by Ann Claycomb
“It’ll be all right,” I whispered, as if she was awake with me and needed soothing. “It’ll be all right.”
I thought of Kathleen’s idea for Tam Lin, of the Fairy Queen getting the last word and how that sounded, how it felt, to have the last word, to be the one echoing into a listening silence. What would the words be that couldn’t be answered? I let myself think about words on a stage, about the Fairy Queen’s curse of Tam Lin, because I was tired and I had too much to do. I couldn’t afford a sleepless night. I had to talk to Tom in the morning, meet with George the lighting designer . . .
GEORGE WAS YOUNGER than I’d expected him to be, probably my age, only about a foot taller and with terrible skin. He wore his frizzy brown hair in a ponytail, and a T-shirt that read INTERNATIONAL SARCASM SOCIETY: LIKE WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT . He was also, thank God, a genius.
“We need to light the back wall,” he said. “And maybe layer it with green on top of blue—I’ve got some ideas. Go stand center stage.”
He vaulted over the seat he’d been lounging in and disappeared up into the lighting booth. I climbed onstage and did as I was told. I stood there a few minutes, itching for a list to write on, then gave in to the impulse and went back and got my pad. I was absurdly afraid of displeasing George, so I hurried back into position. Still nothing happened. I checked a satisfyingly long list of things off from the day before, then ruined it by adding as many new things for today and tomorrow. There was at least one thing I was forgetting too—there was always one thing. I shut my eyes to try to remember, but I just felt tired.
When I opened my eyes, I was underwater. I blinked and took a step backward as if I could step out of the water that wasn’t there. I turned in a circle and the illusion held, dark blue, nearly purple near the floor, shifting to blue and then blue-green above my head.
“How’s that?” George called.
“It’s amazing,” I said, “but am I blue?” I dropped my pad and held my hands out, palms up. They didn’t look blue. I didn’t feel blue-green light on my face either, just that I was standing in the colors.
“Nope,” George said cheerfully. “Well, your pants legs are—that can’t be helped—but I rather like that effect, don’t you?”
I glanced down. My khaki pants looked like I’d dipped them in a wash of indigo dye that deepened from my knees to the floor. George was right (of course). It was a good effect. It would turn the mermaids’ pale green chiffon a darker, wetter green and the sea witches’ purple into black.
“Need any tinkering before I write down the specs?” George called. I realized I hadn’t answered his last question.
“I don’t think so,” I said, “but I would like to see it from the audience.”
“I’ll step in,” said a new voice. I looked over to see Tom coming down the side aisle. I glanced at my watch. He was early, which was not a good sign. Tom wasn’t on time for anything, much less early. But he seemed fine, as far as I could tell looking from forty feet away. Maybe it was just going to be that he didn’t like the color of the prince’s tunic in the shipwreck scene.
“How’s the effect?” I asked.
Tom didn’t even stop walking, just kept on going right up the side steps onto the stage and across to where I stood.
“It looks like you’re standing—like we’re standing underwater,” he said when he got close. He raised his voice to carry. “It’s like I always say, ‘We all owe our careers to the lighting designers. We’d be nothing without them.’”
This got no response from the booth; George didn’t even bother to laugh. Tom made a face of mock distress.
“Have I offended?”
I smiled as I went to stand in the center aisle. “I think you merely stated the obvious as far as George is concerned.”
But then I saw the way the lighting effect was working on Tom, who was suspended—stranded even, because he was so slight and so incongruous in street clothes that seemed suddenly wet and strange—in water. It really was amazing. Kathleen was going to love it.
“Do people tell you that you’re a genius often?” I yelled up to George.
“Yes,” he called back. “Can I assume we’re done here?”
“Yes, thank you!”
The stage surfaced gradually as George hit various lights. Tom came downstage.
“Coffee?”
“I’ve been drinking too much coffee these days,” I said. “Let me just get my stuff.”
“I’ll bring it,” he said. He joined me in the aisle and handed me the pad and pen. For a moment we stood there awkwardly while I flipped the pages shut and slid the pen into the spiral along the side.
“We can go get some coffee if you want to,” I said.
Tom shook his head. “No. I don’t need any either.” He hesitated a moment. “It’s brilliant, Harry, do you get that? Singing it, listening to it—I don’t think you know how good it is.”
I sank down onto the arm of the nearest seat. “That’s not what you wanted to talk about, Tom.”
He kept on as if I hadn’t spoken. “And she’s more than brilliant,” he said. “Christ, even in rehearsals when I know she’s holding back, not singing full voice, not reaching—it’s going to knock people for a loop in performance.”
“That’s not what you wanted to talk about either.”
He let out a noisy breath that stirred the hair over his eyes. “Carianne is freaking out a little,” he said.
This was such a non sequitur that I didn’t know what to say. Carianne was playing the princess, the prince’s chosen human bride, for whom he betrays the Little Mermaid.
“She’s freaking out?” I managed. “Why? She’s doing fine.”
“Not about the singing,” Tom said. “About Kathleen. About the way this part has hold of her, the way she’s singing it, acting it, everything. She’s scared about the death scene.”
“Carianne is?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Jesus, Harry!” Tom snapped. I jumped and knocked my pad off the armrest I’d balanced it on. “Try to think about someone else for one fucking minute, will you?”
“About someone else—”
“Besides Kathleen!”
“But—”
“Harry,” he said, “I know. She told me. I know. And I thought this was a good idea. Stupid, maybe, in terms of actually solving anything, but a gorgeous gesture and then just a gorgeous fucking piece of music and a singing opportunity that I, Carianne, and the rest of us are unbelievably lucky to get as students. And I know it’s helping her, I see that, but it’s not fair to the rest of us, especially not to Carianne.”
“Why especially not to Carianne?”
“Because she doesn’t know!” he said. “I know what’s going on, what you’re trying to do by having her kill them—kill us, Carianne and me—and I’m taking the risk lying there that Kathleen is going to stay Kathleen and not turn into the Little Mermaid because . . . because I trust her to try, at least, because I trust you and I trust Robin, but Carianne doesn’t even know, she’s just freaked out and doesn’t know why and what the fuck am I supposed to tell her, Harry? ‘Hey, you’re imagining things’? ‘It’s not like there’s any chance that Kathleen will get confused and actually kill us with a real knife during the show’?”
I felt like he’d hit me—and been right to do it. I was the director. This was my show; these were my singers. I should have at least noticed Carianne’s anxiety.
Try to think about someone else for one fucking minute.
“I kept telling myself you were just going to complain about your costume,” I said. I reached down to pick up my pad. “I’m sorry, Tom. Can we—can we sit?”
He nodded. I slid over and sat down and he sank down next to me.
“I didn’t know you knew,” I said. “Kathleen didn’t tell me she’d told you—she told you everything?”
“Well,” he said, “I suppose I don’t know if she told me everything.”
“But you kn
ow about the knife.”
“I know about the knife.”
“Do you think the performance is—” I hesitated. “Dangerous, then? For you and Carianne?”
Tom sighed. “No. I’d have to believe that Kathleen was actually losing touch with reality and I don’t think that. It’s more that it’s so good, Harry, so easy to believe in when you’re singing it, that it gets to you. It’s gotten to both of us, me and Carianne, just lying there in rehearsal with her over us, miming stabbing and singing that aria, just the notes she has to hit over and over and then sliding down off them the way she does . . .” He shivered. “It’s unreal to listen to her do it and just lie there.” He put his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. “I’m not making much sense, am I?”
“I think you are,” I said, because I did see, now, what he meant, and what he needed. “You need to know that I’ve thought of it too, of how to control the moment. It’s my job, after all, Tom. And even though I didn’t know that you knew the whole story, I should still have known how much that scene demands of you both. I should have said something and done something about it.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Tom scrubbed his hands over his face then lifted his head.
“It’s a prop knife,” I said. “You’ll see it. You’ll see it before every performance, right before you go on for that scene. I promise.”
“You know, now that we’re actually having this conversation,” he said, “I feel like a complete ass. Of course it’s a fucking prop knife.”
“We can do without a knife entirely if you want,” I said. “Just have Kathleen mime the motion like she’s been doing. We have the red light coming up on you both—that would be enough to convey the stabbing. It’s not a realist production, for God’s sake.”
Tom shook his head. “Won’t work,” he said. “Her sisters give her that big shiny knife on a platter.”
“It’s a scallop shell.”
He snorted. “Whatever. They give it to her and she holds it up and sings to it—she’s got to use it when the time comes.”
“You can think about it,” I said. “And either way—no matter what—I’ll talk to Carianne. She’s singing really well, I noticed.”
“She’s got an audition out in Houston coming up,” Tom said.
“You’re kidding! That’s amazing!”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “And this show’s giving her confidence, that’s the thing. Singing this music, just going into it thinking you’ll try to hold your own, that’s all, and then realizing that you’re doing better than that.” He turned toward me for the first time since he’d sat down. “It’s exhilarating, to tell the truth. None of us wants to back out of this. Not for anything.”
“But you shouldn’t be scared, Tom,” I said. “Not for-real scared.”
“I won’t be if you promise me you’ll take care of it.”
I remembered waking to the smell of the sea in our room, in our bed, the momentary fear of Kathleen’s eyes on me in the dark. But the knife had still been safely in its drawer.
“I promise you I’ll take care of it,” I said.
“All right then,” he said. “But now I will let you buy me some coffee.”
So we went to get coffee and cinnamon rolls and I found out he was up for an Adler Fellowship in San Francisco. I watched his face light up with hope and terror when he talked about the audition process and chided myself again for taking Tom for granted—for taking all our friends for granted. We’d throw him a huge party when he got the fellowship—or even if he didn’t. A champagne-only party. Kathleen could plan it.
When Tom went to the men’s room I pulled out my pad and made a note to tell Kathleen and Robin about both the Adler audition and Carianne’s audition in Houston. Then I added an item to my to-do list for opening night: “Chk prop knife frequently. Bring real 1 with u on night of and put someplace safe.”
THE QUESTION WAS: where? The case was too big to carry with me and the knife was too sharp to carry safely without the case. Two days before opening night I had no solution. I sat on the edge of our bed and took the case out of the drawer. In our production, the mermaid’s sisters presented her the knife they’d bartered their hair for on what was supposed to look like a half of an enormous shell. (Or a platter, according to Tom, but if amateurish props were our biggest problem, I could live with that.) But the real knife case couldn’t be a shell. It was too flawless, too symmetrical. I ran my finger over the nacreous striations. Whatever it was, it had been polished—or manipulated—somehow coaxed into this particular shape.
The apartment door opened and I jerked open the drawer to the bedside table and tried to jam the case back in. It caught on something in the back of the drawer and wouldn’t fit. I glanced at the clock—after ten. Tae had arrived in town for performance weekend and she and Robin and Kathleen had gone to dinner. I’d still been rehearsing the scene with the sisters and the sea witches so I hadn’t been able to go. I hadn’t even noticed how late it was.
“Harry?” came a voice from the kitchen, and I stopped fighting the knife case. It was Tae, not Kathleen.
“In here,” I said, and she appeared in the doorway, slim and chic in cropped navy pants and an ivory sweater.
“We brought you some food,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Kathleen and Robin are on their way up,” she said. “They may have stopped at the convenience store around the corner for ice cream. Kathleen was dropping veiled hints.”
I smiled. “I’m sure she was very subtle.” I let go of the box and it stayed, wedged half in and half out of the drawer. I felt stupid and awkward sitting with my back to Tae, trying to hide the thing. I fumbled in the drawer for something to drape over the knife case.
“Are you all right?” Tae asked. She took a few steps into the room, then stopped. “Oh.”
I gestured vaguely at the case. “It’s not really stuck. I mean, it fits, it’s just tight . . .”
“You keep it there, right by the bed?”
“It’s on my side,” I said, and then didn’t know what to say.
There was silence for a moment, then Tae said, “But you had it out. Why?”
“I need to put it somewhere during the performances.”
“What’s wrong with where it is?”
“Nothing, I just—” I stopped, seeing her puzzling it out.
“Will it not stay there?” she asked.
“It has,” I said. “It has stayed there since I put it there, but I tried to leave it with you and Robin.”
“So you did,” she said, nodding. “I thought you had, but then I asked Rob where it was and he said you must have changed your mind and taken it. I didn’t want to press him and”—she came over and sat on the bed beside me—“I think he didn’t ask because he didn’t want to talk about the thing at all.”
“Yes, well, it’s here,” I said, “and it’s stayed here, in this drawer. But it’s making me nervous and I thought during the performances I’d like to—”
“Keep it a little closer?” Tae asked.
“Something like that.”
“But you can’t keep it on you,” she said. “It’s too big and too obvious. And you can’t leave it backstage, there’d be no way to keep track of it there.”
“No, I know,” I said.
Tae leaned across me and took the case out of the drawer, held it cupped in both hands.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s got to be made of pearl—but can you imagine a pearl this large?”
I half-laughed. “We should have asked the sea witches to show us one when we had the chance.”
“You can’t just leave it somewhere,” she said again, thoughtfully this time. “It’s so lovely someone might actually take it, or at least not be able to resist opening it and—” She felt my involuntary shudder.
“I can take it,” she said.
“Tae, no, that’s—”
“I know what it is,” she said, “so I’ll be carefu
l with it—and careful of it—and I’ve no obligations during the performances, just to sit in the audience and enjoy.”
“But where will you keep it?”
She smoothed one hand over the top, as if measuring it. “It will fit in my shoulder bag, I think,” she said. “It’s not heavy, just awkwardly shaped.”
I watched her holding it, feeling as I had when we’d first shown it to her, that the very way she handled the thing, with the same matter-of-fact reverence for its power that she might hold a violin, made it less frightening, less strange.
“I’d hate for you to have to carry it around all weekend,” I tried, but Tae stood up.
“Your food’s getting cold,” she said, “and I need to get this put away.” She did not say before Robin and Kathleen come in. I followed her out into the kitchen, feeling mingled guilt at having literally passed the burden of the knife to her and relief at being so briskly managed.
“Tae,” I said, “has anyone ever told you that you’d be a natural director?”
She laughed.
When the case was stowed away in her quilted patent leather bag, her coat slung casually on top, I relaxed enough to realize that I was starving. The pad thai they’d brought me was indeed cold, but I didn’t care. Robin and Kathleen came in a few minutes later with a quart of gelato that Kathleen had insisted on because it was called Orange You Glad You Picked This Flavor? She scrounged some chocolate sauce from our fridge and we all had a bowl. Then Robin and Tae left and we went to bed.
It’s not here, I thought as I fell asleep. And I slept better than I had in months.
ROBIN
Composer’s Notes