A Different Kind of Forever(52)

Diane smiled and leaned back against him. “Sorry. It’s automatic.”

“Yeah, well you’re depriving people of their gainful employment.”

She rubbed her hands against his arms. “Sorry.”

Diane could feel the question hanging in the air before he asked it. “What about this Quinn Harris?”

Diane chewed her lip. “Did you ever meet somebody, and in like, three minutes you’re thinking, wow, this is who I’ve been waiting for my whole life?”

Michael stepped back away from her. When Diane turned around, his face was blank.

Diane continued. “Well, that’s how I felt when I met Quinn. But he was married. So nothing really happened. Then he went back to England.” She reached out to touch his face, tracing the line of his jaw, running her fingertips over his lips. “It was a long time ago. Things are different now.”

“There was something in your face, when Angela was talking about him,” Michael said.

“It was a long time ago,” Diane repeated. “I’m hungry. And I need to cool off.”

He kissed her. “Okay.”





By the second week of July, Sam French began casting for ‘Mothers and Old Boyfriends’. Diane began spending time at Merriweather in the mornings. She was enthralled by the whole process. They were casting ten male and eight female roles, and because the Merriweather program had been so well received for a number of years, the caliber of people auditioning was high, many known theater and television actors from Manhattan.

In ten days, they had a cast, and they began to read through her script. It was then that her real work began. She and Sam discussed which lines were working, which sounded hollow, where the laughs were. Diane was not a good collaborator, but she knew Sam was thinking only of the best for her play, and she made extensive notes on his suggestions, as well as suggestions from the cast. It was difficult for her to see characters that she created and felt belonged to her become absorbed by the actors, and the line between the character and the person portraying the character became blurred.

Michael listened to her, nodding in sympathy as she tried to articulate her frustration. They were sitting in her back yard, and she was pacing her patio, trying to explain. He grabbed her, pulled her into his lap, and kissed her soundly.

“I know exactly how you feel. There were times I’d write a song, spend all this time on, it, agonizing over each note, and the band would hear it, and they’d be, like, ‘that’s the best song you’ve ever written, man’, and I’d be thinking how f*ckin’ great I was, then Seth would say, ‘hey, maybe we should do this’, and Phil would say, ‘let’s change this chord’, and in fifteen minutes, the best thing I ever wrote would be completely different. It sucks. I know how hard it is to turn this over to somebody else. But unless you want to act all the roles yourself, you’ve got to allow for a little, well, freedom of interpretation.”

“I know. I guess the whole time I was writing, I never thought it would be actually performed, so what’s been in my head for all this time is hard to shake loose.” Diane kissed him right behind the ear, then began taking small bites on his neck

“Your neighbors are watching,” Michael murmured as she slid her hand under his shirt.

“Are they holding up scorecards?” She asked. “I think we deserve at least a 9.2.”

“I think we deserve even more, but we either have to wait ‘till it gets darker, or maybe go inside.” His hands were moving up the inside of her thighs.

She stood up, grabbed his hand, and led him into the house.





“You don’t text.”

“Neither do you.”

“Yes, I do. I text the girls all the time, especially now that they’re down the shore.”

“Who would I text? All the people I need are right here.”

“You don’t Tweet, either.”

Michael laughed. “Seth is in charge of all that. He’s the maven of all Social Media.”

“And you don’t have a Facebook page.”

“My life isn’t that interesting. What would I put on a Facebook page?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Isn’t yours the generation that must be in constant contact with everyone and everything?”

“Maybe. I’m an old-fashioned guy at heart. I don’t even like talking on the phone all that much. My cell is five years old. I’m not even sure I can text.”