'Any jealous spouses?' I said.
'No. I wish there were.'
'You owe money?'
'Just car payments. I make them regularly.'
'What would you like me to do?' I said.
'Catch the shadow,' Christopholous said.
'Okay.'
'Do you think you can catch him?' Christopholous said.
'Sure,' I said.
'Him or her.'
No sexist, I.
CHAPTER 3
The Port City Theater Company was housed in what had once been the meeting hall of a church at the east end of a disgruntled avenue called Ocean Street. Behind it was a parking lot and beyond the parking lot the harbor where the water was iridescent with oil slick, and the loud gulls clustered to harvest the fragrant effluvia of the fish-packing plants. The church now housed some sleazy boutiques and cafes and places to buy theater memorabilia, and the hall, where once there had been bake sales, had been renovated by Cabot into a 350-seat theater. Christopholous left us in front and went around to the stage door.
'We gotta see this?' I said.
'Of course,' Susan said.
'I'm on the board. I can't come up here, have a drink with the Artistic Director, and not see the play.'
'I can.'
'But you love me,' Susan said, 'and you want to be with me.'
'Of course,' I said.
'What's the play about?'
'Nobody seems to know.'
'What do the actors say it's about?'
'They don't know,' Susan said. She was as close to embarrassed as she gets.
'The actors don't know what it's about?'
'No.'
'How about the Director?'
'Lou says that a play is not required to be about anything.'
'And it runs how long?'
'Four and a half hours with an intermission.'
Susan smiled encouragingly.
'It's very controversial,' she said.
'Excellent,' I said.
'Maybe a fight will break out.'
She smiled at me again, a smile perfectly capable of launching a thousand ships and very likely to burn the topless towers of Ilium.
We got to the box office, collected our tickets, and went into the theater. The theater was full of people who lived on Cabot Hill and could trace their lineage back to the British Isles. It looked like a Cabot College faculty meeting. In a town fifty percent Portuguese and fifty percent Chinese, the theater was a hundred percent neither.
'I haven't seen so many Anglo Saxons in one place since the Republican convention,' I said.
'You've never been to the Republican Convention,' Susan said.
'I've never been asked,' I said.
The houselights dimmed. The play began. On stage there were men dressed as women and women dressed as men, and white people in blackface and black people in white face and a rabbi named O'Leary, and a priest named Cohen. I knew the names because they were printed on a big sandwich board which each of the actors wore throughout the first act. There was someone in a dog suit who kept saying meow. There was very little dialogue, and the actors moved slowly about the stage with angular gestures, stopping periodically in frozen tableau, while an offstage voice recited something ominous that sounded like a hip-hop adaptation of Thus Spake Zarathustra.
After an hour of this Susan leaned toward me and said, 'What do you think?'
'It's heavy-handed but impenetrable,' I said.
'Not an easy achievement,' Susan said.
