Chapter One: Alice Chapter One ALICE FRIDAY Opening night and, as soon as they could get Leontes''s detachable sleeves Velcroed on--the adhesive tape was moist and mucky in the record June heat, not sticking to the tunic--the show would begin. The sun had risen each day that week angry and blinking, baking the asphalt. Alice, sweltering, was tucked away backstage, hidden in the narrow wings. Sadie had once observed that Alice''s favorite part of acting was disappearing. Alice couldn''t deny this was true. This may have been why she loved coming in with clean hair and knowing someone else would take care of the rest. She would be provided the exact words to speak, down to the punctuation, and directed where to stand. Told which shoes to wear to become queen of Sicily.
Alice liked to place herself in others'' hands. She liked how easy it was to slip into another life. And slip into another life she had. A year and a half ago, ditching the Bay Area--and her family, and her best friend--for Hollywood, to pursue stardust dreams she was scarcely sure she had. It had all started in second grade, when Alice had auditioned for the school play, Under the Sea , and landed a role! She''d played a cold-water sea urchin who lived in the Shallows, the underworld of King Neptune''s marvelous kingdom. It was considered an undesireable bit part. Alice couldn''t sit down or pee. All the classmates, mermaids and starfish, shunned the monstrous urchin.
Alice had one line she did not understand, about being turned into uni. Still, having been cast , in a role , to her, life could not be improved upon. Now, in L.A., things were more complicated. Staring down the nothing, the zero, the black hole, the unmanifest, the 100-percent-pure potential, the no-thing. Submitting headshots online, not even landing auditions. But Alice''s mind was peaceful.
She was inclined toward the world, and liked participating with it, even if that meant auditioning for a role and being rejected. She had what she realized so many actors lacked. She believed she had a right to be in the room. Evenings, she worked at the lustrous lobby restaurant of a radiantly white beachside luxury hotel, where $500 a night meant rattan everything, soft-grid cotton blankets in organic shades, and buckets of seashells under museum lighting. She worked downstairs, in the more casual, beach-level dining hall--Pico Boulevard sloped as it dropped to the shore. Elevators opened straight onto the dining room, out of which merry children poured with harassed nannies. The skinny silver flower vases were always tipping over, the paper teapot handle covers always slipping off. But the job supplied Alice with a chance to be her most refined self.
She switched on the waitress role, maintaining a straight face as she logged infants'' orders for Pellegrino, circling back to inquire apologetically whether Perrier would suffice. The nannies nodded, catching her eye. She was glad they did not know she, too, came from a modest dynasty. Though she didn''t need to, Alice always had a job, whether or not she was suited for them. During school, she had worked retail, at a boutique first, then a cruelty-free "skin hair and body formulations" shop, but had been rightly suspected by the manager of extending most patrons her employee discount after failing to ring up every fourth item. What could Alice say? She was a giver. It was just her nature. And last month, she had put her waitress role on hold to return to the sweltering East Bay for rehearsals and for the show tonight--to the Brackendale, a pocket-sized community playhouse.
The theater was in the basement of a large, underused movieplex--the kind that were vanishing everywhere, with the advent of streaming, on their last legs--elaborate with elevators. Audience members occasionally overheard a burst of volume, the action upstairs, giving the quieter live plays downstairs the feeling of a second-tier show. The theater was located, providentially, not ten minutes from the childhood home of her best friend, Sadie. And yet, stunningly, Sadie had bailed on attending, with the excuse of a prebooked trip with her boyfriend. Alice felt sure she was being punished. Sadie had never forgiven Alice for moving to L.A. "Doesn''t it bother you, to be a make-believe person?" she had inquired when Alice planned to pursue acting.
Los Angeles was a place where Sadie, with all her managing, counseling, and advocating, wasn''t. A place where Alice could reinvent herself. Not that she would. Just that she. could. Perhaps for the best Sadie wasn''t here. Tonight''s show was off to an unsound start--Archidamus''s microphone level was set to a higher input than Camillo''s, so his voice thundered and boomed. Alice was aware of the sound operator taking penitent notes beside her; he''d have to recalibrate the mics'' volumes.
Rehearsals were one thing, but it was different tonight, the proceedings activated by the presence of the audience. There were particulars Alice hadn''t noticed before. The curtains were cheaply made: by no means velvet, not even velour. The sound operator had been munching Pringles before showtime and the can stood upright on the audio monitor beneath the call-board. His breath smelled of sour cream and onion. It was so hot the windows of the theater could fold and melt. Pity the audience. Alice hoped they''d be able to forgive it.
"Pardon," a stagehand tech whispered, scooting past with a rack of polyester-fleece prop sheep. Every mistake that night counted; any extension of the show''s three-week run would be provisional. Truth be told, there were still eight or ten lines in the play that Alice did not understand. She did not have the Folger edition many of her castmates had fluffed up with sticky tags. The edition gave a synopsis of every scene. Alice did not want to look as if she needed footnotes to digest something so handily absorbed that the entire audience broke into merriment before Leontes was even through with the line. Why Alice didn''t just SparkNotes them she could not say. Hermione''s lines of dialogue were straightforward enough.
That was the benefit of playing an openhanded character. No machinations, no dissembling wordplay, no complex, conflicting motivations. Goodness was clear. Decency made sense. Alice readied herself, positioning her velvet bodice with voluminous sleeves tight over her jeans. If the small details were sound, the rest would follow. She tried to summon regality. At her cue, she took a steadying breath and her place at center stage, beside her wrathful, insecure, and tyrannical husband.
Hot, hot, the lights were. She felt her freckles flush. Her face, really: every inch was blanketed with them. Back one middle-school summer, at Fernwood summer camp, a hardy, indelicate girl--probably sensing the effect Alice had already even then over the male gender in general and specifically the one male she coveted--had accosted Alice in the dining hall, waving a napkin: "Oops. I thought you had mud on your face. I guess it''s just your freckles." Mean, mean, girls were mean. As a teenager Alice''s face had resolved into beauty--like a camera brought into focus.
And Alice''s fate was set. Her fate: to be exquisite. Alice knew it, couldn''t help knowing--even as she knew it would have benefited her not to know. An innocence impossible to retain when she saw the facts plastered across the face of every person whose eyes she met. A handful of lines later, Alice moved downstage left, to lay her hand on Polixenes''s elegant, ornamented arm, radiating heat under the embellishments. She squinted out at the shifting audience--only forty people, though it looked like an ocean. She was scanning for her best friend''s mother, who had come in her stead. Or who was supposed to have--though Alice had comped her ticket, she knew she was liable not to show.
As a renowned feminist, Celine was a woman who defined what women were. Gender was a construct, she alleged, smiling lopsidedly, daring someone to hold her to account. Bio-sex meant nothing. Simple as that. Alice was surprised that someone who wrote about women''s solidarity could have such a complicated relationship with her own daughter. Sadie had shrugged when first introducing Alice to her mother. "Sometimes moms have charisma and sometimes they don''t." Alice hadn''t known they could.
Tonight, Alice knew Celine would report back to Sadie. Sanford Meisner could be there, and his opinion would matter less. Alice stammered, "I had thought, sir, to have held my peace." But before her character could even get through her line, she was being hauled off for sins she had not committed. The play was a tragicomedy and Alice felt unsteadied by the shifts in tone, finding them difficult to track. "Away with her!" Leontes shouted, in the low growl he had cultivated over the prior week of rehearsals. He paused for audience reaction. The king, undone by his mania, exiles his one true ally: "To prison! He who shall speak for her is afar off guilty but that he speaks.
" This spoken more limply than in the prior four days of rehearsals, when he had still been full of freshly cast bravado, and before the heat wave had hit like an anvil. Alice was always surprised at the ease with which acting came to her. She did not want to be a movie star. Really, she didn''t. She just wanted to stretch her sense of self. She wanted to get to know other people, within the comfort of her own person. The only hiccup was that, as Alice understood it, genuine artistic expression required suffering. "Raise the stakes," Alice''s t.