Chapter Sixteen #2
Even though he missed an eight-count of blocking in “Simple Joys,” and even though the Fosse-esque dance moves often felt awkward in his body, Danny felt blood returning to his veins.
Sure, there was a decent possibility that the show would end up a huge disaster—there was the chance he’d never get the steps right and totally blow a cue—but there was also the slightest possibility that maybe it wouldn’t, that maybe he’d just barely inch his way to an opening night curtain call, that maybe the choreography wouldn’t be perfect but perhaps not entirely distracting, that maybe he’d say his lines in all the right places.
That slight flicker of hope was enough to carry him from one scene to the next, his feet feeling like they were levitating just an inch off the ground.
And when it came time for Danny to rehearse his first scene with Demetrius, the boy playing the title role, something else came into focus that he hadn’t counted on.
As he flexed and grunted, reading his lines in the Staten Island goombah voice he’d discovered in his audition, he was met with the unrestrained sounds of laughter.
The more thickly he laid on his South Shore accent, the more his fellow cast members seemed to delight in his performance.
The dread and confusion of always being in the wrong spot dissolved into a new idea that made his skin tingle—maybe it wasn’t just that he was different; maybe what made him different made him better.
But all of that was before the door in the back of the theater cracked open.
“Let’s try the scene with Nina in ‘Spread a Little Sunshine,’ ” Ms. Mellon called out just as Danny spotted a familiar face peeking through one of the auditorium double doors.
Danny dug his nails into his binder, leaving tiny moons indented in the plastic as a sly Christian Geronimo quietly snuck in and took a seat in the last row.
“Danny, you good?” Ms. Mellon asked.
“Yeah,” Danny gasped, his heart kicking. “Sure, just lemme get to the right page.”
He tried his best to mask the shakiness of his hands as they flipped to the scene where Lewis asks his mother about the royal chain of command.
He squinted, willing his eyes to focus on the words, the same ones he’d memorized for his audition a week earlier.
If there was one part of the show that he should have felt confident in, it was this scene.
After all, he’d practiced on the phone with Nina for hours and then again in his audition, where he’d nailed every comic beat.
But with Christian’s eyes on him, those same eyes that had seen him dance and fly over the rooftops of Chelsea, all the letters on the page began to rearrange, forming illegible patterns.
“It’s you first,” Nina whispered, giving him a little shove with her elbow.
“Right,” Danny said, setting his script down on the floor.
He took a deep breath, sucking in air and puffing out his chest like a numbskull quarterback.
Just ignore him, Danny thought. No, better yet, make him forget.
“Mama,” Danny whined, strutting up to Nina and throwing an arm around her waist, pulling her in tight. “If Pippin kills Father…”
Nina seemed startled by the unrehearsed and somewhat intimate gesture, but she seemed to sense that perhaps her scene partner was trying something new and decided to roll with it, patting Danny’s shoulder soothingly. “Then you’ll be next in line for the throne, darling.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Danny could see Christian in the audience, his chin tucked in the crook of his elbow as he leaned forward on the seat in front of him. Danny let out a big brawny groan, pressing his head dramatically into Nina’s chest.
“But if Father discovers Pippin’s plot and executes him…” Danny said in a dopey baby voice, snuggling his ear in between her breasts.
“Then…,” Nina said in an unusually thin voice, patting his head somewhat hesitantly but clearly trying to make the new bit work, “…you’ll be next in line for the throne, darling.”
And before Danny could really take stock of what he was about to do, he reached down and lifted Nina into his arms like a new groom carrying his bride across the threshold, sparking a chorus of giggles from the side of the stage where his castmates looked on, enthralled.
“Mama,” Danny panted, “no matter what happens, I’ll move up.”
“Yes!” she exclaimed, looking flustered but still trying to sell it.
Laughter bubbled up from the wings. The cast was clearly amused. Ms. Mellon, on the other hand, was inscrutable, looking down at her script, seeming to gather her thoughts.
“That’s…definitely a new approach to the scene,” she said finally.
“Yeah, I thought it might be funny,” Danny said, setting Nina down and helping her pull down her shirt, which had ridden up her back from the lift.
“Uh-huh,” Ms. Mellon said, beginning to chew on the end of her eraser. “I suppose the…Oedipal take is somewhat reinforced by the text. Fastrada and Lewis do have a sort of unique relationship.”
“I mean, how could he not wanna flirt with her,” Danny grunted, draping his arm around Nina’s shoulder, which in turn sparked a few more chuckles from the wings.
“Interesting choice, no doubt,” Ms. Mellon said, looking over her glasses at the two of them. “But physical choices, especially ones that involve touching, or lifting, or, I don’t know, nuzzling…”
A few nervous chuckles escaped from his castmates.
“…Those need to be agreed upon. You can’t just spring those on your scene partner, no matter how much you’re feeling in the moment.”
Heat bloomed across Danny’s cheeks, burning to the tips of his ears. He looked over to Nina, whose eyes briefly met his before flicking to Ms. Mellon.
“It’s totally fine,” Nina said, in a casual tone that Danny didn’t find entirely convincing. “Really. It was funny.”
Ms. Mellon softened her tone. “Nina, I appreciate you being a team player, but if something makes you uncomfortable, you have every right to speak up—”
“Seriously,” Nina cut her off, reaching for Danny’s hand and giving a little squeeze. “I promise. It’s totally fine!”
In the back of the theater, Danny watched as Christian slumped down in his seat.
“All right,” Ms. Mellon said, in a tone that mirrored Nina’s own. “We’ll take a look at it again on Wednesday, but for now, let’s move on to ‘Morning Glow.’ ”
Six o’clock came and Ms. Mellon called it a day.
The cast packed up their bags, throwing Danny thumbs-ups and teasing grins as they headed off for subway rides home.
Danny walked up the aisle, Nina’s arm loosely looped in his own, the two of them giddy, debriefing on the afternoon.
There were line flubs and missed cues and of course the weirdness of their scene (which Nina now seemed willing to treat as some kind of inside joke).
But despite everything, Danny felt proud, actually proud of himself.
For a second, he let himself think that maybe this time things were going to break his way.
But that flicker of hope was snuffed out the moment he stepped into the lobby and saw a chipped-tooth smile waiting for him.
“Christian?!” Nina shouted as they exited the auditorium. “What are you still doing here?”
“Ohhhh,” Christian said, laughing, sounding somewhat guarded. “I didn’t get a chance to wish Danny good luck on his first day of rehearsal, so I thought I’d try to catch you on the flip side.”
“Aw, that’s so sweet,” Nina said, pressing her palm to her chest and doing a little demiplie, which made Danny chew down hard on his molars.
“I’d love to stay and chat but I gotta run home.
My dad seems to think Mondays are now game nights with Trish,” Nina said, the name Trish sounding like it had a lot in common with the word trash.
“See ya tomorrow,” Danny said, tracing his hand up to Nina’s shoulder and giving it a little squeeze. “Thanks for helping me out today.”
They watched as their friend pushed through the set of doors, the clanging metal swinging into silence, leaving them alone in the lobby, a whole Encyclopedia Britannica of words left to say.
“So you never called—”
“Yeah, sorry,” Danny cut right in.
“And when someone picked up, they said I had the wrong—”
“Yeah that was Ma. It’s stupid. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. I was just—”
“Hey,” Danny interrupted again, his eyes flinching away from Christian’s and beginning to examine the frayed ends of his shoelaces. “So we should talk about Friday night.”
“We…should,” Christian said hesitantly.
“That whole night was crazy,” Danny said, rubbing his forehead. “At least, what I can remember of it. I think you might have lent me some money. I’ll try to get that back to you as soon as—”
“No, don’t worry about it,” Christian said, smiling. “I’m just glad you got home safe.”
“Yeah, thanks. I mean, I was so unbelievably blackout.”
Almost imperceptibly, Christian’s smile retreated.
“I’m never drinking again, I swear to God,” Danny said, laughing. “I must have been so embarrassing.”
“No.” Christian shook his head cautiously. “No, you were fine. It seemed like you were having a good time.”
“Yeah. I guess I was,” Danny said, the toe of his sneaker drawing a line along the red grain of the granite floor. “It’s hard to say, I can hardly remember, but I’m pretty sure I did some dumbass shit later on.”
Christian looked as if he was holding his breath.
“Like, I’m sorry if I acted…weird,” Danny said, biting his bottom lip.
“…Weird?” Christian asked.
“Yeah. I mean, Christ, I was so drunk by the time I got to the dance floor that I woulda grinded up on anyone.”
Christian’s face froze.
“But like I said”—Danny looked at his shoes, the growing hurt in Christian’s eyes too great to keep eye contact—“I was really drunk and barely remember what happened, and if I said or did anything…”
Danny lingered for a second. “Just know that it was a mistake.”
“A mistake,” Christian repeated.
“Yeah,” Danny exhaled, looking out the big glass lobby windows at a young couple holding hands and an old woman walking a gray poodle and a man tiredly pushing a hot-pretzel cart up Amsterdam Avenue.
Danny dropped his voice low, facing Christian square on.
“And that’s not me.”
“Oh.”
Danny could see himself reflected in Christian’s eyes, tiny and warped.
And just for a second, Danny saw a flicker of possibility—that Christian might reach out and grab him by the shoulders, jolting him with that lightning charge, that maybe he’d call bullshit on an act that even Danny knew was a tragic cliché and call him out for lying—they were both the same, they could both fly and read each other’s minds and feel each other’s heartbeats when the music thumped just right.
Christian swallowed, then inhaled slowly, widening his mouth into a pained smile. “Well, you don’t need to be embarrassed, tough guy, because nothing happened.”
There’s a story in the Bible that Danny learned about in third grade.
It was the story of David and Jonathan, who were both heroic soldiers.
Danny, like most guys at St. Pete’s, especially liked hearing about David, the guy who’d killed the giant Goliath with a single stone from a sling, hitting him in the head.
As the story went, Jonathan was so impressed with David and his rock-slinging arm that when David would go out to battle, Jonathan would give him his armor and sword for protection.
And when he’d come home safe, the two of them would get to hang out and tell each other things—stories from the battlefield or tales of far-off lands, or maybe secrets, like their dreams, or how they sometimes still got scared at night, or how when they were apart, they felt like two ships lost at sea, but when they were together, it was like their souls were knit as one.
But people got frightened by a lot of things back in those days, mostly things they couldn’t explain.
And one day, David got the news that Jonathan had been slain on a mountaintop.
David was so upset that he refused to eat and wouldn’t talk to anyone, and tore his clothes in the place where his heart used to be.
“Well, you don’t need to be embarrassed, because nothing happened.”
Danny looked down at his shirt, his fingers flicking at his side, desperate to reach up and tear the fabric into shreds.
“Okay, well, I gotta get home,” Danny said. “I’m technically grounded.”
“Right,” Christian said, nodding. “I’ll see ya around.”