Jeremy had been so many people in such a short period of time that he felt like he was developing an identity crisis. He’d auditioned for five Broadway shows in a week, including two brand-new shows, two that were based on popular movies, and a revival of A Chorus Line that he knew he biffed because he wasn’t a strong enough dancer. That didn’t stop him from singing “I Hope I Get It” to himself a lot that week, knowing that the call about See the Light was pending.
But such was the life of a theater actor in audition season. He managed a number of other auditions, including Shakespeare in the Park—one of the thanes in the Scottish play—and a few off-Broadway productions. He’d done this every year for the last few years, auditioning for everything he felt remotely like he might get, maybe a dozen auditions or more, and then hoping he’d land one of the jobs. He usually got something, although there had been that season he’d had to get a job at a dinner theater in Times Square, and another in which his pay for playing Tommy in a cheeky off-off Broadway revival of Carrie: The Musical was so low he’d waited tables on the weekends at a drag brunch. Between gigs, he’d gotten good parts with a small theater company in Brooklyn, which usually paid him just enough to cover his Equity dues. He was smart about saving money and had figured out how to get by.
Of course, Ryan had been a big help there.
Because there was always someone else. An actor with a better singing voice, or stronger dance skills, someone who understood nuances of character that Jeremy didn’t, who didn’t flub that one tongue-twister line the first time through, someone who charmed the socks off the producers, or someone who was just better looking than Jeremy. A producer or casting director might not like something arbitrary—the way Jeremy stood or held his hands or did his hair. Or the North Jersey accent Jeremy had worked hard to eradicate might come out if he was particularly nervous. Sometimes Jeremy nailed an audition and still didn’t get the part, because New York had no shortage of gifted actors. He couldn’t throw a stone in Manhattan without hitting an aspiring theater actor, which meant nothing was a sure thing.
And he hated being the runner-up. The runner-up didn’t get the part.
But that was a major part of why Jeremy wanted the part in See the Light. He was perfect for it. He knew in his gut that he’d kill it, and he was so ready for his big break. He needed a good-paying gig, though, to supplement his rapidly draining savings account now that he didn’t have Ryan to cover his rent during slow months.
Jeremy was between auditions, as he sat in a courtyard he’d snuck into behind a big office building on 42nd Street. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the courtyard was empty aside from a besuited couple who seemed to be having an argument. Jeremy had never had a regular nine-to-five, but he imagined that at this time of day, most of the office workers were tucked away in their offices, working hard or counting down the minutes until the end of the day. Someone had stolen a bunch of the green folding tables and chairs from Bryant Park and left them over here, so Jeremy sat at a table with a cup of coffee and planned to just zone out for a few minutes.
He had just settled into the chair when his agent called.
“Three callbacks!” said Tom. “I’m emailing you dates and times.”
“Which shows?” A tiny percussionist was banging on a timpani in Jeremy’s chest.
“Macbeth, South Pacific, and, ah, See the Light.”
He let out a breath. The Scottish Play would be fun; he’d played Guildenstern in a Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet a few summers before, and he’d had an insane unrequited crush on the movie star playing Hamlet. But that aside, even a small part in one of those productions could be a great launchpad, just because of the caliber of talent that had participated in recent years meant the shows got a lot of attention.
South Pacific would be a great role, too. Sondheim was Jeremy’s first composer love, but he loved Rodgers and Hammerstein, too. He’d auditioned for young Lieutenant Cable, rather than Emile, so it wasn’t a lead role, but the revival would be a hell of a lot of fun.
Still, Jeremy would give up both in a heartbeat to be in See the Light.
“That’s awesome, Tom.”
“Good job, kid. Terry Lewis loved you to pieces. There are a handful of others still up for that part. They’re still tweaking the book, apparently, so they sent me a few songs from other shows to prepare for the callback. They want you to memorize a few lines, then pick one of the songs.”
“Great.” Jeremy’s blood rushed through his body and his hands started to shake. It was beginning to sink in that he’d gotten a callback for See the Light. He’d gotten a callback for See the Light!
The role wasn’t his yet, except it was. He knew it in his bones.
“Anyway, information is on its way to you. You have one more audition today?”
“Yeah, just taking a break before I head there.”
“Break a leg, kid. I’ll talk to you soon.”
Jeremy hung up and stared at his phone for a long moment.
He was still in the running for the role he most wanted. The urge to dance across the plaza was strong. He downed the last of his coffee and looked around. The arguing couple seemed to have made up, and they were now walking away from the plaza arm-in-arm. So, since no one else was around. Jeremy threw himself into a little dance, letting his excitement and energy propel him across the space. He landed with a flourish on a step that led back down to the sidewalk. A woman standing on the corner who must have been watching him gave him a little round of applause.
What the hell? Jeremy bowed.
The he laughed, thanked the woman, and walked uptown toward his next audition.
Max could pinpoint the exact moment that Jeremy had fallen in love with Broadway...and Max had fallen in love with Jeremy.
They’d been thirteen. For reasons Max still couldn’t determine, their eighth-grade Spanish class had gone on a field trip to the city to see a new revival of Evita. Even though they’d grown up just across the river from the Great White Way, this was the first time either Max or Jeremy had ever seen anything on Broadway. All of it was exciting, at least to Max. They’d been allowed to get lunch on their own, with strict instructions not to leave the two-block radius around the theater, but even that felt like a huge amount of freedom. And even though their fast food lunch tasted the same as it would have back home, there was something novel about eating in the three-story franchise in Times Square.
They’d felt exhilarated. Jeremy had practically run down the street between the fast food place and the coffee shop where they bought sugary frozen drinks, and Max had trailed after him the way he always had. But Max was just as thrilled to be running and laughing and burning off the energy of their sugar high with his favorite person in the universe. Whenever Jeremy grinned at Max in that charming, boyish way—the way he still grinned now that they were adults—Max’s heart melted a little. It certainly had that day.
They’d had mezzanine seats that felt like they were eight miles from the stage, but Jeremy said, “No, this is better than orchestra seats. You can see the whole stage this way.” Max loved that Jeremy could rationalize even being relegated to the cheap seats. If they’d been seated three seats to the left, they would have been behind a column, so there was that, Max supposed.
But then the show started. And from the dramatic opening notes of the show, meant to sound like a funeral dirge, Max felt a little bewildered, but Jeremy was rapt. A Hollywood starlet, now long forgotten, but who at the time starred on a popular nighttime soap, played Evita.
At the intermission, Jeremy couldn’t stop talking about how great it all was. How big the show felt, how beautiful the theater was, how the voices of the actors soared above the audience. His vocabulary about theater at the time was limited, but he was in awe, uncritical and overjoyed. If they went to see the same show now, Max imagined Jeremy would have things to say about staging, and he’d point out that the starlet playing Evita was certainly no Patti LuPone, and the starlet’s voice couldn’t quite reach the high notes in “Rainbow High.” He’d have opinions about the theater’s acoustics, about how their seats were outside of the optimal zone every theater had in which the sound was perfectly balanced, how there were times when the orchestra drowned out the actors onstage.
But when they were thirteen, it didn’t matter. Jeremy loved every minute of it.
A couple of seats in the first row of the mezzanine opened up after the intermission, and, with the teacher’s permission, Jeremy and Max took them. Jeremy spent the entire second act leaning on the railing and staring at the stage with a singular focus that Max couldn’t look away from.
When the show ended, Jeremy burst out of his chair to give a standing ovation during the curtain calls. Max stood up beside him, slower to get up and realize he was supposed to clap. But as he clapped, Jeremy glanced at him and said, “That was amazing.” His eyes sparkled and he wore the sort of smile that would take hours to erase.
And it hit Max quite suddenly that he loved Jeremy.
He hadn’t even pieced together that he was gay yet; he just knew that for about ten seconds during the curtain calls of a Broadway revival of Evita, no other humans existed on Earth. It was just Jeremy and his smile, and all Max wanted was to be a part of that forever.
Nothing changed at first. Their friendship was still the same when they got to high school and Jeremy inevitably joined the drama club. While Jeremy argued with his club mates about whether they really needed to do The Odd Couple for the three-hundredth time in the club’s history or if they had the vocal power to put on a musical, Max took extra art classes, because he still hadn’t worked out that skin was his canvas. Plus, boys weren’t supposed to play with makeup.
Max had slipped into the bathroom in his parents’ room from time to time to borrow his mother’s eyeliner and mascara and lipstick, just to see what would happen when he used it on his own face, but then he’d hastily wipe it off and slip back out again. So he had a notion. Just like he had a notion that his attraction to the beautiful male senior who sat in front of him in chemistry, the one with the curly blond hair and blue eyes like the ocean, meant he probably wasn’t straight. But it took a while for all of these things to coalesce into a realization about what that really meant to him.
So even though Jeremy came out as gay when they were still in high school, Max didn’t put all the puzzle pieces together until college.
And it changed nothing; although Max loved Jeremy with his whole heart and had since that day at Evita, he never said it, and though they spent a lot of time together, they each had their own lives. Max took extra art classes and joined an intramural rugby team, and Jeremy was off doing his own thing, too. Or doing his own men, as it turned out. Max walked in on Jeremy and some guy in their shared dorm room often enough. And he always shook it off like it didn’t bother him, even though it did.
He’d foolishly thought Jeremy should just understand that they belonged together, but once Max understood that Jeremy didn’t always see what was right in front of him without someone pointing it out, too much time had passed.
And then he was with Ryan.
Max blamed himself for never sharing his feelings. When he made the decision that he couldn’t live in the same apartment with Jeremy without continually dying a slow death, he did finally slip into a conversation that he was developing feelings—he’d kept his tone light, like this was no big deal. And Jeremy had nodded, said he didn’t feel the same, and he hoped they could continue to be friends. Max had dropped it, because he couldn’t handle his love not being reciprocated. That would likely be the end of their friendship, and Max couldn’t stand the idea of Jeremy not being a part of his life. It would be like cutting off a leg. So he pined from afar. He dated other men. He worked hard to make his chosen career a success, and he was good at what he did.
And yet...
“I’m pathetic,” he said to Anthony one night at a dive bar in Williamsburg. They were in a crowded back office with bad fluorescent lighting as Anthony coached him through doing the makeup for Stephen, a.k.a. Veronica Fake, a queen performing that night as practice for the upcoming Miss Drag Brooklyn competition.
“Now, now,” Anthony said. “You aren’t pathetic. Oh, you know what would be fierce? If you painted one eyebrow a little higher, like she’s got her eyebrow raised skeptically. Like this.” Anthony tapped the screen of his phone a few times and flashed it at Max. It was a black-and-white photo of Veronica Lake with one eyebrow raised, looking as if she knew a secret.
“Perfect,” Max said. He turned to Stephen. “I’m going a little more subtle with the eyes. Then a bold red lip. Authentically fifties. People will think you walked out of a time machine. Close your eyes.”
Stephen closed his eyes and tilted his face up a little. At least he knew where the light was. “Why are you pathetic?” Stephen asked.
“He’s in love with his best friend,” Anthony said as Max chose the brown eyeshadow he wanted and picked up a brush.
Stephen gasped and popped his eyes back open. “Really?”
“Tale as old as time,” Anthony said.
“Is he straight?”
“No,” Max said. “Close your eyes again and stop moving or you’ll look like a Picasso.”
“Max is in love with his best friend who is both gay and currently living in Max’s apartment.”
“Mm-hmm,” Stephen said. Max had to give him credit for not moving.
“But that’s why I’m pathetic,” Max said. “Not only is he not interested, he just got out of a long-term relationship, so he’s kind of on the rebound, and he’s got a lot of other stuff going on right now, and I—”
“Our darling Max, the sweetest guy in all of New York City, has never told young Jeremy how he feels.”
“Mm-hmm,” Stephen said.
“See, it’s my fault. If I’d said something last time he was single...or when we were twenty...or, like, back in high school...but now...it’s too late.”
“It’s never too late. You gonna put eyeliner on her?”
“I thought just at the corners of the eye. A little V right here on the edge. Not quite a full cat eye, but hinting at it.”
“Ooh, yes. This is why you’re a professional.”
“Don’t go too subtle,” Stephen said through clenched teeth. “I am a drag queen.”
“You’ll look gorgeous,” Max said.
“I’m just saying,” Anthony said, “you never know. Maybe after you do Veronica’s makeup, you go home and say, ‘Jeremy, I have a confession to make...’ and then he realizes he feels the same, and then you live happily ever after.”
Max guffawed. “Life doesn’t work that way. Stephen, open your mouth.”
“What?”
“Make an O with your lips. I want to do your cheekbones.”
“Oh. Ooooh.” Stephen hollowed out his cheeks so Max could see where his actual cheekbones were. He drew lines with a shade of foundation several shades darker than Stephen’s skin.
“Also, Anthony, I’m not doing that. I can’t tell Jeremy how I feel.”
“And why not?”
Max and Anthony periodically had this argument, and it always ended the same way, with Max arguing that he didn’t want to risk his friendship with Jeremy, and Anthony arguing that Max could potentially get everything he ever wanted if he just got over himself. “Because.”
Anthony groaned. “If you weren’t so dang talented, I’d give up hope for you.”
“It’s fine. Everything is fine.”
“Sure it is, sure it is.”
Max frowned and picked up a blending sponge. He blended the hard lines of makeup together into softer waves of color then took a step back to make sure his contouring looked realistic. He nodded to himself, satisfied. “All right. I’m gonna do some rosy blush, then I need to powder your face to set everything, then I’m gonna glue on some lashes.”
“Do your worst,” Stephen said.
Anthony pulled a comb from his pocket and ran it over the blond wig Stephen had brought with him, which now sat on a Styrofoam head. Max dusted blush around the corners of Stephen’s face and glanced at the wig. It looked expensive; blond lace front with a gentle finger wave, just like Veronica Lake’s signature look.
“What are you wearing?” Max asked.
“That gauzy purple thing that looks like a nightgown.” Stephen pointed behind Max, so Max turned and saw a purple gown with a lot of tulle hanging from the back of the door.
“Perfect. People will think Veronica Lake has come back from the dead.”
“My shoulders are a little less feminine than hers.”
“Your shoulders are fine.” Max examined his handiwork. He did as much as he could to create the illusion, and the viewer’s brain did the rest of the work. That was the magic of stage makeup. “You’ll be amazing. Now hold still so I can get your eyelashes on. If you move, they’ll end up glued to your forehead.”
“You can exaggerate a little. I’m not trying to be Veronica. I’m trying to look like her, but better. At the end of the day, I’m still a man in a dress.”
Max laughed. “All right, I hear you. Maybe we exaggerate the eyebrows and use some of this glitter shadow stuff I brought.” Max held up the glittery eyeshadow palette.
“Yasss!” said Stephen.
Anthony stood back and gave Stephen a long look. “You look marvelous. Like a Hollywood starlet.”
Max thought about Jeremy and trying to look younger on stage. Max had done a solid job making Stephen look like Veronica Lake, if he did say so himself, but he couldn’t hide the broad shoulders or the Adam’s apple or Stephen’s towering height. But from the audience, Stephen would be convincing. People saw what they wanted to see.