RECKLESS
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” a disaffected man leaves his wife and moves into an identical house a block away. So complete is the change that Hawthorne suggests Wakefield might as well have run off to the South Seas. Alienation can go no further.
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Rachel hooks up with Lloyd, a good samaritan who works with the handicapped. Himself on the run–after walking out on a wife with multiple sclerosis and running over his baby’s head with a snowblower–Lloyd persuades Rachel to move into the home he shares with his paraplegic deaf companion, Pooty. (Rachel soon discovers that Pooty only pretends to be deaf in an appeal to Lloyd’s pity.) They find Rachel a job at the “Hands Across the Sea” charity, where they believe in hiring the handicapped–because they cost so little. There Rachel is asked to mail letters that are really anagram messages detailing a bizarre Albanian spy plot involving her former husband Tom and biogenetic terrorism. Then somehow Rachel, Pooty, and Lloyd get on a Your Mother or Your Wife quiz show where, impersonating each other, they earn $120,000.
The catalog of calamities continues: Rachel again is almost assassinated (during an Oprah-like talk show); five psychiatrists–in the usual “blame the victim” style–try to convince Rachel this is all her terrible dream; and demented Lloyd dies a pathetic death from his nonstop diet of champagne. The one hopeful moment comes when Rachel, now a psychiatrist herself, meets a person from her past. In effect he returns her to the opening scene in the play, where everything had started going downhill. Maybe, the play thinly hints, events may now take a different course. Ha!
