“You were sweet to think of the theatre for me,” he whispered over the blaring horns of the overture.
“Oh, of course!” Alexander responded fondly. “I haven’t seen you in so long.”
“Oh, I know! I have been insanely busy! But then again, so have you!” he said more to himself than to Alexander.
The buxom woman sitting next him shushed him discreetly, and he frowned. The overture was still playing; it wasn’t as if they were missing anything.
Alexander leaned in to him and whispered, “It had to end, didn’t it? All those deadlines, and accompanying drama!”
He smiled in response. “And here we are! Free, if only momentarily…”
“I am still open to running away to Thessaloniki, you know…” Alexander proposed, with a hint of a grin in his whisper.
This time it was his turn to do the shushing: “Alex! The performance!”
They turned their attention to the stage where their entrancingly beautiful friend sang in her clear voice of days and lovers gone by, and how she wished she had paid more attention to what was before her all along.
“She’s ravishing!” he whispered to Alexander, and his disapproving neighbor shuffled purposefully.
“Vanessa’s always been the master of the Shock and Awe,” Alexander noted with the air of a critic. “Look! She has even made you forget how much you hate this song!”
“Why would anyone waste their breath hitting high notes to whine about velleities?” he said stuffily.
“Snob.” Alexander surmised with inherent charm.
He elbowed Alexander in the shoulder, as he stifled his laughter.
He now began to concentrate on the performance. The play was a musical: a grand spectacle about the frivolities of egotistical people paired with the wrong partners, but too arrogant to admit their respective errors. It was only in their staged solitude that they allowed themselves the luxury of remorse and of regret and that too in song. He looked at Alexander who seemed to be above the elegant foolishness taking place on stage. At this point, he was humming along with one of the songs. It was a well-known number in which the singer, a distinguished gentleman, extolled the virtues of his rather juvenile child-wife to a sophisticated old flame whose face bore the grief of knowing too much of the world. He felt the same world-weariness and calculated confusion of that actress reach out to him in the form of a pearlescent vapour, and pour itself into his pores. His heart stirred, and he leaned back and touched Alexander’s shoulder. Alexander leaned forward, questioning concern on his face.
“Quit humming, I can barely hear the song!” he hissed, perhaps a little more vituperatively than he had planned.
An imperturbable ripple of hurt flashed across Alexander’s face, only visible to the very experienced.
“Sorry,” he said shortly, and his friend, slowly dissolving into guilt, nodded.
As the impending intermission began to coax the flighty proceedings to a more equilibrated phase, the two gentlemen decided to pay their friend Vanessa a back-stage visit.
“Do you have the back-stage pass?” he asked with an edge of panic in his voice.
“Yes, I do!” Alexander replied in an attempt to soothe his irrational anxiety. “Don’t worry, there will be no ugly scene involving security!”
He beamed, “You know me so well!”
“Always!” Alexander beamed back.
The bustle of back-stage was overwhelming with wigs and props that seemed to fly around, and people yelled for a myriad things at once.
“Has anyone seen the fake baby?!”
“Marissa is allergic to the green wig! Did you know this?”
“Coffee! Paul needs his coffee before his big aria, and don’t overdo the cognac like last time!”
“Oh my God! This show is a flop!”
It astounded him how people seemed to navigate around them fluidly, as if they knew that he and Alexander didn’t truly belong there.
“Text Vanessa, won’t you?” he said edgily.
But, before Alexander could pull out his phone, a squealing Vanessa managed to locate them.
“Oh my God, you guys, you made it!” she cried as a greeting.
She took one look at Alexander, launched herself into his arms, and kissed him full on the lips.
“What did you think, darling?” she asked him gingerly, throatily, privately.
“I am loving it.” He answered laconically, but his words held within them worlds of dormant desire.
He received a warm, but decidedly platonic hug, and was asked the same question, but sweetly.
He launched into a paean of excessive praise for her high-notes, and he could feel Alexander’s charmed, head-shaking derision pat him on the back, and similarly praise his performance.
After a few more minutes of phatic, all-inclusive chatter, she ushered them in the direction of their seats, and reminded them to keep their “ears peeled” for her high F in the second act.
“She is fantastic!” he said genuinely, for he truly was very fond of Alexander’s somewhat frivolous, but altogether delightful girlfriend.
“You know who else is fantastic?” he questioned rhetorically. “You are! Seriously, you are not allowed to leave my life! And we shall definitely do Thessaloniki! Just the two of us!”
They stood in the narrow gilt-edged corridor of the theatre, a rare two-some not holding cocktails.
“You mustn’t say such things, Alex,” he enunciated carefully, trying fully not to sound embittered or enraged. “I fear…”
“Fear what?” Alexander asked, confusion alighted on his handsome face.
“I fear…” he couldn’t suppress the bitterness now. “I fear that I may fall in love with you.”
