Time and Chance by Alan Brennert

Author:Alan Brennert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER TEN

RICK

They were going to find me out. The thought haunted me, taunted me, all the way back from that first, shattering run-through. I cursed myself for a fool to think I could pull this off—for allowing my ego, my macho pride, to convince me that I was Richard’s equal. I was a reflection, not an equal; a counterpart, but not a peer. In my own deluded mind I’d been competing with Richard from the moment our lifelines crossed, but for the first time I saw that there was no competition here—that I was barely in the race at all. And I saw, finally, that this silly, one-sided rivalry—this jealousy—was utterly pointless. The stakes had suddenly changed dramatically for me. In the space of one afternoon my ambitions had gone from proving I deserved the kind of success and respect Richard had attained, to simply getting by—to somehow struggle through the play, to perform at a level not so far below the rest of the cast as to make an idiot of myself, or worse.

I tried to reassure myself that I wouldn’t, couldn’t be exposed for what I really was; hurrying back to my apartment, I even made, in a fit of paranoia, a thumbprint with an old ink pad and compared it with prints I found on one of Richard’s wineglasses. They were identical, of course. But my confidence was short-lived: I kept thinking of all sorts of subtle physical differences that could be just as damning—a broken bone, say, that could show up on an X-ray, a scar, an appendix or set of tonsils removed or not removed.

Dammit, no. I had to stop this. I had to concentrate on one thing and one thing alone: the play. The part. I took out my playscript and began going over it again, reading aloud the lines, hoping to make them familiar and comfortable. But the more I read the more I heard myself as though from a distance—and what I heard was just as stiff, forced, and artificial as it had been at the run-through. I hurled the goddamn script into a wall, the brads popping, the pages scattering. Damn it—what was I going to do?

As I sat on the couch, staring at the pages strewn across my living room, the phone rang. I had a brief paranoid fantasy that it was my agent calling to tell me I’d just been fired from the production, and I was ashamed at the relief I felt at the idea. Picking up on the third ring, I heard instead Catlin’s bright, cheery voice: “Hi, it’s me. How’d it go today?”

My bleak mood lifted; all at once the depression was forgotten. “Fine,” I said, almost believing the lie myself. “Great. How about yourself?”

“Well, one week in town and I am already besieged with offers,” she said in a tone so exaggerated with false airs that I had to smile. “So many, so numerous, so copious that I couldn’t—I’m sorry, I know this is gonna break your heart, but I can’t, I just can’t—I couldn’t possibly make time for you tonight.

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