Read More: A brief Q&A with Aaron Calvin
After she had been cast as Emily in the high school’s production of Our Town, Anne decided that she was going to take a Lover. It was the one essential experience remaining before graduation. Sure, her friend Kathy had taken first soprano in the school a cappella group. And last summer, Lauren had cut her hair short, dyed it the color of a chemical sunset, started going to college parties, sleeping with college boys, and responding to taunts of ‘Slut!’ with a tongue outstretched between her middle and index fingers. But as Anne gazed into her vanity mirror, watching her expression shift while she practiced her lines and pausing to push back strands of blonde hair, she knew she was meant for more.
Her casting as the play’s star was only the start. She would be great in the role, but more importantly, it would be great material for her audition tape. The tape would, in turn, lead to her acceptance at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University where she would spend two years learning the Meisner technique before spending a year studying at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London. She would be an actress, talented and well-trained. She would start with minor but notable roles in avant-garde Off Broadway productions, attracting attention from critics for her emotionally resonant performances. Or maybe she’d be cast in a traveling show where she could see the world with a cast and crew that would become like family by the end of its run. If things went a certain way, she might even get into acting in movies, though Los Angeles was fogged with pollution and overburdened with girls who looked just like her.
At Lauren’s encouragement, Anne had participated in a few liaisons at college parties, a series of unremarkable sexual encounters. There was a certain thrill in the novelty of them, in being a person she had never been before. Lauren had a different approach: She would pick up a boy at each party and flirt with him all night, but never seal the deal. The boys became devoted to her and had formed a coterie that pined in the parking lot while she was in gym class. Kathy had a boyfriend who was as dull as sand. Anne wanted something more.
A lover? Lauren said when Anne told her of the plan. Like some kind of Victorian harlot?
There was a particular suitor she had in mind. Patrick Matthews was a serious boy, a poet, or so he said. He was sensitive, gangly, but not too tall or too pale. He was a grade below Anne, so not yet as beholden to the future as she was, though he was coolly self-aware and mature. He too yearned to get out. She had known him since being cast as Hippolyta—as a sophomore!—in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Patrick had been cast as Francis Flute, a member of the crude mechanicals who dressed up as a woman in the play-within-a-play. Even then, he’d brandished a smirk like a pocketknife, made her laugh in the backstage shadows. Anne had admired the way he committed to the role. He wasn’t a bit self-conscious about wearing a gaudy dress and exaggerated makeup. He put on the ridiculous falsetto, embraced Shakespeare’s invention of camp. She had been eyeing him long before he appeared in her dressing room on opening night.
You look good in that dress, she said.
You look good too. In your dress, I mean, he said.
Most men I know wouldn’t be able to pull it off.
Well, he said with a little wink, I’m not most men, you know.
It was ridiculous, but it made her laugh.
Anne and Patrick found each other again her Junior year during the Spring musical—she had been cast as Laurey and Patrick as Farmer #2. His role had one line; he couldn’t sing to save his life and it was becoming clear he was a terrible actor. They shared earbuds during rehearsal breaks. Switching back and forth between their iPods, Patrick introduced her to Elliott Smith, which she found too sinister and depressing, and Belle and Sebastian, which she thought was cute and charming. He didn’t take to Regina Spektor, but she got him to admit that Bjork was interesting, at least.
She would have made a move before the Finale Ultimo if not for one big problem: Patrick already had a girlfriend. Megyn and Patrick had been dating since middle school, a fact that repulsed Anne. It would’ve been one thing if Megyn had been compelling, but Anne couldn’t help but notice she didn’t do anything. She was pretty sure, but so was Anne. Anyone could be pretty. You had to have a personality to keep a guy like Patrick, or so she assumed. She worried her consideration of Megyn was sexist.
Regular beach weather, Anne had said to her on a downpour day last April in the doorknob-dull Econ class.
It’s raining, Megyn replied blankly.
They should put you on the local news, Anne teased.
It was all in good fun, or so Anne thought. Patrick sheepishly informed her that Megyn thought she was mean. So Anne could only look on as Patrick and Megyn remained inseparable. They were often seen together in the hallways between classes sharing a seemingly eternal embrace. Anne referred to them as The Klimt Couple in conversation with Lauren and Kathy, who didn’t get the reference.
But on the nights when they were plastered in makeup and the air in the dressing room was thick with the toxic stench of aerosol spray, Patrick would find her. Somewhere in the space between who they were and the characters they attempted to portray, Anne felt the heat of their mutual desire.
Break a leg, he said to her as they took to the wings in their last production together, his hand on her hip and breath hot in her ear.
Oh, I will, she said, though it wasn’t what she meant to say.
Then, on a half-day in October during midterms, the impossible happened: Patrick and Megyn broke up. It was a gray day, the kind that practically begged to be the backdrop to an emotional rupture. It happened in the parking lot. Anne hadn’t witnessed it herself, but according to Kathy, who was parked across from Patrick, she had seen Megyn sobbing as she tried to block Patrick from leaving the parking lot.
He practically ran her over, Kathy said. I’ve never seen anything like it. She was in pieces, laying down on the cold, dirty ground after he’d driven off.
Right after the breakup, Patrick had been offered the minor role of Wilder’s drunk church organist Simon Stinson by the petite and balding school dramatist in recognition of the fact that, though he could not act or even read lines really, he was still handsome and had tried out. Patrick turned the part down. This ruined Anne’s plan to connect with him once again during rehearsals and exploit the flirtation that had been building for years. Instead, she watched from afar as he moved morosely through the hallways.
Two days before her star debut, Anne sat at her vanity. She held up old letters from her father, the ones she had received in elementary school after he’d first been sent to prison, back when she still opened his letters. They were full of promises. That was what she remembered most about her father, the many promises. She held each one over a lavender scented candle, letting them catch fire and watching the ashes falling into an ashtray she had taken from his study, a room her grandmother left untouched. She placed each singed edge in a shallow bowl of water after the rest of the page had burned away.
Anne left the perfumed enclosure of her room and descended the stairs. It was Wednesday. Her grandmother, her sole caretaker, was out attending weekday mass and Anne was alone. She stepped into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and took out a seltzer. The crack opening resounded through the empty room. On the kitchen counter was another letter from her father addressed from the federal prison in Illinois. She would not open it.
She took the stairs down into the basement. To her left, the hallway led to a moldering game room where a pool table, its green felt torn and frayed at the pockets, stood gathering dust. To her right, a circular room with a conversation pit and leather couches was illuminated on all sides by the autumn evening’s dying light. Through the long windows, she watched the cold wind ripple the pool cover, the dry leaves skittering across the cracked clay of the tennis courts. In her father’s absence, much had been left unattended.
Anne investigated a box her grandmother had brought out of storage and left for her to see. It was the marlin, mounted and lacquered and long dead. She remembered it from her childhood and thought of looking up at its blue-gray skin and wide-open eyes, laying in her father’s lap in this very room. She could still see the space where it had formerly hung. She pulled it from the box. It was lighter than she remembered.
A cold half-moon in November hung over the Our Town premiere like a broken piece of pottery. The air had turned cold, but Anne’s body was its own engine.
On opening night, she stood in the blinding spotlight on the hardwood stage, tears streaming down her face. She was dead. She was watching her own family bury her. She returned to see them as they had been—her play father, play mother, play husband—and drove headlong into Emily’s monologue. She had practiced it every day for two months in her room, mouthed it with different inflections into her vanity mirror. The audience’s eyes were on her and, more importantly, the eyes of Rutgers’ theater program administrators would be on her in the recording of this scene. She rolled towards the monologue’s climax, leaving pockets of air between each line and breathing in rhythm to ensure the phrasing was immaculate. Was Patrick there? Was he watching? She hadn’t seen him before the show, wasn’t certain if he’d come.
Oh, earth, she cried after landing softly on the line leading into it. She brought her father into this moment, summoned the pain carefully to prompt the tears she needed for the desired effect. You are too wonderful for anybody to realize you, she said. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?
Anne thought this was a ridiculous question. Of course they didn’t. And who could even bear it if they did?
When the curtain fell, the applause roared. When Anne stepped out from the line with the boy who played George, the crowd stood. She knew it was mostly for her. She squinted to find Patrick among the crowd, but the tears still clinging to her eyes obscured her vision.
She had to remember to smile, to bow gracefully, to appear overwhelmed with it all. Backstage, her grandmother appeared with a bouquet and, inexplicably, a purple rosary, which Anne promptly deposited in the trash. Then Patrick appeared to her. He handed her one red rose, a fake one, probably stolen from the props room.
It’ll last longer, he said.
Says you, she said.
A silence threatened to turn them from one another just as they had drawn close. She watched him looking at her, saw the want that he would not act upon writhing behind his dull blue eyes. So it was she who drew him close and kissed him. Her lips were still stage-ready red and so sealed by primer that he came away with no mark on his lips. An expression of initial shock gave way to that slight smile of his. She had him.
They began seeing each other, furtively at first. They would coordinate bathroom breaks during classes. She slipped away as Mrs. Durng droned on about Pride and Prejudice while Patrick ducked out of Mr. Lotzen’s manic diatribes on the mitochondria. They wandered the hallways together. Sometimes Lauren, escaping her own classes for her own reasons, would run into them and make a lewd comment about it. Anne knew Lauren was a little hurt that, unlike the college boys, she couldn’t be a part of this.
The hallways curved slightly and it was believed that they had been designed so that if someone brought a gun to school, they would be unable to fire straight from one end of the building to the other. But Anne knew this couldn’t be true. The high school had been built in the nineties, pre-Columbine. Still, she liked the idea of this myth and mentioned it to Patrick.
Do you think about it ever? he said. If one of our classmates walked in here with an AR-15 and started firing.
No, she said, though it wasn’t true. I could think of a million things I would want to do, but it wouldn’t matter if it actually happened.
I would rush him, Patrick said. I would run at him and take him down. I would want to try at least, even if I got shot in the process.
What a waste, she said. What use would that be if you got shot?
At least I could say I tried.
You couldn’t say it if you were dead. And why do you assume it has to be a guy?
A woman wouldn’t do that.
Patrick refused to call his high school peers ‘girls,’ only ‘women.’ Anne thought it was a silly schtick, but an endearing one.
As Christmas drew closer, they left classes together for increasing amounts of time, sometimes for entire periods. They would sneak off together to the bare white rooms hidden in the hallway’s connecting side passages. If you didn’t know to look, you wouldn’t be able to find them. The rooms had hard stone walls, supposedly built to house troubled students that needed to be closed off away from the others, though Anne had never seen them used for such a purpose. Instead, students snuck in there to smoke cigarettes, sometimes joints, or take quick swigs from backpack vodka bottles between classes.
This place is like a prison, Patrick said. I mean, this whole school is like a prison, but this room especially.
The word ‘prison,’ so innocuously uttered by Patrick, entered Anne’s mind and caught fire there. She felt a strong desire to walk out of the room after he said this, but composed herself and pushed him up against the wall instead. She kissed him furiously, bit his lip so hard it drew blood. With his hands up her shirt, she felt the cold wall against her back as he pressed against it. There were rumors that students had sex in these rooms, but Anne wouldn’t take it that far. This blank space perfumed with the faint smell of stale cigarettes was illicit enough to turn her on, but only enough for a make out session. Doing anything penetrative there seemed sad.
Winter break came. Anne had Patrick drive her around. At times there was a pretense of a destination. They might end up somewhere—the mall, the movie theater, a bookstore—but often they just drove and talked. Patrick opened up about his relationship with Megyn, how what had seemed like the perfect relationship had been falling apart long before their cataclysmic separation. Megyn had been depressed and, no matter what Patrick did, he couldn’t make her feel better.
I know it wasn’t her fault, he said, but she felt like a black hole, and I was just getting… sucked in or something. I felt like I was imprisoned.
Anne resisted the urge to eject herself from the moving vehicle. It wasn’t yet the right time to tell him. In the aftermath of their breakup, he went on, Megyn had been sent off to a psychiatric wellness retreat by her mother. Patrick felt crushed, he said, by the guilt of having left her while she was struggling. He felt awful. Anne consoled him. He was right to do what he did, she said. He was right to value his own mental health, even if it was difficult.
You can’t let the pain of others control your life, she said. Even if you love them. […]
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