rillarilla (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} rillarilla) wrote,@ 2007-08-10 01:38:00 |
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More Slings and Arrows fic: Eurydice
Now,loneraven beat me to the punch in a lot of ways on this one, which pissed me off no end because she did an excellent job of it with her lovely story Letters to La Paz. For example, we seem to have quite independently arrived at eerily similar ideas about Geoffrey's feelings towards umbrellas. But whatevs, mine is not to reason why.
Anyway, here it is. Geoffrey/Ellen, post-finale, PG13ish, spoilers for the entire series and Sarah Ruhl's play Eurydice.
Now,
loneraven beat me to the punch in a lot of ways on this one, which pissed me off no end because she did an excellent job of it with her lovely story Letters to La Paz. For example, we seem to have quite independently arrived at eerily similar ideas about Geoffrey's feelings towards umbrellas. But whatevs, mine is not to reason why.Anyway, here it is. Geoffrey/Ellen, post-finale, PG13ish, spoilers for the entire series and Sarah Ruhl's play Eurydice.
Eurydice
"Now, if you're up to it," Anna says, hands fluttering nervously, "We should really finalize the season." She slides a piece of paper across the desk to him. The list of plays. It is, dear Anna, a spreadsheet. Tragedies and comedies and classical and modern and Shakespeare and not Shakespeare.
"Ooh, Much Ado," says Ellen, leaning over his shoulder. "Haven't done that one in ages. Isn't that your favorite of the comedies, Geoff?"
"No Shakespeare," Geoffrey says, and braces himself.
"Um, Geoffrey, Theatre Sans Argent is supposed to be a Shakespearean company, the actors are expecting – "
" – For God's sake, Geoffrey, you don't have to take your latest psychotic break out on the rest of us, you're the one who wanted to come right back – "
" – If you need a little more time, everyone here just wants to help."
"Don't be such a jackass."
He waits it out, waits for both of them to finish (he can follow two people talking at him at once, he has lots of practice at that) and when the tide of voices ebbs he says again, "No Shakespeare."
***
After the last box was stacked in the hall and the movers had left and Geoffrey and Ellen were alone in their new apartment in Montreal, Ellen gave him a satisfied smile. “I think this place is just about perfect,” she said – then she turned to him with a look of horror and slid down to the floor and cried.
“What,” said Geoffrey, leaning against the wall and pushing his fist to the top of his nose. Moving took it out of you.
“I just thought,” Ellen said, “I thought, ‘Oliver’s going to be so jealous of my picture windows.’” She leaned against Geoffrey’s leg, turned her face against the side of his knee.
Oh. Geoffrey started to slide down next to her, but she was already wiping her face and gulping. She turned a hard bright smile up to him. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s funny, isn’t it? It took me this long to notice that he was really dead.”
***
Geoffrey has enough experience now with Ellen leaving him that he has more or less worked out a routine. Step one: find someplace else to live (this is occasionally step two, after go insane, but that's not a part of the current plan). This time around that means a small studio near the theatre. It has a couch, a chair, and a skull. He sleeps on the couch, because step two is: do not obtain a bed. He and Ellen are tactile sleepers, and if he sleeps in a bed he tends to roll over and over trying to slide an arm around a waist that isn't there till he falls on the floor.
The apartment's very plain. Spartan, even. Somewhere, in storage or something, there must be boxes and boxes of things of his (of theirs) from the brownstone they lived in for almost two years. Monsieur and Madame Tennant. Ha. He will deal with boxes at some point in the future. Dealing with them seems counter to the spirit of step three, which is: wait for her to come back.
And of course, he will see her at the theatre tomorrow, so tonight the thing to do is probably to have an Ellen-free evening. He potters around, flipping open this anthology and that, roughing out a season in his head. "I think I'll do Phaedra, the Racine version, at the end of the season," he tells Oliver's skull, "Throw a bone to the classicists and the francophiles both," and he picks up Oliver and puppets "That's brilliant, Geoffrey. I would never have thought of that."
By 4 AM he's got the whole season mapped, pretty much. Phaedra, Lady Windermere's Fan, he promised the boys something where they could hit each other so maybe a Sam Shepard. Uncle Vanya, Baby with the Bathwater and there's an end. Something's missing still, but maybe he's just not used to a whole season that's younger than 400.
He falls asleep surrounded by stacks of books. Much later Ellen comes in and says "Well, never mind," and he kisses her, finally oh God, and they make their way over to his couch, shoving cascades of plays to the floor. They're tearing at each other's clothes and Ellen keeps shoving him away to unbutton his shirt, but he needs her close and can't quite disentangle from her long enough to let her. She has her hand down his pants and all is right in Geoffrey's world when he wakes up on the floor with a thump. He is alone, his head is throbbing and he's nostalgic for bygone days of erectile dysfunction.
He starts to sit up and a play falls on his face. If he closes one eye and squints he can make out the title.
"Eurydice!" he tells Anna the next day over breakfast at Le Flic.
"Ya-what?" says Gigi, their stage manager.
"Eurydice," he says. "It's a modernization of the Orpheus myth. Orpheus's wife Eurydice dies and joins her father in the underworld. Orpheus follows his beloved into death and brings her back. Or, you know, almost. It's a lovely play. It came to me in the night."
"Well," Anna says, "It's not on the short list. I'd have to check on how much the royalties would be."
"Please," says Geoffrey. "Because this is our season opener." He swigs the rest of his coffee. "Are you coming to the theatre today?"
"No," Anna says. "I have to work late. My boss has a big case tomorrow."
"Well, enjoy, and I'll see you the next time you get to swap out your legal assistant hat for your far more becoming general manager hat. Gigi?"
"After my shift," Gigi says. She stands and puts on an apron emblazoned LE FLIC.
"I'll walk with you part of the way," Anna says as Gigi buses their table. They emerge into a gray drizzle. Geoffrey holds his umbrella over Anna's head. "I know we're short for time," he says. "But Eurydice has very simple staging. We should be fine with a shorter rehearsal period. I think we can still open on the fifth like we planned."
"Well, okay," Anna says doubtfully. "That's a very short rehearsal period. And don't forget, we've got the thing in a couple weeks."
"The thing?"
"The thing – the thing in New Burbage," Anna says, then presses her lips together.
Right. That thing. Geoffrey hands her the umbrella and steps out of its shelter, tilting his face back to the rain.
"Geoffrey –" she says behind him, "Geoffrey – are you sure you're ready to come back? There's been so much interest in Sans Argent lately, I'm sure we can find someone else to direct the first show."
"Trying to get rid of me, Anna?" he scrubs the rain from his eyes with the heels of his hands.
"Oh, Geoffrey –"
"Anna." He holds up a hand. "Do you know what the first thing I did was ten years ago when they let me out of the asylum?"
"What," she says.
"I directed a play. All right?"
She doesn't say anything, but just looks that Anna look and sighs that Anna sigh and he's worried there may be a hug or something coming out of that so he turns back to the rain.
"Well," she says finally, "This is my bus stop." She tries to hand the umbrella back to him.
"Keep it," he says. "It's Ellen's, anyway. I'd rather get wet."
He regrets that decision somewhat by the time he gets to the theatre and his socks are making squishing sounds in his shoes. He throws his coat at the front row of seats and flicks on the house lights, which blink and buzz to life. "There you are," Ellen says from the back of the house.
"God, what is it with you and sitting alone in the dark? And you can't smoke that in here."
She takes a deep drag on her cigarette, nods thoughtfully, and walks up to the stage. "Sorry," she says, blowing smoke in his face.
She does this to annoy him, but he's started to like it. He closes his eyes and breathes in her smoke. "Yes, that's very impressive," he says. "You're good at smoking."
"One of my greatest talents."
"Your most disgusting one."
"Fuck you. Did you and Anna finalize the season?"
"What do you care?"
"Oh, that's fine," she says, and begins pacing on the stage. "I'm a cofounder of this theatre, Geoffrey. Just because I'm not acting anymore, I have nothing else to contribute, I can't use my years of experience to help shape the season as a whole, is that it?"
"Well, I suppose there's a first time for everything."
She narrows her eyes. "You're angry with me."
"Oh, god, Ellen – "
"You are, I can tell! What did I do?"
He whirls to face her, agape. "What did you do?! Ellen, I'm living above a biker bar! I don't know where half my things are! I seem to have lost about a week and a half of mid-October, and judging from the way everyone flinches when I come into a room and Anna keeps looking at me like I'm the little match girl, I don't imagine that period of time was a picnic!" He shakes his head and marches up the short aisle and down again, kicking seats. "What did you do. Christ."
"Fine," she says. "Fine." He can see that her eyes are shining with tears. "I'm sorry, all right?"
He sighs. "I know."
"Let's just talk about our season."
Our season. “Lady Windermere, True West, Uncle Vanya, Baby with the Bathwater, Phaedra.”
She frowns. “You’re opening with Wilde? Kind of light, don’t you think?”
“Don’t worry, I’m opening with Eurydice,” he says. “Enough death and sadness to satisfy the most discerning critic.”
“Eurydice?” she says. “That weird Orpheus thing? I hate that play.”
Geoffrey flops into a seat and puts a hand over his eyes. “I know.”
***
Geoffrey took a season off from New Burbage after his fourth year to go and do a show Off-Broadway. His girlfriend Katie saw him off cheerfully, wishing him luck, but that wasn’t the case with Oliver. Early in the run he had a number of maudlin late-night phone calls from Oliver, calling him Judas and Iago and whoreson Edmund and any other traitor he could think of, in a voice so slurred Geoffrey could practically smell the whiskey across the line.
“I’m coming back, Oliver,” he’d say. “New York has enough actors, and people keep asking me to say ‘about.’ I’ll be home soon.”
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is,” mumbled Oliver, “To have a thankless – Geoffrey.”
After a particularly bad one of these – Geoffrey still shudders at the memory of the histrionics, it was like something out of Tennessee Williams – the calls tapered off.
So he assumed their reunion would be fraught, to say the least. When he got home he stopped by the theatre to say hello.
“He’s not here,” said that curly-haired, scary tech apprentice – Mary? Mia? “Hold these. He’s at the bar.”
Geoffrey took the stack of gels she handed him. “Really?” he said. Othello was on tour and most of Oliver’s friends had gone with it. “Why?”
“That’s a good question,” she snapped, “Seeing as how he completely overhauled the lighting design for The Misanthrope and he told us to finish the changes tonight. But Shrew’s dark tonight, and you know how they’re joined at the hip these days.” She grabbed the gels back.
“Who are?” Geoffrey said, but she was running up a thirty-foot ladder with a pack of gels in her mouth and didn’t hear.
A shout of welcome went up when he got to the bar. It always inspired warm feelings of camaraderie amongst the New Burbage company when one of their own had failed to conquer New York.
“Welcome back, ducks,” Cyril said, clapping him on the back and handing him a drink. “Shame about your reviews. I didn’t think it was a tired retread of a production. Have a good trip?”
“All right. Where’s Oliver?”
“Out getting cigarettes with his new protégé,” Cyril said. Seeing Geoffrey’s expression, he narrowed his eyes and clucked shrewdly. “Interesting. You’ve not heard about the famous Ellen, then?”
Over the next few hours Geoffrey heard a great deal about the famous Ellen. Ellen had taken over playing Katherine in Taming of the Shrew when Beth got pregnant. Oliver had brought her in because he had done some tour with her years ago. The whole Shrew cast raved about her – she was a huge improvement over Beth, apparently. Oliver had been telling people that she was one of the best actors he’d worked with. The two of them couldn’t get enough of each other. They were together all the time. It got to the point that people were questioning if Oliver was still gay, but it seemed clear that Ellen was anything but, from the swath she cut through the men in the company. Harry and Josh had actually gotten in a fight over her, before she settled on Josh.
When Geoffrey had had quite enough of the famous Ellen, he went out for a walk. When he got back, everyone was gathered around the bar, roaring with laughter. Oliver was standing on the bar, swooning “O gentle Romeo, if thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully.” The balcony scene. And his Romeo, a tiny redhaired person popping in and out of view at his feet, could only be the famous Ellen.
Not about to miss a chance to find things to hate about her, he pushed through the crowd till he could get a good look the girl who’d taken his place in Oliver’s heart.
Oliver was hamming up his Juliet, fluttering his eyelashes and clasping his hands, but Ellen was playing it more or less straight, doing a strangely ardent Romeo. She raised a trembling hand and gazed up with rapturous love at what had to be the ugliest Juliet in history. The two of them really were hilarious, and when Ellen said “I would I were thy bird,” and kissed Oliver, to his obvious, un-Juliettish disgust, Geoffrey shouted with laughter in spite of himself.
Oliver heard him. He scanned the crowd and his face lit up when he saw Geoffrey. “Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow!” he shouted, throwing Ellen off the bar into the arms of the applauding crowd.
Somehow it was mostly Geoffrey who caught her. He slid her tiny body to the ground. Her eyes were enormous and blue like a baby’s. He swallowed. Hating her was going to be tricky.
“Oh good, you’ve found each other,” Oliver said. “Romeo, meet your Juliet.” He threw an arm around each of them. Geoffrey had grabbed Ellen’s hand to help her down, and somehow he was still holding it to his chest. Now Oliver guided them toward a table, pulling them to either side of him, and he had to let go.
Ellen blinked, like she was shaking off a daydream. She laughed and slid into the booth by Oliver, who patted her hair and kissed her on the side of her head. “So you’re the famous Geoffrey,” she said. “I’m glad you’re back because I’m sick to death of hearing about you.” Geoffrey caught sight of Katie across the room, looking pointedly at Ellen. Last he heard, Katie had been cast as Juliet. “What about Katie?” he said.
Oliver waved a hand vaguely. “She’s got no – you know,” he said. “ She can do the Marlowe or something.” He sighed happily, looking from Geoffrey to Ellen. “It’s the two of you now,” he said. “I’m counting on you to put on the best R and J the festival’s seen for a good long time. The three of us are going to have such fun.”
***
“Dear Eurydice,” Andrew says. “I love you. I’m going to find you. I play the saddest music now that you’re gone.”
“Christ,” Ellen mutters.
“Oh, be quiet,” Geoffrey says. “Keep going,” he calls to Andrew.
“You’re not seriously thinking of casting him, are you?” Ellen says. “Look at him, mooning around. What does he think this is, Giselle?”
Geoffrey sighs. Andrew’s gestures are, indeed, expansive. “Ellen, you’ve hated everyone we’ve seen. What do you want?”
“What I wanted was for you to do fucking Much Ado About Nothing,” she says. “Remember?”
“Well, that really wasn’t an option, believe me – ”
“Ah, Geoffrey?”
“What?” he snaps at Andrew.
“I’m done,” Andrew says, arms hovering awkwardly by his sides. “Do you want to see anything else?”
“No, Andrew,” he says, passing a hand over his eyes. “That’s great, thanks. Can you send in whoever’s next?”
Barry enters and plants himself center stage. “Dear Eurydice,” he says. “I love you. I’m going to find you.”
Ellen groans. “If you need me,” she says, “I’ll be in the lobby, smoking all the cigarettes.”
***
Geoffrey only yelled at Ellen once about smoking. He had had a horrible day, Oliver had told him he was taking Romeo away from him (which of course he didn’t, just more head games, the prick), and at the bar he shouted at her to give the fucking things a rest, it was like making out with a foreman grill.
They had just started dating, and all Geoffrey meant to do was start a loud, public, satisfying fight, like the many, many, many they’d had before, and end up in bed. He expected to see her eyes flash with anger, but instead they widened like he’d slapped her. The whole bar watched as she turned on her heel and marched over to Oliver’s table. “Scoot over,” she said. She spent the rest of the evening in the corner with Oliver and Barbara, laughing and talking about people Geoffrey didn’t know as he tried every way he knew to get back in her good graces. After a very loud and drunken recitation of Sonnet #18 on bended knee that seemed to get lost somewhere in the middle, she finally cracked a smile.
“Oh, thank God,” he said. “I’m an asshole. I’m sorry. Can we go home? Please?”
“I like smoking, Geoffrey,” she said, pulling him to his feet.
“I know,” he said. “I won’t mention it again.”
He didn’t, either. But he could see her frowning distantly a lot over the next few days. Then one day after rehearsal she found him, smiling radiantly. “I have a surprise for you,” she said. She held out a pack of cigarettes.
“What’s the surprise?” he said.
“Your birthday present,” Ellen said. She dropped them in the trash.
There followed the worst birthday and the most hellish week of Geoffrey’s life. Ellen screamed at him if he touched her, if he talked to her, if he didn’t talk to her. She made him burned eggs in the morning in a pan that still had dish soap in it, and sat there glaring at him till he finished every bite. She punched him in her sleep, when she was asleep, and not awake and pacing. The whole company was giving her a wide berth and looking at him with immense pity, except Oliver, who seemed amused.
When Ellen screamed “Don’t fucking step on my line!” and shoved him off the balcony, Oliver called out, “Time out, children. Everyone, take ten.”
He went up to Ellen and put an arm around her shoulders. She stiffened, but allowed herself to be led outside as Oliver murmured to her. Geoffrey lay on the stage, hoping that his fall would prove fatal. When Ellen came back in he flinched, but she smiled at him, and offered a hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What a bitch I was. You didn’t step on my line.” She kissed him, filling his nose with the scent of Marlboro lights. He’d never smelled a sweeter perfume.
“Thank you,” he said to Oliver after she’d headed out into the house.
“Happy birthday,” Oliver said, patting his arm.
***
He drives to New Burbage with Anna so he can talk about the show, work out the kinks. “I know you like Christian, and I agree he’s a very nice person but he’s just not nice enough to make me overlook the fact that he can’t time a light cue to save his life. We’re either going to have to find someone else or put someone in the booth with him, and I think the union will make us pay both of them, but it’s true that he’s very good at the design side, I’ve never seen someone do so much with a dozen lights, half of which have to be hung with duct tape. So I’d rather not lose him altogether. Can we afford to put two people in the booth until Christian learns to wait for the last line of the scene before bringing down the lights? Anna?”
“Just a minute,” Anna says. “I’m looking for a parking space.” The theatre lot is packed, and so are the streets around it. More people have come out for this than he expected. They finally find a spot nearer to the bar than the theatre and walk over. “I mean, maybe we could get a lighting intern. I know how you feel about interns, but then we wouldn’t have to pay them. Oh no. Oh no no no no. No, I don’t think so. No.”
They’ve reached the door to the Rose. Richard has outdone himself once again. Just inside the lobby is an enormous photo of Ellen, his favorite photo of her, actually, a very young Ellen playing Saint Joan in breeches and a sword, looking ready to spit fire. Across the bottom of the photo, in what’s clearly supposed to be a tasteful font: ELLEN FANSHAW, 1961-2007. Geoffrey bends at the waist, trying to catch his breath. There’s a roaring in his ears. “No, I don’t think so,” he says to Anna. “Anna, I don’t think I can go in there. Please go tell them that I had to go, um, that I – I – ”
The black-clad crowd inside has started to notice him. Soon someone is going to come out and be sympathetic. Anna rubs his back. “Oh, Geoffrey, I’m so sorry,” she says, and he can hear that she’s crying. “I know, I know you are,” he says. “Anna, please.”
She sniffs and straightens up. “Right,” she says. “We’ll go in the stage door. There shouldn’t be many people backstage.”
This plan involves significantly less going away than he would like, but Nahum has started toward them, concern all over his sweet face, so he nods and straightens up. They’ve rounded the corner when something occurs to him. “I’ll be right back,” he tells Anna. He marches back to the lobby entrance, takes a deep breath and goes inside. Richard sees him and arranges his face into an expression of sympathy. He starts to say something but Geoffrey ignores him, ignores the sea of familiar faces and the hands on his arm. He heads straight for that photo, grabs it and exits at a run. Anna stares when he reappears with it under his arm.
“Do you have any idea how furious Ellen would be that Richard put her birth year on here?” he chokes out in explanation, pushing in the stage door.
***
After Ellen kicked him out during rehearsals for Lear, he rarely went anywhere except Charles’s apartment and the theater. But one day after all the actors had left, Oliver announced, “I’m sick of this place. We’re going to the bar.”
Geoffrey had an armful of notebooks and sketches. “We have to work,” he said.
“We will,” snapped Oliver. “Bring the notes and we’ll sit at the corner table. I need a drink.”
Luckily Geoffrey was able to snag the dark table in the back. It was a busy night and hardly anyone noticed him. Those who did see him seemed to take the fact that he was deep in conversation with an empty chair as a sign that he did not crave company.
Oliver kept rapping his knuckles, because for once he was having trouble focusing on the show. The problem of staging Ellen’s blinding scene was an important one, but his attention kept straying to Ellen herself, who was restless. Usually Ellen stayed at a table, sipping a glass of wine and letting people come to her. Tonight she was up, having a drink with every clique from the new tech apprentices to Frank and Cyril and the old guard, effortlessly being the life of the party in a way she hadn’t bothered to in a very long time.
Some of the young company looked terrified by this strangely friendly Ellen. Some of the older crowd could remember her diving-off-bars days, but even they seemed unsure how to react. Even as she shared some story that had Barbara and her friend the TV asshole in stitches, her eyes seemed to scan above their heads like she was looking for something.
A sting on his knuckles brought Geoffrey’s attention back to Oliver, glaring and brandishing a spoon. “We’re busy,” he said. “She’ll still be flirting with the whole bar in an hour.”
So they dove back into the play. Forty-five minutes later Geoffrey was just getting excited about fixing the lighting problem they were facing when he realized that now he had lost Oliver’s attention. Viciously, Geoffrey grabbed the spoon, till he saw where Oliver was looking.
Paul and the TV asshole had hoisted Ellen up on their shoulders and brought her over to the bar. A laughing crowd was cheering them on, and Ellen hopped up on it with such elaborate grace you would have to know her very well to see how drunk she was.
“I don’t know if I remember it,” she called down with a laugh, smoothing her hair.
“Oh then!” Paul and several of the other men shouted. “Oh then Queen Mab!”
“O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you,” Ellen continued.
“She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep.”
Ellen strutted the bar, hands behind her back, a cocky smirk on her face. You could almost see a sword swinging at her side. Geoffrey leaned his chair back on two legs. If he had to be in Romeo and Juliet again, he had known for years he wouldn’t be Romeo but Mercutio, the doomed mad prima donna smartass. It hadn’t occurred to him until this moment that the same was true for Ellen.
“Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,” Ellen said, sweeping the crowd with a savage glance. “And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats.” She wasn’t preening now, or playing to the audience; she was letting Mercutio’s wildness go. The TV asshole chuckled nervously, but it died off as Ellen continued.
“This is the hag,” she cried, planting herself center bar, “when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:
This is she – ”
“Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!” Geoffrey found himself calling, right on cue. “Thou talk'st of nothing.”
And Ellen’s eyes locked on him, though surely she could barely see him in his dark corner. She smiled that smile that was his, always his. “True, I talk of dreams,” she continued – then she gasped – stretched out an arm to him – no, not to him, to the chair on his left –
“Good night, good night,” Ellen whispered. “Good night.” She kissed her fingers and threw out her hand to his table again. Then she turned and let herself drop into the arms of the company.
The next day Geoffrey asked her about that night. “God, did I really?” she said. “I thought I had grown out of diving off the bar. I was sauced that night. I can’t remember anything.” Then she changed the subject. The day after that, Charles tore her dress, and Ellen left New Burbage.
He asked Oliver about it too, asked him if his newest plan for tormenting Geoffrey involved getting Ellen to break her neck.
Oliver glared at him. “Some things,” he said, “Are not about you.”
***
It’s late when they get back to Montreal from the memorial. Anna drops him at home after making him promise to get some sleep. He stays there just long enough to make sure she’s gone, then grabs a bottle of whiskey and heads out.
He arrives at the theatre drunker than he’s been in years. It takes him three tries to get the key in the lock. Finally it turns, and with one more swig he stumbles through the door.
Ellen is there, in the lobby, standing in a patch of moonlight coming through the one small window near the ceiling. And her eyes are shining and her cigarette smoke curls around her like in an old movie and if he could only touch her he could be sure that this day didn’t destroy him.
“How was it?” she says, smiling. “Were there many people there? Who spoke? What did you say? Tell me everything.”
“I didn’t speak.”
She looks at him and he can see the stormclouds gathering. “Geoffrey! Do you mean to say that at my memorial service my own fucking husband couldn’t be bothered to say a word? Christ, you’re supposed to love me.”
“Well, Ellen,” he says, weaving into the theatre and over to the stage, “They put on a good show without me.” He flops onto his back, cradling the whiskey bottle against his chest. She comes and sits near his head. “Who did?” she asks. “Let’s hear about the people who actually cared enough to speak for me.”
“There was a hideous set, exactly like Oliver’s memorial except with more flaming biers, thank you Darren. There was a photo montage set to The Wind Beneath My Wings. There was Barbara, starting her speech very regal and elegant in mourning and ending it crying so hard she got snot on the podium.”
“And?” she prompted. “Who else spoke?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember? What were you doing the whole time?”
“Playing four-square. What do you think, Ellen?” he yells. “I was crying so hard I couldn’t fucking breathe. I couldn’t tell what was going on two feet in front of me, let alone up on that stage. Ellen, you’re dead.”
“Well,” she says. “You don’t have to rub it in.”
Geoffrey chuckles. Tears are oozing down into his ears. “God,” he says. “What are we going to do?”
He hears her take a deep breath. “You have to move on,” she says, voice filling the theatre. “You have to let me go. Find someone else.”
That hits him like a stone dropped on his chest. “Someone else?” he says. “Really?”
“No, of course not. You’re all I ever loved and I want you to be mine forever. But.” She comes around and lies down next to him. He rolls over to face her. Their faces are inches apart. “But I hate this theatre, Geoffrey. I used to like it, but now I can never leave and I hate it. The acoustics are terrible. And I say to myself, it’s probably time to truly shuffle off this mortal coil and go to the next thing. I can feel it waiting for me. But then you come in and I think, I’ll just stay for one more day of rehearsal.”
"Well," he says. "I can stand it if you can. It's better than nothing."
He reaches a hand out, tracing an outline of her body a few inches above her, moving lazily closer. He shouldn’t. But maybe this time. But he’s too drunk to sneak up on it like he means to, and Ellen flinches as his hand passes through her face.
“Sorry,” he whispers. “Did that hurt? Did you feel that?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
The cast finds him like that the next morning, curled up on his side in the middle of the stage, spooning with an empty whiskey bottle. He wakes up to the stares of a crowd of perplexed actors. Crap.
“Good morning!” he says. “I am still drunk and and have been having regular conversations with my wife who had a stroke four weeks ago. This, my children, is why your parents told you to major in accounting. Would anyone like to take this opportunity to come to their senses and get a real job? No? Excellent. Let’s rehearse.”
And they do. For three more weeks, days and nights and whenever the schedules for various waiters and messengers and legal assistants will allow. Geoffrey sits in the house and watches Eurydice fall to her death, watches Orpheus pursue her, watches as she's drawn into death again, a more final death. Ellen sits beside him and whispers to him about all the things he needs to fix, and she's surprisingly insightful. She would have been a good director. Well, no, not really, not when she was alive, she was too focused on her own performance. But though he sees her watching the stage hungrily sometimes, she's adjusted well to not being on it. She makes the show better.
And it’s good, James is such a sweet calming presence as the father, and Lizzy and Aidan are so simple and true. He should really do Romeo and Juliet with them, or somebody should, some director whose life isn’t over and can still touch Shakespeare with a ten-foot pole. Eurydice falls to her death, and he makes a note to tell Lizzy that she does the fall beautifully. The father tells Eurydice what defunct means – “dead in a very abrupt way” – and Geoffrey manages not to remember Ellen crumpling to the kitchen floor, dropping breakfast with a clatter, her eyes not even closed. All in all things are going well.
They open on schedule. Geoffrey paces through the theatre before the show, checking and rechecking every aspect of tech until Gigi begins hurling French curses and pens at him and makes him go away. He goes backstage and gives the actors a pep talk and gets a long and breasty hug from Lizzy. Some girls like the crazy ones, especially actresses. He gently untangles her and goes off to let James know about a blocking change Ellen suggested.
During the show his leg won't stop bouncing. He's so nervous he thinks he might throw up. It feels like his performance of Lear. Or his last performance of Hamlet. Maybe it's the play, but this show really feels like – death. Like an ending.
Still, the show works. The audience cheers and they get to their feet, wiping tears from their eyes. Backstage the actors are jumping into each other's arms, screeching and laughing.
Lizzy puts her arm through his. "You're coming out with us!" she cries. "You are." And he slips away from her again, saying "Maybe some other time," but Anna, of all people, Anna puts her hand through his other arm and sighs up at him, "I can't believe I'm actually trying to get you to drink, but Lizzy is right. You need to get out of this theatre, Geoffrey." And there is very little that he wouldn't do for Anna, so he promises to go to the bar, although the thought of leaving the place now makes more panicky than ever, because in all his preshow wanderings through every inch of the theatre, for all that he was pulled to every corner of it for hugs and congratulations afterward, he didn't see Ellen anywhere tonight.
So first things first. He chases everyone out to the cast party. "I'll be along soon," he says, ignoring Anna's big, worried eyes and Lizzy's pout. "Just have to clean up."
When they're finally all out and the theatre hums with sudden silence, Geoffrey stands center stage and throws out his arms. "Come out, come out," he calls. "Don't you have any notes?"
And Ellen -- Ellen appears. She fades in like the lights coming up, but not all the way, he can still see the house behind her, through her, and he starts to shake because he remembers this part.
"Stop that," he says, voice husky. "Come here all the way."
"Geoff," Ellen says. "I wish I could. But the play's done."
"God! What does that have to do with anything? There will be other plays. Forever."
"Yes," Ellen whispers. "The next one shouldn't be about dead wives."
"Ellen --"
"Do something that isn't about me."
"They've all been about you."
"Shakespeare. A comedy. Promise me."
"Ellen, I love you --"
"I think you should fuck Lizzy," Ellen says, backing away from him. "I think you should consider marrying Anna. That's up to you, but you have to do one of the comedies. Promise me. Promise me."
"I can't," he says hoarsely. "Ellen, please. How can you go on alone?"
And Ellen gives a sobbing little laugh and Geoffrey sees that she isn't alone. Oliver's white suit glows in the moonlight. Death, real death, seems to have agreed with him; he looks rested.
"Oh, Oliver, I hate you," Geoffrey says. "Don't take her from me again. Please."
"Not everything's about you, Geoffrey," Oliver says softly. "She'll be all right with me. Truly." He puts a hand on Ellen's shoulder and kisses the side of her head. His other hand produces a lighter for her cigarette. Geoffrey can see the exact moment the nicotine hits her ghostly blood. Her shoulders relax just a fraction, and she smiles at him. She steps in front of him and blows smoke in his face. He closes his eyes and breathes it in, and when he opens them again, for the first time since Oliver died, Geoffrey is all by himself.
Through the haze of grief and ghostly smoke, there's a sudden moment of clarity where Geoffrey thinks, I can see the future. Two roads diverge, and the choice is his. It would be easy, so easy, to let it all go. It must be a great relief. His body is as eager as the rest of him to give up the fight, he's weary and sore to the bone from adoring a ghost. It would, of course, be a horrible thing to do to Anna, but he's shamefully certain that she wouldn't be surprised, even by, as they say, natural causes. They can't have gotten far. It wouldn't take him long to catch up.
And what's the alternative? Years and endless years, working and fighting and sweating and never having her throw a vase at his head again. Hamlet again and Lear again and his own R and J and, what the hell, fucking Much Ado About Fucking Nothing, and James booming "Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania," in the park and Jack and Kate too wise to woo peaceably on an LA stage and Lizzy jumping up on the bar and playing the wrong part for the sheer true-love joy of it. And at the end of it, when he finally gets home to them, a few more stories to tell.
Geoffrey sits cross-legged on the floor in his darkened theatre, on his dim set for the underworld. He has a decision to make. He may be sitting for awhile.
"Now, if you're up to it," Anna says, hands fluttering nervously, "We should really finalize the season." She slides a piece of paper across the desk to him. The list of plays. It is, dear Anna, a spreadsheet. Tragedies and comedies and classical and modern and Shakespeare and not Shakespeare.
"Ooh, Much Ado," says Ellen, leaning over his shoulder. "Haven't done that one in ages. Isn't that your favorite of the comedies, Geoff?"
"No Shakespeare," Geoffrey says, and braces himself.
"Um, Geoffrey, Theatre Sans Argent is supposed to be a Shakespearean company, the actors are expecting – "
" – For God's sake, Geoffrey, you don't have to take your latest psychotic break out on the rest of us, you're the one who wanted to come right back – "
" – If you need a little more time, everyone here just wants to help."
"Don't be such a jackass."
He waits it out, waits for both of them to finish (he can follow two people talking at him at once, he has lots of practice at that) and when the tide of voices ebbs he says again, "No Shakespeare."
***
After the last box was stacked in the hall and the movers had left and Geoffrey and Ellen were alone in their new apartment in Montreal, Ellen gave him a satisfied smile. “I think this place is just about perfect,” she said – then she turned to him with a look of horror and slid down to the floor and cried.
“What,” said Geoffrey, leaning against the wall and pushing his fist to the top of his nose. Moving took it out of you.
“I just thought,” Ellen said, “I thought, ‘Oliver’s going to be so jealous of my picture windows.’” She leaned against Geoffrey’s leg, turned her face against the side of his knee.
Oh. Geoffrey started to slide down next to her, but she was already wiping her face and gulping. She turned a hard bright smile up to him. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s funny, isn’t it? It took me this long to notice that he was really dead.”
***
Geoffrey has enough experience now with Ellen leaving him that he has more or less worked out a routine. Step one: find someplace else to live (this is occasionally step two, after go insane, but that's not a part of the current plan). This time around that means a small studio near the theatre. It has a couch, a chair, and a skull. He sleeps on the couch, because step two is: do not obtain a bed. He and Ellen are tactile sleepers, and if he sleeps in a bed he tends to roll over and over trying to slide an arm around a waist that isn't there till he falls on the floor.
The apartment's very plain. Spartan, even. Somewhere, in storage or something, there must be boxes and boxes of things of his (of theirs) from the brownstone they lived in for almost two years. Monsieur and Madame Tennant. Ha. He will deal with boxes at some point in the future. Dealing with them seems counter to the spirit of step three, which is: wait for her to come back.
And of course, he will see her at the theatre tomorrow, so tonight the thing to do is probably to have an Ellen-free evening. He potters around, flipping open this anthology and that, roughing out a season in his head. "I think I'll do Phaedra, the Racine version, at the end of the season," he tells Oliver's skull, "Throw a bone to the classicists and the francophiles both," and he picks up Oliver and puppets "That's brilliant, Geoffrey. I would never have thought of that."
By 4 AM he's got the whole season mapped, pretty much. Phaedra, Lady Windermere's Fan, he promised the boys something where they could hit each other so maybe a Sam Shepard. Uncle Vanya, Baby with the Bathwater and there's an end. Something's missing still, but maybe he's just not used to a whole season that's younger than 400.
He falls asleep surrounded by stacks of books. Much later Ellen comes in and says "Well, never mind," and he kisses her, finally oh God, and they make their way over to his couch, shoving cascades of plays to the floor. They're tearing at each other's clothes and Ellen keeps shoving him away to unbutton his shirt, but he needs her close and can't quite disentangle from her long enough to let her. She has her hand down his pants and all is right in Geoffrey's world when he wakes up on the floor with a thump. He is alone, his head is throbbing and he's nostalgic for bygone days of erectile dysfunction.
He starts to sit up and a play falls on his face. If he closes one eye and squints he can make out the title.
"Eurydice!" he tells Anna the next day over breakfast at Le Flic.
"Ya-what?" says Gigi, their stage manager.
"Eurydice," he says. "It's a modernization of the Orpheus myth. Orpheus's wife Eurydice dies and joins her father in the underworld. Orpheus follows his beloved into death and brings her back. Or, you know, almost. It's a lovely play. It came to me in the night."
"Well," Anna says, "It's not on the short list. I'd have to check on how much the royalties would be."
"Please," says Geoffrey. "Because this is our season opener." He swigs the rest of his coffee. "Are you coming to the theatre today?"
"No," Anna says. "I have to work late. My boss has a big case tomorrow."
"Well, enjoy, and I'll see you the next time you get to swap out your legal assistant hat for your far more becoming general manager hat. Gigi?"
"After my shift," Gigi says. She stands and puts on an apron emblazoned LE FLIC.
"I'll walk with you part of the way," Anna says as Gigi buses their table. They emerge into a gray drizzle. Geoffrey holds his umbrella over Anna's head. "I know we're short for time," he says. "But Eurydice has very simple staging. We should be fine with a shorter rehearsal period. I think we can still open on the fifth like we planned."
"Well, okay," Anna says doubtfully. "That's a very short rehearsal period. And don't forget, we've got the thing in a couple weeks."
"The thing?"
"The thing – the thing in New Burbage," Anna says, then presses her lips together.
Right. That thing. Geoffrey hands her the umbrella and steps out of its shelter, tilting his face back to the rain.
"Geoffrey –" she says behind him, "Geoffrey – are you sure you're ready to come back? There's been so much interest in Sans Argent lately, I'm sure we can find someone else to direct the first show."
"Trying to get rid of me, Anna?" he scrubs the rain from his eyes with the heels of his hands.
"Oh, Geoffrey –"
"Anna." He holds up a hand. "Do you know what the first thing I did was ten years ago when they let me out of the asylum?"
"What," she says.
"I directed a play. All right?"
She doesn't say anything, but just looks that Anna look and sighs that Anna sigh and he's worried there may be a hug or something coming out of that so he turns back to the rain.
"Well," she says finally, "This is my bus stop." She tries to hand the umbrella back to him.
"Keep it," he says. "It's Ellen's, anyway. I'd rather get wet."
He regrets that decision somewhat by the time he gets to the theatre and his socks are making squishing sounds in his shoes. He throws his coat at the front row of seats and flicks on the house lights, which blink and buzz to life. "There you are," Ellen says from the back of the house.
"God, what is it with you and sitting alone in the dark? And you can't smoke that in here."
She takes a deep drag on her cigarette, nods thoughtfully, and walks up to the stage. "Sorry," she says, blowing smoke in his face.
She does this to annoy him, but he's started to like it. He closes his eyes and breathes in her smoke. "Yes, that's very impressive," he says. "You're good at smoking."
"One of my greatest talents."
"Your most disgusting one."
"Fuck you. Did you and Anna finalize the season?"
"What do you care?"
"Oh, that's fine," she says, and begins pacing on the stage. "I'm a cofounder of this theatre, Geoffrey. Just because I'm not acting anymore, I have nothing else to contribute, I can't use my years of experience to help shape the season as a whole, is that it?"
"Well, I suppose there's a first time for everything."
She narrows her eyes. "You're angry with me."
"Oh, god, Ellen – "
"You are, I can tell! What did I do?"
He whirls to face her, agape. "What did you do?! Ellen, I'm living above a biker bar! I don't know where half my things are! I seem to have lost about a week and a half of mid-October, and judging from the way everyone flinches when I come into a room and Anna keeps looking at me like I'm the little match girl, I don't imagine that period of time was a picnic!" He shakes his head and marches up the short aisle and down again, kicking seats. "What did you do. Christ."
"Fine," she says. "Fine." He can see that her eyes are shining with tears. "I'm sorry, all right?"
He sighs. "I know."
"Let's just talk about our season."
Our season. “Lady Windermere, True West, Uncle Vanya, Baby with the Bathwater, Phaedra.”
She frowns. “You’re opening with Wilde? Kind of light, don’t you think?”
“Don’t worry, I’m opening with Eurydice,” he says. “Enough death and sadness to satisfy the most discerning critic.”
“Eurydice?” she says. “That weird Orpheus thing? I hate that play.”
Geoffrey flops into a seat and puts a hand over his eyes. “I know.”
***
Geoffrey took a season off from New Burbage after his fourth year to go and do a show Off-Broadway. His girlfriend Katie saw him off cheerfully, wishing him luck, but that wasn’t the case with Oliver. Early in the run he had a number of maudlin late-night phone calls from Oliver, calling him Judas and Iago and whoreson Edmund and any other traitor he could think of, in a voice so slurred Geoffrey could practically smell the whiskey across the line.
“I’m coming back, Oliver,” he’d say. “New York has enough actors, and people keep asking me to say ‘about.’ I’ll be home soon.”
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is,” mumbled Oliver, “To have a thankless – Geoffrey.”
After a particularly bad one of these – Geoffrey still shudders at the memory of the histrionics, it was like something out of Tennessee Williams – the calls tapered off.
So he assumed their reunion would be fraught, to say the least. When he got home he stopped by the theatre to say hello.
“He’s not here,” said that curly-haired, scary tech apprentice – Mary? Mia? “Hold these. He’s at the bar.”
Geoffrey took the stack of gels she handed him. “Really?” he said. Othello was on tour and most of Oliver’s friends had gone with it. “Why?”
“That’s a good question,” she snapped, “Seeing as how he completely overhauled the lighting design for The Misanthrope and he told us to finish the changes tonight. But Shrew’s dark tonight, and you know how they’re joined at the hip these days.” She grabbed the gels back.
“Who are?” Geoffrey said, but she was running up a thirty-foot ladder with a pack of gels in her mouth and didn’t hear.
A shout of welcome went up when he got to the bar. It always inspired warm feelings of camaraderie amongst the New Burbage company when one of their own had failed to conquer New York.
“Welcome back, ducks,” Cyril said, clapping him on the back and handing him a drink. “Shame about your reviews. I didn’t think it was a tired retread of a production. Have a good trip?”
“All right. Where’s Oliver?”
“Out getting cigarettes with his new protégé,” Cyril said. Seeing Geoffrey’s expression, he narrowed his eyes and clucked shrewdly. “Interesting. You’ve not heard about the famous Ellen, then?”
Over the next few hours Geoffrey heard a great deal about the famous Ellen. Ellen had taken over playing Katherine in Taming of the Shrew when Beth got pregnant. Oliver had brought her in because he had done some tour with her years ago. The whole Shrew cast raved about her – she was a huge improvement over Beth, apparently. Oliver had been telling people that she was one of the best actors he’d worked with. The two of them couldn’t get enough of each other. They were together all the time. It got to the point that people were questioning if Oliver was still gay, but it seemed clear that Ellen was anything but, from the swath she cut through the men in the company. Harry and Josh had actually gotten in a fight over her, before she settled on Josh.
When Geoffrey had had quite enough of the famous Ellen, he went out for a walk. When he got back, everyone was gathered around the bar, roaring with laughter. Oliver was standing on the bar, swooning “O gentle Romeo, if thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully.” The balcony scene. And his Romeo, a tiny redhaired person popping in and out of view at his feet, could only be the famous Ellen.
Not about to miss a chance to find things to hate about her, he pushed through the crowd till he could get a good look the girl who’d taken his place in Oliver’s heart.
Oliver was hamming up his Juliet, fluttering his eyelashes and clasping his hands, but Ellen was playing it more or less straight, doing a strangely ardent Romeo. She raised a trembling hand and gazed up with rapturous love at what had to be the ugliest Juliet in history. The two of them really were hilarious, and when Ellen said “I would I were thy bird,” and kissed Oliver, to his obvious, un-Juliettish disgust, Geoffrey shouted with laughter in spite of himself.
Oliver heard him. He scanned the crowd and his face lit up when he saw Geoffrey. “Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow!” he shouted, throwing Ellen off the bar into the arms of the applauding crowd.
Somehow it was mostly Geoffrey who caught her. He slid her tiny body to the ground. Her eyes were enormous and blue like a baby’s. He swallowed. Hating her was going to be tricky.
“Oh good, you’ve found each other,” Oliver said. “Romeo, meet your Juliet.” He threw an arm around each of them. Geoffrey had grabbed Ellen’s hand to help her down, and somehow he was still holding it to his chest. Now Oliver guided them toward a table, pulling them to either side of him, and he had to let go.
Ellen blinked, like she was shaking off a daydream. She laughed and slid into the booth by Oliver, who patted her hair and kissed her on the side of her head. “So you’re the famous Geoffrey,” she said. “I’m glad you’re back because I’m sick to death of hearing about you.” Geoffrey caught sight of Katie across the room, looking pointedly at Ellen. Last he heard, Katie had been cast as Juliet. “What about Katie?” he said.
Oliver waved a hand vaguely. “She’s got no – you know,” he said. “ She can do the Marlowe or something.” He sighed happily, looking from Geoffrey to Ellen. “It’s the two of you now,” he said. “I’m counting on you to put on the best R and J the festival’s seen for a good long time. The three of us are going to have such fun.”
***
“Dear Eurydice,” Andrew says. “I love you. I’m going to find you. I play the saddest music now that you’re gone.”
“Christ,” Ellen mutters.
“Oh, be quiet,” Geoffrey says. “Keep going,” he calls to Andrew.
“You’re not seriously thinking of casting him, are you?” Ellen says. “Look at him, mooning around. What does he think this is, Giselle?”
Geoffrey sighs. Andrew’s gestures are, indeed, expansive. “Ellen, you’ve hated everyone we’ve seen. What do you want?”
“What I wanted was for you to do fucking Much Ado About Nothing,” she says. “Remember?”
“Well, that really wasn’t an option, believe me – ”
“Ah, Geoffrey?”
“What?” he snaps at Andrew.
“I’m done,” Andrew says, arms hovering awkwardly by his sides. “Do you want to see anything else?”
“No, Andrew,” he says, passing a hand over his eyes. “That’s great, thanks. Can you send in whoever’s next?”
Barry enters and plants himself center stage. “Dear Eurydice,” he says. “I love you. I’m going to find you.”
Ellen groans. “If you need me,” she says, “I’ll be in the lobby, smoking all the cigarettes.”
***
Geoffrey only yelled at Ellen once about smoking. He had had a horrible day, Oliver had told him he was taking Romeo away from him (which of course he didn’t, just more head games, the prick), and at the bar he shouted at her to give the fucking things a rest, it was like making out with a foreman grill.
They had just started dating, and all Geoffrey meant to do was start a loud, public, satisfying fight, like the many, many, many they’d had before, and end up in bed. He expected to see her eyes flash with anger, but instead they widened like he’d slapped her. The whole bar watched as she turned on her heel and marched over to Oliver’s table. “Scoot over,” she said. She spent the rest of the evening in the corner with Oliver and Barbara, laughing and talking about people Geoffrey didn’t know as he tried every way he knew to get back in her good graces. After a very loud and drunken recitation of Sonnet #18 on bended knee that seemed to get lost somewhere in the middle, she finally cracked a smile.
“Oh, thank God,” he said. “I’m an asshole. I’m sorry. Can we go home? Please?”
“I like smoking, Geoffrey,” she said, pulling him to his feet.
“I know,” he said. “I won’t mention it again.”
He didn’t, either. But he could see her frowning distantly a lot over the next few days. Then one day after rehearsal she found him, smiling radiantly. “I have a surprise for you,” she said. She held out a pack of cigarettes.
“What’s the surprise?” he said.
“Your birthday present,” Ellen said. She dropped them in the trash.
There followed the worst birthday and the most hellish week of Geoffrey’s life. Ellen screamed at him if he touched her, if he talked to her, if he didn’t talk to her. She made him burned eggs in the morning in a pan that still had dish soap in it, and sat there glaring at him till he finished every bite. She punched him in her sleep, when she was asleep, and not awake and pacing. The whole company was giving her a wide berth and looking at him with immense pity, except Oliver, who seemed amused.
When Ellen screamed “Don’t fucking step on my line!” and shoved him off the balcony, Oliver called out, “Time out, children. Everyone, take ten.”
He went up to Ellen and put an arm around her shoulders. She stiffened, but allowed herself to be led outside as Oliver murmured to her. Geoffrey lay on the stage, hoping that his fall would prove fatal. When Ellen came back in he flinched, but she smiled at him, and offered a hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What a bitch I was. You didn’t step on my line.” She kissed him, filling his nose with the scent of Marlboro lights. He’d never smelled a sweeter perfume.
“Thank you,” he said to Oliver after she’d headed out into the house.
“Happy birthday,” Oliver said, patting his arm.
***
He drives to New Burbage with Anna so he can talk about the show, work out the kinks. “I know you like Christian, and I agree he’s a very nice person but he’s just not nice enough to make me overlook the fact that he can’t time a light cue to save his life. We’re either going to have to find someone else or put someone in the booth with him, and I think the union will make us pay both of them, but it’s true that he’s very good at the design side, I’ve never seen someone do so much with a dozen lights, half of which have to be hung with duct tape. So I’d rather not lose him altogether. Can we afford to put two people in the booth until Christian learns to wait for the last line of the scene before bringing down the lights? Anna?”
“Just a minute,” Anna says. “I’m looking for a parking space.” The theatre lot is packed, and so are the streets around it. More people have come out for this than he expected. They finally find a spot nearer to the bar than the theatre and walk over. “I mean, maybe we could get a lighting intern. I know how you feel about interns, but then we wouldn’t have to pay them. Oh no. Oh no no no no. No, I don’t think so. No.”
They’ve reached the door to the Rose. Richard has outdone himself once again. Just inside the lobby is an enormous photo of Ellen, his favorite photo of her, actually, a very young Ellen playing Saint Joan in breeches and a sword, looking ready to spit fire. Across the bottom of the photo, in what’s clearly supposed to be a tasteful font: ELLEN FANSHAW, 1961-2007. Geoffrey bends at the waist, trying to catch his breath. There’s a roaring in his ears. “No, I don’t think so,” he says to Anna. “Anna, I don’t think I can go in there. Please go tell them that I had to go, um, that I – I – ”
The black-clad crowd inside has started to notice him. Soon someone is going to come out and be sympathetic. Anna rubs his back. “Oh, Geoffrey, I’m so sorry,” she says, and he can hear that she’s crying. “I know, I know you are,” he says. “Anna, please.”
She sniffs and straightens up. “Right,” she says. “We’ll go in the stage door. There shouldn’t be many people backstage.”
This plan involves significantly less going away than he would like, but Nahum has started toward them, concern all over his sweet face, so he nods and straightens up. They’ve rounded the corner when something occurs to him. “I’ll be right back,” he tells Anna. He marches back to the lobby entrance, takes a deep breath and goes inside. Richard sees him and arranges his face into an expression of sympathy. He starts to say something but Geoffrey ignores him, ignores the sea of familiar faces and the hands on his arm. He heads straight for that photo, grabs it and exits at a run. Anna stares when he reappears with it under his arm.
“Do you have any idea how furious Ellen would be that Richard put her birth year on here?” he chokes out in explanation, pushing in the stage door.
***
After Ellen kicked him out during rehearsals for Lear, he rarely went anywhere except Charles’s apartment and the theater. But one day after all the actors had left, Oliver announced, “I’m sick of this place. We’re going to the bar.”
Geoffrey had an armful of notebooks and sketches. “We have to work,” he said.
“We will,” snapped Oliver. “Bring the notes and we’ll sit at the corner table. I need a drink.”
Luckily Geoffrey was able to snag the dark table in the back. It was a busy night and hardly anyone noticed him. Those who did see him seemed to take the fact that he was deep in conversation with an empty chair as a sign that he did not crave company.
Oliver kept rapping his knuckles, because for once he was having trouble focusing on the show. The problem of staging Ellen’s blinding scene was an important one, but his attention kept straying to Ellen herself, who was restless. Usually Ellen stayed at a table, sipping a glass of wine and letting people come to her. Tonight she was up, having a drink with every clique from the new tech apprentices to Frank and Cyril and the old guard, effortlessly being the life of the party in a way she hadn’t bothered to in a very long time.
Some of the young company looked terrified by this strangely friendly Ellen. Some of the older crowd could remember her diving-off-bars days, but even they seemed unsure how to react. Even as she shared some story that had Barbara and her friend the TV asshole in stitches, her eyes seemed to scan above their heads like she was looking for something.
A sting on his knuckles brought Geoffrey’s attention back to Oliver, glaring and brandishing a spoon. “We’re busy,” he said. “She’ll still be flirting with the whole bar in an hour.”
So they dove back into the play. Forty-five minutes later Geoffrey was just getting excited about fixing the lighting problem they were facing when he realized that now he had lost Oliver’s attention. Viciously, Geoffrey grabbed the spoon, till he saw where Oliver was looking.
Paul and the TV asshole had hoisted Ellen up on their shoulders and brought her over to the bar. A laughing crowd was cheering them on, and Ellen hopped up on it with such elaborate grace you would have to know her very well to see how drunk she was.
“I don’t know if I remember it,” she called down with a laugh, smoothing her hair.
“Oh then!” Paul and several of the other men shouted. “Oh then Queen Mab!”
“O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you,” Ellen continued.
“She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep.”
Ellen strutted the bar, hands behind her back, a cocky smirk on her face. You could almost see a sword swinging at her side. Geoffrey leaned his chair back on two legs. If he had to be in Romeo and Juliet again, he had known for years he wouldn’t be Romeo but Mercutio, the doomed mad prima donna smartass. It hadn’t occurred to him until this moment that the same was true for Ellen.
“Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,” Ellen said, sweeping the crowd with a savage glance. “And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats.” She wasn’t preening now, or playing to the audience; she was letting Mercutio’s wildness go. The TV asshole chuckled nervously, but it died off as Ellen continued.
“This is the hag,” she cried, planting herself center bar, “when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:
This is she – ”
“Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!” Geoffrey found himself calling, right on cue. “Thou talk'st of nothing.”
And Ellen’s eyes locked on him, though surely she could barely see him in his dark corner. She smiled that smile that was his, always his. “True, I talk of dreams,” she continued – then she gasped – stretched out an arm to him – no, not to him, to the chair on his left –
“Good night, good night,” Ellen whispered. “Good night.” She kissed her fingers and threw out her hand to his table again. Then she turned and let herself drop into the arms of the company.
The next day Geoffrey asked her about that night. “God, did I really?” she said. “I thought I had grown out of diving off the bar. I was sauced that night. I can’t remember anything.” Then she changed the subject. The day after that, Charles tore her dress, and Ellen left New Burbage.
He asked Oliver about it too, asked him if his newest plan for tormenting Geoffrey involved getting Ellen to break her neck.
Oliver glared at him. “Some things,” he said, “Are not about you.”
***
It’s late when they get back to Montreal from the memorial. Anna drops him at home after making him promise to get some sleep. He stays there just long enough to make sure she’s gone, then grabs a bottle of whiskey and heads out.
He arrives at the theatre drunker than he’s been in years. It takes him three tries to get the key in the lock. Finally it turns, and with one more swig he stumbles through the door.
Ellen is there, in the lobby, standing in a patch of moonlight coming through the one small window near the ceiling. And her eyes are shining and her cigarette smoke curls around her like in an old movie and if he could only touch her he could be sure that this day didn’t destroy him.
“How was it?” she says, smiling. “Were there many people there? Who spoke? What did you say? Tell me everything.”
“I didn’t speak.”
She looks at him and he can see the stormclouds gathering. “Geoffrey! Do you mean to say that at my memorial service my own fucking husband couldn’t be bothered to say a word? Christ, you’re supposed to love me.”
“Well, Ellen,” he says, weaving into the theatre and over to the stage, “They put on a good show without me.” He flops onto his back, cradling the whiskey bottle against his chest. She comes and sits near his head. “Who did?” she asks. “Let’s hear about the people who actually cared enough to speak for me.”
“There was a hideous set, exactly like Oliver’s memorial except with more flaming biers, thank you Darren. There was a photo montage set to The Wind Beneath My Wings. There was Barbara, starting her speech very regal and elegant in mourning and ending it crying so hard she got snot on the podium.”
“And?” she prompted. “Who else spoke?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember? What were you doing the whole time?”
“Playing four-square. What do you think, Ellen?” he yells. “I was crying so hard I couldn’t fucking breathe. I couldn’t tell what was going on two feet in front of me, let alone up on that stage. Ellen, you’re dead.”
“Well,” she says. “You don’t have to rub it in.”
Geoffrey chuckles. Tears are oozing down into his ears. “God,” he says. “What are we going to do?”
He hears her take a deep breath. “You have to move on,” she says, voice filling the theatre. “You have to let me go. Find someone else.”
That hits him like a stone dropped on his chest. “Someone else?” he says. “Really?”
“No, of course not. You’re all I ever loved and I want you to be mine forever. But.” She comes around and lies down next to him. He rolls over to face her. Their faces are inches apart. “But I hate this theatre, Geoffrey. I used to like it, but now I can never leave and I hate it. The acoustics are terrible. And I say to myself, it’s probably time to truly shuffle off this mortal coil and go to the next thing. I can feel it waiting for me. But then you come in and I think, I’ll just stay for one more day of rehearsal.”
"Well," he says. "I can stand it if you can. It's better than nothing."
He reaches a hand out, tracing an outline of her body a few inches above her, moving lazily closer. He shouldn’t. But maybe this time. But he’s too drunk to sneak up on it like he means to, and Ellen flinches as his hand passes through her face.
“Sorry,” he whispers. “Did that hurt? Did you feel that?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
The cast finds him like that the next morning, curled up on his side in the middle of the stage, spooning with an empty whiskey bottle. He wakes up to the stares of a crowd of perplexed actors. Crap.
“Good morning!” he says. “I am still drunk and and have been having regular conversations with my wife who had a stroke four weeks ago. This, my children, is why your parents told you to major in accounting. Would anyone like to take this opportunity to come to their senses and get a real job? No? Excellent. Let’s rehearse.”
And they do. For three more weeks, days and nights and whenever the schedules for various waiters and messengers and legal assistants will allow. Geoffrey sits in the house and watches Eurydice fall to her death, watches Orpheus pursue her, watches as she's drawn into death again, a more final death. Ellen sits beside him and whispers to him about all the things he needs to fix, and she's surprisingly insightful. She would have been a good director. Well, no, not really, not when she was alive, she was too focused on her own performance. But though he sees her watching the stage hungrily sometimes, she's adjusted well to not being on it. She makes the show better.
And it’s good, James is such a sweet calming presence as the father, and Lizzy and Aidan are so simple and true. He should really do Romeo and Juliet with them, or somebody should, some director whose life isn’t over and can still touch Shakespeare with a ten-foot pole. Eurydice falls to her death, and he makes a note to tell Lizzy that she does the fall beautifully. The father tells Eurydice what defunct means – “dead in a very abrupt way” – and Geoffrey manages not to remember Ellen crumpling to the kitchen floor, dropping breakfast with a clatter, her eyes not even closed. All in all things are going well.
They open on schedule. Geoffrey paces through the theatre before the show, checking and rechecking every aspect of tech until Gigi begins hurling French curses and pens at him and makes him go away. He goes backstage and gives the actors a pep talk and gets a long and breasty hug from Lizzy. Some girls like the crazy ones, especially actresses. He gently untangles her and goes off to let James know about a blocking change Ellen suggested.
During the show his leg won't stop bouncing. He's so nervous he thinks he might throw up. It feels like his performance of Lear. Or his last performance of Hamlet. Maybe it's the play, but this show really feels like – death. Like an ending.
Still, the show works. The audience cheers and they get to their feet, wiping tears from their eyes. Backstage the actors are jumping into each other's arms, screeching and laughing.
Lizzy puts her arm through his. "You're coming out with us!" she cries. "You are." And he slips away from her again, saying "Maybe some other time," but Anna, of all people, Anna puts her hand through his other arm and sighs up at him, "I can't believe I'm actually trying to get you to drink, but Lizzy is right. You need to get out of this theatre, Geoffrey." And there is very little that he wouldn't do for Anna, so he promises to go to the bar, although the thought of leaving the place now makes more panicky than ever, because in all his preshow wanderings through every inch of the theatre, for all that he was pulled to every corner of it for hugs and congratulations afterward, he didn't see Ellen anywhere tonight.
So first things first. He chases everyone out to the cast party. "I'll be along soon," he says, ignoring Anna's big, worried eyes and Lizzy's pout. "Just have to clean up."
When they're finally all out and the theatre hums with sudden silence, Geoffrey stands center stage and throws out his arms. "Come out, come out," he calls. "Don't you have any notes?"
And Ellen -- Ellen appears. She fades in like the lights coming up, but not all the way, he can still see the house behind her, through her, and he starts to shake because he remembers this part.
"Stop that," he says, voice husky. "Come here all the way."
"Geoff," Ellen says. "I wish I could. But the play's done."
"God! What does that have to do with anything? There will be other plays. Forever."
"Yes," Ellen whispers. "The next one shouldn't be about dead wives."
"Ellen --"
"Do something that isn't about me."
"They've all been about you."
"Shakespeare. A comedy. Promise me."
"Ellen, I love you --"
"I think you should fuck Lizzy," Ellen says, backing away from him. "I think you should consider marrying Anna. That's up to you, but you have to do one of the comedies. Promise me. Promise me."
"I can't," he says hoarsely. "Ellen, please. How can you go on alone?"
And Ellen gives a sobbing little laugh and Geoffrey sees that she isn't alone. Oliver's white suit glows in the moonlight. Death, real death, seems to have agreed with him; he looks rested.
"Oh, Oliver, I hate you," Geoffrey says. "Don't take her from me again. Please."
"Not everything's about you, Geoffrey," Oliver says softly. "She'll be all right with me. Truly." He puts a hand on Ellen's shoulder and kisses the side of her head. His other hand produces a lighter for her cigarette. Geoffrey can see the exact moment the nicotine hits her ghostly blood. Her shoulders relax just a fraction, and she smiles at him. She steps in front of him and blows smoke in his face. He closes his eyes and breathes it in, and when he opens them again, for the first time since Oliver died, Geoffrey is all by himself.
Through the haze of grief and ghostly smoke, there's a sudden moment of clarity where Geoffrey thinks, I can see the future. Two roads diverge, and the choice is his. It would be easy, so easy, to let it all go. It must be a great relief. His body is as eager as the rest of him to give up the fight, he's weary and sore to the bone from adoring a ghost. It would, of course, be a horrible thing to do to Anna, but he's shamefully certain that she wouldn't be surprised, even by, as they say, natural causes. They can't have gotten far. It wouldn't take him long to catch up.
And what's the alternative? Years and endless years, working and fighting and sweating and never having her throw a vase at his head again. Hamlet again and Lear again and his own R and J and, what the hell, fucking Much Ado About Fucking Nothing, and James booming "Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania," in the park and Jack and Kate too wise to woo peaceably on an LA stage and Lizzy jumping up on the bar and playing the wrong part for the sheer true-love joy of it. And at the end of it, when he finally gets home to them, a few more stories to tell.
Geoffrey sits cross-legged on the floor in his darkened theatre, on his dim set for the underworld. He has a decision to make. He may be sitting for awhile.
