THE WAREHOUSE was full of seats. They were stadium seats, and they could have been from Ebbets Field. At the back of the warehouse, Denny had set up living quarters for himself. He had a cot and a cast-off dresser, a hot plate and an old refrigerator, and, in a plywood cubicle, a sink, a toilet, and a shower. The concrete floor tended to get damp, so he had arranged skids or pallets to walk on, and he had begun to build something like a stage out of scrap lumber.
“What are you up to here?” she asked.
“You won’t laugh, right?”
“I won’t laugh. Right.”
“A theater,” he said. He looked hard at her for signs of laughing.
“I can see that,” she said, “and I’m not laughing.”
Denny produced a bottle and they sat there into the night, talking. He told her what he hoped to do: to establish a little theater there in the warehouse. Stage some “really interesting” plays, maybe add a coffeehouse. He snapped his fingers and said “yeah” and “man” a great deal, and Ariane recognized the signs of someone trying very hard to become someone else. For the first time, she noticed his goatee. She reached out and brushed it with her finger, and he grinned at her, the old Denny peeking through the new. As he talked on, Ariane could see that his ambition had a hollow heart. He talked about the shell he intended to build, but not what he meant to put in it. He had ideas about the stage itself, and he led her around the area, waving his arms and building it in the air for her; he had ideas about the coffeehouse at the front of the warehouse, where people would enter, and he dragged a table and a pair of chairs into place so that she could sit there with him and imagine it better; he had ideas about the facade of the building, the way he wanted to keep it raw and rough but add to it an entrance that was polished, bright, and promising; but he had no ideas at all about what he wanted to stage there, not a clue. He had no text. He dropped the names of playwrights and plays, but only by way of illustrating the sort of thing he didn’t want to do. He wanted to do something “entirely new,” he insisted, but he didn’t know what it would turn out to be. Nor did this bother him. It brought on a kind of bliss. It would come to him, he was sure. His vision was of the warehouse transformed. Lights shone on the stage. The seats were filled with interesting people. In the café, people held intriguing discussions over miniature cups of espresso, and now and then they looked at the distant stage, where something was happening.
Ariane, for her part, told him why she had broken away from him and drifted toward Guy. She told it frankly and matter-of-factly, without omissions, and both of them understood from the way she told it that they would not be lovers. They might be friends, and it seemed as if they would be friends, and they might spend some pleasant hours in bed together, but they wouldn’t be lovers. Halfway through her story, Denny let his head rest on the table, and in another moment he was asleep.
“To be continued,” said Ariane. She gathered her things and left. On the way home, she decided to return in the morning.
[to be continued]
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