All's Well(87)

“Professor Fitch,” Ellie whispers, “I’m so sorry, but I think I’m going to be sick.”

I let Ellie go, and she stumbles a little, nearly falls backward on the stage, but she catches herself. All the students stop clapping. They stare at me, standing perfectly still in the center of the stage. Not even breathless. Smiling at Her Majesty the King, who gazes at me now with exhaustion.

“You see, Briana,” I say. “A display of wellness. That’s what’s called for in this moment. A performance of health so that the audience understands. The audience will only know how deeply you have been in pain when they see how hard you dance afterward.”

I turn to Ellie, sitting on the floor now, her red dress fanning around her beautifully. “Ellie, you’ll have to learn to land on your feet.”

“Yes, Professor.”

“You both will.”

“Professor,” she says, “you’re bleeding.”

“Am I?”

She points to my lower leg. And I see that all the students are staring, looking horrified. I look down at my leg. Oh my, look at that. A gash. A gash, how did that happen? In all the running around this week, I must have hurt myself and not noticed it. I gaze at the grin-shaped gash on my shin, oozing bright red blood. Smiling at me as I smile at it. The two of us smiling at each other. Smiling because I feel absolutely nothing. Not a burn, not a sting, not a pinch. But then I remember the students are watching. So I make a show of looking disturbed. I excuse myself, go to the bathroom, and try to wash away the blood. I raise my leg onto the counter. I hold up the wound to the mirror and the light. The blood really is bright red. Thin streams of it pouring down my leg and onto my hands. Ouch is the word in my head, am I right? Ouch, ouch. Ouch, I tell my leg, but it’s a lie, Grace. I feel nothing. I can only smile when I see how truly deep the gash is. Can only smile at the bright red gushing blood. Panic, I command myself. But my heart continues to beat steadily behind my ribs, my body a calm blue sky. I look in the mirror. I see a woman in a white dress patterned with red poppies. The blood on her hands brings out the rose color of her lips, which are still curved serenely.



* * *



I tell myself I’ll go visit you again after tonight’s rehearsal, Grace. Right after rehearsal, I’ll check in. Instead my feet walk me backstage, where I fuck Hugo in the scene shop. He’s resistant at first—“I don’t think we should do this, Miranda,” he says. “I really don’t. Not here.” But he succumbs to me in the end; he can’t help it. He melts under my touch in spite of his better judgment, even as I lead him to the stage. “Let me take you back to my place.”

But I don’t want to go back to that sorry place with the suspicious widow and the glowing dog. “I want to be here,” I say, under the starry sky of the theater.

“Let’s stay here, under this sky, in this light,” I tell Hugo. Hugo, whom I keep calling Goldfish, who looks more and more like Paul every time he turns on the light to say, “Goldfish?” Whom I keep commanding to bite my shoulder, I’m curious, will I feel it? When will I feel it? Not when the teeth break skin. Not even when they hit bone, probably. But Hugo barely leaves a mark there or anywhere.

“I told you I don’t want to hurt you,” he says. And I laugh at the idea. That Hugo could hurt me. That anything could hurt me.

He keeps pointing to the cut on my leg, which admittedly is disturbing to see. Getting wider, darker. He wants to address it with something, alcohol, gauze. I let him bandage it up in the workshop. Watch him wrap the gauze around and around the wound.

Behind him, on a worktable, there’s the maquette of Macbeth. The three little plastic witches are gone because one night after rehearsal I buried them in the dirt. Got on my knees on the damp campus green. Dug a hole in the earth with my bare hands. Deep, deep into the earth, I dug. I didn’t have to dig so deep. The dirt just felt so wonderful between my fingers. Now there’s nothing left of the maquette but its husk. Just an empty black box. Black painted sky streaked with silver. That low red paper moon. The world of Macbeth in which he is trapped for the whole of the play. A black play, Ms. Fitch. A far cry from the rainbows and the starry cosmos of Helen.

“Why haven’t you thrown that away?” I ask him now.

He looks at me like, What a question.

“Because I can always paint over it. Use it again. I like to salvage things where I can,” he says. Not smiling. Because he’s bandaging my leg. Trying to salvage me.

“I think you should burn it,” I tell him.

“And I really think you should get stitches for this,” he says.



* * *



Second hiccup: Ellie. Don’t get me wrong, Grace. She’s wonderful, she’s luminous. More luminous perhaps than ever before, thanks to being presumably dumped by Trevor. He appears to have switched allegiances again—a Bertram to the core. Each day he and Briana enter and leave the theater together, walking slowly to accommodate her dragging gait. Briana leans heavily on his arm like he’s a crutch. And Trevor bears her weight like a stoic Englishman at a country dance who has no choice but to take the debutante for a spin. He doesn’t dare look at Ellie, and neither does Briana, who still holds on to Ellie’s water bottle. The pain on Ellie’s face as she watches them is palpable. Her eyes are always red. Her face is gaunt and pale. She looks fantastically thin in her red dress with matching cloak, which is the costume we decided on for Helen’s return from the dead. I want the audience to see her beauty immediately, I explained to the costume designer, a senior in the fashion department. I want it to blaze like the sun.