Calla’s legs dangled over the lip of the stage as she flipped through the loose-leaf binder that contained the script of Twelfth Night. Nicky sat next to her, peering over her shoulder. She found the scene she was looking for, and as she read, without looking up, she took Nicky’s cigarette from his hand, lifted it to her lips, and inhaled a puff. She handed it back to him and kept reading.
“I didn’t know you smoked.” Nicky ashed the cigarette into the company ashtray, an old tin can that used to house split pea soup.
“I don’t.”
“You just took a drag off my cigarette.”
“It was one puff. It calms me down.”
“Then you’re a smoker.”
“I’ve never bought a pack of cigarettes in my life.”
“That makes you a bum.”
“I’m not a bum. I’ve never smoked an entire cigarette.”
“Over the course of your life, let’s say since you were fifteen . . .”
“Sixteen.”
“Since you began bumming a drag off a cigarette, you’re now, what, twenty-one?”
“Twenty-four, but thanks. I’ll need those three years on the back nine.”
“I don’t think so but, you’re welcome. Then you’ve had at least an entire pack of cigarettes in eleven years of bumming—maybe more.”
“You could be right.” Calla jumped up on the stage. “It still doesn’t make me a smoker.”
“What’s wrong with being a smoker?”
“Nothing. It’s not something I want to do on a regular basis.”
“Why? Who cares if you smoke?”
“Frank.”
“Oh, Frank.” Nicky put his hand on his heart.
“Yes, Frank. Promise me you’ll never put your hand on your heart when you’re in one of my plays.”
“I won’t.” Nicky put his hand down and into his pocket.
“He doesn’t like when a lady smokes.”
“Not a Bette Davis fan, I guess.”
“He’s not. Linda Darnell. Gene Tierney. Those are his types.”
“Brunettes.”
“Something wrong with that?”
“Not at all. Look at Peachy. Her hair is as black as a Firestone tire.”
“I hope you come up with more romantic ways to describe her to her face, when the moment calls for it.”
“She doesn’t have any complaints.” Nicky put out his cigarette in the can and jumped up onto the stage next to Calla. “Believe you me.”
“Anything you say, Nicky.”
“At least, she’s never voiced her complaints. Where do I go when Viola is revealed?”
“I have you entering stage left. You stop downstage here. Cheat out just a bit and wait for the Duke.” Calla gently put her hands on Nicky’s shoulders and blocked him in the scene. She jumped off the stage and ran up the aisle, turning to face him. “Okay, Viola’s cue is ‘Hath been between this lady and the Lord,’ and you say to Olivia—”
Nicky cheated out, turning ever so slightly toward the audience just as Calla had blocked him. He tucked the script under his arm and spoke:
So comes it, lady, you have been mistook:
But nature to her bias drew in that,
You would have been contracted to a maid;
Nor are you therein, by my life deceived,
You are both betroth’d to a maid and a man.
“These particular lines delivered by Sebastian are the pith of the whole play.”
“They’re in my hands?” Nicky shook his head.
“Your hands. Sorry, pal. You have to let the audience know that you know that Olivia has fallen for Viola, who has been posing as a man. But you’re her twin, and she has agreed to marry you, thinking you’re Viola posing as Cesario. You have to tee this up for Viola.”
“I get it.”
“So when you tell us what’s happened, let us in on what you’re feeling.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to lose Olivia when she finds out who I really am.”
“That’s a thought.”
“Is it correct?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re the director.”
“You’re the actor,” she shot back.
“You’re the boss.”
“You’re the storyteller. They’re paying to see you. I’m not up there when the audience shows up and sits in their seats. You have to make sense of it for them. Every play is an argument. You’re stating your case.”
“I’m following.” Nicky nodded he understood.
“You bring the words to life and give them emotion and meaning.”
“Fancy talk.”
“You ever had a fare in your cab and the guy gets in and you don’t know why, but you just like him on sight?”
“Yeah.”
“You can talk to the person?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re driving the guy where he wants to go and he asks you a question and you tell him a story. You don’t think too much about the details, you just tell him what happened. It’s natural. You just tell the story, the details, deliver the information. That’s all acting is. Tell what’s on the page like you’d tell a guy in the back of the cab something you heard that you thought was interesting or funny or even disturbing—or scary, which these lines can be if a man thinks he’s going to lose the woman he loves when she figures out he isn’t who she thinks he is.”
Nicky nodded. “I know a little something about that.”
“So use it,” Calla suggested.
Tony Coppolella pushed the stage door open, and soon the actors filed in for the rehearsal Calla had added to the show schedule to incorporate Nicky into the play. He didn’t hear the door open. He didn’t hear Josie laugh backstage, or Hambone trip when he came up from the dressing room. All the while, he was thinking about what Calla had said.
Nicky had long suspected that there were two levels to life—the street level, where he drove the cab, upon which people lived and worked and shopped, ate and slept, made love, argued and settled their differences, and the other level, the depths, beneath the grid, the pavement and sidewalks, deep into the earth, under the rivers, through the silt past the stone and clay, under the layers of rock, deeper still to the magma, the tectonic plates, farther down and in, as far as one could go, to the center of things, where feelings were buried and could only be mined if a human soul bothered to dig.
Nicky had come to the knowledge of this duality of the surface and the depths early on in his life because he had grieved before he learned to read. He believed that anyone who suffered loss knew it was the only thing in the face of anything else in the human experience.