Claude is the most self-absorbed human Cate has ever known. He’s literally a navel gazer. She has seen pictures of him in Pondicherry, in the ashram, in a loincloth. She can’t imagine him helping anyone. He’d step over an old lady collapsed in the middle of the street. He wouldn’t take her cane, he’s not wicked. He just can’t be bothered with the inconvenience of other people. Cate thinks the only reason Neale married him is that beautiful women like her are in an elite class that attracts handsome men who in turn blind everyone to their underlying character. Claude looks like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless. Also, Neale wanted someone to give her the baby who turned out to be Joe.

“Joe told him about it on Skype. So Claude’s Mighty Mouse, coming to save the day. I don’t know. I think it’s the right thing to do. Put a little more male presence in the house. Just for now. Get my parents out of my hair.”

Pain slams Cate hard in the chest, as though she’s been whacked with an oar. Nothing big happens, she’s beginning to see, without knocking around the adjacent pieces.

girls kissing

At the rehearsal space above a Korean restaurant, the actors are bouncing their characters off one another. The room has heavy fragrance—body odor and sizzling beef.

Today, the actors playing Vita and Virginia have come in to work out logistics for the basement scene. Gladys Banner is the exact right type for Vita; it’s easy to see why Molly and Lauren went against the advice of their casting director, who doesn’t think Gladys is up to the job. But she’s British and casually wields both a Received Pronunciation accent and an imperious manner. Most important, she is famous for starring in a movie and two sequels about an icy detective seeking justice in a ruthless world of the future. Molly and Lauren are hoping Gladys’s presence will sell a lot of tickets even before the reviews come out.

Virginia is being played by Ruby Pepper, who, though she has a stripper name, also has a long list of stage credits for having played one or another sensitive artistic type. Her part in Blanks is smaller. Vita’s affair with Virginia occupies only the first act. Act two moves Vita through the destruction of Geoffrey Scott and her subsequent philandering through a short list of lesbians working at the BBC, where she and Harold give their talk on “the happy marriage.”