by Tanya Chris
“OK, but it’s five or ten percent, tops. I can see a woman is good-looking, but she has to have that other thing or it doesn’t register as sex appeal. It’s just beauty. Like, before Joshua you could tell when a guy was good looking, right? Even though you didn’t want to fuck him.”
“I guess so.” I considered Derek, who was definitely good looking, a fact that had never been lost on me. In fact, although Derek wasn’t butter pecan, he was ... tasty. The appeal of the threeway hadn’t only been Lissie and the kink. Derek himself had been a part of it.
“Dude, now you’re looking at me weird.”
“Sorry.” No matter what flavor of ice cream Derek might be, he wasn’t available for tasting, but it was interesting to realize that I might like to take a lick. I focused my attention back on the current dilemma.
“I’m afraid I won’t like it.”
“You already did like it.”
“I’m afraid I won’t like the rest of it. I mean, who doesn’t like a blowjob? It’s a big jump from that to ... kissing.”
Derek raised his eyebrows. “Really? Kissing comes after blowjob?”
I shrugged, partly because I felt that way and partly because kissing wasn’t how I’d originally meant to finish that sentence. There were various activities that homosexual sex might entail I wasn’t sure about. Kissing was the least of them.
“He’s my best friend. I don’t want to screw that up just because we’re sexually attracted to each other.”
“Being sexually attracted to your best friend sounds like a sweet setup. What more do you need?”
Best friend. Sex. What more did I need? Why was this such a fucking issue? Just fucking kiss the dude.
“Am I being ridiculous?”
“I think you are. Do you have any idea why?”
“I’m homophobic?”
I’d never thought so. Homophobic was what I always thought Derek was—nervous about touching another guy, worried about coming across as something other than strictly masculine.
Now Derek was happily submissive and I was struggling to accept my attraction to a man because, while it was fine for some random guy at the theater to be attracted to some other random guy at the theater, and it was even fine for some random guy at the theater to be attracted to me, when I experienced the attraction myself, that was somehow not fine. That was something that required me to pull out my hair and rend my clothes and put my best friend through weeks of mixed messages until he was barely speaking to me.
“Maybe you’re not homophobic,” Derek said. “Maybe you’re just afraid.”
“Isn’t that what the phobic part of homophobic means?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think you’re afraid of the homo part. I think you’re afraid of change. It’s a big jump, but you’ll feel better once you’ve taken it. Just go get it, dude.”
Right.
Chapter 20
Hopefully the old adage that a bad dress rehearsal meant a good opening night was true, because Thursday was ugly. Pete, who’d almost seemed to know his lines on Wednesday, had regressed Thursday, stumbling his way so badly through the first scene that even Joshua lost his patience.
From the wings waiting for my entrance, I heard Joshua break character to remind Pete in angry tones that we opened tomorrow. I peeked around the drape that separated me from the stage to see Pete, accustomed to being the guy everyone laughed along with and protected by Repeat’s hulking presence, blink uncomfortably at the hostile crowd. No one was laughing now, and Repeat, standing next to me backstage, didn’t look interested in charging out to save him. Not knowing your lines at dress rehearsal was no joke.
During the ensuing fight scene, Rudy nicked Pete on the wrist. Their swords weren’t sharp but they were metal and traveled with velocity and hurt to be hit with. Everyone knew it was an accident except Pete who took it as retribution. He didn’t fuss about the quick-rising welt the sword raised but he did spend the rest of the rehearsal refusing to say anything other than his lines in a sulky fit of put-upon temper.
Deb—I was doing better at saying Debra when I spoke directly to her but trying to think of her as Debra was exhausting—had shown up late and angry, refusing to explain why she was late and not getting any less angry as the evening went on. All her lines were delivered as though Desdemona, the sweet-tempered, devoted wife, had become Kate from Taming of the Shrew—sharp, nasty, and nearly unlovable.
Mikaela made the one mistake Carol had asked her not to make. She sent one of the balls she was juggling into the audience where it pinged off Lissie. Lissie’s head was down, her eyes on the remote focus unit for the light board as she tweaked her light cues, so the ball struck her squarely and comically (which was rather the point of a clown) on the top of her head. The ball was painted to look like a cannon ball but it was really only plastic and bounced right off without leaving a mark, but it wouldn’t be funny if an audience member got hit in the face.
One of the wheels on Deb’s death bed jammed so that moving it became a task that required at least two strong men. It was wedged into a narrow passage between the green room and the stage right entrance and since no one had the time or inclination to move it, we had to climb over it to make our entrances from that side.
Rebekah took every opportunity to proclaim her opinion, namely that the chaos was caused by Carol having gone easy on us the night before, until Carol overheard her. Having the world’s worst dress rehearsal blamed on her laxness as an authority figure triggered a bout of tears, followed by a ten minute huddled conference in which Rebekah and Carol somehow managed to make up.
During intermission, I pulled off the top layer of my lavishly-embroidered costume and crawled under the bed to see if I could find the problem. Joshua came over and sat down on top of the bed, his stocking-clad legs keeping me company while I tinkered with the jammed wheel.
“You know what they say,” he started.
“Don’t even say it.”
If one more person repeated that line about bad dress rehearsals, I figured we were tempting fate to prove it wrong. I held up the finishing nail I’d unwound from around the wheel’s pivot point.
“That’s one problem solved,” Joshua said as I clambered to my feet. Together we rolled the bed back against the wall where it would remain until needed at the end of the second act.
“It’s going to be a pleasure to strangle Deb tonight.” I said after a quick glance around to make sure she wasn’t lurking in the folds of the curtains. “Do you think she’s ...”
“No, not tonight. She might have been last night, which would explain the attitude tonight. Within certain parameters, alcoholics function better drunk than sober. It’s part of what makes getting sober so hard. When you stop drinking, you feel all kinds of miserable in your own skin. Reality can be unbearable. Don’t be surprised if there’s a hard crash coming. All this—” Joshua waved his hand, encompassing the theater and me both “—is stressful. I don’t like to buy trouble, but trouble is coming.”
At a loss for what else I could do, I turned to head back to the green room.
“One sec.” Joshua put a hand on my shoulder to stop me. “You’re covered in theater dust.” He brushed his hands over my back and ass, bending down to get the back of my legs. “Rebekah would have something to say about what you’ve done to her costume.”
“I fixed her set piece.”
“Even so.” He finished dusting me and stood up again. “You’ll do. At least you were smart enough to take off your tunic.”
I inventoried what was left beneath the tunic—a white undershirt meant to protect against the scratch of brocade, fantastically silly shorts puffed out like a nineteen-eighties window valance, and green ribbed stockings fitted into pointy leather shoes. “This is a good look for me, isn’t it?”
“Sweet pea, they all are.”
~~~
The second act went considerably better. Carol must have taken her frustrations with Rebekah out on Deb during the break because Deb pu
t more heart into her role. The deathbed scene played beautifully and the deathbed behaved itself. Carol refrained from pointing out the obvious in her notes after rehearsal, which was nice because we all knew exactly what had gone wrong, and also because it would have taken hours to list it all out.
“You’ve got this,” she said in closing. “You all know what you’re doing and I know you’ll do it.”
I went up to her when she dismissed us and rubbed my nose against hers like I used to when we were dating. She might be new to directing, but she was doing a fantastic job with a tough show and a challenging cast. I didn’t tell her all that—I didn’t want to jinx anything, not the night before opening night—but I let her see that I meant it.
She swatted my butt, now encased in my own jeans, and pushed me towards the backstage door. “Get some sleep,” she ordered.
I bumped shoulders with Joshua as we pushed through the exit at the same time. It wasn’t intentional, leaving together. We just seemed to be on the same wavelength, unconsciously coordinated even when we tried to unsynchronize.
Having collided, we couldn’t unpart so easily. We stood together in the downspot of light that guarded the theater entrance from wandering vagrants and exchanged soothing banalities. It was a gentle wrapping up of a harsh evening and I was in no hurry to end it, despite the dragging pull of weariness and the unavoidably early dawn that waited for me.
The yellow light brought out every shade of brown in Joshua’s eyes and I found myself voicing something I’d only thought before: “It should be your name that’s Sherry.”
He tilted his head, perplexed, a smile nonetheless coming to his lips, a smile that simply said, Whatever you’re going on about, I want to hear it.
“Your eyes have this depth to them, all these swirls of amber and mahogany. It’s like looking into the bottom of a glass before you drink from it.”
I stroked a hand across his cheek. Intoxicating, that was what I meant. His eyes were as heady as strong liquor. They drew me in where I might, clear-headed, never go.
“Nate?” Joshua stepped into me. His hand reached for my hip.
I bent my elbow, persuading his face closer, and tilted my head that fraction upwards that was necessary to compensate for his height. This was it then. Kiss the man. I wanted to, I wanted to, but those last few inches were so hard to cross.
The door to the theater flew open at my back and Pete, Repeat and Mikaela spilled out of it onto the sidewalk, too loud and occupying too much space. I dropped my hand, stepping backwards into Repeat who pushed against me, sending me forwards into Joshua again. Joshua put up his hands to catch me, a frown forming on his face, his hands not quite closing around me. It was suddenly and immensely quiet.
“Didn’t realize you and your boyfriend were having a moment,” Pete said.
“We were just leaving.” I turned my back to Joshua and faced Pete. “Like you guys.”
“Better give them their privacy,” Repeat said. He threw his arm around Pete and they brought their faces together in a mockingly exaggerated pucker, like schoolyard lovebirds.
I didn’t react. Reacting would only make them worse. Instead I turned my head towards Joshua, though I didn’t go so far as to make eye contact, and said “Hey, see you tomorrow,” and started walking towards the parking lot.
“Nate,” Joshua said, his voice hesitant and low. I waved over my shoulder and kept walking, pretending I didn’t know that he was asking me to wait, to talk, to finish what I’d nearly started.
That threshold I’d almost crossed now seemed infinitely far away again and terrifyingly serious, like a portal to a different reality that, once breached, could never again be closed. Derek was right. I was afraid.
~~~
It was my own fault Joshua wasn’t talking to me. You couldn’t keep inviting someone in and then slamming the door on them and expect them to come around again.
The mood backstage opening night was a mixture of excitement and trepidation. No one had forgotten the disaster that had been final dress rehearsal, but this was opening night. There were people in the seats we didn’t know. OK, a lot of them were friends and family, but some of them were actual strangers. The scent of flowers filled the green room and everywhere people laughed and talked over each other from nerves and the desire to just be out there, finally doing it.
Deb, when I saw her, seemed more relaxed than most, as though she were relieved simply to have made it this far. She smiled up at me when I walked by so that I stopped and said “Hi, Debra,” and she smiled harder and said, “Happy opening night,” and tilted her head up at me like she wanted to be kissed.
I leaned down and kissed the side of her mouth, somewhere between lip and cheek, and she tightened the hand she’d placed on my forearm as though to keep me there. I didn’t know if it was a good sign or a bad sign or just a side effect of opening night that she was acting friendly towards me again, but one of the bands around my heart loosened.
Then Joshua came in, his head uncharacteristically down, looking as though he hadn’t slept despite having taken the day off.
“Joshua—” I grabbed at him as he went by, but he brushed me off.
“Not tonight, Nate. Enough is enough.” And he walked on, finding someone else to sit next to at the makeup bench, disrupting our backstage routine to avoid being next to me.
I shook it off. I couldn’t afford to be Nate worrying about Joshua. I needed to be Othello, to find a way to use the tangled strands of emotion running through me to be Othello. “This sorrow's heavenly; It strikes where it doth love,” I muttered to myself. “I kissed thee ere I killed thee.”
But if I’d kissed Joshua, I wouldn’t be killing him. I didn’t blame myself so much for that instinctive jerk away last night. It had been the surprise of intrusion into a moment meant to include only me and him, but it was a ghastly repeat of what’d happened before, and I had no excuse for walking away afterwards. I could have stayed and apologized. I could have done what I’d had every intention of doing. I could have kissed the man I loved.
That there was the truth, the missing piece of the equation. It wasn’t just like. It wasn’t just lust. It was love.
If I kissed him, I’d go under. And one day all of it—Joshua, Sherry, that place I’d come to think of as home—would move on without me because they belonged to each other, not to me. And in the meantime, I stood on the edge of happiness refusing to take that last step forward out of fear of losing it.
And now Joshua wasn’t talking to me, so I’d lost it anyway, but I was an actor and it was opening night and the show would go on.
Not wanting to sit in my usual spot where I’d be too aware of Joshua not sitting next to me, I climbed the spiral staircase to the light booth. Lissie hovered over the kid freshly home from college we’d roped into running the light board.
“I’ve got it,” the kid said, exasperation evident in his voice. “Press go. It’s not rocket science.” He pointed at the button clearly marked “go” glowing green on the board.
I wandered over to the big window that overlooked the audience and picked out my family: my mother and two of my sisters. Ma never missed an opening night.
“Is that your Mom next to Arabelle?” Lissie asked, smoothing her hair down in the nervous way women did when they were about to see their hairdresser out in the real world.
“Yeah, and Desi on her other side.”
“Where’s …” Lissie trailed off, having obviously forgotten my third sister’s name.
“Gwen,” I supplied.
“Right, Guinevere.”
“No sitter is good enough for baby yet.” The truth was probably that she didn’t want to spend three hours watching me in a tunic and tights spout lines she’d only get the general gist of, but babysitters made a good excuse. “Hey, Lissie?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you mind that I call you Lissie?”
“That you named me Lissie, you mean? No, I don’t mind. Even Alex calls me Lissie now.
You were right. It fits me better. At least, it fits who I am now better.”
“Bella minds.”
Arabelle had long ago stopped complaining about my nickname for her, but she didn’t allow anyone else to use it. It was a joke between us, something I’d started when I was eleven or twelve and bugging my older sister was a satisfying pursuit. To stop calling her Bella now would wipe out part of our history.
“I heard about the thing with Deb,” Lissie said.
I nodded. Funny the ways you could be selfish and not even know it.
“Don’t take it too seriously.” She put her arm around my waist. “You’re in a really down mood for opening night. Is it Deb?”
“No.” I didn’t want to explain about Joshua. Rebekah saved me from needing to by shouting “five minutes, please” loud enough from downstairs that the call echoed up to us.
“I should get a seat,” Lissie said. She turned back to the board operator who scowled her away before she could even open her mouth and then made her awkward way down the spiral staircase. “Thank God, it’s opening night,” she said over her shoulder. “Every time I go up or down this thing I picture my stomach wedged into it.”
In the space below the staircase, silence ruled. Anticipation had people’s voices already dropping into the hushed, only-when-necessary tone we used when the show was in progress.
Joshua and Pete, in place next to the stage door, shifted to allow Lissie to pass through it to claim her seat in the audience. They were unnecessarily early to be at places—only in an endeavor like theater where every moment was weighty did you get a full understanding of how long five minutes could be—but I knew why they were there. My skin itched with readiness, even though my own entrance would have to wait another ten minutes beyond theirs.
I drifted towards them in Lissie’s wake.
“How’s the house?” Pete asked, nodding towards the staircase I’d just come down.
“Not bad for Shakespeare, maybe three-quarters?”
“Big casts,” Pete said. “At least you get a good opening night crowd.”