by Mindy Klasky
That production gave all new meaning to Hamlet’s line, “There’s the rub.”
Yeah, we theater people were strange.
Drew’s good-natured mocking of the audition process was what I needed to finally put me at ease. At last, I could remember how to breathe, how to act like a calm, cool, and collected stage manager, instead of like a seventh-grader at my first school dance. Thinking of another method-acting disaster, already famous in Twin Cities theater lore, I asked, “Did you see the Richard III they did last year at Epiphany?”
Drew smirked. “Dude! It’s one thing to make Shakespeare come alive, but it was totally broken to give Richard a sword fetish. Especially with those leather costumes.”
John said dubiously, “I wish I’d seen that.”
“No you don’t!” Drew and I both said at the same time.
As we laughed together, Mike pushed his way through the velvet curtain. He swooped my plate down in front of me, bowing from the waist as if he were a courtier and I was some type of queen. John didn’t get quite the same level of attention, although Mike made sure that a bottle of ketchup rested evenly between us. Like a mind reader, he replaced my empty glass with a full one, saying, “And another tonic water, extra lime. Anything else I can get for you guys right now?”
I shook my head, breathing deeply of the magical smell of fresh-from-the-fry-basket potatoes. Why had I stayed away from Mephisto’s for so long?
As if he’d read my mind, Mike favored me with a broad smile. “Enjoy. Kira, it’s great to have you back.”
“It’s great to be back, Mike,” I said as he returned to the bar. Before I could devote an appropriate level of attention to adding salt and pepper to my fries, Drew leaned close, settling one hand on my sleeve. He nodded toward my fresh beverage and said, “I went to Alateen for years. That really helped me learn how to deal with my father.”
“Yeah,” I said, slipping into my well-rehearsed explanation, even as my adrenaline glands pumped into overtime at the thought of his hand touching me. Down, girl, I thought. “Actually, I’m allergic to alcohol. I’m not an alcoholic. Um, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, not that it’s different from any other illness. Like tuberculosis.”
Damn. I was usually a bit more smooth than that. I fought the sudden, ridiculous compulsion to tell him about my allergy symptoms, to explain that my cheeks would turn bright red (as if he could tell the difference, given how furiously I was blushing), or that my palms would start to itch, or that my mouth would begin to tingle.
Yeah, that would make me really popular.
Before I could commit any more social crimes, I took the time to cut my burger in half, grateful that my black sweatshirt would camouflage the worst of my gustatory sins.
My first bite of burger was even better than I remembered. Swallowing hard, I sat back in my chair with a sigh. Drew laughed, which made me sit up a bit straighter. “Dude, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone enjoy one of Mike’s burgers that much, even when I was on the late shift.”
“You used to work here?”
He ducked his head, as if admitting to a secret past. When he smiled up at me through his eyelashes, my heart did another round on the flying trapeze. “Guilty as charged. I’ve had my share of auditions that didn’t go as planned. Mike’s a totally great guy.”
“He is,” I agreed.
“So how long have you been coming here?”
I laughed. “Is that like, ‘What’s your sign?’”
Drew aped the worst sort of pickup artist, smoothing a nonexistent mustache and leering as he said, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
I giggled. I. Giggled. Me, the girl who hadn’t talked to a new guy in a year. The girl who had sworn off men for the rest of my life.
I couldn’t help it. He was funny. He was knockdown gorgeous, breezily friendly, and he was funny.
I played along, remembering the almost-forgotten steps in the dance of flirtation. Barely wasting a moment to wipe my hands on my napkin, I settled my fingers on his forearm, daring to measure the taut muscle beneath his soft cotton shirt. My belly—or something lower—dove when I let myself imagine the dusting of dark blond hair that was sprinkled across that forearm. I immediately forbade myself from even looking at his hands, because I knew that I would completely throw myself off track if I even thought about what those fingers could do.
Instead, I answered in my best mock-little-girl voice, a parody that would have put Jennifer Galland’s rehearsal voice to shame. “Me? A nice girl like me?”
I summoned my finest smile to let him know that I was totally joking, that I was completely aware that we were playing, acting out stereotypes more absurd than the worst plays either of us had ever worked on. He grinned back, and I realized for the first time that one of his front teeth was just slightly out of alignment. For some reason, that tiny flaw, in the midst of his otherwise unblemished Leading Man perfection, made me swoon.
Almost literally. I was back to the silly, heart-pounding, throat-closing, belly-tightening impossibility of talking to him.
Apparently unaware of the crisis building in my traitorous body, Drew nodded toward my plate. “Are you going to eat all of those fries?”
“Please!” I said, and I hoped he wouldn’t realize how abnormally high-pitched my voice had become. I was so excited that he’d continued our silly conversation that I barely heard what he’d said.
“Kira Franklin deigns to share her French fries! Will wonders never cease?”
For one insane moment, I couldn’t place the voice. I’d heard it so many times in my dreams—in my nightmares. I must be imagining it here, in Mephisto’s, surrounded by my new cast, sitting next to my new crush.
I’d had endless discussions with that voice. I’d ranted to it. Raved. Told it exactly what I thought.
But now, hearing it for real, I was struck utterly dumb. Knocked as silent as some poor heroine in a Jane Austen novel. Thrown absolutely and completely for a loop.
TEWSBU. The Ex Who Shall Be Unnamed. Here, and in the flesh, in the middle of the Mamet Room.
How had I not noticed that he was sitting here with my cast? My cast. From my show. From my new life.
I thought a long string of expletives, but I managed to reduce them all to a choked, “Wh-what are you doing here?” as I spotted him halfway down the table.
A strange silence fell over the room. In one breath, all of the chatter drained away, all of the mindless discussion about the morning’s rehearsal, about Bill Pomeroy, about the production that we were devoting the next three months of our lives to create.
Gone.
After all, we were all experienced in the theater. We all knew good drama when it came and slapped us in the face. We all recognized an exciting little play being performed in our very midst.
I forced myself to meet the eyes of the man I’d pledged to marry. They were as blue as I remembered, an amazing blue, a blue that he always—always!—emphasized with an offhand touch of color, a perfect broadcloth shirt, a subtle silk tie. Today, he wore a casual tee; I’d give my next wish from Teel if it wasn’t Hollister’s newest color.
His smile was the one I remembered as well—his perfect white teeth, never capped, in a world where half our acquaintances had their paychecks deposited directly into their dentists’ accounts. His white smile was all the more striking because of the strong lines of his cheekbones, the worn hollows of his cheeks that always made him look like a tortured artist.
He sounded totally normal and utterly untortured when he answered my stammered question. “I’d never pass up one of Mike’s burgers, you know that, Kira. Besides,” he said with an indulgent shrug, “I wanted to meet the people that Steph is going to spend the next three months with.”
Steph. Stephanie Michaelson.
As if a cameraman were laying out my heartbreak on film, my focus changed from the face of the man I once had loved to the puzzled pout on the lips of the woman sitting ne
xt to him. As we’d gone around the circle yesterday, she’d introduced herself without a hint of who she truly was, what she truly meant to me. She was playing Mercutio, Romeo’s best friend. A reckless free spirit who managed to make a pun, even as he died at the end of Tybalt’s sword.
I wished I had a sword, right then.
I glanced at Drew, who had frozen with my French fries halfway to his lips. I could see that he was confused, embarrassed, wondering why it was such a big deal that I’d agreed to let him take some of my food. After all, I had a generous plateful. I felt obligated to say something, to smooth over the situation, to make everything better.
“Please!” I said, and my voice was twice as loud as it should have been. “Have my fries! Eat them all!”
I pushed the plate toward him and looked down, suddenly all too aware of my shapeless sweatshirt, covering up my shapeless body, hiding the shapeless blob that I’d become in the past year. Tears burned behind my eyes, and I blinked furiously to keep from shedding them. I tried to swallow away the searing mixture of embarrassment and shame, of outright rage that coated the back of my throat.
I was furious. Mike should have told me that it wasn’t just us cast members here. It wasn’t just the Romeo and Juliet crowd hanging out in the back room. He knew me. He knew what this encounter would mean to me.
I stared at my burger and tried to remember how I had ever enjoyed fried onions and mushrooms—right now, they looked like noxious slime, oozing from beneath the bun. Somehow, I pasted a smile on my lips and said to Drew, “Really! I mean it! Have all the fries you’d like! I couldn’t eat another one! Please!” I shoved the plate in front of him, eager to get as far from it as possible.
I wasn’t lying. The plate of food was ruined. I wasn’t going to touch them. I might never eat at Mike’s again.
And TEWSBU laughed. He laughed in that easy, confident way that I had admired so many times. He laughed like a carefully calculated director, like a master craftsman who was used to having the attention of everyone in the room. He laughed like a man who pitied the less fortunate. “I didn’t think you’d actually share your food. Give it away, maybe, but never share. It’s nice to know that some things never change.”
I pushed back from the table and scrambled to my feet, suddenly wondering if I could keep down the few bites of late lunch that I’d managed to swallow before everything had collapsed around me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw John jump up, as well. Smart man. He recognized a madwoman when she was flailing next to him. Like the laid-back cowboy he resembled, John was clearly ready to protect his herd, to keep the cast safe from my insanity.
Now that everyone was staring at me, I became completely self-conscious. These people—the cast that I was going to live with, eat with, drink with for the next three months—they were staring at me like I was some kind of selfish, hoarding freak.
They’d all made the connection now, even the ones who hadn’t realized exactly who I was, who hadn’t remembered year-old gossip when we went around the circle the day before, reciting our names. But now they all knew. Now they could all phone up their friends, text messages to actors they’d met three, four, five shows back. They had a story to tell. I could see them storing away this little circus scene for the next time they needed to pity a fellow actor—a character—on stage.
And beneath that pity, on a few of the faces, the final emotion on the hit parade—a tiny curl of disgust. Disgust at a person who didn’t fit into their mold of Body Beautiful, into the self-conscious, size-zero vision of perfection that so many cast members strived for.
I couldn’t look at Drew, couldn’t force myself to see how his face had changed. I couldn’t make myself recognize the jagged shards of the flirtation that had seemed so natural only a few moments before, the easy, silly chatter that had just seemed right.
I had to get out of there. I had to get away from Drew, away from the cast, away from TEWSBU, away from my past.
I jumped back from the table so fast that I knocked over my chair. I fumbled for it at the same time that John did. We nearly bumped heads, and he reached out a hand to steady me, saying, “Easy, Franklin.”
I leaped away as if I’d been stung, my eyes starting to burn from my concentrated effort not to blink. I scrambled for the straps of my backpack and turned on my heel, ducking under the velvet curtain before my flight unlocked everyone else, set them free to move, to speak, to laugh.
“Kira!” Mike called as I burst into the front room.
“Gotta go, Mike,” I said, with too much energy. I fumbled in my pocket, found a crumpled bill, looked down just long enough to realize it was a twenty. “Thanks. Keep the change. It’s been way too long.”
And then I was bursting through the front door, bulling down the sidewalk, gulping in great breaths of freezing air, and trying to remember what it had been like before TEWSBU had ruined every last thing in my life.
CHAPTER 7
SIX HOURS LATER, I WAS ENSCONCED ON THE LIVING room couch, doing my best to drown—er, feast—my sorrows. I had changed out of my stage manager sweats into my home layabout clothes, a disreputable flannel robe that any normal person would have burned half a lifetime ago and a pair of enormous fluffy slippers that had once been red. I had my hair pulled back in a ponytail that was messier than anything Jennifer Galland had ever considered wearing, and it certainly wasn’t flopping around in a cute counterpoint to whatever I was thinking.
I was studiously scraping the bottom of a pint of ice cream. Foolish me—I had thought that I would never eat another bite when I’d fled Mephisto’s in shame. Like clockwork, though, my belly had started to rumble at seven o’clock, refusing to take a microwaved cup of frozen broccoli as an answer.
I had been forced to reach for the hard stuff: Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk. This was an emergency, after all.
I knew from personal experience that some people (Read: My perfect housemate, Jules) could make a pint of ice cream last for an entire month. Every night, after she finished her well-balanced dinner (consisting mostly of leafy greens, with small portions of lean protein and the occasional ounce or two of whole grains), she would permit herself a single spoonful. If one of the delectable “super fudge chunks” lodged on the edge of her spoon, she counted that in her night’s allotment, skimping on smooth chocolate ice cream to make up for the candy treat.
Sometimes, I hated Jules.
For me, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s was a single serving.
Feeling a little sick to my stomach, and a lot sick at heart, I huddled deeper into my robe. I was fumbling wanly for the TV remote between the sofa cushions when Jules waltzed out of her bedroom, wearing a tiny black dress that barely covered half of her erogenous zones. She’d pulled her hair into a smooth updo. I knew that she was wearing makeup, but I couldn’t see where her naturally flawless features ended and M•A•C began. I vaguely recalled that she and Justin were going to some gallery opening, the last event on their social calendar before they headed out to California.
She paused in front of me. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, burrowing deeper into my flannel cave.
“You don’t look fine.”
I bit off a sharp reply. I wanted sympathy, not badgering. “I will be fine,” I amended.
Jules perched on the arm of the couch. “You do know that getting out of that relationship was the best thing you ever could have done, don’t you?”
“Obviously,” I said, sighing and staring down at my pitiful self. I had let a dollop of ice cream slip off my spoon sometime during my administration of frozen pain medication. The chocolate stain added character to my robe.
“Seriously,” Jules said, shaking her head with a vehemence that would have led to a French twist disaster for an ordinary human woman. “We’ve been through this about a million times. You are way too good for that smarmy, superior jerk. You would have been miserable if you’d gone through with the wedding. You would have hated yourself
every single morning that he skated off to his production, taking the lead over every single one of yours.”
“I would have learned to deal with the misery,” I grumbled, knowing that I was acting like a two-year-old.
“Yeah,” Jules said. “You deal with misery really well.” She bent down and scooped up my empty ice cream carton. “If you were still with him, you’d never have been able to take the job at the Landmark.”
“I would have!” I argued. Teel would have found a way for me to take the Landmark job. But I couldn’t tell Jules about Teel.
Jules grimaced. “That man’s career was too ‘important’ for the bastard to make time for your wedding. Do you honestly think he would change travel plans or casting calls or anything else, just because you landed your dream job? Come on, Kira. It’s time to pick yourself up. Get back on the horse.”
Unexpectedly, I pictured John McRae, with his cowboy slouch and his drawl designed to calm a frantic bronco. “I hate horses,” I said sulkily, pulling my hands up into the sleeves of my dilapidated robe. “The only time my father took me to a petting zoo, the pony ate my sweater.”
Jules sighed in exasperation, then stalked into the kitchen, perfectly stable on heels that made my arches ache just to look at them. By the time she came back from disposing of my comfort food remains, I had pulled the lapels of my robe up to my chin. She shook her head as she stared at me. “Seriously, Kira. Do you want me to stay home with you?”
What good would that do? We’d both sit on the couch and watch the latest episodes of some grating reality show. I would ignore the stupid television as I drowned in guilt, knowing that I’d kept my best friend and housemate from yet-another-perfect-soiree with Justin-the-perfect-man at wherever-the-perfect-locale, where Jules would have eaten three bites of whatever-the-perfect-food that whoever-the-perfect-hostess was serving.