I look around the room, and my heart lifts. The pain quiets a little. Goes from a shout to a whisper. The chair leg lifts from my foot. The flashing webs dim slightly.
And then I see it. Sitting on a large wooden table in the center of the room. Covered with a drop cloth. The maquette. A mini replica of the set for this production, a micro portrait of the world of the play.
I hobble over to it excitedly. I admit, I’m moving faster than I thought myself capable.
What aspect of my vision will it depict? I wonder. Will it be Act One, Scene One, when Helen’s plight is first revealed to the audience—that she worships Bertram and can never have him? Or will it be the moment when she uses her witchy powers to heal the ailing King? Or when Bertram is told by the now cured King that he must marry Helen, and he doesn’t want to and we hate him so much? Or when Helen receives Bertram’s cold letter that he has fled to Italy to fight a war because he’d rather die than marry her? Or when finally, finally, after moving heaven and earth, Helen makes Bertram love her? And he tells her and the world that at last he does, he sees her, finally, in that single impossible line?
“Miranda?”
And there he stands before me, hair in his eyes, hammer in hand. Wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, his usual paint-splattered jeans. Looking like a stoned Norse god.
“Hugo,” I whisper.
“Miranda,” he says. “Thought I heard someone back here.” He smiles and a light inside me grimly flickers.
What can I tell you about Hugo except that for a while I thought I dreamed him? Conjured him out of air and Valium to give myself a reason to come to work, to go on living. But I didn’t conjure Hugo. Hugo is a real human. His real job is plant operations, essentially the school’s handyman. But during the winter and spring, he also doubles as my set designer and builder. He is so handsome it feels like a joke God is playing on the women of the English department, a coven of quietly broken creatures with fathomless lusts for Sting. As if to tell us, You see, crones? This is life. Right in your midst. Smelling of evergreens. Making gorgeous things out of wood with his large, thickly veined hands. Behold him and pine. Observe the tattoo vines and leaves climbing his muscled arms as if he grew out of the earth itself, my best, most wondrous tree.
He is also an ex-con. What Hugo did to end up in jail, I have no idea, but I love to speculate with Grace. Attempted murder? Auto theft? Aggravated assault? Who do you think he assaulted? Someone who deserved it, I’m sure.
Miranda, who cares? He builds great sets.
He does build great sets. He’s brilliant.
Prison, Hugo once told me at a cast party, is where he fell in love with Shakespeare and learned set design. Before that he didn’t give a fuck about Shakespeare or theater—Sorry, Miranda.
Oh, don’t apologize, I said. Please. Dead leaves stirring in the dark alley of my heart.
Prison is also where Hugo learned how to work with minimal tools, with limited resources, which made him brilliant for working at a college that has no real budget for theater. I told him so at the party. I said to him, You’re brilliant.
Hugo didn’t know how to respond.
Thank you, he said quietly, and sipped his wine cup. Then he excused himself. Drifted toward his maintenance buddies. They began talking loudly about a metal show they’d all seen together. I watched Fauve lurk in the periphery. Widening her eyes and laughing along at whatever Hugo said. Pretending like she cared about that stuff, she could hang, she didn’t have a stick up her ass, a Sondheim playlist on infinite repeat in her car, no, no. No, she was into this. She even had thoughts, apparently, because she was speaking. And Hugo seemed to be listening to her, nodding.
I went to go find Grace, who was smoking in a corner, who had seen it all. She didn’t say anything to me except, Light?
I can never bring myself to look directly into the strangely flecked eyes of Hugo. Their irises serene, slightly stoned, and ever changing in the light. Or the hair of Hugo, the color of sunbaked wheat in a field. I can never bring myself to contemplate his perfect mouth, made even more perfect by the jagged grin-shaped scar on one side of his lip. A prison injury, perhaps? His other smile. That’s grinning at me now. My body lightens, brightens.
“Didn’t see you there,” he says.
Of course you didn’t, I think. How could you possibly?
There was a time when I would have been able to bring the likes of Hugo to his knees. I picture the young woman I was. Her headshot beaming brightly at me from my old All’s Well Playbill. I keep it stuffed in the very bottom of that dead lingerie drawer, though I fish it out some nights to torture myself. Turn the well-worn glossy pages. And there she is. My impossibly luminous young face framed by a tumble of slick, dark waves. Beautiful. Slightly cruel. Blissfully ignorant of all that was to come.