I got a closer look when she emerged, accompanied by her two scene partners, the playwright and the other girl: they were arm in arm as they walked toward us. By us, I mean the playwright’s parents, whom I’d begun chatting with in the fairly uncrowded foyer. I’d headed straight for the only two older people, figuring they must be related to the playwright. My friend Francesco had brought me along to see this show because the playwright had proposed that they work on a project together, but he’d just left, right after I told him I wanted to meet the girl on the exercise bike. While I say “girl,” she was really a woman over thirty with the face of a girl: smooth and unlined.

The husband and wife were the same height, around five foot six, both of them slightly heavy, and I remember that they both wore brown jackets, his suede and hers vinyl, dressed warm for the end of spring; they seemed to be very close and both seemed startled by the performance. “You must be the parents—of the bride.” I blurted out this last part by mistake, but they found it funny, and so we got to talking … That she’d never been “the bride” was a problem for them, a problem—if you paid attention to the version we’d just heard onstage—not unrelated to the fact that at thirty-five years old, she was still paying for theater space to produce her plays. They told me this with a sympathetic and accepting tone that disappeared the minute their daughter exited from the dressing rooms escorted by her friends.

“Hel-lo,” she said slowly, and her friends kept holding on to her. The girl in the tracksuit, now in a blue and light-striped, eccentrically double-breasted dress, had honey-cream cheeks, honey mixed with blush, swollen cheekbones like she’d been punched: she had the face of a field mouse, an alien’s high forehead, with a boxer’s nose that looked broken, an Owen Wilson or Belmondo nose, though her beauty wasn’t androgynous and in fact appeared carefully designed. She looked at her friend with small, dark, loving eyes. The playwright and the bike girl were the same height as the older couple, while the third girl was almost as tall as me and seemed to know the playwright’s parents, since she was slyly joking with them—“So, did you enjoy yourselves?” The playwright laughed and didn’t comment.