When the Lunts were performing There Shall Be No Night during the end of the war in London, the play was often interrupted by the long whistles that preceded bomb blasts. Plaster dust fell from the ceiling onto the stage. But “the Lunts weren’t afraid of death,” their biographer Maurice Zolotow wrote. “They were only afraid of a scene being spoiled by a rocket exploding at the wrong time.” It was one of those stupid sentences we’d all laughed about, but after Eva and Gabe drove off, it occurred to me that this was how most of us really did live: bombs exploding around us while we carried on the performances that were our lives.
Erik and I moved around the house without speaking. I urged him to lie down and at least try to rest, then sat in our sunlit kitchen, feeling sick with remorse. In that awful instant when I realized they were standing in our foyer, I saw the hurt in Gabe’s eyes, and I understood that his kindnesses these last two weeks—staying close to me at the gala, bringing the Chinese food, even accompanying me to the play that night—had been for Erik.
Not for me; not even for Eva.
Eva texted Erik around noon to say she’d still pick him up and Gabe was expecting to ride with me.
“Jesus,” Erik said under his breath. He was in the bathroom shaving, and he turned to me, hands falling to his sides. “How is she going to get through this?”
“The same way you and Gabe will.”
“We don’t have to be onstage after having our lives blasted apart.”
“She’s a pro, Erik. Onstage is probably the best place for her to be.”
“We look like bank robbers,” I said when Gabe opened the passenger door. We were both in black dress pants, a sleeveless black turtleneck for me, a black cashmere sweater for him.
“Well, you are breaking the law.” He smiled wanly. “And I’m aiding and abetting.”
I think I nodded. The PFA felt so completely unimportant at that point. All afternoon, I kept picturing Annabelle getting ready, being excited, having no idea that everything had changed. I’d wanted to warn her, though, of course, I couldn’t.
“I feel horrible about this morning,” I said as I pulled out of the circular driveway.
“Don’t. It was bound to happen. That it didn’t before is a miracle.” He pulled the seat belt across his shoulder. I was aware of how much broader than Erik he was, though in the confined space of the car he seemed diminished. “It just sucks that it happened today.” He clicked the latch into place. “Although maybe this is exactly how it should end, with a performance.”
“What do you mean end? Did she say that?”
“She didn’t have to.” He was staring out the passenger window. The houses on their wooded road were tucked so far back you could see only a hint of them through the trees: a roofline, a dormer widow. “Or maybe I’m the one who’s done,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
Sunlight strobed his face. “I realize it borders on the ridiculous to say this, because she’s the one who’s been betrayed, but I’m pissed. Ten years of wearing this fucking hair shirt, and for what? Don’t get me wrong: I’d wear it another ten if it kept her from being hurt, but that she just let me? That she knew all this time?”
“But she didn’t,” I protested. “Not really. She suspected, but that’s not the same.”
“She said it was like kids who realize Santa isn’t real but won’t let themselves know it.” He was leaning back, heels of his hands pressed to his eyes.
“Did you tell her what you told me? About how you wanted to tell her the truth all these years, and how you regret—”
“Oh, I tried.” His voice was mocking, bitter. “Before I could say two sentences, my lovely wife very gently, very sweetly, put her fingers on my mouth and stopped me. She said she was glad I didn’t tell her.” He let out a strangled laugh. “What do I do with that? She’s glad we’ve all lied to her for the last decade?”
“Or maybe she’s glad she had ten years of believing she was happy, of being happy!” Is this what Erik had done for me? Pushed down the regret so we could have the life we did? Was that so awful? It didn’t feel like it.
I remember almost nothing of the play. I know there were three curtain calls, and thunderous applause for Eva. Gabe and I clapped so hard our hands were sore. James Goodinson, who was on the board, slapped him on the back from the seat behind and said, “Your wife stole the show!” And then the cast was pulling Kelly onstage as the room rose in a standing ovation. Afterward, when the house lights came up and the audience filed out, their voices animated, Gabe and I stayed in our seats. People kept stopping to tell us, “You must be so proud!” and “Congratulations!” until finally, the theater was empty. Neither of us moved. I think we were numb. I couldn’t believe it was over.
I thought of the roles I’d seen Eva play over the years—Mollie Malloy, the saucy prostitute in Front Page, or the thrice-divorced Julia in A Delicate Balance, or Anna Karenina standing on the edge of the stage before jumping—and in every single performance, there was a moment when she ceased being Eva, so thoroughly did she inhabit her character. Later, when she was back in the lobby, wearing her own clothes again, but with her hair still elaborately coiffed like Anna Karenina’s or her eyes rimmed in dark kohl like Mollie’s, I felt almost shy around her, as if she hadn’t fully returned, some part of her still lingering in the world of the play. Who are you? I would think. Eva loved my reaction. It meant, she always said, that she’d done her job.
It never happened with Quadrille, though, not because she wasn’t stunning as Serena—or at least I assume she was. But even with the high-collared Victorian dress and upswept hair and patrician voice, she never stopped being Eva. I heard the audience laughing uproariously at some of her lines, found myself smiling a few times, but the entire play, my heart was in my throat. Though I don’t think I took my eyes from her once, I found it unbearable to see her as Serena, to see her as anyone except herself. I think some part of me knew, without fully acknowledging it—the way she’d known all those years about Gabe and Annabelle—that she would leave, slip into a new life the way she’d slipped into all those roles, becoming so quickly someone we no longer knew.
In the lobby, the audience was mostly gone. The sky was dark, small groups milling around out front, waiting for one of the passenger vans owned by Ten Chimneys that were ferrying people to the cast party at the Lunts’ house up the road. Laughter and muted conversation floated inside each time someone opened the glass doors. Gabe and I stood at the back of the room, waiting for Eva.
From across the lobby, where he was chatting with the cowboy-booted actor from Texas who had played Axel, Erik nodded to me, his eyes tired. A few feet away, the theater critic from the Tribune was talking to the woman who’d played Charlotte. She had one of those overly dramatic, look-at-me voices, and I kept glancing at her in annoyance, as if she were the cause of the tightness in my chest. Annabelle and Scott, their backs to us, stood with Frank and Genevieve Minni.
I had no idea if Annabelle had seen me. She was waiting for Eva, and I knew she’d rush over as soon as Eva entered the lobby, bursting with excitement and happiness and pride. I’d always envied this about Annabelle, how generous she was with her praise, how she’d become almost giddy when something good happened to one of us. “This calls for ice cream!” she’d announce. “Champagne!”
The room erupted in applause then, and there was Kelly, regal and beautiful in black silk harem pants and a sleeveless blouse.
“We’ve started the petition to get you back next year!” Genevieve Minni called, and someone else said, “Where is it? I’ll sign.”
Kelly just smiled and gestured to Eva, who was suddenly beside her in a glittery silver sweater and jeans and heels. Another scattering of applause. She looked ecstatic. And then Annabelle was hugging her, the two of them rocking back and forth, Eva bending over to accommodate Annabelle, as if she were hugging a child.
“This is excruciating,” Gabe whispered.
And it was—except hadn’t we witnessed this a thousand times in the last few years? Eva and Annabelle hugging, laughing, making plans despite the monstrous lie between them? Shouldn’t it have been excruciating all along?
And then Eva was making a beeline for us, hugging Gabe and then me, all of us speaking at once—You were great, you were fantastic, and Really? Did you like it? When Eva stepped back, her face flushed, she was squeezing both of our hands. “I wish you could come to the cast party,” she said to me.
“I’m just glad I got to see you. You were stunning, Eva.”
“It felt good to be up there.” She looked at Gabe, brushing something from his shoulder. “You holding up okay?” she asked gently. Her eyes were filled with such tenderness and worry, not even a hint of anger or recrimination. I knew right then that she would leave him.
Four days from that night, after their return from Door County, where, Eva would tell me, she and Gabe walked and talked endlessly, she would sit at our kitchen table and tell me she’d known the marriage was over before they got home from our house that morning of the play. “Maybe if I’d been angry, there would have been hope,” she said, but she wasn’t. Not at him, not at us. “I was grateful,” she would say. “It’s as if my marriage was terminal. I probably knew at some level about their affair from the start, but the lies bought me time. How do I regret that? Can you imagine if I’d found out right away? I wouldn’t have met you and we never would have become friends. And I would have missed all those Saturday nights and watching the kids grow up, and all my good times with Gabe, my whole life with him! I wouldn’t have had any of that.” She’d been crying. “I didn’t want it to end any more than I want a play I’m in to close.”