by Mindy Klasky
I dug out my script notebook so that I could review my ever-growing list of notes for the various designers. While John had been around a lot, focusing on the set, I hadn’t seen Alex Munoz, our sound designer, for days. Bill had decided that he wanted all of the actors miked, even—especially—the ones with strong voices. He wanted the option of running their lines through a reverb chamber, making it sound like their words were echoing in the tunnels beneath Verona.
The day before, Bill had also asked me to talk to David Barstow, the lighting designer. Bill wanted all of the colors taken down a notch from the ones they’d discussed months before—darker blues, deeper browns. David wasn’t going to be pleased; he’d already told me that he thought we were going from a “mood” to a “statement.” (Read: He was losing artistic control to an overbearing director.) I didn’t care so much about Barstow’s artistic integrity; I was just starting to worry about how many rolls of glow tape I’d need to buy to mark off every possible corner, doorway, and sharp edge on the twilit set.
There was something else that I was supposed to tell the designers…. Something that had come up at rehearsal the night before. I’d been about to write it down last night, when Drew had come over to get a couple of Advils. I’d lost my train of thought as I’d dug into my backpack, muttering words of comfort to ease his headache, resisting the urge to offer him a neck rub. A back rub. More.
I shrugged. The note would come back to me. Most likely in the middle of today’s rehearsal, when I was frantically scribbling down something else entirely. Like “buy more trash bags.” We’d gone through another two boxes. The women kept catching them on chairs and door frames, and they refused to wear the same bag after we’d taken a break, saying that they got slimy.
Slimy! That wasn’t the thing I’d forgotten, but I remembered another note, one for the costume designer. I dashed out the word sibilant—a reminder that Bill wanted the costumes to slither audibly when the actors moved, not just to look reptilian. As I dotted the second i I heard a familiar voice say, “Is this seat taken?”
Drew.
Drew Myers, inviting himself to join me. With or without my future tense new wardrobe.
I was so astonished, I almost spat coffee all over the table. Realizing just in time, though, that such an action wasn’t likely to endear the man to me forever after, I remembered to smile like an ordinary human being and gesture toward the extra chair. “Please,” I said, trying to sound casual, like I’d known he was going to stop by, that he was going to talk to me.
“You are just the woman I wanted to see!” he said, rattling his cup in his saucer as he leaned closer across the table.
I couldn’t help it. I smiled as if he’d just proposed.
Oh, I wasn’t an idiot. I was pretty sure that he didn’t want to see me, as me. He wanted to see me as stage manager. He wanted to ask me for a favor. He wanted me to do something related to the production. But even as I reminded myself about all that, a giddy little voice inside my head said, “I’m the woman he wants to see! I’m the woman he wants!”
I snarled at the voice to shut up, or I was going to make a fool out of myself.
“What’s up?” I asked.
Right then and there, I should have been nominated for an Ivey—I was the undisputed lead actress in a major Twin Cities production that winter. Hell, they should have handed me an Oscar, too, thrown in an Emmy and a Tony for good measure. I’d made my voice sound perfectly light, easy. I was interested, but not overly eager. I was—in a word—normal.
“Did you happen to find my cell phone when you closed up last night?”
Crash! That clattering sound was the complete toppling of my expectations, the shattering of my dreams. Yeah, I’d told myself not to care, not to imagine anything special, not to generate a wisp of hope. I never was very good at listening to myself.
Unbidden, I pictured TEWSBU. I saw him shaking his head in disgust when I’d let my dreams get ahead of our reality. I saw him sigh in exasperation when I’d suggested that we take some time for ourselves, that we do something as a couple, that we pretend to be two people in love instead of two professionals working in the theater.
Drew wasn’t TEWSBU, I chided silently.
No, Drew was the star of my current show. He was my current crush. And he was waiting patiently, as if I weren’t a madwoman carrying on a conversation in the privacy of my own brain.
“You lost it?” I asked. This time, I didn’t manage quite as perfect a tone of nonchalance. I let myself be distracted by the worried glint in his eyes. I barely kept from reaching out to pat his hand. In sympathy, I remonstrated with myself. I was going to pat his hand in sympathy!
He shrugged, looking like a grown-up Dennis the Menace. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and his beard was coming in with glints of gold, tiny prickles that caught the light and darted it back toward my heart. “I know I had it yesterday morning, but when I got home last night, it wasn’t in my pocket.”
“Did you try calling it?”
He stared at me, thunderstruck, as if my suggestion involved the finer points of nuclear fusion and astrophysics combined. “Dude! I am such an idiot.”
He was cute when he was self-condemning. Okay. He was gorgeous anytime. “You would have thought of it,” I assured him. “After you got some caffeine into your bloodstream.”
That seemed to remind him that he had a perfectly good five dollar cup of coffee sitting in front of him. He took a swig, raising his head with just a hint of a whipped cream mustache. A rather dashing whipped cream mustache it was, but I handed him one of my extra napkins. Stage managers always have extra napkins. We use them to help us resist the urge to lick off whipped cream mustaches from the lips of stunningly handsome leading men.
I fished my phone out of my backpack and punched in his number. Before the missing phone could start ringing, Drew said, “You know my number?”
I wanted to melt away. I wanted to slip under the table, escape out into the snow. I wanted to be anywhere but sitting in this coffee shop, listening to four tinny rings, trying to think of a reason why I could just dial up his cell without a second’s hesitation. As his voice mail picked up, though, the perfect answer came to me. Perfect because it contained a single grain of truth.
“I’m a stage manager,” I said, flipping my phone closed without leaving a message. “It’s my job to know everyone’s number. If Bill needs to reach you quickly, he shouldn’t have to wait for me to look up your number. Or,” I added quickly, “anyone else’s.”
Drew grinned. “Dude! So you memorized everyone in the show’s? How about Bill? What’s his?”
I looked Drew straight in the eye and rattled off ten numbers, a local area code followed by seven totally random digits.
“That’s amazing!”
If he only knew. I figured I’d better stop the game, though, before he asked me to recite one of the actor’s numbers, one that he might actually recognize. I tossed my phone in the bottom of my bag. “Try calling your phone at different times of the day. If someone’s picked it up, they should answer.”
“What other magic do you do?” he asked.
I patted my backpack and tried to smile demurely, all the time resisting the urge to shout out and dance in the center of the room. He thought I was magic! Magic! I resisted the urge to look at my tattooed fingertips, to speculate on the real, genie-backed magic I could work. Instead, I fought a losing battle to sound offhand. “I know all the downtown restaurants that have private rooms, and the places that are open after midnight. Especially the ones with decent beers on tap.”
“You’re too good to be true!” He drained the last of his drink, settling the cup on its saucer with a finality that almost made me faint.
“Aw, you say that to all the girls,” I deflected. Before I could rack my brain for additional banter, I glanced at the large clock on the wall. My disappointment was real, not an act, as I said, “I’m also a perfect alarm clock. We’ve got to get over to the theater.�
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He waited while I gulped the last of my coffee. As we both stood up, I was afraid that he was going to hold my coat for me. I could never find the sleeves when a guy did that; I always managed to snag the collar and force the garment awkwardly toward the floor.
Fortunately, he wasn’t quite that much a gentleman. He did hold the door as we left, though. I let myself lean into his arm, pretending for just a second that he was going to pull me close as the winter wind stole my breath away. I imagined the heat of his body radiating through the sleeve of his coat, through the sleeve of mine.
I was truly head over heels. Truly, disgustingly, head over heels.
Bill and John were already in the rehearsal room when we got there. “Hi, guys,” I said, tossing my backpack on a chair. “I would have opened up earlier, if I’d known you were meeting.” All the same, I was grateful that I hadn’t needed to walk away from Drew, leave him behind at Club Joe, just to make yet another tech meeting.
Bill barely glanced up from the worktable, which was covered with drawings. “We were going over new plans for the balcony.”
Drew shrugged off his coat and came to stare. “Dude! What is that?”
John pushed back from the table, a frown pulling down his mustache. The pencil tucked behind his ear made him look like a cross between an absentminded professor and a plumber. He tapped with one blunt finger and deepened his Texas twang, obviously putting us all on. “That there is a gen-u-ine manhole cover.” He dropped back into normal speech. “We’re buying it from the city, from the repaving project they completed on Lake a while back. Those are the chains to support it.” He gestured toward the sketched lines. “It’ll fly in from the top. There’ll be an iron circle welded around it, so you can open it like a porthole. You’ll be able to lean out.”
“Cool,” Drew said.
But Bill was shaking his head, running an agitated hand over his pate. I noticed that he, unlike Drew, had taken the time to shave that morning, as he did every morning. The bones of his skull made him look hungry. Even more demanding than usual. “It’s not enough,” he insisted, clearly continuing a discussion that had started before Drew and I arrived. “The design will turn this into a play about chains. They’re all the audience is going to see.”
“I already explained,” John said patiently. “We can’t use wire. That thing is too damned heavy.”
“If you can’t figure out how to do this, I can definitely ask around. Someone has to be able to figure out how to suspend that manhole cover.” I was shocked by Bill’s nasty tone. He was like a child berating a babysitter who had told him that he had to go to bed early.
John didn’t take the bait. “You can ask anyone you want. Anything less than a one-ton chain puts every single actor on that stage at risk.”
Bill sighed, thoroughly aggrieved. “We’re creating a reality here! We’re building a complete world, down to every last detail. If we show the audience a manhole cover, if we put the chains in plain sight, it will jar everyone out of the illusion. This is the balcony scene. This is Romeo and Juliet.” He threw up his hands in frustration. “Drew, I’m obviously not getting through to him. See if you can explain.”
Drew gulped audibly before spreading a blinding smile across his face. He clapped a hand on John’s shoulder as if they were the best of friends. “This is Romeo and Juliet, dude.”
John shrugged off the touch, barely managing to make his action look like a reflex and not a planned personal affront. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. When he spoke, his drawl was deeper than ever. “Why don’t we ditch the manhole cover, the real one. I’ll make one out of foam. Paint it up, put it under lights—not even the first row will be able to tell it isn’t real.”
Bill slammed his hand down on the table, making all of us jump. “Have you heard one single thing I’ve said? It has to be real! It has to be solid! In our Verona, men carry iron pipes instead of swords. They beat the walls to prove their manhood.”
John looked at Bill as if the director had sprouted two heads. “Iron pipes?”
Bill turned on me. “I thought you were going to tell him about that change? I thought that you were letting all the designers know about the iron pipe swords!”
I winced. That was the note I’d been trying to remember in the coffee shop, the one that had seemed so obvious the other day that I hadn’t even bothered to write it down.
“This isn’t about Franklin.” John refused to raise his voice to match Bill’s. Instead, he softened his words, lowered his pitch, and told a blatant lie. “She told me about the pipes, but I thought your gals could try beating on something else for one damn scene.”
I tried not to look surprised, tried not to give away the fact that John was covering for me. I don’t know that Bill would even have noticed; he was spluttering over the notion of his “gals” being restrained from expressing their perfect creativity in any way whatsoever.
John pretended not to notice. Instead, he said, “What if…” He trailed off, staring at some invisible point in the middle distance. He nodded, and then went on. “What if we put the manhole cover on a frame? Hell, put five or six of them there, a dozen, make it look like some underground junkyard. We can weld the damn things onto two frames, roll them in from the wings. They can lock into place, solid enough for whatever clanging you want.”
Clutching a pencil with fingers that seemed just a little too tense, John sketched out his thoughts, materializing the metal frames with a few brisk lines. I was impressed by how quickly he adapted his drawings; if I hadn’t seen his temper flare, I never would have believed that he was making this up as he went along, that he had never considered massive iron scaffolding until two minutes before.
Bill narrowed his eyes as he studied John’s drawing. “I like it.” His nodding picked up speed. “Yes, I definitely like it. I knew you could come up with something, if you’d just take a moment to think.”
John ignored the insult that trailed after the compliment. Instead, he scratched a couple of quick calculations on the corner of the drawing. After pulling a firm line at the bottom of a column of numbers, he said, “There’s only one problem.”
“What’s that?” Bill’s voice had turned sharp again.
“We’ll need eight stagehands to move the frames. We already added four last week, for the sheet metal on Friar Laurence’s cell. But we’ll need four more.”
Bill shrugged. “It’s only money.”
John shot a quick look to me, but I just raised my eyebrows and offered a minute shrug. I had already told him—I was responsible for making the show run. I didn’t keep an eye on the checkbook. That was Bill’s job. Bill and the producers. What were another four union stagehands, when we were creating art?
John said, “Then let me talk to the guys down in the shop. I’ll see what we can do.”
Bill looked at his wrist theatrically. He still didn’t wear a watch, but we all knew that he was chiding us for losing track of time. “We’ve only got eight weeks left.”
“I’ve never been late delivering a set yet,” John said. He squinted at his drawing. “I need to make some new measurements, make sure these frames’ll fit backstage. Can I borrow your tape measure, Franklin?”
I extracted the tool from my backpack. I wasn’t an idiot. I could see that John wanted to talk to me. I suspected that he wanted to get our stories straight on the lead pipe thing, to make sure that there wasn’t anything else I was supposed to have told him. I wanted to say that I was sorry, that I hadn’t meant to add to the challenge of dealing with our temperamental director.
Before I could move, though, Bill picked up his script, making a big show of turning to the proper page for the day’s rehearsal. He was clearly ready to start. I handed the tape measure to John, trying to send brainwaves that I’d catch up with him later. He nodded, either reading my mind or just accepting the tool, and then he slouched off into the lobby.
I heard John mutter a greeting to someone, and I looked up, expecting to
see Jennifer. Our Romeo still hadn’t arrived; it was unlike her to be late.
But no. It was Teel. Of course.
She always made a grand entrance, at least ten minutes past the time rehearsal was called for. I’d spoken to her the first few times it happened, but she wasn’t about to change her behavior on my ineffective say-so. Somehow, I didn’t think my genie ever changed her behavior, for anyone.
Bill tolerated her tardiness, accepting Teel’s outrageousness in a way that he never would have tolerated with one of his actors. Bill never looked at his bare wrist when Teel was late. Bill liked Teel. Everyone liked Teel. All the men, at least.
My genie had outdone herself today. She was wearing a tiny black T-shirt, a scrap that looked better suited to a Barbie doll than to an actual adult female. Apparently, she hadn’t been able to find a bra to match. I made a mental note to turn up the heat before the next rehearsal.
Teel’s makeup overcompensated for her lack of undergarments. She must have discovered liquid eyeliner in her ramblings around town, along with a shade of lipstick that reminded me of a fire truck. Alas, a hairbrush seemed beyond her magical ability.
Before I could say anything, my entire body jangled with the energy that meant Teel was working her magic. My eyes closed without my permission. My skin crawled with the full force of my genie’s dangerous electricity. When the shock faded to a dull tingle, I forced myself to look around.
Nothing.
I was back in the nowhere space. This time, I was smart enough to look behind me. No Teel, though. No intern-strumpet, no schoolgirl, not any of the guises I’d previously seen. I sighed in frustration and turned forward again (not that it made any difference to me, in the great nothingness outside the supposed Garden).
And Teel was waiting, an earnest grin on his face. He was dressed as an electrician, with a clipboard in his meaty hand and an embroidered name tag on his chest. A tool belt was slung low around his waist, bristling with insulated pliers, wire strippers, and a half dozen other tools. “Looking for me?” His voice was a bit higher than I expected, and he supplemented his words with a nervous laugh, running plump fingers through his ginger hair.
