From a box seat you get an overhead view of the audience, much as you do of the stage. It is almost as if there are two stages on view from a box seat, one which thinks it is real and the other which knows it is artificial. We lingered, leaning our elbows on the railing, watching first the stage empty and then the theater.
She wore a Liberty dress, a print of tiny flowers in various shades of pink, with a touch of lace at the collar and smocking at the wrists. I wore smoky gray and my tie was quietly opulent. “Maybe,” she said, picking up a conversation we had left at the end of the last intermission, “we accept Viola and Sebastian as indistinguishable twins—no matter how different they look—because we want to believe it.”
“Willing suspension of disbelief?”
“But doesn’t it feel as if Shakespeare wants to force us to understand what we’re doing? Force us to do it, then to know we’re doing it because we want the story. Otherwise”—her light-brown eyes were troubled—“why does he put them together on stage in that last scene? Face to face like that. When you have to see that they never could have been mistaken for one another. But you have to accept that they have been if you want the story to happen.” She looked at me. “I’m sorry.”
Sorry for ignoring my attempt to enter the conversation, sorry for talking so much, sorry for choosing her own ideas over mine: I didn’t know which, and I suspected those options barely scratched the surface of some general apology, her letter to the world which read in its entirety “I’m sorry.” I ignored the apology and addressed her thoughts.
“Maybe he did it because he could. I mean, he could pull it off. It shouldn’t work, and it does. It’s implausible and we believe it. Can you imagine how it would feel to be able to do that?” I could, and it made me smile.
She shook her head; my answer wasn’t good enough. “The play begins with music and love—”
“Ends with a song,” I offered.
“But not a love song. And all the couples, at the end, at the happy ending, they’re all based on misapprehensions. Or deceptions.”
“The fool has the envoi,” I said, in case that helped.
She shook her head again. “Well.”
She was getting ready to leave, reaching for her purse, preparing her thanks and farewells. I made no move.
She looked around the box, at the four empty chairs. “You don’t cut corners, do you?”
“Not for you.” I gave it a little time, very little, just a beat, then said, “I don’t know your name.”
“No, you don’t.”
“That’s all right,” I assured her at the same time that she said, “It’s not that—” and stopped. I should have kept my mouth shut, I thought. I should have been more patient. I wondered how she might have ended her sentence but couldn’t ask now, and it was now too late for waiting to hear what lead she might have given me. I fetched our coats from the anteroom.
“I’ve enjoyed your company,” I told her, holding the mink out for her arms. “Once again.”
“And I thank you once again.” She fastened up the frogs.
“You’re being met?” If I seemed to be trying to pin her down, I’d lose whatever ground I’d gained by not trying to pin her down. “Because I’d like to have dinner with you. Or tea—it’s about the right time for high tea. Tea’s a respectable occasion, safe.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Or a cup of coffee, somewhere close by.”
“I’m being met. It’s just…I don’t know anything about you,” she apologized.
“So you have to take me on faith.”
“Yes,” she said, serious. “Or not at all.”
“Or not at all.”
Then her mood lifted. “But you can’t know, this has been—a respite, Twelfth Night, seeing it. Seeing it with you, that too. You don’t know, but it’s just what I needed.”
“That’s good news,” I said, and meant it. I sat down again so she could leave. She didn’t hurry, she didn’t delay, and before she let the door close behind her she smiled at me, uncertainly.