A Play About a Caterpillar
THAT FUCKING JUTE.
Piers Fawkes burst through his own door, sweeping with him wind, rain, elm leaves in a whirl, hands shaking with anger and alcoholic craving.
Enduring his crap, that’s what it was—enduring. It had been Fawkes, after all, who had driven in the ambulance to the morgue, with the gurney holding the body bag jostling his knees on the turns. It was he who had accompanied the body to the dungeons of the hospital (and who had then burst from its doors and hiked a half mile to some random suburban hotel—with, mercifully, a pub—to down two pints and suck countless cigarettes in an attempt to wash away that image of the stainless steel tables—like oversize kitchen sinks, he could not help observing; designed to drain fluids). After the postmortem, he had signed the death certificate. All the requirements of a housemaster, a lone man in loco parentis, suddenly transformed from the caretaker of sixty boys to the Factotum of Death for one. God, what a nightmare.
And after all this, because of that ridiculous school meeting, the headmaster had the gall to chew him out. Badly. For an hour. Taking it out on him.
Had it really been Fawkes’s idea to invite the doctor? He didn’t even remember, frankly. (Let them hear it for themselves. Had he said that, or Jute?) But Jute pinned it on him. The boys respect authority, Jute had stormed, pacing, they respect firmness. (And how should I respect you, Fawkes had thought, darkly, heaping shit on me when you know I need this job, know I can’t respond. What kind of leadership does that take?) They want, Jute had continued (now the expert on what the students want), to push their childish games so far, but they need someone to know where the line is. You (he had actually pointed) are distant. Not engaged. You’re not respected. You’re the wrong man for a crisis, and God knows—Jute finally coming to it, at last the dagger thrust—whether a better man could have prevented it in the first place. Fawkes had clenched his fists at this point and growled I think this conversation is over before charging from the room and into the swirling, nasty weather, snarling and snapping to himself like a wounded dog until he found himself at the dimly glowing lanterns of the Lot.
Fawkes tore off his wrinkled black robes and flung them onto a chair. He fumbled around his desk for a cigarette. He would walk out, that’s what he would do. See if they could fill his spot on such notice. He would make sure his resignation received publicity. He wasn’t so far gone as a poet that some journalist wouldn’t care. WHITESTONE WINNER QUITS. He liked that. He lit the cigarette and dragged deeply. The nicotine revived his brain and brought with it several sobering and probably quite accurate notions: that this daydreaming was childish; and that quitting was exactly what Jute wanted him to do.
Fawkes knew he had not been the school’s first choice as housemaster of the Lot. At first he’d only been offered the position of English instructor. But then the commission for the Byron play followed, lending Fawkes a whiff of prestige. Then the school’s top candidate withdrew (the man’s wife got breast cancer); an outside candidate was lost to a competing offer; two other assistant masters were deemed too young; and summer was waning. Someone suggested Fawkes. He was the right age; he was looking for a nearby flat anyway; he had some charisma. Fawkes never pictured himself as a caretaker; but his living expenses would be covered; he was assured Matron and the assistant master, Arnold Macrae, would do the heavy lifting; he would still have time to write. He found himself flattered, stroked, coaxed—and frankly it had been a while since he’d had that kind of attention. No one, in the whirl of mutual flattery that accompanies any hiring process—especially a last-minute, desperate one—stopped to recognize that Fawkes had never been responsible for anything more than writing a hundred lines of poetry per day. He’d never held a proper job; never even had a salary. He’d divorced young, so he’d never cared for children; and he was a heavy drinker.
Fawkes had tried to fit himself to the role. But a dull panic seized him when he was faced with the tedious and, he soon realized, incessant demands of the job. Emails—hundreds of them—flooded his school account daily. Parents inquiring about a poor mark; about sniffles in a young one; about the timeline for the refurbishment of the squash court so their son could practice; about a knee injury in football; about bullying, and name-calling, and so on, around the clock. The boys, it turned out, were all amateur arsonists, hackers, pornographers; he was forced to walk the halls at midnight, shutting down computers and breaking up pranks. His 5 A.M. writing schedule went to hell. He started delegating more and more to Macrae. He used his commission as an excuse to write more, housemaster less. Still, it had pained him when he discovered—through a younger colleague, who in confiding his own anxieties, naïvely blurted it all out to Fawkes—that he was unpopular. Hated by Matron. Despised by Macrae. Viewed as a drunk and a wastrel by the other housemasters, who took their duties seriously, their dislike stoked by their (false) supposition that Fawkes was unfirable due to his commission from the school governors (those shadowy, superrich aristocrats who managed the school’s investments and affairs) to write the play. Never mind that Fawkes wanted to commit the whole draft to the fire, and that he had been avoiding sharing the current manuscript with anyone even though it was months late. As far as the great Harrow School was concerned, Fawkes was vain, sloppy, unqualified, and detached. A hiring mistake—now exposed by a boy’s death.
Bad luck? Or bad housemastering? The facts, Fawkes suspected, would not matter. He would take the fall for it. Maybe not sacked publicly—Jute was too shrewd for that; that would be admitting that the school had been at fault—but vilified, scorned. Blamed.
Fawkes angrily stubbed out his cigarette. He would leave. He would take the tube to London. He would call his old friends—the filmmakers and painters and editors and writers he’d come to London to be with and to be. He would get loaded—pints, smokes, pubs, clubs—and dine out on stories about the Hill, a Jurassic Park of British aristocracy. Just walk away, put it all on a credit card for a while, deal with the consequences later. Yes. He breathed deeply, happily. It was the right decision. He felt a sense of elation, as if he’d been trapped in a stuffy room and someone had just thrown open the windows. Oxygen at last. He jumped up to fetch his coat. Snatched his keys. Felt his trouser pocket—wallet, a few bills. All systems ready. He was seconds away from freedom.
And that was when the doorbell rang.
TWO PALE FACES. The porch light cut their features; they seemed to peer, half materialized, from another dimension. Fawkes was prepared to slam the door on them. But it was Persephone Vine, under bedraggled heaps of dark hair, and another Harrovian; Sixth Form, judging from height.
“What do you want,” he grunted.
“That’s not much of a welcome,” said Persephone.
“It isn’t. Because you aren’t.”
“I told you I was dropping in. Are you really going to send us back out into this?”
Fawkes had a soft spot for the girl. Not only because she was beautiful and exotic and delightful to look at—no, that was another liability he was conscious of and, thankfully, able to manage (the notion of sexual frisson between them was ludicrous; Fawkes had a saggy behind and love handles and a tragicomic view of his own former sexual conquests)—but also because she was fun. All these teenagers were desperate for attention. They looked at you with faces like empty plates, wide, open, eager, wanting you, willing you to tell them who they were; Persephone was as bad as the others. But she had a saving feature: she pretended that she and Fawkes were equals. Pals. It was presumptuous, impertinent, and—given that it sometimes involved inappropriate drinking and smoking together—also a great relief. They had met the previous spring when she was cast in the Byron play. She would come to Fawkes’s apartment to talk about The Play—or as she had it more often (and more annoyingly), our play—and he would give her smokes. Soon their project would be long forgotten, and she would ramble about her interpretation of Antony and Cleopatra or yet another chapter in her parents’ epic dysfunction, and he would catch himself: he had been listening. Actually enjoying himself.
“I’m going out for smokes, P,” he lied. “Can’t we do this later?”
“No, we can’t.”
Persephone, clearly and inconveniently at her most insistent, wedged herself and her guest into the hall. Fawkes felt his moment of decisiveness slipping away. She and this stupid boy were blocking his escape. He was about to tell her so.
And then Fawkes saw the face.
He had passed over it at first, distracted by his thoughts. But he doubled back now.
The boy looked at him, strands of hair dripping down over his eyes, not understanding yet that he was being stared at. He had long hair, which only added to the effect, and Fawkes found himself gripping the doorjamb, instinctively touching cold, present reality.
Persephone grinned, watching him.
“You see it, then. Ha! Got you, Fawkesy.”
Fawkes didn’t respond. He just gaped. The pale crescent moon of the boy’s face. He noticed the mouth next—red, round, a brazenly erotic droop in the lower lip, like a rose petal about to drop. And then the eyes. Grey as a wolf’s. These eyes, he noticed—coming back to reality, awakening to the fact that he was beholding an individual, alive and breathing, not a portrait or an apparition—these eyes were sulky, fearful. Something unsettled in them. The usual teenage need, accompanied by a warning.
“Who are you?” Fawkes managed. “I’m Piers Fawkes.”
“I know. You’re my housemaster.”
“You’re American.” It was a statement. “Wait. The American! Oh God. You’re the one who found Theo.”
The boy tensed. “Yeah,” he said warily.
“I’ve been meaning to stop in. Check on you. I feel terrible. It’s been an awful week. Especially for you.”
“Awful,” echoed Persephone impatiently, “but we’re here for an audition.”
“Audition?”
“For the play. Our play?” prompted Persephone. “You see the resemblance to Byron, don’t you?”
“Extraordinary.”
“And you got my note? I knew not to bother with email.”
Fawkes cast a guilty glance at the magazines, newspapers, and unopened letters heaped on the dining table.
“For goodness sake,” she fumed.
“Listen, chaps. Whatever you’re here for, it’s been a long day. If you’re going to stay, how about a drink?”
ANDREW HELD A cold, fragrant martini in his hand, wondering what the protocol was for drinking gin in the apartment of your housemaster when you were underage and had narrowly escaped lynching for being a teenage drug lord. Was this . . . allowed? Apparently it was. Persephone tucked her bare feet under her legs on the sofa and nibbled the lemon twist (which Fawkes had peeled with professional skill as he chatted with them from the kitchen) while Andrew took in the apartment. Nicely proportioned, with a dining room giving onto a patio through French doors, and a small kitchen in black-and-white tile. But so messy it bordered on foul; a squatter’s place. Newspaper littered across the sofa cushions. A modern white desk held letters, papers, folders, a laptop, books with faces down and spines broken; a cordless phone (no cradle), two coffee cups, a full ashtray, a bottle of Advil, a dirty plate with a dirty fork and a bunched-up napkin on top. Andrew sized up Fawkes. His appearance confirmed Andrew’s suspicions in Speech Room: Piers Fawkes had been sleeping poorly. Brown circles stained the skin around his eyes. His eyes were bloodshot, his clothes wrinkled, his hands shook. There did not seem to be much stowed beneath the surface. Piers Fawkes was a wreck all over.
“So you want to play Lord Byron?” Fawkes asked.
Andrew mumbled, “Yeah, I guess.”
“Is he always so enthusiastic?” Fawkes asked Persephone.
“He’s American,” she answered. “They’re laconic.”
“I thought they were bubbly and naïve.”
“I do want the part,” Andrew put in, spurred to speak for himself. “Do I really look like him?”
“See for yourself.”
Fawkes snatched up one of the broken-spined hardcovers from the desk and thrust it into Andrew’s hands, flipping pages for him until he reached the illustration plates. They contained multiple portraits of a dark-haired young man in Regency dress—linen collars and cloaks. The images seemed varnished and remote.
“Are you convinced?”
“Do I really look like this?”
“Are you complaining about looking like one of the most beautiful men of all time?” Persephone was indignant.
“Close enough,” drawled Fawkes. “Can you act?”
“I’ve done a little acting,” Andrew said.
“How little?”
“He played the bad guy in a play called The Foreigner,” piped up Persephone. “I looked it up. Owen Musser, the racist sheriff. Am I right?” Andrew nodded, impressed. She continued: “The role has quite a few lines, actually. The play won two Obies.”
“Not our production,” Andrew added hastily.
“My condolences,” said Fawkes.
“So,” said Persephone, bursting with impatience, “he looks like Byron. He can act, or at least, he has acted. Now tell him about our play.”
“Our play,” repeated Fawkes. “Our play was commissioned by the governors of Harrow School. They provided me a rather large sum of money—to a poet anyway—to play the poet’s time-honored role for institutions. Paid flatterer. Immortalizer of invented virtues. Byron was rich, pugnacious, and a sex fiend. But he attended Harrow. So let’s put some Vaseline on the lens, add some soft lighting, and make him into a play-in-verse. Longer lasting than a brochure. And the children can play the parts.”
“You’re rather biting this evening,” said Persephone.
“The plot,” Fawkes continued, “is simplicity itself. Byron, dying of a fever in Greece, finally reveals who of all his many, many sexual partners was the love of his life. Sort of a literary Rosebud. Not half bad, actually. The least of my worries.”
“What are your worries?” asked Andrew.
“Yes, what worries?” asked Persephone, growing anxious at Fawkes’s tone; she caught the odor of anger and abandon in everything he said; the sarcasm of a man who moments ago had been ready to run. “What are you on about, Fawkesy?”
“I have only three concerns,” he answered. “The beginning, the middle, and the end.” He tossed back his drink.
“So who was it?” Andrew asked. “The love of his life, I mean?”
“I . . .” Fawkes broke off in a bitter laugh. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“You never told me that,” Persephone said, hurt. “I thought it was Augusta, his flesh and blood, his Sieglinde.”
“How could you not know how it’s going to end?” Andrew blurted.
“It’s just that nothing makes sense,” Fawkes exclaimed, rising, warming to the subject. “Does anyone want another drink?” They didn’t. He went to the kitchen. They heard an ice tray snap. Andrew watched Persephone. Her brow furrowed: she had not been expecting this. Andrew felt a kind of relief. Not everyone here is perfect, he thought.
“Thing is,” Fawkes resumed from the kitchen. “Byron at twenty was not a bad poet. His poems weren’t unpleasant to read. But they were conventional. O wilt thou weep when I am low. Buh bah, buh bah, buh bah, buh bah. Iambic quadrameter, and he makes it so dreary. Love. Ladies. Plenty of puerile keenness. He had one poem from his first collection that stood out. But he cut it. He was conventional.”
“What was the poem?” Andrew asked.
“ ‘To Mary.’ It was about a whore. Apparently he fell in love with her. He had a bad habit of doing that. A weakness for saving strumpets. What’s the line? And smile to think how oft were done, What prudes declare a sin to act is.” He sipped his drink. “A sin to act is. A mix of metrical anticlimax and a dirty joke. That is the author of Don Juan. Laughing at himself for loving. That’s mature. Sorry, chaps, but it is. And he cut it.” Fawkes wrinkled his nose. “If he’d died at twenty, no one would know Lord Byron from a hundred other minor nobodies.”
“So what happened? How did he improve?” prompted Andrew. He was sipping his drink freely now. In a haze of Fawkes’s cigarette smoke, mind buzzing with the alcohol, Andrew started to feel at ease for the first time since he had arrived. If he had paused to think about it, he would have realized he was feeling more at home than he had at home. But for now, he was merely aware of an excitement welling in his chest.
“Good question,” said Fawkes, jabbing in Andrew’s direction with his cigarette. “People search for the mystery of Shakespeare—how a middle-class nobody from Stratford could write great plays. Byron’s story is much more unlikely. At age twenty, he’s writing namby-pamby verses. Then, for some reason . . . he flees England. No one knows precisely why. I will never live in England if I can avoid it. Why—must remain a secret. He takes a long sea voyage. Then a few months later—on Halloween night, in Epirus, Greece—he starts a poem. In Spenserian stanza of all things. Which is suddenly . . . a masterpiece. Epic. Rich. Mature. It invents, whole cloth, the Byronic. The young man, brooding and fated, bearing a burden of unspeakable sins. He’s famous, overnight. A genius,” Fawkes said, dubiously, “overnight.”
Andrew and Persephone exchanged a glance. “Is that a bad thing?” asked Andrew.
“It’s not bad. But it’s impossible!” Fawkes ranted. “You’re either a prodigy with talent, or you earn that talent with long hard work. You don’t grow wings in a few months. Poets,” he declared, “aren’t caterpillars.”
Having spent himself, and finished his cigarette, Fawkes rose and fetched a fresh pack, tapping it into his palm. Persephone slumped, looking bereft. The burden of the conversation was now on Andrew. He seized it eagerly. He felt like he hadn’t spoken for days. “Were you a prodigy?” he asked.
“I?” said Fawkes, taken aback.
“Yeah.”
“Piers won the Whitestone Prize at age twenty-nine,” offered Persephone. “He was the enfant terrible of English poetry.”
“Notice the past tense.”
“Are you still famous?”
“If you have to ask,” said Fawkes sourly, “then there’s your answer.”
“So what’s slowing you down?”
Fawkes cocked an eye at Andrew. “I can’t write about who Byron loved, or what he cared about, when I don’t even know who he is. I can’t write a play about a caterpillar.” Fawkes ripped off the cigarettes’ cellophane wrapper with a vengeance.
“Sorry. I offended you,” said Andrew.
“And what do you know about Byron?” Fawkes demanded.
“Me? Ah, nothing.”
“Ever read any?”
“Nope.”
“I suppose you read nothing but Walt Whitman, in America?” said Persephone.
“Robert Frost in anthologies,” countered Andrew.
Fawkes scrabbled around in the desk for another hardcover. He flipped through it quickly, cigarette jabbing from his lips and threatening to ignite the page, then thrust the volume at Andrew.
“Read that,” Fawkes said. He pointed at a poem. “Out loud.”
Andrew was taken aback. “What, now?”
For an answer, Fawkes flopped himself onto the sofa alongside Persephone, watching Andrew expectantly.
“Of course now. You came here to audition, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but it seems like you’re mad.”
“Mad, in the American sense. Mad, as in angry. Yes, I am angry. I have been angry since I was fourteen. It’s been my trademark. I write many poems about it. But I am not mad at you. I want to hear you read this poem. It may well be the highlight of a truly abominable day. And you’re the one, by the by, who needs to be mad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know!” Fawkes and Persephone said the last part together, and laughed. Then they sat and waited.
“Um,” Andrew began.
He attempted to read sitting on the sofa, but Persephone forced him to stand. Then she moved him to the center of the room, and he stood there, holding the volume like a first grader about to recite a poem at assembly. Andrew felt ridiculous.
The book—Selected Poetry of Lord Byron—had a green cover and a dollar-bin smell. He scanned the lines. This was not romantic stuff, trees and mountains and wispy epiphanies. It was something else. He looked up. The same two faces: Fawkes pulling alternately on his Silk Cut and his martini, Persephone’s jaded expression gone, a kind of openness in its place.
So he began.
“I had a dream,” he pronounced.
The two audience members sniggered. Andrew reddened.
“Just read normally,” Fawkes said. “In your normal voice.”
Andrew swallowed. “I had a dream,” he resumed, “which was not all a dream . . .”
The poem began, sonorous, authoritative, vivid, like the words of a correspondent from a war zone.
. . . The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in eternal space,
Rayless and pathless, and the icy Earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.
The poem—the first he had read of its kind: a horror poem, he decided—built, line by line, into an evolving and meaningless tragedy where regular people were stripped of their humanity and were reduced to their animal selves. It was a description, seemingly firsthand, of the world’s demise; a devolution from a grassy, fruitful habitat to a stark, stony rock; a shocking and sudden reversal, from life as history and biography to life as astronomy—volcanoes and darkness and grubbing for food and survival. No Love was left, he read. And by the time he came to the end—the waves were dead—he felt himself swaying, hypnotized by the rhythm—the winds were withered in the stagnant air—dizzy from never taking a breath and stricken by the violence of the poem. He raised his eyes, surprised, almost, to see the dimly lit apartment, and not the waste land of the poem. Darkness had no need of them it concluded, and he pronounced the final words, without quite meaning to, while gazing into Persephone’s eyes:
“. . . She was the Universe.”
Persephone’s face had gone flaccid. Fawkes smoked, an ash stem hanging from his cigarette. Had he bombed? Gone too fast? Been unintelligible? He had slurred once or twice—he was used to beer in cans, not straight liquor—and cursed himself for accepting the drink. Anger and embarrassment choked him.
FAWKES KNEW HE would stew later over being called a has-been by a brat. The anger coming not so much from the boy’s impertinence (which in principle Fawkes valued) but from the fact that he himself was so transparent. That a teenager could, literally, walk in off the street, and after hearing a few unguarded comments, dissect him with ease. Mediocre. Stuck. All true. And not writing—or writing well—plagued him worse than failing at his job. Fuck Jute, he thought for the eleventh time that day, but differently this time, a dismissive fuck off, not an angry one—Jute was nothing compared to writer’s block. Producing thin stuff and knowing it’s thin stuff and not being able to will yourself to quality. Poetry for Fawkes had always been his private treasure room, the secret hoard at the center of the castle, where you sought and sought and finally found the bullion, the pure metal of indivisible value: the ringing, absolute, true-pitched capture of some shred of experience, so right, so dead-on—a bit of dialogue, a comparison, an image—that it almost reminded you of death, the way a sentimental snapshot does: freezing time, to make you notice how relentlessly it passes. But the Byron play—flailing. Until now. Until seeing Andrew. It was almost cheating. Somebody loading the DVD of the Byron documentary, allowing Fawkes to watch the real man (boy) being followed around Harrow by a shaky videocam. Fawkes listened—their feeble breath blew for a little life and made a flame—and felt himself treading the steps of the castle—cold, uncertain, but holding his breath. He was sure now, with this curious sulky American before him, that he saw that golden glow under a door; he was certain he’d found the treasure room.
A moment passed, a long one. Andrew stood there, blushing.
Fawkes returned to the moment. He had not been paying much attention. But it was a good sign, probably, that the boy’s reading had sent him down that lane of—what? daydreaming? What the hell; why not, he thought.
“Can you limp?” he asked. The two students looked at him, puzzled. “Byron had a clubfoot,” he explained. “If you can limp, you’ve got the part.”
They laughed. Andrew hammed a stage gimp around the apartment.
“All right, all right. You’re not playing a pirate. You’ve got the part of George Gordon Byron, the sixth Lord Byron, author of Childe Harold, Don Juan, and many broken marriages. Who surely, at sometime, somewhere, fell in love with someone that he never forgot.”