Night vision

CHAPTER 13

I slid into an empty seat in the back row of the classroom and got my first look at the Prince of Passion. Gerald Prince had a fine thatch of silver hair swept over his ears, a florid complexion, and a face that had clearly been handsome in his youth. His shoulders were rounded and the brown sweater was threadbare at one elbow. A paunch hung over his belt, and the pants were baggy in the seat.

He was pacing in front of the class on an elevated stage, wagging a finger at a skinny young man near the front. About thirty students were scattered throughout the classroom in various stages of semi-somnolence. "And what does the playwright tell us about truth versus illusion?" The voice surprised me. Strong, resonant, a hint of a British accent. An aging actor, a tired Jason Robards maybe.

The young man shook his head. "No se, man."

"Now, Mr. Dominguez," Prince sang in soothing tones, "did you read the play?"

Si, sort of."

"And its theme? Its meaning? What did it say to you?"

"That bitch, man. Liz Taylor. What a ballbuster."

A few laughs from around Dominguez. I saw him only from behind. Dark hair short on the sides, a tail in back.

The professor strutted across the bare stage, coming closer to his student. "You're talking about Martha?"

" Si, Martha. I rented the video, man. I thought something was wrong with my Sony till I figured it was in black-and-white."

Prince's theatrical sigh carried to the back row. He spread his arms, threw back his head, and wailed, "'Blinking your nights away in the nonstop drench of cathode-ray over your shriveling heads.'"

"Huh?"

"Never mind. I suppose it's better to have seen a few fleeting images than not to have encountered the playwright's words at all."

"I liked it okay."

"Good. Edward Albee will be pleased. And its theme, Mr. Dominguez? Its message?"

Dominguez scratched his head with a pencil. " No se, pero, si fuera mi esposa, I'd have popped her one, the way that bitch talked."

The class mumbled its agreement. Prince shook his head and turned to another student, a young black man in the front row.

"Mr. Perry, your review of the play?"

"What it is," Perry said, "talking trash like that, putting him down. My old lady do that, she'd be seeing stars. That George character, no balls."

" No cajones," Dominguez agreed, and his classmates-at least those who were conscious-mumbled their agreement.

"Has it occurred to any of you," Prince asked, quite certain that it had not, "that the conflict between George and Martha, the humiliation Martha heaps on him, is essential to their relationship? That they relieve the tedium with it? That it is part of their game?"

The classroom was bathed in silence.

Prince went on; "What does Martha say about her abuse of George in Act Two?"

A thin black woman next to me called out, "That he can stand it, that he married her for it."

"Yes!" Prince boomed.

For a moment his eyes seemed to catch the light, and his shoulders straightened. "Thank you, dear girl. Then, in Act Three, 'George who is good to me, and whom I revile, who understands me, and whom I push off, who can make me laugh, and I choke it back in my throat, who can hold me at night, so that it's warm, and whom I will bite so there's blood.'"

Prince paused, then asked, "What does it all mean? What is the play about?"

"Conflict," the woman suggested tentatively.

"Yes, yes, and more." Prince moved from center stage and descended three steps toward his students, never looking down. He had been on stages before, I thought, had vaulted landings on rickety sets, and now had settled for a final run in front of a polyglot of nineteen-year-olds for whom high culture was MTV.

"Conflict is the purifying flame," he nearly shouted, heading toward the young woman next to me. "Conflict separates truth from illusion, fact from fantasy. Now, what are their illusions?"

"They pretended to have a child," the woman said. "And George had fantasies about all sorts of things. That he killed his parents, that he sailed the Mediterranean."

"Yes, and when Martha says, 'Truth and illusion, George, you don't know the difference,' what does George respond?"

The class was silent, so I piped up, "'We must carry on as though we did.'"

Prince whirled, scanned his audience, found me, wrinkled his forehead, and asked, "Do they?"

"Yes, but only for a while," I answered. "Eventually they must confront the illusions, strip them away from their relationship. They have no son. George will never be a great writer or even a decent professor. Martha's early dreams are lost in fogs of booze. They must face life the way it is."

The young woman next to me chimed in, "No matter how painful, they must face the truth. In the end all is truth."

Prince raised his arms in triumph. Two or three students nodded their heads vigorously. They understood. The rest had that empty stare of the young. It had been, after all, forty-five minutes without physical movement, roughly nine times the attention span of most adolescents.

Prince strutted back toward the stage, and Dominguez called out.

"I get it, man. But who the hell's this Virginia Woolf?"

Gerald Prince ordered Plymouth gin on the rocks and not for the first time. Up close, the florid complexion was crisscrossed with tiny, engorged veins. The eyes-if they had any color at all-were gray. The brown sweater smelled of tobacco, the fingernails were long and stained. He had snapped at the luncheon invitation, and I brought him to a bayfront restaurant downtown. Near us, bankers and lawyers feasted on expense-account lunches of rack of lamb with mint jelly.

"Even from the stage, I spotted you-the stranger-in back of the class," he said with a sly grin. "In my day, I could see right through the floodlights. One summer in Maine, in a barn-literally a barn-I saw a woman with glorious red hair, fifth row center. Three nights in a row she came. We were doing Long Day's Journey into Night."

"I can picture you as James Tyrone."

He laughed, a low rich chuckle. Thirty years ago. I was Edmund, the younger son."

The sickly one."

"Yes, and quite a challenging role for a young stag. I was robust, brimming with vitality. And virility, if I might say so. I had never tasted a drop of whiskey and had to play some scenes as if drunk."

"And the red-haired woman?"

"She thought I was smashing. The first of many such women in many such towns. I remember the scent of the pine trees around her cottage. Isn't that strange? Chilly nights, a fireplace, and the smell of the woods."

He drained the gin and smoothly signaled the waiter for another. The steaks hadn't yet arrived.

"Edmund Tyrone," he said wistfully, "walks from the beach to the house through the late-night fog. He's been drinking, and his father sits, quite drunk himself, playing solitaire."

Prince let his eyes glaze over and rocked a bit in his chair. "'It was like walking on the bottom of the sea,'" he recited, his voice carrying across the noisy restaurant. "'As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea.'"

He paused and seemed to await the applause. "You have some memory for lines," I complimented him.

"I was an actor! I was good. Not brilliant, perhaps, but with potential. I played the Old Vic when I was twenty-one. I could have-"

"Been a contender."

He smiled. "Brando was always a tad animalistic for my tastes."

"Today, in class, you said something about the 'drench of cathode-ray.' I don't remember that from Who's Afraid- "

"'I'll give him the good normal world where we're tethered beside them, blinking our nights away in a nonstop drench of cathode-ray over our shriveling heads.'"

"Now I know," I said, and I did. The tethered gave it away. "The psychiatrist in Equus."

"Very good. Exceptionally fine for a lawyer. Most are so…so…untutored except in their torts and contracts."

"I had a crib sheet," I confessed, and slid Mary Rosedahl's computer printout next to the glass of disappearing gin.

Prince put on rimless glasses and examined it. "It's from Equus, but of course you know that." He took off his glasses and looked at me through the pale gray eyes. "So very bleak there in print, don't you think? How pathetic, a man so bereft of emotions he conjures up the words of others."

"So you admit sending this message to Mary Rosedahl, Flying Bird?"

"As you lawyers might say, I have no present recollection of that event. But who else could it have been?"

"Why the talk of death?"

"Ask Peter Shaffer. He wrote-"

"I know. I don't care about the play. I want to know why somebody types death notes to a woman two hours before she's murdered."

"And I want to know who wrote Shakespeare's sonnets."

I narrowed my eyes. "We're going to watch you, Prince."

He laughed. They never do that to Clint Eastwood, but I couldn't rattle a half-potted professor. He ordered another drink on my tab and gleefully asked, "Aren't you supposed to say, 'Make it easy on yourself, buddy, and tell us what happened.' And I say, 'Okay, officer, I been wanting to get it off my chest.'"

"Maybe it's funny to you, but some boys downtown think you're the number-one suspect in a double homicide."

"Tell the boys downtown I plead guilty to plagiarism and innocent to murder."

It was a good line, and best I could tell, it was his own. I had nothing to lose, so I tried again. "Okay, then help me out. Two women are dead, and you may be the last person to talk to each of them."

He seemed to think about it. "My lectures might be deathly dull, but don't be ridiculous. I assure you I have neither gouged out the eyes of horses nor strangled young women…"

"Who said they were strangled?"

He paused a moment, took a sip of the clear cold gin. "Your friend, Roderigo."

I studied him. "Where were you between eleven and midnight on the night of June twenty-five?"

"In a drunken stupor, no doubt."

"And July two?"

"That night it could well have been a stunken drupor. I try to alternate, you know."

"And who can corroborate that?"

"As I told your policeman chum…"

"No one."

"Except my old polluted liver."

"Tell me about Marsha Diamond. TV Gal?"

"We chatted."

"On the night she was killed?"

"I suppose so, if your records so reveal. But we never met. In fact, I never met any of the women. They were all so…"

"Normal?"

"Vacant."

"Vacant?"

He smiled an actor's smile. He was enjoying this a little too much for my taste. "As well as vapid, vacuous, and void. And several other 'V' words I cannot quite wrap my tongue around at the present time. Vampish. Vain. Vexatious, but need I add, neither virtuous nor virginal?"

"So why do it? Why waste your precious time?"

"You are being sarcastic, aren't you? Saying my time isn't precious at all. That I've neither parts to play nor plays to write. That I'm an old gasbag run out of gas. And you sit there, sturdy and handsome like some leading man, your contempt for me written across your unlined face."

"My contempt for you, as you put it, stems only from your treating this as a game."

"Life is a game, my friend. Or is it a cabaret?"

"Prince. You're getting on my nerves. Why did you waste your time with the computer game?"

"Oral sex."

"What?"

"Talking about it. Safer than a Second Avenue hooker, don't you think?"

"So you never intended to get together with TV Gal or Flying Bird?"

"I didn't say that. I'm sure that somewhere, deep in the bowels of my mind…Gracious, what a metaphor."

"Sort of makes you a shithead, doesn't it?"

He grimaced. "You're really no good at this, Mister…"

"Lassiter."

"Now, where was I? Yes, somewhere, deep in the recesses of my psyche, I must have believed that a beautiful, literate young woman would take me into her arms and crush me with her ample bosoms. 'I always think there's a band, kid.'"

"A band?"

"Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. To the little boy, explaining his illusions of greatness. Do not underestimate the musical theater. Its homilies and visions of bucolic Americana are often quite revealing, but that, I'm afraid, is another course."

He downed his drink, his eyes a little hazier. "Are we done with the interrogation, counselor?"

"For now."

"Good. But let's do it again, shall we? You may sit in on my class anytime you wish. We're doing Death of a Salesman next week."

"I've already done Biff."

"No. An actor?"

"In college. When I wasn't tearing up my knee on the practice field, I studied drama. I was Big Jule in Guys and Dolls."

"Yes, yes. You've got the size for that. As well as a certain pleasant vagueness of demeanor. But Biff? Biff's a serious role, a difficult role. Willy Loman has to play off his reactions."

I thought about giving Gerald Prince some of his own medicine, hauling out Biff's big scene rejecting Willy, but I couldn't remember the lines. I wondered what it would be like to discover that your father, your hero, is a fake. "Maybe I'll drop by your class again."

"Yes, you simply must come back!"

I nodded and took one last stab at him. "'Catch me if you can, Mr. Lusk.'"

He seemed startled. "Mr. Lust?"

"Mr. Lusk."

"Oh, dear me. For a moment I thought you were making a pass at me. The theater's so full of-"

"You've never heard of Mr. Lusk?"

"A character from Dickens, perhaps?"

If he was a liar, he was a good one. Still, he was the only known link between the two women. "We'll talk again," I said.

"Of course we shall. We'll do a reading. I'll be Willy; you'll be Biff. We'll analyze it for them. The play as social commentary, Willy as the modern tragic character. You do remember the theme of the play?"

"As I recall," I said, "something about illusion versus reality."