In One Person

“Richard!” she called. “Jacques has a question about his
character
!”
    “Oh,
God
,” Elaine said again—this time, under her breath; she was barely audible, but Kittredge had heard her.
    “Patience, dear Naples,” Kittredge said to her, taking her hand. He grasped her hand exactly as Ferdinand takes Miranda’s hand—before they part at the end of act 3, scene 1—but Elaine yanked her hand away from him.
    “What is it about your character, Ferdinand?” Richard Abbott asked Kittredge.
    “This is more bullshit,” Elaine said.
    “Your
language
, Elaine!” my mother said.
    “Some fresh air would be good for Miranda,” Richard said to Elaine. “Just a couple of deep breaths, and perhaps a needed expulsion of whatever words spontaneously come to mind. Take a break, Elaine—you should take a break, too, Bill,” Richard told me. “We want our Miranda and our Ariel
in character
.” (I guess Richard could see that I was agitated, too.)
    There was a loading dock off the carpentry shop, to the rear of the backstage area, and Elaine and I stepped out on the dock in the cool night air. I tried to take her hand; at first she pulled her hand away from me, though not as violently as she’d jerked it away from Kittredge. Then, with the door to the loading dock still open, Elaine gave me back her hand; she rested her head against my shoulder. “They’re a cute couple, aren’t they?” we heard Kittredge say to someone, or to them all, before the door closed.
    “Motherfucker!” Elaine Hadley yelled. “Penis-breath!” she shouted; then she gulped the cold air, until her breathing had returned to almost normal, and we went back inside the theater, where Elaine’s glasses instantly fogged up.
    “Ferdinand is
not
saying to Miranda that he is sexually experienced,” Richard was telling Kittredge. “Ferdinand is saying how
attentive
he has been to women, and how often women have made an impression on him. All he means is that no one has
impressed
him as forcefully as Miranda.”
    “It’s a speech about
impressions
, Kittredge,” Elaine managed to say. “It’s not a speech about sex.”
    Enter Ariel, invisible
—that was the stage direction to my upcoming scene (act 3, scene 2). But I was already
truly
invisible; I had somehow succeeded in giving them all the impression that Elaine Hadley was my love interest. For Elaine’s part, she seemed to be going along with it—maybe for self-protective reasons of her own. But Kittredge was smiling at us—in that sneering, superior way he had. I do not think the
impressions
word ever meant very much to Kittredge. I believe that everything was always about sex—about
actual
sex—to him. And if the present company was convinced that Elaine and I were interested in each other in a sexual way, possibly Kittredge alone remained unconvinced—at least this was the
impression
that his sneer gave Elaine and me.
    Maybe this was why Elaine suddenly turned from him and kissed me. She barely brushed her lips against mine, but there was actual (if fleeting) contact; I suppose I even appeared to kiss her back, albeit briefly. That was all. It wasn’t much of a kiss; it didn’t even fog up her glasses.
    I doubt that Elaine had an iota of sexual interest in me, and I believe she knew from the beginning that I was only pretending to be interested in her in that way. We were the most amateur actors—her innocent Miranda and my largely invisible Ariel—but we were acting, and there was an unspoken complicity in our deception.
    After all, we both had something to hide.

Chapter
4
    E LAINE’S B RA
    To this day, I don’t know what to make of the wretched Caliban—the monster whose attempted rape of Miranda earns Prospero’s unforgiving condemnation. Prospero seems to take minimal responsibility for Caliban—“this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine.”
    For someone as self-centered as Kittredge, of course,
The Tempest
was all about Ferdinand; it’s a love story, in which Ferdinand woos and wins Miranda. But Richard Abbott called the play a “tragicomedy,” and for those two (almost three) months in the fall of ’59 when Elaine Hadley and I were in rehearsals for the play, we felt that our close-enough-to-touch proximity to Kittredge was our tragicomedy—notwithstanding that
The Tempest
has a happy ending for Miranda and Ariel.
    My mother, who always maintained she was just the prompter, had the curiously mathematical habit of timing each actor; she used a