The Fig & Vine

The Fig & Vine was a theater the way a paper boat is a ship: it had the shape, and it had the intention, and it would never survive contact with the open water. It sat in a brick building on a downtown block that had been waiting twenty years for a renaissance that kept arriving next door. Eighty seats. A stage the width of a parking space. A sign out front that had been repainted so many times the letters had lost their edges.

Jace found it by accident, or said he did. He had been walking the block after a casting call that had gone nowhere, a room full of boys who all looked like him, and he had heard the sound coming out of a propped-open side door: one voice, carrying, doing something with a line that made him stop on the sidewalk the way you stop when you hear a song you know from another life.

He went in. He stood at the back, in the dark, and watched a girl on the empty stage, alone, in rehearsal clothes, doing a scene he did not know, a woman waiting for a man who was not coming, making the waiting into something you could see. She was small and fierce, with dark hair pulled back and a face that changed as she worked, and she did not see him, and he did not move, and when she finished, the silence in the room was the kind you don't fill with applause.

He came back the next night. He came back the night after that. He sat in the back row, and she did not know who he was, and he did not tell her, and he watched her for a week before he spoke to her, standing in the lobby afterward while she was folding chairs with two other actors and the house manager, a round man named Sal who did the books and the lights and the apologies.

"You're the guy who's been sitting in the back," she said. Not a question. She had a way of looking at you that made the sentence you were about to say feel already known.

"I'm Jace."

"I know who you are. I mean, I know you're the guy who's been sitting in the back. The other thing—" She waved a hand, dismissing his face, his magazine covers, everything. "The other thing doesn't mean anything in here. In here, you're either good on that stage or you're nobody, and you've never been on that stage, so you're nobody. That's the rule of the house. Sal will tell you."

"It's a good rule."

"It's the only rule. What are you doing here?"

He had not known, and then, standing in the lobby with the fluorescents buzzing and the smell of old velvet and dust, he knew. "I heard you," he said. "From the street. I heard you do the waiting scene, and I couldn't walk past it. I've never heard anything like it. I don't know what the play is, I don't know who wrote it, but I know that woman. I know her the way you know a relative."

Her name was Lena Cross, and she was twenty years old, and she had been acting since she could talk, and she believed in the theater with the ferocity of someone who had grown up in the back of one. Her mother had been a chorus-line dancer in the eighties, a woman of small fame and large grudges, who had married a stagehand, lost him to a heart attack when Lena was nine, and spent the years since working the box office at a house up the street and telling anyone who would listen that her daughter was going to be the thing she never got to be.

Her brother Owen was ten years older, a former Marine who trained boxers in a gym downtown and who looked at every man who came near his sister the way you look at a fire you haven't decided about yet. Jace met him once, in the gym, standing under a hanging bag while Owen worked a kid's mitts.

"You're the actor," Owen said.

"I'm Jace."

"I know who you are." He did not smile. "I've seen your face on a bus shelter. My sister says you've been coming to the theater. That's fine. The theater's fine. Just so you know—she's not like the girls you're used to. She's not a thing you get to try on."

"I know that."

"Do you?"

The bag swung. The kid on the mitts watched them both, breathing hard. Jace looked at Owen, at the scar on his forearm, at the flat, unimpressed eyes, and felt, for the first time in weeks, the absence of Whit's voice in his head, and was surprised to find that he could stand in that silence without falling.

"She's the best thing I've ever seen on a stage," Jace said. "And I don't want to try her on. I want to know her. That's all I want."

Owen studied him for a long moment. Then he said, "You know where the problem is, actor? You talk like a man who's practiced. My sister's the only person I've ever met who never practiced anything, and I can smell the difference."

They did not become friends. But Owen did not forbid him the theater, and that, in the currency of the family, was as good as a blessing.

Jace told Whit about her on a Thursday, at the canyon house, on the terrace, with the city doing its evening trick below them. "She's not like anyone," he said. "She doesn't care about any of it. The covers, the parties, the rooms. She cares about the work. She does this scene—a woman waiting for a man who's not coming—and you sit there and you can't breathe. I want to be good enough for her. I want to be the person she thinks I am."

Whit listened, swirling his drink, and when Jace finished, he said, "That's lovely. That's genuinely lovely, Jace. Now let me tell you what's going to happen. You're going to fall in love with her because she's the first person who's ever looked at you and seen a person instead of a product. That's not love, that's relief. And she's going to fall in love with you because you're the first person who's ever looked at her and seen a star. That's not love, that's hope. And it will be wonderful for exactly as long as it takes one of you to become what the other one saw."

"You're wrong."

"I'm never wrong. I'm just sometimes premature."

"She's going to be my wife."

Whit set down his glass and looked at him with an expression Jace could not read, something between pity and delight. "Then marry her. Marry her tomorrow. Marry her and buy her a theater and sit in the front row for the rest of your life, and be the man who gave up everything for the girl who didn't want any of it. It's the oldest story in the city, and it has exactly one ending, and you'll live it beautifully."

He leaned forward. The city burned behind him.

"But before you marry her," he said, "ask yourself one question. Ask yourself if you want her because she's the best thing you've ever seen, or because she's the only thing you've ever seen that didn't want anything from you. Because one of those is love, and the other is a mirror, and you've spent your whole life in front of mirrors, Jace. You'd know the difference."

Jace left the canyon house that night with the question in his head, and he took it to the theater with him, and he watched Lena do the waiting scene again, and the question did not survive the first act. She was not a mirror. She was the only real thing in the city, the only unpainted surface, and he loved her, and he told her so, standing in the alley behind the theater in the rain, and she looked at him with her steady, knowing eyes, and said, "Okay," and then, "I've known for a week. I've known since the first night you came back. I just wanted to see how long you'd take to catch up."

They were engaged by the end of the month, quietly, in a booth at a diner on Main Street, with Sal as the witness and a ring Jace had bought that morning and a rainstorm going by outside, and Lena laughed with her whole face, and Jace felt, for one clean, clear hour, that he had been wrong about everything, that Whit was wrong, that the city was wrong, that a person could just be loved and could just love back, without any of it costing anything.

He went to the studio to tell Theo, and Theo listened, and Theo's face did a complicated thing, and finally Theo said, "She's lucky, Jace."

"Am I not lucky too?"

"You're both lucky. That's the thing about being lucky—it never tells you what it's going to cost."

And out in the alley, in the rain, in the dark, on the other side of the wall from the lobby where Lena was laughing with Sal, a shadow had stood for a long time, listening, and had then walked away into the downpour, and it was Owen, and he had heard the whole thing, and he had not smiled once.