Stage Left
Theo had stood in the wings of perhaps two hundred shows. He knew where to put himself: far enough back that the follow spot didn't catch him, close enough to the stagehand's headset to hear the calls, at an angle where he could see her face and the first rows at the same time. He knew how long a set ran and how long each song ran. He knew the moment, usually somewhere in the middle, when Morgana used to stop being afraid and start enjoying herself. She would touch her own throat once, lightly, as if checking it was still there.
He stood where he always stood. He'd told her he would.
The first song was fine. Better than fine. He'd heard her sing it a hundred times, in rehearsal rooms and soundchecks, and once in the back of a car on the way to an airport, when she was too drunk to sit up. This was the same song, and it wasn't. Her voice went out over the room and came back with something on it, a kind of width he had no word for, and two thousand people leaned toward it at once. He felt the room do it. He'd never felt a room do that before.
By the fourth song her dress was dark across the back with sweat, and her hands had stopped shaking. He'd watched them shake in the dressing room. He'd watched her try to hold a glass of water and give up. Now they were busy on the microphone stand, and he let out a breath he'd been holding since the walk down the corridor.
Somewhere in the fifth she laughed into the microphone at nothing, and the whole room laughed with her. Theo laughed too, alone in the wings, and couldn't have said why. Later, in one of the old songs, Lou looked up sharply from the snare at the back of Naru's head. He didn't know what that was about either.
Then it was the last song.
"This one isn't mine," she said, and nothing else.
He'd heard it through the wall at three in the morning, eight nights running. He'd heard the pretty version in the grey room under the tyre shop. He knew where the verses sat and where the refrain came up out of the German, and he knew that she hadn't got it right yet. He hadn't told her. She knew.
Lou began the pulse. The room went quiet the way a room goes quiet for something it has decided to listen to. Out in the light, Naru's hands began to shake again on the stand.
The first verse was pretty. Theo stood in the dark beside the stagehand with his arms folded and felt his stomach sink for her. It was beautiful, and it was the version from the grey room, and he could hear exactly how much of it was the dead man's and how little was hers. The refrain came, and to his surprise the crowd knew it. They began to sing it back to her, ragged and soft, in English.
The second verse began, and her face emptied.
Her voice went on. That was the strange part. The German came out shaped and careful, the notes landed, and the breath came from where it always came from. Everything Morgana had trained into that body over ten years kept working, and the woman inside it was gone somewhere. He knew her face. He'd known the old face for four years and the new one for four months, and he knew what it looked like when she was there behind it. She wasn't there now. Her eyes were open on the dark over the crowd and there was nobody in them. Only her hands were still shaking, as if they were the last of her left on the stage.
He took a step toward the edge of the wings without meaning to. The stagehand looked at him. He stopped.
He couldn't have said afterwards how long it lasted. Half a verse, a refrain. He stood with his hands at his sides and watched her body sing while she was somewhere else. He thought, very clearly, she's gone. He'd seen her go away from her face once before, by the pool, in the gold, when she'd told him this is the part that doesn't hurt. That had looked like someone arriving. This looked like someone leaving.
Then the voice changed.
It happened under the notes, the way weather turns before anything shows in the sky. It was the same voice and the same craft, and something had come up underneath them that hadn't been there in eight nights of listening through a wall. It was so raw it was hard to stand next to. Theo felt it go out over the room and felt the room take it. The two thousand went quiet in a new way, inward, all at once. In the front row a girl put both hands over her face.
He didn't. He stood very still in the wings and looked at her.
And for a moment, between one line and the next, he saw her.
He would never be sure what he saw. He would think about it for weeks and never get it to hold still. His eyes saw a woman in a black dress with a high neck, one hand on a microphone stand, under a white light. He knew that. Something else, behind his eyes, saw her the way he'd seen her in the pool: the hair gone the colour of old gold, lit from inside, and the face with nothing in it that asked for anything. And behind that, at the same time, there was something else. It was very large, and much too close. It stood behind her shoulders where the amplifiers were, where there was nothing at all. It had long arms, more of them than anything should have, folded in the dark like something resting that had no reason to hurry.
It was gone before he could look at it. It had never been there. His eyes had never stopped seeing a woman at a microphone.
His heart was going very hard. He put one hand flat against the black-painted brick of the wing beside him and kept it there.
The drums stopped.
There should have been a fill there, the long roll down into the last chorus. He'd heard it a hundred times. It didn't come, and in the bar of nothing that it left she held a single note out over the whole room. It had no words. It sounded like nothing on the record. It sounded like wind over a lot of water. Theo stood with his hand on the wall and his eyes stinging, and didn't know why they were stinging, and didn't wipe them.
Lou came back in like a door slamming, and the room came apart.
She walked off into the wings straight past him. Someone put a towel in her hands and she stood holding one end of it while it hung down, and her hands were shaking worse than they had in the dressing room. The stagehand was saying encore, they want an encore, half into Theo's ear and half into the headset.
He looked at her face. Then he took the headset off the stagehand's head, said "House lights. No encore. Thank you," into it, and handed it back.
Lou came off the riser behind them with her sticks in her hand and said something to Naru about the fill. Theo didn't hear it. He was watching Naru's face, and the face was hers again, all the way to the surface. It was white and wet with sweat, and she was there behind it. Whatever had gone away had come back.
He let his breath go and went to find her a bottle of water.
It took an hour for the Aldine to empty. She sat in the dressing room with the door shut, and he didn't go in. He stood outside with his back to the door and dealt with things. He dealt with the promoter, who was delighted. He dealt with Marcus by watching the phone light up twice in his hand and putting it face down on a flight case.
He had a hundred questions. He could feel them stacked up in him like boxes in a corridor. He did not ask a single one. There were crew everywhere, and phones in every pocket in the building, and what he wanted to ask was not something that should ever be said where anyone could hear it, not even half of it, not even in a whisper.
When the corridor had cleared he went out onto the stage. The work lights were on, two bare bulbs on stands, and the crew had started on the cables. He sat down on the edge of the stage with his legs over the drop, the way he used to sit on loading docks when he was twenty, and looked at the empty seats going up into the dark.
After a while he heard her come out behind him. He didn't turn round. He moved over a little, and she sat down next to him.
"Marcus called," he said eventually. "Twice."
"What did he say?"
"I didn't pick up."
She nodded.
He didn't ask. He sat beside her with every question he had pressed flat inside him. He was fairly sure she knew they were there, and she didn't ask him to say them either. Neither of them said anything else for a long time, and it was, he thought later, one of the best silences of his life.
He drove. She sat beside him with her head against the window and her eyes closed, still in the black dress. Neither of them turned on the radio. At a red light by the bridge he looked across at her and saw that she wasn't asleep. She was watching the river through her eyelashes, the lights lying on the water in long broken lines.
He didn't speak in the car either. Years ago, for someone else, he had found a bug under a car seat, and he had never forgotten how ordinary the little black box looked. He drove with both hands on the wheel and the questions stacked up in him, and waited.
The elevator went up forty-one floors and opened straight into the apartment. She walked into the dark and stood in the middle of the floor with her shoes in her hand. He stayed a moment at the edge of the stone floor with his keys in his hand and listened to the building. Nothing. The faint hum of the pool pump through the glass.
He put the keys down on the island.
"Okay," he said.
She turned round.
He made tea, because his hands wanted something to do. She sat on the purple sofa with her knees pulled up inside the black dress and her arms round them, and watched him do it. He brought it over and sat on the low table in front of her, so that they were at the same height.
"I saw you go somewhere," he said. "In the second verse."
She held the cup and didn't drink from it.
"Your face went," Theo said. "Your voice kept going. Everything kept going. You weren't there." He stopped. "I don't know where you were."
"Down," she said.
He waited.
"There's a bottom," she said. She was looking at the tea. "In me. Under everything. I keep what came up with me out of the Pit down there, and I don't go there, because of what's next to it." She turned the cup a quarter turn in her hands. "I needed something from the bottom to sing that song. Lou was right. It was pretty. It wasn't mine. Mine was down there."
"And you went and got it."
"Yes."
"In front of two thousand people."
"Yes."
He sat back a little. He didn't know what to do with that. He thought of her face in the light with nobody in it.
"Something came up with you," he said. "When you came back. Didn't it."
She looked up at him then. Her eyes in the dark room were the colour of the pool through the glass.
"What did you see?" she said.
He told her. He told it badly. He said gold and your hair, like at the pool, and then he didn't know how to say the rest, so he said behind you and stopped, and tried again, and said something with arms. Then he said, "I didn't see it. My eyes didn't. I want to be clear about that. I'm not telling you I saw a..." and found he had no end for the sentence. "I don't know what I saw."
She was very still.
"You weren't meant to see that," she said quietly. "I didn't show you."
"I know."
"Nobody else saw it. I'd have felt it. Two thousand people, and nobody." She set the cup down on the table beside him without drinking any of it. "You saw it because you know me."
"I don't, though," Theo said. "Not really." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "In July you told me something like an angel. Something old, that loved people, and got thrown away for it. At the pool I asked you if you were one of the good ones or the bad ones, and you told me there weren't any." He held her eyes. "I've let that be enough. And tonight I stood there and something with too many arms stood behind you, and I don't think it was the kind I was thinking of."
She didn't look away from him.
"When I was a kid," he said, "there was a window in our church. Over the altar. An angel in white with gold wings, one hand up in blessing and a sword in the other." He'd never told anyone about it. He'd thought about it more since the pool than in the twenty years before. "I looked at it every Sunday until I was fourteen. I used to wonder who the sword was for."
He saw her understand before he finished.
"Which side of that window were you on?" he said.
The pump hummed through the glass. Out on the terrace the pool lay lit and still.
"The other one," she said.
He nodded slowly.
"I didn't lie to you in July," she said. "Or at the pool. Something like. Thrown away. There weren't good ones and bad ones. All of that was true. But I let you hear it softer than it was." She took a breath, and when she spoke again her voice was very plain, the way it got when she'd decided something. "The word you'd use is fallen. We went to war against Him over whether you deserved to know what you were. We lost. He threw us down. We were at the bottom of the world for longer than there's been a world." She looked at her hands. "Some of us came back up hating everything. I came up hating everything. Most of that is down at the bottom now. What you saw tonight was what's next to it."
"Is it you?"
She was quiet a long time.
"Yes," she said. "It's also me."
Theo sat with that. He found, a little to his surprise, that it didn't frighten him. He tested it, the way he'd test a contract clause he didn't like, turning it over and looking for the place where it gave. It didn't give. He had stood in a parking garage and watched what she could do, and he had been afraid then, cleanly and coldly, and the fear had been his own. Tonight he had seen, or not seen, something with too many arms behind her shoulders. And afterwards she had sat on the edge of the stage with him under the work lights, saying nothing, and let him not ask.
"Okay," he said.
She looked at him.
"Okay," Theo said again. "Fallen. Okay." He picked up her untouched tea and put it back in her hands, because it was going cold. "Drink that."
She made a sound that was nearly a laugh, and drank it.
He should have left it there. It was nearly three. She was grey with exhaustion under the stage makeup, and he had a call with Marcus at ten that was going to be long and loud. But the other question had been sitting under the first one since August, folded small, and tonight it had come loose. If he didn't ask it now, in this room, while she was still letting him, he'd fold it back up and carry it for another four months.
"Can I ask you something else?"
"Yes."
"You told me about Calvin. In August." He chose the words carefully. "That every morning something of his comes to you. That it's what you run on."
"Yes."
"You've never taken anything from me."
He watched her. He'd thought about how to say this a hundred times, and every version had sounded wrong in his head: needy, or hurt, or like an offer. He didn't want it to be any of those. He made himself say it plainly.
"I need to know why. That's all. Whether it's..." He stopped. "Whether it's that I'm not worth taking from. Or whether you're keeping me for something. I'd rather know."
She looked at him for a long time. He felt her looking at him the way she did sometimes, the way he'd learned meant she was seeing past the front of him to whatever was underneath. He let her. There was no point not letting her.
"It isn't either," she said.
"Then what?"
She opened her mouth and closed it again. He'd never seen her do that. Morgana had been a superb liar. The new one didn't lie at all. Either way the words had always come. They didn't come now. She looked away from him, out through the glass at the pool, and her face did something he couldn't read.
"I don't know," she said finally.
He waited.
"When I think about it," she said slowly, "taking from you. Making you something that feeds me every morning. There's something." Her hand had come up to her chest, flat, just below the collarbone, where she had laid his hand in July. "It isn't a thought. It's further down than that. Older. There was someone once. A long time ago. A man." She frowned at the glass. "I don't remember him. I don't remember his face. I think he did something. I think he gave something up, for me, so he could stay." She shook her head slowly. "That's all there is. It's very far away, and I keep it there."
She looked back at him.
"But when I think about taking from you, that's what's there. Not you. It isn't about you not being enough. And I'm not saving you for anything." She held his eyes. "I just won't. Not from you. I can't tell you better than that, because I don't know better than that."
Theo sat on the low table with his hands between his knees and looked at her.
He'd expected, if he ever got an answer, to have to do something with it: be hurt by it, or relieved, or file it under a heading. He found that he didn't have to do anything. It wasn't about him. It wasn't a judgment and it wasn't a plan. It was a reason older than he was, one she couldn't see clearly herself, and it was hers. That was enough. Something that had been held tight in his chest since August, without his quite knowing it, let go.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Okay." He stood up and took the empty cup out of her hands. "Go to bed. You have a call with Marcus at ten."
"I have a call with Marcus?"
"I have a call with Marcus. You have a bed."
She laughed, properly this time, short and surprised, and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and smeared the stage makeup across both cheeks. Then she got up off the sofa, stiff, still in the black dress, and went down the corridor toward her room. At the door she stopped and looked back at him.
"Theo."
"Mm."
"Thank you for not asking. At the theatre."
"I always know which questions are mine to ask," he said. "Just not always when."
She went in. The door closed.
He stood in the kitchen for a minute, rinsing the cup, letting the water run warm over his hands. Then he went round the apartment the way he did on the nights he stayed, turning off the lamps one by one, until the only light left came in through the glass. He stood at the glass wall in the dark and looked out at the terrace.
The pool he left on. In four months he had never found out where that switch was.