At home my food was sharper. Rice bright with vinegar. Pork cut with lime.
Across the table, Luca worked through something on his laptop between bites, one hand on the keyboard and the other steady on the bowl. The kitchen windows were open to the courtyard, and I listened to the fountain gurgling steadily over stone.
After a few minutes, I set the spoon down.
“These are good.”
Luca glanced up. “They’re red beans. Hard to mess up.”
I took another bite.
“You didn’t rush them.”
He watched me for a moment, spoon paused halfway to his mouth, as if deciding whether that counted as praise.
***
We left the house at two, stepping into the thick August air. The pavement on St. Charles radiated heat in visible waves. By the time we reached the Orpheum, my shirt was stuck to my skin.
The theater rose before us with a Beaux-Arts terracotta facade and a cornice decorated with theatrical masks. The marquee announced Dominic’s production in white letters against red: SAINTS: A COMMEMORATION.
The Orpheum had opened in 1918. Severely damaged by Katrina, it sat dark for ten years.
Luca had his credentials clipped to his shirt before we reached the stage door. The door staff recognized him and let us through without checking my name against any lists. I would fix that oversight before the concert.
The backstage corridor was narrow and close, smelling of old wood and plaster. There was also something sweet and vegetal. Luca, beside me, whispered, “Jasmine. Comes in through the loading dock when the doors are open. It’s been climbing the back wall since before the storm.”
The stage was wider than the architectural drawings had suggested. That was a detail that mattered. More ground between Dominic’s conducting position and the wing entrances. A proscenium arch rose forty feet above the deck. The fly system was visible above it as a dark grid of rigging and counterweights.
I watched crew members moving along the catwalks overhead. An electrician walked with a work light clipped to his belt, pausing at intervals to check connections.
From the pit, a trumpet player ran a five-note figure over and over.
I looked out over the seats and up at the balcony. It curved above the orchestra seating in a single unbroken arc, close enough to the stage to feel intimate. An ironwork railing ran the full length. From any point along that curve, a person standing at the rail would have an unobstructed sightline to the conductor’s platform. Less than sixty feet away.
Luca had moved a few steps ahead and stopped when he realized I hadn’t followed. “The sightlines,” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked up, then back at me.
I examined the space methodically: stage right, stage left, and backstage from the proscenium to the loading dock at the rear.Three wing entrances per side. Neither stairwell to the balcony was visible from the stage.
The conductor’s entrance route from the greenroom ran through a narrow corridor with a single blind turn. A mirror would need to be installed before the concert.
I photographed everything discreetly.
I stopped at the front edge of the stage and looked out into the house. The empty seats ran in a deep curve from the front rail to the rear wall. Seven hundred in the orchestra, two hundred above.
On my tablet, I sketched the layout, roughing in the balcony arc and the podium position, then drawing the lines between them.
A double bass fell over without warning.
A stagehand was moving it on a dolly across the upstage area, threading between a music stand cart and an open cello case. A second stagehand caught it.
Four seconds, beginning to end.
Luca had seen it too. “Micah Landry,” he said. “Podium setup, last two seasons.”
