“Paula’s going to kill you,” I tell her.
She startles and looks up at me. “I’ll give you a bite if you don’t tell on me.” She holds out half of her bagel sandwich. “I ran to the deli on Seventh while you were getting your makeup done. I got some real weird looks on the street. Who am I supposed to be anyway?”
She’s in a floor-length red gown, the one Anton was so carefully steaming, with a red feathered headpiece. “You’re Dolly Levi from Hello, Dolly,” I tell her.
“Never seen it.” She shrugs. “For red dresses it was either this or orphan Annie, and that felt a little too on the nose.”
“Would that make David Daddy Warbucks?” I ask, taking a seat next to her.
“I’m not the expert here, but I’m pretty sure there was no sexual relationship between Annie and Daddy Warbucks.”
“Oh, so you didn’t see Annie Two. It was dark.”
She looks at me with narrowed eyes, trying to tell if I’m kidding.
“I probably would have auditioned for it if it existed,” I tell her. “Not that I would have gotten the part.” Like always, I add in my head. Back in my auditioning days I had a pocket-sized Moleskine notebook I brought with me everywhere. In it, I tracked the auditions I went to, the directors I auditioned for, and the results—a few callbacks, but mostly radio silence. I told myself when I hit a hundred auditions, if I hadn’t landed a role, I’d find a different job. A real job, I could hear my father’s disapproving voice say in my head.
On my ninety-ninth audition, I got a callback. This was it! In bed the night before the callback, I rehearsed how I’d tell my story of perseverance when I accepted the Tony award I’d undoubtedly earn even though the role was for an unnamed ensemble member.
I didn’t get the ninety-ninth role, and on my hundredth audition my voice cracked during my audition song, and I knew as soon as it happened I wasn’t getting the part. I threw the notebook in a trash bin outside the theater and haven’t been on a stage since. I’ve barely even been in a theater. When Theo brought me to see Hamilton for my birthday last year, I was queasy from the very first song. I feigned a migraine at intermission so we could leave.
“From where I’m sitting, I think you dodged a bullet,” Hannah says as we gaze out at the rows of crimson velvet seats. “I’d be terrified to do anything with this many people watching.”
My eyes scan up to the mezzanine and then the balcony. Performing in front of this many people would have been my dream.
I wipe at my eyes, embarrassed they’re starting to well. I thought this was going to be my life: performing in front of an adoring crowd. I wonder where the Sliding Doors moment in my life was that I took a left instead of a right and it all went so completely wrong.
Hannah shoves a wad of napkins in my direction. “Paula’s going to have a double homicide on her hands if you don’t stop,” she says around a mouthful of bagel.
“I really tried to make it work here,” I tell her.
“You make it sound like your life in New York was awful. It hasn’t been that bad, has it?” she asks.
“Nothing worked out the way I thought it would.” I dab at my eyes and the napkin comes away streaked with orange and purple splotches.
“I don’t think that’s how life works, Finn. If life worked out how I thought it would, I would have been a teacher slash ballerina slash astronaut, and you know I’d be terrible at all of those things.”
I laugh at the mental image of her trying to control a room of screaming eight-year-olds while wearing a tutu and a space helmet. “But that’s different. That’s kindergarten career-day stuff. I could see this. I didn’t change my mind, but then . . . no one would let me.”
“Do you remember the night we met? You told me you were going to be famous.”
“Oh god, I was so obnoxious!” I hang my head and cringe at my nineteen-year-old self, so sure this would happen for him. What would he think of me now? “I feel like I wasted all my time in New York on dreams that didn’t come true.”
“So what? So you didn’t ever get cast. Sounds like a crappy life to me anyway. Eight shows a week? No free weekends? No social life? Cater waitering between roles for cash? Only so . . . what? You can make it and schlep around the country on a coach bus playing regional shows in Des Moines and Phoenix? You’d hate that.”
“How do you even know all of that?”
“I googled it when you quit. I wanted to be prepared to talk shit about your path not taken.”
I nudge her with my shoulder, touched by her willingness to hate my enemies, real or imagined. “But it’s not just that.” I stand up and pace a track from one end of the stage to the other to burn off some of the anxiety this conversation is creating.
“Enlighten me.”
“It’s theater, it’s Jeremy—” She scoffs at the mention of his name. “Hell, it’s Theo, too. I wasted so much of my time here.”
“I think you’re focusing on all the wrong things,” she says, a hint of defensiveness creeping into her voice. “We had fun, didn’t we? To me, New York is that time we went to a Yankees game before remembering that neither of us give a shit about baseball, so we bought hats and hot dogs and left. It’s slices of Artichoke pizza in the Village at four in the morning, and biking across the bridge to Dumbo on summer weekends so we could stare back at New York across the river. It’s the eight million dinners, and brunches, and nights out, even the ones that kind of sucked because those would be the best to laugh at over bagels the next morning. Not to mention the Christmases. Well, just the good ones. To me, New York is us, and that wasn’t time wasted. Not to me, anyway.”
“I’m sorry, have you seen my best friend? I think aliens might have abducted her because that was sappy as hell.” But then I lean my head on her shoulder because she’s right—there were lots of good parts, too. She leans her head against mine and we stare out into the theater.
“I’m proud of you, you know,” she says after a minute, and I nod. “I’m sad for me, though. It feels like I just got you back, but I know you need to go.” I understand because I feel the exact same way.
“I think a fresh start will be good for me. But we can have video calls—maybe we can do a monthly virtual movie night, all four of us? And you have David now. You’ll be okay.”
She lifts her head and stares down at the remnants of her bagel in its foil wrapper in her lap. “I don’t know. He’s pretty mad at me right now.” She says it casually, but when I turn to look at her, her teeth are gritted, like she’s trying hard not to cry.
I squeeze her arm and try to make my voice light, pushing aside the toll this conversation has had on me, too, and say, “Let’s get back to everyone before Paula kills us for all this eating and crying.”
As we stand up, I add, “You know I’m always here for you if you need to talk, right? Even when I’m not physically here, here.”
* * *