In the Court of the Yellow King (26 page)

On the way back up the stairs, box tucked under her arm, she paused to shine her light on the near end of the wiring system, tracing it up to find where it tied into the building’s electricity. At the last knob, the wire hung loose, its end frayed, attached to nothing at all.

The sounds through the cheap walls of the hotel room were not soothing, but they were predictable. Through one wall of Julia’s narrow room, Nicole’s voice rose and fell like the surf as she berated Kai, for some failing in the day’s rehearsal, or perhaps for showing too much enthusiasm in her scene with Catherine. In the room that shared the opposite wall, Taylor was practicing her monologue from Scene Two, halting mid-sentence, starting over with a different intonation, hours of the same two minutes of speech, a broken record that would continue until nearly midnight. Outside, breaking glass heralded drunks pitching empty bottles into the nearest
dumpster. Julia had learned to ignore the sounds as best she could. Neither the company’s budget nor Julia herself could afford any better living accommodations.

The floor was strewn with the papers she had found in the theater basement. Ever since returning to the hotel, she had puzzled over the dance notation, trying to find their correct order, to spot a page number or direction that would permit her to see the full pattern of the dance. The noises from the rooms next to hers did not help her concentration. A few times she thought she could discern a connection between the end of one stanza and the beginning of another page, but when she looked a second time there was no consonance; she could not imagine why she had placed those pages together.

To her left, a repetitive thud against the wall: the headboard of Nicole and Kai’s bed punctuating their post-argument lovemaking.

Julia gave up. She picked a paper at random and taped it to the mirror that backed the door of her hotel room. It was hopeless to expect that she could properly reconstruct the entire dance; perhaps rehearsing at least one of the pages would give her a sense of what sort of dance it was, a clue to what movements would logically follow. She spread her arms, wrists canted, mimicking the posture of the first stick figure on the page. It was slow work, stopping and adjusting her position, sometimes painfully, none of the movements recalling any dance familiar to her. Julia concentrated on matching each stance before moving to the next, the sounds of the women to either side of her a bizarre metronome to her efforts.

Halfway through the page she broke out in sweat; before the final stanza she stopped and let her arms drop to her sides. In spite of the aches and exhaustion, she felt elated. It was a distraction from the tedious personal drama around her, but more than that, the excitement of learning something new, something difficult but promising, something that with enough effort and practice, she could understand, perhaps even master.

She looked down at the floor and her eyes lit on one of the papers scattered there. She recognized it immediately as the next in sequence, the position of the first dancer clearly the natural progression after the last one in the page on her mirror. Julia couldn’t imagine why she had not seen it before. She taped the new page next to it, paused to drink a glass of water, and began again.

When she arrived at the theater the next morning Nicole was, to her great surprise, waiting for her. Less surprising was Nicole’s cold fury.

“Where have you been? We’ve been rehearsing for hours. Jarré sent more changes last night.” She thrust a paper-clipped script at Julia. “You have a few more lines. Learn them.”

Julia eased herself into the nearest seat; under Nicole’s sharp gaze, she did her best to hide her stiffness and aches from her work the night before. She had a few more lines, true, but none of them were very good, the dialogue not merely short, but banal. She glanced up at the other women; they seemed to share her view, though Kai was careful to wipe the surprise off her face before Nicole saw it.

“What
is
this?” Madison asked. She tapped one long white-tipped fingernail on the page. “Iambic pentameter? Bad poetry? Is he writing this stuff drunk? It’s awful.”

Nicole’s mouth twisted. “This is what he sent. Perhaps it was meant as satire. It’s what we have. The man is a genius playwright, who do you think you are to criticize him?”

“Someone stuck having to memorize this crap,” Madison said, but the fight had drained out of her voice. All of them were nervous and off-balance. Their excitement at being chosen to act in Jarré’s first new play in decades, even with a partial script, gave way to anxiety about his delay in finishing the material. Now their relief had turned sour.

Julia broke the silence. “We shouldn’t rehearse today until everyone has time to look over the new material. Right? Why don’t we all take a break. My ankle’s better, I can practice some of my dance. It’ll be easier on an empty stage.”

She was surprised to hear the confidence in her voice; almost as surprised to see Nicole respond with a curt nod and a gesture herding the other actors out of the theater. Julia rarely spoke when the director was around, and certainly never told her what to do; even hesitant suggestions were ignored, or shut down with disdain. Perhaps it was the uncertainty over the new material that distracted Nicole, but at least it meant that Julia had the stage to herself for practice. She planned to add some of the new steps from the manuscript to her routine, and it would be easiest to do that without anyone telling her to move this way or that to accommodate the other players.

This time, the tilted stage gave her no trouble at all.

Everyone’s nerves were stretched by the end of the week. Jarré made daily changes to the script, sometimes adding entirely new blocks of dialogue or throwing out difficult lines that the actors had finally mastered. Taylor’s monologues next door were more subdued. Kai and Nicole’s arguments were longer and punctuated by tears; sometimes there was silence, as if the women had gone to bed without speaking.

Julia hardly noticed. She had assembled more than half of the manuscript in what she was sure was the correct order. She could no longer see her mirror, covered in paper taped neatly together, the pages spilling around the corner to the adjacent wall. The movements were still difficult at times, even painful, but they formed a cohesive whole. With more of the dance assembled in its proper order, Julia could see that there was more than simple choreography. It told a story, one that she could only glimpse in fragments, conveyed through even small details such as the angle of an elbow or the tilt of the head. She might have called it
interpret
ive dance
except that the dance was the language, itself; the dancer was the interpreter, the conduit for the power and meaning of the dance.

The other thing Julia realized was that the drawings illustrated the movements not of one dancer, but two.

This took her by surprise — the figures were so similar that she did not realize there was more than one until she had assembled many pages. So many revelations in the dance were like that: utterly opaque until enough of them were placed together, and then the pattern was so obvious a child could have seen it. It seemed less choreography than a wonderfully complex puzzle.

The second dancer appeared early on, simply materializing halfway through a stanza, the first figure accommodating its presence as if it had always been there. The second figure grew more prominent until the two were virtually indistinguishable. Julia could not put her finger on why she believed there were two dancers when only one was drawn, but she was nonetheless sure it was the case.

By the last page, only the second dancer remained. It was difficult to tell if the first had simply been removed from the manuscript, or was still present, the second dancer superimposed so that they had... merged? Julia hoped that the solution would reveal itself once she assembled the entire dance.

Her exhaustion and soreness were partly the fault of trying to dance both parts at once, when she had mistakenly thought there was only once dancer. She began with the first, then switched to the second when it appeared. Technically it appeared more difficult, yet as she practiced it became easier, or at least, less stressful to her body; she was able to get through two or three pages at a time without having to stop to rest.

Julia’s one frustration was the text. No matter how she turned the pages or peered at the words, nothing was coherent other than the single word, CARCOSA, that she had seen in the theater basement when she first discovered the play. She could pick out a letter here or there, and very occasionally, groups of letters that turned into nonsense words: DEMHE. PTAHYL. There was meaning here, words at the edge of her memory like the name of a forgotten friend.

She sighed and stretched her limbs. It would become clear to her, in time, just as the strange notations of movement had been incomprehensible at first and then so obvious that she wondered she could have ever failed to understand it. Until then, she would master the dance.

When Julia wandered into the theater late the next morning, there were so many new pages that the play was almost a different script, and Nicole was on the verge of tears. “I don’t understand what he’s doing,” she repeated, as the actors bickered and complained about days of wasted rehearsal, wondered aloud whether the bad writing was some kind of Dadaist feint, the play’s true brilliance reserved for the yet-unwritten Act Two, or whether it was nothing more than Jarré’s descent into alcoholism and dementia.

Julia picked up her copy of the new script and turned to the final scene of Act One. Her brief exchange with the Queen had become a conversation; her insistence that something was wrong growing more strident, the queen’s commanding words turning fearful. There was a mistake, she thought; writing in a hurry, Jarré had confused his pronouns, muddling when the Queen addressed the Dancer and when she spoke to the Masked Stranger. She pointed the lines out to Nicole, who merely shrugged.

“I have a suggestion,” Julia said. “I’ve been practicing a new dance routine, I think I should do more than a few steps on stage during the masque. A real dance, since I have more of a part now. It will make the masque seem more believable.”