Undercover Read Free Page A

context speech, I found my thoughts flitting up, around, and else-where—toward my dad, who had flown off to San Francisco that morning; toward the pond and themarble girl inside the pond; toward Theo, sitting three rows up and two people over, looking like half a person now, without his beloved Lila. I wasn’t dialing into the lecture at all until I heard Dr. Charmin quoting from some critic: “‘The great characteristic of Rostand’s attitude towards the world he lives in consists of two things: a conviction of the necessity of what has recently been called “the lyric life,” and a feeling that the average man fails to appreciate this necessity.’”
    The average man fails to appreciate the lyric life. Well, I thought. What else is new?
    By now Dr. Charmin was on a roll, going on in her sentimental fashion. “Rostand was a man,” she was saying, “who dared, at the early age of twenty-nine, to write a five-act drama in verse. A man whose work is as important to our understanding of ourselves and of language as Shakespeare ever was.” Dr. Charmin had a sob-up-in-her-throat way of speaking and blond hair that was much too blond for her pale skin. Youhad to fight your way through her love of language for the facts.
    Still, she had gotten my attention, or rather this playwright Rostand had, and now I picked up the dog-eared, faded-to-gray play pamphlet that had been left on every one of our desks. Cyrano de Bergerac the play was called, and even as Dr. Charmin continued, I was flipping the pages, scooping up phrases, seeing what I could see for myself. “She’s beautiful / as a peach amused with strawberries,” I read. “So cool / that merely to see her is to enrheum the heart.” Peaches amused with strawberries, I made a Note to Self. Enrheum, I thought. Be sure to look it up. And then there was this passage that would have caught anybody’s eye, about the hero’s fabulously gigantic nose—a Ninth World Wonder of some sort:
    ’Tis my delight to face the world thus snouted,
    for none but fools like you have ever doubted
    that a great nose argues its owner lavish
    gentle and brave, like me, and not a knavish
    nincompoop such as you, whose featureless face,
    which serves no purpose but its own disgrace
    and some small entertainment for these fingers…
    Who knew that the shape and size of noses was a subject contemplated and lyrically translated by very famous playwrights? Who knew, for that matter, that peaches had the capacity, despite their pitted hearts, to grow bedazzled and amused?
    “We’ll be reading Cyrano de Bergerac to one another,” Dr. Charmin was saying. “We’ll be thinking about chivalry and humility, self-sacrifice and love, identity and appearance, loyalty and yearning. We’ll be asking these questions throughout: Tragedy? Or comedy? What is the emotional legacy of this play?” And then without further ado, as they say, Dr. Charmin doled out the parts—the multiple marquis, the officers, the sisters,the porter, a musketeer, a bore, Christian de Neuvillette, Ragueneau, Le Bret, Cyrano de Bergerac, and—to me, the ordinary girl in the back of the room—the object of all male desire, Roxane.

7
    N OVEMBER’S DAYS are shorter than October’s. The sun hangs that much lower in the sky, and the clouds, when there are clouds, are dense. Out by the pond only the steadfast birds remained—the black birds that I like to call ravens for effect but that are, in point of fact, mere backyard crows. “Where are you going?” my mother sometimes asked me. But mostly she did not. I opened the door, and I was gone.
    Dad was, as he said, in a bad place with his work. Stuart Small, the San Francisco client, was a nuisance. No matter what Dad did, Small wantedmore—wanted everything Dad knew and thought and then some. Every few days or so the guy would forget what he had originally commissioned, or change his mind, or fail to implement Dad’s strategy, and then that would be Dad’s fault—this