11
Who the hell knows, Missouri (outside of Joplin)
Of course, it wouldn’t have been a proper cross-country journey unless we ran into mechanical issues.
The van holding the costumes swerved, flagged, and limped to the side of the road as we all slowed in the middle of Missouri’s sprawling emptiness. The drivers pulled the vans off to help assess any damage, and Kline decreed the unexpected stoppage the perfect time to begin rehearsing.
“What’d the old queen say,” Kline announced to the milling actors over a gust of flat prairie wind, “all the world’s a stage, or some shit?”
He gestured broadly at the highway, the rolling grasslands hefting the lonesome pitch of the horizon. The company milled to the far end of the shoulder, where Kline shepherded them through a gap in the roadside fence. They spread out as he began to opine loudly and entirely incorrectly about the origins of Titus Andronicus.
I hung back at the end of the caravan. Still in the thick of my last dose of powder, it felt as though my eyeballs were floating in their sockets. I could hardly wait for the drive to be over. Keeping myself obliterated like this was exhausting.
I stared at the torn-up carcass of a rabbit in the middle of the road. It had been split open to the crude, hot eye of the sun and baked on the asphalt. I counted its ribs, dried-out and bleaching, wondering whether the vultures had already come to take their share of it.
What do you want?
You tell me.
I blinked myopically, shook my head, and turned to the men unloading the costumes so they could jack up the van and check the tire. They lifted boxes and stacked bare mannequins on the road shoulder. Thick layers of fabric sat in scattered rows of carefully folded bolts, bins, and reams in the midday light.
The draw was impossible to ignore. I craved to be close to some part of the work again, and if I couldn’t join the scene-making, I would have to be content with perusing the armor of artifice.
The dresses, box after box of them, were some of the finest I’d ever seen. Unnoticed in the milling of the men hurrying to get the van road-ready again, I ran my hands along crushed velvet and flat beading, stitchwork so particular I nearly had to cross my eyes to see the individual threads.
I was roving my thumb along the edge of a heavy purple skirt when a shadow touched me—I looked up to see Felix Haas with his sunglasses back on, regarding the same garment with the critical eye one could only apply to his own creation.
“That one is old,” he said simply. Haas held his cigarette out to me without looking away from the dress.
I accepted it between two fingers. “Old or not, it’s beautiful.”
“It’s one of my few early pieces still intact. I lost much of my best work to a theater fire in London several years ago.”
I took a wobbly sip of smoke. The taste of his tobacco was foreign, lightly toasted and earthier than what I was used to. “Did you have to make them all new?”
“Hardly slept for weeks to do it in time.” I passed the cigarette back. Our hands brushed lightly with the transfer. “Mostly I played Victor Frankenstein on older pieces with a few rentals no one had picked up and the scraps that weren’t so badly damaged.”
“Did it feel like you’d never climb out of your own pit?” I asked without meaning to, not looking at him, still halfway stuck in my own head.
Haas pursed his lips and hummed shortly. At the edge of the ditch, the drivers began to lever up the van by the chassis. “At first,” he mused. “But then I set my hands to the work, and it got done.”
He regarded me sideways, appraising me from behind the dark, round lenses of his glasses. A smile persisted on his mouth, the subtle pink of his lips. “Am I to believe you’ve found yourself in a pit, Mrs. Shoard?” he asked lightly.
“Please, call me Margaret.”
Haas reached out to me and, just as he had on the dress, drew his hand with a measuring touch along the shoulder of my blouse. “You’re so very put together, Margaret, even amid the dust of the interstate system.”
My heart made a fluttering turn in my ribs. I hoped the flush on my face wasn’t half as bright as it felt.
We watched two men patch the tire—Fuckin’ piece of glass, one of the drivers called up from beneath the undercarriage, while another two standing by traded a handful of money for betting on the reason.
“I used to be those women,” I admitted. I gestured at the box of dresses. “They used to be me.”
When I looked over at Haas, he cast a very subtle, encouraging smile at me. “I’d call you far more alluring than half those tragic windbags.”
I barked a laugh, which made my headache pulse. I reached out for another sip on the cigarette. Haas passed it to me without hesitation. We stood in silence and watched the drivers lower the van back down, kicking shallowly at the tire to make sure it held air again. One of them gave a sharp whistle at Kline when he deemed it road-ready.
Wesley approached me and Haas with an arm raised as the rest of the company broke apart and began returning to the vans.
“Trading secrets about me?” he needled with a grin. Color had risen in his cheeks from the sun. Haas plucked a fresh cigarette from his pocket and lit it for Wesley, who accepted it with a charmed smile.
“How was the baptismal rehearsal?” Haas asked. Wesley chuffed a laugh and wrapped an easy arm around my waist.
“Kline doesn’t know the first thing about any of this.” He shared an exhilarated glance with Haas.
Haas peered out at the road spooling away ahead of us and smiled to himself. “Kline is all hunt and no shot. Only listen to him when it benefits you,” he said, and moved off to oversee the repacking of the van.
From the van’s side mirror past Haas’s shoulder, I could see Wesley and myself reflected back against the pale, endless blue of the sky. We looked haggard but whole.
Haas peered back at me as though drawn by the weight of my sticky, lingering attention left clinging to him.
I wasn’t not attracted to him.
Back on the road again, I realized the exact pitch of the feeling burrowing low in my belly: desire, and the magnetic pull of being wanted in return.
In that night’s motel, I was cataloging my belongings through a buzz-eyed haze as I did at the end of each day to make sure nothing was getting pinched. I counted my stockings and underthings first, and the tidy fold of emergency money secreted into one corner of the lining second.
Wesley was divested down to his undershirt, shining his black wingtips on the edge of the bed. I sat on the rickety vanity bench that smelled of old dust and regarded him with a lazy cigarette as he worked. I could hardly concentrate on one thought for longer than a handful of seconds. It felt like my teeth were going to leap from my jaws.
“I can hear you thinking,” he said without looking up. A small smile was pinned to the corners of his mouth.
I gave him a twitchy smile. “What am I thinking, then?”
Wesley winked. “That you adore me so very much,” he minced, pleased with himself.
I blew a mouthful of smoke in his direction. “That’s cheating.”
The radio was broadcasting the patter of someone narrating the last of spring training. I watched the quick work of Wesley’s hands, so practiced with the blacking polish to avoid getting even a jot of it on his fingertips.
“You’re enjoying his company?” I asked, not looking up from the glossy, sludgy streaks Wesley was scrubbing into a smooth shine over the leather. He paused.
Felix Haas had taken to orbiting me and Wesley at a wide but constant berth. He intrigued me, and I knew he and Wesley had started up regular rendezvousing at gas stations and any stopover longer than a handful of minutes. Wesley rode along with him in the costume van after the men patched the tire when I convinced him I would be fine on my own—I managed to sleep for a few hours and woke with a crick in my neck without Wesley’s shoulder, but it was worth it to see Wesley with a specific lightness of being in him.
“I suppose so.” Wesley didn’t have to ask for a name.
“He’s…nice, then?”
Wesley angled a look at me. I raised my eyebrows in a silent What? “You don’t have a habit of being…” He searched for the word somewhere along his back teeth with the prodding tip of his tongue. “Curious, about them.”
I considered that for a moment. Tracing the end of my cigarette with the edge of my thumb, I stared at the pattern of the filter smudged with the last of today’s lipstick. My head felt thick and obscure as Wesley’s shoe polish.
“He doesn’t seem very much like your usual type. And he intrigues me,” I said.
Wesley snorted. “You don’t have to be coy. You intrigue him, too.”
I frowned gently and took a steady drag of smoke. “I’m not being coy,” I said, but doubted the words as soon as they left my mouth. “Seriously, Wesley. Do you even know the first thing about him?”
Wesley dipped into the tin and scoured at a persistent scuff where his left foot tended to turn in a bit more than his right as he walked.
“I don’t want you to stumble into another Andrew situation,” I said before I could stop myself.
Wesley stilled. He set his shoes down and wiped his fingers off on the kerchief in his pocket as he rose to stand beside me. “I’m being careful,” he said, looking straight at me in the glass. “I promise.”
“Are you?”
Wesley’s expression begged companionable judgment. “Most of the ones in New York have a whole host of complexes. I’m showing them some bright spots to a side of living they’re all so fucking scared of. Men like Felix, they’re—you know. He’s artistic, he’s bold, he says exactly what he’s thinking. I’ve missed being close to that.”
He put a hand on my shoulder and hesitated for only a moment before leaning in and kissing it, a light and encouraging peck. “It’s just a summer crack. Andrew took much longer than we have out here to show his true colors.”
I made a pale sound, shrugging weakly, and turned back to organizing my things scattered on top of the vanity. Wesley sighed.
“We’re all under someone’s thumb for the season anyways,” he said. “How out of hand could anything get?”
I didn’t look up at him. “I don’t know,” I said lightly, lining up a few tubes of creams and paints in tidy rows while I steered wide around what I knew about the festival.
Wesley was quiet until I looked up at him. His gaze had softened with sympathy. “I’m not wandering around in the dark here, Jack,” he murmured. “I know the sorts of circles Ezra runs in.”
I held in a rude chuckle. Sure, he knew the sorts, but he didn’t know them. He hadn’t grown up right alongside the rank and file. I could still remember the loud laughter and acrid aftershave hanging thick in the air at the dinner parties my mother used to host for Mr. Matthews and his chums in those few years before I fled to Richmond, and I didn’t want Wesley anywhere near that sort—they would eat him alive. Felix Haas didn’t seem in-line with the worst of them, but still. I worried.
“I just don’t know him,” I said, which was true. Wesley smoothed his hand over my hair, stroking his thumb along my nape.
“You should get to know him. He would probably like that.”
I ashed my cigarette in a smudged porcelain dish. “Would he?”
“He’s got diversified taste.” Wesley examined himself in the mirror, peering at the sides of his jaw with the particular angle of his gaze that meant he’d go for a shave soon. “Who knows? Could be nice to have for the summer.”
“Mr. Shoard, are you proposing we share?”
Wesley shot me his most roguish smile. “What’s mine is yours.”
I laughed a breathless little huff, more flustered than I would have expected.
Across the room, the radio cut away to a syrupy jingle advertising a new grocery store.
“Would you even want to share?” I asked.
Wesley leaned a flat hand on the vanity top and gave a genial shrug with one shoulder. “Who would I be to stop you? I say again, he likes you. And you’re curious about him.”
“Well.” I peered at the edge of my slip and ran the tip of my finger along the scalloping. My heart had begun to beat more quickly. “I don’t want you to think I’m loose. And you saw him first. Didn’t you?”
Wesley leveled a look at me, the look that always made me go soft. “The only thing I’ll ever think of you,” he said, quietly emphatic, “is that you’re brilliant, and wonderful, and one hell of a good-luck charm.”
I hid a smile in my collar and glanced up into the mirror to look at him there in the glass. “Maybe he can make room for me in his schedule,” I muttered. “We’ll see.”
Wesley pushed off from the table and kissed the shell of my ear before returning to his shoes—picking one up, he turned it in the bilious halo of light from the single nightstand lamp.
I set to pinning my hair ahead of bed. On the radio, the crack of a good solid bat and the roar of the crowd was swallowed by the transmission fuzzing briefly.
When he finished with his shoes, Wesley set them by the door and strode into the bathroom. As I listened to the shower valve groan open and sputter down, I stared into my reflection.
I emptied my purse onto the vanity and took out the paper sack I stored in my suitcase between my least-titillating layers of clothes to dissuade further prying. Dr. French had sent me off for the summer with a few extra rations of powder.
It was a finite supply. I’d been overdoing it for these past few days to keep sane throughout the caravanning. But there was still plenty to last through August, and I could make do. I would.
I stole down a short sniff to stop my temples pounding and began to pack it all carefully away again.
It would be enough. Especially if there were other entertainments to distract me, to make me remember what it felt like to want.