I nod. “The first time I did Shakespeare, I did it in French.”
She turns to me. Her eyes are green, bright as autumn apples, and there’s a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “You did Shakespeare then? And in French?”
“Mostly in English, of course.”
“Oh, of course.” She pauses. “That’s pretty good for a not-serious actor.”
“I never said I was any good.”
She laughs. “Oh, I can tell you were good.”
“Really?”
“Yep. I have a Spidey-sense for these things.” She pulls out a package of gum, takes a stick, and offers me a piece. It tastes like talcum powder and coconuts and makes my still-churning stomach rebel a little bit more. I spit it out.
“Vile, right? Yet strangely addictive.” She pops a second piece. “So how in the world did a Dutchman wind up doing Shakespeare in French?”
“I was traveling. I was broke. I was in Lyon. I met this Shakespeare troupe called Guerrilla Will. They mostly performed in English but the director is a little . . . eccentric and she thought the way to one-up the other street performers was to do Shakespeare in the native language. She’d cobbled together a cast of French speakers to do Much Ado About Nothing in France, in French. But the guy who’d been playing Claudio ran off to be with some Norwegian guy he’d met; everyone was already doubling up parts so they just needed someone who could get by in French. And I could.”
“You’d never done Shakespeare before?”
“I’d never acted before. I’d been traveling with an acrobatic troupe. So when I tell you it was all by accident, I’m not kidding.”
“But you did other plays?”
“Yeah, Much Ado was a disaster but we ran it for four nights before Tor realized it. Then Guerrilla Will switched back to English and I stayed on. It was decent money.”
“Oh, you’re one of those. Doing Shakespeare just for the money,” she jokes. “You whore.”
I laugh.
“So what other plays did you do?”
“Romeo and Juliet, of course. A Midsummer’s Night Dream. All’s Well That Ends Well. Twelfth Night. All the crowd-pleasers.”
“I love Twelfth Night; we’re talking about doing that next year when we have time. We just closed a two-year off-Broadway run of Cymbeline and we’ve been touring it. Do you know it?”
“I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it.”
“It’s a lovely, funny, romantic play and there’s lots of music in it. At least the way we do it.”
“Us, too. We had a drum circle in our Twelfth Night.”
She glimpses at me sidelong as she keeps her eyes on the road. “Our Twelfth Night?”
“Theirs. Guerrilla Will’s.”
“Sounds like the whore fell in love with the john.”
“No. No falling in love,” I say.
“But you miss it?”
I shake my head. “I’ve moved on.”
“I see.” We’re quiet for a while. Then she says, “Do you do that a lot? Move on?”
“Maybe. But only because I travel a lot.”