Paul Levine - Night vision

The classroom was bathed in silence.

Prince went on; "What does Martha say about her abuse of George in Act Two?"

A thin black woman next to me called out, "That he can stand it, that he married her for it."

"Yes!" Prince boomed.

For a moment his eyes seemed to catch the light, and his shoulders straightened. "Thank you, dear girl. Then, in Act Three, 'George who is good to me, and whom I revile, who understands me, and whom I push off, who can make me laugh, and I choke it back in my throat, who can hold me at night, so that it's warm, and whom I will bite so there's blood.'"

Prince paused, then asked, "What does it all mean? What is the play about?"

"Conflict," the woman suggested tentatively.

"Yes, yes, and more." Prince moved from center stage and descended three steps toward his students, never looking down. He had been on stages before, I thought, had vaulted landings on rickety sets, and now had settled for a final run in front of a polyglot of nineteen-year-olds for whom high culture was MTV.

"Conflict is the purifying flame," he nearly shouted, heading toward the young woman next to me. "Conflict separates truth from illusion, fact from fantasy. Now, what are their illusions?"

"They pretended to have a child," the woman said. "And George had fantasies about all sorts of things. That he killed his parents, that he sailed the Mediterranean."

"Yes, and when Martha says, 'Truth and illusion, George, you don't know the difference,' what does George respond?"

The class was silent, so I piped up, "'We must carry on as though we did.'"

Prince whirled, scanned his audience, found me, wrinkled his forehead, and asked, "Do they?"

"Yes, but only for a while," I answered. "Eventually they must confront the illusions, strip them away from their relationship. They have no son. George will never be a great writer or even a decent professor. Martha's early dreams are lost in fogs of booze. They must face life the way it is."

The young woman next to me chimed in, "No matter how painful, they must face the truth. In the end all is truth."

Prince raised his arms in triumph. Two or three students nodded their heads vigorously. They understood. The rest had that empty stare of the young. It had been, after all, forty-five minutes without physical movement, roughly nine times the attention span of most adolescents.

Prince strutted back toward the stage, and Dominguez called out.

"I get it, man. But who the hell's this Virginia Woolf?"

Gerald Prince ordered Plymouth gin on the rocks and not for the first time. Up close, the florid complexion was crisscrossed with tiny, engorged veins. The eyes-if they had any color at all-were gray. The brown sweater smelled of tobacco, the fingernails were long and stained. He had snapped at the luncheon invitation, and I brought him to a bayfront restaurant downtown. Near us, bankers and lawyers feasted on expense-account lunches of rack of lamb with mint jelly.

"Even from the stage, I spotted you-the stranger-in back of the class," he said with a sly grin. "In my day, I could see right through the floodlights. One summer in Maine, in a barn-literally a barn-I saw a woman with glorious red hair, fifth row center. Three nights in a row she came. We were doing Long Day's Journey into Night."

"I can picture you as James Tyrone."

He laughed, a low rich chuckle. Thirty years ago. I was Edmund, the younger son."

The sickly one."

"Yes, and quite a challenging role for a young stag. I was robust, brimming with vitality. And virility, if I might say so. I had never tasted a drop of whiskey and had to play some scenes as if drunk."

"And the red-haired woman?"

"She thought I was smashing. The first of many such women in many such towns. I remember the scent of the pine trees around her cottage. Isn't that strange? Chilly nights, a fireplace, and the smell of the woods."

He drained the gin and smoothly signaled the waiter for another. The steaks hadn't yet arrived.

"Edmund Tyrone," he said wistfully, "walks from the beach to the house through the late-night fog. He's been drinking, and his father sits, quite drunk himself, playing solitaire."

Prince let his eyes glaze over and rocked a bit in his chair. "'It was like walking on the bottom of the sea,'" he recited, his voice carrying across the noisy restaurant. "'As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea.'"

He paused and seemed to await the applause. "You have some memory for lines," I complimented him.

"I was an actor! I was good. Not brilliant, perhaps, but with potential. I played the Old Vic when I was twenty-one. I could have-"

"Been a contender."

He smiled. "Brando was always a tad animalistic for my tastes."

"Today, in class, you said something about the 'drench of cathode-ray.' I don't remember that from Who's Afraid- "

"'I'll give him the good normal world where we're tethered beside them, blinking our nights away in a nonstop drench of cathode-ray over our shriveling heads.'"

"Now I know," I said, and I did. The tethered gave it away. "The psychiatrist in Equus."

"Very good. Exceptionally fine for a lawyer. Most are so…so…untutored except in their torts and contracts."

"I had a crib sheet," I confessed, and slid Mary Rosedahl's computer printout next to the glass of disappearing gin.

Prince put on rimless glasses and examined it. "It's from Equus, but of course you know that." He took off his glasses and looked at me through the pale gray eyes. "So very bleak there in print, don't you think? How pathetic, a man so bereft of emotions he conjures up the words of others."

"So you admit sending this message to Mary Rosedahl, Flying Bird?"

"As you lawyers might say, I have no present recollection of that event. But who else could it have been?"

"Why the talk of death?"

"Ask Peter Shaffer. He wrote-"

"I know. I don't care about the play. I want to know why somebody types death notes to a woman two hours before she's murdered."

"And I want to know who wrote Shakespeare's sonnets."

I narrowed my eyes. "We're going to watch you, Prince."

He laughed. They never do that to Clint Eastwood, but I couldn't rattle a half-potted professor. He ordered another drink on my tab and gleefully asked, "Aren't you supposed to say, 'Make it easy on yourself, buddy, and tell us what happened.' And I say, 'Okay, officer, I been wanting to get it off my chest.'"

"Maybe it's funny to you, but some boys downtown think you're the number-one suspect in a double homicide."

"Tell the boys downtown I plead guilty to plagiarism and innocent to murder."

It was a good line, and best I could tell, it was his own. I had nothing to lose, so I tried again. "Okay, then help me out. Two women are dead, and you may be the last person to talk to each of them."

He seemed to think about it. "My lectures might be deathly dull, but don't be ridiculous. I assure you I have neither gouged out the eyes of horses nor strangled young women…"

"Who said they were strangled?"

He paused a moment, took a sip of the clear cold gin. "Your friend, Roderigo."

I studied him. "Where were you between eleven and midnight on the night of June twenty-five?"

"In a drunken stupor, no doubt."

"And July two?"

"That night it could well have been a stunken drupor. I try to alternate, you know."

"And who can corroborate that?"

"As I told your policeman chum…"

"No one."

"Except my old polluted liver."

"Tell me about Marsha Diamond. TV Gal?"

"We chatted."

"On the night she was killed?"

"I suppose so, if your records so reveal. But we never met. In fact, I never met any of the women. They were all so…"