Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [117]
She snuggled up next to him. “My husband and protector,” she said. “My breadwinner.”
“My balls,” Jack said. They laughed.
Twenty
Sally’s first husband was an actor; they had met while she was a twenty-year-old junior at Mills College—a scholarship student among the sloppily dressed, shaggy-haired rich girls —and he had come out to take a part in one of the school plays. There was something about him that cut deeply into her, a drawn look of constant hunger—for food, for acceptance, for love, for fame, she did not know what. But one thing she was certain of, after she had seen him act: if there was any justice in the universe, this young man was going to become rich and famous. He had talent, the kind that makes you love its possessor, yet at this point it was visible only to Sally. Most of the girls thought he was cute, but funny-looking. They did not know he had talent as an actor, because they did not know what talent was. They only knew that he slopped around at rehearsals, was shy, did not smoke, and secretly picked at his nose. They laughed at him for forgetting his lines and for the way he would frown and place his thumb and index finger on his nose when he was trying to remember something. Most of the girls belonged to the smooth-flowing-grace school of amateur acting, and thought that he moved jerkily. Everyone but Sally thought he was the weak point of the production. They were all afraid that when the play was on he would stop in the middle of the action, hold his nose, and snap his fingers for someone to throw him his line.
But of course he did not. After she had finished her work backstage, Sally went out and around to the back of the hall to watch the performance, and he was the only one onstage. The subtleties, the graces of the other performers were washed out by the lights and the presence of the audience, and only he seemed natural, real, and yet even more distinct than reality; when he said a line you could hear it sharply, even if it was supposed to be a mumble, and when he began a movement you could predict its course, sense it with him, actually participate in the action. And of course he was the only one whose makeup was not grotesque. Sally could tell at the end, when the cast lined up for their curtain call, that she had been almost the only one in the house to recognize his beauty, and it made her bitterly angry; she rushed out of the building with tears in her eyes and ended up wandering alone through the eucalyptus groves, full of hate for the people who could not, would not, recognize his talent, and full of love for him and for herself.
A month later they were married, and Sally supplied to him the two things he lacked: ambition and direction. She discovered he was really just a bum, whose only true love was sailing on the bay, and whose interest in acting stemmed from the fact that he knew he was good at it, and he knew people paid a lot of money to good actors. He hoped someday he would be discovered, but meanwhile he was content to live a marginal existence on borrowed money, unemployment, the GI Bill, or whatever presented itself. Another reason he liked acting, she discovered, was because actors worked at night, when you couldn’t sail anyway.
Sally changed his life. She quit college and got two jobs, doing high-fashion modeling in a department store days and selling tickets in a Market Street movie theater nights, supporting him while he suffered through books on acting and a few courses at San Francisco State, and took the meager roles offered by the San Francisco amateur theater. She did not make him sell his half-interest in his little El Toro boat, but she kept him so busy he hardly ever had time to go out on the Bay. When television or movie companies came to town to shoot exteriors, she made him go out for