When she sees Gladys coming out of her dressing room in fit-pitching mode about something or other, Cate decides to get up out of the oncoming fray and climbs to her reliable perch, the fly gallery, to watch the audience settle in. She’s not expecting to see anyone she knows. Maureen is at the amusement park. Neale is feeling too fragile to navigate crowded airports. This seemed reasonable when she announced it, and Cate said she totally understood, but really, she doesn’t. She took it as one more piece of the distance Neale has been throwing between the two of them.

Then, midway through her scan, in one of the back rows of the orchestra floor, on the aisle stage left, she sees Dana. Or someone she thinks is Dana, but Cate’s desire that it be Dana fills in the rest. She can’t be sure, because she can’t make out details at this distance, and then the house lights are dimming and the curtain is going up on Vita’s living room. The old phone, heavy as a blacksmith’s anvil, goes off on the end table, its huge, jangly ring drawing Vita, handsome in breeches, in through the garden door to pick up the receiver and shout, a little breathless, “Hullo? Yes? Well you see I was all the way down by the moat” to begin the play.

Looking down on her work as the play rolls out, sets thick enough to accommodate big characters, she is happier than she’s been in a long time. She holds still a moment to feel her accomplishment. She designed these sets. She’ll get to make others for plays as good as this one. She saved her friend. She has a fabulous dog. Dana is possibly sitting in a partially obstructed seat at the back of the theater.

When the lights come up for intermission, the bad seat occupied by the real or imagined Dana is empty. Cate goes out to the lobby, then onto the sidewalk in front of the theater, then into the crush in the ladies’ room, but she’s nowhere to be found. The mystery buzzes inside her in a low register through the rest of the play, and through the after-party until she is exhausted, on her way to the hotel in a cab, when it occurs to her that Dana—if it was her—has moved to the unsupervised area of the playground.

erasure