The Weight of an Infinite Sky

by Carrie La Seur

She made a stifled noise against his shoulder and pulled back a few inches with a smile that lit the alley. “So wonderful to see you! I gave Brittany a ride, so I had a navigator, but she took off the minute she saw her friends. You’re her hero, you know. She loves this camp.” Hilary put her hands on Anthony’s stubbled cheeks to take a closer look. “Oh, babe. How are you doing?”

  “Getting a little rough around the edges.” His voice was a mumble barely audible over the raucous class behind him. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  She left one cool hand on his cheek and studied him in that all-consuming way she had—like Brittany, he realized. Hilary, too, had grown up a child in an adult world. He was ashamed to let her take his measure. No matter how much cold water he used, his eyelids had the swollen red rims of someone who’d been up all night, or drinking, or both. The truth of course was both, and Hilary would know that. She had a sixth sense for people who were falling apart—a kinship instinct.

  “You scared me, the way you sounded on the phone. I got over here as soon as I could get away. Mae’s over the moon to have her mama here.” She dropped her hand to his arm and steered him inside, away from the stink of the Dumpsters. “Have you been sleeping?”

  Anthony dropped his face away. He’d liked it better when he was taking care of her. Hilary whole and in charge intimidated him and she was on her game today.

  She pulled him behind a piece of plywood scenery lined up near the wall. “Your hands are shaking,” she said, grasping them. “Why are your hands shaking?”

  He tucked them into his armpits, angry at the role reversal. There had been a time when he’d asked her the same question.

  “I haven’t been sleeping the last week or so. Bad dreams.” But Hilary didn’t need to hear his problems. He’d tried so hard to give her good reports that he’d invented a whole alternative narrative for his time in New York. Now he smoothed his hair and forced a smile. “You look incredible. I can see you’re doing fine.”

  He held her hands wide to take in the flowing rainbow batik dress that stopped well above her knees, weighted down with a massive Mayan-looking medallion hung from her neck on a beaded cord. Her legs looked longer than ever in above-the-knee black boots with tall, chunky heels and she’d put on full makeup for the trip to town. There was no sign of the woman who’d come so undone at the Murphys’ ranch three years ago that he’d had to carry her to the car in her nightgown and deliver her to the airport with her psychiatrist waiting in the arrival lounge at SFO.

  He’d never forget. Mae had come in the short days of early spring and along with her a deeper darkness than was at the windows. Hilary wouldn’t get up for days—or Anthony would arrive with breakfast for them all to find that she’d been up since four cleaning the moldings with a scrub brush, washing every scrap of clothing and linen in the house, and rearranging the furniture. After they caught her wandering one morning half dressed in an early April cold snap, ice on the trees and tiny Mae shivering in footie pajamas in her arms, Chance took Mae down the hill to Jayne every morning and stayed away with chores as long as he could.

  Anthony came any time he wasn’t working to keep Hilary company until she made him leave or Chance arrived, usually after dark, to take up the vigil at her bedside. He saw the way Chance averted his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of Hilary’s collapse—and how Hilary watched Chance. Her longing face followed Chance around the room, but the connection had lapsed like a line gone down in a storm. Neither of them seemed to have any idea how to restore it.

  “Like the dress?” Hilary startled him out of his memories with a little runway turn to one side then the other. “My own design.”

  “I love the sight of you,” Anthony told her with a full smile he hadn’t used in weeks. “You’re like some rare bird migrating through.”

  “I feel like it. I’m definitely not a native species around here.” She lowered her voice in a teasing whisper. “What’d they do with all the black folks?”

  Anthony shook his head. “Aw, honey, you probably don’t want to know.” He stepped out from behind the scenery. “We’ve got the kids doing body and voice exercises. It’s pretty funny.”

  The room was full of kids imitating animals, robots, water, trains—anything that moved—or vocalizing wildly for one another to guess what the sound might be.

  “That was my mom’s car!” a boy with a long black braid announced when nobody could guess his noise. “It sounds like a duck call and a horse blowing!”

  “Good thing we take the bus.” A friend elbowed him and they bent over giggling.

  Hilary circled the room with Anthony, listening and laughing at the loud menagerie. “I know how hard you worked to make this come together,” she said as they reached the door to the hall. “You should be really proud. You’re doing something good.”

  “I’m bankrupting the theater, that’s what I’m doing,” he told her out of the side of his mouth even as he returned an enthusiastic wave from one of the counselors.

  “These things are always on a shoestring. No one goes into the arts to get rich. Maybe I can help a little while I’m here. Do a workshop with the kids.”

  “That would be fantastic,” Anthony said. The board would be thrilled to have an artist with Hilary’s stature and connections linked to the theater. They could use her name—maybe even a video of her workshop—in fund-raising materials. She might drop a word about the program to influential people in the arts on the coasts. Anthony’s heart rate sped up. He cleared his throat to keep the desperation out of his voice. “Come on, let’s go somewhere we can hear ourselves.”

  He led her through the almost fluorescent teal of the main corridor, decorated to chest level with children’s murals, into the deserted box office. They pulled scarred orange plastic chairs together. Hilary leaned her elbows on her knees so that the medallion swung loose and made her look like a squatting pendulum clock.

  “I want to hear about the camp,” she said, “but first—you never told me why you left New York. I kept asking. You said it wasn’t your dad dying.”

  Anthony slumped and played with his shirt hem as he worked to summon a version of events suitable for Hilary.

  “I don’t exactly remember,” he said. Then, trying for levity, “I think I might have been deported.”

  “Anthony.” There was reproach in her voice. It was her plan for him, New York, and Hilary was accustomed to seeing her plans succeed. “What happened? I know you had some rough breaks, but you can’t give up.”

  He stretched his legs and balanced one run-down heel on the opposite toe as his mind ran back the reel. “It was okay once I got out of that scary hostel near Times Square. I met a couple of girls auditioning for the traveling cast of Rent and they had an illegal one-bedroom sublet in Hell’s Kitchen.”

  Hilary frowned. This was more detail than he’d ever given her about the apartment. He’d never forget the size of those cockroaches as long as he lived—especially the one that got into his boot. “You told me you found an apartment with other actors. It sounded good.”

  “I wanted it to sound good. You didn’t need me to worry about. Basically, I rented a share of the couch. There were six of us and the heat was broken the whole time but we didn’t dare complain. It was like camping with flush toilets. We called it the Meat Locker—but at least in winter I could zip up in my sleeping bag. Summer was like three straight months of hot yoga.”

  “How delightfully bohemian.” Hilary ventured an ironic smile, but Anthony didn’t want her irony. He’d wound the starving-artist fairy tale for her the whole time he’d been out there, because he thought she needed it for her recovery. When she called, he’d made himself laugh as he described how he’d met rejection in every imaginable way and several he couldn’t have invented if he’d been paid. He rarely got paid. He didn’t tell her that.

  His barrel chest made him too fat at his thinnest. He was too tall for the tiny leading lady, too quiet, too loud, spoke with too much of a western drawl, or s
ounded too blandly middle American. His teeth were crooked and not white enough. He needed a personal trainer, a plastic surgeon, a shrink—he’d entertained her with the constant contradictions and impossible standards. She must have thought he was at least partly joking but he never was. From her wry remarks he could understand that the situation was amusing from a distant, philosophical perspective—just not to him, not then and not now. He’d spared her and saved the truth for Chance, who always listened, no matter how late and drunk the call was. Now that Hilary was whole and healed in front of him, Anthony had no more sugarcoating to offer for the reality of where he’d been.

  He snorted. “Bohemian. Right. If I could’ve just hunted elk on Broadway, I’d have been fine.” Instead he’d gotten familiar with an American version of hunger where he could fill up on stale doughnuts for the price of a single precious apple.

  “I know money was tight but you were learning so much. There was that master class you were so excited about.”

  “Right. The master class.” Anthony imitated in ringing old Philadelphia tones: “‘You’re utterly generic, and have you ever been thin? Couldn’t you at least be gay?’ Or my personal favorite, ‘How can you possibly be so melodramatic and emotionless at the same time?’”

  “Oh no!” Hilary shook her head with a commiserating smile. “People say the cruelest things without even thinking. I suppose they meant to be funny.”

  “Oh, yeah, it was a big joke. There was one teacher—did I tell you this one?—I’d waited months to audition for his class. He had everyone in the room freeze to tell me with great sincerity that I and my Wizard of Oz speech represented the essence of everything dull and contemptible about white trash flyover country and I had best not breed.”

  Hilary clapped a hand over her mouth in horror—and to hide her own laughter.

  “It’s okay,” Anthony said. “You can laugh. I did, for a while. I told myself it was just to put everyone at ease. No offense intended, he said, like that made it better. I wrote down everything. I thought at first I could learn something from it, like there was a code I could crack that would transform me into what they wanted.”

  “Oh, honey. You never told me it was really getting to you.”

  Sometimes he was astonished at Hilary’s naïveté about the lives of people less gifted than she. “I can’t do what you do, Hilary. I’m not like you. You don’t understand that other people aren’t geniuses.” He got up and began to pace. “You should see how the donors treat me here. I’ve been sending out proposals since April to keep the program going past the summer. Now that I’m in town they cross the street to avoid me, like I’m some homeless guy chasing after them for loose change. I make a lousy lapdog and that’s what theater is—selling yourself every waking minute, one way or another.”

  Hilary stood up and put herself in his path. “A month ago you were absolutely on fire about this project. What’s changed? Is it just funding?”

  Anthony shook his hair back. “Same story as always. I get all worked up about things and then I realize how dumb I was to think I could do it. Last winter I was luring myself out of the sleeping bag for my shift with a bottle of vodka. I didn’t want Dad to be the reason I left New York, but I couldn’t have held out much longer.”

  Hilary grabbed Anthony’s hand as he slumped forward. “I don’t believe that. You just didn’t find your place. Maybe it isn’t onstage. You have great experience in set design. Or writing. Look at how much you write! But you never show it to anyone. You could do an MFA in playwriting or screenwriting. Or the kind of grassroots theater work you’re doing here.”

  “You call this theater?” Anthony looked up at the drooping, stained ceiling tiles and scoffed. “This is where crippled theater goes to lick its wounds and die.”

  Hilary twirled a full circle, letting her dress float out, gesturing grandly at the small space decorated in fading playbills. Anthony couldn’t help but admire her natural way of taking center stage as she posed in front of him like a diva preparing for her aria.

  “Yes! This is the theater as much as any space on Broadway. More important even because it reaches people Broadway never can. Don’t underestimate how much people need that, Anthony. The kids more than anybody, and you give it to them. It’s a calling. You have a great heart for people. You’re a gift to them, the way you see them. You saved me because you really saw me, what I was going through. Don’t you know that?”

  He straightened. Hilary’s full engagement was an enfolding benediction. She could light up all his hope, make him believe once more that the divine breath existed in him—but it never lasted. Anthony turned from her to stare out the front windows onto the street. Hilary stepped up beside him.

  “Come out to the Bay Area and meet some people in the theater scene there. They’d be so excited about what you’re doing. They’d help you. What you said before—it’s going well but you can’t pay the bills—you just described the early stages of every great success. You’ve got to hang in there.”

  Anthony put a tentative arm around her shoulders. “Can you stay in town tonight? I have to get back to the kids, but I want to spend some time together.”

  Gently, she patted his hand and ducked out from under his arm. “I have to get back. Chance and I need to work on some things, and I’m spending as much time with Mae as I can. Jayne came in with us and we’re going to the pool this afternoon.”

  He crossed his arms and shifted a little away from her. “I need to spend time with you, Hil. I’ve missed you.” Surely he had at least a claim of friendship, after everything that had passed between them.

  “You know I care about you, Anthony, but if I’m going to have any chance—ha, exactly—if I’m going to make it work with Chance this time, he’s got to know it’s over with you and me.”

  It wasn’t Anthony’s place to tell her about Alma, but Hilary was an observant woman. If she thought Chance was willing to try again, maybe there was less between him and Alma than everyone believed.

  Anthony sighed. He should have seen it coming. Hilary was trying to restore the time line of those days when she’d first arrived in Montana, and Chance’s door—always open to Anthony—was suddenly bolted at odd hours. Anthony had been a twenty-four-year-old with an economics degree—Dean Fry insisted on something practical if he was helping with tuition—and a theater minor from the University of Montana. He’d gone home after college out of some combination of his mother’s neediness and his father’s demands, poor job prospects, no money, and a failure of imagination. The picture of his life wouldn’t come clear, intermittent job applications came to nothing, and so he’d drifted a few years with Dean barking orders and Sarah wanting a report of his day’s activities at supper every night. Anthony had been at the point of asking Chance to let him move in when Hilary showed up like a violent prairie thunderstorm that took up residence and turned the place inside out.

  The memory took him for a minute before his mind focused on what she’d said. “Over?” The word resonated against four close walls with a menacing buzz that made Anthony’s heart beat strangely. “You don’t mean . . . you told him?”

  Hilary massaged her temples. “It was part of my treatment. Radical honesty. I’m still not convinced it was a good idea. I’ll never forget the look on his face. We were at the San Francisco airport handing off Mae and he just walked away from me. We haven’t talked about it since.”

  Anthony backed up until he hit the door a few feet behind him, feeling short of breath. “What did you tell him exactly?” But he knew already and was terrified. Conscience doth make cowards of us all.

  Her hands came together with a clap. “Everything! How I was falling apart there at the end and he was working all the time and you just—took over, when I couldn’t handle things anymore. You took care of me. I wouldn’t have made it without you.”

  “You told him we slept together?”

  “Anthony.” She was pleading—for what, his forgiveness? Just like that? “Of course. I to
ld him everything. I’d told him so many lies by that point, trying to keep it together—he said he needed to know the whole truth. I think he suspected. He never said anything to you?”

  Anthony gave a tight little headshake, lips pressed together. “When did you tell him?”

  “It was . . . last fall. Not quite a year.”

  It coincided with the new reserve he’d felt from Chance on the phone, when their calls changed from conversations to a more one-sided litany of Anthony’s daily defeats. He’d thought Chance was getting tired of hearing about it and tried to call less. The distance from his old friend was one more ache to carry.

  “He never said a word, not all this time. I can’t believe he knew and—” Anthony’s mind drifted to things Chance had said as Anthony wrestled with the decision to come back to Montana. Now they had vicious double meanings. I’m sure your mom would never see you as a traitor. . . . People are capable of lots of things you wouldn’t believe.

  Anthony had heard Chance’s side of the breakup with Hilary as they sat on the couch or the deck and Chance drank straight rye from a Mason jar. That was how Anthony knew, more than any other way, that Chance had loved her. His straitlaced cousin never drank more than the occasional beer with the guys, but after Hilary left, he bought himself a case of whiskey and worked through it like he was on assignment. Anthony didn’t like to let Chance drink alone so he came every night he could with his own supply of beer. Chance would put the baby to bed—tiny Mae not eating solid food yet, fussed over by a platoon of aunties and grandmothers and neighbors—and remove the current bottle from the case to work through several inches. Sometimes they talked about sports or childhood or the weather, but sometimes they talked about Hilary—how hard Chance had fallen for her in California, his amazement when she came to be with him in Montana, the shock and delight of the baby and how fast it had all gone bad. The wholeness of despair, how it left out nothing.

  Eventually there were more empties than fulls, and finally Chance took the case to town and threw it in a recycling Dumpster and that was the end. No more whiskey, no more stories, and having nursed Chance through it, Anthony had felt safe to leave for New York as he’d promised Hilary. He’d done his penance, closed a door he was all too eager to seal forever. But there was something else he had to say now that Hilary was with him again.