Wishing in the Wings (18 page)

I thought about how many times I’d said those words to Ryan, just that afternoon. I thought about how much I had longed to hear him accept my apology, how much I had craved his accepting my mistake, forgiving it, letting us move on.

What was my real alternative here? I could remain angry with Teel from now until the day his brass lamp tarnished into a pile of metallic dust, but that wasn’t going to change what had already happened.

I kept my voice perfectly even as I said, “I accept your apology.”

The change in Teel was instantaneous. He jumped back from the unseen gate, clapping his hands once as if he’d just played a winning hand at baccarat. “We can fix things at the Mercer! You have two wishes left, and there’s no time like the present to use them.”

“Absolutely not!”

“Just one, then,” he wheedled, glancing at the invisible Garden behind him. “Bring the theater into line, and you’ll still have one wish left for whatever else your heart desires.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, forbidding myself to think about Jaze waiting somewhere in the distance. My remaining wishes were too precious to waste, no matter how hard Teel tried to manipulate me. “No. And you can’t make me.”

“No. I can’t.” He sighed, but then he seemed to remember the guise he’d chosen for himself, the pure seduction that emanated from his suave incarnation. “But we could have some wicked fun while I tried.” He pinned me with those gimlet eyes, and I felt myself buffeted by another wave of his subtle, magical compulsion. A tendril of naked lust curled around my belly. Or something lower.

With perfect clarity, I could imagine exactly what kind of wishes Teel would try to extract from me once he had me in a fully compromised position. “No, thank you,” I said dryly.

He shrugged. “It was worth a try,” he said, flipping the switch on his burning gaze. My heart fluttered as he released me; I felt like I’d had a few too many cups of coffee. My Casanova was suddenly a roguish little boy, hanging his head in mock shame.

“You are incorrigible!” I exclaimed.

“Isn’t that what every girl wants her genie to be?” That slow smile spread across his rugged features and he waited just a beat, obviously hoping that I’d change my mind. Even if I’d been inclined to invite him into my bed—the very bed that he had given me less than one week before—I knew he’d only break my heart in the morning. That’s what men did when they were as drop-dead gorgeous as Teel was pretending to be.

At least in my experience. And in the experience of every actor, stage manager, and other theater professional I’d ever spilled my heart to.

Teel sighed, finally abandoning his pretense of seduction entirely. “So? Who’s up next on the sponsor list? Who are we meeting with tomorrow?”

“No one!” I answered so forcefully that I probably frightened off the nearest of the Garden’s birds. “You are not meeting with any sponsors. You’re not coming anywhere near the Mercer.”

“Please?” he wheedled, stretching out the word like a child playing with chewing gum.

“No!”

“Even if I promise to be good?” Again, with the glowing eyes.

I ordered my body to ignore its immediate animal response. “You don’t know the meaning of the word.”

“You’re probably right.” He sighed and looked toward the Garden again, back to being the lovesick genie I pitied. “You know, I’d give you a bouquet of those wildflowers, if I could reach them through the fence.”

I followed his gaze, acting as if I could see the blossoms. I pushed a little sympathy into my response. “And I’d take them from you. And enjoy every last one.”

“Isn’t the honeysuckle incredible?”

“I’ve never smelled anything like it,” I said.

He sighed and filled his lungs so deeply that I thought his cummerbund would burst. “Time to get back to your real world, though, isn’t it?”

“I think so.”

He turned his back on the Garden I could only imagine. “Thank you, Rebecca. It helps sometimes, just to talk.”

“I know,” I said. “I understand.”

I blinked, and I was suddenly back in my living room. The late afternoon sunlight was blinding as I turned to ask Teel what he was going to do next. Alas, my genie was nowhere to be found.

Before I could worry about what mischief he was getting himself into, my phone rang. I glanced at the Caller ID and battled a sudden wave of queasiness. “Hello, Pop-pop,” I said after the third ring, forcing a smile into my voice. My grandfather had no idea that I’d lost his generous graduation gift.

“How’s my favorite granddaughter doing in the big bad city?”

“As you know perfectly well, I’m your only granddaughter.” The teasing felt old, familiar, like driftwood rubbed comfortably smooth by waves.

“How are things at work?”

“They’re…fine.” Damn. I’d let my voice hitch just a little. Maybe my grandfather wouldn’t notice. Maybe he’d think it was just a hiccup in transmission through the phone.

“What’s wrong?”

So much for that brilliant idea. I thought about everything that was wrong. My genie was hounding me to make my last two wishes so that he could hook up with the imaginary creature he had a crush on. Yeah, I couldn’t mention a word of that to Pop-pop, not without my throat slamming closed. My former boyfriend had taken off for Russia—Russia!—with every penny I’d ever earned. Right, like I was going to share that disaster. I needed to find a sponsor with thousands of dollars to pour into our emergency production of However Long.

Okay. I could talk about work, at least a little bit. “Things are just busy at the office.” I gave him the thirty-second summary of our copyright woes, our rapid schedule change, and our funding needs.

“You’ll work things out,” he said, brimming with the absolute confidence that only unconditional grandfather love could create. “You just need to give yourself a little treat. Take some of that money I sent you and splurge on something for yourself—a day at the spa, or a nice dinner out with your young man.”

My eyes welled up at the kindness in Pop-pop’s voice. At the kindness, and at the all too real fact that I’d lost his money. I couldn’t afford a bottle of nail polish at the corner drug store, much less an entire day of pampering.

As for dinner out with my young man… As soon as my grandfather said the words, I pictured Ryan Thompson. Not Dean, not the boyfriend that Pop-pop expected me to share with. Thinking of Ryan was absurd, though. No matter how smoothly he had planted cabbage seeds in peat cups, he hadn’t conquered my heart. He wasn’t boyfriend material. He couldn’t be—we were working together. Until However Long was over, Ryan was strictly verboten, in any sort of dating sense. I couldn’t even allow myself to think of getting involved with him.

No need to go into all of that with my grandfather, though. I forced a bright smile into my voice. “That’s a great idea, Pop-pop.”

“I won’t keep you,” he said. “I just wanted to hear your voice, doll.”

Doll. That’s what my grandmother had always called me, the woman Pop-pop had been married to for fifty-three years, before Alzheimer’s cruelly stole her away. We said our goodbyes, and I headed into the kitchen to boil water for my chicken-flavored ramen noodles. As I sipped my salty yellow broth, I tried to imagine what it would be like to love someone for more than half a century.

* * *

Four days and seventeen meetings later, I was almost ready to summon Teel and take him up on his wish-granting offer. No, not his offer of flirtation and reckless abandon and probably mind-blowing sex. He was a genie—he’d leave me in the morning—or after I’d made my fourth wish. Whichever came first.

I was, though, seriously considering letting Teel fund However Long.

Ryan and I had sat in office after office, making our pitches. While I came to appreciate the responses that were quick and to the point—I’d always been one to just hold my nose and swallow my medicine—the sudden stab of disappointment never hurt less.

The African Connection was too deeply in debt themselves.

The Women’s Empowerment Consortium refused to consider sponsoring a play written by a man.

The Better World Alliance wanted us to hand over e-mail addresses and phone numbers for every one of our patrons.

The Light in the Night Coalition demanded that we perform the show in their own grotty basement space, which could have used a few lights, or at least a couple hundred roach motels, before I’d even consider walking all the way to the back wall.

The Peace Fund, the World Understanding League, the New Voices Endowment, the New York Friendship Front—my list went on and on and on, but the bottom line was always the same. No one had any money. At least, not money for us. Not this close to production. Not without prior earmarks in the budget. Not, not, not, not, not.

Teel didn’t make things any easier. Every night, he waited for me in my apartment, dragging me off to the Garden as soon as I closed the door behind me. I saw enough genie incarnations that I felt as though I was living in a real-world version of Sesame Street’s “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?”

Every single visit, he—or she; Teel was an equal opportunity Garden recruiter—pointed out the amazing scenery, the delectable scents, the unparalleled sounds. And every single visit, I played along, oohing and aahing as if my senses had never been so stimulated. I couldn’t admit the truth now, couldn’t tell him that every prior visit had been a lie.

Fortunately, my dramaturg brain served me well in the midst of the nothingness that was Teel’s private world. I was accustomed to taking notes on productions, to keeping track of endless details. Just from listening to my genie and watching the angle of his head, I learned which corner of the invisible Garden housed the roses, which contained the vast plots of wildflowers. I memorized where the nightingales tended to congregate, and I hardly ever forgot that the stream flowed from left to right, eddying into a pond just past the boxwood hedge.

But none of that knowledge got me any closer to my ultimate goal. Nothing about the Garden brought me funding for the Mercer.

When I’d learned about funding meetings in school, I’d never imagined how important they would be, here in my first professional job. I’d never dreamed how badly one poor victim-of-crime theater company like the Mercer could need funds, and how desperately one shamed dramaturg could pursue potential sponsors. We would have needed a corporate sponsor for any production that the Mercer undertook, but Dean’s thievery made my mission for However Long infinitely more important than it would have been otherwise.

Matters weren’t helped by the regular phone calls I got from Detective Ambrose. Once he called to ask if I, Miss Morris, had ever traveled to Alaska under an assumed name. No, Detective. Sorry.

Another time, he called to ask if I, Miss Morris, had ever met any of Dean’s relatives face to face. No, Detective. Sorry.

Yet another time, he called to ask if I, Miss Morris, knew of any business associates of Dean’s who specialized in international arbitrage. I barely knew what the phrase meant. No, Detective. Sorry.

Every time I spoke to the laconic investigator, I asked him if they were any closer to tracking Dean down, if they were tracing his movements in Russia, if they were able to rip free any of the millions he had embezzled from the Mercer and the thousands he’d taken from me.

Every time, Ambrose told me that no, Miss Morris, they were no closer to getting the funds. Sigh. But he promised, Miss Morris, that he’d let me know as soon as anything changed. Big, gusty sigh.

And so, after more than a week of the most frustrating conversations about money that I had ever had, Ryan and I found ourselves sitting in the office of Ronald J. Barton, a.k.a. the Popcorn King.

Barton was intent on doing for popcorn what Starbucks had done for Colombian roast. He envisioned one of his orange-and-yellow-themed stores on every block of every major city in the world. He had mastered the art of turning twenty cents worth of Iowa’s finest corn into a five-dollar bag of crunchy snack food. His outlets featured a cornucopia of fine-grained sugars and salts, nearly endless flavor combinations that could be sprinkled over any of his three basic commodities: plain, cheddar, or caramel popcorn.

Somewhere along the way, Barton had heard that it was important to present a consistent marketing message to the world of potential customers. To that end, Barton lived inside a lemon- and tangerine-colored kaleidoscope.

Ryan and I showed up for our appointment, wearing our by-now-customary begging clothes. After a week of dressing like a grown-up, I hadn’t come anywhere near reaching the limits of my Teel-created wardrobe. I could continue to throw together one sober, responsible outfit after another—for another three months at least, if only there’d been a single prospective donor left on my list. If Ryan wondered at the source of my extensive collection of clothes, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he’d shown up every morning in one of two hand-knit sweaters and clean khaki slacks. Neat, simple, and utterly, geekily boring.

We stood out in Ronald Barton’s office like burnt popcorn kernels in a handful of white, fluffy perfection.

Barton’s desk was covered in yellow Formica. Each of his office accessories had been molded out of orange plastic—a stapler the color of tiger lilies was poised on top of a stack of matching paper. Sticky notes blared their presence like freshly harvested pumpkins. The telephone looked like it had jumped out of a box of Crayola crayons. The computer monitor, the pencil holder, the pens, the scissors, the Kleenex box—each and every item assaulted my eyes with pure, undiluted orange.

Barton himself wore a bright yellow sweater and matching slacks. His Popcorn King logo was picked out across his chest: a cheerful orange box with sloped sides, tilted to the right so that kernels of just-popped corn could cascade into a smile. Each puffy white cloud of crunchy goodness bore the initials P.K.

Ronald J. Barton didn’t have anything to do with Africa. He had nothing to do with women’s rights. He had, as far as I knew, never even heard of the Peace Corps.

But Barton had bought a half-page ad in the Mercer program for every single play we’d staged in the past two years. Like clockwork, his checks rolled in. Barton was dependable. Barton was reliable.