It was fifty years, maybe a bit more, since Thomas and Mark last saw each other. It was shortly after leaving school. They met in New York where Thomas was in acting school; Mark lived in San Francisco working a day job and writing at night. Not long after they went their separate ways. Mark wrote a letter to Thomas with all the good intentions of explaining why he now chose to keep what he was working on to himself. It was nothing more than realizing he was too dependent on approval from Thomas. What came out, however, was full of accusations and laced with pent-up anger. Thomas’ letter back was even more to the point:
I used to look up to you as a writer and a playwright and maybe even a genius, but since moving here I’ve met real playwrights who have the élan and vision and insight that I was supplying and which you sorely lack. Whatever promise you seemed to hold is nothing more than the pose of a navel-contemplating superior asshole.
For the next thirty years, neither communicated with each other, but somehow found each other via the internet and resumed talking via emails with never the slightest mention of the falling out or what led to it. After another twenty years, again with no mention of past anger, they decided it was about time for a reunion, which they held at the Bell Tower Inn, located in the center of the University of Michigan campus. As part of the reunion, they read a play that Mark had written, and both had performed in in their senior year at school, called “Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Ode to Something or Other”.
At seventy-two Thomas walked with a limp, grimaced when he sat down and groaned when he shifted positions in his chair. Thomas now had wrinkles on his face which was drawn but otherwise he looked fit. Thomas now lived alone in a small town in Connecticut; Mark lived with his wife in a small coastal town in California. They sat near the window in Thomas’ room.
The play was a pastiche of talk show-like segments between a man who calls himself Ludwig Van Beethoven, and a man called “the announcer”. It is a series of flashbacks from a talk show that apparently had run for a while, mixed with reminiscences and commentaries on the flashbacks given by the people who played the two characters. Ultimately commentary and flashback become indistinguishable.
“Are we ready?” Thomas asked, the two of them in Mark’s room seated by a dark-wooded desk in front of the only window in the room. The view was a busy street, and in the distance was what had once been the graduate library, now united with the undergrad library by a connecting bridge in one happy union. Thomas removed a script from a backpack that had seen better days.
“You sure you want to read this?”
“Having second thoughts?”
“No. Are you?”
“Not exactly.” Mark said this with some hesitation that caused one of Thomas’ eyebrows to raise.
“Then what, then?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Good. Fear and trepidation are essential when revisiting the past. Who do you want to play? Announcer or Ludwig Van Beethoven?”
“I’ll go with the announcer.”
“Why not try Ludwig Van?”
“That part’s yours and yours alone,” Mark said.
“If you want to change your mind, let me know.”
“I’ll stay with what I know.”
“That’s fine. Shall we start?”
“Give me a minute.”
“I’ll give you ten seconds.” Five seconds later Thomas said “Times up. Lights.”
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome someone we all know and love, Mr. Ludwig Van Beethoven!
LVB (speaking while making entrance): Which is not my real name, but rather something I call myself so that I embody concept not personality, and then, not even that.
Annc: And as always, we are happy to have our one and only guest on the show.
LVB: Shut up.
Annc: What’s with you?
LVB: Nothing. I just couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I’d like to do that again; I rushed it,” Thomas said.
“Rushed what?”
“The ‘shut up’. The timing was off.”
“No repeats. It’s not like we’re going to put this on. At least I hope not.”
“OK, we’ll take it from ‘I just couldn’t think blah blah blah...’”
LVB: Nothing. I just couldn’t think of anything to say.
Annc: Not a problem; we’re wide open to anything on the show. So, what have you been up to?
LVB: Do you mean recently?
Annc (hiding irritation): I don’t see what else I could have meant.
LVB: You could have meant recently as in immediate past, like what I was doing before I came out on stage or the past few weeks, depending on how long it’s been since you last saw me, or…
Annc: I think you know what I meant…
LVB: But if you meant before I came out on stage, which is what I presume you meant…
Annc: It wasn’t…
LVB: But it’s what I meant, so I’ll answer it that way.
Annc: I meant recently in the last few days.
LVB (pauses; thinking): I would rather not say.
Annc: Not the last few days? Would you rather talk about what you were doing before you came out on stage.
LVB: Actually, why do we always have to talk about something?
Annc: Well, now I feel we’re getting somewhere. Would you mind telling me what you’ve been up to …uh, in the last few days, say?
LVB: If you insist…
Annc: I do insist!
LVB: (pause) Not much.
(They change their postures to indicate they are now providing commentary of what was just seen.)
Annc: I think what we were trying to do back then was demonstrate there was no difference between those things thought to be different from each other and in so doing we created what I call the ‘vacuum of concern’.
LVB: Yes, that and trying to give everything a meaning where none will serve.
A pause – one of many that would occur during their reading of the play. Mark had written it during the summer between their junior and senior years. He had written it as a celebration of their newfound friendship. Just before the end of the school year, with finals a week away, the two met at a party full of English majors and drama students each trying to outdo one another. Their mutual dislike of the event hinted at a possible friendship. They ditched the party and ended up walking and talking around the haunts of Ann Arbor, riffing off each other like two jazz musicians, in a continuous non-stop conversation about girls they knew or wanted to know, people who they looked up to and those who let them down, and life as they knew it and how it ought to be. After two hours they sat on a bench in between two wings of a dormitory built in the 1940’s that now housed the then-new and then-experimental Residential College. Like many experimental colleges at the time, it encouraged creative pursuits in a humanities-focused environment which could be both eye-opening in its horizons and stifling in its wouldn’t-it-be-nice views of how the world should be.
There would be a theater built in that spot which would open in the fall when school would start up again. They looked at the empty space, and both imagined putting on a play there – what play they didn’t know; they only knew who they wanted to be. Thomas was interested in acting and Mark was interested in writing, and they convinced each other that they were actor and writer, good ones, maybe even great ones with outstanding futures of great promise.
“I’m waiting for your next line,” Thomas said.
“I know. I was just thinking.”
“About?”
“About Scott Anderson.”
“Why on earth would you be thinking about him?”
“The line about finding meaning where none will serve reminded me of him.” Mark looked out the window as if the past event with Scott were there to observe.
“I’ll bite.”
“It was the day after we did the play. He saw me walking down some hallway; it was impossible to avoid him without turning around and walking the other way, which would have been too obvious. He asked me what the play was supposed to mean.”
“And you said...?”
“What I wanted to say was: ‘Your problem is you try to give everything a meaning where none will serve.’ ”
“What did you say?”
“I think I said I had to go somewhere and I was late.”
“What you said was much better.” Thomas squinted his eyes, looking as if he was searching for something in the air. “Didn’t you tell me he was a professor somewhere?”
“Yeah, I Googled his name a few years ago. He’s a drama professor at Boston College. Or was at the time. It’s been a while since I looked him up.”
“I seem to recall that. Well, good for him.”
“I must admit, it was a bit sophomoric. The play, I mean. What passed as writing back then was trying to be absurdist and philosophical and imitating Samuel Beckett. So as much as I disliked Scott, I can see how he’d be irritated by someone majoring in math writing a play. I mean I just wrote it to poke fun at academic posturing in a talk-show format. I think.”
Thomas shifted with a slight groan. “I always thought of it ‘Waiting for Godot’ as performed by Abbot and Costello. But I’ll tell you something else. Whether you knew it or not – and I seriously doubt that Scott did – the play was illustrating Derrida’s ideas about how the center of the structure is hidden within the structure but escapes structure itself. So, you weren’t too far off with your ‘vacuum of concern’. And then the talk show hosts talking about it as if they knew what they were talking about. Scott didn’t have a clue.”
“I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t know anything about Derrida. And I certainly didn’t then.”
“Writers don’t always know what they tap into,” Thomas said. “People in English and Drama departments require convenience over cogitation. So, it isn’t too hard for me to tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is right.”
Thomas drank from his water bottle and walked over to the window, looking out at the same but different town. “Anyway, I’m much older now and I’ve stopped kidding myself, though not totally. So, I’m willing to give Scott his due and admit that my ill feelings toward him are probably due to jealousy on my part. At least he made it in drama. I’m a certified flop in that arena.”
“It’s always good to give people their due,” Mark said. “For all we know, he might have died. I can’t help but notice that the list of people I knew who are dead keeps growing.”
“Yeah, it does put things in perspective, doesn’t it?” Thomas raised his water bottle. “To Scott.”
“To Scott,” Mark said, raising an imaginary glass.
Thomas walked back to his chair, and both sat for in a respectful if not rueful silence.
“Shall we continue?” Thomas said.
“Where were we?”
“At my line that you wanted to say to Scott: “Yes, that and trying to give everything a meaning where none will serve.”
“OK. I got it.”
The two are in “commentary mode”
Annc: I’d like to continue these discussions with you, because it’s so fascinating to look back on those times and because we never do get said what needs to get said or what I really think should be talked about because uh...
LVB: Let’s play that show I was talking about.
Postures change as they transition from “commentary mode” to “flashback mode”.
LVB: I cut myself thinking about light bulbs this morning.
Annc: (pause) I’m almost afraid to ask this next question.
LVB: Go ahead.
Annc: How did that happen?
LVB: Which? Cutting or thinking about light bulbs?
Annc: (Said immediately; no pause) Cutting!
LVB: You mean how did I cut myself?
Annc: That was what I meant to ask, yes.
LVB: With a razor blade.
Annc: On purpose?
LVB: No, I was shaving.
Annc: Oh, I see. You cut yourself shaving. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?
LVB: I didn’t see the need to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the shaving and my cutting myself.
Annc: Or that you cut yourself at all.
LVB: Or that I was thinking at all.
Annc: Well, I think we’ve covered all the bases.
LVB: That’s a good idea; let’s talk about baseball.
They continued reading and pausing, sometimes laughing, sometimes talking about the play but mostly talking about people they knew. As they neared the end of the play Mark stopped and said “Wendy.”
“Oh, not Wendy. When?”
“Two years ago. Lymphoma.”
“What made you think of her?”
“I remember her in the audience when we did the play. She was sitting in the second row. I remember her laughter.”
“I remember her long hair,” Thomas said. “Her long, beautiful hair.”
“She was teaching dance at Antioch.”
“Yes. Dance. She was friends with Donna. Another dancer.”
“Donna lives in Israel.”
“You’re in touch with her?”
“On Facebook. Sort of. Like a lot of people.”
Thomas nodded. “Yeah,” he said, and both were silent “Fifty years is one hell of a long time."
Thomas pursed his lips as if stifling something or maybe just waiting for the timing to be right to say the next line.
“We had one of our story-telling events at my writer’s workshop. Folks tell eight-minute personal stories. I'm the MC and have some line of jive patter. Adolescence was the theme, 'first love' the subject. I went first. As I was talking, I made a powerful emotional connection about Josie, my first love. About how we fit so well because of the crap going on in our families. How our relationship was about healing one another.” Thomas’ lips pursed again.
“The insight burst on me, tears and all, in front of those twenty or so nice people. Everyone said, ‘That’s OK’, and I suppose it was. But still.” He shifted in his chair in an unsuccessful attempt to get comfortable.
“We’re at the end of the play,” Thomas said.
“Well, we’ve come this far. Let’s finish it.”
(Postures and lighting indicate that they are commentary mode.)
Annc: I think the danger of the series at first was we were trying to keep it real, and by keeping it real, it tempered the absurdity.
LVB: Yes, and in so doing we were able to create a situation that was both unbelievable and TOTALLY unbelievable.
Annc: Absolutely.
LVB: I overheard a conversation last night about the show, centering on the fact that our conversations could be art, and then the discussion turned to the inevitable question of ‘what is art?’
Annc: And what was the outcome?
LVB: I don’t know. I fell asleep.
Annc: I never thought I’d hear you say that.
LVB: Well, maybe I didn’t.
Annc: Perhaps it would be interesting if we revealed who we really are.
LVB: But everyone knows who we really are.
Annc: I feel as if I’ve been here before.
LVB: I feel as if I’d never left.
Thomas took a swig from his water bottle. and looked at Mark, now staring at the script in his hand. “I remember when we thought that what we were doing was a promise of fame and fortune,” Mark said.
“I still think about that promise. And I’ll tell you something else too.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Shut up. Listen. Listen to me. I don’t care if you didn’t understand a word of what you had written, though I tend not to believe you. ‘Ludwig’ and your other plays taught me a lot about writing, and it certainly kicked me off in my wobbly wanderings in search of an acting career. You were on my mind when I finally settled down and got my late-in-life PhD. And you were on my mind when I realized that I was drawn to acting because it was a way I could express an authentic emotional life. And since we’re almost talking about it, I’d like to work with you if only you wanted to do it. I know you’re writing.”
“Not too much,” Mark said.
“I also know I’ve been a jerk in the past and still can be. You and I are inverse characters: you’re astute and aware. I’m a bumbler, myopic, and don't know what I don't know. Or maybe I'm just overly fortified in what I know I know. I can’t tell the difference most of the time. And I’m not too good with cause-and-effect relationships. You say you aren’t writing much. And I don’t believe you. But if you want to work with me, let me know. Or not. No pressure.”
Thomas probably meant what he was saying right now; either that or perhaps he needed to believe it, Mark thought. Thomas stood up, slightly unsteady but caught his balance. “I think I’m ready to go outside and walk around and see if anything is left of this town that hasn’t been replaced by a Starbucks.”
“Sounds good,” Mark said. He opened the door to the room, and both looked down the empty corridor to determine the direction of the bank of elevators. “I think we’ve said everything that could be said,” he added.
“We’ll think of something,” Thomas said. “I’m sure of it.” They walked toward the elevators looking like two old friends. “We have chemistry, you and me. Good chemistry.”
A satisfying story. How meaningful something 50 years ago in our lives can still be. I found the conversation in the Bell Tower Inn more meaningful than the conversation on "the stage" but also, not so paradoxically, the conversation in the Bell Tower was very meaningful overall BECAUSE it took place in the context of the play. Shades of Waiting for Godot, of course, lots of conceptual word play, but there's a real arrival in this story even though Didi and Gogo had good chemistry, too!
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