by Adele Buck
Alicia felt a brief wave of guilt for her earlier behavior, but he glanced at her and worried the hand he held. “Joke,” he said. “You’re not the only one who can make them.”
The air-conditioned, stone building seemed to freeze the film of perspiration on Alicia’s skin as they entered, and she shivered.
“You all right?”
“Sure,” she said. “Just a bit chilly from the contrast.”
His eyes flicked down, and he suppressed a smile. “I see.”
Alicia folded her arms across her chest. “Thanks. Now who feels self-conscious?”
He leaned over, and she shivered again as his breath tickled her ear. “I was just wondering if we should skip lunch. I could bring you home and have you for dessert.”
Heat traveled from the crown of her head down to pool in her belly and settle between her legs. “Well that fixes the chill, but not the…self-consciousness,” she said, and he laughed as they began to walk.
Alicia tightened her arms across her chest and tried to ignore the throb between her legs and the memory of his tongue against her. Walking through galleries filled with Colonial-era furniture, she found the more she tried not to think about his tongue, his hands, the…rest of him, the more images flowed through her brain and the more aroused she became. By the time they reached the little café in the middle of the building and were seated, she was flushed and jittery. Her teeth gritted as she looked at him, fantasies of doing things that would make him helpless taking shape in her brain.
An attractive blush had spread across Alicia’s cheeks at Colin’s teasing, and he noticed it hadn’t abated during the walk to the café. He lifted his eyebrows at her, and she gave him a mild glare as they were seated.
Colin smiled. If it was revenge she was after, he was looking forward to it.
The process of ordering temporarily distracted Colin from more carnal thoughts. After he handed the menus back to the waitress and faced Alicia, he saw she was regarding the play of water in a nearby fountain, her features composed again.
“Tell me about acting,” he said, putting his napkin on his lap and leaning forward.
She looked back at him, a quizzical smile quirking up one side of her mouth. “What do you want to know?”
He shrugged, spreading his hands wide. “What’s the work like?”
“You’ve seen me do it. Twice, in fact.”
“I’ve seen the results of the work. I’m not sure I’ve seen the work itself.”
She picked up her napkin, unfolding it slowly before putting it on her lap. “That’s definitely part of the work. The performance.”
“What don’t we see? It seems like the tip of the proverbial iceberg.”
“Of course it is. Most people are interested in the results, though. Not the process. They appreciate the duck gliding across the surface and don’t want to think about the feet paddling away under the water.” She reached out and traced the back of his hand with an exploratory fingertip. It felt like an attempt at a distraction. He turned his hand over and captured hers, holding it steady. Her fingers were cool.
“So…rehearsals—what are they like?” He asked.
“You’re really dogged about this, aren’t you?” She pushed her fringe out of her eyes with her free hand. “Why do you want to know so badly?”
“Because you fascinated me from the first.”
“You didn’t recognize me,” she said with asperity.
“I know. Your performance fascinated me.”
Her eyebrows crimped together. “Why? Most people hardly notice anybody outside the leads.” She said this in a matter-of-fact voice, without frustration or anger. Colin marveled that someone whose very job was getting people to pay attention while they spoke could take being overlooked so easily.
He rubbed his thumb across the back of her hand. “Why did you fascinate me? Because you were angry.”
Alicia blinked, caught off guard for a moment, then chuckled. “You noticed that, did you?”
A smile lurked in his eyes, though his face didn’t seem to change. His hand was warm and large. If she were the type of woman to be reassured by a big, protective man, she would have felt safe.
She wasn’t that kind of woman.
“I did notice it,” he said. “And it made me wonder.”
Panic fluttered under her breastbone. She pulled her hand away to lift her water glass and take a sip. “Did it? Did you come up with any reasons?”
He leaned back, seeming unconcerned by her retreat. “I may have. But I’m more interested in hearing yours. It was startling, given that the Nurse usually breaks down helplessly at Juliet’s supposed death.”
“Yeah, well. That’s part of the process you don’t see as it happens. It’s called making specific choices in context.”
“Go on.” His big, dark eyes stayed fixed on her.
She shifted restlessly in the hard metal café chair. “You decide how you’re going to react in character, in that moment. It’s based on the script, what the other actors are giving you… Given all of those factors, anger made sense to me.”
“It was very powerful,” he said as the waitress came with their food. “But how did you come to that reaction?”
Alicia picked up her fork and poked at some green beans. She hated talking about productions that were done. She thought about Wendy, dreaming of still performing in that childhood play that had long since closed and had a pang of sympathy. Bemused, she realized she even missed the old age makeup. Well, almost. She glanced up at Colin and saw concern in his expression.
“Are you all right?”
She chewed a mouthful of green beans slowly, nodding. They tasted fresh and clean. Swallowing, she said, “It’s…when a play is over it can be hard to let go. There’s a feeling of loss.”
“We can talk about something else. I didn’t mean to pry.” Colin focused on his own plate and perversely, Alicia wanted to tell him everything.
“No. It’s okay. You wanted to know why I decided the Nurse was angry. Well, first of all, what’s her name?”
Colin’s face softened to a puzzled frown as he thought. “She…doesn’t have one, at least not in the text. Does she?”
“No. No, she doesn’t. So, think about it from her perspective.” Alicia leaned forward, stabbing her fork at Colin. “Here is this woman who raised Juliet. Nursed her, quite literally. She was a wet nurse, remember. She probably had more to do with the girl’s upbringing than Juliet’s own mother. She doesn’t even get to have a name.”
Colin’s mouth worked as he thought this through. “I admit, I had never thought about the play from any viewpoint other than the tedious teenagers and their doomed love story.”
“That’s what separates the professionals from the amateurs.”
“Touché. So, she’s lost a child she feels is her own. That explains grief and helplessness, but anger?”
Alicia put down her fork. “The Nurse knew about Romeo. She knew how important he was to Juliet. And yet she let herself get co-opted into supporting Juliet’s father’s scheme to marry her off to Paris.”
His eyes widened as he thought about this. “And it ended with Juliet killing herself. So far as the Nurse knew.”
Alicia’s teeth gritted. “Exactly. For the Nurse, her own child—the girl she considers to be her daughter—is dead. And Capulet not only forced the child into it, he convinced the Nurse to help.”
Mouth dry, Colin reached for his water and took a long drink. He imagined the crushing guilt that someone would feel under the circumstances Alicia described. Imagined living with that, reproducing it night after night. It was nearly impossible to contemplate. “I had thought it was simply anger at Capulet for creating the circumstances where Juliet felt she had to take her own life. I hadn’t considered that angle,” he admitted.
“Well,” she said, lifting her own water glass and taking a drink. “It’s kind of my job to think about this stuff. But guilt and shame can intensify other emotions pretty powerf
ully.”
She said this with a disarming matter-of-factness, but Colin noticed her attention was focused down on her plate. He wondered what made her so reticent.
“I noticed it the first time I saw the play. It was compelling and unusual,” he said.
She flashed him a quick smile. “That’s the trick. Make an unusual choice, but ground it in the text. If you make an unusual choice for the sake of being different, you’re just being gimmicky, not doing something anyone will believe. In that case, usually the resulting performance is just bizarre and puts people off.”
They ate in silence for a few moments, and Colin thought about what she had said. If he had ever thought about what an actor did, he would have supposed that they worked more or less from instinct. But what Alicia talked about was a very intellectual process.
He frowned. “So how do you make all these decisions so consciously and yet not end up acting mechanically? How do you bring real emotion into it?”
Alicia’s mouth twisted in a smirk. “That’s the other trick. Once you’ve made all those decisions, you try to forget about them. Exist in the moment. Be surprised. Watch and react honestly to what the other actors are doing. Every night is at least a little different. That’s what keeps it spontaneous and fresh. The decisions you made earlier will come out naturally if you don’t force it.”
Colin tried to imagine manipulating his emotions in the way she was describing and came up blank. He couldn’t.
“Granted, that’s just the way I work. There are lots of ways of getting a good performance. Everybody’s process is different.” Alicia was still focusing on her plate, almost as if he wasn’t there.
His barrister’s brain, almost against his will, pulled up her previous comments about her family, measured them against what she had said just now about how she created character, the decisions she made about her performance.
Something was there. She was hiding something.
“Alicia.” Her eyes flicked up to his face, slid to the side.
“Yes?” She apparently found the fountain to be fascinating. At least from the way she was studying it.
“You don’t need to protect yourself from me. I’m not going to pry into your personal life.”
Startled, Alicia looked at Colin. His brows were drawn together, and he had put his utensils down. “What do you mean? You weren’t prying into my personal life.”
“No, I wasn’t intending to. But it seems like the emotional nature of your job… Some things, some experiences must overlap. Don’t you use personal experience in your work?”
No. We are not going there. Alicia put her fork down, her plate of food half-eaten, her stomach churning. She breathed in carefully, willing herself into a level calm as she looked across the table at him and said, “That way can lie madness. I try to keep my life separated from my work.”
“Ah.” Polite disbelief radiated from Colin’s expression.
“Really? This again?” Hot anger started to replace the nausea in her gut. They were right back to the beginning. He was determined to see her as some sort of psychopathic liar, just because of what she did for a living.
“What ‘again’ are you referring to exactly?” Colin’s measured tones abraded Alicia’s already raw nerves.
“For some reason, you’ve seemed determined to believe that I’m a liar from the moment you met me.”
“I didn’t say I disbelieved you,” Colin said, taking a bite of his lunch and chewing slowly, dark eyes on hers.
“No, your words didn’t say it. But your entire attitude does.”
Colin put down his silverware again and wiped his lips. “Okay. Let’s just say that it’s not that I think you’re lying to me. I think you’re not being honest with yourself.”
Of all the condescending… Alicia’s jaw clenched so hard her teeth hurt. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”
“My sincerest apology—only one—,” he gave her a small, tight smile, “if I have misinterpreted. But your body language communicates…” He paused for the right words. “Distress quite frequently when you discuss the emotional aspects of your work. It seemed personal, that’s all.”
“And you think you have the right to believe that your read of my body language overrides what I say?”
“Why not? It’s what you did to me.”
Striving for outward calm, Colin took a bite of salad and chewed slowly, wondering how he was going to get it past the knot in his throat. He wondered how far beneath the surface her instinct to walk—or run—away from him lay. Last night and in the sculpture garden he had been able to soothe her. He wasn’t sure of his ability to repeat the trick this time.
Raising his eyes to Alicia, he saw that instead of the defensive fury he expected, she had a strange, almost stricken look on her face. He managed to swallow the mouthful of salad and took a drink of water. He considered saying something, then decided to wait and see what she did next.
Her jaw worked, and her eyes shifted from his face to the fountain and back again. Finally, she said quietly, “You’re right. I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair of me.”
The knot in his throat eased a bit, and he breathed a little more deeply, trying to relax. He had been expecting her to leave, he realized. He didn’t want her to, but he had been prepared for it. He wasn’t sure what he would have done if she had: he was intrigued by Alicia, attracted to her, but he knew he didn’t want to fall into the habit of running after her all the time.
“We seem to have apologized to one another quite a bit today,” he observed.
“Hm.” She picked up her fork and began eating again, and Colin relaxed a fraction more. He still envisioned her picking up her napkin, dashing it to her plate, and walking out. “Do you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing?”
He considered the question for a moment. “Neither. Apologies in and of themselves are frequently a social good. So, lack of apologies when they are warranted is a bad thing. But behaving such that apologies are required all the time is also a bad thing.”
“So, do you think today crosses into ‘all the time’ territory?”
He gave her a quick, cautious smile. “I think it resides firmly in ‘getting to know each other’ territory.”
Chapter 13
Alicia bit her lip and leaned against the door of her apartment. Colin had left her with a few lovely, lingering kisses and a promise that he would call her. She wasn’t sure she believed he would.
And given her usual habit of keeping people at a distance, she wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to or not.
Running her fingers through her hair, she pushed away from the door and went back to the bedroom. Yanking a nearly empty suitcase from under the bed, she sank to the floor and pulled out a large manila envelope. She opened it and leafed through the collection of documents it contained. Her birth certificate, actors’ union documents, and Social Security card she put carefully back into the envelope. She spent a moment looking at the simple piece of folded paper that was the program from the first play she had ever acted in, then added it back to the collection.
She was left with a faded photograph, soft and almost floppy with wear. She ran a fingertip over the family of blond people, strangers to her now. Five small children sitting cross-legged on a dingy braided rug on the floor, three older children lined up on the sagging couch behind them. The wall behind the sofa was a dark mass of fake wood paneling. She could still smell the stale cigarettes, feel the couch springs poking into her skinny butt and legs.
A toddler sat on the oldest girl’s lap, baby fingers tangled in the teenager’s long blond hair that had never yet been touched by a pair of scissors. Mother, heavily pregnant, standing next to the girl, her hand on her daughter’s thin shoulder as if the older woman needed the support. Father at the other end of the sofa, staring hard and uncompromising into the camera’s lens.
Alicia focused on the toddler. She could almost feel the warm weight of the child on her lap again, the tickle of her hair
under Alicia’s chin when she cuddled her close just before the photograph was taken. The tiny girl’s large brown eyes gazed at the photographer, blond curls clustering around her small head. Her little rosebud mouth was slightly open as if she was about to ask a question.
She was always asking questions.
Alicia wondered if the habit had been squeezed out of her. That’s what happened. No force, no physical abuse. Just the steady squeeze of disapproval, prayer, and work.
She slid the photograph back into the envelope with shaking fingers and replaced it in the suitcase. Pushing the luggage under the bed, she stood up, dusting her hands on the seat of her shorts and closing her eyes.
I’m so sorry, Gracie.
Colin shut the front door and dropped his keys into the little brass bowl on the table in the hall. He rubbed his fingertips lightly over his lips as he walked back through the house to the kitchen. He had wondered, bending to kiss her goodbye at her front door, if he would see the sexual aggressor of the night before, the sensuously assured woman of this morning, or any of the other myriad shifting surfaces she had shown him since he met her.
She had shown him none of those. Just a new face: a considering, thoughtful face that kissed him back but also seemed to be perfectly happy to slide into her solitude in that little garden flat. At least for the time being.
They both had a lot to think about.
He dug through his briefcase and pulled out a briefing on a big potential client for the firm, seating himself at the high counter in the kitchen to look it over. He had told Alicia that he usually worked on a Saturday, and that was the truth. But the printed words seemed to slide from under his eyes. His brain couldn’t gain any traction on the facts and figures. Digging his phone out of his pocket, he checked his calendar for the date of the meeting he needed to read this for. Thursday. Fine. He had some time.