The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(103)

“If I can build a set for Noises Off out of the gate, you can do Oklahoma! And you won’t do it alone.”

She smiled. “Well, I know I’ll like having Miles Kelly in the orchestra pit. And I think I’ll like knowing you’re around to talk me off a ledge.”

Him of all people, talking someone off a ledge. Erik had to smile back. With some reluctance, he took his elbows off the piano lid and straightened up. “I have to go get some stuff done. But it was really nice talking to you.”

“I enjoyed it too. I’m going to just sit and play a while. Will it bother you while you’re working?”

“Not at all.”

She gave a little wave of her hand, and then turned back to the piano. As he puttered around backstage, he listened as she went through an eclectic mix of songs from Broadway shows, old standards, a pop tune or two, and then shifted back to classical music. He was up on the catwalk, pulling lanterns off the upstage bar when she started playing the Bach Prelude in F Minor.

Daisy’s prelude.

His hands froze. His head lifted, tilted toward the music. Out of the past it came, those solemn bass notes underneath the rising chords. Floating up to him on his perch over the stage, not in a painful onslaught but a gentle wisp of smoky memory, wreathing around his head.

Do a triple.

Watch this, Dave.

O mio dio, Margarita, you naughty thing…

He waited for sadness, for anger, for any of the emotions typically attached to those years. They didn’t come. He was being pulled in another direction now. Erik crossed his arms on the railing of the catwalk, leaning out a little to look at Melanie at the piano. The curve of her back, the roll and caress of her hands on the keys.

Her head lifted then, and she saw him. She stopped playing and smiled. “There you are,” she said.

Gazing back, Erik raised the fingers of one hand, showing his palm to her, then slowly let them drop again.

Here I am…





Dream Ballet


Melanie indiscriminately called everyone “baby.”

Within a week of meeting, Erik was caught up tight in a crush. Crushed to a giddy rubble. The high of being smitten hit his long-sober, intolerant brain like a line of cocaine. He woke with Melanie all over his mind. He drove to work thinking about her vitality and enthusiasm, her terrific, full-throated laugh. Finding ridiculous excuses to pass by her classes in the auditorium or the Black Box, he lurked in the shadows, watching. He admired her teaching and how she kept order—shrouding strict discipline in warm, often self-deprecating humor. From the stories Melanie told him of her childhood, Erik thought he could detect her grandmother’s influence.

“Minus the fly swatter,” he said.

Melanie held up a finger. “I have one in the office. They better not test me, baby, I will use it.”

In their free time, she coaxed him to the piano with her, waving a book of four-hand duets which they picked through. She even got him to sing with her. It was something he’d never feel he was good at, but if it meant his leg and hip could be cozied up to Melanie’s on the piano bench, he’d sing his face off.

When he wasn’t teaching, Erik was driving his team of stagehands in building a myriad of sets for Oklahoma! Besides the landscape backdrops, they needed house fronts with working doors, picket fences with workable gates. They built cabin walls, barn walls, a surrey with the fringe on top. They devised trick knife blades and host of other props.

“Be aware,” Miles said privately to Erik. “You’re going to have to rig a gunshot blast in the second act. Aunt Eller fires off a rifle.”

“I saw that,” Erik said, touched by Miles’s forethought. “I’ll be all right.”

He also had to rig up a bit of business for the dream ballet which ended the first act. In the midst of the dancing, to a specific cue in the music, a veil had to fall from the sky. He came up with a mechanism to attach to one of the lighting bars and he picked his most musical stagehand to man it. But the first time they tried it out, the bit of white voile drifted about, floating everywhere except where it needed to be. Hilarity ensued as the dancers tried to catch it.

Melanie suggested fishing weights sewn into the hem of the veil. Those weren’t readily available but Erik got some small washers and Melanie sewed them in place with the swift competence of a well-trained needlewoman. They tried the scene again and this time the veil slammed straight down to the floor.

“Well that ain’t romantic, baby,” Melanie said.

Finally, after much trial and error, the veil was released and floated perfectly into the action below. Wild applause in the theater. Melanie gave a whoop and jumped onto Erik’s back, wrapping him in arms and legs, her full-throated laugh against his ear.

Oklahoma! was a triumph. Full house after full house, standing ovation after standing ovation.

A few days later, after the stage was struck, the sets broken down, the props stored and the costumes dry-cleaned, Erik and Melanie went out for a drink.

“You mean like a date,” Melanie said to his invitation. “Or just a do?”

“A date,” Erik said.

She looked at him a moment, arms crossed. “I’ve never dated a white man.”

“Neither have I.”

She clucked her tongue, planted her palm square in his chest and pushed him away. “You are adorable. Pick me up at seven.”