AFTER ACCEPTING BILL Pomeroy’s invitation and agreeing to attend the next day’s rehearsal, I collapsed to the floor of the Fox Hill costume room, staring at Teel in amazement. The genie merely nodded in smug satisfaction; apparently, he was accustomed to the adoration of wishers like myself.
“Can I see that?” he said, gesturing toward my cell phone, which I passed to him numbly.
He started punching buttons at random. I vaguely wondered if my package included calls abroad, because Teel was certainly going to connect with someone if he kept up his nonscientific exploration of the phone. I could hardly tell him to stop, though. Not when he had just granted my first wish. Not when I owed him my greatest professional success to date. Not when I—I!—was going to stage-manage Landmark Stage’s next production. What were a few bucks spent on a call to Ulan Bator, in exchange for guaranteed career advancement?
I hadn’t read Romeo and Juliet since high school, but that was okay. I could skim through it that night—there had to be a copy somewhere in the apartment that I shared with two other theaterphiles. Besides, I’d get to know the play by heart in the days and weeks to come.
Three months till opening night. That made it an April opening. April—a time when a lot of theaters do “hard” plays, thought pieces, demanding productions to make up for the froth of A Christmas Carol and other holiday fare.
I swallowed hard. We could do it. Three months was a century, in theater time. Or so I tried to convince myself.
Teel looked up from the phone. I could hear the double ring that meant he actually had managed to punch in an overseas number. “Ready for your second wish?”
Second wish? Now? I could barely process that my first had been granted.
“Sain by noo?” came a voice from my phone. After a pause, it repeated, “Sain by noo?”
“Give me that!” I said to Teel, snatching back the electronic device. I snapped the phone closed, cutting off my dear correspondent from Outer Mongolia, or wherever Teel had actually managed to reach. I gave the genie a dirty look, but he only shrugged, as if people grabbed cell phones from him every day.
“Your second wish?” he repeated, glancing at his flaming wristband the way a normal person would glance at a watch.
“Do I have to make the decision now?” Two wishes left. That suddenly seemed like such a small number. Such a forlorn possibility. Especially when I saw how easy “one” had been.
Teel sighed. “No. You can wait.”
I glanced at the brass lamp. “So do you go back in there, while I’m trying to decide?”
He shook his head vigorously. “Absolutely not. I get to roam free while you make up your mind.”
That didn’t sound like such a good idea. I tried to remember my elementary school afternoons spent eating junk food in front of the TV, watching syndicated reruns. On I Dream of Jeannie, things always went wrong when Jeannie was allowed out of her bottle. Of course, she referred to the guy who released her as “Master.” I didn’t see Teel becoming that submissive anytime in the near future. (Read: I couldn’t imagine Teel ever bending to my will.)
But could I be certain that he was telling me the truth? What if he disappeared without granting me the rest of my wishes?
Then again, was I really any worse off, with only one wish awarded, than I had been when I woke up this morning? I tried to erase the suspicious tone from my voice. “So how do I get you back, when I’m ready to make my next wish?”
He nodded toward my right hand. “Just press the flames together, speak my name, and I’m bound to come to you.”
The flames?
I looked at my fingertips for the first time since Teel had poured out of the lamp, the same fingertips that had jangled with sparky energy when he’d worked his magic in front of me. If I angled them just so, I could discern vague outlines across the whorls of my fingerprints—flames that seemed to be tattooed in transparent ink. My right thumb and each finger on that hand were marked.
I pressed my thumb and index fingers together and squeezed. “Teel,” I said loudly.
“Ow!” He gave me an annoyed glare. “I’m right here!” He raised his own fingers to massage his temples and said crossly, “Do you want to make another wish now, or not?”
“Not yet,” I said meekly, staring at my hand in amazement. I couldn’t keep from asking the first question that popped into my head. “Why do you care, anyway? I mean, isn’t it better to be out of the lamp than locked up inside there?”
He scowled at me and drew himself up straighter. “Of course it’s better to be outside. But we genies have certain standards. The Registry keeps statistics on every wisher we assist.”
“The Registry?”
He rolled his eyes. “The administrators who keep track of all us genies. The ones who decide who gets to be advanced.” I must have looked as confused as I felt, because he sighed and started over. “Each genie is obligated to grant wishes. If we take too long to grant them, we get shoved into one of the backwaters.”
“Backwaters? Like what? Like Minneapolis?”
“Like Regrekistan.”
“Regrekistan? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Exactly.”
Well, how I was I supposed to argue with that? Instead, I tried to trace his scattered logic through to its most likely end point. “And if you grant your wishes quickly, where do you get assigned?”
“It’s not so much the assignment—most of us stay in the States, or Europe. Or China—there’s a long tradition of wish-granting there. What we’re hoping for, what we’re all hoping for, is time in the Garden.”
His voice changed as he said the last word. The disco playboy disappeared completely. The impatient taskmaster fled. The exasperated worker who struggled to keep both of us on task utterly vanished. Instead, Teel sounded wistful, longing. His face relaxed, as if he were sleeping.
I almost hesitated to repeat, “The Garden?”
“It’s beautiful there.” He sounded like a man talking about his first kiss. “The Garden nurtures our spirits, our…souls. We genies become one with the natural world, the world we are otherwise forced to manipulate, to change. The Garden is the only place where we’re truly at peace. The oldest genies, the ones who have granted hundreds of thousands of wishes, are allowed to stay forever. Not just visit. Not just linger for a day, a week, a month. A year…”
Hearing his voice trail off in wistful memory, I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Part of me felt like I should hurry up and make my last two wishes—who was I to deny bliss to a genie? But part of me wanted to hold on to my treasures, wanted to take time to think things through.
The momentary spell passed as quickly as it had descended. Teel appraised me shrewdly as he urged, “I don’t suppose you’re ready yet?”
I shook my head.
“Then I’m going to spend my time learning what wonders there are in⎯” he pursed his lips into a scornful pout “⎯Minneapolis. As soon as you decide—”
“I’ll…” I touched my fingers together but refrained from adding pressure. Before I could say anything else, my genie turned on his Converse-clad heels and glided out of the Fox Hill Dinner Theater.
I wanted to call out to him. I wanted to tell him to be careful, to remember that things had changed in the intervening decades since he’d last been out in the world. I wanted to tell him to put on a coat; the January evening would be cold. I wanted to tell him to walk past the Fox Hill Cinema without even glancing at the movie posters for Joe White and the Seven Whores.
But he was gone before I could say a word.
* * *
The next morning, I stopped at Club Joe for a cup of coffee to fortify myself before heading in to my first rehearsal at the Landmark. The guy behind the counter looked at me strangely when I asked him to add four shots of espresso to my latte, but he finally shrugged, chewed on his lip ring, and complied. The first sip of the drink hit my bloodstream like gasoline sprayed on a fire.
I tried to convince myself that my pounding heart was just a product of overpriced coffee. I knew, though, that it was really about working at the Landmark, working with some of the Twin Cities theater community’s leading lights.
Teel and his wishes and my sudden professional elevation still seemed completely unreal. I hadn’t even had a chance to share my news with Maddy and Jules yet; they had both spent the night with their respective beaux. Ordinarily, I was thrilled to have the apartment to myself, but I had spent most of last night fighting the urge to phone them both, to demand that they come home to keep me company (and to verify that I hadn’t lost my mind).
Now, hovering outside the rehearsal room at the Landmark, I was as nervous as a kindergartener on the first day of school.
The Landmark had launched after a massive capital campaign, and they’d used their millions to build a state-of-the-art rehearsal facility on the ground floor of their theater space. The idea was to make theatergoing transparent to the audience, to let people buying tickets at the box office peer through glass walls at actors creating the very plays they would later see on stage. Patrons would be so impressed by the hardworking actors, the theory went, that they would gladly shell out more for tickets. And invite their friends. And their relatives. And every other person they knew in the Twin Cities.
I couldn’t say whether the notion had resulted in additional ticket sales, but I knew that the open rehearsal room impressed me. The walls were clear, shimmering planes of glass, which made me wonder who had to clean them. They were fitted with Venetian blinds, to hide the actors when they worked on sensitive scenes. Now, though, everything was open, inviting. The huge space was filled with the best and the brightest actors around.
I’d come a long way from Fox Hill. Or maybe my sense of awe was just inspired by the fact that I hadn’t needed to hurry past a bunch of porno patrons to get in the building’s front door.
Two dozen chairs had been placed in a neat circle. Looking at them, I felt a pang of guilt—setup was my responsibility. Would be my responsibility, I nodded to myself, as soon as I had a key to the theater and an understanding of the director’s expectations.
As suddenly shy as a wallflower at homecoming, I tried to convince my legs to carry me out of the shadows and into the brightly lit rehearsal room. I clutched my cup of coffee in a suddenly sweaty palm, as if it were a lifesaver thrown to me from the deck of some passing ship.
I stared at the actors and wondered if my first wish had been sheer, unadulterated stupidity.
There was Jennifer Galland, winner of three Ivey Awards (our local equivalent of the Oscars). The last time I’d seen her on stage, she had been dressed in a stunningly beautiful Edwardian gown, performing—alas—in a deeply flawed production of The Importance of Being Earnest. (She’d had an ideal sense of comic timing, but everyone else in the show had worked under the mistaken belief that Wilde had written a tragedy. Of epic proportions. And even more epic length—the show had run nearly four hours.)
Now Jennifer was wearing a pair of the rattiest blue jeans I’d ever seen outside of my own apartment. Her plain white T-shirt looked like a refugee from a bargain bin. Her honey-colored mane was pulled back in a bouncing ponytail, and she seemed to have forsworn all makeup. Nevertheless, she was stunning, gorgeous in a way that poets describe as dewy, and teenage boys record as “totally hawt.” She was solid Juliet material, or I was no judge of casting.
I sighed and glanced around the room, daring myself to count the number of men whose tongues were lolling about their ankles. That was one thing about working on a Shakespeare play—the casts were hugely weighted toward males. I’d worked on one production of Julius Caesar in college where the men’s dressing room became so overcrowded that they’d taken over the women’s, forcing poor Calpurnia and Portia into a broom closet.
Counting up Jennifer’s admirers, I received my first shock of the day.
There were at least a dozen women in the room. Many more women than men. For a Shakespeare play. For Romeo and Juliet.
I skipped through the roles in my mind. Juliet. Her nurse. Lady Montague. Lady Capulet. That made for one nubile romantic lead and three dried-up husks.
Even if every designer on the show was female, there were still too many women in the room. And the designers weren’t all female. I recognized David Barstow, a lighting designer who had beaten Maddy out of at least three dearly desired jobs in as many years. He was talking to Alex Munoz, a successful local sound designer. Bill Pomeroy—the director who had made my wish come true—crouched beside him, nodding as Alex pointed out something on a sheet of scratch paper.
No, the designers were certainly not all women.
What was going on here? Was this some elaborate joke? Had Teel somehow corrupted my wish, brought Bill Pomeroy into the loop, only to embarrass me and tell me that my dream job was not actually going to happen? Was I doomed to return to Fox Hill, with everyone laughing at my idiotic self-deception, everyone in on the joke except for me?
But how could Teel have managed that? How could he have known what I would ask for before I did? How could he have worked things out with Bill in such a short time and made my cell phone ring—especially when he’d quite obviously never seen a cell phone before I’d freed him from his lantern?
Who was I fooling? If I was willing to accept a genie who could grant wishes, I had to be willing to accept a genie with a wicked sense of humor. Didn’t I?
Call me an idiot, but I took a deep breath and walked into the rehearsal room.
Bill looked up as I crossed the threshold, and a huge smile broke across his face—the smile of a grateful man, a relieved man. Not a man who had just pulled off the cruelest joke in the history of Twin Cities theater.
“Kira!” he said, and his exclamation sifted silence over the rest of the room. “Our savior! I’m thrilled that you could join us on such short notice!”
He walked across the room and offered his hand, along with a smile that was as bright as the light reflecting off his shaved skull. He wore a tight black turtleneck tucked into black denim jeans; his outfit looked like a crisper, cleaner, much more tailored version of mine. Fine lines spidered beside his eyes, a crinkling maze that reminded me just how long he’d been a theatrical god in Minneapolis, well before he’d landed this plum job at the Landmark.
Still holding my hand, Bill said earnestly, “Maria was so relieved to hear that you accepted our offer. Her mother was discharged from intensive care this morning and she should make a one-hundred-percent recovery. Maria asked me to tell you, explicitly, that she feels so much better knowing that you’ve stepped in to take care of things here.”
Maria. That must be the stage manager I’d displaced. I’d never met her before—didn’t even know her last name. I suspected that Teel’s magic had eased Maria’s concern by giving her a false memory of my work. What crisis, though, had sent Maria’s mother to the ICU? I fervently hoped it was something wholly unrelated to my wish, something completely independent from Teel’s magic.
That had to be the case, right? Maria’s mother had to be in the hospital before I made my wish, before Bill called to offer me the job. Teel might have harnessed another person’s misfortune, but I couldn’t be responsible for actually making a woman ill. Could I?
I glanced uneasily at my faintly tattooed fingertips. Before I could say anything, though, Bill gestured toward the circle of chairs. He shot his sleeve and tapped his wrist at the spot where most people wore a watch. He had none, but he conveyed a sense of time-driven urgency with the gesture. “Come on, everyone. Let’s get started.” He nodded toward the seat beside him, and I took it, figuring that I could best assist him if I were by his side, even if I had no idea of his agenda for the day’s meeting. I gulped another swallow of coffee and braced myself for whatever was to come.
Everyone grabbed a chair, scooting the careful circle into a more comfortable, random shape. Water bottles joined coffee cups on the floor, and a couple of people shrugged out of sweaters. Bill added to the aura of casual ease, starting by having everyone go around the circle and give their names. I was grateful that he didn’t have us say anything else—our favorite movie, our favorite drink, our preferred sexual position.
Yeah. I’d had directors foist some really strange icebreakers on a group, all in the name of smothering first-day jitters.
I wished, though, that Bill had asked people to state their role in the production. I wanted to know why there were so many women present, so many more than I had ever expected for a classical show. With a chill, I thought of a production of Twelfth Night that I’d seen in college, where “the melancholy Jacques” had been played by seven actors. They had chanted in unison, like a traditional Greek chorus, creating a perfect hash out of the Bard’s famous Seven Ages of Man speech. Oh, you know it. It’s the one that starts, “All the world’s a stage…” It doesn’t gain anything by being recited by seven people at once. Trust me.
I swallowed hard and ordered myself to pay attention as Bill started to speak.
“Thank you, all, for joining us today. You are some of the bravest actors and designers I know. Some of the most courageous stars of the Twin Cities, who will be remembered for this production for years to come.”
Courageous.
What required courage? I had to admit, I wasn’t very brave. I was a stage manager, and a damned good one, but I would never be described as…
Boldly, Bill Pomeroy went on. Intrepid. Daring. Gutsy. Venturesome.
Venturesome? The guy was a regular thesaurus, his words tumbling over one another as he exhorted his cast.
I glanced at the glass walls of the practice room, at the Venetian blinds. Was Bill planning a Romeo and Juliet in the nude? Was I about to discover that my days next to the Fox Hill skin flicks were actually the best possible training for my new gig?
I swallowed hard. Why hadn’t I asked more questions? Why hadn’t I hesitated before accepting my first wish on a platter?
I could not keep my eyes from Jennifer Galland. She was staring at Bill eagerly—some might say ardently. I could see her breathing, and I was suddenly uncomfortably aware that the adjective “perky” would probably be featured in any accurate description of her anatomy. I stared down at my own sorry, sweatshirt-clad body and hoped that the rest of us would not be expected to join in the courageous display of bared flesh.
Just as I started to worry about wasting my second Teel-wish getting out of this production, I forced myself to tune back in to Bill’s speech. “Romeo and Juliet has become one of the touchstones of our popular culture. Ask any educated person, and they know the phrase ‘star-crossed lover.’ They know that ‘a rose by another name would smell as sweet.’ They know ‘what light through yonder window breaks.’ Our goal—our mission—is to get people to think about this play in ways they never have before. We will get people to hear the words, to see the action with totally new ears, completely opened eyes.”
The actors were eating this stuff up. They leaned forward on their chairs. Their eyes glinted. They licked their lips, ravenous cats ready to pounce on a prize.
Bill sat back, smiling benevolently as he held out his hands to the room. “But you don’t have to trust me. You don’t have to take my word for it. Let’s read through a quick scene, just so that you can hear the difference our production will make.”
The actors all reached into their bags, digging around to extract their copies of the script. As if reading my mind, Bill passed a copy of the play to me. There were thousands of editions of Romeo and Juliet, of course, with different footnotes and annotations. We would all work from the same version, so that we could more readily find our lines, more easily follow every action on and off the stage.
I took my copy gratefully. Once I got home, I would create my stage manager’s notebook, cutting apart the binding and taping individual pages to blank sheets of paper. With the added margins, I could add copious notes, record the blocking, write in light cues and sound cues, keep track of all the details a stage manager needed to control behind the scene.
For now, though, I followed Bill’s excited instruction to turn to act II, scene 2. “You all know this passage. You’ve known it for years. Listen, though, as we challenge society’s most basic expectations. Jennifer? Drew?”
Jennifer cleared her throat and tossed her ponytail, as if she were impersonating a bobbysoxer at a Frank Sinatra concert. She held her script with her left hand, using the fingers of her right to trace beneath words. When she spoke, her voice was high and light, like Marilyn Monroe giving her most airheaded line reading ever. “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”
I knew the line. As Bill said, we all knew the line. I could picture Juliet standing on her balcony, staring out at the nighttime stars, thinking about the guy she’d just met, the love of her life, the boy—man—she was willing to risk everything for, abandoning her family, her nurse, everything she had ever known and loved and respected.
Except, Jennifer was reading Romeo’s lines.
She completed the monologue, delivering every familiar phrase with the same whispery, ultrafeminine pout. And then, a male voice chimed in from right beside me: “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?”
I started to laugh.
Obviously, this was a game that the company had worked out before I arrived. This was a joke, a hazing for the new kid. They were getting back at me for having missed casting calls, for having joined the production just in the nick of time.
Except I was the only one laughing.
I felt the weight of two dozen stares like a physical thing. Jennifer’s perfect features arrayed themselves in a frown. The man who had responded to her delivery, Drew Myers, who had read Juliet’s lines, looked like I had tripped him while he was carrying a ten-course meal into a dining room. He was startled, and angry, and a little bit embarrassed.
Bill’s paternal voice was gentle. “Exactly,” he said, as if someone had finished arguing some point with the eloquence of a Harvard debater. “Let’s step back and take a look at what happened here. Jennifer, how did it feel to deliver Romeo’s lines?”
Jennifer glanced at me, then looked at the script in front of her. She stared up at the ceiling, as if she could read a response there. “It felt…” Her voice was her own again, husky, seductive in a way that her little-girl whisper could never be. She licked her lips, tossed that ponytail. I was really starting to hate that ponytail. “It felt liberating,” she said at last. “It felt like I was shrugging off centuries of expectation. Of belief. I was able to break out of what everyone thought I should do, thought I should be. I felt free.”
“Excellent!” Bill beamed. “And Drew? How did it feel to deliver your lines?”
As Drew swallowed and shook his head, I had a chance to sneak my first good look at the actor. I knew him by reputation. We’d never worked on a show together, but according to the well-greased wheels of Twin Cities gossip, half the actresses in Minneapolis had fallen for his California-surfer-boy good looks. His broad shoulders filled his often-washed cotton shirt; he wore khakis with a casual ease that let me know he was comfortable with himself, with his place in the world. While formulating a response to Bill’s question, he set his script down across his knee, freeing his hands to flex, as if he were trying to rein in all the mysteries of the world.
If Drew had responded to the proverbial “call to central casting,” he’d report for duty as Leading Man. His hair was tousled, as if he hadn’t taken the time to comb it when he’d tumbled out of bed that morning. (I sternly pulled my thoughts away from an image of him in bed.) Streaks of gold glinted through rich dark blond; if he’d been a woman, I’d have known that he paid handsomely for the highlights. (Since he was an actor, he might have paid, as well, but chances were he was just damn lucky. Besides, I didn’t detect the brassy perfection of even an expert hairdresser’s touch.)
Drew’s eyes were a deep brown, so dark that they were almost black. As he blinked, though, I could just make out sparkles of green, adding depth, complexity. His bone structure was amazing—hey, theater people are taught to analyze things like that, with complete and utter dispassion! His cheekbones were strong, and he had just a hint of a cleft in his chin.
I was half in love—and totally in lust—before I heard him reply to Bill’s question. The strangled crush of my heart against my ribs was only heightened by the adorable shrug he made as he laughed in rueful embarrassment.
“It was a total mind-trip, dude. It was like Juliet was totally hawt for Romeo. You know, first love.”
Okay. So Drew wasn’t going to win any elocution contest. But I was more than willing to help him remember the heat of first love.
Bill jumped to his feet, almost turning over his chair. “Exactly!” Drew’s answer apparently gave our director so much energy that he had to pace behind us. I half turned in my seat, so that I could follow him as he gesticulated. “Reversing our gender roles makes us think about the meaning of everything we say, everything we do. It makes us listen to our old assumptions with new ears. It makes us ask ourselves whether we really mean all those things that we’ve always said, whether we truly believe all those thoughts that have been pounded into us since we were children.”
He waved a frenetic hand toward Drew. “Does it have to be the woman who stands on the balcony, waiting for her love to arrive?” He pounced toward Jennifer. “Does it have to be the man who finds the first courage to speak?” And then, he rounded on me. “What social strictures bind us? Why do we react the way we do?”
I quaked a smile, which felt like the tight-jawed grin of a skull.
Bill waited. And waited some more. “Seriously, Kira,” he said at last. “Why do we react the way we do?”
Well, I supposed I should be grateful that I was being included in the discussion. I should appreciate being brought into the fold right away, from the very beginning. If only the fold weren’t quite such a freakishly bizarre place.
Bill spread his hands in appeal. “Why did you laugh, Kira?”
“I—” I cleared my throat. “I laughed because they took me by surprise. I laughed because I wasn’t expecting to hear those words said by those people. I associate the lines with a certain type of behavior, a certain attitude.”
Bill nodded gravely, and the entire cast mimicked him, like the audience on Oprah’s show. Any minute now, he was going to invite me to share my story, to bring in Dr. Phil for a consult. “Go on,” he said, and I realized I still wasn’t off the hook.
“I laughed because I was uncomfortable,” I said. Even if I hadn’t been uncomfortable then, I was now. That should count for something.
“Yes!” Bill said, and suddenly he’d gone from Oprah to preacher. The cast caught their collective breath, clearly enchanted by Bill’s power, taken in by his aura. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d broken out in song, perfect pitch, one and all. Or maybe that was just my background, coming to the Landmark from so many years in musical dinner theater.
At least I knew what I was supposed to say now. I knew exactly how I was supposed to react. “Society has led me to respond to romance in certain ways, to react to love stories with certain expectations.”
“Precisely!” Bill exclaimed, and the cast nodded its frantic approval. “Kira, here, is saying exactly what we expect our audience will say. She is the voice of the people. Vox populi.”
Really? Me? I was all that? I suddenly found the cover of my script fascinating. (Read: I became excruciatingly aware of everyone studying me like I was some exhibit in a zoo.)
Bill went on expansively. “In the next three months, we’re going to study Kira’s reaction. We’re going to focus on what we know, what we believe, and where there are gaps between those two. We’re going to examine why our society does the things that it does, what we can change, how we can make things different. And along the way, we’re going to change the way that the Landmark, the way that the Twin Cities, the way that the United States of America thinks about art!”
The cast applauded.
They actually applauded, as if they were at a play themselves. For just a moment, I thought that Bill might even garner a standing ovation.
What had I gotten myself into? Were these folks stark raving mad?
Or was this what the real theater world was all about? Was this what artists were really doing, instead of rehashing old musicals while their audience tried to sneak second helpings of dessert from the buffet?
I’d asked for change, and I’d certainly gotten it.
Bill made a few more points. He talked about production design, and how he wanted the play to appear, visually. He explained that in the same way that we were exploring the reversal of genders, we were going to explore the reversal of classes. Our Romeo and Juliet were not going to live in palaces. They were going to live in sewers beneath the Verona streets. They weren’t going to dress in silk and velvet; instead, they’d cover themselves with whatever rags they could salvage from the rotting landfills around them. They weren’t going to duel honorably, with swords flashing in a public square. No, they would fight their battles with nunchucks, tossing in a kick or two to the groin.
We were going to stage a Romeo and Juliet like no other. Of that I could be sure.
Bill wrapped up by announcing a full read-through the following morning. The actors eagerly gathered their belongings, chatting animatedly as they headed out the door in groups of two and three. I glanced around the now-ragged circle of chairs, grimly amused to see that even gender-bending revolutionaries neglected to throw away their own empty water bottles and coffee cups. I shrugged and stacked the chairs into four piles, easing their metal legs together, one on top of the other. Then I started to collect the debris. Some stage manager tasks were always the same, no matter how adventuresome the company.
As I was scooping up the last cup, I heard Bill’s voice from behind me. “Kira, I want you to meet our set designer, John McRae.”
I straightened up to find the Marlboro Man staring at me. He was tall, but a bit slouch-shouldered. His hair was a little too long, as if he hadn’t made time to visit a barber for several weeks. It was wavy and black, with a sprinkling of gray around his temples. This guy had spent more time in the sun than dermatologists currently recommended; he had gentle crow’s feet by his eyes. His mouth was set in an easy smile, but it was half obscured by a mustache—a look that had gone out about twenty years before but somehow seemed to suit him.
Maybe it was the plaid shirt he wore, and the well-worn jeans. Or the toes of his boots, scuffed and comfortable. But I could totally picture him swinging up into a saddle, clicking his tongue in a near-silent message to his horse, riding off into the sunset.
I automatically extended my hand to complete Bill’s introduction, only to realize that I was still holding the lipstick-printed dregs of some actor’s latte. I would have shifted the cup to my other hand, but those fingers were already splayed around a trio of Red Bull cans. At least one of our cast members was prepared to match me, milligram for milligram, in caffeine consumption.
John reached out and took the paper cup in his left hand, offering me his right to shake. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, and I was pretty sure that he was smothering a laugh at my expense. What the hell. I’d been ready to laugh at our entire production.
Bill glanced toward the door and saw that his lighting designer was about to leave. “Dave!” he called out. “Wait up! I want to talk to you about just how dark we can make the fight scenes.
As he hurried away, I turned back to John. “Sounds pretty grim,” I said.
“Sounds pretty something,” he said. I caught the hint of a drawl, hiding beneath his wavy hair and warm brown eyes.
“You aren’t from around here, are you?” I asked, almost kicking myself when the question came out sounding like something from Gunsmoke. Or Bonanza. Or any of the other ancient westerns that haunted late-night TV.
He shook his head. “I moved up from Dallas about six months ago.”
“At least you got to enjoy our summer.”
He grinned. “I can barely remember it now.”
“It’ll get colder before spring. And we’ll have a lot more snow.” I watched Bill walk Dave Barstow out to the front door of the theater. I figured I could venture a question or two. “So, did you know about this whole gender-switch thing when you signed on?”
“Pomeroy and his ‘concepts.’” John shrugged. “I’ve worked with him on a half-dozen shows over the years. He starts out with big ideas, and grows them bigger.”
“I’m not quite sure where else this one can go.”
“Just you wait,” he said with an easy smile. “If Bill says he wants sewers, you can be sure they’ll be the nastiest, slimiest ones you’ve ever seen.”
“Great,” I said, trying to chase a note of doubt out of my voice. “I’ve always heard that he’s thorough. At least we don’t have a smell designer on staff.”
“Don’t put it past him to add something like that before we’re done.”
“Scratch and sniff in the programs?”
“Maybe more like those fancy perfume ads in magazines.” He shrugged. “The audience can rip open Eau de Sewer when they read about the cast. Catch ’em by surprise.”
Surprise. I’d said I wanted a change. I’d said I wanted to do more than I had at Fox Hill. I’d said I was up for the challenge. “I can’t wait.” Success—I’d hit the right note. At least John laughed with me.
He glanced at the oversize clock on the wall. “I’ve got to swing by the lumberyard this afternoon, but a bunch of us are grabbing dinner at Mephisto’s tonight. You up for it? Around six?”
Mephisto’s.
The restaurant was a couple of blocks away, conveniently located near half a dozen of the small theaters in downtown Minneapolis. It was actually called Mike’s Bar and Grill, but all the theater crowd called it Mephisto’s, because Mike looked like the devil, and his burgers were enough to lead anyone down the path to Hell.
I loved Mike, and I adored his food, but I hadn’t set foot in Mephisto’s for over a year. The place was one of TEWSBU’s favorite hangouts. By unspoken arrangement, he’d gotten it in our…divorce. After our non-wedding, I’d had no desire to hang out in the familiar restaurant, to chance running into him. My belly flipped at the idea of going there even now.
Besides, I should head home to prepare my script. I should do some research on past productions of Romeo and Juliet, on other directors’ attempts to turn the story on its head. I should do some laundry and wash my hair and iron my sheets into flawless perfection.
But John was offering me a way to meet my new theatrical family. He was opening the door for me to join the cast, to move forward with the camaraderie that they’d clearly already begun building through auditions.
Besides, Mike’s burgers were really, really good.
I stooped to pick up one last wayward water bottle and was a little unnerved to find John looking at me when I straightened. His expression was relaxed, patient. His weight was distributed evenly on his feet, as if he could wait all day for me to make up my mind. Without saying a word, the man projected calm steadiness, the exact opposite of the tempestuous TEWSBU. “I’d love to join you,” I said before I was even sure that I’d made up my mind.
“Great,” John said, with another easy grin. “I’ll see you there at six. Have a great afternoon.”
I waited until he’d left before I dug my phone out of my backpack. Glancing around the room and shaking my head about the strange rehearsal I’d just witnessed, I auto-dialed my father. I nearly dropped the phone in surprise when he answered the line directly; I always got his secretary.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, recovering quickly. “I’m finishing up here at the theater. Can I swing by in half an hour?”
I was already turning off the lights in the rehearsal room when he said yes.