Now, becoming aware that she was hungry, she closed Uncle Vanya and put the book aside. She hardly ever managed to eat on theater evenings, not if she wanted to be on time. She found a bit of salad dressing in the fridge together with a small, hard piece of leftover beef and two slices of beetroot, and while spreading margarine on the stretchy white bread that was all her father’s gums could tackle, she slipped into a frequent and favorite reverie in which she reviewed edited lowlights from the latest rehearsal, rewriting the scenario as she went along.
DEIDRE: I think the Venticelli are far too close to Salieri in the opening scene. They wouldn’t huddle in that intimate way. And they certainly wouldn’t be touching him.
ESSLYN: She’s quite right, Harold. They’ve been getting more and more familiar. I thought if someone didn’t say something soon, I’d have to myself.
HAROLD: Right. Stop nudging the star, you two. And thanks, Deidre. Wish I’d taken you aboard years ago.
OR
HAROLD: Coffee all around, I think, Deidre.
DEIDRE: Do you mind? Assistant directors don’t make coffee.
(genial laughter)
HAROLD: Sorry. We’re so used to you looking after us.
ROSA: We’ve been taking you too much for granted, darling.
ESSLYN: And all the time you’ve been hiding all these dazzling ideas under your little bushel.
Harold: Careful—I’m turning green.
(more genial laughter, kitty gets up to make the coffee.)
OR
HAROLD: (SLUMPED IN A CHAIR IN THE CLUBROOM)
Now the others have gone, I don’t mind telling you, Deidre, I just don’t know what I’d have done without you on this production. Everything you say is so fresh and original, (heavy sigh). I’m getting stale.
DEIDRE: Oh, no, Harold. You mustn’t think—
HAROLD: Hear me out, please. What I’m working around to is our summer production. There’s such a lot of work involved in Uncle Vanya …
DEIDRE: I’ll be happy to help.
HAROLD: No, Deidre, I’ll help. What I’d like—what we’d all like—is for you to direct the play.
Even Deidre’s feverishly yearning soul found this final dialogue a bit hard to credit. As she scraped out the last bit of solid, shiny yellow salad dressing and distributed it patchily on the spongy bread, she reverted to simpler fantasies. Harold crashing his car. Or Harold having a heart attack. The latter was the most likely, she thought, recalling his stout tummy under its popping brocade vest. She surveyed her completed sandwich. The beetroot was falling out. She caught it, stuffed it back in, and took a bite. It wasn’t very good. The milk boiled over again.
“How do you think it went then, Constanze?”
Kitty was sitting by the dressing table. She had peeled off her tights and propped up her milk-white legs on an embroidered footstool. Although she had announced her pregnancy barely three months ago, she was already inclined to hold the small of her back and smile brave, aching smiles. She winced sometimes, too, in the manner of one reacting to tiny blows. Now, she carefully dotted cleansing cream over her face before giving the expected response.
“Well, darling, I thought you were wonderful. It’s coming along brilliantly.”
“Almost there, wouldn’t you say?”
“Oh, I would. And with so much against you.”
“Absolutely. Christ knows what Nicholas thinks he’s doing. I’m amazed Harold lets him get away with it.”
“I know. Donald and Clive are the only ones who say anything. And then only because they know how you feel.”
“Mm. They’re useful creatures in many respects.” Esslyn had brushed his teeth, put on his midcalf-length pajamas with the judo-style top, and was sitting up in bed tautening his facial muscles. Mouth dropped open, head tilted back, mouth closed, aiming bottom lip at the tip of his nose. He had the jawline of a man of twenty-five, which, on a man of forty-five, couldn’t be bad. He blew out his cheeks and let them collapse slowly. (Nose-to-mouth lines.) Then studied his pretty wife as she finished taking off her makeup.
He always fell slightly in love with the most attractive female member of the cast (they expected it), and in Rookery Nook had got really carried away in the props room with the frisky young ingenue who was now Mrs. Carmichael. She had been playing Poppy Dickie at the time. Unfortunately, when the pregnancy was discovered, he was unmarried, so had felt it incumbent upon him to propose to Kitty. He did this rather ruefully. He had been looking forward to several years of louche living before finding someone to care for him in his old age. But she was a biddable little piece, and he couldn’t deny that this latish fatherhood had upped his status potentwise in the office. And of course it had been the most tremendous sock in the eye for Rosa.
He felt he owed her one for the way she had behaved when he had asked for a divorce. She had screamed and wailed and wept. And bellowed that he had had the best years of her life. Esslyn—reasonably enough, he felt-pointed out that if he hadn’t had them, someone else would have. She could hardly have kept them, pristinely unlived, in a safe-deposit box. Then she had sobbed that she had always wanted children, and now it was too late and it was all his fault. This seemed to Esslyn just plain ridiculous.
They had sometimes discussed starting a family, usually when cast as parents in the current production, but Esslyn always felt it only right to point out that while their stage children would disappear after the final performance, real ones would be around for a whole lot longer. And that although his own life might not be much affected, Rosa’s, since he would definitely not be shelling out for a nanny, would never be quite the same again. He’d thought she’d appreciated the logic of this, but she brought it all up when the question of moving out of White Wings was broached, refusing to budge until she had had some compensation for her “lost babies.” Quite a hefty sum they had cost him, too. He had got his own back, though. When Kitty had become pregnant, he had announced it and their forthcoming nuptials at the end of a rehearsal of Shop at Sly corner. Tenderly holding Kitty’s hand, his eyes on Rosa’s face, Esslyn had more than got his money’s worth.
Of course, by then she had married that boring little builder. To be fair, though, Esslyn admitted to himself, finishing his cheek exercises and starting on some head rolling to reduce the tension in his neck, there were people who thought accountancy just as dreary a job as putting up houses. Perhaps even drearier. Esslyn could not agree. To him, the sorting and winnowing of claim and counterclaim, the reduction of stacks of wild expense-account imaginings to a column of sober, acceptable figures, and the hunting down of obscure wrinkles and loopholes in the law enabling him to reduce his clients’ tax bill was a daily challenge that he would not have felt it too imprecise to call creative.