“Because Tibor — because your father — needs you to help him.” She let the cigarette drop next to a forgotten crabapple. “And I don’t think you should.”
Cristina returned to Cambridge for my graduation a week later. Tibor too. He was playful, in manic high spirits. All my friends thought that I was the luckiest girl in the quad to have such a fantasy close at hand. The hint of a bald spot on Tibor’s crown had widened into permanence. But the rest of his hair was thick and cut and shaped in a way that spoke of financial health as much as art. He had no idea that Cristina had come up the week before, that we had driven out to the Orchard and spoken. But that evening, after half a duck and two bottles of Merlot at Midsummer House, after I’d walked them back to the University Arms, Tibor stopped me under a sulfur lamp on St. Andrew’s Street. The National had signed him to direct a production of Sophocles’ Antigone. He had a concept that he knew could be extra ordinary but required the kind of diplomacy and organization and sense of direction that he believed only I possessed. Might I come work as his assistant? Immediately? This clearly was the help that Cristina warned me about. But Tibor, my father! The National — how and for what reason could I say no?
Even though the National ran with strict union rules regulating hour and place, everyone involved in Tibor’s Antigone had signed a waiver to accommodate Tibor’s particular method. Every day, the entire company met in a large rehearsal room just before noon. Not just actors but designers, carpenters, seamstresses, the occasional executive, and a smattering of ushers and other front-of-house personnel. At the stroke of twelve, Tibor would appear to give a benediction to the company — a sermon that riffed on Sophocles, Dante, Winston Churchill, the changing politics of Eastern Europe, or sometimes just a comment on the hairstyle of one of the actors in the company. Eventually, the road led back to Antigone. And with that, Tibor would declare the workday begun. A couple of trestle tables were laden with food and drink. Most of the company would grab a salad or a Scotch egg and a coffee to fortify themselves for the day’s surprises. Tibor never made a plan in advance. He might begin by gathering a covey of actors into a corner to discuss context and character, or he might spend two hours drilling a speech with the Creon in the middle of the hall while the others looked on. Or he might just huddle with the costume designer, even though everything had been sifted and sorted, for the entire afternoon.
At four, lunch was exchanged for tea. At seven, the drinks trolley appeared. More food at seven-thirty, and then the official end of the day at midnight. Everyone — particularly the actors — was expected to be present all the time, all part of the theatrical engine. “An infernal machine,” Tibor called it, quoting Sophocles or Anouilh or some other aesthetic engineer.
And for the first week, the machine ran like a well-oiled Jaguar. The actors were marvelous, particularly the Welsh girl playing Antigone, the young daughter of the dead Oedipus, who defies the laws of her Uncle Creon to bury her brother, who was killed trying to restore morality to the throne. When they weren’t rehearsing with Tibor, they’d go off into corners by themselves and swot the history or run lines. Fruit and bottled water were the staples of their diets that first week — I was the one on the phone every morning at eleven, calling to the buttery for fresh supplies. And so we came to the end of the sixth day and all was good.
Monday was the day of rest. Part of my job was to pick Tibor up at his over-designed hotel on St. Martin’s Lane before rehearsal and deposit him there afterwards. I didn’t expect to see him on Monday — frankly, I needed a day away, and there was some unfinished business with a tutor of mine up at Trinity. But at 7 a.m. my telephone rang.
“Oc-TAY-vya?” The woman on the other end was clearly not someone who knew me. “I’ve got a friend of yours here. In a bad way.
What’d you say your name was, love?”
I took the tube up to Baker Street, to a basement flat just north of the Marylebone Road. Reshma was the girl’s name — she was tall and well filled-out, roughly my age, but in different circumstances. As she fixed me a cup of instant — with a drop from the pint of milk she’d asked me to pick up along the way — she told me about her dilemma, whether to return to Bollywood or try to make it in England. She rattled off the roles she’d played in community theater in Hendon and Ealing and mentioned a couple of TV shows I’d vaguely heard of that had almost offered her a role. The TV was on low by the counter — BBC strangely enough, with Anna Ford reading the morning news. I looked around Reshma’s kitchen and wondered behind which door “my friend” was hiding, or lying, or dying.
“So—” It was the door behind me, as luck would have it.
“Poor darling!” Reshma looked up at Tibor with the eyes of an actress in mid-audition. Tibor waved her off. He was dressed in the same clothes I’d left him in at the hotel the night before. If he had taken them off, it hadn’t been to sleep. It wasn’t particularly warm in Reshma’s kitchen, but Tibor’s shirt bore a stigmata of sweat beneath the arms and breasts. He was holding a water glass in one hand. The other was planted on his knee to support the weight of a back that refused to straighten. “He’s been stuck like that for over an hour,” Reshma said. “That’s why I called you.”
Tibor shook his head and waved the glass towards the TV. Anna Ford was talking about Vice President Cheney, who was preoccupied with his own stress test. But Tibor was more interested in the bottle next to the TV.
“Do you really think?” Reshma asked, not moving from the chair.
“Ottavia!” Tibor shouted in a Tom Waits whisper and shook the glass again in the direction of the bottle. I brought it over to him — a liter of Absolut with perhaps a slurp and a half at the bottom. “Pour,” Tibor said. He drank, he swallowed. And with an effort that seemed to wring several slurps of sweat out of his body, Tibor straightened his back with a crack that momentarily drowned out Anna Ford. “So,” he said, fully erect. “You found me. The same way you first found me and Cristina.”
“Did I find you?” I asked him. “I thought it was the other way around.”
“When La Principessa walked into my rehearsal on her wedding day,” Tibor said, “wardrobed to the max in full bridal regalia and looking for the District Hall, do you think it mattered which one of us found the other? Which one of us was the Sun? Which one the Earth?”
I blushed, struck for the first time by an image of Cristina seated on a bathroom sink, her wedding dress hiked up around her waist and her second-hand heels digging into Tibor’s bomber jacket.
“In love and discovery,” Tibor said, looking over my head at Reshma, “there is no Fucker and no Fuckee. Only the Fuck. It’s what we do afterwards,” he said, striking a match, “after the cigarette and the vodka and the snoring are over and the stage lights are off, that’s what matters. Action,” he said, pulling on the Camel, “action is everything.”
“I was just telling Oc-TAY-vya here about my dilemma.” Reshma offered me a cigarette. I declined.
“Give her the address,” Tibor said to me.
“Which address?” The most intelligible person in the room was still Anna Ford, and I never knew what she was saying.
“The Studio, the National …” Tibor waved his own cigarette at me. “My concept,” Tibor said. “Cristina told you I had a concept. She warned you, didn’t she?”
I didn’t know that Tibor knew about my tea with Cristina, about her warning. So I said nothing. But on cue, a familiar Eastern European voice came into the room, care of Reshma’s TV.
“This morning, my guest is the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney.”