I’d landed heavily, in a puddle, rainwater sloshing around my feet. When I’d looked back up at the window, the white curtain flapping in the gusty breeze, I’d felt both sadness and relief, the oppositional tug of heaviness and lightness, one lifting me up, one pushing me down. I understood then, Lulu and I had started something, something I’d always wanted, but also something I was scared of getting. Something I wanted more of. And, also, something I wanted to get away from. The truth and its opposite.
I set off for the patisserie not quite knowing what to do, not quite knowing if I should go back, stay another day, but knowing if I did, it would break all this wide open. I bought the croissants, still not knowing what to do. And then I turned a corner and there were the skinheads. And in a twisted way, I was relieved: They would make the decision for me.
Except as soon as I woke up in that hospital, unable to remember Lulu, or her name, or where she was, but desperate to find her, I understood that it was the wrong decision.
“I was coming back,” I tell Kate. But there’s a razor of uncertainty in my voice, and it cuts my deception wide open.
“You know what I think, Willem?” Kate says, her voice gentle. “I think acting, that girl, it’s the same thing. You get close to something and you get spooked, so you find a way to distance yourself.”
In Paris, the moment when Lulu had made me feel the safest, when she had stood between me and the skinheads, when she had taken care of me, when she became my mountain girl, I’d almost sent her away. That moment, when we’d found safety, I’d looked at her, the determination burning in her eyes, the love already there, improbably after just one day. And I felt it all—the wanting and the needing—but also the fear because I’d seen what losing this kind of thing could do. I wanted to be protected by her love, and to be protected from it.
I didn’t understand then. Love is not something you protect. It’s something you risk.
“You know the irony about acting?” Kate muses. “We wear a thousand masks, are experts at concealment, but the one place it’s impossible to hide is on stage. So no wonder you’re freaked out. And Orlando, well now!”
She’s right, again. I know she is. Petra didn’t do anything today except give me an excuse to pull another runner. But the truth of it is I didn’t really want to pull a runner that day with Lulu. And I don’t want to pull one now, either.
“What’s the worst that happens if you do it your way tonight?” Kate asks.
“She fires me.” But if she does, it’ll be my action that decides it. Not my inaction. I start to smile. It’s tentative, but it’s real.
Kate matches mine with a big American version. “You know what I say: Go big or go home.”
I look at the boat; it’s quiet, but the garden is so lush and well-tended in a way that it never was with us. It is a home, not mine, but someone else’s now.
Go big or go home. I heard Kate say that before and didn’t quite get it. But I understand it now, though I think on this one, Kate has it wrong. Because for me, it’s not go big or go home. It’s go big and go home.
I need to do one to do the other.
Forty-eight
Backstage. It’s the usual craziness, only I feel strangely calm. Linus hustles me to the makeshift dressing room where I change out of my street clothes into Orlando’s clothes, hastily altered to fit me. I put on my makeup. I fold my clothes into the lockers behind the stage. My jeans, my shirt, Lulu’s watch. I hold it in my hand one second longer, feel the ticking vibrate against my palm, and then I put it in the locker.
Linus gathers us into a circle. There are vocal exercises. The musicians tune their guitars. Petra barks last-minute direction, about finding my light and keeping the focus and the other actors supporting me, and just doing my best. She is giving me a piercing, worried look.
Linus calls five minutes and puts on his headset, and Petra walks away. Max has come backstage for tonight’s performance and is sitting on a three-legged stool in the wings. She doesn’t say anything, but just looks at me and kisses two fingers and holds them up in the air. I kiss the same two on my hand and hold them up to her.
“Break a leg,” someone whispers in my ear. It’s Marina, come up behind me. Her arms quickly encircle me from behind as she kisses me somewhere between my ear and my neck. Max catches this and smirks.
“Places!” Linus calls. Petra is nowhere to be seen. She disappears before curtain and won’t reappear until the show is over. Vincent says she goes somewhere to pace, or smoke, or disembowel kittens.
Linus grabs my wrist. “Willem,” he says. I spin to look at him. He gives a small squeeze and nods. I nod back. “Musicians, go!” Linus commands into his headset.
>I stop. I turn around. It can’t be.
But it is. Kate.
“Jesus Christ, thank God!” she says, running up to me. “I’ve been calling you and there’s no answer and then I came over but your stupid bell doesn’t work. Why didn’t you pick up?”
It feels like I sent her that email a year ago. From a different world. I’m embarrassed by it now, to have asked her to come all this way. “I left it in the flat.”
“Good thing I saw your dog-walking neighbor and she said she thought you went this way. It’s like one of your little accidents.” She laughs. “It’s a day of them. Because your email came at the most serendipitous moment. David was intent on dragging me to the most hideous sounding avant-garde Medea in Berlin tonight and I was desperately trying to find an excuse not to go, and then this morning I got your email so I came here instead. And I was on the plane when I realized I had no idea where you were performing. And you didn’t answer your phone and I got a little panicky, so I thought I’d track you down. But now here we are and everything’s good.” She exaggeratedly wipes a hand across her brow. “Phew!”
“Phew,” I say weakly.
Kate’s radar goes up. “Or maybe not phew.”
“Perhaps not.”