Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray Page A

reveal startling white areas that were in such dramatic contrast against that black charcoal landscape.
    It was amazing to watch the way Meg worked, with the absolute focus of a pure obsession. I was witnessing a living, moving act of sublimation. She would take that piece of charcoal in her right hand and make endless little marks like streaks of black rain. She became that black rain. She could do it for hours. It was a beautiful world Meg created, a beautiful ordered world that reminded me of my favorite poem of Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” which has the line “Oh! Blessed rage for order.…” Meg had that rage for order and she created it wherever she went.
    This was when I was most deeply in love with Meg, when I would watch her go into these drawing trances, these sketching fits, and I would be her sound track while she created her black rain. I would sit and slowly sip my dark German brews and tell her stories of all the people I’d seen and phrases I’d heard while on my daily walks. At the time it never occurred to me that I saw Meg as the woman Mom could’ve been, had Mom been able to complete art school and do something with it. Mom had dropped out of art school to marry Dad, and during her nervous breakdown she tried to get started again. She took painting classes, but she had a rough time because her concentration was so low and she kept slipping into the past.
    Now I was helping to create a space for Meg’s art to flourish, as if I were doing something my father had never done for my mother. It was a wonder and delight to me that Meg could find such passionate meaning in such strange and frivolous work. I secretly longed to findpassionate meaning in my own life, but I couldn’t imagine what it would be. I had only the sad, soft, ancient legacy of the bog people, the old inheritance of the soft, pulpy Irish in me, telling stories while drinking beer.
    The stories I told Meg, the stories that came at the end of every day, were my art, my rage for order, my way of mastering the night, but I couldn’t see it at the time, because the words just disappeared. They never took a form I could look at. I would have had to write them down, and yet it never occurred to me at the time to do so. What did occur to me was that I wanted, or thought I wanted, to go back to acting. I liked Meg as an audience, but I also craved a larger one.
    So on my walks I began to buy the trade paper
Back Stage
and see what shows were being cast. I now was a member of Actors’ Equity and I had my Equity card; that much I had salvaged from the Alamo Theatre. So I’d check the paper and go to all these hopeless open-casting calls the out-of-work actors called “cattle calls.” I would show up and there would be all these other actors waiting who probably could have done the role just as well as I, or better, and I hated them. I fantasized about giving up on the whole art thing and sacrificing myself to help the needy—which made me think that I might be drawn to the less fortunate in a sick way. Maybe I could only live among sick people in order to feel well. I couldn’t be among normal, healthy people without feeling drained or stolen away by them, without feeling like I was disappearing. It really terrified me. I couldn’t take responsibility for these feelings and I would begin to get angry and blame them on Mom, on some failing in the way that she had raised me. This would be the darkest of paranoias. I would think Mom was like some sort of Medea who had killed her children, that somewhere along the line Mom had realized that if she couldn’t have her children for herself completely and forever, she was going to lay the groundwork for their self-destruction and then, after laying the groundwork, kill herself, just like in the Greek tragedies. Her children would be left with the curse, the fear of intimacy with other women. Because Mom was insatiable and couldn’t get enough intimacy from her family, she