If Jean actually gets the part, the man she's had a crush on since high school will get to woo her and dump her in front of everyone night after night...

LOVE IN THE WINGS

a short story by

Terri Darling

Copyright © 2010 by Terri Darling

Published by Fiero Publishing at Smashwords

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Love in the Wings

Terri Darling

“Before I read out who was cast in each role,” director Harvey Bliss boomed from the stage, “is there anyone who doesn’t understand the story of The Glass Menagerie?”

Jean shivered and sank deeper into her audience chair at the back. The rest of the hopefuls, most of whom seemed to know each other from previous productions, twittered nervously in the seats ahead. Jean recognized a few of them. That woman had played Lady Bracknell in last season’s The Importance of Being Earnest. That pretty girl had been Gwendolen.... Probably had the part of Laura the minute the show was announced. Why had Jean even bothered to audition?

Claire, of course. “You acted in high school, Jeanie,” she’d said. “Why don’t you go out for this community theater thing? You act or you work backstage. Automatic social group. And you know who’s in every production?”

“Bill Sutherland.”

“Exactly. Still gorgeous. Still single.”

And still, Jean thought now, oblivious to her. He hadn’t even nodded when she’d met his eyes and smiled coming in tonight. He’d floated past like a god and taken a seat down front, utterly confident. Jean sank lower.

A whisper to her left: “This is the fun part, don’t you think?”

She turned as the man who’d been the receptionist at the auditions -- Kealan, wasn’t it? -- thumped into the seat beside her. She gulped but was relieved it was him, not someone else. Kealan wasn’t like the others. He had a mess of red curls tumbling back from a receding hairline, laughing eyes, no pretensions. And when Jean had almost walked out before auditioning last week, it was Kealan who’d grabbed her and sent her to the back hallway to scream her nerves away.

“Fun?” Jean managed, dry-mouthed. “I guess.”

“Exactly!” He leaned in and whispered, “Everybody’s guessing. We’ve never done a play here with only four characters and all the actors are killing themselves with envy before the get go.”

“You’re not...?”

“Acting? Oh, please. I leave that to the people with guts, like you.”

Before Jean could object, director Bliss had fixed her and Kealan with a withering glare. Then he swept his hands wide. “So you see,” he declaimed, “it’s really very simple. Domineering mother, a brother who works in a shoe factory but wants to be a poet, and a girl who’s so insecure and shy that she hides herself away with a collection of things as fragile as herself - a menagerie of miniature glass animals.”

The eyes of the other hopefuls flipped around the room now, laying odds, blinking innocently when caught staring. A few looked back curiously at Jean and Kealan. Jean turned her face away and flushed red.

“And, of course,” Bliss swept out a dramatic hand as if coming to her rescue, “there is Jim, the Gentleman Caller, a nice normal chap whom the brother describes as ‘the long delayed but always expected something that we live for.’ Such an obvious casting choice that we’ll start there. William?”

Jean craned her chin up from he seat near the back to see. It was like watching a high school dream rising from the waves. Except Bill Sutherland was even handsomer now, she decided, with the demands of the real world softening the jaw and waistline, making him real.

“The mother, Amanda, will be played by one of our most faithful members, Gertrude Rivers.” A self-satisfied matron in her sixties stood and nodded to everyone around her. “The brother and narrator, Tom, will be played by returning wunderkind Sasha Miller.” An intense-looking string bean in his early twenties rose from the first row, turned, and gave a diffident bow.

“And the lead role of Laura Wingfield, delicate figure of glass around whom the world races like frightening stock cars”—Bliss waved his hand dramatically about—“will be brought to life by a newcomer to our group...”

Jean felt Kealan cover her hand as the director’s eyes swung to her. He called out her name and she fainted.

***

Director Harvey Bliss, Jean discovered, was a great believer in method acting. With her, at any rate.

He gave her eight sets of ill-fitting panty-hose to wear throughout the two-and-a-half months of evening rehearsals; the right toe in each set was knotted inside to make her limp like Laura Wingfield. He insisted she eat dinner at least thrice weekly with the matron Gertrude and call the old woman every night on the phone to develop a ‘mother-daughter bond.’ He assigned Sasha Miller, who was to be her resentful brother, to chauffeur her everywhere she needed to go. Sasha lived on the opposite side of town.

Most nerve-wracking for Jean, however, was Harvey’s insistence on rehearsing the play chronologically. For the first month, Bill Sutherland didn’t even come into the theater at the same time as her. He was, after all, Scene Six of only eight scenes, that ‘long delayed but always expected something....’

So Jean, dressed always in summer dresses and getting to know no one but Gertrude, Sasha, and Harvey the director, stumbled painfully from evenings spent alone to evenings being told how she must move and speak.

Come on, Jean. Why don’t you go out for this community theater thing?

She was going to kill Claire.

***

“Jean!” Harvey boomed in month two. “You live in your own little world, don’t you?”

Jean blinked and looked out from the stage sofa to the audience. “I’m sorry. I....”

“Exactly! This is it exactly. Gertrude, Sasaha. You see?” He looked to the side of the stage. “Kea-lan!”

The red-headed Irishman bounced out from the wings. “What? What’s happened?”

“Leave the scrim work for a moment and pick up a script. Here!” Harvey tossed up a spare script and it landed with a flutter by Kealan’s feet. “Turn to page thirty, beginning of Scene VI. Follow along. You’re going to read the part of Jim.”

“What? But... Where’s Bill?”

“Children...” Harvey shook his head in patient exasperation and strode to the stage, hefted himself up and went to Kealan. Putting his arm around him, he drew him towards Jean and put a second arm around her so the three of them were in an intimate huddle. Jean could feel Harvey’s breath on her cheek and was calmed only by Kealan’s half-cracked smile at her, his warm smell of spice.

“In case you don’t know it yet,” Harvey murmured, “Jean is Laura Wingfield. Isn’t that right, Jean?”

“Um....”

“Your timidity, your fragility, your artistic soul. If someone breathes on you too hard you break. Did you know that? Even when you auditioned I saw that.”

Jean raised her eyes to meet Kealan’s and blushed. “I don’t....”

“So I am not going to bring Bill Sutherland in here, whom your friend Claire tells me you’ve always had a crush on, to woo you then dump you some forty-odd times in rehearsal. I’m not heartless. And,” he said with a squeeze of her shoulder, “I don’t want to smash our little glass figurine until showtime.” He drew himself up straight and looked from Jean to Kealan. “So, do you two have some sort of thing going?”

Jean looked at Kealan and blushed again. “No, I...um....”

“Good!” He turned and jumped off the stage. “From the top of Scene Six, please!”

***

As he’d told her that first day, Jean realized, Kealan was not an actor. Standing script in hand beside the morose Sasha/Tom, pretending to smile and banter with Gertrude/Amanda, clumsily wooing and dancing with Jean as the script demanded, Kealan read like an amateur. Clumsy, wooden, stumbling....

And over the next three weeks Jean actually started to enjoy herself.

It was partly Kealan’s badness, she admitted to herself. It made her realize her own talent, delicate and sensitive as it might be. There were also Kealan’s awkward smiles when he held her, his nervousness that almost seemed to match her own. “When we approached the kiss that first time,” she told Claire later, giggling. “I could feel his whole body freeze. I saw sweat drip off his nose.”

“What about the kiss? Was it good?”

Jean gave her a little shove. “Oh.... Harvey made us just mark it. You know, kiss the air beside each other’s head. Didn’t want his little figurine getting a ‘confused emotional impact.’ ‘Just act,’ he said.”

“Hmm. You go on in a week. When does Billy finally come in to rehearse?”

Jean’s mouth suddenly went dry. “Tomorrow night.” She cleared her throat. “Just to mark it out still. Harvey’s having him save the actual kiss for opening night.”

“Cruel.”

Jean nodded, lips stuck shut.

***

Cruel. Manipulative. Heart-rending. Except Jean didn’t know whether to apply the words to Harvey Bliss, her director, or to Tennessee Williams, the playwright who had penned the scenes she had to rehearse for four hours each night.

With Kealan backstage again, it was Bill bounding about the stage now, holding her and swinging her around, knocking her little glass figurines from their shelf, marking the kiss, then...telling her it was all impossible. A game to him. Her a nothing.

Meaning her character Laura was a nothing to gentleman caller Jim, of course.

Of course.

But Jean found she could not stop shaking any more. She carried it around inside her both in and out of the theater. She was finding it hard to speak with anyone. Even Claire.

Tomorrow was opening night.

***

Jean couldn’t breathe. “It’s too hot,” she gasped to herself, clutching her dressing room table, staring at the made-up, scared little girl in the mirror. “I can’t do this.”

Two rough hands gripped her shoulders reassuringly and she realized Kealan was there, kneeling down beside her. “Want me to send you out in the back alley to scream a while?”

She smiled shakily at him. “I wish that would help. You know?”

He smiled and shook his head. “Not really. You’re the actor. But I’ll tell you what I think Harvey would say in one of his more sensitive moods. You’re supposed to feel like this. You’re Laura Wingfield. Afraid of everything. Shy. Nervous. But delicately pushing ahead anyway because life just doesn’t give you any other choice.”

Jean blinked away the wetness forming in her eyes. “You should be a director.”

“One of these days, maybe. Now you’d better get going.”

She nodded and stood, brushed down her dress, and walked from the room to the backstage, up through the wings and onto the set behind the scrim, that fourth wall that was opaque to the audience until lit from behind. Gertrude, already sitting at the table where they were to mime eating, rolled her eyes at her and gestured impatiently for Jean to sit. Sasha nodded morosely at her from the right stage wing, walked out on the audience side of the scrim, and the play began.

Bill? Jean wondered. Where was he?

Then there was no time to wonder about that for the scrim was backlit then raised and she was in a complete world with her mother and brother, quivering, peacemaking, explaining, hiding. Until her mother, fussing about in a fever with flowers in a bowl, said, “I gave your brother a little extra change so he and Mr. O’Connor could take the service car home.”

“What did you say his name was?”

Jean spilled out the line, half-expecting her mother to respond with, “Bill. Bill Sutherland.” But even though Gertrude kept to script, Jean felt her tremor of anticipation starting on cue, shaking up through her until she could hardly breathe. When finally the stage doorbell rang, she was sick for real, retreating just as the terrified Laura was supposed to.

Yet as Laura had to, she answered the door, welcomed Bill into their home, talked with him, showed him her collection of little glass animals, danced with him. And this time....

He kissed her. His tongue went into her mouth sloppily. His upstage hand groped her through her dress. He tasted like cigarettes and alcohol.

They pulled apart at the same time.

“Stumble-john!” he said unconvincingly as he fished in his pocket, took out a cigarette and lit it. “Stumble-john! I shouldn’t have done that.”

He explained how he had another girl he was committed to. Of course. He shouldn’t have led her on like that. No, but.... He had to go. Take the broken glass figurine from her as a souvenir? Why, sure.

Jean stood in stunned shame, her eyes and ears suddenly aware of the stage lights buzzing, the audience sitting in awful silence watching her. Knowing that this had become really her. Not a play. Jean was Laura, her dream turned to ravishment by a pig. And even he had discarded her.

Gertrude/Amanda bumbled in like the rest of the audience, clarifying the horror. The old woman escorted Bill out. She and Sasha fought. Sasha left and....

Somehow the play was over.

Gertrude had to tug Jean up from her chair to take a bow. She stumbled forward in her knotted pantyhose, almost tripping, not caring. Stood trembling, not seeing the audience, not hearing the applause.

When the curtain fell, she turned and ran for the wings, her eyes blurred, her chest heaving. Kealan caught her there in both arms. He escorted her like a child back to her room and shushed the others away, closing the door on them.

“I’m broken!” she sobbed against his chest, breathing in his sweat and spice. “I can’t do this. They’ll have to cancel the other shows. I can’t go out there ever again.”

He let her heave there a minute, his rough hands rubbing her back, strong and sure, amazingly calming her as she clutched his shirt and burrowed into him. Then he said, “Nonsense. I saw what Bill did and I’ll talk to Harvey about it. Then you’ll go out and do your part just as brilliantly tomorrow night. And the night after that. And for every one of our eight shows. And maybe by the very end of it, all of this won’t hurt so much because you’ll finally realize that Laura’s problem was never her limp. It was her eyes.”

She snuffled, her cheek press firmly against his chest. “What?”

“They got stuck on the good-looking fellow hogging the stage. Very myopic.”

Jean turned her head into his chest to hide her eyes. “That’s not fair. He’s all she has!”

Kealan reached down and eased her back from him, lifted her chin until she met his eyes. “He’s not all you have.”

She let it sink into her then turned it over and over in her head to make sure she understood it properly. “I...um....” Her mouth was dry again and she licked her lips. She tried to laugh. “Should I go out and scream in the hallways for a bit?”

He smiled and shook his head so his red curls bounced about. “You don’t have to audition for me.”

“Good,” she choked. “Because I don’t know my lines.”

“And I’m not an actor.”

“But...um...we kiss here, right?”

His face was close to her now, his breath warm near her mouth. “As long as your sure you won’t break,” he whispered.

“I’m sure.”

She was right.

***************

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Love in the Wings