This simple trip is made long and annoying by a tight budget. Her flight was the lowest fare she could find among the inconvenient-hour departures. Six thirty-five a.m. out of Midway, with a stop in Tampa, as though Tampa is on the way to New Jersey. The rental car she picked up in a strip mall ten minutes down the road from the airport has fuzzy cloth upholstery steeped in cigarette smoke from an ancient civilization. Ninety-five thousand miles on the odometer. Engine rattle when she tries to push it past sixty-five. Although this play is a huge career opportunity, it is nonetheless even lower paying than some of the productions she’s worked on in Chicago or Milwaukee. The off-Broadway pay scale is absurd; she’s heard this before and is now experiencing it. But off-Broadway is, of course, adjacent to Broadway.
So she rattles onward, from the Newark airport to Moonachie, a remote New Jersey location where the sets for Blanks will be constructed. She’s here today to start things off with the fabricators. The shop is in a retired candy factory. A caramel aroma drifts vaguely out of the corners. Everything is in forward gear. Cate loves the energized scent of wood and metal and sweat and, of course, caramel.
It turns out to be an all-woman shop. No-nonsense women. Five of them. One has an injury much worse than Cate’s—her right foot has been replaced with a high-tech prosthesis. This is, she tells Cate (part of a universal private conversation among those with missing parts), from a previous career in chicken processing at a plant unbothered by concerns for worker safety.
Most of the afternoon gets used up working out details from drawings and images Cate throws from her laptop onto a pull-down projector screen in what was once the candy baron’s office lofted above the factory floor.
The carpenters want to know does the stage at Ropes and Pulleys have tracks for platforms?
Cate says no, but they’ve okayed installing them.
The painters are doubtful the walls of the basement scene can be done to Cate’s specification with just paint.
Cate says, “The writing room Virginia has there needs to be already old in the 1920s. Old cellar is, I think, a special color, a particular mix of gray and decay. I’ve brought along Pantone chips for this mottling.” She doesn’t say she got the specific colors from her father. “I’ve also brought an old British fuse box I ordered off eBay. That basement wall needs something for Vita and Virginia to bump against. A romantic nuisance.”
Someone wants to know how much greenery will be needed to create Vita’s garden.
“Bushels and then some. Vita’s writing tower will perch twenty feet above the stage and needs to be covered in vines. The garden backdrop is going to require its own floral tonnage, also climbing roses over the pergola. Basically we’ll need fill for everything that isn’t walkway and French-door entrance.”
Someone has already started painting the wall of books that is the backdrop for Vita’s living room. The books, she sees, are life-size. Cate hates to start off a project by correcting the mistakes of others, so she frames a correction as a collaboration.
“I’ve had to do this before,” she tells the painter, “I think the books look more substantial from a distance if I go to one-and-a-half size. Can I borrow your tape measure?” She pencils in a line three inches above and just under two inches wider than the first book, then does this for the next few books What do you think? Let’s paint them in this size then back off and see how they’ll look to the audience.” Part of what she’s become adept at is asking the opinions of people who will not really be concurring so much as following her orders.
By six, the crew is ready to order materials and begin construction, and Cate heads out. She gets a breakfasty dinner at a steel-sided diner. (Holding her cell under her newspaper, she takes a surreptitious picture of the grill, which appears to be from the beginning of the twentieth century. She shoots this to Dana. But, of course, why is she shooting anything to Dana?) She finds a cheap motel for the night before heading into New York tomorrow. Cheap hotel rooms in Manhattan are way too scary. What she finds on the outskirts of Moonachie is the Loch Lomond. Hers is the only car in the parking lot; all the other guests have trucks. Her room is both depressing and agitating—a pageant of plaid. Bedspread, drapes, and small, tragically decorative pillows on top of the real ones. All the plaids are different tartans. The walls are hung with prints of fox-and-hound events, and of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who does not appear to have really been all that bonnie. The carpet is clean, there’s that. No bugs scatter when she turns on the lights. In the corner across from the bed, there’s a full-size refrigerator. She’s not sure whether to count this as feature or flaw. A flat-screen TV is mounted high on the wall across from the bed. She opens all the windows to get a breeze going, to dilute the air in the room, which is thick with loneliness. There’s a ten-dollar deposit for the remote, which Cate declines; she has a copy of a good play with her, something she saw years ago, early in her career. Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. She remembers the set allowing a lot of agility on the part of the actors. Reading scripts, imagining (or remembering) them up and running, is one of her great free-time pleasures, a busman’s holiday.
She showers and gets into yoga pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt, crawls into bed.
This is their second design meeting, and so the initial butt-sniffing is over, and they are now going forward with a tacit agreement that they can work together. Dan Tennent, the lighting guy, like a lot of lighting directors, thinks the set is a corpse his lights can bring to life. He may be a problem, but Cate decides not to worry about that yet.
Saya Arai is doing costumes. She’s really good. Cate knows how good by the fact that the couple of times her name has come up, Maureen has had something negative to say about her. Saya is ethereal in her presence, thin in a way that implies an internal focus, a diet of lichen. She is extremely quiet. She didn’t talk much at the first meeting, only took furious notes in a slender gray notebook. Cate isn’t crazy about having notes taken on everybody else by someone who’s not putting out her own ideas.
Jenny McAdam is the stage manager, an old pro, a security blanket for Cate. She comes with an air of capability and crisis management. She and Cate were friends back at RISD, so she’s a known among unknowns. Cate could even stay on her sofa to save the hotel bill, but she did that once and found out Jenny keeps ferrets as pets. They live in the hall closet amid a circus of hammocks and exercise wheels, but slither in and out through the night under its door.
Oliver Palmieri, the company’s dramaturge, is the last to arrive, and takes several minutes to negotiate getting out of his coat and sitting down on one of the folding chairs around the table. He weighs probably 350, and is a short man to start with. His butt cheeks overflow the seat of his chair, and the closest his stomach will allow him to get to the table is about a foot away. Cate used to enjoy watching extremely fat people—imagining what they eat when they’re alone, how they manage sex. But now that small, crummy curiosity has been corrupted. Now corpulence tugs a grimy cord inside her.
Ty Boyd gets up to stretch. He’s singular looking. Dramatic, with a white shock of Beckett hair, heavy glasses with thick lenses behind which his weak eyes swim. According to Graham, he’s asexual, which gives him a subtle aspect of outlier. Along with this, there’s a (Cate suspects deliberately) random aspect to the way he dresses. Today it’s a varsity swimmer’s jacket and dark green work pants. Hiking boots.
He was here before everyone else. He catches Cate’s eye and points to his wrist, although he has no watch, to say Lauren and Molly have yet to arrive. They always show up a little late for everything, to let a small flutter of apprehension gather up among those who await them. At the twenty-minute mark, Ty goes to the single window in the rehearsal space, opens it, sticks his head out and looks down the street. He pulls himself back in and shuts the window. “I guess we should just begin.” He’s clearly not convinced this is the right decision. Confirmation of that comes another fifteen minutes in, when Molly and Lauren swirl in, see the meeting in progress and don’t say anything, either of them.
They arrive just as Saya is suggesting—her first entry into the general conversation—that Vita be in skinny jeans for at least the garden scene. “The way Sofia Coppola put those Converse high-tops in Marie Antoinette’s closet. A little anachronism. You just know Vita would have worn Levi’s if she were around today.”
“We’ll think about that,” Molly tells Saya. This is her version of no.
Throughout the rest of the meeting, maybe forty-five minutes, Molly and Lauren are chilly.
No one will start a meeting before they arrive again.
Cate booked herself on the last flight tonight to Chicago. She wants to take a couple of hours to be a tourist. On these recent trips, she’s inside the play more than she’s in Manhattan. She heads up to MOMA, which is open until eight.
Down in the subway, a train must have just come and gone. The platform on her side is empty. The air is sweet and sour with urine. She’s cold, but it’s also nerves that make her shuffle a little from foot to foot, flicking glances toward the passage she’s just come through. She needs to know who will come out next, into this echoing tunnel with no visible police presence, only videocams to record whatever happens down here, the footage valuable only afterward. She hates that she thinks like this now. It’s not fear. Neale bought all the fear available from what happened. Cate’s fallout is a constant readiness. She hates that she’s so ready. Being always ready is quite fatiguing.
December has pushed into January, the light staying longer, the sharpness of winter growing dull. The air—because it’s New York and not Chicago, also because of the changing climate—has a balminess to it. She gets out a couple of stops early, stops in a shop called Black Hole that sells jeans so heavily dyed you have to wash them by themselves not just the first time, but forever. She buys a pair, decides to wear them to MOMA, stuffs the old pair she’s wearing into her backpack. Might as well be modern herself.
Inside the museum, instead of being absorbed by the art, she stands alone and outside everything around her. This is a new bad feeling. Not a panic attack exactly. More a heightened awareness, hearing sounds from a higher register, picking up something drifting in on a chilled wind.
She catches a cab to the airport. Inside, she presses Dana’s number on her contacts list, which she has obscured as T. Oaster. She’s in luck. Dana answers. It’s too early for her to be at work, so she’s probably at home.
“Just tell me I must have the wrong number. I’ll call you later at work. I’m just having a bad moment. I want to hear your voice is all.”
“Sorry. I think you have the wrong number.”