You in Five Acts(49)

“I said I’m sorry.” My fingers closed around a plastic cap and I pulled out a days-old water, gratefully chugging the last inch that was left. That felt better. “I ran into Joy,” I explained. “I lost track of time. I’m ready now.”

“The funny thing,” you said, finally turning to face me, “is that when you say you’ll be someplace you lose track of time, but when you’re not supposed to be there, you just magically appear. You’re never ready at the right time.” Your eyes flashed with anger. I could tell you wanted me to apologize, but not just for running late. Couldn’t you see how complicated it all was? You couldn’t own a person, Joy had said, and it was true. So why did you and Ethan both insist on acting like I had to belong to you?

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“This was a bad idea.” You picked up your coat. “I’m over it. I’m just gonna tell Ethan to find someone else.”

“Seriously?”

“Better than this.” You shrugged your bag onto your shoulder.

“Wow. Well, way to quit.” I tried to keep my voice steady, even though the prospect of facing rehearsals without you—of facing anything without you—made me feel like crying.

“I think it’s for the best,” you said.

“Really?” It was hard to hide my disappointment, but I didn’t care anymore. “For someone so worried about the future, you give up on good things pretty quickly.”

You laughed bitterly. “I don’t think I would describe this as a good thing.”

“It could be.”

“Look, what’s the best-case scenario?” you asked. “We do this, and it doesn’t suck, and then it’s over, right?”

“That’s better than not trying.” I tossed my bag against the wall, where it landed with a dull thud.

“So what?” you asked, shaking your head. “You just want to run lines now? For real?” I opened my mouth and then shut it again. I forgot we were talking, in theory at least, about the play.

The sky was dark; in the time it had taken us to fight, the sun had beat a hasty retreat below the Hudson. If you left, I knew I would have nowhere to go but uptown on the 1 to the top of the park, where I would meet Dante so I could lose track of time, on purpose. Just like that Sunday when I’d walked off the subway without meaning to, I felt a powerful pull to derail. Maybe, if I could just get you to stay for a little while, you would change your mind. Maybe then we could both change course.

“Yeah,” I said.

You let out a deep sigh but pulled off your bag and hung it on a chair. “Fine. Five minutes. Where should we start?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess . . . at the beginning.”

? ? ?


“On a night like this, you can see the whole city,” you said.

We were standing a safe distance apart, ignoring the blocking and just saying the words, facing forward, as if we were doing a staged reading in a black box theater. When we’d started it hadn’t been good, exactly, but some of the venom had dripped away, slowly, and once we we’d gotten about halfway through—five minutes had become ten had become fifteen—we’d found a flow. We weren’t sparking, but we weren’t sparring, either. We were just voices rising and falling on the right beats, building a rhythm. Telling a story.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I wish I couldn’t see it at all. I long for the mountains back home.” Normally at that part I was supposed to be sitting next to you, leaning into your shoulder, and holding your hand. I knew we would skip the stage directions like we always did, and fly past the kiss without even discussing it, but still, it was getting close. I glanced over at you, expecting you to stop any second, roll your eyes, and tell me it was time for you to go. But you were just staring out at nothing, your focus somewhere far away.

“How can you say that?” you asked. “It’s so much better here. There’s so much . . . opportunity.”

“Sewing underclothing in a stifling factory until my fingers bleed doesn’t seem much like opportunity,” I said, trying to slow myself down—learning my lines high had been efficient, but they’d imprinted in a speedy rush that wanted to come out all at once. “The conditions were better traveling steerage.” My fingers twitched at my sides. I needed to do something with my body soon or else I felt like I would explode.

“That can’t be true,” you said. “Besides—” You were supposed to gesture out at the imaginary cityscape in front of us, the metaphorical future ahead, but instead you turned and looked at me. “This is just the beginning,” you said. “You speak as if this is the end.”

“Maybe I wish it was.”

I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. My mind was racing and it was hard to stand still. But closing them only made the room tilt. Joy had been right again; I should have eaten more at dinner. I needed to hold on to something. I just wanted to feel grounded.

“I just want to feel something,” I said, gesturing wildly with my arms to release the pent-up energy. (Mom used to call it “shaking the sillies out.” We had a whole dance we’d do.) “I want to feel something other than homesickness.”

(It was Viola talking, but I was homesick, too, wasn’t I? Only not for some country across the ocean, but for my own apartment, where I used to feel so safe. When did that stop? How could I get back?)