In One Person

"The perfect parts in what?" I asked.

"He is the American Ibsen!" Nils Borkman cried. "He is the new Ibsen, from your backward American South!"

"Who is?" I asked.

"Tennessee Williams--the most important playwright since Ibsen," Borkman reverentially intoned.

"What play is it?" I asked.

"Summer and Smoke," Nils answered, trembling. "The repressed female character has another woman smoldering inside her."

"I see," I said. "That would be the Miss Frost character?"

"Miss Frost would have been a perfect Alma!" Nils cried.

"But now--" I started to say; Borkman wouldn't let me finish.

"Now I have no choice--it's Mrs. Fremont as Alma, or nobody," Nils muttered darkly. I knew "Mrs. Fremont" as Aunt Muriel.

"I think Muriel can do repressed," I told Nils encouragingly.

"But Muriel doesn't smolder, Bill," Nils whispered.

"No, she doesn't," I agreed. "What was my part going to be?" I asked him.

"It's still yours, if you want it," Nils told me. "It's a small role--it won't interfere with your work-home."

"My homework," I corrected him.

"Yes--that's what I said!" the Norwegian dramaturge declared again. "You play a traveling salesman, a young one. You make a pass at the Alma character in the last scene of the play."

"I make a pass at my aunt Muriel, you mean," I said to the ardent director.

"But not onstage--don't worry!" Borkman cried. "The hanky-panky is all imagined; the repetitious sexual activity happens later, offstage."

I was pretty sure that Nils Borkman didn't mean the sexual activity was "repetitious"--not even offstage.

"Surreptitious sexual activity?" I asked the director.

"Yes, but there's no hanky-panky with your auntie onstage!" Borkman assured me, excitedly. "It just would have been so symbolic if Alma could have been Miss Frost."

"So suggestive, you mean?" I asked him.

"Suggestive and symbolic!" Borkman exclaimed. "But with Muriel, we stick to the suggestive--if you know what I mean."

"Maybe I could read the play first--I don't even know my character's name," I said to Nils.

"I have a copy for you," Borkman whispered. The paperback was badly beaten up--the pages had come unglued from the binding, as if the excitable director had read the little book to death. "Your name is Archie Kramer, Bill," Borkman informed me. "The young salesman is supposed to wear a derby hat, but in your case we can piss-dense with the derby!"

"Dispense with the derby," I repeated. "As a salesman, what do I sell?"

"Shoes," Nils told me. "In the end, you're taking Alma on a date to a casino--you have the last line in the play, Bill!"

"Which is?" I asked the director.

" 'Taxi!' " Borkman shouted.

Suddenly, we were no longer alone. The Christmas-dinner crowd was startled by Nils Borkman shouting for a taxi. My mother and Richard Abbott were staring at the paperback copy of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, which I held in my hands; no doubt they feared it was a sequel to Giovanni's Room.