“It’s a play by Shakespeare,” I say quietly, though I want to scream. “One of the problem plays.”
“And we’re sure it’s wonderful,” the dean says. “But here’s the thing, Miranda: the students don’t agree. And here’s the other thing: our donors feel the same way. Now, of course it’s not up to us to tell you how to do your job, Miranda, am I right?”
“Course not,” Comb-over says.
“No sir,” says Bow Tie.
“I mean, we’re not theater people by any means, are we?”
“Nope.”
“And you are the director after all, aren’t you?”
“Am I?” I ask them. I’m really asking.
They ignore this.
“But we also know that you, more than anyone, would want to see Theater Studies flourish again, am I right? Get a new stage. Get that platform you talked with me about once. The one that extends into the audience, remember? What was that called again?”
I stare at his desk. “A thrust,” I whisper.
“Right, a thrust.”
“We know too that you would hate to see the program shrink,” Bow Tie says.
“Dry up,” Comb-over adds.
“Become obsolete,” Bow Tie finishes.
They look at me meaningfully.
“Am I right?” Puffy Nips says to me softly.
I seduced this man when I got the job. Not physically, psychically. It was easy, can I tell you how easy? How I fed off my audience, so long since I’d had an audience. How I shimmered with local glamour. Radiated a nonthreatening competence. It helped that I was replacing Professor Duncan, a withered, old Shelley scholar a decade past retirement and only tangentially qualified to direct. By contrast, and with the help of makeup and drugs, I appeared to be a shiny, pretty new coin fresh from the stage. Winking under the dean’s bleakly flickering lights. Dropping one glittering theater anecdote after another. We have such great theater right here in Massachusetts, don’t you agree?
Oh, definitely, Ms. Fitch.
My body in this room was seduction enough, promise enough, for him. I merely had to make my voice slightly pliable, a trick from my Helen or was it my Snow White days? Merely had to seem dumber, more helpless, more open to suggestion, than I actually was.
And why would someone like you be looking to teach at our little college? he asked me, his final question. Only then did I falter. Only then did my smile slip. Sweat broke on my brow briefly. I thought: Because my dreams have been killed. Because this is the beginning of my end.
But I gathered myself, attempted to look thoughtful. I gazed at the dean’s waiting expression. The ugly concrete wall behind him, the grim clockface.
The theater has given me so much, I said, and smiled. I’d just really love to give back now.
He smiled at that. He bought it. I bought it myself. Believed my own lie even as the truth rankled within me. You would have thought I actually fucking wanted the job.
That interview was my best performance in years.
Now, of course, things have changed. Now he can see my actual helplessness, my interior deadness, my atrophied body shrouded in its tea-length dress. My gray hairs, which I do nothing to disguise. My lipstick that clashes with the misery on my face. My new despair-wrinkles, my pallor of lost hope. My forehead permanently furrowed from explaining myself to doctors, from trying to get a straight answer from Mark, Luke, Todd, John. Just fucking tell me. Is it structural? Is it mechanical? Is it neurological?
It could be a number of things, Mark always says from behind his clasped hands.
“We’re not telling you what to do, Miranda,” the dean says now.
“We’re telling you to consider,” Comb-over says.
“To deeply consider—” Bow Tie adds.
“Switching to that other play.”
“Macbeth.”
The dean winces playfully for my benefit. Whoopsie! “Anyway. You think about it, okay, Miranda? Good luck!”
“They don’t say good luck in theater,” Bow Tie says, popping a mint into his mouth.
“Don’t they?” the dean asks, eyes bright. Look at us, learning even now, even here!
“Nope,” Bow Tie says, crunching, the white-green sparks flashing between his teeth like tiny lightning. “They say break a leg.”
“Oh, right! Right, right, right. Well! Break a leg, Miranda. Oh wait, maybe too late for that, huh? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ouch.”
CHAPTER 8
“THANK YOU FOR seeing me on such short notice,” I whisper to John in the dark. John of small mercies. John of the magic touch. John, my last resort, my shadow therapist. Unaccredited. Under the table. I stand before him in his dim, dust-filled garage, cash in my fist from the drive-through ATM, my head bowed low. A penitent returning.