Harmony (20 page)

“Well, you know. Things he’s got a clearer idea about now he’s been moving the actors around a little.”

I felt a familiar sinking feeling. “Things he might want changed?”

Liz’s smile got businesslike. “You’d really have to ask Howie. Best thing’d be to get Micah here to see about it himself.”

The little two-scene in the middle of the hall ended. The women broke their pose and converged on Howie with their scripts. In her red leotard and flowing black rehearsal skirt, Omea looked both regal and voluptuous. Lucienne looked like a little girl.

Howie rose. There was no trouble hearing his voice. “That’s great, ladies. You’re really beginning to pull out the intimacy of the moment.” He turned back toward Liz. “I think that’s it for today. Will you give everyone their calls for tomorrow?”

He beamed at the actresses and thanked them again, standing close to touch their arms and shoulders, continuing the scene’s intimacy. Omea wanted to discuss her dramatic action and describe the sense memory she was using for motivation. Lucienne giggled and murmured. Howie laughed his big, booming laugh. But as he turned back to the stage managers’ table, he was pensive.

He looked hopeful when he saw me. “’Lo, Gwinny. Micah here?”

“Not today.” I tried not to let any lingering resentment show, but I was going to be a little more careful with Howie from now on.

He glanced around the hall, biting his lip. The way he aligned his body to the walls told me he was picturing himself in the theatre.

“Liz tells me you have some questions about the model.”

“About the set,” he corrected. “Some stuff I think Micah should take a look at.”

“If it’s something simple, tell me, so I can catch Sean before he’s built it already.”

“I really think Mi needs to see it for himself.” Howie’s brow creased faintly, and I backed off. He wouldn’t be the first director to take out his irritation with the designer on the designer’s assistant. Why push it?

“I’m here to get prop info,” I offered neutrally. “You want to be in on it?”

Howie shook his big head. “They’ll tell you what they need. Speaking of Sean, how’s he doing with our vanishing act?”

“I was going by the shop after to check on that.”

“I’ll walk you over when Cu’s done with you.”

“Cu?”

“Te-Cucularit.” He nodded toward the dour young archivist. “He’s their ceremonial expert. He determines the right and wrong of the rituals.”

“Wasn’t that determined ages ago? I thought their religion was very old.”

“Ancient but forever in flux, they tell me. It seems to be all in the interpretation.”

My image of a ritualist was rather more gray-bearded.

Howie took my arm. “Handle him real carefully, now. He’s bothered enough already by the way we do things around here, and they don’t like it when Cu’s upset. Call me when you’re done.”

Howie gathered his script and retreated to the stage managers’ table. The company was packing up their dance bags and making dinner plans in three languages. I looked for tall Mali. He was still slouched in the corner, his thin body draped crosswise over an ancient armchair, reading a book as if the day held no other purpose.

“They must look like this.”

I jumped. I’d been sneaked up on. Te-Cucularit stood behind me, holding out several ragged-edged sheets of paper. A grade-school spiral notebook, worn soft with use, was clamped under his arm next to his playscript. The script was neatly page-tabbed and folded open to his big scene in Act One with all his lines highlighted in Day-Glo green. Elaborate doodling textured the front and back covers of the notebook. Repetitive linear motifs framed fantastical representations of birds, fish, and animals. I looked at the papers he’d pushed into my hands. There were drawings of a Burinda, a schematic of a Matta, and several other unidentified items. The same doodling decorated the surfaces of the drawn objects and formed borders around each sketch.

“These are fabulous!” Cu was abnormally handsome and it was easier to stare at the drawings than at him. My eyes strayed to his notebook. “You did them?”

He nodded, glancing away, less shy than remote, clearly uninterested in conversation. All my carefully considered questions fled from my head—how irritating that mere biology can be such a weakness. This guy would soon be the heartthrob of all those staff ladies who lusted after the unattainable types.

“I wrote the measurements down,” he noted. “You must follow them exactly.”

These Tuatuans spoke better English than old Max Eider. I studied the sketches again. Te-Cucularit’s figures were precise and graceful. “Sure. Okay.”

“We will need them quickly, to paint them.”

I traced the complications of his patterning with a finger. His disapproval was intimidating. I hadn’t even done anything yet. “That’ll take awhile, I guess?”

He nodded again and turned to go.

“Umm…?” I was afraid to call him by name. I might say it wrong and offend him further. “I know about the Matta and the Burinda, but could you tell me what these others are?”

He reclaimed the sketches brusquely. “This is a
Duli
. This is a
Puleale
. I give you their short names. This is a
Gorrehma
.”

“It would be useful if, umm, Micah will want to know what they’re for…”

“They are for ceremonial use,” he replied, as if I’d asked him to sell his grandmother.

“The ceremonial use of the gorrehma,” rumbled a voice behind us, “is for Moussa to sit his big black ass on when he plays his drums.”

Mali loomed like a great, dark stork, book in hand, dance bag slung over his shoulder. He smiled down at me, his transforming brilliant smile, rich with what I dared to interpret as sympathy, though it was rather more complicated than that. “Cu likes to go by the book. Don’t you, bro?”

Nothing in Cu’s manner challenged the older man. He nodded faintly, his face as tightly closed as the notebook beneath his arm. I saw that Mali had intervened not to clear up any misunderstanding but merely to defuse it.

“Ask our Master Cervantes if he might not be more satisfied to discover a knowledge of these objects as they are actually being put to use.”

Get him to come to rehearsal, you mean
. Mali’s gentle formality reminded me of the way one speaks to a child when trying to make it feel grown up.

“I’m sure Micah will understand,” I said lamely.

“I’m sure he will.” Mali hiked up his dance bag and nodded to Cu. “Pack up, bro. Dinnertime.”

Brothers, I wondered? Though both were tall, Mali was much darker, as if he stood under a cloud, and thin to the point of awkwardness, all knobs and sticks, while Cu had that perfect dancer’s body.

Mali slipped his book into an outer pocket of his satchel.

Made bold by his civility, I asked, “What are you reading?”

He laughed, and I wondered if I would ever hear a sound from him that did not seem to have at least three meanings.

“Everything I can get my hands on!” He patted the book in its pocket. It was an old hardback stamped “H
ARMONY
F
REE
L
IBRARY
” on the page ends. “There aren’t a lot of books on Tuatua, never mind a whole library!”

He’d gone out the door with Cu in tow before I realized he’d satisfied my curiosity without actually answering my question.

BRIGHAM:

I stared after Mali, probably looking dumb, then stowed Cu’s drawings between the pages of my pad, and joined Howie and Liz at the production table. “Do those guys ever give a direct answer to a question?”

Liz smirked. “Not if they can help it.”

“But why?”

“They don’t trust us.” Howie wagged his head sagely. “They’ve been so isolated out there on that little island of theirs, they don’t feel a real part of the Arts fraternity. Once they see we’re all after the same thing, they’ll come around.”

The stage managers bustled about straightening chairs and feeding rubbish into the recycler. On our way out, I asked, “Are those birds up in the rafters?”

Howie nodded. “And they come when Moussa calls them. Uncanny.”

As it was past Closing time, only the usual army of cleanerbots kept us company along the lanes as we trudged the long mile to the Arkadie, me wheeling my bike to keep Howie company.

“I guess Tuli’s okay, huh?”

Howie’s chortle was not as complacent as he probably intended it to be. “Ah, they’ll play that mystery out until there’s no one left who remembers it.”

The Outside sun cut through haze and dome to mix its dirty orange with the programmed pinks and ambers of the dawn/dusk artificials, lending the landscape a Turneresque quality: turbulent, smoky, and faintly sinister. The warehouses loomed, laying long bands of shadow across the pavement.

Along the edges of the residential district, we passed several construction sites.

“Higher and higher,” mourned Howie. “No more room to build out.”

“Those foreign hotel people finally tore down that beautiful old town house in BardClyffe,” I said.

“I was at that meeting. Christ, even Micah came. You should have heard him, insisting that only five years ago such zoning variances were ‘anathema.’ ” Howie chuckled. “Only Micah could pull off a word like that. The mayor nearly wept as she agreed that the Founders had not planned adequately for the needs of an expanding economy. But we did manage to knock Francotel down from twenty stories to ten. Fit to be tied, they were.”

Build, build, build, I thought in gloomy panic. Someday even Harmony will look like Chicago.

Howie got pensive again, tromping along like Big Foot.

“How’d it go today?” I asked him finally.

“Fine, just fine.”

“You sound a little tired.”

“Well, they wear me out. Whoever said theatre was a universal language had his head up his ass.” He waved with hastily summoned energy to an elderly woman standing in the rose-twined doorway of a mock-Tudor cottage. Fetching’s style tended away from the Greek hill village ideal and more toward the Cotswold hamlet. “This issue of religion is a bitch. I’m not allowed to sound skeptical, yet if I try to talk in their terms, I’m either co-opting what doesn’t belong to me, or I’m being condescending! I have to think twice about every word, theirs and mine, just to be sure we’re understanding each other. I mean, hell! We’re speaking the same language and I still need an interpreter!”

“Omea can’t help?”

“Omea is also my leading lady. Who translates for Omea? Even she’s been asking me if they could take a walk Outside now and then! I mean, come on! They’ve got to know better than that!”

A walk Outside? “Hickey says the dome makes them feel confined.”

“They live on an island! What’s the difference? Listen, I think I’ll come along while you bother Sean about the vanishing act.”

“I don’t know, Howie… the artistic director in the shop? They’ll think someone’s died.”

“Yadda yadda. At least I know the way. Better’n many I could mention.” But first he steered me through the columned portal and across silent acres of salmon-colored plush, in the direction of the upper lobby. “Gotta make nice with Cam Brigham. Rachel says he’s here checking out the display for
Crossroads
.”

Like most of Howie’s Board of Trustees, Campbell Brigham came from a Founder family that had prospered. His gallery in Lorien Market did most of its business in eight figures over the com lines.

“I didn’t know he bothered with stuff like that.”

“Never has before. But Bill Rand, who’s directing
Crossroads
, is a longtime pal of his. Whenever Cam’s pissed at me, he threatens to desert the Arkadie for Bill’s theatre over in Silvertree.”

“Willow Street? We’re doing a piece with them next fall.”

“Yeah? Good play?”

The stairs to the upper level seemed to float unsupported in the flush of sunlight through the translucent stone walls. The polished brass rail was a warm golden curve beneath my hand, as sensual as skin. Howie took the shallow carpeted steps two at a time. I raced after him, panting.

“Not bad. ‘Cept they keep changing the title.”

“Typical. I’d hate to be their publicity department.”

“At least they don’t keep changing the play, like some theatres I could name.”

Howie tossed a defensive glance over his shoulder. “Hey, kiddo, plays are like fish. Sometimes they get away from you.”

He slowed at the top of the stairs and rounded the corner strolling. He hailed Cam Brigham as if we’d just happened to be wandering the upper lobby at six in the afternoon.

The display area was the curving inner wall that separated the lobby and the bigger theatre’s balcony level. Photos of the current production, and often rehearsal shots or research material relevant to the play, were mounted behind broad sheets of glass. They were there, Micah always said, to give the audience something to talk about besides each other while they nibbled their intermission snacks.

Now the cases were empty. Photos lay stacked against the marble wall or stretched out across the peach carpet. Several minions from Publicity scurried around, hanging and labeling.

Cam Brigham stood with hands clasped behind him, staring down his nose at an eye-catching blowup of an actress in eighteenth-century costume. Howie fell into an identical posture at his side.

“Everything to your liking, Cam?”

“Oh fine, just real fine, Howard.”

Brigham was a fat man, no bones about it. He made bearlike Howie appear svelte. His pale blond hair was thinning and made his head look small compared to the pear-shaped rest of him, and as he seemed determined to play the jovial fat man, he carried himself like one, shoulders pulled way back, belly advancing, arms slightly akimbo to balance his weight.

“Glad to hear it,” said Howie.

“Oh well, I had them move a few things around, that’s all.” Brigham smiled at me expectantly. We’d met at several Arkadie opening nights, but I wasn’t important enough for him to remember longer than the five minutes required for an introduction.

“You know Gwinn Rhys, Micah’s assistant,” Howie supplied smoothly.

“Of course. I’m always telling Micah how lucky he is to have someone around who’s both talented and lovely.”