The Bad Night

The opening was a Tuesday. Lena had been rehearsing for six weeks for a part that had been written for a woman of forty-five, a long, bitter monologue about a marriage she had stayed in past its death, and Lena had made the part young in a way that was either a disaster or a revelation, and nobody could agree which. Sal had printed a hundred and sixty flyers and posted them in the neighborhood. The Fig & Vine had sold eighty-one tickets, which was, by its own standards, a sellout.

Jace brought Whit. He had been resisting it for a month, and Lena had said, "Bring him. I want him to see. I want him to understand what you're choosing." So he brought Whit, and Whit brought two women Jace did not know, and they took the front row like a delegation from a country that had come to look at a colony.

Theo came late and stood at the back, against the wall, in the dark, where he could watch the audience watch the stage.

The play was called The Long Wife, and it was about a woman whose husband has left her for a younger woman and who spends the whole evening, in a single room, waiting for him to come back so she can tell him what she has decided. It was a small play, a one-act, the kind of thing that lives on stages the size of closets, and Lena had been working on the waiting scene for months, and Jace had watched her do it a dozen times in rehearsal, and it had never once been less than extraordinary.

That night, it was nothing.

He knew it in the first minute. She came on stage and the room was there, and she was not. She was there, and she was not in it — the shape of a person on the stage, with nobody inside the shape. She said the lines correctly, and the lines died in the air, and the audience, which had come primed to be moved, began to rustle, as audiences do when they are being asked to feel something that is not being made.

Jace watched from the third row, and the horror came up in him in stages. He had told Whit, had told the city, had told himself, that she was the best thing he had ever seen. And here she was, in front of the one audience that mattered, in front of Whit, in front of the women with the bored, expensive faces, doing the scene like a student who has not believed it.

The man on stage—a young actor who had been good in rehearsal, doing the thankless part of the ex-husband who appears for one beat near the end—said his line and looked at her, and she did not look back. She was looking out at the dark, at the place where Jace sat, and her face was the face of a girl who has forgotten the room and is only remembering that she is being watched by the man she loves, and the waiting scene, the scene that had stopped him on a sidewalk a month ago, had become a girl waiting for her boyfriend to approve of her.

The play limped to its end. The applause was polite, the way applause is when it has decided to be kind instead of true. The lights came up. Whit leaned over to one of the women and said something that made her laugh behind her hand, and Jace heard it, and the sound went into him like a sliver.

He went backstage. He was already deciding what he would say, and he knew it would be kind, and he knew it would be true, and he found her in the dressing room, a closet with a mirror ringed in bulbs, still in the costume, the dark dress of the long wife, sitting on the stool with her hands in her lap.

"You saw," she said.

"I saw."

"It was bad."

"It was—"

"It was bad, Jace. I know what it was. I've never done it that badly. Not even in front of Sal. I don't know what happened. I looked out and I saw you, and I thought, that's the man I love, and I—" She laughed, a small, broken sound. "I couldn't find her. I couldn't find the wife. I was just me, standing there, wanting you to be proud of me. I've never done that before. I've never been anyone but the woman on the stage. And tonight I was nobody, because I was in love."

He looked at her, and something in him had gone cold, and he heard Whit's voice in his head, the way he had heard it every night for a month, and the cold told him what to say.

"You were in love," he said. "That's the whole problem. Don't you understand what you've done? That woman—the long wife—she's real. She's been real for six weeks. And you threw her away because you were thinking about me. You're not an actress anymore, Lena. You're a girl with a crush, and a girl with a crush is the most common thing in the world. There are a thousand of you on every corner of this city. There's nothing in it. There's nothing in you."

Her face did a slow, terrible thing, the way a face does when the floor goes out from under it and it is still trying to stand.

"Jace—"

"I was wrong about you. I told everyone you were the best thing I'd ever seen. I brought Whit. I brought the whole city. And you—you gave it away. For me. You made yourself small for me, and I can't respect that. I can't love that. I loved the woman on the stage. The woman on the stage doesn't exist anymore. You killed her."

He said it all without raising his voice, and that was the worst of it, that it came out so easily, so smoothly, in Whit's cadence, a sentence he had been practicing for a month without knowing it.

"Please," she said. "Please don't. Jace, I love you. I love you more than I love the work. I didn't know that about myself. I didn't know I had that in me. It's you. It's all you. I would give up the stage for you. I would give up everything."

"Then you'd have nothing," he said, "and I'd have nothing, and we'd be two empty people in a room, which is the saddest thing there is."

He walked out. He did not look back. In the hallway, Sal was standing with a clipboard, and Sal looked at him with the round, ruined face of a man who has just watched a fire start, and Sal said nothing, and Jace walked past him, into the alley, into the rain, into the night.

He did not go home. He went to a bar in Echo Park and drank until the bar closed, and then he drove up into the hills and sat in his car above the city and watched the lights and felt the cold thing in him settle, and it felt like freedom. He told himself he had been right. He told himself she would thank him someday. He told himself everything Whit would have told him, in Whit's voice, and it all sounded true.

The call came at seven in the morning. He was asleep in the car, folded into the seat, and his phone went off, and it was Sal.

"Jace."

"Sal. I'm sorry about last night. I was—"

"Listen to me." Sal's voice was not the voice of a man who has come to collect an apology. It was the voice of a man who has been up all night. "She didn't come home. Edie called me at four. They found her an hour ago. In her room. She took a bottle of pills and a bottle of wine, Jace. She left a note. It says she's sorry. It says she's sorry she was nobody. It says—" Sal's voice broke, and came back. "It says she loves you."

The light in the car was gray and cold. The city below was coming up out of the dark, doing its morning. Jace sat in the driver's seat with the phone against his ear and heard the words and did not feel them. Sal was still talking, something about Edie, about the funeral, about not knowing what to say to a man who had been her whole world, and the words went in and did not land, and the phone grew warm in Jace's hand, and then, somewhere behind the words, the cold thing in him moved, and he felt a small, clear note of relief, and the relief was the worst thing he had ever felt in his life, worse than the news itself, and he sat there, in the gray morning, with the phone in his hand, and knew what he was.

He went to Theo's studio. He did not know why. He went up the stairs and through the loading door, and Theo was there, at the easel, and Theo looked at his face and knew, because Theo knew everything about him, and Theo said, "Jace. What happened?"

And Jace stood in the middle of the studio, in the smell of jasmine and turpentine, and said, "She's dead. Lena. She killed herself. Because of me. Because I told her she was nobody."

And then he looked at the painting, the finished painting on the easel, the young face in the amber light, and he stopped.

The face in the painting had changed.

It was not the same face. It was the same mouth, the same eyes, the same impossible youth—and there was a line around the mouth that had not been there on Friday, a tightening, a cruelty, a small, hard curl at the corner that was not Jace Marlowe, that had never been Jace Marlowe, that was the face of someone who had said what Jace had said in the dressing room last night and meant it.

Theo had not seen it. Theo was looking at Jace. "What's wrong? Jace, what's wrong?"

Jace took out his phone and photographed the painting, and looked at the photograph, and the cruelty was in the photograph too, the small, hard curl at the corner of the mouth, unchanged by the camera's indifference.

And Jace stood there, in the morning light, looking at the proof, and knew that the wish had been heard, and knew that the trade had been made, and knew, with a clarity that felt like the first real thought of his life, that he had just paid for everything he had ever wanted.