Between the Curtains
by
Steven Hunley
I hadn’t seen Richard in over a year. I was in covering the war in Europe and he was on his usual stage. Fate threw us together again outside a theater in the West End, and when he shook my hand, he slipped a ticket in my pocket.
I’d been lonely of late, had nothing to do, so why not?
Between acts two and three there was an intermission, and we had a chance to meet again in his dressing room. He was changing clothes behind a screen, but I could easily hear his magnificent voice, the kind one acquires breathing the ancient Shakespearean dust of a repertory company, and a not-so-occasional bottle of Hennessey.
“What have you been doing, Old Boy? It’s been ages.”
“Writing, as usual, and looking for the perfect girl.”
‘Ah," he said in a tone of complete understanding, as if he was familiar with the problem.
“But I don’t have much luck. Things start off with a bang, you know how it is. But then after a while they see your faults, or you see theirs, and you’re back at the starting gate.”
He cleared his throat.
“It depends what you’re looking for. We make it hard on ourselves. We want someone who knows us inside and out, and even knowing, falls in love with our inner worth and forgives our sins. Someone who’ll accept us for who we are, no matter what malformations and scars we display. See us without the make-up, or with the mask, and cheer either way.”
I could hear him gargling, a habit he imitated from Caruso.
“Someone we trust to bind our wounds,” he continued. “I’ve never found a girl like that either, God knows. Perhaps I’ve been kidding myself. There’s a good chance it wasn’t a girl I been searching for, it was perfection. Or worse, I might have been groping for a pedestal to place her on.”
“Pedestal?”
“Women want to be idolized, don’t get me wrong. But none of them care to stand on a precarious pedestal, no matter how costly or Grecian. It takes too much energy to maintain the balance between earth-mother and celestial mistress.”
“I suspect they find the pedestal too beneath them, along with the erotic garbage."
The great actor snickered, “You...always with the bad drawing-room jokes. You make me green with envy, you really ought to be on the stage. Perhaps I can get you a part as the cobra in Jungle Book, spitting out your venom."
“You’re worse, you old fossil,” I countered. “I wanted a single word of inspiration; you gave me a soliloquy of hopelessness.”
“Then we’re even,” he said with righteous authority, like a cop on the beat. “And you didn’t have to pay a penny for the performance. Drinks, Old Boy, after the show?”
“Why not,” I replied. "We're still friends."
After the show it was drinks at Krishna Mulvaney’s.
©STEVEN HUNLEY 2013
