Mending. Sallie Bingham

       SEAGULL

      “LISTEN,” SHE SAID, LEANING ACROSS THE TABLE and laying down her fork, “if this is about money, I’m leaving.” She began to gather her coat around her shoulders.

      “It’s not about money,” he said. “How could I invite you to dinner and the theatre and ask you for money?”

      She hesitated, one arm in her sleeve. “You’re edging toward it.”

      “How?”

      “As soon as you started talking about trying to raise money for your play.”

      “That was innocent,” he said. “Believe me. You’re in this game, too; I thought you’d understand. Getting a new play on its feet—I thought you’d be sympathetic.”

      “I’m plenty sympathetic,” she said, “but I have my own projects.”

      “I know.”

      She stared at him, assessing. Apparently he had researched her. It was easy to find what she’d done: two respectable off-off Broadway productions, mounted by a company she’d helped to finance.

      She regretted, now, that she hadn’t done her homework. All she had to go on was the way he looked, on the other side of the café table. He was thin, tall, his background, whatever it was, hidden by decades of living in the city; she was thin, tall, sharp, her background still hovering in her Midwestern twang, worn proudly, like an award, although she, too, had lived in the city for decades. Both were theatre people—playwrights, occasionally directors, actors in their own or other people’s productions, but invisible, really, in the crowd. And of course there was no money—never had been, never would be. Feeling cheerful, she’d say it kept them honest—theatre people, her tribe.

      But he was black. That was a distinction.

      After ten minutes of talk, she knew they’d both come to the city years earlier, expecting a special destiny. No one could have told them it had not worked out the way they had expected because they knew it had worked out, but that their expectations had been slightly, perhaps fatally, off. So they had already in that first ten minutes established a base and a sort of harmony, and then he had started off in another direction with his play, the production mired in financial problems.

      “The sources I’ve turned to in the past have dried up,” he said now, satisfied that she had let her coat fall to the back of her chair, taking her arm out of the sleeve, although she hadn’t picked up her fork; her tuna filet lay exposed on her plate, rapidly chilling. “With what’s happened to the economy, even the foundations are pulling back, and the two or three patrons”(he couldn’t help giving the word an ironic tinge) “have cut back, as well—and it’s a crucial time for me, I need to do this show now, before we have a change in administrations.”

      “Really,” she said, relenting a little. She was not uninterested although she was dubious.

      “It’s explosive material, but it’ll lose its bang after January. My best work so far,” he added quietly.

      Her opposition seemed to have died and so he set to work, pick and shovel. It was what he usually did, it was his job, as much as the writing of his plays. He didn’t resent the need to lay out his plans, precisely and powerfully, and felt after all these years that the labor of raising money for his productions sharpened his appetite and gave him new reasons to go on. He was educating his patrons (the word had no ironic tinge now), he was bringing them into a world that still in spite of its tawdriness was magic.

      She hadn’t given him much time, rushing into the restaurant late and then looking surprised, in spite of herself, when she saw him. They would need to be finished with dinner and paid in forty-five minutes, to get across the street to the Booth Theatre on time. And neither of them was ever late to a play. They associated that with amateurism, loudly chatting visitors from the suburbs who didn’t leave enough time to park their ridiculous cars.

      She lifted her fork and pressed the tines, tentatively, into her tuna. “How’s your fish?” he asked, hoping for a little air.

      “I don’t know, I haven’t tasted it.” She shot him an imperious glance. He could have strangled her; did she think he was one of those hapless waiters who ask the crucial question too soon? Then he checked himself. He often asked the crucial question too soon.

      Not this time. Too much was riding on it.

      He’d found her by chance because he was working part-time in the box office and had recognized her name when she called to order a ticket and, greatly daring, had called her back (her telephone number was part of her order) and asked her to join him for dinner and the play. “You shouldn’t have to go to the theatre alone,” he’d said, realizing from her startled silence that this was a new thought but not an entirely unwelcome one.

      “I go to the theatre alone all the time,” she’d said, opening another door for his implication: a woman of a certain age, living alone in Brooklyn, riding the subway to the downtown theatres and in spite of herself beginning to worry during the second act about the long, late subway ride home.

      He studied her, realizing that, between bites of her tuna, she was studying him. What he saw didn’t correspond exactly to what he’d imagined when he’d recognized her name; she’d had some success ten years earlier with a one-woman show. He remembered the newspaper shot from that production—a woman smiling energetically—and something of the story: how she’d been working on the piece for years, mentored by several serious contenders, picking up an MFA in theatre somewhere and then seeming to burst on the scene full-blown. But the one-woman show had been followed by silence, although he knew she’d continued to “contribute to the life of the theatre”—that meant money—as well as commuting into Manhattan for classes and plays. The story. All of it easily found, and he’d found it.

      She saw something less defined since she’d never seen Jeffrey’s name in the theatre section, which she still read assiduously as though it decided fates, as it had at one time. His name had been there, a time or two, but inconspicuously, when he’d directed something that bombed in Chelsea or understudied in a little show that managed to run on Perry Street for nine months. That was five years ago, and nothing much since, which was the reason for the part-time job at the box office.

      He was in his early forties, she guessed, in good shape, never a leading man but now maturing into a skilled character actor; he was ready for the parts he had been waiting for when casting directors passed him over for the romantic lead. He was ready for the characters he had tailored in his own plays, which other actors had never found a perfect fit. She could see that; she could see that he fit, especially now that black actors were once again being cast occasionally in white parts, or parts that had always been assumed to be white, by nature. It might be that he was a better actor than playwright, even more likely that his real strength was as a director but knew that field was more surely closed. She thought she was probably a few years older.

      “How did you know my name?” she asked, lightening a little as she ended her scrutiny.

      “From Woman in Love.”

      “But that was a long time ago.”

      “I keep up,” he said modestly. “You made quite a splash, back then.”

      “I hit the crest of the wave,” she said, equally modest, although both of them suspected that modesty was not their strong suit. “Nobody’s interested in one-woman shows anymore.”

      “Or one-man,” he said, to set the record straight.

      She glanced at him, and he wondered if he had run up against an opinion, a hard one, with edges. But she only said, “Did you do those, too?”