This Merciless Glare

Everything — the years at Yale Drama, the little school performances, the deserted local circuit — has taught Henry to recognize when a story is over.

He knows, ten lines before the end of Scene 11 — in front of a gasping opening-night crowd, in front of the raw red marks on Virginia’s neck — that his time on this stage is over.

If he closes his eyes, he can wash it away in a few breaths. Return to the prologue.

* * *

The second week of rehearsals, there is a lightning storm; the loose-pebbled streets and root-burst sidewalks surrender to the mad flood, and rain batters the windows of the Lofgren Theater. At center stage, Cliff’s mouth twitches as he directs Eleanor and Paul, seated stiffly at a circular dining table. Eleanor traces the paisley tablecloth with one nude-painted nail, following the scarlet feathers again and again to their voluptuous ends.

“They want you to play Stanley in a revival of Streetcar,” Henry’s agent had blurted out over the phone months ago, every excited syllable straining their connection. Henry had balked, but only briefly. It was the dream of dreams: leading man in a Williams play, on Broadway, under last year’s Best Director winner. His last encounter with Williams had been a college production of The Glass Menagerie, for which he’d won some local award and contracts. Streetcar — it would be like returning to an old friend, or learning of the expiration of a very rich uncle. And Cliff Collins was so ubiquitous that this production was already being called “Collins’s Streetcar.”

“You think the storm’s going to last?” Virginia emerges from the bathroom, patting a pin curl back into place. She stops next to Henry, pointed heels toeing the border between the left wing and the stage. Just invisible. “I don’t want Sylvia to be scared.”

“She shouldn’t be,” Henry says. He aligns his feet with his wife’s so that they are both perfectly invisible. It is a border of time and identity as well — here in the wings they are themselves, with their own names and histories and cowardly cat. “Last time it was storming, all she did was bury herself in the crack between the sofa cushions, remember? We couldn’t find her for days.”

“I forgot about that. Stupid cat,” she laughs. “She didn’t even meow. Just let us scream all over the apartment looking for her.”

Henry reaches behind them and touches his wife’s hand. Virginia has hands like sandpaper in the winter when her eczema flares up; when he can’t sleep he gets up and slathers lotion on them so she won’t wake in the morning with raw red crevices running through her skin. She blushes at the way he runs his thumb across the delicate wings of bone stretching from knuckle to wrist. They’ve been married for a bit now, but they are still young and fresh in their success — him riding the off-Broadway circuit for a few years, her having just completed an indie film in California.

“You two!” Cliff bellows across the stage. “Get away from each other!”

“Sorry!” Virginia laughs again, tugging herself away from Henry.

“I’m hearing all your damn phones go off with the weather warning.” Cliff rubs his gnarled fingers against his scalp. “That’s enough for today. I’ll see you all tomorrow, if the storm doesn’t get us first. Scene two next. And no more calling for lines.” He glares at Paul, who has the decency to look a little ashamed.

They take the 1 train home. Paul and Eleanor depart together, halfway up the line; Henry and Virginia pretend not to notice. “Showmances, eh?”

Virginia adjusts one earbud. “It worked out for us.”

Henry drops a kiss on her forehead and laces their fingers together. She leans into the crook of his shoulder and he can feel her cheek strain as she smiles to herself.

* * *

This is the theater after dark. A hollow vessel that lives and breathes better than it would with living, breathing things inhabiting it. All of the stories stomped into the boards, all of the screams and laughs pressed into lips, endlessly knocking about the walls.

The Lofgren is an elderly theater, century-worn. These are the seats, synthetic red velvet coming apart at peeling gold supports. Here is the original stage, wood grain worn into soft divots that catch the feet of the greener actors. Above dangle the lights, swaying in the dozens of rotting drafts. The air whispers with the odor of yellowed pages on its tongue, labors of people long gone.

And these are the ghosts who haunt the best theaters. The injuries stumbling backward, the sorrow tracing a single hand along the curtains, the arcane cycle of schoolchildren gazing at the stage. The schoolchild who becomes a theater child who becomes an actor looking out at the audience with their feet planted staunchly in two dimpled potholes.

This is the theater after dark; this is the theater propagating itself, hurtling forward into the coffin-sized windows in the urban vista.

 * * *

“I’ve been thinking about one of the conversations,” Henry says the next week. “In scene two.” Time is counting down for all of them; Cliff has begun dodging calls from the Times and shooing janitors out of the room.

“Which one?” Virginia murmurs, her arms folded and her eyes fixed on Paul and Eleanor as Mitch and Stella.

“The one where Stanley talks about the Napoleonic Code. Brando delivers it with a flourish, but I think it should be more intimate.”

“You wanna run it?” Virginia faces him.

 

STANLEY:
There is such a thing in this state of Louisiana as the Napoleonic code, according to which whatever belongs to my wife is also mine — and vice versa.

BLANCHE:
My, but you have an impressive judicial air! [Virginia whirls away from Henry in a small circle, her skirts fluttering. The stage cues require a perfume bottle; Virginia pretends to spray herself, then him. Henry seizes her floating wrist. He can feel the nubs of her radius and her ulna jutting out from either side. Virginia belts a thin reedy squeal.]

STANLEY:
If I didn’t know that you was my wife’s sister I’d get ideas about you!

BLANCHE:
Such as what! [Virginia hasn’t gotten Blanche’s timbre right yet. She is still too forwardly nervous. Blanche is at once terrified and too stupid to feel terrified of Stanley — but these are emotions that must be gagged and pinned down under iron fists.]

STANLEY:
Don’t play so dumb. You know what!

 

“Better?” Virginia asks.

Henry shakes himself. Leans away so he cannot see the filmy threads of her irises. “Yeah. I’ll bring it up to Cliff in a bit.”

She nods. There is always a strange or stranger look in her eyes after a scene, as if the costume jewelry dangling off of her body has rooted her into the wooden stage. He blinks and sees Blanche at the end of the play, dripping in finery with her hair disheveled, queen of a kingdom only in the mind.

He reaches a hand for his wife, but she has already turned away.

“Know her — know Stella — before you react to Virginia,” Cliff’s voice carries to them from across the stage. Eleanor nods. She’s younger than the rest of them, two years fresh out of school and it shows. She flinches away from Henry when his hand comes down on her, Stanley striking Stella, Henry stage-striking her. Eleanor hasn’t yet learned to tamp down the part of herself that is more human than character.

Paul has a light gait, a pebble skimming across water. Even the way he unscrews the cap from his thermos and dangles his lithe legs over the stage’s edge is every bit Mitch — the skittish, confused salesman to Stanley’s brute. It is Henry and Virginia who are out of place, the only ones cast for their reputations.

Henry has no qualms about admitting his history; he is handsome, so he has earned an inordinate amount of leading roles. His father was a senator, a titan of fool’s gold high society descended from the Four Hundred, so Henry has been educated at some of the best drama schools in the world. He has rubbed elbows with decrepit Obie winners from the ’60s and with raw talent waiting to be melted and cast in gold figurines.

Virginia played with consigned Barbies in a loose-shingled house in the South, raised by the outline of a mother and a father who preferred his girls young. She has a vocal twang that escapes during bouts of self-consciousness; Henry had married her against his mother’s protests of the very thing, the “tramp-oline bounces” in Virginia’s voice.

* * *

The press is endlessly charmed every time Virginia admits she would have ended up a lifelong caretaker for her father if she hadn’t crossed paths with a retired director. This has become the linchpin in the legend of Virginia Chambers. While they hastily jot down the quote, she checks her phone; a photo of her napping husband frames the time on the lock screen.

“Is it difficult working with each other?” The reporter shifts on her hard plastic seat, capping and uncapping her pen with one hand. The yellow Fisher Price-esque chair glows against the backdrop of haphazard costume racks, an orphaned piece of furniture from a production of School of Rock.

Henry watches the seconds flash on her phone as the recording runs. “Not really.” He looks at Virginia, who smiles. She has a kind of magnetic beauty that verges on uncanny — eyes set a tad too wide, cheekbones that plastic surgeons have begged her to fill before she becomes just cheekbones in her old age, skin evaporated into the years.

“Small things, I think, mean more than either of us realized.” Virginia twists a fake diamond around her left pointer finger. “I’ve had issues in the past when castmates are always late, and it’s especially frustrating when leading actors are missing because it means rehearsal can’t start. But we live in the same place, so if Henry’s grumbling and burrowing back into the covers, I can drag him out of bed and throw him in the shower.”

“Classic Blanche projection onto me.” He grabs his heart.

“But Streetcar is a very sharp, emotional drama, right? You really don’t have any frustrations working with each other?”

“We don’t bring our work home,” Henry says, his attention snagging on a loose thread in his jacket. It must be that junior costumer again, the one who keeps breaking the needle on the sewing machine and stalling the entire company. He’ll have to speak to him; he’s young, but if he wants to keep his job and move up the street to The Majestic, he needs to get his act together.

“So no method acting?”

“Not in the Day-Lewis or Hoffman sense.” Virginia’s twang announces itself. “And there’s so much passion between Blanche and Stanley and Stella. Asking me or Henry to drag the roles of a panicked woman and an abusive, rapist brother-in-law to our home, our doctor’s appointments, and everywhere else — it’s a big ask.”

“Brando was a method actor. Do you see him as a model for your work at all?”

“I think it’s impossible not to,” Henry says. “He was a pioneer in the field, and method acting started with his work in Streetcar. But as Blanche said — ”

“Virginia,” Virginia says.

“As Virginia said, it’s demanding. Work is work. It shouldn’t be translated off stage.”

“Of course. I’d like to switch gears now.” The reporter smiles broadly, a journalistic expression which Henry has come to understand means she’s cutting her losses. “The Lofgren. It’s an interesting theater for this kind of production. When this revival was announced, people speculated that it might take place at the St. James or the Lyceum, a theater with enough resources to support Cliff Collins’s vision. But he specifically chose the Lofgren, which has been preyed upon by infrastructure issues for decades.” She consults her notepad. “In 2009, Hurricane Sandy cracked the roof in two. The following year, record-high summer heat and humidity rotted some of the wood beams. The list goes on. It seems like a shame to stage such a hotly anticipated play in a crumbling theater. Is there some method to the madness of this location?”

“This isn’t just a production of Streetcar,” Virginia says. “It’s also an effort to raise awareness for the Lofgren. As you said, it’s an old, old theater — although I think we’ve personally found some of its history endearing over the last few weeks — and it deserves some care. That’s why Cliff has sought investors who will not only fund the show but also fund the renovation of the Lofgren so that future generations can continue to be inspired here. It’s a second chance for this theater.”

“To be fair, I think they should’ve torn it down ages ago.”

Virginia prods him lightly. “Henry.”

 * * *

Scene 3 is new. Difficult. He puts his hands on Stella for the first time on stage.

He and Eleanor discuss it beforehand — the poker scene, the sprawling arms and coarse words, his remorseless fist.

Eleanor is young, but she sets her jaw in a hard line and nods. She’s taller than Virginia, who has caused Wardrobe much grief by shyly asking for taller and taller heels. Blanche now announces her presence through imperious clacks on the worn stage.

 

STELLA:
Drunk — drunk — animal thing, you! All of you — please go home! [Eleanor runs toward the poker table, her arms trembling. Virginia, enrobed in her shadow, steps forward — a hesitant, hollow strike of her heel against the wooden planks.]

BLANCHE:
Stella, watch out, he’s—  [He sees himself from somewhere in the audience, charging toward Eleanor. He feels the burn of Virginia’s gaze on his back as he drags Eleanor into the wings. His wife, his wife.]

MEN:
Take it easy, Stanley. Easy, fellow. — Let’s all —  [Paul’s voice and a few others rise feebly from the table. They are afraid of him. It is erotic. It is euphoric.]

STELLA:
You lay your hands on me and I’ll —  [He and Eleanor stare silently at each other, invisible to the others in their alcove. Henry blinks once, twice. Recordings surround them — slaps, shrieks, vestiges of violence. Eleanor screams on cue. He recalls the cacophony in his head whenever Virginia talks about the boyfriend before him, the college sweetheart she almost married.]

BLANCHE:
My sister is going to have a baby! [Virginia’s voice rises shrilly. Henry does not recognize her. Her mouth is wide open and her eyes so wide they engulf her face. He fists the corduroy of his pants. He speaks to her now, with his own eyes. A promise from Stanley to Blanche.]

 * * *

Afterward they all stumble to the front. Cliff claps his hands together. “Great work today. I really felt that anger from you, Henry.”

His joints are like iron as he nods. Eleanor pats his back. “It all went to plan.”

He must have been that young once. Virginia must have been that young once. He vaguely remembers a patchy mustache and the warmth of Virginia’s hand in his, Hamlet and Ophelia. The role he’d settled for after college. Virginia’s big break.

“Yeah.” He nods. “See you next week.”

Friday. The 45th Street air flush with liberation and fresh cigarette smoke. Undergrads mixing with corporate lawyers mixing with socialites. He used to long for the nights after rehearsal when he could pass silently across the quad without any desperate freshmen actors waving him close. There is none of that here in New York, where stars drop soundlessly from the heavens into the subway grates. Henry wonders, not for the first time, if there is a crinkle in the fabric of his life, some fold that part of his past must have vanished into. Someone important has waved to him for the last time, and he has missed it, or turned up his nose at it, and walked away.

Virginia passes through the theater entrance ahead of him, and they walk silently home. He doesn’t mind. The wind nips only teasingly, and he watches the marquee lights gloss his wife’s hair. Henry loses himself in roles — shedding pounds, tearing up his own shirts, barking orders at the cat — but Virginia has always had the same hair. It drives him mad sometimes, seeing her face on programs or posters, looking always the same. Looking always like the Ophelia he met and loved, the girl he propelled to stardom. He changes so often to forget, as if he could measure his life in failures and successes rather than linear years; she exists outside all that nonsense made heavy.

“I made a reservation for us at Geraldine’s,” he tells her when they get home. She’s frowning at a bouquet of wilting broccoli in the fridge. “For our anniversary.”

“Oh?” She peeks around the door.

“Saturday night.”

“That’ll be nice.” The twang is back, small drops of the watery past staining each word. Perhaps she is just as trapped in Blanche’s grasp as he is in Stanley’s.

“Come here.”

The fridge door thuds shut; she pads toward him on socked feet and he pulls her into his lap. “Virginia, Virginia, Virginia,” he says into the angle of her neck and shoulder.

“Henry, Henry, Henry,” she murmurs, her fingers curling around his arm.

“Do you remember L.A. last summer? When you were filming Othello and everyone kept asking me if I was proud to be mister Virginia Chambers?”

“Yeah.”

He presses her closer. She smells of the Lofgren — the musty, oaky air that croaks out dreams and dares. “That was the most peaceful I’d ever felt. Nothing on my mind except you. Only you. Only those stupid reporters and their fluff questions. Me and you.”

“Mm.”

Henry remembers their first home together — a palm-sized railroad apartment, dollhouse windows clustered with Virginia’s ragtag army of ferns. In the trail of cardboard boxes they’d left from that apartment to this one, she has never picked up the dirt and spade again. They are serious people now.

Her elbow prods into his stomach in the awkwardness of their embrace. She feels breakable, made of hollow avian bones and nervous fluttering. He could break her.

He could do everything to her that Stanley does to Stella, to Blanche. The thought creeps in without fanfare, as common as delays on the train and pedicabs luring in unsuspecting tourists.

“The apes shall inherit the earth,” Tennessee Williams had said of Streetcar, and now there is an ape beating at its chest within Henry’s chest. His father was an ape, a bombastic oligarch who had drunk himself to death but not quickly enough to satisfy his blue-blooded New England wife.

He and Virginia haven’t talked about the ending of the play yet. They’ve only run the scene a few times in the back dressing room, where they can be distracted by the bustle of the crew.

Her fingers are in his hair. “Hey.” She smiles unconvincingly. “Let’s order in for dinner tonight.”

 * * *

Their anniversary passes and they have real sex, not married sex. Eleanor celebrates her 25th birthday. Cliff sweats more but does more interviews. The contractors force them to cancel three rehearsals because of asbestos in the walls. The entire cast and crew catch Eleanor and Paul kissing behind a rack of Blanche’s dresses. The scenes roll past, one by one, until they are at Scene 10.

 

BLANCHE:
I warn you, don’t, I’m in danger! [Virginia smashes the prop bottle on the table and it shatters at the neck. Henry prowls forward.]

STANLEY:
What did you do that for?

BLANCHE:
So I could twist the broken end in your face!

STANLEY:
I bet you would do that!

BLANCHE:
I would! I will if you —

STANLEY:
Oh! So you want some rough-house! All right, let’s have some rough-house! [Henry charges at her and snatches her wrist. Fragile again, the nubs like perfect anchors for his fingers. In the distance, in front of his face, his wife cries out. It is pitiful, beautiful.]

STANLEY:
Tiger — tiger! Drop the bottle top! Drop it! We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning! [“Henry,” she whispers. “Henry, let go.” He is lost. Her voice makes him dizzy; that name on her Southern tongue makes him dizzy. Her cracked and peeling hands come down on his, and one by one by one she pries his fingers off.]

 

“Are you okay?”

Virginia rubs her arm, and he sees the thick red shadows of his fingers on her skin. He looks away. Cliff’s head is bent in conversation with Eleanor and Paul. “That hurt,” she said quietly.

“I didn’t realize I was holding you so tightly.”

“It’s fine.” Her twang has strengthened over the weeks. He lies awake at night watching the streetlamps flash arcane patterns over her face, over her peeling palms, and wonders if the streetlamps are the same in New York as they are in the South.

Henry reaches for her; she shrinks back, still rubbing her wrists.

“That was electric,” Cliff calls from the pit, reaching up and placing his hands palm-down on the stage. He looks like a child attempting pull-ups on too-high monkey bars. “I mean, just fantastic. Ah! Beautiful. We’ll only have to run it one or two more times. Let’s do scene eight again with everyone, and then we can go home.”

 * * *

“Does it still hurt?”

Virginia takes a pack of frozen peas out of their fridge and presses it against her wrist. Water rolls down her forearm and slides off her elbow, drop by drop, into the sink. “It’s fine, Henry.”

“Virginia — ”

“It’s just red,” she says. “Right, Stanley?”

He swallows. Tries to look his wife in her filmy eyes. He almost can. “Right, Blanche.”

 * * *

On opening night, the Lofgren bursts with people. Critics from the variable Timeses, Cliff Collins enthusiasts, local high school theater teachers. Eleanor peeks behind the curtain and immediately darts back, her face scarlet. “I don’t know how I feel about this.”

“It’ll be fine,” Virginia murmurs in her low accent.

“I’ve never performed in front of this many people before.”

“You get used to it,” Henry tells her.

“The trick is to always be grateful. Remember all your failures. You’re all of us. You’re all of the past versions of yourself.” The curtain slices a diagonal shadow across Virginia’s face. She steps back, shrouding herself behind the velvet folds. “Whatever brought you here, let it all go. We’re just animals performing for other animals now.”

 * * *

This is the theater remade. Here are the seats enshrined in black velour and the armrests repainted silver. Here are the wrought iron sconces that offer themselves to the guests. Here is the new heater that whispers its welcome. Let us serve you.

But there is the century-worn stage that remains the century-worn stage. Its divots, its detriments. Its missteps and triumphs calcified.

“My God,” the foreman had murmured when he saw it. He bent down, running his hands across the grain. “Is this American chestnut? It’s extinct in New York now, you know,” he told a crew member passing through with a rack of costume jewelry. She had nodded and fled before he could continue.

The foreman had rough hands and an unyielding estimation of the world, but he had been raised by a grandmother who knew something about the sobbing rush of a good soliloquy. And so he turned back to his crew, waving an arm above his head in a layman’s bow. “The stage stays, boys. Everything else can go, but not the stage.”

Here is the century-worn stage that remains the century-worn stage.

 * * *

They run a little late after intermission, and Paul forgets one of his lines and needs to play it off, but Cliff remains pleased. “Just go out there and be yourselves,” he tells Virginia and Henry. “Bring all that gusto to the stage!” In nervous ecstasy, he shakes Henry’s hand, sweat on sweat.

 

BLANCHE:
I warn you, don’t, I’m in danger! [Now, here, on this stage, just them. Blanche and Stanley, all rippling muscle and aborted dreams. A piercing shatter, Virginia’s moving arm interrupting his predatory daze. She brandishes the broken bottle at him; he knows it is just prop glass, but it grins in the light and he hears a stray inhalation from Eleanor somewhere in the wings.]

STANLEY:
What did you do that for? [Stanley is slinking, seductive savagery. He can feel his pulse chanting its brutish brag in sync with his steps. It is just them in this narrow space, this choked breath too small for God to shuffle his deck and deal and still too large for what is stirring within him.]

BLANCHE:
So I could twist the broken end in your face! [All the bland defiance has melted out of her. Her eyes twitch wildly, squinting and widening.]

STANLEY:
I bet you would do that!

BLANCHE:
I would! I will if you —  [Her voice quivers. There are barely two inches between them now; he can feel the heat of her chest, and he knows if he pressed his heart to hers he would feel hers shrieking in double time. Stanley smiles. He is a salesman, a war veteran slipped in the cracks, someone with the world’s anger balled up in his fist and nowhere to dispose of it.]

STANLEY:
Oh! So you want some rough-house! All right, let’s have some rough-house! [He grips her wrist and he is forcing her down, down onto the floor. From here he knows the audience cannot see him. But they can imagine him. They can envision him glaring down at his wife’s sister, this wastrel in tinfoil diamonds, this country girl who has demanded her way into a world fated to swallow her up.]

STANLEY:
Tiger — tiger! Drop the bottle top! Drop it! We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning! [She drops and goes limp under him and he presses his thumbs into her neck; the column of her trachea flexes under his grip and her pulse quavers. He tugs at her sleeves, exposing the delicate arch of her naked collarbones. His palms skim and scar her skin as he draws them down, down, and down. No one can see this but them. She pushes at him and shrieks, but as he bears down on her he feels the victory inherent to Stanley, this final triumph and the knowledge that no one will ever believe this slip of a failed woman.]

 * * *

In two days he will read the rave reviews. The critics will call him mesmerizing, emotional, savagely sympathetic. They will call Virginia luminous, trembling, broken.

Now, tonight, in Scene 11, he watches the Doctor — played by John-something, a lapsed television actor — lead Blanche away. In a plain dress, hair unkempt, she looks like someone he might have known, someone he might have liked or loved or admired.

She does not cry when she goes. And when she utters that final line, the crowd chokes collectively. It sounds like radio static in his ears. Strangers — they were all strangers once. They were all young once. He was a husband once, if not now, if not forever.

Stella begins sobbing, the bundle — their baby — trembling in her arms. He leaves the poker table and kneels beside her. He doesn’t know what he’s saying anymore, only hears the vague chatter of the crowd and a trumpet keening down below in the pit. “Honey,” he says, and almost adds, “my wife.”