by Vi Keeland
“I want to talk about Ava. And I want to talk about you. I want to talk about how you can become her, find the truth of her, and hold onto it so tightly as you perform that no one doubts for even a second that you’re her. You won’t doubt it, I won’t doubt it, and the audience won’t doubt it. And so, I want you to think of Carmen and Habanera when you work on your part.”
He’s shifted, leaving Muse behind us. I follow his lead, serious in tone too. “Tell me why.”
“Ava is a rebellious bird. She resists Paolo. She resists his teaching, his way of making art. She resists his love too,” he continues in his clear, determined way of speaking. His eyes never stray from mine, and his gaze is so intense it could burn. Then he lowers his voice, softens to a lover’s whisper. “But then she transforms. Love changes her. Love without bounds. Love without reason. She becomes his, and that changes her.”
Those last few words make me feel light-headed and woozy, so I reach for the edge of the piano, holding on.
She becomes his, and that changes her.
“I love that sentiment,” I manage to say and I’m only vaguely aware that I sound a bit breathy. I quickly catalogue my reaction—there are goose bumps on my arms, and there’s a tingling in my belly, and my lips are parted.
It hits me what’s happening.
Because he’s doing it to me again.
He’s fucking me with his words, and I am turned on beyond belief.
My body is responding faster than my brain can apply the brakes—my skin is hot all over, and heat is flaring through my veins. I know this feeling. I usually only feel it when I’m reading a hot scene in a novel. But now I’m feeling it in real life, and not in my imagination, not from pretending or picturing a make-believe session in the sheets. This is real and it’s legitimate and it’s borne from the fact that I’m craving something I haven’t let myself have in years.
Contact.
My vision blurs for a moment, and I dig my fingers into the side of the piano so I don’t fall.
“Which sentiment, Jill?”
He says my name like it’s dessert. Like it’s something he wants to eat. Even though it’s only a simple question he’s asked, I’m unhinged by my body’s reaction to the way he talks. By the way it feels as if my body is no longer my own, that it’s responding to someone else’s cues.
His cues.
For no good reason.
Because there’s no good reason at all why my head should be so cloudy and my body so hazy, and my pulse racing like a getaway train. I can’t let myself get carried away. That would be unbearably foolish, so I remind myself that he’s good with words, he’s good with people, he’s good with ideas. He has to be. He does what Paolo does. He takes nascent, unformed clay and transforms it into something alive and wondrous, with a heartbeat, with a life force. That’s the only reason there’s an aching between my legs. Not because my director is turning me on again. The only reason I am a tuning fork now is because he’s making me feel like Ava, and Ava is turned on by Paolo.
“All of them.”
“All of them?” He raises an eyebrow.
“The one where she becomes his,” I say quickly. My skin is feverish. The heat is cranked too high in this room. I look around. “Can we turn the heat down?”
He stands up, walks to the thermostat, adjusts the lever and turns back. He’s near to me on his return path, so near that even though I force myself to stare hard out the window, I can sense him as he passes me. As if he’s mere inches from me. For a brief moment, I expect him to trail a hand across my lower back. Make me shiver. I close my eyes as the image flicks by, and then I open them.
He hasn’t touched me though. Maybe he doesn’t have to for me to feel this way, because I’m a livewire already.
He sits down at the bench, and plays the opening notes to Ava’s signature song, Show Me The Rebel. “Show me the rebellious bird in you, Jill.”
“But,” I say, stammering. This is so unlike me. I know the music. I know the song. I have never been afraid of performing. Acting has been the thing I love most. But something’s different now. “It comes in the middle of the show. It’s not even her first song.”
My protests fall on deaf ears. He says nothing.
“Can’t we start with something else? I haven’t even practiced it before. ”
There’s a glint of a smile on his lips. “That’s why I’m rehearsing you,” he says, and his voice is like whiskey and honey. Rough and smooth at the same time. “So you can practice. I want you to be able to blow the audience away. I want them to melt for you. I want them to fall for you. You can start by trying to make me feel that way.”
I feel wobbly, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m rehearsing with an award-winning director in my first Broadway show, or if it’s because his words are all laced with subtext and innuendo. You can start by trying to make me feel that way. But as off-kilter as I feel right now, I have to use this emotion. Because Ava feels the same way when she begins this song. She doesn’t know what to make of Paolo, and I don’t know what to make of Davis.
I pick a point on the opposite wall, a random little nick in the plaster, and I sing to it. I serenade the nick on the wall with a flat, empty-sounding melody. I make my way through the first six lines of the song when he stops his accompaniment.
I turn to him, waiting.
“Is there a reason why you’re staring at a spot on the wall?”
“Um…”
“Is there?” he asks again.
I shake my head.
“Do you sing the song to a spot on the wall?”
“No.” My face flames red.
“Do you sing it to the audience?”
“No.”
“Do you sing it to the floor?”
“No.”
“Do you sing it to a random, distant point in the balcony?”
“No,” I say through gritted teeth, and now I want to smack him for the way he’s making me feel stupid.
“Are you mad at me, now?” He asks, but his tone never wavers. He’s like a law professor quizzing a student, dressing her down. He doesn’t anger, he doesn’t rage. He simply peppers her with questions ‘til she’s unnerved. Screw being turned on. Now I’m pissed off.
“No,” I lie, looking down.
He rises from the piano, stalks over to me, and stands mere inches in front of me. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t lift my chin with his hand, or grip my shoulders. He doesn’t have to make contact for me to respond, to raise my face, to meet his eyes. I do it anyway, looking up, meeting him because I can’t not. His midnight blue eyes give away nothing right now except power, confidence, and absolute fucking control. Maybe it’s the ions, maybe it’s electricity. Or maybe there is just a current between us, and it’s one that he alone controls. I bite my lip briefly, and he breathes out, hard. He makes an almost imperceptible sound that borders on a growl, then speaks. “Are you mad at me?”
He doesn’t use my name this time. Nor does he use Ava’s. I need to know who he’s talking to. “Are you asking me or are you asking Ava?”
I’m greeted by the tiniest grin of satisfaction. He nods approvingly, as if he likes the question.
“Jill,” he says slowly, my name taking its time on his tongue, crossing his lips, turning into sound in the charged air between us. “I’m asking you as Jill.”
“I’m saying no, as Jill.”
He shakes his head, narrows his eyes, seeing right through me. “Don’t lie to me. About anything. There is no right or wrong answer. There is only the truth, and I want yours right now. Tell me your truth. Are you mad at me?”
I breathe out hard. Then I admit it. “Yes.”
“Good.”
“Why is that good?”
“Use it. Use it for the song. Ava is headstrong. Ava is passionate. Paolo makes her crazy. He manipulates her. Or so she thinks.” He raises his hand, balls his fingers into a fist, and gestures as if he’s grabbing something. “But he does it to reach down d
eep inside her. To help her find her true self, her true art, her true creativity. Everything he does, he does because he believes in her.”
“But why? Why does he believe in her?”
“Because he knows. He knows in his heart—” he taps his chest “—in his head—” now his forehead “—and his gut.” He hits his fist against his flat stomach. “He knows. Start from the beginning. And take your anger and use it. But don’t sing it to the wall, or the lights, or the chairs. Sing it to Paolo. Look in his eyes. Let your anger carry the song. Let your frustration take you through. Then let go of it, and let it fade away.”
I nod. I don’t think I can speak. I can only feel. The anger at Davis for dressing me down. The frustration at myself for not getting the character right. Then what Ava feels—the spark of hope, the possibility of becoming the person, the artist, the woman that he believes she can be. I take a deep, quiet breath, imagining all those feelings living inside of me, so I can become her.
He returns to the bench and resumes the music, the notes pouring forth, falling on me like rain. Then I’m Ava and I turn and meet my director’s gaze. Only he’s not Davis anymore. He’s Paolo. He’s the man I’m mad at, and mad with, and most of all, mad about. He’s the one I’m singing to. Not the wall, not the floor, not the audience. But him. Just him. The man who drives me crazy with his perfectionism, with his sometimes inscrutable side. But I need him, I need him not only to succeed as a painter, but to break free of all the loneliness I’ve felt my whole life as Ava. And I sing every word, every line, every note to him.
He watches me the entire time. Lets my words, my story, my tale become a part of him. He takes what I have to give. He absorbs all my music, all my passion, all my pain. He is the reason I’m singing, and I give it all to him because he knows what to do with all I have.
Because he accepts me for who I am, and because he makes me feel again.
And as I sing, something deep inside of me loosens. It’s like a brittle piece of my make-believe heart that I’ve been gripping so hard for so long rattles free, and tumbles away. I don’t even try to grab it, to glue it back on. I let it go, because I’m ready for it. For a fleeting moment, I feel buoyant, unencumbered from my past, and it’s an unfamiliar feeling, but such a welcome one. It’s like a reprieve, and my voice hitches on one note, hitting it wrong and raw, but that’s when his eyes light up the most. Then I finish the last note of the song, and take one step closer to him. “I need you, Paolo,” I say, shifting from sung words to the spoken ones in the script that cap off this song. Shifting too from calling him Professor to calling him by his name. “I need you to make me whole again.”
“I will, Ava,” he says, in the softest whisper, but one that carries, reverberating throughout the whole rehearsal studio as he delivers lines that start to bring this hard-edged, mercurial man closer to falling for this woman. “I promise.”
* * *
After several more rounds, I’m sweating. I’ve shed my sweater and I’m wearing only a tank top with my jeans. It’s a workout singing for Davis, and I’m not even dancing. I’m merely standing, and singing. But the way he directs, insisting, and requiring everything I have feels like a workout. I pull at my navy blue shirt so it doesn’t stick to my chest.
“Ready to go again?”
“Any time you want.”
He laughs once, shakes his head. “I was only teasing. I think we can call it a night.”
“Oh, I can keep going,” I say. “But if you need to stop…” then I trail off.
Davis rises from the piano, closes it, and grabs his jacket. “I don’t really think there’s any question about whether I can keep going. And I don’t need to stop. Ever.” Then his eyes rake over me, as if he’s memorizing me for later. “I’m choosing to call it a night.”
Okay, so now my chest is hot again, and I’m ready to take the sheet music and turn it into an accordion to fan myself. How is it that everything that comes out of his mouth is a double entendre? Does he even intend to talk this way? Sometimes, I think I have him figured out, but then he looks at me with those bedroom eyes, or says something that’s so sexy, and I’m back to putting the puzzle pieces together. I revert to humor to find my way out of the innuendo because I’m not quite sure what to do with all this double-speak, especially when he made it clear I’m not his type. Not to mention that teensy tiny little detail about me being crazy for someone else.
I point to his coat. “So you do own a jacket.”
“I’m not entirely impervious to the elements.”
“Aha! He is human. I’ve learned the truth,” I say, and I’m glad to be back to teasing, to toying. It’s familiar footing, and I can handle it so much better than the wobbliness I’ve felt most of the night. Besides, there’s a part of me that’s bordering on punch drunk from singing my freaking heart out. I feel spent in the way that a good, hard run can wring you dry, but leave you surging with adrenaline too.
“Don’t tell anyone though. Wouldn’t want to ruin my badass reputation,” he says, stopping to sketch air quotes, and I like that he lets me tease him. That he doesn’t seem to mind at all that I’ve figured out he likes the image he’s created for himself—take no prisoners, hard as hell, impossible to get to know. Sure, he is tough, but there’s more to him, too, and I don’t think he lets many people see his other sides. Maybe that’s why he seems to enjoy it when I see through him. Almost as if he wants me to. Maybe that’s why he talks to me this way. Because we can be friendly enough. We can move past the weirdness.
“Oh, you’re still badass in my book,” I say, as I pull my sweater back on. For a moment, I wrestle with the neckline, so I can’t see him as I’m stuck under my clothes.
When I emerge, he’s stepped closer, and he’s all serious and smoldering again. The whole dark and broody look is back in full force, and I can’t take my eyes off of him when he’s like that. It scares me how my whole body feels like it’s waking up when he looks at me. “Am I? Badass in your book?” He asks in a voice that’s low and smoky, and makes me want to say yes to him over and over, and to anything he’d ask.
That’s precisely why I can’t answer his question. Because my body’s going one way, but the rest of me is my usual messed-up, mixed-up, fucked-up self, and I have no idea what to do with these veiled questions that feel a lot like foreplay.
Besides, I have Patrick this weekend. I have the chance to finally get to know him for real, like I’ve always wanted. I take a steady breath and jam my arms into my jacket, then cinch it closed. I need to shift gears and focus only on my job. “So how did I do tonight?”
Davis seems to sense the change. To respect it. “You were everything I wanted you to be,” he says, returning to his crisp, professional voice. He stops to lock the door, then we head down the carpeted hallway to the elevator. Once inside, he pushes the button for the ground floor. I glance at his hand, noticing his scar again. I point to it, my finger mere inches from his hand, so close I could touch him, could trace the raised line of the mark on his body. “How’d you get that scar?”
He doesn’t answer right away, and I wonder if I’ve crossed some line. I hold my breath, as I wait for an answer or an admonishment. The gears whir as the car begins its descent. This might be the tiniest elevator ever made because I feel as if I could crash into him if it stops suddenly. I can picture it. Being jolted, being caught. His arms around me. Our bodies so close. That moment when everything can change, when time freezes, and you’re either colliding or you’re not. Maybe I do want more of his innuendo. Maybe I do want the elevator to slam me into him, so my body can take what it wants right now.
But the ride is smooth, and we both stay in our places.
Then, he holds up his hand, regards it as if he hasn’t seen it in ages. “This? Punched the glass window of my front door when I was seventeen.”
“You did?”
“Couple of days after I found out my parents died.”
He says it in the most offhand way, but my heart
leaps to my throat and I want to comfort him. To wrap my arms around him, tell him how unfair it is when people you love die too soon. I reach out and lay a hand on his arm. His eyes jerk to mine, but then he quickly looks away and I remove my hand, because I shouldn’t be touching Davis for so many reasons. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, me too,” he says in a low voice, sounding wounded for the first time. Letting down his guard.
I’m about to ask what happened to them, but that feels too personal, too much, too soon.
The car stops at the lobby and the doors crank open. We step out into the cold, biting night, the sounds of New York traffic hitting my ears. It’s the familiar soundtrack to my days and nights in this city.
We walk down the steps to the sidewalk. A cold wind whooshes by and I pull my coat tighter. He moves closer to me and for a second I think he may drape an arm over my shoulder, pull me in close and keep me warm. But he doesn’t. Instead, he points to a town car waiting at the curb.
“For you,” he says.
“Me? You got me a car service?” I shouldn’t be excited over a car, but I am. I’ve only acted in a few off-Broadway shows and a couple of commercials, and I didn’t even warrant a cab in my contracts for those. I was subway, all the way.
“If I’m making you work late, it’s the least I can do,” he says, as he opens the door for me, and I slide inside.
He leans into the car, reaches for the seat belt, and pulls it across my chest, buckling me in. He’s inches from me, and he smells cold like the night air. But he also smells the way a man should at the end of the day: a little bit of sweat, a lot of work, and all raw power. He brings one hand behind my head and unclips my hair, letting it fall over his fingers. I tremble from his touch as a shiver runs down my spine. “I like your hair up and I like your hair down,” he whispers to me, breaking down all my resistance in an instant.