Night Film

114

It arrived on January 4: an email from Nora inviting me to her New York theatrical debut at the Flea Theater in that gender-bending off-off-Broadway production of Hamlette. She’d done well in her audition and had won the lottery for all New York actors — an actual paying part. Granted, she was only Bernarda, one of two Elsinore castle guards (renamed from Bernardo) who appeared solely in act one, scene one, and she received just $30 per performance—but still.

“I’m a real actress now,” she wrote.

I went opening night, in a small theater. As soon as the lights went down and the heavy black curtain was noisily hauled aside, there was Nora in blue light, her blond hair in two long braids, climbing up to a rickety castle lookout tower made out of plywood. She was surprisingly good — infusing all of her lines with the comical, wide-eyed guilelessness I’d heard so many times. When she encountered Hamlette’s mom’s ghost (who in a strange costume choice was wearing a garter belt and white teddy and thus came off as a strung-out spirit who’d sauntered in from not purgatory but the Crazy Horse in Vegas) and Nora tripped and stumbled backward, naïvely announcing, “ ’Tis here!” and “It was about to speak, when the cock crew!” the audience erupted with delighted laughter.

The play ran without intermission. When it was finally over — after Ophelio offed himself by throwing back too many Xanax, Hamlette finally had the nerve to off her bitchy stepmom, and, at long last, Fortinbrassa and her army of gal pals arrived fashionably late at Elsinore wearing nylon miniskirts straight from the Ice Capades — I remained in my seat.

When the theater emptied, I was surprised to see someone else had remained behind, too.

Hopper. Of course.

He was sitting in the last row in the very back. He must have snuck in after the lights went down.

“McGrath.”

Like me, he’d brought Nora a bouquet of flowers, red roses. He’d gotten a haircut. And though he was still wearing his gray wool coat and Converse sneakers, he had on a white button-down shirt, which looked as if he hadn’t found it on the floor of his apartment, the circles no longer carved so deeply under his eyes.

“How’ve you been?” I asked.

He smiled. “Pretty good.”

“You look good. Have you quit smoking?”

“Not yet.” He was about to add something, but his gaze moved behind me, and I turned to see Nora stepping out from the curtain. I was relieved to see she was still sporting the old transvestite’s wardrobe — black leggings, one of Moe’s purple tuxedo shirts — that she hadn’t changed. Because New York could do that to you in no time, streamlining and sanding, polishing and buffing you into something that looked good, but like everyone else.

Nora gave us the tightest of hugs and waved goodbye to her cast mates.

“Bye, Riley! You were amazing tonight!” (Riley, a pretty bleached blonde, had played Hamlette and delivered “To Be or Not to Be” with all the gravitas of wondering, “To Text or Not to Text.”) “Drew, you left your hat on the prop table.”

Nora, beaming, amped up on theater energy, pulled on her coat and suggested we all go grab a bite. As we exited the theater, she linked her arms through ours, striding down the sidewalk — Dorothy reunited with Scarecrow and Tin Man.

“Woodward, how’ve you been? I missed you. Oh, wait. How’s Septimus?”

“Immortal, as usual.”

“You both brought flowers? You guys got chivalrous all of a sudden?”

We went to The Odeon, a French brasserie on West Broadway open late. We piled into the booth, Nora staring at our faces like they were foreign newspapers she’d finally got her hands on, filled with the latest news from home.

“You both look good. Oh.” She yanked off a glove to display the inside of her right wrist, across it a small tattoo of three words.