The Book of Air and Shadows

close up three minutes after the curtain rises, I can’t breathe, a painful vise clamps around my head, and my digestive system wants to rid itself of its contents from both ends. My sister is obviously correct when she says I need my head examined, a need I decline, however, to satisfy.
    I don’t mind rehearsals, though, with the lights up and people moving around and the director calling out directions and actors missing marks and lines. It’s sort of fun and not at all like being pinned, silenced, in the dark, while living people in ghastly makeup pretend they are not who they are; just as I do.
    When I arrived at my wife’s house my daughter was waiting on the front steps of the brownstone, chatting with a couple of young men. These had obviously arrived in the white Explorer with gold-plated fittings that stood double-parked on the street with its rear hatch open, the better to share with the neighborhood the thump of its dull chanting music, which was at a volume calculated to shiver stone. She seemed to be having a good time and I was reluctant to break up the party. The young men greeted me politely, for they were from Paul and were keeping an eye on my house, as he had promised. Imogen seemed a little annoyed when I told her this, after we were seated in the back of the Lincoln, since she had thought she was doing something transgressive, entertaining a couple of obvious gangbangers. After this had been straightened out, we rode to the school in silence, at least on my part; Imogen was immediately on her cell phone, speaking to girls with whom she had just spent the entire day and whom she would be seeing in a few minutes. Anything better than a nice chat with Dad.
    Well, you know, there is really nothing like Shakespeare, even performed by children. Mrs. Rylands likes
MSND
because it lets her use children from a range of ages, from the lower as well as the upper schools; her conceit is to use the little kids as fairies and slightly older ones for the major fairy parts, freshmen and sophomores for the royals and the lovers, and the biggest kids for the rude mechanicals. When the boys get to horsing around and cracking up she tells them that the greatest women’s parts in all of drama were created on the stage by twelve-year-old boys, and no one thought it at all ludicrous, and here you are, you big louts, playing men at least! And remarkably, when the golden lines begin to flow from their lips they are able for a moment to leave the shut hell of teenaged narcissism and inhabit a broader, richer universe. Or so it seemed to me. I watched my daughter make her entrance in the first scene of act II and give her great angry speech:
These are the forgeries of jealousy
. I don’t know where she gets it, how she knew how to speak:
    Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By pavèd fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beachèd margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind
    and arrange her face and move her body so as to generate a vision of the fairies dancing. Mrs. Rylands was entranced too, and Imogen is a cinch to do Juliet next year at fourteen and shatter hearts.
    As I say, I rather enjoy rehearsals and I feel that attending as many of them as I can makes up a little for missing the performances. And the place was full of lovely young flesh and their adorable moms, which was nice too, and I exchanged some melting looks with the moms, and this made me think about Ingrid. I stepped outside after Imogen had finished her scene and called Tarrytown to see if I could come up after my meeting with the Russian, but she was cool and said she had some work to do. I’ve always had a certain skill at detecting lies over the wires and I did now. This wasn’t at all like Ingrid, a fairly straight arrow. Could she have another lover? Probably. Did I care? Yes, a little. I always care, but not all that much; and they can tell, hence the historically rapid turnover in my romantic life.
    After the rehearsal I asked Imogen if she wanted to go out for something. In times past, when she was Daddy’s darling, she delighted in being taken to a particular local saloon and having made for her a Shirley Temple festooned with fruity garbage, but no longer. Imogen thinks divorce is boring, practically every one of her peers is what we used to call a child of a broken home, and she rather enjoyed the cachet of being unbroken. Or maybe not. I have no entrée into her lovely little head. We therefore rode home in