Just One Day 02: Just One Year (18 page)

JULY

Amsterdam

“H
ey, Willem, how are you feeling today?”

“I’m fine, Jeroen. How are you?”

“Oh, you know, the gout is acting up.” Jeroen pounds his chest and heaves a cough.

“Gout is in your leg, you twat,” Max says, sliding into the seat next to me.

“Oh, right.” Jeroen flashes her his most charming smile as he limps away, laughing.

“What a tosser!” Max says, dropping her bag at my feet. “If I have to kiss him, I swear, I might puke on the stage.”

“Pray for Marina’s health then.”

“Wouldn’t mind kissing her though.” Max grins and looks at Marina, the actress who plays Rosalind opposite Jeroen’s Orlando. “Ahh, lovely Marina, self-serving though it is, wouldn’t want her to fall ill. She’s so lovely. And, besides if she couldn’t go on, I’d have to kiss that git.
He’s
the one who I want to get sick.”

“But he doesn’t get sick,” I tell Max, as though she needs reminding. Since being cast as his understudy, I have heard, endlessly, relentlessly, how in his dozen years of doing theater, Jeroen Gosslers has never, ever missed a performance, not even when he was throwing up with the flu, not even when he had lost his voice, not even when his girlfriend went into labor with their daughter hours before curtain. In fact, Jeroen’s spotless record is apparently why I was given this shot in the first place, after the actor originally cast as an understudy booked a Mentos ad that would’ve required him missing three rehearsals to shoot the commercial. Three rehearsals, for an understudy who will never go on. Petra demands everything of her understudies, while at the same time demanding nothing of them.

As required, I’ve been at the theater every day since that very first table read, when the cast sat around a long wooden scuffed table on the stage, going through the text line by line, parsing meaning, deconstructing what this word meant, how that line should be interpreted. Petra was surprisingly egalitarian, open to almost anyone’s opinions about what Sad Lucretia meant or why Rosalind persisted on keeping up her disguise for so long. If one of Duke Frederick’s men wanted to interpret an exchange between Celia and Rosalind, Petra would entertain it. “If you are at this table, you have a right to be heard,” she said, magnanimously.

Max and I, however, were conspicuously not at the table, but rather seated a few paces away, near enough to hear, but far enough that for us to participate in the discussion made us feel like interlopers. At first, I wondered if this was unintentional. But after hearing Petra repeat, several times, that “performing is so much more than speaking lines. It’s about communicating with your audience through every gesture, every word unsaid,” I understood it was completely intentional.

It seems almost quaint now, that I worried about it being
too
easy. Though it has turned out to be easy, only not in the way I thought. Max and I are the only understudies who don’t have any actual roles in the play. We occupy a strange place in the cast. Semi-cast members. Shadow-cast members. Seat-warmers. Very few people in the cast speak to us. Vincent does. He got his Jaques after all. And Marina, who plays Rosalind, does as well, because she is uniquely gracious. And of course Jeroen makes it a point to talk to me every day, though I wish he wouldn’t.

“So, what we got on today?” Max asks in her London cockney. Like me, she’s a mutt; her father is Dutch from Surinam and her mother is from London. The cockney gets stronger when she drinks too much, though when she reads Rosalind, her English goes silky as the British Queen’s.

“They’re going over the fight scene choreography,” I tell her.

“Oh, good. Maybe that ponce will actually get hurt.” She laughs and runs a hand through her spiky hair. “Wanna run lines later? Won’t be much of a chance once we start tech.”

Soon, we move the set out of the theater for the final five days of tech rehearsals and dress rehearsals at the amphitheater in Vondelpark where the show will go up for six weekends. In two Fridays, we’ll have our soft opening, and then Saturday, the hard opening. For the rest of the cast, this is the payoff for all the work. For Max and me, it’s when we cash out, when any semblance of us being in the cast disappears. Linus has told us to make sure we know the entire play, all the blocking, by heart, and we’re to trail Jeroen and Marina through the first tech rehearsal. This is as close to the action as we get. Not once has Linus or Petra given us any direction or asked us to run lines or gone over any aspect of the play. Max and I run lines incessantly, the two of us. I think it’s how we make ourselves feel like we’re actually a part of the production.

“Can we do the Ganymede parts? You know I like those best,” Max says.

“Only because you get to be a boy.”

“Well, natch. I prefer Rosalind when she’s channeling her man. She’s such a simp in the beginning.”

“She’s not a simp. She’s in love.”

“At first sight.” She rolls her eyes. “A simp. She’s ballsier when she’s pretending to have balls.”

“Sometimes it’s easier to be someone else,” I say.

“I should think so. It’s why I became a bleeding actor.” And then she looks at me and snorts with laughter. We may memorize the lines. We may know the blocking. We may show up. But neither one of us is an actor. We are seat warmers.

Max sighs and kicks her feet up onto the chair, daring a wordless reprimand from Petra and a follow-up telling off from Linus, or, as Max calls him, the Flunky.

Up on stage, Jeroen is arguing with the choreographer. “That’s not really working for me. It doesn’t feel authentic,” he says. Max rolls her eyes again but I sit up to listen. This happened about every other day during the blocking, Jeroen not “feeling” the movements and Petra changing them, but Jeroen not feeling the new blocking either, so most of the time, she changed it back. My script is a crosshatch of scribbles and erasures, a road map of Jeroen’s quest for authenticity.

Marina is sitting on the cement pilings on the stage next to Nikki, the actress playing Celia. They both look bored as they watch the fight choreography. For a second Marina catches my eye and we exchange a sympathetic smile.

“I saw that,” Max says.

“Saw what?”

“Marina. She wants you.”

“She doesn’t even know me.”

“That may be the case, but she was giving you fuck-me eyes at the bar last night.”

Every night after rehearsal, most of the cast goes to a bar around the corner. Because we are either provocative or masochistic, Max and I go along with them. Usually we wind up sitting at the long wooden bar on our own or at a table with Vincent. There never seems to be room at the big table for Max and me.

“She was not giving me fuck-me eyes.”

“She was giving
one
of us fuck-me eyes. I haven’t gotten any Sapphic vibes off her, though you never can tell with Dutch girls.”

I look at Marina. She’s laughing at something Nikki said, as Jeroen and the actor playing Charles the wrestler work some fake punches with the fight choreographer.

“Unless you don’t like girls,” Max continues, “but I’m not getting that vibe off you either.”

“I like girls just fine.”

“Then why do you leave the bar with me every night?”

“Are you not a girl?”

Max rolls her eyes. “I am sorry, Willem, but charming as you are, it’s not going to happen with us.”

I laugh and give Max a wet kiss on the cheek, which she wipes off, with excess drama. Up on stage, Jeroen attempts a false punch at Charles and stumbles over himself. Max claps. “Mind that gout,” she calls.

Petra swerves around, her sharp eyes full of disapproval. Max pretends to be absorbed in her script.

“Fuck running lines,” Max whispers when Petra’s attention is safely returned to the stage. “Let’s get drunk.”

• • •

That night, over drinks at the bar, Max asks me, “So why don’t you?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Get off with a girl. If not Marina, one of the civilians at the bar.”

“Why don’t
you
?” I ask.

“Who’s to say I don’t?”

“You leave with me every night, Max.”

She sighs, a big deep sigh that seems a lot older than Max, who is only a year older than me. Which is why she doesn’t mind seat-warming, she says.
My time will come.
She makes a slash mark over her chest. “Broken heart,” she says. “Dykes take dog-years to heal.”

I nod.

“So what about you?” Max says. “Broken heart?”

At times, I’d thought it was something like that—after all, I’d never been quite so strung out about a girl. But it’s a funny thing because since that day with Lulu in Paris, I’ve reconnected with Broodje and the boys, I’ve visited my mother and have been talking to her again, and now I’m living with Uncle Daniel. And I’m acting. Okay, perhaps not acting, exactly. But not accidentally acting, either. And just in general, I’m better. Better than I’ve been since Bram died, and in some ways, better than I was even before that. No, Lulu didn’t break my heart. But I’m beginning to wonder if in some roundabout way, she fixed it.

I shake my head.

“So what are you waiting for?” Max asks me.

“I don’t know,” I answer.

But one thing I do know: Next time, I’ll know it when I find it.

B
efore Daniel leaves, we hang the last of the kitchen cabinets. The kitchen is almost finished. The plumber will come to install the dishwasher and we’ll put in the backsplash and then that’s that. “We’re nearly there,” I say.

“Just have to fix the buzzer and tackle your shit in the attic,” Daniel says.

“Right. The shit in the attic. How much is there?” I ask. I don’t remember putting that many boxes up there.

But Daniel and I lug down at least a dozen boxes with my name on them. “We should just throw it all away,” I say. “I’ve gone this long without.”

He shrugs. “Whatever you want.”

Curiosity gets me. I open one box, papers and clothes from my dorm, not sure why I kept them. I put them in the garbage. I go through another and do the same. But then I come upon a third box. Inside are colored folders, the kind Yael used to keep patient records in, and I think the box must be mislabeled with my name. But then I see a sheet of paper sticking out of one of the folders. I pick it up.

The wind in my hair

Wheels bounce over cobblestones

As big as the sky

A memory rushes back: “It doesn’t rhyme,” Bram had said when I’d showed it to him, so full of pride because the teacher had asked me to read it to the entire class.

“It’s not supposed to. It’s a haiku,” Yael had said, rolling her eyes at him and bestowing upon me a rare conspiratorial smile.

I pull out the folder. Inside is some of my old schoolwork, my early writing, math tests. I look in another folder: not schoolwork but drawings of a ship, a star of David that Saba taught me to do with two triangles. Pages and pages of this stuff. Unsentimental Yael and clutter-phobic Bram never displayed things like this. I assumed they threw it away.

In another box, I find a tin full of ticket stubs: airplane tickets, concert tickets, train tickets. An old Israeli passport, Yael’s, full of stamps. Beneath that, I uncover a couple of very old black-and-white photos. It takes me a moment to recognize that they’re of Saba. I’ve never seen him this young before. I hadn’t realized any of these photos had survived the war. But it’s unmistakably him. The eyes, they are Yael’s. And mine, too. In one photo, he has his arm slung over a pretty girl, all dark hair and mystery eyes. He looks at her adoringly. She looks vaguely familiar, but it can’t be Naomi, whom he didn’t meet until after the war.

I look for more old photos of Saba and the girl, but find just an odd newspaper clipping of her in a plastic liner. I peer closer. She’s wearing a fancy dress and is flanked by two men in tuxedoes. I hold it up to the light. The faded writing is in Hungarian, but there’s a caption with names: Peter Lorre, Fritz Lang—Hollywood names I recognize—and a third name, Olga Szabo, which I don’t.

I set the photos aside and keep digging. In another box, there are endless keepsakes. More papers. And then in another box, a large manila envelope. I open it up and out tumbles more photos: me, Yael, and Bram, on holiday in Croatia. I remember again how Bram and I walked to the docks every morning to buy fresh fish that no one really knew how to cook. There’s another photo: us bundled up for skating the year the canals froze over and everyone took to their skates. And another: celebrating Bram’s fortieth birthday with that massive party that spilled off the boat, onto the pier, onto the street, until all the neighbors came and it became a block party. There are the outtakes from the architectural magazine shoot, the shot of the three of us before I was cropped out. When I get to the bottom of the pile, there’s one photo left, stuck to the envelope. I have to gently pry it away.

The breath that comes out of me isn’t a sigh or a sob or a shudder. It’s something alive, like a bird, wings beating, taking flight. And then it’s gone, off into the quiet afternoon.

“Everything okay?” Daniel asks me.

I stare at the shot. The three of us, from my eighteenth birthday, not the photo I lost, but a different picture, taken from a different perspective, from someone else’s camera. Another accidental picture.

“I thought I’d lost this,” I say, gripping the picture.

Daniel cocks his head to the side and scratches at his temple. “I’m always losing things, and then I find them again in the strangest places.”

A
few days later, I leave for rehearsal and Daniel leaves for the airport. It’s strange to think that when I come back that night, Daniel will be gone. Though I won’t have the flat to myself for long. Broodje has been in The Hague for most of the summer on an internship, and now he’s in Turkey visiting Candace, who’s on a two-week trip there with her grandparents. When he comes back, he’ll stay here with me until he and Henk move into their new flat in Utrecht in the fall.

Rehearsal today is frenzied and frenetic. The set is being broken down, transported to the park for tomorrow’s tech, and the lack of scenery seems to have unhinged everyone. Petra is a whirlwind of terror, yelling at the actors, yelling at the tech guys, yelling at Linus, who looks like he would like to take cover under his clipboard.

“Poor Flunky,” Max says. “For someone menopausal, Petra seems like she’s on the rag. She smashed Nikki’s mobile.”

“Really?” I ask Max, sliding into our usual seats.

“Well you know how she is if you put your phone on in the ‘sacred rehearsal room.’ But I heard she’s extra uppity because Geert said ‘Mackers’ in the theater earlier.”

“Mackers?”

“The Scottish Play,” she says. When I fail to understand she mouths
Macbeth
. “Very bad mojo to say it in a theater.”

“You believe that?”

“I believe you don’t mess with Petra the day before the first tech.”

Jeroen walks by. He looks at me and feigns a cough.

“That the best you can do?” Max calls after him. She turns to me. “And he calls himself an actor.”

Linus has the cast do an entire run-through. It’s a mess. Lines are forgotten. Cues are missed. Blocking is flubbed. “
The curse of Mackers
,” Max whispers.

• • •

By six o’clock, Petra is in such a state that Linus lets us all go early. “Get a good night’s sleep,” he says. “Tomorrow is a long day. Call is at ten.”

“It’s too early to go to the bar,” Max says. “Let’s go eat and then go dancing or hear a band play. We can see who’s on at Paradiso or Melkweg.”

We ride over to the Leidseplein. Max is beside herself because some musician who was once in a famous band is playing solo tonight at the Paradiso and there’s still tickets left. We buy a pair. Then we wander around the square, which this time of year is ground zero for tourists. There’s a crowd of them surrounding some street performers.

“It’s probably just those bloody Peruvian musicians,” Max says. “Do you know, when I was little, I thought it was the same troupe, following me. Took me ages to work out they were clones.” She laughs and knocks her head with her knuckles. “I can be right thick sometimes.”

It’s not the Peruvians. It’s a group of jugglers. They’re not bad, juggling all kinds of typically spiked flaming things. We watch for a while, and when the hat passes, I toss in a handful of coins.

We turn to leave and Max pokes me in the side. “Now’s the real show,” she says. I turn around and see who she’s talking about: a woman has her legs wrapped around one of the jugglers’ hips, her arms tangled in his hair. “Get a room,” Max jokes.

I watch them a moment longer than I ought to. And then the girl drops down and turns around. She spots me and I spot her, and we do a double take.

“Wills?” she calls

“Bex?” I call.

“
Wills
?” Max repeats.

Dragging the juggler behind her, Bex comes up to me and gives me a big theatrical hug and kiss. It’s quite a change since the last time I saw her when she would barely shake my hand. She introduces me to Matthias. I introduce her to Max. “Your girlfriend?” Bex asks, sending Max into a theatrical howl of protestation.

After a bit of chit-chat, we run out of things to say, because we never really did have that much to say even when we were sleeping together. “We should go. Matthias needs lots of
rest
before so he can
perform
.” Bex gives an obvious wink in case anyone wasn’t clear about what kind of resting and what kind of performing she was referring to.

“Okay then.” We kiss, kiss, kiss good-bye.

We’re walking away when Bex calls out. “Hey, did Tor ever find you?”

I stop. “Tor was looking for me?”

“She was trying to track you down. Apparently some letter came for you at Headingley.”

It’s like a switch is thrown, the way my body surges. “At Headingley?”

“Tor’s place in Leeds,” Bex says.

I know where Headingley is. But I rarely gave anyone a mailing address at all, and I don’t remember ever giving anyone Tor’s home address, which was the occasional Guerrilla Will headquarters, where we’d go to rehearse or recuperate. There’s no reason on earth to think she’d send me a letter there, that she’d know to send me a letter there. But still, I walk back toward Bex. “A letter? From whom?”

“Dunno. But Tor was quite keen to get it to you. She said she tried emailing you but you were unresponsive. Imagine that?”

I ignore the dig. “When?”

She scratches her brow, trying to dislodge the memory. “I can’t remember. It was a bit ago. Wait, when were we in Belfast?” she asks Matthias.

He shrugs. “Around Easter, wasn’t it?”

“No. I think it was earlier. Around Shrove Tuesday,” Bex says. She throws up her hands. “Some time around February. I remember pancakes. Or March. Or maybe it was April. Tor said she tried emailing you and got no reply so she wanted to know if
I
knew how to reach you.” She widens her eyes, to show the absurdity of such a notion.

March. April. When I was in India, traveling, and my email account got infected with that virus. I switched to a new address after that. I haven’t checked the old account in months. Maybe it’s right there. Maybe it’s been there all along.

“Don’t suppose you know who the letter was from?”

Bex looks peeved, bringing back a bunch of memories. When it didn’t last between us, and Bex had been nasty the rest of the season, Skev had made fun of me: “Didn’t you ever hear? Don’t shit where you eat, man.”

“No idea,” Bex tells me in a bored tone that seems practiced, so I’m unsure whether she doesn’t know or does but won’t say. “If you’re so interested, you can just ask Tor.” She laughs then. It’s not friendly. “Though good luck getting her before fall.”

Part of Tor’s “method” was to try to live as close to Shakespearian times as possible while she was on the road. She refused to use a computer or a phone, though she would sometimes borrow someone else’s to send an email or make a call if it was important. She didn’t watch TV or listen to an iPod. And though she obsessively checked the weather reports, which seemed a rather modern innovation, she checked them in the newspapers, which somehow made it fair game because newspapers were around in seventeenth-century England, so she said.

“Don’t suppose you have any idea what she did with it?” My heart has sped up, as if I’ve been running, and I feel breathless, but I force myself to sound as bored as Bex, for fear that if I make the letter sound important, she won’t tell me anything.

“She might’ve sent it to the boat.”

“The boat?”

“The one you used to live on.”

“How’d she even know about the boat?”

“Good Christ, Wills, how should I know? Presumably you told someone about it. You did live with everyone for a year, more or less.”

I told one person about the boat. Skev. He was going to Amsterdam and asked if I could hook him up with any free places to stay. I mentioned a few squats and also said if the key was still in its hiding place, and no one else was there, he could camp on the boat.

“Yeah, but I haven’t lived on that boat for years.”

“Well it’s obviously not that important,” Bex says. “Otherwise whoever wrote it would have known where to find you.”

Bex is wrong but she’s also right. Because Lulu should’ve known where to find me. And then I stop myself. Lulu. After all this time? The letter’s more likely from a tax collector.

“What was all that about?” Max asks after Bex and Matthias have gone.

I shake my head. “I’m not sure.” I look across the square. “Do you mind? I need to duck into an Internet café for a second.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll grab a coffee.”

I log onto my old email account. There’s not much there but junk. I go back to the spring, when it got infected with that virus, and there’s a pocket of nothing. Four weeks of messages that have just vanished. I try the bulk bin. Nothing there. Out of habit before I sign off, I scroll back for the emails from Bram and Saba, relieved to find them still there. Tomorrow, I’m going to print them out and also forward them to my new account. In the meantime, I change the settings on my old account to forward all new mail to my current address.

I check my current email account, even though Tor wouldn’t have known about it because I only told a handful of people the new address. I search the inbox, the junk mail. There’s nothing.

I send Skev a quick note, asking him to ring me. Then I send a note to Tor as well, asking about the letter, what it said, where she sent it. Knowing Tor, I won’t get a response until the fall. By that point, it’ll have been more than a year since I met Lulu. Any sane person would say it’s too late. It already felt too late that first day, when I woke up in the hospital. But even so, I’ve kept looking.

I’m still looking.