Jonathan Levi - Septimania

At four, lunch was exchanged for tea. At seven, the drinks trolley appeared. More food at seven-thirty, and then the official end of the day at midnight. Everyone — particularly the actors — was expected to be present all the time, all part of the theatrical engine. “An infernal machine,” Tibor called it, quoting Sophocles or Anouilh or some other aesthetic engineer.

And for the first week, the machine ran like a well-oiled Jaguar. The actors were marvelous, particularly the Welsh girl playing Antigone, the young daughter of the dead Oedipus, who defies the laws of her Uncle Creon to bury her brother, who was killed trying to restore morality to the throne. When they weren’t rehearsing with Tibor, they’d go off into corners by themselves and swot the history or run lines. Fruit and bottled water were the staples of their diets that first week — I was the one on the phone every morning at eleven, calling to the buttery for fresh supplies. And so we came to the end of the sixth day and all was good.

Monday was the day of rest. Part of my job was to pick Tibor up at his over-designed hotel on St. Martin’s Lane before rehearsal and deposit him there afterwards. I didn’t expect to see him on Monday — frankly, I needed a day away, and there was some unfinished business with a tutor of mine up at Trinity. But at 7 a.m. my telephone rang.

“Oc-TAY-vya?” The woman on the other end was clearly not someone who knew me. “I’ve got a friend of yours here. In a bad way.

What’d you say your name was, love?”

I took the tube up to Baker Street, to a basement flat just north of the Marylebone Road. Reshma was the girl’s name — she was tall and well filled-out, roughly my age, but in different circumstances. As she fixed me a cup of instant — with a drop from the pint of milk she’d asked me to pick up along the way — she told me about her dilemma, whether to return to Bollywood or try to make it in England. She rattled off the roles she’d played in community theater in Hendon and Ealing and mentioned a couple of TV shows I’d vaguely heard of that had almost offered her a role. The TV was on low by the counter — BBC strangely enough, with Anna Ford reading the morning news. I looked around Reshma’s kitchen and wondered behind which door “my friend” was hiding, or lying, or dying.

“So—” It was the door behind me, as luck would have it.

“Poor darling!” Reshma looked up at Tibor with the eyes of an actress in mid-audition. Tibor waved her off. He was dressed in the same clothes I’d left him in at the hotel the night before. If he had taken them off, it hadn’t been to sleep. It wasn’t particularly warm in Reshma’s kitchen, but Tibor’s shirt bore a stigmata of sweat beneath the arms and breasts. He was holding a water glass in one hand. The other was planted on his knee to support the weight of a back that refused to straighten. “He’s been stuck like that for over an hour,” Reshma said. “That’s why I called you.”

Tibor shook his head and waved the glass towards the TV. Anna Ford was talking about Vice President Cheney, who was preoccupied with his own stress test. But Tibor was more interested in the bottle next to the TV.

“Do you really think?” Reshma asked, not moving from the chair.

“Ottavia!” Tibor shouted in a Tom Waits whisper and shook the glass again in the direction of the bottle. I brought it over to him — a liter of Absolut with perhaps a slurp and a half at the bottom. “Pour,” Tibor said. He drank, he swallowed. And with an effort that seemed to wring several slurps of sweat out of his body, Tibor straightened his back with a crack that momentarily drowned out Anna Ford. “So,” he said, fully erect. “You found me. The same way you first found me and Cristina.”

“Did I find you?” I asked him. “I thought it was the other way around.”

“When La Principessa walked into my rehearsal on her wedding day,” Tibor said, “wardrobed to the max in full bridal regalia and looking for the District Hall, do you think it mattered which one of us found the other? Which one of us was the Sun? Which one the Earth?”

I blushed, struck for the first time by an image of Cristina seated on a bathroom sink, her wedding dress hiked up around her waist and her second-hand heels digging into Tibor’s bomber jacket.

“In love and discovery,” Tibor said, looking over my head at Reshma, “there is no Fucker and no Fuckee. Only the Fuck. It’s what we do afterwards,” he said, striking a match, “after the cigarette and the vodka and the snoring are over and the stage lights are off, that’s what matters. Action,” he said, pulling on the Camel, “action is everything.”

“I was just telling Oc-TAY-vya here about my dilemma.” Reshma offered me a cigarette. I declined.

“Give her the address,” Tibor said to me.

“Which address?” The most intelligible person in the room was still Anna Ford, and I never knew what she was saying.

“The Studio, the National …” Tibor waved his own cigarette at me. “My concept,” Tibor said. “Cristina told you I had a concept. She warned you, didn’t she?”

I didn’t know that Tibor knew about my tea with Cristina, about her warning. So I said nothing. But on cue, a familiar Eastern European voice came into the room, care of Reshma’s TV.

“This morning, my guest is the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney.”

“ Fututi pizda matii! ” Tibor roared. “It’s the Puli-tzarina!” A baby started crying in the next room.

“Oh shit!” Reshma said, as a wet stain began to spread over her T-shirt by her left nipple. “Pardon my Swahili and pardon my hungry monster. Won’t be but a minute.” And with that, she disappeared through another door.

“She follows me everywhere!” Tibor lurched around the room looking for the remote. Cristina continued to talk calmly to the vice president with authority and the charming scalpel of her Rumanian accent. I was happy to have her in the room with us, even if I could understand Tibor’s annoyance. Cristina had a way of looking through the camera and making you believe you were her sole audience. Nevertheless, I reached behind the TV and pulled the plug.

I got Tibor out of the flat and into a mini-cab by Regent’s Park before Reshma finished breakfasting her infant. Back at the hotel, I poured coffee and scrambled eggs into Tibor and tucked him into bed. He began to snore immediately. I cancelled my Cambridge tutor and the rest of my Monday and pieced through the hotel room Tatler s and Vogue s. Cristina was mentioned five times in the magazines, Tibor only once and then as “husband of …” I thought about calling Cristina but remembered Tibor’s reaction to her appearance on TV. She follows me everywhere. I remembered her appearance just a few weeks before on the forecourt of Trinity. Was Tibor jealous of Cristina’s success?

Was that why she warned me?

Was he warning me?

I thought about Reshma and her baby. I thought about the night Tibor had spent in her depressing flat. I thought about why I had followed Tibor’s instructions and given her the address of the Studio. I didn’t think about the bottle of Absolut.

Tibor woke around 4 p.m. He sat up in bed. He had no idea where he was. He reached out with his left hand and hit a pillow. He reached out with his right and knocked over the over-designed bedside lamp. I stood above him and handed him his glasses. He tweaked them over his ears and looked up at me.

“So.”

I offered to call up some food. I handed him a glass of water.

“Go away.”

“Can I call you later? See if you’re okay?”

“I’m okay. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Are you sure?”