Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

“You move so well,” he said.

“Well, I used to be a professional. A chorus girl, actually. Now I’m a frump. I teach ballet to snots.”

“Frump! I had you pegged as a dancer.”

“You didn’t have me pegged as anything.”

His eyes roved her body and she’d pulled him inside the room.

And now, even now, a hotel room in San Francisco in the morning light. Those weightless days. A man, an insignificant man he would have seemed to more significant men who do nothing but judge their significance in relation to other men. He’d told her he worked in an architect’s office but that he wasn’t an architect, only a draftsman. It wasn’t lack of brains or talent, he just preferred to draw. Buildings themselves meant nothing to him, only the renderings mattered. He lived with his mother. Years later he sent her a drawing, a portrait of her, in the shape of a cathedral. Bernice’s face was at the top of the steeple. He was kind about her nose. The contours of her figure were sleek and aerodynamic. The twin columns out front were legs, her legs, the ways her legs used to look, and they wore golden ballet shoes. She hadn’t known what to make of it. She stuffed it in the bottom of a drawer. But these days, the drawing, too, has come bubbling back. She thinks about digging it out but fears finding other things she doesn’t want to be reminded of. If it even survived the last move, that drawing is in some box in the basement. Someone might find it one day, one of the grandkids maybe, and not know what to make of it either.

They were still in bed when the bellhop knocked on the door with the message. It was after three in the afternoon.

Two men, two days, one bed. I’m a walking scandal! A private joke she told herself for years. Bernice sits down by the window in this quiet house and looks out at Seymour’s tomatoes and cabbages. In spite of her lack of encouragement, they continue to grow like gangbusters. A man named Anthony, his bony shoulders, his nimble probing fingers. And before, each time, he’d asked permission, “May I?” How long dead himself?

You may .

And she thinks of the furniture in that room at the Fairmont, how ugly and solid and useful it was, the most prominent piece, by far, being a massive green high-backed chair. It was some kind of joke in terribly expensive leather, an absurd throne built for a giant. Anthony was appalled and fascinated by it. Seymour too had thought it hilarious. He posed on it wearing only skivvies and his peaked officer’s hat. But Seymour laughing about the chair was of course different and by then she was through with it, the chair, the room, San Francisco.

“The children,” she’d said, louder than she intended, as if the children were anywhere near. A grown man back from war, bouncing up and down on that colossal chair, his hands mincing like an excited puppy. “Seymour,” shouting now, “the children!”

Alarge flat, in the neighborhood of Via Trieste, many closed doors, room after room. We’re solidly bourgeoisie, Rocco said as he unlocked the gate. If there was a convention, we followed it. My father was a doctor before — Rocco stopped. Well, you’ll see. And it was true. The first thing you noticed walking in the front door was layers of writing scrawled across the walls, in pen: small, purposeful writing, phone numbers, names of old friends, names of products. (In the bathroom, vertically alongside the mirror, Nivea, Nivea, Nivea .) But mostly they seemed to be jumbled sentences. Faulkner wrote on his walls, I said. Faulkner wasn’t out of his mind, Rocco said. At least not completely. My father wanted to be a great researcher, he dreamed of making groundbreaking discoveries. The last thing he wanted was to see patients, with their ailments, their complaints, their smells. But that’s what he did. And he never received the university appointment he always wanted; he was only a family doctor. After work he’d close himself up in his study for hours. His specialty, he said, was childhood diseases, the mumps in particular. But it was never entirely clear to us what exactly he was trying to find. He must have thought we wouldn’t have understood. A few years ago I visited my parents after my son was born, the first grandchild, and my father shuffled over to me in those paper slippers he always wore around the house, holding a fat book. Have a look, he said. It was Who’s Who . My father wanted me to know he’d been listed in Who’s Who . Everybody’s listed in Who’s Who . You pay a little money, they give you a little entry. My lonely father. The only one who ever believed in him was my mother and this only seemed to frustrate him. It was her job to believe in him. What he craved was the recognition of other people. And even my mother, over the years, began to doubt him. A half century of him shutting himself in his study with his medical texts in English. In the morning, he saw patients at his office. He was a fine doctor, an excellent doctor, but there are many excellent doctors. My father wanted to stand out, to be known, and this whole place is built on this unfulfilled ambition. Always, he had to be different. Every one of his friends married Italian girls, so my father found himself a German wife. And although she spoke excellent Italian, she rarely left the house. As a child I remember her being here — always — but there was some part of her, the corner of her eye, let’s say, that was somewhere else. When she finally had to put him in a home, the first thing she did was move back to Bavaria. She said she wanted to be closer to her parents’ graves. Now when she visits my father, she stays in a hotel. I am supposed to be selling the place. I have to have it painted, obviously.

I think of waking up in that quiet flat, Rocco still asleep, and wandering around all those rooms laden with heavy furniture. Doors opening up into still more rooms, those walls and the chains of words, a mind trying to hold on to something, anything. But it all keeps falling. My train won’t leave for another couple of hours.

The same scene as in Act I. Eight o’clock in the evening. Behind the scenes in the street there is the faintly audible sound of a concertina. There is no light.

Eisendrath finds himself early on in Act II of The Three Sisters . He’s on the stage of the New Players Community Theatre in Covington, Kentucky. It’s opening night, the high-school gym. How he got here isn’t important right now. Neither is the fact that Eisendrath hasn’t acted since an eighth-grade production of Little Mary Sunshine , and even then he was only one of a chorus of five singing forest rangers. The last time he was in Kentucky was five years ago, before his life imploded. His lines, what in the fuck are his lines?

Masha Prozorova Kulygina, who is facing him, now says something incomprehensible after a long and seemingly meaningful pause.

MASHA: What noise there is in the stove right now. Not long before Father’s death there was a howling in the chimney just like that. The very same!

Eisendrath is, at least he is supposed to be, the irredoubtable Aleksandr Ignatyevich Vershinin, forty-three, formerly the Lovesick Major, a man with two children and a wife who frequently, even once during the play itself, tries to poison herself just to spite him. A gallant who breezily says, Two or three hundred years from now, the world will be inexpressibly beautiful and all this suffering will have been worth it . In Act III, a place we will not reach tonight, Masha confesses to her sisters that she loves Vershinin for his voice, his speeches, his theorizing, his misfortunes, but even now, in Act II, Eisendrath can see this love in her eyes. The woman playing Masha is not a great actress, but she’s trying, and she’s not unsubtle, and she’s even a little beautiful in exactly the way the three sisters are beautiful: weary, resigned, fatigued by expectation. If only they could make it back to Moscow. Everything will be different in Moscow. By day Masha is Susan Stempler and she works eighty-hour weeks in Customer Service at Bank One across the river in Cincinnati. She has yearned to act since she was a kid, and here she is — and here is Vershinin, a glib character if there ever was one, and he has suddenly and irrevocably forgotten all his lines, and apparently who the hell he is, even.