He called out, softly. A single limelight blasted out of its box, illuminating like desert sunlight a section of the balcony, and he looked to see if one of the plumber’s sons was again experimenting with the gas, but he was nowhere in sight. Again the light, in the absence of any other, struck him as if possessed of sound, and in the slowly drifting dust of the audience’s departure, it appeared to billow. He had once, not long ago, dreamed he was sailing alone through the Golden Gate, and felt the wind, the famous wind, almost imperceptibly slacken. His telltales fluttered. When they fell limp against the sail, he perceived the event as ominous. He was as usual not overly concerned, certainly not frightened — he never was in life, he reminded himself, much less in dreams, no matter how dreadful or sorrowing — but remembered that the wind was something emphatically not under his power of control. It had nothing to do with his family’s wealth, but rather with the turning of the planet in space, and he could call as loudly as he liked for a certain level of performance in that strait, but the answer would always be the same: here is how the world works. He called out his first line to the empty theater: “That’s just what I wanted to see!” but the world had changed in some subtle way, the world was working itself without him, and he imagined Vera sitting at the back of the main floor, in the darkness under the balcony. “The telltales are fluttering! They’re drooping!” he called out, thinking that one consequence of this change — whatever else was happening, had happened, or would happen — was that he was completely in her power, as hypnotized as if she were a mad-bombing Svengali. If he had always seen himself in the world as somehow playing, he now saw himself in a dream that was darkening even as he watched it unfold around him, deepening in tone at the same time it became more vivid and fantastic: the little house orchestra executing a precisely controlled allargando, something out of Wagner, Das Rheingold, as the characters, people near and dear to him as well as strange and new, took on the costumes and gestures of the fairy tale, and as the footlights snickered and fizzed and went out one by one across the stage, became the unstrung puppets of their own fantastic shadows.