4

The theater on Commerce Street, opening night

We opened Macbeth on a Friday. The house was packed. The applause was still roaring in my ears.

I stumbled into my dressing room after the second curtain call, still in my nightgown from the final scene, sugar blood crusted under my fingernails. The play had it right; no matter how I scrubbed, it didn’t come all the way out.

“I’ll be there!” I called over my shoulder into the hall as the rest of the company bustled, laughed, cheered, and capered, celebrating our victory. “I know, Harry’s—I heard, we’re all going to Harry’s! I’ll meet you there!”

I shut the door and locked it. Leaning back against it, I took a heavy breath in; held it; blew it out.

A manic titter kicked up from my chest and dissolved quickly back to a stricken silence.

I’d done it. I’d done it, and they loved me.

The craving to scratch at my arms burned white-hot.

I tried to ignore it. The Lady’s final words rang hard and heavy through my head—What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed!

My entire body was trembling. I couldn’t feel anything but a faint buzzing like chalk shrieking across a blackboard from head to toe. I ground my teeth and slapped myself several times against the sides of my head. “Stop it. Get back here. Come back, Margie.”

I’d become the Lady.

They loved me.

I would never feel so powerful again.

That was it, wasn’t it?

I began to pace, tugging my hair out of its pins and folds and curls. That was the stuff, never mind that she ended up dead. Everyone died, someday. Somehow.

I was a force of nature.

Conviction, that much of it, women weren’t meant to hold that for ourselves. We were supposed to be apart from it, killed to restore order if we so much as tasted a lick of it. If I tried to bring any of her into my waking self, it would ruin me. It didn’t fit. It just wasn’t done.

My breath picked up, jogging hard in my chest. I began to cry.

That sense of control, of action, the taste of it onstage made it so painfully clear to me that I’d never owned a single day in my life. I’d never been in control. The only thing I had ever truly done for myself was run: run from home, run from Hollis, run under Edie’s purview, run into a marriage with Wesley. My fate had never been mine. I was made to steer and veer and speed like a poorly handled Hudson Hornet in the dark of night, no headlights, weaving between every hurdle.

This was no way to live. This was not a life.

I needed to break something. I needed to scream. I needed to tear myself apart.

Wesley had sent a crystal vase of yellow roses ahead of me that afternoon, waiting on my vanity when I arrived for call with a handwritten card tucked amid the petals—To my Lady, This is only the beginning. —W.

I hurled the vase at the wall. It shattered apart in a brilliant, violent spray.

The roses looked so strange on the floor, little baby birds punted from their nest with wobbly necks bent sideways and limp. Around them, the carpet glittered with the splintered remains.

An inquisitive tapping on the door brought Ezra’s voice to the jamb: “Margot? Everything alright?”

I crouched beside the best of the wreckage and marveled at the danger of it.

Another knock. “Margot?”

I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head—I could hear three men at once saying my name, Ezra-Hollis-Jensen-Hollis-Ezra. My vision began to tunnel, fuzzy black blooming like mold around the edges of reality.

“Where’s Wesley?” I called, without looking away from the glass.

My flesh itched to be addressed. Marked. Parted.

“What do you need, did something fall? I heard—”

“No,” I said, my voice high and panicked at the back of my throat. “Go find Wesley, please, it’s—it’s important, I need him.”

It was important. I had to tell someone. I couldn’t be alone. I stared and stared and stared at the glass, my forearms screaming.

“Why?” More knocking. “Margaret, what—”

“Get Wesley,” I snarled, rounding on the door as though gnashing at an outreached hand.

I was not piloting my limbs. I was a passenger in my own body. The Lady was still in me, she would—she would always be in me, I had brought her to life; I had created her, birthed her, I could never let her go again. We were the same, we were so much the same, she was me and I was her, but she had power.

I didn’t want to be free of her. I couldn’t. I needed her.

I reached into the shattered pile and turned over a particularly rude cleat of crystal in one hand. My fingertip beaded with blood when I tested it.

The knocking evolved from polite tapping to several raps from the side of Ezra’s fist. “Richard is fetching him, Margaret, open up. Margaret.”

Go get some water, and wash this filthy witness from your hand.—

Why did you bring these daggers from the place? They must lie there. Go carry them and smear the sleepy grooms with blood.

My hands are of your color—

“But I shame to wear a heart so white.”

I snapped my attention to the mirror. Lady Macbeth in all her finery, crown and stole and heavy chains of office, her woolly hair piled in regal braids, stood behind me in the reflection.

“Devour,” she bade me, and all fell to dark.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

The first thing I saw upon waking was Wesley looking at me like I might dissolve any moment.

“Oh. Hey. Thank God; hey, Jack. How—how are you feeling?” He whispered to me so gently, as though to hear too many words might wound me further.

He was so wonderful. I was so doped that I could swear I heard one of his monologues piping in through the radio across from the hospital bed.

I’d been put up in a small room painted the color of baby shit, perhaps because I had done something awful. I pushed at my very dry lips with my lumpy tongue and only looked at the bandages on my wrists through my periphery. Wesley was wearing a suit mottled with hideous bloodstains dried to a rusty brown, bow tie undone—he had attempted to comb his hair into a begging sort of order at some point, but he’d missed a spot: An ornery curl sprang out at the back of his neck.

“Where is she?” I croaked. I sounded like a wounded goose. Wesley smoothed a hand over my hair, matted down into the brickish pillow under my head.

“Who? Edie? She’s just down the hall; she had questions for the surgeon.”

Not Edie. Who…Christ. I didn’t know. I nodded at the radio. I couldn’t lift my arms. “Could you turn that off?”

Wesley flipped the power switch, and I realized the broadcast had been a late-night talk show. Not Macbeth. It clicked off right in the middle of a gaudy bout of audience laughter.

I leaned into the broad warmth of Wesley petting across my forehead. He had large hands and his fingers were careful, so very particular. He cast the refrain of that worried look on me. I surprised us both by laughing.

“What?”

“I’m sorry.” I sighed a little into my malformed, drugged hilarity. “I suppose you’d rather be at a party right now.”

Wesley’s expression twitched like one great seizing muscle. “Don’t be ridiculous. Here with you is the only place I need to be, Jack.”

His hand was still in my hair, the tendons tight even as he soothed a soft thumb along my cheek. I stared at the shape of my feet under the blanket and wondered distantly what they had done with my shoes.

“Is Ezra upset?” I asked.

Wesley made a wheeze that probably meant to be a chuckle. “Ezra is livid.”

I laughed again, a great jag of it that made my shoulders leap. I didn’t feel it turn into the sharp, untamable bolt of tears until Wesley lulled me and softly swiped at the tears under my lashes.

“Did I ruin it?” I whispered. I wanted to reach up and cling to his arm, keep him there, but I couldn’t move my hands. I turned my face and buried it in Wesley’s palm instead.

“You did nothing of the sort.” He kissed my forehead and left his mouth there at my temple for a moment. “You were sensational.”

“Are you going to commit me?”

I felt the shiver chase up Wesley’s spine as though it were my own. He stepped back and regarded me, clear-eyed and serious. “I could never. Not ever.”

Sniffling hard, I nodded. “I’ll get better,” I said.

“You will,” Wesley murmured, “of course you will.”

I tried to wet my lips again and tell him how badly I wanted to believe us both. But Wesley held a cup of water with a straw up to my mouth for me, so I drank instead.

Smart, heeled footsteps stopped in the hall, then a brisk knock on the door kept ajar. Edie entered and took careful stock of me from over Wesley’s shoulder.

“The doctor wants to speak with you. Did she just wake up?” she asked.

Wesley nodded.

Edie plucked idly at an invisible thread at the edge of his jacket. “Have you eaten?”

“A bit.”

His chin was beginning to stubble—I could see it beneath a measure of stage makeup he’d missed with the sponge, or maybe not had a chance to get at before…He was so beautiful. Hail, Macbeth.

“Go see the surgeon, then find something hardy,” Edie said. “Take a break, poss, put your head down.”

She ushered Wesley from the room. He took a long look at me before turning away down the hall, straightening his jacket and squaring his shoulders in spite of the misery clinging to every inch of him.

Edie stood and watched me for a long moment. She had a fox fur around her shoulders, a matching pillbox hat fixed to the crown of her head, and a pair of emerald-green gloves the same shade as the silk pencil dress pouring down over her body. From above her, the fluorescent light cast a gold pall over the plinth of her. She looked like an angel.

I told her as much, and she scoffed. Edie nodded down at my arms, slack atop the stiff hospital sheets. “Those bandages will match that new chiffon of yours.”

Edie rummaged through her clutch as she crossed to stand beside my bed. From somewhere down the hall beyond the open door, an unhurried metallic beeping started up.

“Your name is everywhere tonight. Did you know that?” Edie slipped a cigarette from her case and offered it to me. I nodded in the vague direction of my hands.

“I don’t think I can hold anything.”

As if it was simply the thing to be done, Edie tugged off one glove and lit the cigarette before holding it to my lips.

I leaned forward and thought of Ezra’s long-suffering poise, the same grin-and-bear-it professionalism with which he and the others of Edie’s generation held themselves. The idea that his stores of patience with me might one day run dry made my nerves shiver—I took a deep drag on the smoke and refused to think about it.

With her hand at my mouth, infinitely steady, Edie began to tell me exactly how news of my dressing room episode had fluttered out through the ranks of the social strata like ripples from a thrown stone.

“Did you really get ten minutes of applause?” she asked.

“Eight,” I croaked.

Edie hadn’t been in the audience tonight. Edie never came to opening nights. She waited for the comfort of a few good shows to work its way into the company before coming to see any of our performances.

She looked at me with an impenetrable, incisive gaze. “How did it happen then?”

Apparently I’d bled like a stuck pig, one of the costumes was ruined after Wesley tried to stanch me with it, and a stagehand fainted at the sight.

“I don’t know.” I nodded at the water again, and sipped as Edie offered it with her other hand. A trickle of it slipped past my mouth, and Edie swept it away with the edge of one finger. I shook my head. “I can’t…What were they saying, what did you hear?”

I smoked from Edie’s fingers and heard about the salons and clubs and private parties across the city that were awash with my name. A strange delight overtook me at the idea.

I didn’t allow myself to think properly on the fact Edie might never see me as Lady Macbeth. For just one night, I was on everyone’s mind. People knew me.

Edie ran a hand through my hair, just as Wesley had done, and took her own brief draw on the cigarette. She watched me steadily and did not blink. Her eyes were so blue I wanted to drown in them.

“Most women would simply take to bedding someone unadvisable instead of all this,” Edie said. “You really have it out for yourself, don’t you?”

“Sorry.”

“Oh, don’t apologize. You’re terrible at apologizing. You’ve made your bed and now you’ll have to lie in it, but at least you did it with a bang.”

She was quiet for another protracted moment.

“I told you when you got married,” she said, and then stopped herself briefly at a thought. “He’s the best of them. He is. You’ll never find another man willing to love you warts and all the way Wesley does. He’s a rare sort.”

I frowned. “He has his own share of uglies.”

Edie made a very measured sound, considering. She was still petting my hair. “You must be kinder to him, Margaret.”

I looked up at her in silence. My mind was moving like congealed soup. Edie ashed the cigarette and held it close so I could reach it again, burnt down just past halfway. “He’s a mess. Ezra told me he could hardly speak when they were calling the ambulance. They couldn’t get him to let go of you to get you here, he rode along with the medics.”

She turned away from me and looked intently at nothing. “I would never tell him this,” she said, “but please understand me. You attempting some…last hurrah, or whatever you want to call it, this has sheared years from his own life. You have to recognize the violence in that. And not just to yourself.”

I held very still. I stared at the ridges of my covered feet again and did not imagine the taste of dirt.

“I don’t tell you this to…blame you, I don’t know. Maybe I do. Maybe I’m angry at you.” Edie adjusted her stole with one hand, rolling her shoulders smoothly and drawing up a little taller. “I only think you should know the reality of it, especially if you’re serious about building any lasting future with him. You absolutely cannot do this again.”

The room was quiet. The beeping down the hall persisted. I counted it inwardly like the sluggish, drugged-down tick of my own pulse.

Edie cleared her throat. “And so long as I’m being honest, I may as well be selfish. I’ve no stake in anything you do beyond my own pride, but if you’d carried off this folly, then I’m not entirely sure what I would have done with myself, either. So.”

I tsked my tongue gently against the insides of my teeth, bone-wet in their straight, solid rows in the rest of my mouth, so soft and strange. “That isn’t fair, Edie.”

“I never said it was.” Edie took the cigarette back, drew it to the filter, and stubbed it out in the ashtray on my bedside table. “But it’s the truth.”

She put her hand back in my hair, the one with the glove still on, and swept it down to the back of my neck. I shut my eyes and sank into the feeling of being held. Tears prickled behind my squeezed-tight lashes.

“Quit this foolishness,” Edie murmured. “Quit looking for a way out, because it doesn’t exist. Face life like the rest of us, in all its hideous beauty.”

I sniffled hard around a sob. My throat clicked and skittered with uncontrollable sorrow. “I don’t know who I am anymore, Edie,” I managed to weep.

“Oh, hush. Of course you do, darling. Of course you do. You’ll learn.”

I didn’t believe her. I was a ridiculous, impossible creature, too many people in one body—Margie, Margaret, Margot, Wolf, Shoard, Jack, every bloodied woman I’d ever embodied and then slain onstage. My own near miss of an ending.

I was tired. That was the crux of it. I was so very deeply tired, and I didn’t know where I would ever find relief from myself to rest.

From down the hall, the beeping stopped.

Somewhere, Wesley had hopefully found a place to catch up on sleep.

Life, the spiteful bleed of it, would keep on whether or not I sought to join in.