Gabriel leaned across the bed and flipped the switch that turned it on. Rita Yearling’s incredibly lovely face appeared on the phone’s screen.
“Hi,” she breathed.
Gabriel hung suspended, stretched across the bed with one foot in his suitcase, tangled in his dirty underwear.
“Hello yourself,” he managed.
Her eyes seemed to widen as she noticed the open suitcase. “You’re not leaving?”
Gabriel nodded. He couldn’t talk.
“Don’t you care about the show?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Don’t you care about me?”
With an effort, Gabriel said, “I care a lot. Too much to watch you ruin your career before it really starts. That hockey puck of a leading man is going to destroy this show.”
She dimpled at him. “You’re jealous!”
“No,” he said. “Just fed up.”
“Oh, Ron...” Her face pulled together slightly in a small frown.
“I can’t take it anymore,” Gabriel said. “It’s just one battle after another... like fighting with a Hydra. Every time I chop off one head, seven more pop up.”
But she wasn’t listening. “Ron... you poor sweet boy. Come out onto your balcony. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“On the balcony?”
“Go out and see,” Rita cooed.
Untangling himself from the suitcase, Gabriel padded barefoot to the balcony. He was wearing nothing but his knee-length dashiki and the chill night air cut into him the instant he opened the sliding glass door.
“Surprise!” he heard from over his head.
Looking up, he saw Rita smiling lusciously down at him. She was on the balcony one floor up and one room over from his own. She stood there smiling down at him, clothed in a luminous wisp of a gown that billowed softly in the breeze.
“I took this room for the weekend. I wanted to get away from the suite where B.F. is,” she said.
Ron’s knees went weak. “It is the east,” he murmured, “and Juliet is the sun.”
“This is a lot more fun than talking over the phone, isn’t it?” Rita gave a girlish wriggle. “Like, it’s more romantic, huh?”
Without even thinking about it, Gabriel leaped up on the railing of his own balcony. He stretched and his fingertips barely grazed the bottom of Rita’s balcony.
“Hey! Be careful!”
Gabriel glanced below. Ten floors down, the street lamps glowed softly in the cold night air. Wind whipped at his dashiki and his butt suddenly felt terribly exposed.
“What are you doing?” Rita called, delighted.
He jumped for her balcony. His fingers clutched at the cold cement, then he reached, straining, and grabbed a fistful of one of the metal posts supporting the railing.
His feet dangled in empty air and his dashiki billowed in the wind. Somewhere far back in his mind, Gabriel realized what a ridiculous picture this would present to anyone passing below. But that didn’t matter.
Beads of cold sweat popped out all over his body as he strained, muscles agonized by the unaccustomed effort, hand over hand to the edge of the balcony’s railing. His bare toes found a hold on the balcony’s cement floor at last and he heaved himself, puffing and trembling with exertion, over the railing to collapse at Rita’s feet.
She dropped to her knees beside him. “Ron, darling, are you all right?”
He smiled weakly up at her. “Hiya kid.” It wasn’t Shakespeare, he knew, but it was the best he could manage under the conditions.
They went arm in arm into her hotel room. Rita’s gown was a see-through and Gabriel was busily looking into it.
She sat him down on the edge of the bed. “Ron,” she said, very seriously, “you can’t leave the show.”
“There’s no reason for me to stay,” he said.
“Yes there is.”
“What?”
She lowered her eyelids demurely. “There’s me.”
10: THE DIRECTOR
Mitch Westerly sat scowling to himself behind his archaic dark glasses. The other passengers on the jet airliner shuffled past him, down the narrow aisle, overcoats flopping in their arms and hand baggage banging against the seats and each other.
