Cyclorama, page 20
“You look terrific,” Eileen said. Old age suited him. She couldn’t believe that, when he’d directed her in Anne Frank, he’d been nearly a decade younger than she was now. Her eyes lingered on the walking stick he was carrying.
“A prop,” he said. “I’m rehearsing for a new role. I’ll be playing an old man.”
Eileen laughed. “You’re not that convincing yet.”
“Give it time.” Tyrus cast a suggestive glance down at Eileen’s I VOTED sticker. “So you’ve done the dirty deed, have you?” he said.
“I have.”
“And who did you vote for? The cunt grabber or the cunt?”
Eileen could imagine few secrets she would keep from Ty-Ty, but she feared that if she told the truth, he’d make fun of her. “What about you?” she asked.
“Oh, what difference does it make?” Tyrus said. “I’m cursed. Every candidate I vote for loses: Eugene McCarthy, Edmund Muskie, John Anderson, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader.”
By now Eileen had all but conceded the fact that Danny Cirillo wouldn’t show up at her house—that he had either erased her message or was playing it for his co-workers and wife, who were all laughing like hell. “Do you want to grab coffee after you’re done?” Eileen asked.
*
They met at a Starbucks. Eileen, trying to sound sunny, told Tyrus that her mom was “still living in the same house” and “still goin’ great guns at eighty-five” and, now that Eileen was all but through with mourning Tim, she was excited to get back on the job market.
“I envy you,” Densmore said. “You have no idea what the future will bring, whereas I know all too well.”
“You don’t for sure,” said Eileen.
“Of course I do,” Tyrus said. “I used to be a person with plans: New York, London, L.A. Plays to write, films to direct. Now none of it will happen. Every day will be the same as every other one, except just a little shittier, until one day it will all—” Tyrus made a magician’s poof! gesture.
“Well, what’s the spring play gonna be?” Eileen asked. “At least you have that to look forward to.”
“What does it matter?” said Tyrus. “It’s all the same. It’s like you fall in love for a few weeks or more. Then, after you strike the set, it’s like it never happened. You’re lucky if you get a card at Christmas.”
“That’s not true,” Eileen said. “You’ve mattered to so many people. How long’ve you been teaching?”
“Fifty-two years.”
“That’s amazing,” said Eileen. “What’d you do for your fiftieth anniversary?”
“Nothing. Who would want a fuss over something like that?”
“North Shore didn’t do anything?”
“Of course not.”
“Not even cupcakes? Not even a watch? A card?”
“They knew I wouldn’t want that.”
“But fifty years,” said Eileen. “There should’ve been a party. There should’ve been cake. They should’ve named the Annex after you—not Trey. Just because the Newsons have money, just because they felt guilty, that shouldn’t mean they get to name things so they can feel better about themselves.”
“They liked the speech I gave at Trey’s funeral, so they made a donation. I thought it was a nice gesture.”
“Even so, it should be your name there, not his.”
“But I’m still alive,” said Tyrus.
“Then that’s more than enough reason for a party,” Eileen said. “And if no one else was classy enough to throw you one, I will.”
“Oh, will you?”
“Yes. Absolutely.” And the more Eileen thought about it, the more she liked the idea. She could rent out some party room at Tommy Nevin’s or Prairie Moon or wherever. Everyone who’d taken a class with Tyrus or acted in one of his shows would be invited. Newspapers and TV stations would cover it; maybe Franklin could write one of his long articles that nobody ever finished reading. It would be like the massive Eileenfests that she used to throw every summer where she hauled trays of food out of Houlihan’s and turned her apartment into Party Central. There would be an open bar, killer music; Sammy could organize it, probably pay for it too—he had the dough. Eileen needed a job, a partner, a new purpose in life; what better way to make that happen than to throw a bash for a few hundred old acquaintances and friends to show off what she did best?
Finally, she would have a good reason to contact people. She didn’t have to call as poor Eileen whose husband just croaked or poor Eileen who needs a job and a fella. No, this would be ass-kicking, stage-managing, U-Stuff-It executive Eileen who still threw the best parties with seven kinds of cheese, eight kinds of beer, and nine kinds of ham.
By now it was dusk. Sidewalks were crowded with men and women in business attire and I VOTED stickers heading home from the Metra station. Eileen walked Tyrus to his car; along the way, she grabbed his ass; she wanted him to feel wanted again, didn’t want him to feel as if his life had passed, for that would mean her life was passing too.
“We’re totally doing that party,” she said. “I’m not gonna let you out of it.”
“Whatever will be, will be,” said Tyrus.
Eileen spent her drive home concocting her guest list for “Tyrusfest.” She wanted every generation of Tyrus’s students represented. When she got out of her car in her mom’s driveway, she leaned against the hood and typed a text message to Declan: Dec-Dec, way too long since we last rapped. How’s the wife? How’s the kid? Save for being widowed, having no job and no money, I’m doin’ GRRRRREAT! HA! Did U know Ty-Ty has been at North Shore for 50 years and those MF’ers still haven’t thrown him a PAR-TAY? We’re gonna throw him the biggest bash EV-UH. You’re my first choice to be on Planning Committee. Are ya in or ARE YA IN? DM me!
She walked to the house and saw a note taped to her front door. Probably that asshole “I’m with Her” girl. She loved the idea of that little bitch waking up in the morning, checking her phone, and finding out Trump had won. It probably wouldn’t happen, but what if everyone in America was a lot more like Eileen than they pretended to be? What if all their thoughts were a little nastier than they let on? What if they all liked the smell of their own farts, and threw random trash in the recycling when no one was looking, and thought, Bip-bap, bip-bap, when they saw someone with a big ass waddling by, and held their breath when they walked past a homeless person, and called Homeland Security when their landscapers did a shitty job? What if they all said “I’m with her,” but what they secretly meant was Fuck you, I’m voting for Trump?
Eileen read the note—a brief message on Century 21 letterhead: “Sorry I missed you. Lemme know when’s good—Danny C.”
Eileen practically had a coronary right there. She ran to the street to see if Danny was driving away. Nope. She shook her head and laughed. Win some, lose some, she thought; she’d voted for Trump, bumped into Ty-Ty, and had begun planning Tyrusfest, but she’d missed out on boning Danny Cirillo. After she got into the house, she texted him: Sorry I was out when you came. I’ll be here all nite. Cum on over. She liked spelling it that porny way.
Eileen hadn’t even taken off her shoes when Danny texted back: 8:00 okay?
It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that Eileen climaxed the moment Trump declared victory. But close enough. When Fox News called Pennsylvania, essentially giving him a lock on the presidency, Danny was already dressed, putting on his loafers, and telling Eileen he had to get home to his wife and kids, but maybe they could do this again same time next week. In fact, when Hillary was calling Trump to concede, Eileen was too spent to do anything other than lie on her rumpled bedding, assembling the Tyrusfest guest list, which was already up past 120 when she finally fell asleep. She hadn’t listened to the radio or watched TV that night, and the only reason she found out what had happened in the election as early as she did was because the CNN news notification on her phone woke her up.
But no matter how excited Eileen had been to cast her vote, she barely registered the TRUMP DECLARES VICTORY IN NEW YORK CITY alert. She was far more distracted by the other message on her phone. It was from Declan: No way would anybody catch me dead at any party for Tyrus Fucking Densmore.
Eileen stared at the message, trying to figure it out. God, people could be so self-involved, she thought. She couldn’t believe anyone could hold a grudge for thirty-five years. She didn’t get how anything that had happened so long ago could still matter.
Mr. Van Daan
Eileen’s message inviting Declan to help plan the abomination she was calling Tyrusfest wasn’t the only trigger, and it was hardly the first. Every time Declan drove past the North Shore campus or saw the unread copy of The Diary of Anne Frank on his son Tuan’s desk, every time the song “Amanda” by Boston came on the radio, the events of spring 1982 returned to torment him.
All that wound up happening—to Declan and everyone around him—wasn’t solely because of the election either, though those first dazed weeks in November had completely undermined Declan’s vision of how the world was supposed to work: good deeds rewarded; villains getting their comeuppance. Nearly every day, Declan still thought of that horrible mistake Densmore tricked him into making and the confession Densmore all but forced him to write in his diary. But really, he didn’t know why he kept beating himself up over what had happened when others did far worse, felt no guilt, and faced no consequences. Densmore still lorded over his Annex, treating his actors like his prisoners, and he still lived in the same lovely house and made nearly two hundred grand a year. Trump was on TV every day threatening Muslims and immigrants, and he was about to enter the White House. Declan had gotten kicked in the balls and punched in the face for mistakenly thinking someone wanted him, and where was he now? Still in his shabby Sauganash bungalow with too much clutter, not enough furniture, a wife and son who barely tolerated him, memories he would never be able to shake, and a fate he figured he would just have to endure.
The only time Declan felt free of guilt, anxiety, or self-doubt was on Thursday trivia nights at the Deacon’s Daughter, a neighborhood bar on the northwest side of Chicago. Declan and his team, the Serviceable Villains, hadn’t lost a match this season, but on the last trivia night before Thanksgiving, the topic was football, and neither Declan nor his teammates had been able to answer a single question in either the “Defensive Deviates” or “All-Pro Sex Offenders” categories. They were eliminated in the first round, at which point the whole fateful conversation began.
While the other teams competed to win free drinks and a fifty-dollar gift certificate to Hub’s Gyros, Declan sat at the bar nursing an O’Doul’s in the company of his three teammates: part-time set designer and full-time mattress salesman John Herrington, whom Declan called “John Falstaff”; John Shelley, a retired landscape architect (Declan called him “Old John of Gaunt”); and “Mistress Quickly,” aka Dr. Patricia Roebling, a prim, effervescent assistant English lit professor at Northeastern Illinois. Patricia served as volunteer dramaturge and botany researcher for the site-specific productions of Arcadia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Norman Conquests that Declan had directed at Indian Boundary Park, where he worked full-time as activities coordinator. The two Johns often told Declan that Patricia was in love with him, but Declan said Patricia was just bored and lonely; she was twenty years younger than he was, and anyway, he was married and Patricia was in a serious long-distance relationship with her grad school boyfriend, who taught classics at Oklahoma State.
Above the bar, a TV was broadcasting a rerun of The Bumbry Show. In the episode, “Exeunt, Pursued by a Thespian,” Calvin Bumbry Dawes’s son was trying to escape the advances of a drunk, lecherous theater director named “Nicol” on a trip to New York.
Some of the other people at the bar were laughing at the crude slapstick, but Patricia watched with her mouth open, hands on her cheeks—Edvard Munch by way of Macaulay Culkin. “How can people laugh at that?” she asked. “There’s nothing funny about it; it’s deeply, deeply disturbing.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Declan. “If you lived through it and you don’t want to cry, laughing’s pretty much the only thing you can do.”
Patricia’s eyes watered. “You lived through something like that?”
“Not ‘something like that’—exactly like that.” Declan explained that he had acted in school plays with the star and creator of that series, and that he was originally supposed to go on a trip like the one the show was spoofing. “Maybe if I’d gone, I’d have my own show, and Calvin would be here tonight. But it’s probably better this way,” Declan said. “If Cal hadn’t made it big, he might not still be on this planet. Whenever we talked about what we’d do with our lives, Cal nominated himself ‘Most Likely to Die at Twenty-Seven.’ ”
“And what were you most likely to do?” Patricia asked.
Declan sighed. “I don’t like to think about what I was most likely to do before you were born,” he said. Patricia laughed giddily at this. “I prefer to think about what I’m most likely to do in the future.”
“And what’s that?” asked Patricia.
“Drink more O’Doul’s!” John Falstaff said with a big belly laugh.
“And learn something about football, you pathetic git,” said John of Gaunt.
They stayed for another round. Declan didn’t care for bars, but he liked this one. He felt a little like Prince Hal in Henry IV here, carousing with drunks yet knowing he would eventually become king, and he tried not to remind himself that he was now probably twice Prince Hal’s age. But then the bartender said he and his teammates were too loud, and some of the other teams were complaining, so they all went out to the parking lot, wished each other a happy Thanksgiving, and vowed that, come next Trivia Night, they would start another winning streak.
The two Johns got into their cars, but Patricia—as she often did—lingered.
“Did you ride your bike here again?” Declan asked.
“No.” Patricia made padding, flippety-floppety gestures with her hands. “Walked.”
“Then I shall squire you home.”
Though Declan had known Patricia for the better part of a year, he still couldn’t get a read on her. She seemed to be one of those inexplicably good people who had come to teaching literature simply because she loved it so much. When she had asked if she could join his theater company as dramaturge, he had no idea she would take the job so seriously or that she would be so good at it. She had taught him more about Shakespeare than he ever learned in college or even while performing the Bard’s plays in daytime, twenty-bucks-a-show performances for school groups at the Ivanhoe theater. She had referenced Polonius to teach Declan what “mansplaining” meant, told him that Hamlet had been “virtue signaling” when he leapt into Ophelia’s grave, and stunned Declan when she explained that, because of the rhythm of Shakespeare’s verse, he had intended either for the character of Vaughan in Richard III to be pronounced “Vo-han” or for the actor playing him to speak with a stutter and call himself “V-Vaughan.” Yet, no matter how kind Patricia seemed, no matter how intelligent, pretty, and poised, whenever Declan saw her outside the Deacon’s Daughter, she was alone and looked as if she had just stopped crying.
She was wearing an iridescent green crushed-velvet dress, black stockings and pumps, and a black pillbox hat, as she sat with her hands in her lap while Declan drove casually, or as if he were attempting to look casual. He often had trouble telling the difference between when he was feeling an emotion or just acting it out. Which was why, though he was being truthful when he began telling Patricia about Densmore, he couldn’t say whether he was relaying these stories because he needed to unburden himself or because the stories seemed to affect Patricia so deeply.
“And all this happened when he was your teacher?” Patricia asked.
“That’s right,” said Declan.
“How horrible.”
Patricia lived on Bernard Street in a spacious Queen Anne, but she had only half of the top floor, accessible via two flights of rickety wooden back steps. Declan followed Patricia into her kitchen nook, struck by how pristine and well put together everything seemed: alphabetized cookbooks; a gleaming, dish-less sink; sponges that looked new.
Patricia filled a kettle with water. “Tea?” she asked. “Beer, wine, and Diet Coke are also possibilities.” She opened the refrigerator—so well organized: Where were the half-eaten dinners covered haphazardly with cling wrap? Where were the smudged and splattered bottles of condiments? Where were the cans of cat food, the wilted produce, the pints of melted ice cream, there because someone had spaced out and forgotten to put them in the freezer?
“Tea would be great,” Declan said.
She poured the tea—made with leaves, not bags; in matching China, not random NPR giveaway mugs—and they sat side by side on the sofa, cups and saucers on Patricia’s glass-and-chrome table, which was topped with neat stacks of the New Yorker, Harper’s, and American Theatre.
“We don’t have to keep talking about your old director,” Patricia said. “I’m sure it’s upsetting; we can change topics.”
“I don’t mind,” Declan said. “It’s just that, at a certain point, you can’t keep blaming your past for who you became—and it’s not like I was totally blameless back then.”
Patricia’s nostrils flared. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Honestly?” Declan asked, employing one of his signature conversational gambits: small confessions designed to avoid larger ones. “I was kind of an asshole kid. There were reasons—family stuff, a nasty divorce, pretty typical—but I was envious, I was self-involved, always looking for approval. I was a shitty boyfriend, clingy, overbearing. And if I’m being honest, I did enjoy the attention. Whenever Mr. Densmore pinched my ass, grabbed my crotch, or even slapped my face, I felt special—chosen.”
“You were a child,” said Patricia. “You cannot possibly be blaming yourself for your own assault.”
