Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“That’s just butterflies, Arnold. All performers have them. You’ll be fine … You do understand why I won’t be able to go with you?”

“I guess so,” he said.

“Well, then. I think we’d better get started. We’ve got a lot of rehearsing to do. Your first date is just three weeks off.”

“Would you mind, Pepper, if I worked the routines out on my own in Springfield?”

“No, Arnold, of course not.”

“If you’re not going to be there with me, maybe it’s a good idea to get used to performing by myself.”

“Certainly, Arnold. If that’s what you want.” I sounded wounded, I suppose, but frankly I saw his point, and besides, I’d been neglecting the Charm School since I started working with Arnold.

His first booking was a club date at a convention in Atlantic City. At the last minute I decided to take time off and go down with him, but when I told him he said I’d just make him more nervous than he already was. He had to do it on his own, he said. I made him promise to call me just as soon as he got offstage, and I sent him a good-luck telegram at the hotel where he was to appear.

I knew he was supposed to go on at about ten o’clock, and so when I still hadn’t heard from him at midnight I called him.

“How did it go, sweetheart? Were you marvelous?”

“It was all right.” He didn’t sound as if it really was. He’s probably tired, I thought. I asked him for details, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it. Indeed, I could almost see him frowning into the phone — a funny little squint which I had seen often in the past few weeks, the sign of his tension, I’d felt.

When he returned to Springfield the next day, again it was I who called him.

“What’s wrong, Arnold?”

“Nothing. Nothing is, Pepper.”

“Well, it doesn’t sound that way. It’s almost as if you’re avoiding me.”

“I love you, Pepper.”

“Well,” I said, “glad to hear it. You had me worried there. I thought that now you’ve made it into the big time—”

“I haven’t made it into the big time, Pepper.”

“You will, darling. Do you know what I thought?”

“What?”

“That maybe … maybe you’d fallen onstage.”

“No,” he said, “I moved very well.”

What I really thought was what I’d started to tell Arnold: that he was just another bastard who uses people. Why, he hadn’t even paid me, I remembered. We’d fallen in love before that became a point. But it was so absurd to think of Arnold in this light that I was ashamed of myself. I reminded him that his next performance was in two weeks. We saw each other in the interval almost as much as we had when we were still working together, though Arnold still insisted on working on his act alone. And though he was just as sweet as he had ever been, sometimes when he didn’t think I was looking I would catch him frowning. Was it possible that having achieved his goal it was no longer attractive to him? I didn’t ask, but I decided to wait until after his next engagement before making any additional dates for him.

There was no question about my seeing him work that booking. It was for a week at the Fox Theater in St. Louis, one of the last motion picture houses in America where they still had a variety show between features. This time I waited three days for him to call. Finally he did.

“How is it, Arnold? Are the audiences responsive?”

“They’re very kind.”

“How do they like the part where you have the houselights turned up and you memorize the first fifteen rows of the audience? Did they go wild for that?”

“I don’t do that part.”

“Arnold, it’s the most exciting thing in the act.”

“I don’t do that part.”

When he came back from St. Louis he was as gloomy as ever. Now he always wore that odd squinting frown of his, even when he knew I was watching. It was very strange because he had never looked so good. Evidently he had bought a whole new wardrobe in St. Louis — everything in the latest fashion, the best taste. A couple of his suits looked as if they’d been custom-made. Nor had he ever been so ardent, so clever a lover. But he continued to rehearse alone, and each day he seemed more despondent. By the time he went to Vegas anyone could see that he was miserable.

I had to know what was going on, so without telling Arnold I flew out to Las Vegas on a different plane and dropped into the lounge where he was performing. I took a table in the back, as far from the small stage as possible. When he was introduced and the spotlight hit him, I gasped. He took my breath away — I had never seen him during an actual performance before — so beautiful was he. He seemed magnificent in the new tuxedo he had bought for the engagement. I was reassured at once, but then, when he began his act, it was all I could do to keep from fleeing from the room. He was terrible! He moved splendidly, better than I had ever seen him, but when it came time to give them what he had memorized he seemed confused. He stammered and hesitated, he faltered, he stuttered and sputtered. One didn’t know if his memory or his speech had given out. He did only a few of the routines we had worked out together, and these badly. For the rest he substituted halting recitations of poems he had memorized in his childhood, violating the first principle of such acts — audience participation. And with his constant frown he seemed almost angry at the audience. It was awful. It was dull. It was so bad that the audience took a sort of pity on him and were more patient and attentive than they might have been with an act two or three times better than his. When he was finished they generously applauded.

I hadn’t wanted him to know I was there; he would have guessed that I’d come to spy and not to surprise him. But he looked so miserable when he was through that I had to go to his dressing room.

He didn’t seem surprised to see me. “Did you see it, Pepper?”

“Oh, Arnold, I’m so sorry.”

“I didn’t want you to know,” he said. “I’m so ashamed.”

“That’s silly,” I said. “So you’ve got a little stage fright. We can lick that. Remember how frightened you were when you were clumsy? We worked on that and today you’re one of the most graceful men in show business.”

“But I don’t have stage fright. I was cool as a cucumber up there.”

“But, Arnold, the way you stammered, your confusion—”

“It wasn’t stage fright. It’s my damn eyes.”

Arnold told me that ever since he had become graceful his vision had begun to deteriorate. For two months, he said, he had been becoming increasingly far-sighted; each day what he could see moved a little farther off. Since he had an eidetic imagination and could remember only what he saw, and most of what he saw was a blur, his photographic memory had inevitably been affected — even the beloved poems from his childhood. When he closed his eyes the print was indistinct. That’s why he squinted; he was trying to make things out.

“But surely you’ve been to an eye doctor,” I said.

“Yes. It’s severe astigmatism.”

“Well, then, he can prescribe glasses.”

“He made a pair up for me. They’re thick, Pepper. They’re awful.”

“Well, so what about it?”

“If I wore them, anybody could tell I’m far-sighted. Since you taught me to move so well I just couldn’t; they’d detract from my appearance. I’d only be clumsy Arnold again. I even tried contact lenses, but they hurt my eyes and made them water. Onstage I looked like I was crying.”

So he was vain. That was what had been underneath the clumsiness we’d rubbed off. I’d taught him to move and now he couldn’t stand not to be graceful, glassless Arnold.