Just One Day 02: Just One Year (19 page)

T
he tech rehearsal is a monster. Aside from lines, plenty of which get forgotten in the new environment, everything has to be relearned and reblocked on the amphitheater stage. All day long, I stand behind Jeroen, Max behind Marina, as they fumble through their various scenes. Once again we’re like their shadows. Except none of us has a shadow because there’s no sun today, just a steady drizzle that has put everyone in a sour mood. Jeroen hasn’t even made a joke about his malady of the day.

“It makes you wonder whose brilliant idea this was,” Max says. “Outdoor bloody Shakespeare. In Holland, where English isn’t even the language and it rains all the time.”

“You forget, the Dutch are the eternal optimists,” I tell her.

“Is that true?” she asks me. “I thought they were the eternal pragmatists.”

I don’t know. Maybe
I’m
the optimist. I checked my email when I got back from the Paradiso last night and again before I left this morning for rehearsal. There was an email from Yael, and a forwarded joke from Henk, and a bunch of the usual junk, but nothing from Skev or Tor. What exactly did I expect?

I’m not even sure what there is to be optimistic about. If the letter is from her, what’s to say it’s not a long-distance piss off? She’d have every right.

We break for lunch and I check my phone. Broodje’s texted to say he’s heading off on some wooden sailing boat and he’ll be incommunicado for a few days, but he’ll be back in Amsterdam next week. Daniel’s also texted to let me know he’s arrived safely in Brazil, and forwarded a photo of Fabiola’s belly. Tomorrow, I vow, I’m getting a phone that accepts pictures.

Petra forbids mobile phones in rehearsal. But when she’s talking to Jeroen, I put my ringer to vibrate and slip my phone into my pocket anyway. Optimist indeed.

Around five o’clock, the drizzle lets up and Linus resumes the rehearsal. We’re having trouble with the light cues, which we can’t see. Because the show starts at dusk and goes into the night, the lights come up halfway through, so tomorrow’s rehearsal will be from two in the afternoon to midnight, so we can make sure the second half, the in-darkness part, is properly lit.

At six, my phone vibrates. I pull it out of my pocket. Max widens her eyes at me. “Cover me,” I whisper, and scuttle off to the wings.

It’s Skev.

“Hey, thanks for getting back to me,” I whisper.

“Where are you?” he asks, his voice dropped to a whisper, too.

“Amsterdam? You?”

“Back in Brighton. Why are we whispering?”

“I’m in a rehearsal.”

“For what?”

“Shakespeare.”

“In Amsterdam. Fuck, that’s cool. I gave that shit up. I’m working at a Starbucks now.”

“Oh, shit, sorry.”

“Nah, it’s all good, man.”

“Listen, Skev, I can’t talk long but I ran into Bex.”

“Bex.” He whistles. “How is that sweet thing?”

“Same as always, hooked up with a juggler. She mentioned a letter Tor was trying to get to me. Earlier in the year.”

There’s a pause. “Victoria. Man. She is something else.”

“I know.”

“I asked if I could come back and she said no. Just that one time. Off season. Don’t shit where you eat.”

“I know. I know. About that letter . . .”

“Yeah, man, I don’t know anything about it.”

“Oh.”

“Victoria wouldn’t tell me. Said it was personal. You know how she gets.” He sighs. “So I just told her to send it you. I gave her the address on the boat. I didn’t know if you could get mail on the boat.”

“You could. We could. We did.”

“So you got the letter?”

“No, Skev. That’s why I’m calling.”

“Well, it must be at the boat, man.”

“But we don’t live there anymore. Haven’t done for a while.”

“Oh, shit. Forgot it was empty. Sorry about that.”

“No worries, man.”

“Break a leg with your Shakespeare and shit.”

“Yeah, you too—with your cappuccinos and all.”

He laughs. Then we say good-bye.

I go back to the rehearsal. Max is looking crazed. “I told them you had to puke. The Flunky is mad you didn’t ask first. I wonder if he calls Petra for permission before he makes love to his wife.”

It’s an image I do my best not to conjure. “I owe you. I’ll tell Linus it was a false alarm.”

“You gonna tell me what this is about?”

I think of Lulu, all the wild-goose chases this year that have led nowhere. Why would this be anything else?

“Probably just what you said: a false alarm,” I tell Max.

• • •

Except that
probably
becomes a pebble in my shoe, aggravating me for the rest of the day, making it hard to keep from thinking about the letter, where it is, what it says, who it’s from. By the time rehearsal ends, I feel this sort of urgency to know; so even though the rain has returned, and even though I’m bone tired, I decide to try Marjolein. She doesn’t answer her phone and I don’t want to wait until tomorrow. She lives close by, on the ground floor of a wide house in a posh neighborhood at the south end of the park. She’s always told me to drop by any time.

“Willem,” she says, opening the door. She has a glass of wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and she doesn’t seem so happy that I’ve dropped by. I’m dripping wet, and she doesn’t invite me in. “What brings you here?”

“Sorry to bother you but I’m trying to find a letter.”

“A letter?”

“That was sent to the boat, some time in the spring.”

“Why are you still getting mail at the boat?”

“I’m not. Someone just sent it there.”

She shakes her head. “If it went to the boat, it would’ve been forwarded to the office and then on to the address you provided us.”

“In Utrecht?”

She sighs. “Probably. Can you call me in the morning?”

“It’s important.”

She sighs. “Try Sara. She handles the mail.”

“Do you have Sara’s number?”

“I’d have thought
you’d
have Sara’s number,” she says.

“Not for a long time now.”

She sighs. Then reaches for her mobile. “Don’t start anything up with her.”

“I won’t,” I promise.

“Right. You’re a changed man.” I can’t quite get whether she’s being sarcastic or not.

Inside, the music changes, from mellow jazz to something wilder with screaming trumpets. Marjolein looks longingly inside. I realize that she’s not alone.

“I’ll let you go,” I say.

She leans forward to kiss good-bye. “Your mother will be pleased I saw you.”

She starts to close the door. “Can I ask you something? About Yael?”

“Sure,” she says absently, her attention already back in the warm house and on whomever’s waiting in there.

“Did she, I don’t know, do things, to help me, that I didn’t know about?”

Her face is half hidden in shadows, but her toothy smile shines in the reflected light. “What did she say?”

“She didn’t
say
anything.”

Marjolein shakes her head. “Then neither can I.” She starts to close the door. Then she stops. “But did you consider in all those months you were gone, why your bank account never ever went to zero?”

I hadn’t considered it, not really. I rarely used my bank card but when I did, it always worked.

“Someone was always watching,” Marjolein says. When she shuts the door, she’s still smiling.

Utrecht

E
verything takes too long. The train is late. The bike share line is too long. So I catch a bus instead and it stops to pick up every old lady in town. I shouldn’t have left so late, but it was already late when I got hold of Sara this morning. Then it took a bit of cajoling before she finally remembered there was a letter. No, she didn’t read it. No, she didn’t remember where it came from. But she thinks she forwarded to the address on file. The one in Utrecht. Not that long ago.

By the time I get to Bloemstraat, it’s almost noon. The second tech rehearsal is at 2:00 back in Amsterdam. I have nothing but time in my life, but never enough of it when I need it.

I ring the eyeball bell. There’s no answer. I have no idea who lives here anymore. I texted Broodje on the train over but he didn’t answer. Then I remembered that he’s in the middle of the Aegean somewhere. With Candace. Whose name he knows, whose telephone number and email address he got before he left Mexico.

The front door is locked but I still have my key and it still works. The first good sign.

“Hello,” I call, my voice echoing through the empty house. It no longer looks like the place I lived in. No more lumpy sofa. No more boy smell. Even the Picasso flowers are gone.

There’s a dining room table, with the post scattered all over it. I rifle through the stacks as quickly as possible, but I see nothing, so I make myself slow down and methodically go through each piece of mail, dividing it into neat piles: for Broodje, for Henk, for W, even some for Ivo, who’s still getting letters here, for a couple of unfamiliar girls who must be living here now. There is some mail for me, mostly dead letters from the university and a travel catalog from the agency I used to book our Mexico tickets.

I look up the stairs. Perhaps the letter is up there. Or in the attic in my old room. Or in one of the cabinets. Or maybe it isn’t the one Sara forwarded. Maybe it’s still back on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht. Or somewhere in Marjolein’s office.

Or maybe there is no letter from her. Maybe it’s just another false hope I’ve conjured for myself.

I hear ticking. On the mantel, where the Picasso used to hang, there’s an old-fashioned wooden clock, like the kind Saba once had in his Jerusalem apartment. It was one of the few pieces Yael kept after he died. I wonder where it is now.

It’s half past twelve. If I want to get the train back in time for the tech rehearsal, I have to leave now. Otherwise, I’ll be late. And being late for tech? The only thing worse in Petra’s book would be not showing for a performance. I think of the original understudy, replaced because he had to miss three rehearsals. It’s too late for her to replace me, but that’s not to say she can’t fire me. I’m nothing but a shadow, anyhow.

Being fired won’t make any material difference in my life right now. Except I don’t
want
to be fired. And more than that, I don’t want to hand over that decision to Petra. If I’m late, that’s exactly what will happen.

The house seems huge all of a sudden, like it would take years to search all the rooms. The moment seems even bigger.

I’ve given up on Lulu before. In Utrecht. In Mexico. But that felt like surrendering. Like it was
me
I was really giving up on. This feels different, somehow. Like maybe Lulu brought me to this place, and for the first time in a long time, I’m on the cusp of something real. Maybe
this
is the point of it all. Maybe this is where the road is meant to end.

I think of the postcards I left in her suitcase. I’d written
sorry
on one of them. Only now do I understand what I really should’ve written was
thank you
.

“Thank you,” I say quietly to the empty house. I know she’ll never hear it, but somehow that seems besides the point.

Then I drop my mail in the recycling and head back to Amsterdam, closing the door behind me.

One Day

AUGUST

Amsterdam

T
he phone is ringing. And I’m sleeping. Two things that shouldn’t be happening at the same time. I open my eyes, fumble for the phone, but the ringing continues, crying out into the still night.

A light flicks on. Broodje, naked as a newborn, stands in front of me squinting in the yellow light of the lamp, and the lemony walls of the nursery. He holds out my phone. “It’s for you,” he mumbles, and then he flicks off the light and sleepwalks back to bed.

I put the phone to my ear and I hear the exact four words you don’t want to hear on the other end of a middle-of-the-night phone call.

“There’s been an accident.”

My stomach plummets and I hear a whistling my ears as I wait to hear who. Yael. Daniel. Fabiola. The baby. Some subtraction in my family that I can no longer bear.

But the voice continues talking and it takes me a minute to slow my breathing and hear what is being said.
Bicycle
and
moto
and
ankle
and
fracture
and
performance
and
emergency
and it’s then that I understand that it’s not that kind of accident.

“Jeroen?” I say at last, though who else can it be? I want to laugh. Not because of the irony, but because of the relief.

“Yes, Jeroen,” Linus snaps. Jeroen the invincible, felled by a drunken moto driver. Jeroen insistent he can go on anyhow, with his foot in a cast, and maybe he can, for next weekend’s performances. But this weekend’s? “We might have to cancel,” Linus says. “We need you at the theater as soon as possible. Petra wants to see what you can do.”

I rub my eyes. Light is peeking through the shades. It’s not the middle of the night after all. Linus tells me to be at the theater—the actual theater, not the stage in Vondelpark—at eight.

“It’s going to be a long day,” he warns.

• • •

Petra and Linus hardly look up when I arrive at the theater. A sloe-eyed Marina offers a tired, sympathetic look. She’s holding a roll and breaks off half and hands it to me. “Thank you,” I say. “I didn’t have time to eat.”

“I figured as much,” she says.

I sit down on the edge of the stage, alongside her. “So what happened?”

She arches her eyebrow. “Karma happened.” She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “I know it’s his joke to brag about his perfect record, and I’ve heard him do it many times before and nothing’s come of it.” She pauses to dust the crumbs off her lap. “But you don’t laugh at fate like that without fate eventually having the last laugh. The only problem is, it doesn’t just affect him. It might shut down the remaining run.”

“Shut it down? I thought it was just tonight’s.”

“Jeroen won’t be able to perform either of this weekend’s performances, and even if he can actually manage it in the boot cast he’s apparently going to have to wear for the next six weeks, they’ll have to reblock the whole thing. Plus, there are questions of insurance.” She sighs. “It might be easier to just cancel.”

My shoulders slump with the weight of that statement. So it falls to me. “I think I’m starting to believe in the Mackers curse,” I tell Marina.

She looks at me, the worry in her eyes mixed with sympathy. She seems about to say something when Petra orders me to the stage.

Linus looks miserable. But Petra, she of the thousand tantrums, is actually calm, cigarette smoke swirling around her like a statue on fire. It takes me a minute to realize she’s not calm. She’s resigned. She’s already written tonight off.

I climb onto the stage. I take a breath. “What can I do?” I ask her.

“We have the cast on standby for a full run-through later,” Linus answers. “Right now, we’d like to run your scenes with Marina. See how those go.”

Petra stubs out her cigarette. “We’ll skip ahead to Act One, Scene Two with Rosalind. I will read Celia. Linus will read Le Beau and the Duke. Let’s start just before the fight with Le Beau’s line.”

“‘Monsieur the challenger, the princesses call for you?’” Linus asks. Petra nods.

“I attend them with all respect and duty,” I say, jumping right in with Orlando’s next line.

There’s a moment of surprise as they all look at me

“Young man, have you challenged Charles the wrestler?” Marina asks as Rosalind.

“No, fair princess; he is the general challenger: I come but in, as others do, to try with him the strength of my youth,” I reply, not boastfully, as Jeroen does, but tempering the bravado with a little uncertainty, which I somehow now know is what Orlando must feel.

I’ve said these words hundreds of times in readings with Max, but they were just lines in a script, and I never stopped to figure out what it all meant because I never really had to. But just as Sebastian’s monologue came alive during my audition months ago, the words seem charged with meaning all of a sudden. They become a language I know.

We go back and forth and then I get to Orlando’s line: “I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me, the world no injury, for in it I have nothing. ” As I say the words, I feel a tiny catch of emotion in the back of my throat. Because I know what he means. For a minute, I think to swallow the emotion down, but I don’t. I breathe into it, letting it carry me through the scene.

I’m feeling loose and good as we move onto the fight scene, in which I pantomime fighting an invisible opponent. I know this part well. Orlando wins the fight, but he loses anyway. He is cast out of the duke’s kingdom and warned that his brother wants to kill him.

We reach the end of the scene. Petra, Linus, even Marina, they all stare at me, not saying a thing.

“Shall we continue?” I ask. “On to Act Two?” They nod. I run that scene with Linus reading the part of Adam, and when I finish that, Petra clears her throat and asks me to take it from the beginning, Orlando’s opening monologue, the one I flubbed so badly during my callback.

I don’t flub it this time. When I finish, there is more silence. “So you’re off book, that is clear,” Linus says finally. “And the blocking?”

“Yes, that too,” I say.

They look so incredulous. What do they think I’ve been doing all this time?

Warming a seat
, comes my own answer. And maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised by their surprise. Because isn’t that exactly what I’d thought I’d been doing, too?

• • •

Petra and Linus excuse Marina and me. They have some things to discuss. If they decide to proceed with tonight’s performance, there will be an all-cast rehearsal at the theater at noon, and I’ll have to do an additional tech run-through at the amphitheater later in the day with just Linus.

“Sit tight. Keep your phone on,” Linus says and he pats my back and gives me a look that’s almost fatherly. “We’ll speak soon.”

Marina and I head to a nearby café for coffee. It’s raining, and inside the windows are fogged up. We sit down at a table. I rub a circle of condensation off the window. Across the canal is the bookstore where I first found the copy of
Twelfth Night
. It’s just opening up for the day. I tell Marina about the flat tire and stopping at the shop, the strange chain of events that led to me being Jeroen’s understudy, and now possibly, playing Orlando.

“None of that has anything to do with that performance you just gave.” She shakes her head and smiles, a private smile, and it’s this, more than anything else, that makes me stop feeling like a member of the shadow cast. “You were holding out on us.”

I don’t know how to answer. Maybe I’ve been holding out on myself, too.

“You should tell him,” she says, gesturing to the bookstore. “The guy who sold you the book and told you about the play. If you go on, you should tell him it’s partly because of him.”

If
I go on, there are lots of people I’ll have to tell.

“Wouldn’t you want to know?” Marina continues. “That in some little way, something random you did had such an impact on someone’s life? What do they call that? The Butterfly Effect?”

I watch the man open the bookstore. I should tell him. Though the person I really want to tell, the person who is somehow intricately tied up in all this, who has really led me to this, I can’t tell.

“While we’re confessing,” Marina says, “I should tell you that I’ve been a little intrigued by you from the start, this mysterious actor who keeps to himself, whom no one has ever heard of, but who is good enough to get cast as the understudy.”

Good enough? That surprises me. I’d thought it was the opposite.

“I have a strict policy of no showmances,” she continues. “Nikki keeps saying you can be an exception because you’re an understudy and not in the show, but now that you maybe are I’m even more intrigued.” She gives me that private smile again. “Either we close tonight or we close in three weeks, but either way, after it’s over maybe we can spend some time together?”

That surge of longing for Lulu is still in my bloodstream, like a drug wearing out its half life. Marina is not Lulu. But Lulu is not even Lulu. And Marina is amazing. Who knows what might happen?

I’m about to tell her yes, after we close, I’d like that, but I’m interrupted by the ringing of my phone. She glances at the number and smiles at me. “That’s your fate calling.”