The peristalsic aesthetic according to Hopewell; The World Series and Apple Island

Invaders were coming from the West as they had historically, when intending to force open China for trade. Maybe all barbarians come from the West. Consider the Californization of America. Think of all the tribes that assaulted India and how the language spread. Think of the Greeks and Troy. Ponder the Goths, from north and west attacking Rome. Finally, think of the producer and director from the West Side of NYC who came to visit the week before the Labor Day production at The Green Door. Smiling. Bearing gifts.

Pamela had ignored my mumblings about Nothing. She was too busy writing her own anti-invasion playbook with Frank Marino. The plan was to show just how yahoo the Island market was, how it couldn’t sustain another major theatre on the North Fork. “Go compete with Guild Hall in East Hampton,” Pamela said in skull sessions in Frank’s office. I eavesdropped as I walked up and down the hall between their offices, counting the tan and brown squares of linoleum. I was worried the Merling money would stop appearing in my bank account since I’d stopped writing. I needed new clothes. I’d been living in two pairs of jeans, one pair of chinos, and one white summer suit (which had looked okay in Paris, but after a third year of summer service had more ink on it than any paper on my desk).

There was a men’s store in Port Wagner. Fall clothes were importantly displayed in its window with autumn paraphernalia like gourds and dry grasses tied together into harvest bouquets. I’d felt a cameleon urge to blend in. Or escape detection. I got a haircut and paced in front of the clothing store. I looked like I was casing it.

Pamela’s plan included all manner of havoc to unfold when the barbarian hoardes arrived. In the midst of chaos on Frank’s desk, a folder of financial information was going to be craftily available, its printout easy for a kindergartener to analyze. It would reveal (bogus) cost overruns, loss of subscription audience, and projected problems facing The Green Door for the upcoming year.

“Won’t this make them think we’re ripe for the picking?” I overheard Frank ask.

“All right. We’ll leave out the loss of subscribers. They’ll see part of a dress rehearsal so that they can see it’s not us,” Pamela said, “it’s population density. We’ve got the niche. This area can’t support two fulltime theatres. Better to scotch the serpent in its shell…”

Deaf to Pamela’s mixup of Macbeth and Julis Caesar, Frank said, “We best not bend over too far backwards being nice to them. They’ll smell a fish.”

I thought it was a rat, but I wasn’t in the conversation, I was in the hall. Maybe in Isle End, it was a fish.

During the strategic rehearsal, Pamela sat ten rows back from the stage, watching the costumed cast in I-Beam’s sets. I sat a few rows to her right, alert for both theatrical events about to start. The first Little Foxes set was true to the stage directions, The living room of the Gidden’s home, in a small down in the deep South, the spring of 1900. Before the play, the cast milled about the stage, admiring props and checking their marks. A piano had just been wheeled into place. Pamela complained about the visible wheels, and I-Beam immediately solved the problem by placing a Victorian loveseat in the curve of the piano and two small end tables in front of the legs. He looked enormous onstage. Jenny, who played a fin de 19th siecle teenager, was dressed in a red-flowered yellow dress with red velvet bows on it and in her curled, wigged hair. She looked younger, as intended, innocent as a five year old.

Where was the lively writher I knew so well? She winked at me out in the audience and sat down at the grand piano. Then she started playing the heavy bass of a top 10 rock song. Angelo, playing her conniving older cousin in aging makeup and a banker’s cutaway suit, started singing the lyric, and then the rest of the cast, including Hank Feit as the white-haired heart-diseased father, began to dance like ecstatic pagans. Pamela bent her head and pressed her forehead into her palm.

I called across to her, “I didn’t know Jenny could play.”

“Play who?” Pamela said.

Her reply startled me, but I was distracted when Jenny changed tune to one she sang loudly as Angelo joined her, “One fine DAY, you’re gonna want me for your GIRL…” She thumped through the song to its last bars as her onstage colleagues danced until they applauded themselves, the stage lights dimmed, and the cast filed off into the wings.

Pamela called, “Curtain!” and the play began.

It was going along so well that I hated to be distracted when the New York invaders walked down the aisle. I looked them over and correctly guessed: short, battery-energized man (director) and richly dressed tall woman (producer). Pamela acknowledged them as they sat beside her, but she continued writing copious notes on a yellow legal pad. It was near the end of Act II, and we were deep into the corruption of America by industrialization. Two middle-aged brothers were realizing they could steal bonds they had only hoped to borrow.

“How soon can you get them?”

“Today. Right now. They’re in the safe deposit box and—”

“I don’t want to know where they are.”

The other brother understood as the White House basement boys had.

“We will keep it secret from you.”

Moments later, down the perfectly bannistered stairway ran Jenny as the innocent girl. I felt like the butcher who believed he had known the lamb.

Liz Prager descended the stairway behind Jenny, as her monster mother. Liz wore a highnecked green dress and a dark, coiled wig. The scene concluded with terrific effect. Pamela called, “CURTAIN!”

No curtain fell. Liz just nodded and walked offstage with the others. The NYC observers applauded strenuously. I couldn’t move. I-Beam appeared from backstage and hammered nails into the staircase where Hank had leaned.

The West Side producer called to I-Beam, “Fabulous set,” and the giant nodded to her, but kept banging away. Then Pamela called me over. I managed to arrive at the end of her introduction:

“— of The Green and Golden Girl, this year’s Merling winner.”

They did not look into my mouth to count my teeth, but the director asked, “Working on something now?” He was wearing an excellent chino suit, brown plaid shirt, brown tie. I coveted it all. Pamela leaned toward me and patted my hand before I could answer him.

“Our Arthur,” she said, “is hard at work. Isle End is inspiring him.”

“How?” the director said pleasantly.

I felt mildly stoned, as if I’d smoked a joint. “It’s hard to say,” I heard myself say fatuously, “which is why I write it down.”

Pamela led them away, “…to meet Frank Marino…He’s done extensive market research about this area…”

My knees felt soft. I sat down. Our Arthur. The stage parlor was dark and looked like my grandmother’s house.

In satellite photos from the dark of outer space, forests appeared red. Circling in a jet before landing, one saw the city below as a glowing birthday cake. Taking the long view eliminated all the details where the meanings were. Who could be interested in the survival of a small theatre in Isle End? Who could appreciate what a theatre was for? I believed if I could know one thing, I would have the point from which all circles derived.

As I was not writing, but only pondering, I concentrated on the World Series race. By the end of August, it was obvious that the New York Mets had the National League East pennant, but the games continued as cardiac and spiritual workouts. Ten run leads. Ninth inning turnarounds. They just couldn’t lose. Angelo’s beer and 13 inch TV became the focus of my life. When guilt prodded me about (not) working, I told myself that thinking baseball was the best way around the bases to reallly American playwrighting. Pamela, who had scared away the West Siders with Frank’s help, was more than skeptical. She insisted on the confessional upchucking from me that she’d said went against her grain.

“It’s a great paradox,” I argued with Pamela. “Playwrights are introverts forced to cooperate with their natural enemies, extroverts. Showfolk love to strip fast, to go from sex to autopsy without dialogue before, during, or after. To act. I did my emotional two-step in Green and Golden Girl. I don’t want to tango again in Paris or anywhere else.”

As I paced around her office, she looked up from her desk.

“Arthur. What happened in Paris?”

“What is this?” I said, sprawling in her chair, my legs over the flowered arms.

“It’s chintz. Glazed cotton. Paris?”

“A German girl at the Sorbonne. She was studying to be an entomologist. Loved bugs. You know the German mind the first time you hear their word for butterfly: Schmetterling. My first 4th of July in Paris, she helped me locate a party of Americans on a rooftop on the Left Bank. I was homesick. Someone had brought a couple of cases of Millers. The pretzels were German. The cheese was French. We could see the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. We drank and missed hamburgers and hot dogs and Cajun cooking—“

“Someone from Louisiana?”

“Yeah, someone was, but we were all remembering Hallowe’ens and Thanksgivings. Much drinking. Started talking baseball, lit sparklers and sang the Star Spangled Banner. I drank so much, I was patriotic as a Marine.”

“Yes, we saw that in Green and Golden Girl. Your sentimental mania.”

“Nice. I’m not homesick or drunk now. I’m home, more or less, and sober. I’ve got a Rumplestilskin theory of artistic creation. You never actually see the dwarf alchemist do the deed. I say, art comes out of Rump’s alimentary canal. He eats straw, and he…emits…bricks of gold. Hurts at both ends. This is the Peristalsic Aesthetic of Arthur Hopewell.”

“Write some of your speeches down. But I am not hopeful about a play about baseball,” Pamela concluded.

I was not hopeful about anything except the Mets. I was content to watch them triumph like heroes against all comers. Labor Day weekend arrived, and the opening of the first production at The Green Door. I missed the Thursday night dress rehearsal because the Mets were playing. Jenny came back to the apartment and said Angelo was driving down to East Hampton for the night. She was relaxed about opening night the next evening. Friday night, I was at the theatre because Pamela had ordered me there to introduce me to major subscribers.

“You must understand, Arthur, that you’re their investment in magic. Most people have none in their lives. They run a dreary business or take the kids to Brownies or Cub Scouts. You are a magician.”

Pamela annoyed me, waving her wand over me, but I liked how flushed her face got when she finally snapped, “You’ve got the talent, and you’ve got the town. How dare you turn your back on what you can do? To be able to act is life’s greatest gift. Do you think ghosts like to walk through doors? Don’t you think a ghost would prefer to be able to turn a doorknob and hug and kiss?”

“You had me at magic,” I said.

She stalked away.

But on opening night, I was obediently out front early. I observed the arriving audience: ‘summers’ and townspeople I recognized, like the baker over whose store Angelo and I lived, there with his extended family. Then, from backstage, a loud moan rose like a dark cloud. Some of the audience turned toward it. When I got to the wings, there was turmoil. Jeff, the lights man, was hiding by the board, and shook his head in warning at me as I passed him.

“They lost the damn costumes,” he said.

“Merde.”

“No shit,” he said, “it gets better.”

I stayed away from the dressing rooms. I saw the tall bulk of I-Beam in a dim corner of black curtain. I moved toward him, avoiding a grim-faced Frank Marino and a scurrying Pamela Hall.

“The cleaners fouled up,” I-Beam said. “Sent boxes of leotards instead of the costumes. Black leotards.”

“And the cleaners are—“

“Closed – not enough time anyway – they’re going ahead.”

“How?”

I-Beam’s shoulders moved in what in a mortal would be a shrug; his anatomy suggested tectonic plates and mountains heaved up.

Backstage took on sinister quiet. Pamela left the dressing room area. Jenny emerged wearing black tights and a leotard with a puckered front that advertised her breasts. In demure contrast, a pink ribbon was tied around her waist and a similar small bow was baretted in her hair. Seeing me, she rushed over and put herself in my arms.

“It’s gonna work fine, don’t you think?” she asked.

Her heart was pounding. “You bet,” I said.

“Say it in French.”

Which what she said to me in bed to arouse her. I mumbled and kissed her, and she ran to join the cast. Backstage, it looked like a modern ballet was about to start, not The Little Foxes. I made my way back to my seat.

The lights were dimming quickly. In the last flicker of a wall sconce, I felt tripped by déjà vu: some elderly woman’s face. I lost sight of her in the dark and fumbling to my seat. When the lights came up again on I-Beam’s set, the applause distracted me. Then Laura Jones and Paul McCormick, two black actors, came onstage, and the play began. They looked ridiculous in the black leotards, and the audience whispered and giggled. Then a white actress followed them on, also in leotard, and Liz Prager and Jenny, all gamely obeying the dictum the show must go on.

At intermission, loud reviews ran from frustration to anger. A short,stout woman apologized to her sun-burned husband, “I had no idea they were avant garde,” she whined. “ I thought it would be like Bette Davis in summer stock.”

I-Beam’s presence was a good distraction in the lobby. An Isle End woman who looked like a whooping crane complimented the set and told him, “Your paintings should be on display here for the ‘summers’ to buy.”

“By Thanksgiving,” he said, “I am getting things together for a show.”

I couldn’t watch or eavesdrop anymore when Pamela arrived, became the center of attention, and offered me around like an hors d’oeuvre. No one was impolite enough to tell her what they thought of her “fresh vision,” but they were unconvincing when they said they were considering become subscribers and getting neighbors to join The Green Door. But then a tall man appeared at Pamela’s elbow, taking her hand and putting a card in it.

“With proper publicity,” he said, “you should draw an audience here from Nassau and Suffolk counties, even in the winter. Call me, Ms. Hall.”

Pamela thanked him half-heartedly, but he held onto her hand. Her face reddened.

“Call me,” he repeated, patting her hand. Then he placed it in mine.

We continued to hold hands as he joined the remnant of audience stoically returning to their seats; most had rushed out to their cars at the start of intermission. When the third act finally ended, there were no curtain calls. The reviews in the weekly papers were pans, and by the end of the first week of Pamela Hall’s reign, subscriptions had flattened. Even with the return of the costumes, The Little Foxes ran for only six of its scheduled eighteen days. In the East Hampton Star, an article about Guild Hall’s concern about competition from “the renaissance of The Green Door” helped morale a bit, but most of the actors felt angry and blamed Pamela’s bad judgment for all their sorrows.

She could be heard talking to herself in her office, muttering about never getting to Apple Island this way. But I never saw her actually lose her cool. It didn’t occur to me that she might be one of those people with loads of energy, but no real talent.

In Isle End, Apple Island meant the place you sailed to when you were in love, or that happy.