“…and with that, my dear children, I wish you all goodnight.”
The lights went out, and I sat, weeping silently, in my chair. The show would run just one more year, but I was done. Our last recording, and no contracts renewed. Maybe, they can scrape enough together, but there didn’t seem much hope. Maybe, there’ll be a reunion tour. Good for Alex, Gloria, the rest, but I’m sixty-five. In forty years, they can have their reunion, old, settled actors remembered by the children who grew up watching us—when they’re old enough to love fairy tales again—but I will not be there in forty years to sit in my chair beside a fire and read a soft preamble and make some strained moral as I tell the children goodnight. Some other voice shall have to come.
The dictionary we’ve used for a prop all these years is heavy in my lap. I run my fingers over the familiar leather thinking of the last story I read from it. Sad Ariel, bound by our tears. I pull myself to my feet and set the big book back in its place again upon the little table. No more. Never again shall I flip through your pages and pretend to read the lines I had rehearsed. Easily, we might have hidden the copy between the leaves, but I found a sort of freedom in the pretense.
I took off the rounded glasses that had no prescription and unbuttoned the comfy smoking jacket. I had grown into it. I remember feeling stiff, unreal, a pretender. It was perhaps the most expensive prop when we started, except we got it for free, half an advertisement and half a favor from the producer’s friend. A real smoking jacket; we hadn’t replaced it all these years. Drab now, like all the worn out costumes. As it came off my shoulders, I felt cold and naked.
To relinquish—perhaps because it was so hard to let go, I knew I had to. I laid the jacket in the chair and faced the darkness of the empty studio.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Bowing, I left the stage.
“Row, row, row your boat,” I mumbled as I stumbled toward the glowing red “Exist” sign. Odd. E-X-I-S-T. Never noticed it before.
***
As the cast and crew gathered over their drinks, a somber silence pervaded the quiet chatter as they all remembered the old man, the professional, who’d been difficult, who’d been kind, who had been hopeless in understanding the youths but had always been willing to listen. Sometimes, all you needed was for someone to listen. The morals he tacked on after the show were never that important anyway. They were never his words, though he said them well. Anyway, the children were always asleep by then, tucked away and dreaming.
“He didn’t want you all to worry,” producer Bill was saying. “We knew it would be soon, I just didn’t realize that…”
He saw the scene again in his mind, heard the director yell, “Cut,” and the applause that followed. Then the silence. “It’s a wrap,” the director had said. But the actor didn’t move. The old man had said goodbye to the audience, and then, quietly, silently, without protest, had fallen asleep.
Tale Told 