Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

“That’s just what I want to see!” he said with clear, carrying warmth.

The audience knew he was a man for whom people would wait, for whom they would wait. They wanted to wait for Christopher the American. They wanted to know what he thought and why he liked the painting so much. They wanted, in that strange and almost perverse turning of the table that sometimes happens in show business, his approval.

Charles’s approval.

Noémie contrived to appear indifferent. “I think I’ve improved it,” she said of the painting, looking not at it, but at Charles. She could feel the audience’s wish to participate in his world, and saw that she could bask in their love if she played her cards properly. She quietly let her admiration become apparent as he let a good deal more of his character appear.

“Well,” he said, “yes, I suppose you’ve improved it; but I don’t know, I liked it better before it was quite so good ! However, I guess I’ll take it.”

He was neither, strictly speaking, himself nor Christopher Newman, and his agonized, neurotically observant introspection seemed vain and peculiar to him now, in that moment. He was acutely aware of employing himself to create the illusion of Christopher Newman, and confident that nothing could be more natural than to do so. “He” was a decent and amiable but shrewd and relentless man who’d made a fortune after the Civil War and who had come to Europe to spend some of it, a lot of it, “learning about beauty.” When the beauty turned out to be visible to him solely in the face of a young French widow, and he was confronted with the absurd strictures of the ancient families of the aristocracy — who were eager to bathe in the rivers of his cash but who could never allow him to marry one of their own — his quiet outrage and candid determination to have his reasonable but passionate way filled the theater. He loved the sad and lonely Claire with all his great and open heart, and he would be damned if he could not make the world work the way he wanted it to work.

The one great thing took him in, amplified him a thousandfold, and sent him back to himself in wave after wave until at the end it all seemed to be crashing on the stage. They were already cheering and whistling and stamping before he could say his last lines: “Ah, my beloved!” and kiss Claire’s hand, causing her to cry — she who had been so remote and resigned to despair for three solid hours—“You’ve done it, you’ve brought me back, you’ve vanquished me!”

Just before the curtain-closing kiss, he shouted, bellowed really, in his superb opera-quality tenor, as it was now quite hard to hear, “THAT’S JUST WHAT I WANTED TO SEE!”

The orchestra played a Sousa march throughout the rainstorm of applause, while the cast, bowing repeatedly and smiling broadly, waved little American flags. The only cloud of truth that passed between himself and the audience was his glimpse of Sir Edwin in the wings. Neither smiling nor frowning, seeming neither pleased nor relieved, he watched Charles demonstrate his gracious ease, his graceful courage, in Neverland — and of course Charles watched him. He had not the faintest throb of an erection: dead dead dead. An erection was, he had decided, the only sure indication he was alive. Millions of souls, swiftly and easily replaced, every time he came. So yes, he was troubled even as the packed house cheered and cheered and cheered him.

Around a lighted doorway on Filbert, halfway between Stockton and Grant, next to the motorcycle shop, he could make out ten or fifteen figures, people, no doubt, conversing unintelligibly and waiting for their turn to ascend a narrow flight of stairs. Those in the yellow light gestured to those in the shapeless dark. When he appeared, way was made for him, as it always was, and he climbed the stairs slowly. He reached the yellow lamp itself and perceived it as some kind of lamp in a fairy tale, with a life of its own and a secret, or as a beacon very far away that only seemed near because of a trick of sorcery or atmospheric anomaly. A small group had formed around this light and in the open doorway. Talkers gestured carelessly with drinks as they worked elaborate rhetorical figures. He entered an apartment in which a common party or reception appeared to be taking place. Noisy and crowded, the room looked as if it had been shaken in the earthquake and neglected since. It appeared to tilt: the lines of the walls, floor, and ceiling seeming neither parallel nor perpendicular. Wallpaper, depicting various scenes from The Odyssey, hung in peeling strips from the walls, and the floorboards were warped and discolored. The place was less sturdy than a stage set, and less convincing. There were newspapers everywhere, scattered as if they’d been caught by a wind, stacked in sloping piles next to anything that might support them, rolled up in people’s fists, spread open on tables.

Turning from the crowd to the wall and the bookshelves against it, he saw many volumes of Balzac, in French, bound in blue. He selected his favorite, Le Père Goriot, opened it, or rather let it fall open to a page upon which it had, clearly, many times before been opened, to where the cynical, worldly wise lodger Vautrin is exposed as a criminal mastermind. He read to himself, translating the French and remembering the English: “Vautrin was at last revealed complete: his past, his present, his future, his ruthless doctrines, his religion of hedonism. his Devil-may-care strength of character. The blood mounted in his cheeks and his eyes gleamed like a wildcat’s. He sprang back with savage energy and let out a roar that drew shrieks of terror from the boarders.” Is Monsieur Vautrin here tonight? he wondered. Is the owner of this building some kind of Vautrin? Is there perhaps not a flaw of Vautrinism in all of our characters?

He picked up a newspaper to cover the swell of this attractive thought: The Tremor, one he’d never seen before. The masthead lettering was drawn as if it stood on shaky ground, little shivering lines suggesting vulnerability, uncertainty, and the front page featured a cartoon of a Pinkerton detective, a tiny but slope-browed and lantern-jawed head atop a huge, grossly muscled body spilling from a shapeless coat, drawn with a heavy but expert hand in dark smears of charcoal. The caption read, “IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ’EM, FRAME ’EM.” He studied the monstrous detective and saw now a little round bomb, spitting sparks, tiny as the fellow’s head, concealed in a meaty fist. Opening the paper, he glanced at one column, “The Fine Print,” and another, “A Fair Shake,” then shuffled and squared the pages, folded the paper neatly, and set it on the shelf next to the Balzac. A pleasant sense of peril overcame him, and he looked around the room with a mixture of furtiveness and mock-furtiveness: Were there in fact bombers here? Real bombers, dressed and speaking like ordinary citizens concerned about culture and the public weal? He remembered a breakfast table talk from a decade earlier: Father’s insistence that ninety-eight known dynamiters in the Bay Area were going to be rounded up, whether they’d done anything or not, whether, he had asked with the sarcasm his father detested, they were dynamiters or not. Might the place be raided by “authorities”? Might there not be people here wearing serious disguises — that is to say, real disguises as opposed to the fake ones they used on the stage? Might not the ratio of disguised to undisguised people be excitingly large?

He thought for a moment of a painting Mother had bought when they were in Paris, an Ensor, a crowd scene in which the difference between a mask and a face was hard to see, as all seem caught up in some kind of knowledge giving way to terror.

The man nearest him, as tall but lighter both in weight and color, whom he thought he might have seen that strange day in the motorcycle shop below, when he’d come to unload his Merkel and the laughable Minerva, began to speak more loudly than he had been, to the man he was not quite hiding. “Dickens,” the man said, “and Dostoyevsky did not write books, they wrote newspapers! Why, a list of passengers sailing on the Kronprinz Wilhelm is more nearly a work of art than a novel by Thomas Hardy!”