No Great Magic | Page 9

It made
me remember her saying, "My brain burns." I ducked aside as if she
were majesty incarnate.
And then she didn't break her own precedent. She stopped at the new
thing beside the door and poised her long white skinny fingers over the
yellowed keys, and suddenly I remembered what it was called: a
virginals.
She stared down at it fiercely, evilly, like a witch planning an
enchantment. Her face got the secret fiendish look that, I told myself,
the real Elizabeth would have had ordering the deaths of Ballard and
Babington, or plotting with Drake (for all they say she didn't) one of his
raids, that long long forefinger tracing crooked courses through a
crabbedly drawn map of the Indies and she smiling at the dots of cities
that would burn.
Then all her eight fingers came flickering down and the strings inside
the virginals began to twang and hum with a high-pitched rendering of
Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King."
Then as Sid and Bruce and Martin rushed past me, along with a black
swooping that was Maud already robed and hooded for Third Witch, I
beat it for my sleeping closet like Peer Gynt himself dashing across the
mountainside away from the cave of the Troll King, who only wanted

to make tiny slits in his eyeballs so that forever afterwards he'd see
reality just a little differently. And as I ran, the master-anachronism of
that menacing mad march music was shrilling in my ears.

III
Sound a dumbe shew. Enter the three fatall sisters, with a rocke, a
threed, and a pair of sheeres. --Old Play
My sleeping closet is just a cot at the back end of the girls' third of the
dressing room, with a three-panel screen to make it private.
When I sleep I hang my outside clothes on the screen, which is pasted
and thumbtacked all over with the New York City stuff that gives me
security: theater programs and restaurant menus, clippings from the
Times and the Mirror, a torn-out picture of the United Nations building
with a hundred tiny gay paper flags pasted around it, and hanging in an
old hairnet a home-run baseball autographed by Willy Mays. Things
like that.
Right now I was jumping my eyes over that stuff, asking it to keep me
located and make me safe, as I lay on my cot in my clothes with my
knees drawn up and my fingers over my ears so the louder lines from
the play wouldn't be able to come nosing back around the trunks and
tables and bright-lit mirrors and find me. Generally I like to listen to
them, even if they're sort of sepulchral and drained of overtones by
their crooked trip. But they're always tense-making. And tonight (I
mean this afternoon)--no!
It's funny I should find security in mementos of a city I daren't go out
into--no, not even for a stroll through Central Park, though I know it
from the Pond to Harlem Meer--the Met Museum, the Menagerie, the
Ramble, the Great Lawn, Cleopatra's Needle and all the rest. But that's
the way it is. Maybe I'm like Jonah in the whale, reluctant to go outside
because the whale's a terrible monster that's awful scary to look in the
face and might really damage you gulping you a second time, yet

reassured to know you're living in the stomach of that particular
monster and not a seventeen tentacled one from the fifth planet of
Aldebaran.
It's really true, you see, about me actually living in the dressing room.
The boys bring me meals: coffee in cardboard cylinders and doughnuts
in little brown grease-spotted paper sacks and malts and hamburgers
and apples and little pizzas, and Maud brings me raw
vegetables--carrots and parsnips and little onions and such, and watches
to make sure I exercise my molars grinding them and get my vitamins.
I take spit-baths in the little john. Architects don't seem to think actors
ever take baths, even when they've browned themselves all over
playing Pindarus the Parthian in Julius Caesar. And all my shut-eye is
caught on this little cot in the twilight of my NYC screen.
* * * * *
You'd think I'd be terrified being alone in the dressing room during the
wee and morning hours, let alone trying to sleep then, but that isn't the
way it works out. For one thing, there's apt to be someone sleeping in
too. Maudie especially. And it's my favorite time too for
costume-mending and reading the Variorum and other books, and for
just plain way-out dreaming. You see, the dressing room is the one
place I really do feel safe. Whatever is out there in New York that
terrorizes me, I'm pretty confident that it can never get