Like a lesson in how to become single: the fire lit when she started reciting Beckett from atop a concrete parking-lot pylon. She was drunk, true, all of them drunk, and beautiful, made beautiful, made inherently inside-out, glowing. Tip-toe above the earth pirouetting godlike or at least Hepburn-like, Whit discovered he loved her like lightning, like sunset, like childbirth.
She did both voices herself: "You loved me once. Once? I've made you suffer too much, haven't I? It's not that. I haven't made you suffer? Yes!"
"Bravo!" said Sweeney.
"Yes," said Dirk, answering, applauding both. Claude, Dirk—Whit confused them, real or stage, they looked the same.
"You love her?" Whit said.
"We all do."
At which point she fainted, a Scarlett O'Hara, all Atlanta burning around her that moment, despite the chill harbinger Wisconsin college bar night and the mortally modern sidewalks of their particular now. Whit caught her, set her down.
"I've got to go," he said.
"But we're rehearsing," she said. "And it is going swell, ain't it?"
"Kate, I've got to go."
"No!" said Lissa, the ditzy blonde younger sister, now in skateboard chic, pigtailed still, a multiplicity. She began to monologue, skipping ahead to the next street-light: "Brutus, Brutus, don't leave me little goldfish, oh how will I survive without you?"
Gramps, pepper-white glinting falsely in his hair, grumbled, half in-character, "Oy vey."
"I need a Goldfish," Whit said, coming home.
"It's going well?"
"You look lovely." Whit touched her, passing her, Annie his fiancée in her pajamas already—what time was it?—with cocoa.
"My big actor man."
"Director."
"You need a Goldfish?"
"Costumed."
"What will I have to say?"
"Only about five lines. And a song."
"Okay."
Easy.
Whit took off his shirt. Blood trickled into him, veins, capillaries, cavernous, and he felt he could hear it echoing as it fell.
"I love the way you organize your chaos," he said, pointing at the bulletin board, her project that night, postcards canted, pushpins bent, a few scraps of paper purposefully torn. Their apartment wasn't much, one payday better than a dormitory, but it would do until she graduated, got work.
She said, "No you don't."
But she untied one shoulder of her pajamas just then—an effective, convincing end to Beckett and chaos.
Their bedsheets, sewn at the seams, spread on the hill: a backdrop. Shadows moved behind them, backlit, and from front-on parents, boyfriends, professors, the big elms of the hill ricocheting sound.
"Come one, come all, a comedy tonight, a vaudevillian villain, a lecherous old man, a catatonic princess, a Goldfish! Sit, yes, you, bring your friends, sit, we've got beer."
Until the earthen steps filled, until from the sheer weight of curiosity and the un-noise of police lights barricading in case of riot, quietly, they could wait no longer. The Fishsuit.
"You'll do fine."
"I will."
"You will."
"I love you..."
But Whit darted away, lights, make-up, props like toy guns and spaghetti for the food-fight scene, organized, catalogued. He cued her out: "Goldfish, on one, go!"
And the lights went up.
The crowd chuckled, threw beer, a good sign.
Oh, god, she said nothing.
Which was fine, fine, it would be fine, let it mount.
Kate with fake pistol, the prop, pressed to Whit's head cooed, licked his ear-lobe, it would be fine.
He leaned around the sewn bedsheets.
The Goldfish began to speak.
"Welcome, we're about to start a...yeah, I'm a Goldfish, so what...we're about to start an original play, and you're invited to participate. Here's spaghetti. Pass it around. Throw it. Eat it, if you like, though it might taste a little fishy."
Whit turned, exhaling. It had started. Opening night, a full hill, and he pulled Kate to him, close.
"My god, you smell good," he said.
"You need to stay," Kate said.
"I can't."
"We've only got two days left. This needs more of you. A devotional. A last thrust. Ooomph."
"I can't."
"I quit, then."
"You can't."
"I can't act if I'm not directed, dipshit."
"You act like a newborn breathes. It's the first and last thing you'll ever do."
"That sounds like an insult."
"Oh, no. No it's not."
"Listen, give me half an hour more. It might seem like it just happens for me, I hope it seems that way at least, but I'm nervous too, okay?"
"I've got to have the keys back to..."
"We'll go outside."
"Where?"
"The hill. Right where the stage'll be set up."
"It's on my way back home, I suppose, okay."
Dripping, dripping, sapping into the stonework of the wells and catheters, blood-sound, the stage shadow in the auditorium, the hall shadow in the antiseptic splendor of after-janitorness, slipping the stage keys into his Professor's mailbox, dripping, tinkling, charm-sound, slipping out the backdoor, locking it behind them.
She took his hand in hers.
"What is your favorite part about me?" she said.
"That I can leave you each night."
She slapped him.
And it was a very quiet walk to the hill, passing the same Beckett pylon, passing the streetlights, all puddling sulfur Romeo halos, seeing Lissa skipping ahead, the shadow of her, and hearing the Friday-night noises gone, the mad crowds, the anonymity. Studious, tired, too-soon the show must go on, too bright for a big city the stars, the hoot-owl somewhere urgency of a dove about to roost. They cut between buildings, found secret stairs made more secret by the dark.
Whit could not help but think of kissing her. He couldn't depend on her response, the flirtatious act, the vixen, the starlet chill, who would she be now? Not Annie, that he knew, not his fiancée, never. Kate's pushpins were bent by their own volition.
"Will you regret never kissing me?" she said.
"Yes."
He turned to face her. Above, in the glass house of the law-school library, a student returned volumes to a shelf.
"When is the wedding?"
"This summer."
"She's nice. I like her."
"Me too."
"She makes a good Goldfish."
"Cheery."
"It is easy to cast someone as themselves."
"I needed her in the play, because of you. Like a shield."
"Are you going to kiss me now or what?"
"No."
Stage right, Goldfish returns, faux head flipped aside onto the prop table.
"That was murder."
"Brilliant murder."
"Thank you, Kate. I really appreciate you saying that. From you that means a lot." Annie is sincere, saccharine, strange in rouge and scales.
Behind her back Kate pantomimes puking.
Whit cannot help but laugh.
Fortunately Gramps has just led a Golden Yak on-stage.
Everyone laughs.
Anonymity. Hate. Laughter. The emergency of single water droplets rushing downriver toward Iguaçu.
Kate stretched naked in the moonlight, uncaring that the peripheral sidewalks reveal her in her splendor moonlit, white and dark and secret and open, on the site of the stage to be.
"This is my favorite scene."
"Oh, God," said Whit.
"I like to perform."
"Oh, God."
There was no curtain to close.
But they linked arms amid a waste of spaghetti, the blue gel of frost and midnight flashing to red, the police approaching, drunkenness.
"Afterglow at Vinny's Cafeteria!"
"Come one...come all."
The mob, the urgency, sidling downhill into the honking and sweet-talk of bars and street musicians, hold-hands, tell her everything, bow, smile, be.
Hold Annie's flipper in your left, hold Kate's razor sharp nails embedded in the depth of your palm, right, Whit, and smile, and bow, and be, white, blue, red, the gels aureate around you and you'll sting with sunburn tomorrow from backlighting, Whit.
Forget her.