Harmony (22 page)

“She works in a costume shop,” Cris said. “She should be used to seeing people undress.”

“But, my dear, you do have to get extremely intimate to fit this particular garment. It’s nothing but a long strip of cloth, and it requires some, uh, manual adjustment to get it into place.”

“As it were,” said Micah.

Out of respect for Mark, I was trying not to laugh out loud. Marie was so bright and animated and a wonderful mimic, especially of Jorgen, the sour, self-pitying head of the Ark’s costume shop. He was good at his job, but nobody liked him much. Sarah was a SecondGen seamstress, and only seventeen.

“They could have left their jocks on,” remarked Jane.

“Moussa thought he could make it easier if he helped, but because he’s as naughty as my five-year-old, he couldn’t resist teasing her a little…” Marie writhed like a belly dancer, pitching her voice as low as she could to groan in comic ecstasy. “Then Pen got impatient and uppity like he does, and by the time Jorgen returned, poor Sarah was in tears and a terror with the pins and Jorgen finally had to send her home.”

The thought of Jorgen dampened Marie’s hilarity. She stirred her coffee, tapped the rim with her spoon. “Jorgen said later they ought to be thankful they’re in Harmony instead of back home in all that mess and why don’t they behave themselves? Now he’s pissed at me and Howie and the cast and starting to give me reasons why he can’t do this or that, and the stitchers still refuse to use machine seven and Jorgen blames that on the Eye as well.” Marie flopped back in her chair with a sigh. “What ever happened to professionalism?”

“They do seem to be a handful,” Micah conceded.

“They’re not so bad! They’re just…” Marie’s blousy sleeves and dark hair flew about her head. “Well, so we’re getting a lot of attitude! Most of the time they’re just trying to have fun! These people sit at the sewing tables all day and gossip and bitch about how bored they are, then when something new shows up, all they do is complain that it’s not what they imagined it would be!”

Mark broke his silence suddenly. “It’s just like clothing.”

All of us waited for him to continue.

His eyes were tired, half-lidded, and his full mouth tight from holding in his grief. But his voice was steady with conviction. “It’s a question of signals. Because we live in the same small world, us and the Eye and everyone, we share a set of surface signals—clothing, haircuts, expressions—but all these signals carry subtext, and subtext is very local. We didn’t grow up in the Eye’s subtext, so the signals get crossed. We misinterpret them. Because the surfaces are often familiar, we interpret some signals as if they were our own when they’re not, and some as different when really they’re just the same. People get uptight when they suspect they’re misreading someone. They feel ignorant. It makes them want to blame the other person.”

This was a big bite to chew on. Finally Micah shifted in his seat, nodding gravely. “Very well said, Mark.”

“Yeah,” Cris seconded softly. And since there was not much one could add after that, lunch ended then and there.

Songh’s glance followed Mark back to Marie’s studio. I decided he had found a new hero, one who might not give him as hard a time as Crispin always did.

Back at my drawing table, I said to myself,
Now, that’s the way a costume designer should think
. But was any talent worth sacrificing the less talented? Would keeping Bela on really have meant the eventual loss of both? How could such choices be weighed? The only thing I was sure of was I was grateful the decision wasn’t mine.

RUN-THROUGH:

What finally pushed Micah out of the studio was Sean calling up to complain. “Damn stage managers won’t give me the friggin’ model ‘til you and Howie have a little chat about it!”

But Howie wasn’t at rehearsal when we arrived, sweaty and irritable from the Friday matinee crowds. There was a basketball game going on. Not on the video feed. Right there in the room.

The hall shimmered with noise and pounding feet and a rainbow of racing, naked skin. Mali and Cu, stripped to their jeans, were teamed with Omea against Moussa the giant, young Pen, and Sam. Only the magician Sam wore shoes, I noticed. Omea’s flowing rehearsal skirt was hiked up around her thighs. Lucienne laughingly guarded a trash can at one end of the hall, and Tuli a smaller metal wastebasket at the other. Matching goalies, dark and light. Even the sultry siren Tua cheered like a tomboy from the sidelines.

Liz Godwin’s amiable calm was showing strain. She sat at the production table winding the ends of her red curls around her pencil and tapping her foot. The other stage managers pretended to be busy, even the assistant with the splinted ankle, fresh from his mysterious bicycle accident. Overhead, birds fluttered in the rafters.

Micah surveyed the chaos with bemused astonishment. “Did Howard give up and go home?” I was amazed myself. Serious, dignified Mali and maternal Omea scrambling around like adolescents?

“Howie,” replied Liz heavily, “is down at Town Hall, bailing out our choreographer.”

“Whatever for?”

Harmony’s jail was a block of small holding cells where inebriated tourists could sleep it off. To discourage its use as an impromptu hotel, bail was exorbitant.

Liz shut her eyes and took a ragged breath. “Security found Ule asleep in Founders’ Park this morning. Just lying there, right on the grass, happy as a clam.”

“And?”

“They arrested him, of course.”

I looked to Micah. “Is that a crime?”

He sucked his teeth uncomfortably. “There are vagrancy laws, I suppose.”

“He’s not a vagrant!” I recalled what Hickey had said. “He just hates sleeping indoors!”

“Indoors is where you’re supposed to sleep!” Liz shook her head, realizing how that sounded. “I mean, he should have known better. How’s this going to look for Howie and the Arkadie? They give you these big airs of spiritual superiority, then they go and do a thing like this.”

“He probably never thought—” I protested.

“Well, he should have!” she snapped, and immediately regretted it. “Look, it’s just, you know, the world is watching.”

The ball slipped through Pen’s damp fingers and careened toward us. Sam bounded after it, silent and agile as a cat. He snatched the ball away an inch from my head, then grinned at my defensive cringe, and spread his arms wide. “Ha!” For an instant, the ball vanished. Then he had it again and was whirling back to the game. His T-shirt, as he turned, lifted to reveal long, parallel scars across his lower back. Old scars, pale against his biscuit-colored skin, at least a dozen of them. I stared after him.

“And then,” Liz was saying, “there’s this charming little thing.”

She grabbed a fold of paper and flipped it open in front of us. An e-mail printout, without identifying lettercode or signature.

“ ‘Citizens of Harmony,’ ” Micah read, “ ‘the door is open. Do you know who your neighbors are?’ ”

“What is that?” My vehemence surprised even me.

Micah eyed me curiously. “It was in the public-message board this morning.”

Liz said, “It was also taped to the front door of the Arkadie, and to the door here, and not to any other door I know of.”

“Howie’s street artist?” I offered brightly, wishing I’d never heard of the Closed Door League. “Trying out a new medium.”

“Yeah? So why is he picking on us?” She stuffed the paper away in her notebook. “Don’t tell them.”

“Them?”

She nodded toward the basketball players. “Howie doesn’t want them upset by stuff that doesn’t concern them. They’re distracted enough by what’s going on back home.”

A rolling clatter rocked the hall as Pen darted beneath Cu’s guarding arm and dunked the ball into the wastebasket. Cu was dancer-graceful but too controlled to match Pen’s loose, aggressive style. Tuli clapped her hands to her eyes and squealed with laughter. The wastebasket toppled and rattled off into a corner. Pen hooted and strutted. Cu scowled. He sent Tuli a rude gesture, which only made her laugh harder. Noting her lean bare arms, I began to doubt my memory of that first rehearsal day. Was it Tuli who’d been wearing the sling? Certainly no sign of injury now.

Mali trotted after wastebasket and ball. “Ho, Cu, you gotta watch out for these little guys!”

Pen tossed a punch at his ear as he passed. Mali ducked and swerved, laughing. Pen swore and bolted after him to swing at him again.

“Yah, bro!” Mali danced out of the younger man’s reach. The troupe’s pensive elder statesman was transformed into a grinning maniac. He whirled and sprinted away to scoop up the ball, then dribbled it a few times in Pen’s direction, tempting him to swing again. Tuli scrambled to restore her wastebasket. Cu moved in to cover. In the center of the hall, Omea leaped and yelled for the ball, while big Moussa and solid, compact Sam waited like a wall of dark and light behind her. A flock of small birds landed in a line on the overhead crossbeam, watching.

Mali sighted on Omea and stretched his long, flat-muscled arm to throw, the ball balanced on his palm. He hesitated, then pivoted, and lobbed the ball in a high, gliding arc toward the front entrance.

All eyes followed this sudden change of trajectory. The ball hit the floor once and bounded straight into No-Mulelatu’s hands as he jogged through the doorway.

He was barefoot in ragged cutoffs. A knitted wool cap perched on his braided hair. His plain white shirt hung open to his chest, the long shirttails flapping. Small wonder Security took him for a vagrant. On a thong around his neck, he wore a dark, carved bead just like mine. The one I still wasn’t wearing around the Eye.

The little choreographer caught Mali’s throw without breaking stride. He bounced the ball twice, let out a high-pitched yodel, and charged into the game. The others cheered in welcome.

I scolded myself for easy credulity, but it was hard not to see prescience in the perfect timing of Mali’s throw.

Howie halted in the doorway. “What is this, recess?” he growled at Liz. “Are we doing a run-through today or not?”

She look back at him helplessly. I thought she might cry, but she caught herself and produced a stony grin. “Just letting the children run off a little steam.”

Across the hall, the game wound down into a muttering huddle as Ule spun the tale of his arrest. Howie turned on Micah instead. “Well. You picked a fine time to show up!”

“What’s a better time?” inquired Micah mildly.

“Forget it. I should be glad you’ve spared us a small moment from all that other shit you’ve got going.” Howie moved away. “Liz, try and establish a little order here, will you? Micah, let’s get this over with.”

The model waited in exile against the wall. Howie loomed over it like a thunderhead. “I’m having a real problem here with the scenes inside the Mission and the public bar.” His big hands chopped at the interior space like knife blades. “I’m losing all the intimacy out here in the open, and there’s all this business that has to get done and no goddamn place to put anything!”

Micah peered into the model speculatively. I stood back.

“I need something,” Howie went on, “like a wall that comes in.”

“A wall?”

“With a door in it, so I can get these entrances working right.”

“A real wall with a real door?”

Howie shoved past the warning in Micah’s voice. “And some shelves or cabinets to put all the props in. We’ll fly it in. Shouldn’t be too hard for Sean to work out.”

“Not for Sean, no.”

“Okay. And we’re gonna need some kind of little hut…”

Only the shadow moving along the floor alerted me to Mali’s arrival. He was damp from his exertions. He stood silently at my shoulder, observing, surrounding me with his clean, earthy smell.

“… out here for the scenes in the village.”

“Howard, whoa.”

“What is it?”

Micah kept his tone admirably neutral. “I’m concerned about breaking style here, Howard, about jarring the viewers’ expectations where we might not want to. If we drop a realistic wall into this imagistic environment, it’ll look like it fell in from another play.”

“So make it look like it belongs. What’s the problem?”

“Howard, don’t you think the whole idea of a realistic wall might be contrary to the style we’ve worked so hard to establish?”

“All the style in the world’s not gonna help me if there’s no place for my actors to play the damn scenes!”

Howie in extremis, Micah would say later, with simultaneous exasperation and compassion. But just because Howie’d had a rough morning at the jail didn’t mean he was allowed to take it out on his scenographer, on his friend.

Micah placated. “Let me look at it. See what I can come up with.”

I wanted to yell,
It’s not the set’s fault if you can’t make the play work!
I may have even taken a breath or opened my mouth. A light touch on my arm restrained me. Mali. His fingers were there and then they weren’t, and my angry impulse passed. Saved again. I’d slipped him a glance of gratitude before it occurred to me to be amazed that he’d read a virtual stranger so effortlessly and so well.

Howie stood rigid, as if boxed into a man-sized cubicle. “If you’d been around a bit more and had some sense of how the piece is shaping up, you might understand my problem.”

Micah nodded. “You’re having a run-through? I’ll stick around.”

Howie noticed Mali beside me. He cranked out a smile that would have shattered if you’d dropped it. “Just working out a few set details.” He gave a stingy bit of the smile to Micah. “’Course we don’t have to worry ’cause this guy Mali can make anything work, anywhere, anytime. We should have whole companies of this guy!”

He moved past Micah and looped a bearpaw arm around Mali’s stooping shoulders. “What do ya say,
bro?
Shall we get to work?”

And I hated him for the false ring of it on his tongue.

* * *

So we stayed for the run-through, and it was your typical halting second-week effort. It had been three years since the original production and the piece had been rewritten so much they might as well have been starting from scratch. But for Micah and me, the script that had been mere words on a page and the troupe that had been a faceless exotic import at last became individual performers in a living event.