by Mindy Klasky
“What the hell are you doing? We’re supposed to be at rehearsal!”
“They won’t miss us.” The burly guy cocked his head, as if he heard something in the distance. He scratched at his freckled nose. “The stream is running high in the Garden,” he said. “You can hear it from here. There must have been a lot of rain lately. Look how much the vines have grown!”
I refused to stare at nothing, refused to pretend that I could see some monsoon-inspired overgrowth in my genie’s invisible happy place. Instead, I grumbled, even though I knew the answer. “How could they not miss us? We just disappeared in front of them!”
“We’ve been through this before. Even though you refuse to acknowledge it, the Garden exists outside their time, outside their space. We could stay forever, and they wouldn’t be any wiser. Not that we’d want to stay today, with thunder coming in like that.”
“What thunder?” I had heard absolutely nothing. In fact, even Teel’s voice was muffled, as if my ears were stuffed with cotton balls.
He blinked. “You don’t hear that at all? You didn’t just see that flash of lightning?”
My exasperation gave way to a gnawing twist of curiosity. Would a rainstorm drench Teel and leave me completely dry? Before I could speculate further, my electrician genie brandished his clipboard at me. He poised his pen as if he were ready to check off some very important box on his master cover sheet. “So? Ready to go with your third wish?”
“I told you! I’ll ask when I’m good and ready!”
“I just thought that you might have forgotten—”
“Not likely,” I growled, “with you throwing yourself around rehearsal every day.”
He flinched, and I thought that my words might have sunk home. Before I could relish the victory, maybe even make him back off on the sexpot intern bit, a rapturous smile spread across his face. “Can you smell that? Rain on fresh-turned earth. Is there anything better?”
“You’re nuts,” I muttered. I knew the smell that he meant. In my world, though, it was the middle of winter.
I realized that I was jealous of him, jealous of his magical senses. Jealous of his ability to sense the Garden.
“Not nuts,” he said, an appealing earnestness shining through his freckled features. “Just eager to get inside. To get into the Garden, where I belong. Me and all the other genies who’ve earned a visit.”
Grudgingly, I folded my arms across my chest. “Well, I’m not ready to help yet. And dragging me here every other day isn’t going to make me decide any faster.” I knew that I sounded petulant, but I felt pressured, confined. The gray nothingness around me was oppressive.
“I just thought that if you could see it, if you could understand what it means to me…” There was honest wistfulness in his voice, true longing in his clear blue eyes.
“I can’t, though,” I said. “Teel, you have to promise that you’ll leave me alone between wishes. Promise that you’ll let me make up my mind. You can’t keep bringing me here. I’m never going to see what you’re talking about, to smell it, to hear it.”
“If you could…” His tenor almost cracked with longing.
I was embarrassed to hear his desire so plainly. “I can’t,” I said, my voice harsher than I meant for it to be. “Promise, Teel. Don’t bring me here again.”
He stared into the distance, and I knew that he was looking at dazzling flowers, listening to a lyrical stream, tracking the progress of the invisible storm. He swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I thought that I could share all of this with you, help you to understand who I am. Who all genies are.”
I shook my head.
He sighed and said, “All right, then. I promise.”
Sadly, as if he’d just learned of a traumatic death in his family, Teel raised his blunt-fingered hand to his ear. He tugged twice.
And we were back in the rehearsal room.
Back with Drew and Bill. Back with Teel dressed like an extra from Sluts on Parade. I started to exclaim, to shout out in amazement, but Teel merely spared me a sly grin and a wink. Smiling broadly, she greeted Bill with an air kiss, then gave Drew a quick hug. I glared daggers at her, all goodwill engendered in the invisible Garden completely dissipated.
Teel was utterly oblivious. I was trying to figure out what I could say, how I could put “my intern” to work—preferably in another building—when Bill barked, “Where the hell is Jennifer? She was supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago. Kira, will you give her a call?”
Give her a call. Well, that was a brutal return to my reality. Bill wanted me to punch Jennifer’s phone number into my cell, quickly and efficiently. Without delay. From memory, as I had boasted to Drew that I could do, less than an hour before. I pasted on a sickly smile. “Sure,” I said. “Let me just grab my phone.”
I fumbled in my pants pocket, knowing it wasn’t there. I reached into the side section of my backpack, pushing around the contents with an earnest determination, willing Jennifer to walk through the door before I could be proven a liar. “I think you put it in the main part,” Drew said helpfully.
Great. At least he’d been paying attention to my every move. I plunged my hand in, shoved around the junk inside, and finally decided to find the phone. I took it out, flipped it open, flashed another smile at the men, this one more desperate. I wondered if I could point behind them, shout, “Look! Over there!” as I excavated my phone list and snuck a look.
Fat chance.
Just before I tried a one-in-a-trillion guess, Jennifer burst through the lobby door. “I am so sorry!” she was saying before she even made it into the rehearsal room. “My car battery died, and I had to wait for a friend to pick me up!”
Bill shook his head in disgust, but he settled for one more glance at his imaginary watch before starting to lead the actors in some physical warm-ups. Not surprisingly, Teel joined in with Drew and Jennifer.
Bill was always partial to yoga stretches—a few Cows here, a few Cats there, working out the kinks in everyone’s backs as they crouched on all fours. In apparent deference to the morning’s high tension, he coached them through some Warrior poses as well, then had them rest in Downward-Facing Dog. I was grateful that I wasn’t part of the activity; even though Teel had carved thirty pounds off my ass, I didn’t particularly want to be shoving it up in the air.
I caught Bill studying Jennifer’s and Teel’s forms, cocking his head to one side. I couldn’t really criticize him, though. I’d made sure to take a prime viewing spot of Drew’s exercises myself. It was my responsibility, I thought beatifically. If anyone overstretched and strained a muscle, I needed to be ready with the first aid supplies in my bag.
Next came the vocal exercises, tongue twisters designed to get lips and throat ready for the complexity of Elizabethan speech. Lovely lemon liniment. She stood on the balcony inexplicably mimicking him hiccuping. Which witch wished which wicked wish? Red leather yellow leather. I knew each of the precisely enunciated sentences so well that they formed the soundtrack to my dreams.
Only after we had retired a speed round of girl gargoyle, guy gargoyle did Bill declare us ready to work with the text. This was a crucial scene, he explained. This was the crux of the romance between Romeo and Juliet, the touchstone of romantic love for centuries of Western culture.
Jennifer took careful notes as Bill described the way a man would view the scene. She caught her tongue between her perfect teeth, nodding dutifully as Bill explained that when Romeo mentioned stars, he really meant sex. When Romeo talked about the moon, he was referring to sex again. When Romeo finally brought himself to mention Juliet’s cheeks, he wasn’t referring to her face, not at all. Not when he’d just spent ten lines talking about the fullness of the moon.
John returned at the tail end (no pun intended) of Bill’s exposition. He’d apparently worked off his frustration; he was back to playing the laconic cowboy. He leaned against the wall beside the door, crossing his hands over his chest and making a show out of not interrupting Bill. He was
chewing on a toothpick, moving the tiny stick up and down in the corner of his mouth. If he’d had a ten-gallon hat, he could have passed for a wranglin’ man, just arrived from the Santa Fe Trail.
Bill concluded in a booming voice: “Sex, Jennifer! The entire speech is about sex! Romeo wants to get in Juliet’s pants.”
Jennifer nodded earnestly and said, “Let me see what I can do.”
“Get a bag first.” Bill nodded toward me, but I was already handing her a Hefty bag, with convenient holes already cut for her head and arms.
Drew took his, as well, nodding as enthusiastically as if I were handing him a cup of beer just pumped from a keg. I hadn’t cut the hole for his head quite large enough, though, and he got stuck partway through. “Just a second!” I said, raising my fingers to rip the opening a little wider. My hands brushed across his hair, and I felt a thrill almost as electric as the ones that flashed through Teel’s magic. Drew emerged with a rogue’s smile on his face. “Hey, dude. There’s something kinky about all this black plastic,” he whispered, winking at me.
Knocked speechless, I resorted to smoothing the bag over his shoulders. His broad shoulders. His firm, virile, remarkably attractive shoulders.
I almost forgot that there were four other people in the room.
“Are you ready?” Bill asked dryly. I leaped back, picking up my script notebook as if it were a charm against the devil. As I scrambled for my pen, Bill nodded. “Okay, Jennifer. Go ahead.” He sat back like a wiry potentate, rubbing a hand across his bald skull in eager anticipation of the fruits of his creation.
Jennifer took a few steps around the room. She lengthened her stride as she walked, drooping her right shoulder. She curved her hand toward her side, slouching along as if she was just waiting to give some dap to her homeboys. When she completed one full circuit, she shot out her left hip and looked up, squinting as if she could barely make out Juliet’s manhole-cover window in the gloom of the underworld. “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?”
There was a soft snort by the door. I looked up to see that John was smothering his amused reaction with his hand, barely remembering to rescue his toothpick from the corner of his lips. “Sorry,” he mouthed to me, and shrugged. The actors were so intent on the scene that they hadn’t noticed.
“No, no, no,” Bill was saying. “You want Juliet. There’s nothing cerebral about this. Nothing noble or beautiful or touching. Lust, that’s what I want to see.”
Jennifer nodded, chewing on her lip. She took another lap around the room to get into character, and by the time she stood in front of the nonexistent manhole cover the entire room was silent, frozen with expectation—horrified expectation for some of us. “But, soft!” Jennifer brayed, sounding like a cross between John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.
“No!” Bill interrupted. “Lust, Romeo! You want to hump her! You’re horny!”
This time, John actually laughed out loud; I couldn’t have been the only one who heard his guffaws before they turned into a cough. Jennifer swallowed a furious look of despair and groped beneath her trash bag, clutching at her crotch and tugging her jeans with pit bull aggression. “But, soft!” she grunted. “What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!”
“Yes!” Bill exploded. “Exactly! Pure animal attraction.” He looked around wildly. “Teel! Teel! Ah, there you are. Now, what would Juliet think when she hears this sort of line? How would a woman feel?”
I wanted to roll my eyes. If Bill only knew Teel’s true nature, he wouldn’t be panting after her bare midriff quite so blatantly. He’d never let her be the voice of female reason, if he’d seen Electrician-Teel or Chef-Teel or Geek-Boy-Teel. Definitely not if he’d seen Disco-King-Teel.
But I had to admit, my genie played this role to a tee. “She’s frightened,” Teel said. “Overwhelmed.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, and her lips quirked into a tiny smile as she looked at the flames locked around her wrist. “Excited.”
Drew leaned closer to hear her last word. “Excited?” he repeated. “Dude!” He clearly had not expected that.
Teel nodded and stretched, as if she were trying to grasp the perfect words out of thin air. I thought she was going to sink her talons into Drew. “There’s something about that power, about the demands that Romeo is making. They’re a total…turn-on.” She barely breathed the last two syllables.
Great. Perfect. My perceptive genie had just turned Shakespeare’s most romantic female lead into Playboy’s Miss February.
I spluttered, trying to figure out how to get this rehearsal out of the gutter. Couldn’t Drew and Bill see that Teel was toying with them? Couldn’t they recognize that she was a bored, manipulative woman, intent on dragging out every seductive stereotype ever imagined by an oversexed teenage boy?
I had to say something, do something, throw something across the room, if only to bring the rehearsal back to a basic level of human decency. A basic level of sanity.
John must have agreed, because he chose that moment to retrieve his drawings. He made an elaborate show of crossing the room quietly, stopping just short of tiptoeing around the perimeter in pantomime. His rangy frame, of course, drew everyone’s attention. He stopped, halfway to the table, and shrugged elaborately. “Damn. I didn’t mean to break things up.”
Fortunately, that interruption was enough to bring everyone back to their senses. Jennifer asked for a five-minute break to think about her motivation for the rest of her lines. Bill lowered his head and rolled his shoulders, shaking out his arms as if he’d just wrestled the Minotaur into submission. Teel stood in the middle of the room, blinking her absurdly outlined eyes, the picture of tarted-up innocence.
And Drew looked around like a man awakening from a dream. He swallowed hard and stumbled toward a chair, jumping almost a foot into the air when a huge spark leaped from his fingers to the metal frame.
“Static electricity,” John said as Drew yelped and shook his hand. “It’s the worst damn thing about winter up here. Of course, those plastic bags don’t make it any better. They come out of the box already charged.”
I narrowed my eyes and glared at Teel. There must have been more to her sexual innuendo than even I had suspected. She must be purposely spicing things up with her magical powers. What had she told me when she’d begged for permission to come to rehearsal? She was bored, waiting for me to make a wish? Obviously, playing with Drew Myers had become an antidote to her boredom.
To her credit, she met my gaze and shrugged, the picture of innocence. I said to no one in particular, “I’ll bring in a humidifier tomorrow. That should help.”
John nodded. “Can’t hurt, with all the extra metal on the set. We can set up a couple backstage.”
Earlier, those words would have sounded like an invitation to battle with Bill. They would have heightened the tension in the room, upped the ante. Now, though, our brilliant director only nodded. His voice was firm, paternal, as he said, “I know you’re still not sold on this yet, John. But I can see it in my mind. I’ll work harder, I promise, so that you can share just what it is I’m seeing. I’ll get you to believe me, to understand.”
And right then? In that one second?
I did believe him. I understood. Even with—especially with—the crazy gender shift, even with the darkness, the gloom, the slippery, sibilant sewers that Bill thrived on, I believed him.
After all, anyone could do an ordinary Romeo and Juliet. Fox Hill could have done an ordinary Romeo and Juliet. The Landmark was different. The Landmark was special. Our show would be talked about for ages.
I was so supercharged from my sudden rush of confidence, from my remembering that this production was what I’d always wanted, what I’d always hoped to achieve in the theater, that I almost missed Teel sauntering over to Drew. She made an elaborate show of reaching into her jeans and digging something out of her too-tight pocket.
“Oh, Drew,” she said, in a voice that sounded like it was just for him
. A quick tingle up my arm, though, let me know that she was broadcasting her words through magic. She meant for me to overhear. “I meant to tell you right when I got here. I must have picked up your cell phone by mistake yesterday. I don’t know how that could have happened.” She giggled, sounding like a more-sexual Paris Hilton. “My bad!”
She took her time dropping it into his outstretched hand, making sure that her fingers touched his. I didn’t even know if he was aware of his movement when he stepped closer to her, when he brushed against her too-tight T-shirt. When he thanked her, she tossed her head back and laughed, raising her hand to stroke her throat. I watched her tattooed flames glitter, matched by a suggestive jangle along the edges of my own tattoo.
A different fire, a hotter one, kindled in my belly. By the time Drew suggested they grab a bite to eat, my vision was actually sparking with anger.
Teel looked over her shoulder as they left the room. She caught my eye and mouthed, “Don’t wait up!”
I barely remembered not to launch myself across the room and strangle her then and there.
CHAPTER 11
I HAD TO WAIT HOURS FOR JULES AND MADDY TO GO to bed that night. They wanted to play a game of Scrabble. Then they wanted to watch Law & Order; an old friend was playing the corpse in the first scene. To commemorate the role, Maddy popped a batch of kettle corn in the microwave.
I have never liked kettle corn. It’s dishonest. It smells like popcorn while it’s popping, and it looks totally ordinary in the serving bowl. But when I taste it, it has a hint of sweet beneath the salt, a dessert flavor that just doesn’t belong. Nevertheless, I took a handful, just to be sociable, and I ate the kernels one by one. I successfully drew out my serving, so that Maddy and Jules had emptied the bowl by the time I was done.