by Mindy Klasky
“Exactly.”
Well, how I was I supposed to argue with that? Instead, I tried to trace his scattered logic through to its most likely end point. “And if you grant your wishes quickly, where do you get assigned?”
“It’s not so much the assignment—most of us stay in the States, or Europe. Or China—there’s a long tradition of wish-granting there. What we’re hoping for, what we’re all hoping for, is time in the Garden.”
His voice changed as he said the last word. The disco playboy disappeared completely. The impatient taskmaster fled. The exasperated worker who struggled to keep both of us on task utterly vanished. Instead, Teel sounded wistful, longing. His face relaxed, as if he were sleeping.
I almost hesitated to repeat, “The Garden?”
“It’s beautiful there.” He sounded like a man talking about his first kiss. “The Garden nurtures our spirits, our…souls. We genies become one with the natural world, the world we are otherwise forced to manipulate, to change. The Garden is the only place where we’re truly at peace. The oldest genies, the ones who have granted hundreds of thousands of wishes, are allowed to stay forever. Not just visit. Not just linger for a day, a week, a month. A year…”
Hearing his voice trail off in wistful memory, I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Part of me felt like I should hurry up and make my last two wishes—who was I to deny bliss to a genie? But part of me wanted to hold on to my treasures, wanted to take time to think things through.
The momentary spell passed as quickly as it had descended. Teel appraised me shrewdly as he urged, “I don’t suppose you’re ready yet?”
I shook my head.
“Then I’m going to spend my time learning what wonders there are in—” he pursed his lips into a scornful pout “—Minneapolis. As soon as you decide—”
“I’ll…” I touched my fingers together but refrained from adding pressure. Before I could say anything else, my genie turned on his Converse-clad heels and glided out of the Fox Hill Dinner Theater.
I wanted to call out to him. I wanted to tell him to be careful, to remember that things had changed in the intervening decades since he’d last been out in the world. I wanted to tell him to put on a coat; the January evening would be cold. I wanted to tell him to walk past the Fox Hill Cinema without even glancing at the movie posters for Joe White and the Seven Whores.
But he was gone before I could say a word.
The next morning, I stopped at Club Joe for a cup of coffee to fortify myself before heading in to my first rehearsal at the Landmark. The guy behind the counter looked at me strangely when I asked him to add four shots of espresso to my latte, but he finally shrugged, chewed on his lip ring, and complied. The first sip of the drink hit my bloodstream like gasoline sprayed on a fire.
I tried to convince myself that my pounding heart was just a product of overpriced coffee. I knew, though, that it was really about working at the Landmark, working with some of the Twin Cities theater community’s leading lights.
Teel and his wishes and my sudden professional elevation still seemed completely unreal. I hadn’t even had a chance to share my news with Maddy and Jules yet; they had both spent the night with their respective beaux. Ordinarily, I was thrilled to have the apartment to myself, but I had spent most of last night fighting the urge to phone them both, to demand that they come home to keep me company (and to verify that I hadn’t lost my mind).
Now, hovering outside the rehearsal room at the Landmark, I was as nervous as a kindergartener on the first day of school.
The Landmark had launched after a massive capital campaign, and they’d used their millions to build a state-of-the-art rehearsal facility on the ground floor of their theater space. The idea was to make theatergoing transparent to the audience, to let people buying tickets at the box office peer through glass walls at actors creating the very plays they would later see on stage. Patrons would be so impressed by the hardworking actors, the theory went, that they would gladly shell out more for tickets. And invite their friends. And their relatives. And every other person they knew in the Twin Cities.
I couldn’t say whether the notion had resulted in additional ticket sales, but I knew that the open rehearsal room impressed me. The walls were clear, shimmering planes of glass, which made me wonder who had to clean them. They were fitted with venetian blinds, to hide the actors when they worked on sensitive scenes. Now, though, everything was open, inviting. The huge space was filled with the best and the brightest actors around.
I’d come a long way from Fox Hill. Or maybe my sense of awe was just inspired by the fact that I hadn’t needed to hurry past a bunch of porno patrons to get in the building’s front door.
Two dozen chairs had been placed in a neat circle. Looking at them, I felt a pang of guilt—setup was my responsibility. Would be my responsibility, I nodded to myself, as soon as I had a key to the theater and an understanding of the director’s expectations.
As suddenly shy as a wallflower at homecoming, I tried to convince my legs to carry me out of the shadows and into the brightly lit rehearsal room. I clutched my cup of coffee in a suddenly sweaty palm, as if it were a lifesaver thrown to me from the deck of some passing ship.
I stared at the actors and wondered if my first wish had been sheer, unadulterated stupidity.
There was Jennifer Galland, winner of three Ivey Awards (our local equivalent of the Oscars). The last time I’d seen her on stage, she had been dressed in a stunningly beautiful Edwardian gown, performing—alas—in a deeply flawed production of The Importance of Being Earnest. (She’d had an ideal sense of comic timing, but everyone else in the show had worked under the mistaken belief that Wilde had written a tragedy. Of epic proportions. And even more epic length—the show had run nearly four hours.)
Now Jennifer was wearing a pair of the rattiest blue jeans I’d ever seen outside of my own apartment. Her plain white T-shirt looked like a refugee from a bargain bin. Her honey-colored mane was pulled back in a bouncing ponytail, and she seemed to have forsworn all makeup. Nevertheless, she was stunning, gorgeous in a way that poets describe as dewy, and teenage boys record as “totally hawt.” She was solid Juliet material, or I was no judge of casting.
I sighed and glanced around the room, daring myself to count the number of men whose tongues were lolling about their ankles. That was one thing about working on a Shakespeare play—the casts were hugely weighted toward males. I’d worked on one production of Julius Caesar in college where the men’s dressing room became so overcrowded that they’d taken over the women’s, forcing poor Calphurnia and Portia into a broom closet.
Counting up Jennifer’s admirers, I received my first shock of the day.
There were at least a dozen women in the room. Many more women than men. For a Shakespeare play. For Romeo and Juliet.
I skipped through the roles in my mind. Juliet. Her nurse. Lady Montague. Lady Capulet. That made for one nubile romantic lead and three dried-up husks.
Even if every designer on the show was female, there were still too many women in the room. And the designers weren’t all female. I recognized David Barstow, a lighting designer who had beaten Maddy out of at least three dearly desired jobs in as many years. He was talking to Alex Munoz, a successful local sound designer. Bill Pomeroy—the director who had made my wish come true—crouched beside him, nodding as Alex pointed out something on a sheet of scratch paper.
No, the designers were certainly not all women.
What was going on here? Was this some elaborate joke? Had Teel somehow corrupted my wish, brought Bill Pomeroy into the loop, only to embarrass me and tell me that my dream job was not actually going to happen? Was I doomed to return to Fox Hill, with everyone laughing at my idiotic self-deception, everyone in on the joke except for me?
But how could Teel have managed that? How could he have known what I would ask for before I did? How could he have worked things out with Bill in such a short time and made my cell phone ring—especially when
he’d quite obviously never seen a cell phone before I’d freed him from his lantern?
Who was I fooling? If I was willing to accept a genie who could grant wishes, I had to be willing to accept a genie with a wicked sense of humor. Didn’t I?
Call me an idiot, but I took a deep breath and walked into the rehearsal room.
Bill looked up as I crossed the threshold, and a huge smile broke across his face—the smile of a grateful man, a relieved man. Not a man who had just pulled off the cruelest joke in the history of Twin Cities theater.
“Kira!” he said, and his exclamation sifted silence over the rest of the room. “Our savior! I’m thrilled that you could join us on such short notice!”
He walked across the room and offered his hand, along with a smile that was as bright as the light reflecting off his shaved skull. He wore a tight black turtleneck tucked into black denim jeans; his outfit looked like a crisper, cleaner, much more tailored version of mine. Fine lines spidered beside his eyes, a crinkling maze that reminded me just how long he’d been a theatrical god in Minneapolis, well before he’d landed this plum job at the Landmark.
Still holding my hand, Bill said earnestly, “Maria was so relieved to hear that you accepted our offer. Her mother was discharged from intensive care this morning and she should make a one-hundred-percent recovery. Maria asked me to tell you, explicitly, that she feels so much better knowing that you’ve stepped in to take care of things here.”
Maria. That must be the stage manager I’d displaced. I’d never met her before—didn’t even know her last name. I suspected that Teel’s magic had eased Maria’s concern by giving her a false memory of my work. What crisis, though, had sent Maria’s mother to the ICU? I fervently hoped it was something wholly unrelated to my wish, something completely independent from Teel’s magic.
That had to be the case, right? Maria’s mother had to be in the hospital before I made my wish, before Bill called to offer me the job. Teel might have harnessed another person’s misfortune, but I couldn’t be responsible for actually making a woman ill. Could I?
I glanced uneasily at my faintly tattooed fingertips. Before I could say anything, though, Bill gestured toward the circle of chairs. He shot his sleeve and tapped his wrist at the spot where most people wore a watch. He had none, but he conveyed a sense of time-driven urgency with the gesture. “Come on, everyone. Let’s get started.” He nodded toward the seat beside him, and I took it, figuring that I could best assist him if I were by his side, even if I had no idea of his agenda for the day’s meeting. I gulped another swallow of coffee and braced myself for whatever was to come.
Everyone grabbed a chair, scooting the careful circle into a more comfortable, random shape. Water bottles joined coffee cups on the floor, and a couple of people shrugged out of sweaters. Bill added to the aura of casual ease, starting by having everyone go around the circle and give their names. I was grateful that he didn’t have us say anything else—our favorite movie, our favorite drink, our preferred sexual position.
Yeah. I’d had directors foist some really strange icebreakers on a group, all in the name of smothering first-day jitters.
I wished, though, that Bill had asked people to state their role in the production. I wanted to know why there were so many women present, so many more than I had ever expected for a classical show. With a chill, I thought of a production of Twelfth Night that I’d seen in college, where “the melancholy Jacques” had been played by seven actors. They had chanted in unison, like a traditional Greek chorus, creating a perfect hash out of the Bard’s famous Seven Ages of Man speech. Oh, you know it. It’s the one that starts, “All the world’s a stage…” It doesn’t gain anything by being recited by seven people at once. Trust me.
I swallowed hard and ordered myself to pay attention as Bill started to speak.
“Thank you, all, for joining us today. You are some of the bravest actors and designers I know. Some of the most courageous stars of the Twin Cities, who will be remembered for this production for years to come.”
Courageous.
What required courage? I had to admit, I wasn’t very brave. I was a stage manager, and a damned good one, but I would never be described as…
Bold, Bill Pomeroy went on. Intrepid. Daring. Gutsy. Venturesome.
Venturesome? The guy was a regular thesaurus, his words tumbling over one another as he exhorted his cast.
I glanced at the glass walls of the practice room, at the venetian blinds. Was Bill planning a Romeo and Juliet in the nude? Was I about to discover that my days next to the Fox Hill skin flicks were actually the best possible training for my new gig?
I swallowed hard. Why hadn’t I asked more questions? Why hadn’t I hesitated before accepting my first wish on a platter?
I could not keep my eyes from Jennifer Galland. She was staring at Bill eagerly—some might say ardently. I could see her breathing, and I was suddenly uncomfortably aware that the adjective “perky” would probably be featured in any accurate description of her anatomy. I stared down at my own sorry, sweatshirt-clad body and hoped that the rest of us would not be expected to join in the courageous display of bared flesh.
Just as I started to worry about wasting my second Teel-wish getting out of this production, I forced myself to tune back in to Bill’s speech. “Romeo and Juliet has become one of the touchstones of our popular culture. Ask any educated person, and they know the phrase ‘star-crossed lover.’ They know that ‘a rose by another name would smell as sweet.’ They know ‘what light through yonder window breaks.’ Our goal—our mission—is to get people to think about this play in ways they never have before. We will get people to hear the words, to see the action with totally new ears, completely opened eyes.”
The actors were eating this stuff up. They leaned forward on their chairs. Their eyes glinted. They licked their lips, ravenous cats ready to pounce on a prize.
Bill sat back, smiling benevolently as he held out his hands to the room. “But you don’t have to trust me. You don’t have to take my word for it. Let’s read through a quick scene, just so that you can hear the difference our production will make.”
The actors all reached into their bags, digging around to extract their copies of the script. As if reading my mind, Bill passed a copy of the play to me. There were thousands of editions of Romeo and Juliet, of course, with different footnotes and annotations. We would all work from the same version, so that we could more readily find our lines, more easily follow every action on and off the stage.
I took my copy gratefully. Once I got home, I would create my stage manager’s notebook, cutting apart the binding and taping individual pages to blank sheets of paper. With the added margins, I could add copious notes, record the blocking, write in light cues and sound cues, keep track of all the details a stage manager needed to control behind the scenes.
For now, though, I followed Bill’s excited instruction to turn to Act II, Scene II. “You all know this passage. You’ve known it for years. Listen, though, as we challenge society’s most basic expectations. Jennifer? Drew?”
Jennifer cleared her throat and tossed her ponytail, as if she were impersonating a bobby-soxer at a Frank Sinatra concert. She held her script with her left hand, using the fingers of her right to trace beneath words. When she spoke, her voice was high and light, like Marilyn Monroe giving her most airheaded line reading ever. “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”
I knew the line. As Bill said, we all knew the line. I could picture Juliet standing on her balcony, staring out at the nighttime stars, thinking about the guy she’d just met, the love of her life, the boy—man—she was willing to risk everything for, abandoning her family, her nurse, everything she had ever known and loved and respected.
Except, Jennifer was reading Romeo’s lines.
She completed the monologue, delivering every familiar phrase with the same whispery, ultrafeminine pout. And then, a male voice chim
ed in from right beside me: “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?”
I started to laugh.
Obviously, this was a game that the company had worked out before I arrived. This was a joke, a hazing for the new kid. They were getting back at me for having missed casting calls, for having joined the production just in the nick of time.
Except I was the only one laughing.
I felt the weight of two dozen stares like a physical thing. Jennifer’s perfect features arrayed themselves in a frown. The man who had responded to her delivery, Drew Myers, who had read Juliet’s lines, looked like I had tripped him while he was carrying a ten-course meal into a dining room. He was startled, and angry, and a little bit embarrassed.
Bill’s paternal voice was gentle. “Exactly,” he said, as if someone had finished arguing some point with the eloquence of a Harvard debater. “Let’s step back and take a look at what happened here. Jennifer, how did it feel to deliver Romeo’s lines?”
Jennifer glanced at me, then looked at the script in front of her. She stared up at the ceiling, as if she could read a response there. “It felt…” Her voice was her own again, husky, seductive in a way that her little-girl whisper could never be. She licked her lips, tossed that ponytail. I was really starting to hate that ponytail. “It felt liberating,” she said at last. “It felt like I was shrugging off centuries of expectation. Of belief. I was able to break out of what everyone thought I should do, thought I should be. I felt free.”
“Excellent!” Bill beamed. “And Drew? How did it feel to deliver your lines?”
As Drew swallowed and shook his head, I had a chance to sneak my first good look at the actor. I knew him by reputation. We’d never worked on a show together, but according to the well-greased wheels of Twin Cities gossip, half the actresses in Minneapolis had fallen for his California-surfer-boy good looks. His broad shoulders filled his often-washed cotton shirt; he wore khakis with a casual ease that let me know he was comfortable with himself, with his place in the world. While formulating a response to Bill’s question, he set his script down across his knee, freeing his hands to flex, as if he were trying to rein in all the mysteries of the world.