“Amy darling, it’s me, Mom. Ermm. Are you there? No? Well, it’s just that I’ve got these tickets, well, actually Daddy got them, only he’s … well, he can’t come. So we thought maybe, if you’re not busy, perhaps you’d like to go … with me … oh, darling, there’s a strange bleep, does that mean I’ve run out of time? Well, maybe I’ll phone you later, lots of love, darling. Bye.”
Thus it was that Amy’s mother, in a roundabout mother-not-quite-getting-to-grips-with-this-answerphone-lark way, invited her to the theater on Thursday night. Now the laws of stage and screen dictate that one can’t be both onstage and on set at the same time. But Amy’s world and the excuse of a charity event attended by Fergie dictated otherwise, so for the gala performance of Henry IV, Part I with Orlando Rock as Hotspur, Amy and her mother had seats in the stalls.
Amy is a bright girl, and she knows in a vague way that the stalls are not really visible from the stage, but she’s also an optimist, so she left work at three o’clock on Thursday afternoon to indulge her optimism fetish. She exfoliated and lathered, waxed and waned, creamed and preened an excessive amount. She put her makeup on in the nude (very important for that oh-so-sexy frisson in one’s gait) and combed her hair with the loving strokes of a seven-year-old grooming her pony. She slipped into her exactly-the-green-of-her-eyes silk shirt and her oldies-but-goodies trousers. Veeerryy nice, she thought as she assessed her appeal. Not a hint of the lesbian, just lots of lipstick.
She stood in the foyer beside the rows of jelly babies and Kit Kats, looking ravishing among the red velvet and living in a little daydream of being Orlando’s lover. She looked alluring, and the second someone caught her eye she shyly and conspiratorially lowered her head, convincing them that, yes, she was the great woman behind the great man, but let’s just keep that between you and me, Mr. Theater-goer, don’t want the press crawling all over the place, do we? Don’t want to upstage the tiaraed one in the stalls. Her status as the new woman in his life was a fact she was sure she had convinced everyone in the crowded foyer of until her mother rushed in. Her raincoat sodden, panting and delving into her abyss of a handbag for the tickets, her mother cried, “Darling Amy, I barely recognized you. You look lovely,” to the assembled theater-goers, a few of whom turned to witness the transformation.
“Thanks, Mom, do I usually look so awful?” Amy mumbled, her chin buried in her chest.
“Now don’t be so sensitive, I just said you looked very nice. Now where are those tickets?” She foraged some more, a truffle pig let loose in the foyer.
They sat back in their seats as the pprrrinngg of the bell sounded in the theater. Amy’s stomach lurched with churning motions usually reserved for first dates and job interviews. She practiced different poses: coy, ebullient, nervous (a theater wife should always have sympathetic stage fright for the one she loves), tragic (it was Henry IV and Hotspur’s death was imminent). As she and her mother flicked through the programs she, ever so casually, let slip that she’d in fact had tea with the phenomenally famous Orlando Rock on Sunday (just enough volume to impress the neighbors), but her mother wasn’t deeply thrilled.
“And what were his parents thinking of, do you think? Sheer cruelty to give a child such a ridiculous name. Was he nice, dear?”
Amy gave up but felt suitably elevated in her neighbors’ esteem so resumed her careful countenance. You never know, he just might look up during a soliloquy and see me.
His performance was impeccable, and the actress playing his wife was attractive in a Royal-Shakespeare-Company-actress-type way but really nothing to write home about, and certainly not someone you’d invite to share champagne in your dressing room afterward, she reassured herself. When the time came for Hotspur to oh-so-heroically die she was barely consolable.
“ ‘Food for worms … etc.… Fare thee well, great heart.’ ” Dies. She could hardly bear it. God, she fancied him in his thigh-high boots and poniard thrusting in a Shakespearean fashion. Pure animal sex in chain mail.
In her mind she was whisked onto the stage at the end and kissed and thanked: “I couldn’t have done it without the love of this wonderful woman,” crooned Orlando, his poniard pressing against her thigh. The audience cheered as she wowed them all in her imaginary diaphanous Ophelia dress, as light and pale as baby’s breath. And then on to the Oscars and a whistle-stop charity tour of the Czech Republic. Amy handing tickets to culturally starved theater-goers at the door, Orlando pacing the stage with the passion and majesty of Olivier. Shakespeare around the Globe they’d call their project, Orlando Rock and his wife.
Actually her coat was trodden on by sniffy people impatient to leave, and her mother couldn’t find her handbag. People tried to get past and huffed and sighed, Amy crashed calamitously to earth and, bruised and unhappy not to have been spotted on her cloud in the stalls by Orlando Rock, caught the last bus home.