Behind the Curtain

by Jerry Cole

  The man noted Nick’s grimace and nodded.

  “The man loves his blackmail,” he sighed. “I’m Llewellyn Richards. You can call me Lou. I suppose it would be rude to ask what he’s blackmailing you for?”

  “Nick Bellerose,” Nick shook the other man’s hand, relieved he at least wouldn’t be alone in his misery here. “He doesn’t have anything on me, but he’s got photos that could ruin my friend’s career.”

  “It’s good of you to put up with this for your friend’s sake,” Lou nodded solemnly. “Not a lot of people would do that. You said Bellerose, right? I think I saw you play Horatio once.”

  “Fall before last, yeah,” Nick confirmed. “That was a good one. Not a huge turnout unfortunately.”

  “Yeah, that venue was a killer,” Lou confirmed. “Middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere. If I hadn’t known someone who knew the owner I’d never had heard of it. Some people go in for that obscure thing I guess. And it was very well done. Your Ophelia was a trip.”

  “Yeah, that was Charlotte,” Nick chuckled. “She’s fantastic. She deserved a bigger crowd. But the maestro out there has been dogging my company for ages since we threw him out. He rented whole theaters out and left them empty for a month just to keep us from showing there.”

  “Oh, man, you’re from the Green Carnation, aren’t you?” Lou laughed. “He talks shit about all the acting troupes he was with before starting the Players, but he never shuts up about you guys. Apparently, he took it really personally.”

  “I gathered as much,” Nick shook his head. “I thought we’d finally get rid of him by opening our own venue, but he just bribed the reviewers to tank us.”

  “Yeah, he’s good at that,” Lou sighed. “I don’t trust any of the reviews in this town anymore.”

  He peered out onto the stage with a hum.

  “It’s almost my cue,” he said. “But hey, most of the cast gets together to commiserate after the show. You can come with if you want.”

  “I don’t have anything better to do,” Nick agreed, shrugging.

  “See you there!” Lou jogged off onto the stage and Nick found a place to sit backstage and wait, and dwell on what he was going to do with this situation.

  ***

  “I don’t know what’s worse, the groping or his smug face.”

  Farah Summers, who had been on the track to being an amazing screen actress before she’d been sniped by Matthers, rubbed her temples in exhaustion. She sat on a long couch in the theater’s green room, about an hour after the last customer had been shown out and the stage reset for the next evening. A handful of other members of the cast were scattered around the sofas as well with sodas and leftovers from the craft services table, lamenting their place in life. Nick sat near them, still feeling too numb to really participate.

  “Like yeah, the manhandling would be bad enough coming from a stranger,” she went on. “But coming from him? It’s about a million times worse. One of these days I’m going to lose it and throttle him, I just know it.”

  “You could always beat him off with a broom like our boy Nick here,” Ed Truhilo, the stage manager, patted Nick on the back heavily. “I wish I could have seen that. He was still griping about it last week.”

  “You can see how well it worked out for me,” Nick sighed. “I wouldn’t suggest it.”

  “Just one good review,” another actress, Amy Howell, looked at her soda like she wished it was alcoholic. “Just one and I’m out of here. I don’t even care if I have to get a day job again. I’ll take it! Anything but this bullshit day in and day out.”

  “At least you don’t have any scenes with him,” Lou griped. “I have to let him put his greasy hands all over me in front of an audience and pretend to like it.”

  “There’s no point in play Pity Olympics,” Ed waved them down. “It sucks for all of us.”

  “Don’t you ever want to do something about it?” Nick asked. “There’s got to be some way out of this.”

  “For a lot of us, leaving would mean the end of our careers,” Farah explained. “Even if it weren’t for Eric intentionally sabotaging us, we’re now associated with this monument to vanity. If we can’t prove we’re good enough here, it will be nearly impossible to get work again.”

  “This place has the resources to let us do something truly stunning,” Amy agreed. “The highest of production values. Professionally made costumes and sets, state of the art lighting and sound. Only the best, always. But you have to be truly stunning to leave. There is no other way. Except those that let Eric break them. For the ones that give up and let him run them into the ground, there is no way back.”

  “You’re lucky,” Lou told Nick. “Coming in during the middle of the season like this, you’ll get to see how things work without having to get involved in the shit show. You’ll be fully prepared for the next production.”

  “We can use you on the crew in the meantime,” Ed offered. “So you aren’t just sitting around. We always need more crew.”

  “I have a little experience with pretty much everything backstage,” Nick offered. “My last company wasn’t exactly bursting with resources. Everyone had to pitch in.”

  “Eric doesn’t believe in pitching in,” Lou said, rolling his eyes.

  “He’d rather hire someone new every time something needs to be done,” Farah griped. “We’ve got about a thousand ‘assistants’ running around with about five minutes’ worth of work to do between them, and they’re all tripping over each other all the time…”

  Nick nodded, remembering Matthers’ griping back when he’d been with the Carnation, whining about “hiring someone” to do anything he didn’t feel like doing.

  “Listen, it’s awful here,” Lou said, patting Nick’s knee, “but we look out for each other. I know he’s got a special interest in you, so if his harassment gets too bad let us know and we’ll run interference. It’s not a lot, I know. But we’ll do our best.”

  “Thanks,” Nick smiled, grateful. “I appreciate it more than I can say.”

  ***

  He didn’t go home that night, or the next. The idea of being there was too nerve-wracking, even beyond the possibility that one of his friends might come looking for him. He crashed in the green room, or at Lou or Ed’s place later as he got closer to them.

  He never felt quite so alone. He knew it was an isolation of his own making—a wall built from unanswered phone calls and avoiding his own apartment—but it didn't make it easier. The only friends he had, he turned his back on for this. There was no going back now. The other cast and crew made it a little easier, but he was still a stranger to them, an outsider, and whatever their good intentions he was made more so by Eric’s attention.

  “I’m not sure what we should do next season.”

  Eric cornered Nick by the craft services table during rehearsals, backing Nick against the wall, looming over him without even an attempt at subtlety. Nick was doing his best to ward the other man off with the box of string lights he was holding, but it wasn’t doing him much good.

  “I want to do something with a small cast,” Matthers said, a hand against the wall to block Nick in with his arm. “Something really…intimate.”

  “I really don’t know,” Nick tried to duck under Eric’s arm and was thwarted as the other man shifted to stay in the way. “But I really need to get these lights to Ed, so—”

  “You should think about it!” Eric insisted, leaning uncomfortably close. “I’d love to hear your suggestions. You know whatever it is I want to cast you as the lead.”

  “What if I suggest Wicked or something?” Nick said with a nervous laugh, wondering if he could duck under the table walling him in on the other side to get away. At this point, he was considering going over it.

  “We could do a gender bent version,” Eric said at once. “It’ll be edgy. You and I would look so good on stage together…”

  He leaned in closer and Nick felt panic rising before a wave of soda crashed over the side of Eric’s head.
He jumped backwards with a shout and Nick flattened himself against the wall to avoid the spray as the drink dripped from Eric’s hair.

  “Oh my gosh I’m so sorry!” Farah, holding a cup and having clearly just thrown its contents onto Eric, brought her hand to her mouth in horror. “I tripped on the tablecloth! Are you okay?”

  “I can’t believe you! Look at my costume!” Eric shrieked. “You’ve ruined it! You’re going to pay for this, literally! It’s going to have to be emergency dry cleaned before tonight’s performance!”

  Farah winked at Nick conspiratorially, and Nick cast her a grateful smile before ducking around the distracted, screaming Eric and hurrying away.

  From the sidelines, while working makeup and lights and whatever else was needed, Nick watched the play night after night. The others were right; they really did have the best of everything. Nick had never seen an Off-Broadway feature with such high-performance values. How much money was Eric leeching off his father to fuel this vanity? How much must he have been wasting before for his father to be encouraging this as a preferable alternative?

  Despite the highest quality costumes, the cutting edge equipment, the performance itself was lackluster. It didn't help that Eric Matthers was directing as well as producing and acting in the play. It wasn't hard to tell the man didn't know what he was doing, and his cast openly despised him. But he was too full of himself to notice and plodded on making terrible decisions that his overall apathetic actors went along with because they'd long since learned there was no point in arguing. A few of them put their genuine best into the acting, hoping the high production values and ad budget would get them seen and picked up by a more competent troupe. Others seemed to be treading water, disinterestedly reciting their lines and collecting the stipend Matthers paid them to stay with his company. He gave one to Nick as well, which was something he supposed. The Green Carnation had never been able to afford stipends for their actors. He kept his day job and tucked the extra pay into savings. He needed the tedious temp work to distract him from rehearsals, which were worse. Matthers was as handsy as he'd ever been, finding any excuse to touch Nick and often letting his hands wander once they were there. It was infuriating and humiliating, even with the rest of the cast doing their best to look out for him, and Nick was certain it wouldn't be long before Matthers decided it wasn't enough and pushed Nick for what he really wanted out of this arrangement. Nick saw Matthers openly harassing the other actors and actresses with very little discrimination, but it was clear his interest in Nick was more specific, and far more insistent. He wasn’t going to stop any time soon.

  “Just hang in there,” Lou brought him water as he sat in the green room after narrowly escaping another accosting backstage. “He’ll get distracted and move on to someone else soon enough.”

  “I don’t know, Lou,” Farah, sitting near them and looking at Nick with worry. “This isn’t one of his passing infatuations. He’s been after Nick for ages. I don’t think we can handle this the same way we usually do.”

  “What else can we do?” Lou said helplessly. “We can’t expect to keep getting between them forever.”

  “I appreciate you doing as much as you have,” Nick said, rubbing his face. He was tired. He was finding it hard to keep caring. Being outraged and afraid all the time was exhausting and he was slowly losing the willpower to keep being afraid. He was almost ready to give up and just let it happen. “But there’s nothing you can do. He’ll never stop unless we stop him.”

  ***

  Life took on a gray cast. The days blended together. Night after night, performance after performance, Nick felt more and more drained. Nights after the shows with the cast were a welcome reprieve. Most of them were decent people in the same miserable situation he was, and they made good company. But he missed his family. He missed Walter and Charlotte. He missed Clay. He wanted to go home, but fear kept him from visiting at all but the oddest hours, to grab clothing or some other necessary item and flee again before anyone he knew could see him and ask him why he betrayed them.

  Meanwhile, tolerating Eric’s advances became increasingly impossible. He began to feel nauseous at the mere thought of the creep’s hands on him. And when it inevitably happened he was left shaking in a cold sweat. The rest of the cast did their best to intercede on his behalf, and he learned better every day how to avoid the other man, but they could only do so much. He knew sooner or later Eric would trap him in a quiet room and get what he was after. If he didn’t find another way out of this soon he would lose his mind.

  “Christ, did you see him tonight?”

  Farah fell onto the couch next to Nick and kicked off her shoes, still in her costume and looking exhausted.

  “He was giving us dialogue from act three during act one,” she said, disgusted. “We’ve been performing this for two weeks now! How can anyone be so stupid and self-absorbed?”

  “I figure it’s a pretty inevitable result of being raised with that much money,” Nick said, sympathizing with her exhaustion. Eric had, on a whim, fired all those unnecessary assistants, and also half of the actually useful crew, in what was apparently a well-known cycle. Nick and the rest of the remaining crew had been running themselves ragged trying to make up for the missing manpower. “When you’re that rich, society trips over itself to tell you how much better and more important than everyone else you are. Why would you ever learn to think about other people’s feelings?”

  “That’s a pretty broad generalization,” Farah chuckled. “Didn’t you grow up well to do?”

  “Not that well to do.”

  “Well enough to have had fencing lessons.”

  “Okay, you have a point,” Nick rolled his eyes. “Still, I stand by my point. Excessive wealth leads to feelings of superiority and a deficit of empathy.”

  “I don’t know,” Farah questioned. “Those white supremacist hillbillies you see at conservative political rallies seem pretty lacking in empathy and they’re poor as shit.”

  “I didn’t say it was the only source of empathy problems,” Nick shrugged. “It seems like resource inequality causes similar problems on both sides of the spectrum.”

  “So what’s the solution?” Farah asked. “We should all be poor?”

  “According to Jesus, anyway,” Nick pointed out. “I will never understand why the term, ‘wealthy Christians’ isn’t treated like the oxymoron it is.”

  “Because wealthy Christians set up the system and dictate how it’s interpreted,” Farah supplied.

  “True,” Nick agreed. “But the answer, to resource inequality I mean, is to phase out the monetary system entirely. Everyone should have access to the basic necessities of life. Food, water, shelter, electricity. In this day and age, probably internet access too. These things should be a right. No one should have to struggle just to keep their heads above water when we have more than enough resources to support them. Anything beyond the basics should be earnable through hard work and merit.”

  “Ah, so you’re a communist,” Farah teased.

  “Socialist,” Nick argued. “And not even a very good one.”

  “You realize that’s a totally unsustainable system though,” Farah pointed out. “I mean, this system is unsustainable too, but—”

  She yawned and infected Nick, who yawned as well, then fell back against the arm of the couch, closing his eyes.

  “I have an argument prepared,” he muttered. “Just ask me again when I’m not so exhausted.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Farah agreed, rubbing her temples. “My head is killing me. Did you hear he scheduled a show for Christmas Eve at the last minute? Asshole. He’s not even paying us extra for it. He just assumes we’re all as alone and miserable as he is. My family is coming all the way from Des Moines for the holidays, and I’m going to be stuck in this hell hole. He wouldn’t even comp them tickets.”

  “I would have been shocked if he did,” Nick snorted. “God, I’m losing my mind here. I keep expecting him to be around every
corner, waiting to club me over the head and drag me off like the Neanderthal he is.”

  “How’s the escort thing been going?” Farah sat up, squinting as she tried to uncross her vision. “I’m sorry I had to leave you during act two. I couldn’t miss my cue.”

  “It’s fine,” Nick assured her. “Lou was there a few minutes later. Having you guys around has definitely helped, but I think he’s starting to catch on. When Lou needed to go on stage I was supposed to wait with Ed, and Eric came up with this huge list of bullshit to keep Ed busy so he could corner me and talk about how he wants to die his hair and don’t I think he’d look great as a redhead? Ugh.”

  “We’ll switch it up,” Farah said. “Mix in some of the ‘accidental’ interruptions with the escort missions. Throw him off the scent.”

  “It’s not going to keep working for much longer,” Nick told her, looking away, mouth twisted in bitterness. “I’m trying to just be ready for it.”

  “Don’t,” Farah shook her head, eyes hard. “You can’t just give in. You have to keep fighting it, no matter what!”

  “Why?” Nick asked her. “Being resigned to it doesn’t make me any less willing. Being too tired to keep fighting doesn’t make me deserve what he wants to do to me. Why is it less noble to accept the inevitable? Why is it better to wear myself down fighting the tides?”

  “He’s not the tides,” Farah insisted, taking him by the shoulders. “He’s an asshole. We’ll figure this out before he gets to you, I promise.”

  She pulled Nick into a tight hug.

  “More of us have been through what he’s doing to you than you know,” she said. “I won’t let it happen again. I got the last two of his targets out of this theater before he could get to them. It’s half the reason I stay here. So just hang in there a little longer.”

  Nick hugged her back slowly, clung to her arms and wished they were Clay’s. He hated himself for not appreciating the incredible person Farah was and what she was doing for him. But he couldn’t stop wishing for someone else.