5

Shoard Downs

I spent three days at the good hospital near Gramercy before they released me with a packet of care instructions for Wesley, as though he was bringing a wounded puppy home from the pound. I took my first hot bath since before opening night and stared at the ridged, black lines of nylon sutures on my arms held fastidiously away from the water as Wesley washed my hair.

Our apartment was dark except for the single standing lamp left on beside the bookcases. We had decamped to the chaise in the sitting room, me lying across it and Wesley on the floor with his knees drawn up.

The minor tremor in my fingers had died down after the first day, as my nerves began the slow work of righting themselves. The surgeon, a serious man with a heavy brow and very steady hands, deemed me lucky I hadn’t truly wrecked anything. I could hold my own cigarettes now.

The rest of the Bard Players had brought me flowers and meals between calls—although never Ezra himself, as hospitals tended to remind him he was just as human as the rest of us.

“Be honest, Jack. Is it my fault?”

I turned to look down at Wesley at his question, in shirtsleeves and nursing a bottle of gin in one fist. He had slackened his personal rule of not drinking during a show run since his every free moment offstage was spent at my bedside; I refused to let him quit the run entirely, we needed the money more than I needed company. Ezra had apparently hired in an understudy for the Lady from a different company, and nobody would tell me straight if she was good or not. They all just made noise about how opening night had been singular, and how proud I should be.

My free hand was loose and lazy, combing steadily through Wesley’s hair in ceaseless, comforting rote. “Don’t be stupid,” I said, “of course it isn’t your fault.”

“Feels like it’s my fault.”

“You aren’t the one who put the glass in my hands.”

“Wasn’t I, though?”

The bottle sloshed with Wesley’s next sip. I took another mouthful of smoke. Through the open window, the whine of a siren passed on the street below.

“This whole thing feels like my fault,” he repeated, but this time on a whisper. A brief and subtle rage slithered between the gaps in my ribs.

“Well, it isn’t. Please stop saying that.”

Wesley was glowering at the middle distance when I glanced down at him. Silence persisted for a moment.

“I’ve heard about this,” he announced. “Hysterics. It happens when women aren’t getting their needs met.”

“ ‘Their needs met.’ ”

“Do you remember the last time I took you to bed?”

I ran the filter of the cigarette against my bottom lip. “That’s neither here nor there, it—”

“Of course it is,” Wesley spat. “If I don’t give you the very basics of a proper fucking marriage, then this mess is my fault.”

“Stop it,” I snapped. “I said yes to you, Wes, I knew exactly what I was signing up for. This had nothing to do with you. Let it be mine.”

Wesley took another slug of gin before settling the foot of the bottle against his bent knee. He shook his head to himself. “Well. Whoever’s fault we want to call it, you really scared me.”

Another long pause sat heavily with us. I ran my thumb along the shell of Wesley’s ear and felt him shudder as he leaned into the touch, unable to hold himself back from seeking comfort.

He drew a shaky breath. “I love you,” he said, stark and shattered. “You know it. You have to know it, I-I love you in our own strange way, but if it isn’t enough for you, you need to tell me instead of…this. Again. Ever again. Making plans for—for what life would have been like, I don’t want to do that. I won’t. I don’t like thinking about who I might be without you!”

His voice trembled with a fever I had never heard in it before, not even in his most tragic roles. I drew my hand flat against his brow and leaned his head back gently to rest against the edge of the couch. I tendered my fingers upward into his shallow widow’s peak. “I know,” I said over the sound of him struggling to hold in his tears. I tended him with a hush. “I’m sorry, Wesley. I know.”

I looked down and saw his chin buckle. “I can do my part,” he said. “I—I’ll get myself help. There are ways, I can—I can change, if you need me to, I—”

My hand stilled in his hair. “What?”

“I can be different, J—Margot, there are—they have treatments, places where—”

I tugged at the roots of his hair sharply enough to make him gasp. “Don’t you dare even think about that.”

A pitiful spillage of tears tripped up from Wesley’s chest. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he sobbed.

I turned him with ginger care to face me, to look at me full-on with those terrified, sweet eyes of his, over-brimming with awful shimmer.

“That’s just as much violence as what I did,” I said, searching his face. “Stop it. I promise you, you promise me. Not ever again. Do you hear me?”

Wesley sniffled messily. Surrender shuddered past the fear deep in his gaze. “I promise,” he rasped.

“Good.” I eased my grip on his hair and smoothed my hand over the crown of his head. I tapped off the end of my cigarette before taking one more tidy drag. “Perish the thought you’ve been anything but a boon to me,” I murmured. “You’re wonderful. Believe that, if you can stand it.”

Wesley drew in when I handed him the cigarette, obedient. His cheeks hollowed shallowly. His eyes were still pink and wet but the fear in them had deadened by the smallest bit. There had always been an aspect of the hare in him, as there was in me, a fevered animal that only ever wanted something else’s jaws around it.

I could give that to him. Together, we could cradle each other in our teeth and never let them shut.

“I need you to tell me, Jack.”

“Tell you what?”

Wesley took another mouthful from the cigarette. He looked away as he exhaled, the very edge of his mouth twitching as he gathered himself. “You keep me so far away from you. If you need—when you need something from me,” he said and looked me straight in the eye. “When you need me, you tell me. This never happens again. You tell me. Alright?”

I nodded, blinking away my own bolt of exhausted, frustrated tearfulness. “I’m sorry.”

“Would you quit apologizing to me, Jack; just tell me you’ll try, and mean it.”

His voice flashed with the brittle efficiency of an officer petitioning a wayward cadet to quit behaving like an idiot: You’ll get yourself killed doing that; do you think this is all a game?

I swiped at my eyes and sniffed hard. “I’ll try. I will tell you, I promise.”

Wesley heaved a wracking sigh. He shifted up to his knees and gathered my free hand to his mouth, pressing a fervent kiss to my knuckles with care not to move my wrists. “I love you,” Wesley whispered, and I thought of the day he asked me to marry him.

I had to let him in. I had to protect him.

“I love you,” I said, and I knew it, and I meant it. I squeezed his fingers and chased the promise with a tight draw on the last of the smoke.

We sat in the silence of licked wounds, tending to our own quiet vices. When Wesley finally stood, he leaned down to kiss me. His lips tasted of salt.

“I’m for bed,” he said. “Are you coming?”

“I’ll be in later. I’m not tired yet.”

He took stock of me for a moment with sluggish, half-drunk darts of his eyes before sighing and trudging to the bathroom with the bottle still in hand.

I stared through the window into the building across from ours. The bedroom of the woman who lived inside was empty, with the television on. It shouted jagged splashes of monochrome light into the dark room. I thought of my mother in earnest for the first time in years.

She married the shiny new preacher in town when I was fourteen. The day of her wedding, Mama helped paint my face to be her maid of honor and told me all about the privilege of becoming somebody’s wife.

Wives are the masters of the home, she told me, patting a pretty pink lipstick onto my cupid’s bow. I had never worn makeup before. That had been the most exciting day of my life back then—my first part to play, aside from simply being my mother’s daughter. We raise the babies and cook the meals and make everyone comfortable, because without us there would be no warmth in the world. Wives are the keepers of kindness.

Where was that power beyond the weight of homemaking? I had no designs to be anything but married. I didn’t want to be a mother. What transformative potential existed for me as a wife if I wasn’t going to follow the script I’d been given?

There was so little point in only tasting ambition, never chewing or swallowing it—power, respect, all of it mine by proxy, artifice alone. Without direction, I had to make up the rules to this as I went.

But I had to be here, and for good. For Wesley.

I dabbed at my eyes with the edge of my sleeve and curled up on my side. I wrapped my arms around myself, careful not to press on the sore straits of my scars, and wondered who I was to become.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

Replaced.

What an ugly fucking word. I had never thought about it before, but it really was hideous.

Excised. Tossed aside. Put back on the shelf. Replaced. Like I was no better than a sheet of plastic, draped lazy and limp over something rotten.

I blinked rapidly, as though seeing better would change the meaning of the word. “You’re kidding.”

Ezra’s office was tucked deep into the veins of the theater, overstuffed and cramped with the folios and contracts from years of past plays. No windows, only one door in or out, and bursting with paper. Above us, the feet of the stage crew yammered as they practiced a changeover.

“Probation,” Ezra said, easy as anything, removing his pince-nez to fiddle them idly between his fingers. “Protracted.”

“Replaced,” I repeated, tasting the depth of its cruelty for the first time.

Ezra held in a sigh and canted his eyes up at me in exasperation. “You aren’t in any fit state to perform, Margot. You have to see that.”

My stitches had been removed the week prior. I applied a vitamin salve twice a day to the skinny red lines; the nurses told me it would work wonders—See here, one said as she lifted the edge of her blouse, indicating a flat and barely there smudge of silvery skin on her waist, I had my appendix out and now you can barely tell. I was back to routine with Wesley, lunch at our favorite café three times a week and going with him to parties again with my new rotation of evening gloves.

I was alright. I was alive. I could forget this ever happened and move on.

But none of that mattered if I couldn’t work.

“Ezra,” I said, but stopped when my throat caught on spiny frustration. I swallowed and forbade my voice from rising. “When did you decide this?”

He sketched a simpering shrug at me. Twelfth Night was still open on the far end of his cluttered desk—O Time, thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me t’untie. “We’ve had to make do without you in the meantime,” he said, “and after the first few shows I realized we could give you the space you need to recover without compromising the integrity of the run.”

I held up the undersides of my arms to him, showing him the evidence, and relished privately the way he flinched from the sight. “I appreciate it, as I’m sure my understudy has, but I’m recovered now. I need to work, Ezra.”

“You need to rest.”

“Are you my doctor?”

“I’m your director,” Ezra said coolly, leaning back in his chair, “which strangely seems to hold more weight to you. Do you realize how close you came to dying in my theater?”

Good, I nearly blurted. I clenched my jaw and said nothing. Someone above pelted from stage left to right with a quick clip. From the wall behind Ezra, our poster for the company’s inaugural performance of Romeo and Juliet stared me down with my adolescent-looking signature beneath Juliet’s name.

“You have to let me work,” I said, and hated how my voice wobbled.

Ezra sighed. “The only thing I have to do is look after my cast.”

“By cutting me loose and letting me—what, waste away in my own apartment?”

“By protecting the rest of them from the stresses you’ve caused,” Ezra said evenly, enunciating every word.

Aghast, I stared at him. “What the hell does that mean?”

“You didn’t have to see the mess you made.”

“I had to feel it!” I jabbed a finger at myself and crossed to the short side of the desk, where I could almost loom over Ezra. He sat and looked solidly up at me. “I’m not the one who pushes the company to their fucking limits to get the performances I want!”

Ezra raised his thick, silvery brows. “If my methods distress you, perhaps probation is more fitting than I’d thought.”

“Jesus, Ezra!”

Sighing, Ezra unfolded into a full stand and fingered the first button of his jacket closed again. Any height advantage I had disappeared. I crossed my arms and glared at him.

“Margaret. I appreciate your devotion to giving every blaggy old bitch in our audience a reason to crow about a cursed production and garnish ticket sales like this. But if it’s truly my methods that drove you to it, then I think it’s best we take a long break from each other. Professionally.”

He didn’t try to soothe me in any way beyond that. Ezra’s hands were in his pockets and my own fists were stuffed under my armpits, and the impasse between us was so vast I wanted to cry.

I settled for taking up the paperweight on his desk, a cheap cast of a Rodin with two hands barely touching, and hurling it at the far wall.

It bounced off and thumped to the floor, where it rolled to a pitiful stop on the carpet. Nothing broke.

“This is a mistake,” I seethed, not looking at Ezra. I could feel him watching me curiously.

“No, I really don’t think it is, darling. See this time for the gift it is, and we can talk again when you’re feeling better.”

My horrible, stupid eyes began to well up. I turned my face to the floor, where the statue had lolled to a stop, one of the hands begging for alms while the other pushed it away. “What’s your metric for me feeling better?” I ground out.

“Well, that will be for you to decide, won’t it?” Ezra settled back in his chair and placed his spectacles on his nose. He gestured at the door, the sight of him blurring quickly in a wash of sable and pink as my gaze shivered with unshed tears. “Leave the door open when you go.”

In my haste to leave, ripping it open, I let the door bounce back on its hinges. As I strode into the slim aisle of the halls, I heard one of Ezra’s frames judder from its nail and crash to the floor. I hoped it was the Romeo and Juliet poster.

Outside, the sun stung my cheeks. I pawed at my eyes and hid my face in a silk scarf that I wrapped hastily around my hair before cramming on a pair of sunglasses. Summer was shedding one final wash of itself, venting the last of the heat before autumn, and I was sweating in earnest by the time I reached the stretch of smaller theaters and clubs just north along Seventh Avenue.

If Ezra wouldn’t give me work, then someone else would.

But I should have known he’d been talking.

Everyone had been talking.

Three different directors in the West Village made careful niceties before telling me in their own avoidant ways that I was a liability.

A risk.

Poison.

Fuck them. I didn’t need them.

That was a lie—I didn’t want to need them. I wanted to be a self-sustaining creature who didn’t need to throw myself into fictional bodies to make sense of my own.

My anger drove me even farther uptown, to the pond in Central Park where I usually liked to take air and watch the ducks mill around. When I sat down on the bench and took a moment to push my breath back down, reality caught up to me.

I was done for.