Gillyflower
Gillyflower
Copyright © 2018 by Diane Wald
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
Published April 2019
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-517-9
E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-518-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956295
For information, address:
She Writes Press
1563 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707
Interior design by Tabitha Lahr
She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
In memory of
James Twyford Mehorter
“Dreams and anguish bring us together.”
—Eugène Ionesco
1. Nora
The pain is essentially gone, but the mystery remains. I went through all the proper stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—sometimes one by one, sometimes simultaneously, but I never did get past the wonder of it. A death would have been easier to endure. For my situation—ours—there exists no comforting ritual, no consolation from relatives or friends, no body of literature that could interpret or advise. The one person with whom I might have shared my loss was the one person whom I could never contact—oh, he was alive, and reachable had I attempted to reach him, but that was unthinkable. Somewhere in the world he was struggling just as I was, in his own (and, I was quite sure, better) way. I have wonderful memories, it’s true; I will always have them. But try as I might to focus on their sweetness, any sweetness always seems to lie, tantalizingly, at center-bottom of a clear, but immeasurably deep, pool of bewilderment.
Let me set things in time: It was 1984. I’d read in the paper that Hugh had been presented with a prestigious award for a new film. The article quoted his very amusing acceptance speech, but there was no photograph. The other papers did not carry one either; I know because I went out and bought them all. I’d considered whether or not to even see the film, knowing I suppose all the time that I would go see it, sooner or later. I knew, too, what would happen when I did: how my heart would thunder against my ribs, drowning out the soundtrack; how my eyes would throb, exhausted from their effort to absorb his every move; and how my mind would thrill to judge and catalogue each shot, not in order to criticize his performance but in an effort to determine: Was he well? Would he live forever? It was not enough to understand that his work would outlast us all; I had to be sure of his continued, actual presence in the world.
All of this is not to say that my life was a ruin, that my every energy was directed toward nourishing the memory of Hugh in my arms, or even that I was—or ever had been—truly “in love” with him in the usual sense. I was what is known as happily married; I had a decent job, good friends, and in recent years my drawings had sold nicely, earning me a small but satisfying reputation. It is not to say either that I did not almost constantly, under the surface of my conscious life, continue to mull over the things that had happened, or that I did not think of him every day. It might have been better to forget, but I was unwilling.
Since I knew I would never find an explanation for what had happened to Hugh and me, the question itself was what I held to, and I tried to make it part of me, to “pray without ceasing,” as mystics do, until my very breath was the question, an involuntary impulse I could rely upon to sustain my need. The only thing I was sure of: Hugh was not a dream. He had been one once, but could never be again. Keeping that in mind, I believed I was luckier than most.
I guess I knew something would happen when I wrote that letter, although of course I told myself nothing ever would. Before I wrote it, I had that feeling you get when the inevitable is dropping down around you, and it’s not the fact that you can’t stop it that bothers you, it’s that you feel you ought to want to stop it but you wouldn’t if you could.
The idea for the letter hit me while I was driving home from New York. The day before I’d seen Hugh in a Broadway play, and I was still trying to recover from what had happened in that theater. My elation, my feeling of having been truly graced by guardian angels, was marred only by an absurd and gnawing sense of shame regarding my role in the incident. Not that I was sorry for what I’d done.
I should explain a few things. Hugh Sheenan is an actor, a movie star. An Irishman, raised in Canada, who’d made his home in England for many years. Even his Irishness appealed to me: my mother’s maiden name is Feeney. I’d had a crush on him as far back as I could remember, a mighty crush considering I was never the crush type and he was never all that popular, except for one or two brilliant but not overwhelmingly well-reviewed films. He was what people call an actor’s actor, but in spite of his astonishing good looks (especially, some say, when he was young, though I am not among them), I think he was rather a hard man for most fans to love. Very tall, spare, dark of hair and eye, heroic, witty, with a reputation for drink and wildness, Hugh nevertheless remained somewhat aloof from his audiences and somewhat untouchable by the press. He allowed them to observe him, and to say what they would, but he never, shall we say, invited them home to tea. One got the impression that he could happily go on practicing his profession on some luminous star in the heady altitudes of art, looking on both adulation and adverse criticism as necessary, but satellite, planets. His intensity caught at my heart—his intensity and his eyes.
Experienced, baroque, heavy-lidded, ever so slightly angry, his eyes radiated a passion and power that made me weak and grateful even when I was watching one of his lesser films. His eyes are black—truly black, not dark brown. The color is clear, with a glint of blue at times, but elusive and often shocking. For years I’d had pictures of Hugh Sheenan on my bulletin board and had always gone out of my way to see his movies and to read things about him, even in the shoddier magazines. However ridiculous the story, just reading his name gave me pleasure. Never did I think I’d get to see him in person; as far as I knew, he rarely left his home in London to come to the States. When he did come he was making movies, and what chance would I ever have to catch him at that? I can’t say it really mattered: he fell into the category of an “if-you-ever-met-him-he-could-never-measure-up” celebrity, well outside the realm of everyday life.
Then one day my younger sister, Fran, came to visit from New York (Fran and my mother both lived there, in the house we’d all shared before my father died). We were in my study and she looked at the tacked-up photo of Hugh over my desk and said, “That’s a great photograph. Have you read the reviews of his new play? They’re really good.”
It took a minute to sink in; I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What play?” I asked.
I must have looked funny because Fran laughed and said, “My God, don’t tell me you didn’t know Hugh Sheenan is making a month-long appearance on Broadway in The Lion’s Share? It just opened.”
I tortured her for details, of which she had few. Then I called my mother and begged her to get tickets, telling her I’d drive down from Boston any weekend that month, or if weekends were sold out, any time at all—somehow I’d get the time off from work. Mom said she’d like to go herself and promised to call me back the next day.
That night I dreamed of Hugh, but it was a puzzling dream. The scene was lifted from one of his recent films (rather a flop, though rather endearing). He appeared to be meditating up on the roof of a church. There was something wonderful in that simple moonlit set: Hugh, sprawled on a pitched shingle roof in a loose white shirt, leaning back on his elbow with a wistful, mysterious look on his face and his fabulous eyes shining with something that can only be described, oxymoronically, as happy grief. I was standing on the lawn below, looking up at him, and at first, he had no idea anyone was there. He continued to muse and I continued to stare, and then finally the power of the stare made him look down. Our eyes caught, hard; the impact stunned me. I woke up. My first thought was to wonder if my mother had had any luck.
I went to work but by ten o’clock I was going crazy, so I called her. Not only had she obtained matinee tickets for the Sunday most convenient for me, but she had gotten first-row seats. They were hideously expensive, but I didn’t care. I called my husband at his office to see if he wanted to go, but he said he couldn’t leave town that weekend and to offer his ticket to my sister. (Rick knew I was nuts about Hugh; he called me “Miss Number-One Fan.”)
When there were still three weeks before the play, I began a countdown, getting more excited by the hour. Though grateful for my mother’s help with the tickets, and grateful to my sister for setting off the whole chain of action, in a way I wished I were going alone. My mother’s oldest (and most annoying) friend, Belinda, was coming too; she and my mother liked to go out together, since both of their husbands had died.
As the time drew near, I entered a very fanciful state. I bought a weird and lovely yellow silk dress to wear to the performance and planned my drive and weekend meticulously. I bought pale yellow stockings to match the dress and took really good care of myself those weeks, as if preparing for a wedding or some other life-altering occasion. I modeled the dress for Rick, who sweetly told me, “It makes you look like a flower.”
When the day came to leave for New York, I was calm, I felt prepared. I drove to my mother’s on the Saturday, and when I went to bed that night in my old room I dreamed the conclusion of the rooftop dream: it shook me to return to it. This time Hugh tumbled from his rooftop in slow motion, his body tumbling over and over and the white shirt loosening from his body like a great flying scarf. He landed near me, in the same leaning posture he’d been in on the roof, and was obviously unhurt. We looked into one another. People began to gather, acting as if they were going to take him away. “He’s mine,” I cried out. “He’s mine.” They fled, and we were alone. For what seemed like years, we stared into each other’s eyes—it was like falling through the deepest sky, without a consciousness of any other state.
I woke feeling scared and delighted, my limbs returning to the waking world slowly, tingling with possibilities, as if they’d just been born.
2. Hugh
My birthday had again arrived (I was sure I’d had one just a few months before), and I was in a bad mood. The play was going well. I was able to see my four-year-old daughter, on loan from my ex-wife, as frequently as I liked, and she, lovely child, did not appear to hate me. Even the early-summer New York weather was not at all hideous, and I had to admit I’d probably be suffering more had I been in London. Yet suffer I did. I was aging like a cheap wine; I was a living cliché. That morning I looked in the bathroom mirror and said, “Sheenan, you are fifty-seven today and you look seventy. Your teeth are nearly the color of sand; your gums have receded another foot at least. The lines on your forehead are as deep as fjords.” I took a whack at my ridiculous black, brown, grey, and blond hair (having been dyed so many times, for so many roles, my hair could no longer decide what color to be) but could not whack it into order. I shaved with my trusty straightedge and took a chunk off one of my famous cheekbones. Bugger.The blood dripped into my mouth and I had to staunch it with paper toweling. Stepping into my shorts, I tore them. They were new. My favorite shirt had somehow become bloodied from the razor attack, so I put on a striped one that made me look like a sports referee of some sort, matched it poorly to an emerald green bow-tie, and hitched on some trousers. Noticed I’d lost more weight. Could find only one of my lucky blue gloves. Shouted for coffee.
“No coffee, darlin’.” The shout was returned by my faithful pit-bull secretary, Leon. I was not allowed coffee. Not allowed spirits of any sort. Not allowed spicy or fatty foods or any kind of physical pleasure whatsoever, though I did manage to smoke my beloved Galoises whenever I could find a secret space in which to indulge. I think Leon was afraid to stop me, and Leon was not afraid of much. When he did carp about my smoking, I always quoted to him the words of the old music-hall song: “A little bit of what you fancy does you good.” But, as I said, he did not offer much resistance to my habit; since my second wife had evaporated, I had chased after nary a woman, had not really even desired any, and possibly Leon felt a messy trail of tobacco grains preferable to a messier trail of females in my bed. As it was, I slept little.
Leon brought in my treacle and gruel—or whatever it was. Since they’d revamped my heart’s valves and my entire circulatory network some years earlier, imposing the strictest and most diabolical dietary restrictions upon me, I’d simply eaten whatever Leon offered, growling and griping to make him feel needed, though in truth I cared very little anymore what I ate.
“Leon,” I said that morning, “as you know, it is my birthday, and I’ll thank you not to offer your condolences, congratulations, or advice. Hold all calls. I’ll be going to the theater early, in the blue car.”
Sensing my mood, Leon said only that he’d call for the car to come ’round in half an hour.
I liked the blue car, an older American thing belonging to a friend in the city who kindly offered me the use of it when I was in the States. It came with a driver who was, happily, a man of few words, and it permitted me more privacy than the limousine the theater provided. Not that I was all that famous anymore; indeed, by this point I think it was more my bizarre appearance that attracted attention than my once-well-known face. Once they’d noticed me, people would sometimes recognize me, but few of them bothered with me other than to comment to their friends on how poorly, or how old, or perhaps simply how odd I looked—if they could even remember my name, that is. I imagined that they stared at me in pity; I was rife with pity for myself. Tall as a giraffe, thin as a weed, I saw myself flapping through the city like a vision of death and doom and felt I must appear that way to others. So I habitually skulked to the theater in the blue car, shuffling in through a side door, and not shuffling out again until an hour after the show, when I would skedaddle to some boring restaurant (preapproved by Leon) or back to the hotel for an insipid meal in my room. I felt like nothing so much as an aging rock crab . . . “a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Eliot, you wry dog.
But the play, as I said, was going well. I was even enjoying it. My costar was a talented, daffy, and quirky-looking young man whose high spirits were often infectious, and the rest of the cast was likewise talented and benign. Truly I had my run of the place—they allowed me liberties with the script I wouldn’t have allowed myself—but then it was my first Broadway appearance, and as a staple of the British stage and bona fide curiosity of a movie star, I was filling the house almost every performance.
Thinking back, I was a man in a trance. Had I been younger (pre-surgery younger) I would have taken to drink, but a drink here and there was all I could handle at that time, and even here and there was not that enjoyable. There remained a little post-surgical pain, which positioned itself for some perverse reason in the general vicinity of my gut and not my chest. I think a lifetime of heart-highs and heartaches had steeled the contents of my chest cavity to a certain level of activity. I relied on my past reputation, my impeccable brandy-swirling style, and a flamboyant pantomime with my cigarette holder to make me look a drunk, and was often rewarded for this successfully rendered minor r
ole by a finger-shaking reference in the next day’s gossip column: “Hugh Sheenan seen swaggering and staggering at Milty’s. Didn’t we hear the old dear daren’t down a drop?” the writer would cunningly say, and, if I were lucky, there’d also be a smudged photo of me wiping my brow with my white silk scarf. Never taking the time to properly cleanse my ruined features after the play, I had ravaged quite a few scarves with makeup, much to poor Leon’s dismay. He was a wonderful mother.
So after the performance on my birthday, which had occasioned a pleasing ovation and a rowdy singing of the happy-birthday song at play’s end, I tootled away the requisite hour, then called for the blue car. I told Leon I wanted to go to Milty’s, but he said, “The Tall Ship, Mr. Sheenan; I think tonight you should have white fish.”
“‘Mr. Sheenan,’ is it, Leon? And what infringement of the rules have I unwittingly committed this evening?”
“None, Mr. Sheenan,” said Leon with a sassy grin. “I just thought you would appreciate a little extra respect on your birthday.”
I did laugh at that. I loved Leon. If he’d been a woman I would have married him years ago, and I often told him so. It made him grimace but I know it pleased him. Leon knew when I needed a giggle, he wiped up after me, he put up with almost anything, and probably he would have done even had he not been so handsomely paid. I’d met him during my disastrous season in the Royal Navy and had kept him by me ever since.
I told people Leon had rescued me from a dreadful death at sea, but the truth was that it was I who rescued him, during our brief foreign travels in the Queen’s service, from the clutches of a beautiful and wicked girl who was simply not worthy of his virtues. In fact, I bought her off, at a dear price, and Leon never knew it, nor did he know that before he fell for her she’d fallen for me and that his purest of hillside flowers and I had spent three thoroughly drunken and dissipated days in a fleabag hotel. The woman had a truly beastly outlook on life, even for my taste in those days. When I flicked her off she went after Leon, which only shows what a dolt the girl was to begin with; any clear-sighted woman would have been able to perceive his worth over mine in the flash of an eye. I was not even famous then, so there was really no excuse for her at all.