Chapter 2… Descriptive of the playwright’s August experiences and a freak accident in Africa.

My expectation of lunch with Pamela Hall kept me from sitting still at the kitchen table and pretending I could write. I got out of the apartment and wandered around the village green to an old cemetery behind the white Congregational Church. Places like this were pictured in history books: the moss-blackened tombstones carved with homilies, tilted ones with the same name as the hardware store in town – graveyards were the text of a community opened to its stoniest pages.

Mid-August, there was a break in the humid, hot weather. A bite of autumn sharpened the air. The light in the cemetery came to me through clearer lenses. I thought as I walked above the old bones, what a humble graveyard this one was compared to those along the southern Mississippi around Natchez where I’d gone on a dig one sweltering Southern summer. 300 years earlier, the first emigrating Europeans had died there and been buried in Western Hemisphere earth. I’d imagined future academics with their careful tools, discriminating my bones from the layer I walked upon. The Mound Builders (Lanford Wilson had already mined the metaphor) around Natchez had an absolute monarchy with a king titled The Great Sun. This humble Protestant cemetery in Isle End contained namesakes of Benjamin and Reuben, and all those other sons of Jacob who’d stuffed their brother Joseph down a well and sold him into slavery.

I strolled out of the cemetery toward a windmill crowded with tourists on this August day at the western end of town, well past The Green Door. It was a long walk there and back, but the air was cool. It only took several cultures and epochs of time to calm me down about having lunch with Pamela Hall.

From the apartment, I drove to pick her up at the theatre. A dark green Jaguar sedan passed me. It went by so quickly, I didn’t see the driver, but I had the uncanny sensation that no one was at its wheel.

Pamela Hall was wearing a pink dress and a pink headband holding back shiny hair. She got herself quickly into the car, although I tried to open the door for her. If I’d driven straight to the set designer’s house right then, she never would have missed lunch. As it was, she only picked at what she ordered. I also worked over an enormous platter I had no appetite for. I thanked her again for the barbecue she’d invited me to the previous weekend. It had been lavish: platters of skewers of shrimp and scallops, strange-colored mushrooms, and salads sprinkled with herbs.

“That was nothing,” she dismissed modestly, stirring a lemon around in her iced tea. “Thanksgivings, in my other life, I’d use the guest house as the dining room for 50 people—and I prepared most of the dinner in the weeks before. I even made pumpkin soup and served it in the biggest pumpkin I’d grown in my own garden.”

She saw me looking at her absent wedding band.

“One of the things I admire about you, Arthur, is how you keep your past to yourself. I don’t like confessional literature, in poetry or plays. I prefer the Classical to the Romantic

I looked down at my plate. Half of the hot turkey sandwich, with its little paper cup of cranberry sauce on the side, was a splendid still life. She admired ‘things’ about me.

“Tell me about your play,” Pamela said.

The cranberry sauce continued to impress me. Finally, I heard myself saying, “Well, there’s not much to it yet. Roughly, there’s one scene.”

“You must have other scenes in mind.”

“Must I?”

“What specifically do you want to write about? You said Congressional hearings.”

“Yes.”

“So what are we doing here, then?” she said.

I looked straight into her green eyes, and they looked impatiently back at me. They looked oddly out of place on that lovely face and yet were her most compelling feature.

“One of the things I admire about you, Pamela, is how you know specifically where you are going. Where can I buy a map?”

She frowned but kept her voice encouraging. “I want to make The Green Door the top regional theatre in the Northeast. Then I want to make it a model for regional theater nationally. What do you want, Arthur?

I looked at her, but said, “My needs are humble.” A waitress approached. “I want a hot fudge sundae.”

“Anything else?” Pamela asked before the server could.

My dessert order was taken – Pamela wanted no more – and then I added, “I want to know why a woman like you isn’t married. Or something.”

“In adolescence, one bares one’s soul more easily than one’s body.” She moved then, something like a shudder, like a cat rippling water off its back.

In any case, it was a feline moment. My ice cream arrived, and I ate it so fast, my forehead ached. She just watched me, saying nothing, until I put the spoon down.

Then, she stood up as she said her line, “Let’s go see our set designer. He never answers his phone.”

I tried to get the check, but she took it as if I were her son.

Even the edge has an edge. Though Isle End was the last town on the north branch of Long Island, the center of town where I lived was still several miles from the sheer end of the peninsula surrounded by Sound and Atlantic. As we drove east, the two lane road became narrower, no longer rimmed by shoulder but by Queen Anne’s lace, blue sailors, and a dense green shrub. It was the edge of a thin-treed forest of scrub oak and pine, moss-mottled and not many yards deep which opened onto fields belonging to farmers resisting both history and encroaching developers from the City.

I’d never liked places where opposites met. Like water and land. Isle End compounded the unease for me by being dotted by small bridges over sudden water-filled depressions all the way out to the Point where the Wagner Estate stood. It was as if the land was always unpredictably falling away beneath me. The Wagner Estate officiated at the end of the island. It had been the home of the man for whom Port Wagner was named, a whaling tycoon of Long Island’s East End 18th-19th century glory days. The Estate was a national historical landmark and had been restored about ten years earlier. It rose in European splendor like the great houses of Newport, but here it was all alone, an oddity among the farms and lacy land and seascapes.

Pamela directed me to the right, and I turned onto a dusty road marked by a boulder. Up this road, the land rose in a slow incline, trees growing more densely and shading the way. We passed few houses, a couple of acres apart. Pamela kept looking for some identifying mark because the mailboxes bordering the road were numbered without names.

Finally, she pointed and I turned, taking us up a steep driveway to a ranch style house with a wide bay window. Behind a white screened door, the front door was open. We rang the bell and called. No one answered. We walked toward tiger lilies growing in patches of sunlight under pines. At the back of the house was a cement patio with a rusting barbecue and steps leading down to a large pond. The woods were loud with birds and ecstatic cicadas. The undergrowth shivered with all manner of small mammals. I hoped they were only squirrels and chipmunks; snakes remained a vivid Louisiana childhood fear. I tried to keep that thought as much in check as I did my accent.

“Well, where is he hiding?” I said.

“It’s like a fairytale,” Pamela sai

Closer to the pond was a smaller ranch house with more windows and several skylights. Its screendoor was two car garage-wide. Pamela and I both peered inside and saw a huge man leaning against a big table, sanding something.

“C’min,” a giant’s voice said.

I.B. Rainbird stood before us, a head and a half taller than God. His ruddy skin was not sunburned; he appeared part-Native American. He had shoulders like car fenders. Displaying his dirty shoe-sized hands in an explanatory way, he didn’t offer to shake hello.

“We’re coming along fine, Miss Hall,” he said.

He led us to another table where he showed us two models for the sets of The Little Foxes They were perfect replicas of a 19th century parlor and veranda. Above us, the sun came down in shafts of milky light.

Isaac I-Beam Rainbird had played tight end for the Vikings. This was the man who I’d seen catch a 15 yard pass over the middle and run down the field, tackled by player after player who attached to his body like magnets. He’d carried their bodies along with the ball for 35 yards and a touchdown. I felt like kneeling in his presence.

I-Beam, aptly nicknamed, had retired from football and made a career of what had been a hobby. His large paintings leaned against the studio walls. There were scenes of Isle End downtown, of the cemetery where I’d walked that day, and seascapes that included the Wagner Estate. There was only one of a view of an island of flowering trees. It stopped me, and I stood in front of it for a long time while Pamela talked and I-Beam tilted his huge head down to listen to her. I couldn’t help myself, I interrupted her to ask him, “What is this I wish I could afford?”

I-Beam looked over at me. “That’s Apple Island. As I see it.”

“Out east, beyond the Point?” I said. “I’ve heard it’s a storied place.”

He nodded his mythic head.

Pamela continued as if there had been no pause.

“So by the end of this week,” she said, jotting down a date in her notebook and tucking it into her canvas satchel, “we want the cast to be able to do a walk-around— ” she hesitated at his name.

“—I-Beam,” he smiled at her, and then at me, sharing some knowledge of her.

He shepherded us to the screen door. “I promise to drive these flats over in my truck soon’s I can. I could use a little help,” he said to me.

Pamela’s expression made me dread whatever she was about to tell him.

“Oh no,” she said, “Arthur can’t do that. He has to work on his play. He’s the Merling Winner.”

“With good taste,” I-Beam said, gesturing toward his Apple Island canvas.

I found a scrap of paper and wrote down the apartment phone number. “A little help is all I’m likely to be,” I said, “but the spirit is willing.”

Pamela was cheerful when we returned to the car. She felt she’d “accomplished something substantive and substantial,” though I didn’t share her certainty about I-Beam’s delivery of the sets. They would come when they would come. Given my writer’s block, this was a cheering thought to me. For artists, I told myself, the readiness was also all.

As we drove back west toward Isle End, Pamela happily hummed to herself, leaning against the car window. She removed the pink headband, and the breeze tossed her blond hair. Crossing one of the precarious bridges, we passed kids carrying fishing rods. She waved to them as I passed them carefully, and the kids waved back. After that, though, her humming stopped.

I had to swerve when a car heading east zoomed past us. “That effing Jaguar again!” I Angelo-curse

“You’re so impressionable,” Pamela said, turning the radio on. She found a local station, and we heard the voice of Lowell Sykes in a commercial that he must have taped before he’d left for his soap opera.

“When does that start, with Lowell?” I asked.

“This week, I suppose.”

“That’ll be fun, to watch him.”

“He’s a fine artist,” Pamela said. She wasn’t thinking about Lowell. “I wonder if I-Beam ever does portraits.”

“I didn’t see any. Did you like being on a soap?” I asked.

“It was work. People don’t realize how difficult it is.”

“I never saw you. I saw your movies, though.”

“It feels like another person did those things.”

We were near town and the turn toward her house. I hesitated.

“Do you want to –?” I began.

“—go back to The Green Door,” Pamela directed, and I kept driving.

As if acknowledging my disappointment, she repeated, “It feels like another person did those things.”

Autre temps, autre gens. I thought of the persons I had been and of the essays I had written in my mind about Memory and Personality and how much Pamela Hall would not want to hear them. I stopped the car in front of the theatre. I played chastened chauffeur, opening the car door. She gracefully swung her legs out and accepted my unnecessary assistance to the curb.

“You call I-Beam if he doesn’t call you,” she ordered. “I need those sets.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Back at the apartment, I checked to see if Lowell was on TV. The half-expected knock meant that Jenny was having a break from rehearsal. I opened the door to find her in a long shirt over shorts I couldn’t see.

Lowell’s soap opera became apt backdrop for Jenny’s and my foreplay and foreground. The camera focused on the foot of the TV bed, the sheet covering libidinous movement; then we moved to my bedroom where later a camera could’ve panned up to bare-chested me and more discreetly sheet-wrapped Jenny in my arms. She rested against my chest, staring up at the ceiling. I could feel her heart beating slowly through the wall of her back. Jenny had a wiry body and spirit, but for the moment, she felt soft and delicate. I reached over with my free arm and moved her hair back from her forehead.

We heard Lowell Sykes’s unmistakable baritone on TV through my thin bedroom wall. There was something odd about it.

“That’s him!” Jenny said, out of bed and into her shirt and shorts, rushing into the living room.

Presently, with the sheet wrapped around me, I followed her. Angelo walked through the door and in a glance took in the scene. Jenny waved to him over her shoulder; she was familiar with the soap story and starting explaining it. Angelo interrupted her.

“Yeah, I know. He told me,” Angelo said, opening a can of Meister Brau, “that he’s supposed to be French. Will you look at his effing hair?”

Neither noticed Sykes’s moronic accent. French? He sounded like The Lone Ranger’s Tonto. Then he sounded adenoidal, after which Maurice Chevalier appeared. All three personalities spoke various baritones that covered many sins. But not all.

“C’est pour rire,” I said, to demonstrate what French actually sounded like.

“He’s making $1300 a week,” Angelo said, “that effer.”

“You do more commercials than I do,” Jenny scolded. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”

“But, cara, I don’t get effed as often as you do,” he smiled.

“Or as well, I bet,” she said.

Angelo and Jenny exchanged a look. Irritated by their badinage, I went to the bathroom. My hope was that if I stayed in there long enough, they’d both be gone when I came out. I got my wish. Jenny tapped on the door and she had to get back, wouldn’t I come over later and we could have dinner together. Then I heard Angelo go into his room and shut the door. In the bathroom, I read a magazine about Long Island life and found out that what gets served in restaurants as swordfish was often Mako shark. When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers. Was Oscar Wilde never wrong?

Around this time, the afternoon of August 21st (as I saw on the news that night), it was 9 p.m. in Cameroon, Africa. At the bottom of a 300 foot deep lake inside an extinct volcanic crater, a mudslide imbalanced the CO2 levels and turned the lake into a lethal drink whose bubbles exploded into a gas cloud that spread 24 square miles and killed 1746 people and 8300 animals. Even a day later, small pockets of the cloud remained, and little black kids by the riverside, going for a morning swim of drink of water, folded up instantly and died. The thing about the Cameroon disaster was that most of those who died were adults. Most who survived were children younger than 14 years old. I couldn’t stop thinking about those kids who woke up next to dead mothers. The news anchor interviewed a scientist who came up with a way to avoid catastrophes like this one. But the surviving Cameroons said it was the ghosts of the dead who had caused the disaster: they wanted cattle sacrificed to the spirit of the lake.

At the same time, I-Beam’s sets arrived and Labor Day approached. Sykes’s French accent didn’t improve. I got hooked on his dopey soap. How did the writers generate that much dialogue every day when I created nothing? Then, along about the time a psychic dwarf was introduced into Lowell’s soapy storyline, I, The Vision, had a Vision: I could not write a play.

It happened as I sat at the kitchen table, looking at a fresh piece of white paper rolled into the typewriter, and the Cameroon death cloud floated in my mind. I saw the sacred whiteness of the page. What I had to add? What a mathematical breakthrough Zero was. Nothing. I had no cattle. Nothing to do but walk over to The Green Door – driving the Merling-mobile would feel like blasphemy – and make my proclamation to the Queen of Something.

Pamela, however, had other things on her mind when I arrived, sweater tied over my polo shirt in a proper yuppie knot, suggesting I might become a haberdasher. Pamela was no more amused than Queen Victoria because the word was that some City theater group was negotiating the rental of an empty school building in nearby Port Wagner. As if competition from the long-established Guild Hall in East Hampton to the south were not a sufficient thorn in Pamela’s side, this invasion by theatrical Huns threatened Pamela’s vision.

“One Vision at a time,” Pamela said, and hers came first.

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