Page 22 of Just One Night (Just One Day 2.50)

Allyson feels paralyzed all of a sudden. Last night, she’d stood at that very stage door and Willem had breezed right by her, into the arms of that other woman. The one who is now in the arms of that other man.

This is not last night. This is tonight. And Willem is walking right toward her. And he is smiling. Wren thrusts the bouquet Wolfgang prepared (an enormous bouquet; it almost capsized the bike on the ride to the park) into her arms.

The bouquet is smashed in about five seconds. Because Willem doesn’t seem to give a shit about the flowers or the crowd of people waiting for him. He seems to be heeding Orlando’s words tonight.

“I would kiss before I spoke.”

And for the second time in a day, he does.

And, oh, what a kiss. It makes the one this morning seem chaste. It makes the flowers smashed between them bloom all at once. Allyson could live in that kiss.

Except she hears laughter behind them. And a voice, an unfamiliar one, though Allyson knows at once that it belongs to the redhead.

“I take it you found her then,” the voice says.

• • •

It takes ages for them all to troop out of the park. There are so many of them: Willem, Allyson, Broodje, Henk, W, Lien, Max, Kate, David. Wolfgang and Winston, the guy from the hotel whom Wren has been spending time with, are joining them later. The logistics are complicated. This one left a bike back there. This one is meeting them over here.

But it’s the introductions that take longer.

Kate is a theater director. Whom Willem met in Mexico, while he was looking for Allyson.

David is her fiancé, whom Willem has never met, who is going on about how good Willem was tonight, the vulnerability he brought to Orlando, what a brave way to play it.

Wren is the friend Allyson met in Paris and bumped into again in Amsterdam. “I wouldn’t have found you if it weren’t for her,” Allyson tells Willem. “I was about to give up but she made me go to the hospital you were at.”

>Willem’s cast mates slap him on the back, offer congratulations from last night, and condolences for next week. He accepts them both.

Max is by his side, as always. She is the other understudy, for Rosalind, and Willem’s best friend in the cast. “You win some, you lose some. And sometimes you win and lose at the same time. Life’s a bloody cockup,” Max says.

“Is that Shakespeare?” Willem asks.

“Nah. Just me.”

“Sounds like the Universal Law of Equilibrium,” Willem says.

“The what?”

When Willem doesn’t answer right away, she says, “Sounds like a bunch of shite.”

“You’re probably right,” Willem agrees. And then he asks her if she’ll come out after the show.

“I’m still hungover from last night,” Max complains. “How many parties does one man need?”

“This is different,” Willem says.

“How is it different?” Max asks.

Max has become one of his closest friends these past months, and yet he hasn’t told her a thing. There is nothing to do now but to tell her everything.

“Because I’m in love.”

• • •

Kate and David arrive just before curtain. She’d meant to come straight from the airport, but when she’d seen David, she had been overcome. It was a bit silly, really. It had only been a few days since she’d seen him, and they’d been together for five years. But she’d been feeling roiled since last night. A good Shakespearean performance was known to have aphrodisiacal effects. So when David arrived, she’d hustled him back to her Major Booger hotel and had her way with him. Then they’d fallen asleep and gotten themselves massively lost on the way to the park (someone should mention to city planners that Amsterdam was laid out like a rat’s maze, albeit a very pretty rat’s maze) and now here they are.

I hope I haven’t oversold it, Kate thinks as the lights go down. She has essentially promised Willem an apprenticeship based on last night’s performance, but David has to agree. She is sure David will agree. Willem had been that good. But she is nervous now. They’ve offered apprenticeships to foreigners before, but sparingly, because the visa paperwork and union issues are such a headache.

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