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for Leslie Brody, who inspired this novel’s first draft in 1984, and who refused to let me give up on it, even when I suggested I would burn it and myself up before I returned to it, even when there was an actual burning of one draft—even when I threw another draft out with the garbage, retrieving and saving that ream and actually hiding it from me, with the help of our late great friend, the poet, writer, and teacher Joan Joffe Hall, who sent it to me ten years later, and to whose memory I also dedicate this book.
so that we may save him later.”
.....
Thus was the story told of the wealthy Californian who goes to Europe in search of art, of beauty, who falls in love with the widow of an impoverished aristocrat, and who encounters simultaneously a deep disdain for his lack of family and a deep lust for his surplus of money—in about a quarter of an hour of helter-skelter hilarity . . . while outside, a tiny, celebratory, nominally pro-war rocket rose up on a thin line of fizzing and sparking red flame, broke the window next to the one Charles had left open (there was, in the immediate aftermath and first stages of investigation, some suspicion, for a moment or two, that someone had secretly entered the theater and opened a window on purpose). It exploded loudly but without much force, and began to burn itself out smokily in the carpeting. Which in turn caught fire, spreading quickly over the floor and consuming the false dome, under which hung the chandelier that was the main source of general lighting in the theater. When they smelled smoke and looked up and saw the paint begin to bubble, the ensemble, already darting and jogging, moved in confused anticipation toward the center of the theater, their lines trailing off and the speed of their movements slowing. When it became clear that the ceiling was burning, they scrambled left and right past the velvet seats, then up or down the aisles toward the stage or the exits, from which vantage points they watched the chandelier go dark. Shouting run run run, they all ran. Some of the last, Charles included, heard the heavy, slow crash in the darkness.
He held a novelty handkerchief—red, white, and blue, stars and stripes, mandated by his board for publicity purposes—to his nose and mouth, and bent low as he could, bringing his knees nearly to his still falsely bearded chin, and walked up the front stairway to the second-floor lobby. The haze either stung and filmed his eyes and distorted his perception of the red-carpeted, red-wallpapered stairway, making it look narrower and steeper and higher than it was; or was he perhaps simply light-headed from the smoke . . .? This may be the beginning of my death, he thought. Will I know? Each second growing more and more certain until the final moment when the smoke is gone and my head is cool and there is a flash of clear light and I know that the sham is over and that I am, how do we say, dead? The lobby was like a mountaintop cave, a small dark mouth opening in the swirling mist. There was no trace of a wise man—he was all alone and could hear the building whispering, moaning, shouting restlessly to itself. It did not wish to die, and yet was willing to burn. Sir Edwin’s aesthetic love of destruction, of collapse and immolation, did not extend, it appeared, to those things of his own which he wished to preserve. He had begun to ask Charles in a normal tone of voice, manly but urgent, one understood, one knew, brooking no bullshit, straight to the point, if Charles might consider dashing in and retrieving a few valuable bits and pieces of theatrical memorabilia—but he hadn’t been able to maintain the tone. He lost control of his voice and his face and his hands at the same moment: he squeaked and shrieked and shook like a leaf. Charles couldn’t look at him and turned away in disgust. His prize possessions amounted to museum pieces indicating the aesthetic ancestors of what Sir Edwin called “The Free Theater” but which everyone else referred to now as “the Minot”: a portrait in oil of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen; a spotted and torn photograph of the Meininger Players assembled on a tiny picture-frame stage somewhere in the heart of Thuringia or Saxony; another, blurry and desiccated, of those same players either lying facedown on a mattress or huddled over it as if about to pounce on it, grinning melodramatically (the use of the mattress to muffle offstage “crowd noise” was legendary in the birth of “stage realism”); more photographs of Andre Antoine and his Théâtre Libre, and the famous “missing fourth wall” stage set put together with junk lumber and cast-off furniture; wood-cut prints of Sir Edwin’s fantastic, eerie set design for the Moscow Art Theater’s Hamlet. Charles yanked paintings and photographs down from the walls, wrapped them in a tablecloth, then smartly rapped a display case, breaking its glass. He thought he could stay in the burning room forever: this was how things were. Nothing could have made him happier, more deeply content. But he balanced two miniature stage sets on top of the bundle of pictures and autograph letters, stuffed two small sculptures under his arms, and made his way back down the stairs. They had become something like the face of a cliff, and he walked perpendicularly to it, defying gravity. Then he was in the main lobby and he could hear crackling and crashing and the firemen shouting inside the theater. Then different shouts and cannonading bursts of water. Outside on the street, Sir Edwin had gotten hold of himself and lit a cigar. Drawing voluptuously on it, he stared at Charles with a strange, almost mocking, superior gratitude. Both men were slick with soot-black sweat, sticky with blood from small wounds. Edwin seemed satisfied with the show of destruction and manly staving off of destruction, now that it was all over—even pleased. He spoke with fatuously coy irony of a dream to use the sounds of the firefight, from gush of water to shriek of fear, from splatter of horse dung to clatter of shoes on cobblestones, in place of the small orchestra: “That,” he insisted, “was the music of the future.” Firemen trudged past alternately muttering and braying with victorious exhaustion. Charles and Sir Edwin could hear hot wood sizzling and steaming above them in the black building, and smell the wet ash, the burnt spores and flowers of mold. Charles was nauseated by the ridiculously sweet smoke of Sir Edwin’s cigar, and disgusted with his reinvigorated incoherence and perversity, but they were walking now and had passed into a livelier block, full of restaurants and saloons, people with stuffed bellies and laughing mouths, and Charles surrendered to a fleeting vision of his master’s alcoholically perceived but immutable truth. Something “great” might be revealed if he did something “real” on the stage. Let it happen to me, he thought, seeing in his mind the crackling flames in the lobby, as you say it will. Then someone came running after them to tell them that a little boy, one of the plumber’s sons, no doubt, had been found under the chandelier.
.....
