Thank You, Dark

I started acting when I was a teenager. Most people thought I did it for the attention. But it wasn't that. Never that. I did it because I wanted to be alive for a little while in a space where at last the world made sense, a world of consequences, where good was rewarded and evil punished, a world where the right words came to you unbidden and made all the difference.

I played the father of Kate the curst and Hamlet's stepfather and the bitter husband of mad Mary Tyrone. All before I graduated from college. I wanted to speak daggers to the audience and roar them as gently as any sucking dove. I wanted to put their souls in traction. I wanted to give them the teeth-chattering heebie-jeebies.

After graduation, the other young actors I knew moved to Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. I stayed in the dull gray city of my birth. Not Midwest. Not West. Not anywhere. I did some community theater. That's where I met Ellen, my wife, a makeup artist who never tired of hectoring the company about performance clichés like jazz hands and the good old park-and-bark. She was so deep into theater that every night before we fell asleep, we played a game she invented called Shakespeare tennis. She'd lob a line at me. I'd pick a word from it and lob another back that used the same word.

She'd say, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

And I'd answer, "Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds."

"Ooh," she'd say, jabbing me, "good one!" And then, "Home without boots, and in foul weather too!"

It was silly but it got so I couldn't fall asleep unless we played.

Then one day in the third year of our marriage she dropped to her knees with a massive headache. The MRI showed a swelling in one of the vessels of her brain as big as a berry. So they decided to keep her for observation. But twenty minutes after they got her into a bed, she died. Cerebral arteriovenous malformation, leading to swelling, leading to sentinel bleeding, leading to rupture, leading to death. I didn't understand any of it, didn't want to understand any of it. All I knew was that the world whipped right out from under me like some magician's cheap trick. I mean to say, I lost more than my wife: I lost my self. When someone you love dies, you lose more than the person. You lose a piece of yourself. "And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries."

Grief never goes away. It loses its sharp edges, but it never goes away. A time comes when you sense your friends have had enough, so you learn to hide it. That's as good as it ever gets. But it's still there, the grief, a dark figure waiting in the shadows for its moment.

I still see her sometimes, in dreams. The room is empty except for a straight-backed chair. She's sitting quietly, her gaze aimed at me, though her eyes seem not to see me, to see anything. That's it. That's the whole dream. After the first time, I woke up thinking it meant she was in a better place. I lay there in the dark listening to a car hiss along the damp street.

I said, "O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!"

My words hung in the air. I lay there in the dark waiting.

For a while, I stopped acting, but I gradually got back into it. Small parts at first. The mailman in Come Back, Little Sheba. One of the poker players in Streetcar. Then a big part—Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock. The reviewer complained that I wasn't funny enough. Well, I didn't feel funny. And anyway, O'Casey subtitled it A Tragedy. I did another play. Then another. A few local commercials. I told myself it's what Ellen would have wanted...