The Vanishing Half(72)

Thirteen


By December, The Midnight Marauders poster outside the Stardust Theater had already been tacked over with an advertisement for West Side Story. Jude must have looked so glum that the man changing the marquee glanced down his ladder and said, “Sometimes they bring ’em back for a second run.” But she wasn’t thinking about the show—she was only thinking about Stella, who still had not appeared. Now the play was over and what did she even have to show for it? A few old stories about a woman she would never know.

On the night of the final performance, she stepped into the empty theater to sweep the floors and found Kennedy standing alone on the dim stage. She was never early, so Jude asked if something was wrong. Kennedy laughed.

“I always come early to the last show,” she said. “It’s the one people will remember you by, you know. You’re only as good as your last performance.”

She was wearing ripped jeans and a big floppy purple hat that hid half her face. She always dressed like that, like a child ripping clothes out of a costume chest.

“Why don’t you come on up?” Kennedy said.

Jude laughed, glancing around the empty theater. “What’re you talking about?” she said. “I’m working.”

“So? No one’s here. Just come up for a second, just for fun. I bet you’ve never even been on a stage like this before.”

She hadn’t, although she’d thought about trying out for the school play every year. Her mother had starred in Romeo and Juliet—learned all that funny English, had to let Ike Goudeau kiss her in front of the whole school. But what a time she’d had, taking her final bow to thunderous applause. Her mother would have been thrilled to see Jude star in anything. And she’d almost found the nerve to audition, not because she wanted the role but because acting was something her mother once loved. She wanted to prove to herself that they were alike. But she’d barely stepped into the theater for tryouts before she imagined the whole town laughing at her, and she slipped out the wing before the drama teacher called her name.

She propped her broom against the front-row seats.

“I almost tried out for a play once,” she told Kennedy, climbing the steps. “But I chickened out.”

“Well, maybe that’s your problem,” Kennedy said. “You tell yourself no before anyone even says it to you.”

The theater did look different from the stage—the house lights dimmed, so you couldn’t see the faces of all the people watching you. How strange that must be, to not know what the people looking at you were thinking.

“I used to have these terrible nightmares,” Kennedy said. “When I was little. I mean, awful ones.”

“About what?”

“That’s the thing, I could never remember. But when I started acting, they stopped. It was the strangest thing. Like there was something bad inside me trying to get out and I could only get rid of it here.” She tapped the stage floor. “But that doesn’t make any sense, does it? The doctors said that creative people have the most vivid dreams. I don’t know why. Maybe you’ll figure it out when you’re a doctor.”

She didn’t want to be a psychologist, but she was grateful for Kennedy’s confidence. When you’re a doctor. It sounded so easy when she said it.

“Yes,” she said. “Maybe.”

She followed her down off the stage. She could hear the rest of the company arriving, giddy as they raced around backstage, dressing for the final time. She would sweep the theater floor, then take her place in the dark one last time. And after the final curtain, for the first time since she’d realized who Kennedy Sanders was, she had no idea when she might see her again.

“You should come to the cast party,” Kennedy said. “Bring your boyfriend. I bet the theater’ll pay him to take some pictures.”

The suggestion was surprisingly thoughtful; she’d told Kennedy once that Reese was a photographer but she never expected her to remember.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll give him a call.”

Kennedy started toward backstage, then paused. “I don’t know what happens after this.”

“What do you mean?”

Maybe, to an actor, the dark wing of a theater felt as intimate as church; either way, Kennedy began to confess. She didn’t know what she would do tomorrow—no, literally, what she would do when she woke up in the morning, because this play was the only thing that had given her any sense of purpose in months. It was the only thing she was good at, acting. She’d left school because she was shit at it, she was shit at everything else. And maybe her mother was right—maybe she had made a big mistake. Maybe acting was a waste of time. Maybe her parents argued so much because they were splitting up. Maybe her mother would rather grade math assignments than talk to her. Maybe all those things were true. And maybe she had only landed her biggest role yet because the boy she was sleeping with told her one night, while they were stoned, that his big brother had written a hilariously bad play that some company was putting on downtown. And even though it was bad, she’d wept when she read the script. A lonely girl living in a world surrounded only by ghosts. Nothing reminded her of her own life more.

Maybe the director, Doug, sensed this, or maybe he just liked looking at her tits, or maybe the boy told his brother to pull some strings, to do whatever he had to do to make sure that her name was at the top of the call sheet. Either way, she won the starring role.