Rooting around in an antiques shop in the Village, Cate has found a gnarly gilded picture frame. Perfect for Vita’s living room. She can fill it with a portrait of some ancestor. Ancestors were something Vita wasn’t short on. Cate really shouldn’t be bringing this in herself. She has a prop master; this is technically his bailiwick. But sometimes she goes a little off-road, lured in by a thrift shop window. Cumulatively, over the years she has been extremely unthrifty in thrift shops.
Due to a small schedule snag, they have the theater for a luxurious two whole weeks before the play opens—now down to a week and a half. And after today, they will see how the sets hold the actors without confining them. That’s always Cate’s first priority.
Lauren spots the frame as Cate brings it in. She thinks it’s possibly too ornate.
“We like your idea of the living room being overstuffed. But we want to stay shy of distraction.”
Molly comes over. Cate assumes she’s going to weigh in personally on the frame. Instead, she looks briefly at Cate and blinks a question to the surface. “Could you run and get me a coffee? A flat white?” It’s a wonder no one has killed them by now.
Still, they are inarguably talented. Molly will give her opinion of the frame, just not right now. Their attention to detail is impressive; this is something Cate really likes about them, and might be a reason they picked her. She enjoys watching them roll the pieces around. Tiny, wobbly balls of mercury that attach to each other as they go, obtaining critical mass. This is the way they assemble plays that will be remembered, and win awards and get produced again and again. In this effort, they appear to have abandoned small courtesies that might siphon off their focus. They let everyone else recede to a pulsing blur, a blur emitting a soft gray noise. It’s kind of hilarious how everyone is a gofer to them, fetching whatever while the two hold their vision aloft. Well, except for Gladys Banner, who, being a huge movie star, could have taken the play or left it. The play’s success is not reliant on her, but her name on the marquee will pump up advance ticket sales. Gladys is not asked to run errands.
When Cate brings the coffee back from Hssss, an espresso shop around the corner, ferrying it with the enormous amount of balance necessary to not disrupt the skin of micro-froth on the top, she sets it on the binder resting semi-precariously on the arm of a fourth-row seat next to the one Molly occupies. (A few hours later, when Cate leaves the theater, she’ll notice the coffee still in place where she set it down, the foam intact.)
They’ve loaded in the sets today. Two—Vita’s living room and her garden—are already up on the gliding platforms. The less elaborate ones—the train station platform, the basement, Persia (two taxidermied camels; a large, shallow sandbox; a stationary sunrise at a horizon) await transfer. This afternoon Cate will time the stagehands switching the sets to see how the scene transitions might be speeded up. One of the pitfalls of multiple set changes is the collective blinking of cell phones lighting up the darkness so audience members can check the time. When that happens, you’ve broken whatever spell you’ve managed to create.
Cate is looking at the camels, which are a little more threadbare than she was hoping for. She’ll have to find a rug to cover the bald spot on the worse one. Persia would not have given a diplomat’s wife a mangy ride.
Cate is not going to have the luxury of being a creative diva on this production. She runs even the smallest adjustment past Lauren and Molly. They are her masters. If they want changes, even drastic ones, she nods and gets to work. Nonetheless, by the tiniest increments, they seem to trust Cate more, now leave small and middle-size choices to her. She can bring in a frame or a fuse box now, relatively unchallenged.
She sits down on a seven-step staircase, stairs to nowhere. Eating a bag of chips. Waiting for the arrival of one of these revisions, a change she herself suggested. Cate thinks Vita needs to be reading on a long sofa rather than on the love seat originally planned. A sofa is sexier, even if it’s not being used for sex. A lot of the aura of this play is sex and its treacherous power, power derived from its societal suppression.
The metal grate of the elevator door screeches as it’s pulled open, revealing a heavy, blood-red velvet sofa with slightly ragged fringe at the bottom. This will provide Vita a place where she can both sit and recline. She’s going to be sitting and reclining with a number of girlfriends throughout the play. (One actress, Alex Shields, will play each of these women in turn. Her specific talent is taking on a character, vanishing into it. Here, she can disappear deftly into these characters with only wigs, hats, dresses, and voices.) Cate gets up and goes over to inspect the sofa. She asks Gladys to try it out. She’s a little thrilled to be ordering around a megastar. Who takes the order, bounces onto the sofa, stretches out full length, then sits up with her legs crossed.
Ruby runs the same test, then turns to Cate, who left her bag of chips and a Mexican Coke on the steps behind them. “Might I have a crisp?” she asks, pointing. Ruby is in full costume as Virginia Woolf—long, nubby sweater, narrow tweed skirt, sturdy shoes, her hair “bobbed.” She speaks in a high, reedy voice she says she has found in a rare recording of Woolf. She has dressed and spoken this way through every day of rehearsal. Like she’s Daniel Day-Lewis on the set of Lincoln. Another piece of this verisimilitude is that she inhabits 1927. If you try to talk with her about something in the here and now, she looks at you with fake bewilderment. This makes her impossible to talk to or be normal with in any way. Cate doesn’t even try. In this particular instance, she understands that Ruby is asking for a potato chip.
“Thanks awfully,” Ruby says to the offered package, then pauses as she eats two chips. The pause is long enough that Cate is afraid she might be about to start a conversation, but then, mercifully, she walks off, twiddling her fingers next to her head. “See you on the morrow.”
Cate moves through the shadows at the back of the stage, then climbs up into the lighting grid to get a bird’s-eye view of the sofa, see how it works in the scene about to be rehearsed—a conversation between Vita and her husband, Harold. Their marriage is, at this point, purely companionate.
Judd Shoemaker, playing Harold, is a good physical match—a slight man, given heft by brogue shoes, a thick mustache, and a pipe. Before this, Cate has only seen him in movies. Onstage he has to project. He’s skillful, though, and by now, toward the end of rehearsals, he has blended into this role. He smells of cherry pipe tobacco and tweed.
Harold has just come into their library; Vita is at a small writing table, intent on a note she’s writing, scratching away with one of the fountain pens Cate found at the used-desk store.
HAROLD
Who’s the favored recipient of that letter? Mrs. Campbell?
[Mary Campbell is a new interest of Vita’s.]
VITA
No. The recipient is Mrs. Woolf.
[Vita is arranging the assignation with Virginia when Vita goes up to London. She will arrive half an hour early to meet Virginia in the basement. The scene lays out the terms of Vita and Harold’s philandering. Harold takes his pipe, knocks the ashes out of it into a standing ashtray, and leaves it there. He sits on the arm of the sofa.]
HAROLD
Perhaps, between kisses, you might tell her I’ve a notion to do a book on George Curzon, his postwar policies. I’m thinking Hogarth might be interested.
When Vita says nothing, just keeps scratching away with her pen, he falls gracefully backward, onto the couch. Molly, in the front row with Lauren, holds up a gnarly hand to stop the clock, then hoists herself out of her seat and totters up the steps to the stage.
“Judd, I’d like you to do something a little faggy here. Just to underline. Vita doesn’t really have to do anything but look butch and commanding. I think it would be good counterpoint if you did something small that a straight man mightn’t.”
He gets up, goes back to the doorway, repeats his lines, falls backward onto the sofa, this time crossing his legs at the ankles, as he props them on the sofa arm.
“Perfect,” Molly says. The scene moves on.
HAROLD
[Stares at the ceiling.]
Your silence, is it cloaking something we ought to talk about? Is it, in fact, speaking volumes?
VITA
Well, perhaps one. A slender volume. You’re going to scold me now, aren’t you?
HAROLD
I’m just saying you have to keep in mind that you don’t have la main heureuse when it comes to other peoples’ marriages. And you might want to be particularly careful with Virginia. She’s really too mentally delicate for your hijinks. You wouldn’t want to tip her over her edge. You might not see her advancing toward that, given there is so little in the way of edges for you.
VITA
No. I do think about that. But she’s more the seductress in this than I. And for my part, it’s such fun bringing romance to someone who hasn’t had much of it before. I think she’s surprising herself. And—
HAROLD
And—?
VITA
Well, I suppose part of my attraction to her is that she’s a big silver fish. A prize.
Lauren interrupts from the third row. “Gladys. You’re reading that line as though you mean it, which Vita doesn’t. She’s thirty, beautiful, titled, a popular author of her time, more popular than Virginia. So let’s go over that line, and give it a reading that’s blithe and slightly insincere.”
Lauren knows exactly how she wants every line read. She wrote them and can hear them in her head. The cast is filled with terrific actors; the only weak link is Gladys, whenever called on to act queer. Which is kind of a big problem, in that she’s the lead. The next day, Cate gets up some nerve and asks Molly if she and Lauren have a minute, that she has a small idea.
“Of course. We encourage our people to come forth with better ideas.” The tone in which she says this indicates they never encourage this. That no idea could be better than theirs and that if it were, they wouldn’t want to know about it. But now Cate is out on a limb and there’s no way to scurry back down the tree.
Surprisingly she isn’t put off to another time. They all three sit down on the red velvet sofa.
“The quick scene in the basement, where we project that flirty note above them? ‘So I’ll see you tomorrow, in the basement, and I’ll be nice to you and you’ll be very nice to me, won’t you?’ What I was thinking was maybe the scene could be played without dialog. There’s only a couple of lines before they kiss, and having total silence in that small space might increase the tension. Then Virginia, who wants this more, just moves her hands inside Vita’s open coat, like you already have her doing, but neither of them says anything. They start to move in. Then, just as their lips are about to meet, the lights fade to black. The audience never sees the kiss. They’re left in a state of anticipation, which is something like arousal, isn’t it? The tiny pause just before something delicious.”
Molly looks at Lauren in a telepathic way, then says, “Interesting idea. We’ll try it out.”
Cate is not accustomed to elation. She almost doesn’t recognize it. At first she mistakes it for indigestion.
Later in the afternoon, she gets a glimpse of how Lauren and Molly finesse suggestions that don’t interest them. She is in the wings, working with two stagehands, packing a large trellis with fake white roses and five boxes of plastic greenery. Onstage, a read-through of a revised patch of the first act is happening at a collapsible (and slightly collapsing) table. Gladys is pitching a small, muted fit. She can’t feel the line she is supposed to say at this point; she thinks the line is unnecessary.
“Would Vita directly tell Virginia she’s busy with Mary Campbell? Wouldn’t she couch something that would be so upsetting?”
Lauren says, “Yes, well, we all have our jobs here. You especially, your job is to be a perfect Vita. Mine is to write as near-to-perfect a script as I can. You are Vita as I wrote her, not as the person who lived. You’ll need to keep that in mind as we move forward. Now, can we start with that line and go from there?”
Cate hopes to never be scolded like this.
Ty Boyd walks her back to her latest hotel. This one is plaid-free, but goes wrong in another direction. Two really old guys—visible through the door—are asleep on the lobby sofa.
“They must’ve cropped them out of the TripAdvisor photos,” he says. “You can come back home with me. I have one of those blow-up beds.”
“Thanks. I’ll just take an Ambien and block out the room.”
“You have my number if things get hairy at three a.m. Like if the walls start dripping blood. I know this play isn’t happening at a good time for you, but life is so wily, so always out-of-order. Your situation is a lot like everyone else’s, just kicked up a few notches. And you’re doing fine here; Molly and Lauren are crazy about you. Sometimes a newcomer has the advantage. New York theater is a tight community, but sometimes a breath of fresh air is welcome exactly because of that. Sometimes we’re all a little weary of each other.
“If you’re interested, there’ll be more work here for you. Even though you’re a murderer. Maybe because you’re a murderer. I think that gives you a certain stature. You’re a little scary.”
Cate senses she and Ty are at a tipping point. He appears to be pursuing a friendship. She has by now been to his apartment (a quietly dramatic scheme of gunmetal gray and Chinese red filled with hard-to-find pieces of low-end Americana—in other words, a temple in her religion); met his cat, Chris; eaten what he says is his best dinner offering, fish tacos. From here, the next steps would be small, then larger personal revelations, trust, a gossipy alliance. But she can’t do it. She is by now too far outside almost everything and too low on social energy, and is not looking to be let in anywhere new.
“I’d better get up to my lovely room and hop on eBay,” she tells him as a way of slipping free of their conversation. “I have some accessorizing ideas for Vita’s living room.”
She thought this hotel—slightly above her price range—would be better than the plaid hotel, but it’s really just a different spin on awful. Everything in the room has either a scary sheen or a burnish. The color scheme (flamingo pink, gray, and mauve) and artwork (pinky-orange sunrise, or possibly sunset; it’s hard to tell) suggests modulated grieving. The bedspread is a slippery grayish beige. Greige. She has folded it and put it in the closet.
She sits cross-legged on the bed with her laptop and a small plastic carton of couscous salad and shuts out the room around her. Instead she pushes her thoughts inside the play, which is the best thing she’s worked on since Adam died. Once in a while, despite the antiquated nature of theater—all the fakery happening in the same room as its viewers—a really good piece can use this propinquity to intensify the audience’s experience, make them forget where they parked their car. This is that play. Vita’s serial womanizing could easily have been played for laughs, a sexual farce, but that’s not what Lauren had in mind. Vita is just a vehicle for the confusion that comes from not being able to firmly stake an identity. And the pain that comes for those who lend their emotions to a shadow that lengthens, then recedes. This is not the story of damage done by a reckless lover, but by a society with ignorant, vigorously enforced conventions.
Once the furniture was loaded onto the sets today, Cate could see that Vita’s living room—the biggest set, using both sliding platforms at once—could benefit from a few more details underlining who she was. A substantial stack of manuscripts, books by writer friends. Souvenirs from globetrotting. Definitely Persian cushions on the sofa. A hookah. A cheesy painting of the Grand Canyon, where she set one of her novels. An ashtray and cigarette caddy on the coffee table. She texts these to the prop master to see what he has, what they have to order. She is so grateful for something preoccupying to work on just now. Her thoughts these days are not her friends. Which doesn’t keep them from stopping by, particularly at night when she is too tired to fight them off.
A text coin drops in. Maureen.
start spreading the news…
(followed by an emoji of can-can dancers). Today Maureen has been firing off lyrics. It’s a sort of thing she does.
you’re leaving today…
Cate types, hoping a single reply will end this small dialog. She’s too tired to get perky and creative just now, which isn’t to say she doesn’t appreciate the contact. Early on, their calls developed a hollow ring. Texting goes better. With texts they can steer around what Maureen clearly finds an unpleasant subject. She is beginning to tire of Cate’s PTSD. (“I hate that you suffer from something that already has an acronym.”)
And Cate can’t really blame her. Enough repetition can flatten even a harrowing narrative. Maureen wasn’t in the kitchen. She’s sorry it all happened, of course, but mightn’t it be time to move on, particularly with their relationship, which Maureen probably still hopes is spreading strong, sturdy roots beneath it? On this matter, she has moved a step or two beyond Cate. Sometimes Cate likes this. Other times she wishes she could stop Maureen until she’s had time to catch up.
The texting does offer a jaunty flavor to the bad place in which Cate still too often finds herself. Sometimes, like tonight, she wakes up at two-thirty barely hanging on to a slippery rung above a space narrow and bottomless, where she finds, usually, an already-worn memory, but sometimes a whole, fresh, stinking scene being served up to her consciousness for the first time.
she’s down on the floor, making the call to 911, at the same time trying to wipe blood off neale’s face, which is already starting to swell, particularly around her left eye. she notices her own hands, the right in particular. the side of it along the thumb is caked with blood. the skin looks rusted. her palms are shiny and raw with a web of small cuts. half of one of her fingernails is torn off; she can’t look at that. she goes very still, listening for the possibility that the woman is still somewhere in the house. she gets up and pulls a knife out of the block on the counter, then crouches next to neale, waiting for whatever comes next.
She pulls out of this, but can’t lose its oily, metallic aftertaste. She calls the one person with whom she still (ludicrously) feels an open connection.
“Let me go back to the storeroom. We’ve only got one customer. A gentleman who has mistaken my restaurant for Starbucks. He’s been on his laptop for an hour now. One cup of coffee.” Then a few footsteps and the squeaky hinge of the swinging door to the kitchen, then its rubber flaps thwacking behind her, and she’s back. “So, black thoughts again?”
“You think I only feel powerful. But I also feel smeared by the contact with him. Like now I’m soiled.”
“I think it’s probably hard on a person, being a killer. If you’re a regular human, it pushes you out of any space you’re used to. And probably into a space the people around you are uncomfortable with.” She stops to take a drink from a bottle of water; Cate can see this exactly, the way, when she’s finished, the bottle drags away, tugging at her lower lip. Then, “Honestly, I think all this drift will eventually go away. But in the meantime you should definitely keep talking with me about it. You really can’t call me too much.”