Harmony (11 page)

In the center of the plaza, a clutch of street cleaners were hard at work scrubbing the already gleaming marble. As we passed, I caught, with a jolt of déjà vu, a glimpse of big red lettering disappearing under their push brooms.

I slowed. “… lose the… oor?” Not enough to make sense of, but clearly it had read the same as the graffito on the sign in BardClyffe. “Micah, you ever seen graffiti in Harmony before?”

“Tourists sometimes carve their names on the trees, but that’s about it. Nothing on this scale.” Micah waved to his colleague Max Eider, who waited in the Arkadie’s shadowed entry. Eider carried a fat roll of drawings beneath one arm and a pencil behind one ear. He was frowning darkly over the plaza.

“Well met, Max!” Micah trudged up the broad steps to join him.

Eider gestured with his drawings. “Ach, Micah! Look what goes on these days!”

Micah glanced around inquiringly.

“Slogans on the stone!” complained Eider heatedly.

I hung back. Eider scared me, though I hardly knew him. He was a diminutive elderly man of ferocious mien, with an accent, not like Micah’s faint Latin rolling of the vowels, but a real accent, as if he had not been born speaking English as well as his local tongue. He kept his white hair long and combed straight back without a part. His dark suits were worn but always well pressed, and his black eyes could pin you to the wall. It was a surprise to me each time he opened his mouth that fire did not issue forth. In fact, he was usually very soft-spoken, which conspired with the accent to make him often hard to understand.

“Slogans?” Micah turned back with renewed interest. “What did it say?”

Eider shrugged, as if text were irrelevant compared to the outrage of defacing the perfect marble. “Howie, he says a piece of street art.”

Micah laughed expansively. “Very likely. The empty space… the broad and glistening stone… I was often tempted myself in my Young Turk days. We’ve settled in too much, don’t you think? A little street art would do us good. But, Max, how are you? Have you been in there giving Sean the business?”

I thought Micah let go of his curiosity very easily, but he was so amused and satisfied that I was left wondering what the devil was “street art” and why didn’t I know about something Micah obviously regarded with such fondness.

The mention of Sean deepened Eider’s frown. He shook his roll of drawings like a fist. “He is very hard to convince, this boy.”

“But he’s the best, Max. They don’t come better. Did he tell you we’ll be sharing the shop, you and I?”

“
Ja
, Micah, but don’t worry—I am already onstage before he must start with you.” The old man wagged his head disapprovingly. “This Howie, he does not think always his schedule so well.”

“Sean’ll work it out,” Micah assured him. “He bitches and complains, but he always works it out. Is
Crossroads
a big show?”

Eider spread his arms until he looked like a frail and angry bird readying for flight. “What is big, Micah, these days? You know we must be always doing more and more each time, or they say, “ ‘
Hein
, this was fine but too much like last time.’ ”

“Oh, I don’t know, Max. Maybe it’s our fault for allowing the bigger-and-bigger syndrome to persist for so long.”

Eider’s black eyes narrowed as if he suspected a joke. When he saw Micah was serious, he grasped his sleeve and drew him close to murmur so low that I had to sidle up behind to hear. “Watch out with Howie talking these big ideas of no scenery. No one asks the director ever to make do with less. He will go on and do the play as he wants, and only you will be left with egg on your face.”

Max Eider had survived a long and bumpy career before arriving as a guest artist at the RoundHall some seasons back. His work was so instantly popular that his special application for residency was voted through Town Meeting on its first round. To listen to him, you’d think everything bad that could happen in life and the theatre had happened to him. Who knew? Maybe it had.

Micah briefly borrowed Eider’s frown. “Howard’s already out telling the world what the show’s going to look like, is he?” He smoothed the folds of his loose white shirt as if brushing away doubt, then smiled. “To tell the truth, Max, I’m looking forward to being less distracted with the technical details of a big production. Howard and I want to create a truly integrated work.”

Eider nodded, patting Micah’s arm rather gloomily. “Well, you are still young. As for me, I cannot afford these risks.”

“Nonsense, Max.”

“No, I am known for what I am known for.”

Micah’s smile tightened. “Every once in a while, there comes a time—I’m sure you’ve been there, Max—when you can’t afford not to take a certain chance, so that you’ll be able to move on to the rest of your career.” He paused. “So there will
be
a rest of your career.”

Eider’s look must have pretty much mirrored my own. Micah had already endowed this little play with a crusading significance. At twenty-two, I found this astonishing but somehow reassuring, that Micah at forty-nine was still willing to tilt at windmills.

Max Eider was not reassured. He summoned a sickly grin and gave his birdy little shrug. “Ach, Micah. You will make good of this, and then you will see them coming to the rest of us saying, ‘Look what Cervantes has done! Why didn’t you think of that?’ ”

Micah chuckled. “But, Max, it could be so satisfying, to be artists again instead of mere showmen.”

“But we
are
showmen!” Eider hugged his drawings tight under his arm. “If not, why make our work in a theatre and not alone on the canvas?”

“I’ll bet that’s what you say to Sean when he’s telling you to cut down on the expensive detail.” Micah’s amiable smile said he’d gone as far as he cared to with this debate.

Eider accepted the truce. “This is only how I get what I want from him.”

“An example to us all.” Micah was already moving up the steps, out of the glaring sun. “Good luck. See you around when the time comes.”

Eider waved, heading out across the heat-shimmered plaza, past the street cleaners finishing up. “
Ja
, Micah, same to you. But only, watch out for this Howie!”

“Phew!” I said when we’d got inside, into the Arkadie’s prizewinning lobby, suffused by sunlight filtered through panels of stone cut thin enough to be translucent. The walls glowed warmly, showing only a faint and carefully planned pattern of seams and fasteners.

Micah nodded ruefully. “Sean wasn’t kidding when he said Max was a handful. He’ll stand at a painter’s elbow for hours, telling her how to lay in each stroke. One old carpenter at Willow Street nearly put a clip of nails through his head.

“But he does something very special that the audiences love, and he does it very well. What Sean won’t admit in all his railing against the old man is that producers hire Max precisely because he can exact such good work from the shops.”

“But you get good work out of them…”

Micah’s laugh was deprecatory. “Oh, I grump and coerce. Max browbeats. And there are plenty who feel on principle that a designer’s not getting the best for the producer’s money unless he or she browbeats the shop. Those people don’t tend to hire me.”

What he really meant was he didn’t accept those people’s offers. Micah would rather be rude to a rich backer than insult a stagehand. The discussion with Eider seemed to have fired him up. He strode through the carpeted acres of lobby as if ready to take on the entire design establishment, which at that moment in Harmony, perhaps in the world, included himself and Max Eider and at most a dozen others.

At the door to the administrative offices, he punched the entry code and we stepped into pandemonium. People in motion, the clatter of simultaneous conversation, the skreel of the fax machines. The offices, where the public never set foot, were nowhere as luxurious as the lobby. Here, the space shortage endemic to life under a dome reasserted itself with a vengeance. The staff worked practically in each other’s pockets. The aisle between the desks would not have allowed for a fat man.

The walls were painted a careful pale lavender but every inch that wasn’t behind a desk or file cabinet was covered with clippings and notices and printout and schedules and subscription lists, and all the rest of the paper detritus of running a theatre. What old fool said computers would free us from drowning in paper?

“Micah! Welcome back!” The subscriptions director gripped Micah’s shoulder as he squeezed past with a stack of printout under one arm. “I’ve only read the first act, but I love it!”

“This is going to be a tough one to sell, you think, Micah?” worried the head of Marketing, glancing up from her terminal.

A secretary I knew gave me the thumbs-up sign from across the room. The heavyset bookkeeper wriggled his shoulders in proud anticipation. “Isn’t it wonderful? What other theatre would take this kind of chance?”

“Micah! About time you showed!” Kim Levin, Howie’s assistant and right arm, hung over the railing of the executive offices balcony with a harried grin. “Get the hell on up here!”

We scaled the slim spiral stair as the child receptionist gawked after us. Kim met us at the top with brisk kisses on both cheeks. She was a thin, pretty brunette, always dressed to kill, with a street-wise manner that belied her native Harmonic upbringing. I wondered if both parents having been apprentices explained why they’d done right what so often went wrong with second-generation kiddies. Howie would have been lost without Kim and everyone knew it. And she knew we knew it. She never felt the need to throw her weight around. Plus, she always remembered all the apprentices’ names. I expected she’d be running the Arkadie someday, when Howie got tired of it.

Micah slumped against the railing as if celebrating a narrow escape. “Time to petition the Board for more office space.”

“Foolish man,” Kim snorted. “Try something we might be able to afford, like more staff. We are ready for some new blood around here! We’re so bored looking at each other all the time!”

“You’re about to get your wish, I do believe.”

Kim laughed. “Indeed. And I’m a big fan of surprises, but a touch more advance information would be heartening. So far all I know about the Eye is that they’re great and there are ten of them.”

Ten. Even Crispin hadn’t uncovered that little kernel. I pocketed it to carry home in triumph.

“I suppose it’s company policy that their reviews never mention individuals?” Micah asked. “Presenting only the communal identity?”

Kim groaned. “Oh god, I hope not. We’ve been through the group-decision number before. Everything stops dead in rehearsal while the entire cast votes on whether so-and-so should walk upstage on this syllable or that one.”

She linked one arm in mine and the other in Micah’s and drew us down the narrow, carpeted hallway. “
He
is a madman today. When I left, he was yelling at Reede Chamberlaine and had reached decision crisis over the lunch menu.”

“How are things going with Reede?”

Kim hissed eloquently. “Slime, he is slime.”

Rachel Lamb, the general manager, called a hurried welcome as we passed her open door. Several meetings were going on at once in her little cubicle, and a sidebar was starting up out in the hall. We squeezed by and found Howie as promised, in his own cramped but well-appointed office, hunched over his vid with a caterer’s menu clenched in his fist as if he were ready to ram it into the screen. His curly mane of red-gold and gray was more than usually disarranged.

“Then you damn well talk ’em into it, Reede!” he roared. “No, we can’t push the schedule back! I have a season here! I have trustees and subscribers to answer to! Bring that famous velvet pressure to bear.” Howie waved us into chairs without looking up from the screen. “We can’t let these actors start here thinking our time means nothing just because they don’t live that way. If they have to go home first, they have to, but the quarantine means I need ’em here three weeks early!”

Reede Chamberlaine’s answering voice was an Oxbridge-accented purr, so casual in contrast to Howie’s ranting as to sound faintly sinister. I tried to sneak a look over Howie’s shoulder but moved too slowly.

“Right. Keep me posted.” Howie slapped the cutoff with a growl, then spread the crushed menu flat with both palms. “Now, Micah. What don’t you eat every day at the studio?”

Micah eased into a chair beside the translucent outside wall. The glow warmed his olive skin to burnished gold. He looked very youthful and relaxed, slouched deep in cream-colored leather as if on holiday. I loved to watch Micah’s Great Master persona slip whenever he left the studio. He put his feet up on the chair opposite and waved me into a third.

“I solve this problem thusly: I let them send me whatever they feel like, with enough variety to allow plenty of alternatives.”

“What if you don’t like any of it?”

“It’s never happened.”

Howie pulled at his nose reflectively. “Maybe I should change caterers. D’you suppose yours’d charge me extra for long-distance delivery?” He turned to me. “So whadda ya say, Gwinn? Know what you want to eat?”

They might be willing to take up most of our precious lunch hour discussing the lunch itself, but I wasn’t going to be a party to it.

“Lean corned beef on sisal rye with french mustard, cornichons, a side of red cabbage slaw, and iced tea with lemon.”

Kim whistled. “I like a decisive woman. Make that two!”

I’d only learned to order like that since I’d come to Harmony. In Chicago, menus were a fable. You ate what was available.

“Three,” rumbled Micah.

Howie grasped his temples. “But I hate corned beef!”

Kim levered the menu out of his hands and headed for the door. “I’ll order you chicken salad.”

Howie nodded. “Dull, dull. But no heartburn.”

Micah folded his hands like a pasha over his solid stomach. “I ran into Max Eider on the way in.”

“Max, Max. He’s already driving Sean around the bend. I’m adding a rider to the standard contract: no designers allowed in the shop more than twice a week until technical rehearsals.”

“He didn’t much like all this talk of pared-down production.”