The Colonial Period of Arthur Hopewell

July, 1987: Hopewell returns to America amidst other comings and goings.

Bear with me. I started stupid, but I got smarter. I had gone to France to find out what it meant to be an American. I had gone with the name I’d given myself, Arthur Hopewell, and with the intention of never going back to who I’d been – or been with – not that there were any special tragedies in my upbringing, but because I decided to operate on the dictum: as in the work, in the life. It sounds better in French. Nearly everything does, which was how I got myself over to France for two years after college on a fellowship. My two years there were eventful and productive. I wrote a play, a comedy titled The Green and Golden Girl. It won the prestigious Esther Merling Fellowship which brought me back to the States. The play was about the French creation of that green and golden girl, the Statue of Liberty. The French hadn’t had American liberty in mind so much as Napoleon III’s abridgement of French rights, but it would have been impolitic and dangerous to confront their sovereign directly. In my play, Lady Liberty walks around in developing layers of costume and makes penetratingly funny comments about all the men who want her. The French who saw it – a group of copains and I managed to mount a small production in le quartier Latin – found the play bien amusant, but the real kicker was hearing from the Merling Foundation that I’d won a one year fellowship to be playwright-in-residence at a regional theatre on Long Island; let us understand that meant under the shade, if at the edge of the penumbra, of the BIG Apple, New York City.

The theatre, The Green Door, was located in Isle End, a town on the northeastern tip of Long Island. Long Island is over 100 miles long. It looks like a long fish who tail fins divide into a North and South Fork. Isle End was on the extreme tip of the North Fork with a ferry to Connecticut. It looked east to Apple Island and England and enjoyed cross breezes from Long Island Sound and Great South Bay as it becomes the Atlantic Ocean. Apple Island, I learned to my joie, had a local mythology that begged to be transformed into literature.

I arrived at The Green Door one deadly hot and humid July day reminiscent of my New Orleans origin. There was no fanfare. I was not the big expectation that day; someone named Pamela Hall was. I learned this deflating information as I sat outside the open office of Frank Marino, the manager of the theatre. I passed his open door without introducing myself and caught a glimpse of his rotundity behind an old desk. He was talking to a tall old guy. No one was around to ask me what I was doing there, and I got the impression that if anyone had been, they wouldn’t have cared. Isle End struck me as a town where people didn’t lock doors or windows. Yet. Some spillover had begun from the yuppie invasion to the Hampton-Montauk south, but Isle End still kept time with the tides rather than with the summer people. These summers (as they are also called in New England) made up a growing part of The Green Door’s audience.

From the conversation I heard outside Frank Marino’s office that July day, this Pamela Hall was coming to enlarge that audience and make it more sustaining all year. She was a longtime soap opera star who’d had occasional small parts in major motion pictures (she played Paul Newman’s sister in one film), and the experience of acting and directing at Williamstown and the O’Neill thing in Connecticut. Marino was summarizing her bio for a tall, white-haired self-important baritone. This was Lowell Sykes, known as “The Voice” on the east end of Long Island for the eponymous radio show he did weekly. He also did commercials on local TV for restaurants and car sales. His Darth Vader tones made American English sound almost as good as French. He was especially “impressed” and “enthusiastic” by Pamela Hall’s arrival. She was a “Top Pro” with “Major League Experience.”

“Well, we’re not exactly bush,” Marino protested.

“No, of course not,” rolled Sykes, “but leaving you as I am, I do feel Pamela Hall will make up for my absence.”

“Well, it’s a great opportunity for you, Lowell,” Marino said – this didn’t sound like the first time he’d said it. Sykes had been doing some voiceovers in NYC and had landed a network soap. He was the kind of guy who had to be reassured it was all right for him to stab you in the back before he did it. He was so needy and nagging, you’d hand him the knife.

“What Pamela Hall brings to us… to The Green Door… Frank, is professional Vision. Money, as we both know, is not enough…”

“Yeah, it’s only 150%,” Frank said.

“…an Artistic Director needs professional Vision. Bringing in this young playwright is just the thing,” Sykes exhaled.

On the bench outside Marino’s office, I blushed. I was her Vision. I liked Pamela Hall already. I didn’t know how the Merling people placed a winner where, but evidently I had been asked for. I was requested. Of course, I held the modern view. I knew I was no more than a dust mote in the cosmos, blown any which way probability would carry me, physics and philosophy so merged in me as to proclaim me l’homme existential. Bien sur. But as I sat in an American outer office, a hallway, really, of The Green Door Theatre in Isle End on Long Island, that great fish in a New York sea, I felt, quelle etrange, summoned to a destiny. Hopefully, mine.

I looked around. I was on the top floor of what had once been a firehouse. I knew this thanks to directions I had received from someone on Main Street who’d pointed me to the theatre. The walls were painted pale yellow. A long narrow bulletin board ran from the stairs at one end all the way to Marino’s office. On this bulletin board were tacked all sorts of announcements, actors’ photographs, and a calendar from a previous year. It had a picture of a white sailboat leaning into the wind in choppy water. (Isle End clung to a nostalgic, colonial sea-faring memory. Everywhere were anchors on this and life preservers on that, Ye Olde fonts and numerals on houses and stores.) I sat on a dark wooden bench long enough for a doctor’s waiting room. I faced a blank yellow wall. A door at the other end of the hall faced another flight of stairs. It had a frosted glass window with writing on it too far away to read. I was about to lock the image of the linoleum tile in my mind when I heard voices from below, and Sykes, unbelievably, interrupting himself.

“She’s here, Frank! She must be here!”

They exited the office nearly together, doing one of those competitive, comic elbowing numbers. They didn’t notice me (the Vision), and raced past down the stairs. Marino was a stocky guy, mid 60’s, and bald. He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt over Bermuda shorts and sockless sneakers. Sykes, a mature Ken doll, was in a tan suit, blue shirt, striped tie. They had established hierarchy at Marino’s office door – Frank won – and he noisily descended the stairs ahead of the fashion plate.

I listened to the welcome, boisterous at first, then muted and richly affectionate. Between Sykes’s baritone and Pamela Hall’s classic contralto, they were just about singing approval to one another. I stayed upstairs, awaiting Discovery.

First, they must have gone on a tour of the stage and backstage areas. I listened to their voices Doppler away from me. I could hear cicadas out the window, battering a sexual anthem in the sycamores. I was vicariously admiring that activity, when steps rose close to me, and I saw on the landing a guy my age who was more surprised to see me than I him. I had heard him coming. He was Italian-looking, compact, tight, and dark, apparently another actor from his good looks and that nervous intensity PR feels compelled to call smoldering. This was my first view of Brian Angelo, his real name, with whom I was to share a small apartment during my year’s stay in Isle End. I recognized him from a picture I’d been sent by the Merling people. He didn’t know me. I hadn’t sent them a photo. He paused and just about sniffed me as if we were meeting at midnight by a strange hydrant. I smiled and pushed my glasses up my nose, a civilized primate submission gesture. I’d had my teeth wired after a Parisian street brawl, and they still ached from time to time. Angelo’s Al Pacino glower was a character note.

“Hopewell,” I said, “Arthur.”

“Bad timing, Hopewell Arthur,” he said. “The great lady just arrived. I had to pick her up from the airport and drive her here. Effing hot day and the air conditioner in the car broke, and she bitched the whole way. The only thing she liked was ‘all the lovely vineyards.’ Angelo, Brian,” he extended his hand.

“Hi,” I said.

“You’re the effing vision.” He dropped my hand abruptly. “I guess you’re an intellectual, and being lean with glasses, mistake yourself in the mirror for a young Michael Caine.”

Just as this scene of introduction ended, tall, blond, incredible Pamela Hall & Entourage ascended. She stopped mid-small talk to take in Angelo and me. She dismissed him by looking just at me. I remembered their hot, unpleasant ride from the airport, but I chalked up the lady’s attention to le bon gout.

“And you are – who?” she said, blond hair shaped into a curved question around her Grace Kelly face. She was as tall as I was, looking straight into my glasses. Her eyes were green. Later, I learned they were grey with those contact lenses that can do anything, but what the hell. They were green. I didn’t hear anything for probably a minute while I swam around in those green eyes. She let me.

Then I must have remembered my name because she smiled and gave me her hand. Frank Marino and Lowell Sykes were also enchante to meet me.

“That was a wonderful part, Pierre, for me,” Lowell Syke’s basso-profundoed in Marino’s now-crowded office, “too bad I won’t be here to do it for you,” he apologized.

I nodded, intending to thwart his obvious intention to tell yet again about his good luck in having the soap job in The City (all they all called NYC), but Pamela Hall interrupted him and astonished me.

“Oh, we won’t be mounting Green and Golden Girl, “she said.

“We won’t?” I asked.

Angelo grinned.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You will be writing a new play for us. Several one-acts, too. Well, perhaps one of each,” she amended. “This will be a wonderful year for you. A seminal year.”

Thank god I saw the look on Frank Marino’s face, or in the heat and her expectation, I might have passed out. Oh, he liked her, there was no doubt of that. She was irresistible, a beauty, filled with energy, purpose, and professional vision. But he saw something else that made him smile.

“You’ve got big ideas for us all,” he said.

“You bet I do. We have no tradition in this country for the support of our arts, like the English. A theatre in every small town there, and an eager audience. We have no budget from the Federal government. In fact, they have strangulated what little we did have. But I plan to create a tradition. Traditions have to start somewhere. I say we start one here!”

Angelo was grinning at Marino, enjoying every minute.

Marino stood up then, and he walked to a bookcase crammed with folders of varying colors. I recognized those kinds of folders. They were what you sent plays in to theatres like this one. Marino had a bookcase filled with them, complete with dust. He lifted up about twenty and carried them over to Pamela, who, without understanding, took them into her arms. I figured she was somewhere around 35. She didn’t wear a wedding band. There was a dew of perspiration over her upper lip. I knew it would be delicious.

“These are yours now,” Frank said. “Read them in good health.”

“All of them?” Pamela said.

I was eager to help her carry them wherever they were to go.

“All over this country there are young playwrights, like Artie here, who dream of us choosing their play for The Green Door. Us to them means anywhere.”

“I have already scheduled the ten plays we’ll be doing next season, taking into consideration readings of the works-in-progress that Arthur will write for us. I plan for us to start production right away for a Labor Day run of The Little Foxes, followed by A Delicate Balance–“ Pamela began another of her terrifying speeches.

“Yes, well, that was a fine list you sent, and we’ll get a lot of chances to go over it, but these plays have been coming in since our last Director – and, well, truth is, they belong in your office. I just don’t have enough room in here as it is,” Frank said.

“Where is my office?”

We all moved together toward the door like the convicts in the Woody Allen movie. Frank pointed down the hall to another frosted-glass door. Pamela nodded, and I volunteered to take the rest of the scripts from one office to the other.

I didn’t get to see her office that day, though, because Angelo said he was beat to ship (oblique obscenity was another of his character notes), and if I wanted an effing ride to the apartment, I’d better effing go with him now. Hello, Isle End. Welcome home. Comme ca.

I hadn’t lived just in Paris for the two years of my fellowship. I traveled around France and lived for a semester in Avignon. I thought of nomadic tribes on the American Plains and prehistoric settlers in Avignon, and I felt there must be some intercourse and conception between place and personality, but how? And what would be born? To this thought was added, as I followed Brian Angelo into our apartment, was that here I will live one of the ten fundamental years of my life. From 20 to 30, I then believed, personal geology lays down a sediment all the rest of life bears down upon with attendant metaphoric, metamorphic possibilities of coal or diamond, etc.

Angelo had walked straight to the window and the loud air conditioner. He stood in front of it, bending his sweaty neck into a blast of cold air. I looked around the room. There were a lot of doors. The living or common room was large enough, with one couch, a rocking chair, and a studio kitchen wall. A maple table and three chairs made up what could be called the dining area. There were no pictures on the white walls, but green metallic curtains hung at the windows that looked down onto Main Street. We lived over Ellis’s Four Star Bakery.

A strong sweet smell of chocolate rose through the floor, along with a fine yeasty French smell of bread. Both aromas were being chilled by the surprising power of the small air conditioner. Some of Angelo’s sweat also marked the atmosphere. I was as sensitive to smell as Jonathan Swift, but human odors and excretions didn’t repulse me. Group bathing, as at Bath, England, which so revolted Swift, might bother me, I can’t say, given that bathing wasn’t all that went on. Watching people pick at themselves and blow snot into the water would probably make me throw up. In France, people bathe far less frequently than Americans do, and I thought it made for a more individually identified population. Men and women don’t smell alike, vive la difference! I’m not talking about French perfumes. Copulation without cunnilingus, I’d learned on my travels in France, is what Wonder Bread is to French bread.

Angelo, still in front of the air conditioner, pointed to the door to his room on the kitchen/bathroom side and then across to two doors, a closet and my cubicle, hardly much to distinguish one from the other. My cell was painted blue. It was about six feet wide and eight feet long, big enough for a bed and a narrow dresser and a two foot deep closet. No table for a typewriter. On the jet back to the States, I’d daydreamed of reentering the Technological Age, of having a wide, white Parsons table with room for books, papers, and a state of the art Mac.

At least my room had a window above the headboard, and it wasn’t curtained in funeral parlor green. It had no curtain at all. I could look out at a slice of central Isle End any time of the day or night, which seemed likely since Angelo wasn’t my idea of an ideal roommate. I could hear him in the kitchen, banging something open and shut. He turned down the air conditioner to a less arctic setting, and I heard the unmistakable sound of a beer tab hissing. I looked over at my white-sheeted bed, bare dresser, blue room, and weighed the seduction of sleep against thirst. Angelo at that moment surprised me by knocking on the wall between the rooms, then poking his head around and leaning in, offering me a beer. I took it and followed him back into the big room.

He sat down in the rocking chair and drank. I took the couch and a swallow of very cold beer (not in two years had I drunk anything so cold, not even chilled champagne when I’d won the Merling). I couldn’t remember what circadian cycle I was on. There had been constant partying before I left for the States.

“So,” Angelo said, “I’ve got a – ,” he paused, gave me a look, “soiree in East Hampton tonight. Wanna come?”

“Jet lag.”

“Liked her, didn’t you?”

“I’ve been out of the country for two years,” I said. “I forgot how fast Americans get personal.”

“Mind my own effing business.”

“I like tall women.”

“She’s a bossy bitch,” Angelo said.

“I didn’t have to drive her from the airport,” I admitted. “Anyway, she’s supposed to be the director, so – ”

“Direct this,” Angelo said lightly, slapping the inside of his thigh. “I gotta take a shower. There’s your key on the counter. There’s some food in the fridge and stuff. We’ll figure out later who pays what. As I hear it, your half of the rent’s paid already, so mine gets cut by half starting today, which makes you, Welcome,” Angelo said, raising his now empty beer can to me.

My memory fogs on that first dialogue in our shared dwelling. I must have found my way back to my blue cell and slept. In fact, I slept on and off for a day and a half before I awakened, alone, to the hum of that air conditioner. I got up, went inside, and turned it off, returned to my room and opened the window above my head, and lay down again. I stared at the ceiling. I heard cicadas and car noises from Main Street. The Four Star Bakery was going strong downstairs; aroma penetrated the floor and wafted out my open window. It must have rained during the nights and day that I’d slept. My stomach growled at me. Worse, it clenched and knotted when I remembered the orders for a new play — and couple of afterthought one-acts! It had never occurred to me that as “playwright in residence” I might be expected to write something new. I thought I’d won it for what I’d done, not what I would do. (Life laughs. Again, that sounds better in French.)

Green and Golden Girl had not come easy to me. I had read everything, seen everything, and listened to more advice – the French theorize almost as maniacally and logically as the Germans – and in one year, Pamela Hall expected what? Jesus.

Furthermore, I thought (still prone in bed), Green and Golden Girlshould be put on immediately: America, NYC especially, had just celebrated the Statue of Liberty’s 100th birthday only the previous October. I’d seen the fireworks reported on French TV and read about Her centennial in just about every American newspaper in Paris. But apparently my Girl wasn’t her cup of tea. Maybe Pamela Hall was resistible to Angelo not only because he was gay (I speculated), but also because she just was a bossy bitch.

Meanwhile, behind my eyes I was scanning for ideas for something to impress her with. Thus testosterone makes cowards of us all. Even before, I’d been attracted to the McCarthy and Watergate hearings – just imagining a scene or so. I was hoping to feel the green thing underline and expand those images, which is what had happened when I got going on Girl. One thing I didn’t believe in was complication. The good stuff is always simple. Whatever else, Macbeth is ambitious. Hamlet thinks too much. (How French.) Willy Loman’s got the wrong dream.

What about me? (How American.)

Angelo burst into the living room and stamped over to the air conditioner again, turning it up full blast. He swore in his ridiculous way. I didn’t move. I hoped he wouldn’t remember me had an apartment mate. He did. He knocked on the wall. My right hand turned into a welcoming fist in response. “Yo,” I said.

“Effing East Hampton,” he said, entering my room and sitting on my dresser. He balanced himself as if on a bike, one leg on the bottom drawer his foot poked open, the other on the floor. “I gotta black fly bite, wanna see?” he leaned toward me, pulling his polo collar away from his neck.

Sure enough, there was a swollen red spot someone could mistake for a huge hicky.

“What have you put on it?” I asked.

“They sprayed it with Solarcaine which works for about an effing second. If the buzzing SOB,” he pronounced it as in someone crying, “had bitten me here,” he touched his heart, “I’d be effing dead.”

“Dommage,” I said.

“Who knows what the H else bit me,” he said. “I gotta change my shirt.”

I followed him into the living room.

“These people live in the effing woods,” he resumed ranting from his bedroom. “They buy the $100,000 acre, the quarter of a mil contemporary gets smacked up by local carpenters who piss in the walls as they put them up, they put in the tiled pool, and then they tell you what a terrific effing thing it is to live in Nature. Ef Nature! That’s yuppie talk for not having the real bucks to live where they cut down the effing trees and then landscape. Dina Merrill doesn’t live with black flies or deer ticks you can be G.D. sure. Old Cliff Robertson’s not on A.T.& T.’s payroll with effing fly bites on his chino ass, I can promise you that.”

“So you had a good time,” I said. “I thought I’d been asleep for days.”

“Day and a half,” Angelo said, back in front of the air conditioner. “Why’d you turn it off?”

“It cooled down.”

“Where? At the Pole? Which reminds me, don’t you have to appear or something at The Green Door? I guess Miss Pam scared your onions off.”

I was standing in my underwear and looked down. I didn’t feel like talking about Pamela Hall or vegetables with Angelo.

Departing, Angelo ordered, “Leave the AC effing on.”

“Within hearing,” said a voice in my head as he was closing the door. “Within hearing,” I echoed aloud.

“What?” Angelo turned back.

“Never mind,” I said.

But the inspiration dazed me. Yes, when Ms. Pamela Hall heard that title and what went with it, our relationship might well begin on mutually attractive footing.

By noon, I had pulled myself together enough to leave the apartment, cross the street, and have lunch at the Ocean Diner crowded with summer tourists. Every new place I entered felt like another voyage of the Tardis, Dr. Who’s time machine. A TV character, Dr. Who had been influential in my formative years, and I was later happy to discover the show survived through ever-changing actor incarnations.

There was a small newsstand at the diner entrance offering The New York Times, Newsday, and local papers from Isle End, Port Wagner (the larger town to the west) and South Fork Hampton villages. I bought one of each and sat down to read while I ordered am all-American breakfast. I was not a big breakfast eater, but I ordered bacon and eggs and Cheerios and white bread toast which came with little foil-covered plastic pots of grape jelly (also plastic), orange juice (canned), and tasteless American tea. My eyes ate the front pages of the newspapers, and the words in my native tongue tasted more delicious than anything I had eaten in two years, despite the news of hostages and Iran-Iraq war. War continued also in Afghanistan. There were the usual brutal bombings in Beirut. But in the East Hampton Star, there were portraits of newly-engaged girls. I saw a photo ad for The Green Door that featured me with as Arthur Hopewell. For a second, I didn’t recognize me.

It was a short hike to a car rental place. It doubled as a garage run by a big man in a blue, grease-stained coverall with cut off sleeves. He was friendly once he found out I wasn’t a summer. He was dee-lighted to meet The Merling Man. Mrs. Merling was a great lady, and wasn’t I supposed to get a rental car free with the prize? He gave me what he decided was the best car there, a silver ’86 Olds Ciera. It still had new car breath. He slammed my door closed and leaned into the window, encouraging me to turn on the air conditioner. He gave me quick instructions, said, “She runs beautiful,” and I took off. In France, all I had driven, when I could borrow it, was a rusty Citroen. Eh bien, ca marchait.

He was right, she ran beautiful. The radio was tuned to a Golden Oldies station, suited to the car’s middle age plush. I leaned into my Tardis’s cushioned seat, trying to time travel to my 40th year. I familiarized myself with Isle End’s roads. There was a Main Street and North Road (closer to the Sound). South of Main was a narrow lip of land linked by Ocean Lane. The Green Door was at the western end of Main Street in an old firehouse. Between the theatre and the new red firehouse was a white Methodist church. A Congregational church was in the center of town, its original 17th -18th century cemetery spread on a fenced rise beside and beyond it. On Main Street were the town’s stores, but at either end of the shops were houses there since the 1600’s. Several were historical restorations, museums crowded with tourists on this summer day. Tiger lilies leaned out of front yards also crowded by blue hydrangea bushes, and along the road in the shade of old trees, chicory grew as weeds on long blue-flowered stalks they called blue sailors up here in the North.

“Good day, Sunshine,” the Beatles sang on my merry Oldsmobile. I saw The Green Door before I made the left into its parking lot. It was a brick building with an expanded white frame rear addition. The front doors were green. It looked like a real, respectable theatre, nothing like the back alley affair where my Girl had first been onstage in Paris.

The lobby floor was paved in black and tiles, and the walls covered in green embossed paper. In twos, I took the stairs that led to Frank Marino’s office. He waved me in and reintroduced me to Lowell Sykes.

“Lowell here was just saying farewell,” Frank said.

I’d thought he’d done just that the other day, but said nothing.

“Too bad you missed the party last night,” Lowell said. “Everyone was there to say good-bye. I was very touched.”

“Well, Lowell, I guess it’s just lucky the kid got to meet you at all before your meteoric rise to fame,” Frank said.

“It is terrific good luck,” Lowell agreed.

I couldn’t be sure if he meant for himself or me.

“Anyway, Frank,” Lowell went on, “it looks like you have a strong replacement here,” as he moved reluctantly to the door. “I just hope,” he said, not remembering my name, “I hope you don’t my saying this, but I do hope my meteoric rise will keep me a bit ahead of you young fair-haired heroes. And maybe, perhaps, one day our paths will cross, and there will be a part for me, a major part, keep in mind,” he winked at Frank, “in a play you write for Broadway or Hollywood.”

I saw us as comets colliding in outer space. Frank got up and walked Lowell out of the office and down the hall to the stairs. Returning, Frank said, “Everything going okay, kid?

“So far.”

“People have dreams, and sometimes when they come true, even so, it’s hard to leave what you know.”

“Lowell’s got a great voice.”

“Personally, I don’t believe in pots of gold at the ends of rainbows. Tell you the truth,” he said, sitting down behind his desk, “I’m satisfied with rainbows.”

The phone rang and he picked it up. I thought of my mother on the subject of rainbows. In the Bible, they were emblems of God’s promises which He invariably broke. When Frank hung up, he was grumbling.

“This place should be called In the Red Door.” He did some quick calculations on a pad, grumbled some more and looked up. “So. What can I do for you this a.m.?”

“I don’t know. Where do I begin?”

“I don’t know, kid. There was only one other Merling winner who was assigned here, six years back, a real lioness of a girl, a little older than you. She’s got a Pulitzer now, you know her? Anyhow, she never asked me a damn thing, and I never thought to give her a suggestion. What’d you do over there in France?”

“Studied. Got a Master’s. In French drama.”

“No, I meant how’d you get started writing your play? Isn’t that what you wanted to know?”

“Mr. Marino—“

“Frank—“

“Frank. I didn’t know I was going to have to write a whole new play. And one acts besides? Also, is my car covered by the Merling? Guy at the garage thought so.”

“Ah, now that’s my kind of question. This Artistic Director business tends to tickle my rear, tell you the truth. I got into this whole thing backwards, fell in, I think.”

“How?”

“I was a fireman, a volunteer fireman, for years. When I sold out my old plumbing business, I kept hanging around, still volunteering when they moved into the old firehouse here… Anyway, plenty of good-looking ladies,” he winked. “And the people are nuts, which is nice. If there’s a moral in that, what is it?”

“I have no idea. About anything.”

“Lookit, you just take a walk down the hall and speak to Herself.”

“Pamela Hall.” I liked saying her name. “She’s something, isn’t she?”

“Well put, kid.”

“It’s Arthur. Hopewell.”

“I know your name. What do you want to be called?”

“What do you want to call me?”

“Late for dinner. Ha. If I had a dog, I’d call him Prince.”

“In Paris, my friends called me Artur. He’s one of Babar’s elephant children.”

“I’ll look into that insurance question about the car. Stop by later, and I’ll let you know the story. Hey, do me a favor, Prince, grab another armful of those manuscripts there,” he pointed to the bookcase, “and take them to Herself. I’ve been thinking about painting that bookcase for months. I should probably replace the sagging shelves first.”

There was nothing to do then but what I’d avoided and desired since I’d awakened, to go and face Pamela Hall. At least, I comforted myself, I had a royal title. Her office door was open. I tapped on the molding to get her attention. She was sitting in an easy chair, newly-brought into the room. It was an upholstered chair covered in some English-looking flowered material. She was wearing a white skirt and a blue blouse. Her blond hair was loose except for a barrette of a wave across her brow. Those eyes were still green.

“Hi there,” she said, waving me into the room. It was much bigger than Frank’s office. It looked like it had been a common room for the fireman back in the day. Sunlight poured into the large windows facing Main Street. The floor was covered in tan linoleum, with a big wooden table surrounded by cheap wood chairs in the center of the room. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases had bottom shelves sagging under piles of scripts; top shelves held cardboard boxes of things unexamined for years. She followed my eyes around the room.

“It won’t stay like this,” she assured me. “I’ve already had this brought in,” she patted the arm of her chair, “and I’ve ordered several other things. I think setting is an essential element into any drama, on or off the stage.”

“I like setting.” I looked around the room again, feeling like a first grader facing the Teacher. I put down the scripts I was holding.

“Would you like to see the theater? The stage?” she said. “Did you see it the day you arrived?”

“No.”

“C’mon, then,” she commanded, and I obeyed like a good dog.

Downstairs, she chose the front rather than the back way which would have taken us out onto the stage first. We entered the back of the lobby as any theatergoer would.

Pamela said, “I have a reason for this, to give you the expectant feeling of your audience. I try to have a reason for everything.”

“I feel expectant,” I agreed.

“Two hundred seventy seats,” she said, with a wave. “I feel as if I’ve been here for several lifetimes instead of just two days.”

The seats were green velvet and the walls were darker green than the lobby, with brass wall sconces that turned gold when she flipped a switch. The carpet underfoot had a green and gold fleur de lis pattern.

“What a beautiful theater,” Pamela said, “funded by the Merling Foundation. Her hand is everywhere. I look forward to meeting her, don’t you?”

“Meeting her?”

“Esther Merling lives nearby. She only used to summer here, before her husband died, but then she moved and became involved in the community. I believe it was her involvement with the early Green Door that led to her support for young playwrights like yourself. Every one of the eight before you has gone on to great success. You must be very excited. I know I was when the Foundation contacted me.”

“This is all news to me.”

She looked at me, tilting her head. I felt she was questioning the Foundation’s judgment where I was concerned.

“Have you read the play?” I asked.

“Which one?”

We walked up the side steps to the stage and went to the center, facing the audience.

“Mine.”

“Oh, of course, yours” she laughed. “I’m sorry! Frank has avalanched me with hundreds, and there you were just now, bringing in more! I’m going to have to tell him I have already planned out our season of ten plays, including you new ones, and I have plans for building — there’s plenty of room, land, that the theatre owns.”

“Pamela.”

“Yes?”

I found I was mute.

“I read your play,” she said. “I was sent a copy.”

I hated that moment. “I do have an idea for a new play,” I lied.

“Good,” she brightened and patted my arm as she had the upholstered chair’s. Her hand was cool. “Tell me all about it.”

“I’ve got to get something substantial on paper first.”

“That’s insecurity. This is a group effort. A play is stone soup.”

I knew the tale: a hungry traveler involves a town in the cooking of his ‘stone’ soup by getting them to contribute all the food. I’d heard the story in French from young communists at the Sorbonne.

“Well, maybe it’s soup or maybe it’s blank paper with my name on the rejected script.”

She ignored me and took the stage in a 360 turn, spreading her arms out and then clapping her hands together as she stopped. I knew it should repel me, but it had the opposite effect. She fairly sang, still acting, “Let me show you the back rooms and understage.”

I followed her backstage. Even in a loose white skirt, she presented a primo view. By the time we got back to her office, I heard myself spilling secrets. “It’s tentatively about a congressional hearing…”

She looked at me.

“In fact, it’s tentatively called WITHIN HEARING…”

Her green eyes made me think of the submerged ice in icebergs. “And?” she said.

“Well, it’s about the idea of hearings.”

“And,” she repeated.

“And I think it’s going to be a very American play. That’s what I’m after. Tentatively.”

“Sounds tentative.”

“Well, basically. At this point in time.”

“And so, that’s it.”

“It is,” I said, “at this point in time.”

A year of this, I thought.

The thing is you forget how much work it is to create a life. For the first seven years, Nature and family do the job, and for twelve years some school system does what it can to remind matter that evolution is an ongoing process. At 18, you pretty much have to decide which track to take, only it doesn’t look like train tracks that always neatly converge to a point in the optically-deluded distance. Instead, the future looks like a plank that pirates present to their captives. Then for some, there’s college and grad school available, more promise of widening vistas and structured hours. In Paris, even the incredibly loose grad system punctuated my life’s sentences for me.

Then Fate took a hand and picked me up and dropped me down in Isle End. I would have had to go somewhere when my two years in France were over, but I’d had nothing in mind. I concentrated on the moment or problem at hand; writing Green and Golden Girlhad been a problem to solve. Could I write a play better than the ones I’d read and seen? Writing a play wasn’t as important, say, as practicing medicine. Sometimes, it seemed quaint to have lived in the past when writers believed, like Browning, that they were God’s agents, the conscience of the earth. No one was more amazed than I that a French audience liked my play and found so little derogatory to say about an American production. And then to win the Merling, a free trip home, a theatre, an apartment, an ’85 Oldsmobile?!

For days into weeks after my initial shock of return, I wandered around in a dazed condition like perpetual jet lag, wondering how on earth William Saroyan wrote a five act play in six days. The funny thing was, everyone who met me thought I was a playwright; I knew I was only a guy who’d written a play. Maybe I was a nuclear physicist; if I built a bomb, I would be.

Now I didn’t have just my own life to create, I had to create new characters for a new play. I didn’t know if I could do it, or if I wanted to. I liked Pamela’s stone soup collaboration even less. Who was this woman, after all? Just because she had everything I ever wanted in a woman — a beating heart – was I going to let her shape my life, create me? What shape was her life in, anyway?

To give me something to do when I wasn’t taking long walks or staring at the narrow ceiling in my apartment cell, I hung around for rehearsals for the Labor Day production. No one questioned my comings or goings. Or even noticed them. They had work to do. Pamela was starting the season with The Little Foxes, a play I knew well because my idea of learning about playwrighting had included the laborious longhand copying out of the Hellman play. It had taken a lot of time. I didn’t like the play. There was no way out of its suffocation. It was like the part of an action movie that closes in on the trapped hero and heroine. It was like the structure of some crystals too rigid to allow for change.

The cast members weren’t much interested in my literary criticism. My roomie Angelo was concerned with learning my repertoire of French obscenities. During those early rehearsals, I also met Liz Prager, a 40-something actress playing Regina, the lead bitch. Liz had a thin, birdlike face and two teenage sons who often showed up at the theatre to cadge money, although her husband was the accountant. Hank Feit was a Jewish guy around Liz’s age. He looked like Glenn Ford’s brother; I liked him. He was playing Regina’s invalid husband, Horace. There were, altogether, eight fulltime Equity actors in The Green Door company. The outstanding one for me was Jenny DePinna. She was my age, a brown-eyed brunette with a body she carried like a doublescoop ice cream cone, requiring you to take a lick because she was melting fast.

At our first private meeting, after she was part of a group reading around a table backstage, Jenny led me into the costume room. In the distant past, it had been the firemen’s closet. She found us a spot on the floor under and between the crowded racks of clothes and pinned an unresisting me.

“Have you got anything?” Jenny said.

“Drugs? Nah.”

“No, I mean any disease.”

I must have shaken my head. Something, I know, rattled in my ears.

“Then do you have a condom?” she demanded.

It was a fast as a fantasy.

“You’re skinny,” she said, sliding her hand up my arm and along my shoulder, tapping as if I were a cantaloupe. “All muscle… take off your glasses… What big brown eyes you have, my dear,” she kissed, “…what lips,” she kissed again, “and what blond hair!” through which she moved her fingers to hold me more tightly for a climactic kiss. “Do you do it any different in Paris?” she breathed.

“Just more slowly,” I managed.

“Any better?” she asked, stripping.

Briefly, I wondered about the costume room door being ajar, but the theatricality of the performance seemed to excite her, and I was no critic. Her concluding sigh was complimentary, but I emerged from the encounter as I did all that followed, feeling something like gum she kept overnight on a bedpost. I thought perhaps I was part of her Method of getting up for a part. That first time, in what past generations used as a cigarette break, the ritual sharing of smoke like a peace pipe, I asked, “Why me?”

The question had no meaning for her.

“I just like to do it, don’t you?”

There was a meeting of mind and body on this point. Perhaps I nodded.

“Readings get so tense,” Jenny said.

“About disease,” I said, picking up our earlier conversational thread, “aren’t you concerned about – “

“AIDS? I had the condom, didn’t I? And I don’t ever do backdoor or with gays. I don’t use drugs. I wouldn’t even smoke grass anymore. It’s so high school!”

I admitted she had the subject licked, diction that brightened her eyes anew, but I felt off balance. I didn’t mind being what was available, god knows; I was afraid – Jesus, it makes me smile now – that she might be a good enough little actress to be hiding, harboring sentimental ideas about me for the future. The future was another pirate’s plank.

Jenny dressed, checked her watch, and looked down at me, returning to my first question. “If not you…?” she shrugged cheerfully, leaving me on the floor, looking up at the clothes rack with the 19th century costumes hanging from it and thinking, qui donc.

Townships in South Africa were ringed by black smoke and white police, and I began to write Within Hearing. I took over the small kitchen table. Angelo didn’t complain since he rarely ate in the apartment. When he did, he ate standing, staring out the front window onto Main Street. We had begun to ignore each other well. I had one scene of a first act on paper when Pamela phoned me on an August morning.

“On my schedule,” she said, her voice shaping her face in my mind, “it’s time for two things.”

My pulse leapt.

“Sets for Little Foxesand a review of what you’ve accomplished so far.”

“I didn’t know there was a due date,” I said. “I could use a copy of that schedule.”

“Don’t be like that. I don’t want you under any pressure,” Pamela said.

“How do you want me?”

“You don’t have to show me anything now, Arthur.”

“Well, I mean. Just to have some warning here. Diable.”

“Sois sage, copain,” she said. “Junior year abroad,” she explained, “plus numerous vacances.”

“What’s happening with the sets?” I changed direction.

“Don’t ask.”

“I saw drawings in Frank’s office –“

“—for cost approval –“

“They looked good enough to frame and hang. I could use some decoration in this apartment,” I added in what I hoped she’d hear as an invitation to feminize bachelor quarters.

“Yes, the set designer is a wonderful artist, but laconic – I have to go out to his place today. Would you like to come along? You can show me what you have.”

My mouth went dry.

“I’m too busy to pick you up,” Pamela continued. “Come get me in an hour. Lunch, work-in-progress, and sets,” I heard her check these off a list, and then the click of the phone that had touched her lovely ear as it was returned to its cradle.

To read Part II, see The Green Door – Part II