She was still dazed as the curtain closed at last and the cast fell to laughing and embracing. Champagne appeared and Marta herself popped the cork—after shaking the bottle—letting the contents spray everywhere. The stage manager wouldn’t be happy about that. People came to hug Charlotte, and she held them off with the shield of roses and tried to be gracious. She was suddenly exhausted. All that pacing backstage. But everyone else was buzzed and manic as squirrels, and the night was just starting.
She realized that she hadn’t thought this far ahead. It was enough to have her play finished and actually staged, and she hadn’t dared think any further than that, except to assume that it would all be a dismal failure. But, by all appearances, the play was a success. Shouldn’t she be happy?
IF THE PLAY had been a failure, the invitation-only opening-night party would have been a wake, and they could have mourned in peace without having to talk to anyone but themselves. Since the play had been successful, it would be the most sensational and sought-after party of the month. Tonight would be a celebration. Charlotte tried to ignore a growing sense of foreboding.
Otto had reserved the restaurant, but Marta had rented the limo for them all to arrive in, them being Marta, the actors, Charlotte, Otto, and Otto’s young actress wife, Helen. Part of why Otto was a good director was because he didn’t automatically cast Helen in everything he did.
“Where’s your handsome lawyer? I didn’t see him at the theater,” Helen asked, and Charlotte blushed.
“Working late.”
Helen acknowledged this happily enough, but Otto gave her a sympathetic, almost pitying smile.
Otto had Helen on one arm and Marta on the other as he swept them up the sidewalk to the door of Napoli’s. Harry and Fred tried to sweep Charlotte the same way, but she resisted, extricating herself from their grips in the restaurant’s lobby.
“Dorian’s meeting me here,” she said, faking confidence.
“Wait for him inside,” Harry said, pouting.
“Just another minute.”
More and more people arrived, passing through the restaurant’s lobby, checking their coats, hugging and kissing cheeks. Many were already drunk, all of them cheerful. There were reporters here, and photographers. Otto would get all the publicity he could hope for. It was fabulous. Charlotte paced. Her steps dragged, and the maitre d’ kept asking if he could get her anything. She almost gave up. She almost lost faith.
Then there he was, in his sweeping overcoat and intense face, a man with purpose. He held a bundle of roses.
“You came!” she said, maybe a little too brightly.
“Of course I did. You look wonderful.” He pressed the roses into her arms and leaned in for a quick kiss on her cheek. He’d rushed, she could tell. He was still catching his breath and a faint sheen of sweat lay on his neck. “I’m sorry I missed the play. I’ll make it up to you. How did it go?”
She took a deep breath. The thrill was finally starting to build. “It was amazing. It was brilliant, it was—” She sighed. “Come inside, help us celebrate.” She took his hand and tried to urge him in.
“Honey, that’s wonderful. But I’m not sure I’m up for a late night with all your theater friends. Wouldn’t you rather have a quiet evening? We could celebrate in private, just the two of us.”
Her heart melted at that, a little. But she might only ever have one big successful opening-night party. She couldn’t be expected to pick between her dashing boyfriend and her opening-night party, could she?
“Just for a little while. Please?”
He finally slipped off his coat and gave it to the check clerk. Charlotte held the roses with one arm and him with the other as they entered the main dining room.
The room was full. She hadn’t realized so many people were here—the cast and crew and all their significant others didn’t account for everyone. How many invitations had Otto given out? He probably hadn’t expected everyone to come. But the show was a success. They were hip and cool. Who knew? She recognized a handful of celebrities, the deputy mayor, a popular news anchor. And was that the masked hero Breezeway, in uniform, posing with some of the cast? Maybe her own rescuer would be here. But she looked and couldn’t see him.
She could smell champagne as if it flowed from fountains. The place was in chaos, people sitting on tables, shouting across the room, accosting waitstaff bearing platters of finger food. No one should have noticed Charlotte and Dorian slipping in late. But they did.
“Charlotte!” Otto called from across the room, where he held court at a round table covered with a red satin cloth and a dozen champagne bottles. He was loud enough to draw the attention of the others, who turned to look.
“To our playwright! To the genius!” Otto raised a glass.
Marta, at her own table with a dozen fawning admirers, took up her own glass. “To the genius!”
And everyone raised glasses and cheered and applauded all over again. This was more than Charlotte had expected, more than she had imagined. She could only bask, silent. The playwright, wordless.
Beside her, Dorian looked at her and smiled. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.
“Congratulations,” he whispered, posing for pictures with her, making sure the reporter spelled his name right.
The party went until dawn, but they left early. He brought her home to his place this time and made love to her more attentively than he had since their first weeks together.
BY MORNING, TEN different people had e-mailed Charlotte a photo going around the news Web sites of the masked hero on surveillance footage thwarting a convenience store robbery yesterday evening, the same time she’d been pacing backstage. The photo was black-and-white, grainy, and showed him standing with one foot on a guy who sprawled in front of the checkout counter. A gun could be seen nearby, as if it had fallen and skittered away from the would-be robber’s gloved hand.
But she recognized the convenience store, on a corner a few blocks away from the theater. He’d been right there, almost.
The reviews of the play were all right, which was more than she’d hoped for, and while they didn’t sell out again after the opening, the house was mostly full every night. Maybe that first night had sold out because of the novelty of her instant fame, if people were just coming to see the play written by that woman who was rescued by that Blue Collar vigilante. But if that was all the play offered, ticket sales would have bombed soon after. Which meant that maybe she knew what she was doing, and maybe everything was going to be all right. Weeks passed, and the play continued its respectable run.
Then people starting asking, “How is the next play coming along?”
And it wasn’t. She stared at her laptop for hours, took her notepad to the park, the coffee shop, the library. She thought she had characters—another woman, another hero, another subversion of traditional gothic narratives, etcetera. But every line she wrote sounded just like what she’d already done, and the words didn’t fit anymore.
She’d sit in her chair by the window all night—even the nights she spent at Dorian’s—make notes in her notebook, and watch the sky grow light. If she was at Dorian’s, he’d wake up, see her sitting wrapped in a blanket, staring instead of writing, and try to be helpful.
“You’ll get there,” he said. “You did it before, you can do it again.” Like it was just a matter of arguing a case.
One morning at Dorian’s, she’d made it to bed and was still there when he was nearly ready for his day.
“The DA wants to come see your show. I told him I could get him tickets.” Looking in the mirror, he straightened his tie. “You can get tickets, right?”
“Sure,” she said, emerging from blankets. “For when?”
“For tonight.”
“That might be kind of tough.”
“Come on, honey, surely you have some pull. You guys always hold a few tickets back, right?”
