Forever in Blue (7 page)

These weren’t the right questions. They were N/A. She remembered getting three N/As on her first-grade report card and worrying that she’d failed those subjects. When she told her father, he’d laughed and fiddled with her hair. “That means Not Applicable, Beezy. It doesn’t mean you failed anything.” He’d been able to comfort her back then. Back then she’d tried harder, too.

Now it wasn’t a home where needs were had or met. If Perry or her dad needed her, it didn’t matter, because they wouldn’t accept her help anyway. If she needed them…well, she didn’t. They had nothing to give that she wanted.

She couldn’t help them. She didn’t need them. That was the truth. Not everybody got a close family. Not everybody needed one.

She was flying away from the sun, but it would be there to meet her when she landed. They were just taking different routes to the same place.

She felt herself relaxing into her seat, unsticking her mind from the continent behind, looking to the one ahead. She couldn’t help her dad or Perry. She couldn’t. Her job was to look forward, to make as good a life as she could. She didn’t need to look back anymore.

She pulled off her sneakers and tucked her feet under her. She crossed her arms and held her hands in her armpits to keep them warm. When she woke up, she’d be in Turkey. On another continent, in another hemisphere, on another sea.

She felt the tingle starting. But this was the tingle of excitement instead of fear. The one that made you hungry rather than sick. The one that came from looking ahead and not behind.

In a way it was the same tingle. It just felt a lot better.

Carmen doodled on the handouts while aspiring theater types—known here as apprentices—from all over the country sat listening to the presentations in the main theater building. Julia painted her toenails, which seemed like kind of a ditzy thing to do. But she painted them black, which seemed to Carmen like an actressy thing to do.

Carmen looked around at the number of decked-out kids. Julia wasn’t the only one in layers of vintage clothes and inky black eyeliner. It almost made Carmen laugh to think that though Julia stood apart from all the schlumpy kids at school, Carmen stood apart from the glamour queens here.

The director of the big and coveted Main Stage production, Andrew Kerr, made his presentation first.

“This year we’re putting on The Winter’s Tale. As I’m sure you know, for every decade anniversary of the theater we do an all-Shakespeare summer, and this year is number thirty. We’ve got some wonderful professional actors involved. Here’s the thing.” He cleared his throat to get attention. “This Main Stage mounts a professional, Equity production. But by tradition we open only one role to an apprentice. One role, and it’s typically not a lead. That’s the way it is every year. You are welcome to try out, but callbacks will be minimal. Don’t waste too much energy on it. There are many great roles for you in the Second Stage and community productions. All of you will have some part in one of them.”

Most of the kids knew this already. But it was hard not to be hopeful. Carmen suspected a lot of them were going to waste a lot of energy on it, regardless of what Andrew Kerr said. She was beginning to realize that actors, as a general category, were hopeful, and they also had strong self-esteem.

“All the auditions begin together. Then we’ll follow up with separate callback lists for each of the three productions.”

Was anyone else here going straight to crew? Carmen wondered. Was she the only predefeated theater apprentice in America?

“Auditions begin not tomorrow, but the day after. Sign-up sheets are in the lobby. Good luck to all of you.”

Carmen wondered whether she’d get the chance to work on sets for the big production. She guessed not. There were actual known set designers and builders arriving here. Well, she’d be happy working on one of the other shows.

After the meeting, Julia was inspired. “Let’s go back to the room and get to work.”

“I don’t think I have anything to work on yet,” Carmen said, falling a little bit behind Julia’s energized stride.

“I was hoping you would run lines with me,” Julia said.

Some bodies like change better than others. The rest of Bee’s group was sacked out over the three rows of the old Suburban, one of several large and battered vehicles owned by the Consortium for Classical Archaeology. Bee sat straight as a palm, studying the countryside between Izmir and Priene. Now they were close enough to the coast that you could see the Aegean out the right-hand windows.

“Ephesus is a few kilometers to the left,” said Bob Something, a graduate student, who was driving the car. “We’ll spend at least a day there this summer.”

Bridget squinted eastward, remembering the pictures of Ephesus from her archaeology class. The sun had indeed arrived along with her.

“Also Aphrodisias, Miletus, and Halicarnassus. These are some of the best ruins you’ll ever see.”

She was glad she was awake, because otherwise Bob would have had no one to tell this to and she wouldn’t have heard it.

“What about Troy?” she asked, beginning to feel a little breathless. Here she was in this incredible place, farther from home than she’d ever been. There was as much history here in this soil as anywhere on earth.

“Troy is north, up near the Dardanelles. It’s fascinating to read about, but there isn’t as much to look at. Nobody from our group is making that trip, as far as I know.” He had a faded orange alligator shirt and a round face. She thought he must have recently shaved a beard, because his chin and lower cheeks were pale and the rest of his face was pink.

“I read the Iliad in school last semester,” Bridget said. “Most of it.” In addition to her ancient archaeology class, she’d taken Greek literature in translation. She hadn’t realized it at the time, but looking back, she considered it by far her most engrossing academic experience. You couldn’t always know what would matter to you.

When they pulled into the site, Bridget was surprised at how small and basic it was. Two very large tents, several smaller ones, and beyond them, the dusty, roped-off shapes of the excavation. It sat on a high hill overlooking a river plain and, just beyond that, the Aegean.

She left her bags in one of the tents, which had canvas walls over a wooden platform. It held only four cots and some open shelving, but it seemed quite romantic to her. She was nothing if not a veteran of rustic summer venues.

The new arrivals groggily gathered for a welcome meeting, and Bridget exercised the bad habit of looking around and deciding who was the best-looking guy in the room. It was a habit that predated her being a girl with a boyfriend, and she hadn’t entirely managed to eradicate it.

In this case, the room was actually a large, open-sided tent, which would serve as their meeting room, lecture room, and cafeteria. The best view was of the Aegean, but there were a few good faces, too.

“This is a comparatively remote site, folks. The plumbing is rudimentary. We have four latrines and two showers. That’s all. Make friends with your sweat this summer,” said Alison Somebody, associate director, in her not very welcoming welcome. She had a kind of boot-camp mentality, Bridget decided. She was excited about privation.

Well, Bridget could get excited about privation too.

“We’ve got a generator to serve the field laboratory, but the sleeping areas are not wired. I hope nobody brought a hair dryer.”

Bridget laughed, but a couple of women looked uneasy.

It was a small and fairly new dig, Bridget gathered. About thirty people altogether, a mix of university and scientist types and a few civilian volunteers. It was hard to tell, amid all the Tshirts and cargo pants and work shirts and Birken-stocks, the professors from the graduate students, from the college students, from the regular citizens. Most of them were American or Canadian; a few were Turkish.

“There are three parts to this site, and all of us spend some time in each of them. If you are a student and you want credit, you must attend lectures Tuesdays from three to five. We’ll take a total of four trips to other sites. The schedule’s on the board. All trips are mandatory for credit. That’s the school part. That’s it. Otherwise, this is a job and we work as a team. Questions so far?”

Why were organizational types so joyless? Bridget wondered. Who wouldn’t want to see the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus?

It was lucky, in a way, that Brown University was situated in a relatively urban setting and not in a tent, because it was difficult to concentrate with the sea winking at you like that. She began to tune Alison out in favor of her habit. There was one good-looking guy who she guessed was also a college student. He had black curly hair and very dark eyes. He was Middle Eastern, she thought. Maybe Turkish, but she heard him speaking English.

Another one was sort of good-looking. He looked old enough to be a graduate student. He had reddish hair and so much sunscreen on his face it cast a blue tint. That was maybe not so sexy.

“You’re Bridget, right?” Alison asked, startling her from her habit.

“Yes.”

“You’re in mortuary.”

“Okay.”

“What does mortuary mean?” Bridget asked a tall girl named Karina Itabashi on their way to the field lab.

“It means dead people.”

“Oh.”

After lunch Bridget settled in for her first lecture and discovered an interesting thing: The best-looking guy was neither the possible Turk nor the sunscreen-slathered redhead. The best-looking guy was the one standing in front of her, lecturing about artifacts.

“Okay, folks.” The best-looking guy had been holding an object behind his back, and now he presented it to them. “Is this object in my hand a technofact, a sociofact, or an ideofact?” The best-looking guy was looking directly at her, wanting her to answer his question.

“It’s a tomato,” she said.

To his credit he laughed rather than throwing the tomato at her. “You have a point, uh…?”

“Bridget.”

“Bridget. Any other ideas?” Various hands went up.

She’d thought he was a graduate student when she’d first seen him eating a sandwich under an olive tree earlier that day. He didn’t look like he could be thirty. But he’d introduced himself as Professor Peter Haven, so unless he lied, he was one. He taught at Indiana University. She tried to picture Indiana on the map.

At sunset that night after dinner in the big tent, a bunch of people gathered on an embankment on the hilltop to watch the sun go down. Several six-packs of beer were on the ground. Bridget sat next to Karina, who had a beer in her hand.

“Do you want one?” she asked Bridget, gesturing to the supply.

Bridget hesitated, and Karina seemed to read her expression. “There’s no drinking age here, as far as I know.”

Bridget leaned over and took one. She’d been to enough parties over the last year that she’d formed a solid acquaintanceship with beer, if not an actual friendship.

On Karina’s other side, Bridget recognized one of the directors, and she was struck here, as she had been at dinner, by the mixing of the team. The group wasn’t hierarchical, the way school was. Age-wise, it wasn’t nearly as homogeneous. If anything, people assembled more according to the area of the site where they worked than according to age or professional status. She realized how accustomed she was to looking out for authority figures, but here she wasn’t finding any.

“Where are you digging?” she asked a woman who sat down next to her. She recognized her as Maxine from her cabin.

“I’m not. I’m a conservator. I’m working on pottery in the lab. What about you?”

“Mortuary. For starters, at least.”

“Ooh. How’s your stomach?”

“Good, I think.”

She saw Peter Haven at the other end of the group. He was also drinking and laughing over something. He had a nice way about him.

The sun was down. The moon was up. Maxine lifted her beer bottle and Bridget tapped it with hers. “To mortuary,” Maxine said.

“To pottery,” Bridget added, never having drunk beer with a conservator before. It was good to be an adult. Even the beer tasted better here.

If Leo had looked at her as planned, Lena wouldn’t have had to think about him several times that night, or tried to figure out his last name so she could Google him.

She certainly wouldn’t have felt the need to go to the empty studio on a Saturday morning when all self-respecting art students were still in bed. She went there to sneak a look at his painting, secretly hoping that maybe his artistic skills were not all that his reputation promised.

She checked first on her own painting. It was a standing figure of a thick-thighed woman named Nora. Lena could convince herself of Nora’s beauty only as long as Nora was standing still. As soon as she changed her expression or opened her mouth, the concept crashed to the floor and Lena had to build it again at the start of each pose.

But those thighs of Nora’s did have their strange grace and, more importantly, presented Lena with an unsubtle view of mass, so hard to re-create in two dimensions. Lena liked how that part of her painting was coming.

Now, embarrassed even though she was alone, she edged across the scuffed linoleum. She considered the empty model stand, the unmanned easels, the high, creaky casement windows, the fern that nobody watered, the leftover smells. An empty studio reminded Lena of the world at night. It was hard to reconcile that the night world was the same place as the day.

Lena remembered a summer lightning storm when she was in middle school. She was wide awake at midnight and bravely made her way down the stairs in her nightgown to sit on the front porch and watch. A burst of lightning flashed, midnight became noon, and Lena was jarred to see that all the things in the mysterious night world were exactly the same as they were in the cheery, prosaic day.

After that she spent a lot of time convincing herself that what you saw, even what you felt, had an unreliable relationship to what was actually there. What was actually there was reality, regardless of whether you saw it or how you felt about it.

But after that she’d started drawing and painting and had to unravel all the convincing she’d done. There was no way to access a visual reality beyond what you saw. Reality was what you saw. “We are trapped in our senses,” her old teacher, Annik, told her once. “They are all we have of the world.”