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Chapbook Selections From Web Del Sol

Bill Brandtford, Stage Designer

Michael Brodsky

BILLY BRANDTFORD'S FRIENDS in the industry--he had many, hell, he was a stage designer respected far and wide--were unanimously haunted, so he needed to think, by a single worry: Was he finally going to don the robes of authority, vocationally speaking, conferred by lifelong struggle rather than simply go on confirming its street meaning for ill-wishing onlookers, namely, that he had been eminently deserving all along of all his aches and pains owing to an inherent worthlessness.
     Bill, said Frinzie Makomber, a colleague from way back, when are you going to stop trying to get your neck broken yet again and start living off the cash cow of past mishap. He thought, but did not stoop to say: The inexhaustible fertility of smashed hopes. Sweetie, you've just got to know when to throw in the towel as far as suffering is concerned. To go on and on and on forever on the voracious lookout for another raw deal is the way not to regeneration but to suicide. In short, don't be greedy.
     Bill sat her down by the fireplace built from scratch on weekends with his own bare hands and, ogling an andiron which was the belated heartwarming donation of a director-acquaintance, charged not quite full speed ahead. You know that citystreet sequence in the new Nick de Cusa three-act? Or is it four? Well, all I'm on the lookout for right now, voracious or other- wise, is the right right-as-rain effect. As a matter of fact, Frinz, if I've been on the lookout for anything in this wretchedness of ours, I mean, of mine, mine, all mine, it's been nothing more precisely than puddles reflecting columns of bluish sky defined by the quoins of--and infinitely more sturdy and perduring than-- mighty skyscrapers. Oh, I'm not asking for stanchions (of vapor) wide as major thoroughfares, massive and garish slabs such as are known to live high on the hog over on Thirty-fourth and Third, say, or Fifty-seventh and Sixth, just a little flutelike contraption at the beginning of some sidestreet in the mid-twenties, west. In any event, whenever I bear down on one of those puddly heart's desires, rimmed with dead gingko leaves, its depth sounded by a neck- (or alighted on by a diseased pigeon: wrist-) like streetlamp, I never fail to mistake what it withholds in solution for some bulwark of urban filigree about to be hacked to extinction by this or that contractor in the name of screwing the poor and feathering his nest a wee bit more cozylike. Only nowadays, from no matter what direction I'm bearing down, as I put it, I'm forever looking backward. No more pious, trembling upsurges of expectation that if only I manage to work hard enough, gritting my teeth hard enough in the process, then .. . then ... I'm smart enough to know for the likes of me all bets are off, and every windfall--every wind-egg even--is fossilized under exhumation-resistant mullioned plexiglass.
     On that note of resignation before--prolonged by a few voluptuously futile toasts to--life's labours lost, they proceeded to do what they'd planned on the set of "John Gabriel Borkman" some hours before: make their way to the hospital bed of stricken producer Hank Buffers. Prostrate he bellowed up to the diminutive TV opposite: This should happen to my worst enemies. Get a nurse, Bill, doublequick, Frinzie cried. Within seconds she was way ahead of him in the corridor, unapologetically fridge-white, nervously swinging her shoulder bag as if it were a censer. He's horrible, isn't he. No, no, no, Bill insisted, keeping an eye out for anything resembling a name-tag. I envy the arrogance that underwrites this upgush of bile, even if I'm prime target, which in this case I very well may not be. Hank always knew how to milk his misery, real or imagined, for all it was worth. When, oh when, will I be able to rise to the same tocsin-like and princely pitch of killjoy innuendo. At that point I dare say I wouldn't have to eat the shit of the world's Hanks, that's for sure.
     Having at last cornered a medico, whom he pointed towards the room in question, he was mildly surprised to note that a crowd of familiar-faced actors were busy forcing their way in, only Frinzie was far busier shooing them out, doubtless employing her celebrated funny-face tact for their grumblings were generously peppered with guffaws. When he got back following a brief stopover at the toilet (Staff Only, but he was desperate: sight of the tribe had reminded him he had still to create two or three more sets worthy of their fjord-blasting self-interrogations) Frinzie was leaning her back against the door to the room, eyes closed.
     Everything okay?
     The nurse is with him now, she said, still unseeing. Out of the blue she suggested a bite down on the Bowery. Several of her favorite haunts or joints (he didn't catch the word, this bothered him somehow), especially around Chrystie Street, now served pizza et al. He looked so thin, didn't he, Billy? so unlike the Hank we know and loathe; then deciding that to unwrap the breadstick in her hand was too much trouble she proclaimed: What I really need is a stiff drink.
     He, Frinzie Makomber's pal for more than twenty-three years, couldn't help undergoing the proclamation as a calculated, altogether uncharacteristic provocation to his tolerance. For him (and up until this moment he would have assumed for her as well), I could use a stiff drink was a trap to be sidestepped; but clearly it was now the conduit to where things happened the way Hollywood had countless times proved they should. He'd liked it, though, for embodying a momentary bypass of everything that came before even if he also disliked it for not having, strictly speaking, come by its bypass honestly--as a deducible outcome allowing thereby for a retroactive new slant from--there would've been the unprecedented wonder of it!--deep within the unshirked unshakable context of that before.
     No way to tell her. This made him sad, even sadder that one day, in a haunted joint just like this one, somebody, but a somebody far less kindly disposed, a Hank, say, would notice, exactly as he had, just such a mere nothing as she would be sure to have overlooked yet again. And this datum would become her enemy's prize weapon. Or rather, given its easy availability, how could her companion of the moment be expected to renounce tormentorship?
     Maybe this was why she had never risen in the theater business like--like--(he wanted to puke a cackle at the bald, boldfaced absurdity of the construction, irresistible to its maker for that very reason)--like . . . he had! Too many Hank Buffets (sic) holding something over her head, having caught her just too many times in the act of simply not having caught herself in time.
     His only recourse under the circumstances--his sort always under never soaring beyond--was to get gnomic. Whatever we overlook, dear girl, is enemy-fodder.
     Who's the enemy she asked distraitly intent as she was on catching their waiter's eye. Bill couldn't remember what he looked like beyond his having been (at least at the moment of proffering breadsticks and water) tall, gangly, with post-acne scimitars and fosses borne--in so far as he was grimly proleptically almost challengingly aware of their probable effect on every flawless customer-mug--with intriguing stoicism, even nobility.
     The ones who make everything look as it should the better to electrocute us out of an unwarranted sense of security. The perfect definition, in fact, of stage designers. They assure us everything's in the right place. Too late do we discover they meant: everything except us. "Only the inmate does not correspond."
     My heart's in the right place, she said, unfortunately for me. Seeing Hank stretched out as if at a coffin-fitting session almost broke it. I've always loved him madly you see.
     He didn't think he'd ever find the strength to speak again; however: I don't--quite. In any event, as I was saying: Everything we overlook about ourselves goes towards constructing us as a target. You should know that! he added (gratuitously, therefore scolding-scaldingly). To miss ourselves, to miss catching ourselves in the act of being ourselves--worse, trying to be other than ourselves through such lame contraptions as I could use a stiff drink--is to go the dreary way of making and remaking those selves in the image of sitting ducks: bloated with dates, raisins, corn mush, even an exotic kumquat or two, and slated for family picnic target practice (somewhere in the vicinity of Elizabeth, New Jersey) on the fourth of July.
     Completely shifted away (it's true the booked saxophonist, now dominating the podium from literally out of the blue, could be considered something of a heartthrob give or take a few orts of unprepossessingness, so why shouldn't Frinzie be ransomed to his writhing trunk?), she held a table napkin to her right eye and murmured, Hank never invited me to a single picnic, neither on July fourth nor at any other time.
     But the more aware we are become (he knew he was whining because far more intent on (re?)capturing her attention than explaining--the more we rarefy ourselves away to blessed unpinpointability. Don't you want that kind of freedom, Frinzie? Don't you need it now more than ever? He wasn't quite sure why he had to go and drag in now more than ever, yet once dragged in it was nothing less than thrillingly appropriate, wildly inventive even, tags (he duly noted) putrefactive media hacks were always loath-- when you came right down to it--to affix to his own efforts.
     She didn't answer. Neither did she sneer. What's so good about that kind of freedom? I just want Hank back. Then again, Frinzie never sneered: she was every inch the bluestocking, all the more so as battleground of contortion-prone grief and lust.
     OUR CHARACTER 1S PRECISELY WHAT--AS OTHERS SNEER-FODDER--WE MISS ABOUT OURSELVES.
     Frinzie took his hand, a weather eye still on the music man. After announcing that he'd never in his life played it, he proceeded to embroider magisterially on what Brandtford recognized as his favorite Arlen ballad: "The Man that Got Away" It was being put across so well he didn't for a minute miss, as he almost always did when it was rendered otherwise than in A Star is Born, Garland and Cukor and Mason. Up until this minute, I never realized what a lonely life you lead. Or rather, by what a lonely life you let yourself be led to the scaffold of obsession.
     The only conceivable rejoinders being A mere scaffolding my dear, not a scaffold, and I don't need people the way some people need people, he tried to put the temptation they represented behind him by seceding fingerwise and humming haphazardly along. He could, however, note: When I get sick and Tired of that old bugbear companionless characterlessness I simply rustle up my . . . suppressed versions: imagine myself living out the rest of my days and then some with the loathed old pop, or is it mom?--ofcourse, it's mom--I've not quite left behind, or as a henpecked, tyke-ridden, promotion-shy meat-packing-plant accounting clerk just outside Pensacola. In either case, a dutiful, disdained dishrag singularly skillful at provoking, and at the slightest deviation from home martial law, this or that baleful repercussion of a commensal's toothless ire. Or, when I need a real live-wire of an escape I make it my business to volatilize into the most assiduous sucker-upper you ever did see: debase myself thus before the very coqueluche rivals I'm otherwise especially vociferous about righteously "exposing" yet whose ever-widening celebrity triggers my most shamefully unavowable and therefore most unsquelchably persistent inclination to asslick. It's horrifying, I know, but when you're thinking your abasement why stint, why not go the limit?
     Oh Bill, she whispered, not quite mistress of her mimicry of a hammy actress they'd both worked with not too long before (in a putative spoof of the buddy-buddy musical), can you ever for- give me?
     How forgive or not forgive. I'm too busy being the simple sum of all my repudiations of the rat I might have become to see about acquiring a forgiving . . . character-armor.Who the hell do you think I am, pussycat? Lionel Barrymore? Edward Everett Horton? Maria Ouspenskaya?
     Funny, she mused, once again eyeing the breadstick wrap. He refused to play prompter. That having wanted nothing more all along than to wake up every morning beside Hank I find myself nothing less than rapturously relieved to be waking up to the fact that he's--that he's--that he's--that I'm to be spared at least one sneer-worthy . . . version of self.
     She was shrugging him off, and not just because of the breadstick or the podium torso (Harold had never sounded so plangent), so he felt it behooved him to say, But just because I've shed all my shit doesn't mean I haven't been all along reacquiring it as a positive force-field. Don't you understand: true character is a continuous repudiation and remastering of the contingential tics most slobs mistake for character. She gently snapped away as the saxophone man began the beguine (I never played this before in my life, honest: but what better time than the present to inform you folks it reminds me of unleashed fire hydrants, tenement stoops, washboards rusting beneath the kitchen sink or clogging the tub), seeking a posture that would read as supremely attentive. Licking her lips, smoothing down the pleats of her frock (a subdued print), Frinzie at last looked as if she'd managed it. So he was more than surprised when she half-turned to him and said, I don't understand a thing. Seeing Hank in that cage and now ... him (nodding in the musician's direction). Don't know where I am. All I these details (glance at the breadstick) are just being wasted on the likes of me. Because at this moment I don't feel like--what do they call me in the playbill (that is, when there is one)?--a lighting designer. And I'll tell you something else (was he imagining she was beginning to blubber): I haven't felt like one since the night they rushed him to the emergency room: that dive. Yet if only I could manage to--feel like one, I mean--I might blend in with the details and get through all this in one piece. You can't imagine how badly I want to realize I'm with my very best friend, Billy boy, in a really hip little hangout downtown no less and they're playing what from this moment on I decree to be Our Song. Sought after by its details as their only conceivable center of gravity; I want to uphold the sanctity of this, Our Moment. But I'm, what's the term, unpinpointable now that Hank's dead. Or better yet, I'm all oozed away Diffuse as a smelly pudding. The waiter, a little to their right, extended his neck in sign of a discreet willingness to purvey either food or drink, or smokes: At least this was Bill's take on the twitch. For where none saw movement, Bill always made it a point to discern gesture. Frinzie nodded gracelessly at nothing and everything. He was beginning to understand all that shooing off and away of the actor tribe in front of the sick man's door, and at the same time already regretting the brief spell during which having gotten it completely wrong reigned supreme and made for the closest his sort (what sort was that?) ever came to contentment. As if on cue, she repeated: I don't understand a thing. So he told her just like that--the key was precisely to husband all the details before they got themselves understood and not try to fight one's way out of that old gift-horse paper bag: savorful ambiguity. To wit, is that sunny smell dogshit gone amuck among brick-shaped oak leaves or down-home cooking from soup to nuts in the last bungalow on our left. Look, he added for good measure, be tickled pink you're not in a position to so make heavy weather of too surefooted an identity, be it lighting designer or foxfire extinguisher. as to frighten them away--them being the details--for good. Live in their unknown, the way you--we--want the audience to live long after the curtain goes down. Details are our true home, especially weather-resistant when we're not quite sure of their chemical make-up.
     She retorted (not letting her Beat it look meant for the waiter break her rhythm): This isn't some half-assed three-act being taken in here and let out there like a pair of thrift-shop pantaloons doomed out of the blue for presentation on the Broadway fall rack. All I want--wanted--was to draw them--the details--what am I saying?--hirn--Hank--tosvards me by implanting the conviction only they--he--could complete me. Only Hank's a beast. Was. So how can you expect me to have an identity however minimal, for this, the meticulously detailed moment currently under discussion when I've been miming identitylessness for so long in the hope he'd alight at last among its boughs in celebration of our own-moment, that is. I just wanted to be one with Hank and the two of us one with the surrounding flora and fauna. Forgive me, but there simply isn't any room in all this grief--grief!--for my own special brand of catching myself in the act of perpetrating atrocious contingencies for the sake of perpetuating that mealy-mouthed character disorder known to the general public as little old me. Oddly (or not so oddly if he took her trembling at face value), she did not simper on little old me.
     She watched the other man jump the podium and went on watching long after he'd downed his first Scotch between two barstools. Bill, on the other hand, had eyes only for the trio in an adjacent booth who, he now realized, had actually been devouring late supper, and in several courses, all through the performance. The male member, thinnest of the three, was most unremitting, though always decorous, in his wielding of knife, fork, cup and, on occasion, soup spoon. Subsisting in another time zone, he'd been carelessly spliced into this (compliments of central casting) whose two female inhabitants, though equally committed (one adjacent, one across) to gorging themselves over the medium term, nonetheless found the time to be busy chat- ting. Now that he was done he amiably put a proprietary arm around the one adjacent who was instantaneously transformed-- Bill had seen it all and would be the first albeit grudgingly to testify accordingly--into the woman at his side.
     Frinzie glanced quickly at the object of his attention and murmured, He reminds me of Hank. (But who was he?) Then, disregarding the remark as if it had been he who'd made it, and tactlessly at that, in a statelier and more matter-of-fact register she intoned, Do you happen to remember when I asked you to please leave the room and check with the nurse about Buffers's last feeding?
     He nodded, though hadn't she asked him to go check about something else? It didn't matter: he wasn't thinking of the Hank, nor of the event per se, his going out of the room, that is, but rather of its earning him, here and now, this uttered disinterring of a shared memory, however disfigured. The eye of her utterance on him, he was once again leaving the sickroom and entering the corridor in search of a nurse's station, and to hell with the reason. Her seeing flooded him with . . . joy So why did Hank and his verbose dying have to intrude? And, more to the point, how go back to the old poverty once Hank, living, dying or dead, succeeded in ruining it, namely, the being so flooded.
     A strange thing happened, she said.
     When, he asked, though he knew when.
     I was all alone with Hank--the Hank, as you call hi--so unlike his old self. He even smiled up at me and said, You're doing all right. Can you imagine? He was actually in awe of the robustness he had the gall to be inventing there and then for my habitation. How meet this need--for robustness, I mean--when I was completely done in by the construction, that is, by a misconstruction so flagrant born of indifference and the bedridden's headlong envy of the mobile. She took a deep breath: He never knew me as I really am. I'd never had anything because nothing with--from-- Hank. I was flooded with memories of all the ways he'd managed to keep me at arm's length: bold-faced dispatches I'd somehow construed as sure signs of ever-growing ardor on the prowl. There was no going back to the old life of misconstruings.
     But surely, despite its poverty (she winced: as she would have hearing any other word denoting the same thing? any word--no matter what it denoted--at such a juncture?), there are satisfactions, rhythms, rituals. You're selling it short.
     (Obtuseness, thy name is man!) Nothing to sell, short or otherwise. I had to hear him invent my robustness to realize I'd come to the end of all those makeshift treks through time elapsing in anticipation of our next encounter. Our was spoken so caressively there was just no hearing it as meaning to include him in its embrace. I just wasn't made to live alone, Billy boy, like you. In any event, you can't imagine what it was like, sitting there. A cabin in the woods it was, hundreds of miles from the nearest truckstop bodega. If only somebody--anybody--had entered brandishing the whiplash of a salutary reminder that I was being just plain remiss in my duty as comforter. That would have arrested my exploration of--more like a raid on--Hank's criminal exploitation over the years. Any old impersonal rebuke-- some helpful hint about the seemly thing to do in such a situation be it via bedpans or bedsores or bedbugs--would have immediately dissipated my uncontrollable horror at the infinite possibilities for vengeance lying at hand.
     But you were all so damned slow getting back to barracks.
     The saxophonist put down his shot glass, lit a cigarette, turned around with elbows behind him on the bar, surveyed his public. I can understand your fascination, Bill said, nodding in his direction. He doesn't rehearse. He conies in, out of the hot and cold, and before you know it he's put on his trombone, or what- ever the hell it is, as just another plausible skin through which to exhale his dread before drinking it back in detoxified. "The bird flies into the tree and becomes a leaf." Outraged at having come up with effective press for his rival, no less, and for free he quickly returned to the subject at hand: Didn't you try to just get up and go away? The musician smiled at him: something in the play of muscles indicating there were times when you just had to be brutal to be kind must have struck a chord of sensuous fellow-feeling in the lonely artist.
     Of course I did, she said, matching him for what she had taken to be mere exasperation. But the moment was so . . . still. At any other time I would have been doing my damnest to burrow my way out. Tonight I wanted to enjoy snowing myself in. Stopped time could no longer raze me to the ground because I was uncoupled from Hank and always it'd only been my relation to him, not me myself, that was lacerable by contingencies as the more or less probable signs of his coming to love me at long last. Now--then--I was simply . . . I. Uncoupled, I could step right up and smother the bastard.
     Mounting the podium, the musician said he'd do one last number: an extemporization on Porter's "I Concentrate on You." He'd never had the least to do either with theme or with variation, until this pregnant moment. He wasn't even sure he'd ever heard the ballad through. Frinzie seemed to be resenting the attention Billy was according Mr. Mike (the saxophonist's name, picked up via the waiter's meaningful-glance-punctuated kibbitzing with the barkeep [a frustrated jazzman?]). Or had he heard it passing the lips of the guttlers at the table adjacent who, singlemindedly dedicated to getting their money's worth out of the floor show such as it was, were now all comfortably ensconced at last in the same time zone. Grabbing at his upper sleeve: At that point, Billy--Billy! listen to me--I adjusted the lamps--there were three of them in the room, I think--in such a way as expertly (if I do say so myself) to give his face a sleepy--an almost rapturously blooming--rosiness. More life-affirming, that look, than anything life itself could have concocted. As I stood at the door (I knew that cantankerous horde of hams was but footsteps away) coldly appraising my handiwork (you know how self-critical I can be)--my very life-work, as it were-- he--it--almost had me fooled. For once, the features--puffy, ill-formed as they had so often been in the round: I can admit all that now--were purged of every trace of their bearer's blustering old signature compulsion to be always revenging himself on this plaguey world by subduing it to paroxysmic envy of all he had and all he was still to have. In a word, there, in death, he lay yet at the very furthest remove from its dominion than he'd ever been.
     She removed her hand, was about to grab the breadstick then backed down, said: I'll kill myself, but it's got to be quick, perfect. Only I can't help wondering what's going to happen--
     --to your cats.
     She wasn't offended, liked the gallows levity To my cats, yes, but more to the point, to the in fact final vision of our life together that I brought with me into the hospital room. What's going to happen to that swarming detritus of a craved futurity?
     With a truculence he hadn't intended, Billy said: What happens to anybody's vision of his destination (a spiral jetty; say) after it is ousted by the real thing?
     I would like it to be part somehow of the . . . ending. I put the biggest part of myself into it.
     Mr. Mike was done but refused to bow at this, the end of his gig, wasn't that what they called it. He made his way back to the bar, almost swaggering, but more, Bill saw, from timidity than from anything approaching complacency. To steady himself as he discreetly picked up the tab, he said, pretending to be recomputing the total, So somehow you've got to get this vision of "life with Hank" into the act of slitting your pretty throat, is that it, Frinzie, my girl? Because you've thrown your whole . . . character into it. Because you've mastered its every tic, its every contingency. In the greased tone of a saleslady: Let's face it, doll, that vision is you. For the likes of him, however (embryonic nod in the direction of the vacant podium), there's no percentage in shoving predigested details into the maw of the work at hand. For him, the work is the arena of getting to know--mastering--the blessed unknown. All that is nor Mr Mike or (in your case) Ms. Frinzie. He's aware that nobody will shell out for the doily-perfect putting back together of some Humpty-Dumptyjigsaw puzzle devised who knows where, who knows when. His life up there (the podium was getting darker by the minute) can never be made to correspond one-to-one with what he's been forced to live out here, among our sort.
     But he couldn't go on pimping for the saxophone because he kept seeing--as through a scrim of swarming wasps and their mates--Hank laid out flat in all his robust splendor thanks to the tastefully synergistic cross-fire in which--under a lucky star to the bitter end--he'd succeeded in getting himself caught. In spite of (unbeknownst to?) himself, Bill couldn't help wondering if he mightn't discreetly feed off all that swarming robustness in the course of his own quest for the right right-as-rain sets for the Nick de Cusa three-act. He just didn't have the heart--Frinzie or no Frinzie--to waste such vivid imaginings.
     But in fishing for the right mix of coins and bills, he noted that she was far ahead of him, almost at the door where the cashier, staring hard at her off-white fingernails so as not to be staring hard elsewhere, was chitchatting with a cop. All he could think about as he paid up was whether she'd already seen the second one and, wait, the third, both standing outside (the much thinner of the two by the window, blocking as if by design what had to be the obligatory glossy head shot of Mr. Mike) and was therefore at this very moment steeling herself to stroll coolly past every last agent of the law.
     Having paid and exited, Bill saw immediately they were expecting him to get in beside Frinzie, her appropriately enigmatic profile facing straight ahead. One of them, though occupying a jump seat (was this standard procedure once the jig was up?), had nonetheless turned discreetly away from her impermeability. Clutching his upper arm almost at the armpit and clearly intending not to ease her grip, much less let go, all the way to what he assumed would be headquarters, was her way of making him understand she'd decided to choose their unforeseeable, alien element-resistant . . . ending, or maybe she just needed to hold on to something familiar.
     Being roundly scuttled right, left and sideways, the treetops, when instantaneously poised against streetcorner (not major thoroughfare) rations of still-glowing horizon, proved far more black than bluish green. He happily took note. Encountered right side up for a change and even a bit enhanced thereby, every ration to a man, from this moment on all without exception to be known as Bill Brandtfond's very own (dammit, things were taking a turn for the better) unpuddled columns of city-scape sky, regretted to inform him (alas, this day too had its dog) that they--more to the point their newly sealed connection with his projected design for the new de Cusa--would never--never! (so get to the point: he knew how to take the good with the bad)--be the subject of a fireside chat between him and one Frinzie Makomber.
     At any rate, he'd have understood without the clutching (now localizable below his armpit, somewhere in the vicinity of his watchband wrist). For what she'd been looking forward to as Her Own Ending would only have been deferred again and again and again through its massive insistence on working everything in--all the bits and pieces of blighted craving, to have flashed forth as blessed event within the life to come. No, not life. What was her term for so unscalable a heap of one-track, one-note visions?
     It was on the very tip of his Detritus.

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