Эд Макбейн - Barking at Butterflies and other stories

“Look, I’ve discussed motivation with them till I’m blue in the...”

“I said direction .” She paused. Her eyes were blue and hard and cold and bright. Danny was pinned against the wall, surrounded, and she would not let him escape those penetrating eyes. “Direction,” she repeated. “From a director.”

The first sign of fear flickered on Danny’s face. Hypnotically, he kept staring into Beth’s eyes, and then forcibly turned his head away, glancing first at Edward, and then fixing his gaze on me across the table.

“You think I should get tougher with them, is that it?” he asked.

“Danny,” I said, “we feel...”

“Danny,” Edward said, “it just isn’t working, really it isn’t. Maybe you’re too close to it, maybe...”

“No closer than any of us,” Danny answered. “I thought it went fine tonight. Give me a performance like that on opening night, and...”

“It was no different tonight,” Beth said flatly.

“I thought...”

“It doesn’t matter what you thought,” Beth said. “The actors don’t know what they’re doing, and you haven’t yet told them what’s wrong.”

“Well, look, honey, if you know what’s wrong, I wish you’d let me in on the secret,” Danny said, his voice rising. “Just tell me what the hell it is, and I’ll fix it.”

“We don’t think you can,” Beth said.

She delivered the words softly, the way she might have if she were underplaying a particularly powerful scene on stage, except that she was not acting. She turned her head toward me as she spoke, avoiding Danny’s eyes, ducking her chin toward her right shoulder.

“I don’t understand,” Danny said, but I knew he had understood at last, I knew that the meaning was now absolutely clear, he had been told, and he had understood, and there was nothing left to do now but administer the coup de grâce .

I do not know where I found the courage. I think it was spawned only by Beth’s sudden weakness, the way her chin was still turned into her shoulder. “We want to replace you,” I said, and felt suddenly sick to my stomach.

“Then why the hell didn’t you say so?” Danny snapped at once.

“It’s just not working,” I said.

“Sure, sure.”

“We’ve still got a week,” Edward said, “we may be able to save it.”

“Sure.”

“Danny, please understand,” Beth said.

“Don’t ever say that again!” Danny shouted, and the table fell silent. He looked down into his drink. He seemed suddenly embarrassed, as though his inability to have understood graciously and immediately was somehow shameful, as though his having failed to make it easier for us was something that now brought him very close to tears. I found it painful to watch him, and yet I could not take my eyes from his crumbling face. “You didn’t have to give me a song and dance, you know,” he said, “I’m not a beginner. If you want another director, then get one, that’s all. I’m not a beginner.”

“Danny,” Beth started, and she reached across the table for his hand.

“Yes, we want another director,” I said sharply, terrified that she would blow it all in the final moment, touch his hand and lose all her resolve, allow sympathy and loyalty to stand in the way of what had to be done, what had almost already been done.

“Do we want another director,” Danny asked, “or is it just you, Gene?”

His eyes clashed with mine, and then he turned slowly to Beth. Her hand had stopped midway across the table, still reaching. Something passed between them, something I could not define, as delicate as air, caught in their locked glances. It hovered silently, painfully, endlessly. And then Beth pulled back her hand, clenched it in her lap and said, “ I want it, too, Danny. We all want it.”

“All right,” he said, and nodded briefly, and glanced at the jukebox, as though fearful even his song would run out too soon. He nodded again. “Who?” he said.

“We thought Terry Brown.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“No, not yet,” Beth said quickly.

“Is he in town?”

“I think so.”

“Well, go on, call him then.”

“Danny, I wish...” Beth started.

“Call him,” I said.

She sighed, and nodded, and said to Edward, “Have you got a dime?” and then she went to call the man who would save my play.

We stood together, Beth and I, at the rear of the theater on opening night. I could see Natalie sitting in the sixth row center, flanked by my parents on her left and her parents on her right. She was wearing a long green velvet gown, pearls at her throat. She looked as beautiful as she had almost twenty years ago when she’d walked over to me in the small park outside N.Y.U., wearing sweater and skirt, put her hands on her hips and said, “My friend Nancy said you wanted to know my name. Why?” As radiant as that.

We knew, of course, five minutes after the curtain went up. The first laugh line rushed past without a titter from the audience, and I felt Beth stiffen beside me, and actually crossed my fingers, something I had not done since I was a boy of seven. And then another laugh line followed, with no response from the audience, and the actors felt the apathy and began pushing, playing it more broadly, forgetting what the play was about, concentrating only on getting those laughs when they were supposed to come, estranging the audience completely. By the time they got to the serious stretch in the middle of the first act, they had alienated everyone in the house. The audience was coughing and sniffling and stirring restlessly when the first act curtain fell.

I took Natalie’s hand as she came running up the aisle. Her eyes were wide with questions. I nodded and said, “Natalie, I think we’re dead,” and she squeezed my hand and said, simply, “Yes, Gene.”

We went backstage to talk to the actors between acts, encouraging them, telling them everything was going fine, just don’t press, the audience is loving it, we’ve got a sure hit on our hands. And the actors, flushed with the excitement of the night, involved in performances they had been preparing for six long weeks, believed every word we said and went out prepared to clinch their victory in the next two acts.

I met Beth at the rear of the theater.

“Do you need a drink?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said.

She took my arm, and we went across the street to Ho Tang’s welcome dusk. The jukebox was silent. Neither of us put any money into it. We sat at the bar and ordered our drinks. Beth was in a black gown with a diamond pin just below the yoke. I was wearing a dinner jacket and a frilled shirt, and the studs and links Beth had given me as an opening night gift. We raised our glasses and touched them together, and Beth said, “Here’s to the next one, Gene.”

“To the next one,” I said.

We drank.

“It’s a goddamn rotten shame,” she said.

The reviews would come in much later that night, we would hear them read to us over the telephone from the Times and the News and later the Post, and then we would actually see the morning papers and read what we had earlier heard on the telephone, and we would commiserate into the night while the celebration party at Sardi’s dissolved and eventually disappeared around us. But we would be numb by that time, and so we sat in Ho Tang’s now and shared the death of the play together, and for the first time in a long time, we talked about other things, my children and the fact that Sharon had to have her tonsils out, the difficulty Beth was having getting a maid, the chances of the Mets this year, how lovely the weather had been this past week.

We both drank more than we should have, not going back to the theater for the second-act curtain, trying to obliterate what was happening across the street, and finally succeeding. Awash at last in boozy self-pity, I put four quarters into the juke, and we listened solemnly to the music, and nodded a lot, and stared mournfully into our glasses, and sighed, and ordered more whiskey, and began talking in an endless drunken round I will remember quite forever, despite my own drunkenness.