Set Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries) (14 page)

“Amazing.”

“You fixed us up, remember?”

“What?”

“Helen and I—you got us together.”

“How could I have done that?”

“That September; sophomore year.”

“John, that was a long time ago.”

He shook his head.

“It was yesterday.”

“All right, it was yesterday a long time ago. What did I do that was so important?”

“Want some more shrimp?”

She shook her head.

“Suddenly, watching that feeding frenzy going on out there, I’m beginning to lose my appetite.”

“Don’t.
 
It’s just nature.”

“I suppose,” she said, taking a sip of iced tea. “Unless you’re the thing being eaten. Then it’s nature plus a little more.”

“You asked us to do a report together. Write about whether Oedipus was innocent or guilty.”

“Oh yes. I do remember something about that assignment.”

“We went over to her house and sat out in the garden.
 
We argued. I can’t remember which side I took. Anyway, that was our first date. We went out together for two more years. I was thinking so hard about proposing to her. I knew I should wait through our senior year though. Now I think about it and…I mean, if I had, maybe Interlochen wouldn’t have happened.
 
But of course she would have just had a life here. None of New York would have happened either. It’s just me, being selfish. But Nina…”

“Yes?”

“Do you think it would be all right if I saw her again?”

She looked at him.

The vast silver circus of feeding and sparkling that had been staged simply for their benefit had disappeared.

The spotlight now illuminated only turquoise swells, darker blue, lighter green, now almost black.

“I don’t know, John. That has to be up to you.
 
Just…you have to realize she probably isn’t the same person you knew five years ago.”

He was looking at the same blank spot in the ocean, as though waiting for the lights and the spectacle to begin all over.

“Of course.
 
It’s just––”

“Just what?”

“When she came by today—well, it was just to make small talk.”

“A normal thing.”

He shook his head.

“I don’t think she’s all right.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I got to know Helen very well. I know about her ambition. I know her expressions. I know when she’s––”

He hesitated.

“When she’s what, John?”

Then he shook his head.

“It’s like,” he whispered, “out there in the water. I can tell when something’s happening. I just can’t tell always, what it is.”

“Helen’s not out in the water, John. She’s not being eaten by anything.”

He simply looked at her and said quietly:

“I think she is.”

There was silence for a time.

During the rest of the dinner and during the ride home they talked about other things.

Nina forgot what they were.

CHAPTER 8:
 
THE IMPORTANCE OF E:14

The following Thursday Nina attended a rehearsal of
Hamlet.

She was never to forget it.

There was, of course, a most obvious reason why she would not—and could not—forget it.

But there were other things, too.

She could not forget how two major rooms in the old Robinson mansion had been melded together, their ceilings obliterated, their walls and windows darkened—in order to make a stage reminiscent of the one she and Frank had seen in Chicago, where they’d spent their tenth wedding anniversary.

Lights everywhere, all of them high over the stage, pointing in different directions out of black shiny tubes that looked like weaponry.

In the back of the stage, a back wall and behind that another back wall and above that ten back walls that could be dropped from ropes and pulleys and various mechanical wonders.

No, these things she would not forget.

But also not to be forgotten was the fact that this was not community theater.

She’d never acted in any of the community plays done by Alana Delafosse and her minions, nor in any of the plays done in Bay St. Lucy before her coming.
 
But she’d helped out. She’d been on the refreshment committee or the publicity committee or the costume committee or the parking committee or the sets committee or the animals committee or the prompters committee—

––because a small town—its churches, its schools, its government, the very fabric of its existence—cannot exist without committees.

So Nina was always on one committee or another, whatever the time of year, whatever the holiday, whatever the festivity, or whatever the time of grief.

She’d been on committees for
Oklahoma, South Pacific, Streetcar Named Desire
,
My Fair
Lady, Cabaret, Harvey, Arsenic and Old Lace, Desire Under the Elms
(which the community had not liked very much), and, for several Christmases running, the combined church choirs’ production of Handel’s
Messiah
.

But it was always very different.

People mingled and had coffee and laughed. Somehow rehearsing got done.

But a good deal was eaten and there was uproarious laughter, and there was much gossiping.

Here, even as she entered, propping up Hope with a palm under an elbow until they found seats in a far back corner, here it was different.

In the first place, she could not tell the men from the women.

It was not a question of being gay or not, for Bay St. Lucy, artistic community that it was, had long since dealt with this question with a casual wave of the community’s hand and the words:

“As long as it doesn’t hurt anybody…”

––no, it was something different.

These people all existed in a world in which sex did not exist, or at least during working hours. They all looked the same. Their hair was the same.
 
It was a little too short in the women (if those were women up there) and a little too long in the men (if people with skin like that could be called men).
 
They had on what at first seemed enormous amounts of clothing; but, since the temperature was always 72 degrees in this sarcophagus of a theater, that would have been impossible due to the probability of heat stroke. No, this clothing was not remarkable because of its excess but because of its bagginess. The sweaters melted into the shirts which melted into the pants which melted into the one thing everybody had on that was precisely the same, that being brown sandals.

“This is so exciting!” whispered Hope.

“I know.
 
For me, too.”

There were more differences.
 
For one thing, there was no conviviality here. People did not eat. There was no anteroom where a huge coffee pot had been set up.
 
True, there were a few isolated small cups of coffee being sipped from time to time—it was, after all, ten thirty in the morning—but the knots of genderless beings huddled in different parts of the stage, and, high above, back in the balcony, and, over there, by the very last seat in the first row—were not laughing and were not here for fun.

They spoke very quietly and intensely, pointing here and there, and carrying notebooks, which they seemed constantly to be fighting for, as though everyone had written something down to which the others had been denied—and desperately needed—access.

“What,” asked Hope, bending to whisper in Nina’s ear, “scene will they be rehearsing?”

“I overheard someone at the entrance say Act I, Scene 3.
 
That’s Polonius’s big scene with his son, Laertes.”

“Oooh, I see.
 
Is Helen in it?”

“Yes, it’s Ophelia’s first scene.”

And the scene did in fact come together.

She watched as various main players detached themselves from the groups they’d been conversing with, and gravitated toward the stage, onto which they climbed with a kind of trepidation, warily scanning and then assaulting it, as Mrs. Throckmorton had assaulted the community theater piano some six weeks earlier.

There, young and virile, gray sweater, dark hair, sideburns—that must have been Laertes.

Yes, he had just flashed Laertes’ smile.

And there, entering from stage right, slightly baggier, slightly darker gray sweater, sandals flopping just a bit, hair the exact shaggy style as everyone else within sight but starting to turn white—or was that dye? No one knew with these people—that must have been Polonius.

“Look Nina! There she is!”

And it was true. Helen Reddington had materialized as a ghost materializes, standing completely motionless, an Ophelia-statue in her sweater-slacks uniform, center stage, but as far back as she could plant herself.

Her eyes were closed.

She simply stood, breathing.

It was as though she were meditating.

She saw nothing, nor seemed to look at anything around her.

She looked, Nina found herself thinking, so small.

Then, movement from behind
 
them.

She turned, as did Hope, as did the few other people seated in the audience, as did all of the other people hanging above the audience, or working behind blinking electronic consoles overlooking the audience, or wherever else they might have been or whatever else they might have been doing in relationship to the audience.

For into the theater had walked Clifton Barrett.

He strode down the center aisle.

“Clifton.”

“Morning
 
Clifton.”

“Hello Clifton.”

All of these comments were directed toward––by people who happened to be sitting or standing or kneeling or reading or conferring or scribbling or whatever else—three feet of the man’s path.

He made no gesture of recognition to any of them.

He simply strode to the stage, mounted it, and took control of it.

All of the groups on stage were now doing something or other in relation to him.

He had become the sun; they no longer worked but orbited.

He looked, she thought, quite different than he had the last time she’d seen him.

Smaller, but…

Somehow that did not matter.

No scarf now; but no sweater either. He was a slender man, not quite six feet tall. His black hair glistened like a raven’s in the floodlights that poured down on the stage; he had a pencil-thin goatee which descended to the point of a dagger just below the cleft in his chin.
           

He was dressed in elegant simplicity––white dress shirt, superbly pressed, with gold cuff links.

He took from the pocket of this shirt a pair of wire rimmed glasses, whose frames were barely detectable, and he moved his face toward or farther from each sheet of paper that was shown him, while he either nodded or scowled or shook his head or nodded curtly.

He did not smile.

Finally, like debris sucked down into various drain spouts, the superfluous people on and around the stage huddled together and prepared to do what they had to do while Polonius said good bye to his son and Ophelia said good bye to her brother.

“Ready?”

This was the first audible word Nina had heard from Clifton Barrett, and it was directed not at the three actors who stood around him but at two monstrous green eyes glowing in the balcony.

“We’re ready,” answered either the eyes or some spirits of the machine that had hidden themselves behind them.

“Run the block code once through, all right?”

“All right.”

These mysterious voices continued, and it hardly came as a surprise that they spoke an incomprehensible language.

“Line 867-1,098 Polonius will be R-21, move to O-56 on 965, finish M-32.”

The four figures on the stage stared at the area around their feet, as though they expected snakes to crawl up their legs.

Finally, there seemed to be general agreement, and nodding of heads.

Clifton Barrett raised his gaze to the balcony and said.

“All right so far.
 
Go on.”

And the same type of gibberish continued to rain down.

“Laertes’ lines 1,125-1,246 will be M-46, finishing O-18.
 
Ophelia’s lines…”

Etc. etc.

“What,” asked Hope in a whisper, “are they doing?”

Nina shook her head.

“I’m not sure, Hope.
 
I think they’re blocking the scene.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re making sure of where everyone has to stand when a certain line is delivered.”

“Is it that important, as long as the audience can see them?”

“I think it is because—oh I don’t know, Hope, but it may be that those lights in the balcony are from TV cameras.
 
They’re not just going to perform this play. They’re going to film it.”

“Yes, I know.”

“It’s costing everybody a lot of money; but it all has to be perfect. When the camera thinks Laertes is going somewhere, he’s got to be there.
 
Exactly there.”

“Well,
 
I wonder what would happen if…”

“Wait, Hope!
 
I think they’re starting!”

“All right.”

Astonishing, absolute quietness.

Polonius speaking to Laertes:

“And these few precepts in thy memory, see though character…”

Then the great speech;
costly thy habit, neither borrower nor lender…

Polonius himself was not giving the lines though, nor was there being made on the part of the actor any effort to call the old man forth. These lines were spoken without dialect, dryly, with no emotion, flat affect.

Important to each actor, Nina could finally see, was only position.