Page 89 of Playworld
“Well, crikey,” he said, positively amused, “it means we’ll see you on detention this Saturday.”
Amanda could not stop laughing when I told her. We were at the garret apartment, and while she laughed, she pulled me close and cupped her hand to my ear, since Suzy was within earshot, and her touch sent a shiver straight to my soles. “It means,” she whispered, “get an erection.”
I blushed, and Amanda smiled. She adjusted her position so that she could lie on her side and place her ear on my lap. “This is nice,” she said. She curled into me. Her face relaxed. “Do you ever realize how tired you are all the time?”
I did, and I let my hand come to rest on her hip. The window unit hummed. It was Anthony Quinn week onThe 4:30 Movie.They were showingThe Guns of Navarone.We were at the part when David Niven discovers his timers and fuses have been sabotaged and that there’s a traitor on their commando team. “This is a great scene,” I said to Amanda and Suzy, who was stretched out on the floor and looked at me, exasperated.
“You always do that at the good parts,” she said.
Thiswasa good part, I thought, what with Amanda all to myself and my palm at rest atop her skirt. Because Suzy was near us, because I was afraid to move an inch, the actors’ voices sounded especially distinct and loud.
So what does she do?Niven says.She disappears into the bedroom, to change her clothes. And to leave a little note. And then she takes us to the wedding party, where we’re caught like rats in a trap because we can’t get to our guns. But even if we can it means slaughtering half the population of Mandrakos.
Amanda, drifting off, said, “Tell me what’s happening.”
As best I could, I tried to catch her up. The war hanging in the balance. The Axis’s plan to wipe out thousands of marooned soldiers. The elite team of commandos on a desperate mission to blow up the Germans’ top secret weapon, a pair of long-range guns housed in an impregnable mountain. And now a spy in the team’s midst.
She said, “It sounds exciting.”
“My parents went on their honeymoon with Anthony Quinn,” I said.
“So cool,” Amanda murmured.
“My dad was his voice coach.”
Did I think Dad’s adjacency to stardom might confer on me a sort of glamour in Amanda’s eyes—as if it might function as a sort of spotlight that revealed me, standing on her stage? I’d been in a Hornbeam picture, after all. Why did I need the assistance?
Softly, Amanda said, “I could fall asleep right now.”
Her eyes were closed, and I considered her profile. She was very close, very far, very still; I was very still, very happy, very sad. Oh, that tiny apartment, where we spent most of our time together. Of all the places in my memory that I’m certain would seem smaller if I revisited them, this one, I’d like to believe, would in fact seem larger, being, as it was, the site of one of my first and most tender acts. I raised my hand and stroked her hair. I slowly dragged my thumb across her temple, letting my hand rise slightly as it ran past her ear and, in an unbroken circle, settle again, to touch her once more, until her weight gradually sank, barely perceptibly, into my lap. An act that, imitating love, was the closest to it, at that moment, that I thought I could get. And one of the rare occasions I caught Amanda acting, because her fluttering eyelids were a dead giveaway: she was pretending to be asleep.
—
The following Saturday morning, when I showed up in the basement theater and reported to Damiano that I had detention, he slowly shook his head and said to the cast, “Take five, people.” Then he asked me, “Who’s the proctor?” When I told him I didn’t know yet, he said, “Let’s go,” and we marched upstairs to the front hallway and waited.
It turned out it was Miss Sullens. They spoke softly, and after exchanging a knowing look, first at me and then at each other, she gave me permission to skip.
“Don’t thank me all at once,” Damiano said as we walked back downstairs.
To which I replied, “I won’t.”
Since performances began next week, we were in dress rehearsal. Wearing a ruff, doublet, breeches, and hose, plus shoes like a pixie’s, I sat in the wings, feeling like a total asshole. But because we were doing two run-throughs today and my pair of scenes came early in the first act,I didn’t have to be back for the second performance until after lunch. Which meant that I could head upstairs for the next several hours and rejoin theD&Dgame.
Marc Mason, upon seeing me at the classroom door, considered my costume and said, “Well, at least you’re into it.”
Todd Wexworth, who was barely a pair of eyes above his Dungeon Master screen, said to him, “You hear the story about those guys that died in the sewers because they wanted to play live action?”
Jason Taylor, a British middle schooler playing a halfling thief, said, “I’m quite certain that’s a muh, muh—” He stammered on“myth.”“—apocryphal.”
Angel Rincondon, a dwarven cleric, said to him, “Actually, one of them was my cousin.”
Kazu Makabe, who was playing a ranger, said, “Can we resume, please?”
Chip Colson, a seventh-grade kid playing a ninth-level mage, said to me, “You bring money for pizza?”
I handed him a five.
“Throw in more,” said Hogi Hyun to me—he was playing a monk—“and I’ll give you a couple of my doughnuts.”