Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

As Charles made his ridiculous departure that day, he saw, thought he saw, Vera push her face through the greasy red drapery and then withdraw it. Perhaps he had seen it in the corner of his eye — the sudden absence. He could feel her every moment across all time and space, no? He was in love with her, no? Love was not thinking about love, it was not about lolling about in feelings of love, it was apprehending the movements of the loved one across all time and space.

She knew more than a little about Charles, and about his family — not simply because she was the hostess of a salon and a terminal of radical gossip but because they were a family about whom things necessarily were known. The desire of the people of San Francisco to have knowledge of the Minots was somehow virtuous — because they were in so many easily demonstrable ways so admirable and so detestable. And the release of knowledge from the family, too, seemed virtuous: We belong to our city, they seemed to admit and proclaim at the same time, to our state, to our country, our God. Playing dumb, sometimes just for the derisive fun of it, sometimes to draw out an unsuspecting and perhaps valuable speaker, was something she did frequently and too easily; she disliked the occasional arrogant nastiness and fundamental lawyer-like deception of it but also could not help but be fascinated by the newly visible person she saw, or thought she saw, blinking uncertainly but hopefully, where the opaque and therefore hostile stranger had been standing. This was especially the case, it turned out, with Charles, whom she was afraid she was prepared to like, despite his wealth, because he was admirable — and because, she was also afraid, he had a target painted on his back.

Taking his feelings as genuine, primary, and direct responses to recent, incontrovertible acts, and noting that all action was incontrovertible and therefore worthy of the most intensely rigorous scrutiny, Charles decided to invite Vera out for an afternoon at the Sutro Baths, on the ocean side of the peninsula. This was an extravagance of engineering in which seven tanks were flushed and filled daily by the tide, several of them heated for the purposes of relaxation, one filled with fresh water: two acres of swimming, diving, and bathing pools within a luminous structure — even on the bleakest and grayest of days — of glass and black iron that could accommodate fifty thousand swimming, eating, drinking, smoking, waltzing, and promenading people.

Vera said that she was familiar with the place: her friends had taken her there after a particular grim and grimy year.

They had taken the lift down from the sidewalk and were staring into the gloom of the basement beneath the motorcycle shop. After a moment Vera stepped across the threshold of metal and cement and motioned for Charles to follow as she opened a door and made her way through a damp dripping space redolent of burnt oil and mildew and gasoline, navigating almost purely by memory between piles of junk and frames of motorcycles like skeletons and disassembled engines with parts spread around them on greasy cloths, all shapeless masses shifting in the dark, until she came to a second door, on which she used a key, selected in darkness and fitted to its lock as surely as if it had been broad daylight. She entered the room and with a long, measured sigh, lit an oil lamp.

A printing press took up most of the room. She took a sheet from the press tray and brought it near the lamp. A cartoonist using pen and ink had drawn a doctor handing a rich woman with a single child a packet of birth control information with one hand, while waving away, with the other hand, behind his back, a poor woman with six or seven children. The caption read: THE BOSS’S WIFE CAN BUY INFORMATION TO LIMIT HER FAMILY AND THE BOSS CAN BUY YOUR CHILDREN TO FILL HIS FACTORIES WITH CHEAP LABOR. She moved to the washstand, glanced at herself in a tiny oval mirror with an ornate grillwork of vines and leaves framing it; then at the old printed slogan:

NO GODS TO FEAR

NO MASTERS TO APPEASE

NO DOGMAS TO RECITE

She stood for a moment staring blankly at it, then back at herself in the little mirror. Some breathlessly unmeasured time later, Charles watched Vera and Vera’s reflection as she poured water from the jug into the bowl. She splashed her face and neck and arms and dried herself with a snow-gray towel. With the raspy cloth still to her face, she appeared to remember that she’d not locked the doors behind her. She hung the towel on its hook and turned to the door, where a man strange to Charles now stood.

He looked shy and arrogant on the shadowy threshold, a tender bully. Looking over Vera’s shoulder at Charles he said, “I’m sure not that sleek asshole they call ‘the American.’ In fact, I look like a rat. But I’m not. And I do have whiskey and cigarettes.” It took Vera only seconds to recover herself. “I like to drink,” she said. “And I like to fuck.”

His name was Warren Farnsworth and they had been lovers for some time, but it was understood that the room in the basement was a private, nearly secret place, where he was not, where no one, was welcome. “That’s terrific,” he said, stepping from the murky shadow into the yellow light. She saw where his dirty suit had been ripped, and fingered it. “Knifework,” he said. “Fraction of an inch.” He took hold of her fingers and held them for a moment. Then it became clear that he was struggling not to sob, and failing. He made several noises that were more like barks than anything else and his face was wet with tears. “I wouldn’t have come down here if I wasn’t at the end of my fucking rope,” he whimpered. “Get him the fuck out of here, please.” She held his head to her breast and then it was over. Warren was embarrassed and turned away. Charles excused himself and made his way back to the lift.

Vera saw Warren was very tired. It took him a long time to slip the coat off. By the time he’d hung it on the nail in the wall, she was naked and under the covers of the little bed. She was looking at the coat, glancing at him, and returning her gaze to the coat.

She thought its folds were as rich with texture and shadow as any Renaissance drapery or cloak, and that he was in every way a superior man — a storm of disgust for the wealth and privilege she normally held in prodigious equanimity had blown up out of a clear sky — to Charles Minot.

But in the wake of the storm: greasy gray pity. She did not enjoy the sex. It was in fact, she realized, the last time she would sleep with him.

Rehearsals the next day were devoted to blocking, to choreography, to the apparently essential movements of persons and things around the stage by means of a timing that was a subset of real time but which required its own very specific measurement, and the marking with chalk of certain apparently important spots on the boards where whatever might be said or done must be said and done. It was a different but equally real space and time. But because he mistrusted plans so fundamentally, preferring and hoping — Sir Edwin whispering narcotically into his ear and in his dreams — for a kind of improvised dance instead, he introduced a set of exercises that Sir Edwin had grouped under the heading, THE SHOWING OF HEAVENLY EFFECTS IN EARTHLY ACTORS. He also sometimes referred to them as “Colombian Hypnosis,” as he had first seen it practiced at the opera house in Bogota. The purpose of the exercises was to prepare them for what would happen in performance, night after night: they would arrive at the proper place at the proper time, but it would be unfamiliar. Everything would seem to have changed, irrevocably and without a trace of the old and familiar, the chalked X marking the spot of the remembered thing. And so they worked muscles that would relieve them of the pain caused by the tension of being a stranger in a strange land, of living with what Sir Edwin rather awkwardly, in a very brief and incoherent pre-rehearsal speech — the offering of notes — called “the mental illusion of things that aren’t really there.”