1993, Fayetteville, Arkansas

By Stacy Pershall

I am dressed in a nun’s habit, singing “Ave Maria” in the dark. It feels like I will lose my breath, pee myself, pass out cold. I grab the black velvet curtain to steady myself and it gives off a great poof of dust. My face smells like expired Ben Nye makeup and the blood bag tucked beneath my armpit is sticky from sweat. But tonight, at this moment, everything is sublime. I know exactly where I am and what I’m supposed to be doing. I have a script. I have a costume. I am Agnes of God.

When I first met Alex Green, the director, the chair of the theatre department, the man who would become my driving obsession, I was dumping powdered Rinso into an industrial washing machine at Hogwash, the laundromat just down the hill from the University of Arkansas. By the time I put my clothes in the dryer his eyes were burning a hole in my back. I felt his gaze travel from my hair down my spine to my ass, and it was strangely warm and pleasant, like an oversized bath towel or a blowdryer or a hug. I shivered. I turned around.

“Hi,” I said, and he nodded.

He wore glasses and loafers and a sweater worthy of Bill Cosby, and his salt and pepper hair just brushed his eyebrows. He was distinguished in an art-professor way, and I fell into a dirty-old-man-father-figure fantasy that left me tingling as I gathered my laundry and walked home.

The next time I saw him was at my first audition as a new theater student at the U of A, a major I chose largely because the only other career that interested me was brain surgeon, but I knew I couldn’t pass the math.

When I finished my monologue, I realized that the man from Hogwash was standing in the doorway.

“Do you sing?” he asked.

I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. Did he mean, “Do you sing as badly as you act?” Or did he mean that he had seen something in me, some hidden magic, that I didn’t see in myself, and if I sang that would make it complete? Better yet, perhaps he meant, “Will you sing showtunes in the altogether while doing the dance of the seven veils at the foot of my bed after we make sweet love?”

“Sure,” I said.

He motioned to me and I followed him across the hall, into a classroom where five girls sat watching one another deliver monologues, their laser gaze focused like kryptonite upon whomever was performing at the moment.

“Sing something,” said Alex, and my mouth opened and I stared into his eyes and belted out “I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper” from the Clockwork Orange soundtrack.

He stared at me.

“Hmmm,” he said.

He let me go.

The next morning, as if there was any hope, I slunk into the green room to read the cast lists. Hedda Gabler was, as expected, going on without me. The list for Agnes of God consisted only of the names of the actresses playing Mother Miriam and Dr. Livingstone. And then I saw Alex, standing in his office doorway, studying me. He caught my eye and nodded me inside. Everything stopped: my breath, my central nervous system, time.

The room smelled like Marlboros and textbooks baked in the sun. The plastic casters on his chair sang his short roll toward his desk. He took out a script out of the top drawer and slid it across the desk to me. He didn’t look up.

I kept that script beside my bed for a long time, long after rehearsals had ended and the play had closed, because I wrote Alex quotes on the grubby pages like gospel. During the day I shared him with other people, but alone at night I closed my eyes and conjured his face and kept him for myself. His words put their hands all over me.

****

I had exactly two female friends in college. Dana, a dramatically pale, dramatically thin grad student with ice-blue eyes that bulged out of her head and skin so translucent you could almost see her bones, and Polly, a wiry aspiring playwright who stayed up late into the night doing shots of Jack Daniel’s, chain-smoking the generic cigarettes that already smelled like stale butts while they were still burning, and tapping out endless revisions of her masterwork about the last hours of River Phoenix. Shortly after I met Polly we became roommates, moving into a ramshackle rent house with a dubious roof.

One night Dana came over for whiskey and beers and revealed the riveting information that Alex was her MFA thesis chair and she went to his house for their meetings.

“You’ve been in his house?” I whispered, incredulous.

“Oh, sure,” she said.

“What does it look like?”

“Well, there are pictures of his dead wife everywhere.”

“Dead WIFE?” I gasped.

“Yeah, she died of cancer five years ago.”

This inspired the bulk of my sexual fantasies throughout the rehearsal of Agnes. I ate, slept, and breathed my lines. I sang hymns naked in front of my mirror, running my hands all over myself. At rehearsals, when Alex gave us notes, I gazed at him with an expression I hoped conveyed the dual sentiments of, “I’m listening very carefully to everything you say,” and, “I can love you better.”

In the middle of the night, I sat on Polly’s bed with a joint in one hand and a cigarette in the other and detailed for her my obsessive repertoire of Alex Green fairytales. She half-listened while scribbling notes about the striking similarities between River Phoenix, Dracula, and Gandhi, occasionally snapping her fingers at me to get me to pass the joint. Eventually the conversation would degenerate into silence, and we’d end up sitting in front of the TV watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall and eating Cool-Whip out of the tub, and these were the dreams that got us through the night.

****

For once, people approved of what I did. Every night, for the six divine nights Agnes of God ran, I walked out for the curtain call covered in corn syrup blood, very pleased with myself. Polly and Dana carried roses to the foot of the stage and offered them up to me, and I leaned over the footlights to take them. After the show Alex hugged me, and he leaned into my ear and whispered in his low sweet voice, “Nice work, little nun.” I lived for those hugs, every night until the show closed, six treasured embraces, six times folded into his healing blanket arms.

And then, on Sunday after the matinee, they began to tear down the set. I watched the walls that had held me safe dismantled before my eyes. Alex, my deity, walked out into the parking lot, got into his Green Nissan, and, just that easily, My God was gone. For six days he had held me, and on the seventh he drove off and rested.

That afternoon I walked home alone, carrying the wilting flowers that had adorned my dressing room table. They seemed sad, so I didn’t want to throw them away. I thought I’d dry them and hang them over my bed like an upside-down shrine.

At home I left the vases on my bedroom floor while I ran a bath. It wasn’t until I saw the sticky fake blood redden the water that I realized I couldn’t get clean enough. I wanted anything that would remind me of the show off of me, wanted to wash away Alex’s last hug, wanted to admit to myself that he was at home right now without me, that I wasn’t really going to be his lover. I turned on the shower, clutched my knees to my chest, and cried as the bathtub overflowed. I could scald my skin, pelt myself with hot needle rain, abrade my flesh with all the loofahs in the world, it
didn’t matter, I wasn’t Agnes anymore.

He never cast me again. There was always someone else, some new girl. He picked us like daisies. When it was Polly’s turn, when she was cast in the Neil Simon play instead of me, I seethed for days. I knew I was better. After all, Polly’s voice cracked and squeaked from her constant smoking, she couldn’t enunciate, and she wasn’t an actress anyway, she was a playwright.

For the next six weeks, as they rehearsed, I swallowed furious tears when I saw Alex call Polly into his office. I ached to know what went on behind that door. One day, I pressed my ear against it. I heard a couple of bumps, like a table moving, and then nothing.

****

I was sitting in the green room doing my homework the afternoon everything shattered.

It took me a moment to realize Dana had come in, and that she looked sort of green.

“What the hell?” I said.

“He was jerking off.”

“What?”

“I went to his house,” she said. “He was standing at the back door, the sliding glass doors, he was naked. He was jerking off. He was looking right at me.”

Everything turned red, and then black. Her voice echoed. The green room had become a wind tunnel.

“I went to turn in my thesis,” she said, “the final draft of my thesis. He told me just to bring it by his house.”

I threw down my books, ran all the way home, fell on the floor and sobbed. Polly stubbed out her cigarette and knelt down beside me. She lay her hand on my head like a nicotine mother.

“Baby,” she said. “Honey, what happened?”

I choked it out. At first her hand was warm and then it was cold and then she pulled it away. She jumped up and grabbed her bag. The door slammed. The wheels of her car squealed in the driveway. She didn’t come back until the next morning. When I woke up, she was sitting on my bed.

“I was sleeping with him,” she said.

She told me everything that morning. She brought me coffee and cigarettes and weed and we held each other in my bed and we shook. Sometimes we laughed, or yelled, but we always went back to crying. The question kept scraping my throat but I tried to keep it down. It was, after all, vile of me to even think it. And then it won, it came out, it asked itself.

“Why not me?” I said.

“He thought you were too volatile.”

“Did he use that word?”

She nodded.

Where do you go when you find out that the person you love the most is lying? Do you kill yourself? I tried. When Polly was gone I went through all the samples of her old anti-depressants, Pamelor and Elavil and Parnate, swallowed them with vodka, and chased them with a bottle of One-A-Day vitamins for good measure. The vitamins and vodka made me puke it all back up, an orange-green flood into the toilet, undissolved gelcaps swimming like lethargic fish. I considered jumping from the top of the theatre building, so he’d have to see my bones, but he probably wouldn’t care anyway. He’d just nod and say, “I always knew she was volatile,” and turn, and walk away, and find some other student to fuck.

When you find out your gods are fallible, the best thing to do is forget.

Stacy Pershall now lives very happily in a New York City apartment the size of a shoebox. In her spare time, she is trying to cover her entire body with tattoos.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, January 5th, 2007 | Email This Post

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