Richard didn’t react at first, as if he hadn’t understood, then abruptly turned on his heel and left through the wings without a word.
Gwendolyn looked down on James and Alexander. “You two take five as well, look over your lines, and come back ready to work. In fact, everyone take five. Go.” When nobody moved, she flapped her hands to shoo us out of the auditorium, like we were so many unwelcome chickens. I loitered until James brushed past me, then followed him out to the loading dock. Alexander was already there, already lighting a spliff.
“That son of a bitch,” he said. “He’s got half as many lines as we do and he’s got the nerve to interrupt our first off-book run? Fuck him.” He sat down, sucked hard on the spliff, then passed it up to James, who took one short drag and handed it back.
“You’re not wrong,” he said as he exhaled, a cloud of white smoke issuing from his lips. “But neither is he.”
Alexander looked mutinous. “Well, fuck you, too.”
“Don’t pout. We should know our lines better. Richard’s called us out on it, is all.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but he was a major dick about it.”
One corner of James’s mouth twitched toward a smile. “True.”
The door opened and Filippa appeared, arms folded against the nighttime chill. “Hey. You guys okay?”
Alexander took another long pull and let his mouth hang open, the smoke pouring out in a long, lazy stream.
“It’s been a long night,” James said, flatly.
“If it makes you feel any better, Meredith’s just bitten Richard’s head off.”
“What for?” I asked.
“For being a jackass,” she said, as if it should have been obvious. “Just because she’s sleeping with him doesn’t mean she can’t see when he’s being a shithead.”
James: “I’m confused. Is he a jackass or is he a shithead?”
Filippa: “Honestly, I think Richard could be both.”
Me: “At least he won’t be getting laid for a while.”
Alexander: “Yeah. Great. That’ll make him much more cooperative.”
“Actually, he apologized,” Filippa said. “To Meredith, anyway. Said it was childish and he regretted it already.”
“Really?” Alexander said, smoke curling around his head like he was about to combust. “So not only is he a jackass shithead major dick son of a bitch, but he’s already apologized?” He threw his spliff on the concrete and ground it out with his heel. “That’s just perfect, now we can’t even stay mad. Seriously, fuck him.” He finished pulverizing the spliff and looked up at the rest of us. We stood in a loose ring around him, lips pressed tight together, struggling to keep straight faces. “What?”
Filippa caught my eye and we both burst out laughing.
SCENE 11
Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. With us it ambled, trotted, and galloped all through October. (It never stood still until the morning of November the twenty-second, and it seems, to me at least, that it hasn’t really moved since then.)
We had long ago finished cataloging our strengths and weaknesses. Alexander followed Meredith and declared his ability to frighten people rather proudly, but confessed the concern that he was the villain in his own life’s story. Wren presented a double-edged sword: she was intimately in touch with her emotions but, as a result, too sensitive for such a competitive artistic environment. Richard told us what we all knew already—that he was unfailingly confident, but his ego made him difficult to work with. Filippa made her statement without any trace of embarrassment. She was versatile, but because she didn’t have a “type,” she would be stuck playing secondary characters forever. James—speaking slowly, deep in thought, seeming not to even see the rest of us—explained that he immersed himself completely in every character he played, but sometimes he couldn’t quite leave them behind and learn to be himself again. By the time my turn came we had grown so numb to one another’s insecurities that my saying I was the least talented person in our year didn’t seem to surprise anyone. I couldn’t think of any great strength I had and admitted as much, but James interrupted me to say, “Oliver, you make every scene you’re in about the other people in it. You’re the nicest person and the most generous actor here, which is probably more important than talent anyway.” I immediately shut my mouth, certain he was the only one who thought so. Oddly, nobody else argued.
On October 16, we took our usual places in the gallery. Outside, a perfect autumn day had lit the trees around the lake aflame. The blaze of color—tawny orange, sulfurous yellow, arterial red—shimmered upside down on the surface of the water. James peered out the window over my shoulder and said, “Apparently Gwendolyn has the art classes stewing up stage blood to splatter all over the beach.”
“Won’t that be fun.”
He shook his head, mouth quirked up at one corner, and slid into the chair opposite mine. I pushed a cup and saucer toward him and watched as he lifted the cup to his lips, still smiling. The others rattled in from the hall, and the spell of lazy tranquility faded into the air like steam.
Officially, we had left off our lessons on Caesar and moved on to Macbeth, but Caesar’s familiar words leapt readily to our lips, and with them came a kind of bristling tension. Weeks of difficult rehearsals and Gwendolyn’s psychological puppeteering had made neutrality impossible. That day, what began as a simple discussion of tragic structure quickly devolved into an argument.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Alexander said, halfway through our lesson, impatiently pushing his hair out of his face. “What I’m saying is that the tragic structure is staring you in the face in Macbeth; it makes Caesar look like a telenovela.”
Meredith: “What the hell does that mean?”
Frederick: “Language, please, Meredith.”
Wren sat up straighter on the floor, returning her teacup to the saucer between her knees. “No,” she said, “I understand.”