Chapter 8
“Can you believe that arrogant Australian?” Dídac growled as he stabbed a piece of beetroot with his fork. “ ‘That… seemed… sincere.’ Sincere? That cultureless Antipodean couldn’t recognize ‘sincere’ if it slapped him right in the face!”
“Calm down, Didi. He probably just wasn’t sure how to talk to you. You guys have been at loggerheads ever since you met.” But Laia made sure she kept her eyes on her salad, while she made this remark. She was quite familiar with Dídac’s passions.
“It was your idea, Laia, remember? The whole come-on as a dedicated actor and show him your stuff?”
“Dídac, that is unfair. Anyway, you are a professional actor. You should be showing your best work from the get-go, especially to a new director.”
“Well, he hated it, didn’t he?”
“How could he have hated it? Of course he didn’t. The fact he didn’t tell you he loved it, doesn’t mean he hated it. Directors never say what they think out loud, especially him.”
“How am I ever going to get through this rehearsal season? The guy’s an ice block.”
“The same as you ever do—with perseverance, discipline, and as much creativity as you can pull out of yourself on a daily basis.”
The moustachioed blond waiter came to bring their mains, strutting that muscular ass, and they waited for a few long respectful moments, their eyes following the dance of those enticing globes as he headed back toward the kitchen. Then they picked up their forks.
“My advice,” Laia finally offered, after having made a decent inroad into the pork knuckle she was attacking (Laia was the only woman he knew who could eat enough for a five-a-side rugby team and still stay as thin as a rake), “is study his previous work, particularly the lead actors. Most directors have a type of lead actor or actress they cast and recast from one show to the other. Maybe by studying the sort of performance he’s got from his leads on previous shows, you’ll get an idea of how to move forward. ”
“Nothing would give me less pleasure,” Dídac grumbled.
But then he was silent, concentrating on his food, and Laia knew he was at least thinking about her idea. They were silent for a few minutes, eating. Then suddenly Laia slammed her fork onto the table:
“Shit!”
“What?”
“The press conference!”
“Oh shit!”
They were both supposed to be there.
“It’s OK, we’ve still got minutes. I’ll get us a ride now.”
Dídac pulled his phone out, opening his ride share app.
“No, I should have been back half an hour ago to prep with Kim. He’ll kill me. And we can’t arrive in the same car. It’ll put his back up.”
“Why? He knows we’re friends.”
“Even so….”
“OK, you take the ride. I’ll come a little later. He thinks I’m an undisciplined schmuck anyway. Another late show won’t put me any deeper in the shit.”
“No, it will. You can’t afford that. Damn it, let’s just go in together. I’m not going to apologize just for having lunch with a friend.”
In the best dramatic tradition, the press conference had been arranged on stage.
Xavier Pons, and his stage manager, a scruffy, dark-haired twenty-something called Pau, who always wore the same grease-stained overalls day-in day-out, had set up a semi-circle of half a dozen chairs and microphones on stage behind a low coffee table containing a jug of water and several glasses.
When Laia rushed into the theater, Dídac sauntering a good few paces behind, the few dozen journalists and photographers invited from Barcelona’s numerous media organizations, were still milling in the aisles and hadn’t yet sat down.
Laia rushed straight up on stage and crouched down beside Kim Delatour, the foreign director, who was so far the only person seated center stage, an isolated figure on his own.
Yet Dídac noted that the lone zenith down light illuminating him turned his mane of blond hair into a burnished helmet of blazing light.
He had changed into a light beige linen suit and white open-neck shirt that accentuated his powerful frame and gym-worked body.
Laia pulled up a stool beside and behind him, from where she could act as his interpreter and informant.
Thankfully, Kim didn’t seem to have realized that Laia and Dídac had arrived together.
Down in the stalls, Santi Puig and Jordi Veràs were both working their way through the throng of seasoned theater journalists, shaking hands and slapping backs, making sure they shared a friendly word with every reporter who had come.
Felipa Gomez and Domènec Faro, as the production’s senior actors, were also there, working the press with their well-oiled charm and experience.
Then the photographer from La Vanguardia spied Dídac coming slowly down the aisle and ran to get a few shots of him in relative isolation.
At the first flash, two other photographers followed, and so he paused, leaning against the theater seating and allowing them an impromptu photo session.
After rehearsal and before going to lunch, he had also changed and was now wearing a charcoal-gray jacket and green silk shirt that set off his eyes beautifully.
One of the photographers turned on a portable spotlight to better illuminate Dídac, and the sudden brightening of light caught Kim’s attention.
For a moment, their eyes sought each other across the dim theater space, each lit brightly, two islands separated by the wine-dark sea: Kim, a white-gold viking staring down at the swarthy, green-eyed Dídac, who was lounging seductively against the red velvet theater seats.
Something, a moment, or perhaps some spark of communication passed between them as they gazed at each other.
Dídac was unsure what. He only knew that in that moment the two of them seemed connected in a way he couldn’t quite fathom.
But then Santi and Jordi were climbing upstairs onto the stage and taking their seats.
So Dídac excused himself from the photographers and walked down the aisle, going up on stage as well.
He took a seat on the far side of the semi-circle, stage-right, from where he could watch Kim in the center with Laia by his side.
Felipa and Domènec were seated between them, and on Kim’s other side sat Santi and Jordi, facing Dídac.
As soon as everybody was assembled and the journalists had taken their seats in the stalls, Jordi Veràs leaped to his feet and went into his introductory spiel, talking about Teatre Romea and the amazing season the theater had lined up, outlining the various shows they would be putting on over the coming twelve months.
It was the kind of speech Dídac had heard a million times before, and he found his attention wandering back to Kim.
Some, in fact most people get nervous when they find themselves before an audience.
Kim Delatour, like Dídac himself, was the reverse.
You could just tell, he was the kind of person you might feel was visibly tense when you met him in any day-to-day situation.
But up here on stage, illuminated by the lights, with a few score reporters ready to quote and print anything that came out of his mouth, he seemed thoroughly relaxed, as calm in his element as a fish in water.
A lion in its lair. An eel in its riverbank.
As Dídac was trying to think of the perfect metaphor that expressed the way the director was sitting there, Kim suddenly looked over to see Dídac observing him, and he actually smiled.
It was an unexpected blaze, like a flash of sun glare that hits you while you’re driving, blinding you, forcing you to pull over to the side of the road to recover.
Then Laia whispered something into his ear, perhaps a translation of something Jordi was saying, and his attention whipped back toward the Romea’s artistic director.
Effectively, Jordi was now extolling Kim Delatour’s praises and explaining what a coup it was to have hooked his production of The Swan for their theater.
Dídac found himself floundering. Rarely had he been on the receiving end of such a powerful gaze, such a burning beam of intensity.
Because Kim’s smile was not one of friendship.
It was the smile of a radiant god seated on Mount Olympus, gazing down at some delectable mortal that intrigues him, knowing that all the choices are his, all the power to take what he sees fit.
Dídac would normally have been outraged, incensed that anyone meet his eyes with such brazenness as Kim had just displayed.
But strangely, having Kim see him like that for the first time, he had felt intensely vulnerable—yet seen.
It was as if Kim had looked deep inside him, reading his innermost secrets, his fears, informing him that he had complete power over him, and yet letting him know that Dídac was safe in his care. It felt humbling, but not unpleasant.