a New Yorker. “Where do you come from?” he asked, moving his hand along the tablecloth to grasp his glass of wine.
“Indiana,” she said, relenting,” a long time ago,” and her hand, matching his, moved toward her glass. “I’ve lived in the city or at least in the boroughs since I graduated from school.” She gulped her wine.
He didn’t need to ask which one. She had the implacable air of privilege; it would have been Yale or an equivalent although he couldn’t think at the moment of an equivalent. Certainly nowhere in the West or the South.
“Were you born here?” she asked in her turn; they were moving onto neutral ground, and Jeffrey realized that she was not intractable. It was even possible that she was embarrassed by her outburst.
“Right up in Harlem.” It was what she expected. “Single mother, all that.”
“Don’t use that as an excuse,” she said briskly. “You might end up president.”
“So might your daughter,” he said recklessly, trying to even the ground.
“I don’t have a daughter.”
“I mean a young woman of that generation.”
“I don’t think anyone will risk it after what the Senator went through last spring.”
“You do have to be tough,” he said. She was tough, he knew, but not in the way he’d expected; she had resources, but they were not spread out to be viewed, they were not her wares. He’d never met a woman with resources who did not spread them out, disparaging them, maybe, but knowing their draw. It was possible, he realized, that she believed she had another draw. But he could not be sure.
She was a realist. Surely she was. Otherwise it would be very hard to negotiate.
“Do you enjoy producing?” he asked.
She smiled. “Yes, my own work, but I can’t afford it.”
He knew that was not true. She was keeping a drop cloth over her display.
“I like that dress. A very nice color,” he said although until then he hadn’t noticed. “Green is a good shade for your hair.”
“No use, Jeffrey,” she said, smiling. “I know what looks good on me, I don’t need to be told.”
There was the rock again, the foundation stone. “I’m not trying to flatter you,” he said.
“I know, and anyway, you couldn’t. We only have a few minutes—tell me what you want, stop beating around the bush.”
He nearly gasped. Suddenly, she was coming forward, even rushing at him. “I want your help,” he said, before he realized that she might misunderstand. “I want money,” he explained, and felt a rush of shame.
“I know you do.” She folded her napkin neatly. This was what she’d suspected from the beginning. She knew this situation as well as she knew the feel of her coat lining, the beige silk that hung over the back of her chair. “Go ahead,” she said evenly. “Tell me your plan. You must have a plan,” she added when he was silent.
And so he began. He had to. There was no option. And at the same time, he felt a great wash of sympathy, as though he’d found something in his path, unexpected, soft, wounded, and was about to step back to avoid crushing it, but did not.
The details now, all of them, were laid out. She listened without expression.
He did not believe this was the conversation she had expected when he called her up to make the date.
She would never admit that, now, and yet her vague, smiling fantasy of what he might have wanted hung in the air like a trailing bit of steam.
He summed up, sighing, in spite of himself. “That is what it would take.” He had the specifics in mind; it only took two or three minutes to list them: the costs, in general terms, of a six-week run, Equity requirements, the audience he hoped to reach and how he planned to reach them. It was a template, and she knew that. There was nothing new in it although it was well-grounded in the experience they both shared.
“Isn’t there another way to go about it? Selling tickets that way seems not to work anymore,” she said, getting up as he waved at someone for the bill. “Everything happens on the Net.” She put on her coat while he was paying. “The audience has changed,” she added, “and your ticket prices seem high.”
He hurried after her. There was so little time. Her back was unexpectedly broad in her coat.
“We’ll use the Internet, too,” he assured her, holding the restaurant door for her to sweep through—and she knew how to sweep, he saw that.
“I should hope so,” she said over her shoulder. “Print advertising—”
“Theatre audiences are older, they still look at the listings.”
“Not for limited-run engagements way down town that may never get past the previews.”
He did not reply. That was just another dig, her due, he supposed. Nobody liked being asked; it seemed to devalue them, whether they gave or didn’t was immaterial.
They were waiting to push through a crowd crossing the street to the gold lights of the theatre marquee. In spite of all their disappointments, the sight of that marquee and the crowd streaming toward it excited them.
But then she took the shine off. “My fifth Seagull,” she told him.
“I’ve only seen it twice.”
She began to name the productions she’d seen, the famous Russian one, the new translation with a hot British director, the slipshod amateurs in a summer theatre on the Cape. Meanwhile he guided her, palm under her elbow, across the street and through the crowd.
It was what she expected. He was fairly sure of that.
They waited in line at the will-call box until a man in carefully rolled-up sleeves and a vest handed them their reserved tickets. She seemed surprised that they would be sitting side by side.
“How did you manage that? I thought it was sold out,” she murmured.
“I have my ways.” There were some advantages to his part-time job.
He saw she was wondering if they were comps. “You paid and I paid,” he reassured her. That was not the sort of doubt he wanted to raise.
They swam through the crowd, as used to it as sea creatures to drifting weed. The waters parted before them, he found their seats without assistance. He took the aisle. They were good seats, more than he would have been willing to pay if the ticket hadn’t provided him with this opportunity.
The girl in black was on the stage. He hadn’t had time to look at the program and so didn’t know her name, but there was the famous line, “I’m in mourning for my life.”
He glanced at Helen. Of course she was wearing black, too. In this city it meant nothing.
He wondered suddenly if she wanted sympathy. That had never occurred to him before,
