CHAPTER 109 — Stray Cat Strut (2)

11 East Seventy-Third.

The Vaughan House.

Monday, 27 October 2008.

Breakfast at the Vaughan House was served at half past six, GFC or otherwise, with George laying the papers along the marquetry table in the order of curated seriousness.

This morning, every one of them had the same triumphant face.

Eppie read the headlines upside down while Nora’s egg yolk soaked her avocado toast. The Times gave Senator McCain eight points. The Journal gave him eleven. The Post had a picture of the guy waving, as if he had already won.

Eight days out from the election, and nobody was pretending anymore.

Where are you, Hope and Change? Eppie squinted to see if there was a certain future president hiding in the background. In her old world, a junior Senator from Illinois had owned this week, and the seventy-two-year-old war hero who was his opponent could do nothing to turn the tide. In this one, he was touring his own state with a slogan for sensibility.

“Good morning, Euphemia.”

“Good morning, ma’am.”

Vaughan gave her cup a quarter-turn on its saucer, then drank.

“Looks like he’ll win,” Eppie said.

“It’s a high probability,” said Vaughan. “Though it’s a shame for an old friend. She had sat where you are right now, did you know? She makes excellent conversation.”

Eppie put her fork down.

The incumbent administration had done exactly as she expected, which was to save the nation’s failing institutions with the taxpayers’ dime. It was a deeply unpopular, divisive thing, one that would decide an election even if the Democratic candidate wasn’t a former First Lady. Likewise, she knew for a fact that the loans to the banks would all be paid back, but good luck telling a town hall that when the public couldn’t get loans, or withdraw their savings.

Another quarter-turn.

“Fret not, Euphemia. Mr Clinton had eight years. Mr Gore has had eight. Sixteen years of one party in that house, it’s time for change.” Vaughan said it the way she might have given the provenance of seasonal change. “We as a nation do not care for the status quo. We breathe and live change, regardless of how things change.”

Eppie wondered what the next four years portended—yet, in a liberating way, the colour of the President’s tie didn’t matter. Their Ark for Artists was done. The state’s funding would also arrive, eventually.

Maybe Hope was only running late.

And if the nation had more time, maybe, just maybe, they would be more accepting of things like universal healthcare… and Dijon mustard, and tan suits.

“Whatever the case,” said Vaughan drily, “we who have made out like bandits are in no position to throw stones at Mr Gore, who bailed out the insurers. George?”

“Madam.”

George set a single sheet of paper beside her saucer.

“The insurers have paid,” she said. “The Treasury paid, then they paid. We owe that to the President’s pen.” The dryness had something under it. “One hundred and nineteen million dollars, Euphemia. For ten.”

Eppie’s [Arithmetics] did the sum and brought it to her like Mr Chin with a dead bird.

“Ninety of it went into the Ark Trust on Friday,” Vaughan went on, “where it may be lent to people who materialise artistic joy, and may not be spent on frivolous things, like yachts.” She touched the handle of her cup. “And yours?”

“Mine?”

“Your Trust. I have told you my number. It is only manners.”

“Mr Prewitt isn’t very transparent, considering my age.” Eppie reached for the toast. “So I did the sum myself. If the Ark Theatre never sold a single ticket, I could keep the lights on, and everybody paid for four years. Longer, once the fish come in.”

“Ah, your fish,” said Vaughan.

“The fish, ma’am.” Eppie nodded.

“Mr Davis sent one to the house. George has hung it in the pantry.” Vaughan closed her eyes, as if imagining the horror. “It sings at Nora when she’s whisking eggs. The motion sets it off.”

“Which brings us,” Vaughan said, “to your request.”

Eppie licked her lips.

“You wanted a theatre, and, as predestined by the crisis, loans went bad, and stages were put on the auction block.”

She looked to George, who had been standing at the sideboard, and who now came forward and placed beside Eppie a ring of keys.

They were old keys. Brass, most of them, and one of iron as long as her hand.

Eppie could smell the history.

“You gave George a telephone number in September. A place you fancied, on Broadway,” said Vaughan. “We saw it at auction. It belonged to a bank that no longer exists. George tells me he did not have to raise his voice before the hammer came down.”

Jesus, Eppie felt her heart pound. Holy Jellicle Cats, it’s happening.

“The contracts were signed on Friday. It is the Estate’s.” A quarter-turn of the cup. “It is not yours, Euphemia. Do not thank me as though it were. You will have a lease, and you will pay rent, market rent, like a common theatre director. George has the figure. Pay the man from your Karmatronic Trust.”

Eppie held up the keys. West Forty-Eighth, the tag read. They weighed a ton.

She recalled the address.

It was the small one, set back from the building line. Cream terracotta, and a row of dancing women with their faces worn off, and a gap above the doors where somebody had torn out the signage. As it stood, it housed five hundred at most, too big and too expensive for a small company, too small for Broadway, which was why it had stayed dark for so long.

“It wants cleaning,” Vaughan was saying. “I am told there are stray cats and decrepit furniture. The rigging… will need replacing. The electricity is a whole other problem. But the roof is sound, and the stage is where they left it.”

Eppie found that she was standing. She did not remember deciding to.

“Ma’am—”

“Don’t cry now.”

“I wasn’t going to—” Eppie felt her eyes grow warm.

Vaughan lifted her cup, and behind it, where a lesser woman would have smiled, her eyes went soft. “Whatever you feel, I am well satisfied. Are YOU satisfied?”

“Yes.” Her reply came out too fast and too high, in the true voice of an actual sixteen-year-old. “Yes. Ma’am. Very much.”

“Good,” said Vaughan. “Now go and do good.”

“If you’re thinking of visiting your new abode,” George said in a voice that was measured and jovial, “please do so with a torch. Fully charged. It’s rather dark in there.”

Eppie had the keys in her fist before he finished. She took the stairs. In the hall, she remembered her shoes, went back for them, forgot her coat, and was halfway to Fifth Avenue with a fistful of brass before it occurred to her that she could finally call people and tell them that it was happening.

Cooper, Tyker, Lim… and hopefully… a family from the land of the orange groves.

The Vaughan House.

Monday, 3 November 2008.

West Forty-Eighth, after Eppie toured the place, reported itself as outright hazardous.

The fire curtain was asbestos. The ropes that flew the scenery were last serviced under Truman. The wiring wanted an exorcist; there was no functional air-conditioning because it was THAT old, and the ladies’ room had two working toilets. The gents had row upon row.

It was a different theatre, for a different time.

Dr Cooper walked it with her twice. He did the Julius Caesar speech on the stage and said “Sweet Lord!” in the basement, then “CHRIST ALMIGHTY” when they saw the cats… Nonetheless, he had the heat turned on by Wednesday, so that by winter’s end, they could decide if the pipes needed replacing.

Left to itself, the restoration wanted a year. Thankfully, George had purchased the place with renovation in mind. When Juliana Vaughan sent out the call, every company that worked Broadway leapt at the opportunity to work for an employer who had cash to spare and would never miss an invoice. As for the sound system, her faux-father promised that he would personally oversee a world-class fit-out.

Her new friend, Delphine Richards, had people ring in as well, people with skills Eppie had not known existed. A rigger who spoke of the grid, the loft blocks and the arbours. A plasterer who did nothing but prosceniums. A gilder. A draper who called her house curtain “a rag” and wanted to know how much she was willing to burn. And a man in New Jersey who had been re-springing theatre seats since the war, who tried to sell Cooper on horsehair.

And overseeing it all was Susanna Tyker, only Tyker had not said yes. She had said she would fly in on Friday with her folio, and decide after feeling the place with her own hands.

After the Gantt charts went up, they were looking at May of next year, assuming everything passed code. Total budget: two million from the Estate. Six million from the Karmatronic Trust, for everything that made it a theatre, including the total electrification and mechanisation of the stage house: motorised winches in place of the hemp lines, a pit lift, a trap room that worked, new dimmer racks, and a modernised industrial switch that would not fry their on-staff electrician. In September, she had told Dr Cooper three—but money was no object to Eppie.

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After all, [Causality] meant songs, and songs meant money.

If they were low on budget, she could just… burn her life away, like a proverbial torch, to light the way.

Which was why she now sat at the study desk, punching an Excel spreadsheet.

“[System],” she told the ceiling. “Show me my [Potential].”

[Causality: 961,407]

She had done a lot of work over the last month.

A song given back to the family it was stolen from.

A job for a teacher who needed one.

A door left open under an orange tree.

A plastic Wally, and a nation of strangers who could mock their bullies back.

And under all of it, steady as rent, her creations continued to bring joy to the masses.

She had also received a theatre.

AND she had… about half a year of being alive, if all she did was vegetate at a desk.

She also had another problem.

Stray Cats.

Not a cat. Not a family of cats. A civilisation. Upwards of a hundred of them came and went through a gap behind the fly gallery, a broken coal chute, and a skylight that had not closed since the last light winked out. They had held the building for a decade, and they had furnished it.

Eppie had shovelled steaming bags of cat SHIT for the Stray Cat Society.

That had been a shitty chore.

This was scatological archaeology.

The attic was the worst. The contractors carried out forty-one sacks of what Dr Cooper called, with a teacher’s delicacy, deposits. The stink had fangs. It had retractable claws. A cleaner in a respirator came down the ladder and said he was seeing cats invade his skull.

Nor had they stopped at the attic. Every velvet seat in the front rows had been claimed, individually, in claw and fur. The orchestra pit was a litter tray with a brass rail. In the wardrobe room, a ginger tom the size of a lynx had been sleeping on the same fur coat since, by the look of the added fur, Cats the Musical was released.

And the attic was the room she had been planning to sleep in.

Now, it was feline country.

A hundred cats, coming and going.

But Eppie had a plan.

A cunning, catty plan for the feline friends of Ark Theatre.

George showed her that the sale included a narrow service building, which nobody had mentioned because the frontage was one generous window wide.

It stood hard against the theatre’s east wall, three floors tall, and had been, in order, a costume store, a ticket agency, and a place to keep pamphlets, posters, and drapery. The ground floor opened onto the street and had a drain. The middle floor had north light. The top floor had a sloping ceiling, a sound roof, and a small iron door that led straight into the theatre’s attic.

Perfect for [The Ghost Light], because the city would freak if they found a bedroom in the attic—but if she crept across and rolled out a futon every night…

Eppie giggled to herself.

As for the civilisation of cats… Eppie knew exactly one man qualified for this, and he was in Los Angeles, packing his things to fly East.

An Ark for Artists, and an Ark for Cats of the Arts.

Come and play with kitties while you wait outside the marquee. How can a man or a woman resist those soulful eyes looking at them through the windows, like the Little Matchstick Girl?

Compared to a rigging system, how much could a state-of-the-art cat shelter cost?

One No.1? Probably not even a popular Hot 100 top 10…

Then she got up from the desk, because she was now all hot and bothered thinking about the kitty blanket in the attic, because she wasn’t the one shovelling the shit for once.

Her theatre couldn’t be draining money once it was established, meaning she needed to balance the books.

The play’s the thing…

So Eppie sat back down, powered on both her Macs, and continued collating what the [System] had gifted her.

She had been carrying them in her head, and partially in her hard drives, since LAPA. Since September, she had been processing them via [Memorisation], with [Composer] playing aide. Thus far, she had finished three scripts.

Her first priority, built for Cooper, was Sister Act II. She had mentally processed it for so long that her fingers still typed it. A failing parish school. A choir that could not sing. A boy with a temper who finds out what his voice is for, and a middle-class girl whose family wants her out of music altogether. It was half a play and half a musical, and the songs already existed—but needed RnB arrangements.

She opened the file.

SAINT GOSPEL STREET

A saint, a gospel and a street. Great play on words. Her own invention, and she was kind of proud of it. She read through her notes and the skeleton that was already completed. Her [Script Analysis] was at [B+], and her [Composer] was at [B].

“Raise both to [A],” she told the table inside her head.

Her [Causality] went down by [75,000].

[Causality: 886,407]

[Script Analysis]

Causality Tier (A)

You are known for having a highly analytical mind, reading between the lines, and putting yourself in the shoes of both real and fictional individuals. This trait is modified by your [Wisdom] statistic. At [A] tier, the Usurper has a higher chance of sharing elucidations with targeted audiences.

[Composer]

Causality Tier (A)

You can compose complex arrangements pertaining to a wide range of music, for any instrument and for the human voice, singly or in chorus. This Trait is boosted by additional Traits in proficiency of instrumental and vocal forms.

Presently, the skill is bolstered by

[Instrument: Guitar], [Songstress], [Vocality], [Gospel] and [Perfect Pitch].

This trait has attained maximum efficacy.

She calmed her nerves.

There would be more [Causality], so long as she kept creating.

Then she opened the second file for review.

Her second trump card was for a different awards circuit.

It was Pygmalion, and it was not hers at all. It was Shaw’s, word for word. It was a tale of creation and the created, of class, of love, of pride and dignity. It was a story about a professor who thinks he has made a dolly-wife, and a dolly who knows better than her professor.

This one… would need extensive doctoring. The wit could remain, the setting could stay true, but her [Script Analysis] had told her that tweaks were required, both for the very controversial ending and for the setting, to encompass a multi-cultural, multi-lingual cast.

Especially if she wanted to write Eliza for Mio.

William Chen had shattered her friend’s hopes.

But she would reassemble Mio like a kintsugi bowl, then set her free.

Of course, Mio still had months of work with Dr Cooper, but they had time—about a year—and Mio still had to audition.

The third file was Strictly Ballroom, from Baz Luhrmann. That one was a musical, out of a film whose rewind button she had worn flat in another life. It was about a boy who is punished for dancing his own steps, and a girl whose family possesses the real ones, but not the money or the prestige. It had always seemed strange to Eppie that the best of it—a Spanish family who had the real thing, a father who danced the paso doble—had been shoehorned into a 1990s Australian musical comedy as the exotic bit, confusing the local audience and charming the rest. Now she was free to make it American, raw and ecstatic and loud, with an ending big enough that the house would be on its feet at the climax, clapping the dancers home.

Three scripts. Done. And in dire need of polish.

Saint Gospel Street was set in a parish she had never lived in, among people she had never been. She had the shape of it and every note of the music, but not the authenticity.

Pygmalion was worse, because it was a time capsule. Shaw’s perfection was London, with an all-Caucasian cast. Her flower girl dropped her aitches in Covent Garden. In New York, nobody would know what she had dropped, or how a man could tell a girl’s street from her vowels. An American Eliza needed an American experience. The cast needed its New Yorker authenticity.

And Strictly Ballroom was Australian down to its sequins, and a third of its pages said only THEY DANCE. Despite everything, Eppie couldn’t dance. Ergo, she couldn’t direct a musical founded on the heat and passion of flamenco.

So… who could?

She pulled a legal pad across the desk and did what Lana did when the blinking cursor had no answers. She wrote down her problems in thick, bold pen strokes.

Presently, she had acquired quite a list of dramatis personae.

Lucia Lancet, nineteen, out of the finest conservatory in the world at fourteen, and on loan from her grandmother, could be a hell of a workhorse across all three plays.

Kel, who had been a choir boy before he was anything else, was a shoo-in for Saint Gospel Street, and he still owed her big time.

Mio could play a wide variety of roles, the chief of which was the role she would write for her. Dr Cooper would be theatre director, manager and teacher, all at once.

Valorie would, in her opinion, not refuse a request if Eppie made it.

Zara, the source of her inspiration, couldn’t act, but her family sure as hell had the connections, and by God, the girl could dance.

She had five aces in the hole.

She looked at the list for a while.

Then she wrote, underneath, MEN.

NEED MORE MEN

She wrote in bold.

YOUNG MEN. OLD MEN. MIDDLE-AGED MEN.

A professor. A dancer. Fathers, rivals, the boys in the back row of a choir. Three scripts, and every one of them had a man in the middle of it or a man standing in the way.

She knew men, of course.

But they were all dads. Trent Davis. Dr Cooper. Jack. Aubert. Eric. George. Father Parson. Uncle Paco. Goodness. She really did attract dads like a beer lady at Oktoberfest.

Lim was none of those, unless she decided to do Cats the Musical.

Sixteen years old, and I do not have one guy friend. She moped, completely neglecting Kel, who was most certainly a virile young man with too many young-man issues.

Lana had had the same problem.

A dearth of… men her age.

She inspected her shell in the dresser mirror.

Her philosophical zombie was a perfect, if juvenile, specimen.

And no, there would be no men for her either. Her [Causality] could not afford the drama. What if she perished tomorrow? Her penance was no joke, and the [System]’s arithmetic remained a ruthless overlord.

Eppie realised, after drowning in dread for several minutes, that she had grown distracted.

Returning to the page, she wrote:

Who can finish St Gospel St?

Then she wrote:

Who can fix the dialogue and context of Pygmalion?

Then she wrote:

Is there a ballroom company that’s willing to work with a flamenco one? Where do I find a troupe of triple-threat actors? Male and female?

She looked at the three questions until the house began to wake around her, then paid the cost of sleep in [Causality].