Jessica in Parentheses by Anna May Samson
Jessica in Parentheses
The announcement was malfunctioning.
‘Tonight the role of ( ) will be played by ( )’.
The pre-record had not been updated with the necessary specifics, to amused chuckles by those in the foyer who noticed, and frowns from the few who cared. Owen cared. His daughter was ( ) and would be playing the role of ( ) tonight. Her agent, Annie, who also happened to be Owen’s longest enduring female friend, had let him know. Despite misgivings Owen had made the journey into town. He felt he should and should not be here with equal and opposing force. His driver had stopped behind the line of taxis, aircon on, in the strange heat of the city’s Anticyclonic Gloom, waiting for the dribble of escapees at interval and the profitable rush at curtain. Owen had taken a full three minuets to get out of the car.
He had declared he was planning to go at the last moment to Deanne. She had raised an eyebrow but continued without argument. His daughter was the result of an affair in the early years of his relationship with Deanne, exposed during the heavy years of their marriage and terrorising the past three, after Owen had decided to ‘take an interest’. Deanne would not let things collapse, they had their own children to think of.
‘Will the two of you have dinner after?’ Deanne had asked.
‘No. I’m not telling her I’m coming,’ Owen had said.
‘I’ll leave something in the fridge.’
Deanne was practiced in manoeuvring the painful edges of life with domesticated elegance. Owen had left the house with such unconscious intensity that his youngest had asked if he was angry with them. The night air was oddly still and he wished he’d worn something with a little more give.
‘Tonight’s performance runs for two hours and thirty minutes, with interval.’
Owen bought himself a noisy box of Maltesers and a bitter shiraz. A girl in an ill-fitting waistcoat told him he must decant his wine into plastic before entering the theatre, while handing him his wine, in glass, along with the program.
‘Can you can exchange for another night? I don’t want to see the understudy,’ a woman perched at the bar was saying to an apologetic looking companion. Owen found himself gently knocking the woman’s elbow and some of her wine spilt to the floor.
‘Terribly sorry,’ Owen said.
‘Oh, do we know you?’
Yes, Owen thought. ‘The understudy is meant to be terrific,’ Owen winked.
‘Oh. Terrific,’ the woman parroted, trying to assign Owen’s face to something solid, in an avenue of memory. He turned away before she made a discovery. He had avoided the opening night of this production, despite the invite, in spite of the hype. He avoided foyers. He had bad eyes and he couldn’t remember names. He fingered through the program. His daughter’s photo-graph accused him from the page. She did not have his surname.
He thought a pretty actress he had seen before (worked with maybe?) was trying to catch his eye from across the meandering throng moving into the theatre. It was not the night for her. He slowed at the bottleneck of door two, keen for the show to start and for it to be over. He negotiated the seemingly endless awkwardness of getting to his seat and braced himself for two hours of up-cycled Greek tragedy, the usual suspects masticating mid-century furniture. The lead actor was Owen’s contemporary and had the vocal clarity of porridge - but everyone’s a critic he thought and then sat down next to one.
Max Taranto was the city’s last serious theatre critic, having made a name for himself with shock jock like statements and a signature gimmick of comparing decent actors to digestive functions. Owen remembered the injustice of being described as ‘the gut-rot of Elsinor.’ Owen readied himself for small talk, as so often critics failed to grasp that they were not allies. Taranto looked briefly to his left and gave Owen a small, vague nod-smile. Owen blinked and remembered with a sinking rush that he had not been on stage for six years and that much of himself had changed, the browns of his hair, the cut of his silhouette, that something had slipped away from him. He hated Max Taranto with a fresh flavour, but with less vim. He retrieved his glasses, not wanting to fall short when it came to Jessica. His daughter was meters away from him now, he knew, on the winged precipice of her Iphigenia in Aulis. He was filled with thrill and unmeasurable dread; a constant state of Jessica.
***
‘This is your call to stage.’
A stillness, distinctly alive. The stage lights snatched moments from those who wore glasses. An odd feeling; this dress, fitted for another's body, a different shape to her’s. Jessica had pushed, zipped and braced herself into the costume well enough, though she had broader shoulders than the original actress. More rib. The audience had been warned that the understudy would be stepping on. ‘Shoes to fill’ had been the cliche of the day.
The ancient woman in the front row had fallen asleep within moments of act one. Most of the audience seemed glued now, sensing that something on stage had stuck (or un-stuck). Inevitably someone had a mild coughing fit. Jessica tried to breathe. It seemed an unappealing choice between suffocation and hyperventilation. Calm down, she told herself. There were barely a handful of people here to see her anyway. Off-cuts from various friendships groups who could come at late notice. Most could not find babysitters. Annie might be out there, wondering if she was having another breakdown the agency would be obliged to manage. (And him). Jessica looked out into breathing darkness. She looked at her hands, her palms. She looked up. Dust uncollected was mov-ing slowly in the highways of light that punched down from the heavy rig above. She looked down at unfamiliar shoes. Run away, they replied. Another small voice whispered, ‘it's you’.
His daughter seemed to be nodding in perpetuity. Owen felt, acutely, the limitation of his own reach. His hand twitched.
***
Owen waited in shadow near stage door in the unmoving air of the night, out of sight from an avocado shaped man in cargo shorts who was clutching a soggy headshot of the lead actor.
Annie had texted after curtain; ‘You should stay fuck-knuckle. Take her for supper. Just a bad night.’ Annie was one of the few women from who Owen took direction without struggle.
Jessica knew this dinner, in the stiff, snug theatre restaurant. He was famous and she liked the way people looked at her while in his company.
‘I don’t want to eat-eat,’ she said putting down the menu.
‘Cake then?’ he said. The children who he still had a chance with were eight and twelve. All he knew was sugar.
‘Yes. Cake.’
Owen busied himself with summoning a waitress and ordering tiramisu. Jessica said nothing for a time.
‘Stage fright?’ he said.
‘I don’t think so.’
Owen understood that he should say something clever and helpful.
‘Right. No,’ he said.
She burned that he had nothing to say about the epic dry that had happened on stage, that Clytem-nestra was forced to swoop down from upstage and save her, that three pages of script had been skipped. If he had had anything to say on the subject she would have ripped the tablecloth from under them with her teeth. They were bound in a lose-lose. He thought about discussing the theatre itself, he had performed here and remembered it as a kind theatre, in the ways that mattered; acoustics, plumbing, history.
Jessica looked away, catching the eye of one of the women at the table next to them. Last year a rancid tabloid had speculated that she and Owen were having an affair, which Jessica thought was funny, in a morbid, ironic way. She did look a lot like her mother in those long lens camera grabs.
‘Did you know I was here?’ he asked.
‘Of course. Front of house told us at the half,’ Jessica said. She suspected her father was partly to blame for what had happened up there tonight but giving him full credit for her failure felt too close to a compliment.
‘Did I see Max Taranto?’ she asked.
‘He wasn’t reviewing. Just there for pleasure.’
‘I wouldn’t trust his definition of that word.’
Owen laughed, his daughter was acerbic and clever.
‘I like the blonde.’
‘It was for the role,’ she said, ‘How’s Deanne?’
He paused. Jessica watched him. Owen rarely talked about his wife with her. When he did, he spoke of Deanne as if she were a ridiculous cut-out of a woman. Jessica believed half of what Ow-en told her about the woman. She believed only half of the man she dined with, which was a fair exchange as Owen received barely a true morsel of Jessica.
‘She’s good,’ he said. ‘You should keep it that way,’ he said, pointing a dessert fork at her head, bringing her attention back upon herself. He had said it without thinking but now he looked at her he decided he was right, yes, she was beautiful. She had wonderful angles that revealed themselves in shadow. The bleach had made Jessica’s scalp dry and itchy, damaging the soft browns of her true colour. When the show was over she wouldn’t maintain it. She looked at the network of creases in his expensive blue shirt and wondered why he hadn’t ironed it before coming out. Ah, she was a last minute thing.
The tiramisu was placed between them. They took turns at slicing and deconstructing, aware of the intimacy of sharing and of silence. He wondered what advice he could possibly give her (tonight, ever). A spoonful later she had inhaled the fine dust of coco and made a childlike cough-snort, bringing up a little goop onto her lip. Owen smiled but before he could pass her a serviette she attended to herself with her sleeve, her big eyes watered.
He left her the last bit of sponge and cream, which she did not touch. He signed for the bill once it was brought to them by staff keen to close for the evening but not wanting to offend. He ignored the fawning waitresses well, Jessica thought. He then pushed the silver dish away from him and stood, as if wishing to disown his generosity. Jessica took both the pearly mints and placed them on her tongue.
‘Do you have money for a cab?’ he asked. She did but shook her head and he resurfaced his wallet. He fumbled a little as he returned the wallet to his back pocket again. He dropped it and bent with effort. Jessica felt an inconvenient rush of pity. She tucked the feeling behind her ears with her hair and moved out of the restaurant leaving Owen to follow.
The cab driver’s faces were awash with small light as they idled on their phones. Owen tapped his knuckles on the window. Jessica knew his distaste for anyone who seemed distracted from their work. He expected diligence in the people he paid. Jessica’s mother had been able to afford a pleasant apartment, south of the city, with his money.
Bridled horses, that drew a customerless carriage behind them, fidgeted next to the cab win-dow. Jessica sat low in the backseat, bunkering into her jacket, peering out from the parapet of her collar. The horses nickered and snorted as she became lost in the nightmare-dark of the horse’s wet black eye, the red light reflected. She thought of his whole wide life and how small her part was within it. The thoughts she did not permit herself most nights of the week. She thought of the other children waiting for him at home and the light turned green. The taxi and the horses moved on.
The city was spilling into the sharp hours of the night as Owen walked. His daughter was safe. He thought about what her apartment might look like. What colours did she like? Did she have a pet? The lucid, callow questions asked when learning a new language. Owen crossed the road, walking past his car and towards the river. The driver would wait all night if he had to.
A long yellow hair, dark at its root, had found its way to the shoulder of his best blazer. A cool wind struck up, and the hair was gone.
