Presence by Arthur Miller

Author:Arthur Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-11-04T10:38:28+00:00

A Search for a Future

I read where Faulkner, just before he died, was having dinner in a restaurant and said, “It all tastes the same.” Maybe I am dying. But I feel good.

I was pasting on my beard. My mind was going back through the mirror to all the other beards, and I counted this as number nine in my life. I used to like beard parts when I was younger because they made me look mature and more sure of myself. But I don’t like them so much now that I’m older. No matter how I try I can’t help acting philosophical on stage with a beard, and in this part I’m a loud farmer.

That night I looked at my makeup jars, the sponge, the towel, the eye pencil, and I had a strong feeling all of a sudden: that it had always been the same jars, the same sponge, the same towel stained with pink pancake, exactly like this one is; that I had not gotten up from this dressing table for thirty-five years; and that I had spent my whole life motionless, twenty minutes before curtain. That everything tasted the same. Actually I feel I am optimistic. But for quite a lengthened-out minute there I felt that I had never done anything but make myself up for a part I never got to play. Part of it is, I suppose, that all dressing rooms are the same. The other part is that I have been waiting to hear that my father has died. I don’t mean that I think of him all the time, but quite often when I hear a phone go off I think, There it is, they are going to tell me the news.

The stage-door man came in. I thought he was going to announce ten minutes (ten minutes to curtain), but instead he said that somebody was asking to see me. I was surprised. People never visit before a show. I thought it might be somebody from the nursing home. I felt frightened. But I wanted to know immediately, and the stage-door man hurried out to get the visitor.

I never married, although I have been engaged several times—but always to a gentile girl, and I didn’t want to break my mother’s heart. I have since learned that I was too attached to her but I don’t feel sure about that. I love nothing more than children, family life. But at the last minute a certain idea would always come to me and stick in my brain. The idea that this marriage was not absolutely necessary. It gave me a false heart, and I never went ahead with it. There are many times when I wish I had been born in Europe, in my father’s village, where they arranged marriages and you never even saw the bride’s face under the veil until after the ceremony. I would have been a faithful husband and a good father, I think. It’s a mystery. I miss a wife and children that I never had.

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