Who do you love most?
Leopold Henneman gave Zara a trick question, so she gave him a trick answer.
“Interesting,” he says, a new lightness at his edges. “Very interesting.”
Satisfaction floods Zara, brighter than the lights. The director is playing along. And for one sharply outlined moment, Zara sees that she would do anything to keep this place. This feeling.
“And who is this charming creature?” Leopold asks.
Zara curtsies so deeply that one knee kisses the stage. “Aurelia.”
There is no callback.
Zara settles into the fact that she has lost the part. That she never could have won it in the first place.
“Open casting was a stunt,” says one of the girls in the senior class play. Zara is sitting in an orange plastic seat in the high-school auditorium, trying not to remember the Aurelia. It feels like holding back a tidal wave with one hand. “Leopold does stuff like that,” the girl continues, as if she and the director are old friends. “It drums up attention for his shows.”
Zara nods. She doesn’t offer up her story. Zara doesn’t want anyone to be nice to her and give her a series of consoling nods while secretly thinking that she wasn’t good enough.
She learns her lines for Hello, Dolly!
She makes a date with her boyfriend. Watches him eat all the breadsticks in the basket at Olive Garden, order more, eat those, and then break up with her. He tells her she’s been acting weird.
Zara can’t deny it.
She settles into the fact that she has lost the part. She does not settle as well into her old life.
There’s college to think about. Applications. She shoves those thoughts down, but they keep coming back like the tap, tap, tap of a headache at her temple.
The first week of October, her name surfaces in a headline in the New York Times. Her parents get the paper every weekend, although they hardly ever read it. Zara is the one who inhales the Arts section every Sunday. So she’s the one who sees: NEWCOMER EVANS PAIRED WITH WARD IN FAMOUS TRAGEDY. Zara reads the first paragraph, about how she beat out two thousand girls for the chance to act opposite Adrian Ward, one of Hollywood’s prettiest young leading men. Her mind drifts over the rest of the article in a detached way that makes her think she must be dreaming. Or dead.
A second shock follows. As she’s running around the kitchen getting ready for school — late because she spent too long staring at the newspaper — her phone rings in her pocket. A soft, troubling pulse. When she looks at the screen, there’s an unknown 212 number. Zara picks up, expecting the casting director, maybe the assistant stage manager or the AD.
Leopold Henneman is on the line.
“Is this Miss Evans?” he asks. Zara noticed his slight accent during auditions. She tries to trace it to the country of origin but dead-ends somewhere in Europe. “This call is the most delightful part of my job,” he says. “Of course, I should have been the one to tell you the news. Our cast list must have been leaked to the press.”
“Oh,” Zara says. “Right.”
His voice pushes through the phone, making him feel much closer than New York. “Strange, I know, not to hold callbacks. The Aurelia producers wanted to fight over it.” He laughs. Gently. “Don’t worry. I convinced them that you’re perfect for this role. For this production. I’m sure you’ll prove me right. And this is a nice little moment, don’t you think? Your dream has come true.” Zara doesn’t know what to say. Her words have flown away, like birds before a storm. A few seconds later, when she still hasn’t answered, he says, “You must be overwhelmed.”
Zara sits on the kitchen floor. “A little.” The tile looked like a good idea when she was standing up, but now that she’s down here it’s cold and gritty.
“That’s natural,” Leopold says. “Your life is about to change in so many ways. But I’m going to be with you, from the moment you arrive at the theater. If you need anything, you come directly to me.”
Zara nods. Then she remembers that Leopold can’t see her. “I will. Thank you.” She says it again, knowing the words will never be big enough. “Thank you.”
Zara asks her mom to drop her off at school, because it’s still possible she’s dead, and dead people shouldn’t drive cars.
Her weekly acting workshop takes place that afternoon. The teacher is waiting in the lobby of the arts annex, and when he sees Zara, he gives her an endless hug and congratulates her on being his first student to “really make something of herself.”
So the article was real. The phone call actually happened.
She’s going to play Echo.
Zara rushes to the bathroom where the girls warm up because the tile has such good acoustics.
“What if it doesn’t work out?” one of the girls says, right after hugging her. From the tone of her voice, it sounds like she wants to prepare Zara for the worst. “The Aurelia’s a really big deal.”
“I know,” Zara says.
The girls — all five of them — lean toward the mirrors to retouch their makeup. Zara has thought of them as her friends, but they don’t study together or talk about their lives. They don’t spend time together outside of class. They work on their scenes and talk about their dream roles.
Your dream has come true.
The girl standing closest bumps Zara playfully with her hip. “Are you going to be okay standing this close to Adrian Ward? I think he might blow your sweet little mind. He’s really famous. And hot. I can’t tell if he’s more hot or more famous.”
“Hot,” says the first girl. “Definitely.”
They all laugh. The sound turns hard when it hits the tile.
“There’s a curse on the Aurelia,” another girl says. She tries to sound like she’s just teasing, but an edge breaks through. “You’re not worried about that, are you?”
Zara knows they are saying these things to bother her, but the last one stays with her longer than it should. Which is silly. Theater superstitions are like Ouija boards — everybody loves them, but nobody really believes in them. The Aurelia’s curse is just a string of accidents made to sound ominous.
It’s nothing.
The play is everything.
Late that night, Leopold calls. He lights up her cell phone, rips her out of sleep. “Apologies,” he says. “I didn’t realize it was so late.” He calls the next night, and the next, and just when Zara is getting used to it, he doesn’t call for six days.
When he finally does, Zara grabs her phone and stares into the painful glow of the screen. It’s 2:37 in the morning.
“Hello, my dear. I’m sorry if it’s late where you are.” Leopold fans out his excuses. He’s in Brussels. He forgot she has school in the morning. He’s so excited about a detail of act 2, scene 3 that he didn’t even think about the time.
“What is Echo feeling here?” he asks.
Zara has thought about this before. She stares up at the ceiling and says words that she never thought anyone would want to hear. She is telling a famous director what she feels. “Echo wants to run away, she’s ready. But it hurts.”
“Because she’s leaving so much behind?” Leopold asks.
“No.” Zara shakes her head. “Because she’s taking so much with her.”
“Mmmmm.” Every time Zara tells Leopold something about Echo, he makes an appreciative sound, as if she’s laying out a feast for him. Leopold acts like everything she thinks about Echo is delicious.
The next night, he tells her about a vision.
“I saw you onstage in white,” he says. “Organza, I think. It clung to you in a very becoming way.”
Zara wants this to be true. She needs it. In just twelve weeks she’s going to be in front of hundreds of people, and they will expect her to be beautiful. “How do they work?” she asks. “The visions?”
“They’re simple, really. The visions show me how to create a perfect story. And then, if need be, I help things along.”
“Have they ever been wrong?” she asks,
thinking of the white dress.
He is quiet for so long — not even breathing — that she thinks the call must have been cut off. “No.”
Zara wakes up in a haze. She doesn’t tell anyone about the phone calls that keep her up until dawn — who would she tell? Her theater friends are so jealous their faces curdle when they see her coming. Her parents wouldn’t like it if they knew she was up so late, especially because of the play. It’s already disrupted her life so much. So Zara keeps Leopold a secret. She waits for the soft, dark center of the night, and the call that might be coming. She thinks about Echo, who is completely fictional, but feels more solid than anyone she’s seen in weeks.
Zara’s last day of school is here and then gone. She won’t graduate with the rest of her class in the spring. She won’t go to prom. She’ll miss the spring play, which used to matter so much, and now has been eclipsed to the point that she can’t even see the bright edges of what she used to care about. Her parents are the ones who worry about her missing out on all the normal teenage milestones. They support her decision, but in the next breath they make her promise to finish her coursework, promise to take the GED, promise to apply to colleges for next fall, even if she has to defer. They wince as she picks out school after school in New York City. She adds Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, to make them happy, and then promises herself she won’t go.
“We know how much this means to you,” her mom says, which only proves it doesn’t mean as much to them. Still, they cluster her with hugs, douse her in support. They even throw a small party a few days before she leaves. There’s ice-cream cake and a fistful of balloons, because they don’t know how to celebrate in a way that is not identical to her eighth birthday.
October flares like a match, then dies. Wind strips the trees. The world that Zara called real for so long is falling away.
When Roscoe looks down, the theater hovers far beneath his feet. The walkway he’s standing on is a series of open spaces and thin metal slats.
He won’t be hanging lights for another few weeks, but he needs to be up here. Other places don’t have the power to make him this happy. In the subway, he yells at the pigeons that ruffle the rails. “Feathered assholes!” In Grand Central Station, he is buffeted and kicked while he tries to watch the light move across the floor, while he says the prayers he learned as a boy, a few of the words gone, like fallen-out teeth. In winter, he sits on park benches and stares at the people hurrying past, their cheeks scratched with cold.
Red and red and red.
He picks up his stack of gels and an X-Acto knife and gets to work on gobos. Sliced plastic films, thin as breath, that he will spend hours and days teasing into the perfect shapes. Slim trees for act 2, scene 3. Dappled cave light. And water for the ending.
So much water. Enough to drown a girl.
But will it be good enough for Leopold? That’s the other reason he needs to be up here — to figure out what went wrong. To fix it. His design was due this morning, and Leopold hated the light plot, hated the whole thing, wanted to throw the graph paper out and start over. Wanted to throw Roscoe out and start over.
But it’s no real trouble. Roscoe will get it right, and Leopold will love him again.
He has Eli, too. She was a find, a girl who doesn’t run from his mutterings and the smell that makes other people step back and back. She is a kind person, true kind, underneath the bluster and the boots. Sometimes she brings him food from home. Sometimes she picks up sandwiches from the deli two blocks down, with extra turkey for Roscoe. He likes the way that she makes coffee, swimming with hot milk, a little scalded, a little sweet. He likes how she talks to the lights just like he does, although she usually switches to Spanish. But that’s all right. He doesn’t need to understand what she’s saying. He knows that it’s a private conversation.
He wishes Eli were here right now. He gave her the day off.
He shuffles his gels and gets to work on another gobo. Pure white, this one, as sweet as Christmas lights.
That is one time Roscoe likes the city, and it’s coming on fast. Winter. Cold and cold and white and red. They’re already a few days into November, which means millions of lights will go up soon. If he made a god, that god would hang Christmas lights everywhere, including a few in Roscoe’s brain, just to brighten things up.
He’s not allowed to hang Echo and Ariston lights yet because Death of a Salesman is still running. Roscoe is just here to think. To plan. The series of catwalks above the stage connects to a hidden strip of a balcony above the orchestra pit. From there, he can reach the booth. He will get a sandwich soon, because tomorrow Eli will ask if he ate, and Roscoe doesn’t want to disappoint Eli. But right now he will visit his light board. A few hours hunched over the slides and buttons will make him feel better.
He will work and work and never stop until he gets this right.
Then Roscoe hears a sound — the door from the lighting booth. A person can climb from the booth, up a ladder, to a secret walkway that connects to this one, a walkway hidden by a false plaster ceiling covered in painted angels. Not many people come through that way.
It could be Eli. Maybe she didn’t want her day off. Maybe she’s figured out that this is the best place and never, ever wants to leave.
Roscoe stands on the lip of the balcony, because that is where he pictures what the lights will look like when they hit the stage. He reaches out, pretending that each finger is a beam of light, but he reaches too far, everything wobbles, and in that wild second he sees the wooden edge of the railing. Below that, air. Then the deep red carpet of the orchestra pit.
It would be a long fall from here to the ground.
Zara is back in New York — finally.
Her parents made her promise to get off at Penn Station and immediately take the subway uptown, but after a few hours of that flattened train feeling, Zara follows a new impulse through the doors of the subway car, into the tight press of bodies in Forty-Second Street Station.
Zara climbs the stairs toward the gray sky, her suitcase announcing each step with a clunk.
If you need anything, come directly to me.
Broadway is awash in tourists. There are probably people from twenty different countries and as many states on this block alone. Each square of sidewalk holds something new — mismatched buildings, forty posters for the same album on a construction wall, roasted-nut vendors, obsessively brisk women in heels.
The sky simmers with bad weather.
Zara’s new roommate is expecting her. Zara knows she will turn up at the apartment late, probably wet. She fiddles her phone out of her purse and sends a quick text. Wanted to see the theater.
Then she’s off, wheeling as quickly as she can, bumping the suitcase over tiny breaks in the sidewalk. She can’t help running through the important dates in her head. It’s November 5, the day before the first read-through. Echo and Ariston opens on December 29.
The Aurelia is there, waiting for her. The white marble gives her the same feeling as good poetry.
I’m going to be with you, from the moment you arrive.
Leopold might not be in the building right now. Zara knows that. If she can’t find him, she’ll call, but it would be better to see him in person. They’ve had a dozen late-night talks and it hasn’t been enough to banish the worst of Zara’s nerves.
She isn’t ready for this read-through. She still feels like she should be sitting in the theater instead of up on the stage.
Zara presses her forehead against the glass doors. She jolts the bars. Locked.
When she goes around back, she assumes that the stage door will be locked, too — but it pushes right in. The audition signs have been cleared. The emptiness of the hallway pulls her toward the wings.
Zara steps onto the stage. It’s all hers. No one waiting in line, pushing to take her place. She tells herself: If the door was unlocked, it must be all right for me to be here.
She tells herself: I belong here.
Heel-toe, one
step at a time, she starts to walk the boards. One of her directors taught her to do this, and it stuck. It’s about learning the space, that director said. It seemed important to Zara, like learning the body of a person you love. She spent time on every boy she dated, finding out their details. She savored that part: the freckles, the skin, the secrets. Zara spent time on girls, too. Certain ones. Maybe it was just theater — how it’s supposed to make you notice everything — but Zara found herself painstakingly aware of the way one girl would tilt her head when she sang her scales, how another would smile to herself as she waited for her entrances.
Zara discovers the Aurelia, one step at a time. Heel-toe, heel-toe. The stage is giving her a grounded feeling that nothing else could. This is better than going straight to Leopold. Now when she sees him, she won’t be frantic and afraid. He’ll know that he made the right choice when he cast her. If she comes up with some new insight into Echo, he might even be impressed.
As she walks, she tells herself the story of Echo and Ariston.
I was born to inhabit a kingdom, but that’s not a blessing.
Zara pinches off bits of the stage with each step.
We’ve been at war since before I was born.
More steps. More stage.
My father promised me to the heir of the neighboring kingdom, a boy I’ve never met. Ariston. So I ran away. I ran through the woods, and I made it to the sea. I met a boy, and I didn’t know he was Ariston — of course — so I fell in love with him, of course. A series of famous love scenes follows. Zara’s blood rises and swells. This play taught her everything she knows about being in love.
Echo After Echo Page 2