All Night (3 page)

“What are you doing Saturday night at the Rats’ Nest?” she says. “To honour Peter? What’s the plan?”

“It’s improv comedy,” I say. “We just say the first thing that comes into our heads. Even better if it’s funny. There is no plan.”

“So you and the third guy, what’s-his-name, Jeremy. You haven’t talked about how to honour your missing partner?”

“We haven’t.” The floor is cold. I move to get free of Jess but she pulls me back. I let her.

“You haven’t actually replaced Peter already, have you? Mr. Elephant?”

I am not an elephant beside her. More a giraffe beside a herd dog.

“Of course we haven’t replaced him yet.”

“Can’t you do improv with two people?”

“Not really, not as well,” I say. “Three people are funnier. They can trip each other up. Aren’t you cold?”

“No.” She is focused. Focused on fixing me. “Okay,” she says, “pretend it’s Saturday night. Jeremy Elephant is away. It’s just you. Some big talent agent is in the crowd. You’re all alone onstage. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and I mean it.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen! Direct from the filthy, frozen apartment he will never escape! Mr. Gregor Luft!”

I stay still.

“Master of stacking chairs and cleaning cake from carpets!”

“Shut up.”

“Gregor Luft! The funniest man making minimum wage. It’s your big moment.”

“It’s not my big moment. It’s not Saturday night. I don’t feel right.” I pull free, get up, and see the hot plate. It’s all we have for a stove, nearly useless for cooking. But thats not what we need right now. I turn it on. The hot plate element begins to glow orange.

I smile at Jess—she is looking at me. I hold my chilly hands over the hot plate burner. Surely she can see me now—the real me? The burner isn’t much, but it’s quietly funny, and a little warm. Lovely in the dark, like an old campfire. From back when we humans were hardly more than giraffes and elephants.

Any other time she would smile, but not tonight. Peter’s death really has rattled her. “Let’s just go to bed,” she says, her voice now dim, like a candle flame almost out.

Suddenly, the wind blows the door open again. I hadn’t told the landlord a crazy story: we really are fighting arctic storms.

“Shut the door!” Jess wraps herself in blankets. “Come to bed!”

I jam a
National Geographic
magazine under the door to keep it closed. Then I return to my laptop.

“I hope there are no elephants in that magazine,” Jess says. “If the lock is broken, how are we supposed to keep out burglars?”

“We have nothing to steal,” I reply. “That will keep out burglars.” On the laptop I try her account, but I can’t get in. “Did you change your password?” I look up from the screen, waiting.

“Maybe.”

“You never change your password.”

“You haven’t known me very long,” she says. “I changed my password all the time before I met you.”

My fingers are still waiting. “Two years is a long time. What’s your new password?”

She tells me it’s a secret because she doesn’t know mine. But I
did
tell her, that night in the taxi, when we were stuck in the snow. She had decided she wanted to know everything about me.

I remind her of that conversation. “Oh, that famous night when we took a taxi!” she says. “We were just blowing through money!”

She’s stalling. She really doesn’t want me to know her password. Why would that be?

Because words have power. More than we know.

“I will tell you mine again,” I say, “but then you might feel bad for not remembering, and blame me. So you need to forgive me now.”

“I forgive you,” she says.

“Okay. Here’s the clue: one of the toilet inventors.”

“Oh! Oh!” She holds her head in her hand. “A password so stupid I should never have forgotten it!”

“At least you forgave me,” I say.

“But you must have changed it by now,” she says.

“I don’t go around changing things that are perfectly good,” I reply.

“No. No one will guess ‘Crapper.’ Thomas, wasn’t it?”

“Thomas Crapper. Now you tell me your password,” I say.

Jess closes her eyes. “Can’t you guess it? I thought you knew me better than that.”

“You couldn’t guess my password, and I’d already told you what it was!”

She sits up, not tired at all now. Ready to just keep on arguing. “But you’re really smart. You could be doing a lot better than this. It’s just about stacking chairs for you. Being in the moment. But you can’t be in this moment. Where are you? Waiting for Saturday night, Mr. Elephant? That’s the moment you want.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you knew me at all, you would know,” she says.

I hold my head. “You’re just ... just
looking
to make trouble.”

“I am. I’m a troublemaker. I want someone who really, really knows me. Who pays attention. Who makes plans.”

“I do make plans!” I say. “Didn’t I buy the bus tickets with our credit card points from shopping at the grocery store? Tell me that didn’t take planning. Saving and using those points.”

“I do the shopping. You save the points. Some plan. But what’s your plan about me, about our life together, about how we’re going to pay the bloody bills? Now that we have no grocery points left?”

I press my lips together.

“You looked as if you wanted to say something,” Jess says.

“I am sitting here, taking your criticism like a man. Not an elephant. Or a giraffe.”

“Giraffe?” She softens. “Come to bed, Mr. Giraffe.”

When I do get in bed, with the laptop, she touches my nose, a sudden, loving gesture. “Misty,” she says.

I don’t get it.

“That’s my password!”

Misty. Misty ... suddenly I hear Peter’s voice in my head, talking to Jess.
“Misty, when are you going
to dump this guy?”
The way he used to talk, even when I was around. Joking, but not really.

He loved her. He loved her. And she is using his pet name for her. She uses it for her password.

“Check my e-mail and let’s go to sleep!” Jess says. She pulls the blankets over her head as if she doesn’t care what might be waiting for her.

Misty.
Peter and Jess. Jess and Peter. Some things you have to put to one side. They will need thinking through. They can’t be taken care of right away.

I type “Misty” on Jess’s password line and then try to forget about it. “You have 2,081 unread messages,” I say. “Don’t you ever check your mail?”

She nudges me under the blankets.

“They are all junk messages, aimed at men with little thingies,” she says. That wouldn’t apply to Peter. He and I used to swim together. I don’t want to think about his thingy.

“I knew it. I knew it!” I see the golden message she missed.

“What?”

“Ten o’clock. Tomorrow morning! An audition!”

“For what?” Jess pulls the blankets off her head. “What am I trying out for?”

“Sweeney Circle Acting School and Theatre.”

“No!” She twists out of bed. Those small feet thumping on the floor. “I sent in my application months ago.”

“And they replied last week. Why don’t you read your e-mail? You have to be there at nine-thirty.”

“I have nothing ready to perform!” she says.

“The acting school program lasts two years, and you get fully paid,” I say. “The first year is training, and the second year you’re in real plays with the other actors.”

“But I have to try out! What am I going to do?” Jess wails. “I just ... I could give them that speech I learned when I played the girl who joined the circus in that show. In
Whimsy.
But I haven’t done it in ages. Do I even have the script anymore?”

She could do any number of things. I could give her a list. She could even do the elephants.

I read from the screen: “Actors are to perform three to five minutes of original work.”

“Well, that sinks it,” Jess says. She pulls at her hair as she walks around. She
can
do this. I know she can. But she says, “I don’t do original work. I
can’t make things up. And there’s no time now. Oh, forget it.”

“You make things up all the time,” I say. “What about the elephants?”

“The elephant story only works with you. You know everything I’m thinking. The acting judges at Sweeney Circle do not.”

I do not know everything she is thinking.
Misty,
for example.
Peter.
But I get out of bed and catch her hands—colder than ever—to stop her pacing. “If you get this,” I say, “we could rent a place on the planet’s surface. With proper windows and natural light! Fresh air. A little ... a little rose bush. You could smell it on your way to work in the theatre company of your dreams!”

“I can’t make things up,” Jess says. “I need a script.”

But that is what I’m here for: I make things up all the time, even when I’m on stage. I clap my hands. “We’ll just work out something right now. Okay? Pretend I’m a judge.” I make my voice sound stern. “What is your name, dear?”

“Jess. Jess Hale.”

“And what is your chosen topic for this morning, Ms. Hale?”

“Ah, you got me,” Jess says.

I drop the phony voice. “No, that’s not a good answer. What’s in your head right now?”

“Death. My father’s death.”

“Excellent!” I become a judge again. “Please proceed.”

Jess paces, paces. “Oh damn, oh damn! My father was ... a strange man.”

“Don’t tell me. Perform it!”

“My father was a fighter. He was a martial artist, a tai chi bookkeeper.”

“Act it out!” I say. “Show me with your hands and arms.” I punch the air.

“Shut up,” Jess says. “This is not going to work.”

“I have an idea. What were you doing—exactly— when you found out? About your father’s death?”

“I’ve told you this, like, a hundred times,” she says.

“I know. It’s a good story. You could use it in the audition. Just be yourself. The judges will fall in love with you telling that story.”

Like I did.
I don’t quite say it.

Jess shakes her arms loosely, moves her head from side to side to get ready to perform. “Well, I
was sitting on a streetcar. And this guy who smelled of pee was standing in front of me. I felt sorry for him. I was ready to give him my seat. But the stink was like a wall I’d have to pass through.”

“Great!” I jump on the bed. “Do the wall!”

“The wall?”

I hold my arms and hands flat, as if I am a wall.

Jess ignores me. “And my phone rings. It’s my mom.” She pretends to be on the phone. “‘Hi, Mom. Can I call you back?’ ” Jess looks out at nothing, as if she might be on stage, with the lights shining in her face. The judges will love her. “I’m, like, how do I even breathe with this stench? The guy is looking at me. Does he want my seat? My phone? What?

“My mom says, ‘No. Are you sitting?’ She sounds tight. As if she can’t breathe. ‘Mom, are you all right?’ She says, ‘It’s your father, dear.’ And then a hole seemed to open up in the earth. I don’t know how I got from the wall of stink and the streetcar to running along the street. Oh, God! The air felt like a thick liquid that I had to swim through. I was nearly home, but I felt as if I would never get there.

“I don’t remember Mom saying, ‘He’s dead,’ those exact words. She said, ‘Daddy crumpled in
the bathroom.’ Down he went. Standing at the sink, with the door open. He was clipping his nose hairs. And then he crumpled.”

The Sweeney Circle judges will see and hear her like this and love her, love her like I do. But suddenly her face shuts. She says to me, “You’re thinking I’ll get in because the judges will feel sorry for me. That’s sick.”

“No. It’s a good story. That’s all. You’ve got this mighty martial arts bookkeeper father. And he crumples in the bathroom while clipping his nose hairs. That’s life. That’s life right there.”

“Great,” Jess says. “My father’s nose hairs. A fine story.”

“It needs an ending,” I say.

“He died!” Jess says. “The end. I don’t remember getting home. But when I got there, Mom had already dragged him into the bedroom. Somehow, she had lifted him onto the bed. She didn’t want anyone to know that he died in the bathroom.”

Just saying the words seems to split her open. In a moment she’s crying. I hold her. She sobs into my shoulder.
Misty.
Peter’s pet name for her. Because she does cry. A lot.

“That’s not a story,” she says. “It’s the terrible thing that blew a hole in my family a couple of years ago. I’m not going to get picked.”

“Shh,” I say. She did cry today for Peter. She rained hard. We all did.

Jess says, “There are no lucky breaks. You don’t get picked based on something you threw together a few hours before trying out.”

“Sometimes it happens,” I say. She has to believe that, if she wants to be an actor.

“Never. Not to me,” she says.

I hold her so that she has to look into my eyes. “Tell them about later. With the moon and everything.”

“It’s hopeless,” she says.

“How you were walking that night in the summer. And the moon was hanging like a huge, pregnant dinner plate in the sky.”

Jess moves away. “A pregnant dinner plate?”

“I forget how you put it. How did you put it?”

She seems to have forgotten. But then she says, “The moon itself was like a beaming, pregnant belly. Like my father’s belly. He was so proud of all the chi he packed into his insides. He said he was almost pregnant.”

“They might not know what chi is,” I say. “You could tell them it’s healthy energy, sort of an Eastern idea.”

Jess crosses her arms. Almost hugging herself. “Well, a fat lot of good Dad’s healthy energy did him. His heart gave out. That could happen to anybody. How many more examples do we need?”

“But about that moon. Beaming down on you. And you had that feeling ...”

“I guess.”

“You were flooded with chi from the pregnant father moon,” I say. She must remember telling me this. She must! “And a great weight lifted. Right? And then you just knew—”

“You remember,” Jess says.

“Of course I remember! It was just about the first thing you said to me. Right after, ‘Please pass the pickles.’ You talked about your father, and the moon, and that feeling.”