“Fits the mood of the city, certainly.”
“Yes, that is certainly so.”
“Henry James’s The American? Or some other sort of American.”
“Henry James, right. Adapted it himself, I understand, from his novel.”
“He’s dead, you know.”
“No, I did not know that.”
“Couple of months ago.”
“I see, I see. That’s, well, that’s . . . too bad. I’m sorry to hear it. Did you, do you, like his novels . . .?” Charles couldn’t believe he was discussing literature with a daredevil, but pressed on, making a note to ask Sir Edwin if he knew about “his friend” James’s death. He was sure he did not, and would extol it as the man’s supreme fiction.
“Yes, I do,” said Owner judiciously. “And I don’t care who knows it. Once I learned to read I didn’t care how complicated things got. I think I’ve gotten to where I prefer them complicated. Simplicity is some kind of snake oil. Simplicity is, you know, like the story of the little theater that wasn’t damaged in a fire set off by an errant firework but by evil men who are not like us and who hate us and who hold human life in utter contempt. You?”
Somehow he knew he was back to the novels and stories of Henry James. “Yes. I think I’ve read most if not all of the New York edition.”
“And your theater is physically viable, is that right? Structurally sound?”
“Yes, that’s right, and we hope to open very nearly on schedule,” said Charles with once-again-regained composure and authority. “The American is in terrific shape, August Strindberg’s Spook Sonata is very difficult—do you know Strindberg? He was given an anti-Nobel a few years ago, just before he died.”
There was some clapping, whether in honor of the inventor of dynamite or of Strindberg it was hard to say.
“Difficult—” Charles began to say but could not repress the laughter that was going around the room, a strong suggestion that it was the inventor of dynamite who had been applauded, “—difficult I say to work on but very exciting, and Romeo and Juliet, well . . . there are a lot of lines to be memorized there, of course, but we think we’ll be ready with what our artist in residence calls a dream of the future.”
“Romeo and Juliet as a dream . . .?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Of the future.”
“Yes, sir. That’s the phrase that keeps coming up in our . . . our talks. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet, and Tybalt and Mercutio and the rest of them, are not causes for sadness and grief and weeping.”
“No?” Owner was amused but deferential.
“They are sacrifices in a glorious cause.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. They are . . . hastening the downfall of the corrupt . . . forms . . . of their fathers. Their poisonous ways and decadent tyrannies. When they are together and in love, they are actually . . . in the, uh . . . in the future. You can tell it’s the future because the lighting is different and we speak differently. The violence all takes place in the present. We use it as a kind of way to rend the fabric . . .” and here Charles faltered. He was tired of this faltering and could not understand it. Sooner walk into a burning room than subject oneself to the judgment of strangers who act like they know you.
The hidden Vera once again saw the icy clown just beneath his handsome features, the ironic lout just beneath his goodwill.
“Yes?”
“Of time.”
“Probably a little too sophisticated for me.”
Charles took a good breath and recovered himself. “I’m not sure that that is the word for it. Sir Edwin is a visionary and freely accepts ridicule on that count. There’s a good deal of entertaining sword fighting, in any case, and poetry.”
“‘Sir’ Edwin?” asked Owner.
“Yes. An English knight.” Charles chuckled falsely, grinning, to make up for it, with even greater falsity around the room. Because it sounded like an exit line in a scene that left the audience roaring with laughter, Charles decided to make for the big open doorway, at that moment a great archway of light.
“You’ll leave the Merkel with us, then?”
“Yes, and the Minerva!” Charles shouted, stunned that he’d forgotten why he’d come. He took a few uncertain steps back into the gloom. “Tell Vera I—”
“MINERVA?” shouted Owl. “WHAT THE FUCK IS A MINERVA?”
“Belgian make. Minerva. 1902.”
“What’s the kid talkin’ about?” Jitney asked Owl.
“HE WANTS TO SELL US A BELGIAN WAFFLE! YOU HUNGRY?”
“No interest in the Minerva, Mr. Minot,” said Owner. “You have to shut the engine off to change gears.”
Charles stopped then and turned and held up his hand as if he were departing a group of able and courageous men with whom he had accomplished something of sentimental as well as practical value. “THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE OF VALUE TO A COLLECTOR,” he fairly bellowed.
“NO COLLECTORS HERE, KID! ONLY DAREDEVILS!” Owl bellowed back.
“THANK YOU! THANK YOU ALL! YOU’VE BEEN A TERRIFIC AUDIENCE! PLEASE BE SO GOOD AS TO CONVEY MY GREETINGS TO VERA!”
“VERA WHO?” Owl redoubled his bellow.
The laughter in the shop continued until Charles was quite a long way down the sidewalk and out of earshot.
Vera watched all this from the other side of the curtain, holding it closed and revealing only the unnaturally white oval of her face, wanting only to play a game, hoping Charles would overcome his politeness and a profound and certain confusion and come running down the aisle again to find her. Yes: she wished it was a game. But if it was a game, what kind of game was it? Who would win and who would lose and, in the end, would they know why they had played? Her salon—at what passed for one without the structure and animation of money, at her salon des pauvres, somebody had nicknamed it and which had stuck, le Salon Romantique et Revolutionnaire, she preferred to call it, with pride that was maybe a little defensive, a little guilt-ridden as she had always wanted to be part of a smart set and had just begun to learn French—there, yes, they knew all about it: Henry James would be taken at his word and escorted quite a bit further down the road, where his American would become not the fresh air in the moldy museum of Old World aristocratic privilege, bright and kind, resourceful and determined, but a ruthless destroyer of the weak, the sick, the ridiculous. Romeo and Juliet would be a savage and bloody fairy tale about utopia. Watching The Spook Sonata would be like taking a powerful narcotic that would set free the enslaved minds of its audience. They had heard these ideas proposed and articulated, and debated them with learned pleasure, like doctors in the amphitheater of a surgery. They were anarchists, so of course they were interested in all new theories of disease and cure, in plans for the real abolition of slavery, an understanding of true weakness, for the demolition of palaces and the deaths of tyrants. Still, she was uneasy. There was so much authority and obedience to authority in even the most charming and reckless of these speeches, so much discipline and sacrifice in even the daffiest of these aesthetics, that unspeakable atrocity seemed right around the corner. Petty despots would race up and down the high roads and the low roads like insane tinkers who’d wrested magical weapons from stupid sorcerers, or mountebanks playing the shell game and killing everybody who happened to win. Killing and killing and killing because even the rigged game could not be counted on, you had to kill them all, winners and losers alike,