Each summer, we commission some of Aotearoa’s finest writers to tell us a short tale. This year’s theme is “second acts”.
He was single. The magazine headline “Divorced Again” above a grainy paparazzi photograph of him walking with a dog. There was plenty of grey in his beard, but he was still beautiful. I remembered he was very charismatic and perceptive, determined to live a life dedicated to his art. We’d been a couple almost three decades ago, before he was a famous actor, and it had ended badly. I was never exactly sure why he chose to leave. I suspected he thought he couldn’t achieve his dreams if we were together – he wanted to live in London or New York, and though I loved to travel, I was happy to remain at home, closer to family. I think he believed I might hold him back, my own artistic achievements merely a hobby.
In spite of the heartbreak, I thought of him often. He was a hard man to forget, and it was even harder once he became famous. Always in the magazines and on the television.
I’d recently achieved success of my own after years of mediocrity – a national award for portraiture – and I wondered if, now we were older and wiser and similarly successful, there might be a second chance.
I emailed him. Come for a drink. It was a surprise he accepted the invite; another surprise when he showed up. I wanted this to be proof of a mutual yearning for what we’d once shared, a connection I’d never found with anyone else.
We sat on the front step of my house drinking wine. The sun was setting, and I couldn’t stop looking at him. In the golden light of dusk, I saw his face as I remembered, and they hovered together, the young and the old face, the past and the present alive in the same instant.
He told me about a play he’d appeared in several years earlier. It was memorable not only for the performance they were doing – Hamlet, his favourite Shakespeare – and not only for the role he was playing – Hamlet, a role he’d spent a lifetime working towards – and not only for the theatre they were playing in – The Chamberlain. It was a dingy place, he said, The Chamberlain. The acoustics were poor. The whole place smelled like pickled onions. But it was one of the oldest theatres in the country, and this performance of Hamlet was to celebrate their 150th anniversary. “It was an honour to be involved,” he said solemnly.
He gazed out over my front lawn, at the weeds in the grass and the flowers on the rose bush. I wondered what he thought of my house, my choice of wine. He performed off-Broadway and spent summers in the Hamptons, and I was newly aware of my lack of sophistication. I spoke quickly then, as if to distract him, as if to convince him of my interest in what he was telling me. I asked what it was about the play that made it so memorable, other than the attainment of a lifelong dream to play Hamlet.
It was, he said, the night he saw him.
“Who?”
“My dad.”
I hesitated. His father had died when he was a child. “Your dad?”
With a sad smile: “I know, right?”
“I stood downstage,” he said, “beneath a pale purple light.” The Chamberlain’s lighting was angled in such a way it also illuminated the people in the first three rows, their faces appearing to float in the dark of the theatre. He was bewitched by the effect this had. The faces looked grey, and strangely still. Not so much as a muscle twitched. For most of the first act, he wondered if they were even alive. Usually someone was sneezing, or looking down at the programme, or shifting in their seat from boredom, so it was striking to see no movement at all.
“It was an emotionally charged night for me,” he said. “Hamlet! I was feeling all sorts. Then in the final scene of the first act, I looked up. There he was. Third from the right in the second row.” He pressed his finger into the bridge of his nose and looked at his feet. “You’re the only person I’ve ever told.” He drew out a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, flicked a match and took a drag. The way his lips puckered when he smoked reminded me of sitting on another staircase, 27 years ago, when he had more hair, and I was in love. We’d sat on that staircase, talking for hours, and then he’d leaned down and kissed me.
I said, “You know I don’t believe in ghosts.”
He shook his head violently. The wine in his glass surged full tide to the rim: his hands were trembling. “Not a ghost. He was real.”
He told me he’d been paralysed mid-sentence. “I felt saturated with relief. As if I’d been waiting all this time for him, and I wasn’t even aware of how desperate I was to see him.”
“Did he recognise you?” I wasn’t sure why I asked this. I didn’t believe it was his father.
“I doubt it,” he said. It had been 50 years since he’d last seen his father. The blond hair of his youth had darkened and then receded; his childish body grown into the six-foot physique of a man. “If I was a stranger to him, then I would’ve understood.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you think I did? I went back to the dressing room and did a couple of shots of tequila. Prepared for the second act.”
“And then?”
“I emerged on to the stage all guns blazing. I wanted to impress him. I knew this was my chance, finally, to show him …”
When he fell silent, his face was frozen in an expression I’d never seen before. I was struck by the possibility that none of what he’d said was true, he was an actor after all, and as the darkness of night edged towards us, everything felt unsteady, unreliable.
He moved closer and said, “He was gone. The seat was empty.”
I reached out and took his hand. His skin was warm and soft and his fingers closed around mine and within the overwhelm of sensation was the suggestion of possibility.
“I was devastated,” he said. “Do you know what I mean?”
I knew what he meant, but I didn’t know what he wanted me to say, if he wanted reassurance or recognition or comfort. Eventually I told him it sounded horrible, and I knew immediately I’d said the wrong thing.
“I know,” he said, and without looking at me directly, withdrew his hand. “I know what it sounds like. I was overcome by the role of Hamlet, dehydrated, a little drunk, I’d had too much cocaine, and I thought I saw my dead father. You don’t have to believe me.”
“It sounds like you miss him,” I said quietly, watching him, the cigarette between his lips. He was not quite the man I once knew, but he was still beautiful to me. And I knew it was too late to tell him, too late to tell him how I felt, though when had the right moment been? I wasn’t sure. The only thing I knew for certain was whatever might have happened between us had already happened, a long time ago.
Josie Shapiro lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her debut novel, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, won the inaugural Allen & Unwin Fiction Prize.
