Wish Upon a Star (24 page)

“How long is that going to last?” I asked Dani.

“It should only be a few more days. I’ll pay for her to be fixed, when it’s over.” I started to protest—surely, the Master Plan required me to be responsible for my cat’s medical care—but Dani shook her head. “She’s my responsibility, financially at least. I’m the one who brought her here.”

I thought about the packages of ramen that still made up the better part of my kitchen supplies. A little financial help from Dani would be more than welcome. “All right,” I said, reluctantly. “We’ll talk about it more when she’s ready.” I scritched Tabitha on the head one last time, and then let Dani and myself out of the apartment.

Listening to the cat’s yowl turned out to be good preparation for that day’s rehearsal. By the time I arrived at the theater, Martina was in full cry. She was working through a supposedly delicate scene in the second act, when the Gentleman Caller comes to visit. In Williams’s original play, the encounter is heartrending; the audience learns along with Laura that she will never gain the strength to break free from her mother, from her dreams, from her past.

In
Menagerie!
the scene was transformed into something infinitely more powerful. After delivering her painful, stilted lines in the spoken play, Laura was supposed to sing a haunting ballad, belting out a powerful paean to individuality and strength and the cost of making one’s own decisions. The number should have been a blockbuster, ending with a final chorus sung after a vigorous dance interlude. The score provided a pause for enthusiastic audience applause, then launched into an immediate reprise, sung half an octave higher.

And therein lay the problem.

Martina insisted on turning the song into a punk anthem. She opened the first verse with a banshee shriek that was nowhere in the score. She shouted out her words, punching up the rhythm, doing her level best to torture a beautiful ballad into an angry, rebellious screed.

She could pull it off for two verses and a chorus—if you liked that sort of thing. (Could anyone, anywhere, anytime, truly like that sort of thing? I wanted to invent a Human Invisible Fence, a dog collar that I could strap on Martina, so that it would zap her with a bolt of electricity every time she howled. Still, someone
must
appreciate that Queen of Punk introduction, because Ken never ordered her not to do it.)

The entire venture fell apart, though, after the dance section. Martina was winded by the time she got to the end; she panted like a racehorse during the gap for audience reaction. Then, she insisted on launching the reprise with the same violent shout that she used to lead off the number. The problem was, she couldn’t sustain anything approaching a lyrical sound—not after the demanding verses and certainly not after the dance interlude. Every single time she tried, her voice cracked. Try after try, the first line of the reprise was lost in a scratchy, painful croak.

After every single attempt, Shawn leaned closer to me, digging an elbow into my side, clutching my knee as if he were a drowning man, pretending to scream in agony at the monstrosity that Martina was bringing to life onstage. Every line of his mugging face argued that I was the better performer, that I should be onstage.

All of the understudies had my back. They all told me that I was a better performer than Martina, every time Ken had us run through scenes. But that and four bucks would buy me a Starbucks latte. Martina’s name continued to draw attention from the press; just the other day, the
Times
had run an article about reality TV show stars, and what they were doing now. More free publicity for
Menagerie!
—another strike against my ever going onstage.

Nevertheless, every time we understudies rehearsed, every time we ran through scenes, I spun out a fantasy where Ken changed his mind. Even at this late date, he accepted that he’d made a terrible mistake, that he never should have given in to the producers. Over and over, I delivered one hundred percent—through every spoken scene, every song and dance number. The rest of the cast noticed, and Ken did, too.

But even if Ken
wanted
to fire Martina and hire me to take her place, he couldn’t. Not without alienating the producers, the guys with the money who were eagerly counting on sold-out houses for weeks.

As a company, we had tried everything to help Martina. The composer had rewritten the piece, transposing it to a different key. The choreographer had modified the dancing, not once, not twice, but three separate times, fighting to build a level of energy that would satisfy the audience, while still matching Martina’s fitness. Or lack thereof.

We were down to the worst possible option—adding dialog between the two parts of the song, meaningless lines delivered by Amanda and Tom solely to pad out the scene, to give Martina a chance to recover. Then, once she had her breath back, she could belt out the reprise, preferably without her ear-piercing rebel yell.

That modification was fraught with peril, too, though. No matter how many times Ken came up with new words for the other actors, they sounded harsh compared to Tennessee Williams’s original poetry. The additions were fake and flabby and forlorn. They were utterly unnecessary.

And even
that
wasn’t the biggest problem.

No, the biggest problem was that the audience wasn’t going to understand. They’d applaud like crazy at the end of the song, and then they’d quiet down to hear the important, plot-driving lines that Amanda and Tom had to say. Everyone would be disappointed when they realized that Amanda and Tom weren’t actually saying anything crucial, anything to advance the actual story. Then, when Martina’s song broke out again, the audience would have no idea whether they should sit back for new, multiple verses or whether they should just enjoy a brief, now meaningless, reprise. They might clap, but the most we could hope for would be polite applause. The audience would be confused. They’d be lost. And losing audiences was the very last thing we wanted to do, especially three-quarters of the way through the second act.

After one particularly off-key yowl from Martina, Ken interrupted the accompanist with a shout of disgust. “Stop!” he called. “Stop, stop, stop! Let’s take a break.”

Martina, apparently blissfully unaware that she was the source of the entire company’s angst, made a beeline for the wings. I turned to Shawn. “Are you getting anything to eat?”

He grimaced. “I’ll wait until the path is clear.”

I smiled tightly. None of us ever wanted to get between Martina and the craft services table. Nevertheless, my stomach growled. I was really hungry. Not to mention, I was looking forward to seeing Timothy.

I was a big girl. I could face Martina. After all, avoiding her wasn’t going to make her go away.

Miraculously, she was nowhere in sight when I got backstage. Timothy stood alone at the table, refilling one of the platters of food, his attention completely snagged by the delicacies he was setting out. It was warm in the wings, and he’d shed his long-sleeved work shirt in favor of a black tee. The cotton garment accentuated his muscles; his biceps rippled as he reached across the table. The motion drew my gaze to his waist, to the pair of black denim jeans that looked as if they’d been designed solely with him in mind.

I wasn’t only captivated by his body. Sure, that was part of it. But even more striking was his economy of motion, the controlled way that he completed his work without using any more energy than necessary, without wasting a single movement, a solitary action.

Watching him was peaceful. Soothing. He was a man who knew what he wanted to do and had built a world where he could do it. He was a man in control.

Except for that little detail about his rent.

What would happen to Timothy if he lost Garden Variety? I couldn’t imagine him working in someone else’s kitchen. I couldn’t see him manning the grill at some chain restaurant, churning out mundane menu offerings, the same happy-happy products day after day after day. He’d be beaten down by the commonplace details, destroyed by the boring humdrum inanity of it all.

I cleared my throat. Timothy looked up slowly, the motion controlled, as if it were part of some ballet. “Erin,” he said, and his voice was as warm as his caramel gaze. His lips curled into a hint of a smile. As always, he had that scruffy beard, that rebellious three-day growth.

Damn. I’d forgotten the English language. Again.

Timothy, unaware of my stupid inability to speak, said, “Could you help me for a moment? Just hold these, while I get the serving fork?”

Grateful for the distraction, for the bit of stage business, I took the stack of plates that he handed me. Somehow, the familiar action freed me up to use my words. “Um, Amy called. She asked if she can move your meeting to four.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “Thanks for being the go-between.” He put one serving fork onto the tray in front of me, then turned back to rescue another from a box behind him.

Before I could scrape together another conversational gambit, Martina Block interrupted. “I hope that you have some
protein
there,” she announced in a voice capable of scraping paint off the theater’s back wall. She plucked the top plate from the stack that I held, scrutinizing it as if she expected it to be dirty.

Martina had obviously used the break to freshen up backstage. She moved in a cloud of perfume that made my eyes water. She had renewed her makeup, too—the outlined edges of her lips were sharp enough to cut paper. She wore more eyeliner than a club full of Goths.

Timothy’s shoulders stiffened as he turned to face her. “Of course,” he said, his voice the frozen model of politeness that I had first heard him use with Sam.

“What’s that?” Martina brayed. My attempt at conversation with Timothy was forgotten as he described the puff pastries—havarti and prosciutto, fig with blue cheese, chocolate pistachio cream. He was the consummate professional chef, speaking to a particularly demanding customer.

And if he could be polite to her, then I could, too. After all, Martina and I didn’t have to be enemies—no matter what Shawn might say. We were both professionals. We were both working toward a common goal—the success of our show.

I took a fortifying breath and moved into the cloud of her perfume. Mentally testing my voice, I strived for deference. For friendship. For a companionable sharing of theatrical frustrations. I cleared my throat and said, “That last dance combination is really difficult.”

Martina turned to stare at me as if I were some insect mounted in a cotton-swathed display case. She narrowed her eyes and jutted her chin forward as if she couldn’t quite make out my features. And then she said with a chill usually reserved for known terrorists or torturers of defenseless animals, “I’m sorry. Have we met before?”

I would have been embarrassed under any circumstances. I would have been mortified at the thought that I had worked with a woman for over a month but had remained so insignificant, so undistinguished, so unworthy of notice, that she couldn’t even remember
seeing
me before.

But the shame was a hundred times worse because Timothy was watching. He was there, to hear me stammer a reply. He saw me utterly at a loss to defend myself, to take a stand, to act like the adult I supposedly was. Before I could figure out some way to tell Martina that we
had
met—that we had worked together every day for nearly a month—she managed to make it all even worse. She peered down her nose at me and said, “I’m not accustomed to discussing dance combinations with a caterer. Now, could you hurry up and fetch me a regular coffee?”

Outraged, I said, “I am
not
a caterer.”

I snapped the words without thinking. I didn’t mean to imply that there was anything wrong with caterers. I didn’t mean to say that I was better than anyone who
was
a caterer. I simply meant to say that I was an actor, that I was a theater professional, just like she was. I was entitled to as much respect as Martina got.

Before I could clarify my intention, though, Timothy turned away from the table. His shoulders were rock-hard as he collected a cup of coffee for Martina. His face was unreadable as he passed her the caffeine.

And then, before I could figure out a way to make everything all right, to explain that I hadn’t meant to denigrate him or what he did for us, the stage manager called us all back to our places. Martina huffed and left her coffee cup on the table, scarcely touched. Panicked at the thought of actually talking to Timothy after my faux pas, I scrambled to get back to my seat in the house.

I told myself that I needed to get settled before the action could start onstage. I needed to make myself invisible, like a good understudy.

As soon as I sat next to Shawn, I thought of all the things I could have said, should have said. I could have laughed off Martina’s rudeness. I could have told Martina she was an idiot, a drama queen, a pretentious Hollywood star who couldn’t begin to carry a Broadway musical. I could have adopted a professorial tone, instructing her on how to perform her role, how to play the part of Laura without ruining the show.

But I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I’d let the role of Laura control me. I’d let myself become a tongue-tied child, a girl afraid of the world around her.

All of that was bad. But worst of all was that I’d forgotten about Timothy. I’d forgotten that
he
had been cut by Martina’s snobbery as badly as I had, probably even worse. I should have stuck up for him immediately, without hesitation. My tongue-tied intimidation around Martina had led me to insult a guy I really liked.

The more I thought about it, the worse I felt.

I leaned over and whispered to Shawn, “I’ve got a terrible headache.”

He waited for Martina to finish her rebel yell. “No wonder.”

“I’m getting out of here,” I said. He glanced toward the stage manager, and I shook my head. “I don’t want to interrupt. Rehearsal should be over in an hour, anyway.”

Shawn grimaced. “I’ll cover for you, sweetie.”

“You’re my hero,” I joked. I kissed him on the cheek and squeezed his arm in thanks before I slipped out the back of the theater.