Arena Stage Ch. 06

* * * *

Three weeks later, the production was coming together. The script rewrites were finished, which was a good thing, because most of my time was now spent in dance rehearsals. And the dance routines were also about as close to perfection as they were going to get.

Mr. Masters was brooding, no longer the center of attention, and spent much of the time during the day in the townhouse, going through papers he wouldn't let me see. Often at night we was on the Boxoffice, however, and those nights he came home too exhausted to mess with me when he got into bed. I knew that this was something Gil was doing—for me. He was occupying both Mr. Masters and Handelsman, and keeping them off me.

It also meant, however, that the occasions when Gil and I could meet were rare. But meet we did, where we could. And we made love whenever there was an opportunity.

Although Gil was helping to minimize the demands on me from Mr. Masters and Handelsman, there was little he could do with Miloslav Cersenka. I had become the dance master's favorite. He frequently would call me into his room at the theater after dance practices, and would fuck me on the chaise lounge there.

I worried about him, though. The closer the dance sequences were coming to perfection, the more ravished his body appeared. We was dragging to the rehearsals in the end, and he was asking me to show the other dancers what he meant when he was trying to correct their positions. His eyes took on a haunted look, and his fucking was labored and almost perfunctory.

Thus, it was bound to happen on that day, when, faced flushed and excitement bursting out of him, Cersenka ended a dance rehearsal by saying we were ready. He trumpeted the fact that he had fulfilled his responsibilities a good week before the dress rehearsal and while Handelsman was still yelling at his actors and calling them fucking dumb donkeys.

He took me by the arm and led me to his room, bubbling over with pride at just how perfect the dance sequences were. As I stripped for him, I could hear him behind me, wheezing, but still talking up a storm, barely intelligible and slurring his words, although I knew he was congratulating himself on cheating death—on having taken on another production when everyone, all of his doctors included, had warned him it was too much. How he had snatched his victory and produced a masterpiece of dance work.

He died in my arms, his cock inside me, his face buried in the hollow of my neck. He jerked, and I thought he was coming. But, he wasn't. He was going.

I dressed him and sat him up at the dressing table, as if he had slumped over dead there. Then I dressed myself and went to the front of the theater and told them I'd found him unconscious in his room and that they should call 911.

The sounds of the sirens were coming closer, as I left Arena Stage through the lobby entrance and crossed Maine Avenue for the short walk to the 7th Street townhouse.

Mr. Masters was sitting at the desk in the living room, looking through some papers. I walked over to where he was standing and looked down and recognized envelopes from a realitor in New York City and saw at once that they concerned the sale of our apartment in Manhattan.

He swept other papers over those, but he hadn't been fast enough. I'd seen them. And I was in shock. But as I'd already been in shock, the import of the papers didn't occur to me until much later.

Mr. Masters looked up at me, a wary, guilty look on his face.

"You're back early," he said.

"Miloslav Cersenka is dead,"I said. I knew I sounded flat, too matter of fact. That's what shock was doing to me. "Just now. I found him in his room. I suppose those sirens we're hearing are for him."

"Had he finished preparing the dances for Defiance?" Mr. Masters asked. No "Oh my God," no "Oh, I'm sorry you had to be the one to find him," no "I'm sorry we pushed him like that," no "What a great loss to the theater." Just, "Had he finished his part of my fucking play?"

I had never hated Creighton Masters as much as I did at that moment.