Wolf at the Table, page 34
Ten minutes later, Noelle, along with two male security guards wearing yellow windbreakers, is walking Lake Lakota out of the mall’s main entrance and toward Myra’s car. His hands have been zip-tied behind his back.
Myra gets out of her car, and Noelle and the two security guards walk the boy over to her. There’s an abrasion on his right cheek, suggesting a struggle. Myra imagines his face being driven into the carpeting of the video game arcade, adult knees boring into the flesh between his shoulder blades.
“Is this him?” Noelle asks.
The boy won’t look at her.
“Look at her,” one of the security guards orders him.
He does so.
“That’s definitely him,” Myra says.
The boy spits harshly onto the pavement.
“Hey!” one of the security guards barks, then jerks the boy’s wrists to make him stand up straight.
“Lying bitch,” the boy hisses at Myra.
The two security guards jerk him sharply upward again and then Noelle begins reading him his Miranda rights as she signals to the other two to walk him over to her police cruiser. After she secures him in the caged back seat, she locks the door and returns to Myra.
“You’re doing the right thing,” she says. “That kid might finally get his life together.”
“I hope so,” Myra says.
“Good luck with your recovery,” Noelle says, offering her a ten-dollar bill.
Myra never saw the money materialize. Is it the same bill she gave Lake? No, he would’ve spent it on the arcade game. Is it Noelle’s money? Myra accepts it without comment, crumpling it in her right hand.
Noelle heads back to her car, where she thanks the two security guards and gets in on the driver’s side. Moments later her siren squawks once, her revolving lights flash on, and she pulls out of the parking lot with the boy’s figure silhouetted in the caged back seat of her cruiser.
LATER, AS MYRA DRIVES along a winding, rural stretch of road in search of a motel, a deer runs out in front of her car. She is driving well below the speed limit, but she can’t stop in time and rams through the animal. Given the compact size of her rental car, she would have expected the impact to be more substantial, but it felt as though she had struck merely a half-empty suitcase or a bag of groceries. In her rearview mirror she can see the animal oddly contorted in the center of the road.
She pulls the car over and gets out. The front of the Escort is badly dented, with bits of fur clinging to a corner of the Arkansas license plate. One of her headlights is broken. She walks back fifty yards or so to the deer, whose neck is broken. In fact, half of it is severed, Myra sees, and blood is pooling around it on the pavement. Only now does she realize the deer is just a fawn, its coat still dappled with white spots. She looks around for the mother. There are woods on both sides of the road but no sign of the doe. Myra feels a terrible sadness, the purest absence of joy, as if someone has reached inside her chest and wrung all the blood from her heart. At least the young deer didn’t suffer.
Is this some sort of punishment for lying about Lake? she wonders. Was that infraction worth this level of retribution? After all, she was trying to protect the boy. But her God has always been a retaliatory one. He has taken her husband’s mind, her health, and so much of her happiness. He even took her baby brother in his infancy. He’s always been ruthless. Why would anything change now?
She grabs the fawn by its rear hooves and pulls it over to the shoulder. Her legs feel feeble, as if all the chemotherapy has cooked the muscle away. The little deer seems impossibly heavy for its size but she’s determined to get the animal off the road. It feels like the fawn has been stuffed with lead. She is lucky that no other cars are approaching. As she drags it toward the shoulder, its blood marks their path. The heat rising from the young animal’s body is unfathomable. Myra wishes she had something to cover it with. She always keeps blankets in the rear of her car up in Vermont, but the rental won’t have anything in the trunk. The crows will no doubt have their way with the poor thing.
After she finally gets the fawn off the road, she has to go to a knee and nearly collapses on top of the animal. It takes almost all her strength to stand. She feels cored out. Her car, just across the road, might as well be a mile away.
Later, when she gets to her motel room, she’ll take a cool shower and call her mother back in Elmira and tell her that Alec has a job as a groundskeeper at a nice Catholic church, that he lives in an upstanding residential motel. She will say that they had a pleasant lunch—that he even offered to pay for it, but that they wound up splitting the bill.
She will tell her mother that he’s missing a tooth and has gone mostly gray but is still handsome and his health is good. The postcards, he claims, are just a mean joke. She will not tell Ava Larkin about the boy. There is no sense in breaking her mother’s heart.
14
LONDON, ENGLAND
JULY 25, 1998
RONAN
HIS AGENT WARNED HIM about the dreary weather but Ronan had no idea that it would rain so much in London. It’s the final Saturday of July and it feels as if it hasn’t stopped the entire month. This has been Ronan’s first trip abroad and it’s a far cry from Hemingway’s colorful Pamplona or what he imagined from James Salter’s Autun, France, in A Sport and a Pastime. He’s already bought and lost three different umbrellas this month, and as he jogs along the storefronts of Goldhawk Road toward the Bush, the theater company producing the world premiere of his new play, Near, he determines to invest in a decent raincoat with a hood. He would never lose a raincoat—it’s too cumbersome—whereas if he could account for all the umbrellas he’s lost since he moved to New York City seven years ago it would probably equal a month’s rent.
He’s just come from a liquor store, where he purchased two bottles of Jack Daniel’s for Anton and Reese, the two American actors starring in his play. Conveniently, the store is only a block away from the apartment that the Bush is renting for him, on the corner of Goldhawk and Hammersmith Grove. The tidy studio has a Murphy bed, a portable washer-dryer machine that he has yet to figure out, and a cockpit-style bathroom so small that his knees are practically in his mouth every time he sits on the toilet.
At the liquor store he’d asked for Maker’s Mark, but the hard-of-hearing proprietor could only offer him Jack Daniel’s, a Tennessee whiskey, rather than the classic Kentucky bourbon that is drunk in his play. The proprietor didn’t see the difference between them. “As long as it gets you pissed,” he told Ronan.
Opening night—or “press night,” as it’s known in London—is tomorrow, Sunday. Ronan’s already gotten a gift for the director, Harold Hull, the brilliant, beloved Falstaffian leader of the Bush, of whom Ronan has grown incredibly fond. In addition to witnessing Harold expertly guide Near through the rehearsal process, Ronan has also drunk many glasses of red wine and pints of stout with him at O’Neill’s, the street-level pub one story below the Bush, where, following each rehearsal and preview performance, Harold holds court in his favorite corner booth, presiding over the cast and crew. The conversation, always conducted by Harold, swerves entertainingly from American politics to punk rock to what constitutes a good English “trifle” to what minor London celebrity might have been spotted in the eighty-seat theater that night.
Harold, fifty-six, a former carnival barker (and Eton alum), is a beast of a man. He is six-four, weighs over three hundred pounds (twenty-two stone), and possesses the largest hands Ronan’s ever seen. A survivor of two minor heart attacks, he had a pacemaker installed in his chest three weeks before his fiftieth birthday. In addition to his heart condition he suffers from gout and is currently enduring a tenacious flare-up (big toe), thus the walking cane, which looks like a conductor’s baton impossibly supporting the listing, limping form of a giant. And then there’s the psoriasis riddling his hands, cheeks, neck, and forehead. And yet with all of these afflictions there is still the sense that Harold Hull will outlive half of England.
When he drinks, which is every night, things often turn ugly, usually after his third merlot, at which point his speech begins to break down and he winds up unleashing a random but extremely nasty remark aimed at one undeserving member of the party. The other night he told Anton that although he was a pretty solid actor he was mostly a lazy twat who relied on his poor man’s Hollywood charm and blond Beach Boys look, and rarely made his scenes about anyone but himself. Two nights before that he’d told Reese, a petite but feisty girl with long curly auburn hair and intense green eyes, that she was too worried about her perfect drama school diction to ever really live in the actual circumstances of her character, and that she might be better off focusing her career on shilling cashmere holiday jumpers in commercials on American telly. (She cried.) That same evening, to Muriel, his assistant director, who clearly loves him like a father, he slurred bitterly that she was too posh to ever make anything of any consequence. (She also cried.) And then he called his longtime stage manager, Ian, a kind bald man in his early forties, “a humongous cucumber with ears” and said he was so sexually undefinable that he might as well belong to a giant species of useless gourd, suggesting he drop his trousers to prove to the table that he’d been assigned a proper pair of testicles.
These cruel attacks seem to come out of nowhere, at which point Ian will nod at Dawn, a recent drama school graduate and intern, who will produce the company petty-cash envelope, remove a ten-pound note, and hand it to Ian, who will pass it to Harold under the table for taxi fare, a gentle cue to wrap things up. The night often ends shortly thereafter, and Harold always shows up the following day apoplectic at himself, bearing a sincere apology to the entire company and a bottle of expensive French wine for whomever he can remember abusing.
So far the only person who’s been spared one of his drunken attacks is Ronan.
Harold is married to Katja, a Dutch writer and former actress who is as beautiful as she is deeply in love with her troubled giant of a husband. Ronan first met her when he and Anton accompanied Harold in the taxi to their home in Notting Hill. Harold was so shit-faced that they feared he wouldn’t make it from the taxi to his front door. Katja greeted them at the gate as Ronan and Anton helped her staggering husband across their bluestone path, up the three steps, through the front door, and into his three-story Portland Road home. As they negotiated Harold through the foyer and deposited him onto his living room sofa, he garbled various declarations, one of which was his intention to somehow contract an incurable virus, moonwalk into Parliament, and “gob” on Prime Minister Tony Blair. Once on the sofa he quickly passed out and broke into a long, comical symphony of snoring.
Katja, who had already prepared a pot of tea, implored Ronan and Anton to stay, exiting to the kitchen and returning with an entire tray of cheeses and salamis. At first Ronan couldn’t tell if she was starved for attention or simply desperate to have a buffer around in case Harold woke up angry, but he and Anton parked themselves in armchairs and kept her company, touched by the late-night generosity and impressed by the patience she exhibited in the face of her gruesomely drunk husband, now unconscious on the sofa, his barrel chest rising and falling like some volcanic island on the verge of an eruption. Katja laughed at each of his inebriated snorts and grunts, and it seemed this must be the crux of their love story: Harold was the brilliant artist who fell tragically into nightly alcoholic stupors, and Katja was the dutiful wife who was always there to clean up his messes and help him get sober and back on his gout-riddled feet.
But that night Ronan learned that Katja was a successful, award-winning playwright and translator whose celebrated adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie had recently been produced at the Donmar Warehouse (a bigger theater than the Bush). In the early phase of her career she’d worked solely as an actor, often at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is where she met Harold, who directed her in a production of Midsummer. They would soon fall in love (“Harold looked like a young Terence Stamp back then,” Katja told them) and form their own theater company, Midnight Corpus, whose mission was leaving Shakespeare and the classics behind in favor of new plays concerned with the modern world. Working out of a small theater in the back of a pub in Islington, they collaborated on over twenty original projects. Katja wrote and Harold directed, often to great critical acclaim, and they even switched roles a few times. Eventually, through the help of public funding and robust ticket sales, they were able to employ a small company of actors—eight in total—who were incredibly dedicated to what became known as “MC.” Several Midnight Corpus members went on to have impressive film and television careers.
As first impressions go, Harold and Katja seem to be enacting the kind of creative and romantic relationship—aside from Harold’s drunken stupors—that Ronan wishes he could have with Henny. Theirs has been increasingly maligned by an unspoken competitiveness, especially recently. Early on, Henny was well ahead of Ronan when it came to productions logged and awards won. He learned so much watching her navigate the exciting turns in her career that for a while their disparity in success was a comfort to him. But as he found his own footing, and experienced a handful of successful world premieres, things grew more even. During the past year they have found themselves in uncharted waters, as their productions have pulled them to different cities for months at a time. The last time they were together—six days at the beginning of June—was troubled. Something between them seemed to have atrophied. Their smallest rituals felt mechanical. Conversations during meals were halting, if not chilly. There was a lunch at their favorite East Village spot, Cafe Mogador, during which they said hardly a word to each other.
During those six days they had sex only one time and on the morning Ronan left for London, he woke to a note on Henny’s kitchen table:
I went for a walk.
Have a good trip.
She didn’t even sign her name.
They’ve only spoken twice since he’s been in London. International phone cards are expensive and the handful of booths in the little Internet café near his apartment are almost always full.
Henny is currently at the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, where she is workshopping her new play. Over drinks last week, Harold cautioned Ronan about dating another writer. Two playwrights dating each other, Harold said, was the equivalent of two infected creatures fighting for the sole available dose of a vaccine. According to Harold, the one time he and Katja tried writing plays simultaneously it almost ruined their relationship. Things always went much more smoothly when she was the playwright and he was the director. He warned Ronan that he was better off falling in love with a ficus tree than a fellow playwright.
“But you can’t have sex with a ficus tree,” Ronan countered.
“Cut a fucking hole in it and stuff it full of oysters!” Harold cried.
Ronan appreciates Harold’s bawdy humor, his stark honesty, his disdain for anything remotely fashionable. But most of all he appreciates Harold’s deep feelings for his play that’s about to open. At its heart, Near is the simplest of love stories: two lost souls—a Gulf War veteran, Briggs, and a young Midwestern runaway, Birdie, find each other on the mean streets of New York. They wind up squatting together in a condemned building on the Lower East Side. They tolerate each other for a while. At the brink of their splitting up, Birdie finds out that she is very sick, and Briggs, who has his own medical and psychological problems, nevertheless winds up caring for her until the final blackout. The play is really just two people stuck in a room and one of them having a hard time leaving. Ronan took the title from a Tom Waits lyric “But I’d trade off everything just to have you near,” from a song called “Saving All My Love for You,” the third track on his album Heart Attack and Vine.
Seeing Harold bring his play to life and coax Anton and Reese toward their brave, touching performances has been an incredibly inspiring experience for Ronan. Because there are so few available seats at the Bush, Harold makes a habit of viewing the play from the hollowed space underneath the audience risers. On more than one occasion Ronan has spied him weeping as the stage lights were fading to black.
For press night Ronan has bought Harold a hat. He purchased the whiskey-colored Brisbane fedora two days ago from Bates, a hatters shop on Jermyn Street, near Piccadilly Circus. It’s an exact replica of the one Harold currently wears, which is stained and losing its form. The hat cost nearly two hundred pounds, the most money Ronan has ever spent on anyone besides Henny, but he truly loves this man and believes that the hat is worth every penny. Muriel, the assistant director, joined him on his quest to find it; the hat had been her idea, after all. It was day one of tech rehearsals and Harold had given everyone the morning off so that the crew could get the set installed. Ronan and Muriel took the Tube to Piccadilly Circus and spent the afternoon dodging the rain and dipping in and out of the various shops. After finding Harold’s gift they grabbed lunch at an Indian restaurant on Regent Street.
Muriel, twenty-four, is wickedly funny and speaks with a “highborn” accent that Ronan is familiar with from watching videos of Noel Coward plays at Lincoln Center’s theater performance library. Muriel studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but is now determined only to direct plays, not to act in them, as she finds the life of an actor to be a series of demeaning misadventures. She told him all of this over lunch at the Indian restaurant where Ronan enjoyed his first chicken korma. Muriel also happens to be very pretty, with dirty-blond hair, deep brown eyes, and slightly imperfect, perfectly crooked teeth. According to Harold, she is the daughter of an English lord. In the rehearsal room Ronan keeps finding himself inching his chair closer and closer to hers.
Now, arriving at last at the Bush, Ronan hands off the bottles of Jack Daniel’s to Ian, the stage manager, with instructions to set them in the actors’ dressing rooms before tomorrow’s half hour, and asks Ian to print out an e-mail from his Aunt Lexy that he received this morning. Then he heads down to O’Neill’s. Per usual, the late-afternoon crowd is sparse, with the spot at the end of the bar occupied as it is every day by an old man, easily an octogenarian, sitting in what appears to be a thin golf cart. Ronan has seen him drive this cart in through the French doors at the back of the pub and park at the end of the bar, where he’ll order two double scotches and sip them at such a slow pace it’s always a surprise when he finally orders another round.
