1
The Edison
Ezra Pierce was of the same generation as Edie Bishop, eccentric and stubborn and in possession of very specific tastes. Edie preferred ballerinas, and Ezra was fond of fawnish little bastards.
We had been rehearsing Twelfth Night for the last eleven weeks, and Ezra was lining his pockets with good karma and the assurance he knew exactly what his leads were up to the night before opening by treating Wesley and me to dinner. We met at the Edison. Ezra was accompanied tonight by an insufferable student called Benjamin—Full name, my dear. Not Ben. Never Ben. Too gauche. A-haw!
Wesley insisted on covering the bill. “It’s the least I could do, maestro,” he teased as he reached into his sport coat for his wallet after we finished sipping our coffees and dessert liqueurs. Another braying laugh leapt from Benjamin-Not-Ben—A-haw!—who had been mooning over Wesley since the moment we sat down.
Who could blame him? Wesley was a vision. He carried his trim, elegant figure with the springy surety of an athlete as he moved through the world with an attentive kindness that made it painfully clear he didn’t understand how attractive he was. He had thick, wavy hair the color of crow feathers that shone near-blue in stage lights and sunshine alike. Those bright eyes of his, so gray they must have been a devil to capture on film, always seemed to be laughing with you, and when he smiled a single dimple came to life on his left cheek.
Late into the afternoon of our first drink together, Wesley and I gave each other the rundown of our rambling histories. He’d grown up in Maine, taken to sailing, and stayed in California after completing his naval service on the Pacific front. I’d carefully dowsed from there for the story of what brought him to the city and discovered that the one who ruined it all for him—to land one in Ezra’s employ, there was always someone who ruined it all—was called Andrew: a magnetic casting director with Hollywood in the palm of his hand. He folded Wesley so smoothly into a vertiginous lifestyle of drug-addled parties that by the time Wesley realized the art-films Andrew secured for him were only ever screened at adult theaters, it was too late to get out with his reputation intact. He’d become nothing but a pretty pet trapped in a four-year cloud of vices.
It was the cold slap of reality that woke him one morning, and Wesley’s nasal mimic of the incident over his third gin sling had made me laugh despite the distant pain settled like silt at the back of his gaze—Collect your things and get out, Shoardie. The valet will put whatever you can’t carry in the driveway for you. Twenty minutes, or faster if you can swing it; there’s a breakfast meeting that I’ll absolutely shit to be late for.
And from that morning forward, Wesley’s name was mud in all the places Andrew could reach to sully it. No studio would let him so much as darken the doorway of their soundstages, not even the least reputable. With nowhere else to go, he sought the theater again. The part of him that lived for Shakespeare had long been dormant, but it was to Shakespeare and the boards that he returned.
There was much of my own story in his. An instinctive resonance ran between us as I shared mine in turn: Lexington, then Richmond, then here; the private hell in those early places, and the scrappy life of my own making.
We got along like a house on fire, a cracking good match both onstage and off. It really was unfortunate our proclivities weren’t more in line.
“Shall we?” Wesley chirped, tucking the cash under the ashtray at the center of the table, and stood to pull my chair out for me.
In the lobby, we fetched our jackets from the coat check. Wesley gently shook mine out and offered it.
“Is that the one you found on sale last fall?” Ezra asked at the end of a fresh cigar as he lit it, nodding at my silk bolero. He was a tall, narrow man with an imperious nose, on which he wore brass pince-nez. His wisping white hair and well-groomed beard were in tame order, which was rare to see—I was used to him brooding through the empty house of the theater during rehearsals or the wings on performance nights, twisting his fingers into his goatee as he stewed on new ways to eviscerate his cast for failing to read his mind.
He was a phenomenal director, a genius eye for staging and a savant-like ear for the text, cursed with the shortest fuse I’d ever seen. Edie attributed it to the exhausting company he chose to keep, the simpering Benjamin-Not-Bens of the world. It makes him feel young, I think, the exasperation.
I turned in place as Wesley put on his hat. “You’d know better than I would,” I said to Ezra. “It all blurs in the closet.”
“Heard that at a party last week,” Wesley said briskly, grinning. He held out a hand to Ezra and ignored another laugh from Benjamin—A-haw! “Thanks for having us, Ez.”
“Ez?” Benjamin raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. He was a soft-edged cellist from the Juilliard School. All the boys who let Ezra stop over in their love lives liked to fancy themselves seasoned but were usually so doe-eyed I just ended up feeling sorry instead of truly disliking them. I truly disliked Benjamin. “You hate nicknames.”
Ezra shook Wesley’s hand, blew a purple-tinged cloud of smoke from his nostrils, and leaned in to air-kiss both my cheeks goodbye. “He’s the only one who makes them sound dignified,” Ezra said. “Somehow. Nothing to it, darling, just don’t muck up the show.”
The tips of Benjamin’s ears turned pink. I dug my gloves out of my purse and realized with a quick tightening in my chest that I had scored my arms with roving pink threads in repetitive passes under the table as we’d eaten. Shit. I tugged on each one swiftly before holding out a hand to Benjamin.
“Lovely to meet you, Ben.”
Wesley and I walked out together. I took his elbow when he offered it, and he shot me a small, secretive smile. “That was cold,” he muttered.
Wesley lived a few blocks away from me in a third-floor walk-up that smelled of singed black tea. His apartment was spartan and tidy, kept with the efficient hand of an ex-officer. He had no roommates, no art on his walls, and an impressive bar cart.
“So is trying to flirt with his date’s employee the whole time,” I said. Wesley snorted.
“I’m a grown lad.” He patted my hand on his arm. We stopped at a crosswalk and waited for the light to change. “But I do appreciate a knight in shining armor.”
I smiled at him, his profile cut cleanly against the dark in the mottled wash of neon signs and halogen bulbs glowing. He noticed me watching and grinned. “What?”
“Nothing.” I rubbed at his arm through the linen of his sleeve and tugged us across the street when the light went green. “I’m just happy. I’m looking forward to opening.”
“I like happy Jack,” Wesley said as he fell into step, letting me lead the way. “You’re fun when you’re happy.”
He’d been calling me Jack since he first saw me in my Cesario costume, claiming I wore trousers better than half the men he knew, and had I ever considered doing drag? The name stuck, and every time he said it, a warm sense of belonging came in to fill the small, empty places left wanting inside of me. He was my friend. It made me feel as precious as a creature of Eden given its proper title for the very first time.
The air was calm and perfectly temperate, the deep clutch of spring settled down over the city, and the bustle of the street had begun to turn over from evening to night.
I had once believed Lexington and Richmond were the biggest cities I would ever know, the places most full of life in the entire world. A fond scrap of memory wagged through me when we passed a gentleman with a velveteen coat and matching hat—I recalled my old director at the Richmond Revue, Ansel Jensen, sitting in the empty house between shows and teaching me how to recite iambic pentameter as I swept the aisles.
We stopped in front of my building at the top of the basement stairs. Next door, the pharmacy threw its sterile fluorescent shout onto the sidewalk. Wesley removed his hat.
“I’m for a nightcap,” Wesley said. “There’s a party on the pier. Care to join?”
I knew exactly what a party on the pier entailed, and ordinarily I would have jumped at the chance. Those parties were riotous islands of secret, shuddered joy, filled with men in dresses and wigs, women in suits more handsome than any heartbreaker in the city, and everyone in between with their arms slung over one another’s shoulders and sipping from the same glass.
A party on the pier was where I first saw Edie’s social prowess at work, invited into the sacred space of the city’s underbelly to meet her there. She had asserted herself as my ambassador on the upper level of a building tucked into the narrow shrug of Charles Lane, where I’d looked down and gone dizzy to see the packed milling-about of every colorful someone below.
Over the wail of the band, Edie had told me of Ezra—and from Ezra came regular work and this rare, fine friendship with Wesley. I could pinpoint every good thing that had happened to me since arriving in Manhattan on that single party. The magic of the city was fickle, but kinder to me than any other place I had called my own.
Wesley was watching me expectantly for an answer. I gave him an apologetic smile. “I can’t,” I said. “It’s too close to opening. I’m antsy.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“I know. I’m wound up. It’s better if I just try to get some sleep.”
Wesley looked amused as he leaned in and kissed my cheek. “You sure? I’m going to run myself down.”
I reached up and put a hand to his cheek in farewell. “I know, I’d just get in your way. Have fun. Thank you for dinner. Don’t stay out too late, remember call is five-thirty tomorrow.”
“Should I phone if I’m going to be past curfew?” he teased.
“Only if you end up in the drunk tank.”
He turned his face, grinning, and kissed the tips of my fingers. As Wesley stepped back onto the sidewalk, he replaced his hat on his head with a flourish.
“Sir,” he announced into the dark, the light from the streetlamp pouring over him like a spotlight, with his voice pitched in the higher register he took on when he parroted my own lines at me as Viola, “shall I to this lady?”
“Ay, that’s the theme,” I sallied back, digging for my key in my purse. “To her in haste.”
The deadbolt always took some wrestling to get open. There were four units along the narrow hall, and a shared bathroom at the end of it, which was only ever clean when I set to it with a scouring brush and the end of my patience.
Home.
I undressed to my slip and stood at my vanity with its uneven legs to rub a pasty dittany along the insides of my arms. The cooling soothe of it was familiar, faraway, and I stared at the fine pink furrows before going to the kitchen.
I wasn’t nervous. I wasn’t. It was going to be a good show. It was a comedy—everyone loved the comedies. I trusted Wesley, and I trusted myself. We would be great together.
So why now, why the old habit rising like a portent?
I picked up the bottle of Wild Turkey and peered at the contents. After nine years, the bottle was still one-third full. If Twelfth Night opened well, I would toast to myself with a small sip after making my way home in the wee hours after the cast party. I put it back in the cabinet and made myself a slapdash martini. I was out of olives.
My script sat on top of the pile on my table. I flipped to the beginning, sat down in front of the mirror, and began to run my lines aloud.
I put myself back in the space Jensen once taught me to access—Get in their heads, Margot, feel yourself step into their lives. You can become anyone with enough imagination. That’s the power of the theater: transformation.
It used to frighten me how deeply I could feel. My mother had insisted it was a blessing, a light from the good Lord to allow me the full glories of His gifts, but for the longest time I could only see it as a curse on my small, useless body. I saw no point to the miserable ability, no reason for my highs or the sweet agonies that came with them, until I found the stage.
To bend an audience to my will was my sole sense of control in this life, the only one I truly owned. I could make people laugh, cry, gasp, fear, desire; in thrall to artifice in their seats, they had to behold me, to see me for all that I was: an unstoppable force. On the boards, I was more than a woman. I was a conduit. The stage was the only place fit to tame these strange passions.
I reached the end of the fifth act. I poured another drink, ran my thumb very gently along the inside of one wrist, and started again from the top.
Wesley and I became inseparable during Twelfth Night. I’d marked a tangible change in myself for the better since we had become friends, and Edie agreed—no matter how much she teased me for such a girlish attachment to a man like Wesley, she was right. I adored being around him. He carried a certain lightness, a sense of unshakable humor I longed to embody. It was a joy to bask in the warmth of his ease.
Rumors flew, of course. The rest of the company made bets and gossiped in poorly covered whispers about whether or not Wesley and I were fucking. We hadn’t, nothing near it—but we spent lots of time together outside work, and where there was the smoke of actors being friendly offstage burned the fire of sharp-tongued conjecture.
Twelfth Night had been open for three weeks and was receiving perfectly average reviews, as I expected. It wasn’t the kind of show that moved critics to tears or any feelings much bolder than plain enjoyment. But Ezra was content, so we were allowed to take our days off for ourselves instead of spending them refining, refining, ever refining under his watchful eye.
Chap pawned a ticket for a new off-Broadway farce on me when other plans came up for him on an odd Wednesday. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I took myself out. I had a smart little dinner with Edie at the all-night diner on Canal Street before she went off to a preview she was dreading—“It’s Antigone,” she said, sneering over the edge of her coffee cup. “Nobody likes Antigone. Do you like Antigone? See there, you look positively stricken. My point exactly.”
I ducked a brief, spitting rain between awnings and overhangs to get to the theater in Chelsea. It was less a theater and more of a walk-in closet with rows of seats put in. There were fewer than a hundred of us in the audience, which meant the house looked packed. It would serve the actors’ egos well.
I tried to enjoy the show. Truly, I did—but it was maudlin and affected, too confident in its own misery, and it left my curiosity so lacking that I found more entertainment in surveying the characters in the audience in washed-out relief from the stage lights.
A man with thick muttonchops and his wife fought a nodding, sneaking sleep farther down my row that took them each in turn; first him, then her, then him, then her. Just ahead of me, an older woman with a feathered hat shook her head subtly to herself, which made the feather wag in the dark with quick, harried jumps.
And there, two rows from the front, sat Wesley and a companion.
Their shoulders were touching, subtly. Wesley was watching the stage with impressive effort, his eyes narrowed as though reading a sign very far away that might make clear where the hell this plot was going. His companion, a buttoned-up professor type, looked bored to tears.
The pressure of my eyes must have drawn some sensation in him, as Wesley stilled and turned to face me. Confusion limned his expression in the dark, but after a moment he smiled. He gave a small, twitching wave. I sent one back and looked away as I noticed Wesley’s date turning to look at me as well.
At intermission, I ordered a dirty martini from the bar in the lobby. Too dirty; I was debating tossing the glass of brine surreptitiously into the plastic ficus tree beside me when Wesley approached with his friend.
“Are you dead of boredom yet?” he muttered, leaning in to kiss me hello on both cheeks.
“Only halfway,” I said, “but the final act might seal the coffin.”
“I think the butler did it.”
“The butler always does it.”
Wesley’s friend cleared his throat carefully. Wesley started and ushered him forward by a step with a sheepish look on his face. “Jesus, where are my manners—Jack, this is Wallace Miner. Wallace, this is my co-actor, Margaret. Margaret Wolf.”
We shook hands. His palm was warm and slightly sticky with sweat. I gave him my most winsome smile. “A pleasure. Are you also in theater?”
“Ah, no. Linguistics.”
I nudged Wesley with my elbow. “Does this one talk your ear off about all his favorite soliloquies?”
“I don’t—do much theater, usually, Shoardie, would you like a drink?”
“Vodka tonic,” Wesley said, touching Wallace barely on the waist as he peeled away to find the end of the concessions line.
I gave Wesley a doubtful look until I was sure Wallace was out of earshot. “He’s a charmer,” I said lightly.
Wesley shot me a wry smile. “I know. It was either this or a lecture on semiotics, and he wants me over for a drink with his friends later tonight, so this was my bargain.” He slid his hands into his pockets, pulling out his leather cigarette case from the left one. “I thought it would be more interesting, Chap was going on about it all last week.”
“He gave me his ticket,” I said, and Wesley barked a laugh around the end of a cigarette as he popped it between his lips. He held the case out to me. I offered my lighter from my purse instead of taking one. Wesley leaned forward to let me give him the flame.
I tried another sip from my martini, grimaced, and held it out to Wesley. He tasted it, recoiled, and dumped it into the ficus before handing the empty glass back to me.
“Are most of your friends professors?” I asked, peering around at the eclectic crowd. Wesley made a considering sound.
“Some.” He exhaled and waved his hand vaguely in the air. “I like them a little older. Comes with the territory.”
“A refined palate.”
“Exactly.” He ashed into the fake plant and examined the fresh cherry end. “How do you think Twelfth Night is going?”
I shrugged and leaned alongside Wesley’s casual ease. We both looked out over the milling audience—I could see Wallace looking out of place and impatient behind a woman wearing a boa so voluminous it nearly swallowed her face.
“I think it’s going fine,” I said. “I don’t know. I’m a poor judge from the middle of it, especially since it’s a comedy.”
“You don’t like the comedies?”
“Oh, I like them. There’s just less…subtlety to them. Barefaced. Not so many layers to the characters.”
Wesley nodded on another steady inhale. He caught my eye with a whiff of mischief, as though he had a rich secret about Lisette or Richard, our stage manager. “I heard,” he muttered, “that Ezra’s planning the Scottish play next.”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
I looked at him immediately and caught the quiet pride in his expression, gossip being the currency of the theater. “The fall opener,” Wesley hummed.
My heart hammered to a sprint. Sweat prickled along my underarms and the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet.
“If you’re joking,” I said, fighting to keep myself poised, “I’m going to be very upset with you.”
Still smiling, Wesley’s brow creased with curious confusion. “What? It’s just a rumor.”
“From whom? Where did you hear it?”
“Greg, from props. Ezra put in an order for more sugar blood and a bunch of Highland-style daggers.”
I scowled. Part of me didn’t want to believe him. I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I had no patience for being disappointed, but I had never craved any role more thoroughly than Lady Macbeth. “That could be any number of the tragedies.”
The lights flickered—five minutes until the show started again. Wesley sucked on one more mouthful of smoke before stubbing out his cigarette in the poor fake plant. He kissed me on the cheek and searched my gaze. “I have to collect my linguist. What? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“It’s nothing,” I blurted, and squeezed his hand. “I’m fine. If you’re wrong, you owe me a drink.”
“Alright, Jack. Have a nice night, won’t you?”
“Of course. Enjoy your linguist.”
I slipped away into the ladies’ room. I shut myself in a stall and squeezed my eyes shut, jamming the heels of my hands against the sockets until I saw colors.
Ezra was going to do Macbeth. The chance of a lifetime, finally within reach. The only thing I had ever truly let myself want—the life I wanted more than any other to embody, and learn, and dwell in.
I forced myself to steady my breathing. I could do it. I was good enough.
Two voices roiled in my mind, both of them from Richmond, the angel and devil clinging to my shoulders.
Think of her motivations. Jensen used to coach me as I polished the footlights of the Richmond Revue’s playhouse, picking up every odd job he would give me until he finally agreed I was ready to take a part onstage. What could push a woman like her to such lengths? What must she have faced? Build her story for yourself, and it will move through you with the text.
And there behind him within me loomed Hollis, cold and malformed in untouched memory. You’re too green, Margaret, I’ve told you a thousand times! I could still hear, smell, feel the words on the fine hairs of my face from his sour hiss as he crowded me against the vanity in the dressing room locked behind him. You play the roles I see fit to give you. Now put on the goddamn dress and be grateful.
“Stop it,” I whispered urgently to myself. I shook my head, wagged out my wrists to keep from scratching, and left the bathroom, the emptied lobby, the strange little theater, in a rush for home through the shower pelting down outside.
I didn’t even bother taking off my shoes before I was rummaging through old folios back in my apartment, exhuming my copy of Macbeth. I peeled it open with trembling hands and took a moment to stare at the gentle pen strokes of Jensen’s direction notes.
I had loved him with all the innocent ferocity of girlhood. He was arrested on a degeneracy charge only days before our own production of Macbeth was due to open, in a rash of police raids on queer bars all over Richmond. The Richmond Revue fell apart swiftly in the aftermath, and I ended up at the Halcyon across town under the direction of Michael Hollis.
I poured myself a straight shot of rye from the kitchen cabinet and sat down with the script. I would get this role. I would finally bring this woman to life: ambitious, and sure of herself, and filled with power of her own making.