Harmony

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  The intercom blared the Crossroads rehearsal: deep male voices proclaiming, silvery female laughter. Music. Trumpets and drums. The carpenters watched Micah pace the unfinished deck. The bearded kid who’d nearly taken the fall off the scaffold smiled at me as he hauled a long sheet of surfacing material into place.

  “I’m Peter.”

  “Gwinn.” I gestured. “You know Micah.”

  “No, actually. I’m here ’cause a friend told me he needed help. I… really admire his work. Hey…” He beckoned me closer. “I saw your petition.” He gave me the thumbs-up sign. “But you oughta know, most of the shop’s not too happy about it.”

  I nodded. “Thanks for the warning.”

  An older woman, thin and muscular, greeted Micah familiarly as he turned away from his study of the drop. “I’ve seen that look before,” she noted. “Don’t quite like what you see, eh?”

  Micah shook her hand warmly. “I never could fool you, Margaret. Thanks for coming in to help. I wonder, is the model around?”

  She shook her head significantly. “But I sneaked upstairs for an eyeful, and let me tell you, if I were building this sucker, I’d tear it all down and start over. But your man Sean, he’s in a tough spot time-wise, so I’m just here doing what Ruth tells me. Listen, Micah, it’s none of my business, but did you and Sean have a bad fight or something?”

  Micah looked down at his feet, then away upstage at the skeleton of the drop. “Without a cross word being spoken, but yes, I guess we did.”

  “Time to make it up, then.”

  “So everyone seems to think,” he replied with a trace of irritation. “But I don’t seem to have it in me just now.”

  Louisa Pietro bounded up the escape stairs at the back of the deck. “Sean’s over at Crossroads and there’s no one in the electrics shop. Has the entire theatre stopped dead for that other damn show?”

  “So it would seem!” declared a voice from the house.

  “Marie!” Lou surged downstage to meet her.

  “Hiya, Lou. Long time. Look at your hair! Ohh, I love it!”

  Marie enfolded the shorter woman in voluminous purple sleeves. Her own dark hair was wrapped in a scrap of glorious floral fabric.

  “Hold it, get a camera,” murmured Margaret. “All three designers in the same room at once.”

  Marie draped an arm about Louisa’s waist. “So, you want to hear the latest? First this morning I have little SecondGen stitchers refusing to work on our show because it supports ‘enemies of Harmony’—a phrase right out of the latest e-mail abomination! Have you read the play? says I. No, says they, but…” Marie released Lou to wring her arms wildly. “Next thing I know, Jorgen’s bringing in all the skirts from Crossroads and throwing them all over the worktables because they have to be shortened by an inch and a quarter, every damn skirt and every damn petticoat, and do you know there are twenty-three women in that cast! Bill Rand says he can’t see enough of the ladies’ ankles! My god! And of course I had to let Mark off to take his petition around. Oh, Lou, you wouldn’t believe it! The Gift was a simple import when I took it on, and all of a sudden I’m fighting to get it done!”

  “ ‘Enemies of Harmony’?” repeated Lou. “What is going on in this theatre?”

  “We’re under siege,” said Micah pensively.

  “Because of this little play?”

  “It’s not the play, it’s the company,” said Marie.

  Louisa brightened. “Oh, wonderful! I can’t wait to meet them!”

  Over the shop intercom, a full-orchestra music cue died in mid-phrase, drowned out by a screech that devolved into a hair-raising grind. “Hold it, hold it, hold it!!” someone yelled.

  “Stop, please,” intoned the stage manager’s voice.

  The carpenters in Theatre Two froze automatically, listened to the hubbub drifting through the loading door, went back to work.

  “Trouble…” gloated Marie.

  Doors slammed in the shop. Voices shouted orders. Winches hummed. Loading doors rattled and slid apart.

  Sean stuck his head though the widening gap upstage. “Donny! Andre! Need you next door, on the double!”

  Two of our crew put down their tools and quick-stepped into the shop. Sean squinted at Margaret and Peter.

  “Whacha say, Meg? And you, what’s your name, redhead! We need every hand we can get!”

  Louisa pushed herself forward. “Hey, wait a minute!”

  “Yo, Lou! Finally decided to join us?”

  “That’s our crew you’re stealing, buddy-boy.”

  Sean leaned stiff-armed against the doorframe. “Only ‘til we make the repair. Program glitch just blew a whole board of remotes. Open dress tonight. Only way we’ll get through it is to hump the damn scenery by hand!”

  “What about this dress?”

  “A week away. Right now, that’s forever.” He beckoned impatiently. “You guys coming?”

  “Uh, I guess…” Peter looked from Micah to Sean and back again.

  “Nope,” said Margaret.

  Sean cocked his head at her. “Suit yourself.”

  Micah stared after Sean as he stalked into the shop. “All right, then, I’ll close down the studio. If he won’t do the job, we’ll have to do it for him.”

  “The curfew,” I reminded him.

  “I don’t have a curfew.”

  “Me neither,” noted Margaret.

  Micah nodded, brusque and badger stubborn. “Whatever the fucking hell it takes.”

  * * *

  Later, by the great stone fireplace in Cora Lee’s fairy castle, we held another secret strategy session. Mali wandered the room restlessly while Sam talked.

  “You need to present it publicly, not just to the mayor so she can shove it in a drawer.”

  “Like, at Town Meeting?” I suggested.

  Sam nodded, stiff-necked. He was still moving like an old man, very carefully, as if his muscular body were a sack of loose parts. But he had the full use of his jaw back. He glanced at me speculatively as if pleased to note I was capable of creative thought. “Town Meeting. That’ll do.”

  “Town Meetings are Thursdays,” said Mark. “Gives us a week.”

  Mali twitched tapestried drapes across the leaded panes to block the glare from Cora’s new yard lights. “Do it at curfew time.”

  Sam grinned. “Absolutely right. Oh, absolutely.”

  “We have our first dress rehearsal that night,” I pointed out.

  “So?” said Cris.

  “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

  Sam looked to Mali. “I’m not sure I want to miss this.”

  Mali chuckled softly.

  “Have to do it sooner,” said Sam. “There’ll be a lot of people working that night.”

  “Monday’s our dark night,” I reminded them.

  Mark weighed his thin sheaf of petitions, nibbling his lip. “The Town Council holds its executive board meetings on Mondays, but I don’t know…”

  “Monday. The day off. Perfect.” Sam seemed given to self-deprecatory asides, but he had yet to show an iota of doubt in the rightness of his strategy decisions. “The surprise will give you an edge. They know about the petition, but they won’t be expecting you to hit them with it so soon.”

  “But can we get the numbers that soon? In three days?”

  “Well, that’s up to you now, isn’t it?”

  Mark nodded, sitting up a bit straighter. “Yes, sir. It is.”

  WORKING LATE:

  Micah arrived the next morning in the closest thing he owned to work clothes: a pair of thick denims saved for the few chilly days in the weather program, and an old paint shirt that had hung behind the studio bathroom door for at least as long as I’d been around.

  It wasn’t exactly illegal to close your studio, but it was assumed that the Apprentice Administration had granted you a sufficient number of assistants and that at least one of them should be available during open hours to man the fort. Some high-handed tourist was bound to complain. S
o Micah’s gesture was more than just moving his labor force around. It was a public protest that could cause Sean some real professional embarrassment.

  Margaret laughed when Micah demanded to be put to work. “Promise you’ll do exactly what I say?”

  Peter was ecstatic. The idea of having the Great Man around all day where he could talk at him sent him into a high-energy buzz that lasted the morning. Micah put up with it. It got things done.

  “Peter and I’ll get on with the building,” Margaret decided. “You all put those artist eyes to work texturing the backdrop. Do a little fix-it along the way.” She pressed her work gloves into Micah’s studio-soft hands. “No buts. Just wear ’em.”

  “Those hands are too valuable, Mr. Cervantes!” seconded Peter.

  Micah tried the gloves, flexing his fingers. Margaret’s long, rangy hands were as big as his own. “Perfect,” he said, then slipped them off, and stuck them in the pocket of his shirt.

  “Knew you couldn’t follow orders,” Margaret grinned.

  She sent Cris and Songh up the curve of the drop to smooth out the awkward bumps and seams. Both were delighted to be out of the confines of the studio. Songh surprised me, clambering easily about on the sweeping metal skeleton. He might have a tough time speaking up for himself, but he was no physical coward. His agility goaded Crispin into showing off. I was sure one of them would break his neck.

  Jane and I cleared space downstage to prepare materials for the finish layer. Plastic, foam, and fabric must become the pebbles, cracks, and craters in the model, and reproduce the parallel incising of lines that echoed the cross-hatching painted into the props.

  The whole day, I waited for Sean to appear, hoping he’d find Micah hard at work, see the error of his ways, and immediately assign a crew of fifteen to finish up the job. He showed up late in the afternoon, slipping in from the lobby to stand in the aisle, out of the circle of work light. If he was fighting any inner battles, his face gave no sign of it.

  Micah didn’t notice, locked in his own battle with the misshaped backdrop. Sean watched silently for a while. When I looked again, he was gone.

  No one said anything. We all kept working. But I felt closer to despair than I had in a long, long time.

  * * *

  Building scenery can be brutish work when you’re not used to physical labor. I went looking for work gloves by the time we broke for lunch. The plastics needed hot water to make them pliable enough to mold, the fabrics required a glue that sucked all the moisture from your skin, and the rough edges of the foams scraped and cut like sandpaper. I expected Jane to wimp out early, but she kept at it, slow but steady, refusing to give up on a detail until she was sure it matched the model.

  Micah tired quickly from all the lifting and carrying, though he fought not to show it. His long hours were spent sitting at meetings or at a drawing board, and the enormity of the physical task in front of us daunted even him. “They haven’t started those tracking units,” he noted late in the day. He lowered himself into a seat in the front row with a wheezy grunt.

  “No.” It was still a question whether the additions Howie had required would work with the rest of the design.

  Margaret watched him worriedly. “You go home. Make Rosa a nice dinner.”

  He squinted up at the backdrop. “Rosa’s doing readings in Dakar ‘til Tuesday.”

  “Go home anyway. Go next door to the Crossroads dress. Watch ’em stumble all over themselves. I’ll see the kids to the dorm if they work after nine. Anyone challenges me, I’d relish the chance to give ’em a piece of my mind!”

  Micah tilted his head at her. “Taking sides, Margaret?”

  “Oh, Christ, those people! If they want to stop new kids coming in, that’s one thing, but it’s no fair penalizing the ones already here!”

  “Sensibly said.” He rose to stretch cramps out of his back. “I’ll do better tomorrow night.”

  “Go on, outa here. If they start canceling previews, it won’t be because of the set.”

  Micah retreated gratefully.

  Songh went home when we broke for dinner. The rest of us pooled our pocket change to buy a group supper at the cheapest café in Fetching. But even this onetime piano bar had come up in the world since last we’d been there. A coat of peach paint, some floral-print tablecloths, and suddenly the waiters were looking askance at our apprentice coveralls. Cris was ready to mouth off. I held him back. Peter and Margaret straightened their civilian work clothes and fast-talked the maître d’ by dropping Micah’s name a lot.

  “It’s happening overnight,” I mourned when we had been conceded a rickety table next to the kitchen door.

  Cris glared at the waiter, who was ignoring us. “That only means it’s been lying in wait.”

  Margaret was from funky Franklin Wells, the jazz-crazy, pseudo-urban anachronism directly across the dome, occasionally referred to as the Underside of Harmony. “Fetching’s a snob town. If it were me alone, I’d hop the Tube to the Maple Leaf. Nikos there was an apprentice. Oboist. Didn’t quite work out for him career-wise, but he runs a great pub.”

  Halfway through dinner, Songh appeared with a sandwich and sat down. “I am in deep shit at home.”

  I laughed. He’d said it so seriously, but with this satisfied glint in his eye.

  “They want me home right after work every night. They said no hanging out after dinner, no more staying over at the dorm. They said, stay away from those actors.”

  “What did you say?” Jane asked mildly.

  Songh flicked his head, very Mark-like for a moment. “I told them that’s fine with me, maybe I’d see them around sometime, and I left. My mother’s probably still yelling at me.”

  “Cool,” said Peter. “I’m always fighting with my dad.”

  “I never did,” said Songh. “Before.”

  Margaret clucked her tongue dutifully. The rest of us cheered. Our waiter swept over to tell us that if we couldn’t behave ourselves, we’d have to leave.

  We went back to work still hungry. It didn’t help our grim mood to have to fight our way through the white-wigged and panniered Crossroads chorus filling the halls with high-energy chatter and vocalizing. The first act blared over the shop monitor. The evening cleanup had been forgotten in the mad dash to be ready for their first audience. Every drawer gaped open, every cabinet had been plundered of its tools. I found Donny, our erstwhile crew member, sitting on a worktable drinking coffee.

  “How’s it going?”

  “They’re gettin’ through. Audience seems to like it.”

  “You coming back to work for us?”

  Donny scuffed his palm through a pile of sawdust. “Not tonight. Got a big shift coming up.”

  “So I guess the remotes aren’t fixed.”

  “Not yet.” His glance swung toward me, then away. “Some’re saying it’s a voodoo curse on it.”

  Later, I overheard Songh and Crispin having an actual conversation-between-equals, maybe their first ever, about parental oppression. Interesting, since Cris had never offered me anything but the highest praise for his father. Jane rattled on dreamily about what her life would be like on Tuatua, with the Eye. What could I do but listen? She’d let float a major sector of her reality, like a balloon on an endless string, and was happier than I’d ever seen her.

  Margaret pulled the boys off the back wall when they started dropping heavy tools onto the deck. “No accidents on my crew,” she declared. Too weary to argue, they settled in with Jane and me on the sculpture brigade. When the nine o’clock curfew arrived, no one mentioned it.

  Conversation lagged as the hours wore on, and neither the steady tap-tap of Margaret’s hammer nor Peter’s tales of disasters he’d worked on in other theatres could drive the stillness from that empty, half-dark space. But for the patter of voice and music over the monitor, it was hard to believe there were nearly a hundred people watching a show right next door. There were people busy up in Costumes, and Hickey’s crew was still working in the Ca
ge. There were probably people working late in the box office and up in the offices. The Crossroads crew banged around in the shop from time to time, going in and out of the rehearsal. No one came to say hello or check up on our well-being. A system going about its business. Within it, our isolation was profound and complete. As if its business didn’t include us anymore.

  I really didn’t understand it at all.

  Just when our mood hit bottom, the Eye arrived.

  They came trouping down the aisle from the lobby, the women a rainbow of bright batik wraps, the men in long, loose-fitting patterned robes except for Sam, in black head to foot like a street mime. Mali loped across the back of the theatre to catch the orange that Sam lobbed his way and toss it back again. The throw was mischievously high. Sam leapt, snagged it easily, as if he’d been nowhere near death’s door five days before.

  “It was him, I tell you,” Ule was insisting. “In the lobby right next to the Fat Man. Talking up a storm, they were.”

  “How could Deeland be here?” Tua scoffed.

  Sam frowned at his orange, both discounting and thoughtful. Suddenly, there were two. He looped one backward over his shoulder. It landed in Mali’s hand.

  “You’re saying I don’t know what I see?” Ule complained.

  “You might have said something,” Sam replied.

  “Ha. You were too busy taking sympathy calls from the ladies.”

  The Eye circled and settled among us like birds lighting in the corn. Te-Cucularit knelt to inspect a particularly detailed bit of rock texture that I’d just given up on. Mali wandered about, peeling his orange, testing the solidity of the sloping deck. Omea paddled her legs girlishly in front of her and sent a long look at the backdrop where Margaret was doggedly banging away.

  Jane smiled at them as if the sun had just risen in her eyes. Peter charged downstage to greet Moussa. “Hi, I’m Peter. Thanks again, man!”

  Moussa and Pen were bickering. Pen held a half-empty wine bottle by the neck, the two-liter kind that caterers use. His arm was around Tuli, hauling her alongside sloppily. Each time the big bottle bumped against her breast, Tuli giggled.