TEN

“Alison, what?” floated a muffled voice from beneath the second-story floorboards of the little powder blue house on West Court. The voice was right: she wasn’t being a very good housemate at the moment. Normally, Alison’s presence was minimal and unobtrusive. Absorbed in her work as a rule, she could typically be found curled tightly in her stupid egg chair, shielded from the universe by her Berydynamic over-ear headphones, quietly typing into oblivion. The chair was the most cliche college student thing she owned, which she hated, but she couldn’t argue with the comfort and safety it offered as it perfectly matched the contours of her tall frame while quietly forgiving her terrible posture.

But slouch-and-study was a distant memory in this brave new world. Having accepted her fate as Hamlet’s fight director, Alison had pushed all her furniture to the edges of her room to create a workspace to iron out complex exchanges and visualize patterns of movement. Her bed frame and mattress were propped against the far wall, blocking the window, leaving her almost nine square feet of hardwood to stomp, pounce, and pace about wildly. To the rest of the house, this translated to three or four loud thumps at a time, manifesting at random and unpredictable intervals, and which could be heard and felt in any room.

“Seriously, Aly, what on Earth?” Cara was standing in the doorframe now, a mint green facemask applied presumably to accentuate her Frankenstonian rage, and gesturing patently with a nail file. Alison had just completed a three-shot haymaker combination from the defender’s point of reference, and it was dimes-to-doughnuts that Cara had just witnessed her getting beat up by an invisible combatant. And, to be fair, this must have been a particularly unsettling tableau for the type of person who just wanted to spend a quiet evening filing her nails and exfoliating.

To Alison, nothing had changed, really. She was, as ever, absorbed in her work. The work itself had changed but that’s life, am I right? She attempted this line of reasoning with Cara, but in typical Alison fashion, skipped a few steps.

“Yeah. So, I’m just– working out a fight for Act V, Scene II and– you know what? It’s pretty much the same as before because I’m doing the same thing, but it’s just a different thing that I’m doing.”

Cara did not have the tools to respond to this. She slowly scanned the room, its furniture strewn wildly. This, compounded with Alison’s out-of-breath rambling, and the colossal beating she had apparently just taken from a ghost, was too much. She swallowed, slowly lowered the nail file, and left.

The message, however, was clear to Alison. She was taking on too much, and some of it was spilling out.

***

There were perks, however, to Alison’s decision to step up to the plate. This was a leadership role. That meant front-page billing in the playbill, the final decision on integral elements of the play, and a seat at the top table for design and production meetings. If Alison felt the “Who’s there?” between Bernardo and Francisco in Act I implied a fight, she had the power to arrange a bare-knuckle boxing match right there in the lobby of Elsinore Castle. She was also expected to lead weekly conditioning workouts and stage combat rehearsals for any actors with fighting roles. Her name was now listed as Student/Faculty in the Brown directory, an accolade that came with a small stipend and an office of her choosing, in which she was required to hold regular office hours. Being in the BFA Acting program always felt diminutive to Alison– as though she were always fighting for her life, ever on the precipice of losing her in-company status if she couldn’t pony up the goods. This was different. BFA Tech made her feel like a boss. She found immediate preference for navigating this new world, even if the extra responsibilities sometimes made her feel like a leaky levee.

These items were amongst Alison’s first quiet contemplations made from her first office at her first sitting of office hours– though the term office need be applied very loosely to the quirky rehearsal hall/storage room in the basement of Lyman Hall she had selected for her own. The large, rectangular room was equipped with the painted hardwood flooring of a black box theatre, and enough room to navigate complex blocking. However, at some point, the Properties Department must have called dibs on this particular space for their storage overflow, as its walls were lined with shelving that housed a menagerie of the most peculiar implements. Old books, candelabras, musical instruments, and a great assortment of liquor bottles gave the room the ambiance of a posh Victorian study. Alison had pushed a couple of black-boxes into a corner near a drink globe (currently housing her water bottle) to form a makeshift nook– one that would vaguely resemble a desk if she weren’t seated on the floor, knees curled to her chest, atop an ornate orange throw pillow. She was just writing down the phrase “Leaky Levee” in a notebook, under a list entitled “Nicknames for Paige,” when the door opened, revealing the scurvy-ridden scallywag Casey Harrington.

“If it isn’t the Dread Pirate Casey,” she found herself saying, suddenly wishing for a chair. You can banter from a chair. It’s harder to banter on a throw pillow.

“Aly, hey!” he said, her quip having flown about as high above his head as an admiral’s pennant, delicately draped from the mizzen mast. “I was just– is this your office?”

“Yes, Casey,” she replied. “Is that what you’re looking for, or are you lost?” Apparently, she was too tired to force any further unregistered sea puns, but still had enough feudal spirit to compare him to a lost child.

“Yeah, the schedule said this was your office hours.”

“The schedule was correct.”

“Oh, okay, tight,” he offered, an infuriating pause between each hand-picked utterance.

“Yes, Casey, it’s very tight,” she affirmed. And, after an excruciatingly prolonged silence, threw in a slightly frustrated “What do you want?”

“Right, yeah. So, I’m Hamlet, and you’re the fight director.”

“Your memory is spotless.”

“Thanks. So, I was hoping, if I come in for your office hours, that you could teach me how to do stage combat. Just the basics, you know?”

“Casey. Haven’t you taken Stage Combat I and II?”

“I’ve been putting it off. It seemed like a whole thing, you know?”

Alison did not know. She always took prerequisite courses as soon as they were available, so she could qualify for as many roles as possible. Casey’s devil may care attitude was at very least unthinkable, if not impossible to square in this program. But somehow it didn’t matter. Either nobody bothered to ask him, or he was granted some sort of exception. That, or he pulled some sort of New England affluence judo with his parents’ annual gifts to the college. This thought would have made Alison’s blood boil, except, it was already boiling on something else. When auditioning for the role of Hamlet, she had been asked, explicitly and twice, whether or not she had completed Stage Combat II, which was required for the role. She took a breath to gain her composure and tried to swallow her hellfire, because this had just evolved into a full blown crisis.

“Casey! This is a disaster for you!”

But as soon as she said it, she realized: this was a disaster for her. Casey Harrington’s K-Mart brand telenovela acting was his own. But his fighting would reflect on her. It could even put people in danger if his body control was anything like his control of the English language. This was honestly what riled Alison up the most about gender inequity. If the patriarchy was composed of a convocation of shrewd, thoughtful men and she was out-competed, fine. But the men she witnessed getting the edge at Brown were all part of an inane chorus line of infantile, flaxen potatoes. And now she either had to tie Casey’s shoes for him or shoulder the blame for his ineptitude. Even so, she wasn’t sure it could be pulled off.

“It took me a semester of training to get the basics,” she continued. “And I’m good.”

“I could be good,” he retorted.

“You’re wearing boat shoes and chinos!” She took a moment to smirk at her comment. He looked mildly offended.

“Hey, now. I’ll have you know that deck shoes are the ultimate in comfort and versatility. In my time on the sailing team–”

“Oh, honey,” she cut him off with a sweet, mothering tone. “No.” That would have been enough for her, but he looked less than convinced. “Here, I’ll show you. Square off.” He slid his left foot backward, bent his knees slightly, and lifted his fists, knuckles out, like he was trying out for the Peaky Blinders. She resisted the urge to say “Jesus Christ” and instructed him to throw a right hook.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, in all seriousness. If Paige were in the room, she would have snorted. Alison simply blinked.

“I’ll be okay,” she said, dropping into her fighting stance. “Go ahead.”

He took a step forward and started shifting his weight for the punch. Alison deftly tucked her head under the aperture of the blow in a fluid motion, lunging forward toward Casey and stepping on his foot. She placed a hand on his solar plexus and gave the slightest push, still leaning securely on his loafer. His equilibrium already thrown off, he lost his back footing, and, sans any traction from the slick-soled boat shoe, slid back into the splits.

“Oh, wow,” he said, taking stock of the situation. A realization hit his face, which Alison prayed to wise Athena was more along the lines of “This is going to be harder than I thought” and less akin to the sort of “I wonder if Taco Bell still has those tacos with the Doritos cheese dust” sort of thoughts that must be swimming in his head so often. She helped him to his feet and gave him a moment to gather his composure. He locked eyes with her and took the sort of breath you take when you have something to say that holds a modicum of gravity. Alison crossed her mind’s fingers in hopes that this wasn’t a cheese dust thought.

“You’re worried that I’m not going to work hard,” he said, clearly more socially aware than she had given him credit for.

“Yes,” she said, simply.

“Normally, I only work as hard as I have to. Maybe that comes off as lazy.”

“Yes,” she repeated. If he was going to just hand her low-hanging fruit, she was going to take it.

“But this is a wicked wedge, and I don’t think there’s any other path.”

It occurred to Alison that this was a recurring impasse in her life: whether or not to trust a guy to do as he says. It double-sucked because:

1. She usually got burned, and
2. She believed in the goodness of humankind, whatever that meant.

“Okay, Casey,” she said after another elongated inner-diatribe. “We’ll– get you caught up. I’ll show you a few things today that you can do in your chinos. Next week, show up in normal-person athletic wear.” She paused a moment, a mildly acerbic thought arising in the wake of her mildly embittered recollection that some people face a lot more wicked wedges than others, and continued. “Actually, you should buy some yoga pants.”

***

First off, she was going the wrong way.

Alison still had Directing II to get to before she could hang her hat for the day. But her head was full of static and the sky had taken on that dark kind of overcast that promised rain even when it was cold enough to snow. She liked the cold well enough. It enabled her to wear her military jacket with the faux-fur-lined hood– the one Paige affectionately called her “Ranger Jacket.” But crisp, cold air and a cozy coat couldn’t quell the gloom that lined Alison’s leaden heart after signing up for a course of regular and repeated interactions with Admiral Dirtbag. And, without the benefit of clear thought, she autopiloted home with a heavy stride and a well-worn Father John Misty record to take the edge off.

Oh, hook me up to the tank
And roll me to the door
I’m going where my body leads me
I can fend for myself
With what looks I have left
I’ll put away a few
And pretty soon I’ll be breaking things I have of you

Ooh, flowers and bows
Milk and honey flow
Just a couple states below

Alison did not know this yet, but her temper had become a precariously-wavering Jenga tower whose structurally-essential center bricks had been delicately relocated by a full course load, newfound directorial responsibilities, an all-consuming game that seemed more vivid than real life, and an infinitely-frustrating salty sea bass who will not be named. An only child and a serial avoider of conflict, Alison had little practice getting in touch with her emotions. Her fuse needed to be lit before she could see she even had one. And, it so happened that on this pithy pity-walk, while her mind buzzed like a can of bees, Alison caught a glimpse of the straw that made the camel mad.

It was a brown duffel coat.

With a spring in her step and a “Not today, Satan” in her heart, she took off towards the little turd. He had been tucked away,  almost out of sight behind a Baroque outcropping protruding from the exterior of Sharpe House. But Alison was now finely-tuned to the visage of brown duffel coats and the mysterious movements of those within. He took a moment to register what he was seeing as Alison bounded in his direction, fiery-eyed, a Pamplonan bull who had just caught sight of a corn-fed American tourist in red stretch pants. He hoisted himself over the low wall guarding the building and tried to cut the corner towards Angell Street. But Alison was in no mood, and exploded right through the hedgerow that blocked the interim path. He let out a stifled cry as she smashed into him, the mass of bodies tumbling into the dry, dead grass underfoot.

Alison kipped to her feet with stunning dexterity. Her mark started shifting to rise as well, but she stopped him with a raised index finger.

She had a lot to say, but, mind muddled, all she could muster was an exasperated “What.” On reflection, it got the point across.

“Yeah, I– guess now is as good a time as any that we meet officially,” he said, out of breath. “You can call me– X.”

Alison bent down, placing her hands on her knees and bringing her face a little closer to his. “I am not calling you that. Show me your ID and unlock your phone for me or I will kill you, and then kick you in the breakfast nook.”

The soft poetry appeared to move him, and he complied accordingly.

“Nick Rodgers,” she said absently as she scrolled through his email. A slew of messages from the College of Psychology verified beyond a reasonable doubt that he was Chariot. She tossed the phone back to him. “What do you do for Chariot, Nick Rodgers?”

“I’m an intelligence broker. I trade what I know to the highest bidder. That is, assets that might be in possession of information we need. You’ve been on our list of potential clients for a few months. We used to have a contact in Footmen. Tony Keane. We worked on a mission together before he–”

“Call him. Put it on speaker.”

Nick did as he was told. Tony’s voice registered on the line, a cheery “Nick, how the heck are you?” Satisfied, Alison reached in and ended the call.

She took a beat before returning her gaze back to the humiliated mass that remained of Nick Rodgers. “Why didn’t you just talk to me, instead of shadowing me like a psycho?”

“I was afraid you’d kick me in the breakfast nook.”

“Fair point. Why should I trade intel with you?”

“Because we want the same thing.”

“And what’s that?”

“For Elephant to lose.”