Free The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin Page A

oblivion with athletic sex. It was great. I felt sleek, powerful, cagey; in the mirror I detected yon Cassius’s lean and hungry look. Madeleine was glowing from all the sex and edgy from lack of sleep. She was living on fruit and coffee. One of her callbacks, an enormous long shot we’d chosen because she was so definitely right for it, was for the role of Maggie in a revival of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. She wanted it almost beyond endurance. The call had sent her dancing around the apartment, over the couch, knocking down chairs. “I’m Maggie,” she crooned. “They know it, they know it, I’m Maggie.” But they didn’t know it and she didn’t get the part. When the call came, she broke down and wept. She was hysterical actually; I couldn’t get near her. She lay on the bathroom floor kicking her feet and pounding her fists against the tiles. Then she got up and vomited into the toilet. It was pure nerves and rage. I got her cleaned up and tucked into bed where she cried herself to sleep. In the morning she was pale and haggard, but she took a shower, disguised the dark circles under her eyes with makeup, drank two cups of black coffee, and set out for another day of rejection. She came back with a callback for a new play at the Bijou and a week later she got the part.
    I’d been striking out all over town and my last shot was a new play about criminal activity in a bakery. I had a scene for the callback and Madeleine and I worked it over so scrupulously that I didn’t need the book. When the audition was over the stage manager reading with me looked like he’d run into atrain. The director stood up and shouted, “That does it.” I had the part.
    Naturally Madeleine and I wanted to celebrate. I called Teddy, got his machine, and we shouted “WE HAVE JOBS!” into the receiver. Within the hour Teddy called back, as excited as we were. “No burgers tonight,” he said. “Meet me at Broome Street. Dinner’s on the pater.”
    T eddy had an evolving theory about the importance of actors in the survival of the human species. At Yale he’d been in a play about Charles Darwin, with the result that he had actually read
Origin of the Species
, which inspired in him an informed but idiosyncratic respect for the theory of evolution. Actors, he maintained, are imposters and imposture is an evolutionary strategy for survival. He described the butterfly whose wings so resemble a leaf that even water spots and fungal dots are mimicked, a perfect imitation of random imperfection. All manner of camouflage delighted him, the lizard who turns from bright green to dull brown as he wanders his varied terrain, the deer on his father’s land in Connecticut, coppery red in the coppery fall and drab gray in the winter, when the world is monotone and dull. The actor, Teddy concluded, is selected for survival, like the white moths in a British mining town which, as the coal dust blackened the local birches, mutated to black. Predatory birds couldn’t see the black mutants so only blackened moths survived to reproduce themselves.
    Because humans have only other humans as natural predators, and are, by nature, tribal and territorial, what could bemore essential to the flourishing of one’s genetic material than the ability to pass for the prevailing type, to play before the fascist, another fascist; to offer the drug-crazed, gun-wielding holdup artist a fellow in addiction. In their predilection for imposture, their insistence upon the necessity of a counterworld in which they play all parts, banker and pauper, murderer and victim, man and beast, actors are equipped for survival. They are human chameleons, born with a natural ability to take on the coloration of the psychological and physical environment. And, according to Teddy, it is this evolutionary edge that accounts for the paradox of the actor’s social condition. He is both lavishly admired and eternally suspect. Actors make ordinary people uncomfortable, yet they inspire