by Karen Grey
“Well, as I said, I like helping out young women in finance. We need to support each other.” She raises her hand, signaling the waiter for the check. “I’ve got to head back to my room to get some work done before tomorrow’s meetings, but I’m very glad to have met you, Kate. I hope we’ll be working together. Sooner or later.”
I’m speechless. When the waiter arrives, however, I find my voice and insist on paying for the drinks. I make it through a professional handshake and out the door before I squeal and jump around.
That was not how I expected the meeting with Steve’s professor to go. I figured I’d walk away with a list of nonprofits to research, or grad programs to check out. Instead, I have a potential job interview that could be a turning point for my career.
I’ve been dragging my butt through my days since Will and I broke up, unable to focus on anything fully. But now I can’t wait to get home and polish my résumé.
How is it that a single answering machine message could have such an impact on the course of my life—giving me a priceless opportunity while taking away a treasured relationship?
As I near the T station near Tufts, my steps falter. I’m within walking distance of Will’s place. Every part of my being wants to rush over there and tell him everything that just happened. I check my watch. It’s after seven on a Thursday night. He probably has a show. Or is working at the bar. Should I stop by, just in case?
Going over all the reasons we broke up, I’m still not sure if any of them really make sense. Yes, I’m risking my heart with him, but if I were to draw up a profit and loss statement of the relationship, I gained so much more than I gave up.
Any enterprise has to take risks in order to expand and grow. If I were to give my life an honest appraisal, things had stagnated before I met Will. A graph of my accomplishments would show a significant spike since the day Will made me that fake old fashioned. I go on research trips all by myself, I stand up to harassment, I carry myself with confidence. The guys at work seem to respect me more and challenge me less. If I were putting together a recommendation on Will, I’d have to point out that he brought balance to a situation I hadn’t even known was out of whack.
Another thing about talking to Irma Ortega? It’s clear that I don’t have any examples to follow at Rhodes Wahler. No older women who have forged a path, who have figured out how to be successful at work and have a home life. Maybe that’s something I’d be able to learn at this new job. If I get it.
Is it too late to fix things with Will? When I told him I was too overwhelmed at work to deal with our relationship, he seemed pretty eager to get out the door.
Here on the corner, at a literal fork in the road, my big brain counsels my poor little heart. We have to face reality at some point. One, he’s not likely to be home, and two, every indication points to the fact that he’s done. With me and with us. I waited too long to acknowledge his true value, and now it’s too late.
Tears cool my cheeks in the light breeze. I turn away from Will and toward the T station, grief for what might have been, heavy on my shoulders. There’s a Will-shaped hole in my life. It’ll be a good long time before I’m able to think of him without being sad.
However, these feelings are not the self-loathing and overwhelming emptiness I felt when Jonathan ended things.
I’m my own person now, a person that I actually like. I don’t need a man to complete me. Being with Will taught me that it’s possible to share my life without losing myself.
Smiling through tears, I send a silent thank you to my very favorite vest-wearing actor/bartender. Even if he won’t be in my life, I’m grateful for the time I spent with him.
I truly hope that eventually he finds what he’s looking for too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
BEEP. MONDAY, 10:35 a.m.
Will, hi, this is Marnie Farrell at Boston Casting. Graham Wolfson handed me your headshot this morning, and I actually have an audition today that I’d love to bring you in for. We have slots open for a few times this afternoon. Look forward to meeting you.
WILL
A week after stalking out of Kate’s place, a letter in my mailbox with her return address on it is the last thing I expect to see. Everything’s been so crazy I haven’t even begun to process the breakup. Between R&J rehearsals, picking up shifts at the bar so I can pay bills, and a string of auditions thanks to Graham, I’ve been working from early morning to late at night every single day. Thank goodness, otherwise I’d be wishing Kate were there or that I was going to her place afterward.
Now, I’m contemplating whether or not to even read the letter. Do I want to hear her apologies? Or worse, her explanation that she’s found the right guy and it isn’t me? Not sure and definitely not, but I may as well just rip this Band-Aid off quickly.
My hand’s shaking so much by the time I get to the end of the letter, the words are almost unreadable. Crumpling the paper, I hurl it across the room with a strangled roar.
It’s not enough. I need something to throw, to punch, to kick, but my hands can only find my fucking head. They’re clamped on my skull, trying to contain the pain that’s pounding through my entire being.
Suddenly, I’m shivering all over. I find the floor, panting, my vision blurring. Swallowing around the boulder in my throat, I drag my mind to my breath. Finally, it starts to smooth out. Carefully easing up from the fetal position I’d been curled into, I sit back against my bed.
I’m drenched with sweat. Whatever just happened, it’s obvious Kate makes me feel things that are out of control.
Better that we ended things before I fall for her even harder. Because according to that letter, she’s leaving town. That’s what always happens when you let anybody get too close.
They leave.
And you never see them again.
The next day, when the stage manager finally calls the end of rehearsal, I’m slumped in a folding chair, not sure if I can get out of it.
I’ve either been directing fight choreography, practicing my own combat sequences, or running through scenes the entire day. I’m working on only a few hours of sleep. I’d collapsed on my bed long after midnight only to have Kate parade through my mind for hours.
A hand rests on my shoulder. “Good job, love. Keep digging deeper on that last scene, eh?”
Mira’s warm smile holds a hint of disappointment. I nod, trying to hide my own frustration. My death scene is not working, and I don’t know why. Seems like our director has no clue, either.
Ben walks over to pick up his bag, stowed under the chair next to mine. “I’ll see you in the morning at the dance studio, right?”
“Yep, see you then.”
Mira grabs Ben’s free hand and pulls him toward the door. “Come on, Benny, you owe me a meal.” I watch them go. I’ve been impressed with the work Ben’s doing as Romeo. Better than I’m capable of at the moment.
Eva Marie’s voice floats across the rehearsal hall. “‘Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch. Marry ’tis enough.’” The vibrations of my mentor’s melodious alto on Mercutio’s lines reverberate through the room.
I make myself meet her gaze. “Yeah, that’s the problem. Seems it’s not enough.”
She nods slowly. After a moment, she tips her head toward the open rehearsal space.
“I’m so tired,” I manage, sounding like a whiny little kid.
She holds my gaze. “Mm-hmm.”
My chin drops to my chest. “Aaand, that’s often the best time to work.”
“Mm-hmm.”
I haul myself to my feet and trudge across the bare floor.
Eva Marie shoves a blue mat my way. “Lie down. Just breathe. Release everything into the mat. No effort. At all.”
I follow her orders, closing my eyes and resting a forearm over my face. I hear the scrape of a chair being pulled across the room, a squeak as a body settles into it.
“Just breathe, William,” my teacher’s voice reminds me. “Let go of thought.”
At her dire
ction, I focus on my belly and try to relax those muscles, but my solar plexus is a stubborn knot. I put a hand over it, feel my palm’s warmth, but it doesn’t ease the pain that’s taken up residence there.
This is exactly why I should’ve stayed away from Kate in the first place. I can’t afford to have my heart broken. I need it for work.
“Relax your jaw,” Eva Marie says softly. “Good. ‘Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.’”
A chuckle burbles under my palm. Oh, the hurt could be much. I let the impulse fly on the text. “No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve; ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.”
In this moment, Mercutio’s words are absolutely hilarious to me. By the time I get to “Why the devil came you between us?” I’m on my side, hysterical with laughter.
My eyes are still closed, but I can feel Eva Marie’s presence close by. “Yes! That line again.”
“‘Why the devil came you between us?’” I ask the universe.
“Why did he? Why did Romeo betray you?” she challenges.
I repeat the words over and over, allowing the emotional fuel to shift the intention. I’m hurt, pleading with an imagined Romeo. Angry, punishing Romeo. And then jealous, beating back an image of Steve kissing Kate.
I’m struggling to get back to the world of the play when Eva Marie prods me on. “Go with it. Whatever’s happening, just put it on the text.”
Her permission unleashes something, and I roar with jealousy. Pain. Frustration. Fear. Rolling onto hands and knees, breathing deep into my soul, I howl Shakespeare’s words like they’re my own, going at the speech, over and over, giving full rein to any and every emotion that rolls through, until my voice is hoarse.
“On your feet,” Eva Marie commands. “One more time.”
Wrung out, I stagger to my feet, letting go of any last shred of control and deliver Mercutio’s final monologue one last time.
By the time I croak, “They have made worms’ meat of me,” I’m laughing again. The final, nonsensical words, “I have it, and soundly too: your houses?” blend rage, grief and physical pain into a stew that finds its own logic.
Spent, I drop into a squat, head low, hands on the scratched wooden floor. The mat makes a squelching sound as Eva Marie settles onto it. Her hand rests between my shoulder blades, its warmth melting through to the back of my heart.
After a few moments, I fall onto my butt next to her. Face in my hands, my voice still rough, I talk to my palms. “I’m working through a breakup. I guess it’s messing me up more than I thought.”
“Hm.”
“What?” I ask when she doesn’t elaborate.
Her eyes follow dust motes dancing in the shafts of light slicing through the room. “Well, I’ve been meaning to say something to you since the All’s Well run. I don’t know how you felt about it, but I thought you had a real breakthrough in that show.”
I’m a bit thrown by the shift in topic. “What do you mean?”
“You always do good work, William—technically, you’re spot on. Audiences love you. Are charmed by you.” She catches my eye with a kind smile before her gaze narrows. “But at school, the faculty struggled to figure out how to help you open up. Go deeper. Your instincts are good, and you soaked up everything in classes. But your heart.” She makes a cage with her hands in the air between us. “There’s always been this shield around it that keeps your performances… a little polite.”
A surge of feeling clogs my throat. I blow through my lips, eyes back on the ground. Thinking back to my final evaluation at BU, I remember that I hadn’t understood what they wanted from me. I worked my ass off, I learned my lines, I knew my objectives. I thought I had everything under control.
But maybe that’s been the problem. All this time, I’ve been skating over the surface of everything, afraid of what lurks down below.
“I can hear you thinking,” Eva Marie says softly.
It’s a struggle to get words out but I push past the knots in my gut, my throat, my jaw. “I guess I always thought it was better to be in control of things than to risk being—I don’t know—messy emotionally. It’s easy for me to play through emotions in a scene. Just like playing cops and robbers when I was a kid. Like, ‘Bang! You’re dead!’” I grab my heart and fake being wounded. “‘Aaagh!’”
She dips her chin at me, left eyebrow cocked.
“But I guess all this time I’ve really just been hiding from—” My throat constricts again. I push past it, even though my voice is uneven. “I lost my dad pretty young.” A bitter laugh puffs past my lips. “That’s what I tell everybody. I mean, those are the words I always use. So they’ll assume that he died. But he didn’t. He didn’t die—he left.”
An unfamiliar emotion growls from my belly as words I’ve never shared with anyone outside our family exit my mouth. “He lost all his money—our money—and then he disappeared. Just moved on. We never saw him again.”
Suddenly, I need to get this out, even though the shame is beyond overwhelming.
“It was worse than if he’d died. Because he chose to leave us. To leave me. Like I wasn’t important enough to stick around for. I’d idolized him until I found out what a loser he was. Him lying to us and then just leaving, it—” I press a fist to my chest. “It made me so angry, so angry I didn’t know what to do with it.”
Sparked by the memories, that anger propels me to my feet, launches me into movement.
“My brothers and I fought a lot after he left, but that just made me feel worse. I got in fights at school. My mom tried to help, but she was dealing with her own loss on top of struggling to support us on her own. I felt bad for causing her more pain, and part of me was scared of what I was feeling. Afraid that I might hurt someone. Badly.”
Eva Marie is on her feet, too. She folds mats into a stack. “Hurt this.” She smacks the flat blue canvas with her palm. “Or try,” she challenges.
I shake my head, try to control the tremble taking over my hands. I want to hit something, but I don’t want to feel this. It’s too ugly, too secret, too scary.
“What? You’re going to let that asshole ruin your entire life?” she shouts, her voice harsh.
My head snaps up.
“Yes,” she spits. “He was your father. He may have loved you, loved all of you. But he fucked up, and he couldn’t deal with it. He was a loser!”
Rage flares low in my gut. I want to yell at her, defend my dad. But I also want to hurt him. Fight back.
Roaring, I kick the pile of mats and then drop to my knees to attack, ugly sounds escaping past bared teeth as I punch over and over again. The mats’ resistance eggs me on.
Eva Marie’s voice reaches past the violence. “Put it on text.”
At first, I’ve got nothing, but eventually some of Hamlet’s words surface, and the pain rides them past my open throat. “King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me!”
She urges me to stick with this line until others bubble up. I find, “Let me not burst in ignorance,” then, “Oh, villain, villain, smiling damned villain!”
The blue of the mat, the whack of my fist against its surface and the roar inside my head and outside my mouth are all I know. I have no idea what words I’m saying, nor how long I’m at it. At some point, I collapse, breath heaving, forehead resting on the mat, my entire body quaking. But the rage is gone.
Eva Marie’s hand warms the middle of my back again, taking the edge off what little pain remains. “Good work,” is all she says.
I puff out a cracked sound. I’d be embarrassed if I hadn’t witnessed similar breakdowns in acting classes over the years. At least I didn’t cry. Much.
I roll over to sit up, resting my heavy head on my forearms. Eva Marie plops down, patting the mat as if to thank it for taking on my rage.
“Wow,” I mumble, unable to come up with anything else.
Eva Marie’s silent for a bit. When she finally speaks her voice
is clear and firm. “We talk about vulnerability a great deal when teaching acting. I think many people assume that it’s all about the soft emotions, like love or pain. That you’re vulnerable when you’re risking that you’ll be hurt. That’s not the whole picture, though. You also have to allow rage. Earth-shattering rage. You have to feel safe enough in this space”—she gestures around the rehearsal room with her free hand—“to be ugly. To be unhinged. Most of all, to not know.”
Her hand grasps my forearm and shakes it slightly until I look her in the eye. “That’s what you’ve always struggled with, William. You always know. The audience never really feels that you’re risking anything. If you truly don’t know what’s going to happen next, if you let go of knowing what you’ll feel moment to moment? That is electrifying.”
She points at me. “And that’s what I saw in your performance as Bertram. You were all over the place, dangerous—in a good way. Unpredictable. Riveting. And Hamlet’s words fit you just now in a way I couldn’t have imagined before.”
She lets that comment hang in the air for a bit before continuing. “Just remember. Emotion is just energy. It’s got to move. It won’t hurt you if you let it move. But if you stop it up, that’s when it fucks with you.” She taps on her skull. “You’ll need to do some more work, perhaps talk to a professional, but I think if you excavate all you’ve been feeling about your father leaving you and get it out in the open, you’ll not only do better work, you’ll feel better, too.”
I nod. I’m a bit too undone to speak. She stands and squeezes my shoulder before stepping away.
“I’ll leave you for now, but I’m happy to talk anytime.” Picking up her bag, she heads for the door, but pauses at the threshold to catch my eye. What I see in her face is simple love and acceptance. What my mother hadn’t been able to give me in the midst of her own grief, Eva Marie gives me now: the deep knowledge that it’s okay to feel all these things, that it’s human to feel them. That I’ll not only survive it, I’ll come out the other side stronger.