In the Court of the Yellow King (27 page)

Nicole looked at her, opened her mouth, then turned her gaze away, as if she thought better of her reply. No one, other than Julia, rehearsed that afternoon.

There were no more changes the following day, which muted some of the grumbling about the poor quality of the script. They worked their way through the leaden dialogue, some with better humor than others. Julia hardly cared. Her lines were perhaps not as bad as those of Kai, who played the Queen, or Taylor, whose monologue was almost now a comedy; and besides, the important thing was the dance.

Nicole stood up quickly and interrupted Kai halfway through a line. “Julia, we have a real problem here. I’m stopping rehearsal for the day so that you and I can go over this one-on-one.”

Julia looked at her with mild surprise. Nicole seemed less angry than... afraid? Kai, too, noticed something was wrong, her gaze flickering from her lover to Julia as she reluctantly filed out of the theater with the others.

Julia sat down cross-legged at the edge of the stage and waited patiently.

Nicole paced back and forth. “The play—” she said, and then seemed to reach a decision. She stood in front of Julia and looked up at the smaller woman. “It isn’t Jarré.”

“Of course it’s him. That first scene, nobody else could have written it.”

“The first scene
was
his writing. All his. And so were parts of the others.” Nicole glanced over her shoulder at the entrance to the theater, as if she feared eavesdroppers. She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “You understand, Julia, he was not a very pleasant person. He is – he was – almost eighty, and he managed to piss off a lot of people over the years. I was the only person left he didn’t have to pay to deal with him or his problems.”

“Was?” Julia said. She stared at Nicole, not quite sure if she thought she had heard correctly.

“Very few people knew where he lived. He was a recluse, everyone knows that. He hated e-mail and faxes. All of his new material, he mailed to me. When there was nothing, for days, I drove out to his house. I thought he’d gone on a bender or had some kind of artistic fit. I thought if I met with him face to face, I could bully him into getting his act together.” Nicole smiled without humor, her eyes looking to one side of Julia as if just remembering something. She gave herself a little shake. “I knew something was wrong as soon as I arrived, the house—the lights were all on. He was notoriously cheap. When it got dark he’d only have one room lit at a time, to save on his electric bill.”

“And he was dead,” Julia said quietly. She didn’t believe the words as she said them, waiting for Nicole to snap at her for jumping to conclusions.

“I knew when I opened the front door. The smell of the place, you can’t imagine. I found him in his study, behind his desk. I don’t know what killed him. Probably a heart attack, or his liver finally giving up. There were some papers stacked on his desk that looked like they were part of
Carcosa
, so I grabbed them and got out of there.”

“What did you do with him? Did you call the police?”

“So that everyone would know he was dead? What do you think would have happened to the play? To
us
? Do you think anyone would come to watch a bunch of struggling nobodies put on half a play, and that half not even finished?” Nicole’s gaze shifted. “I thought I could use his notes to finish
Carcosa
. I’ve known Jarré since I was a teenager, I thought I could... imitate his style, fill in the gaps. But his notes were garbage. I couldn’t even read most of it, he was probably full of tequila when he wrote them.”

Julia took the wrinkled papers from Nicole’s outstretched hand and smoothed them out. Spiky handwriting slashed across the pages at a steep angle. Nicole craned her neck and tried to point out a few legible words. “This is all I could make out—something about the Masque. That’s why I added some more lines for you, I thought that’s what he wanted. The rest of it... let me show you.”

Julia leafed through the pages. She understood now why Jarré had bragged in interviews about using his father’s manual typewriter; the man’s handwriting was all but illegible, ordinary poor penmanship dragged into ruin by his advancing age and years of heavy drinking. She frowned. Here and there she could make out a few letters, almost a word—

Demhe

Ptahyl

Carcosa

Nicole stared at her with frank desperation. “Look, I know I’ve been harsh, but... I’ve watched you dance on days when we cancelled rehearsal. Whatever you’re doing, it’s like you understood something Jarré tried to write in his play, or... I can’t fake this anymore, Julia. If you can help at all...”

Julia set the pages to one side. She hardly saw Nicole. In her imagination the skittering text between the stanzas unfolded itself, like a flower opening through too many angles to be properly seen. All she had to do was sort them into the correct order; she marveled at herself that she could have missed it before.

“Let’s head back to the hotel,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

Julia was no playwright. Reading the words on the manuscript was one thing; making them into coherent speech, and crafting them into dialogue or plot was beyond her. For that, she used Nicole. The two of them sat on the stained, worn carpet of Julia’s hotel room, surrounded by pages that Julia had carefully removed from the walls. She didn’t need to number them or mark their pages; the correct order was plain to her now. She pointed out words to Nicole that she thought were important. When Nicole admitted she couldn’t make sense of them, Julia read them out loud, or cleared the papers away to perform a few steps of the dance, to show Nicole the
essence
of the words. Nicole wrote everything down in a small notebook, her pen skittering across the page, her handwriting, from Julia’s upside-down perspective, growing as tangled and unreadable as Jarré’s had been. As the manuscript had been, before Julia finally understood.

This time it was Nicole who arrived late, while the troupe milled around sullenly and wondered whether she’d quit. She handed each of them a thick stack of pages, still warm from the printer: the script, all but the first scene completely rewritten.

“You must have been up all night working on this,” said Kai. Her gaze was fixed on Julia.

Nicole ignored her. “We need to step up our efforts. We’re short on time. I suggest we start with readings to familiarize ourselves with the dialogue. Start from the beginning, we’ll work our way up to just before the mask.” Her eyes were bright with excitement and fatigue.

Julia listened to the rehearsal with half an ear as she read through the script. The dialogue was still banal, the scenes still disjointed, but the phrasing was more like Jarré’s; something hidden under the bland surface of the words, a predatory shadow, barely glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. The tension rose throughout the first act. There was no Act Two, not yet. Julia thought there must have been something, an outline, or at least rudimentary notes, among the papers Nicole salvaged from Jarré’s desk.

She wondered if Jarré were really dead, if Nicole had told the truth that he was unmistakably a corpse. He could have been blacked out, unconscious drunk, or simply sleeping on the floor, exhausted from his driven schedule. Or, she thought, perhaps Nicole had killed him? She imagined Jarré dismissing Nicole and her little company on a whim, bestowing the honor of acting out his glorious return to the theater on some other, newer favorite—

Maybe he refused to fi
nish the play.
Julia pictured it as clearly as if it were real: Jarré an old man with the mind of a petulant, spoiled little boy, his desk cluttered with the half-formed remains of plays that he had begun and discarded when he tired of them, dismissing Nicole’s stuttered protests with a sneer, turning away from her in disdain, and the heavy liquor bottle on his desk right at hand....

The theater was quiet. Julia closed the script and stood up, stretching. She had been so absorbed in her silly fantasy of Nicole as a murderer that she hadn’t even noticed that everyone else had left.

The play would be finished, she knew. It only waited for the right time to reveal itself.

When Julia returned to her hotel room, Kai was waiting. Julia nodded and slid her key card into the door. Before she could shut it behind her, Kai had pushed her way in.

“What are you doing to her?”

Julia looked at her, puzzled. “Nothing. Are you jealous? We’re not lovers, Kai. If you two are having problems it’s nothing to do with me.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Kai shoved the door closed. “Nicole’s not herself. She acts like she has a fever, she isn’t eating, she has bags under her eyes, she looks like
you
.”

“Like me?” Julia turned to her mirror. She had gotten out of the habit, since for several days it had been obscured by the slowly accumulating pages of the manuscript. Her reflection startled her. Dark rings smudged her eyes and shadowed her orbital bone. The planes of her jaw and cheekbones stood out in sharp angles. There was a slight tremor in her lip that she’d never seen before. Fear rose in her throat and threatened to choke her.

“When did you last eat, Julia?” Kai said. The anger in her tone softened. “You’re obsessed with this stupid play. I don’t understand, I know this Jarré guy is an indie favorite, but the play isn’t all that good. It’s not worth what you’re doing to yourself. I won’t let you pull Nicole in.”

“
D
emhe
,” Julia said. “
Hali
.” The words calmed her and she turned away from the mirror. “No one will see my face under the mask, anyway.”

“What mask?” Kai looked at her in bewilderment. “And what are you saying? Are those more of his stupid plays?”

Julia bent over to pick up some pages and taped them back over her mirror. She looked at the one in her hand; it was the page where the second dancer first appeared, insinuating itself next to the first.

She straightened up and put the manuscript aside. “You know what, Kai? I think it would be easier if I just showed you.”

“Where the ever-loving hell have you
been
all day?” Taylor said. “And where’s Kai?” Everyone but Nicole was arrayed on the stage, scripts in hand: the scene that opened the beginning of the Masque.