Читать книгу Letters from Max - Sarah Ruhl - Страница 18

I visited Max after that surgery in New York, at his apartment on the Upper East Side, as soon as Hurricane Sandy allowed me to brave the subway. I brought noodle kugel and met his family. Max teased that though I was a Midwestern goy, my kugel passed his beautiful mother’s Israeli muster. Max was always good company, even post-surgery. I could tell he was furious if he wasn’t well enough to make the people around him laugh. If he was not well enough to make people laugh, he usually told friends not to come by.

I gave him Dear Elizabeth to read because he was wrestling with the ethics of quoting someone else’s letter in the play he was working on. I thought Max would enjoy reading Lowell and Bishop’s whopping fight about the ethics of Lowell using letters from his ex-wife in his book Dolphin.

Max was still very much my student—I gave him notes like “Put that speech in iambic pentameter.” “Bring in that scene rewritten with a twenty-five percent word reduction.” “Write a little song for that moment.” I would write him about a scene: “I love how specific and never arbitrary you are.” And he would write me about his hopes for a new scene: “I am adamant that something extravagant and silent happen.”

Max handed in his play at the end of the semester. It begins at an altar, and also features a scene in which a sick boy goes to get a new tattoo, but at the tattoo parlor, the tattoo artist is something of an analyst, and the boy and the tattoo artist speak in iambic pentameter. The boy says to the tattoo artist:

“So I have brought inside my little pouch, a little draft of a Hokusai crane.”

Max got a tattoo after every surgery. He wanted to make something beautiful out of something painful. They were all birds, modeled after different artists. One was a crane, inscribed on his head, inspired by the Japanese artist Hokusai. In his tattoo parlor play, Max wrote these stage directions:

The tattoo artist finishes, and picks the boy up, very gently like an angel helping another angel. She offers him a compact mirror gently like an angel offering a compact mirror to another angel. He smiles and begins to check it out.

Then the boy says: “It’s dope. I really love it in this light.”