Right after the Weather - Hardcover

Carol Anshaw is the author of Carry the One, Aquamarine, Seven Moves, and Lucky in the Corner. She has received the Ferro-Grumley Award, the Carl Sandburg Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She lives in Chicago and Amsterdam.

Desk desk
On the fourth floor of a warehouse under the long stretch of the Green Line as it heads west out of the Loop, Cate prowls across a vast plain of old office desks. A walk through the decades of the previous century. She travels from linoleum to fake wood to real wood to scarred metal. She is looking for a particular desk. The play—At Ease—for which she is designing the sets, takes place in the late 1950s, on a military base in Georgia. She needs a metal desk, olive drab if possible. She has found two possibilities, but one is too small and one is tan. This will be the desk of the closeted drill sergeant. She decides to go with the larger one and spray-paint it at her shop. She snaps a couple of pictures, measures it with her tape, then pencils these dimensions into sketches of the play’s two sets. In the second set, the desk will be covered with a mattress and used as a bed.

Her cell makes the sound of a coin dropping into an old pay phone, a notification sound Maureen put on Cate’s phone so she’d know it was Maureen calling. Maureen’s photo appears on the screen, to the side of a text dialog box. The picture was taken on one of their early dates, a couple of months back now. Maureen is in a theater seat, leaning sideways to fit in the frame. Looking terrific in an effervescent way.

what’s up?

Cate never knows how to reply to this vague sort of question.

looking for a desk

can I see you tonight?

going to neale’s yoga class

ok. so, tomorrow then. already excited.

Advances in communication technology have made Cate’s life so much smoother. She is bad at phone calls, especially bad at making them, possibly interrupting someone in the middle of something more important. She hates hearing that small adjustment in someone’s voice. Now she almost never has to hear it. Probably the best phone calls of her life were the vintage ones, the hours she and Neale spent on the phone late at night as teenagers, luxurious conversations, artifacts of an earlier civilization. Also artifacts of who she and Neale used to be when they were trying to assemble the universe.

Now her phone is mostly a tool for semaphoring whereabouts and plans, for taking pictures of stage sets and furniture, interesting colors, appliances of the past.

Maureen’s phone, on the other hand, is her best friend. Everything in her life is filtered through it—information received, confirmed, replied to, shared. Not to mention recorded with the phone’s camera. One night when the two of them were hanging out on Maureen’s giant sectional sofa, Maureen startled herself.

“Wow. I almost forgot. It’s Jill’s birthday.” Which prompted her to send a small burst of texted good wishes punctuated with a selfie of her waving. “I know they’re stupid,” she said, but kept on tapping in emojis of firecrackers and a cake. Jill is not a person, she’s a decrepit barn cat who belongs to one of Maureen’s stable of once lovers/now friends.

The dinner Maureen is already excited about is her treat at a ridiculously expensive restaurant. Cate hopes her pair of dressy pants is clean and pressed. As soon as she slips the phone back into her pocket, it starts ringing, an actual call. She looks at the screen. It’s Raymond. The guy doing the lights; she has to answer.

“What I’m thinking,” she tells him, “is big lights for the drill scene, big Georgia daylight. Then a creepy sort of pale, late-afternoon darkness for the sex scene in the barracks.”

“I can definitely do creepy,” Raymond says. “Make it double creepy if you like.”

Cate lies down, stretching out across three desks. “We need to pump up the visuals on account—”

“On account of the play sucks?”

“We can help, though.” No one wants to write or direct or act in a bad play, but bad plays do happen. And when they do, everyone concerned, Cate believes, needs to do their best to save the play from itself. When it was written, At Ease was a story with a gay subtext in a time when queerness was too naked to present directly; it needed to be discreetly dressed. It needed underwear and an overcoat. The drill sergeant’s murder of a corporal in the second act is ostensibly military discipline gone too far, but beneath it bubbles jealousy and self-loathing. The drill sergeant seethes at a crummy affair the corporal is having with an unhappily married nurse at the base hospital. Sometime in the 1950s this was put up on Broadway or near Broadway with not Ava Gardner, but someone sort of famous—like Carroll Baker or Shirley Knight—playing the nurse. And so the company is putting this relic up to honor its place in gay history rather than for its watchability.

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.