Gillyflower Read online

I also spent money prodigally, and Leon was forced at last to shelve his own salary for a period of some months. That and that alone shook me to reform; I could not bear his silent charity. So Leon and I returned to England: I with my headaches, heartaches, stomachaches, and guilt, and he with an admirable attitude of relief and concern. We set about restoring my life to some kind of order. I sold several cars, accepted a script for a promising American movie, and eschewed many pleasures I was used to absorbing mindlessly and daily. It was then my doctors discovered the deplorable state of my heart. A lengthy operation and three dreadful weeks in hospital furthered my reclamation, and I returned to the London house (which fortunately I’d managed to keep) to recuperate, a changed fellow.

  Leon nursed me, cursed me, and kept the public at bay. I remained essentially housebound for nearly two years—by choice, not by doctors’ direction. I meditated on my childhood in Ireland, where I’d spent my early years. I reflected, for the first time in eons, upon my parents’ accidental double death. I mourned for them with a child’s simple grief; its intensity stunned me, and I turned for a time into what Leon refers to as “the wild child.” I considered, in fact, my entire youth, including my Canadian years, when I’d been cared for by my good aunt Kate, a kindly, deeply religious woman and a ceaseless knitter of pretty blue gloves, which she called, for some apocryphal reason I can’ t remember, “St. Patty’s mittens.” I was encouraged to wear them everywhere but to bed.

  When I turned eighteen, Aunt Kate allowed me, with tears in her sparkling Irish eyes, to remake my Atlantic crossing, where at last I encountered, in London, the reason for my life: The Stage. It was odd how completely my memory had previously forsaken my Vancouver days; at most they had always called to mind the rainy, windless weather I’d always loved—that I still love in England.

  And, too, I read poetry, sitting for hours in the whirlpool Leon had had installed and sprawling on a sand-chair in all weathers on my front lawn with a glass of what Leon called “faux gin” (Perrier) by my side. I was befriended by a stripy stray tomcat whom I dubbed Horatio; he would sit forever on a rug at my feet but would rarely allow me to touch him. I imagined myself saying to him, “. . . There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  The day I realized I was considering writing my memoirs was the day I knew I had to get out of the house. So I accepted another American script—I had almost been forgotten by this point, but not quite—Leon packed our trunks, and we set off again across the seas.

  Women were out of the question: not only did my physical debilitation make the idea of sex strangely repugnant to me (I had the expected fear of dropping dead in an unworthy hussy’s arms and being discovered in some humiliating position—a fear I gradually, thank God, outgrew), but I had also found a certain peace in my recuperative years that was made up mostly of avoidance. Of course there were lonely days and nights, but I was so dreadfully tired.

  In America I met Maryann, though I did not meet her immediately. Leon had found a pleasant rental in the hills outside Los Angeles and we sculpted a quiet life there, as quiet a life as being in films permits. I did go out to parties and such, perhaps once a week, but I never asked anyone home. While out, I considered my old image worth reviving, and would down vast quantities of faux gin—pretending, of course, that it was gin, and acting it up accordingly.

  This made me both popular and worth avoiding simultaneously, since the new regime in Hollywood, although dopers and profligates for the most part, were riding the crest of the “clean living” wave, and flamboyant alcoholics were only just tolerated by the younger crowd. Maryann was the sister of one of these younger actors, and I was introduced to her some months after my arrival at a gallery opening where the actor’s simplistic photographs were being exhibited. She was perhaps ten years my junior, but about her was a pure and old-fashioned air that attracted me at once. Physically, she looked like an English “mod,” which was also, by that time, old-fashioned, and this outmodedness touched my heart in a well-callused place. I did not find these stirrings distasteful.

  I think now that poor Maryann allowed herself to be swept away more by my image than by my person. I suppose I had grown tired of myself during my long seclusion, and when we began keeping company I allowed her to feel too soon that my intentions were serious. She took the outcome of our affair as predestined from that time on, but I did not notice at first that this attitude was taking a lot of the fun out of things. I courted her like a storybook knight, and it did not take long to win my prize.

  Leon was astonished the first time I brought her home.

  “An American girl?” he asked the next morning, attempting to seem casual.

  “Yes, Leon,” I said. “But try not to hold it against her. She comes from the East; she is not one of these loon-brained California maidens you so despise, and I happen to admire her a great deal, so you will be seeing more of her.”

  “Then I will not need to have a messenger return these?” Leon asked, holding up a pair of long-legged silver hose. I gazed at him. His face crinkled. And together, we began to laugh a laugh that had been too long under the earth.

  “Like old times, Hugh,” said Leon. “Like the good old times.”

  But after Maryann and I were married it was not like old times. Not at all. It was nothing like my first marriage. My first wife was a highly intelligent woman, a passionate woman, and very much her own person; never could she have survived so many years in my company had she been anything else. Had I been faithful to her? “In my fashion,” I had been, and she’d understood that. And she to me? I do not know, or care to.

  I am sure Maryann never even considered such things; they would have been beyond her ken. She had no power to reason further than the conventional.

  Maryann was not brainless, but she was guileless, and I found it hard to distinguish between the two. Her old-fashioned air, I discovered, included a rather stodgy worldview, one in which no oddity of life, no human peculiarity, could be heralded as interesting, much less accepted as a bonus to quotidian existence. She focused herself on me and my activities in a way I found made me profoundly paranoid. I also grew tired of her in bed, where she was the queen of clinging vines, and became daily more disgusted with myself for having fallen prey to a simple loneliness I had not properly identified at the time. I had fancied myself in love with her, when it was only age and vanity—tempered, of course, by affection.

  I continued to treat Maryann nicely (if insincerity can be called “nice”), and to sleep with her when it was unavoidable, and she for her part continued to put up with me for lack of the ability to invent a good reason to leave. I know my growing dissatisfaction must have hurt her, though I tried to cover it as best I could. By the time I was quite fed up (it only took a month or so), Maryann was with child, and that improved things for a time. I had no heir from my previous marriage and I wanted one. Maryann was devoted to me, if boring, and I felt I could live with her and the child if I watched my manners and conducted my personal life in a way that could damage neither of them. I did not wish for other women in this secret life I imagined; I envisioned only the stuporous contentment of waking alone and looking for some kind of new inspiration in each day.

  A little girl was born to us just before our first anniversary, and we called her Ruby. Or I should say I called her Ruby, for in a rare fit of assertiveness Maryann had insisted on formally naming her Raychelle, after her grandmother. I considered Raychelle Sheenan an intolerable appellation, but I did not argue. I simply addressed the baby as Ruby, and Ruby she quickly became, to one and all. This so infuriated Maryann that she made life at last visibly miserable enough for us to separate. One would not think such a thing could occasion a marital rift, but indeed it did: the fruit of our incompatibility was ripe to burst.

  When Ruby was two, Maryann took her east to her family, and my long-confused and hidden heart was broken. I had meant to see the child every weekend, but distance and work (which w
as fortunately in good supply) made this often impossible, and my darling girl-child began to seem no more than a piquant memory. I did see her, however, perhaps every month or so, and Ruby grew only more precious to me for her infrequent availability. She called me “Papa-man,” and seemed fond enough of me in her distracted child’s way. Maryann and I had entered upon no legal separation, but toward the time when we might have been celebrating four years of marital bliss, she suddenly divorced me. She had found someone else, as was inevitable, and while she assured me she had no actual plans to give Ruby a step-papa-man, she also told me she was finding the infinite extension of our sham marriage too bleak a condition to bear. I could not blame her. My solicitors allowed her a generous settlement, and I would be able to see Ruby whenever it seemed reasonable to all concerned. Very civilized.

  And though I craved the company of my daughter, I could see no reason to dally any longer in the States. In four years, Leon and I had returned to England only twice, for very short visits, and I was aching for my comfortable, empty home and its familiar consolations. I even began to wonder if my funny cat Horatio still remembered me (“Art thou there, truepenny?”) And I told Leon that as soon as we could, we would go to Ireland for a time, where I hoped the fragrant air of my ancestors would restore to me some lost greatness.

  When I looked at last at my watch it was time, nearly past time, to make for the theater. Guilt-stricken by my lengthy musings, I left my poor devil of a waiter a monumental tip. Leon greeted me at the stage door with a murderous look, hauled me inside roughly, and stood me up like a doll against my dressing-room door.

  “It’s god-awful, Hugh, the way you worried us!” he said. “You ought to be paddled and locked in your room for a week, you great, stupid child!” His bulldoggy face was red and white with anger, the whites of his eyes were shot with crimson, and his voice cracked as he scolded me. Under stress, what I heartlessly called Leon’s “working-class face” always sprang into prominence; he looked like a gargoyle straining to leap from its cathedral. “You have about five minutes to dress,” he said, “so get on with it, man, and we’ll talk about all this later.”

  I tried to catch hold of him and calm him down, but he was out of the room before I could move, and I felt truly sorry. “You are a fucking-bloody-selfish-hopeless idiot,” I told myself, and vowed that I would make it up to Leon somehow and reform my dreadful habits for a week or two at least.

  Then it hit me that perhaps Leon was in need of a vacation. As far as I could remember, except for a few fleeting visits to his family now and then, he had barely left my side for many years. I never found Leon’s presence intrusive, but then, no matter how rooted in friendship were our daily working relations, I was still in truth “the boss,” and when I needed to be free of Leon I simply commanded him to be gone. He, on the other hand, had access to no such relief, and since mine was the far more difficult and abrasive personality, I told myself Leon must have his rest; I would send him off on an enforced leave, for a period of time not less than a month, for purposes of rest and reconstitution.

  I decided to “lay it on him,” as the Americans so aptly say, right after the matinee. I would miss him sorely, but I would just have to get by.

  Cheered by this heroically selfless decision, I played well that afternoon. My voice was strong, my timing tip-top, and my confidence so overwhelming, even to me, that my only struggle was keeping myself in check. The house was packed; there were even standees in the rear (I had peeked out like an ingénue from behind the curtain before it rose), and there was in the air that indefinable crackling of acceptance that keeps a performer’s heart thumping with excitement no matter how many times he’s spoken his lines.

  At intermission the place was abuzz, and backstage even Leon was smiling, though he succeeded in never smiling once at me. It’s all right, I thought, I shall straighten the dear boy out when this is over. So when, toward the end of the last act, I lost my mental footing for a moment, I was most unpleasantly surprised.

  It wasn’t that I’d forgotten my lines; indeed, I was not even supposed to be speaking when it happened. I had moved, as planned, slowly from one side of the stage to the other, listening to the ongoing dialogue, and was standing very close to the front of the platform, looking out into nothingness, waiting for my turn to speak. My only task at this point in the play was to look bemused. Usually, this pause in the action gave me welcome relief, since my speaking parts were long and fairly constant throughout, but that day as I stood there I began to feel nervous and frightened. I can only say that I felt somehow besieged, and the attack, or whatever it was, was definitely coming from outside the play, not from the actors behind me. It flashed through my mind that perhaps there was something monstrous happening in the theater, that perchance a lunatic was loose in the mezzanine or a fire had been instigated from someone’s outlaw cigar. But I knew instantly there was no public danger. The threat was centered on me.

  I battled with all my considerable stage experience not to “leave” the play, but I was in the grip of a panic greater than any actor’s determination. So I did the unthinkable: I looked down, down from the nothingness on which I had hung all my attention, and down into the first few rows of seats, a scant seven feet or so beneath me.

  From the first row a woman was staring into my eyes. I am sure this had happened before, many times—one can hardly have played on so many stages without occasionally catching the determined eye of an audience member—but this was somehow outlandish. Our eyes caught hold and locked; there’s no other way to state it. I was furious with her for having disturbed my concentration, and I hoped my face was showing her some of that fury (while still retaining my character’s proper façade of course), but I could not take my eyes from hers. I barely saw the rest of her such was the vise my view was held in, but I had a vague impression of a yellowness of dress and a lightness of hair. I also knew, though I barely saw, that her mouth was a little open and slightly smiling.

  This woman and I carried on our private, illicit exchange for some minutes, or what couldn’t have been, but seemed like, some minutes, during which neither of us blinked. Horrendous.

  At last I was able to look away, my ears at least having had enough sense to listen independently for my cue, and my lips to speak my next line—thank God in heaven a short one. I was then to walk toward a chair near the edge of the set and curl up into it, but when I attempted this familiar feat I nearly missed my mark, executing a clumsy motion that almost tipped the chair, and then banging my bones into the seat so that the impact must have been felt in the last rows of the theater. I muttered some bugger-it-alls and went on with my lines, ignoring a few titters I heard from the audience. I knew they would forgive me almost anything, and would even feel privileged to have witnessed this little gaucheness, but I was still furious—with myself, with the chair, and with that brazen little baggage in the first row.

  She had somehow managed to hurt me, and I would never be able to tell her so.

  8. Rick

  I forgot to mention Nora’s art, which is strange since it’s one of the things that drew me to her in the first place. She was artistic in almost every way, “different,” that is to say—in her hairstyle and dress, and in almost all her tastes—but she could also blend into just about any group. It was an attractive quality.

  I watched her closely at the bookstore for about a week before I asked her out the first time, and in those few days I saw about six or seven different Noras, all of them true to herself, but each of them showing that ultimate charity of making everyone she spoke with feel comfortable. She could talk to the janitor or the boss or a college student or an old lady and find some common ground with each of them. She was quiet about it; I don’t think too many of our coworkers noticed how good she was with people. In fact, I think the general consensus was that Nora was shy. But I noticed, and I liked her for it. And the funny thing was that it didn’t really gel with her eternal pessimism, or even her dreaminess, but there you ar
e. She’s “complicated.”

  Anyway, one day, about two weeks into our relationship, Nora invited me home for dinner. She lived in an attic apartment in one of the suburbs, which she had furnished sparely, but with comfort and individuality. There were some funny little drawings tacked up over her desk and hung about the place in cheap, colorful frames. They were scratchy, black-and-white things, with an occasional burst of color that lent them a certain whimsical tone. One in particular caught my eye: a drawing, about a foot square, of an overcrowded, weedy garden, full of trowels and rakes and such, and in one corner a little turquoise-blue rose, more carefully drawn than the other flowers, with a yellowish sort of halo around it containing a bright red bee. I don’t know why I liked it so much, but I really did, and I asked her about it. “I did that last summer,” she said, “when I was visiting my aunt.” And then, very seriously, as if she were letting me in on an important secret, “There really aren’t any roses that color, you know.”

  I liked that, and I was thrilled and surprised that Nora had made the pictures. Thinking back, I guess it never occurred to me that she was the artist because, for one thing, in the two weeks I’d known her she’d never spoken about her drawing, and for another, there was absolutely no sign of paper, paint, crayons, or anything else of an artsy nature visible in her apartment. She had everything hidden away. I told her I was impressed, especially with the bee picture, and she seemed to like that, but we didn’t talk about it very long.

  I gradually learned that her art was like her dreaming: something she needed terribly and held dear, but wanted to keep essentially private. She’d show me things now and then of course, and once in a while, in a romantic moment, would dream aloud that we lived together and were rich and she could stop working at the bookstore and draw all day, but it wasn’t a frequent topic. And sometimes she’d send a picture to a magazine and they’d like it and print it next to a short story or something, and pay her a little money. I knew that made her really proud. One of the great regrets of my life is that for our first anniversary Nora gave me the picture of the rose and the bee, and I, great dolt that I am, managed somehow to lose it when we moved to a new apartment. It hurt her feelings, I know, though she never held it against me.