Enderby sat in one of the many toilets of the Peter Brook Theater reading a paperback volume of what were known as Science Fiction Stories. He sat long partly because of a costiveness that seven Gringe tablets had so far done nothing to ease. Perhaps, after all, salads were healthful. Too much protein and starch. For breakfast he had eaten pancakes and maple syrup and sausages on the side. He had brought his own steaming mug of tea down with him, an eccentricity now accepted by the Sheraton. Must do something about diet. Must not reject little paper cup of coleslaw issued with lunchtime sandwich. Spinach munched from can like marine character in old cartoons with ridiculously overdeveloped forearms. He sat long sequestered also partly because there was such a hell of a row proceeding at rehearsal. Clash of characters, egos really. That fag Pete Oldfellow and the divine April Elgar were creating, with claws distended and genuine hurled spittle, more compelling drama than any dramaturge could contrive. God was still, after all, so Enderby ungrudgingly conceded, the best of the dramatic poets, though shapeless and uneconomical. A bit like Charles Dickens. God was good on the physical and emotional sides and a great one for hate. He generously spilled his own hate into his dearest creation. That's why you had to have Jesus Christ, who unrealistically overstressed the love part. But God hated him too and sponged him out one Friday afternoon. The play now enacted on the dimlit stage was God's play, though God had to leave it to people to provide an ending.
Enderby read about people travelling to imaginary galaxies. God, if he would only grow arms and learn how to write, could do this sort of thing much better. The monsters on the planetoid Anatrakia were very anthropomorphically conceived. There seemed to be a lot of this sort of thing around, alternative universes ten a penny, and the young actor who had lent him this volume for a quiet lavatorial read boasted of possessing over four hundred science fiction paperbacks. Ought to have volumes of Shakespeare, really, Sophocles, Racine, Ben Jonson, others, but didn't. Didn't take his paid art seriously. Dick Corcoran from Manticore, near Toronto, Ontario, playing Essex and understudying the fag Oldfellow, who was making a very peevish job of Shakespeare.
Enderby read a story about the inhabitants of Garagogoki, the capital city of Berkibark on the planet Urkurk, who gave birth to little machines of no apparent purpose but produced babies in flesh factories. If the parents, or purlerguts as they were called (a term roughly meaning beneficiaries), did not discover the purpose of their machine within four orgs, a measurement of time relating to the periodic explosion of a renewable sun called Maha, the machine, which grew steadily to a monstrous size, Molochlike devoured them. The hero and heroine of the story, named Arg and Gogogoch respectively, tried to smash their machine at birth, but this resulted only in fissiparous replication of the monster. Enderby was deeply absorbed in this implausible narrative when a voice above his head said:
"Mr Enderby is urgently wanted on the telephone."
No escape. There were loudspeakers everywhere. He discounted the allegation of urgency and wiped himself, alas, drily. There was nothing urgent for him, at least not on the telephone. He had managed to get through to Tangiers yesterday and, except for the explosion of the frying machine in the kitchen and a fire quickly doused, everything seemed to be all right there. Muy bien. Adios. Enderby took his time getting to the telephone in the main office and there heard a woman's voice say to his ear hole:
"Mr Elderly? Laura Schoenbaum."
"We must really, you know, get this business of the name properly sorted out. I am Enderby. Enderby the poet."
"Oh, so glad you're there. Mrs Allegramente didn't want me to but I'm doing it just the same. Nobody else could say what it meant, but I'm sure you can."
"Another tabletapping session, eh? A lot of nonsense. Somebody pretending to be William Shakespeare, eh? There's a lot of malice going on back there, ought to have something better to do with their time, eternity that is. What was -"
"Well, yes, it was the Bard himself from the Happy House and he just made the same sound three times. Through Mrs Allegramente's mouth of course, which was wide open, she was in a trance."
"What was this sound?"
"Well, it sounds kind of silly – kha, kha, kha, just like that. And then a pause, and then the same again. And then another pause, and then the -"
"Kha, kha, kha?" asked Enderby. Girls looked up from their typing. "Or was it more ha, ha, ha, though with a very strong aspiration?"
"You could say that, I guess, yes."
"Hha, hha, hha, then," Enderby said. "Fairly clear, I should think. There's a sonnet beginning with the line 'The expense of spirit in a waste of shame', and it warns about the dangers of lust. The sin of animality. Then comes the line that begins 'Had, having and in quest to have', and there's no doubt that he's mocking the noise of lustful panting. Dog and bitch in heat. Men too. Women also perhaps." Typing had not been resumed. "Solie's reminding somebody not to get caught up in the toils of unconsidering sensuality. Hha, hha, hha, eh? Of course, it may not be Shakespeare at all. Just somebody who's read him."
"There was nobody there it would apply to, Mr Elderly."
"You can never be sure," Enderby said darkly. "Hha, hha, hha."
"Well, thank you, I hope everything's going all right there."
"Everything's going just fine," Enderby said, as he heard the screams of April Elgar and Pete Oldfellow approaching the secretarial area and Toplady's office. "Hha, hha, hha," he said in valediction. And he put down the handset.
God, how bloody beautiful she was in a rage. Her raging elongated sunset of a rehearsal suit, a onepiece jersey jumpthing, turned her into a flame with teeth. Enderby's heart melted. Behind her, glum and nailbiting, was Toplady. They were going to have it all out in a kind of privacy. Oldfellow whined, but he had neither her vocabulary, suprasegmental tropes of remote jungle origin, nor her numinosity. He was a man of about Enderby's size with a nose that would not get in the way in kissing sequences, mean blue eyes and a pouting mouthful of porcelain crowns. With him was his wife, Ms Grace Hope, a thin woman in a ginger trouser suit and an extravagant fair wig. To her Enderby abruptly addressed himself, saying:
"A question of money. There are two hotels requesting nay demanding payment. My own resources are not ah unlimited. I invoke the terms of my contract."
"Later," Ms Grace Hope said. "At the moment the show itself is in jeopardy."
"Not through any fault of mine," Enderby said. "I've done everything required. Totally accommodating."
"A smidgen too accommodating," Oldfellow said. "My part's been slashed to fucking ribbons." And his head with its mean blue eyes locked to April Elgar and ticked back to Enderby. Enderby said:
"I'll thank you not to use that word in ah her presence. Nor, for that matter, in the presence of ah her." Meaning Ms Grace Hope, his wife. "Questions of propriety."
"Don't give me that kind of shit," Oldfellow said. "I know what's been going on around here."
"In," Toplady said with weary bitterness, his nailgnawed right thumb showing in where.
"What precisely," asked Enderby of Oldfellow, "are you suggesting?"
"Oh, for Christ's sake," Toplady said, entering his office first.
"Myself also?" Enderby asked.
"Yeah, yourself also."
"Why," Enderby asked Toplady, when they were seated, "are you called Angus?"
"I don't see what the shit that's got to do with anything."
"What I mean is, the Scottish blood, if any, is not made manifest in any – Well, a certain directness of utterance, though usually coarse and improper, an apparent passion for whisky: that bottle on your desk is now empty but was full yesterday -"
"I get this for lagniappe," Toplady told everybody.
"They were going to call him Agnes," April Elgar said, "but when they got a closer look -"
"Stop it, stop it, stop it," Oldfellow screamed.
"Right," Ms Grace Hope said, a very hardfaced woman. "We keep our tempers, right? And we talk about the script. A musical's changed while it's in flight, we know that, but there've been too many changes behind Pete's back with no consultation. He's the star, right? He plays William Shakespeare, right? He gets the script and he says okay, lousily written but that can be put right later, and then when he gets here -"
"Who," Enderby said, "says that it's lousily written?"
"You may know Shakespeare," Oldfellow said, "but you don't know the theatre. There's a difference."
"You don't know the theatre, either," Enderby said. "You're what is known as a film star."
"Oh, for Christ's sake," Ms Grace Hope said, a sudden winter sun shaft firing a faint lanugo Enderby had not before noticed, so that her face seemed to bristle, "let's stick to the point. This is supposed to be a musical about Shakespeare."
"Which it is," Toplady said. "It's also about the Dark Lady."
"It's about the Dark Lady," April Elgar said very sweetly. "It's also about Shakespeare."
"You see?" Ms Grace Hope told a poster.
"Well," Enderby mumbled, "the concept was bound to change. The talents of Miss ah Elgar here have to be employed. The emphasis is on the power of certain ah dark forces on the life of the poet. I admit there was no such emphasis before. The emphasis now seems to me to be a just one."
"Thanks, kid," April Elgar said.
"Practicalities," Ms Grace Hope said. "We want certain things restored that got cut out behind our backs."
"This plurality," Enderby said. "Do you speak as ah Mr Oldfellow's wife or as his agent or as ah what?"
"I," she told Enderby, "am taking this show to Broadway. There's money being put into this show on certain strict understandings."
"I assumed," Enderby said, "that Mrs ah Schoenbaum -"
"That applies here. It doesn't apply when the show takes off from this theatre."
"What she means," April Elgar said, "is that she's producing a musical to show that the great overpaid Pete Oldfellow is more than just a pretty face."
"Listen who's talking about overpaid," Oldfellow hotly said. "I do this fucking thing for peanuts and she -"
"I will not," Enderby cried, "have this continual debasement of language."
"Ah Jesus," Toplady went.
"All that's needed," Ms Grace Hope said, "is cooperation, right?"
"Okay, tell that fag of a husband of yours to cooperate, okay?"
"I will not be called a fag by this black bitch."
"Ah, I knew we"d get that sooner or later. Okay, maybe this black bitch better schlepp her black ass off home."
"He didn't mean that," Enderby said. "And you didn't mean that about his being a fag."
"Didn't I just, brother."
"She calls everybody a fag," Enderby explained. "She calls me a fag too, but I don't object."
"Baby," April Elgar said, "you may be an uptight ofay milk-toast limey bastard, but you ain't no fag."
"Thank you," Enderby said gravely. Pete Oldfellow said in heat:
"She's got him by the balls, she's made him pussydrunk, she eats him for dinner." Toplady cried:
"We've got less than one month before opening. This can't go on."
"Well, try a smaller size, baby," April Elgar said.
"I'll say one thing," Enderby suddenly said with weight. "This thing is not entirely in our hands. There are too many messages coming through. Not very coherent perhaps, but we're being warned, I think, not to play ducks and drakes with the dead. I'm no more superstitious than the next person, but there have been various signs." They all looked at him. Ms Grace Hope said:
"What do you mean – signs?"
"Mrs Schoenbaum has these seances, superstitious nonsense, of course, but there seems to be somebody out there, watching. A fire at the Holiday Inn. My fryer back in Tangiers exploded."
"You're crazy," Oldfellow said without conviction.
" 'Good friend,' " Enderby said, " 'for Jesus' sake forbear -' "
"Jesus," went Toplady anticlimactically.
"A thought, that's all. We're trying to celebrate, in a popular and rather ah American form, altogether appropriate considering the double nature of the celebration, the human side of a great poet. That human side must not be traduced. The dead seem to have their own way of responding to the law of libel. If anybody's going to be made to suffer, it's going to be me. A fellow poet. Letting the side down. You," he said sternly to Oldfellow, "had better watch out. You're acting Shakespeare like a kind of cowboy. And with what I take to be a Milwaukee accent. Shakespeare's not going to like that."
"You're crazy, that's for sure," Oldfellow said, now with conviction. "And I come from Cedar Rapids, Iowa."
"Listen," Toplady hissed at Enderby, "I'm director, okay? And I'll decide who does what and how. You just give what you're asked for, okay? That's laid down in your contract."
"It's also laid down in my contract that I get some money."
"Give him some money, for Christ's sake," Toplady said to Ms Grace Hope. Ms Grace Hope at once gave him some money out of a big canvas bag covered with widowed letters of the alphabet in various typefaces. Enderby thanked her courteously. "Okay," Toplady said, "next call's at two. Entire company. Act One."
"That fag," April Elgar, "that plays piano. I want him out on his fat ass."
"Mike Silversmith always has him," Toplady patiently explained. "Mike Silversmith needs him."
"I don't need him, brother. And I don't have him."
"Silversmith," Enderby pronounced, "is musically analphabetic. His sense of prosody is rudimentary. This fag, Coppola I gather his name is, is at the moment necessary. He can notate music."
"Who," Toplady said viciously, "is running this show?"
Enderby bowed to everybody and then took his urgent engorgement and the image of April Elgar off to another toilet. Then, having finished the implausible story about the planet Urkurk, he went off to have a beef sandwich with coleslaw, which latter he ate.
That afternoon, from a lonely seat in the dark auditorium, he watched Act One unroll. The Induction was back in. Then Elizabethan London was primarily April Elgar and a dumpy woman choreographer. Oldfellow gawped at London, gumchewing kid as dumb Hamnet holding his dad's paw, and gave it slow hayseed (Cedar Rapids, he had said) greeting. He had prerecorded his songs, cheating but permitted in a star who had never sung before, and to the thumping of a live piano by the bald but hairy Coppola opened and shut a soundless gob. April Elgar did not warble Enderby's little Elizabethan pastiche about love; instead she belted out gamier words, though still by him, Enderby:
"Love, you say love, you say love?
All you're talking about
Is fleshly philandering,
Goosing and gandering.
Peacock and peahen stalking about,
Squawking about
Love,
He-goat, she-goat, mare and stallion,
Blowsy trull, poxy rapscallion.
You'd better know that my golden galleon
Is not for your climbing aboard
Of"
And so on. And it was not right. She was shaking her divine black ass to it. She was black America, which was better than Cedar Rapids, but she was not Elizabethan London. Nor, God help him, were his own rhythms. And another thing: what right had he, Enderby, to assume that Shakespeare had fallen for a genuine negress (inadmissible term nowadays, he had been told)? A dark lady was not necessarily a black lady. A chill fell on Enderby. He had been corrupted in advance, he had wanted a black lady, and nobody had questioned his assumption. Another thing: the dialogue was being steadily corrupted to modern American colloquial. Pete Oldfellow now said, in his Shakespeare persona: "Okay, then, let's forget it." Enderby yelled:
"No!"
Toplady, who sat in the centre aisle at a table with a light trained on his script and notes, looked round from over black-framed reading glasses at the source of the agonized cry, then he counteryelled:
"Out!"
"Are you talking to me?" a quieter Enderby said, while the cast looked down.
"Yeah, talking to you. And what I said was."
"I know what you said. Am I to sit here and hear that bloody traduction and make no bloody protest? I said no and I mean bloody no. And if you haven't the sense of historical propriety to say bloody no too then you're a."
"You want to be thrown out? You're barred from rehearsals, get that? When I want you I'll let you know, right? Now get your ass out of here."
"Bugger you," Enderby said doubtfully and getting up. "The whole thing's a bloody travesty. I'm getting out. I'm also going home. Bugger the contract." And he climbed panting up the deeply raked aisle. When he got outside into the dusking concourse or whatever they called it he breathed deeply and angrily. Also impotently. He had no return ticket nor money for one. He had, in the toilet, counted Ms Grace Hope's meagre handout. He had neither publisher nor literary agent in New York. He had no source of money to get him to what he called home. He lighted himself a White Owl, better than Robert Burns though not much, he had been recommended to try Muriel but he had once known a girl called Muriel, and he looked through the great window at the dusking carpark. Snow spun on blacktops and, tautomorphically, white tops. Gonna be a white Christmas, they said. He turned to snort smoke at the double door whence he had exited and puff disdain at what lay within. Then the doors opened to show April Elgar running on long legs out. Ah God, that damnable beauty, crystalline and coral concern, body like flame, arms like lesser flames towards him. Then she had him embraced, and he, White Owl awkward in gripe, had to embrace back, then throwing White Owl to hoot out disregarded smoke on oatmeal carpeting. Recover it later.
"Honey, honey," she said, "we'll beat the bastards, you'll see." Then she raised her lips (only a little way necessary) and kissed, with surely histrionic though instinctually histrionic sincerity, him, Enderby. Who dithered. Who trembled kneewise. Who groaned. Who said with little breath:
"You shouldn't. You know. Changes world. Forces me to. Avowals. Most dangerous word in the."
"I'm with you, baby. Screaming fags. Just thought I'd let you, you know, like know. Ow." That was Enderby's embrace unwillingly pressing the air out of her. But a sturdy tumescence more appropriate to her image than to her pressed reality thrust them, in the first phase of its arc, apart like some instrument, a truncheon say, of moral order. One of her sharp metal heels transfixed Enderby's White Owl and it ceased, though not for that reason, to smoke. Enderby, seeing it, said:
"Ought to. Give it up. No breath, you see. Don't make me. Avowals."
"That bastard Topass insulted you, kid, and I've come to take you back in there. You got your rights. He's gonna pologize."
"I don't," Enderby said, volume of SF at groin, "want his bloody apologies. I wouldn't go in there again if I was dragged. I'd be on the next plane if I had the money. I'll lock myself into that bloody cell with the electric typewriter, obscene thing purring at you all the time, and I'll do what has to be done. Then I'll get paid and I'll bugger off. Forgive my bad language."
"You coming back in there with me."
"No, I'm not. And there's another thing. The whole damned enterprise is becoming farcical. Quite apart from Oldfellow's stupidity and incompetence. I mean, there's no sense of the past in it. I mean, what with jazzing things up and you, forgive me, wagging your divine ah buttocks."
"Divine buttocks. I got to remember that. I'm singing the songs, right, saying the words, right, acting this Dark Lady, right? It's that fag Oldass that's fucking it up, right?"
Enderby sighed profoundly. "It's as if there's no sense of the past here in America."
"Well, who wants the past? Like the cigarette commercial says, we've come a loooong way, baby. This past you talking about is a bad bad time. You ask my mother. You coming back in there?"
"No," Enderby said. "I need tea."