My Life

by Maryrose Wood

  “Who told me is the same person who told everybody here!” cried Daphne, gesturing dramatically with her fuzzy Aurora-style mittens. “She posted it on the Aurora blog about”—Daphne pushed up one mitten so she could see her watch—“an hour ago.”

  “An hour ago?” Philip repeated. “An hour—”

  “Who?” screamed Emily. “Who who who who?”

  Daphne looked at them, dumbfounded. “Marlena!” she said. “Marlena Ortiz!”

  14

  “I BELIEVE IN YOU”

  How to Succeed in Business

  Without Really Trying

  1961. Music and lyrics by Frank Loesser,

  book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert

  Philip and Emily gaped at each other. An hour ago—that would have been right about the time Emily was faking a puke attack in Mr. Henderson’s class, the same time that Philip, who hadn’t bothered to show up at his social studies class at all, was sitting in the IHOP across the street from Eleanor Roosevelt High School, waiting for Emily and drinking watery coffee and staring at the train schedule even though he knew it by heart.

  Why, Philip thought bitterly, why couldn’t they have wireless Internet access on the Long Island Rail Road, would that be so frickin’ hard?

  Daphne looked at them with pity. “Oh my God! You mean you didn’t know?”

  Emily’s stomach gave a little twist. “Of course we knew,” she heard herself say. Truthfully, until that minute some secret part of her had clung to the possibility that it was all just noxious gossip, spread, perhaps, by the cast of some competing show, or a publicist for Wicked like Ian had said. The stomach pain was spreading upward, into her chest.

  Philip looked at Emily, who was wheezing in an asthma-attack kind of way, though he knew she didn’t have asthma. He put his hand on her shoulder, to steady both of them.

  Data, numbers, facts, figures. That’s what Philip needed. Then he would know what to do. “What did Marlena’s post say?” he asked Daphne. “Did she say why the show was closing? Did she say when?”

  “She was pissed! She was filled with righteousness!” Daphne cried. “She said the producers made the decision to close and didn’t even tell Marlena or anyone! They were trying to keep it secret—they thought if Marlena knew, she would walk! As if Marlena Ortiz would ever walk out on Aurora! As if!” Daphne yelled it to the skies.

  The line moved forward an infinitesimal amount. Philip looked at his watch. It was three o’clock. The box office had just opened.

  “But Marlena found out somehow—you know Marlena!—and she was like, no way José!” Daphne continued, wagging her finger the way Marlena always did in the first-act finale, in a song titled “You Gotta Show the Love.” “ ‘The fans need to know so they can come show the love,’ that’s what Marlena said! So she posted it on the blog right away. I guess word got around fast. I ran right outta my office when I saw it. I’m gonna lose my job over this one.” Daphne closed her eyes and began to sing.

  “Show it show it show it show it,

  Show the love,

  You gotta show it show it show it show it,

  Show the love,

  You gotta show the love!”

  Daphne started to sway as she sang.

  Though she loved every syllable and every note of every song from Aurora, hearing Daphne sing “Show the Love” under these circumstances made Emily want to smack her. “Did she say when the final show is?” Emily yelled, rather close to Daphne’s face. Five hundred (or more) people standing in a mob were making a fearsome background noise.

  Daphne opened her eyes. “Two weeks from Saturday,” she said. “You better get on the back of the line, girl, there is no way we’re all gonna get tickets!” Daphne draped her scarf across her face like a veil and started dancing. “I heard they’re only letting each person buy two.”

  “Philip!” Emily said, her voice rising with panic. “Did you hear that?”

  Of course he had. His mind was already calculating—two weeks, sixteen performances. It was reasonable to assume the roughly 1,500-seat theatre was presold for say, seventy percent of the tickets, leaving approximately 450 seats unsold for each performance, for a total of 7,200 available seats—but Aurorafans everywhere were working their telephones and computers this very second, gobbling up the remaining Aurora tickets on Telecharge, while he and Emily stood here, not even in line yet and with throngs of people already waiting. . . .

  It was hopeless. Philip had two thousand dollars cash in his pocket (Emily had been too nervous to carry it), but you had to have a credit card to use Telecharge. They could walk up the line trying to scalp tickets for crazy amounts of money, but the hard-core Aurora crowd despised scalpers; if he started to flash his cash they might end up being stoned to death, or (the New York version) being pushed in front of a speeding taxi. . . .

  “Please, Daphne, let us stand here with you!” Emily begged. “We were on the train and we didn’t see Marlena’s post, we just got here, you know we would have been the first ones here if we’d known—”

  A warning grumble started to rise from the people in line behind Daphne, but they needn’t have worried. “I’m sorry, honey,” Daphne said, shaking her head. “But justice is justice, I can’t mess with the way things are meant to be.” She started singing a different Aurora song:

  “Look inside!

  See what you see.

  Who you are

  Is who you’re meant to be—”

  Philip, meantime, was counting heads. There were now close to seven hundred people clamoring for tickets. There was only one thing to do.

  “Hey!” said Daphne as Philip started to lead Emily away. “If you didn’t know about Marlena’s post, how did you find out the show was closing?”

  “We uh, uh, uh—” said Emily.

  “Emily, let’s go,” said Philip, gently tugging her arm. “We have to get in line.”

  Upstairs in the Sardi’s building on West Forty-fourth Street, Stevie Stephenson looked out the windowed rear wall of his office. The floor-to-ceiling glass offered a heart-stopping view of Times Square: the animated advertisements, the glittering theatre marquees, not to mention the underwear models pictured on Times Square’s legendary sky-high billboards. From each photo a tanned and oiled, nearly naked model gazed moodily into Stevie’s tenth-floor office. It made his visitors uncomfortable, and Stevie liked that.

  Ten stories down, on street level—Stevie liked what he saw there, too. The theatre district was always crowded, but the sea of desperate ticket-buying humanity before him triggered a special thrill in his nervous system. He lived by the producers’ credo, also known as PBIS: Put Butts In Seats. Most of the people on the street below had never heard of Stevie Stephenson, but at this moment he was a man who wielded power over an awful lot of butts.

  One of the nicest of these belonged to Marlena Ortiz, and Stevie chuckled at how well his little plan had worked. How easy it had been to let his news about Aurora “slip” to his idiot nephew Lester in Florida. How quickly the “rumor,” thus carefully planted, had spread, finding its way back to the intended target within a twenty-four-hour period and leaving a comet-trail of gossip (and free publicity!) a mile wide.

  He still wasn’t sure how Marlena had gotten to the heart of the rumor and confirmed it so quickly, but it didn’t matter. Her reaction was perfect: utterly predictable and endearingly, wrongheadedly noble. Three years of playing Aurora had turned the wide-eyed chorus girl into not merely a star, but one who fancied herself a “woman of the people”—it was touching, really, the way she took her fans so seriously.

  She’d make a fine Evita someday, he mused. For now, Marlena had done for free what a thousand highly paid press agents couldn’t—she’d turned an ordinary closing notice into a phenomenon.

  And just wait, he thought. Wait till you hear what’s coming to the Rialto next.

  The One Sure Thing in Show Business, that’s what. He had two signed contracts as proof, typed very late at
night by a specially hired temp who could input a hundred words a minute but understood not one word of English. Stevie knew how to leak a secret, and he also knew how to keep one.

  The One Sure Thing in Show Business. Steve smiled. All the top producers knew what it was, but none of them—so far—had been able to make the deal happen. To do so would be like catching lightning in a bottle. Many said it was impossible and had given up trying. Not Stevie.

  He grabbed a stick of cinnamon gum from his desk drawer. Stevie had quit smoking cigars a decade earlier on the advice of his doctor, but at times like this he would get a craving.

  Music, he thought as he chewed. That’s what he needed. He punched the intercom button on his desk.

  “Miss O’Malley,” he said. “Would you put on the How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying recording, and pipe it in to my office?”

  “Original cast with Robert Morse, or 1995 revival with Matthew Broderick?” asked Miss O’Malley, without missing a beat.

  “Matthew Broderick.” Stevie snapped his gum with satisfaction. “Broderick, please.”

  It was two full hours before word got down to the end of the line, transmitted from person to person like an evil game of telephone—there were no more tickets. The box office was closing. Everyone should go home.

  By this time Emily and Philip had about two hundred people in line behind them and six hundred people still in front. For the last half hour Philip’s teeth had been chattering and Emily had needed to go to the bathroom, but they had stood resolutely, without complaining.

  They’d passed so many familiar faces on their long walk to the end of the line—it seemed like most of the regulars were there. Some waved, others averted their eyes. From a half block away Morris had mouthed, “You just GOT here?” in disbelief before limping off into the crowd. None of them had offered to let Emily and Philip cut the line, but if they had it might have started a riot, so it was just as well.

  There were no more tickets. The box office was closing. Everyone should go home.

  Somebody nearby started to cry. Others stood there, unable to leave the line, but no longer knowing what they were waiting for. After a few minutes, the bulk of the crowd wandered off in defeat. One group started singing as they walked away:

  “Never be enough

  Ten thousands shows could

  Never be enough . . .”

  But Emily and Philip, the die-hard Aurorafans of Rockville Centre, could not leave without some final heroic effort, no matter how futile. Without even needing to discuss it, they ran, weaving at full speed through the thinning crowd, to the Rialto Theatre box office. The manager was about to turn out the lights.

  “Please!” Emily cried, pounding on the box office window. “We have to have tickets to the final performance! You can charge us anything you want. We’ll stand in the back. We’ll watch from the wings!”

  The box office manager looked exhausted. Grimacing, he said to Emily what he’d already gone hoarse saying to 426 people before her, not that any of them had believed him, either.

  “Regardless of what you may have read on the Internet, ‘officially’ we have not announced a closing,” he croaked. “So ‘officially’ there is no final performance!” He started to pull down the Plexiglas divider that shut the box office window.

  “But unofficially?” Emily cried, jamming her hand under the glass. The manager was barely able to stop the window before it smashed into her fingers.

  “Unofficially—the next two weeks are completely sold out. We’re not selling tickets for performances after that date at this time.” He looked at them with burning eyes. “Do I have to write it in blood? Go home!”

  “Wait!” said Philip. “Will there be any rush lines on the days of performance?”

  “No more rush lines!” The box office manager put his mouth right next to the narrow opening beneath the glass. Emily could feel his breath on her hand. “There are no more tickets!” he rasped. “Got it? Go see Phantom of the Opera! This box office is closed.”

  Emily barely got her fingers out before he slammed the window shut.

  15

  “KEEP IT GAY”

  The Producers

  2001. Music and lyrics by Mel Brooks,

  book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan

  There are times when a person is alone in her room crying but is secretly hoping someone will come in and find her, sit on the side of the bed, ask the right questions and listen calmly, all while radiating a tender glow of sympathy and understanding.

  This was not a time like that. This was a time when Emily wanted more than anything to hide from the truth, pull the blankets over her feelings and pretend that everything, just for a moment, was the way it used to be. But her feelings refused to cooperate. They erupted, hot as lava, and poured down her cheeks and twisted her face into a horrible tight crying expression that made her feel like her skin would split.

  She’d slept on and off all night, waking, remembering, crying, dozing, and waking again. Her bike had been gone from the train station when she and Philip got back, as she’d expected, but that didn’t make it any less upsetting. Luckily her parents had been too distracted by the missing bike to poke any serious holes in her story about the PSAT class instructor being late and taking the class out for pizza afterward to make amends.

  Grandma Rose had been out for the evening and had uncharacteristically left the door to her room locked, so the unspent two thousand dollars (minus the cab fare from the station) was stashed in Emily’s closet, rolled inside a bedroom slipper and hidden in the back, behind her summer clothes.

  Emily thought of all these things during her wakeful fits of misery, but mostly she thought of Aurora.

  Is this how things ended? she’d wondered at 3:18 a.m., when she finally left her bed and stared out the bedroom window at the street below. With the last time of whatever it was you loved already over, and you didn’t know it was the last time so you didn’t pay special attention or say goodbye or anything?

  If that was what last times felt like, she realized with horror, anything could be the last time. This could be the last time Emily stood shivering in front of her window, or the last night she spent in her own bed.

  Maybe a meteor would strike her house this minute and crush them all to powder, making this the last time she’d be able to think about what last times felt like!

  Emily remembered her bike—she’d never ride it again, never never never—and started to cry again. She crawled back under the covers and hugged her pillow, until she dozed off once more.

  Much to his surprise, Philip woke up on Tuesday morning to the smell of pancakes.

  For a moment he wondered if he might be having a stroke. That was a symptom of stroke—you started to smell things that weren’t there. He was sure he’d read something like that in a book once. He inhaled. Pancakes. A stroke, definitely.

  Even after going to the bathroom and splashing water on his face he smelled it, and as he approached the kitchen he heard something sizzle, just like batter on a hot griddle. Obviously the stress of Aurora’s closing had caused some fragile artery in his brain to weaken and burst—

  “Good morning, honey!” said Mrs. Nebbling. She was wearing not her customary hazmat suit, but an apron, and she was cooking breakfast. “I decided to stay home today.”

  “Oh. Hey.” Philip wondered if he should kiss her on the cheek, but she was holding a drippy ladle in one hand and a greasy spatula in the other. It seemed dangerous to get too close.

  “I’m making breakfast,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Philip. “I smelled it. I thought it was a stroke.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” said Philip, peering at the griddle. “That batch needs to be flipped.”

  “I’m so sorry I wasn’t home for your birthday,” she said. “I hope you had fun.” The kitchen was filling with smoke. If there had been batteries in the alarm, it would have gone off by now.

  “It’
s okay.” Philip reached over the stovetop and turned on the exhaust fan.

  “Thanks,” said Mrs. Nebbling. She handed him a plate of steaming pancakes. “Syrup’s on the table.”

  Philip was so used to eating cold pizza out of the box and Pop-Tarts out of the wrapper, he’d forgotten that the cabinets of the Nebbling kitchen contained actual dishes. Cream-colored background with a pink and green floral pattern around the rim: the same dishes they used to eat dinner off every night in their old house.

  “Your brother and I had a long talk last night,” Mrs. Nebbling said.

  “Mmph,” Philip said. The syrup was Mrs. Butterworth’s—Philip preferred real maple, which was too expensive for their household now—but the pancakes were delicious. “These are good,” he said, his mouth full.

  “You look skinny,” Mrs. Nebbling said. She smiled at Philip as he ate. It seemed like a fake smile, but maybe Philip had just forgotten what her smile was like. He knew he should be miserable because Aurora was closing, but the food tasted so good. Hot breakfast that you ate off a plate! He heard himself making little yum-yum noises as he chewed.

  “I can understand why you might not have wanted to tell me,” Mrs. Nebbling went on. “I haven’t been home very much, I know. I guess you probably feel like I’m not interested in your life. But I am.”

  Philip was distracted by his meal, but not so much that he didn’t immediately start to wonder where this was going.

  “And don’t be mad at Mark,” she said. Her smile was starting to look more familiar. “I was the one asking questions. I’m a lawyer, remember?”

  Mark is an idiot, Philip wanted to say. Mark is gross and mean and lies about everything. But he couldn’t say those things because his mouth was crammed full of pancakes.