Cue the Dead Guy. H. Mel Malton
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say to you?” said a voice in my ear. I turned to find Jason McMaster, the stage manager, gazing intensely at Amber’s retreating form. He was dressed in stage-crew black, the uniform of stage managers everywhere, and carried an arm-load of audio cable. Black was not his colour. I swallowed my preferred response, which would have been to raise an eyebrow and say in a chilly voice: “You are her keeper, yes?”
“Excuse me?” I said, instead.
“What did she say to you?” he repeated.
“She introduced herself,” I said. “Does she need your permission for that?” Jason and I had enjoyed a couple of run-ins already and weren’t destined to become bosom buddies.
He shook himself like a wet whippet and glared at me. “Of course not. It’s just that she seems to be avoiding me, and I can’t figure out why.”
“I think she just wants to meet everyone,” I said, carefully. I could at least make an effort to be friendly, I figured. “You know her, I take it?” I had known Jason for less than a week. He came up in advance of the cast, as per his Equity contract, to do the stage-manager’s organizational thing. He was originally from Kuskawa and a graduate of the Laingford High drama club. I’d heard that he’d been through the theatre tech program at Kingsway Theatre School in Toronto, and he took his job seriously.
He’d never mentioned a connection with any of the cast-members.
“Amber’s my fiancée,” he said.
Two
MOTHER: You’ll meet with strangers on the path, take care / Be wary, but polite, and comb your hair.
-The Glass Flute, Scene ii
Jason’s eyes started flickering around the room. He’d lost sight of Amber, and he was panicking.
“Have you been engaged for long?” I said.
Jason looked at his watch. “Three and a half hours,” he said, then grinned. “And six minutes.” The smile perked up his face, lending it a kind of basset-hound sweetness. I’d never seen him smile before. He usually looked as if a timber wolf had just bitten his butt. The smile was the first warm moment we had shared.
I grinned back. “Congratulations,” I said. “You work fast.”
His face immediately soured. “We’ve been going out for three years,” he said. “Both of us getting this contract was a fluke, and it speeded things up, that’s all.”
“I was kidding,” I said, backtracking. Golly. Touchy. “Well, congratulations, Jason. Why don’t you let me buy you a drink?”
“I’m working,” Jason said. “Setting up the rehearsal space for tomorrow.”
“Oh, relax. Take a minute to celebrate. You don’t get engaged every day. One drink isn’t going to hurt.” He thought about it, shrugged and followed me over to the bar.
Sam Ruttles, the theatre accountant, was in charge of the drinks. Short and bald, with a horrible taste for practical jokes, Sam was known as the Don Juan of Sikwan. Women were drawn to him like flies to a Vapona strip, for reasons which they thankfully kept to themselves. He was surrounded by his usual harem, which included Rico, who gave me the thumbs-up sign. That meant that Sam hadn’t recognized him, I supposed.
“Scotch on the rocks, please, Sam. And something for my friend Jason, here, who has just gotten engaged.”
“What would you want to get engaged for, Jase?” Sam said, grabbing a bottle of generic Liquor Control Board of Ontario mystery scotch. “Marriage takes all the fun out of it.” He handed me my drink—a quarter inch of pale yellow liquid with too much ice. Jason asked for a beer, which was wise, because Sam couldn’t be stingy with that.
“We’re engaged because we’re in love,” Jason said, simply. All Sam’s ladies said “Awww,” including Rico.
“Love’ll get you through the first month, tops,” Sam said. “I should know. Been married six times.”
“He’s the only guy I know who owns his own tux,” I said. We all looked at Sam. He was wearing it.
“What are you dressed as, Sam? The robber bridegroom?”
“No, Polly,” Sam said, “just a wicked bachelor.” He made a lunge at Rico, who swooped away, shrieking. I chuckled. Sam would just poo when he found out.
Jason took his beer and audio cables and melted away. I winked at Rico and moved off into the crowd. Listening to Jason talking about Amber had reminded me that I was very single, with no prospects on the horizon.
My last affair, back in the fall, had ended miserably. I had lived in the District of Kuskawa for almost four years, and all I had to show for it in the relationship department was a failed flirtation with one of Kuskawa’s finest, an Ontario Provincial Police officer called Mark Becker. We had been overcome by a roaring chemical attraction, which turned into one admittedly wonderful date, which turned into chaos after I offered him a post-coital joint. We hadn’t spoken much since, other than to exchange polite greetings in town.
One night of passion in the last forty-eight months. I think I had the right to be a little depressed.
“Why the long face?” It was Tobin Boone, the technical director, with whom I’d been working for the past four weeks in the shop downstairs. Nice guy. Very married.
“Oh, you know, Tobin. The kissy-face thing. Singlehood. Jason just got engaged.”
“Oh yeah, I’d heard that. Guy plays close to the chest, eh?” Tobin said. “But you, Polly? You don’t strike me as the marrying type.” He flashed his pearly-whites at me. Tobin was dressed up as a black-face minstrel, white gloves and all. He’s black to begin with, so it was okay.
“I’m not,” I said. “Maybe I should make more of an effort, though. I could take lessons from our fearless leader.” We both glanced over at Juliet, who was flirting madly with Jason. The young stage manager looked annoyed and defensive.
“She should know better than to hit on the kid,” Tobin said. “We’ll be dealing with a sexual harassment suit before you know it.”
“Why is he setting up the rehearsal space now?” I asked.
“He said he wanted to. I swear, I’ve never met a more obsessive SM in my life,” Tobin said. “Never quits.”
Jason was handsome in a petulant, underfed way. He had a flop of dark hair that fell romantically over his brow, and he was always flicking it back impatiently. I had vowed a week earlier to tie him down and hack it off with a pair of shop scissors. Tobin had promised to help.
In the theatre, there’s a long-standing tradition that all stage crew people wear black. The idea is that if you wear black, you can’t be easily seen onstage or in the wings as you go about your job. Most of the stage managers I’ve known have a wardrobe almost entirely made up of black stuff. Jason was no exception, but he took it to extremes. Every time I’d seen him, he was wearing the same trademark black leather vest, with multiple pockets for notebook, keys, pens and tiny flashlight, the tools of the trade. He wore black boots, black socks and black T-shirts. It was likely he wore black underwear as well. The vest clanked and jingled when he walked, and I would bet he wore it to bed. The vest was his authority, and without it, he’d be diminished.
He was the kind of stage manager that we used to call a stage-mangler when I was in the touring biz—the officious kind who gave everybody folders at the first rehearsal, with schedules and contact sheets with everybody’s home phone number on them. He would read the company rules aloud and make sure everybody had a copy. He would call Equity coffee breaks in the middle of an important moment in a rehearsal, then get huffy if the actors said they wanted to continue to the end of a scene. He would be a pain—well, he already was. He had already been in my face downstairs in the shop, criticizing my work, which is why, as I said, we weren’t destined for lifelong friendship.