58 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
floor,” one said.) After stretching, he
boiled water for his throat-soothing
“potion”: half a teaspoon of salt, half a
teaspoon of baking soda, and half a
teaspoon of corn syrup. At seven-twenty,
he raced downstairs to the stage, where
the cast had gathered for their nightly
fight call. Russell, who lives in Driver’s
neighborhood, was gossiping on the
sofa about snotty Brooklyn preschools.
They ran through their fight scenes,
stomping and kicking and smacking
at half speed, as if they were in a Three
Stooges routine.
Driver went back upstairs to shave
and to gargle his potion. Because of
Actors’ Equity rules, I wasn’t permit-
ted to see the rest of his routine, but
he told me what would happen next.
When the play started, he listened on
the speaker system until he heard his
cue. As he headed to the stage, his
dresser reminded him to put a prop
watch in his pocket. He thought about
the character of Robbie, his dead brother.
Sometimes he would picture Robbie
as the idea of “losing something beau-
tiful.” Or he would think about a mass
shooting in the news. Or he would
peek out at the silhouettes of the ush-
ers in the theatre and view them as
Robbie. Or he would think about the
AIDS epidemic—Robbie is gay but dies
in a freak boating accident—and pro-
ject it onto the audience: “Maybe they
were all Robbies, and here I am facing
them all. And they’re faceless. All these
artists who are gone.”
And then he tore through the apart-
ment door onto the stage and deliv-
ered a ten-minute rant about parking
and potholes and “this shit city”—
Wilson wrote it in the throes of an anx-
iety attack—as he thrashed around like
a wild bird in a cage. “Sometimes ev-
erything I’m thinking about helps,” he
told me, “but every once in a while it
doesn’t. And, the minute I get in my
head, it’s fucked.”
“
M
arriage Story” begins after the
marriage in the title has ended.
Charlie and Nicole, played by Driver and
Johansson, are in a mediator’s office, the
air between them thick with resentment.
The film is, in some ways, an update of
“Kramer vs. Kramer,” the 1979 drama
starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl
Streep—but while Streep’s character dis-
appears for most of the movie, allowing
the audience’s allegiance to drift toward
Hoffman, “Marriage Story” toggles be-
tween the spouses, as if they’d been
granted joint custody of the story. At one
point, when Nicole seems to be winning
the battle over their young son, Charlie
tells his lawyer, through tears, “He needs
to know that I fought for him.”
Driver’s parents divorced when he
was seven. Until then, the family lived
in San Diego, and Driver has happy
memories of their life; every Friday,
they’d go to the beach and eat hot dogs.
His father, Joe, was a Baptist youth coun-
sellor, and his mother, Nancy, who met
Joe at Bible college, played piano at
church. After their split, Nancy moved
Driver and his older sister to her home
town of Mishawaka. He said, of “Mar-
ON THE F LY
Though twice I forgot them
in that apartment between two lives,
when I was—well,
what was I doing?—
it is well to consider the flies
and their flights, the soft stumble
of the moth fly,
or the pixel drifting up
from a peach so soft it’s torn
by its stone,
or the soot fly, or the evening
hoverfly,
the sweat fly, the deer fly,
or the laser flight
of the corpse fly, which from miles away
hears your breathing
pause
and soon too soon homes in.
*
Though mostly it is houseflies
we notice,
taking off backward
(swatters must compensate)
as if they’d suddenly remembered something.
*
Magnets, magnets!
shrilled my landlady,
when I got back from weeks
of doing what I was doing.
She meant, of course
(I had forgotten
to tie my trash),
maggots.
*
