Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

“Here’s a rag!” whinnied the dowager in her stage voice. “Poor dear!” She hadn’t looked up from her game, however.

“How very ironic,” the old man concluded, shooting his eyes comically left and right.

“Ironic?” murmured the dowager.

“That Chucky should vomit at the sound of the anthem when he’s—”

“Mmm.? Oh yes. Yes, I see what you are — MY GOD I WISH THEY’D STOP THEIR CATERWAULING!” She wiped her eyes. “It’s like a church service.”

Charles stood uncertainly, then drew himself up with a deep breath. To polite applause, he announced that he was all right and that he felt better, none of the diamonds had been dislodged from his incredibly expensive prop cane, everything, he was sure, was going to be okay. The dandy and the trollop left the room. The marquis said that it sounded as if half of San Francisco were out there.

“How many seats have we?” he asked.

The princess replied that he knew perfectly well how many.

Everyone was now on edge and eager to show it with any kind of clamped-down hysteria they could find.

The dowager swept the cards from her little table with a cry of outrage. “But I don’t, dear!”

“One hundred and thirty-seven,” Charles said, accepting the glass of water.

The plumber’s son poked his head around the door again and said they’d sold fifty standing-room-only tickets as well.

“ No !” cried the very old man.

“Yes they did ,” insisted the little boy.

Charles let the rag drop to my feet. The vomitus was actually little more than bile and saliva, and he toed the rag back and forth in it, soaking it up. When he stopped, he looked up to find everyone in the room watching him.

“ Where ,” inquired the marquis, “is one’s valet when one has need of him?”

“Fuck you,” said Charles, without real conviction, rehearsing.

“Fuck me?” asked the marquis, equally wanly. He stood and adjusted his sash. “Fuck you. ”

Charles stooped and quickly brought the smelly, dripping rag to the marquis’s nose, who scrambled out of the way, bumping into the very old man, who in turn sat down in the lap of the dowager, who had picked up her cards and dealt herself a new game. They all laughed.

“I’ll beat you all with my diamond-studded cane,” offered Charles.

“Oh yes, please!” they all moaned and jiggled.

“ Places ,” hissed the stage manager, who appeared out of nowhere. “What on earth is the matter with you people?”

“You have upset my game,” said the dowager coolly. “God damn you to hell.”

She and the princess crossed themselves, the princess suddenly pale and crazy-looking, her deep voice even deeper now with dread. “Here we go,” she said, as if from the tomb.

The dowager went to pieces again. “We are just not ready!” she shrieked. “I can’t believe you’re going to force us out there like this! To just. throw us out there ! To the, to the. to the dogs !”

Charles sidled quietly over to the princess and told her that he was in love with her. He had clearly said it as Christopher Newman, but he had said it in a place where Christopher Newman did not exist. And saying so gave him an erection — he couldn’t understand it: it was not something that would happen to Christopher Newman. Refusing to turn her face to Charles, Vera glanced at him with a kind of calm but insane expectancy.

“Do you love me?” he asked, not knowing what else to say, and having no time to think about it.

“No,” she said, swiveling her eyes back at him. “No, Charles, I do not. But I will suck your cock after our first scene.”

“You will?” he asked.

“Yes. I will.”

“All right.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she wailed in sudden terror. “Give me a thousand dollars and I’ll do it.”

Theater was happening and nobody could stop it.

Charles felt suddenly defeated. “It won’t work. Never mind. If you need some money I’ll give you some.”

Sir Edwin stood in the doorway, rubbing his hands just as the very old man had done. Never before had he seemed so completely depraved a monk as he did then. Charles saw now only looks of panic and frank hatred on those faces that had beamed only the day before, the hour before, with childlike devotion and the most intimate trust in his mystic vision, and so was not surprised to see their Mad Englishman gone from the doorway when he looked back.

He walked from the green room to the nearest wing, still sipping his glass of water, and examined the scenery-flat flying ropes knotted to the pin rail. The knots, he believed, looked secure and well tied. He climbed up to the fly gallery: shipshape here as well. He was no longer ill, no longer afraid; he was in fact utterly oblivious to his surroundings. As if he were a casual bystander, he looked out onstage, at the “shabby sitting room on a small Parisian quatrième ,” sparely suggested by odds and ends of furniture collected from the theater’s patrons — from people, he marveled, like Durwood Keogh. He loathed Keogh, of course, but could not say why, not precisely, in that moment anyway, and was stricken with gratitude at the gifts of furniture. The curtain was still down, but he could feel the force, the weight of nearly two hundred expectant people just beyond it. He felt curious and intrigued: it trembled, whatever it was out there, a faint wave that rippled from one end of the curtain to the other, as if the breathing of the audience had taken on the properties of a breeze. The idea that they were not individuals, but rather one great thing, was not new to him, or theater folk in general, but he felt it now — not in his guts, where it had just finished making him nauseous, but in his heart, where it made him not brave but fearless: he didn’t care. He didn’t think he cared, anyway, didn’t feel that he cared. And wasn’t that how daredevils felt? It was only one thing and he didn’t care what one thing might think or say about him, or even directly to him. It knew nothing of him, after all, if it thought he was not part of its own “one-thingness” and its judgment would perforce be poorly constituted, superficial, beside the point if not altogether contemptibly mean-spirited. He was now a little angry, and when he realized it, was surprised at himself. He wanted to be calm again. Not caring was not an acceptable alternative. He wanted to be serene and helpful. But that was not how he had been trained to enter the scene.

“They will get the show they deserve, eh?” whispered the marquis, plumping his belly.

“We had better be good,” Charles whispered, his heart suddenly pounding.

“Yes,” agreed the marquis. “They will tar and feather us if we aren’t.”

The curtain rose in voluminous, screeching jerks, and what had only seemed a polite silence was now terrifying condemnation. A man in the balcony cleared his throat.

Would the balcony collapse?

The footlights, which still ran on gas, snapped and quivered behind their mesh grating. The dandy chased the trollop, Noémie, around the stage. They scampered and minced in a way that made his heart sink. Noémie then stopped in her tracks and the dandy nearly collided with her: it was slapstick. It would be all right because slapstick was foolproof. She held up an imperious finger and said, “I declare that if you touch me, I’ll paint you all over!”

And the audience, unaccountably, roared with laughter.

“What do you know,” whispered the marquis. He and Charles exchanged an incredulous but pleased look; the laughter was infectious.

He couldn’t wait now to get onstage. The first scene was interminable and then there he was, striding languidly, confidently, handsomely, richly, “the American,” into the limelight. He approached a painting around which Noémie coyly fluttered. He stared and stared for what in a theater seemed a very long time, a dangerously long time — but it was working, he could feel it and he liked it — and then he judged it. He pointed with his fabulous walking stick.