India would not say mourn. She would not say grieve. Not even to herself, no matter how often the social workers and adoption counselors advised it. You have to give yourself a chance to mourn this baby, your son, they said. You will be devastated, they said. You have suffered a tremendous loss. Give yourself time to sorrow, a period of lamentation that might last a lifetime.
India objected to this advice and this characterization and, especially, to being told how to feel. She had chosen this of her own free will in her own right mind with her own big brain, so did not appreciate the intimation, however sympathetically intended, that placing the baby with the Andrews was something she’d been cornered into, owing to being lost, wronged, depressed, misled, maltreated, poor, unemployed, woebegone, and/or without any other options. That read made her character a tragic figure and a disempowered one, infantilized and victimized, and she was none of that. Would not be. Refused.
The anguished parts, the heartbreak, were obvious so did not need belaboring to ensure observation. The euphoric parts—the Andrews got a baby, the baby got a stable, lovingly given, ardently sought family, India and Davis got … not what they wanted, exactly, but more of what they wanted given the available options—were the parts that would get lost if no one insisted on them. So she did. She insisted. There was cause for heartbreak, yes, but there was also cause for celebration. If she could have eaten anything, she’d have asked for birthday cake.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t mourn. She could barely move. It didn’t feel tragic; it felt apocalyptic, a life lost—hers—the baby and college and Davis, the stage lights and star parts, the world she commanded and years of well-laid, well-loved, well-executed plans. For what seemed the first time since she was ten, she didn’t know what would happen next. So it felt like that, like the world was ending, even though it was not, no one’s was, and in fact by every measure—every one—the world was much improved by what had happened here.
Still.
She was sore and bleeding and leaking milk—leaking fluids of all kinds, in fact, because also she could not stop crying. She was empty. Emptied. She lay on her bed in her dorm room like the college student she essentially no longer was anymore, like the person she had been two days ago who she also no longer was anymore.
Dakota brought her a can of cream soda and two slices of pizza so greasy they turned their box translucent.
“I can’t eat.”
“You didn’t try,” said Dakota, but she ate the pizza herself then replaced it with an entire chocolate babka and a bagel sandwiching two full inches of lox.
“I’m not a tourist,” India said.
“You have to eat New York food while you can,” said Dakota. “We’re graduating in four days.”
“And moving eight blocks away.”
“Maybe they don’t have as good bagels over there.”
“Then we’ll walk back over here.”
But it was the pickle too fat to get her fingers around and the lump of whitefish salad in a seeping cardboard container that finally got India vertical. No matter how sore she was, no matter how sorry and sorry-looking, no matter how much she knew Dakota was just trying to help, she could not inhale through her nose in that room a moment longer. She made her way outside and limped around campus.
Move-out was underway, and she watched sweaty students shove overfull trash bags into overfull cars. She watched all the hugging and tears from friends about to be parted for three mere months before they got to return in the fall. She watched crews of workers polish the campus for graduation and the expected onslaught of parents and guests and potential donors. Flower beds got new-blooming bulbs and fresh soil. Dumpsters overflowing with left-behind dorm detritus got emptied and filled again. Ivy was trimmed (but not removed—it was too good a photo op). The sun shone in a world-continuing-on way, and everything was glittering and hot and changing forever.
She found a bench outside the drama department and had her own very small, very private graduation ceremony. She made herself remember that she knew better than most how goodbye could be sad but needn’t break you and why endings were so often marked by commencement. Then she called Davis.
“How do you feel?” He arrived and lowered himself beside her gingerly, as if jostling the bench might be what hurt her.
“Terrible. You?”
“I didn’t just give birth.”
“Still.”
“Also terrible,” he conceded.
“I’m sorry.” She was.
He nodded. He knew. He was also sorry. “Are you okay, though? You know”—he waved at her, her body—“physically?”
“A little sore.” That this was an understatement was not the point. Nor that the distinction he was making—physical pain owing to birthing a baby and giving it to the Andrews versus emotional pain owing to birthing a baby and giving it to the Andrews versus emotional pain caused by everything else in general and Davis himself in particular—was indistinct. “Congratulations,” she said instead.
He looked surprised. “For what?”
“Graduation?”
“Oh. Thanks. You too.”
“And, you know, moving on. From everything. It’s over now.”
“In some ways.” His face closed a notch, and she said nothing to that. They had tried enough times to know there was no way through it.
“They named him Lewis,” she reported.
“Lewis? He sounds like an old man.”
“He looked like an old man, actually.” India understood why Davis hadn’t wanted to—couldn’t—be there. But she wanted him to know.
“Did he…?”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Davis admitted.
“Look like you? Like me? Seem happy for a newborn? Seem destined for a wonderful life?”
“Yeah,” Davis breathed. “All of those, I guess.”
“For sure,” India said. “All of them.”
Davis nodded. He wiped away his own tears, then hers, which didn’t take. Eventually he said, “I heard you got a big-shot agent.”
“Maybe. I haven’t … I haven’t been able to call him yet.”
“India.” He pulled back to look at her. “This is important.”
“Yeah, I know, I know, I—”
“No, I’m not nagging you. Extenuating circumstances, for sure. I’m just saying this is important—”
“I know. I just—”
“This is why we did this.”
“No it’s not.”
“Gave up the baby, I meant.”
“Placed him. I knew what you meant. And no, it’s not. We did it because we didn’t want to have a baby together right now.”
“Yes. And this is why. At least some of why. So you could get an agent. So you could get a job. So I could get a job. So we could have our lives. So don’t let the aftermath of this ruin that.”
“No. I won’t.”
“You might have to make yourself, you know?” Very gently. Knowing her. She felt this in her chest. “It’ll be hard, but you can’t call this guy a month from now and say, ‘Sorry, I was really busy giving birth and breaking up with my boyfriend and graduating and getting my shit together emotionally, but thanks for your patience and I’m ready now.’”
Breaking up with my boyfriend. “Yeah. I know.”
“So just suck it up and breathe deep and call him. You don’t even have to get dressed. You don’t even have to stop crying.” He reached over and wiped her eyes again. “You just have to act like you’re not crying.”
“That’s my best thing,” she cried.
“I know,” he said. Then added, “I did.”
“Cried?”
“That too. But I meant I got a job. A great one. A dream job.”
She unfolded herself to face him fully and felt the joy branch out from her center into every part of her. “Davis!”
“Yeah.” A little sheepish.
“Fuck yeah,” she corrected.
“Yeah. It’s great. Thanks.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s an education start-up that uses performing arts—plays, musicals, operas; ballet, I guess?—for after-school programs. So the job is programming but also theater.”
“Musicals?”
“They were really impressed with all my acting experience. So I have you to thank. I’d never have gotten this job without you.”
“Sure you would have.”
“Nope. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I don’t think so.”
She reached into the pockets of the hoodie she’d tied around her waist in case she bled through her shorts and threw a handful of a shredded Macbeth program over his head.
“Thanks,” he laughed, but then he said, “It’s in San Francisco.”
Since it didn’t matter anymore, she was surprised to find that this knocked the wind out of her. “Oh. I didn’t … I didn’t know you were looking out there.”
“I wasn’t. I was only looking in New York because…”
… because we were going to live together and get married together and have more babies together and you needed to be in New York and I needed to be with you and we love it here …
“But then when…”
… when I didn’t want to be with you anymore …
“I expanded my search,” he finished.
“I thought…” She didn’t know how to finish that sentence honestly and kindly, for honesty and kindness were called for here. She settled on “I hear it’s nice out there.”
“I’ll be the opposite of the song. Instead of leaving my heart in San Francisco, I’ll bring it there and see how it goes.”
They were holding hands, all four hands—she did not know when or how that had happened—and leaking again.
“You’ll have mine with you too,” she said.
He put one hand on it. “And I’ll leave most of mine broken here with you.”
“I know.” She slotted her forehead into the notch in his chest where it belonged, and he held her, and they cried.
And then he kissed her goodbye and walked away.
Because she had promised Davis she would, because it was her dream and her destiny, maybe just because the show must go on, on Wednesday India forced herself out of bed and into clean clothes. She could only wear sweatpants because nothing else fit, and only black ones because she was still bleeding, and a terrible sports bra she lined with cabbage leaves because, in their understandable confusion, her breasts were as painful as her singing.
She kicked Dakota out of their mostly packed-up room. The walls without their posters and programs and photos felt naked. The desks without their piles of books and paper and highlighters and scripts felt obscene. Her index cards were all in careful boxes. Their room felt bereft. Or maybe that was India herself.
She managed to tell whoever answered the phone that she was calling for Ajax Axelrod, but after he picked up, her voice broke on her very next line. “He-llo.” Inauspicious, but she kept on, professionally. “This is India Allwood.”
A moment of nothing on the other end. “India Allwood?” Another too-long pause. “Who are you?”
It had only been maybe sixty hours since he’d slipped his card into her shoe. It’s true she had become a different person in that time. But he probably hadn’t.
“You left me your card Sunday night?” Nothing. “I was Lady Macbeth?”
“Ahh, yes, Lady M,” Ajax Axelrod remembered, and then, “Sunday? Bacon, lettuce, and tomatoes, you took your time.”
“Something came”—out, she wanted to say, but went with—“up.”
“More important than landing the hottest agent in the city?”
“Not more important than,” she hedged, “but—”
She hadn’t been sure going into that sentence how she’d get out the other side, so it was good he interrupted.
“This is why I do not ordinarily take on students.”
“I’m barely a student anymore. Graduation is this weekend.”
“You were very good.” Not praising her. Informing her. “In all my years, I have never seen a pregnant Lady M. Clever. That Alan Darden’s doing? I forget this about him. He’s smarter than you think. College professors, eh?”
How to answer that? Fortunately, he didn’t wait for her to do so.
“Well, Al gets credit for a good idea, then. But the genius was in the execution. You really sold it. I truly believed, truly felt, you were about to have a baby.”
Shit.
“You were pregnant. Desperate, hormonal, heartbroken. Everything about you screamed, ‘I am overlarge, ungainly, uncomfortable, formidable. I labor under the burden of impending labor. I am carrying the progeny of a too-weak, too-frightened, too-deluded man.’ It was an impressive performance. Shed real light on a play I have seen, truly, dozens of times.”
She ran quickly through the pros and cons of coming clean, but again, her response seemed not to be required.
“I represent actors, singers, dancers, directors,” said Ajax. “New York. LA. I do the whole thing really. I’m very good.”
He paused. So she said, “Wow.”
“Yes, wow,” he agreed. “But I don’t do playwrights. I draw the line at writers. All the ego of actors but more neuroses and less money. However, one of my clients has written himself a vehicle, one he will star in and direct, so I’ve been forced to make an exception. We’re scheduled for ten weeks at the Public, but there’s already buzz that we’ll transfer.”
“Transfer what?”
“Transfer where, dear. Broadway.”
“Ahh,” she said, half I-understand, half holy-fucking-shit.
“Indeed.” He seemed to get both meanings. “But we’re worried about casting. The female lead is proving tough to fill. It calls for not just young but ingenue, so we don’t want a Hollywood starlet looking to slum it onstage for the publicity. It calls for real, gritty, not too pretty.” But while India was coming to terms with that, he added, “And mostly, it’s a killer role, let’s hope not literally but it’s not out of the question. The play’s in two parts, six-plus hours total, and she’s onstage the whole time. There are acrobatics. Flame work. Live animals. Eight shows a week. Tight schedule. It’s a big ask. Impossible, maybe. But then you, Sunday night, you were the first flicker of hope I’ve had that there exists someone capable of pulling this off.”
“What’s it called?”
“Nestra. Technically Nestra: Imagined After Aeschylus. You see what I mean about ego. Honestly. Nestra is the part we want you for. Unless I’ve scared you off.”
Off? No. But scared didn’t even begin to cover it.
He arranged for her to audition Friday afternoon. She spent the fifty-two hours in between trying to figure out whether she’d been very, very lucky or this was the worst thing that would ever happen to her. On the one hand, it obviously didn’t bespeak extraordinary talent that she was believably pregnant when she was actually pregnant, a fact he would surely have noticed at the audition if she hadn’t had the baby almost three weeks early in the heartstoppingly narrow window between being discovered and having to prove herself. Lucky.
On the other hand, she was thus being given a chance she didn’t merit, and once word got around about her lack of talent, she’d be ruined before she had time to learn and improve and work her way up, and all of this, all of it, everything in the world, would be for naught, and her dream would be dead, and so would she.
Worse still, there were no index cards to be made, no performance history to research, no lines to learn by heart in advance. The play was unpublished, as yet unperformed, existed nowhere but in draft form on the actor-turned-writer’s computer. She had to go in cold. Cold and less talented than advertised.
She put on a very thick pad and a very padded bra, packed two entire changes of clothes—outfits she’d had to buy the day before, since ratty black sweatpants were not appropriate—and arrived with enough extra time to, if necessary, remodel herself down to the studs. But on the way up to the audition room on the tenth floor, the elevator got stuck and ate all her extra time. The man who came to fix it played improv games with her through the door to keep her calm—at a professional rehearsal studio in New York, even the maintenance workers had Broadway dreams, apparently—and when the doors finally opened, she had only enough time to thank him for freeing her then run, leaky and sweaty and panicked, to the audition. There, she channeled all she’d learned in four years of drama classes, four years of college productions, twenty years of her short-so-far life, and tried her best. It was all she could do.
Ajax Axelrod called Saturday morning to tell her she had the part.
Ajax’s actor-turned-playwright-and-director was named Henri LeClerk. When India showed up the first day, she realized she knew him.
“Hey. You’re the guy who unstuck my elevator.”
He bowed deeply, then rose to admit, “Also the guy who stuck it.”
She blinked, waited for this statement to clarify itself in her brain. “I don’t get it.”
“I’m not really an elevator repair specialist.”
“What are you really?”
“An actor. I was acting like an elevator repair specialist.”
“I still don’t get it.” This was not how India had envisioned her first moments at her first job.
“I am not just an actor. I am also a playwright and a director.”
She still looked at him blankly, now tinged with irritation.
“The playwright and director,” he clarified. “I needed to know what you sounded like before I knew what you looked like, to hear you before laying eyes on you. And I wanted to audition you in a situation where you’d be under pressure but not trying too hard to impress.”
“That’s…” Creepy? Insane? Actionable?
But before she could decide how to finish that sentence, he said, “You had the job before you set foot in the audition room.”
So she had to allow it.
As someone in charge of building maintenance, he was exactly what you’d want, but as a writer-actor-director, he was terrifying: a giant, tall and muscled, with flashing eyes, simmering machismo, and barely contained volatility. She understood that was acting, but she doubted anyone was that good an actor, and beneath that, he was cocky and entitled and confident, swaggering, and that was also terrifying.
“Welcome,” he began once everyone was assembled that first morning. They were sitting at an enormous U-shaped table with cards in front of them indicating their characters’ names and, much smaller, their own. India peeked at everyone while trying not to stare. They looked unfazed. No one looked panicked. No one looked starstruck or overwhelmed or in over their head. No one looked stunned to find out that the elevator repair specialist was actually the director, so she must have been the only one to get that audition treatment. “For those of you who don’t know me”—his tone suggested this was an unlikely state in which to find oneself—“I am Henri LeClerk.” He pronounced it ON-ree. “Soon we’ll get to know one another. In the meantime, I must let you know that at the moment this play makes no sense whatsoever. We will put it together together.”
He handed out the script. First they did yoga. Then they did a table read. Then he sent them home. “Tomorrow, we will discuss. We will explore. We will find out all this play might mean and all it actually does. Get some rest.”
“Get some rest!” India shrieked at Dakota. “Is he fucking kidding me? Is he kidding himself? Is this a joke he’s perpetuating for his own amusement? Is it a joke the universe is perpetuating against me?”
“I think you can rule out that last one.” Dakota had her head on their tiny kitchen table. Since she didn’t have an Ajax, she was working at a coffee shop she opened at five o’clock every morning so as to leave her afternoons and evenings free for open-call auditions.
“First of all, what kind of man traps women in elevators for an audition?” India was chopping carrots into such tiny pieces they were approaching juice.
“Or really for anything.”
“Second of all, he thinks he’s so great. He’s an actor and a director and a playwright, and he’s so handsome, and he’s barely thirty, and isn’t everyone so impressed? Well no, I’m not, because I’m sure he’s not that great an actor, and I’m even more sure he’s not that great a director. Yoga? That’s not the first thing you do on the first day of rehearsal. ‘Get some rest’? That’s his advice?”
“Sounds amazing,” Dakota mumbled.
“Are you even listening?”
“One ear is. One is getting some rest.”
“And a playwright? Hardly. Playwrights write plays that make sense. Playwrights write plays that can actually be performed. Plus, he didn’t really write it. It’s an adaptation. Yes, the original is lost, but it’s not like he made the whole thing up.”
“Did you figure out what it’s about?”
“Nestra.” India waved her knife around. “Hypermnestra, actually.”
“What does that mean?”
“Extra Nestra? Super Nestra? Really fast Nestra? How should I know? It’s about twins. One has fifty sons. One has fifty daughters.”
“Multiples are more likely to have multiples,” Dakota said.
“How do you know?”
“Remember that semester modern dance was full so I had to take biology?”
“The father of the sons wants to marry them to the daughters.” India had moved on to destroying leeks.
“They’re cousins!”
“Yeah, but the numbers work out.”
“Gross.”
“And nonsensical. This is my point. Anyway, the daughters agree with you, so they try to escape.”
“Good call.”
“But they can’t, so their dad is like, ‘Look, I have all these daggers. Everyone take one, get married, and then just kill your groom on the wedding night. Problem solved.’”
“Tough family,” Dakota said.
“So they have this giant group wedding, and then that night, all the brides kill all the grooms. All except one.”
“Hypermnestra?”
“Hypermnestra.”
“Why?”
“She doesn’t like blood? Killing is wrong? She loves her cousin?”
“I mean, I love mine too,” Dakota said. “He taught me how to turn my eyelids inside out, but I don’t want to marry him.”
“You’re gay.”
“I don’t think that’s why.”
“He says we’re going to put it together together, but it’s not even close. We open in six weeks. And I don’t see how this thing is so buzzy when it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe he doesn’t realize because English isn’t his first language?”
“It’s not?”
“Isn’t he French? Henri LeClerk?”
“Are the French egotistical megalomaniacs who trap women in elevators and stage plays literally no one understands?”
“Mais oui,” said Dakota.
For the whole first week, they started every morning with yoga, then sat around the big table and talked about the play, tried to make sense of it, discussed. For the whole second week, after yoga, the designer came in with a mock-up of the set, and they spent every day on the space of the play. Anytime anyone said anything that wasn’t about the space, Henri would declare it off topic, but what was and wasn’t the space was a mystery to India. Week three was back to table reading again, interrupted every few minutes by Henri editing in real time, his laptop plugged into a projector, India reading new lines aloud as he wrote them. They were three weeks into a six-week rehearsal process, and no one was off book because the book wasn’t finished yet, nothing was blocked, nothing tried, not even tried and rejected never mind tried and adopted and honed. Rehearsed. India didn’t understand her lines. She didn’t understand her character. She was starting to panic. She wrote the whole play on index cards—her evolving lines and everyone else’s—and made notes on the back as to what they might mean. She was only guessing, but it was better than nothing.
On Friday of week three, they fell out of her bag and scattered all over the floor.
Henri picked up a few that had settled at his feet, turned them over front and back. She held her breath and waited to see if he was offended.
“This is all wrong,” he said finally, “but I like it. Right isn’t the goal after all.”
“It’s not?”
“The goal of writing is not to give the audience answers. It’s to ask them questions, throw out some possibilities. I’ve been thinking of rehearsal as an excavation we do as a cast, a process of discovery and creation we undertake together. But I’m starting to see we need somewhere to start. And quickly.”
She was weak with relief that he’d finally noticed.
“Fuck yoga,” Henri began first thing Monday morning. “Voilà!” It was the first French he’d uttered, and he used it to reveal an enormous piece of butcher paper that took up the entire floor. “We shall unspool the whole play on this thing, block it for the stage, and then hammer it to the walls as well as our souls until it stalks our waking moments and haunts our very dreams.”
They made notes, sketches, arrows; they pasted pictures, articulated connections, exploded small ideas into stars. It was like dancing, but with colored pens. And afterward, suddenly, a miracle occurred, which India supposed was the way of miracles. She was used to the kind that took nine months and were mixed blessings at best. But surely suddenly was the traditional way. Suddenly, the words on the page made sense. Suddenly, they went with movement and motion and intonation that also made sense. She didn’t have to memorize them because the words were hers. She was able to imbue them with the subtleties of Nestra’s emotions and relationships, which were as complicated as emotions and relationships always are—love but fear, scorn but admiration, loyalty but a loyalty you questioned constantly and berated yourself for—and she could make Henri, playing opposite her or sitting at the table watching his cast roam the floor he’d taped off to the dimensions of the stage, hear all of it.
Also suddenly, Henri proved a more interesting character. For one thing, all the preening, simpering egoism turned out to be acting too. He was very good. He was not even French but actually from Oklahoma where his real name was Henry Clark Smith. He was as lost and terrified and excited and ambitious and wonderstruck as India—he was young and new in the professional theater world too—but unlike her, he had only himself to blame if this show’s hype proved unfounded. But they were not alone. They had a whole cast and crew of wildly talented, madly hopeful, much more experienced people with whom to get down to work.
And what work it was.
India would try things twelve ways, even things that were working well enough the first time, and see which worked best, or maybe not even best, maybe most interestingly. She could do this because the people she was working with were just that talented. It was not that Al-Like-the-Song and Davis and Dakota and all her friends from school weren’t good. It was that they’d prevented her from knowing, really knowing, how good good could be. Davis was good, but his heart was never in it. He’d done it for his grandmother or to woo India or because she wanted him to, never because he loved it. Al-Like-the-Song’s job wasn’t to do a good show as much as it was to teach them to do a good show or, failing that, as good a show as they were able.
Whereas these people could do anything. Henri would say about a character, “Okay, but what if he’s lying?” And they’d try it like that. And then, after they worked the rest of the scene, he’d say, “Or what if it’s not that he’s lying but that he’s fudging certain aspects. It’s mostly true, just not all the way true, though he thinks it’s less true than it is,” and India would sit and watch the actor give you that, that tiny change in attitude and aspect, clear as exposition, as if he’d held up a sign telling you. And slowly, play and questions and trying things were hammered into specificity—life-and-death specificity, because the technical aspects of the show were such that if you weren’t at the exact right spot at the exact right moment, you would fall through a trapdoor or be crushed in a fold of scenery or catch fire.
India recognized Nestra. She recognized her in herself. And she recognized her the way she’d recognized Robbie all those years ago: Oh, it’s you. I’ve been waiting for you. She was Nestra who said no, no to her father and no to her sisters and no to the chaos and hysteria that erupt when everyone in your entire family agrees to something you do not. Nestra who understood that sacrifice was not the point with marriage, no matter that everyone said it was. Nestra who understood that family ties are more complicated than mere genes, that blood can bind and also unbind, unwind, unravel until it is gone.
But more than recognizing Nestra, India invented her. She stopped acting by channeling her own life—acting sad by remembering Davis, acting torn by remembering Rebecca, acting benevolent by remembering Lewis and the Andrews—and starting acting sad and torn and benevolent by being sad, torn, benevolent Nestra. It was like making a baby: you sparked her into life, you grew him until he was ready, but then you delivered to the world someone new, someone else. This was also how India learned to be India. Learned to stay India. Nestra didn’t take birth control, but being Nestra was acting. India was so thoroughly Nestra onstage that it was clear how not-Nestra she was everywhere else. At home, on her commute, on the phone with her mother, hanging out with Dakota, she was India.
She was India who, among other things, thought about calling Davis every day to tell him the good news. “I figured it out,” she wanted to tell him, “how to act and take birth control, how to be good onstage but keep my shit together off it, how to star in a play but also consider the future, consequences, and other people.” She wanted to tell him, “I’m fixed. You can come back now. Please come back now.”
But instead of telling him, she decided to invite him to opening night and let him see for himself.