Chapter Seventeen
“Do relax, I could seduce you as well in the theater as in my flat,” Kyle said with some annoyance.
“I need not lure you here, put on a beautifully patterned smoking jacket, ice the champagne, ooze over your shoulder as you fret over your lines, and coerce you to my couch in order to do it, you know. That’s what they do in melodramas of any worth—but please remember the theater presents things perfectly in order to make them more exciting.
However, as I’m sure you also know,” he continued as Hannah glowered at him, “the thing can be done backstage, on a pile of canvas, between the intermission and the second act. Actually, Lester always brags that he was conceived before the first act, as though that were more than a lovely play on words,” he added conversationally.
Hannah lost her look of fury as she began to giggle. It was impossible to be angry at his outrageous lack of propriety. He was of the theater, after all, and not the world she’d been aspiring to.
“Yes,” Kyle went on, “and then he boasts that being conceived before the first act is the nearest thing to a virgin birth that he can conceive of in the theater. A very amusing fellow—but it’s true.
At any rate, I asked you here tonight in order to rehearse, because we’ve little time and much to do.
I considered that our being completely alone in an empty theater in the night would be much more intimidating for you than simply coming to my rooms. But then,” he said with exaggerated hauteur, “I am not a respectable person, I suppose, and cannot be expected to know the latest rules of modesty that prevail among the refined and genteel.”
Hannah grinned at him over the script she held, but her smile slipped as he added, “Of course, should you care to share my couch, I’d be more than delighted: I’d be honored, pleased, and gratified beyond mere words.
But even so. I’d prefer that you restrain your understandable lust for me until after you’ve got the part down pat, if you please,” he said, raising one thin hand to forestall the furious comment trembling on her tongue, “because, alas, the play comes before play, in my heart, always.”
She shook her head. There was no way she could stay angry, and his smile showed that he knew it very well.
It was late, because they’d worked at the theater all day, had dinner, and only then had time to come to his rooms in order to rehearse the part she’d promised to undertake in a few days’ time.
She’d trouble with one scene, and it was necessary that it be perfect.
She didn’t need her costar to rehearse with—she considered him a conceited ass, anyway—only a knowing, patient tutor, just as Kyle had said.
It was all very reasonable. But she’d discovered, only moments before, after she’d given him her coat, taken up her script, and waited for him to return to the room, that she was nervous about it.
He’d pleasant lodgings; three rooms in a decent neighborhood, on the second floor of a well-appointed brownstone house near the theater.
His parlor was furnished with a plump leather couch, a few plush chairs, several fat glass-globed lamps, and a piano with a gaily patterned cloth flung over it; and though it was obviously his landlord’s taste, he’d his own framed photographs of theater folk on the walls and tabletops.
They’d been warm and comfortable surroundings until he’d come into the room again after hanging her coat on a stand in the hallway.
Because then, as he’d loomed up out of the shadows of this new setting, she’d seen him as if for the first time, and had thought that he was really a most attractive man, if you didn’t know him.
He was, after all, she thought, eyeing him, if not tall, then at least above average height, and if lean, he’d a trim figure.
His long dark hair shone with cleanliness, not scented oil, and his great dark eyes were lustrous and surprisingly long-lashed.
But it was more than that. He’d an almost aristocratic, long-nosed, fine-featured thin face; indeed, everything about him was lean, almost starved, and spoke of some intense and insatiable hunger.
And that, she began to perceive with her newly heightened sensibilities in such matters, was precisely where his attraction lay, because such hunger was in itself oddly compelling.
So far as she knew, he’d been celibate on the tour.
But he’d once asked her if she’d like to change that: she remembered that now.
Although he’d lived in a single state then, he’d been, after all, extremely single-minded then as well.
The men in the troupe had often joked with each other about that singular state.
They’d implied it was unusual and unlike his reputation of having little trouble finding a female for diversion, and liking such diversion very much.
In fact, Hannah had noted several of the new girls in the show casting longing glances at their director.
Lately she’d thought she’d noted a certain overdone coyness on the part of one of the dancers whenever Kyle was near her, and he showed a correspondingly overly pronounced lack of interest toward her at the same time.
But she wasn’t here tonight, nor was there a trace of another human presence anywhere in the flat, and Kyle was also said to be fond of having such company live in with him.
This might be due to laziness, as she’d once overheard Frank jesting when he’d spoken of a notoriously vain actress Kyle had once been linked with, or because of his omnipresent appetites—however unwise an arrangement, such a man might prefer to have even an icebox handy for his snacks rather than having to eat out every night—as she’d heard Lester answer Frank before she’d scurried away so they’d not discover her, red-faced from her eavesdropping.
The fact was that Kyle could be considered an attractive man, and was, by many women. He was probably of an age with Gray, Hannah realized. And he was never a gentleman as Gray was, and didn’t pretend to be.
But he’d read her face before she’d read her lines, and so even if she was still on her guard, at least she could laugh with him now. Until he spoke again.
“Alas, I fear my timing is off, for once. I’m too late, aren’t I?” Kyle asked gently. “You’ve fallen in love with him, haven’t you?”
It was his sad smile, his low and velvety tone of voice, and the lateness of the hour that undid her.
Hannah nodded, and before she entirely understood what was happening, lowered her guard; she’d yet to learn that a mind could be seduced while one was busy worrying about the body.
But it felt so very good to unburden herself, even though she knew that was the whole point of any seduction.
“I suppose I have,” she admitted, looking up over her script, “but it doesn’t matter. Because nothing will come of it.” She rattled the papers in businesslike fashion.
“It seemed to me,” Kyle persisted gently, “that he was similarly afflicted.”
“That doesn’t matter either,” she said abruptly, her hands tightening on the script until it crumpled, “because nothing can come of it either—Oh Kyle,” she groaned, gazing into his deep, dark endlessly soft, and sympathetic eyes.
It was all soon told. Every embarrassing, painful bit of it.
Repetition took the difficulty as well as the reality from the words, as with any part to be played.
She was silent when she’d done, marveling over how, once told, it was so simple to tell again even after all these long silent years, when he spoke again.
“Ah. And so, after he discovered all, he left you?” Kyle asked thoughtfully.
She shrugged, and said as lightly as she was able, “What else could he do?”
“He could have asked to marry him anyhow. As I do now,” Kyle commented so blandly, she almost spoke again before she heard his words again, and then fell still, staring at him, too astonished to even be afraid of his declaration or the light in his newly kindled eyes.
“Hannah,” he said carefully, coming no closer, though his tone of voice as well as his warm looks reached out to her, “I’m not jesting.
What is a marriage, anyway, but a meeting of two minds and two souls?
Ah well, of course the joys of the meeting of two bodies cannot be discounted.
But if they must be—they can be.” He smiled sadly as he added, “Although, believe me, the reverse is never true. That’s the point,” he said.
He began to pace, and Hannah grew alarmed both at what he was saying and how he was saying it; for he’d a way of making everything, no matter how farfetched, make sense as he said it, and knowing it scarcely helped.
“I need you,” he said, throwing her a bright glance, “I’ve told you that before.
You’ve been a wonderful helpmate to me. I’d thought you might be more—but as you say, that’s to be seen, and well may never be.
That doesn’t change things, not really. You’re a dedicated worker, you know the theater, you’re good with people—I may be able to persuade them to do all sorts of things,” he said on a half-smile, “you however, have a way of making them like you, no matter what I’ve persuaded them to do.
That rubs off on me, and makes my path an easier one.
“Now it transpires that you’re a fine actress, too,” he said, and nodding, added, “You are, Hannah, don’t doubt it—or at least, I feel you will be when you stop fearing it.
Believe me, my feeling a thing about the theater is as good as knowing it.
Yes, I’ve a wondrous good opinion of myself.
But only about the things I know. I do know the theater,” he said, stopping in his tracks and staring at her where she stood, amazed.