She slides the phone back into her pocket and lies very still. The damp autumn day outside gets filtered in here through groaning radiators, the light sifted by grimy, wire-meshed windows, then carried down on the dust that occupies the air in this sealed-away space. An el train hurtles past, sucking every other piece of noise out of the air, leaving behind a brief wake of silence.

From here, she enters a mental space she gets to by way of a deep tunnel. Once inside, she can realize a set to its smallest detail. She can see the actors bring the set to life. Sometimes she casts the play with perfect actors. Oliviers and Branaghs and Redgraves. Inside her imagination no flubbed lines trip up the dialog, no tape mark is overshot, no doorbell rings randomly, off-cue. Even a play as bad as the one she’s working on now can at least get bathed in a glow of respectability.

She rolls over and idly tugs open the drawers of the very old wooden desk on which she’s lying. One contains a short stack of yellow dog, the cheap, porous paper reporters used for typing copy back in the day. Somebody else’s day, before her day, but she knows what it is. She has become a historian of small visual details. These pages are still yellow at the center, faded to gray at their edges. In the top drawer she hits pay dirt—two ornate fountain pens, Esterbrooks, their casings marbleized Bakelite, one deep red, the other brown—the sort of small detail that subtly lends a period play authenticity. She slips them into a jacket pocket. She will ask downstairs if she can have them. She’ll give them the number of the desk. They’ll get it out somehow. She’s never asked how they perform the extraction. The desks are impossibly cheap.

warrior two

“Your right knee should be directly over your ankle.” Neale walks among the students, tracing a winding path between their mats. They are in warrior two, an easy lunge with one arm stretched out in front, the other behind. Neale puts her hands on Cate’s shoulders and gently presses them down, a little longer than necessary. An adjustment, but also a tiny piece of connection in their long friendship.

Taking classes at the studio, Cate can observe Neale in her floral movements, folding this way, then that, bending in a nonexistent breeze. Neale doesn’t look like anybody else. She doesn’t even look like her parents, who are short and nondescript and careworn. She appears to be composed entirely of recessive genes. Movie-star threads in her DNA. This doesn’t make her vain, but she definitely operates out of a keen awareness of her body. This is where her confidence lies. She walks into a room and can calibrate how much of it she occupies.