“They are your crew.”
“As only you could say to me. But I thought that I had hired a professional entourage, not a contingent of panicky schoolchildren. His wigs. And all of this seems like idiocy and distractions until we can get to the heart of the play, Molly. We are just hammering away. Pretending that all is normal. The truth is that we don’t have a play here anymore, Molly. We have a set and script filled with lines. And a Marguerite that nobody knows anymore. Once more, I have to be forced to manage all this childish behavior.”
Max held on to Sarah’s forearm, gently releasing his grip, and turning it to a mannered stroke. Like that of an old matron with her favored but finicky pussycat. “You more than anybody know that it is part of the art of theater,” he said. “The panic is the basis of the nervous energy that instills the emotion into the performance. From the stagehands’ frenzy about the mechanics to your irritation. It is as much about the play as the final production. You understand as well as I do that the day that this is all laissez-faire is the day when we put on the flattest show ever played.”
“This seems like excrement. Not excitement. Perhaps it is no longer my reading of the play. Maybe it is just that I am too old, Molly.”
“Let’s not talk of old today. We’ll run through the play tonight to calm all fears and concerns of this strange house. And then later you and I will cozy up in your room and try to find the soul of Marguerite Gautier. You heard Kinney, the initial troubles are behind us. Now we just go ahead. Like one, two, three.” He tapped her arm in cadence. “One-two-three.”
“You are such a molly’s Molly,” she said. He could manage to make light out of anything, and it could not ever occur to him that feeling old and useless was more than the end effect of a crisis. For Max, depressive states were symptomatic reactions to situations easily rectified. Problem. Sad. Fixed. One-two-three. It will devastate him when he finds out how real she is. More real than he could possibly ever have imagined.
“Just a little while longer?” he asked.
“You will pardon me if I’m too exhausted for this.”
There were no words. She truly was exhausted and not just delivering a dramatic exit line to extinguish the conversation. She could not believe that Max wouldn’t see it in her eyes. That there was almost a refusal to look with any depth, like looking into an eclipse, afraid that what he sees may blind him. It was as if he thought he had to stand guard for both of them, knowing that one sign of weakness, one inkling of surrender, would permanently drop the curtain. So maybe Max wasn’t so unaware of the crisis that was igniting her. He was merely trying to smother it, through feigned ignorance and disbelief.
“Molly,” she said, “I really don’t need to be here right now. They will figure it out better without me here.”
“Maybe you are right. You can go to your car to rest for a little while until we need you.”
“My railcar is here?” She smiled.
“Let me just tell Kinney that I am going to walk you out there. He’s like a chessmaster patiently waiting for one errant move.”
“You don’t need to walk me there.”
“But I have the key.”
“I can certainly hold a key, Molly. What, are you going to lock me in there? Cage in the unpredictable lioness?”
Max’s face softened from Max Klein, international manager for the world’s greatest star, to Molly, the lost tragic little gay boy who found a home in the world of the diva whom he worshipped, the envy of the lost little gay boy world. His eyes squinted in a genuine smile, sending out little lines that betrayed his age to his boyish demeanor, but nevertheless looked as innocent and scared and hopeful as the day she first met him. And in that moment she wanted to forget Abbot Kinney’s theater in the middle of nowhere, forget that barn that needed to be miraculously reconfigured to the intimacy of the Parisian stage (for God’s sake, the place was large enough to hold all of Paris), allow the musty, moldy smell that had seeped into every slat of wood from the moist air to leave her senses, and just hold Molly like she had in the early days. When a simple eye-to-eye signal had sparked an all-day ticket for mayhem and laughter and reckless indecision, one that instantly took their seriousness of the theater out for a few breathing hours. It seemed like they were living more before they tried to get serious about living. And she really had fallen in love with him in a way that nobody could understand. It was so much deeper than anything else that she had ever really known in her life because it was a love based on pure selfless trust. The church hadn’t offered her that successfully. Nor acting. Not her family. Nor her romances. Only her Molly. He had no motives. No ambitions toward something greater. Only pure, exonerated love for the passion that was her soul. But like most relationships, it seemed to have turned to business and the management of life. Keeping track of schedules. Money. Futures. Policing each other. And only occasionally could it be broken up with a quiet intimate dinner, but even then the business of the relationship slowly seeped in. They were a partnership now. Overtaken by comfort and routine. Something that even their past respective romances hadn’t been able to destroy.
“Please walk me to my railcar, Molly,” she said. “I can’t imagine going there without you.”
Max reached down to take her hand. There were grunts and moans from the crew as they lifted a wall of painted bricks and cutout windows to stage left. And high up in the grid another pair of men were tying down the pulleys that would raise the interior of Marguerite’s anteroom, and lower the walls of the country house in Bougival. The hammers banged away, shooting disjointed echoes across the hall like ricocheting gun blasts. Nails were held in waiting between teeth. Men hovered with hands on their hips. An occasional melody hummed from an indecipherable corner of the room that suddenly stopped and then was picked up unconsciously from another corner of the house. It all worked in a mechanical rhythm like the most sophisticated piece of machinery the age could offer. All coming together beautifully, as do the actors onstage.
Max forgot to tell Kinney where they were going. They walked right out of the theater. Temporarily two young lovers.
IT WAS DARK INSIDE THE RAILCAR. The plush black curtains, faded velvet stained purplish by dust streaks, were pulled tight, allowing only a sliver of light to slice through the part in the middle, leaving a dirty darkness. The twenty-five-by-ten-foot container smelled like it had been locked up tight for the past three days, which it had. The normally nondescript smells that flavored the essence of the furnishings emanated their own brand of staleness when left alone. The scent of inertia bled from lack of breath in the cluttered single room. Max once referred to it as an abandoned whorehouse, and another time as a gypsy fortune-teller’s lair. A long, wide bed blocked off the back, fluffed up by a rumpled comforter with random brown stains that splattered out like haphazard sunrays, and bordered by a heap of threadbare pillows covered in what once had been the finest spun cotton. Behind it hung bright cherry wainscoting that was more funereal than royal. Along the right side sat a red velvet provincial couch, its richly cherry-colored legs standing like lazy soldiers on duty, buttressed against a rosewood table that held a Chinese vase and a Saxe statuette. Opposite it was a vanity with the mirror expanding up and wide in an ornate frame, carelessly brushed white more than once (its master carver surely would be horrified to see his detailed craft mauled by thick brushstrokes). The desktop was littered with small bottles of perfume made of cut glass and with silver tops, surrounded by jars of makeup and pills and brushes and clips and combs and traces of forgotten jewelry.