They brought Eudora homea week later. Noah set her up on the table in the front hall beside a vase of fresh flowers from the garden. He was starting to say his goodbyes.
AJ, meanwhile, felt as though she was meeting Eudora all over again through her papers. She would sit in the drawing room for hours poring over her director’s notes.
Noah did not approve. Often, he would come read nearby to register his displeasure through a series of heavy sighs and askance looks. Once, AJ actually heard himtsk.
“Yes?” she said without looking up.
“Oh, don’t mind me,” he said, nose in his biography of Jane Quinn. Then, “Learninganything?”
“Your love…shaped me.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him suppress a smile.
To be fair, Noah’s wariness was not unfounded. Eudora had been scheming that whole summer.
“Phasing” was the term she and Ezell had used for that near-telepathic state of play they’d once achieved. Ezell had passed before they had figured out how to replicate it—work Eudora would then attempt with AJ and Noah, in hopes of publishing a follow-up toLaughter & Death.
July 13, 2000
E—
Morning: Much Ado About Nothing
10 minutes repetitions
10 minutes hair dryers
2 hrs. three-line scenes
Notes: Music seems to be the key. This is our second week on NOW 4—it’s so god-awful it might drivemecrazy, but it’s bringing them closer to phasing than ever before. The more time they spend in a nonverbal capacity, the more in tune they get with each other. Each day, they surrender a little of the awkwardness a little sooner. Which is no small feat for two adolescents.
They’re both clearly taken with each other but are sublimating it into their scene work. Noah in particular is showing greatrestraint. He knows something of women by his age, but she is entirely unspoiled—I can tell by how she walks. She has no idea the effect she’s having on him, and he is doing everything he can to keep her from realizing.
In return, AJ is showing remarkable trust in Noah—it’s almost like she’s imprinted on him, using him as her safety net as she begins to test her abilities. It’s a very tender phase in her development as a performer. If all goes well, she should be able to replicate this trust with other players. At this point, though, she only has it with Noah.
AJ heard a jingle and looked up as the dog trotted in.
“Hey, Hortense,” she said without thinking.
Noah’s gaze lifted from his book.
AJ blushed. “I don’t know why I just said that.”
“I believe it’s called ‘revertigo,’ ” he said, eyes crinkling.
“I’m sorry, Bud,” said AJ, as the dog wagged up at her cluelessly. “I didn’t mean it. You absolutely do not look like you’ve had twelve children.” Then to Noah, “She hasn’t, has she?”
Noah shook his head. “She is fixed, like her dad,” he said, then turned back to his book. AJ felt a queasy jolt in her sternum as she realized he was referring to himself.
In the wake of their reunion, they hadn’t discussed Huntington’s disease once. If it came up, Noah referred to it obliquely. “As I get older” was a favorite euphemism of his, as in, “I’ll have to give that up as I get older.”
AJ knew it was on his mind significantly more than he let on. She continually tried to gauge his emotional landscape, but their channel was far from clear.
Noah had been right that sex did come with some transparency, but the kind of sex they were having mostly gave vent to intense bursts of excitement: highly erotic, but not all that informative. Outside the bedroom, AJ’s read on him was crude—at most, she could sense the temperature of his moods.
But AJ didn’t need to phase with him to understand that for the past thirteen years, he had dealt with his prognosis by scripting his life in tight increments, and that what they were doing now was strictly off book. AJ also understood that despite this, Noah was sticking with her.
Still, there was a part of him that was desperate to shut this down. As these sultry weeks stretched on, open-ended, AJ could sense it growing restless—a shadow in conversation, a pall encroaching on their felicity.
