It’s a little before 2 a.m. Tonight they blocked At Ease. Her first chance to watch the actors negotiating her sets. A gloomy evening. Her sets are fine, but everyone knows the play stinks. Still, tickets have already been sold, ads placed. The show must go on. Cate took the job to pay respect to gay history, but she has an argument going with herself about whether even the better plays from earlier, benighted eras—plays like The Children’s Hour and Suddenly Last Summer—are too worn-out and anachronistic to put on for twenty-first-century audiences except as history lessons.
As she comes into the alley behind her apartment, Cate looks up and sees a wavy blue-green light in the room Graham is using. As soon as she is through the door, she’s in the new sort of quiet she has grown accustomed to: refrigerator hum overlaid with an intermittent narration coming off the internet as it bleeds out of her spare bedroom. Cate enjoys Graham’s company and is kind of crazy in love with his dog, Sailor. She has never had a dog, didn’t know how great it would be. Now she wonders how she got along without one. Graham and Sailor moving in with her was supposed to be a temporary situation, just until he got back on his feet after his most recent marital breakup (he is now two wives farther along from Cate), but man and dog have been here three months now and Graham is still off his feet. All that seems to have happened is that he has become increasingly nocturnal, interactive with the web. Watching someone from somewhere talking into his—in fewer instances, her—webcam. Different voices come in on different nights, but all with the same dark, knowing tone, a tone that has a sideways delivery, a hand in front of it.
When he sees her in the doorway to his room, Graham puts up a Metallica playlist on Spotify. For masking purposes.
“How’s it going?” She looks in. The desktop computer’s screensaver is luminous with the pale aquarium colors of the Zapruder film clip. JFK’s motorcade coming through Dealey Plaza in a repeated gif, a mood enhancer, the way lava lamps used to smooth out the vibe for seductions, only in Graham’s room the mood is paranoia.
Her arrival stirs Sailor. He must’ve been totally sacked out; usually his nose is at the door when she comes home. He unfolds and frees himself from the nest of cords and cables under Graham’s worktable. Standing on his hind legs, his front paws on her shoulders, giving off a dry, delicious warm-dog aroma, he’s tall enough to be a dancing partner. She acknowledges this by doing a quick mambo step, then gets him down on the floor and sits next to him; then she flips him over like a pancake and scratches his stomach. He appears to be a mix of something red—Irish setter maybe?—and Lab. And whatever else. He’s a glorious mutt.
Cate doesn’t pay as close attention as Graham does to the machinery of government. She reads the Times online every morning, political pieces in The New Yorker. She does get-out-the-vote work for Democratic candidates around elections, and is grateful to have had, at least for the last eight years, someone smart and well-intentioned in the White House. Maybe she’s been on cruise control because of that. But she understands Graham’s suspicions, and knows what he believes—about lobby-purchased legislators, gerrymandered congressional districts, suppressed votes, backroom deals, enforced inequities, suppressed science, dark money shuffled and laundered endlessly, the planet poisoned, vats of chemical sludge dumped into rivers at night—is true. Where there used to be a few things to seriously worry about, now there are way too many. He is fixated on the death of privacy, the amount of personal information available to whomever is interested in obtaining it, and the really bad uses it might be put to. And how unaware of this exposure most people are. He believes the world is in the golden age of internet naiveté. Philosophically, he’s a disciple of Edward Snowden.
A smaller invasion of Cate’s individual privacy is Graham’s open-ended presence in her apartment. Her spare room has been taken over with command-post electronics and a giant bed he had delivered soon after he arrived. It goes up and down, can be hard or soft, hot or cold. Plus, it vibrates. Other than this anomalous room, her apartment is of a piece, a set of sorts. Well, of course it would be. The play would be titled 1944. She’s fascinated by this period, which she knows mostly from a love of its movies. She loves the furnishings, the reliance on hats, the cavalier smoking, the enormous cars. She has combed junk shops for old furniture from these days gone by, reupholstered several pieces herself in dark mohair. Maroon and moss green. She painted the walls the color of a paper bag. Possibly too much bamboo. A heavy, standing ashtray is surrounded by a population of emphysemic ghosts. She enjoys standing in one room or another, surveying the total effect, also the small pieces that make it up. Her bedroom furniture is of a heavy, dark wood with lighter panels of inlay. She has an indigo chaise by the window, lampshades with fringe. Framed and hung rotogravure portraits of movie stars from the studio days.
Graham is spoiling this “curated” (she only ever uses this word to herself) environment. But he’s a good friend, not to mention he bought the apartment for her.
When she gets out of the shower, she can hear him chatting with Lucille Rae. On the screen of one laptop, Lucille Rae is peering seriously at the camera. Behind her head and shoulders are shelves crammed full of teddy bears. She appears to be sitting on the teddy bear subway at rush hour.
Graham holds up the laptop and Cate waves at it. “Hey, Lucille Rae.” Lucille Rae lives in the Black Hills in South Dakota, which she’s certain lie on top of huge hidden bunkers filled with recorded phone calls.
Having come farther into the room, Cate catches a whiff of mustiness off Graham, mustiness and herbal supplements. When did he start looking and smelling like a nut? He’s developing tics. Rotating his head to get a crick out of his neck. Picking at his fingers, tearing up the cuticles until they bleed. He doesn’t wash his hair, wears it pulled back in a greasy ponytail. When did he start sleeping in his clothes, or maybe it’s that he’s working in his pajamas? Hard to tell with the garments—there’s really no other way to describe them—he wears. Hemp and unbleached cotton, drawstring closures. He looks like someone who has an entourage of naive followers.
Fate dealt Graham a joker. He only intended his big, cheerful play to be a temporary financial solution. He wanted to make a play to which you could bring your nephew, your lover, and your great aunt. He didn’t allow himself any artistic intentions, just stuck to the template of combining surefire elements of Broadway blockbusters. These included:
He put all this into a jumberator and what came out was Pand-a-Rama!, which by now has had two Broadway runs and has four touring companies roaming the world, a movie version, a novelization, a video game, and a line of detective panda action figures. He will never have to work again in his life. He will always be famous for this unsinkable piece of junk.
What the indignity bought him is endless time to write and produce plays that are brilliant but so obscure and opaque hardly anyone comes to them. The shows are elaborate puzzles the audience must solve. People don’t want to work this hard for their entertainment, or take notes in the dark (he provides lighted pens). Or come three nights in a row to see all the acts necessary to complete the “geopolitical acrostic.”
His obsession with surveillance has taken over his writing. The play he’s working on now takes place in a single room, underground. There are only two characters. They are not friends; they’ve just been assigned together to the room. They wear identical gray jumpsuits. They are both listening in on phone calls. Their only interaction with each other is when they take off their headsets for a coffee break. They only talk about the coffee, although coffee may be a code word, also stale cookie. It is never clear who they work for, who is benefiting from their machinations. They might or might not be facilitating something that might or might not be a zero-sum endgame, and the winners are not going to be regular people, or even, necessarily, humans.
The audience, he’s told Cate, hears every phone call. What he’s trying to capture, he has told her, is a very slight amount of change. Picture a vacant field on a cloudy day at five-eighteen in the afternoon, then at five-twenty.
The whole apartment smells of chemical lemon. Which means Pledge. Which means Jennifer was here today. Jennifer is a small, amazingly industrious woman Graham pays to come in every week to clean. When she leaves, the entire apartment is immaculate. She has three cell phones (also four passports under different names; Cate went through her purse once), which she sets out on the kitchen counter while she’s cleaning; she is vigilantly poised for incoming information. Her driver’s license identifies her as Raluca. She comes to work in a fur coat. She told Cate she made it.
She comes from terrible poverty in a beautiful setting in the Carpathian Mountains, a rural area, grindingly poor. Cate stands a little in awe of Jennifer. She has lived through extreme cold, hunger, and fear. She had three root canals done without novocaine, just gripping the arms of the dentist’s chair. She has triumphed over circumstances of poverty and ignorance and is now negotiating her way through a culture that does not value her. Still, it’s better to admire her from a little distance. To enter into a conversation is a step into quicksand. Her main topic is her various ailments. (She has so many that, if you added up all of them, Cate once figured, every single part of her body has hurt, blown up, been infested with ringworm, or suddenly prolapsed. Or itched like crazy, or, according to her, really needed to be sawed off.) She has a boyfriend, who is hiding somewhere. From Interpol. Cate didn’t know Interpol still existed. Whatever he did was not his fault. Legal maneuvers are being arranged. Things may or may not work out. Once she gets going, there’s no stopping her. She doesn’t break for breath or paragraphing. Interaction for her is you nodding at her rhetorical “Do you know what it is that I am saying?” tagged onto whatever run-on sentence. There’s no polite way to extricate yourself. If they are both at home, Cate and Graham work a system where, after ten minutes, one goes into a closet and calls the other, pretending to be someone important with something crucial to be attended to. Immediately.
It’s easier to just be out on Wednesdays. Even Graham finds somewhere to go.
“Hungry?” he says now. He and Sailor have followed Cate into the kitchen. “New supplies for base camp.” He nods toward the table. Ripped-open Dean & DeLuca FedEx cartons with their arctic blocks of Styrofoam padding, their steaming packets of dry ice, clutter the surface. Large chunks of cheese, three bottles (one already open) of Pouilly-Fuissé, a package of shrink-wrapped blinis next to a jar of caviar, a crock of vegetable pâté.
“Not really. Mostly I’m exhausted.”
Sailor has positioned himself close by her side, which, not coincidentally, puts him near the cheese. She takes a few of the crackers billed on the package as “handmade in Abruzzo.” She imagines old women in a small factory bent over as they shape cracker dough into deliberately asymmetrical squares. “I’m just going to give him a little snack.” She unwraps a chunk of Humboldt Fog, breaks off a piece, and tucks it between two crackers. Sailor is sitting up on his haunches, his head cocked to one side. Even mooching, he looks majestic. He was less majestic when he arrived. After a few months living in the midst of Graham’s disintegrating marriage, Sailor looked middle-aged. Heavy, slow, fur clotted, one eye crusty with what turned out to be a minor infection. Since he has been here, Cate has taken him to the vet, put him on a feeding schedule, and added green beans to his dinner. She takes him on a couple of walks every day to supplement whatever Graham doesn’t do. They are still participating in the fiction that Sailor is his dog.
“Do you ever feel, deep in your heart, that Lucille Rae might be a crackpot?” Cate has just poured herself a glass of a dramatically expensive wine.
“No, she’s not a crackpot. The crackpots are all focused on stuff that’s already gone down. Falling towers and missing planes. They’re nostalgists. Whatever bad thing that’s already happened isn’t going to happen again. At least not in the same way. It’s much harder to look ahead and beyond. To use events predictively. To form the near future, give it a shape.”
“Okay. Then what is she digging up in hillbilly holler?”
“Don’t call her a hillbilly.”
“Well, she does lives in a hilly part of the country.”
“It’s not the hill, and you know it; it’s the billy. You wouldn’t like it if someone referred to you as a Chicagobilly. Just because she wears terrycloth and her hair is fluffy, you don’t take her seriously. Did your set work tonight?” He is always happy to steer the conversation toward At Ease. Eleanor Quinn, his most recent ex-wife, the one who threw him out, plays one of the main characters. He loves hearing anything unfortunate about Eleanor.
She’s an impressive actress; she’s only attached to this stupid production as a favor to the director. That she and Cate are involved in the same play isn’t that much of a coincidence; the world of Chicago theater is like a tangle of double-sided sticky tape.
“My set isn’t up to the task of saving this play. Some things shouldn’t be revived. Revived implies something that was once alive. Here’s a line.” She pulls the script from her messenger bag, flips through it, then reads aloud.
“ ‘You hate me because I remind you of your mother.’ I mean, you can’t use that line. Maybe Sophocles could have, but—I mean, really. How’s yours going?”
“Still tinkering with act six.”
By 3 a.m. they have polished off one bottle of wine and half of a second, and are now walking Sailor together. Sailor loves this. He pushes his chest out in pride at showing off his family, although at this hour no one except barflies is out and about. This is a real fall night: skittering leaves along the pavement have replaced the summer’s cicada din. A Peapod truck wanders by once, then again.
“Something is definitely off about that,” Graham says. “Do they even offer three a.m. deliveries?” But this doesn’t throw him into a spiral of worry that the van is a secret CIA surveillance vehicle. He is too distracted, teasing apart the threads of Eleanor’s complex personality. Cate doesn’t see any complexity to her at all. While she can subtly delineate any role she plays, in real life Eleanor is just a blunt instrument of ambition, also deeply unpleasant. It’s a mystery to Cate why Graham is hung up on her. In spite of the fact that, at the end of their marriage, she put a live rat in the glove compartment of his car. Cate is at a loss in advising on the more terrifying variants of love.