Your Orlando. Something about the way she says that makes me feel like it won’t be mine for much longer.
“But the role of the understudy is not to bring his own interpretation to the part,” she continues. “It is to play the part as the actor you’re replacing played it. So in effect, you aren’t playing Orlando. You are playing Jeroen Gosslers playing Orlando.”
But Jeroen’s Orlando is all wrong, I want to say. It’s all machismo and prancing and no revealing; and without vulnerability, Rosalind wouldn’t love him, and if Rosalind doesn’t love him, why should the audience care? I want to say: Let me do this. Let me do it right this time.
But I don’t say any of that. And Petra just stares at me. Then, finally she asks: “Do you think you can manage that?”
Petra smiles again. How foolish of me—of all people—not to recognize her smile for what it was. “We can still cancel for this weekend,” she says, her voice soft, the threat clear. “Our star has had an accident. No one would fault us.”
Something given, something taken away. Does it always have to work like that?
The cast starts to drift back into the theater, the ten-minute break over, ready to get back to work, to make this happen. When they see me and Petra talking, they go quiet.
“Are we understood?” she asks, her voice so friendly it’s almost singsong.
I look at the cast again. I look at Petra. I nod. We’re understood.
Forty-five
When Linus releases us for the afternoon, I bolt for the door. “Willem,” Max calls.
“Willem,” Marina calls behind her.
I wave them off. I have to be fitted for my costume and then I have only a couple hours until Linus will meet me to go through my marks on the amphitheater stage. As for what Marina and Max have to say: if it’s compliments of my performance, so Jeroen-like even Petra was impressed, I don’t want to hear it. If it’s questions about why I’m playing it like this, when I played it so differently before, then I really don’t want to hear it.
“I have to go,” I tell them. “I’ll see you tonight.”
They look wounded, each in their own way. But I just walk away from them.
Back at the flat, I find W, Henk, and Broodje busy at work, pages of yellow pad on the coffee table. “That’s Femke in,” Broodje is saying. “Hey, it’s the star.”
Henk and W start to congratulate me. I just shake my head. “What’s all this?” I gesture to the project on the table.
“Your party,” W says.
“My party?”
“The one we’re throwing tonight,” Broodje says.
I sigh. I forgot all about that. “I don’t want a party.”
“What do you mean you don’t want a party?” Broodje asks. “You said it was okay.”
“Now it’s not. Cancel it.”
“Why? Aren’t you going on?”
“I’m going on.” I go into my room. “No party,” I call.
“Willy,” Broodje yells after me.
I slam the door, lie down on the bed. I close my eyes and try to sleep, but that’s not happening. I sit up and flip through one of Broodje’s copies of Voetbal International but that’s not happening either. I toss it back on my bookshelf. It lands next to a large manila envelope. The package of photos I unearthed from the attic last month.
I open the envelope, thumb through the pictures. I linger on the one of me and Yael and Bram from my eighteenth birthday. It’s like an ache, how much I miss them. How much I miss her. I’m so tired of missing things I don’t have.
I pick up the phone, not even calculating the time difference.
She answers straight away. And just like that time before, I’m at a loss for words. But not Yael. Not this time.