The Summer Set Page 13

  “Deal,” he said, eyes shifting back from her to the shadowy garden. “It hasn’t been that bad, so far, this summer—has it?”

  She paused, watched the silhouetted palms tremble in the night breeze, as she summoned the courage to admit that it had been the best month in recent memory. She had quit acting in the all-encompassing, light-a-match-and-watch-the-house-burn-down way she did everything. But the feeling had crept back since joining Chamberlain. It was so much easier to inhabit someone else’s skin than her own, so oddly freeing.

  “You know what? Don’t answer that,” he laughed, leaning back against the bar again. “Look at this place. I mean, all these memories here, good ones, and this place has closed, but it’s still here. It’s alive, it’s a little rough, but it’s here. It can be restored. It just needs some work, right?”

  “Definitely not a lost cause,” she said to the weathered landscape. “There’s still a heartbeat here.” The air began to feel heavy with years of unspoken words, so she took the bottle from the bar, held it aloft. “I’m gonna take care of this, and be right back,” she said, turning and taking a step in the direction of the stairwell door.

  He lunged, catching her wrist. “Wait—” The bottle slipped from her hand, shattering against the slate patio. Neither flinched, they stood perfectly still, his hand gripping her. His translucent eyes pierced hers. She waited, barely breathing. Her pulse beat against his fingertips, so rhythmic she could almost hear it, like the clashing of drumsticks before the start of a favorite song.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to...” He finally spoke, slowly, as though searching for the words. He released her hand, his gaze pulling away, settling instead on the broken glass.

  “Well, we got the bottle open, so that problem is solved,” she said, crouching over the shards of glass and spilled wine, assessing the crime scene. “It’s just a lot harder to drink this way.”

  He smiled, head hung in apology, kneeling across from her. “Maybe we do destroy everything we touch,” he said lightly, paraphrasing Sarah’s insults.

  * * *

  They swept up with a broom from the supply closet downstairs, finished their sandwiches in relative silence, seated atop the bar. When the rain finally began to dissipate, they walked home through the quiet, glistening streets, stealing glances at each other.

  Sarah was already locked in her room, asleep or pretending to be, when they returned. Nick resigned himself to the fact that they wouldn’t leave on good terms with her. Charlie, he could tell, felt responsible, though she shouldn’t have.

  “I don’t understand her,” she told him, frustration darkening her voice as they said good-night. “I honestly didn’t think she could say no if we came all this way. But instead we’ve enjoyed a day of verbal abuse and inadvertent sightseeing.”

  “No, this whole thing was my idea, my problem, my mess, my...everything.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I’ll find another way, but it was worth a shot.” He said it as encouragingly as he could, but she looked skeptical.

  It was true though. Failed mission aside, as he lay in the guest room bed that night, replaying his day with Charlie, he couldn’t help but believe the trip had been worth it. If nothing else, he felt a thawing had begun with Charlie, which would hopefully make their work at Chamberlain smoother. He felt more than that, but that was something.

  Sarah didn’t bother to see them off the next morning. Their cab arrived before dawn for Heathrow, and Charlie knocked once more, this time sending a note under the door.

  Mistakes were made, but we’re trying to rectify them and are asking for your help. If you care about the Chamberlain and Grayson’s legacy as much as you claim, then come.

  xx,

  Charlie

  * * *

  It was late afternoon by the time they arrived back in Chamberlain. Nick parked outside the house on Avon and pulled Charlie’s duffel bag from the trunk of his dented ten-year-old Range Rover. He sensed a shift between them and wished they’d had more time away, wished they weren’t being thrown immediately back into the reality of a failing theater, dress rehearsals and opening night two days away. As she slung the bag over her shoulder, he racked his brain for the perfect goodbye that would encapsulate all of this.

  “I enjoyed our...” What would he call it? Excursion didn’t seem enough. “...our ‘bottle episode.’” He smiled, triumphant at this label. He liked that it recalled last night with the wine while also referring to an episode of a TV series that takes place with just a few of the main actors in a limited setting.

  Before she could answer, he nodded, climbed back in his SUV. She shut the car door, leaned in the open window. “It wasn’t really a bottle episode,” she said, coquettish enough while also needing to be right.

  “It was all in one location—London—” He was the one who had produced a (failed) sitcom after all.

  “True, but it wasn’t confined to one set.”

  “Though it included just a couple characters. Me. You. Us.” He couldn’t believe she was really challenging him on this. She was missing the entire point.

  “But a bottle episode’s purpose is actually to save money and our trip was, in fact, a tremendous expense.” She smiled at this, adding with the right self-deprecation, “Not that I should be reminding you of that.”

  “So in that case—” he smiled “—maybe you could just say, for instance, ‘I enjoyed it too.’ Or, ‘It wasn’t so bad.’”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” she said, but it sounded like more and he liked that.

  “Agreed,” he said, and with that she took the front steps two at a time and disappeared inside.

  29

  COME AT ME, BRUTUS

  Sierra was still on the phone when Ethan knocked on the door a full ten minutes early to collect her for their usual afternoon scene-running on the Quad.

  “I’ve gotta go, I’ll let you know if it’s assigned seating,” she said, opening the door while trying to hang up. “...I think it’s just, like, a general admission situation... Yes, there are chairs... You’re thinking of standing room, it’s not that... I will, it’s, like, two months away.”

  She looked at Ethan, embarrassed, mouthed, Sorry. He shook his head, not seeming to mind, glancing at the photos on her desk, which he always looked at.

  “I know, I’m excited too... Okay, love you too.” She hung up, exhaled.

  “So you do have a secret boyfriend,” he said.

  “My parents.” She rolled her eyes. “They already bought tickets for the Black Box show.”

  “I didn’t think those were even on sale yet—”

  “They’re not. But they begged the box office.”

  “Wow—”

  “Exactly,” she laughed. “And that’s all you need to know about my family. Thank God I’m not on the main stage or they would find a way to move here all summer.”

  “Not the worst problem to have,” he said, just wistful enough.

  “Sorry.” She felt bad, even though she knew he didn’t mean for her to.

  “Nah, it’s cool. It would just make me nervous, anyway, to have the whole family here or whatever.” He shrugged it off.

  “If it’s any consolation, they did harass me about my dissertation too, so that was annoying,” she said, hopeful.

  “Thank God,” he sighed in mock relief. He pulled out his copy of Julius Caesar. “Ready?”

  She grabbed her bag, and they set out to their usual shady spot on the Quad.

  “Rehearsal ended early? Two days before opening?” she asked. “Guess the understudies have it all under control.” Harlow had spoken endlessly about covering Charlie’s roles during the Romeo and Juliet rehearsals while she was in London for three days.

  “They’re fine but nothing special.” Ethan smiled. “Blunt and Charlie are back today supposedly. They’ll be at the dress rehearsal tonight. What do you
think that was all about, anyway? Kind of a crazy time for international travel, right?”

  Sierra just shrugged. “Who knows?” But she did. And she hated keeping this secret from Ethan. If the theater closed before the end of the season, there would be no agents or casting directors coming to see the apprentices, no potential to catch someone’s eye, launch a career. This place had to remain open long enough for that to happen. For their lives to begin. Hers, Ethan’s. Harlow’s. Everyone had a shot. But Sierra knew better than to say anything. Instead, she pivoted. “You have to tell me what the vibe is like tonight, with them back.”

  “I’ll tell you, but first you’ll have to kill me,” he joked, hopping to his feet, tossing his copy of Julius Caesar at her, which she caught. “Come at me, Brutus.”

  * * *

  Cameras rolling on the cozy set of Good Day, Boston—the first stop on the company’s media push the day before opening night of Romeo and Juliet—Charlie settled back between Chase and Matteo, attempting to project the necessary degree of sunshine for morning TV.

  If she was being honest with herself, Charlie was possibly a little bit nervous about opening night. About the show. About everything. Nick was still the only director who had ever actually fired her—even though her other two film directors had surely wanted to—for being too vocal/hostile/opinionated/insistent/reckless. She had needed to harden her shell again as they drove back into town yesterday, and as she reentered that house on Avon.

  Matteo had greeted her with a raised eyebrow. “How’d it go?” he’d asked, following her to her room. He was the only one who really knew the full financial mess that was the Chamberlain. Danica and Chase had been fed the same story as everyone else: Charlie went home for “family matters,” and Nick had a previously scheduled meeting about a postseason project. No one should’ve bought those stories, but they had.

  “Dame Sarah can’t be bothered to return this summer. She sends her deepest regrets,” Charlie had told Matteo in her mother’s posh accent.

  “No, I mean, how did it go?” he’d asked again, and she’d known he meant with Nick.

  “It was okay, could’ve been worse,” she’d said with a finality. Matteo had understood and nodded, polite enough not to ask more.

  She reviewed the past few days in her head as she sat beneath the hot lights of the TV studio. Charlie had forgotten how much she disliked this part of every project: the selling part. Luckily, Chase had taken over, charming the host, doing most of the talking, letting the rest of them smile and nod. But it couldn’t last forever.

  “And, Charlie, this must be quite a change of pace,” said the host, a perky blonde named Grace Garfield. “I’m sure many of our viewers are as familiar with your past films as they are with your movie theater—North End Cinema.” Charlie smiled, nodded, took a sip of water from her Good Day, Boston mug. “But before joining Chamberlain, you were involved in a horrific crash, here in Boston Harbor...”

  Charlie smiled again. After a long pause she asked, “Is that a question? Then, true.”

  “What has it been like recovering from that?” Grace leaned in, chin perched on her hand.

  “I’ve been incredibly successful at not talking about that,” Charlie said as her costars laughed nervously. She smiled, took another sip. “It was not the best night of my life.”

  “Would you say you’ve healed from that trauma?” Grace asked.

  “I would say, I don’t remember a lot of it.”

  “Fascinating. No memory?” she said, hooking on. “And you were more or less required to join the cast as a community service—”

  “You know what?” Matteo jumped in. “We’re glad she’s okay, of course, and also just happy to have her here, despite the circumstances. When you see her in the show you really—”

  “You had a famous relationship with Nicholas Blunt during his film version of The Tempest,” Grace went on.

  “Not so much during,” Charlie felt the need to clarify.

  “Well, even so, can we take this to mean you two are together again?”

  Charlie, still smiling politely at Grace, rose to her feet, unclipped the mic from her shirt collar and calmly yanked the entire battery pack up through her black satin blouse and out at the neck, like a magic trick where a colorful scarf is pulled endlessly from a hat. Finally, she dropped the whole mess on the floor and strolled off set, continuing right out of the building and down the street, summoning an Uber and taking herself to the next meeting, arriving early at a Boston magazine photo shoot.

  * * *

  Nick hadn’t planned to watch Good Day, Boston. He was in his office, avoiding everything he had so impressively pushed out of his mind in London. He had a lot to catch up on—emails, calls, inevitable new rejections—from the past sixty hours. And then there was tomorrow’s sold-out opening night to prepare for. He had comped tickets to potential investors and would be there pleasantly harassing them with his sales pitch. It felt not unlike what everyone on stage would be doing, except he would just be playing a version of himself rather than a Shakespearean character. He needed the show to be good, he needed the reviews to be good, he needed it all to feel exciting enough that these potential investors in attendance would feel desperate to be part of this world.

  When he stumbled onto Good Day, Boston’s website, streaming live, he knew from the host’s first question to Charlie that it would derail. But Charlie being Charlie always made for the most compelling viewing.

  Rehearsals for the play itself had actually been going not terribly. That frenetic energy and adrenaline had set in, as he remembered it could before a show run, all the performers clicking. Even Chase. He wouldn’t win awards—his body and words still plenty robotic—but he was passable, and truthfully, it was enough just having him here to be worth the chunk of the budget that went to securing him.

  Some duos were better than others: Chase was best as Juliet—which they renamed Julian—opposite Matteo. Danica had pleasantly surprised him, and when she played Juliet, she savored it like something precious and fleeting. Charlie could handle all of the parts, not just with skill and ease, but her wildfire. And while Nick would always prefer her as Juliet, he could agree that her Romeo—or Ramona, as they dubbed the character when she or Danica had the role—felt powerful and playful and free. Her Romeo made this old, weathered play almost shockingly new. Now, if it could just be enough to score some more hefty contributions. Weren’t people looking for tax write-offs anymore?

  * * *

  With the costumes gathered—white on white on white, jeans and T-shirts and blazers and tank tops and leggings and dresses to pop against the minimalist black on black on black sets—and ready to go in dressing rooms so far in advance, Sierra had been moonlighting: first painting sets, and now inspecting each of the five hundred seats in the theater for damage, repairing tears in fabric, removing egregious stains.

  She worked quietly, methodically and at a snail’s pace, finding it impossible not to be drawn into the show’s final dress rehearsal. Privy to the behind-the-scenes catastrophes—further swordplay injuries, major memorization fails (Chase had only just gone off-book four days before opening) and the sideshow fascination of Nicholas-and-Charlie’s ups and downs—Sierra had expected it to be, well, rocky. But instead it fizzed, all chemistry and magic. She couldn’t peel her eyes away.

  Ethan especially—she had found herself captivated when he was onstage. She forgot that he was someone she knew, someone she ran lines with in the Quad between rehearsals. That this was the same friend who joked about the terrible cafeteria food and never charged her for her iced tea at the pub and who liked to drop into her Black Box rehearsals to watch whenever he could. Which made her more nervous than she would ever admit, even though he only ever gave her the most glowing praise. Watching him now, she had another thought: if nothing came of this apprenticeship, professionally, she would at least be grateful for this friendsh
ip.

  30

  IT’S JUST SHAKESPEARE

  Charlie still had her earbuds in—an aggressive, pounding soundtrack, the kind of thing athletes listened to before winning gold medals in fast solo sports like downhill skiing—when she arrived backstage to preshow mania. Tech crew zipping around in their shadowy black apparel, talking into their headsets. Stage managers and apprentices all boundless nervous energy. Fellow castmates sequestered in dressing rooms; apprentices buzzing in the greenroom where a TV showed live feed of the stage, the audience just beginning to trickle in. And Nick, who appeared to have nothing better to do twenty minutes before opening than to pace outside the dressing room Charlie shared with Danica.

  “Almost showtime.” Charlie smiled, about to brush past him to go inside, determined to appear calm, as she usually was on an opening night or a shooting day. Today though, the pressure of returning to this world for the first time in so many years inspired a greater fear than she had expected. You could do something perfectly a thousand times rehearsing in an empty theater, but it was terrifyingly easy to fuck it all up in front of an audience. Even the gala had been more under her control. Here though, there were so many moving parts. Every time on stage felt new and uncertain, this is generally what she had always loved about theater.

  “Yeah, it is, thanks for joining us.” He folded his arms across his chest. She pulled out her earbuds, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear him. “Call time was, like, days ago. Maybe come a little earlier tomorrow, before they start dimming the lights.”

  “We’ll see.” She winked, earbuds back in, and sauntered into the dressing room.

  As soon as she shut the door, she closed her eyes, deep breath. Charlie took opening nights seriously, that was why she arrived when she did. She couldn’t get there a minute too soon. Too much time was poison for her. She needed to breeze in, hair done, makeup almost all on, throw on her costume, touch up her face and land on stage, all in one sweeping motion like an uninterrupted tracking shot. You wouldn’t catch her doing tai chi backstage two hours before showtime like Danica, who did this even for dress rehearsals. (The woman sat on a magenta ikat-patterned floor pillow in full costume now, meditating in a corner of their tight dressing room. She opened one eye briefly as Charlie entered. They exchanged respectful nods.)