I set off for the patisserie not quite knowing what to do, not quite knowing if I should go back, stay another day, but knowing if I did, it would break all this wide open. I bought the croissants, still not knowing what to do. And then I turned a corner and there were the skinheads. And in a twisted way, I was relieved: They would make the decision for me.
Except as soon as I woke up in that hospital, unable to remember Lulu, or her name, or where she was, but desperate to find her, I understood that it was the wrong decision.
“I was coming back,” I tell Kate. But there’s a razor of uncertainty in my voice, and it cuts my deception wide open.
“You know what I think, Willem?” Kate says, her voice gentle. “I think acting, that girl, it’s the same thing. You get close to something and you get spooked, so you find a way to distance yourself.”
In Paris, the moment when Lulu had made me feel the safest, when she had stood between me and the skinheads, when she had taken care of me, when she became my mountain girl, I’d almost sent her away. That moment, when we’d found safety, I’d looked at her, the determination burning in her eyes, the love already there, improbably after just one day. And I felt it all—the wanting and the needing—but also the fear because I’d seen what losing this kind of thing could do. I wanted to be protected by her love, and to be protected from it.
I didn’t understand then. Love is not something you protect. It’s something you risk.
“You know the irony about acting?” Kate muses. “We wear a thousand masks, are experts at concealment, but the one place it’s impossible to hide is on stage. So no wonder you’re freaked out. And Orlando, well now!”
She’s right, again. I know she is. Petra didn’t do anything today except give me an excuse to pull another runner. But the truth of it is I didn’t really want to pull a runner that day with Lulu. And I don’t want to pull one now, either.
“What’s the worst that happens if you do it your way tonight?” Kate asks.
“She fires me.” But if she does, it’ll be my action that decides it. Not my inaction. I start to smile. It’s tentative, but it’s real.
Kate matches mine with a big American version. “You know what I say: Go big or go home.”
I look at the boat; it’s quiet, but the garden is so lush and well-tended in a way that it never was with us. It is a home, not mine, but someone else’s now.
Go big or go home. I heard Kate say that before and didn’t quite get it. But I understand it now, though I think on this one, Kate has it wrong. Because for me, it’s not go big or go home. It’s go big and go home.
I need to do one to do the other.
Forty-eight
Backstage. It’s the usual craziness, only I feel strangely calm. Linus hustles me to the makeshift dressing room where I change out of my street clothes into Orlando’s clothes, hastily altered to fit me. I put on my makeup. I fold my clothes into the lockers behind the stage. My jeans, my shirt, Lulu’s watch. I hold it in my hand one second longer, feel the ticking vibrate against my palm, and then I put it in the locker.
Linus gathers us into a circle. There are vocal exercises. The musicians tune their guitars. Petra barks last-minute direction, about finding my light and keeping the focus and the other actors supporting me, and just doing my best. She is giving me a piercing, worried look.
Linus calls five minutes and puts on his headset, and Petra walks away. Max has come backstage for tonight’s performance and is sitting on a three-legged stool in the wings. She doesn’t say anything, but just looks at me and kisses two fingers and holds them up in the air. I kiss the same two on my hand and hold them up to her.
“Break a leg,” someone whispers in my ear. It’s Marina, come up behind me. Her arms quickly encircle me from behind as she kisses me somewhere between my ear and my neck. Max catches this and smirks.
“Places!” Linus calls. Petra is nowhere to be seen. She disappears before curtain and won’t reappear until the show is over. Vincent says she goes somewhere to pace, or smoke, or disembowel kittens.
Linus grabs my wrist. “Willem,” he says. I spin to look at him. He gives a small squeeze and nods. I nod back. “Musicians, go!” Linus commands into his headset.
The musicians start to play. I take my place at the side of stage.
“Light cue one, go,” Linus says.
The lights go up. The audience hushes.
Linus: “Orlando, go!”
I hesitate a moment. Breathe, I hear Kate say. I take a breath.
My heart hammers in my head. Thud, thud, thud. I close my eyes and can hear the ticking of Lulu’s watch; it’s as if I’m still wearing it. I stop and listen to them both before I walk onto the stage.
And then time just stops. It is a year and a day. One hour and twenty-four. It is time, happening, all at once.
The last three years solidify into this one moment, into me, into Orlando. This bereft young man, missing a father, without a family, without a home. This Orlando, who happens upon this Rosalind. And even though these two have known each other only moments, they recognize something in each other.
“The little strength that I have, I would it were with you,” Rosalind says, cracking it all wide open.
Who takes care of you? Lulu asked, cracking me wide open.
“Wear this for me,” Marina says as Rosalind, handing me the prop chain from around her neck.
I’ll be your mountain girl and take care of you, Lulu said, moments before I took the watch from her wrist.
Time is passing. I know it must be. I enter the stage, I exit the stage. I make my cues, hit my marks. The sun dips across the sky and then dances toward the horizon and the stars come out, the floodlights go on, the crickets sing. I sense it happening as I drift above it somehow. I am only here, now. This moment. On this stage. I am Orlando, giving myself to Rosalind. And I am Willem, too, giving myself to Lulu, in a way that I should’ve done a year ago, but couldn’t.
“You should ask me what time o’ day: there’s no clock in the forest,” I say to my Rosalind.
You forget, time doesn’t exist anymore. You gave it to me, I said to my Lulu.
I feel the watch on my wrist that day in Paris; I hear it ticking in my head now. I can’t tell them apart, last year, this year. They are one and the same. Then is now. Now is then.
“I would not be cured, youth,” my Orlando tells Marina’s Rosalind.
“I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind,” Marina replies.
I’ll take care of you, Lulu promised.
“By my troth, and in good earnest, and so God mend me, and by all pretty oaths that are not dangerous,” Marina’s Rosalind says.
I escaped danger, Lulu said.
We both did. Something happened that day. It’s still happening. It’s happening up here on this stage. It was just one day and it’s been just one year. But maybe one day is enough. Maybe one hour is enough. Maybe time has nothing at all to do with it.
“Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love,” my Orlando tells Rosalind.
Define love, Lulu had demanded. What would “being stained” look like?