Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica (25 page)

Lucky snorts at me when I tell her these things: if it isn't a tech cue or a blocking note, it has nothing to do with the real play as far as she's concerned. She doesn't understand that for me the play is best before it is real, when it is still only mine.

“Nine sharp,” she says now. “Time to start. Some of them have already been out there long enough to turn green.” She smiles; her private joke.

“Let's go,” I say, my part of the ritual; and then I have to do it, have to let go. I sit forward over the script in my usual eighth row seat; Lucky takes her clipboard and her favorite red pen, the one she's had since
Cloud Nine,
up the aisle. She pushes open the lobby door and the sound of voices rolls through, cuts off. All of them out there, wanting in. I feel in my gut their tense waiting silence as Lucky calls the first actor's name.

They're hard on everyone, auditions. Actors bare their throats. Directors make instinctive leaps of faith about what an actor could or might or must do in this or that role, with this or that partner. It's kaleidoscopic, religious, it's violent and subjective. It's like soldiers fighting each other just to see who gets to go to war. Everyone gets bloody, right from the start.

Forty minutes before a late lunch break, when my blood sugar is at its lowest point, Lucky comes back with the next resumé and headshot and the first raised eyebrow of the day. The eyebrow, the snort, the flared nostril, the slight nod, are Lucky's only comments on actors. They are minimal and emphatic.

Behind her walks John the Baptist. He calls himself Joe Something-or-other, but he's John straight out of my head. Dark red hair. The kind of body that muscles up long and compact, strong and lean. He moves well, confident but controlled. When he's on stage, he even stands like a goddamn prophet. And his eyes are John's eyes: deep blue like deep sea. He wears baggy khaki trousers, a loose, untucked white shirt, high-top sneakers, a Greek fisherman's cap. His voice is clear, a half-tone lighter than many people expect in a man: perfect.

The monologue is good, too. Lucky shifts in her seat next to me. We exchange a look, and I see that her pupils are wide.

“Is he worth dancing for, then?”

She squirms, all the answer I really need. I look at the resumé again. Joe Sand. He stands calmly on stage. Then he moves very slightly, a shifting of weight, a leaning in toward Lucky. While he does it, he looks right at her, watching her eyes for that uncontrollable pupil response. He smiles. Then he tries it with me. Aha, I think, surprise, little actor.

“Callbacks are Tuesday and Wednesday nights,” I say neutrally. “We'll let you know.”

He steps off the stage. He is half in shadow when he asks, “Do you have Salome yet?”

“No precasting,” Lucky says.

“I know someone you'd like,” he says, and even though I can't quite see him I know he is talking to me. Without the visual cue of his face, the voice has become transgendered, the body shape ambiguous.

“Any more at home like you, Joe?” I must really need my lunch.

“Whatever you need,” he says, and moves past me, past Lucky, up the aisle. Suddenly, I'm ravenously hungry. Four more actors between me and the break, and I know already that I won't remember any of them longer than it takes for Lucky to close the doors behind them.

The next day is better. By late afternoon I have seen quite a few good actors, men and women, and Lucky has started a callback list.

“How many left?” I ask, coming back from the bathroom, rubbing the back of my neck with one hand and my waist with the other. I need a good stretch, some sweaty muscle-heating exercise, a hot bath. I need Salome.

Lucky is frowning at a paper in her hand. “Why is Joe Sand on this list?”

“God, Lucky, I want him for callbacks, that's why.”

“No, this sheet is today's auditions.”

I read over her shoulder. Jo Sand. “Dunno. Let's go on to the next one, maybe we can actually get back on schedule.”

When I next hear Lucky's voice, after she has been up to the lobby to bring in the next actor, I know that something is terribly wrong.

“Mars…Mars….”

By this time I have stood and turned and I can see for myself what she is not able to tell me.

“Jo Sand,” I say.

“Hello again,” she says. The voice is the same;
she
is the same, and utterly different. She wears the white shirt tucked into the khaki pants this time, pulled softly across her breasts. Soft black shoes, like slippers, that make no noise when she moves. No cap today, that red hair thick, brilliant above the planes of her face. Her eyes are Salome's eyes: deep blue like deep desire. She is as I imagined her. When she leans slightly toward me, she watches my eyes and then smiles. Her smell goes straight up my nose and punches into some ancient place deep in my brain.

We stand like that for a long moment, the three of us. I don't know what to say. I don't have the right words for conversation with the surreal except when it's inside my head.

I don't know what to do when it walks down my aisle and shows me its teeth.

“I want you to see that I can be versatile,” Jo says.

The air in our small circle has become warm and sticky. My eyes feel slightly crossed, my mind is slipping gears.
I won't ask, I will not ask….
It's as if I were trying to bring her into focus through 3-D glasses; trying to make two separate images overlay. It makes me seasick. I wonder if Lucky is having the same trouble, and then I see that she has simply removed herself in some internal way. She doesn't see Jo look at me with those primary eyes.

But I see: and suddenly I feel wild, electric, that direct-brain connection that makes my nerves stand straight under my skin.
Be careful what you ask for, Mars.
“I don't guess you really need to do another monologue,” I tell her. Lucky is still slack-jawed with shock.

Jo smiles again.

Someone else is talking with my voice. “Lucky will schedule you for callbacks.” Beside me, Lucky jerks at the sound of her name. Jo turns to her. Her focus is complete. Her whole body says, I am waiting. I want her on stage. I want to see her like that, waiting for John's head on a platter.

“Mars, what…?” Lucky swallows, tries again. She speaks without looking at the woman standing next to her. “Do you want…oh, shit. What part are you reading this person for in callbacks, goddamnit anyway.” I haven't seen her this confused since her mother's boyfriend made a pass at her years ago, one Thanksgiving, his hand hidden behind the turkey platter at the buffet. Confusion makes Lucky fragile and brings her close to tears.

Jo looks at me, still waiting. Yesterday I saw John the Baptist: I remember how he made Lucky's eyebrow quirk and I can imagine the rehearsals; how he might sit close to her, bring her coffee, volunteer to help her set props. She'd be a
wreck in one week and useless in two. And today how easy it is to see Salome, who waits so well and moves with such purpose. I should send this Jo away, but I won't: I need a predator for Salome; I can't do a play about desire without someone who knows about the taste of blood.

“Wear a skirt,” I say to Jo. “I'll need to see you dance.” Lucky closes her eyes.

Somehow we manage the rest of the auditions, make the first cut, organize the callback list. There are very few actors I want to see again. When we meet for callbacks, I bring them all in and sit them in a clump at the rear of the house, where I can see them when I want to and ignore them otherwise. But always I am conscious of Jo. I read her with the actors that I think will work best in other roles. She is flexible, adapting herself to their different styles, giving them what they need to make the scene work. She's responsive to direction. She listens well. I can't find anything wrong with her.

Then it is time for the dance. There are three women that I want to see, and I put them all on stage together. “Salome's dance is the most important scene in the play. It's a crisis point for every character. Everyone has something essential invested in it. It has to carry a lot of weight.”

“What are you looking for?” one of the women asks. She has long dark hair and good arms.

“Power,” I answer, and beside her Jo's head comes up like a pointing dog's, her nostrils flared with some rich scent. I pretend not to see. “Her dance is about power over feelings and lives. There's more, but power's the foundation, and that's what I need to see.”

The woman who asked nods her head and looks down, chewing the skin off her upper lip. I turn away to give them a moment for this new information to sink in; looking out into
the house, I see the other actors sitting forward in their seats, and I know they are wondering who it will be, and whether they could work with her, and what they would do in her place.

I turn back. “I want you all to dance together up here. Use the space any way you like. Take a minute to warm up and start whenever you're ready.”

I can see the moment that they realize,
ohmigod no music, how can we dance without, goddamn all directors anyway.
But I want to see their interpretation of power, not music. If they don't have it in them to dance silent in front of strangers, if they can't compete, if they can't pull all my attention and keep it, then they can't give me what I need. Salome wouldn't hesitate.

The dark-haired woman shrugs, stretches her arms out and down toward her toes. The third woman slowly begins to rock her hips; her arms rise swaying in the cliché of eastern emerald-in-the-navel bellydance. She moves as if embarrassed, and I don't blame her. The dark-haired woman stalls for another moment and then launches into a jerky jazz step with a strangely syncopated beat. I can almost hear her humming her favorite song under her breath; her head tilts up and to the right and she moves in her own world, to her own sound. That's not right, either. I realize that I'm hoping one of them will be what I need, so that I do not have to see Jo dance.