He wore his hurt openly. “I’m not happy.”
She saw how miserable he was, how miserable she was making him. She thought of the Pants and her single-minded wish. What wouldn’t she ruin? What wouldn’t she sacrifice for a dot of blood?
“I know you’re not happy,” she said regretfully.
“I wish I could do something.”
She wanted him to leave. That was what he could do. She wanted to be alone with her uterus. “If I think of something, I’ll tell you,” she said, opening the door and stepping aside for him to go through it.
“Will you?”
“Yeah.”
“You promise?”
“Yeah.”
“Tibby?”
“Yeah?”
He looked like he might cry. He wanted to be able to talk.
We shouldn’t have done it, she wanted to say. We opened ourselves up to all this. Why did you want to so much? Why did you make me believe it would be all right?
She knew she should be having this talk with Brian. Instead, she had it, once again, with herself.
“What?” she pressed, knowing full well what he wanted.
He looked at her for another moment and turned to go.
She felt mean. She was mean. She hated herself more than she hated him.
He walked to the elevator. He had come all this way, and now he was going all the way back. Only Brian would do a thing like that.
Usually these gestures moved her. She appreciated the way he was, the way he trusted himself and her, regardless of how the rest of the world worked. Usually she understood the particular ways he felt and the things he did.
Tonight she felt differently. After she closed the door she wondered what half-sane person would travel twelve hours to see a girl for ten minutes.
Julia worked on the Princess of France while Carmen, self-consciously, worked on Perdita.
“Perdita means lost child, did you know that?” Carmen asked, looking up from her book the night before the callback. The room had been silent for so long, she wanted the comfort of a little conversation.
“Yes. I know that,” Julia said flatly.
Carmen tried not to feel hurt. “Do you want me to read Berowne or the king for you?” she asked.
“No, thanks.”
Later, it seemed to her that Julia felt bad. “Do you want me to read with you?” Julia offered.
“Um, sure. That’s really nice. Do you want to be Polixenes?”
“Fine.”
“Okay, so I’ll start where she goes.” Carmen squinted at the page, knowing she should try it from memory. “Uh, ‘Sir, welcome…’ ”
“Go ahead.”
“ ‘Sir, welcome! / It is my father’s will I should take on me / The hostess of—’ ”
“No,” Julia interrupted. “It’s ‘hostess-ship,’ not ‘hostess.’ And you don’t say ‘of.’ It’s a contraction. You say ‘o.’ You say ‘hostess-ship o’ the day.’ ”
“Right,” Carmen said. She tried it again.
Julia stopped her after another three lines. “Carmen, have you read Shakespeare before?”
“Not that much. Not out loud. Why?”
“Because your meter is all wrong. Rhythmically it just sounds wrong.”
“Oh.” They were close enough friends that Carmen had trouble believing Julia meant to sound as mean as she sounded.
“And it’s not like I have time to teach it all to you either,” Julia said. “I have a lot of work to do for my own callback.”
“Fine,” Carmen said. She felt like she was going to cry.
Julia shut her book, seemingly blind to what Carmen was feeling.
Carmen kept her eyes on her script.
“Listen, Carmen, no offense, but are you sure you should bother with this? It doesn’t seem like your kind of thing, you know? It’s going to take a lot of work, and the chances of it working out are pretty small. Maybe you should just blow it off. That’s probably what I would do if I were you.”
Carmen did not want to cry. “I already tried to get out of it,” she said almost inaudibly. “I told Judy she’d made a mistake.”
“You did?” Julia’s voice was loud and quick. “And what did she say?”
“She said she didn’t.”
Julia’s normally pretty face did not look pretty at this moment. It looked pinched and suspicious. Carmen tried to use her imagination to restore its prettiness, to remember why they were friends.
“Didn’t what?”
“Think she’d made a mistake.”
“Well, yeah. But you know yourself better than she does.”
Carmen nodded wordlessly. She lay on her bed and turned her face to the wall. What was wrong with her? Julia was being a witch to her and all she felt like doing was crying. Where was the famous Carmen temper? She was a master at standing up for herself.
But that Carmen felt like someone she only knew about from a long time ago. That Carmen wasn’t this Carmen. This was a faded Carmen. She’d lost her mojo for that kind of thing.
Maybe you needed to feel strong to stand up for yourself. You needed to feel loved. She’d always been better at acting up with people she trusted to love her.
She wished she could just fall asleep and sleep straight through her callback audition and forget about the whole thing. Maybe Julia wasn’t simply being mean. Maybe she was being honest and it was the honesty that was tough to swallow. Carmen didn’t know how to read Shakespeare. Her meter was undoubtedly wrong.
She wished she could sleep, but she couldn’t. Even long after Julia turned off the light, Carmen lay there feeling wretched about herself. She felt despair, and apart from the Pants, she couldn’t think of a way to feel better.
And then she thought of one small way. Quietly she picked up her script from the bottom of her bed. Quietly she walked out of the room and into the hallway.
She sat down outside her door in a spot where the light was good. Feeling an odd sense of rebellion, she stayed in that spot and studied the lines.
She read them all. Not just Perdita’s, but the whole play. She read it again, and then, through the remaining hours before morning, she read Perdita’s part, each time with more care. She didn’t try to memorize it or figure out what Julia meant by the meter. She just tried to understand the play.
Carmen didn’t know how to act like an actress. But it dawned on her that she wasn’t supposed to. She was supposed to act like Perdita. She was supposed to act like the lost daughter of estranged parents—a flawed but repentant father, a beleaguered but upright mother who gets carried off to sea. Maybe that was something she could try to do.
As Lena dressed for her alleged date, she realized she hadn’t thought of Kostos in two days. Compared with how she used to be, two days was forever. Was she forgetting yet? Did that constitute forgetting? Maybe the fact that she was still asking meant no, not yet.
Lena wanted to look pretty, but not date pretty. She didn’t want to try too hard, but she did want him to notice that she was attractive. Or was thought to be so. That struck her as funny. You may not have noticed it, Leo, but I am thought to be attractive.
She liked and admired Leo for not seeming to notice, but she did also want him to. Here she had this supposedly striking quality, and it mostly caused her strain and annoyance—vapid attention and endless comments and people assuming she was a princess or a snob. She might as well take advantage of it once in a while.
Without meaning to, she was suffused with the memory of the last time she’d wanted to take advantage of it. It was at her bapi’s funeral, when she knew she’d see Kostos.
Lena lost track of her preparations. She dropped the eye pencil on her dresser. She sat on her bed, her hands tucked under her. That was the hardest day to remember.
She stared at her feet for a while and then out the window at the building across the way. This did not count toward forgetting, she realized.
When she finally got up, she dispensed with the makeup and the hair fi
ddling. She changed back into her comfortable shoes that made her feet look like the boats they were. She hedged; she left herself how she was.
She walked along with the address flapping in her hand. Where did he live? Did he have a roommate? Was this going to go along a standard date format? Or was this simply the gesture of a charitable friend? She wasn’t sure which she wanted less.
She turned onto his street. She knew the street, but not this part of it. It was deserted and a little bit dodgy, she recognized, and yet the old industrial loft buildings were staunchly romantic.
She stopped in front of 2020. She buzzed 7B. 7B buzzed back. She pushed into the building and made sure the door was shut behind her.
Of all the hundreds of possibilities she had considered, one of the few she hadn’t met her at the door.
“Hi, I’m Jaclyn. You’re Lena?”
Lena gaped for a moment too long and then stuck out her hand. “I am. Hi.”
Jaclyn was a tall African American woman who appeared to be in her early forties. She was wearing a paint-spattered denim work shirt over olive green cargo pants and elegant brown slides. She had three sparkly clips in her long braided hair. She was beautiful.
Lena’s brain was rushing around as she looked past the woman into the apartment. It was a gigantic loft. The ceiling must have been twenty feet high in the main room, and around it was a balcony suggesting a second floor. The railings were hung with huge tapestries and a few ancient-looking carpets.
The effect of the woman and the place were quite dazzling to all of Lena’s senses, but her brain was wondering how she, Lena, could possibly fit into it. Leo was less conventional than she’d even guessed. And apparently he liked older women.
Leo appeared behind Jaclyn. “Hey. Welcome. Come in.”
She followed them through the big room to an open kitchen under the balcony. The table was set, and pots were steaming on the stove. The air was spicy and garlicky.
“I hope you like, uh, flavorful food,” Jaclyn said. “Leo uses a head of garlic every time he makes dinner.”
Another sense dazzled. Another surprise about Leo. Lena nodded. “I’m Greek,” she said.
Jaclyn smiled. “Excellent,” she said.
Leo was manning all four gas burners with an admirably cool head. Lena had grown up in a family of cooks, but she couldn’t manage even one burner.
“Mom, could you get me the butter?” Leo called.
All the bits and pieces swirling in Lena’s head came apart and recombined. Jaclyn was his mom?
Jaclyn got the butter. More evidence that she was indeed his mother. There wasn’t anyone else around who could be his mother.
Lena looked from Jaclyn to Leo and back. Huh. She considered Leo’s dark gold skin. It made sense now. Lena saw, now that she really looked, how much of his mother’s beauty Leo had.
Lena realized that as a dinner guest it was not desirable to be completely mute. “Can I help with anything?” she asked politely.
“I think we’re set,” Jaclyn said, looking for something in the cupboard. “Leo, how’s it going?”
“A couple minutes,” he said. “Hey, Lena, will you bring me the plates and I’ll fill them up here?”
She was glad to have a job. She gathered and carefully stacked the yellow plates. “These are beautiful,” she murmured.
“They’re my mom’s,” Leo said.
It took her a second to realize that he didn’t just mean that his mom owned them.
“You mean like…”
“She made them. She’s a ceramicist. Mostly.”
“You made these?” she said stupidly to Jaclyn, who was setting glasses on the table.
“Yep. Water with dinner? Juice? Wine?”
“Water, please,” Lena said. She couldn’t help looking at Jaclyn with bald admiration. She was beautiful. She was young. She made exquisite yellow dinner plates. Lena suddenly wondered about Leo’s dad. Was there a dad? There were only three plates.
Lena thought of her own mother with her tailored beige clothes and her shiny briefcase.
Lena’s taste buds were her only sense yet undazzled, and a few bites of dinner did the trick. It was a spicy curry with lamb and vegetables over some eventful and delicious kind of rice. “This is so good,” she said to Leo, her awe undisguised. “I can’t believe you made this.”
He laughed and she realized it hadn’t come out all compliment, as she had intended. “I mean, not because you don’t seem like you could cook,” she added lamely. “Because I’m so bad at it.”
Why was she always putting herself down in front of him? What charm, exactly, did that hold?
“You probably haven’t practiced that much,” Leo said.
“That’s true. Everybody else cooks in my family, so I haven’t needed to yet.” She thought of all her ramen noodles with silent shame. “My grandparents owned a restaurant in Greece.”
The conversation rolled on from there. Jaclyn wanted to hear all about her family and how her parents ended up in America. Lena talked for a while, and when she remembered she was shy and lost, Jaclyn rescued her with a funny story about the time she went to Greece with an old boyfriend, lost him in a market near the Acropolis, and never saw him again.
After that Lena discovered that Leo’s dad was a businessman from Ohio who was no longer in the picture and that Jaclyn had brought up Leo mostly on her own.
“She supported us selling her ceramics and her tapestries,” Leo explained with obvious pride.
Lena admired the tapestries and then all the other lovely things lining the walls and shelves. The whole place was filled with things the two of them had made. Drawings, pots, sculptures, paintings. It was almost overwhelming to Lena.
She thought of the empty beige walls of her house and of the hard, minimal surfaces of metal and polished stone. Her parents, hailing from a romantic, disheveled homeland, had grown up in ancient, disheveled houses. Now they wanted only American sleekness.
You grow up, Lena thought, about herself and them. You leave home. You see other ways of living.
Lena looked around, intoxicated by her sense of longing. She wanted this.
It was late and Bee still had two hands and two knees against the floor. She had cleared several more feet and could not leave it. She’d work through dinner. She’d do it by moonlight if she had to. She could do it in the dark. She’d dreamed about it the past three nights. She simply loved the feeling of finding the floor, inch by inch, under her hands. By now she really trusted herself to know where it was.
The difference tonight was that Peter was kneeling two feet away, clearing next to her. He had not yet learned the floor as she had, but she was slightly proud to note that he had put aside his trowel and adopted her technique. She was faster, smoother, and surer every hour she worked.
“You can go,” she said. “Seriously. I’m fine. I’m a crazy nutjob, I know. I can’t help it. But I swear I won’t ruin anything.”
“I know you won’t,” he said almost defensively. “I’m not staying for you.”
She laughed. “Good to know.”
He had the slightly abstracted look she also wore when she had her hands on the floor. “I mean.” He raised his dirty hands. “It’s addictive.”
“Don’t I know.”
“Worse than pistachios.”
“So much.”
He disappeared briefly to find a spotlight and hook it up to the generator. He hopped back down.
“Hey, look,” she said. She held up a large piece of pottery. “Another one.” They had piles of them. They had left off with the proper labeling as it got later and later in the night.
“From the kalyx krater,” he said.
“I think.”
“Dude. We might find the whole thing.” He was excited. He did what he did for good reasons. She could understand wanting to spend your life like this.
“Dude, we might,” she teased him back.
He left again later to find a few pieces of pita bread and
a large chocolate bar and a half-empty bottle of red wine. He gallantly shared them with her.
After the eating were long periods of silent work. Occasionally she heard laughter from over the hill, where the nightly party was rolling on.
“Another sherd,” he said. “It’s from a lamp.”
“Arrrrg!” she erupted. “Say shard! Don’t say sherd.” The word potsherd was the single thing about archaeology she really did not like.
He passed her a challenging look. “Sherd.”
“Stop it!”
“Sherd.”
“I hate that.”
“Sherd.”
“Peter! Shut up!”
“Sherd.”
She reached over and shoved him hard. He was not only startled, he was poorly balanced. He fell over into the dirt.
Even though she felt bad, she was laughing too hard to stop. She walked over to him on her knees. She wanted to say sorry, but she couldn’t get it out.
He reached up and shoved her in retaliation. She fell onto her back, laughing so hard she was practically suffocating. They both lay in the dirt, punch-drunk and wine-drunk.
Once he’d gotten his breath and sat up, he reached out his hand. “Truce?” he said, hauling her up.
She was back on her knees. He was still holding her dirty hand in his. He pulled it toward his chest.
“Truce,” she meant to say, but she started laughing again midway through.
“Sherd,” he said.
“How’d it go?” Julia asked when Carmen joined her for a late dinner after her audition. By Julia’s expression, it looked to Carmen as though she had a specific idea in mind about how Carmen should answer.
It was a disaster, Carmen was supposed to say. I made a total fool of myself.
She could tell that that was what Julia wanted to hear, and that if she said it they could both laugh over it and be close again.
Carmen put her tray down and sat. But if Julia was actually her friend, why did she want to hear that? And if Carmen was so good at standing up for herself, why did she feel the need to say it? Why did Julia require that she be a failure, and why did Carmen go along with it?