People can spend only so much time in the dark, even at the theater. With no sign of light yet on the horizon, an authentic disgruntlement broke out in the seats, although the bearded man next to me seemed as calm as ever, casually typing away at his phone. I knew we’d reached the end of the production: the bassoon was now in unplayable pieces. Music having been at the very heart of The Vegetable Gender, the dismemberment of the last remaining instrument told me there could be no more melody, even if three of the actors had remained on-stage in gnomic postures, with the play’s action unconsummated, and all speech defeated—indeed, all sound. The giant was resigned to his dying.
Lights of a startlingly ordinary brightness flickered on and too quickly restored mundanity to proceedings. I’d been right; that had been the end. I sat for a while, breathing deeply, rubbing my eyes, shaking out my drawing hand. By the time I’d finished rousing myself this way, and I looked back down the row, the rose-scented man had managed to slip away. I’d been playing with the idea of conspiracy tonight, yes, but not putting serious stock in it. It was all a harmless delusion that would be resolved after the show, I assumed, when I’d find out that this man hadn’t actually known the first thing about me or Garrett. But now, in his absence, I was left to consider.
Patrons had risen from their seats, and while a few looked poised and nodded meaningfully, most appeared bewildered. If you’d come tonight expecting theater in the ordinary sense, where narrative intelligibility had primacy, you were going to be confused or irked, because what you got was something more like visually sculpted form. In sensory terms, I thought, there was actually a surfeit of meaning on offer. But here it couldn’t be peeled away from its experiential embodiment, from the story inhering directly in the positions of figures in space and light, the sounds enveloping the audience, rather than in the meanings of the words that fell from characters’ mouths. I would be sifting through these sensuous details for the rest of the night, I knew, and for some time after, too. Yet this kind of significance didn’t lend itself to commentary, which explained the bemusement I saw around me. I don’t really think anyone knew quite what to say about what they’d just seen, and, for most, post-show discussion was the very point of going to the theater. Plays that left you at a loss for words were bound to be a problem, no matter how sensorially profound they might be. I, of course, was hoping I’d discovered with my pen just this sort of intelligibility in things and the cascade of event that others were evidently failing to find with words. I could have checked right away to see if I had—my sketchpad was still there in my lap—but I knew that if I’d fallen short, it would only spoil my mood, and I had to preserve my spirits, since my job hadn’t yet come to an end. I’d not met Daphne yet, of course. Garrett had asked that I try. And anyway, didn’t I want to?
The stage below me filled from all sides with a medley of crew and audience. Yet I didn’t see anyone from the cast, including Daphne. Just beyond the spot where the front edge of the light had roamed during the show, two refreshments tables sat end-to-end: heirloom tables, thick slabs of dark wood propping up the usual rows of red and white wine, green beer bottles, and clear plastic cups. This setup would have been there the entire time, during the performance, just barely out of sight, waiting for this after-show mingle, which seemed to be picking up speed, as people getting over their dismay or disappointment mixed on-stage with members of the crew, whom I could see were decked out in black tees. Soon enough, it was all clinking plastic and laughter; you wouldn’t have suspected the strain we’d all just been put under.
A pair of exits for personnel featured at the back of the stage, and it was just there that I caught sight of that distinctive throb of blonde hair; it was almost white in the light. And then that long, gaunt face, with a nose tiny and crimped, the one feature of perfection I’d noted from Dumont’s film. Daphne wasn’t speaking with anyone, though, or sipping a drink. She was making for the exits with purpose, and she’d be out of sight in seconds.
I scrambled for the aisle and nearly tripped over a long, mustard-yellow scarf tangled with the seat of the man who’d fled. A bit warm for such an item, I thought, but the wind was beginning to carry a nip in the evenings. Finding it here actually gave me new hope. I peered up at the hall entrances through which I’d come and searched for the patchy beard and those inelegant acetate glasses, which were both unfortunately too common around here: at least four people sported a look like his, up near the doors and in the aisles. When I looked down toward the stage again, Daphne was gone, though I saw one of the exit doors, gray metal with a long bar across it, easing shut. I glanced back up once more, at the four lookalikes—now there were six—and collected the scarf, wrapping it around my hand as if making to punch someone while protecting my knuckles. Let him find me. And if he never got this pretty swatch of cloth back, well, it would be recompense for viewing my pictures over my shoulder, uninvited.
I cut down the aisle at a gallop, shouldering through the crowd to catch up with Daphne. On my way, I twisted the scarf around my neck as bait for the rose-scented man, who would very likely be looking for it: though it was faded and frayed, it was so fine between the fingers I had the feeling it was something more luxurious than cashmere. Vicuna, maybe. Its shambolic state might also soften my appearance some, turn it more bohemian, which would help with this crowd, and probably Daphne as well.
When I reached the bottom of the pit, the light had more strength, but then it was also harder to see over the milling people. One man was in fact easier to spot from down here, because if you looked up, above the crowd, there was only one head, one face, located on this plane, and that was the old man. But he wasn’t old anymore. He had no sign of a stoop either, and he might have rinsed off his makeup, as the pallor was gone, too. His age had been an act skillfully realized, and the contradiction I’d felt between the giant’s infirmity and his size must have been driven by the ardor of youth radiating from beneath his makeup and modest clothing. That said, just how much virility the actor really had was an open question. This younger version, somewhere in his thirties, was every bit as morose as the old giant he’d played. Really, there was only slightly more cheer in him now than in the dying moments of the show. This subdued quality in actors, once they’d finished playing their parts for the night, didn’t strike me as all that uncommon, though. Men and women in this trade were congenitally hyperactive or apathetic. I’d not met many in New York or California who were anywhere near the center of the personality spectrum.
I pushed through all the people onstage, navigating mostly by the young giant’s face there above the crowd, although, when his head went out of sight due to the angle, I used the cup of red wine in his hand, which he sipped in a manner that suggested he was perpetually rediscovering it to be unpalatable. For a small moment, a fissure in the crowd, which led all the way to his feet, opened up. It must have lasted half a second. Yet in that transient corridor, I noted, with real relief, that the one making the giant’s head bob somberly was none other than Daphne. She spoke up to him, wearing a sardonic look that didn’t suit her. I squeezed into another shaft of space, oriented almost perpendicularly to the first—these lanes were opening and closing around me all the time—and glimpsed another cast member, one of the two actors playing the troubadour, who I continued to conceptualize as such although not a song was sung, and the bassoon anyway was no instrument for vocal accompaniment. What, in the end, did I owe the truth? The passage closed too quickly for me to be sure whether it was the troubadour’s older or younger self who was coming back in through those exits at the rear of the stage, dressed in jeans, with his hair wet along the edges as if he’d just scrubbed his face.
I pushed on toward the giant and his plastic chalice. At least three times he glanced at me as I waded through the crowd. I don’t know if he understood that I was steering by him, but he showed no interest in my approach. Eventually I broke through to another clearing and discovered, to the other side of him, at least a head shorter than he was, the interloper—the Arab wanderer—the one who’d ceded his key to the giant. The play had asked us to see this Middle Eastern man like this, as the foreign body that literally held the key to the territory: a sentry or scout, maybe a roving knight of the Levant. There was also a new man in the vicinity of the giant and the Arab. He was small and unimpressive, I thought, narrow-faced, with little in the way of a jaw. He would have been better served by a beard, no matter how ratty, while his near-black eyes would have benefitted from being set deeper into his skull (there were surgeries that could accomplish this) rather than clinging to the surface of his face, giving him a permanently bedraggled look even when he affected haughtiness and self-satisfaction, as he did now. His lack of physical distinction extended to his attire: the billowy shirtsleeves he was swimming in, giving his body a massless aspect, and blue trousers with very wide cords that had the look of art-school upholstery.
This man was busy not shaking hands with the theatergoers who were congratulating him on the production. The throng had overcome their consternation and come around to the play, doubtless aided by the open bar and the chance to connect not only with the cognoscenti of vanguard theater, but with The Vegetable Gender’s prime mover: Nikita Volger. This was him. In response to the plaudits directed at him every half-minute by someone new, he would nod or curtly wave, pointedly refusing all handshakes and hugs. He did embrace one thing: a small crimson flask with a stitched leather stopper, which he alternately caressed and furtively swigged from, shifting his eyes this way and that. This discretion was absurd, of course, no-one could have missed him, standing there in plain sight. A reflex from years of sneak drinking?
I checked back on the giant and found him warily eyeing me. Perhaps he’d not appreciated my sizing up his boss. Before things could take a paranoic turn, I put on a quick tight smile, walked right up to the oversized man, and asked without guile about Daphne’s whereabouts. His pale face hardened. He’d heard this question before. He leaned down low to whisper into the ear of the Arab. They made a motley pair, one the patriot, one the enemy, but now thick as thieves. The Arab smiled conspiratorially and looked me over slowly, even lustily, I felt, before tapping Nik on the shoulder. The director didn’t seem to appreciate such handling. He shot the Arab a look that read as a warning and a reminder. Still, once the question had been conveyed to him, he recovered well enough. All three of them began to laugh in a muted sort of way, and the people still trying to get a word in with the director laughed as well, rather too theatrically, I thought, as they couldn’t have heard the question and had no inkling what was funny about it.
“Oh, well, she’s gone, of course,” Nik said, though I wasn’t sure to whom he was speaking, as he quickly turned back to the crowd to refuse more praise. This was his bit, his pleasure, and I was interrupting it. As had our wandering Arab. Nik was done with both of us. I might have been annoyed with the director’s dismissive words had they not come wrapped in a mid-Atlantic accent that diminished him even further in my eyes. He had that disheveled Slavic look about him, which lent him a certain gravitas by putting you in mind of the great Russian tradition, not just drama but also fiction. He could have been a Dostoevsky character, and not entirely by accident; he seemed to have attempted to mold himself into literature. Yet his accent betrayed him. He’d clearly grown up in the States. Probably he was second- or third-generation American, at best only the great-grandson of one of those titans.
I turned to the Arab, who winked at me before looking up at the giant with a tentative smile, as if waiting for me to leave. But I wasn’t finished yet.
“I just saw her,” I said. “I saw her hair, actually, from over there.” I pointed back up to my seat, or where I thought it was, anyway; a sea of them rose up like a wave behind us, disorienting me. “She can’t have gone far.”
“Oh,” said the giant, “but she never, ever stays.” His cadences were twitchy and clipped and bathed in neurotic insecurity, which struck me as comic, coming from a pituitary case like him. “Why do you need her, anyway? Who are you?”
Introductions were made. The Arab and the giant began by telling me what I already knew, namely, that the man with the crowd around him was the director, Nik. They went on to name themselves: Sikah and Hank.
“How exactly do you know Daphne?” Sikah said with put-on poise. He kept looking at me as though he were a pimp and Daphne were one of his girls. If I played my cards right, his tone suggested, he might be able to find work for me, too. I considered, just briefly, tearing the tiny gold chain that hung from this shifty Arab’s neck.
“I’d been told,” I said, “by a friend of hers, a family friend, to say hello if I could.”
“You know her through a family friend?” Hank scoffed. He and his colleague looked at me dubiously, clearly suspecting I was just one more overexcited metropolitan looking to get close to a dramatic principal. I sympathized, in a way. Almost everyone who entered the world of the stage, whether as a viewer or a performer, was slightly off. That’s why I’d refused to go to the theater with Claire, preferring the movies on our sofa where I could be at a safe remove from people of their ilk.
“Daphne doesn’t have family friends,” Hank whispered coldly and angled toward Sikah, as if that should be the end of it. The giant seemed to tune me out instantly, the way professional actors will as soon as they’re off-duty. Yet his Arab friend continued to study me, especially my fitted suit and ragged scarf, as though our intercourse had some distance left to go. Perhaps in a bedroom. Sikah’s lasciviousness, I soon realized, had the unwelcome air of the intellectual about it: you couldn’t find any raw kink in his mien, the kind that might actually appeal, just self-conscious titillation, which made you hope, one day or night, he’d be given more than he could handle and left in a pile by a true sexual sadist. Maybe that would make him finally quit all his playacting and accept which side of the line he was on—the effete and not the carnal. He had a peculiarly bony face, and a bony body to boot, with a freakishly defined collarbone. His knowing eyes darted around after long stares, as if to demonstrate that nothing was beyond the ken of a mind so alert.
Taking all this into account, Sikah’s hypnotic entrance onto the stage this evening, with that tiny key hanging off the chain that was still around his neck, was probably his bread and butter: he seemed like he could exist very comfortably on the city’s circuit of advanced theater and performance art. Hank was different. Despite his perversely elongated body, he seemed somehow more ordinary than Sikah, his patent neuroticism being routine among mainstream actors. He was talking shop quite enthusiastically with the crew and cast, displaying an earnestness that seemed charmingly out of place here: the Broadway character actor amid radical performance artists.
Yes, as I meditated on him I began to see that he, not Sikah, was the real interloper in The Vegetable Gender. Ever the professional, Hank had no time for chit-chat with a stranger, whereas Sikah could take a fugitive interest in me, at least for a while. And so I felt his gaze pass over my shoes, my watch, my tie of rust. If I were to learn anything more of Daphne, I’d have to settle for speaking with this one making eyes at me. I turned to face him directly.
“Where do you think she might’ve gone, Sikah?” I asked.
Apparently he’d assumed Hank had stamped out that topic of discussion. Sikah’s ethereal smile withered into cosmopolitan hardness. Yet before I could say anything more, I felt a sharp tug from behind. I nearly fell backward as the scarf began to cinch around my neck. The bitter Arab’s eyes glinted.
“You really think this suits you?” someone snickered from over my shoulder. Finally I slipped out of the noose and spun halfway around, gasping for breath. Those glasses, that beard, the rose in the air: it was him, smiling, the yellow strip of cloth now dangling from his hand like a whip.
“I really did think that was yours, Jeff,” said Sikah. “Put it back on. You look naked without it. And you just wear it so much better than this one.” He glared at me showily.
Jeff started tying the scarf around his neck in an elaborate knot, all the while delivering to me the flattest of stares. It did suit him better, I had to admit, its frayed edges and fading colors smoothly integrating with his blazer and jeans. Still, it was too hot in here to wear a scarf as anything other than an affectation. When he’d finished primping, his empty eyes returned to life. “How did you all like the lights tonight?” he nearly shouted, making Hank and Nik turn to him.
I found it remarkable that Jeff had nothing more to say to me—I who had, as far as he could tell, outright stolen his scarf, even if I’d mostly done it to get him to reveal himself to me. Perhaps he simply assumed that if you leave something lying around, someone’s going to take it home with him: on another night, he would be the one lifting someone’s orphaned scarf. This was the city, after all.
“The lighting was fine,” said Sikah, “just like the last night, and the night before that.” He rocked forward, held out his long thin arms and lightly embraced Jeff, stroked the back of his neck, ruffled his hair with his fingers. “Hank here just fucked up,” he said, tapping the giant in the ribs.
Just like that, Nik turned away from his minions to face us. Only a barb about his work, I suspected, could get his attention on nights like these. He looked us over uncertainly and he drew his flask halfway from his pocket. He let it slip back into place, took a breath, and offered us a sardonic scowl, shaking his head with distinct notes of embarrassment, irony, and just beneath that, rage, as though his Arab wasn’t entirely wrong about the flaws. For a half-second, Hank appeared genuinely stung by Sikah’s words, and when Nik signaled his general agreement, Hank’s dewy face wrinkled up, giving us a glimpse of the old man he really would become. It seemed, then, he had reason to be morose tonight. He’d been off his game. Nevertheless, he quickly took the wince on his face and willed it into a funhouse frown, passing off his woundedness as merely show, although anyone could see his ruse. You’d think he’d not have tried it; it was so obvious and cringeworthy. We all had a little pity in our eyes at the sight of it, but the others less than I. They were performers, and make-believe was their trade. By this point they’d mostly stopped caring about deception, even the bald-faced kind.
It was the same with Jeff, who I gathered was their lighting designer. Did he have nothing to do with Garrett, then? I’d been sent reeling by this question ever since he’d tried to strangle me with his scarf, wondering what exactly his role was. Earlier I’d assumed that if he did come back for the missing accessory, my first task would be to diffuse his anger, proving to him I hadn’t really meant to keep it. But he’d shown no anger, and I sensed that, unlike the giant or the Arab, he genuinely felt none. It was the most normal thing in the world to him—to steal. What was the point in even bringing up the incident?
Could he have somehow divined, however, my true motive for taking the scarf, namely, to lure him to me? That he might have deduced my eccentric flight from routine behavior toward something unlikely and far better suited to the stage—and that this might be why he wasn’t angry with me—suggested that, in several ways, he might be much like the actors after all.
“Well,” Jeff said, looking up at Hank, as everyone had to, and trying to soften the blow dealt to the giant: “What do you think of the lights?”
“They were fine—tonight,” came the reply in that skittish voice. “But there’s a point in the show, when Elias enters, where they’ve been too low for the whole run. They’re meant to brighten, isn’t that Nik’s idea? And finally, tonight, they did—”
“Perfect,” Jeff said, sneaking a look at me.
“No, but it threw me off, that you’d actually fixed it. Try to keep it this way now. Because one thing I can say is that no-one can do the whole fucking thing in the dark. Well, maybe your role, Sikah. Nobody with a real part.” The Arab backed up and made his mouth into an O of mock outrage, though the perfect circle—the tongue twirling slightly within the wet hole—probably meant a few things. He grasped Nik around his neck, as if falling into his arms for comfort, and a palpable shudder of disgust ran through the director’s body. Nik gathered himself quickly and sharply righted Sikah before turning back to his narcotic: his devotees.
“Why?” a voice whispered from behind me, loud enough for me and no-one else to hear. I looked over my shoulder and there was the girlish brunette, belatedly replying, it seemed, to my questions about Daphne with one of her own: “Why do you need Daphne?” She sounded older than during the performance, yet not old enough to catch up with her manifest age, which put her, by my eye, in her mid-thirties.
“I’m supposed to work with her on something,” I said. “Maybe.” I almost kneeled, as if I were talking to a child; but I caught myself and straightened up, prizing her apart from her character. She was tiny, whatever her age. I stood to her as the giant stood to me, and so I regarded her in the same paternal manner. You almost couldn’t help it, when addressing someone so much shorter. Hank’s insecurities and inhibitions were all the more curious for this fact.
“Like what?”
How to put it? “It’s a project for her... I don’t know, a good friend of her father’s?” How much secrecy could Garrett expect from me? I was surprised he’d not said something about it. It was bound to trip me up eventually.
“Someone close to her father?” Sikah was right there over my shoulder, caressing me around the hips, ostensibly in jest. I shot an elbow into his chest with just as much good humor and he backed away nursing his sternum. “Jeff, what do you say to that?” he croaked.
“Maybe she’s got a step-father we don’t know about,” he replied with a trace of glibness.
“No,” Sikah said, “I mean the one we know, the father father. Tony. You know him better than any of us. Who could get close to him?”
“Hmmm... Daphne might be close to him.”
“Oh, that’s not true.”
Jeff adjusted his scarf a little and looked at me. “As close as you can be to someone like that, anyway. A lonely intellectual.” Like Sikah and Hank, he was basking in all I didn’t know. There was a faint hostility to his actions, his words, but I didn’t mind. I had taken his scarf. Moral calculi have their complexities, particularly when applied to cases like Jeff’s.
Over his shoulder I saw the troubadour-cum-terrorist approach. Gone was that thin linen shirt. The normality of the light was changing my impression of everyone, especially Jeff, along with my sense of the space we were all occupying, which was vast and towering, the ceiling being much higher than I’d imagined—and I’d imagined it quite high. But the troubadour: this was his older incarnation, supposing there really was a distinct younger version of him and his aging hadn’t been simply an effect of costuming or makeup. A few steps off to his side, standing shyly and without a drink, was the play’s inert, androgynous character. I’d almost forgotten it—my preferred pronoun for such persons, in lieu of barbarisms like they—this figure so inscrutable and universal, who’d returned to the stage just before the end of the show, almost as an observer, a stand-in for the audience. Even now, there was no way to tell what it was. Taken as a girl, she was good-looking. Rosy-cheeked, full-mouthed, with hair almost like the fur of a rabbit, she smiled blithely at me. Maybe she’d been observing my conversation with the rest of the cast. But when you drew together the weights of those features a little differently, leaving the emphasis on the sturdy shoulders and hard chin, there was also a handsome man to be seen. He too was smiling at me, of course, though my desires evaporated, even while my admiration for the person’s form held steady. What wonderful versatility!
All this was knowable because of the clinical lights above us that reminded me of classrooms, this law school auditorium where many an exam would have been sat. Surveying the actors around me in one sweep, I could see plainly that most of their countenances had been simple imaginative fill-in on my part, the spontaneous hypothesizing the eye engages in when the world fails to throw light. Everyone in the audience would have done the same, though whatever they supplemented those near-silhouettes with, only they could say. They and perhaps their psychiatrists. It can feel like a cheat, a disappointment even, that the mind so eagerly draws on memory and habit to fill in missing details. But what would the alternative be? Perception riddled with absences? Tears in the cloth of consciousness, and with it the crippling anxiety of not knowing what lived in these fissures? Better to gloss over the gaps than to be confronted by your ignorance of so much that lies around you, when most of the time there’s nothing you can do about it, no way of putting everything under lights like these and taking inventory. How easy we find it to adapt a previously vague portrait of someone or something to the more detailed picture we arrive at later, and convince ourselves that this is what we’d seen all along. Only someone who’d had reasons to set down their vaguer impressions at the time, as I had tonight, in my sketchpad, would have to admit just how much those impressions had been the dreamwork of the eye, waiting to be massaged into shape by a fuller acquaintance with their object.
This was a datum of drawing I’d learned as far back as middle school: the viewer finishes every picture. Form and volume and color—in all these things he has a hand or an eye. This is why it doesn’t pay, as an artist, to recapitulate all the finer details of a scene. You can push the viewer right out of the frame that way. A kind of deadness overtakes images of this sort: photographs, for one, which too often present a replete world without any need for the viewer and his creative powers. Lively and dead all the same. Having said that, I nevertheless believed the troubadour to be pretty close to my original vision of him from the seats, given how distinct an impression he’d made on me. His was a formidably masculine presence, though he wore it more lightly now, with the beat-up jeans he’d changed into and the mussed-up hair still dripping water from washing his face, which darkened the thin bright tie he now wore over his plaid button-down. He stood by Jeff and spoke to me without the usual self-consciousness of actors: “You’re not the artist, are you?” He seemed genuinely curious. All the actors, even the director, looked more closely at me now. “It’s just, the way you’re dressed, it’s hard to...”
“So then you do know her,” Sikah said with briefly widening eyes. “I really thought you had to be some scion who’d ended up at the wrong play. Or else your fiancée had dragged you here.”
“Oh, one of those wunderkind philanthropists,” the childlike, middle-aged woman exclaimed. “Like what’s his name. Chris Hills?”
“Hughes,” Sikah corrected her.
She didn’t seem to mind or to notice—she’d already moved on, evidently transfixed by my shoes. I didn’t learn her name, not then. She was too shy to tell me, it seemed, and none of the others apparently thought it worth mentioning.
“We could use one of those types,” Hank said.
“Though with actual style,” added Jeff. He dusted my chalk-striped shoulders with his hands. “That’s a very nice jacket.” I gave him a hard look in return that he seemed to appreciate. “I don’t know why you’d ruin all that with this scarf,” he said. “You know, I thought you might have been a critic—for a little magazine from the seventies.”
I was relieved, in a way, that they’d heard something about me. I wasn’t going to have to tread quite so lightly and keep all things secret.
“Did Daphne know I’d be here tonight?” I asked. “Was she told?”
The giant offered a frazzled shake of his sweaty head before I’d even finished asking. I think he shook that head a lot. No came naturally to him.
“I don’t know about tonight,” the cowboy troubadour said as he searched the crowd, not so much looking for Daphne as making sure she wasn’t around.
“Even if she did know,” Sikah opined, “I’m not sure she would have stuck around for you.” I waited for him to explain but the wanderer went for a glass of wine instead—not much of a Muslim, it seemed—and brought back another for the troubadour, whose name, I discovered then, was Elias. Apparently Sikah had some regard for his colleague. The man was, I should say, handsome. Maybe they’d fucked at some point, or, if not, Sikah dreamt of making it happen, with enough wine.
“But Daphne did say she was going to sit for an artist, yeah,” Elias resumed, while clinking glasses with Sikah and drinking deeply. He looked me over in a friendly sort of way, man to man, as he gulped. “Some sort of project.”
Sikah made to drink from his glass, white wine to Elias’ red, but paused to say, “I only meant, she’s shot after these gigs, sick of humankind. Is that what you call a delicate soul?”
“I thought she said she had movie people to meet tonight,” the woman interjected, trying, I think, to be helpful, unlike the others.
Sikah gibed.
“Maybe,” said Elias. He seemed only slowly to be coming out of character. There’d been a stoicism to the role Nik had given him that wouldn’t come off as easily as the makeup he’d washed from his face. In an hour’s time, maybe, he’d be his old self, though I wouldn’t be around to see who that was.
“I think,” the old girl declared, “she could be an actual genius. I do.” To emphasize the point she screwed her face up rather hideously. I had to assume she wasn’t aware of the fright she could give like this, but then what sort of actress would she be, to be unaware of something so monstrous? She must have meant to give me that look—an even more disturbing prospect. “Is that why you’re painting her?” she asked.
Hyperbole, I knew, was commonplace among the theater set. But Sikah, who consistently stinted on praise, looked on resignedly, without any of his usual quibbles. The woman’s use of the g-word might then have had more substance to it than usual.
“Could,” Sikah said at last. “Exactly.” Which only confirmed my feeling.
“Oh no, she is—she has to be a genius,” Nik broke in after a long absence from the conversation, shedding several interlocutors and returning to our circle. “We need her to be.” I got the feeling he’d been monitoring everything said by his flock, as leaders will. How long until other acolytes and hangers-on swooped in on him? This must have been a perennial matter of distress or pleasure after shows, depending on Nik’s mood, or how things had gone that night —or how much of that flask he’d managed to empty down his throat. As he joined us, he looked firmly, properly, at me for the first time. The alcohol had made him bold. He brightened, as if he’d not really seen me at all until now; perhaps he was wondering if I was some young and ambitious critic, or, given the way I was dressed, a member of a distinguished New York family. I thought he might introduce himself to me, but he didn’t go beyond a nod. He was playing hard-to-get, or had changed his mind about my being a man of influence. At least the nod conveyed respect. Or caution. I’d seen none of either before now. “Daphne holds the whole show together,” he said finally. “Did you notice that? We wrote the thing for her.”
I offered no response; nor did I introduce myself. Disregard of this sort came naturally to me, frankly. I’d been told more than once that it was an odd quality of mine, this lack of interest in making myself known to those around me. I simply carried on, at most social functions, as if I were either already well-known to most, or perfectly anonymous and happy to keep it that way. Claire had delighted in this, my relative indifference to power, which, in the world she came of age in, was a treasure hoarded, guarded, stolen, or (grudgingly) ceded. Fortunately, before my lack of deference or concern could sour things with Nik, the giant’s words caught our attention.
“The lighting—I’ve been trying to say, it was really perfect tonight. It has to be like this all the time, though.” Hank was speaking to Jeff and some crew members several yards away, but he loomed so large above the others, it felt as if he were still with us, however far from us he stood. From where we were, we could see only the back Jeff’s head, the first signs of thinning hair, and his ratty blazer, one of those deliberately not-nice jackets that becomes kind of nice through its lack of airs.
“Daphne’s very, very good—Alice is right,” Elias declared. So this was the woman’s name.
“Oh, but she’s hardly there yet,” Sikah hissed in his effeminate way. I would have painted his nails if I were his portraitist.
“Why not?” Alice snapped. “Just because you aren’t?” Elias nearly sprayed a mouthful of wine over me then. He found his composure swiftly enough and half-apologetically regarded Sikah, who was trying to laugh off his fury for the diminutive infidel. Nik was amused by it all, of course, as I was. These rivalries among his adopted family had to bring him joy. It probably sharpened their performances, that hot-bloodedness spilling over from whatever real-life feuds they had going with one another into the play itself. Nik, I was sure, would have had some pet theory about it he trotted out in interviews.
“I don’t know, Sikah, she’s getting along pretty well these days, that’s how I’d put it,” said Nik. “She’s got plenty of time, too.” The director glanced in my direction, and on seeing that I was enjoying the Arab’s torment, appeared more comfortable with the prospect of holding my gaze. I thought to shake his hand, to say something about tonight, as all those sycophants were doing. Did he have any real idea of who I might be? Perhaps he’d been kept out of the loop by Sikah and Hank, as siblings will shield their patriarch from certain schemes.
Sikah sucked his teeth. He wasn’t going to convince any of them of very much, so what was the point in quarreling?
Elias got right in front of me now, taking advantage of my open posture, which had been intended for Nik, who was suddenly being led away by a woman I thought I vaguely recognized from fashion advertisements. We watched the two of them disappear through the gray doors at the back of the stage, before Elias asked me flatly: “What sort of pictures are you making of her?”
I took a step back. “I’m not really sure yet,” I said. It was, of course, the truth, though it came across as an evasion. “I made some sketches tonight, just to get me started.”
“Are we in any of them?” Elias squinted at me as though he wanted to see them right then. I felt him slipping into character, not the one he’d played and then washed off in the sink, but one he liked to play socially with certain people. “Will we be in any of them?”
“As if he’s going to tell you,” Alice said.
Elias paused, taking this in. I thought he might even pat her on the head. “Where were you sitting? Specifically? What did you see in us tonight?” His tone turned dreamy, as did his posture, everything softening slightly in a way I found absurd.
I pointed indistinctly at the seats as I pushed on with the matter at hand: Daphne. Time was passing. I couldn’t afford to be diverted further. “Did she seem, well, excited about the project?”
Elias, though, stayed in character and kept up his soft, silly smile, pretending not to hear me.
“More than you are, presumably.”
My little rebuff took the slack out of his face and made the other two tittle. Elias recomposed himself and faintly smiled in acknowledgement of the power of my barb, and from that I knew he’d like nothing better than to retaliate now, by pressing me, in front of all of them, on the subject of my feelings about the play, on what I’d seen, correctly intuiting that my impressions were mixed or at least unformed. How could they not have been, given how oblique this piece was, all the way down to its curious title? This ambivalence had so far led me studiously to avoid all mention of the performance, and it was why, as he well knew, that any questions on the subject were premature and to that degree unfair.
Elias, however, suddenly pulled back. I can’t say what crossed his mind then, but I saw the heat lifting in the way he unset his jaw. “Is she excited about working with you?” he repeated rhetorically, as if I’d asked the question half a second ago. “I don’t know, to be honest.” He nudged Jeff, still facing away from us, and looped him into our exchange: “He’s asking, was Daphne excited about the art?”
Jeff had to be intimately linked with the play, with Daphne, and ultimately with Garrett, I realized, for Elias even to put this question to him. Hadn’t he been occupying one of Garrett’s seats tonight? Jeff twisted toward us as if he’d been waiting for an excuse to do so for quite a while. I think his exchange with the giant and the crew had run its course some time ago; he was ready to move on, and what better time to re-enter our circle than at a moment where he could cudgel me for the theft of his scarf? I braced myself.
“Well,” said Jeff, “I think Daphne’s unsure about what all this involves. About you, I suppose.”
“Maybe that’s why she disappeared?” Sikah’s grin had been made steelier by the shots Alice had taken at him. There was a genuine refinement to him at his core, I could see that much, yet somehow it had spoiled into this.
“She’s very quick to go most nights, though, isn’t she?” said Jeff, appearing more eager to cast doubt on Sikah’s hypothesis than to tell me what was likely to be true.
“It really does exhaust her,” Alice whispered to me, pained merely by reporting this unhappy fact. How protective this never-was could be about our would-be starlet.
“Have you tried out back? Through there?” I thought I heard these words, but it wasn’t easy to be sure; the twitchy little voice, Hank’s, came from some way off. Apparently he believed his height equipped him to converse over ranges others couldn’t, as if his peculiar visibility in a room had the effect of amplifying his voice. If I had trouble making out his words, though, I could see his bratwurst-like fingers pointing at one of the exits behind the stage area.
I shook my head.
“She might still be smoking, out in the parking lot,” he yelled. Then he closed the distance between us and spoke at a more sensible volume. “She chain smokes, you know. She could definitely still be there.”
“I’ve seen her smoke a whole pack like that,” Jeff said. “Things went really well that night, I remember.”
“Opening night, I think,” said Elias.
I absorbed the bunch all at once; the eye, like nothing else, can do this. They were a family of sorts, perhaps only for a few months, convened just for this production, though I suspected their connections pre-dated it. You could see an entire glimmering network of psychic forces running through them, and this is what made them kin. It was right there, though it would take you months of acquaintance to begin to articulate it, at least in words. My acquaintance with them, though, probably wouldn’t outlive the night. I lingered a second, wondering whether Garrett might allow me to include them in a drawing or two. They were a thread in Daphne’s life, after all. For tonight, though, I made do with fixing each one of them in my sights: the old girl, the troubadour, the Arab interloper, the giant, the director, and the transsexual, or whatever it was. I skipped over Jeff. I didn’t even have an allegorical nickname for him. The spy? Too melodramatic. Then I cast my eye about, in the emptying amphitheater, for the true child who’d disappeared into the dark, once and for all. No luck. The rest of them nodded back at me, understanding the finality of my gaze, and I made my way through the dissipating crowd toward the exit through which Daphne would have left.
“Did you like our seats?” someone called after me. Jeff. Apparently he wasn’t quite done. I let him catch up to me and we continued together toward the doors. “James always gets us good ones,” he said.
“You did the lights? That’s what I heard.”
“I did, I did. Hank’s been complaining about them, so I got out there in the seats to take some notes. Just like you.” He tapped my coat pocket where the pad’s outline could be seen. “He’s fucking nuts. The lights are fine.” He smiled. “Now I remember why I quit doing this full-time. See, I’ve actually been engineering at Antral for a long while. Reflectancy mostly. But before I ever got into analyzing light, I was working with it. In set design, obviously. And now I’m starting to do it more and more again. Because of James, of all people.”
We pushed open the doors and found ourselves in a small foyer. The noise of the reception dropped away.
“So—”
“So James asked me for a favor. A while back. Not for the lighting for this show but another one of Nik’s, a few months ago.” He wrapped his scarf tighter; the air was suddenly colder. “Really Daphne asked him whether I’d do it, and what was I going to tell him, my boss? He’s always game to help out Tony’s girl,” he said with an unhurried wink. “He needs a child of his own.”
“He’s pretty young.”
“He needs to get his wife back.”
“Maybe he was trying to do you a favor, too.”
“Me? Well, I don’t know. You think he was trying to set me up with Daphne?”
I was about to correct his impression when I realized he’d not misunderstood. He was simply trying to put another thought into my head.
“But that would be sick,” he continued. “No, I don’t think so. The favors were all for her. Always. I didn’t even want to do it, but felt I had to, out of loyalty. And then I maybe made a little mistake with the group—with Daphne. Took things too far. And now he seems to want me less and less at Antral. Nik’s more my boss than James is at this point. Though he’s a much worse man.”
“I just meant,” I said, “that James likes his staff engaging in cultural things. He probably thought it’d be interesting for you to work on your craft with Nik and Daphne. Though I’m guessing he didn’t think you’d get this deeply involved with the troupe, making art.”
“It’s why he hired you, though, right?” Apparently I’d said something wrong.
“Well, he hired me as an artist, not a technician.”
“But you have to know by now, that’s all an artist is for him. A technician.”
I gave him an awful smile. I didn’t have to try either. I just had one when I needed it, and my body always knew before I did that it was time. Jeff and I evidently were at an impasse. I was afraid, more than anything, that he’d want to accompany me in my search for Daphne. He was interested in her, or at least he wanted me to think so. Could he be doing this also on Garrett’s behalf? Keeping me away from his favorite, whatever that meant?
He tapped again at the pad in my jacket pocket until I pulled away, out of reach. “So,” he said, “what did you see tonight?” He must have been listening, with his back turned, when Elias asked me this. “I mean, it was so dark in there, wasn’t it?” He paused a beat before sticking out his hand and pointing through the outer doors. “There. She could be right there. If she hasn’t run off with someone else.”
The wind swept in as I pushed through the doors. Before they could close behind me, Jeff thrust his hand through the crack, holding the scarf in his fist. “Maybe you should take this,” he said. “She thinks it’s sexy.”