“The air-conditioning?” She looks again. Is he dumb? Maybe he isn’t really standing there at all. Maybe he is a mirage. Maybe the heat really is getting to everyone.
“Doesn’t seem to be working very well,” he says. He smiles. He wipes his brow.
Oh no. What is that phrase?To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
“Please tell me you are here to fix that thing.”
“Afraid not.”
Dear God, she thinks.Has it come to this?Strangers permeating the doorframe, the charade of dressing room sanctity revealed for the joke it is, the never-ending suffering of heat under her bonnet, under these too-many clothes, and all of it for what? Some regional reenactment run by Salem’s smallest museum? Once again, she has blinded herself with hope, seen what she wanted to see. Maybe she is just a bad judge of character. Her hands are untying her bonnet, dropping it onto the floor, raking through her hair.
Fuck it, she thinks. It’s too hot to behave.
Somewhere in another dimension, the man is talking, explaining he is looking for some materials here in the museum. An assistant who had begun to help him has disappeared. “I think the head archivist is on holiday,” he sighs. But the man does not exist in Bridget’s world. Bridget licks three coats of mascara onto her lashes, pouring water from a flask onto her fingers and rubbing her eyelids until she can feel it streaking. She is thinking about injustice. She is preparing herself for a final fight.I am innocent as the child unborn.
Pointing to the fan, he clears his throat and says, loudly: “I didn’t know they had those in the sixteen nineties.”
Susan squints, witch interrupted.Can’t he see she is working?She inhales, takes him in. He is a man who requires a second look: his height is disguised by a bookish slouch, his steady blue eyes by thick, old-fashioned frames. There is a seriousness about his haircut, his crisp button-down, but he gives himself away with a cheeky, lopsided smile, a single, handsome dimple.
He thinks he’s clever.
“Witchcraft.”
“Makes sense,” he nods. He holds her gaze, does not take her hint to leave. After a moment, he asks, gently: “Are you okay?”
Of course not. I am going to die.Bridget would say it, if she were responding, but this man is clearly concerned about Susan, her face smudgy and undone, flush with heat and emotion.
“I’m going to be fired.” She realizes it only as she says it.
“Is there anything—” he starts. And then: “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It will be worth it,” she says with precarious mania. “It’s better than sleepwalking through life.”
He looks at her unblinking, inhaling as if he has something to say. What can he possibly say? She could laugh. He must have no idea. He does not leave. Instead, steadily, he crosses into the greenroom, as though searching for some way to comfort her. Can’t he see, she doesn’t need comfort? She has never been more powerful than on this precipice.
Nevertheless, he points his aquiline nose up at the machine, taps it twice with the flat of his palm.
“In my professional opinion, it’s dead. Chuck it.”
“And what kind of a professional would that be?”
“Well, I’m trying to become a doctor.”
“So medically, it’s dead.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean a medical doctor, obviously. Who needs them when the witches around here are so good?”
She laughs. Forgives, despite herself, the intrusion.
“I’m more of a history doctor,” he continues, “or working on it. So, I guess I’m a professional in what does and doesn’t need saving.”
If you asked her, Susan would tell you that she doesn’t have a type. She would also tell you that she hasn’t been in love, but this she is less sure about. She finds it difficult not to fall, with sudden intensity, for the men she dates—it’s too simple to imagine herself becoming the type of woman they would love in return. She does not see this as a fault. If anything, it’s this capacity (she tells herself) that makes her such a convincing scene partner—the ability to find the lovable in everyone. The only point of consistency is unfamiliarity. In men she is looking for something she has not yet discovered, something she cannot find in herself.
So, this history doctor intrigues her. He is old, but not so old—not yet thirty by her estimation. He is looking at her with the assurance of someone who knows what he wants.
In the corner, a small black-and-white TV runs a feed from the stage. She has time.
“So what about me?” she asks.
