shoved down in its pockets. I wondered if he was punishing me for leaving him alone, or if he was so thin under there that he didn’t want to frighten people. In high school, he would take his shirt off at every opportunity, claiming it was hot out at sixty degrees. I’d assumed back then that his dark skin was from Italian genes, but now I saw it must have been the sun.
The two other men were dressed in sleek sweaters, and the two women wore silk blouses and pants. Audition outfits, like Peter used to have dozens of. He looked now as if we’d grabbed him off the street.
We started with the first painting, Caillebotte’s
Paris Street; Rainy Day
, and the short-haired actress read a brief Stuart Dybek story called “Rainy Day Chicago.” When she finished, the crowd moved across the gallery to a tiny Picasso, where one of the men read a poem called “Triangle Woman.” We’d pulled a miracle, getting the Art Institute to move so many of its own crowd-pleasers into one exhibit. Even so, there were certain works they wouldn’t let us use. We’d asked the writers to e-mail us their wish lists, and
Nighthawks
topped almost every one. It must have been something about the loneliness, the coffee, the silence—everyone wanted to lay private claim to that one desolate corner of the universe. In the end, no one got it because it was on loan in New York. How could this one object embody loneliness, I wondered, when people crowded shoulder-to-shoulder around it, shared it, traded it, paraded it? If Hopper’s little coffee counter was lonely, it was in the way a prostitute was lonely. Or an actor.
I had a hard time paying attention, and I stood there thinking how flat the readers all were, how little grace they showed compared to Peter in his prime. He played Edgar in
Lear
one summer up in Evanston, in the park by the beach. He was beautiful in a red shirt, and his voice made every line sound like something you’d been on the verge of remembering, if you’d only had time.
Peter’s first reading was for my least favorite story, as well as my least favorite painting in the entire museum. A very young, way-too-hip fiction writer from Bucktown named Sam Demarr had e-mailed us that the only painting he felt like writing on was “the one with the giant gum.” I’d actually loved it as a child—that enormous pack of gum floating over the city skyline. Now I hated how the gum hovered there, out of proportion. It had nothing to do with the city below it, no shared color palette, the garish green wrapper rendering the brown skyline drab and uniform. On one of our first dates, Carlos and I had stood there joking that it was based on a true story, the Giant Gum Crash of ’72. Since then, I’d always thought of the gum as about to land, to flatten the unsuspecting workers below, so I’d found it particularly funny that the story Sam Demarr had submitted was called “The Gum Flew Away.” Demarr himself was standing at the side of the room in dirty khakis, smirking into his wineglass.
Peter pulled a tube of papers from his coat pocket and unrolled it so he could read the top one. The other actors held theirs in the black folders we’d sent them in. “First, all the gum flew off,” he read, “leaving Chicago in its spearmint dust. Then the department stores floated away.” Aside from the fact that his papers were visibly shaking, Peter sounded like himself, strong-voiced and in full command of the English language. This story suited his flat, ironic delivery. I’d chosen it for him specifically because it was monochromatic and free of dialogue. “The hot dog stands were next,” I heard him say. For all my daydreaming about finding myself stranded onstage, this was the closest I’d come to feeling as if it were my own energy propelling an actor, as if when I stopped focusing, the whole thing would fall apart. Peter was gesturing around now, with the still-shaking papers, backing toward the wall and away from the old
The two other men were dressed in sleek sweaters, and the two women wore silk blouses and pants. Audition outfits, like Peter used to have dozens of. He looked now as if we’d grabbed him off the street.
We started with the first painting, Caillebotte’s
Paris Street; Rainy Day
, and the short-haired actress read a brief Stuart Dybek story called “Rainy Day Chicago.” When she finished, the crowd moved across the gallery to a tiny Picasso, where one of the men read a poem called “Triangle Woman.” We’d pulled a miracle, getting the Art Institute to move so many of its own crowd-pleasers into one exhibit. Even so, there were certain works they wouldn’t let us use. We’d asked the writers to e-mail us their wish lists, and
Nighthawks
topped almost every one. It must have been something about the loneliness, the coffee, the silence—everyone wanted to lay private claim to that one desolate corner of the universe. In the end, no one got it because it was on loan in New York. How could this one object embody loneliness, I wondered, when people crowded shoulder-to-shoulder around it, shared it, traded it, paraded it? If Hopper’s little coffee counter was lonely, it was in the way a prostitute was lonely. Or an actor.
I had a hard time paying attention, and I stood there thinking how flat the readers all were, how little grace they showed compared to Peter in his prime. He played Edgar in
Lear
one summer up in Evanston, in the park by the beach. He was beautiful in a red shirt, and his voice made every line sound like something you’d been on the verge of remembering, if you’d only had time.
Peter’s first reading was for my least favorite story, as well as my least favorite painting in the entire museum. A very young, way-too-hip fiction writer from Bucktown named Sam Demarr had e-mailed us that the only painting he felt like writing on was “the one with the giant gum.” I’d actually loved it as a child—that enormous pack of gum floating over the city skyline. Now I hated how the gum hovered there, out of proportion. It had nothing to do with the city below it, no shared color palette, the garish green wrapper rendering the brown skyline drab and uniform. On one of our first dates, Carlos and I had stood there joking that it was based on a true story, the Giant Gum Crash of ’72. Since then, I’d always thought of the gum as about to land, to flatten the unsuspecting workers below, so I’d found it particularly funny that the story Sam Demarr had submitted was called “The Gum Flew Away.” Demarr himself was standing at the side of the room in dirty khakis, smirking into his wineglass.
Peter pulled a tube of papers from his coat pocket and unrolled it so he could read the top one. The other actors held theirs in the black folders we’d sent them in. “First, all the gum flew off,” he read, “leaving Chicago in its spearmint dust. Then the department stores floated away.” Aside from the fact that his papers were visibly shaking, Peter sounded like himself, strong-voiced and in full command of the English language. This story suited his flat, ironic delivery. I’d chosen it for him specifically because it was monochromatic and free of dialogue. “The hot dog stands were next,” I heard him say. For all my daydreaming about finding myself stranded onstage, this was the closest I’d come to feeling as if it were my own energy propelling an actor, as if when I stopped focusing, the whole thing would fall apart. Peter was gesturing around now, with the still-shaking papers, backing toward the wall and away from the old
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