PART TWO
One Day
Forty-two
AUGUST
Amsterdam
The phone is ringing. And I’m sleeping. Two things that shouldn’t be happening at the same time. I open my eyes, fumble for the phone, but the ringing continues, crying out into the still night.
A light flicks on. Broodje, naked as a newborn, stands in front of me squinting in the yellow light of the lamp, and the lemony walls of the nursery. He holds out my phone. “It’s for you,” he mumbles, and then he flicks off the light and sleepwalks back to bed.
I put the phone to my ear and I hear the exact four words you don’t want to hear on the other end of a middle-of-the-night phone call.
“There’s been an accident.”
My stomach plummets and I hear a whistling my ears as I wait to hear who. Yael. Daniel. Fabiola. The baby. Some subtraction in my family that I can no longer bear.
But the voice continues talking and it takes me a minute to slow my breathing and hear what is being said. Bicycle and moto and ankle and fracture and performance and emergency and it’s then that I understand that it’s not that kind of accident.
“Jeroen?” I say at last, though who else can it be? I want to laugh. Not because of the irony, but because of the relief.
“Yes, Jeroen,” Linus snaps. Jeroen the invincible, felled by a drunken moto driver. Jeroen insistent he can go on anyhow, with his foot in a cast, and maybe he can, for next weekend’s performances. But this weekend’s? “We might have to cancel,” Linus says. “We need you at the theater as soon as possible. Petra wants to see what you can do.”
I rub my eyes. Light is peeking through the shades. It’s not the middle of the night after all. Linus tells me to be at the theater—the actual theater, not the stage in Vondelpark—at eight.
“It’s going to be a long day,” he warns.
Petra and Linus hardly look up when I arrive at the theater. A sloe-eyed Marina offers a tired, sympathetic look. She’s holding a roll and breaks off half and hands it to me. “Thank you,” I say. “I didn’t have time to eat.”
“I figured as much,” she says.
I sit down on the edge of the stage, alongside her. “So what happened?”
She arches her eyebrow. “Karma happened.” She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “I know it’s his joke to brag about his perfect record, and I’ve heard him do it many times before and nothing’s come of it.” She pauses to dust the crumbs off her lap. “But you don’t laugh at fate like that without fate eventually having the last laugh. The only problem is, it doesn’t just affect him. It might shut down the remaining run.”
“Shut it down? I thought it was just tonight’s.”
“Jeroen won’t be able to perform either of this weekend’s performances, and even if he can actually manage it in the boot cast he’s apparently going to have to wear for the next six weeks, they’ll have to reblock the whole thing. Plus, there are questions of insurance.” She sighs. “It might be easier to just cancel.”
My shoulders slump with the weight of that statement. So it falls to me. “I think I’m starting to believe in the Mackers curse,” I tell Marina.
She looks at me, the worry in her eyes mixed with sympathy. She seems about to say something when Petra orders me to the stage.
Linus looks miserable. But Petra, she of the thousand tantrums, is actually calm, cigarette smoke swirling around her like a statue on fire. It takes me a minute to realize she’s not calm. She’s resigned. She’s already written tonight off.
I climb onto the stage. I take a breath. “What can I do?” I ask her.
“We have the cast on standby for a full run-through later,” Linus answers. “Right now, we’d like to run your scenes with Marina. See how those go.”
Petra stubs out her cigarette. “We’ll skip ahead to Act One, Scene Two with Rosalind. I will read Celia. Linus will read Le Beau and the Duke. Let’s start just before the fight with Le Beau’s line.”
“‘Monsieur the challenger, the princesses call for you?’” Linus asks. Petra nods.
“I attend them with all respect and duty,” I say, jumping right in with Orlando’s next line.
There’s a moment of surprise as they all look at me
“Young man, have you challenged Charles the wrestler?” Marina asks as Rosalind.
“No, fair princess; he is the general challenger: I come but in, as others do, to try with him the strength of my youth,” I reply, not boastfully, as Jeroen does, but tempering the bravado with a little uncertainty, which I somehow now know is what Orlando must feel.
I’ve said these words hundreds of times in readings with Max, but they were just lines in a script, and I never stopped to figure out what it all meant because I never really had to. But just as Sebastian’s monologue came alive during my audition months ago, the words seem charged with meaning all of a sudden. They become a language I know.
We go back and forth and then I get to Orlando’s line: “I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me, the world no injury, for in it I have nothing. ” As I say the words, I feel a tiny catch of emotion in the back of my throat. Because I know what he means. For a minute, I think to swallow the emotion down, but I don’t. I breathe into it, letting it carry me through the scene.
I’m feeling loose and good as we move onto the fight scene, in which I pantomime fighting an invisible opponent. I know this part well. Orlando wins the fight, but he loses anyway. He is cast out of the duke’s kingdom and warned that his brother wants to kill him.
We reach the end of the scene. Petra, Linus, even Marina, they all stare at me, not saying a thing.
“Shall we continue?” I ask. “On to Act Two?” They nod. I run that scene with Linus reading the part of Adam, and when I finish that, Petra clears her throat and asks me to take it from the beginning, Orlando’s opening monologue, the one I flubbed so badly during my callback.
I don’t flub it this time. When I finish, there is more silence. “So you’re off book, that is clear,” Linus says finally. “And the blocking?”
“Yes, that too,” I say.
They look so incredulous. What do they think I’ve been doing all this time?
Warming a seat, comes my own answer. And maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised by their surprise. Because isn’t that exactly what I’d thought I’d been doing, too?
Petra and Linus excuse Marina and me. They have some things to discuss. If they decide to proceed with tonight’s performance, there will be an all-cast rehearsal at the theater at noon, and I’ll have to do an additional tech run-through at the amphitheater later in the day with just Linus.
“Sit tight. Keep your phone on,” Linus says and he pats my back and gives me a look that’s almost fatherly. “We’ll speak soon.”
Marina and I head to a nearby café for coffee. It’s raining, and inside the windows are fogged up. We sit down at a table. I rub a circle of condensation off the window. Across the canal is the bookstore where I first found the copy of Twelfth Night. It’s just opening up for the day. I tell Marina about the flat tire and stopping at the shop, the strange chain of events that led to me being Jeroen’s understudy, and now possibly, playing Orlando.
“None of that has anything to do with that performance you just gave.” She shakes her head and smiles, a private smile, and it’s this, more than anything else, that makes me stop feeling like a member of the shadow cast. “You were holding out on us.”
I don’t know how to answer. Maybe I’ve been holding out on myself, too.
“You should tell him,” she says, gesturing to the bookstore. “The guy who sold you the book and told you about the play. If you go on, you should tell him it’s partly because of him.”
If I go on, there are lots of people I’ll have to tell.
“Wouldn’t you want to know?” Marina continues. “That in some little way, something random you did had such an impact on someone’s life? What do they call that? The Butterfly Effect?”
I watch the man open the bookstore. I should tell him. Though the person I really want to tell, the person who is somehow intricately tied up in all this, who has really led me to this, I can’t tell.
“While we’re confessing,” Marina says, “I should tell you that I’ve been a little intrigued by you from the start, this mysterious actor who keeps to himself, whom no one has ever heard of, but who is good enough to get cast as the understudy.”
Good enough? That surprises me. I’d thought it was the opposite.
“I have a strict policy of no showmances,” she continues. “Nikki keeps saying you can be an exception because you’re an understudy and not in the show, but now that you maybe are I’m even more intrigued.” She gives me that private smile again. “Either we close tonight or we close in three weeks, but either way, after it’s over maybe we can spend some time together?”
That surge of longing for Lulu is still in my bloodstream, like a drug wearing out its half life. Marina is not Lulu. But Lulu is not even Lulu. And Marina is amazing. Who knows what might happen?
I’m about to tell her yes, after we close, I’d like that, but I’m interrupted by the ringing of my phone. She glances at the number and smiles at me. “That’s your fate calling.”