So I blinked the tears back into my head and repeated to Armelle, “She just really wants to get those episodes right.”
Armelle sighed. “Look at the time,” she said after a moment—but she was looking at me. Not her watch, or her phone. Look at this pile of garbage sitting in a chair like a person, she might as well have said. Beside her, Mackie dutifully waved her tanned, toned arms at our server, bracelets a-jangle, a human alarm bell.
Liz showed up wearing thin running gloves with bulges in the palms where she had stuffed them full of tissues.
“It’s like stigmata this morning,” she told me as we stood at the coffee machine. “Spurting palms.”
“Pretty soon we’ll just wrap you in gauze head to toe, like a mummy,” I said. “And you can just … seep into your gauze all day long and not have to worry about it.”
“That sounds cozy,” said Liz. “I think I’d be okay with that.”
It struck me I’d be okay with that too. To be swaddled, secure. Free to seep.
I contemplated her as we settled around the table, opening our computers, silencing our phones. Her face was poreless and glowing, which made me reconsider all the claims I’d dismissed about exudation being good for the skin. The glow of her face complemented her expression, which was serene. She looked faintly holy, like a lady saint in a renaissance painting.
I couldn’t figure it out. Was Liz being a trooper? Putting on a brave face for us, her team, but secretly miserable? Was just she bravely sucking it up every day—the intolerable professional stress in combination with the sodden inconvenience of her body—then going home and sobbing into the neck of Roger the bullmastiff for the rest of the night? As a tiny lake took shape around her? I didn’t think so. I knew I would be, but Liz seemed fine. Which was craziest of all, in its way. She was practically melting in front of us but she sat at the head of the table shoving tissues into her gloves with nonchalance.
The word cozy came back to me as I watched her tucking tissues away.
“I think the best thing we can do today,” said Liz. “Is talk about what Marietta’s death is going to mean to the rest of the ensemble individually. Let’s go through them one by one. We need to think about how they’ll be situated with respect to—”
“WE NEED TO KILL HER,” said a loud male voice I’d never heard before.
It was the white Bruce, speaking above a mutter for the first time any of us had ever heard. Liz raised her eyebrows at him. All of us did. Except for the other Bruce, who looked away as if to distance himself, even though they sat, as usual, side by side.
“We are killing her,” said Liz, not in the frosty tone I was expecting. She spoke to the Bruce almost soothingly, as if to a spikey-furred cat. “This is the process we’re engaged in, Bruce. At this very moment. We’re killing her as we speak. It may not feel like it, because we’re being mindful. And loving. But killing Marietta is very much what we are doing.”
I could see Riva vibrating in her chair and I knew the Bruce’s outburst had emboldened her.
“But Liz, we need to figure out the basic beats. How she dies. What actually happens in the episode. We only have a couple days left.” I was astounded. Riva wasn’t even using uptalk. On the opposite side of the table, Ellen started nodding. Uh-oh, I thought.
“Guys,” said Liz. “I know the process is arduous. But this is a woman’s life. Okay? This is someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister. Someone’s mother. A fully realized … human … child of this earth. Seen, felt, and beloved by the people she’s encountered along the way.”
“Wait,” I said. “Marietta has a kid?”
Liz nodded and stuffed some more tissue into one of her gloves. “It occurred to me last week. When she was seventeen. She had to give him up for adoption. She’s never gotten over it. Her mother told her she—”
“IT DOESN’T MATTER,” said the insurgent Bruce in his new voice. “IT DOESN’T FUCKING MATTER THAT SHE HAD A BABY.”
Liz blinked at Bruce for what felt like a good half hour. But she wasn’t angry. She looked stymied, and sad. Let down. If Liz ever looked at me like that, I felt I would’ve hurled myself out the nearest window. But all the Bruce did was look down at his keyboard.
Ellen leaned forward, “I think what Bruce means to say is that the time for delving into character is past. What we need to do now—” here Ellen made the fatal mistake of slowing down to consider her words, so Riva jumped in.
“—What we need to do now is break the episodes. We just gotta break ‘em, Liz. Now. We don’t have any time left.”
“We still have the weekend.” Liz turned to me. “How long will you need to write Episode Nine?”
I’d been avoiding thinking about the fact that whenever—if ever—we finished breaking the Marietta episode, I was the one appointed to go off and actually write it. Me, with my non-functioning digestive system, my recent flirtation with cardiac dysrhythmia and my three hours (on a good night) of sleep. I closed my eyes as if to think, saw a creeping river of bright, pulsating slime-green mold, felt like vomiting, and opened them again.
“However long you want to give me,” I told her. “You need it in two days? I can do it in two days.”
“YOU ARE JUST ENABLING HER,” said white Bruce. “THAT IS ALL YOU DO IN THIS ROOM.”
“AND YOU NEED TO SHUT UP, WHITE BRUCE,” I said. At which point both Bruces reared back in their chairs.
“I apologize,” I said in my normal voice. I realized I was standing, so sat back down. “I apologize to both of you for that.” But really I was apologizing to the Bruce who was black and I tried to make sure with my eyes that he knew it. But that Bruce wasn’t meeting my eyes.
“Guys,” said Liz again, in a voice so calm it was madness. “I’m begging you to have faith in this process.”
With that, white Bruce got up and left. After he shut the door we all sat there.
“Well I guess we know where that Bruce stands,” said Liz.
Then the other Bruce got up and left too.
“We’ve lost both Bruces,” I announced in a daze. “We’re Bruce-less!” Somehow I was still trying to make jokes and bring light, as I had been hired to do. I kept thinking, as I had been so uselessly all along, I just have to do my job. I am here to do a job and I just have to do my job.
That’s when Riva, chin wobbling, got up and left too.
Liz leaned forward in her chair and extended a hand each toward Ellen and I. We were seated directly across from one other—me to Liz’s right and Ellen to her left. I took Liz’s hand immediately. After a moment, Ellen did too. Liz squeezed. Ellen and I looked at each other.
The gloves were soaked completely through.
At some point, Liz said fuck it and went online and ordered multiple plush terry-cloth robes that she could change in and out of throughout the day. This struck me as ingenious—much better than my mummy-wrapped gauze idea. The robes even had hoods for when she was spurting from her cranium—on those occasions, Liz would take a belt from one of the surplus robes and wrap it around her head, sheik-like, to keep the hood secure against it. She had all sorts of little strategies now.
And speaking of strategies, that’s what we were supposedly doing—strategizing. For the first month of our unemployment, I’d show up at Liz’s a couple of afternoons a week and Liz would lounge, be-robed, on her ottoman, as we discussed how to get her show back. There was no real point to this exercise, but it made us both feel better—we were used to seeing each other every day, after all, talking things over, solving problems. We defaulted to the process we knew best, the process that had always worked for us in the past, even though it did nothing anymore but give us comfort.