Dark Benediction

“I don’t know,” she muttered. “It’s been so long. Anybody could have ad libbed through that fight scene.”

“You can do it. Rick’ll keen you cued and prompted. The engineer’s here, and they’re fussing around with the Maestro. But it’ll straighten itself out, if you give it a couple more scenes like that to watch.”

The second act had been rescued. The supporting cast was still a hazard, and the Maestro still tried to compensate according to audience reaction during Act I, but with a human Marka, the compensatory attempts had less effect, and the interpretive distortions seemed to diminish slightly. The Maestro was piling up new data as the play continued, and reinterpreting.

“It wasn’t great,” he sighed as they stretched out to relax between acts. “But it was passable.”

“Act Three’ll be better, Thorny,” Mela promised. “We’ll rescue it yet. It’s just too bad about the first act.”

“I wanted it to be tops,” he breathed. “I wanted to give them something to think about, something to remember. But now we’re fighting to rescue it from being a total flop.”

“Wasn’t it always like that? You get steamed up to make history, but then you wind up working like crazy just to keep it passable.”

“Or to keep from ducking flying groceries sometimes.”

She giggled. “Jiggle used to say, ‘I went on like the main dish and came off like the toss salad.’” She paused, then added moodily: “The tough part of it is—you’ve got to aim high just to hit anywhere at all. It can get to be heartbreaking, too-trying for the sublime every time, and just escaping the ridiculous, or the mediocre.”

“No matter how high you aim, you can’t hit escape velocity. Ambition is a trajectory with its impact point in oblivion, no matter how high the throw.”

“Sounds like a quote.”

“It is. From the Satyricon of an ex-Janitor.”

“Thorny—?”

“What?”

“I’m going to be sorry tomorrow—but I am enjoying it tonight-going through it all again I mean. Living it like a pipe dream. It’s no good though. It’s opium.”

He stared at her for a moment in surprise, said nothing. Maybe it was opium for Mela, but she hadn’t started out with a crazy hope that tonight would be the climax and the highpoint of a lifetime on the stage. She was filling in to save the show, and it meant nothing to her in terms of a career she had deliberately abandoned. He, however, had hoped for a great portrayal. It wasn’t great, though. If he worked hard at Act III, it might—as a whole—stand up to his performances of the past. Unless—

“Think anybody in the audience has guessed yet? About us, I mean?”

She shook her head. “Haven’t seen any signs of it,” she murmured drowsily. “People see what they expect to see. But it’ll leak out tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Your scene with the lieutenant. When you ad libbed out of a jam. There’s bound to be a drama critic or maybe a professor out there who read the play ahead of time, and started frowning when you pulled that off. He’ll go home and look up his copy of the script just to make sure, and then the cat’s out.”

“It won’t matter by then.”

She wanted a nap or a drowse, and he fell silent. As he watched her relax, some of his bitter disappointment slipped away. It was good just to be acting again, even for one opiate evening. And maybe it was best that he wasn’t getting what he wanted. He was even ready to admit to a certain insanity in setting out on such a course.

Perfection and immolation. Now that the perfection wasn’t possible, the whole scheme looked like a sick fanatic’s nightmare, and he was ashamed. Why had he done it—given in to what he had always been only a petulant fantasy, a childish dream? The wish, plus the opportunity, plus the impulse, in a framework of bitterness and in a time of personal transition—it had been enough to bring the crazy yearning out of its cortical wrinkle and start him acting on a dream. A child’s dream.

And then the momentum had carried him along. The juggled tapes, the loaded gun, the dirty trick on Jade—and now fighting to keep the show from dying. He had gone down to the river and climbed up on the bridge rail and looked down at the black and swirling tide—and finally climbed down again because the wind would spoil his swan dive.

He shivered. It scared him a little, to know he could lose himself so easily. What had the years done to him, or what had he done to himself?

He had kept his integrity maybe, but what good was integrity in a vacuum? He had the soul of an actor, and he’d hung onto it when the others were selling theirs, but the years had wiped out the market and he was stuck with it. He had stood firm on principle, and the years had melted the cold glacier of reality from under the principle; still, he stood on it, while the reality ran on down to the sea. He had dedicated himself to the living stage, and carefully tended its grave, awaiting the resurrection.