The Hayes Theater wasa colonial brick number wedged between two much sleeker buildings on Forty-fourth Street, and it looked like the theater time forgot. It was only a ten-minute walk from 30 Rock, so AJ was able to pop over whenever necessary.
Noah was footing the up-front costs for the production, which felt sort of like asking someone out to an expensive restaurant then making them pay. Per usual, he didn’t mind. While AJ was at work, he also shouldered the technical aspects of their show, from the lighting and sound cues to the needs of the stage and house managers.
One day, he texted AJ to come to the theater in a white T-shirt. When she arrived, he had her stand center stage under the hot lights as he looked up at her from the house.
“You see?” he yelled to Alfie in the booth. “The blue gel is completely washing her out.”
He hopped up onstage and tugged off his black crew neck sweatshirt, one of a long lineage that had taken up residence in AJ’s closet.
“Put this on,” he said, handing it to AJ. He stood beside her, now in a white T-shirt, slightly out of breath and so intensely in his element, itmade him hard to look at. As AJ pulled on his amazing-smelling sweatshirt, Noah took a few steps downstage to assess her. He shook his head.
“She should be golden. It should hit her here and here,” he yelled up to Alfie, indicating AJ’s brow and chin. Then, as if only just seeing her, he walked over to AJ and kissed her soundly.
“What was that for?” she said, breathless as a new constellation of lights clinked on above them.
Noah shrugged, then kissed her again, holding her to him until she sighed.
AJ never did seetheArchitectural Digestkitchen. Whatever Noah’s objections to her couch, they weren’t enough to keep him from sleeping over every night. There was a practical excuse for this: it made it easy to rehearse amid AJ’s work schedule. But that’s what it was, an excuse.
With just two weeks until curtain up, they began practicing more at the theater, waking early to get time in before AJ went to 30 Rock. They knew the scripted section cold, exchanging roles each day. On Sundays, they would run the entire show multiple times with the light crew so the technicians could get a feel for blacking out the hour-long improvised second act.
The Hayes may have been Broadway’s smallest theater, but to AJ it felt huge. As their opening neared, she found herself grateful for the cons, where she had faced crowds several multiples of the Hayes’s capacity, as she increasingly had to remind herself.
Truthfully, it was exhilarating being onstage with Noah even without an audience.
“It’s ours forever.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This hill, the view. The stars. We’ll be safe here.”
The spell ofFire & Waterhad banished any sense of an ending from the Hayes Theater. Noah hadn’t mentioned their separation in weeks. When AJ was with him, she could feel how much he loved her, and it did not seem insane to hope that he might come around.
But the instant she was out of his presence, time returned, indifferent and inevitable.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
In those weeks, the familiar rushes and routines of work became AJ’s tether to the person she had been before that summer. It was at work that she found herself exhausted. At work, where she could contemplate what would become of her if this didn’t go her way.
She’d spend long bleak hours in her office wondering if she would ever find anything funny again, then walk over to see Noah and land so firmly in the candy-colored present she couldn’t think five minutes into the future.
Most shows kicked offwith a week or two of previews to iron out the kinks, but since this was a minimal production with a short run, they settled for a dress rehearsal the Monday before their Tuesday opening.
In keeping with the sets, their costumes were simple: blue jeans and T-shirts—white for W, black for F, with the actors swapping colors in tandem with their roles.
The atmosphere was fraught going into dress rehearsal. They both knew what this final run-through meant, but neither addressed it. Instead, AJ watched Noah stand onstage, adjusting the prop chairs. Then, half an hour later, he slammed one down so forcefully during a scene, its left anterior leg snapped clean off.
“That’s good luck,” their stage manager, Jerry, reassured them.
After, they sat at the edge of the stage under the work lights, looking out at the rows of empty seats in the orchestra and balcony. Noah was in white, AJ in black.
He glanced at her. “Nervous?”
AJ sat back a little. “Not exactly.”
She felt jittery thinking about certain things—walking on for the first time, feeling the energy of the crowd. But they knew what they were doing. They couldn’t have been better prepared. And the truthwas, the fears motivating AJ went so far beyond stage fright, the performance seemed almost incidental. This was for Noah and Noah alone.
“I’m…ready.”
