Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

“I wonder if I might have a private word, Mr. Minot?”

“Oh, do please call me Charles. And please speak freely.”

“I want you to know that despite all this business, we, most of us, thought that whatever it is you did up there, you did it well. You did it astonishingly well. And whether most of us can admit it or not, we derived a definite benefit from your performance.”

This rather awkwardly delivered, terse, formal speech that in no way addressed her current concerns was nevertheless stunning and magical in its effect. It suggested very strongly that a woman could after all assuage hurt feelings, shore up a shaken foundation, smooth ruffled feathers, provide shelter, refuge, and that part of what he felt — he no longer had to feel ashamed about it — when he felt desire for women was a desire for consolation, and warmth, and peace. Finishing with her smile a gesture that Mother may have begun once when he was a little boy but left undone, or never made in the first place, Vera opened herself to him, and utterly transformed herself.

“That’s very kind of you,” he said, still guarded. “Thank you for taking the trouble to say so.”

“We were rough with you,” she apologized.

He contrived to be gallant. “Not at all. I deserved it. If I can’t take responsibility for my actions on the stage, then I should not mount it .”

“Oh, Charles, you are not responsible for what we make of your actions.”

She seemed to be speaking very softly but he heard her quite clearly. The noise around them rose and fell simultaneously as the crowd gathered and dispersed and gathered and dispersed.

“No,” he said, “I suppose not. But part of my responsibility is to expect. I mean to say, if I clamber up on the stage and make a speech, make a big fuss over myself, I can’t expect people to listen to me only as I wish to be heard. I can’t expect them to listen to me when I want them to listen, understand what I want them to understand, and treat me as I wish to be treated!”

“That’s right,” said Vera. “You can only treat them as you wish to be treated. And that is what I’m trying to say to you: you treated us to the best you could do, and I for one am grateful.”

“Again I must insist: you are too kind.”

“Tell that to the man I tried to drown in buttons!”

“Ha ha, yes, yes indeed,” he said. Then: “Did you really try to drown him?”

“ Oh, Charles .”

“In buttons?”

“Why not in buttons?” Then, much closer: “It was an act .”

“Yes, of course,” he agreed, but not really understanding in what sense she meant what she said.

“This is what I wanted to talk to you about!” she whispered with lovely ferocity in his ear.

She stepped back and stared at him. It was a haughty, lascivious stare that still somehow promised a warm oven of sympathy and relief.

“Follow me,” she both suggested and commanded. She took his hand and drew him through the kitchen and a bedroom to a door that opened on a steep and dark staircase. The light from the bedroom failed to penetrate its depths, but Vera began her descent with an alacrity and agility that he found inexplicably exciting: it was almost as if she’d leapt into a well. He followed as quickly as he could and when he reached the bottom step he could see Vera’s face glowing in the darkness. She now wore a serious look that thrilled him to his marrow. There was heartache and loneliness in it, but it was perfectly calm and its desire was incontrovertible. He took that face in his hands and kissed it. There was a great deal of strength flowing through her hands and lips, but they remained exquisitely soft. Excluding the stage embraces and adolescent silliness, it was possible that this was really and truly his first kiss. It seemed the first time a kiss had been mutual, had been expressive of something other than a reflex. He now felt as if he’d been born to it. He wanted to kiss Vera for the rest of his life. He clapped a hand around the back of her skull and one around a buttock, but just as it had begun it was over and Vera was laughing. She led him through a darkness of crates and he thought perhaps the frames and disassembled engines of motorcycles until they came to another door. He tried to recommence the kissing — he had found his métier, he was a natural — but Vera pushed him away and took off a bracelet, from which evidently a key jingled, because a lock was clicking and the door was now open. He stood in the doorway of the room that held the press as Vera once again disappeared in darkness. He realized he was panting and tried to calm himself. He had lost his virginity years earlier; he had never kissed a woman as he’d just kissed Vera. The light from an oil lamp appeared, not too far away but far enough for the hiss and sputter to be nearly inaudible, and slowly, as if it were filling the room with water, began to illuminate its shapes and limits. Taking up most of the room was the printing press, which seemed for a moment to have gargoyles attached to its outermost parts; in a corner was a simple wooden washstand on which were placed a pitcher and a bowl and a small towel, all of which appeared snow-gray in color but which slowly became yellow as he looked at them. A tiny oval mirror with an ornate grillwork of vines and leaves framing it was hung on the wall. Next to it was a piece of paper, old newsprint, yellow, tattered, smeared, on which he, drawing nearer, read the slogan Vera had proclaimed only minutes earlier, in another world:

NO GODS TO APPEASE

NO MASTERS TO BOW DOWN TO

NO DOGMAS TO RECITE

In this dark and strange cave-like place, it was incantatory, incantesimo, not defiant, a relic from an ancient rite and not a political battle cry. Altogether there was a faint sense of hallucination gathering, and while it didn’t dampen his ardor, he felt a certain elevation and refinement of what, until that expanding, nebulous moment, had seemed almost brutal in its perfectly ungovernable simplicity.

An unmitigated or unadulterated seriousness had overtaken Vera as well. He moved around the press and found her sitting on the edge of a small, tidily made bed. She patted a spot beside her and he sat down. A natural shyness had caught up with them.

“Here is what I wanted to say,” said Vera tentatively. “I don’t think we should go to the theater to see plays about politics or our lives. I mean, they are wrong to make you stand for something and say you’re good only if they agree with you. The reason I think that is because the theater is a dreamy place, it’s not a real place. I mean, everything in it seems like it’s happening in a dream. And when you’re good, as you were good, Charles,” and here she paused to kiss him warmly and lingeringly on the cheek, “you do things you would never do in real life, but exactly the things you would do in a dream. As we were good. I’m sorry I’ve been baiting you like that all evening.”

“Well, yes, it’s—”

“Let me finish. Everyone knows we’re not saying what you think, we’re just repeating the lines you memorized, and we’re doing something we practiced over and over again. And everybody knows that we do and say the same things night after night, but they don’t care because it’s a dream. At least it is if we’re good. If we’re bad, it isn’t anything at all like a dream. It’s ridiculous and pointless. As you said so many times in your impassioned provocations to the company. It makes a person feel bad to watch it, rather than strangely happy. I’m not very smart, certainly not in your league, anyway—”

“I’m not smart,” he said urgently. “Please don’t think I’m smart. They teach you how to make speeches after dinner and I can fake everything, even being smart, I spent four years studying the classics, but I’m really just a fool.”