‘Hey, Greg! Are you gonna invite us for dinner again?’
I gaped at Jess who was standing in her ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ T-shirt as if she hadn’t just asked a senior faculty member to feed us for the second time in a week.
‘Shut up, you asshole.’ Greg glanced around. ‘I’m not having the whole campus over.’
Jess shrugged and slumped into one of the red chairs on the end of a row, throwing her green sneakered feet onto the one in front.
‘BEE! WHERE’S BEE?’ hollered Mel and a skinny girl bounced onto the stage, still swallowing the remains of a bag of chips.
Rehearsals lasted another hour and a half, after which Jess and I dawdled in the lobby while the cast said goodnight.
Finally, Greg plodded out of the auditorium.
‘Lucas, how old are you?’ he demanded.
‘Nineteen,’ I replied sheepishly.
‘You creep. I want to go to a bar.’ He paused to look at me. ‘You seem kind of like an adult.’
At that, he stalked past us and headed in the direction of the parking lot.
‘Are you coming?’ he yelled over his shoulder. ‘I have an eggplant.’
Jess and I gathered our backpacks and scurried after him, childishly vying for shotgun.
‘I’m reading a lot of Art History at the moment – T. J. Clark on Courbet, Kirk Varnedoe on American art after Pollock, the theorist Michael Fried.’ As usual, Greg had refused to let us help and was crushing garlic with the side of a knife. ‘I think my next play will be an Ionesco. Have you read The Bald Soprano?’
I shook my head dumbly as I always did when he asked me if I’d read something and he muttered what sounded like, ‘Of course you haven’t.’
‘Where do you find time to read all this, Greg?’ Jess was reclined on a dining chair, munching olives. I was still swilling my first stone, unsure what to do with it in the absence of a visible bin.
‘I get up at five and read. It’s the only thing that makes being here bearable.’
‘What about us?’ Jess spluttered. ‘’Twas is good,’ she added.
‘It’s very good only because I’m a very patient and skilful director.’ He winked. ‘No, there are some good actors and I like having you two. I’m not sure about this dramaturg business, but it’s good to have a number of assistants.’
I smiled to myself, remembering Jess and Jackie’s rant in the green room earlier about how Greg just wants a scribe and won’t let you do anything as an assistant director. The two of them were smug that they had dramaturg work to do as well and I was the one stuck making his rehearsal notes. I’d nodded in the appropriate places but felt rather guilty agreeing with them when I was still simply grateful Greg had chosen to give me a chance.
‘Some of the others are a little shy, though,’ Greg continued, adding things to a skillet. ‘They don’t know how to be with adults. There’s something about this campus; it’s very sheltered.’
Jess snorted but Greg ignored her, turning his iguana eyes on me. ‘What are you doing here, Ms Lucas?’
‘I dunno,’ I shrugged, finally placing my olive stone on the edge of the tablecloth. ‘I didn’t know anything about it; I just wanted to get out of England.’
‘You didn’t get to choose where you went?’ asked Jess, startled.
‘No, they just advertised they were doing an exchange and I applied. They said it was going to be rural but that was it.’
‘Ha, rural all right!’ she hooted. I was beginning to piece together Jess’s utter hatred of this place, but despite a nagging feeling that I should maybe hang around with more positive people, I realised I liked her.
‘Is that eyeliner?’ Greg had come over to the table in order to peer into my face.
‘Uh, yeah. It’s the only make-up I know how to apply.’ I felt self-conscious and glanced pleadingly at Jess.
‘It’s a shame.’ Greg’s voice was flat, the same one he used when describing the actors’ abilities. ‘We thought you were exotic, but you’re just plain old English, aren’t you?’
‘Sorry.’
Greg returned to the cooking and to the previous conversation. ‘The faculty keep to themselves too. I ask them to come see a show and they claim they’re working day and night. My roommate is in Gender Studies and they seem more sociable. They hang out here and have long, profound conversations deep into the night. I’d rather discuss art, of course, but I’ll take what I can get.’
‘You go home to New York at the weekends, right?’ I asked.
‘Yes. You girls should come to the city. I spend a lot of time with my children watching very bad and very good movies and reading books and eating at brilliant little restaurants. That’s my pleasure. And, in the summer, I go to my house in the country and hang out with friends.’
Greg was now bringing plates piled with twisting pasta in a steaming purple sauce to the table.
‘Violà, pasta alle melanzane!’
An hour or two later, Jess and I glanced at the empty plates before us, knowing we needed to offer to wash up before we left, but disinclined to hurry that moment. The conversation had moved from theatre to art, then to Rosella gossip and sexuality in general. Greg finished his glass and turned his attention to Jess.
‘So, Ms Hunt. What’s your story? You’re a senior, right? Why haven’t we worked together before?’
Jess’s cheeks were flushed and she was leaning comfortably upon the table.
‘I took a year off to chill out. Basically, I went crazy after dating a professor.’
My eyes widened involuntarily, but Greg sat up casually and laughed.
‘Y’all are so funny!’ Jess swilled the half-mouthful left in her glass.
‘Please expand,’ Greg said eagerly. ‘What did you do? I hope it was something really terrible.’
‘It’s not like that.’ Jess finished her wine, then sighed. ‘Uh, I took an intensive elementary German class and started hanging out with my professor. It was fine and only mildly flirty until the summer. We AIMed all the time and eventually we kind of tried dating, but it was weird.’
‘Go on,’ Greg murmured.
‘I’m kind of messed up about sex. When things started to head that way, my body flipped out and I started throwing up all the time. Eventually I saw a therapist who sent me home when I told her I wanted to die.’ Jess added with a forced laugh, ‘Good times!’
‘That’s terrible.’ Greg was looking angry. ‘This guy should be fired. Is he still here?’
Jess nodded.
‘A professor has way too much power to be messing around with students. I may raise eyebrows by having students over to my house, but I’d never do something like that. How old was this creep?’
‘Thirty-six.’ Jess was not embarrassed. Later, I would ask her about that and she’d say she had spent a year dealing with it and was now going through an ‘honesty phase’.
‘God, that’s really disgusting.’ Greg paused. ‘So you saw a therapist? Did they put you on Prozac?’
‘Yes, actually,’ Jess replied and for the first time Greg looked uncomfortable.
‘Sorry, I won’t make any more jokes about therapy. You could tell us about your therapist. Is that allowed? Male? Female? Mysterious? Helpful? Insane?’
We all laughed and any awkwardness subsided. Jess and I stacked the plates and took them to the sink. Greg disappeared while we washed up to locate a book he wanted to lend me, then walked out with us so he could smoke a menthol cigarette. He thrust the rest of the packet at us and told us he’d given up. Just past the art museum, he uttered, ‘Enough, I’m going to bed,’ and stalked back into the night.
Greg, Jess and I had dinner two or three times a week for the rest of the rehearsal period. Greg and I learnt more about Jess’s scandalous past and I gave carefully censored descriptions of my own relationship history. Greg described growing up abroad, travelling the world, and acting for directors whose names I pretended to recognise, then looked up later. He told me to read his mentors and littered his theatre stories with intense descriptions of following a beautiful girl for thirty blocks only to lose his nerve and turn home, or debauched tales of women climbing through his apartment window so his girlfriend wouldn’t find out.
‘I’ve never cheated on my wife,’ he said more than once. ‘Marriage and children change everything.’
Jess and I would curl under her duvet and discuss what Greg had said. Jess wasn’t so sure she believed his protestations of fidelity and the rumours circling the theatre department vehemently contradicted his statements, but I trusted him.
Over the coming weeks, I also used our impromptu sleepovers to pry further details about Jess’s past. Her professor had insisted throughout that he’d never done anything like this before and that he was falling in love with her. But one evening, after they’d made out for an hour on his bed and he’d removed her bra, whispering about how they could move to Berlin once she’d graduated and start afresh where no one knew them, Jess had excused herself to the bathroom and burst into tears. When she re-emerged and calmed down enough to be coherent, Atlas had kindly offered to help her with her German homework instead.
Jess was the first person I’d known on anti-depressants and her honesty thrilled me. In return, she’d fish for information from me as I let details slip one by one over many too-tipsy evenings. I was careful to avoid specifics and made her promise not to tell Greg that I may or may not have my own older man waiting for me in England.