The Ruby Tear (21 page)

Opening Night

“T
he Jewel” ended in silence. Eva stood poised in front of the shattered mirror with the door open behind her on a menacing—or promising?—slash of darkness and brightness beyond. Her pose was a question, the open door was a possibility.

Jess couldn’t breathe. She was afraid she might pass out as the curtain slowly descended. There was always the chance that the audience weren’t awestruck by the power of the play but indifferent, holding back jeers and laughter, or asleep.

In the age-spotted glass she could see the reflected swags of heavy velvet curtain rippling down, mercifully blotting out the blurred sea of faces.

What were they thinking? In her own mind her final costume, a tapestry dress in deep jewel-tones, suddenly seemed garish and unflattering. The scar on her eyebrow felt raw and hot, blazing out from under a pathetic mask of sweat and makeup.

They hate the play
, she thought miserably.
They think it’s ugly and stupid; and they hate me. I’ve lost everything I thought I could bring to this, I’ve made a fool of myself and let everyone down.

Applause began like distant surf, rushing with supernatural speed toward the shore on which she waited. Gasping with gratitude, she turned to give herself to the tumult of clapping, cries, and whistles.

Nick stepped forward from his position downstage to join her. He dragged his damaged leg more than usual—he’d admitted that the role of Marko was longer and more tiring than he would have made it if he had known he would be playing it himself.

His eyes shone with elation.

“We did it, Jess,” he said. “Listen! It’s everything we hoped for!”

The curtain rebounded and Jess saw people’s hands held high as their palms smacked enthusiastically together. Thrown flowers landed helter-skelter among the footlights.

“Author, author!” they yelled.

Nick stepped forward, and they cheered even louder. No one out there knew why Anthony Sinclair had dropped out of the production (although in the theater world gossip had run wild); but Nick’s agreement to take on the role of Marko himself had sealed the success of the production. It was a double comeback: Griffin and Croft, returning together. The audience loved it.

Walter Steinhart ran onstage to take his bows with the cast.

“Jess!” he said, grabbing her hand. “You were wonderful!” He bent to kiss her knuckles, tickling her skin with his whiskers.

“Damn good thing,” Nick said out of the side of his mouth, “considering what a lump she’s got for a leading man.”

The director laughed. “Lump, schmump—what are you talking about? You’re doing fine, and from here on you’ll grow even more into the part. You did great!”

Jess drew the two men’s hands together in her own, smiling from one of them to the other and then raising their hands high, offering her colleagues for the crowd’s adulation.

Meanwhile, her gaze searched among the excited faces out there for one face that she both hoped and dreaded to see. If the brazen-haired vampire was there, she couldn’t spot him. She didn’t know whether she was more disappointed or more relieved.

There followed a half dozen curtain calls, and then a rush backstage to prepare for the whirl of celebration as friends and well-wishers rushing to congratulate the cast. Jess, swiftly shedding her costume and makeup with Marie’s help, toweled off and put on her green silk dress. With a woolen paisley shawl drawn over her shoulders for warmth (the theater boiler was still not working properly), she signaled Marie to start letting in the crowd from the corridor, a few at a time.

Kisses, hugs, extravagant declarations, damp handshakes, clumsy compliments and invitations—she had forgotten how it all felt: glorious, that’s how, a high you never wanted to end. Her aunt Clara bustled in with a box of Godiva chocolates, stared and gushed adoringly, and fluttered out again to wait in the lobby with two neighbors she had brought with her on the subway from Riverdale to see her niece perform.

Between incursions by the admiring public, Jess scanned the congratulatory telegrams and sipped a very good champaign provided by the Whitelys. The adrenaline spike smoothed into a more even buzz of satisfaction over a goal achieved, not just by herself but by all of them together: theater magic, despite a rough road getting there.

When the stream of visitors thinned at last, she gathered herself to leave the shelter of the tatty little dressing room and go celebrate.

Someone knocked. “Nick?” she called.

It was Johnny Wagner, abandoning his post at the stage door, and looking anxious. “Ms. Clausen said not to let him into the theater again, but—”

“Jessamyn?” A tall man in a fur-collared coat leaned hesitantly in past him, hat in hand. “Please?”

Marie drew herself up between him and Jess. “You’re not welcome here, Mr. Sinclair.”

But Jess motioned her aside. “Thanks, Marie, but I’d like to hear what Anthony has to say.”

“It’s okay, then?” Johnny said, trying to look threateningly at the intruder.

Jess nodded, but Marie, glaring at Sinclair, barked, “Stick around outside, John. Just in case.”

Anthony Sinclair winced visibly, and hot color stained his cheeks. “Jessamyn, if we could speak privately—?”

“Say what you came to say,” Jess said, “and I wouldn’t drag it out if I were you. Nick will be along any minute to collect me, and I understand that he gave you a pretty stern warning about not wanting to find you here.”

“Or anywhere,” Marie muttered. With a final glare at Sinclair, she turned away and busied herself with the costumes, creating at least the illusion of privacy for Jess and her enemy.

“I never had a chance to explain,” Sinclair said earnestly, advancing a tentative pace into the little room, “and I don’t want any unfounded suspicions to cloud your relations with the rest of your company, Jessamyn. I—”

He swallowed hard and blinked wretchedly at the floor.

Then he drew himself up with his eyes squinted half-shut and said quickly, “I wanted Anita MacNeil to take your place so that my wife could step into Anita’s role as Magda. Sal was desperately unhappy when she lost her job, she was talking about—about suicide, or retiring and going to live with her mother in Canada and teach school or something equally awful.

“I have an old connection with Walter. I knew I could persuade him to let me import Sal into ‘The Jewel’, once you’d left. The thing is, as soon as we’re working together again on the stage, Sal and I, it will be all right between us again. You have no idea what it’s like, Jessamyn, to love someone like that, to need them so badly—”

She watched the sweat bead on his forehead, noted the carefully combed sweep of his thinning hair, the manicured shapeliness of his graceful hands. It was strange, but she felt more sadness than anger. She couldn’t guess what he felt, but she mourned and resented the loss of their friendship that had never been even that, really. The illusion of his friendship, then, was lost for good, and she was sorry.

“You did it alone and you did it for love, is that what you’re saying?” she said, trying not to sound sarcastic.

He smiled painfully. “Thank you. Yes. I never meant to hurt you, just to get you to leave the production. I felt then and I feel now only the greatest fondness and admiration—”

“Stop, please. That’s not helping.” Nothing could help, but why go into that?

“You don’t understand, you’re young, you have so many chances ahead of you. But for Sal and me—” He licked his lips nervously and looked away.

“Anita knew nothing about it, then, just as she says,” Jess said.

A shamefaced nod.

“Thank you for that clarification,” Jess said. She couldn’t think of anything more to say. Her silence said it all.

The hectic patches blazed on Sinclair’s cheeks and he stepped pleadingly toward her. “They were supposed to frighten you, those idiots, just to frighten you, that’s all! My God, I’d been shadowing you myself after Nick left, to scare you, not to hurt you. I never once thought of doing anything to actually harm you—just to frighten you away.”

He smiled hopefully, attempting camaraderie. “You didn’t recognize me when I followed you, did you? Even Marie didn’t spot me that day I led Johnny off into the bookstore. It was—it was like a game, but you can’t imagine how serious it was for me.”

“They came at me with a razor, Anthony,” Jess said. “Your—your
henchmen
. It was serious for me, too.”

“I know, I heard, and I’ll never forgive myself.” He raised his fists and pressed his knuckles to his forehead. “You have to believe me. I thought I’d made it absolutely clear that there should be no violence!”

Either he was sincere—or he was acting. It made no difference.

Jess said, “Sally Sinclair is used to leading roles. What would you have done when she got restless playing Magda, a supporting role? How far would you have gone to make your wife happy, when she started chafing to take over the lead and play Eva to your Marko?”

Sinclair’s eyes opened wide with outrage. “She isn’t like that, Sally would never—”

“But you would; and you did, in my case.” Jess sighed. “I’m not pressing charges, Anthony. Nick wanted to, but there isn’t enough evidence, and anyway—I believe in what Eva says in the play. Revenge is an acid that corrodes whatever it touches. You don’t have to worry about me going after you over all this.

“But don’t come here again; and there will be no more discussion. There’s nothing to say. You’d better leave now, before Nick shows up.”

Sinclair took a breath to speak.

Marie said, “You want to lose the rest of your hair and have your bridgework dissolve in your mouth, Mr. Sinclair? I know some tricks, and I know some people. Mrs. Sinclair wouldn’t be so fond of you with your kneecaps fused. Miss Croft said go away; so go!”

Sinclair turned very pale and seemed to shrink into himself, resembling the skinny old man he would truly be in a few years’ time. Without another word he turned and left. His footsteps hastened down the corridor, although nothing followed him but glares from Marie and Johnny Wagner.

Jess turned wide eyes on her dresser. “Wow. That was pretty ferocious, Marie.”

“He deserves worse,” Marie said, banging the dressing room door shut. She held an open-topped cardboard box in her hands. “Well, forget him. Look at this—odd flowers to send on an opening night.”

“What flowers?”

Marie took a small pasteboard card from between the two plain pots of bright geraniums that were in the box, tied together loosely with a scarlet ribbon. She handed the card to Jess, her expression studiously blank.

The card shook slightly in Jess’ fingers. On its creamy surface someone had inscribed in a firm, flowing hand, “The past can be a prison cell or wings on which to soar. Thank you. v. C.”

Her hand flew up involuntarily to touch the two tiny scars on her throat. If he’d been there himself—a man she held in a fierce, sad fondness and hoped never to lay eyes on again—she’d have gone to him, gone with him, for another taste.

No. That was a dream, a scene from a delirium that she could play onstage but not maintain in real life. She wasn’t cut out to be consort to an immortal; she had too much ego of her own, for one thing, because she was an actress, and a good one by God. But she was not truly Eva, not any of the roles she played, not larger than life.

Offstage, she was just life-sized, like everyone else.

Nick burst in looking angry and alarmed. “Was that Anthony Sinclair I saw just now, scuttling out of here like a bug?”

Marie snorted disdainfully. “He just came around to see if he’s safe from prosecution,” she said darkly. It had hurt her, giving up her crush on the great Anthony Sinclair. On that account alone Jess couldn’t regret having spoken harshly to the man.

She looked at Nick, the flexed shoulders, the aggressive set of the jaw. She was sure he was fighting the temptation to go after Sinclair and beat him up as if they were contemporary rivals, not a muscular young man and a rather frail older one.

Vengefulness corrodes what it touches.

“Nick,” she said. “There’s cold cream in your right ear.”

He made a face and dabbed at his ear with his handkerchief. In that moment, he reverted to the man she knew: smart and funny, and maybe someday as good an actor as he was a playwright.

She took his hand, his warm hand with the slender fingers and big knuckles and the fine golden hairs on the back; a living hand warm with the beat of its own blood under the skin. “Come on, let’s go. Your play is an energy-gobbling monster. I could eat six pizzas!”

“Dissolute theater creatures,” Marie said with a sniff. “You should be resting up for tomorrow night’s performance, not painting the town.” She grinned. “The best revenge is for you two to become an even more famous theater couple than—than that sorry man and his spoiled wife.”

Nick kissed Jess’s palm and pressed it to his cheek. “That’s the plan,” he said. “Oh; you dropped something, Jess.”

Jess picked up the card that had come with the geraniums. She fixed it boldly to the makeup mirror by wedging one corner under the scarred wooden frame.

“A note from a friend,” she said lightly. “Come on, they’re waiting for us. It’s going to be a hell of a party!”

“Will this friend be there?” Nick asked in a low voice, his gaze averted as if he were afraid to see something unwelcome in her expression.

She grabbed his shoulders and drew him down so she could press her cheek to his and speak privately in his ear.

“No. He’s sent the flowers from his apartment for me to take care of; that must mean he’s left town, and he wants me to know it. He wants
us
to know it.”

“But is it what you want?” He held her by both arms in a tense grip.

“Yes, it’s what I want. It’s your freedom, and mine too.”
And his I hope
, she thought, but she didn’t say this. She leaned closer to Nick and kissed him, hungry for the salty human taste of his skin, the roughness of the beginning stubble of his beard, and the slightly rank scent of his hair with the sweat of stage work not yet washed out of it.

“Come on,” she said, “the others will eat everything up! Aren’t you starving? We have to start pounding on Walter about that scene change in Act Two, and this is the time to start.
Houdini
couldn’t do his costume changes in that amount of time—could he, Marie?”