Max sighs and kicks her feet up onto the chair, daring a wordless reprimand from Petra and a follow-up telling off from Linus, or, as Max calls him, the Flunky.
Up on stage, Jeroen is arguing with the choreographer. “That’s not really working for me. It doesn’t feel authentic,” he says. Max rolls her eyes again but I sit up to listen. This happened about every other day during the blocking, Jeroen not “feeling” the movements and Petra changing them, but Jeroen not feeling the new blocking either, so most of the time, she changed it back. My script is a crosshatch of scribbles and erasures, a road map of Jeroen’s quest for authenticity.
Marina is sitting on the cement pilings on the stage next to Nikki, the actress playing Celia. They both look bored as they watch the fight choreography. For a second Marina catches my eye and we exchange a sympathetic smile.
“I saw that,” Max says.
“Saw what?”
“Marina. She wants you.”
“She doesn’t even know me.”
“That may be the case, but she was giving you f**k-me eyes at the bar last night.”
Every night after rehearsal, most of the cast goes to a bar around the corner. Because we are either provocative or masochistic, Max and I go along with them. Usually we wind up sitting at the long wooden bar on our own or at a table with Vincent. There never seems to be room at the big table for Max and me.
“She was not giving me f**k-me eyes.”
“She was giving one of us f**k-me eyes. I haven’t gotten any Sapphic vibes off her, though you never can tell with Dutch girls.”
I look at Marina. She’s laughing at something Nikki said, as Jeroen and the actor playing Charles the wrestler work some fake punches with the fight choreographer.
“Unless you don’t like girls,” Max continues, “but I’m not getting that vibe off you either.”
“I like girls just fine.”
“Then why do you leave the bar with me every night?”
“Are you not a girl?”
Max rolls her eyes. “I am sorry, Willem, but charming as you are, it’s not going to happen with us.”
I laugh and give Max a wet kiss on the cheek, which she wipes off, with excess drama. Up on stage, Jeroen attempts a false punch at Charles and stumbles over himself. Max claps. “Mind that gout,” she calls.
Petra swerves around, her sharp eyes full of disapproval. Max pretends to be absorbed in her script.
“Fuck running lines,” Max whispers when Petra’s attention is safely returned to the stage. “Let’s get drunk.”
That night, over drinks at the bar, Max asks me, “So why don’t you?”
“Why don’t I what?”
“Get off with a girl. If not Marina, one of the civilians at the bar.”
“Why don’t you?” I ask.
“Who’s to say I don’t?”
“You leave with me every night, Max.”
She sighs, a big deep sigh that seems a lot older than Max, who is only a year older than me. Which is why she doesn’t mind seat-warming, she says. My time will come. She makes a slash mark over her chest. “Broken heart,” she says. “Dykes take dog-years to heal.”
I nod.
“So what about you?” Max says. “Broken heart?”
At times, I’d thought it was something like that—after all, I’d never been quite so strung out about a girl. But it’s a funny thing because since that day with Lulu in Paris, I’ve reconnected with Broodje and the boys, I’ve visited my mother and have been talking to her again, and now I’m living with Uncle Daniel. And I’m acting. Okay, perhaps not acting, exactly. But not accidentally acting, either. And just in general, I’m better. Better than I’ve been since Bram died, and in some ways, better than I was even before that. No, Lulu didn’t break my heart. But I’m beginning to wonder if in some roundabout way, she fixed it.