Ghost of a Flea

Chapter Seventeen

Obviously this man has come to and found himself onstage. He looks about him, off to the wings, out at the audience. Then back to the wings, where a prompter reads him a line. He repeats it. The stage crew comes on and begins carrying off parts of the set, a chair, a screen, a table, as he speaks, looking back and forth from prompter to audience. Then a second person steps out and begins speaking. Their stories, we soon realize, interweave. And now there’s a third….

Something familiar, too, in what they’re saying.

I recognize lines from Suddenly Last Summer just as Deborah leans towards me to whisper: Ionesco. The crew reappears, lugging yet another character in its wake, and goes back offstage bearing further bits and pieces of the set, a bookcase, a teapot, leaving this new character behind. Like the first, he looks about, disoriented. Then lines of Sartre spring from his lips, not The Flies, I think, something a bit more obscure.

Moliere, O’Neill, Ben Jonson and Vian soon follow.

Gradually we come to realize that these are characters left over, as it were, from other plays, secondary characters, supporting roles-all those to whom, in whose stage lives, nothing much happened.

Afterwards at a coffeehouse on Magazine, as I watched powdered sugar from beignets drift in a blizzard onto her dress and cafe au lait’s breath struggle up from the cup, Deborah was quiet.

“I miss it, Lew.”

“Theater, you mean.”

“It’s as though something’s been torn from me. As though there’s this huge vacant lot in the middle of my life, buildings all around.”

“So plant a garden. Take back the lot.”

“It can’t be that easy, can it, Lew?”

And of course it wasn’t. In the weeks following, Deborah began play after play, at length abandoning them all.

“It’s gone,” she said, weeping against me in the deep of night. “How do people live without passion, without that one bright blue light? How do they go on without something central in their life?”

We were agreed on the idiocy of good advice, that only a fool would give it, a greater fool accept it. That night, three in the morning with Deborah’s body shuddering against me and wind padding predatorily about outside, was no different.

“That’s what people do,” I said. “They go on.”