10
The Port Authority Bus Terminal
After officially signing his contract for the summer festival—the Sumner Summer Shakespeare Soiree, which looked more like a series of printing mistakes than a bona fide production—Wesley and Edie both assured me it was legitimate. They’d met the impresario and deemed him real, if eccentric; he’d given the actors handsome advances ahead of their regular weekly pay before they even left Manhattan.
But legitimate hardly meant comfortable. We found that out the hard way at six o’clock in the morning, bags in hand, standing before a fleet of battered Volkswagen Transporters ready to cart us across the country on a thirty-hour drive.
“You’re kidding,” Wesley said, his trained-in smile only faltering partway. He adjusted his grip on his suitcase and shifted to keep the other under his arm in place. “I had assumed we were only going from here to the airport.”
One of the men leaning on the driver’s-side door of the nearest van gave him an appraising look. He seemed constructed from choice cuts of beef stacked together in the vague shape of a man, corded and overmuscled. He said nothing, but another one came forward to take my suitcase and hitch it to the nearest roof rack.
A small, compact man approached me with his hand stuck out. “You must be Margaret Wolf.”
I took the offered greeting, my stomach lurching at the rarity of my stage name. “Shoard,” I said. “I’ve married.”
He was shorter than me by an inch or two, shy of five-and-a-half feet, but he carried himself like a giant. His hair was combed down in an oil-slick part that barely covered a balding spot on the crown of his head. He led with his shoulders, which were heavily padded to a severe line under a sharkskin jacket.
“Vaughn,” he said, grinning so broadly I could see three gold fillings in his premolars. He churned my hand like a water pump. “Vaughn Kline. Director and general upstart.”
I flashed my own smile at him, the most obvious I could make it despite my doubts. “A pleasure.”
A sharp, weaseled glint in Kline’s deep-set eyes caught my reluctance. “I’ve heard about you.”
“Have you?” I hadn’t let go of his hand. He didn’t have a terribly firm handshake—Kline seemed to me the sort of man who didn’t need to be intense; if he saw himself as the brain, then this armada of strongmen did the literal and less-literal heavy lifting for him. All he had to do was be smart.
Smart could be dangerous.
He regarded me without lechery, simply sizing me up. “You planning on gracing the boards with us, too?”
My resolve shuddered. I withdrew my hand and pretended to fuss with my purse. “That’s kind of you, but no,” I said, avoiding his gaze. “I leave that to my husband.”
Kline glanced over his shoulder to where Wesley had given up trying to help the driver load our trunks onto the roof. He tarried back with his jacket draped over his arms, terribly out of place amid the collarless shirts and cigars, and tried to hail the working men to no avail with his questions—Excuse me; are we really driving all the way there? That would take what, a week? Do we have that kind of time?…So you’re all from Jersey?
Jerking a thumb at him, Kline raised an eyebrow at me. “I’ve heard about him, too.”
With my hand still inside my purse, I found my powder compact and closed my fist around it like a security blanket. I gave Kline another wooden smile. “He’s plenty marvelous for the both of us,” I said, and excused myself to secure a seat by a window.
I climbed into one of the empty vans and peered around: two rows of bench seats behind the driver, cracked leather and yellowed detailing from eons of smoking stains, the persistent smell of spilled coffee. I prepared a dose from my compact on my finger and sniffed it down, absently licking off the last of it.
Wesley climbed in after me, scowling. “Lovely hospitality so far,” he said under his breath.
“I met Kline.”
“Isn’t he a riot?”
Lisette stuck her head into the van, wearing the sunglasses that meant she was staggeringly hungover. “Room in here for another?”
We helped her inside, and as though we were sitting at a bistro for a bit of hair of the dog instead of preparing for a cross-country caravan, she launched into a story about a dinner party last night in Gramercy Park that somehow turned into a scavenger hunt along the East River. She kept her sunglasses on.
As we left the city—trundling through the Lincoln Tunnel, blinking in the sunlight after exiting on the other side of the water, shifting with a wince as the van’s chassis bumped hard and often over potholes—Wesley slept heavily against my shoulder. Our driver drank a steady march of beer cans cracked open as he followed the route westward, smack-dab in the middle of a five-long caravan. Three newcomers to Ezra’s crew had taken the other seats. I knew them only in passing from other corners of the Village, and their names slid off my powder-fogged brain when Lisette and Wesley introduced them to me. They smoked a sweet-smelling herb and didn’t offer any to us.
It would be three days of driving crammed tight with this cobbled-together company. I kept up a low buzz with quick sniffs of powder every few hours and watched the scenery bleed from busy urban density into rural blandness. It was more than I usually used in a day, but I told myself it was a temporary measure. Once we got to Sumner, wherever it was, I would find plenty of other things to stay busy and pull myself back down to baseline.
We stopped for gas several times along the approach to the Midwest. Lining up to wait our turns at the toilets made me feel like a schoolgirl again. I averted my eyes from the mirror, knowing I looked like hell but not wanting the confirmation, and scoured my hands in each measly sink despite knowing I wouldn’t feel clean until I could get a shower at the motel at the end of this first day’s leg.
On our third stop, I climbed back into the van and considered for the first time whether or not I was making a mistake coming along. What was out here for me? What had I signed up for by asserting myself—a summer of slow wasting while Wesley was constantly away doing his job, just to catch a whiff of it from beside him?
I couldn’t think of it like that. I had to believe it would be worth it. It was either this, or fritter away three months on my own.
I stared through the window and searched the feathery clouds hanging above this stretch of highway north of Pittsburgh. With the van door hanging open, the air swam sharp with the smell of gasoline. Our vans took up both fill pumps, idling in a line like the lot of us using the restrooms.
One of the rust-flecked toothpaste-colored beasts was stacked to the limits of its roof rack with huge boxes bursting with skeins of fabric—costumes. The man at the pump beside the open driver’s-side door stood out against the droll gray daylight as though he’d stepped from the pages of a men’s fashion catalog.
He sported a head of copper-red hair in a perfectly pomaded coif. His nose, straight and long and ending with a flick like the tail of his face’s signature, arced down above a firm mouth pursed with vague derision. He held the stern set of his expression as though keeping in a scathing remark to everything at once, the graceful jut of his chin just the delicate side of square.
He looked up and found me through the window, past the black impasse of his round sunglasses. I couldn’t look away from the casual acuity of his unseen gaze while he peered at me, one hand in his pocket and the other steadying the fuel nozzle at height with his hips.
Before I could drum up the muster to let my attention flit away, the man smiled. It was subtle, nothing more than a quirk of his lips.
I turned quickly in my seat and stared through the opposite window at the endless roll of Pennsylvania blandness. I dug out my compact and, still dizzied with my last dose, clenched my fist around a tube of lipstick Edie had lent me before leaving the city. I can’t wear this color here, she’d told me easily, waving a hand; don’t know why I even bought it. Go give it some new life in the middle of nowhere.
The untouched wax stick was a deep, earthy red. I applied a fresh coat along my lips, careful and practiced, and found it perfectly balanced to my skin tone in the hand mirror.
I felt the itch again—the weight of eyes. I shut the compact and looked up at the man at the pump, but he was gazing out at the horizon past the vans. He was stunning.
As I shut my purse again, Wesley came out of the gas station with a paper cup of coffee. He passed the costume-stacked van with the red-haired man and, turning to catch his eye, offered a wave. The man returned it.
“How much fuel do these monsters guzzle?” Wesley asked. He patted the rump of the van.
“Too much,” the man said, and gave him the same keen smile. “But it’s Kline’s money, so I feed the bitch as much as she wants.”
Wesley laughed, carrying the notes of interest I could hear in him like fine partials of ringing glass.
Well, if he really was interested, this man seemed quite the departure from Wesley’s usual type of oh-so-particular and mannered. I watched the stranger rack the fuel nozzle and tug a kerchief from his pocket to wipe tidily at each finger in turn, peering along the stretch of road rising into the distance. He tucked away the kerchief before pulling a strike lighter from inside his jacket, and crossed to the gaggle of drivers cutting fresh cigars to offer them the flame with the ease of belonging amid their grit.
Maybe not Wesley’s type, but certainly mine.
We stopped at a deflated motel outside of Columbus, Ohio, as dusk pulled in tight. There was a restaurant down the street, and Kline announced we would be breaking bread together there. I had a headache from one too many doses of powder and looked forward to a drink to soften the dull throbbing.
“Don’t worry about your things,” he said over his shoulder, leading us across the empty street like a foolhardy mother duck in monk shoes. “The boys have ’em.”
I looked backward at the vans parked in a row outside the rooms we had rented. The glow of several cigars persisted in the dark. Wesley touched my elbow.
“Ready, Jack?”
A streetlamp caught a hard angle of his face in oxidized off-orange. I took his hand. “After you.”
The place across the street, Dizzy’s, was sleepy at best. Kline hailed the owner, who was hunkered in an office in the back, while the rest of us milled at the bar and pretended not to overhear the chatter through the half-open door about an eye-popping sum of money for some hot meals and an open bar tab.
I peered at the rows of solemn-looking bottles along the back of the bar. The other patrons, a scant combination of locals and freight drivers, eyed us as though we’d dragged the circus into town.
A harried waitress with a pile of limp brown curls tied back in a bow herded us to a row of tables hastened together into one long plank. Amid the chorusing of chairs scooting out and all of us taking a collective load off, wincing for cramped legs or sore backsides, I took stock of the company.
I was the only one in attendance who didn’t have something to do with the production. I knew a little more than half of the others from the Bard Players or various corners of the theater circuit in passing acquaintance made at one party or another—Lisette and Chap, the dancer-née-songbird Oliver Langham, and several other people I could only call friends at a surface level.
Well. It was something to do. Hopefully I’d get back home with a good story or two.
I carved into the same rubbery steak slathered with ketchup the rest of the table had been served and glanced around the restaurant.
“Who was that man at the gas station?” I asked Wesley, low at his ear. He glanced at me as he sipped his drink—at the very least, the bar here was stocked more than well enough to satisfy the road-weary. After the first few rounds, we would forget to be fussy about the trip still ahead of us.
“Who?”
“The man, the one with the sunglasses and the beautiful suit.”
Wesley’s eyes flashed. He glanced up, nodding his chin at the bar, where the drivers not on van-watch duty were perched. “Felix?”
I looked up and found the man from the fuel pump dropping a couple sugar cubes into a cup of coffee. He sat with poised tension, as though all of him had been sewn and tucked and primped exactly into the picture of man he now presented.
I bit down around my fork and chewed at the gristle, nodding shortly to Wesley. “What does he do?”
A small smile flicked up onto Wesley’s mouth. “Costumes.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You know him?”
Wesley nudged me with his elbow. “What,” he muttered, “are you keen?”
When I looked back up at the man, Felix, he was sipping from the cup with a distant frown, soldiering through the taste of roadside sludge. He set the cup down and added another cube—and looked over at us, where he caught only the scrap of my gaze before I looked quickly back down at my plate.
“I don’t know him well,” Wesley said with an air of fond teasing, smiling directly at him, Felix, while he spoke to me. “But he is handsome, isn’t he?”
I nudged Wesley right back. “I knew it, you dog.”
When the waitress cleared our plates—much more cheerily now, with a fat wad of tips in her apron pocket—we did as all theatrical folk tended to do and began to tell stories.
Wesley was a wonderful storyteller. He did voices with uncanny accuracy and could arrest a room with the recitation of a shopping list. When it was his turn around the table, he told one about the time Ezra tried to cover a dance call himself in the absence of our choreographer. Wesley paced the length of the table as he gestured, snapped, and bitched with perfect mimicry, reducing the lot of us to stitches.
He closed on a cheap pun about curtain legs and a low, graceful bow. We applauded, and I looked up to find Felix standing by the jukebox watching Wesley.
It was a familiar look where Wesley was concerned. He was a dazzling specimen, particularly in his element, and I knew well the ways hungry men made eyes at him.
I excused myself from the table and crossed to the bar under the auspices of topping off my drink. Felix caught my eye on the single look I gave him as I stood, and he appeared at my side as the bartender scraped a cloudy glass through the ice bucket.
“Your husband is quite the character,” he said, drawing up to lean an elbow on the bar.
His voice was oddly liquiform, oak-barrel soft and bending as though his accent had been molded into too many different shapes to recall which one it was meant to hold. I watched him in my periphery, keeping my attention on the drink coming together for me on the bar top. The sunglasses from earlier had been clip-ons, fixed to the narrow brass frames of his spectacles, whose lenses reflected the garish indoor neon signs like shimmering soapsuds.
“Would you like to meet him?” I passed a bill of my own across the bar and turned to face the man in full. I stood as high as his shoulder. He looked more put together than anyone should be allowed to after a full day’s road trip.
The left hand he put out in the narrow space between us was unwavering and well-manicured. “Felix Haas,” he said, his eyes flicking over all of me at once. “Master tailor and costume designer.”
I ignored how aware of my own dress I had become, how frumpy I felt after not being able to freshen up in earnest. I took his palm with the intent to shake it, but he lifted my hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to the back. I smiled at him over the rim of my drink. “Margaret Shoard. Margot. Wesley’s wife, erstwhile actor myself.”
Haas’s lashes behind his glasses were thick and pale, with dramatic herringbone curves. He peered at me, cataloging my body with a surveyor’s eye. “Of course. Did I see you in the Bard Players’ Scottish play?”
I sipped and took a moment to meditate on the medical sting of the cheap whiskey coating my tongue. “Only if you came to the opener,” I said breezily, and flashed my most disarming smile—Felix looked at my mouth, his gaze sticking for a moment. “Do you know Ezra? Were you also drafted by him to come out here?”
Haas returned the smile as though matching an ante. “My accord for this parody lies elsewhere, but I do know Ezra Pierce—somewhat against my will.”
I furrowed my brow, still smiling. “Parody?”
Haas’s poised mouth twitched with distant amusement. “Of course. It’s summer stock.”
“Margie! Come help us with ‘Sixteen Tons’!”
I looked over at the table and found Lisette waving me over. I shot back the rest of my drink and touched Haas’s arm. “Good to meet you, Felix.”
“And you, Mrs. Shoard,” he said, nodding politely at the table to usher me back over to them. He looked pleased with himself. “Or do you prefer Margie?”
I grimaced with levity and earned a warm chuckle from him before returning to my chair. I didn’t help much for singing, but I kept time with my hands on the tabletop as several others spun half-drunk renditions of their favorite standards.
“Does he even know the first thing about theater?” I asked, nodding toward Kline, once we gave up the busking and commandeered the jukebox—someone had cued up the same doo-wop single for five songs in a row. I had lost sight of Wesley.
“Who cares?” Chap crowed. “We’re getting paid our weight in gold to take a fucking break from Manhattan. I’d recite the Gettysburg Address to a barrel full of raccoons if he told me to.”
A minor headache had started to settle in at the back of my neck. I collected my purse and excused myself for the restroom to take another dose of powder in private.
Just one. Just one last hoist to my mood, and I’d be done for the day.
At the back of the restaurant, two narrow doors with chipping paint stood under a measly hanging fixture with a satin glass shade. I tried one handle and found it locked, so tried the second one and found it open. The door groaned inward with a rusty heave.
“Get— Oh. Shit. Hi, Jack.”
I froze in the doorway staring at the tumble of two bodies: Felix Haas, lounged backward against the chipped porcelain edge of a dripping sink, and Wesley on his knees before Haas’s open belt. I blinked. Haas tipped his head slightly to one side.
“Jack?” he asked with lilted curiosity.
Jogged back into the moment, I looked away and hurried to cover my eyes.
“You should lock the door,” I blurted, scrambling for the handle again. “I’ll— Jesus, Wes, at least put a towel down, the floor is filthy.”
I yanked the door shut again and pulled until the latch engaged. Haas muttered something that made Wesley chuckle, and the gentle rattle of shucking open a pair of very finely made trousers continued.
I returned to the table and finished the last sip of a drink that might or might not have been mine. “The toilets are a mess here,” I said to any of the company that was listening. “If you see Wesley, could you tell him I went to the room?”
I hurried back across the empty highway and fetched our room key from the front desk attendant, who looked halfway asleep on his feet, latched like a baby to the nipple of a baseball game on a portable television frizzling with static.
The hot shower I summoned for myself was most welcome. The tiles had a suspicious off-brown luster to them, the water smelled heavily of lye, but I was clean.
I put my hair up in a towel and pulled on a slip that didn’t smell of the van’s stale upholstery. The television leapt to life as I switched it on in passing, and listlessly I watched it through the mirror as I set my curlers for the next day.
Power, I could still hear like an echo now that I was in the relative silence of privacy. Or was it Devour? The shape of the sound was too muddled to tell. I turned up the volume on the television by a couple clicks to drown it out and burrowed under the covers of the single bed furthest from the tightly shut curtains of sickly yellow velour.
Wesley returned a little under an hour later. He slid the chain lock home on the door and came over to kiss me on the forehead.
“I’m sorry you—”
“No apologies,” I said gently, not looking away from the television screen. “Tell me you washed up.”
“Of course I did, you goose,” Wesley muttered with an impish grin mashed against my temple. “Rinsed off with toilet water, though, couldn’t be helped.”
I rolled my eyes and swatted at him. He made for the bathroom, and in my periphery I marked the looser pitch of his gait; mellowed, as though Wesley had been unfolded, ironed out, and reassembled by attentive hands.
He showered with the door open, singing idly to himself under the steam. I watched his back as he combed his hair and pulled on a pair of clean cotton shorts for sleeping.
“Scoot,” he said, slipping under the covers beside me and leaving the second bed empty.
I leaned into him, my cheek pressed hard to his bare chest. All of me ached from so many hours of sitting. I loathed that there were two more days of this ahead.
“Promise me you’ll be careful,” I said gently. He drew one hand down the length of my arm.
“About what?”
“Just be careful, Wesley.”
Tenderly exasperated, Wesley gathered me more fully in his arms and squeezed. “He likes you, too, you know.”
I made a neutral sound, ducked close to the soapy scent on Wesley’s skin. “He’s very handsome,” I said through a yawn. “I’m not exactly looking the other way, but…you know. Don’t get blinded by the flash.”
Wesley sniffed a chuckle to himself. I shut my eyes.
“He is that,” he murmured, resting his cheek sideways on the crown of my head.
“What was it he said when I shut the door?”
“That ‘Jack’ seemed pedestrian for someone so beguiling.”
My face flushed. Wesley laughed again, feeling me fail to hide my smile in the sure, unflagging thud of his heartbeat.
When Wesley rose later to switch off the television, I turned over and doused the light. He settled back under the covers beside me, curling up to hold me close and sigh mightily into the space between my shoulders.
No matter how hard I tried not to listen to the dark, the absolute silence of this place was deafening.
Power.
Devour.
When sleep caught me, it was sudden and black and entirely dreamless.