31
1957
I hadn’t done Ophelia in years. Her lines were more melodic than I remembered—the poetry enchanted me.
I felt the weight of character as never before: not with the urgent press of assuming her desperate sorrow as my own, but with once-removed sympathy I could put on and take off like a jacket. Rather than being Ophelia, I was inviting her in when she served me and ushering her back out again when I was through working. I played the part.
And I played it well. Ezra went so far as to explicitly compliment my mad scene—not only with backhanded kudos, but with a curt nod and a Good work, as though I’d really moved him.
Wesley was coming back to himself, slowly. I wrote Edie twice a month in Melbourne, so she could keep abreast of the most essential gossip. Her subletter was a patrician pianist who only ever practiced at very appropriate hours. My new favorite pastime between rehearsals was sitting on our balcony to listen through his open window from below.
Autumn turned over into an icy winter, and after the new year rolled over all frosted about its edges, we arrived at the opening night of Hamlet.
I got to the theater an hour early to set my room just the way I liked it. I organized my makeup on the dressing table, checked to see if any of the mirror lights needed replacing, and made sure all my costumes were hung and ready in the proper order on the wire rack at the far end of the room. Whoever had used the space in my absence kept the hair tools in a different drawer, which I changed back immediately.
The rug had been replaced, and the sofa reupholstered. Once the vanity was set to rights, I sat and smoked a slow, meditative cigarette as I stared at where I had bled out.
That version of Margaret was unreachable now. I had put her to bed where she belonged—not exiled but retired into the calm fields of the past at the edge of memory. I knew her, of course, but she could finally rest. After all of it, rest was what she deserved.
Three tidy knocks rapped at the door. I extinguished my cigarette and stood to answer it.
Ezra proffered a single columbine to me. “From Wesley, he sends his best from the house. I made him forgo the whole bouquet until I’m sure you can be trusted with a vase in here again.” He peered at the room over my shoulder.
I accepted the flower and kissed him on the cheek. “There’s that old confidence in me.”
I took my time preparing. Once my face was painted, I stood and did my warm-ups—voice runs, leg stretches, and breathing patterns lying on my back in the middle of the floor.
I stared at the ceiling. I could do this. The dress rehearsal had been rocky. Tonight would be great.
I sat up, stepped into my costume for the first act, and primped at my hair. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked exactly like her, as well as I could recall from her visits.
In the wings, I sought the dresser on stage left and peered out at the audience through the edge of the curtain as she cinched up the back of my dress. I found Wesley in the front row with the rest of his bouquet across his knees, sitting beside a new man he’d been seeing lately. He was a poet called Victor who fancied himself somewhat of a modern Oscar Wilde—scintillating, challenging, but not technically dangerous. They flirted privately with each other as they perused the Playbill, Wesley’s elbow brushing Victor’s every time he leaned over to point someone out in the cast notes.
The lights in the house went low. The murmur of the audience quieting settled in like a thick wool blanket. I shut my eyes and took a deep, stilling breath.
A gift.
The performance was unparalleled. Being back in front of an audience was like arriving home at dawn after a very long night spent wandering in the dark.
At curtain call, Wesley leapt to his feet and began flinging the bouquet at me one by one—rosemary, pansies, fennel fronds, more columbines, and fistfuls of daisies: every flower from Ophelia’s armful in the play. I caught them as best I could, my eyes blurring with happy tears as the flowers pelted me.
“Bravo, Jack!” he shouted. Victor joined him, throwing flowers and leading the cheer. “Bravo!”
I took another bow. More of the house joined the cheer over their applause, swelling with praise.
I was Ophelia, I was Jack, I was Margot, I was Margaret, I was Margie; I was meant to be nowhere but here—all of me at once, seated firmly at the helm.
The next morning, I met Wesley for a late lunch in the park. He brought a paper sack of sandwiches, last night’s suit impressively unrumpled from a stay at Victor’s place after we’d wrung ourselves out at the third after-party.
I’d grabbed a newspaper as I crossed Sixth on the way here for the express purpose of flipping directly to the Arts and Culture section—we had four inches of a very nice review, and I shoved it triumphantly into Wesley’s hand as he passed me my sandwich.
“ ‘…and the return of Margaret Wolf is not to be missed,’ ” Wesley read aloud, his eyebrows up with pleased surprise. “ ‘Her Ophelia frets and yearns and dissolves with all the proper anguish. The arresting chemistry she brews even without her usual foil is well worth the price of entry.’ Well, look at you.”
Wesley swatted my knee fondly with the rolled-up paper and tucked into his own sandwich. We ate in companionable silence as the trees winnowed on a breeze, dappling the light streaming down over our bench.
“Is it strange to you from here?” Wesley asked.
“Is what, a good review?”
“Opening something.” Wesley thumbed a fleck of mustard from the corner of his mouth. “Particularly as Ophelia, after…all of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“She drowns herself,” Wesley deadpanned.
“It’s different now.”
“Is it?”
I let him sit with that for a moment as I neatened my lipstick with the crumpled edge of a paper napkin.
“Is it weird to see me up there without you?” I asked, examining the bread for the next ideal bite.
When he was silent, I turned to look at him. I could tell something was making him itch. Wesley caught me watching and shrugged. “It’s alright. Really. It only feels sometimes like I’m still waiting for another shoe to drop,” he said gently.
“That will pass.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I keep meaning it.”
I balled up the wax paper and crusts into the paper bag and passed it to Wesley to toss into the trash can on his side of the bench.
He put an arm around me and his gaze skated over the milling strangers, the valiant leaves browned and still clinging to their branches.
“How’s Victor?” I asked. I leaned to lay my head sideways against his shoulder.
“Perfectly lovely. He’s all the right things at once.”
Across the pathway at the edge of the pond, there was a family with a baby carriage and a little girl in a bright pink jacket who couldn’t have been older than four. She had floated a plastic boat into the water and was reaching for it, her stubby fingers out wide with the unfounded confidence of a child’s unflappable curiosity.
Her foot slipped. She overbalanced, pitching toward the pond, but a man who looked like her father was quick to react and snagged her swiftly by the back of her collar before she could go in. He reached forward to rescue her boat in the same gesture. Wagging the water from it, the man deposited her back on her feet without skipping a beat of conversation with the girl’s mother.
The little girl clutched the boat to her chest and stared at the pond, her eyes wide as saucers. For a moment, it looked as though she was going to burst into tears—but instead she broke into a cherub-cheeked, dimpled grin and dissolved into a fit of hysterical giggles at her own fear.
Good kid.
We remained in the park, sitting and ambling and running into a few friends, until the cold grew a few too many legs around us. On the way back home, we stopped into the grocer and split as usual—Wesley to the produce aisles and me to the deli counter—and met back up on the corner of Hudson outside the exit. We walked home with Wesley between me and the road. He juggled the door open for me on the way back up to the apartment.
“Did you see Ezra laying into Richard’s new assistant?” Wesley muttered, raising a hand hello to the porter as he let me board the elevator first.
“They’ll be all tied up in each other in under a month,” I said. Wesley’s attempt to swallow his chuckle failed miserably.
The lift stopped on the fifth floor. Wesley stood aside to let me out ahead of him, and then hoisted my bag onto his arm so I could dig into my purse for our key.
Through the west-facing window, a long shaft of light fell into the apartment. In the mirror on the wall across from the door, I watched us shed our coats and hats and shoes, shucked into the privacy of the life we insisted on sharing for the rest of our days.
“Do you want a double?” I asked over my shoulder, on the way to the bar cart.
“Use the last of that old port, would you?” Wesley called as he unpacked the groceries at the counter.
I uncorked the bottle and poured for us both.