Collected Short Fiction, page 562
An earlier Mark Jenner might have drawn back timidly from such a radiant beauty, but the Mark Jenner of 1976 was afraid of no one, of nothing. He smiled at the blonde girl in the ermine wrap.
He said, “Helene, will you marry me?”
“Of course, darling! Of course!”
Spring, 1975. Mark Jenner was thirty-eight. Three Days in Marrakesh had played nine days on Broadway. The night that closing notices went up, Mark Jenner pub-crawled until 3 a.m. The sour taste of cheap tap beer was in his mouth as he staggered home, feeling the ache in his feet and the soreness in his soul. He had not even bothered to remove the gray makeup from his hair. With it, he looked sixty years old, and right now he felt sixty, not thirty-eight. He wondered if Helene would be asleep.
Helene was not asleep; Helene was up, and packing. She wore a simple cotton dress and no makeup at all, and for once she looked her thirty-one years, instead of seeming to be in her late teens or very early twenties. She had the suitcase nearly full. Jenner had been expecting this for a long time, and now that it had come he was hardly surprised. He was too numb to react emotionally. He dropped heavily on the bed and watched her pack.
“The show closed tonight,” he said.
“I know. Holly phoned and told me all about it, at midnight.”
“I’m sorry I came home late. I stopped to condole with a few friends.”
The brisk packing motions continued unabated. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Helene . . .”
“I’m just taking this one suitcase, Mark. I’ll wire you my new address when I’m in Los Angeles, and you can ship the rest of my things out to me.”
“Divorce?”
“Separation. I can’t watch you this way any more, Mark.”
He smiled. “No. It isn’t fun to watch a man fall apart, I guess. Goodbye, Helene.”
He was too drained of energy to care to make a scene. She finished packing, locked the suitcase, and went into the study to make a phone call. Then she left, without saying good-bye. Jenner sat smiling stupidly for a while after the door slammed, slowly getting used to the fact that it was all over at last. He rose, went to the sideboard, poured himself a highball glass of gin. He gulped it. He cried.
Late winter, 1977. Mark Jenner was forty years old. He sat in a special chair in Walt Hollis’ apartment while lights played on his tranquil face . . .
It was three months and many miles of mylar tape before Hollis was satisfied. Jenner had gone through a two-hour session each morning, reminiscing with unhesitating frankness. It had not been like the analysis at all; the analysis had not been successful because he had lied to the analyst frequently and well, digging up bits of old parts and offering them as his personal experiences, out of perverse and no doubt psychotic motivations.
This was different. He was drugged; he spewed forth his genuine past, and when the session was over he had no recollection of what he had said. Hollis never told him. Sometimes Jenner would ask, as he drowned his grogginess in a postsession cup of coffee, but Hollis would never reply.
From ten to twelve every day, Jenner recorded. From one to three, Hollis cloistered himself in the little room and edited the tapes. From three to six every day, Jenner was banished from the house while his counterpart in the project occupied the little room. Jenner never got so much as a glimpse of the other.
When the three months had elapsed, when Jenner had finally surrendered as much of his past life as he could yield, when Hollis had edited the formless stream of consciousness into a continuous, consecutive, and intelligible pattern, the time came to enter the second stage of the process.
Now there were new drugs, new patterns of light, new responses. Jenner did not speak; he listened. His subconscious lay open, receptive, absorbing all that reached it and locking it in for permanent possession.
And slowly, the personality of a man formed in Jenner’s mind, embedding itself deep in layers of consciousness previously private, inextricably meshing itself with the web of memories that was Mark Jenner.
This man was like Jenner in many ways. He was physically commanding; his voice had the ring of authority, and people listened when he spoke. But as Jenner watched the man’s life shape itself from day to day, from year to compressed and edited year, he realized the difference. The other had chosen to be personally dominating as well. He, Jenner, had sacrificed his personality in order to be able to don many masks. A politician or a statesman must thrust his ego forward; an actor must bury his.
The other man, Jenner’s mind told him, was forty-two years old. A severe attack of colitis five years back was the only serious illness he had had. He stood six feet one and a half, weighed 190 pounds, was mildly hyperthyroid metabolically, and never slept more than five hours a night.
He had a law degree from a major university—Hollis had edited the school’s identity out. He had been married twice, divorcing his first wife on grounds of her adultery, and he had two children by his second wife, who regarded him with the awe one usually reserves for a paternal parent. He had been an assistant district attorney and had schemed for his superior’s disgrace; eventually he had succeeded to the post himself, and had consciously been involved in the judicial murder of an innocent man.
Despite this, he thought of himself, by and large, as liberal and enlightened. He had served two terms in the Congress of the United States, representing an important eastern state. He hoped to be elected to the Senate in the 1990 elections. Consulting an almanac, Jenner discovered that many eastern states would be electing senators in 1990: Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia. About all Jenner learned from that was that his man was not officially an inhabitant of New York, Pennsylvania, or Connecticut.
Before the three months ended, Jenner knew the other man’s soul nearly as well as he knew his own, or perhaps better. He understood the pattern of childhood snubs and paternal goadings that had driven him toward public life. He knew how the other had struggled to overcome his shyness. He knew how it had been when the other had first had a woman; he knew, for the first time in his life, what it was like to be a father.
The other man in Jenner’s head was a “good” man, dedicated and intelligent; but yet, he stood revealed as a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, even indirectly a murderer. Jenner realized with sudden icy clarity that any human being’s mind would yield the same muck of hidden desires and repressed, half-acknowledged atrocities.
The man’s memories were faceless; Jenner supplied faces. In the theater of his imagination, he built a backdrop for the other’s childhood, supplied an image for parents and first wife and second wife and children and friends. Day by day the pattern grew; after ninety days, Jenner had a second self. He had a double well of memories. His fund of experiences was multiplied factorially; he could now judge the agonies of one adolescence against another, now could evaluate one man’s striving against another’s, now could compare two broken marriages and could vicariously know the joys of an almost-successful one. He knew the other’s mind the way no man before had ever known another’s mind. Not even Hollis, editing the tapes, could become the other man in the way Jenner, drugged and receptive, had become.
When the last tape had been funneled into Jenner’s skull, when the picture was complete, Jenner knew the experiment had been a success. Now he had the inner drive he had lacked before; now he could reach out into the audience and squeeze a man’s heart. He had always had the technical equipment of a great actor. Now he had the soul of one.
He wondered frequently about the other man and decided to keep his eye on the coming senatorial campaign in the East. He wanted desperately to know who was the man who bore in his brain all of Mark Jenner’s triumphs and disappointments, all the cowardices and vanities and ambitions that made him human.
He had to know, but he postponed the search; at the moment, returning to the stage was more important.
The show was called No Roses for Larrabee. It was about an aging video star named Jack Larrabee, who skids down to obscurity and then fights his way back up. It had appeared the previous fall as a ninety-minute video show; movie rights had already been sold, but it was due for a Broadway fling first. The author was a plump kid named Harrell, who had written three previous triple-threat dramas. Harrell had half a million dollars in the bank, fifty thousand more in his mattress at his Connecticut villa, and maintained psychoanalysts on both coasts.
Casting was scheduled to start on October 20. The play had already been booked into the Odeon for a February opening, which meant a truncated pre-Broadway tour. Advance sales were piling up. It was generally assumed in the trade that the title role would be played by the man who had created it for the video version, ex-hoofer Lloyd Lane.
On October 10, Mark Jenner phoned his agent for the first time in six months. The conversation was brief. Jenner said, “I’ve been away, having some special treatments. I feel a lot better now. I want you to get me a reading for the stage version of Larrabee. Yeah, that’s right. I want the lead.”
Jenner didn’t care what strings his agent had to pull to get the reading. He wasn’t interested in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Six days later, he got a phone call from the play’s producer, J. Carlton Vincennes. Vincennes was skeptical, but he was willing to take a look, anyway. Jenner was invited to come down for a reading on the twentieth.
On the twentieth, Jenner read for the part of Jack Larrabee. There were only five other people in the room—Vincennes; Harrell, the playwright; Donovan, the director; Lloyd Lane; and an actor named Goldstone who was there to try out for the secondary lead. Jenner picked up the part cold, riffled through it for a few minutes, and started to read it as if he were giving his maiden speech on the floor of the Senate. He put the words across as if he had a pipeline into the subconscious minds of his five auditors. He did things with vowel shadings and with facial expressions that he had never dared to do before, and this was only improvisation as he went. He wasn’t just Mark Jenner, has-been, now; he was Mark Jenner plus someone else, and the combined output was overpowering.
After twenty minutes he tired and broke off the reading. He looked at the five faces. Four registered varying degrees of amazed pleasure and disbelief; the fifth belonged to Lloyd Lane. Lane was pale and sweat-beaded with the knowledge that he had just lost a leading role, and with it the hefty Hollywood contract that was sure to follow the Broadway one.
Two days later Jenner signed a run-of-the-show contract with Vincennes. A squib appeared in the theatrical columns the day after that:
Mark Jenner will be making a Broadway comeback in the J. C. Vincennes production of No Roses for Larrabee. The famed matinee idol of the seventies has been absent from the stage for nearly a year. His last local appearance was in the ill-starred Misty Isle, which saw ten performances last March. Jenner reportedly has spent the cast season recovering from a nervous breakdown.
Rehearsals were strange. Jenner had always been a good study, and so he knew his lines flat by the fourth or fifth run-through. The other actors were still shambling through their parts mechanically, muttering from their scripts, while Jenner was acting—projecting at them, putting his character across. After a while, the disparity became less noticeable. The cast came to life, responding to the vigor of Jenner’s portrayal. When they started working out in the empty theater, there were always a few dozen witnesses to the rehearsal. Backers came, and other directors, theatrical people in general, all attracted by the rumors of Jenner’s incandescent performance.
And it was incandescent. Not only because the part was so close to his own story, either; an actor playing an autobiographical role can easily slip into maudlin sogginess. For Jenner the part was both autobiographical and external. He interpreted it with his double mind, with the mind of a tired actor and with the mind of a potential senator on the way up. The two personalities crossbred; Jenner’s performance tugged at the heart. Advance sales piled up until record figures began to dance across the ledger pages.
They opened in New Haven on the tenth of February to a packed house and rave reviews. Ten days later was the Broadway opening, right on schedule; neither driving snow nor pelting rain kept the tuxedo-and-mink crowd away from the opening-night festivities. A little electric crackle of tension hung in the air in the theater. Jenner felt utterly calm. This is it, he told himself. The chips are down. The voters are going to the polls . . .
The curtain rose, and Jenner-as-Larrabee shuffled on stage and disgorged his first mumbled lines; he got his response and came across clearer the second time, still a bent figure with hollow cheeks and sad eyes, and the part began to take hold of him. Jack Larrabee grew before the audience’s eyes. By nine o’clock, he was as real as any flesh-and-blood person. Jenner was putting him across; the playwright’s words were turning to gold.
The first-act curtain line was a pianissimo; Jenner gave it and dropped to his knees, then listened to the drumroll of applause welling up out of the ten-dollar seats. The second-act clincher was the outcry of a baffled, doomed man, and Jenner was baffled and doomed as he wrenched the line out of him. The audience roared as the curtain cascaded down. Jenner drew the final line of the play too—a triumphal, ringing asseveration of joy and redemption that filled the big house like a trumpet call. Then the curtain was dropping, and rising again; and dropping and rising and dropping and rising, while a thunder of applause pounded at his temples; and he knew he had reached them, reached them deeply, reached them so deep they had sprung up from their own jaded weariness to acclaim him.
There was a cast party later that night, much later, in the big Broadway restaurant where such parties are traditionally given. Vincennes was there belligerently waving the reviews from the early editions. The word had gone out: Jenner was back, and Jenner was magnificent. Lloyd Lane came up to him—Jenner’s understudy, now. He looked shell-shocked. He said, “God, Mark, I watched the whole thing from the wings. I’ve never seen anything like it. You really were Larrabee out there, weren’t you?”
Looking at this man he had elbowed aside, Jenner felt a twinge of guilt, and redness rose to his cheeks. Then the other mind intervened, the ruthless mind of the nameless politician, and Jenner realized that Lane had deserved to be pushed aside. A better actor simply had supplanted him. But there were tears in the corners of Lane’s eyes.
Someone rushed up to Jenner with a gaudy magnum of champagne, and there was a pop! and then the champagne started to flow. Jenner, who had not had anything to drink for months, gratefully accepted the bubbling glass. Within, he kept icy control over himself. This was his night of triumph. He would drink, but he would not get drunk.
He drank. Vapid showgirls clawed through the circle of well-wishers around him to offer their meaningless congratulations. Flashbulbs glittered in his eyes. Men who had not spoken a civil word to him in five years pumped his hand. Within, Jenner felt a core of melancholy. Helene was not here; Walt Hollis—to whom he owned all this—was not here. Nor was his counterpart, the man whose mind he wore.
Champagne slid easily down his gullet. His smile grew broader. A bald-headed man named Feldstein clinked glasses with him and said, “You must really be relishing this night, Mark. You had it coming, all right. How does it feel to be a success again?”
Jenner grinned warmly. The champagne within him loosened the words, and they drifted easily up through his lips. “It’s wonderful. I want to thank everyone who supported me in this campaign. I want to assure them that their trust in me will be amply repaid when I reach Washington.”
“Hah! Great sense of humor, Mark. Wotta fellow!” And the bald-headed man turned away, laughing. It was good that he turned away at that moment—for if he had continued to face Mark Jenner, he would have had to witness the look of dismay and terror that came over Jenner’s suddenly transformed, suddenly horror-stricken face.
The play was a success, of course. It became one of those plays that everybody simply had to see, and everyone saw it. It promised to run for at least two seasons, which was extraordinary for a nonmusical play.
But night after night in the hotel suite Mark Jenner had rented, he wrestled with the same problem:
Who am I?
The words that had first slipped out the night of the cast party now recurred in different forms almost every day. Phantom memories obsessed him; in his dreams, women he had never known came to reminisce with him about the misdeeds of a summer afternoon. He missed the children he had never fathered—the boy who was seven, and the girl who was four. He found himself reading the front pages of newspapers, scanning the Washington news, though always before he had turned first to the theatrical pages. He detected traces of pomposity in some of his sentences.
He knew what was happening. Walt Hollis had done the job too well; the other mind was encroaching on his own, intertwining, enmeshing, ingesting. There were blurred moments in the dark of the night when Jenner forgot his own name, and temporarily nameless, dreamed the dreams the other man should have dreamed.
And, no doubt, it was the same way with the other, whoever he was. Jenner realized bleakly that a strange compulsion bound him. He lay under a geas; he had to find his counterpart, the man who shared his mind. He had to know who he was.
He asked Hollis.
Hollis had come to him in the lavish hotel suite on the sixth day after Larrabee’s opening. The little man approached Jenner diffidently, almost as if he were upset by the magnitude of his own experiment’s success.
“I guess it worked,” Hollis said.
Jenner grinned expansively. “That it did, Holly! When I’m up there on the stage I have the strength I never knew I could have. Have you seen the play?”
“Yes. The third night. I was—impressed.”
