Marina is sexy and gorgeous and smart. And she’s also wrong. Three weeks can make all the difference. I know that because one day can make all the difference.
“Yes,” I tell Marina. “They can.”
“Oh,” she says, sounding surprised, a little hurt. Then: “Are you with someone else?”
Tonight on that stage, it felt like I was. But that was a ghost. Shakespeare’s full of them. “No,” I tell her.
“Oh, I just saw you, with that woman. After the show. I wasn’t sure.”
Kate. The need to see her feels urgent. Because what I want is so clear to me now.
I excuse myself from Marina and poke through the flat, but there’s no sign of Kate. I go downstairs to see if the door is still propped open. It is. I bump into Mrs. Van der Meer again, out walking her dog. “Sorry about all the noise,” I tell her.
“It’s okay,” she says. She looks upstairs. “We used to have some wild parties here.”
>The musicians start to play. I take my place at the side of stage.
“Light cue one, go,” Linus says.
The lights go up. The audience hushes.
Linus: “Orlando, go!”
I hesitate a moment. Breathe, I hear Kate say. I take a breath.
My heart hammers in my head. Thud, thud, thud. I close my eyes and can hear the ticking of Lulu’s watch; it’s as if I’m still wearing it. I stop and listen to them both before I walk onto the stage.
And then time just stops. It is a year and a day. One hour and twenty-four. It is time, happening, all at once.
The last three years solidify into this one moment, into me, into Orlando. This bereft young man, missing a father, without a family, without a home. This Orlando, who happens upon this Rosalind. And even though these two have known each other only moments, they recognize something in each other.
“The little strength that I have, I would it were with you,” Rosalind says, cracking it all wide open.
Who takes care of you? Lulu asked, cracking me wide open.
“Wear this for me,” Marina says as Rosalind, handing me the prop chain from around her neck.
I’ll be your mountain girl and take care of you, Lulu said, moments before I took the watch from her wrist.
Time is passing. I know it must be. I enter the stage, I exit the stage. I make my cues, hit my marks. The sun dips across the sky and then dances toward the horizon and the stars come out, the floodlights go on, the crickets sing. I sense it happening as I drift above it somehow. I am only here, now. This moment. On this stage. I am Orlando, giving myself to Rosalind. And I am Willem, too, giving myself to Lulu, in a way that I should’ve done a year ago, but couldn’t.
“You should ask me what time o’ day: there’s no clock in the forest,” I say to my Rosalind.
You forget, time doesn’t exist anymore. You gave it to me, I said to my Lulu.
I feel the watch on my wrist that day in Paris; I hear it ticking in my head now. I can’t tell them apart, last year, this year. They are one and the same. Then is now. Now is then.
“I would not be cured, youth,” my Orlando tells Marina’s Rosalind.
“I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind,” Marina replies.
I’ll take care of you, Lulu promised.
“By my troth, and in good earnest, and so God mend me, and by all pretty oaths that are not dangerous,” Marina’s Rosalind says.
I escaped danger, Lulu said.
We both did. Something happened that day. It’s still happening. It’s happening up here on this stage. It was just one day and it’s been just one year. But maybe one day is enough. Maybe one hour is enough. Maybe time has nothing at all to do with it.