Once again she looked out at water, but this time from far above, as if her white stucco cottage with orange-tile roof was floating through the pale blue sky above Sydney Harbor, its great glass windows framing the busy scene below. It was like a theater, Jessica thought, sitting in her living room and watching sailboats and ferries, catamarans and water taxis, yachts, freighters and ocean-going liners crisscross the harbor, miraculously avoiding collisions that seemed inevitable until the very last minute. And it was the closest to the theater she had come in the ten days she had been in Sydney.
She had arrived at the end of November. It had taken six weeks to finish her illustrations and arrange with Robert to have her horses and her house cared for. When she was almost ready to leave, she wrote to three producers whom she had met years before in Sydney, asking to see them. All three replied with flattering letters urging her to call as soon as she arrived. But from the moment she stepped off the plane, Sydney overwhelmed her.
It had been six years since she had been in a city. All those years, when she had been living so quietly in Arizona and then on Lopez, she had forgotten what a city sounded and felt like. Sydney, with its three million people and driving energy, seemed huge, deafening and frantic, as foreign as if she had landed on another planet.
The city sprawled outward from the harbor, old buildings and new piled together like blocks that children had tumbled out of a toy chest The streets climbed up from the water on long hills lined with jacaranda and fig trees. Traffic was dense, fast and ruthless: a never-ending stream of cars and trucks that, to an American, seemed to careen toward disaster, since they drove on the left, as in England. The sidewalks were jammed with uniformed schoolchildren, tourists, business people and shoppers, all instinctively dodging each other, then clustering patiently at red lights even when no cars were coming from either direction. Often Jessica was jostled on street corners when she did not move with the crowd. Each time, she received a profuse apology, but she thought she was the one who should be apologizing, for being slow and stupid, for not fitting easily into city life—she who had fully mastered New York for so many years without giving its tumult a conscious thought.
But she had repressed all memories of New York, until now, when sights and sensations and the din of traffic brought it all back, and made her shrink from calling the producers to whom she had written. What am I doing here? she thought. I don’t belong here. What did I think I could do here? I ought to go back where I belong, where I know what I can do.
But she did not go back. Instead, she began to look and listen, and soon found things that gave her pleasure. First was language, because language had been her whole life. She liked the Australian accent: a smooth version of Cockney, the words like notes sliding up and down the scale, as jaunty and cheerful as the people themselves. And she liked the names of places: sounds and syllables that rolled on her tongue like poetry or music. “Kirribilli,” she would say. “Woollahra. Wooloomooloo. Taronga. Parramatta.” They made her smile even when she did not feel like smiling.
Then she began to explore Sydney, at first tentatively, then more determinedly. She went again and again to the harbor, an enormous natural bay bisected by the great arc of the Harbor Bridge, with fingers of land jutting out all around its periphery to form coves, harbors, inlets and dozens of small beaches. From Circular Quay, she took a ferry crowded with tourists and a tour guide who gave a running commentary as they made a circuit of the harbor, complete with anecdotes about Sydney’s history and the people, including American film stars, who owned the houses and apartments that climbed up the hills from the water’s edge. She took other ferries to the suburbs close to the center of the city, thinking about a place to live. One day she took a ferry to the Taronga Zoo, built on a steep hill, where she navigated the paved roads in a small motorized cart for disabled visitors and spent hours gazing at koalas and kangaroos, emus and wombats, and hundreds of other animals and brilliantly colored birds never seen in America.
In another motorized cart she drove along paths in Sydney’s vast Royal Botanic Garden, through tropical forests, rose gardens, herb gardens and stretches of lawn dotted with flowering bushes and enormous eucalyptus, palms, and Moreton Bay and Jackson Bay fig trees with trunks of thick cords braided together and branches stretching straight outward like welcoming arms.
To get around the rest of the city, she took taxis, telling herself she was interested in everything. But she was lonely and it was difficult to concentrate.
She was always alone. People looked at her with sympathy and often made way for her as she limped onto a ferry or across a crowded street, but she spoke to no one except waiters in the restaurants where she ate. I’ll meet people when I’m in the theater, she thought. It will happen very quickly. But until then she missed her house, and her garden with its familiar view; she missed her horses and the farmers waving as she rode past; she missed her occasional conversations with Robert, the sound of the waves as she sat on her terrace, the moon through her bedroom windows. She missed Luke.
She missed him in quick flashes that brought back a sentence, a phrase, a smile, and then vanished, leaving her aching inside. She missed the sound of his footsteps in the house, the quiet way he worked beside her in the kitchen, the warmth of his body in her bed. She missed the feel of him. At any moment, when she relaxed her guard, she felt his arms around her and his lips on hers, she felt him inside her as she drew him deeper and heard his sigh of pleasure, she saw his smile and the long, absorbed look in his eyes when they sat by candlelight talking, talking, talking . . . oh, how much they had had to talk about!
He had written to her, brief lighthearted letters that arrived every few days while she was finishing her work on Lopez.
Martin has found a new cookbook and has decided to try every recipe, first page to last. My chances of getting into the kitchen have dwindled to nothing. But I’m not sure I want to. I prowled around it the day I got back and it struck me that it was unfinished: it desperately needed something to make it complete. And of course that was you, and the two of us, side by side, doing mundane tasks that seemed magical because we were together.
I saw your publisher at a dinner party the other night. I may have sung your praises too vociferously, because one of the guests asked me if I’d become an agent in my spare time. Only for extraordinary people, I said.
Tonight I sat in my bedroom, very late, holding the blanket I told you about, ships and sailboats and links to my parents. It occurred to me that I took nothing from Lopez that was a memento of my week there. I wish I had. That is a sentimental thought that would amaze many people who think they know me.
I’ve decided to cut out and frame the illustrations from your books that I like the best. There’s a wall in my bedroom that’s perfect for them, catching the sunlight.
New York is like a fabulous circus after the farms and forests of Lopez; I stayed home tonight to catch my breath. One has to get acclimatized to all the highjinks in order to survive. After dinner I pulled out my plays, thinking about your wonderfully perceptive criticism. I’m about to rewrite whole scenes. I can hear your voice reading the dialogue, with the fire sputtering and crackling in the background, and Hope watching over us, and I know that the magic we found was not just in the kitchen. I’ll be working on the plays for some time, I think; I’m grateful for the time you gave to them.
Grateful, Jessica thought. Grateful. I did it because I love you.
She had answered him twice, her letters cooler than his, and then she had left Lopez without telling him where she was going. It can’t drag on; it’s finished. It’s the past and this is now, and I’m starting over again.
And so she took ferries and taxis and kept moving, learning as much about her new city as quickly as she could. It was a hodgepodge, seemingly without rhyme or reason. There were frame buildings with lacy steel balconies that seemed transplanted from New Orleans; there was a stretch of George Street raucous with discount hawkers shouting their prices into microphones, Castlereagh with garish discount stores close to European designer boutiques, and William Street, where she saw her first Boomerang School. She thought there was no center to the city, but then her taxi came to a stretch of high rises near the harbor, where the crowds were more dense and parks and restaurants lined the streets, fountains played, the hospital stretched a full block—a sprawling pile of turreted and columned red stone straight out of the nineteenth century—and office buildings, shops and hotels clustered tightly, as if creating their own private city.
Just a few blocks farther were neighborhoods, called suburbs, crowded with mansions on private beaches or clinging to the hills above, with apartment buildings scattered among them. Farther inland stretched street after street of smaller homes and cottages dwarfed by the trees around them, each with its own garden. Sydney in November was a city of flowers.
Three nights in a row, she went to the theater, applauding with the audiences while making a critical balance sheet in her mind of what she had found excellent and what was weak. As she did it, a ripple of anticipation ran through her and a small spurt of excitement, the first she had felt since arriving. I’m ready for this. I’ve been away too long. If I’m in the theater, the city isn’t important. I can feel at home anywhere, if I’m in the theater. And then, on her fourth day in the city, impatient with taxi drivers who drove too fast when she wanted to dawdle, she rented a car and found, to her amazement, that it took only a short time to master driving on the left side of the street That was a kind of triumph and once again she thought, Maybe I can do this after all. Maybe I really can feel as if I belong.
And so, on the sixth day, she rented a house, a pure white stucco cottage with an orange-tile roof that reminded her of Provence, fine furnishings much like those she might have chosen herself, and a deck cantilevered over the hill below. From there she looked down on the houses that seemed to be clambering up to her from the harbor’s edge, and on the harbor itself, with its inlets and coves snaking in and out from distant headlands on her right to the great arch of the Harbor Bridge on her left. Beside the bridge, on a peninsula jutting into the harbor, was the opera house, its roof in the shape of huge white sails moving majestically out to sea. A theater and water, Jessica thought, and a quiet place of my own, above it all. She felt almost as she had on Lopez: alone and sheltered. Safe.
Hope sniffed, inspecting the rooms, always circling back to Jessica to be comforted amidst the strangeness. The rooms were overfurnished and no two pieces matched. After the clean, simple lines of her house on Lopez, Jessica thought she could not live amidst such a riot of color and patterns, but somehow the stripes and florals and solids and geometries came together and were oddly harmonious.
She set the box of Constance’s letters on the mosaic coffee table in the living room and arranged her collection of plays on a shelf in the bedroom. I wish I had something of Luke’s. Just one small thing to put somewhere and look at now and then. But I don’t. Not a single thing. He said the same thing. We both parted empty-handed. She flung a Scottish cashmere throw, brought from Lopez, over the back of one of the couches, and arranged fresh flowers in a Majolica vase she found in the dining room. The hotel sent over her luggage and she found places for her clothes in closets and built-in cupboards. The delivery boy brought groceries and she stocked cabinets and the refrigerator and freezer. The landlord came to make sure the hot water was hot, the cold cold, and the air-conditioning working, since it was November; almost summer in Sydney. A woman called and said she had been the housekeeper in that house for five years and did Miss Fontaine want her to continue? Emphatically, Jessica said yes. When she hung up she looked around and sighed. It was almost home.
So, at last, she made the first of her telephone calls and that afternoon met with Alfonse Murre, a producer whom she had met long ago in Sydney. She wore a summer dress of fine silk with a long skirt and long, almost transparent sleeves, and when the secretary announced her Murre came forward, hand outstretched, smiling broadly. He was fatter and balder than Jessica remembered, with a flimsy mustache that quivered anticipatorily before he spoke. He stopped when he saw her. “Jessica? My goodness.” His face smoothed over and they shook hands. Jessica’s was cold. “Come in; sit down.” He pulled an armchair forward and watched as Jessica sat on the edge, propping her cane against the arm. He bypassed the armchair beside hers and sat behind his desk. “What brings you all the way to Sydney? I was surprised to get your letter.”
He had not said he was surprised in his answering letter; he had said he could not wait to see her.
“I’ve been here before, as you know,” she said.
“Of course. In A Moon for the Misbegotten. You were quite wonderful. I was new here and you made Sydney seem civilized, when I’d been thinking it felt like the end of the world.”
Jessica smiled faintly. “I’ve been here three times and I like the theater here. So now that I’ve decided to direct plays, this is where I want to start.”
“Direct. You want to direct.”
“I’ve always been interested in it; I don’t think that’s unusual. You know how many musicians want to be conductors; it’s the same thing with actors. They usually think they understand character better than—” Don’t explain so much; it sounds like pleading. “Well, it’s what I want to do now. I saw your production of American Buffalo the last time I was here and I thought it was excellent. I’m hoping you have some scripts under consideration and we can work together on one of them.”
“Well. Interesting. I wouldn’t have thought . . .” He drummed his fingers on the desk and frowned at the carpet. “Of course you stopped acting because—well, I mean, no one would . . . I mean you couldn’t possibly . . . Dear me, Jessica, it doesn’t seem likely, does it? I mean, to direct one of my plays, to be in the public eye, giving interviews, being written up in the papers, there’s so much public, you know, about directing. I mean, you may think it’s all behind the scenes, but even there, you know, where you have to instill confidence in actors and the crew, you have to be someone they look up to and—Oh, now, just a minute—” Jessica had stood up and he leaped to his feet as she walked away, leaning on her cane. “Jessica, dear me, you mustn’t think I don’t have full confidence in you, in your ability, that’s not the issue, the issue is—”
“—your narrow-minded, frightened, ignorant prejudice,” Jessica said icily. Standing in the doorway, knowing his secretary was listening, she turned back to him. “You think because I’ve changed physically, I’ve lost my brains, my competence, my ability to function as anything, much less a director. You—”
“Now wait a minute; you can’t talk to—”
“You don’t think, you react.” Her voice soared, filled the office, swept over him as once it had swept over audiences. “You scurry away when something surprises you. Look at me! What do you see? Someone who isn’t beautiful anymore. What does that have to do with my ability to direct a play?”
“I didn’t say—”
“That’s just what you said. No one would look up to me, no one would have confidence in me, no one would admire me. How do you know? Your pitiful little mind imagines it, but those are excuses to hide the fact that you don’t like looking at me, you don’t—”
“Goddamn it, I won’t listen to this crap. What the hell is wrong with you? You were never a bitch before. You’ve gotten sour and mean, and if you think I’ll forget this, I won’t. I won’t forget it, Jessica; you can’t insult—”
“You fool,” she said, her voice a despairing sigh. She turned and limped through the anteroom, trying to hurry, knowing she was even more awkward when she did, aware of the secretary watching her and seeing the image of Murre in her mind as he stood just inside his office, his lower lip thrust out, his eyes furious. She was trembling and her throat was choked with tears.
Damn, damn, damn. I knew it, it’s why I stayed on Lopez. I was right, I knew this would happen.
She found a sidewalk cafe a block from Murre’s office and sat at a table tucked in the shade of an awning. “Iced coffee,” she said to the waiter, and clasped her hands to still their trembling. He’s only one man, she thought, and not a smart one. There’s no reason to think the others will react that way, have that look on their face. . . .
But it might be too late. Damn it, she thought, how could I let him get to me? How could I be so stupid? In every city, the theater is a small world; he’ll tell everyone.
And he did. When Jessica telephoned the other two producers, their secretaries reported that they were out of town, and would be unavailable even when they returned; so busy, so backed up, right in the middle of one of Sydney’s most crowded theater seasons; they were deeply sorry . . . perhaps when the season was over . . . they knew Miss Fontaine would understand.
From the aerie of her living room, she gazed at the harbor and the far-off headlands. She was halfway around the world from New York, but the nightmares that had haunted her for six years had followed her here. She felt bruised and lifeless; she barely had the energy to pet Hope, who sniffed and licked her face and followed her in bewilderment as she walked indifferently through the house. She paced aimlessly, seeing over and over Murre’s instinctive withdrawal, hearing the reproach in his voice, as if she ought to have known how public a director was and spared him the entire interview. “The hell with him,” she said aloud, but he clung to her thoughts like a burr.
Once again, her house became her refuge. She did not go out. With Hope at her feet, looking as melancholy as she felt, she sat by the windows, filling her notebooks with sketches of the harbor and scenes of Sydney from her memory. She listened to music and read books and the morning paper that was delivered daily; she ordered groceries by telephone and had them delivered. And at night she lay in bed, her thoughts roaming where she could not stop them.
I never pretended that you still have the beauty and perfect body you once had. But the more I got to know you the less important any of that seemed. To me, you are magnificent.
Luke, dearest Luke, she thought, it’s not enough. The rest of the world doesn’t agree.
I love you. What does the way you look have to do with that?
Nothing, when it’s just the two of us. I do believe that now. But to the rest of the world, the way I look is all that counts.
Come with me. Come home with me; marry me.
Thank God I didn’t. When this happened in New York, you would have felt responsible; you would have argued with the Murres of New York, defended me . . . and for what? I could not work in the theater in that atmosphere and it would have poisoned our lovely fairy tale, and left us bereft.
But it seems I can’t work in the theater in this atmosphere, either.
She moved through the days in a kind of trance, waiting . . . for what? For a way out. For the moment when she would stand up decisively and pack her bags and leave. But she did not. She sketched and read and listened to music and ate and slept. It seemed that this went on for a very long time, but one morning she noticed the date on the newspaper and saw that it had been only four days since her meeting with Murre. And at that moment, the telephone rang.
She jumped—good heavens, what a strange sound, and how loud!—and then thought, Luke. No, how could it be? He had no idea where she was. One of the producers, then. Not likely. Well, probably the landlord. Nothing important. She answered on the third ring.
“Jessica Fontaine?” The voice was strident and powerful, a woman’s voice that was like a cross between a train engine and a trombone. She could knock down the walls of Jericho, one way or another, Jessica thought, and a giggle escaped her, her first laugh in days. “I’m calling Jessica Fontaine; have I found her?”
“Yes,” she said. “What can I do for—”
“Hermione Montaldi here. You of course know who I am.”
Jessica sat straighter. “You’re the producer of The Secret Garden. I saw it a few nights ago. It was very fine. The best I’ve seen here.”
“How many have you seen?”
“Three.”
Laughter reverberated through the telephone, threatening to shatter it. “A small sample, but if you saw them all you’d still say it’s the best. I hear from Al Murre that you came to see him, looking to work with him, but when he told you he didn’t have anything right away you tore into him with all ten claws.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“I did tear into him, but it was for other reasons.”
“Do you want to tell me what they were?”
“I’d rather you told me why you’re calling.”
“Right; that’s fair. I’m intrigued by all this, I remember you with the greatest pleasure from the times I saw you here and in New York, I’d like to talk to you, I’ve got a play that might interest you, I’d like to find out if we could work together. Are those enough reasons?”
“Even after you talked to Murre?”
“Your mistake was, you took that little fart seriously. Nobody else does. Well, a few people do, but the savvy folk know better than to pay him any mind. How about dinner tonight? We’re neighbors, you know, you could walk here in five minutes. I make an ossobuco you can’t beat anywhere, and my house is much better than a restaurant for talking; nobody’ll tell us somebody wants our table.”
“How do you know where I live?”
“The telephone company is a fount of information. Come early, six o’clock, is that too provincial? It doesn’t matter; I want to get started and so do you. Number forty-five, the pink stucco house two blocks down the hill from you. Palm trees in front; wrought-iron gates; high wall. I don’t like gawking tourists. You’ll be here?”
“Yes.”
“See you then. Very casual, by the way; no silks or satins.”
Jessica was smiling. She felt light, almost weightless; her heart lifted and excitement ran through her, buoying her up. The past four days were forgotten. It did not even give her pause when she reflected that nothing might come of this. She did not believe that. Hermione Montaldi—what a marvelous name!—would not have called if she thought nothing would come of it. From her voice, it was clear that this was a woman who made things happen.
She went shopping, escaping once again from a self-imposed prison. At David Jones, she mingled with the crowds as if she had not, only a few days ago, felt inundated by the city, and bought Armani slacks and shirts, Valentino cotton dresses, and Yanono long silk skirts, flowered and striped. She ate lunch in the restaurant on the curved balcony of Dymocks Bookstore and, on her way out, bought histories of Australia and novels by Australian authors. After all, I may be here for quite a while. Driving home, she parked on one of the boutique-lined streets in Double Bay and bought bath salts, soaps, and sybaritic lotions and creams for herself, and an arrangement of orchids in a curved wicker basket for her hostess.
“Oh, spectacular,” Hermione said as soon as she opened her door. “All four of my favorites. How did you know? Do you know their names?” She walked ahead of Jessica into the house, talking over her shoulder. “Red Beard, Flying Duck, Large Tongue, and Dotted Sun. Sounds straight out of a Chinese espionage novel, doesn’t it?” She set the basket on a table before a broad window and turned, holding out her hand. “Welcome. I’m glad to meet you.”
Their hands clasped. In the unsparing sunlight that flooded the room, Jessica gazed steadily at her, giving her a chance to show surprise or dismay. Instead, she saw a wide smile in a long, narrow face bare of makeup, with high cheekbones, black eyes close together beneath heavy brows, and a pointed chin, all surrounded by a flaring halo of frizzy black hair. She was taller than Jessica by six inches; she wore wide black pants and a long, loose, short-sleeved cotton sweater. Gold hoops swung from her ears. Her feet were bare.
“Well, you’ve had a rough time,” she said, their hands still clasped. “Amazing, isn’t it, how vulnerable our poor bodies are to change. What have you been doing with yourself since that train bust-up? Not acting, we all know that, but not directing, either, right?” She crossed the room to an open hutch with shelves of glasses and a built-in sink. She opened the cabinet below. “I have a terrific red wine, if that’s all right with you. Then we can stick with it for the ossobuco.”
Jessica had not moved. She was stunned. No one yet had confronted her so casually with talk of the accident and what it had done to her.
“Red wine?” Hermione said again.
“Yes. Fine.” She could not think of anything else to say, so she surveyed the room. The view through the huge windows was identical to hers, as was the strange collision of blazing sunlight and cooled air. The room was much less crowded than hers—most rooms in most houses would be, she thought—but almost as colorful, furnished with couches and chairs that were deep and inviting and covered in native fabrics from Bhutan and Nepal in earth tones spiked with startling deep blues. The rugs were woven in blues, reds and blacks; the lampshades, startlingly, were fringed. The walls were covered with paintings of old people, lined and craggy, sad, weary and wise, all looking past the viewer, at whatever lay ahead.
“They make me feel young,” Hermione said, and laughed. She handed Jessica a glass of wine. “That’s not the main reason. Mainly they remind me that there’s a lot of wisdom in the world and if I’m clever and pay attention, I may acquire at least a portion of it before I die.”
“I like that,” Jessica said, startled out of her self-absorption. “What a good thing to believe.”
Hermione raised her glass. “To good beliefs and new friends.”
“I like that, too.” Their glasses touched and the faint chime made Jessica think of the bell that called them to their places on stage just before the play began.
Hermione settled herself in a corner of the long couch facing the windows. A rough-hewn coffee table held platters of crostini, mussels, and chicken satay. “I’m going to call you Jessie. Do you mind?”
“My parents called me that. No one else ever has. No, I don’t mind.”
“Good. Sit down, make a plate for yourself—dinner will be late; I forgot to turn on the oven—and tell me everything. If not everything, at least most of it.”
“You know most of it from looking at me, and talking to Al Murre,” Jessica said bluntly.
“Tell me anyway. If I get bored, I’ll let you know.”
Jessica laughed. She filled a plate and took a napkin, and sat in the other corner of the couch, facing Hermione. She felt herself curve into the curves of the cushions, relaxed and suddenly happy. “I like this room,” she said. “I like you.”
Hermione nodded. “Same here. We’re going to do well together. But first we have a lot of talking to do. Eat something and then talk.”
“If you will, too.”
“I can talk your ear off if you have the patience to listen. But you go first. Take your time; we have all night.”
They talked for most of it. Their closeness in the quiet room, with the sky darkening and Hermione lighting a dozen candles in ceramic holders on the coffee table, reminded Jessica of the evenings with Luke, hour after hour, enclosed in the safety of her house. But this time it was two women who were sheltered together and it took her back, beyond Luke, to her times with Constance; to a deep, fast friendship that had helped make her what she was today.
And so she began by talking about Constance, going all the way back to the beginning, when she was sixteen. Answering Hermione’s questions, she told about those parts of her career Hermione did not know, and at last she came to the train wreck, and Arizona, and Lopez. “I was fine on the island; I was settled and busy, and I thought I was resigned to it. But it wasn’t enough. I did like what I was doing and I guess I could have gone on doing it forever, but it never would be anything like the theater.”
“Meaning passion.” Hermione looked at her closely. “No passion in anything you’ve done since the accident. No theater . . . and no man? Good God, six years with no man? Did you decide that a limp and gray hair made you sexless?” When Jessica did not answer, she said, “Not beautiful, no sexy bod, therefore, a sexless woman. Right? Oh, wait,” she said after another silence, “somebody came along and changed all that. Am I close? Where is he now?”
There was a pause. “New York.”
“And he wanted you to go with him and you said no. You said you weren’t the clinging type and what would you do in New York? Of course you could have decided to be a director in New York, too. How come you didn’t? Why Sydney? Jessie,” she said gently, “you did promise to talk.”
“He’s a director,” Jessica said briefly. “I’d rather not talk about him, at least not now. Maybe later, when I . . . Oh, I don’t know. Probably not at all.”
“Well, you poor darling, you’re crazy about him and you sent him back to that zoo of single women and then came all the way out here to make your own name again. Are you writing to him? That’s the last question; I won’t ask any more.”
“No.”
“Does he even know you’re here?”
“That’s another question.”
“It’s part of the first. Are you writing to him and, if not, does he know you’re here?”
They laughed together, and it was a good sound. “No. Now it’s your turn. I want to know about you.”
“I’ll check the veal; we should be close to dinner. Have some more wine.”
Jessica divided the last of the bottle between their glasses and sat back, nibbling on crostini. Beyond the window, the clouds in the night sky glowed from the lights of Sydney. Lights glimmered on the water below, where ferries and water taxis plied their routes, and in houses and apartments in North Sydney, across the broad expanse of the harbor. Like a fairyland, Jessica thought, just as it is from my house.
It was the first time that she had used those words. My house. My city. My friend. And, maybe, soon, my work.
“Getting there, but it’ll be another half hour,” Hermione said, taking her place on the couch. “Therefore, salad in ten minutes. Can you wait that long?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“Well, then. I’m sixty-two, divorced once, widowed once, two sons, one in the U.S. at Harvard, one in the U.K. at Cambridge; they’re smart and fun and I miss them, but off they went with nary a backward glance, thank God, because I would have worried about them more if they hadn’t. I was born in a dusty little town in southern Illinois; my father had a small grocery store with a hardware store in the back room—barrels of nails and screws and hinges that I’d play with by the hour; they don’t have those wondrous things anymore—and he sort of made a living until a supermarket opened nearby with nails and screws in neat little plastic packages and that just about finished us. I’d hated the town even before we got to be dirt poor; I’d spent my childhood pretending I was somebody else living somewhere else—almost anywhere else. I was taller than the other kids and I read a lot and used long words and we were the only Jewish family in town, so they had lots of reasons to think I was odd, sort of foreign, and therefore untrustworthy, and they were always either ganging up on me or giving me the cold shoulder. So naturally I became a hellion at school and at home: some minor shoplifting, building booby traps, scaring my schoolmates—once I put a live frog in every desk in the classroom, including mine; you should have seen the action when thirty kids opened their desks to take out their books and pencils. Oh, my, what a happy memory. I’ve always wanted to use it in a play, but the frogs would get into the audience and some people might not be amused. Anyway, I was staging productions even then, hoping I’d drive my parents crazy and they’d send me to boarding school or the army or anywhere. They didn’t, so I did the next best thing: I got married. Fifteen years old, to definitely the wrong man, but it got me out of Illinois, which was the whole idea. We split in New York a little before my sixteenth birthday and I got a job cleaning bathrooms in a couple of hotels, and that’s where I met a terrific woman, the wardrobe mistress for a British repertory company in town for a month, who asked me if I’d like to be her assistant. I went to London with her, graduated college, got married again and had two sons, and when my husband died and left me with a modest pile of money I decided to be a producer. Got started in London, but Sydney was more fertile territory, so I settled here. It’s getting tighter now, but I still do my best to shake it up. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”
“What do you like?”
“Good food, especially when I remember to turn on the oven, red wine, late Mozart and Beethoven, the Bach masses, all of Schubert, most of Poulenc. Biographies, novels, and history, adventure movies but no spurting blood—it gets so boring after a while—opera, ballet and everything in the theater.”
“No sports?”
“Sailing. I like to race. And riding; I board horses with friends about an hour north of the city.”
“No men?”
“Not at the moment. They come and go. The supply gets smaller and less interesting the older one gets. Anything else?”
“What don’t you like?”
“Alfonse Murre, people who talk about money all the time, exhibitionists who are always yelling at the rest of us to notice them. People who don’t feel a responsibility to their neighbors, anybody who makes a virtue of not thinking. A simple list: stupidity, arrogance, pomposity and pretense. I’m sure there are more, but that gives you an idea.” She stood up. “Let’s eat.”
They talked through dinner, through dessert and coffee and port in the living room, through the hours that bracketed midnight. “Oh, no,” Jessica said when she finally looked at her watch. “I’ve stayed far too long.” She reached for her cane. “I had no idea how late it was.”
“It’s not late for me, and I’m having a good time.” Hermione was still lounging in her corner of the couch. “Unless you’re too tired to stay. Are you?”
“No, but you must think I’m—”
“I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re starved for friendship, especially with a woman. I think you’ve been a lonely little sparrow flitting around Sydney, trying to find something to make you feel at home but not having anybody to talk to. I think you miss your New York director and you haven’t found anybody to make you feel good about yourself, or about the world, until tonight. And I think you ought to stay and have another glass of port and tell me why you want to direct plays.”
Jessica leaned her cane against the arm of the couch. “Thank you for understanding all that.”
Hermione leaned forward and filled their glasses. “And you want to direct because—”
“Because I can’t go back to the stage.”
“Why not?”
And for the first time, Jessica spelled it all out, even more harshly than with Luke. “People are uncomfortable looking at me. When I’m on stage, when any actors are on stage, we create an intimate relationship among ourselves, but at the same time we’re speaking to the audience, sweeping them with us into our story. We’re characters and storytellers at the same time. No audience would be able to identify with my character, or be swept up in my story, if all they can think about is how unpleasant it is to look at me.” She gave a small laugh. “That sounded like a lecture on acting. I’m sorry. What I meant was—”
“I know what you meant. Have I seemed shifty and evasive, tonight? Generally uncomfortable? Was your New York director uncomfortable when you were together?”
“It’s not the same thing. Neither of you paid money to be entertained, to be lifted out of your daily life to another place, some magical place that actors create for you.”
“Well,” Hermione said drily, “I’ll wager your director felt you’d created some magical place for him.”
Jessica drew in her breath as the pain of loss stabbed her. It had been magical. And he had said so, so many times.
“Forgive me,” Hermione said. “That wasn’t kind. We all have demons to wrestle with and I shouldn’t question yours. Let’s go back. You’ve told me why you can’t act anymore, but you haven’t said why you want to direct.”
“Because I know good theater. I know how to bring a script to life. I know how to work with actors. I know how to create mystery and reality at the same time so that audiences believe absolutely in what they’re seeing. I’ve done all that on stage. I can do it from backstage, too.”
“And besides, you’re so hungry to get back to the theater it’s driving you crazy.”
Jessica gave a short laugh. “Put in its simplest terms. You’re right. I don’t know any other way to feel truly alive.”
“You’re sure you can do it, but you never have. Is that right?”
“I’ve never directed a play. I’m sure I can do it.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. I’m pretty sure you can, too. I have a few scripts I’m considering. Do you want to take a few days to read them, think about them, then call me?”
“Yes. Oh yes. Thank you.”
“You should have started with me instead of that prick. Hold on.” She left the room and returned with a stack of notebooks. “Six. Take your time. I want opinions. I think they all need work; some more than others. I’m sending you home; you look exhausted.”
“I am. Thank you. Thank you for everything. I can’t tell you how much I needed you.”
“You didn’t hide it.” They stood and instinctively put their arms around each other. Hermione kissed Jessica on both cheeks. “I’m glad I found you, Jessie. I predict great triumphs for the two of us. Get a good night’s sleep.”
Jessica held her cheek against Hermione’s for a thankful moment. Someone to trust. “I’ll call you soon.”
“Oh, one other thing,” Hermione said casually as she opened the front door.
“Yes?”
“I’d write to him if I were you. It can’t hurt, just to keep in touch.”
Jessica stood in the doorway, leaning on her cane. “Good night,” she said, and left.
But the words stayed with her and the next morning, very early, she took out a sheet of her new stationery and began to write.
Dear Luke, I’ve been in Sydney for a little over two weeks. I won’t go into all the thinking I did to get here, but finally I just had to find out if I could be a part of the theater again. You brought it so crashingly into my life that I couldn’t ignore it anymore, and so I looked for a place where I could begin again with a clean slate, not on stage but as a director, and that turned out to be Sydney.
I’ve rented a house and done the tourist things and finally I’m beginning to think I might like living here. It’s odd how a place can seem strange, even faintly hostile, and then, because of one special person, it begins to feel welcoming. That was what happened to me last night. I met a wonderful woman, a producer you may have heard of named Hermione Montaldi, and in a very long evening in her home we became friends and, maybe, partners. If that happens—she gave me scripts to read, to see if there’s something I can direct—everything I hoped for by coming here will come true.
This is a lovely city, with its own peculiarities. All the glass-and-steel skyscrapers on the harbor are spanking new, built in the last twenty years, and behind them are buildings from the last century with all the decorative gewgaws that stonemasons used to make when time and money didn’t dictate stark silhouettes.
The streets are crowded, and at first I thought the people were so friendly, waving to each other as they walked, but then I realized they were brushing away flies. It’s quite fascinating: that constant fanlike motion of hands in front of faces, plus everyone seems to be carrying tiny cellular telephones cupped in their hands, almost invisible, so what you see are streams of pedestrians waving away flies while seemingly talking to themselves. Definitely living theater.
My house is in a section of the city called Point Piper, high above the harbor with lovely views of Double Bay (a fancy neighborhood called a suburb) and the city. Hope is with me and we’ve both settled in quite nicely. I hope The Magician is thriving, and that all is well with you. Jessica.
A cold letter, she thought, signing it. But she did not know how else to write. I miss you and I wake up at night reaching for you. There was no way she could write that. I go through the city and find myself describing things to you. She could not write that, either. I love you. No, of course not. All she could do was be friendly.
And why was she doing that?
Because she could not give him up. She desperately needed to feel close to him, even through letters, just as once she had used letters to feel close to Constance, and when Hermione said it was a good idea, it was as if she had been given permission. She had thought she could give him up completely, but it was too hard, at least for now. Maybe later, when she had a play to direct and was making other friends, maybe then she could cut him out of her life. But not now. Not yet.
The letter sat on the dining room table, which she was using as her desk, and she glanced at it as she read scripts that day and late into the evening, and the next day as well. Hermione called that afternoon. “I’m wondering if you’ve made friends with any of those scripts yet.”
“There’s one in particular that I like very much.”
“But you’re not about to tell me which one.”
“Not until I’ve read them all.”
“Good idea. Which means, that’s how I’d do it. Are you all settled, or is there something you need? Can I do anything for you?”
“No, thank you. I like living here; it’s beautiful and very private.”
“Not the poshest of the posh suburbs, but definitely my favorite. Call me when you’re ready to talk. I’m getting antsy to have a play in the works.”
So there it was: she had a friend and a future. I’m not dependent on Luke, so now we can befriends. And she mailed the letter.
He replied by return mail.
Dear, dear Jessica, to go so far to find what you’re looking for. I know you’ll say it was necessary and I won’t argue with that, but when I think of you (which is most of my waking moments) I have a disconcerting image of you teetering at the very edge of the world, clinging to Point Piper (I like the name) or to your new friend, Hermione Montaldi (I like that one, too).
I haven’t heard of Ms. Montaldi; it’s surprising how little we in New York know of the theater in Sydney, or they of us, I’m told. But of course you chose it for just that reason: because it was far away and not part of the two-way street between New York and London.
We’re in the midst of an early cold spell and I’m enjoying evenings at home, working on my plays, watching old movies and thinking about you. Martin is a happy man: I’m home for dinner so he can experiment in the kitchen, and both of us agree that he’s on his way to becoming a master chef. He’d be happier if I had a companion, since it’s much more fun cooking for two than for one, but I told him he has to be satisfied with me, at least for now.
You know how much good fortune I wish for you. I hope you write often, telling me all that you do; I can pretend you’re close by, talking to me, when you do. With my love, Luke.
Almost as cold as mine, Jessica thought. Except for a few phrases. . . . She read the last one again. I can pretend . . . Well, that’s the business we’re in, both of us. Pretending.
And he had been anxious: her letter had taken four days to reach him, but he had sent his by overnight express mail. I could do that, too, she thought, sometime, if it seems important.
The next day she called Hermione and said that this time she would cook dinner. Hermione arrived at six o’clock and stood in the doorway, scanning the crowded room.
“Well, would you look at this. The lost and found for stray furniture. Stray patterns, too. But it’s not unpleasant. Somehow it works. You don’t get dizzy, living in this Arabian tent?”
“I like it. Three sides of protection and the fourth is all sky and water.” She flushed as Hermione gave her a quick look. “Protection is something I think about.”
“So I see.”
They sat as they had in Hermione’s living room, at each end of the couch, with papers and manuscripts spread out between them. They went through Jessica’s notes on each script, lingering over the ones that showed the most promise. After dinner they took their coffee back to the living room and worked on, coming at last to the play Jessica wanted to direct.
“So we agree, right from the beginning,” Hermione said with satisfaction. “Journeys End. God, titles are so damnably hard to think up, but somewhere in Shakespeare there’s always the perfect one. Now tell me why you want to direct it.”
“I like the people; I like the story. Only four people in the cast, which makes everything easier, but mainly there’s a kind of magic in the way they come together at the end, when they realize everything they’ve been searching for has been close by, but they hadn’t recognized it, or even known how to look for it. There’s a mystery in that—how people find each other in such a complicated and vast world—and I like that. The best theater is filled with mystery: all the wonders that make love and friendship and family and belonging possible.” She paused. “I’m sorry. That sounded like another lecture. And a maudlin one at that.”
Hermione gazed at Jessica for a long moment. “Did you write to him?”
“What? Oh. Yes.”
“Did he write back?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That didn’t sound like a lecture, by the way, and you weren’t being maudlin. The whole business of love and friendship and family is a mystery: how some people can stay married fifty years and others can’t make it through the first six months, how some friendships go on and on, how some families thrive even though they’re so stressful you’d think they’d explode, and others are always at each other’s throats. Nobody understands it, and thank God. Where would we be without mystery? We’d be staging cookbooks. By the way, what’s his name?”
Jessica began to gather up the scripts and notes. “Lucas Cameron.”
“Well, you can’t do any better than that. If he comes for a visit, I’d like to meet him. Okay, now, let’s talk schedules. This is the second week of December. The Drama Theater at the Opera House is available for March and April; they told me I could have it if I let them know right away.”
“More than enough time to be ready,” Jessica said.
“It is if you know your way around, but you don’t. You’ll have to rely on me to recommend actors to read for the parts, and a stage manager and production secretary. You’ll have the scene shop at the Wharf, and the Drama Theater lighting director and wardrobe and props crew, but it takes time to get to know them and be comfortable with them and have them be comfortable with you.”
Jessica shrank back into the corner of the couch. Have them be comfortable with you. She had forgotten. Everything with Hermione was so easy and natural that she had let herself be lulled into forgetting. Comfortable with you. Of course they wouldn’t be. Any more than Alfonse Murre had been.
“I’m talking about getting acquainted,” Hermione said mildly. “It always takes a while, whomever we’re talking about. But let’s get this straight. You thought I meant they wouldn’t work with you because you walk with a cane. Is that right?”
“Not just—”
“Oh, and also because you’re not a glamour girl. That’s it? That’s why they’ll refuse to work with you? They’ll say, ‘Great God, she has gray hair—’ Why don’t you color it, by the way?”
“Because it wouldn’t change anything else. It would seem pathetic.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. But we’ll let it go for now. Where was I? Oh, yes. You’ll walk in and everyone will say, ’Great God, she limps. She has gray hair and a stoop. We make it a point never to work with anyone who limps or stoops.’ ”
There was a long silence. Then Jessica began to smile. She had told Murre that it made no difference what she looked like, but it seemed that she hadn’t bought her own argument. But now Hermione made her fears sound absurd. And maybe—just maybe—they were.
“That’s better,” Hermione said briskly. “Now we know where we are. I’m going to produce Journeys End and you’re going to direct it, and we’ll work together every step of the way. I’d guess that you’re a fast learner, and you’ll figure out our whimsical Aussie ways in no time. By the way, one other small problem: the playwright died a month after finishing it. Young man, too, just dropped dead. So we’ll have to manage without the creator explaining things or rewriting, if we want it, which is sometimes a blessing, sometimes not. Okay, let’s look at dates. You’re going to want to get your ideas together and think about the kinds of actors you want. How soon will you be ready to start casting?”
Hermione spread a calendar on the coffee table and they bent over it, and began to make plans.
Dear Luke, we’ve started. Hermione and I walked through the Drama Theater the other day and it was as lovely as 1 remembered it from the time I appeared there. It has only 544 seats (made with white Australian wood and upholstered in blue Australian wool, which everyone speaks of with great pride), but the acoustics and sight lines are very fine. It’s one of two theaters on the lower level of the Opera House, with symphony and opera halls upstairs, so there are times when the whole building vibrates with rehearsals. Our sets will be made at the Wharf Theater, really and truly a wharf, converted to two theaters upstairs, and huge rooms below for set construction, props, costumes, and so on. We rehearse there, too, in a small rehearsal hall with a tiny balcony at the back where students come a few at a time to watch. Hermione asked me if I’d mind and I said I wouldn’t . . . I don’t think. How do I know what I’ll mind? I’ve never done any of this before.
The play is Journeys End, written by an Australian who died, tragically young, soon after writing it. It’s the story of a wealthy woman, one of Sydney’s greatest benefactors, who, we discover, made her fortune by defrauding a couple she’d known most of her life. She’s an influential, famous woman, but she has no feelings. She herself says she feels dead, without knowing why. The son of the people she defrauded buys the apartment next door (I hope to use turntables for the two apartments, if we can afford them) and the rest of the story is the way they discover each other (they haven’t seen each other since they were children) and the way she comes to life, not only through him but through his parents, who are visiting him. It’s the story of how an inhuman woman becomes human—a fairy tale, you’ll say. Well, we need fairy tales, and every one that I’ve ever heard of is built around a kernel of truth, so maybe even inhuman people can learn and change. And this story has a strong dose of reality because at the end the parents understand her but never forgive her, so she doesn’t get the clean slate she longs for. She’s found love, she can feel, she’ll be happy, but she can’t erase the past.
We begin casting next week. Hermione has called several actors and also a management company; she thinks we’ll find our cast very quickly. I hope so, I’m anxious to see this play come to life. I hope your writing is going well. Jessica.
She hesitated before sealing it. There were so many other things she could say. She could tell him how frightened she was, of failing, of disappointing Hermione, but mostly of working on a play without being in it. She did not know if she could bear that.
She shook her head. It was too personal. She’d told him enough. She sealed the envelope, stamped it and mailed it on the way to the Wharf for the first casting session.
Dearest Jessica, I’m wrapping this letter around a Christmas gift and I hope you accept it, since it comes not only from me, but also from Constance. The bracelet is from the collection that she left to me in her will, saying that she hoped I’d someday find a woman I wanted to give them to. She would have been very happy—and triumphant?—to know that you are that woman. With it I send my wishes for a very happy Christmas, and a joyous and fulfilling New Year.
Your letter about the Wharf and the Drama Theater just came. I know the excitement you’re feeling; I still have it whenever a play begins to take shape. Its like working with a lump of clay for a while and suddenly seeing in it the shape of a head, the curve of a horse’s mane, a leaf, a flower, a bird . . . still indistinct but waiting to be set free. That’s what you’ll be doing: setting free the hidden parts of the play—why people do what they do, the acts of love or hate they inflict or suffer, how they come to understand (or never understand) the life around them.
Nothing in the world brings the same good feeling as that. It almost makes up for the fact that we can’t always shape our own lives the way we want. Almost. Nothing, after all, makes up for the absence of a loved one.
Hermione sounds terrific; I think you’re going to have a wonderful time. As for the play, it sounds interesting, with a powerful lead, but it’s hard to tell from a summary. Would you send me a copy? All my love, Luke.
The bracelet was of small square diamonds with a ruby clasp. Jessica put it on and held out her arm, the diamonds flashing in the sun. She had wanted something from Luke. Now she had something from Constance, too.
By now a letter from him arrived every day. Sometimes it was just a note scribbled in a taxi, more often it was a single page of news of the city and the theater, tales of people they knew and others whom Jessica had not met, recollections of Constance, suggestions for a movie to see or a book to read, the weather report, Martin’s latest menu. He never wrote about a party or going on a date. One could assume, from his letters, that he had indeed become a monk.
Luke Cameron? Never. Of course he was seeing women, squiring them about the city, sharing their beds. There was no reason for him to write to her about them; the first she would know was when he wrote to tell her—for she was sure he would do this—that he was getting married.
But she would not think about that. She saved his letters, filling a drawer in the hutch in her living room. Then, one evening on her way home she stopped in Woollahra and saw in a shop window an Italian box covered in fine, dark green leather with a gold tooled border on the hinged lid. She brought it home and put Luke’s letters inside—so many, already—then set the box on the coffee table beside the one holding Constance’s letters. She stood back, gazing at them. Not much personal contact, but there’s a lot of paper in my life.
“Handsome box,” Hermione said later that evening. They were eating vichyssoise and cold chicken at the coffee table. “Good leather. Two Italian boxes. Both for letters?”
“Yes.” Jessica filled their wineglasses and held hers up. “To the cast we’ll find one of these days.”
Hermione touched her glass to Jessica’s. “Any day now. One box for Constance; you told me about that one. The other for Lucas Cameron?”
“Yes. He’s asked to see a copy of Journeys End. Would you mind if I sent him one?”
“No, why would I? It’ll be published in a month or two, anyway; he’d be able to buy it anywhere.”
They ate in silence for a moment. “Well, what is it?” Jessica asked. “Something’s bothering you. Is it that we’re starting so late on the casting?”
“Hell, no. We don’t start anything until you feel ready. That doesn’t bother me at all.”
“Well, something does. Come on, Hermione, you’ll tell me eventually, so why not get it over with?”
“Why not, indeed. Well, the fact is, I’m not finding investors. I’ve got one, Donny Torville, a sweet guy, loaded, who doesn’t care a fig about the theater, but he likes me. I was hoping for two or three more, but they don’t seem to be out there.”
“Because they don’t think I can direct it.”
“Right. I don’t like to be brutal about this, but we have to face it. They ask me why I think you can come back after so many years, and come back as a director, which you’ve never been. And if you really could do it, they say, why not do it in New York?”
“What do they call me?”
“It doesn’t matter. You know what it is, Jessie? They’re mad at you for coming back. They remember you when you were the most gorgeous creature and the most brilliant actress, and they’re mad because they don’t want to know that looks can fade and bodies can be damaged; they don’t want to know that bad things happen, because then they’d have to face the fact that bad things could happen to them. They want you to go away and let them believe that beauty and perfection last. What a bunch of assholes, turning their back on life.”
“What do they call me?”
“I told you, it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“Jessie, it has nothing to do with—”
“What do they call me?”
“God damn it, you’re more stubborn than I am. Well, if you really want to know . . . Washed up and a cripple.”
Jessica nodded, waiting for the sharp pain to fade. And it did, very quickly. She had felt it before, so many times, but now everything was different. “Well,” she said quietly, “we’ll have to prove them wrong.”
Hermione’s eyebrows rose. “Is this Jessica Fontaine speaking? A transformation. Maybe it’s because we’re two days from Christmas. But I didn’t think you felt Christmasy, since it’s ninety degrees outside and as humid as a sauna.”
Jessica smiled. “It definitely does not feel like Christmas. Do you know how odd it is to see Christmas decorations next to silk trees in bloom, all those summery pink flowers like hundreds of birds perched on the branches? I can’t get used to it.”
“So Christmas didn’t do it. What did?”
“You. And Luke. Knowing you both believe in me. And being back. Every time I walk into that rehearsal room, I feel alive and whole, because I’m where I belong. And none of your whining investors is going to take that away from me.”
“Well, hallelujah. You’re wonderful, I love you, I have absolute, total confidence in you. In us. This play is going to make money. Therefore, I’ve decided to back it. I would have told you earlier, but I wanted to know how you felt first.”
“No. Hermione, you can’t do that. You know you should spread the risk around; you can’t assume it all yourself.”
“Don’t forget Donny.”
“You need at least two more people.”
“They aren’t out there. For your second play they will be, but not for this one. I’m okay with this, Jessie; I’m not worried.”
“You should be. You’ve got an unknown playwright and a first-time director; that’s hardly a sure thing.”
“I’m okay with it.”
“Well, then.” Jessica went to the dining room table, strewn with papers and books, blocking charts, and scripts marked with colored pencils for each character, and rummaged until she found her checkbook. “How much did Donny put up?”
“Now hold on. This isn’t your job. Your job is to direct this play.”
“Let’s not argue about money, Hermione; it’s so boring. How much did he give you?”
“Two hundred thousand. Money is never boring.”
“Arguing about it is. I’ll match that and you can do the same. Can we produce this play for six hundred thousand?”
“Yes.”
“With the turntables?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t priced them. Jessie, are you sure you want to do this?”
Jessica was writing a check. Without looking up, she said, “You and Luke aren’t the only ones who believe in me. I’m beginning to believe in me, too.”
She handed the check to Hermione. “This is on my money management account in the U.S., but I don’t think you’ll have trouble depositing it.” She raised her glass. “I think we should drink a toast to our play. And to all the people who will be sorry they didn’t back it.”
Hermione grinned. “I haven’t felt this excited for a long time. We’ll knock their socks off.”
Knock their socks off, Jessica thought two weeks later, after the Christmas holidays, when they were at the Wharf rehearsal room for their first casting session. She and Hermione had exchanged gifts on Christmas morning, then cooked dinner together for a few of Hermione’s friends. On New Year’s Eve they had visited a couple in Melbourne, spending the night and returning the next afternoon. “We don’t want you getting gloomy about holidays,” Hermione had said, and the week that Jessica had dreaded passed almost without pain.
Dear Luke, thank you for the wonderful bracelet. It means so much to me that it comes from both of you. I wore it to a quiet Christmas dinner, just ten people, and an even quieter New Year’s Eve in Melbourne: four of us, Hermione and I and the couple we were visiting. He owns a construction company and she’s a poet so the conversation roamed in all directions. You would have enjoyed it. I hope your holidays were good, and I wish you a wonderful new year. Thank you again. I love the bracelet. Jessica.
She had mailed it on the way to the Wharf and it came to her as she sat in the rehearsal hall that she had not meant to add that last phrase, but at the last minute she knew she could not send him a letter that was so cold, about something so special. I love the bracelet. I love you. He would not make that connection.
Sitting beside Hermione, she watched two actors come to the center of the room. She was nervous and it did not help that the room was very hot. The doors to the harbor were open, but the faint breeze off the water seemed to lose heart before it reached them, and no air stirred except from two floor fans that had long since conceded defeat. Thermoses of iced tea and water were on the table where they sat, and Jessica took a long drink of ice water. “Let’s begin in act one where Helen discovers that Rex has moved in next door.” She turned the pages of her script, so marked up in places she could barely make out her notes. She looked around as someone opened the door and walked in: a short balding man with bowed legs, long arms, and bright blue eyes in a deeply tanned face.
“Sorry, so sorry I’m late, it won’t happen again.” He held out his hand. “Dan Clanagh. Your stage manager. Hell of a way to make an entrance, but somebody rear-ended me at a stoplight and nobody but me was in a hurry to get all the paperwork done so we could resume our suicidal dash through rush hour. Anyway, how do you do. I’m looking forward to working with you. This is a truly fine play.”
Jessica was smiling as they shook hands, remembering what Hermione had said. “He’s the best there is; you’ll like him.” And she did.
“Act one,” she said again.
She had done this so many times that she felt disoriented when the actors began to read their lines. She was in the wrong place, on the wrong side of the table. Why was she silent while these people were speaking the lines of the play? She felt Hermione’s hand on her arm. “Pay attention, Jessie. You’re directing this play.”
Of course. She was directing this play. She would not be on stage. She would be behind the scenes, invisible and anonymous.
But I told Hermione I felt alive and whole and that is the truth. As long as I’m here, everything is all right.
She began to listen critically. Actors walked in, read, and left, and now and then she felt a spark of interest, but it was not a big spark and it never lasted long. “It must be me,” she told Hermione that night at dinner. “They’re all competent; there must be something wrong with me that I don’t think any of them are right for this play. Maybe”—she forced herself to say it—“maybe I’m jealous.”
“Could be,” Hermione said casually. “But I didn’t think they were right, either, and I haven’t got a thing in the world to be jealous about. Tomorrow may be better; Angela Crown’s coming to read Helen and she’s impressive. And the one for Rex, well, I’m not sure about him, but he might do. If nothing else, you’ll like his name. Whitbread Castle.”
“What?”
“You heard me. His mother probably got it out of a romance novel. If we use them both, we’ll have a crown and a castle. How can we go wrong?”
“You can’t take anyone seriously with a name like that,” Jessica said, but when she heard him read the next day she sat up with sudden interest. He was extraordinarily handsome, with a deep voice and a powerful aura of sexuality, and when he and Angela Crown read together it seemed they already felt some of the tension that would build between Helen and Rex throughout the play. Jessica let them read without interruption. “He’s too tight,” she murmured to Hermione at one point. “Voice and body. But we can loosen him up, don’t you think?”
“Worth working on,” Hermione whispered. “He’s okay.”
“And Angela?”
“Better than him. I like them both. Don’t you?”
Jessica nodded. “Angela,” she said, “would you read the last two lines again, please? But first tell us whether you’re annoyed or curious or maybe threatened, that he’s now your neighbor.”
Angela Crown was a large woman, a trifle overweight, with masses of blond hair. A faint coarseness in her features kept her from being beautiful, but she was attractive, and audiences found her easy to remember, in part because of her size. She wore a red sundress with thin straps and a plunging neckline and Jessica found all that skin quite imposing in a woman almost six feet tall. “Annoyed, curious, threatened,” Angela repeated in a well-modulated voice. “Well, maybe all three, but probably mostly curious. I mean, I don’t know yet if he knew I lived here or if it’s just an accident that he’s moved in.”
“But if you think he might have known you lived there, and deliberately chose that apartment, do you think you might feel invaded?”
“Invaded. Oh, you mean, what the hell is this guy from my childhood doing on my grown-up turf? I like that.”
“Then would you think about that when you read those lines again? And go on from there, both of you.”
“Oh, much more interesting,” said Hermione as Angela began again. “She’s quick, and that’s all we need, besides talent.”
. . . so we cast her,
Jessica wrote to Luke,
and Whitbread, too. I thought of asking him to change his name (telling him if it was shorter it would be easier for audiences to remember), but I was pretty sure that would get me nowhere and I’d rather ask only for things I have a good chance of getting. He’ll be very good as Rex, once we loosen him up. One of his problems could be that he’s never had women as both director and producer and, poor fellow, he probably feels as if his mother is sitting here, doubled, and he’s torn between rebelling and being a dutiful son. I’ve asked Dan Clanagh, our stage manager, to pay attention to him so he has at least one man to talk to. Once we cast the other two parts, he’ll have another man, and that should help him feel he’s not outnumbered; the two of them can whisper together like boys sneaking a cigarette behind the barn. We hope to finish the casting tomorrow and have our first run-through no later than Monday. Oh, how familiar it is! But how strange, too. Do you know how it feels when you look through an airplane window at your neighborhood in New York and you can’t identify half the buildings from that weird perspective? That’s how I feel now and sometimes it’s so unnerving I begin to feel disoriented, as if I’m not sure who I am. But that will pass, I’ll get used to all of it, and most of the time I enjoy my view from the plane a lot. I hope you got the play; did you like it? Jessica.
Getting a little warm, she thought, reading it over. What happened to that cool distance I was so good at, no emotions, just facts? Maybe I should rewrite it; change a few sentences . . . it wouldn’t take long.
Oh, but it’s so good to be able to tell him these things.
And she mailed the letter.
Dearest Jessica, do you have a fax machine? Love, Luke.
“I have one,” Hermione said when Jessica asked her the next morning. “But you ought to have your own. I’ll have my secretary bring you one tonight. Is that okay?”
“Yes. Thank you.” A man and woman walked into the rehearsal room and introduced themselves. “Let’s begin in the second act,” Jessica said, “where you first arrive to visit your son and you discover that Helen lives next door.”
She was restless that morning and no one pleased her. They were in their third day of casting and she was increasingly impatient to get to rehearsals so that they could get to opening night. She wanted to discover how good she was, and she wanted to discover it right away. Now that she had let herself come back, all the years on Lopez seemed like marking time, and suddenly she wanted everything at once: challenge, achievement, success, acclaim. She wanted people to say she was wonderful, that in spite of all that had happened to her, in spite of what she looked like, she deserved admiration and praise and love.
I love you. What does the way you look have to do with that?
She brushed his voice away. It wasn’t enough. She had to prove herself in other ways, stand on her own, become whatever person Jessica Fontaine would be from now on.
“Thank you,” she said curtly to the two who had just read. “We’ll let you know.” Though of course they would not, because there would be nothing to say.
“Lunch,” Hermione said, and they walked upstairs to the cafe. It was airy and open, with glass walls and open glass doors so that it seemed to flow into the terrace and then to the harbor and on to the farther shore, where a face painted on a Ferris wheel grinned at them from an abandoned amusement park. They ate quickly, saying little, both of them frustrated and anxious and worn down by the heat. “Well, I apologize,” Hermione said as they walked back downstairs. “Can’t seem to do a damn bit of good around here.”
“You found Angela and Whitbread; that was wonderful. How many do we have this afternoon?”
“Four. One of the women might be okay. I haven’t heard of the men; they came from the management agency.”
Jessica took her seat again, feeling hot and sticky and vaguely annoyed. There ought to be a better way to do this, she thought. She looked idly around the rehearsal room, her gaze passing over Dan Clanagh’s perspiring baldness, a technician’s shirt stained with sweat, and then up, to a group of people crowding onto the tiny balcony. They were all students except for a gray-haired man, and she found herself staring at his sad face, long and gaunt, and deep-set, shadowed eyes. She touched Hermione’s arm. “Who is that man?”
Hermione turned to look. “Director of the drama department at the University of New South Wales. Just got here a few months ago. God, he looks unhappy.”
“He looks like Stan.”
Hermione stared openly at him. “He does indeed. I wonder if he can act.”
“He’s head of the drama department.”
“Not a guarantee. Dan,” she said, leaning over, “could you run upstairs and ask that guy, the tragic one, to come talk to us?”
When Dan led him to them, Hermione thrust out her hand and introduced herself. “I’m bad at names and yours has slipped out of my head.”
“Edward Smith.”
“Not much excuse for forgetting that one. I apologize. This is Jessica Fontaine. We’d like to talk to you; can you leave your students alone for a few minutes?”
“They’ve taken over the cafe upstairs. What can I do for you?”
“We’re staging a new play,” Jessica said. “I’m directing it; Hermione is the producer. We’d like you to read for one of the parts.”
“You’ve acted, of course,” Hermione said.
“In Canada,” he replied. “I never got very far. Why do you want me to read for this part?”
“Because you look like this guy,” Hermione said. “His name is Stan, he’s about your age, with a forty-two-year-old son, and he and his wife have had a rough time because twenty years earlier someone took them for everything they had and he’s never found a way back.”
“A loser.”
“A victim. But he comes back, they both do, and in a way they’re the ones who triumph in the end. It’s more complicated than that and more interesting, but if you don’t mind trying a scene with just that much and a quick read-through, we’d like to hear you.”
He turned to Jessica. “Have you ever known anyone picked out of a crowd to be just what you’re looking for?”
“No. It would be a first.”
He gave her a long look. “Give me ten minutes.”
He went outside, to the broad walkway that ran the length of the building, and stood in a shaded corner, reading the section Jessica had marked. When he returned, he said, “Who will read with me?”
“Nora Thomas,” Hermione said. “Our last hope for Doris, at least for today. Nora? We’re ready.”
A stocky woman with steel-gray hair, a pug nose and full rosy cheeks closed her book and came to them from her chair in the corner. She took the script Jessica handed her, glanced at it and nodded.
She and Edward Smith shook hands, eyed each other, then sat on facing chairs some distance from Jessica and Hermione, and began to read a dialogue between Stan and Doris. Jessica clasped her hands in her lap, listening for what could be drawn out in the future, as well as for what was there now. When the voices stopped, she said, “Thank you. Would you please wait outside?” As they left, she turned to Hermione. “Well?”
“Neither one of them. Damn, this is taking forever. He’s got a good voice and a couple of times I almost thought he had it, but he left me cold. No fire, no passion. He’s so down. As for Nora, she’s not bad, but I don’t like her looks.”
“What does that mean?” Jessica asked evenly.
“Nothing personal. She looks small-town. We want somebody who looks like she knows what it is to be rich even though she isn’t anymore.”
Jessica nodded thoughtfully. “I’d like to use both of them.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, I like them. Give them a couple of weeks of rehearsal and you’ll be agreeing with me.”
“No way. You know how many times I’ve done this, Jessie? More than you can shake a—” She stopped. “Okay, I promised I’d never do that. I’m not holding it against you that you’ve never directed before; I’m just questioning your judgement in this one case.”
“Two cases. They’re better than you think, Hermione. I’m not guessing; I know it.”
There was a silence. “Well,” Hermione said. “A little conflict here. And everything’s been so sweetness-and-light. What if I said absolutely not?”
“I don’t answer hypothetical questions. You won’t say it because you do trust my judgement. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if you didn’t.”
“Well, God knows that’s true.” Hermione tapped her pencil on the table. “You know there’s a lot of money at stake.”
“A third of which is mine. I don’t intend to lose it.”
“Okay.” She dropped the pencil and slammed the table with her palm. “Done. I hope to God you’re right. I’ll go get them.”
When they returned and Jessica told them they had the parts of Doris and Stan, Edward Smith looked at Jessica. She was startled at his intensity. He was better looking than she had thought, and he was gazing at her with a kind of brooding interest she found attractive and intriguing.
“Can you take a leave of absence?” she asked him. “From now until at least the end of April. And if we continue the run at another theater, even beyond that.”
“I’ll find out.” He went to the telephone on the wall. Nothing tentative about him, Jessica thought.
“I want to thank you,” Nora was saying. “I’m so excited about this play, so incredibly excited, I’ve been praying for a week—”
“Have you ever been rich?” Hermione asked bluntly.
“What? Rich? Well, we had plenty of money when I was growing up. Why?”
Jessica let them talk, her thoughts wandering. When Edward hung up and turned and saw her looking at him, he smiled, the first smile Jessica had seen from him. “It’s a little difficult, since I just took this position, but I think we can work it out. Summer vacation helps. I haven’t thanked you for your trust. It means a great deal to me that you of all people think I have some ability on the stage.”
Jessica’s eyebrows rose. “ ‘Of all people’?”
“I went to New York from Toronto several times to see you on stage. I never dared hope we would meet. I’d like to ask you to dinner; is that improper, now that we’re going to be working together?”
Jessica smiled. “I don’t think so.”
“Tonight, then?”
His eyes were gray; she had not noticed that. “I have a meeting with our stage manager at five; can we make it eight o’clock?”
“I’ll come by for you. If you’ll give me your address . . .”
Jessica wrote it down and handed him the slip of paper. “We have to know definitely about the leave of absence. If there’s any doubt, we’ll have to find someone else.”
“There is no doubt,” he said quietly. “I will play this part.”
When he and Nora left, Hermione said, “He perked up. There might be something there after all. When are you going out with him?”
Jessica shook her head. “It always amazes me that you can be carrying on a conversation and listening to another one at the same time.”
“I couldn’t hear all of it; Nora talks nonstop, without commas, periods or paragraphs. We’re going to have to slow down her metabolism. Which night?”
“Tonight.”
“Fast work. Have you thought about it? It might not be a good idea. First of all there’s something about him that bothers the hell out of me. Don’t ask me what; I don’t know yet. But I wouldn’t trust him.”
“Hermione, you don’t know anything about him.”
“Instinct, pure and simple. But my instinct and I don’t usually let each other down. And there’s something else. If you’re his director, don’t you think that’s really all you ought to be? At least while you’re directing. One thing at a time, one set of complications at a time.”
“I don’t see a problem.”
“I do, Jessie. I don’t think you should go out with him.”
“One dinner. Then I’ll rethink it.”
After a moment, Hermione shrugged. “You’re a big girl; I can’t tell you what to do. You’ll still be at the meeting with Dan at five?”
“Hermione.”
“Well, yes, that was a stupid thing to say. I do know this play comes first with you. And second, third and fourth, too. What are you doing until then?”
“You and I are going to sit here and make plans. I’d like to have the read-through on Monday, if that’s all right with you. Then we’ll start rehearsals on Wednesday. I need to go back to the Drama Theater to make measurements, and I’d like to photograph the backstage: dressing rooms, prop room, everything. Could you arrange that? And you said you’d have scene and lighting designers for me to talk to this week.”
“Monday afternoon for Augie Mack, the scene designer. I’m still talking to a couple of lighting guys; give me till next week on that. I’ll let you know what time for the Drama Theater, probably this weekend, early in the A.M., before the tours of the Opera House begin. Do you have any idea how much you’ve changed since we first met?”
Jessica looked up from her list. “Changed? How?”
“How, she says. Listen to you. All of a sudden you’re all put together; you know what you want and how to get it, or to get other people to get it for you. I’m very impressed. Particularly since I think I played a small but meaningful part in getting you out of those dumps you were in.”
“You did.” Jessica smiled. “And now I’m ordering you around. I apologize.”
“Don’t. I like decisive people. Now, here’s my list of things to do. Oh, by the way, will you be home at seven-thirty?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s when the fax machine arrives.”
Dear Luke, here is my fax number. I’m about to go out so I won’t write now, but this weekend I’ll tell you all about Journeys End. We have a cast and we’re on our way. Jessica.
Dearest Jessica, here’s my fax number. The Magician is sold out through March, which makes everyone very happy. Monte no longer worries about what he calls its “ultimate success”; as far as he’s concerned, we’ve made it and he’s looking around for another play. I’ve just given him Kent’s new one, all three acts, though we agree the third still needs a lot of work. Would you like to read it now or when he’s finished with the revisions?
I spent the weekend at Monte and Gladys’s place on Kiawah Island (as big as their place in Amagansett). The beach is just outside, with joggers at all times of day and night, and, when everyone is asleep, only the sounds of the waves to break the silence. It was a lot of space and a lot of silence for one person and I thought about you all weekend. You would have enjoyed the conversations and the people. It was a weekend when all the vacation homes were filled with couples and I was more aware than ever of how the world prefers partners; how it subtly nudges to the side single people who, among many logistical problems, remind others that they, too, may be alone one of these days—and who wants to be reminded of that?
I hope I don’t sound self-pitying. I enjoyed Monte and Gladys, but I did miss you. Congratulations on finishing your casting; do you have photos of your four people? Tell me about them. And about yourself. All my love, Luke.
P.S. I note from the time of your fax that you were getting ready to go out at about eight p.m. Are you having a busy social life?
Dear Luke, I went to dinner with one of our cast members, who is taking a leave of absence as assistant director of the university drama department. I plucked him from a group of students he was leading through the Wharf and it may be a gamble that fails, but what a triumph for him and us if it works]
It’s late Monday afternoon now, very hot and humid, but in my living room it’s blessedly cool and quiet. Today we had our first read-through, so I can tell you about that and the cast at the same time.
She wrote steadily for an hour, adding to her descriptions many of her ideas for staging the play. It was like thinking aloud; like talking to herself. It was like writing to Constance.
Thank you for listening to all this. Writing helps me make sense of all the parts that make up a play. I never realized how many thousands of details directors have to remember and make time for. I’m learning so much that sometimes it seems I’ll burst from the sheer mass of it, but then I think of writing to you and putting it all in order and that’s enough to make everything seem manageable again. Aren’t faxes amazing? It’s the closest thing to a conversation. Jessica.
Dearest Jessica, a telephone would be closer. All my love, Luke.
The telephone rang. “Jessica, it’s Edward. Will you have dinner with me tonight?”
“No, I don’t think . . . I’d rather stay home tonight, Edward. I’m sorry.”
“Tomorrow night, then. One more dinner before rehearsals begin. I’m afraid of a lot of things changing after that.”
There was a pause. “All right, then, tomorrow night.”
“I’ll come by for you as usual. Eight o’clock?”
“Yes.”
As usual. After only one dinner together, he was trying to push her into a shared history. She liked him; she was drawn to him and enjoyed his company, but now she felt pressured and she reached for the telephone to tell him she could not go with him tomorrow night, either. But then she glanced at the one-sentence letter that had come that day from Luke. Everyone pushes, she thought. Everyone wants at least some degree of control. And dinner with Edward will be pleasant.
Dear Luke, I prefer the fax. Jessica