Free Angels All Over Town by Luanne Rice Page A

knew.
    After showing me their stash of Scotch, since I hadn’t been forewarned and therefore couldn’t be expected to have brought my own, Susan and Louis left me to my own devices. Intimate orange light shined from small table lamps. I stood against the old refrigerator, its metal skin yellow and its edges round, and watched the dancers.
    “Hi, Una,” a husky female voice said. It belonged to Jane Valera, a woman I hadn’t seen since Juilliard. “How is your life on television?”
    “Terrific. How’s life on the boards?” I happened to know that Jane hadn’t had a paying part since graduation. Even at school she had had a superiority complex, had called our professors and actors like Al Pacino and Glenda Jackson “colleagues,” had thought that any art without struggle was worthless. She would say “television,” not “soap opera,” because she would not want to admit that she knew what a soap opera was. She had claimed never to watch TV. She had once said she had never heard of Mary Tyler Moore.
    “I’m not acting right now,” she said. “Ted and I have founded a repertory company at our place in Vermont.”
    “Really? You have a company?”
    “A
wonderful
company. I feel so fortunate. The honor of working with these people…I hardly deserve it. We have Robert Hincks…do you know his work?”
    I nodded. Robert Hincks was a director known for his wild, often violent interpretations of classics like
The Three Sisters, The Master Builder, The Tempest
. Jane talked on and on, swinging her very long, dark hair in that characteristic, jittery way she had, an affectation meant to suggest that she was a neurotic artist. She spoke in a low, gravelly voice and punctuated her speech with choppy shoulder shrugs and jerks of the head. Her favorite trick was to put herself down, forcing the other person to contradict her.
    “Ted and I have a country house, the Battenkill runs across our property…you can see the mountains all around you. We have an old barn, a massive old barn, which we have made into a theater…we have already started rehearsing
The Cherry Orchard
. The place is so lovely. So…serene. You absolutely must come to us. It seems to…affect people’s artistic spirits.”
    I knew exactly what someone like Jane must think of the artistic spirit of a soap opera actress. “Thank you for inviting me,” I said.
    “Ted and I feel so fortunate to have such excellent colleagues,” she continued breathily. “We have Trent Lieber, who trained at Yale, Sligo Mallory, who came to us from Trinity in Providence, Hoya Armstrong, who’s worked at the O’Neill workshop six summers in a row—we were so fortunate to get him—and Julius Kramer, from the Guthrie. He did that Pinter in New York last season. Did you see it?”
    “No, I didn’t.” I noticed that everyone Jane had mentioned was male. She had always had a retinue of men at Juilliard; she seemed to draw them with her husky voice, her self-effacing manner. I would say she drew them like “moths to a flame,” but she was so mothlike herself, flitting through the conversation, trying to convince the world she was more spirit than human.
    Susan came to rescue me. “Una, I want you to see Stan’s new painting. ’Scuse us, Jane.” She led me away from the kitchen, into the part of the loft that belonged to Stan and Daria. “Was she telling you about her artists’ colony in Vermont?”
    “Yes, you can see the mountains from the stage.”
    “Louis and I went up last July. She had a big party, where we were all expected to help build the stage. I’m not kidding you! She was really pissed off because we’d forgotten to bring hammers—she didn’t have enough to go around. So her boyfriend taught me how to use an electric saw, and I spent the afternoon sawing wood for the seats. The audience sits on benches. ‘Rough-hewn benches,’ according to the brochure.”
    “Very basic—the performances are so mesmerizing, you’re not supposed to