Booth One
Ivy
The swan dies at eleven forty every Friday, and every Friday he watches her do it.
I knew where he was before the spotlight found me. Booth One sat at the lip of the Larkspur’s stage, a horseshoe of oxblood velvet so close to the footlights that the man inside it could have reached out and closed his hand around my ankle. Nobody ever had. Nobody had ever sat in it the way he did, either, alone, in a plain black mask that covered him from hairline to the hard edge of his cheekbones, a glass of something amber going untouched at his elbow while the rest of the room got loud and drunk around him.
The Velvet Hour called Fridays Masquerade Night. Half the audience wore masks from the rack in the lobby, glitter and feathers and cheap satin that slid down their noses by the second act. His wasn’t from the rack. It was matte and close-fitted, the kind of thing that had been made for one face, and it turned him into a silhouette with a mouth.
Saint-Saëns rolled out of the house speakers, cello first, the way it had once rolled out of an orchestra pit when I was nineteen and wearing a tutu that cost more than my rent. I rose onto the balls of my feet in my heels. Old habit. My arms remembered the port de bras before I asked them to, wrists breaking soft, fingers trailing like feathers through warm air.
Then I did what the ballet never let me do.
I took the feathers off.
The black tutu went first, unhooked at the hip and stepped out of like a dropped shadow. Then the long gloves, one finger at a time, my teeth on the satin. The crowd hollered on cue. I barely heard them. The light was hot on my shoulders and I let it slide down my back as I turned, slowly, and peeled the bodice open on a long, aching note of cello, until I wore nothing but the black-feather pasties, the tiny matching briefs, and the swan’s last breath.
I sank to the boards. Folded. Died beautifully. My cheek against the stage, I let my eyes open just enough.
Booth One.
He hadn’t moved. He never applauded with his hands like everyone else. He just sat forward, forearms on his knees, and looked at me as if I’d done something that cost him.
The house went black. The applause hit like weather.
“Your fan’s back,” Dulce said, before I’d made it two steps into the dressing room.
She was at the long mirror in nothing but a robe and her stage lashes, wiping the kerosene smell of her fire act off her throat with a cotton pad. Dulce Moreno was thirty-one, swallowed flame for a living, and had the bedside manner of a customs officer.
“He’s not my fan,” I said. “He’s a man who likes a very specific bird.”
“He likes a very specific bird enough to buy Booth One every Friday for seven weeks. At Margo’s prices.” She tipped her head at my station. “Neil brought it in.”
There was a box on my counter, propped against my mirror like it belonged there.
Not a florist’s box. Not the grocery-store roses some of the regulars left at the stage door with their phone numbers rubber-banded around the stems. This one was flat and long, wrapped in heavy black paper, tied with a ribbon the color of dried blood. A cream card was tucked under the knot.
Seven weeks of this. The first Friday had been a single white feather in an envelope, long and perfect, the quill dipped in black ink. The second, a bottle of the arnica oil I’d used for every sore muscle of my life and had never once mentioned to anyone at the Larkspur. The third, a pair of opera-length gloves in silk so fine I’d been afraid to wear them. Each with a card. Each card with a few lines in square, deliberate black handwriting, no signature.
I sat. My thighs were still trembling from the floor work. I untied the ribbon.
“You’re smiling,” Dulce said.
“I’m not.”
“You’re smiling like a woman who’s been mailed a severed finger and likes the manicure.”
I laughed, because she wasn’t entirely wrong, and lifted the lid.
Inside, on a bed of black tissue, lay a fan. A real one, antique, ostrich plumes dyed the deep blue-black of a crow’s wing, the guard sticks lacquered tortoiseshell. When I opened it the feathers moved like something breathing. It smelled faintly of cedar and old theaters.
“Holy shit,” Dulce said, coming to look over my shoulder. “That’s a nineteen-twenties fan. That’s a Sally Rand fan.”
“It’s not a Sally Rand fan.”
“It’s somebody’s Sally Rand fan.” She whistled. “That’s four figures, mi amor. Maybe five.”
I set it down very carefully and opened the card.
You died differently tonight. You lingered on the left hand. As if you weren’t sure you wanted to go.
You were right not to be sure.
I’ve watched a great many people perform their own endings. You are the only one I’ve ever wanted to argue with.
My throat went tight in a way I didn’t have a name for. I read it again.
I had lingered on the left hand. Nobody had noticed. I hadn’t noticed, until I was down on the boards with my wrist curled over my face and something in me hadn’t wanted to give the last beat up yet. It had been a fraction of a count. Maybe two.
“Okay,” Dulce said, reading over my shoulder, “that’s either the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen or I need to call somebody’s mother.”
“He’s paying attention.”
“Ivy. Men who pay that much attention end up on podcasts.”
“It’s not like that.” I touched the edge of the card. “He’s never once tried to come back here. Never asked Neil for my number. Never waited by the stage door. He sits in the booth, he leaves a gift at the box office, he goes home. He’s the most polite obsession in the history of the city.”
“That’s how they get you. Polite.” But she said it softer, because she’d seen my face. Dulce had known me for two years, since the night I’d walked into Margo Sharpe’s audition with my hair still in a ballet bun and my hands shaking so hard I couldn’t undo my own wrap skirt. She knew what it had cost me to leave the company. She knew why. “Just keep the door locked, okay?”
“I always keep the door locked.”
As if to prove the point, someone knocked on it.
Neil Arden leaned in without waiting for an answer, the way he did. He ran the light board from the booth at the back of the house, a pale, pleasant man in his mid-thirties in a black hoodie, with a headset still slung around his neck and a habit of turning up wherever I happened to be. He’d been at the Larkspur longer than I had. He’d shown me where the breaker for the dressing-room heaters was my first week, and brought me coffee the second, and somewhere around the third I’d realized he was going to keep bringing it whether I drank it or not.
“Saw he sent another one,” he said. His eyes went to the fan on my counter, and lingered there, measuring. “Fancy.”
“Very,” I said.
“You want me to say something? Next time he leaves one at the box office?” He shrugged, easy, one shoulder. “Guys like that. Masks and presents. You never know what they want. I could tell him to back off. Nicely.”
“That’s sweet, Neil. I’m fine.”
“Just saying. I’m here late anyway. Somebody should look out for you.”
“Somebody is,” Dulce said, without turning around from the mirror. “Me. Out, Neil, she’s half naked.”
He laughed and held up his hands and went, and the door swung shut behind him. Dulce caught my eye in the glass and made a face, and I made one back, and we both let it go. Neil was harmless. Neil was a little lonely and a little much, and every theater I’d ever worked in had one.
I didn’t tell her the rest. That every Friday at eleven forty, when I lowered myself to the stage and opened my eyes on that black mask, the fear that should have been there wasn’t. What was there instead was warm and low and hungry. It felt like being seen by a thing that wanted me, and not by a thing that wanted me to hold still.
I’d spent fifteen years of my life holding still for people.
The next morning I met the man who owned the walls.
I didn’t mean to. I’d come in early because the stage-left fly rail had been groaning under my aerial hoop for a week, and Margo had sworn she’d get someone to look at it, and I didn’t trust Margo’s someones. The Larkspur in daylight was a different animal. The marquee lights were dead. The lobby smelled of carpet shampoo and last night’s champagne. Dust floated in the long shafts of sun that came through the high lobby windows, and the house beyond the doors was a dim red cave.
There was a man standing on my stage.
He was tall, broad through the shoulders in a charcoal overcoat that had been cut by someone who charged for the privilege, his back to the empty seats. He had one hand flat on the fly rail’s pin rail and his head tipped up toward the grid, toward the battens and the ropes and the iron counterweights hanging in the dark forty feet above, as if he were listening to them.
“We’re closed,” I said, from the aisle.
He didn’t startle. He turned his head and looked at me, and the first thing I noticed was that he had the stillest face I’d ever seen on a living person. Dark hair, cut close and going silver at the temples. A thin white scar that split his left eyebrow. Late thirties, maybe. Eyes so dark I couldn’t tell their color across the house. It wasn’t a cold face, exactly. It was a closed one. A door with the lock on the inside.
“I know,” he said. “I have keys.”
“Everyone who breaks in says that.”
Something happened at one corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The idea of one, considered and declined. “Gideon Black,” he said.
Oh.
Every dancer at the Velvet Hour knew that name the way sailors knew the names of storms. Black & Ashby Holdings owned the Larkspur and the whole block of Calloway Street around it, and nobody had ever seen the man who ran it. Margo got her lease renewals by courier. The rumors were that he lived in the top floor of the old Ashby Building across the alley like a dragon on a pile of deeds, that he’d testified against his own father in some ugly fraud trial a decade ago and never been photographed since, that he was going to sell the Larkspur to a developer and the developer was going to turn it into lofts with exposed brick and a cold-brew bar where my dressing room used to be.
“I’m Ivy,” I said. “I dance here.”
“I know that too.”
I came down the aisle anyway, because I wasn’t about to have this conversation shouting from row M. “Are you here to tell us to pack?”
“I’m here because your rail is failing.” He took his hand off it. “The lock on the third line is worn through. The rope is older than you. If someone flies anything heavy on it, it will let go.”
“Someone does,” I said. “Me. Twice a night.”
That made him look at me again. Properly, this time, from my sneakers up to my messy bun, and the look went on long enough that I felt it under my sweatshirt. Then he looked away, back at the grid, as if I’d been too bright to stare at.
“Then it will be fixed by Friday,” he said.
“Margo’s been trying to get it fixed for a month.”
“Margo has been trying to get it fixed through my property manager, who has been trying to get me to sell.” He said it flatly, a fact read off an invoice. “I’ve replaced my property manager.”
I stopped at the foot of the stage. He stood above me, the footlights dead between us, and I had a sudden, disorienting sense of the angle. This was what the booth saw. Me, looking up.
“So you’re not selling,” I said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re replacing a rope on a building you’re about to gut?”
“I’m replacing a rope,” he said, “because a woman flies on it.” He came down the stage steps, unhurried. Up close he smelled like cold air and wool and something under it, warm, cedar maybe. He stopped a careful arm’s length away and I had to tip my chin to keep his eyes. “The stage is the only honest room in the building, Ms. Laurent. I’m not in the habit of letting it kill people.”
He knew my last name. Of course he did. He owned the lease.
“That’s a very nice line,” I said. “Do you use it on all your tenants?”
“I don’t have conversations with my tenants.”
“You’re having one now.”
“Yes.” He looked at me a beat too long again. “That was a mistake.”
And he walked up the aisle, coat moving around his legs, and out through the lobby doors into the sun, and left me standing in front of my own stage with my pulse in my ears and absolutely no idea why.
The rail was fixed by Thursday. New rope, new lock, a man in coveralls who wouldn’t tell Margo who’d hired him. Margo, fifty-eight and suspicious of gifts on principle, walked the fly floor twice and came down looking like she’d found money in a coat she didn’t own.
“He’s either about to sell us,” she said, “or he’s in love with somebody.”
“Landlords don’t fall in love,” Dulce said. “They appreciate.”
I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about a woman flies on it, and how he’d said it like it was the reason for everything.
Friday came. The swan died at eleven forty. Booth One was full.
I lay on the boards with my cheek against the stage, and this time when I opened my eyes I looked straight at him. Not the half-lidded glance I’d allowed myself for seven weeks. I looked right into the dark eyeholes of the mask and held it, my breasts rising and falling under the feathers, sweat cooling at the small of my back, the whole room a roar I couldn’t hear.
He went very still.
The lights went out.
Neil brought it to my dressing room himself that night, held between two fingers like a playing card. “Box office,” he said. “No present this time. Guess he’s running out of ideas.” He waited, as if I might open it in front of him. I didn’t. After a moment he shrugged and left, and I listened to his footsteps all the way to the end of the corridor before I untied the ribbon.
It was a card, nothing else, folded once and tied with the same dried-blood ribbon.
You looked at me tonight.
I’ve been trying to decide whether that was an invitation or a warning. I think, with you, it might be both.
So I’ll ask you a question, and you may throw it away, and I will still be in the booth next Friday, and I will still not come one step closer than you want me.
What have you never asked anyone for?
I sat at my dressing table for a long time after the others had gone. Neil knocked again around one, the way he always did, and called through the door that he was locking up the box office and did I need anything. I said no. I heard his footsteps go off down the corridor toward the stage door, and the building settled around me with the sounds old theaters make at night. Steam knocking in the radiators. Wind in the fly loft. The ghost light out on the empty stage, humming on its pole.
I took a sheet of the Larkspur’s letterhead out of the drawer. I uncapped a pen.
I’d been asked a lot of questions in my life. What weight I was. Whether I was really committed. Whether I understood that a body like mine, by twenty-three, had started to become a distraction to the line. That one had come from the artistic director of the company I’d danced in since I was eight years old, in a white office with a white orchid on the desk, three weeks after I’d been promoted to soloist. A distraction. My hips. My chest. The way men in the audience looked. He’d said it like a diagnosis, kindly, and suggested I think about my future.
I’d thought about it. I’d walked out of that office and never put on pointe shoes again.
Nobody had ever asked me what I wanted. Not once. Not like it was a real question with a real answer someone intended to hear.
I wrote three words and crossed them out. Wrote them again.
Then I kept going, and I didn’t stop until the page was full and my face was hot and my hand ached, and I folded it into an envelope and wrote Booth One on the front, and before I could change my mind I walked it to the dark box office and left it under the brass bell where the gifts always came from.
What I’d written, at the top, before I’d lost my nerve and found it again, was this:
I want to be chased.
The Bridge Over the Alley
Gideon
My grandfather built the Larkspur in 1926 with bootleg money and a conviction that a city deserved one room where people agreed to lie to each other honestly. He also built the Ashby Building across the alley, and between the two, four stories up, a covered iron footbridge so he could walk from his office to the fly gallery without being seen by the people he owed.
I inherited the debts, the buildings, and the bridge. I’ve only ever had use for the bridge.
At one-fifteen on Saturday morning I crossed it in the dark. The iron rang softly under my shoes. Wind came through the gaps in the old glass and smelled of the river and wet brick. The door at the far end opened onto the Larkspur’s fly gallery, a narrow steel walkway forty feet above the stage, and from there I went down the ladder and along the back corridor to the box office the way I’d gone every Friday for eight weeks, with the black mask folded in my coat pocket and my heart doing something I didn’t approve of.
I’d stopped telling myself I came for the building.
The first night, I had. I’d come in September to decide whether to sell. A developer named Halvorsen had offered more than the Larkspur would earn in my lifetime, and my property manager had wanted his commission badly enough to stop maintaining the place in hopes it would make the decision for me. I’d sat in the back row of the balcony in the dark like any other ghost and watched the revue with the detachment of a man pricing furniture.
Then a woman in a black tutu had walked into the light and started to die.
I’ve thought about it a great deal since, the way you go back over an accident. I can tell you that the music was Saint-Saëns, that the light was a cold blue special out of the second electric, that she’d been trained for years by people who knew exactly what they were doing, because nobody’s arms move like that by accident. I can tell you that the striptease was the least of it. That when she took the feathers off, it was not the taking off that undid me. It was that she did it like a woman setting down something she’d been made to carry for too long.
And then she lay down on my grandfather’s stage and refused, for a fraction of a count, to stop breathing.
I did not sell the Larkspur. I bought Booth One for the following Friday, and the Friday after that, and the mask was an accident of the calendar. Fridays were Masquerade Night. Nobody looks twice at a masked man in a burlesque house. That’s what I told myself.
The truth was simpler and worse. I had not been looked at in a long time, and I had discovered I did not want her to look at Gideon Black. I wanted her to look at whatever sat in that booth, and decide for herself what it was.
The gifts were worse still. I knew it while I chose them. The arnica because I’d watched her favor her left calf in the second act. The gloves because she peeled hers off with her teeth and I wanted to know what she’d do with a pair worth wearing. The fan I didn’t choose at all. It had lain in a cedar box in my grandfather’s desk for ninety years, and it had belonged to a fan dancer named Lila Marsh, who’d worked the Larkspur in 1931 and married the man who owned it. My grandmother. She’d died before I was born. The only photograph of her I have shows a laughing woman with her chin lifted and her hands full of feathers, looking straight into the lens as if daring it to blink first.
I’d given a dead woman’s fan to a living one I’d never spoken to. If anyone had told me that about another man, I’d have advised him to see someone.
I’d have been right.
There was an envelope under the brass bell.
I stood in the dark box office with it in my hand and did not open it for a long moment. Booth One, in a quick, slanting hand, the ink pressed so hard it had dented the paper. It was thicker than a note. Several pages folded together.
I’d asked her the question expecting nothing. Hoping, if I’m honest, for nothing. A man who leaves gifts for a woman he’s never spoken to is already standing on a ledge, and I knew it. Nothing would have let me step back down.
I took it back across the bridge unopened. I poured a drink in my apartment and didn’t touch it. I sat in the chair by the window that faces the Larkspur’s dark marquee, and turned on the lamp, and read.
I want to be chased.
I’ve written that three times and crossed it out twice, so you’re getting the third one. Don’t make me regret it.
I danced from the time I was eight. You know that. You can tell, you’re the kind of man who can tell. What you can’t see from the booth is that the whole job, for fifteen years, was holding still. Holding a position while someone corrected it. Holding a smile while someone said my hips were a problem. Holding my breath through every lift so a man could put me where the choreographer wanted me and take me away again. I was very, very good at being put places.
I left because one day I realized I’d never once run. Not really. Not with my whole body, not away from anything, not toward anything. Every step was counted.
So here’s what I’ve never asked for, because every man I’ve ever dated would have laughed, or flinched, or liked it for the wrong reasons.
I want the lights off. I want to be somewhere big and dark and empty, somewhere I know so well I could find my way blind, and I want to run. I want to hear someone coming after me. Not slowly. Not politely. I want him to want me badly enough to hunt for me, and I want to fight when he catches me. I want to fight with everything I have, and I want him to be stronger than that, and I want to lose. On purpose. Because I chose to.
I want to be held down by someone who’s thought very hard about how.
I want him masked. I don’t know why. Yes, I do. Because then it isn’t about his face, or his name, or whether he’ll call. It’s about the wanting. Just that. Nothing else in the room.
I’ve never said any of this out loud. I’m not saying it now, technically. I’m writing it to a man whose face I’ve never seen, which is either the bravest or the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t tell which, and I’m going to put it under the bell before I can.
You asked. Nobody’s ever asked.
Your move.
Ivy.
I read it four times. The fourth time I had to set it down on the side table and stand up and walk to the window, because my hands were not steady and I wanted, very much, for them to be steady.
Across the alley, the Larkspur’s ghost light glowed through the high back windows of the stage house. One bulb in a wire cage on a pole, left burning all night on every empty stage in the world so nobody walks off the edge in the dark. Superstition says it’s for the ghosts, so they can perform when everyone’s gone.
I thought about her running through that building in the dark. Past the dead footlights. Up the stairs to the dressing rooms. Down through the trap room under the stage where my grandfather used to make showgirls rise out of the floor in a cloud of smoke. I knew every inch of it. I owned every inch of it.
I thought about catching her.
What moved through me then was not gentle. It was a hunger with teeth, and it had been circling for eight weeks, and her letter had opened the gate. I wanted her under me with her hair in her face, cursing me. I wanted to feel her fight. I wanted the moment she stopped fighting, not because she couldn’t anymore, but because she’d decided I’d earned it.
I wanted it so badly that I made myself sit back down and think about why I shouldn’t.
There were several reasons, and one of them was a lease.
I owned the floor she danced on. I signed the paper that kept the lights on over her head. If I walked out of the booth and into her life, I would be walking in with a weight she couldn’t see, and I knew enough about power to know it doesn’t stop weighing just because the man holding it promises to be careful. My father had promised to be careful with a great many people’s pensions.
The decent thing was to stop. Stop the gifts. Give up the booth. Let her think the masked man had lost interest, and let her find somebody who could walk into a room under his own name without owning the room.
I’ve done a great many decent things. I testified at twenty-nine against a man I loved because it was the decent thing. It cost me my family, the last of my good name, and any desire to be seen by strangers ever again.
I still remember the courthouse steps. My father had taught me to tie a tie on the morning of my first day at his firm, standing behind me in front of the hall mirror, his hands over mine. Seven years later I’d sat in a witness box in that same tie and explained to a jury, in a level voice, exactly how he’d moved four hundred retirees’ savings through three shell companies and into a house in the Caymans. He hadn’t looked at me once. My mother never spoke to me again. When I walked out afterward there were forty cameras at the bottom of the steps, and every one of them was pointed at my face, and I understood, the way you understand a burn, that I would never again be anything to anyone but the son who did that.
The paper ran the photograph above the fold. Son Testifies. My jaw set, my eyes on nothing. I looked, a columnist wrote, like a man who felt nothing at all.
I’d felt everything. I’d just learned, very young, where to put it.
I put it in the booth now. Every Friday at eleven forty.
I picked up my pen.
I wrote her back on Sunday night and left it under the bell on Monday at four in the morning, crossing the bridge in the dark like a thief in my own house.
Ivy.
Yes.
I’ll write the rest of this letter as carefully as I’ve ever written anything, because you deserve care and because what you’re asking for requires it. But I wanted you to have that first, before any of the rest, so you don’t spend a single line wondering. Yes. I’ll chase you. I’ve wanted to since before you asked, which you should know, and which you should weigh.
Not yet.
What you’ve described is a game where the rules have to be stronger than the hunger. Mine is considerable. So we build the rules first, here, on paper, where neither of us can be swept along by the dark. Answer these, and answer them honestly, and add anything I haven’t thought of.
What are the things you never want? Not the things you’re unsure of. The walls. I won’t go near them.
What are the things you might want, if they’re done right? Tell me what right looks like.
When you say fight, how hard? I’m a large man and I’ll be holding back. I need to know how much.
When you say no in the dark, will you mean it? I’d like you to be allowed to scream it and not have it count. If so, you’ll need another word. One that isn’t part of the game. One that ends the game instantly, no matter where we are, no matter what I’m doing, no matter how close. Choose it. I’ll learn it the way you learned your positions.
You’ll also need a way to stop me if your mouth is covered.
As for the mask.
I’ll wear it. Every time. I won’t take it off until you ask me to, and you never have to ask. If one day you do, I’ll take it off and tell you everything there is to tell, including the parts that will make you angry. You should know there are parts that will make you angry. I’m telling you now, because I won’t lie to you, not even by leaving things out, except for my face, and only because you asked for it.
Last. You wrote that this is either the bravest or stupidest thing you’ve ever done.
It’s the bravest. I’d stake the building on it.
Your move.
I didn’t sign it. I’d never signed any of them. I looked at the blank space at the bottom for a long time, and thought about writing the G, and didn’t.
She took four days.
I went to the bell every night and found nothing, and every morning I told myself this was the right outcome. She’d come to her senses. Somewhere between the yes and the not yet, the letter had become too real. Women who want to be chased in the abstract don’t always want a man who answers with a questionnaire. I’d been too much. I’m always too much, and then not enough, in the way that very controlled men are.
I worked. I took a call from Halvorsen’s lawyer and told him the building was not for sale at any price, and he laughed and said everything was for sale and I hung up. I walked the Larkspur’s roof with a structural engineer and paid him to tell me how much it would cost to make the stage house last another hundred years. I didn’t go to the window at night. I went twice.
On Wednesday the lighting tech, Neil Arden, stopped me in the alley.
I’d been coming out of the Ashby Building’s service door, in my own coat with my own face, and he was smoking by the Larkspur’s stage entrance in a black hoodie with the sleeves pushed up. Mid-thirties. Pale. Pleasant, in the way of a man who’s practiced being pleasant in mirrors. He’d worked the Larkspur’s board for three years. He was also, as far as I knew, the man who carried the gifts from the box office to her dressing room.
“Mr. Black,” he said, and straightened, flicking ash. “Didn’t know you came around.”
“Occasionally.”
“Hey, thanks for the rail. Everybody’s been talking about it.” He smiled. His eyes went to the Ashby Building behind me and up, to the fourth floor and the iron bridge, and back. “Margo thinks you’ve got a secret admirer in the cast.”
“Margo thinks a great many things.”
“Sure.” He laughed easily. “Hey, you know anything about the guy in Booth One? The mask? Ivy’s got this whole…” He made a vague gesture with the cigarette. “Thing going. Gifts. Notes. Kind of a lot, if you ask me. I keep an eye out for her. Somebody should.”
Something cold settled at the base of my skull. I’d had it before, in a courtroom, watching my father’s lawyer smile at a jury.
“I wasn’t aware anyone was asking you,” I said.
His smile stayed exactly where it was. “Just looking out.”
“Then look out for the rope locks. Third line’s new. Check it every show.” I walked past him to the car.
It was nothing. A man who liked to feel needed. I filed it in the place where I keep things that are probably nothing, and I didn’t think about it again until much later, when I would have given every brick on Calloway Street to have thought about it then.
Thursday, before dawn, there was an envelope under the bell.
It was thin. One sheet. I didn’t make it back across the bridge. I opened it right there in the dark box office with the street outside still black and wet and empty, holding it up to the red glow of the exit sign.
For one absurd second I looked for my own name at the top, as if she could have known it. She hadn’t written a name at all. She’d drawn a little sketch of a mask at the top, a black oval with two holes, and beside it, in that slanting, hard-pressed hand:
My word is curtain.
Everything else is on the other side of this page, and it’s long, and I mean all of it.
Read it. Then come tonight at midnight. Through whatever secret door you use, because I know you have one, nobody leaves that many gifts without a secret door.
The ghost light will be on.
I’ll be on the stage.
You’ll be in the house, and you’ll stay there until I say otherwise.
I turned the page over in the red light and began to read, and by the time I’d finished, the sky over the river had gone the color of a bruise, and I was standing very still in a dark room, holding a sheet of paper with both hands like it was the only thing keeping the floor where it belonged.
The Ghost Light
Ivy
At eleven fifty-two on Thursday night I stood alone on the Larkspur’s stage in a black leotard and a wrap skirt, barefoot, and tried to remember how to breathe like a professional.
The house was a pit of darkness. Eight hundred red velvet seats I couldn’t see, rising away into the black like the inside of a throat. Behind me the stage house went up and up into the fly loft, battens and borders and ropes hanging in a dark so deep it had weight. The only light in the whole building was the ghost light, a single bare bulb in its wire cage on a pole at center stage, throwing a small, yellow, shivering circle that reached about six feet in every direction and then gave up.
Inside that circle, me. Outside it, everything else.
I’d told Dulce I was meeting a guy from an app. She’d made me share my location and promise to text her every hour, and I’d promised, and I’d meant it, and the phone was on the stage-left prop table with the screen lit, where I could get to it in four running steps. I’d counted.
I’d written him everything.
It had taken me three nights and most of a bottle of wine, the last night stone-cold sober because I’d wanted him to know I meant it sober. I’d answered every question in his letter in order, neat as homework, and then I’d kept going past the edge of the page.
Never: my face. Don’t hit my face, don’t put your hands around my throat, not even lightly, not even as a joke. No marks anywhere my costumes don’t cover, which, you’ve seen my costumes, so mostly the backs of my thighs, and I don’t care how that sounds. No blood. No cameras, no recording, no one else, ever, not watching, not after. Don’t call me a whore. I don’t mind dirty, I mind that word.
Maybe, if it’s done right: your hand over my mouth. My wrists held. My hair. Your teeth, wherever you want them below the neckline. Being told I’m yours. Being told what you’re going to do to me while you do it. Right looks like you never once forgetting that I picked this.
How hard: hard. I’ve held a grand plié for two minutes while a man stood on my thigh. I’ve lifted male dancers on a bet. I’m going to kick and claw and I’m going to try to get away and I want you to have to work. If I win, I win, and you stop. I don’t think I’ll win. I don’t think I’ll want to.
Yes. I’ll say no in the dark. I’ll say stop. I’ll scream it. I want to be allowed to. None of it counts.
Curtain counts. Curtain ends it, wherever we are, whatever you’re doing.
For my mouth: I’ll hold the ribbon from the box. The red one. I’ll keep it in my fist the whole time. If I let go of it, if you feel it fall, you stop. Same as curtain.
I’ve attached my last test results, and I have an IUD, because if we’re doing this right we’re doing all of it right. I’d like yours.
And I want to meet you first. Not the chase. Just you. In the dark, in the mask. I want to hear your voice. If I don’t like it, I’ll tell you to leave, and you’ll leave, and you’ll never send me another feather, and I’ll be sad about it for exactly a week.
At the bottom I’d written: Twenty-six years old and finally asking. Don’t be boring.
The ghost light hummed. A radiator knocked somewhere back in the dressing rooms. My bare soles were cold against the boards and my heart was going like a moth against a window.
At eleven fifty-nine, a door opened at the very back of the house.
I didn’t see it. I heard it, the soft hush of the felt-lined lobby doors swinging and settling, and then nothing. No footsteps. The carpet in the aisles was thick. I strained into the dark, past the edge of the light, and the dark gave me back nothing at all.
“You’re early,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. The Larkspur’s acoustics were built for a time before microphones; I didn’t have to raise it. It went out over the empty seats and lived there.
“One minute early.” His voice came out of the black. Low. Unhurried. Somewhere around row F, maybe, or G, I couldn’t tell. Pitched just above a murmur, so that I had to hold very still to catch it. “I’ve been in the alley for twenty. I thought one minute was the most I could get away with.”
Something loosened in my chest. It was a good voice. That was the first thing. A voice like a hand on the small of your back, the kind that didn’t need to get loud because it had never once in its life not been listened to. Educated. Dry. A little rough at the bottom, like he didn’t use it much.
“Where are you?”
“Where you told me to be.”
“I told you the house. The house is big.”
“Then you’ll have to find me.”
“I’m not coming out of the light.”
“No,” he agreed. “Not tonight.”
I folded my arms, which was a mistake, because it told him I was nervous. I unfolded them, which told him I knew he’d noticed. Somewhere in the dark I swear I heard him breathe out, and it might have been a laugh.
“You read it,” I said. “All of it.”
“Eleven times.”
“That’s a strange number.”
“I stopped myself at eleven. It seemed unhealthy to go on.”
“And?”
A silence. Long enough that my stomach dropped.
“And I’ve never in my life been trusted with anything that frightened me more,” he said quietly. “Or that I wanted more. Those two things together. I don’t have much experience with that.”
I swallowed. “Did you bring yours? Your results?”
“They’re on the edge of the stage. Stage left. In the envelope.”
I hadn’t seen him put them there. I hadn’t heard him come anywhere near. I went, four running steps out to the very edge of the light and a little beyond, and found it propped against the dead footlight, a long cream envelope with a black ribbon. I tore it open and tilted it to the ghost light and read. Clean, all of it, dated last week. Beneath the lab sheet, a folded card in that square black hand.
You asked. I’ll always answer.
I put it in the waistband of my skirt, against my skin, and walked back to the center of the circle.
“How old are you?” I asked the dark.
“Thirty-nine.”
“That’s old.”
“Ancient,” he said gravely. “I’m told I creak.”
“What do I call you?”
“Whatever you like.”
“Your name would be a start.”
“It would.” A pause. “Not tonight.”
“Because I’d recognize it.”
He didn’t answer, which was an answer. A thrill ran down my spine so sharp it was almost unpleasant. Somebody I’d heard of, then. Somebody with a name that meant something. A politician. A judge. One of the bankers who came in on Margo’s private nights and tipped in hundreds.
“I could call you Booth,” I said.
“You could.”
“Mr. One.”
“Please don’t.”
That was a laugh. A real one, short, startled out of him, and it moved through the dark and through me and I felt my face go hot and stupid. I’d made him laugh. I wanted to do it again.
“Tell me why the mask,” I said. “The real reason. Not because I asked for it. You wore it before I asked.”
He was quiet for so long I thought he wouldn’t answer.
“Because once, a long time ago, I did something I had to do, and afterward everyone looked at me as though I were the thing I’d done,” he said finally. “I found I didn’t want you to see that man. I wanted you to see whatever was left when you took him away.”
“And what’s left?”
“I’ve been trying to find out. It’s mostly someone who likes watching you die.”
I breathed out. “That’s dark.”
“You asked for dark.”
“I asked for a lot of things.” I took a step toward the edge of the light. Not out of it. Just closer. “You never told me what you want. You asked me. You made me write it all down. Nobody asks you either, I bet.”
“No,” he said. “Nobody does.”
“So I’m asking.”
The silence went on so long that I heard the ghost light’s filament tick.
“I want to be the only one who sees you run,” he said at last. “Not the house. Not the booth. Not some man you’ll meet next year who’s lucky enough to hear about it. Me. I want to know what you look like when nobody’s counting.” His voice dropped. “I want to be the thing you’re running from, and the thing you’re running toward, and I want you to know the difference every second. That’s all. That’s the whole of it. I’ve thought of very little else since your letter, which you should also weigh.”
My mouth had gone dry. “That’s not all.”
“No,” he admitted. “But it’s all I’m willing to say from row G.”
“I asked for a chase.”
“Yes,” he said, and his voice had changed. Lower. A thread pulled tight. “And I’m sitting in the dark, seven rows from you, holding on to the arms of a seat because you told me to stay in the house. So I’d suggest you be very sure what you say next.”
The ghost light hummed. The whole building seemed to lean in.
I put my hands on the tie of my wrap skirt.
I didn’t take it off. I want to be clear about that, for my own pride. I’d spent two years taking things off on that stage and I could have done it with my eyes shut. That wasn’t what I wanted to give him.
I tightened it instead, and went up onto the balls of my bare feet, and danced.
No music. Only the hum and the radiator and my own breath. I gave him the swan the way I’d never given it to anyone in that theater. Not the burlesque one, with its hip-rolls and its feathers and its wink. The real one. The one I’d learned at nineteen, my arms going soft and boneless and broken, my bourrées so small and fast across the boards that I felt like I was floating on cold water. I hadn’t danced it properly in three years. My calves burned within a minute. I didn’t stop. I danced it right out to the edge of the ghost light, where my fingertips went into the dark and came back, and I sank down at last onto one knee, folding forward over my extended leg until my forehead nearly touched the boards, and let my left hand linger.
Then I let it go.
When I lifted my head the dark was silent.
Then, very quietly, a sound I didn’t expect. Something like leather. Something creaking. A seat, giving up a man who’d been gripping it too hard.
“Come up,” I said. I was out of breath. “You can come up.”
He came.
I heard him first, the soft fall of his shoes on the aisle carpet, unhurried, coming closer row by row. Then the stage stairs, stage right, the third one that always groaned. Then the boards. He stopped just outside the light.
I could see the edges of him. The shape of tall shoulders. The paleness of a white shirt collar under a dark coat. The faint shine of the mask, black on black, catching the bulb like the eye of something in a forest at night.
“Into the light,” I said.
He stepped into it.
He was bigger up close than he’d been in the booth, which made sense, and also didn’t, because I’d spent eight weeks looking at him and thought I knew the size of him. Dark coat, open over a white shirt with no tie. Hands bare, big, long-fingered, hanging very deliberately loose at his sides. The mask covered him from his hairline to the line of his cheekbones and down the bridge of his nose, and below it I finally saw the rest. A hard jaw, freshly shaved. A wide mouth set so tight it looked like it hurt. Dark hair, close cut. In the eyeholes, shadows. I couldn’t see his eyes at all.
He smelled like rain on wool. Like cold air and something warm underneath it, something woody and expensive. He was close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him.
“Hi,” I said, stupidly.
The corner of his mouth moved. “Hello, Ivy.”
My name in that voice. Something in my belly turned over and lay down.
“You’re not touching me,” I said.
“You haven’t said I could.”
“You want to.”
“I’ve wanted to for eight weeks,” he said. “I can want to for another eight.”
“Could you, though?”
He didn’t answer that. His hands, at his sides, curled very slowly into fists and opened again. I watched them do it. It did something to my knees.
I reached up. Slowly, so he could see it coming, because I wanted him to see it coming. I touched the edge of the mask, where it met his cheek. It was some kind of molded leather, warm from his skin. I traced it down, along the hard edge, to where it stopped and he began. His jaw was smooth under my fingertip. Hot. I felt it clench.
“Is this allowed?” I asked.
“You’re the one making the rules tonight.”
“Then it’s allowed.” I followed the line of his jaw to his chin. To the corner of his mouth. His breath went out of him against my fingers, unsteady, and for a man who’d been nothing but control from the moment the lobby doors opened, the unsteadiness went through me like a blade. “Do you know what you did to me? Leaving those cards. Knowing about my left hand. Nobody notices my left hand.”
“Everyone notices your left hand,” he said, very low. “They just don’t know what they’re seeing.”
I dragged my thumb across his bottom lip. He let me. His mouth was softer than it looked.
“Tell me to stop,” I whispered.
“No.”
“I mean it as a test.”
“I know what you mean.” His voice had gone to gravel. “No.”
So I came up onto my toes, the way I’d done ten thousand times for a partner’s lift, and set my mouth an inch from his. Not touching. Close enough that I could feel his breath against my lips and taste the warm bite of whatever he’d been drinking, something smoky. Close enough to feel him go absolutely rigid, the whole tall length of him, like a man standing on a ledge.
I held it. One count. Two. Three. My calves trembled.
“You said you’d come no closer than I wanted,” I breathed.
“I did.”
“I want you closer.”
He made a sound. Barely anything. The kind of sound a man makes when something gives way.
He still didn’t move. That was the thing that undid me, in the end. That he could have, that every line of him wanted to, and he stood there in my small circle of light with his fists at his sides and let me be the one.
I kissed him.
It was supposed to be soft. A test. A first page. It wasn’t. The moment my mouth touched his he breathed in hard through his nose and his mouth opened under mine and he kissed me back like a man who’d been starved and handed bread. Deep. Slow at first and then not slow at all. His hands stayed at his sides; I could feel them shaking there, could feel how much it cost him, and it made me wild. I fisted my hands in the lapels of his coat and dragged him down to me and licked into his mouth, and the sound he made that time was not small.
Somewhere above us, in the fly loft, a rope creaked in the draft. I didn’t care. I’d have let the whole grid come down.
When I finally broke away, we were both breathing like we’d run the length of the building. My lips stung. His jaw was wet where I’d been. In the dark eyeholes of the mask, I still couldn’t see his eyes, and somehow that made it worse, and better. I had no idea what his face was doing. I only had his mouth, and his breath, and his hands, still at his sides, opening and closing.
“Your turn,” I said, shakily.
“Ivy.”
“I’m not saying run. Not tonight. I’m saying you can touch me.”
He didn’t move. “Say what you want. Exactly. I’m not going to guess with you.”
My heart was trying to come out through my ribs. I looked at the ghost light, burning beside us on its pole. Every theater I’d ever worked in had one. You never turned it off. Never. The stagehands said it kept the ghosts happy and the living from falling into the pit.
I reached past him and switched it off.
The dark came down like velvet dropped from the grid. Total. Absolute. My eyes went wide and found nothing, no edges, no shapes, not even the red glow of the exit signs from where we stood, deep in the stage. Just the warm, enormous presence of him in front of me, and his breath, and my own heartbeat roaring in my ears.
“I know this stage blind,” I whispered. “Do you?”
“Every board of it.” His voice came from closer than I’d thought. “Turn around.”
I turned. Slowly. The skin on the back of my neck lit up, every nerve standing on end, waiting.
He didn’t touch me. Not yet. I felt him step in behind me, felt the heat of his chest a breath away from my shoulder blades, felt him bend his head, his breath stirring the loose hair at my nape. The leather of the mask brushed the shell of my ear, cool, and then his mouth, warm, not quite touching.
“Here is the only rule I’m adding tonight,” he murmured. “Every time I touch you, you’ll know it’s because you said I could. So say it. Tell me to go and I’ll walk down those stairs and out through the house and be in my booth on Friday like none of this happened.” His hands came to rest, finally, so lightly I almost didn’t feel them, on my hips. Just resting. The heat of them burned through the leotard like a brand. “Or tell me to stay.”
In the dark, I closed my eyes anyway.
“Stay,” I said.
