Free Act of God by Jill Ciment Page A

made-up and ready to hit the boards, Vida, Edmund, and the Earl of Kent watched the Weather Channel on the Fool’s iPad. Regan and Lear, married in real life, played gin for a dime a point, while the stage manager went outside for the third time. If the rains were abating, the surface of Turtle Pond, the small lake next to the stage, would calm down first. Canceling would be an easier call if the play were Hamlet or Henry V. The stage boards would be too slick for swordfights. But the only real stage violence in Lear, aside from the storm and a couple of stabbings, is the plucking out of Gloucester’s eyes, and that could be accomplished without slipping on the wet boards. Cordelia, a television actress Vida found insufferably earnest and mediocre, strode into the dressing area and announced that the audience was waiting. “We can wear big fun hats to protect the mikes,” she said.
    “What kind of a big fun hat should the King wear to his own tragedy?” asked Regan, reshuffling her hand.
    “Gin,” said Lear dryly to his wife. “You now owe me one thousand sixty-six dollars and eighty cents.”
    “First Julia broke her teeth, and now this,” said Edmund.
    “I’m canceling the performance,” said the stage manager.
    Booing, louder than the rain, filled the dressing area, and all the actors turned toward the sound as if it had been directed at them personally. The stage manager must have just announced that the performance was canceled.
    “Let’s just get takeout,” Regan said to Lear as he changed out of his kingly robes into his stretch-waist jeans.
    “I’m wired, does anyone want to get a drink?” asked Cordelia.
    “I’m going home, lighting up a fat joint, and watching TV,” said Kent.
    Vida caught a cab back to the hotel. When she initially made the reservation she hadn’t known the hotel had a loud club off the lobby. There was always a throng of tattooed young waiting to get in. The club’s entrance resembled a limestone cave’s mouth. Inside, aquamarine light shimmered, like reflected water in an underground grotto. The elevator kept to the same blue theme and her corridor, also blue, was lit with concentrated halogen spots that made Vida feel as if she were stepping from one lily pad of light to another. When she finally reached her room, took off her shoes, and stretched out on the bed, she felt the club’s music thrumming through the floor. The hotel was costing her a fortune, and today she learned that she wasn’t going home anytime soon. The day after tomorrow, her house would be hermetically tented and disfigured with acid until every last spore of what her insurance agent now referred to as The Supermold was dead. The EPA had ordered an immediate burn because the infestation had spread to her adjacentneighbors. After forty-eight inches of rain in five days, her basement must have become a primeval swamp.
    She reached for her cell phone and texted Sam, a former lover whose key she still had. He was doing Othello in London. They had met through Virginia and had once played husband and wife in Albee’s The Goat, but when the run ended, their robust sex, without the goat, fizzled into friendship.
    He answered her immediately.
GUESS WHO ’ S SLEEPING WITH DESDEMONA????????? ME CASA SU CASA. SORRY ABOUT THE MESS .
    She didn’t know if he was referring to her situation or the cleanliness of his apartment. He lived in one of those posh new Williamsburg developments on the East River, only a few blocks from her home. She had looked at an apartment on the twelfth floor of the second tower before deciding on her old row house. She hadn’t wanted to live so aseptically, in concrete and glass.
    On the second floor of the first tower, she got off the elevator and unlocked Sam’s door. He wasn’t kidding about the mess. The entry floor was stained red. An open bag of pretzels, half-empty jars, and pineapple rind cluttered the small kitchen counter. A woman’s black sleeveless dress, silk