Youngblood hawke, p.98
Youngblood Hawke, page 98
Adam looked sidewise at her, his eyes almost shut. "Well, I'll have to risk another outburst at me like your last one. The tax people are doing their duty under the law. Arthur had some bad advice and went into some questionable situations. It's that simple."
Jeanne said, "I won't break out at you, but I think it's a hellish state of affairs."
Adam said, "I just want you to remember hereafter—because I know he'll listen to you when you're married—that the hazard is not the tax laws but his temperament. I trust that he's been cured of speculating, or if he isn't, that you'll rein him in. That's the real answer to his problem."
"I couldn't rein him in before. Heaven knows I tried. Maybe he's acquired some respect for my batting average as a predicter of misfortune."
"I'm sure he has."
Jeanne added with a wicked little grin, "Of course the nagging power of a wife will be a formidable new weapon. It's probably the edge I've always needed." She glanced at her drink. "This tastes funny. Exquisite, but funny. Can it be that I'm going to like New York again?"
"I hope you will, since I'm stuck here, and I hope to see you and Arthur—and Jim—reasonably frequently in the coming years."
Jeanne glanced at him with instinctive coquetry. "How well you look! If Arthur only looked one tenth as well!"
The lawyer laughed and stood. "I do a humdrum day's work, seldom sleep less than eight hours, and usually spend one or two days out of seven in the wilds. Arthur's schedule is a little different."
Jeanne bathed, perfumed herself, made up with care, and dressed in a clinging green and gold Chinese silk housecoat. Her mirror told her that she looked more desirable than she ever had in her life, but worried. She relaxed the frown between her eyes with an effort.
Shortly before midnight the doorbell rang, and Hawke came stumbling in with heavy footfalls, like a man falling downstairs. "Hello, my love. It took forever and ever and I'm sorry, and it was all about absolutely nothing." He grasped her by the shoulders, looked at her haggardly and crushed her to him. Still holding her, he raised his head and sniffed. "Well, this is a tender gesture, I must say, after an all-day plane trip and everything else. Thank you, darling."
"What is?" She thought he was talking about her array and her perfume.
"You're cooking tacos, aren't you? I could smell them clear down in the elevator. It's a perfect cloud in here."
She knew about his smell hallucinations and felt a thrill of alarm, but she said with a light laugh, "That's all you can think of when you're around me. I'm not, but if Elizabeth thought to buy canned tortillas I will. Let me go look."
He caught her. "No, no. I'm not hungry. My smeller is out of whack. Doesn't mean anything. You look irresistible. Where did you get this slinky green thing? Ye gods, my only reason for ever liking you was that you were so smart. Now you've turned beautiful. Let's sit down somewhere and neck."
"I'm not that kind of girl," she said, moving as fast as he did to the couch.
They kissed furiously for a while. Hawke said, "When will we get married?"
"Any time."
"Have you any bourbon?"
"Sure."
"Plain. No ice. And a bottle of beer."
"Right."
It struck her that he was acting and talking in a daze. He was rational enough, yet he had taken no notice of the extraordinary condition of the apartment, and he was ordering her about as though they had been married for years, with no slightest attempt to bridge the gap of the months since they had seen each other. When she came in with the bourbon and beer he sat slumped with his legs thrust out and his head on the back of the couch, eyes closed. His nose stood out like a beak, and his white cheeks were sunken. It was an upsetting sight. She thought he might be asleep, but he opened his eyes, sat up and smiled at her with the sudden innocent pleasure of a boy. "You look so lovely," he said. "You're such a beautiful woman. You smell so good and you feel so good and you look so attractive. This is just wonderful."
She asked him about the progress of the book. He downed the bourbon and sipped at the beer. He had not stopped working on it for a single day, he said. He had done a long stint on the plane to New York. His writing hours were midnight to ten in the morning; then he managed a few hours' sleep before the theatre business started up. The last chapters had stretched out, but he believed he'd finish the raw manuscript about the time The Lady from Letchworth opened in Philadelphia. "After that I think we should get married," he said, "win, lose, or draw. Until then, darling, you'd just be a kissless bride."
"You need sleep more than a bride right now."
He said, "I want to talk to you. There's so much to say. I can't exactly pull myself together. Can I lie down for half an hour? Then get me up and we'll talk, and then I'll go back to work."
"That's a good idea."
He closed his eyes, stretching his big frame the length of the couch with a pitiful groan. "A half hour, you hear? No more. That's all I need."
"Yes, Arthur."
He fell asleep instantly. She brought an old quilted comforter out of a bedroom closet and covered him, after loosening his tie and slipping off his shoes. Hawke slept on the couch straight through until noon of the next day, not moving.
5
In the first week of rehearsal Jeanne's hopes rose as she watched Feydal and the actors go about their work. The pains they took to map out each move and gesture, the gradual painting of life and intelligence into the lines, the improvisations of comic business, the script changes Hawke made on the spot to meet little difficulties, the new lines (some of them very funny) which he would bring out of a half-hour's isolation in a dressing room with a typewriter, the astute suggestions of Irene Perry—all these things impressed her. She began to think that Feydal had made a wise commercial judgment, and that this old play was a rediscovered treasure that was going to ransom Hawke. But she was alarmed at the physical cost to him. He was writing at his book all night and spending most of the day at the theatre. He put in the long hours cheerfully, but each day that she saw him he looked worse. A cup of coffee shook and spilled in his hand. Once when she remonstrated he said, "I'm in it now, Jeanne. It's only two more weeks at this pace. I'd feel like a dog if I didn't pitch in. It's their livelihood too, you know, and I'm not working harder than any of them. It's just that I'm doing another job at the same time. That's my own affair."
"Alms for Oblivion was produced without you."
"A comedy is different. Anyway, to be honest, I find the whole thing interesting. I never want to do it again, but it's a thing to go through, like a death or a war."
"Then stop working on your book."
"I can't."
Adam would come in the afternoon, and sit with Jeanne in the orchestra, watching the rehearsal. He shared her concern for Hawke, and a lack of sympathy with the entire theatre process. The transparent vanity of the actors, their long elaborate character analyses leading always to a plea for more lines; the popinjay airs and temper tantrums of Jock Maas; the thick sugary flattery which Feydal used on Hawke, to get the writer to change scenes or write new ones—Jeanne and Adam watched such commonplace rehearsal events with satiric disdain. Hawke would glance around and see them whispering or laughing together in a rear row. He would wave at them and grin, acknowledging that he was caught up in a dance of folly, and turn again with weary patience to the nagging little crisis at hand, whatever it was.
It would have taken clairvoyance on the part of Jeanne or the lawyer to guess that they were feeding Hawke's private nightmare and sapping his remaining mental strength as much as the importunate actors and director. The fact was that—whatever the source of that mysterious human property called nervous strength—Hawke had about come to the end of his.
He had serious causes enough for anxiety in his financial predicament, his physical condition, and the uncertain value of this play he was putting on. But he kept these fears suppressed, and the bottled-up anxiety was breaking forth in the wild and groundless fantasy that Jeanne was falling in love with Gus Adam! Hawke in more normal times, and even now in his lucid hours, knew not only that Jeanne loved him, but that she had loved him from their first meeting and had never stopped loving him. He was ashamed of his nightmare. He knew it for what it was, and so could not give voice to it; but all the same it haunted him, and was haunting him more and more as the days went by, as the pressures on him mounted, and as his last reserves of strength began to give out.
It had started at the airport when Jeanne, walking away from the airplane, had called out to Adam first, instead of to him, "Hi, Gus! You here too? Great!" This had struck Hawke as a peculiar thing for her to do, and jealousy had flashed into his mind though he himself had brought Adam to the plane. The hesitant swift kiss she had given Adam had also offended him. Jeanne and Adam in their wildest imaginings could not have discerned that during the taxi ride to the city Hawke had, while keeping up a normal conversation, constructed a complete fantasy, which was this: Jeanne had long since tired of his eccentricities and follies. The sober, reliable, clever Adam was far more to her taste. Adam was the sort of man she truly wanted and needed. She might or might not be aware of this; most likely she was. At any rate he, Hawke, observing small telltale things she did and said, had seen through to the truth.
As Hawke spun this stuff in his mind, another side of him remained unmoved by it, recognizing it for the silly anxious daydream it was. But he could not dismiss it. When he came to the apartment that first night and saw the pains that Adam had taken for Jeanne's comfort, his reaction again was fiercely jealous. He resented the fact that the lawyer had the leisure to do this kind of wooing and he had not; and his refuge was to say nothing about it. Even when they had necked on the couch Hawke had bitterly sensed that Jeanne was working at pleasing him, instead of feeling real passion. There was this much truth in it, that Jeanne was dog-tired, and worried about Hawke, and also that she did not want to start sleeping with him in this apartment, certainly not with Elizabeth there; nevertheless she had loved being in his arms and had experienced in those moments the first true flickers of happiness she had known in years. When Hawke woke after his twelve-hour sleep and had breakfast with Jeanne, he remembered his imaginings as one dimly recalls a horrible fever dream. He had been tempted to recount them to her so that they could laugh together over his idiocy and forget it. But he was unable to bring the crazy notion out in the daylight. By night-time it was rising in his mind again as he sat through the unending tedium of casting. In the days that followed the delusion came and went like a malaria fit, like his delusions of smell, and he tried to live with this new aberration in the same way, promising himself that it was a ghost conjured up by exhaustion, which would vanish with rest. He was in this unreasonable vein only for short periods. Sanity would return, and he would be filled with love for Jeanne and grateful friendship for Adam, and he would resolve to choke off the next fit when it came.
The first run-through of a play can be decisive to a knowledgeable onlooker. Often it is better than the finished performance. The players are fresh to the task and still struggling with it. This adds vibrancy to the acting. The absence of the heavy literal sets and costumes of Broadway permits the imagination to go to work. Hawke had high hopes for The Lady from Letchworth during the early scenes of the run-through, as the cumulative impact of theatre make-believe enlivened his words. But as the rehearsal went on he became less sure. He resolved to be silent and to listen to what others said. There was a sprinkling of spectators at the rehearsal: backers, staff assistants of Maas and Feydal, understudies, costume and scene designers, and the handful of anonymous Broadway people who are always present when anything serious is happening in the theatre. This was the first run-through of a new play linking three radiant celebrities who had had a success together not long ago: Youngblood Hawke, Georges Feydal, and Irene Perry. There was almost continuous laughter from the sparse audience.
When the performance ended excited chatter broke out both in the orchestra and on the stage. Maas was off in one corner of the theatre making jubilant noises to smiling backers. Feydal on stage had summoned the actors into a semicircle, and was exchanging animated comments with them. Lax was exulting to Hawke that it was no contest, that he was flying back to Hollywood at once to tell Trav Jablock that if he wanted this play for a seventy-five-thousand-dollar down payment he'd better come east and see a rehearsal and make a deal; after the opening in Philadelphia the down payment was going to be a hundred fifty thousand! Even Adam was cheerful. He said the theatre would never cease to amaze him. From everything he had heard of this play, from everything he had seen at rehearsal, he had been pessimistic; but tonight the comedy had sprung to life for him, and he believed it had a good chance for success. In Adam's measured and cautious vocabulary this was wild raving.
Jeanne said nothing.
Hawke and Jeanne escaped after a while, and darted to Sardi's through a rain that sparkled white and gold in the theatre lights. He said to Jeanne over their first drink, "Well, it's just The Lady from Letchworth after all, isn't it?"
She said, "That's what I thought."
He said, "We're right. The others were just talking."
"However, Arthur, all those people were laughing, Lord knows. Even Gus! Gosh, if old Blackstone himself is amused maybe there's hope."
Her reference to Adam gave Hawke a twinge of sickness, but he suppressed the jealousy with a grim effort, as though he were forcing down a tough spring with his hand. He was not going to give way to that craziness any more!
He said, "It's a lesson, isn't it? All that labor, all the invention of Feydal and the actors, all my rewriting, all the genius of Irene Perry—did you ever see a woman who could do more with the rise and fall of her voice, or a gesture with a purse?—all it comes to, in the end, is the silly farce that I wrote in 1943 on a Kaiser liberty ship going from San Francisco to Guadalcanal, twenty-seven days at ten knots without seeing land, living on dehydrated potatoes and fried spam, cold spam, spam salad. That's it, you see, Jeanie. Do what you will with spam, it remains spam. And all the theatrical geniuses in the world can't rise above the level of the play they're doing."
Jeanne said, "Still, it may make money."
"I guess it may. Christ, I have to hope so. There's some fun in it. . . . Say, Georges! Looking for Molière? Table number four."
Feydal sailed over to them, unmindful of the stares of everybody in the restaurant, and sat, beaming. He had a copy of the next day's Times under his arm. "Victor Hugo, more nearly, my dear Hawke. Master of all forms. Good evening, Cerberus, you look dazzling, hang you. I'll have a double gimlet, extremely dry," he said to the waiter. His merry face turned tragic. He passed the Times to Hawke. "I'm shattered about this. Really, I could strangle my agent. They're all alike. There isn't one with the tact of a charging rhinoceros. Imagine breaking such a story when we're ten days from opening! The morale of the cast is going to plummet."
The paper was unfolded to the drama section. The headline over the movie news read:
FEYDAL WILL STAR
IN LIFE OF BALZAC
and the story disclosed that shooting of the movie would begin on the sixth of July. It was quite true, Feydal said. He had actually signed the contract weeks ago but had demanded that the news be suppressed until the Philadelphia opening of the Hawke play. "One had no choice, dear boy, the money is fantastic and the part is lovely. One must keep one's bills paid. The cast expects me to wetnurse them across the country for weeks and really it makes no sense. The play will be what it will be when it opens in Philadelphia, after which I'll leave. Nothing will matter much after that. Of course I'll fly out from time to time and check the performances."
Hawke said, "Don't you think the play may need work after it opens?"
"Jock Maas is very capable, truly he is. He'll take over very well."
"Maas is a lunatic, Georges."
"Dear boy, a touch of lunacy is helpful in the theatre. Just be sure you don't let him fatten up that tall blonde's part, what's her name? I presume she has a name, but how can one remember it? He keeps pushing, you know, because he's sleeping with her, isn't it dull of him? A television girl twenty-one years old. So insipid. I should think Jock would prefer stronger cheese."
"I didn't know about that."
The moon face turned crafty and ironic. "One soon learns the signs, dear Hawke. We have three red-hot affairs going in the company at the moment. The motto of a play company in rehearsal is the cry of old Lear, 'Let copulation thrive.' It releases tensions, and after all, one should have a little jam with all that dry bread, hm? All that tedious repetition?"
While consuming a vast platter of spaghetti with clam sauce, Feydal discussed the run-through. Despite the optimistic talk he wasn't quite satisfied. He felt that the yellow script had lost some of the first freshness of the black script, even of the red script. Moreover there were some good things in the green script that they might put back. He felt he should spend a whole day with Hawke scissoring together the best things of all the versions, and he had ideas for one or two new scenes. He said with a sly glance at Jeanne, "You see I haven't even asked Cerberus what she thought of the run-through. I could hear all three heads barking back in the theatre."
Jeanne, figuring she had nothing to lose, said, "I'm wondering if it's fair of you to get Arthur into a play production by saying the script was excellent, then persuading him to do a new version every week, then walking off before the job's done. He's in this thing because he believes in you."
"You're a terrible woman, my dear," said Feydal. "Under that dear sweet American surface there is the steel of Saint Joan. I am absolutely terrified of you. I can only say that this man's writing so hypnotizes me that I thought the play was perfect and I said so. One finds things out in rehearsal, my love, just as one strikes rock or clay or water in digging a building's foundation, and then one must adjust one's blueprints a bit." He turned to Hawke. "You know I wouldn't leave you in the lurch, dear Hawke. You know I wouldn't do that, don't you? I promise you that I'll give my heart's blood to this job between here and Philadelphia, my heart's blood, and there'll be nothing left in me thereafter to contribute, anyway. I'll be wrung out like a dishrag, I swear to you. I have a late appointment with that idiotic monster, my agent, clear on the other side of town. Do forgive me. Cerberus, you're far too severe, and I abominate you, but as women go you have few peers and I've known them all."
