Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits

by Jenna Hilary Sinclair

  “Tom, listen. I’ll see you tomorrow at the school. Could we… I’d like to go out with you for dinner afterward so we can talk. Would you do that with me? Please. At the very least, we’ve got to make some decisions for our trip to Big Bend. Remember?”

  I let the case drop to the floor. No, I hadn’t remembered, because I’d been nursing my anger awfully close, encouraging it to stave off a sadness just as overwhelming, but I remembered now. Kevin in a bedroll with sleepy eyes. The first time since college that my life had expanded enough that I’d have something else to do on a holiday besides visit the ranch. Kevin must have guessed how much I was looking forward to those days with him. Well, I knew he was too. What had happened at his house sharpened into knife-like reality. No Big Bend for us.

  “I need to tell you I’m sorry. You have a right to be angry with me. I screwed up and I know it. I wasn’t being fair to you and to what you need, and to your own… your own strengths. I won’t do it again. Give me a chance to show you that I won’t screw up again.”

  My own strengths? Who was he kidding? I didn’t have any, and wasn’t that half of what had enraged me back at his house? The knowledge that he was right: if he had told me Channing knew he was gay, I would have never dated him. Never gotten to know his ready laugh or his steady thoughtfulness or how thoroughly he kissed me.

  I closed my eyes and tried to contemplate life without Kevin, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t go there.

  “Tom…. Honey, I’m really sorry. I hope everything went okay at school today. I’ll see you tomorrow, all right?”

  “Don’t call me honey,” I said to the air. Then I opened up the suitcase and grabbed the first tape on top. The rest of the night I spent watching other people make love.

  GEORGE WAS right. Tuesday’s rehearsal was better than Monday’s had been, except that Kevin arrived an hour earlier than his usual late appearance. By four p.m. he was casually waving to me from the back of the auditorium where he was working with paints and brushes. I waved back as if everything were fine. Letting on that something had come between us could lead to disaster. We were just Mr. Smith and Mr. Bannerman, nothing-special friends who’d met through the play. No big deal, even if it was a big deal to see him again. I was still angry, but I wanted him…. It was hard to turn away.

  George and I both stayed in the unheated auditorium that afternoon. He wanted me to critique the final form of the two major duets from act one, plus the kids would be using their microphone headsets for only the second time. They needed to get used to volume projection and control. I didn’t want to stay; I wanted to be anyplace where Kevin wasn’t. I settled into a seat in the tenth row, feeling conspicuous, holding my clipboard and pen with red, cold fingers. Danielle wasn’t working today, and neither was the art teacher, so it was only Kevin back there with the long rolls of scenery. I wondered if he was wearing the old ratty T-shirt he usually put on when painting—he looked like James Dean in that shirt—or if he’d brought something warmer today that didn’t show off his arms and the flex of his shoulder muscles.

  First one up was Mimi and Roger’s song, “I Should Tell You.” In my opinion the whole show had difficult melodies, especially for high school kids, but this song that Sam and Sarah were tackling was the worst. Even with the piano player clearly providing the tune, Sam kept going off key. Sarah was standing way too stiffly, and I told them that from my place in the audience. So George motioned to the pianist and had them start over again.

  I should tell you I’m disaster, Roger sang.

  I made a note that Sarah needed to turn more toward Sam during that line, and couldn’t help but think how true this song was. Every couple should have some sort of required upfront confession before they started out together.

  Tom, you teach my daughter, and she knows I’m gay.

  Kevin, I’m disaster. This arm of mine. This heart of mine. You can’t be interested in me. You’re dangerous, and I don’t trust you.

  But I wished I did. The porn didn’t cut it, not as far as giving me what I needed. My empty house didn’t cut it anymore either, or the prospect of barren weekends without him. Needing sex. Missing Kevin. Facing loneliness. It all combined so I couldn’t separate out one from the other.

  What was I, addicted? Like Mimi in the play, addicted to… more than I’d had before. To Kevin. How could I consider telling him goodbye? It was just one mistake he’d made. We could have more time together before we had to….

  I shifted in the hard seat and stared fiercely at one of the broken chairs roped around with plastic orange tape so no one would sit on it. What was the sense of reaching out to Kevin again when I knew it wasn’t going to work between us? I already had ample evidence that our relationship was impossible to keep quiet; I was teetering on the edge of being outed by a careless, emotional girl. Why not keep things the way they were right now? I could say: Remember the good times, Kevin. Have a nice life.

  Not a shitty life. A nice one where you’ll be happy. Where you’ll find that person you’re looking for.

  Bleakly, I knew I wasn’t going to be that person.

  “No, stop there,” George told the kids on stage. “Tom, were they enunciating enough there?”

  I had no idea, but I called out, “They could do better.”

  And so Sam and Sarah started again, and I tried to force my attention back to them. That had to be their seventh time through the song. Actors, I’d learned, had to have a high tolerance for repetition. How did the people who played on Broadway night after night manage without going out of their minds with boredom? Then again, I supposed some plays might engage a person enough, in the same way that some long-married couples never tired of each other’s company. Like my mother’s sister Christine and her husband. It was a family legend how they’d met on a Tuesday and stood before the preacher the Monday after that, and then gone on for fifty-two fulfilling years. They’d known they were right for each other from the beginning. The rest of us weren’t that lucky.

  Sam sang, I’d forgotten how to smile until your candle burned my skin.

  My face burned. Ridiculous, really, to notice that line on the eighth repetition. Kevin had said that about me in Houston, that I never laughed. It wasn’t true. He’d made me laugh plenty.

  I was supposed to be taking notes and helping, not acutely conscious that Kevin was listening to the same lyrics I was. The space between my shoulders prickled, as if his gaze were on me right then, touching me, caressing me, caring about me the way I knew he really did.

  And I cared about him. I loved him.

  I drew in a shuddering breath. Now was a bad time to admit that to myself. It didn’t change anything, not really, except to explain why I felt flattened by the world.

  Here goes, here goes, here goes, here goes.

  “Excellent!” George enthused. “Just right that time. You’re showing the feeling now, that they’re both willing to start trusting each other. They’re on the edge and now ready to jump off the deep end. Jump! That’s what lovers have to do sometime. All right, off you two go, back to the Little Theater. Send Robbie and Steven down here, would you? Tell them to bring their headsets with them.”

  A minute later two energetic seventeen-year-olds came bounding down the main aisle, leaping like gazelles and shouting at each other.

  “Slow down!”

  “Catch me!”

  “Not fair!”

  “Slowpoke!”

  I hollered, “Boys, no running!” But by that time they’d already flashed by me.

  Steven jumped up onto the stage directly from the orchestra pit, and the thump from his large-sized sneakers reverberated through the auditorium. Robbie wasn’t far behind him. His ascent to the stage wasn’t so graceful, but almost as effective: he leaped up backward so he landed on his butt, then scrambled to his feet.

  “I won,” Steven said smugly.

  “No way, Stevie. Not when you take a head start like that.”

  Long-suffering, George said, “Boys, your at
tention, please?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Keating.”

  “Sorry.”

  Within a minute he had them in their places for the love song from Rent, “I’ll Cover You,” which was the setup for the pain of Angel’s death later in the show. The love had to be believable, as George had hammered home, or the emotional depth of the show would be stunted. The boys dropped into their roles seemingly without effort. One second they were school-boy foolish, and the next they were facing each other solemnly. Angel started to sing.

  Live in my house, I’ll be your shelter. Just pay me back with one thousand kisses. Be my lover, and I’ll cover you.

  Unlike the other two, Robbie and Steven now had this song down pat, and they both offered rich, powerful vocals. George and I had come up with some complex, interesting blocking for them, and they effortlessly danced around each other, came together, fell apart, caught each other’s hands, and ended the song perfectly with both of them singing: Oh, lover, I’ll cover you, Yeah, Oh, lover, I’ll cover you.

  And after that came the kiss. They’d done it often enough that there wasn’t any hesitation between them: it was brief but sweet, lasting long enough to go with the fading notes of the song. And most definitely lip to lip. They parted, but not completely, holding hands and pulling back enough to grin at each other again.

  “We nailed that!” Steven exulted.

  From behind me, Kevin said, quietly, “My God. I hadn’t seen that before. That was beautiful.”

  A jolt went through me to hear him so close. He must have abandoned his work during the song, when I’d been concentrating on the stage. But I couldn’t bring myself to turn and look at him. “Yes, they are.”

  “They kiss like they mean it.”

  “Maybe.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw him come into view, into my row, until he stopped a few chairs from where I was sitting. No one else could have heard him when he said, “I know what it is to kiss like that. Was I wrong to think that you do too?”

  “Kevin! Shut up,” I gritted out. Wouldn’t he ever learn? Not at school!

  “No,” Kevin insisted, intensely, but that was all, because George had dismissed the boys and the piano player; he came striding up from in front of the stage toward the two of us. He was an unlikely savior, but I grabbed at anything I could. If I was going to talk to Kevin, it wasn’t going to be in the middle of rehearsal.

  “That was fine,” I called to him when he was still twenty feet away.

  George beamed. He had to be proud of the way his show was shaping up, light-years better than when I had helped him on Bye Bye Birdie. “Yep, pretty good, don’t you think?”

  Noticeably, Kevin stayed quiet until George joined us, but then he said, “They’re great. And you’ve done a terrific job staging the song.”

  “Thanks, but Tom had a hand in on this one too.”

  “I’m not surprised to hear that,” Kevin said, and this time I did look up at him. There wasn’t a trace of lightness to him. “Tom’s one talented guy.”

  “Right,” George agreed. “I’m glad he’s working with me on this.”

  I tensed, waiting for Kevin to go completely over the line and say something like I wish he were working on something with me or something equally incriminating. But he didn’t.

  George, thankfully, was oblivious to the tension between the two of us. “Tom, would you make a note for me? I don’t want Robbie to look too feminine. Anybody who sees him on stage, even when he’s in drag, I want them to know that’s a man up there.”

  I expected Kevin to make some smart remark to that, but he didn’t. My fingers didn’t want to work, but I managed to write on my clipboard: Robbie shouldn’t look like a girl.

  “What’s next?” George wanted to know.

  I consulted the schedule. “Channing with ‘Over the Moon’.”

  “Okay, I’ll go get—”

  “Mr. Keating!”

  Johnny Robertson sounded urgent and more than a little frantic. Visions of a car wreck or some sort of accident in the lobby immediately came to my mind. I jumped to my feet and watched him come jogging down the main auditorium aisle, waving a yellow piece of paper.

  “Here!” Johnny said, and he thrust the flyer into George’s hand. “Look at that!”

  George held it out, both Kevin and I left the row to stand next to him in the aisle, and I read the big block letters with dread. This wasn’t going to end, was it? It would go on and on, only getting worse.

  GOD DESTROYED SODOM AND GOMORRAH!

  CHRISTIANS, JOIN US FOR A

  PRAYER VIGIL

  AROUND THE SCHOOL FLAG POLE AT 6 P.M.

  PRAY WITH US FOR THE MISGUIDED

  SOULS INVOLVED IN THE GUNNING

  HIGH SCHOOL PRODUCTION OF RENT

  LEARN THE TRUTH OF WHAT THE BIBLE TEACHES

  ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY AND DRUG USE

  BRING YOUR BIBLES!

  “Mr. Keating?”

  George looked more resigned than anything else. “Yes, Johnny?”

  If there was anybody down-to-earth in the cast, it was him, but the boy’s forehead wrinkled with worry. “I think you’d better know Principal Watts has been watching the rehearsal from the back, sir. He’s got somebody with him who’s not too happy with us.”

  “Okay. Listen, let’s not sensationalize this, okay?” George lifted the flyer. “We knew we’d run into opposition to the play, so this is just another—”

  “Mr. Keating, could I have a moment of your time, please?”

  That was Hiram Watts striding down the main aisle toward us, and with him was that “somebody” Johnny had seen, a short, barrel-chested man with gray hair and a pleasant, inoffensive, round face.

  “Of course, Hiram,” George said right away. “Johnny, why don’t you go back with the others? Tell them we’ll be there soon to continue rehearsal.”

  Hiram didn’t waste any time. Before Johnny was out of earshot he said, “George, I’d like you to meet Pastor David Hunnicutt from the First Baptist Church in town. Pastor, this is George Keating, our choir and theater teacher here at school, and the director of the school play.”

  My fight-or-flight response screamed at me to follow Johnny, but I was caught. Assistant directors didn’t abandon their directors, and friends didn’t abandon their friends, even if every possible problem that I could have imagined when I’d agreed to help George with Rent was coming true. What was this minister here for? To pray over us the way the kids had done over Robbie? I could imagine his prayer if he knew he was standing in the presence of two Sodomites. Would he want to talk to the students? I’d fight that tooth and nail, even though Johnny was undoubtedly carrying word of this back to the kids right now.

  The two men shook hands, George faking a cordiality I knew he didn’t feel. “This is Tom Smith,” he said, gesturing to me, “our assistant director. And this is Kevin, ah… ”

  “Bannerman,” Kevin put in.

  “Right, sorry. Kevin Bannerman, one of our faithful parent volunteers.”

  “That’s real fine you do that,” Hunnicutt said, in an I’m-a-regular-folksy-Texan manner. “Parents need to be there for their kids.” Then he shook both our hands, with a strong, definite handshake.

  There was a noticeable pause. I braced myself.

  “George,” Hiram said, “Pastor Hunnicutt would like to have a word with you about the, ah, the content of the play.”

  “We could go someplace where there aren’t little ears hanging out, if you want,” Hunnicutt offered.

  “No,” George said. “It’s okay. Now’s a fine time to talk.” Everybody who’d been working around the edges of the auditorium had abandoned what they’d been doing and riveted their attention on us, but nobody was all that close. It wasn’t likely they could hear.

  “There’s no better time for the truth than right now, I agree with you. Now, Mr. Keating. I know you’re an educated man or you wouldn’t be on the faculty of this school. You know that this play you’re putting on he
re, this Rent play, is the subject of some controversy.”

  “Of course. I read the newspapers like anybody else.” George said. He’d dropped the false front he put on for the cast and crew whenever the subject of opposition to the play came up. He was deadly serious now.

  “I have racked my brain ’til it’s sore,” Hunnicutt said, “but I cannot figure why you decided to give us a show that undermines the morals of our young people.”

  I glanced at Kevin at the exact time that he glanced at me, and for a moment we were in tune again. He looked as worried as I felt.

  “Rent is topical, award-winning, and speaks to teenagers. We’ve never had as many students audition compared to when we were doing, say, South Pacific. It’s good to have interest and enthusiastic participation.”

  “But what are they enthusiastic about, eh? If you dangle temptation in front of them, Mr. Keating, they’ll jump at it.”

  “Or you can look at it in another way. Rent speaks to this young generation with its music and willingness to confront real issues that show up in the headlines every day. It’s more pertinent to their real lives.”

  “Real lives? Not in this town, surely.” Hunnicutt ticked off on his fingers. “Drug use, homosexuality, the AIDS disease, children not showing the respect they should to their mothers and fathers. That’s what’s in this play, exactly what we don’t want our young people getting into. None of that is for the greater glory of God.”

  I wanted to close my eyes. You can’t fight religion, George. The Bible is the last word. Reason falls away in the face of ingrained belief. Ask me. I know.

  “Maybe, maybe not. I tend to look at different issues the playwright addresses more subtly.”

  Hunnicutt took a step toward George, out of the circle of the five of us into the center. “I’m asking you for the good of the children. For the whole town too, and the school, of course. Do us all a favor and pick another play.”