All the Things You Are

by Declan Hughes

  Oh yes, she had worked at it all right. She just hadn’t stuck with it. The theater was like a marriage, and you had to honor it in good times and in bad, for better or worse, in sickness and health all the dada-da-da. There were so many fine actors who’d only started to get the breaks in their thirties, even their forties. So many in Chicago, and more than a few of them took the time to tell her they’d noticed her and admired her work, made a point of encouraging her to keep her nerve. To stick with it.

  But she was tired of coming second best, tired of blaming it all on luck. She was tired of dive bars and damp apartments and nothing on the horizon but hope. She was tired of smiling tightly as her friends with careers in law or medicine or finance began to settle down and have children and buy property when she still found making the rent a monthly roller coaster. The limit came when the boy-wonder director of a new Uncle Vanya told her they’d be looking to cast Sonya a little younger for this production. She was a week past twenty-eight. That night, she called Danny Brogan and cried down the phone. And Danny said, ‘You know I’m here. I’ve been waiting. Come home.’

  Home meaning Madison, Wisconsin. Madtown itself: ‘Sixty square miles surrounded by reality.’ They had met at UW, the University of Wisconsin, on their first day as undergraduates. Got drunk their second night. Going together within the week. They were the kind of couple who held hands in lectures, the kind of couple that united a class of freshmen, hitherto strangers, in the sweet complicity of eye-rolling revulsion. They even inspired a headline in the fledgling Onion newspaper, and gamely posed for a photograph, playing up the lovestruck sap factor: Death Penalty to be Reintroduced for Icky Undergraduate Romances: Area Man says, ‘I’ll flick the switch myself.’ They bonded over a love of thirties and forties retro. They drank cocktails and listened to swing and bebop and dressed in thrift-store duds and generally carried on like they were starring in their own black-and-white movie, which they kind of were. They both acted in the University Theater, Danny for the fun of it, Claire with increasing dedication, and together, memorably, in their penultimate year, as the lovers in Congreve’s restoration comedy The Way of the World, given a screwball comedy/Art Deco treatment (Claire’s idea).

  That was the show that changed everything. Word spread about a brilliant production of a rarely staged play, and about Claire, and People From Chicago came down to see it, people from Steppenwolf and the Goodman and Second City, and they gave Claire their cards and their numbers and told her she had a future on the stage, and any lingering doubts Claire may have had about her talent or her path were set aside. Danny got a few cards and numbers as well, but if he used them at all, it was only to fire up another joint. And that was the way things would go. In their graduation year, Claire worked and dreamed of the life to come, acting and directing and visiting Chicago at weekends, inhabiting the world of the theater as if she were already a part of it, while Danny took a sidetrack into an all-male world of beer and brats and bongs, of Badgers games and all-night Playstation marathons.

  Had he already been preparing himself for the bust-up? She had tried to talk to him about the future, but he refused to engage. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, but she didn’t want to get married at twenty-one, and she didn’t want to stay in Madison, and she didn’t want him in Chicago while she was trying to make a go of things. Had he known all along that she was pulling away? Was dwindling into a stoner and a slacker simply a way of protecting himself? After all, his future was mapped out: his father was already a sick man, and Brogan’s Bar was Danny’s to manage whenever he was ready, or when his dad dropped dead, whichever came first. Sometimes he had spoken of other plans, but only half-heartedly: deep down, she knew that’s what he was going to do and so did he. He was older than her by eight years, and had learned the ropes at Brogan’s before he went to UW, and he would run it when he left: it was just the way things were. When the time came, they made love one last time, and she cried, and so did he, and he saw her off at the bus stop by the Union. On the bus to Chicago, she felt like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders, and then guilty for feeling that way, and finally relieved at the lightness – the lightness, even in fear, when the past is past and the future all there is.

  They’re passing through downtown now, heading west, the houses and storefronts festooned with Halloween pumpkins and lanterns, witches and ghosts and ghouls. Stopped at the lights on Gorham at State, she sees students queuing in the brightly lit Jamba Juice on the corner, and more ambling along the street. Used to be, in her early thirties, Claire liked living in a college town, liked the sense of energy. She looked young for her age then, even after the kids, still got carded in bars. She maybe identified with the students, as if passing for one meant somehow she was going to beat the clock. Now she was in her fortieth year, and felt the opposite: their presence was a sting and a reproach, a constant reminder that she was headed in one direction only, and that a lot of the things she’d hoped for in life – all that creativity and self-expression, to take one small example – simply hadn’t happened, and almost certainly weren’t going to, and all she was doing now was running out of time.

  She looks at the students. Almost everyone is wearing at least one plaid item, mostly red plaid, the boys shirts and coats, the girls scarves and skirts. Is plaid just always in fashion these days? Or is it a Mid-West thing, a Madison thing? The red is a Wisconsin thing, of course, a sports thing, for the Badgers. Everyone wore plaid twenty years ago as well, although rarely did they wear skirts that short. Claire did though, when she tired of retro chic: a tiny red tartan kilt, punk-rock style, with torn black hose and motorcycle boots. Claire wants to wear a skirt that short now. She still has the legs. Women her age wear them. But they look wrong. They look, not quite desperate, but kind of angry, defying you to criticize them, to tell them they’re not twenty-two any more, when it’s obvious they aren’t. They look nuts. Good luck to them. But she can’t do it. She can’t do it, but she can’t rest easy about not permitting herself to do it. Looking at these girls heading up State Street, she knows she should be thinking of Barbara and Irene, and how in no time at all they will be at university, that this will be them in a mere few years. She knows that’s where her focus should be, that you have children to cushion the blow of aging in so many different ways. She knows how she should feel. But she doesn’t feel that way. She looks at the girl with the long legs and the red plaid mini-skirt and thinks, that’s still me, and knows it isn’t, and wants to scream. As the cab crosses State, the college kids stroll on up the street, the illuminated Capitol dome seeming to hover above them, splashes of red shimmering in the falling darkness, like the flashes she gets behind her eyes when sleep won’t come.

  Barbara and Irene, Barbara and Irene, Barbara and Irene. They’ll be waiting for her – not quite the way they waited when they were six and four, say, but still. She hasn’t even spoken to them for a week, nor to Danny; they agreed, no phone contact. Or at least, she agreed with herself, and he agreed to agree with her. He had her hotel number in case of emergencies, a Kimpton in the Loop, the something or other, Allegro? She wants to call the girls now, but her cell ran out of juice on the Tuesday and she didn’t bring her charger. She goes into the Macy’s bag she has their stuff in, dresses and tops and accessories, some J. Crew, some A & F, vampire costumes she got in a Halloween store, too much, really, but it’s been a week and she wants to spoil them. Checking now to see if it’s all there, her hand closes on a card and she pulls it out, thinking it’s a receipt and wanting to put it in her bag in case anything needs to be returned.

  It’s not a receipt.

  On the envelope is her name, Claire Taylor.

  In Paul Casey’s handwriting.

  Paul Casey, her ex.

  Whom she had not intended to meet, had not contacted, but who showed up on the first night in the Old Town Ale House with all the old crowd. Just like she kind of knew he would.

  What she didn’t know was that he’d be divorced. No kids. And a
little quieter, a little more somber, as if life had dealt him a setback or two. A little silver through that dark hair, a few lines creasing the pale milky skin, a couple shadows in those vivid blue eyes. Haunted, that’s how he had always looked, or so she remembered, like an English romantic poet who would die young; haunted even more so now, with a melancholy that finally seemed earned.

  She can feel the heat in her face now. What if Danny had found the card? Or one of the girls? What would she have said? She hadn’t planned to mention even seeing Paul to Danny. She was trying to avoid mentioning it to herself.

  When had Paul put that in there? In the bar, after Macy’s?

  Or later, in the … or later?

  She can’t look at it now. She stuffs it inside her purse and tries to bring her breathing back inside the range appropriate to a wife heading home to her family. The calm, steady, deliberate breathing of a woman who has settled, and is happy with her choices. A week ago, the way she saw it, no question: she had settled. Whether she was happy or not, she didn’t want to say. Maybe it would have been futile to ask.

  She doesn’t see it that way any more. The way she sees it now, she’s been given, not an actual second chance, but maybe the glimpse of one. Is she going to take it? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do. She doesn’t know what to think. But she thinks she knows what she feels. It’s been a long time since she felt it. That stirring in her stomach, the flutter in her heart, the sudden bursts of laughter and exhalations of breath and random idiotic announcements, at what? At nothing? Not nothing, no. At a feeling. What she feels is suspiciously like happiness. The kind of happiness she didn’t think she’d ever feel again.

  A Cottage for Sale

  The cab driver has long gray hair in a plait and silver sleeper rings in both ears, a classic Willy Street sixties survivor, or casualty, take your pick. He’s already asked for extra directions, as if Madison is some sprawling metropolis and not a city of under a quarter million people, and he’s made his ritual little dig about the upscale West Side, as if it’s all Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive over here and not the American Mid-West 101. Although Claire doesn’t exactly live in the 101 tract, but on a sparsely inhabited tree-lined road in the heart of the UW Arboretum. The car pulls up outside the black iron gates of the old house. Claire doesn’t have her remote with her, so she gets out of the cab to open them by hand. The driver gets out too.

  ‘There’s a chain around it,’ he says.

  The approach light clicks on. She’s never seen the heavy link chain before. A haunted house game the girls were playing, maybe. There’s no padlock, and it’s easily removed. She can see the lights of the house up the drive. The night air is crisp and refreshing after a day of hotels and flights and taxis, and the walk will do her good. She pays the driver and he gets her bag out of the trunk, then looks up and down the narrow, deserted road, the inky darkness almost glossy, like paint, a fragment of moon glowing dull, as if behind a veil.

  ‘You sure about this?’ he says.

  ‘Sure about what? You think I don’t know where I live?’ Claire points up the drive. ‘Look, the house lights are on.’

  ‘I didn’t know there were houses out here.’

  ‘Just little old us.’

  The driver shrugs and smiles.

  ‘Well, you know where you’re going. No need to worry.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Claire says, smiling herself, suddenly glad to be safe home. And as she walks up the drive towards the welcoming lights of her hundred-year-old Queen Anne house, her fairytale house with its turrets and towers, she shakes her head a couple of times and actually says ‘No!’ out loud, followed by ‘Nothing!’ and ‘No problem!’ and ‘Fine, thank you!’ – not at the prospect before her but to banish what has just been, whatever it was, whatever Paul put in that damn card. It’s like she slipped and fell in the street and found her feet immediately and is marching on undaunted, daring anyone to question or commiserate, trying hard not to stumble again. Whatever happened in Chicago, stays in Chicago. That’s the official version now. Happiness? Jesus. She’s not a teenager any more. So she feels guilty. That’s her problem; don’t make it Danny’s, let alone the girls’. She’s nothing to feel guilty about anyway, not really. Not really. No problem, no problem!

  The first glimmer she has is Mr Smith doesn’t bark when she turns her key. Normally, he brings the house down at the merest hint of a visitor, not angrily but with excitement. He should have started when he heard her footfall on the porch, or when she started talking to herself. But there isn’t a sound, not a scratch of his paws.

  ‘Hey, honey, I’m home!’ she says, with sitcom brightness, as she pushes the door open. If she had known that nothing would ever be the same again from this moment on, maybe she would have chosen her words with less irony. But change so often comes without warning, like the secret policeman’s dawn knock, and we rarely have our faces fixed or our stories straight to greet it.

  The extent of what has happened is not so apparent in the hall, apart from the marks on the wallpaper where all the paintings have been removed, and the fact that the long red Ikea table that ran along one wall is gone. It’s when she leaves her bag down and moves into the living room – she remembers later feeling as if she was on castors, so involuntarily, so inexorably was she drawn in search of what’s no longer there. No battered old brown leather three-piece suite that they know is past its best but can’t bear to get rid of for sentimental reasons. No TV, no books, no bookshelves, no rugs on the floor, no art on the walls. Through to the dining room, and it’s as bare: the heavy-legged mahogany Chippendale table and matching chairs Danny insisted on keeping from his grandfather’s time are gone, as is everything else. Up the stairs, and yes, there it is, whatever it is, gone: the beds, the closets emptied, the girls’ toys and books and games, the rugs, the linen, gone, all gone, the lampshades.

  She’s standing on the landing, empty rooms on either side of her, exposed gables above, the arched entrance to the tower ahead. She’s never seen the house like this. When they moved in, Danny’s sister Donna had been living here; before that, it was the family home, back through Danny’s grandfather. Sure, they – she – redecorated, stripped walls and polished floorboards and flung out dumpster loads of trash, but one room at a time. How hard she had fought to make their mark on it all, replacing heavy drapes with blinds, bulky old Victorian furniture with contemporary pieces, little by little working to open it up and modernize, to lay the ancestral ghosts and make it theirs, make it hers. Now it’s bare throughout, as if she has never lived here at all, as if no one has. In Chicago a day, mere hours ago, she found herself daring to wonder what it might be like to break free of what held her. Now it feels as if she made a wish, and it’s come true, and all she wants is what she has lost.

  In the bathroom, the empty bathroom, she sits at the edge of the tub, breathing deeply, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ, over and over again. Claire is a lapsed Catholic, which means she isn’t really religious, or hasn’t been for some time, but Jesus Christ Almighty, what the fuck is going on? She leans a hand on the mirrored door of a cabinet mounted above the bath, and it snaps open, and Claire almost cries with relief to see it full of stuff, their stuff, tins and tubs of talcum powder and Vaseline and calamine lotion and athlete’s foot spray – proof, precious proof, that she hasn’t been sucked into some parallel universe. And then, when she sees the Sponge Bob Band-Aids and the Colgate Smiles toothpaste and the Sure Girl deodorant Barbara suddenly, urgently needed about six months ago when her body started to change, Claire does cry. Where is Danny? Where has he taken her girls? Why is the house cleaned out?

  Minutes pass; she doesn’t know how many. She wipes her eyes, mascara and eyeshadow mackerel staining the backs of her hands. She’s shivering. She needs to call someone: Danny, her friend Dee, the cops. She goes back into her bedroom. No phone. No phone downstairs in the hall either. They took the phones. Who would take the phones? They took the phones. That’s a
line from something. Don’t think like that, not everything is a line from something. Back upstairs, she opens the study at the base of the tower. Her cell-phone charger should be in the desk drawer. Should be, and would be, if there was still a desk there, Jesus. She casts around the bare room, the floorboards dusted with dead bugs and plaster crumbs where cables were ripped from the wall, the walls seamed with bookcase shadows, the spiral staircase ascending to the upper level.

  Finally her eye lands on something, on the mantelpiece and above it, two actual objects, watch closely now. The first thing is a picture, a photograph, of her and Danny in thirties evening clothes in The Way of the World. They played the leads, Mirabell and Millamant, and the photo was taken during their love scene, when, having agreed to marry, they make promises to and demands of each other for the future. The second thing is a porcelain statuette of two lovers in old-fashioned costume in some kind of pastoral setting, maybe a shepherd and shepherdess, they’ve never been sure, Danny got it made to resemble the one in The Palm Beach Story, one of their favorite movies. How it worked in the film was Claudette Colbert, who is looking to snare a rich husband, tells Joel McCrea, the husband whom she still loves but who can’t seem to make enough money to keep her, that as long as the ornament stands intact on the mantlepiece, he’ll have nothing to reproach her with. She won’t have strayed. Everything will be as it was.

  Claire slides down the wall and comes to rest on the dusty boards by a phone socket. They took the phones. Glengarry, Glen Ross, that’s what it’s from – shut up Claire. Can’t she for once feel a thing directly, without reference to anything else, especially not a quotation from a play? ‘Shakespeare is full of quotations.’ Shut up shut up shut up. She needs to think, needs to do something … but she just sits there on the floor in the tower and stares at the porcelain lovers, and slowly, steadily, starts to feel calmer. Whatever has happened – and evidently it involves a removals firm packing up the entire contents of their home and taking them away, and her husband and daughters disappearing – Danny is letting her know it’s all right. There’s nothing to worry about. He’s always been able to make her feel like this. She knows that’s part of why she married him: because a life based on chance and uncertainty had spooked her, she craved security, and she felt safe in Danny’s arms. Danny is letting her know it’s all right. But why in such a cryptic way? There must be something else, some kind of message. Her laptop. She remembers him saying, ‘Take your laptop, restaurant reservations, flights, the weather,’ but she didn’t want to. ‘I can do it all on my phone,’ she said. And then deliberately left her charger behind. She wanted to be out of reach. She wanted – didn’t she – to be in situations where her husband simply couldn’t get in touch. Now her phone is dead and her laptop is gone and she can’t get in touch with her husband.