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ONE

A BITTER medicinal smell, something like iodine. Then a sudden clearing, blankness in my nostrils. And then jasmine, gorgeously subtle at first but soon heavy, pungent, fetid: as if jasmine blossoms were rotting, as if rottenness itself underlay the fragrance, lending a brown tinge to the blossoms.

And now a murky iron odor, reminding me of something. I can't find the name for it. Images flicker across my closed eyelids. A city, not American, someplace in Eastern Europe. Sarajevo? No, this city is grander, imperial, with massive buildings—St. Petersburg, it must be St. Petersburg. Yes, the Winter Palace. I smell wet wool and sweat and excitement. There's a crowd in the palace square, I'm in the midst of thousands of people. We're participants in one of those vast spectacles Russians used to stage on the streets during the Revolution: reenactments of battles, with ordinary citizens playing the roles of Bolsheviks and Czarists, and soldiers playing themselves.

I hear the roar of artillery, rifles, handguns. People are shouting all around me; a great rocket soars upward, its noise deafening. Then a hush. Everyone begins fervently singing the "Internationale" while five-pointed red stars light up above the palace. A red banner appears behind it, fierce yet jolly.

The lights begin to dim. Now I see a man, tall and slender, taking a bow on a platform erected at one end of the square. Captured by a spotlight, he's wearing a black cape; although his eyes are masked, the rest of his face is very pale. A large placard, suspended by ropes, drops down behind him. It appears to be an advertisement for a play. The man in the cape points at it enthusiastically, then calls out to the spectators.

AnnouncingColumbine's Scarf,he proclaims. Ladies and gentlemen, my theater troupe performs this marvelous drama so strangely, you won't recognize the original! We've got a real band with a conductor, and action right in the audience --- involving you, dear spectator! Come see it!

A clown emerges from beneath the platform. Clambering onto the stage, his movements jerky and awkward, he joins the caped man. Together they make vulgar gestures and goofy faces, to widespread laughter. Then a vast, all-white curtain falls, concealing the entire platform and square.

A teenaged boy slouches onto the forestage. He is wearing a black trench coat and a mask, and he's joined by another boy, another, another; they run in circles, a blur of trench coats and masks. Above them flaps a large black banner lettered in white. WELCOME TO COLUMBINE, it reads.

The caped man reappears, pushing his way through a slit in the white curtain. He's waving frantically, trying to get the boys' attention. Please, don't do it! he cries. No more death!

Then I see my father, directly behind the caped man. Apparently unconcerned with what is happening around him, he produces a large bottle of perfume, opens it, and sprinkles its contents on the curtain. Once again I smell the sharp odor of decaying jasmine.

The caped man inhales deeply, then begins to smile --- knowingly, it seems. Something in his expression suggests he's been waiting for this very moment. Moving to one side of the forestage, he turns to face the opposite side, tosses off his cape, raises his arms above his head, and initiates a graceful, swift cartwheel, then another, another, unhesitatingly.

Sorrow! he exclaims as he travels head over heels across the stage. Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow! His rhythms are perfectly synchronized, yet his speech and movements are entirely at odds, which makes the overall effect indefinably compelling --- light and urgent at once. Watching, I know I've never witnessed anything like it.

The man cartwheels off into the wings. Alone now, Jordan pulls a book of matches from his pocket. He strikes one and holds it to the curtain, which bursts into a dense, silvery mist that evaporates --- poof! --- and is instantly gone, along with everything else. My eyes open.

THE PALM of my left hand was brick red and sticky. I sat up in bed, peering at it.

It seemed I'd reopened the cut bisecting the pad of my thumb, and it had bled during the night. There were spots on my sheets, a delicate trail of them.

I got out of bed, rinsed my hand, put ointment on the cut, and bandaged it tightly. Then I regarded my eyes in the mirror. The taupe-colored skin below them was just a little puffy. Not bad, given how fitfully I'd slept.

I blinked, remembering the iron odor. Yes, the smell of blood: my thumb.

And gunfire, something called Columbine --- I must've been dreaming about the shootings at that high school in Colorado. But wasn't this dream taking place somewhere else? A public square, a massive open-air stage. A scent, too. And Jordan, yes --- what the hell was he doing there?

I've always been a lively dreamer. Normally my dreams are strung-together nonsense, each episode like a crazy quilt or a spilled set of puzzle pieces. None of the edges fit together right; the composition is semi-coherent at best. But this particular dream was different. It had the feel of a real-life event, and Jordan was in it --- a most abnormal occurrence. I hadn't dreamed of my father before. Ever.

AS I was fixing breakfast, the dream temporarily forgotten, my phone rang. I was surprised to hear Danny's voice.

"You up?" she asked.

"Sure," I replied. It wasn't Danny's habit to phone me first thing on a Sunday morning, though that didn't mean she had something important to tell me. She might simply feel like chatting. Or hearing me chat. Talk as blotting paper, something to soak up spills of feeling.

Her mother --- my cousin, Eve Pell --- had died two months earlier, without warning, after contracting bacterial meningitis. Since then Danny's moods had become difficult to gauge. Some days she'd call me repeatedly, gabbling about trivia, as if she were the most empty-headed twenty-five-year-old alive and her mother's death hadn't affected her in the least. Other days I'd hear nothing from her, leave messages at her office, and get no callback. I'd start worrying, wondering if she was holed up in her apartment in Brooklyn, not eating, refusing all contact. One day she'd shown up at my shop and begun to heave things around. She didn't break anything, and I managed to calm her down, but the episode revealed how shaky her hold was. I wondered how she was able to get through a day on the job without coming unstuck.

"You by any chance going to your shop today?" she asked.

"I am, actually," I said. Normally I don't work on Sundays. But I had things to catch up on, and the weather forecast was dour.

"Leaving soon?"

"I'm having my coffee now. What's up?"

"Just wondering if I might stop by later for a little visit."

"Like when?" Something in Danny's tone was putting me on alert.

"After I leave here. Say, five-thirty." Now I realized she was calling from her workplace, a graphic-design firm on Seventh Avenue. I could hear background chatter, several early-bird colleagues conversing in the hallway.

"Sure," I said. "But you're at work now? Why on a Sunday?"

"Oh, everyone's here. We all had to come in for this big project that's way behind schedule. Total mismanagement. Welcome to the world of design."

"You get paid extra for this?"

"Hah."

"Everything else all right?"

"All right," she echoed neutrally. Not for the first time, I was conscious of how much her voice resembled her mother's. The same pitch, the same rough timbre, just this side of gravelly. Since my cousin's death I'd had a few uncanny experiences of answering my phone and thinking Eve before registering the reality of her daughter on the other end.

"Don't be staring at any walls, okay?" I said, aiming for a spot between jokiness and concern.

"I've got tons to do here," Danny responded evenly. "Actually it's been good to be busy with something other than Mom's closets." She paused, then added: "I've packed up the last of her stuff, by the way. All I have to do now is ask Sam if he'll cart some boxes to the Salvation Army. Then the whole thing's behind me."

"Good," I said. "So I'll catch you at the end of the day."

I HUNG up the phone and finished my coffee, contemplating Danny's call.

The whole thing. She'd been referring, of course, to the process of emptying first her mother's gardening store and then Eve's rent-stabilized apartment. The latter task had turned into more of an ordeal than it should have, thanks to Eve's landlord. Though I'd paid him for an extra half month to give Danny more time, he'd been hounding her relentlessly since her mother's death. One evening he'd threatened to toss any remaining possessions out the back window and into the alley.

That focused my own pent-up anger. After staging a fight with him in the building's dingy lobby, I'd used one of Eve's keys to score a series of long gashes across the front door of her apartment. "Art for art's sake," I'd said to Danny, happy to make her laugh.

So the clearing-out job was done, yet the whole thing, as Danny called it, wasn't behind her --- couldn't possibly be. It was still unspooling, a chain of improbabilities whose initiating event had been that most ordinary of complaints, a headache. With astonishing swiftness, Eve's symptoms --- a pounding head and stiff neck—had been followed by delirium, coma, a spreading purplish rash, and blood poisoning, which was what had ultimately killed her. Wham, one doctor at the hospital had said (not realizing I was eavesdropping) to another, a young intern. Seventy-two hours, man! Never saw anything like it.

To me Eve's meningitis had arrived as a natural disaster might have—some unannounced tornado stem-winding down an unsuspecting street, everyone looking the other way. And something more was en route, too. I could feel it. Not another death but a shake-up of some sort, necessary and unavoidable, for which no preparation would be possible.

GATHERING MY things for work, I glanced at the Arts section of the paper before shoving it into my bag. Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian circus, would be coming to Madison Square Garden, and tickets were going on sale that week.

Unlike lots of plays, circus acts are always both funny and sad, sweet and grotesque at once. They're an old art form, after all --- old, wise, and playful. I ought to go, I thought. It'd do me good. And I should take Danny. She'd love it.

A switch flipped in my memory: clowns. A dream (had it been only last night?), involving my father in a circuslike performance, outdoors, in a strange city. Not American, perhaps Central European . . . Jordan had been doing something with perfume. And there'd been another man, wearing a cape, who'd cartwheeled across the stage. A theater director, I was sure of that. I thought I recognized him, yet couldn't think who he might be.

And the scent in the dream --- jasmine, yes, definitely jasmine. But not quite right. A bit off, somehow?

LATER THAT morning, shortly before noon, Stuart and Sam entered my shop at the same moment. Having nearly collided at the door, they were as taken aback as I; I wasn't expecting either of them. They greeted each other cordially.

Stuart I've known thirty-two years. He's short and thin, with large gray eyes and a minimal gray beard. His body's supple and agile, a perfect mime's body. In college in New England, which is where I met him, Stuart was something of a celebrity. He used to hire himself out as a mime for community events and frat parties, and during those four years he made enough money to cover his massive book bills. His dorm room looked like a very cramped library. Books were stacked everywhere but in one corner where Stuart stored his props: top hats, canes, feathers, face paint, and black patent-leather spats.

He still performs occasionally, for friends --- never formally. Sometimes I wonder if he's missed his real calling, but Stuart claims he's happier watching a mime than being one. A mime's work is terribly gloom-inducing, he says. That's how Stuart talks. He strings together words that might seem affected coming out of someone else's mouth, but sound entirely natural emerging from his. When he speaks, his hands talk, too. He's got remarkably flexible wrists and broad palms, each with five long snakes attached: his fingers. I've never met a man with nicer nails.

Stuart and I first encountered each other in our college's theater on a cold Saturday in December. That autumn, having worked hard and happily on two productions, I'd decided I wanted to be the theater's props manager for the rest of the year. Normally this job was rotated between two students, but on that afternoon I cornered the director and began lobbying for a change in policy. She was not easily convinced, and we began sparring.

Stuart happened to be waiting around for an audition to begin. Hearing me press my case, he sidled up to the director and began tipping his head from side to side like a slightly manic cuckoo bird. Both the director and I fell silent, at which point Stuart launched into a spot-on pantomime of our debate. We began chuckling at him, no longer contestants but an audience. Winding up his improvisation with a bow, Stuart said: "Give this girl whatever she wants." His voice, which I was hearing for the first time, was as attractively reedy as his body.

"Who is she, anyway?" he added, pointing a sharp forefinger at me while aiming his words at the director. "Camilla Archer? --- never heard of her! But I can tell she's good with props. Only a totally obsessive person would hunt you down and harass you right before an audition! Has this girl not heard of an opportune moment?"

Won over, the director relented. That's Stuart: he performs a bit of magic and things change, often for the better. But he's a jouster, and I'm an easy mark for him. "If we were in a spook house at an amusement park," he asked me once, "and you were really scared, and we were holding hands, would you let go of my hand if I ordered you to?" When I shook my head, he jeered, "Of course you would --- to prove how brave you are!" I asked him why, in that case, he'd even bother to order me. "Do you have any idea," he retorted, "how appealing you are when you're unnerved?"

SAM SAID something similar to me --- I like it when you're flustered --- soon after we met. I took this as a good sign, proof of his ability to see behind surfaces.

That was a long time ago. Sam and I met in Eve's gardening store. We lived together for two years, were married for seven, and have been divorced for nine --- which means we've been co-orbital, as he puts it, for eighteen years. We both still live in the West Village, and we still co-own my shop, The Fourth Wall, which we opened at the start of our marriage. When that union ended, we saw no reason to shut down our business, which was clearing a small but reliable profit.

The Fourth Wall is an odd little place. It sells performing-arts memorabilia and curiosa of all kinds, including scripts, scores, libretti, posters, photos, small props, and costumes. Opening a specialized store was never a goal of Sam's, but he went along with the idea, and we came up with a division of labor that's still in place. Sam seldom accompanies me on my buying missions and never mans the shop, preferring instead to handle its bookkeeping and taxes.

He's also a successful publishing consultant with a great eye for well-conceived quirkiness. Mostly he packages and publicizes books featuring the work of contemporary photographers, several of which have done quite well. In addition, Sam also owns a lively art gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a neighborhood he spotted long before it became trendy. The gallery was launched by Lila, his current wife, whose name, Stuart likes to point out, is a shortened version of my own. (And she's a lot shorter than you, too, he adds, which she is. Younger and prettier, too.) A couple of artists actually run the space, which operates on a shoestring but shows interesting work. Sam's quietly proud of it.

Then there are the kids. Three-year-old Zeke is Sam's and Lila's son; Abby is a seven-year-old redhead, Lila's from a former marriage, now Sam's adopted daughter. He adores them both. The children are what Sam's always wanted, what he and I didn't manage to --- what's the right verb, conjure, concoct? --- while we were together.

"SO WHAT brings you two here?" I asked. "On a Sunday, no less?"

Stuart gave Sam a deferential, you-go-first nod.

"Just wanted to say hi," Sam said. "Plus I have a favor to ask you."

The favor, I figured, would be a short-term loan from The Fourth Wall's account. Sam's gallery sometimes has minor cash-flow problems.

"Ask away," I said. "Unless . . ." I gestured at Stuart, thinking Sam might want to speak with me in private, but Sam shook his head.

"No, it's okay," he said. "This has to do with Danny, actually. Maybe you'll have some ideas, too, Stuart. I mean, you know her pretty well, don't you?"

"Not very," Stuart replied. "But go ahead."

Sam gave a preliminary shrug. I knew that shoulder roll, as I knew most of Sam's repertoire of gesture. It communicated confusion.

"She called me last night," he said. "Wanted to know if I had room in my cellar to store a few boxes of stuff she'd taken from Eve's apartment, and if I could drive the rest to the Salvation Army. Then she said she'd gone through her mother's papers and found something she wanted to discuss with me. When I asked her what it was, she said she'd rather tell me in person."

He glanced first at me, then at Stuart. "Wonder what's up."

"Taxes, maybe," said Stuart. "Your cousin wasn't too good at that kind of thing, was she?" he asked, turning to me.

"That can't be it," I said. "Danny and I have already been over all the paperwork. I've dealt with the insurance companies, Social Security, the IRS, everybody --- there aren't any outstanding bills to pay."

"I figured as much," said Sam.

"She called me, too," I said. "This morning. Wanted to know if she could stop by later and talk with me about something." Within me, a little balloon of unease began slowly expanding. "When are the two of you supposed to get together?"

"Thursday --- I'm taking her out for a drink. I guess you and I should check in afterward?"

Stuart gave one of his polite but perceptible frowns. "Maybe Danny doesn't want to talk with both of you about the same thing. Maybe she wants separate responses to separate matters."

Sam shrugged more aggressively this time, then turned to me. "Let's just confer later," he said. Though bland, his words twanged my nerves. Stuart noticed my discomfort.

"Cam, what sort of shape is Danny in, these days?"

I shook my head. "I really can't tell. She's back at work, and she seems to be eating and sleeping all right . . ."

"But has she been talking about Eve with you or anyone else?" Stuart prodded.

"Depends what you mean by talking." I decided to attempt straightforwardness; with Stuart there, Sam might do the same. "The truth is, I think she's suffering. Acutely. But more because she's angry than because she's grieving."

Sam's face was a perfect blank.

"Hmm," said Stuart. "What's it boil down to?"

Stuart is intolerant of lengthy psychological explanations. I produced as short an answer as I could: "Let's just say she never had her mother's undivided attention."

"Love, yes. Attention, no," said Sam. His phrasing surprised me; I hadn't expected him to take Eve's side.

"A distinction without a difference?" asked Stuart.

"No, I don't think so. I mean, a kid knows whether he or she is loved, which is all that matters—"

"Oh please." Stuart's breeziness barely concealed his scorn. "Let's get back to where Danny's at. Of course she's angry --- but that's not news, is it? She's been angry at her mother for years! What's new is having to figure out how to be angry at a dead mother." He paused. "It'll be a while before she can say anything about what she's actually feeling, I'd bet. So she'll express her inner troubles in some other way. She's not drinking, is she? Pills? That's the kind of thing to watch out for."

"We're aware of that. And a little blunting of pain isn't necessarily a bad idea either." Sam had iced up; he was registering Stuart's dismissiveness. "If Danny needs short-term help from booze or drugs, I say fine. I'm sure she's not abusing anything. That's not her style."

He was right; I nodded in agreement.

It was Stuart's turn to shrug. "For what it's worth," he said, "I think the biggest issue for Danny has got to be fear. She's alone now, in a whole new way."

Sam clenched and unclenched his right fist several times, a signal that either the conversation or the mild muscular ache he occasionally suffers in that hand was disturbing him. I was fairly certain which it was, since we were discussing Danny. He glanced at his watch.

"Gotta go --- I'll check in with you after Thursday, all right, Cam?" He leaned over and kissed my cheek. "Take care of yourself. Bye, Stuart," he called over his shoulder as he left.

THE DOOR closed. Stuart raised his arms straight up over his head, then released them downward, slowly, his elbows bent and palms turned upward. Dipping his knees, he bobbed both forearms simultaneously, as if handling something spherical and heavy.

"Oof." He exhaled, his hands flopping to his sides as he dropped his imaginary burden. "Beats me how folks do it."

"Do what?"

"Carry so much at once. A wife, two kids, and an ex-kid, plus there's an ex-wife . . ."

"Danny's not an ex-kid," I said. "And for the record, you were kind of rough on Sam. He's as worried about Danny as I am."

Stuart cocked one skeptical eyebrow at me. "Well, you know what? The man didn't say so, but he's actually concerned about you."

"Oh please," I said, mimicking his earlier rebuke of Sam.

Stuart wagged a forefinger in disagreement. "This is a three-way, my dear. Sam knows you're bearing the brunt of this situation. He could offer to spend more time with Danny. He's the father figure in this setup, right? The one steady male presence in the girl's life, the only guy who was around from the time she was a kid --- am I right? Well, the man feels guilty, which is why he showed up here. To mollify you."

It was fruitless to argue with Stuart about Sam. Although not consistently displayed, Stuart's animus was old enough to elude my attempts at uprooting it. "What exactly is a brunt?" I asked, to divert him.

"Brunt?" Stuart rose to the bait. "It's Middle English, for fire or heat. It means a direct impact or hit. Or, metaphorically, the hardest part."

"Thank you, Webster, I know that part. I was hoping you'd tell me the word comes from some medieval cookery book. What brings you here, anyhow? You didn't say."

"Didn't exactly get a chance to stick a word in edgewise, did I? What with all the yakkety ex-husbands around here." He stuck out his tongue and twisted it into a corkscrew.

"Don't be arch."

"Aaaarch," he crooned. "Lovely word." Extending one arm in front of himself and cocking its wrist downward, he spread his thumb and fingers into an upside-down U. With two fingers of the other hand, he mimed a mincing walk-through beneath the arch.

"Time to go, Stu," I began.

"Bye-bye," he sang. "She's evicting me --- there's a first!"

"Quit it," I said. "I've got a client coming in this afternoon to pick up a purchase I haven't wrapped—"

"Okay, Cammie." Airborne, Stuart's hands wafted downward, two large feathers settling on my head, the warm palms sliding down to embrace my ears. He leaned over and kissed me on the nose. I smelled his aftershave, a clean, subtle citrus, familiar and reassuring.

"I was over on Seventh Avenue running some errands, passed by your shop, and there you were! Actually I was wondering if you wanted to grab lunch, but we can do it another time."

Stuart and I often eat lunch together. It's a pleasant twenty-minute walk from Bedford Street, where I am, over to Washington Square, then up University Place and over to Fourth Avenue, where Stuart's bookstore is located.

"Soon," I said. "Something to look forward to."

He gave me a clipped salute, chest thrust forward. I walked him to the door and watched him march eastward. Halfway up the block, he was still miming a soldier's erect progress. "You look ridiculous," I called after him. Without breaking step or turning around, he raised a hand and lowered all its fingers but the third.

WITH CARL, the man with whom he's lived for half as long as I've known him, Stuart owns Backstage Books. It's dedicated to theater, with the best selection of plays in the city, lots of biographies and critical works, and journals of all kinds. Above the shop is Stuart and Carl's apartment, which is nicely furbished, thanks to Carl.

Carl's a benign presence, consistently easygoing about my friendship with his lover. He doesn't interest me much, though --- no more, I suppose, than Sam ever interested Stuart. As for Sam's Lila, she doesn't interest me either. She's thirty-seven, thirteen years younger than I am, and the difference shows: in our bodies, of course, but also in our frames of reference. To her, JFK's the Oliver Stone film, not the memory of a gym class interrupted by a teacher shrieking the news.

Lila doesn't try to undermine Sam's and my ongoing connection. I sense she realizes it won't lead to the demise of her marriage to a man she obviously loves. Whether the feeling's mutual is something I'm unable to evaluate. Sexual heat, compatibility --- I have no idea whether any of it's in place for Sam. Maybe none of that matters as much to him as it once did.

I'm ongoingly grateful to Sam for making it possible for me to continue running my own show at The Fourth Wall. I'd be completely at sea in a regular job. In this I'm like my father, who never enjoyed being an employee; other people's professional priorities simply didn't interest him. Jordan was a perfumist, and he spent most of his time in his lab, focused on his central obsession: odors and the architecture of their molecules. He never knew what he might hit upon while he was mixing things up, and he liked it that way.

So do I. Though I'm no artist, I'm a decent sleuth. I cater mainly to bona fide collectors, and I know the kinds of things they're seeking. There's nothing like my shop in New York City, or anywhere else in the country, for that matter. I don't go in for the posters and T-shirts sold by those theater souvenir stores on Broadway. There you won't find a letter written by Giuseppe Verdi to his neighbor in Bussetto, thanking him for several kilos of superior parmigiano. Nor could you purchase a snapshot of Maurice Ravel sitting in the back of a New York taxi in 1936, necktie askew and expression dismayed, as if he'd just caught a whiff of his own death, which did arrive, a mere twelve months later. These are the sorts of small treasures I offer.

My job's something like that of a theater coach, except my clients aren't actors. They're designers of private dramas in which props themselves are the stars. The people who come to my shop want to acquire objects other people can't readily find: recalcitrant gems. My role is to pep-talk this variant of desire. You, I tell each of my clients, are in pursuit of something most people can't appreciate, can't even imagine! How many other people, I ask them, are really capable of understanding what it means to own a conductor's baton custom-made for Arturo Toscanini, with the maestro's initials inscribed on its tip? Or a silver cigarette case owned by Sir Laurence Olivier? Or a little stuffed rabbit that sat backstage at the Helen Hayes Theater throughout the entire run of Harvey?

Naturally I know all the serious merchants of memorabilia in the city, and I go to all the best antiques shows and estate sales. But I also scavenge. I've found breathtaking surprises in streetside trash and unkempt attics and cellars. It's not all golden, this line of work. It's a bit like being a private investigator: loads of time goes into following up baseless rumors and barking up wrong trees. Although I've been at it for years, occasionally I wind up in a tricky situation. Once or twice I've had to defend myself against charges of theft. Infrequently but memorably, I meet a genuinely deranged individual—someone who believes he's a famous director, or a world-class cellist, or the man who really wrote all of Edward Albee's plays. Such encounters supply their own form of drama, reminding me that although I'm no actress, I can still play my part in the theater of the absurd.

AFTER STUART left I spent a frustrating hour readying one of my client's purchases for pickup. This man, an odd and very rich duck, had recently paid a hefty sum for a pair of wheels from a large wooden wagon that had appeared in the New York premiere of Brecht's Mother Courage. As I fumbled with cardboard and packing tape, I distracted myself with a mental inventory of Eve's apartment. What, I wondered, might Danny have been referring to when she spoke with Sam? What had she found while going through papers there?

I pictured the cramped, dimly lit study at the rear of the apartment. This room had usually been a total mess. After Eve's death I'd been gratefully surprised to find all her important personal and financial documents in one obvious place --- an ancient metal filing cabinet beside her desk. The desk itself was a nondescript oak worktable with a couple of off-kilter drawers. Instead of a chair, Eve had used one of those miserable backless stools popular in the Seventies, the kind you tuck your legs under. The only other piece of furniture in the room was an old rocker, its cane seat pockmarked with holes into which Eve had inserted bunches of dried flowers.

Eve hadn't been interested in interiors. Her eye had always landed first on gardens, shrubs, trees. The only good furnishings she'd owned were several Stickley armchairs and an unusual Art Nouveau rug. These had come from the family apartment, as Eve used to call it: the place on Ninth Street in the West Village where she and I grew up.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life in that apartment. Dan Pell --- Eve's father --- and his second wife, Sarah --- Eve's stepmother --- had agreed to take Jordan and me into their home after Jordan promised to cover the rent. Dan was broke, so Jordan's offer must've seemed too good to refuse, even given that Dan had no idea who he was dealing with. My father and I had materialized more or less out of thin air. About our existence Dan knew nothing until we arrived from Paris, the city where Camilla Archer, née Pell—Dan's sister --- had died during childbirth. Mine, that is. I was a few months old when we landed in New York.

DANNY SHOWED up just as I finished tidying my back office.

I can always tell it's her when she enters The Fourth Wall: I can smell her, faintly but distinctly. She favors Guerlain fragrances, which seem made for her. Very few twenty-five-year-olds can get away with wearing Jicky, Champs-Elysées, or the other Guerlain old-timers (which seem made for women over forty, with checkered pasts), but Danny's one of them.

"I'm here," I called. "Come on back!"

All six feet of her appeared. Though she's large-boned and tall like Eve, Danny's never looked anything like her mother. She's got brown eyes; Eve's were dark blue. Danny's long brown hair is streaked with blond highlights; Eve's hair was short, dark, and curly.

She gave me a little wave; I took in the flash of red fingernails and her usual silver rings. "How goes it?" she said, stepping toward me.

"Just fine," I said, hugging her. Her eyes were a little red, but otherwise she looked good, her color restored. The chic, pulled-together Danny, I thought, immediately suspecting this judgment was premature. "You smell super."

"This is a good one," she said, giving the underside of her wrist a quick sniff before extending it toward me. "I just started wearing it. It's a Guerlain called Lui. Mom had a bottle of it, but she didn't like it so she gave it to me. Good thing she did --- it didn't suit her at all. You have no idea how much perfume was in her bathroom closet, Cam. Like a damn department store. The only one she ever wore was that one of your father's --- what was it called, Lune?"

I nodded.

"Well, there's none of that left. I threw out the one remaining bottle, it was nearly empty. All the other stuff must've been gifts from her fuck-mates." Danny's voice thickened with sarcasm. "You'd think Mom would've had to label each bottle. You know, this one is Jim's, this John's, this George's . . . Wouldn't do to get them confused, would it?"

"Cool it," I said.

"Oh come on. She's dead. I can vent to my heart's content!" Her snicker sounded forced.

I leaned in for a close sniff of her scent. It reminded me slightly of Chanel No. 5. Both fragrances have the same bottom notes of iris and vanilla, but a woody, shadowy underlay in the Guerlain distinguishes it from its famous sister. On Danny, I could detect a hint of fern.

I have a decent nose, though I find certain scents hard to recollect. The best perfumes can't easily be called to mind. One of my father's --- Lune, my favorite as well as Eve's --- was maddeningly elusive. To this day I can summon only its initial notes, not the delicate medley arising hours after its application. Lune was the olfactory equivalent of moonlight dappling the surface of water, apparently serene, yet really not.

"Have a seat," I said, releasing Danny's wrist.

Taking the chair opposite mine, she dropped her leather backpack on the floor and sat in silence, staring downward. When she was in high school, she'd sometimes done the same thing: gaze vacantly at her knees, her hands clasped between them.

"How's work going?" I said.

"Busy. Frustrating. In addition to everything else, today I was asked to design the cover of a new art book. Sam would hate it! Tacky photos of fat old people in casinos. Like bad Weegee." She shook her head. "Still, it's a gig. Work's basically fine," she ended.

"Keeps you out of trouble," I offered.

She frowned a little—whether in response to my platitudinous remark or to something else, I couldn't tell. We sat in further silence.

"Care to tell me why you're here?" I asked at last.

MY DIRECTNESS seemed to rouse her. Training her gaze on me, she said steadily, "I've been thinking about my father. About his relationship with my mother. He wasn't in the picture for very long, was he?"

The question was completely unexpected. As a child Danny had occasionally asked about her father, but her interest in him had never been sustained. During her high school years she'd referred to him as the garden boy, in reference to the fact that Eve had said she met him on a landscaping job. Otherwise Eve had rarely spoken of him. He'd died in a hospital, of a freak infection, when Danny was a toddler.

"No," I said, "he wasn't. In fact, I think you'd just turned three when he --- "

"I'm not referring to his dying," she broke in. "I'm talking about how Mom didn't want him around. Do you know why?"

"Nope."

She frowned. Clearly, monosyllabic answers weren't going to cut it. "Your mother didn't normally acquaint me with her reasons for doing things," I added.

Danny nodded, but I could tell she wasn't satisfied. She'd been asking many questions about Eve since her death, seeking, I supposed, to weave my perceptions into her own, and thus render the whole more graspable. I'd been responding to her inquiries as vaguely as possible. It wouldn't be right, I'd decided, to off-load my own messy feelings onto her. I'd kept them to myself while Eve was alive, so why discharge them now? Yet Danny was continuing to press me. Occasionally our dialogue felt like a subtle tug-of-war.

"When your mother became pregnant," I continued, "she hadn't known Billy for more than a few months. She was living upstate. But you know that already."

"Billy Deveare," said Danny. "What kind of a name is Deveare?"

"Got me," I said. "Could be British, could be French . . ."

"She ever describe him to you in any detail?"

"No."

She twisted one of her rings, pried it off her finger, pushed it back on. "What was it about him that made Mom not want to have him around?"

I shrugged. "As I said, she didn't talk about it --- not with me, anyway. You're not actually surprised to hear me say that, are you?"

"Mom was like that with everyone," she replied tersely, as though detecting in my question a case of special pleading. "Do you know if Billy wanted her to keep the baby?"

"Eve never said. She wasn't in love with him, though. That's the impression I got, anyway. I don't think she cared what Billy thought."

Danny tugged her ponytail loose from its elastic band, gave it a shake, and re-banded it. I knew these repeated-motion tics. When she was very young, she used to perform them frequently, sometimes as a prelude to a tantrum. I half-expected one now, though her tone remained calm as she asked, "Anything else you remember?"

I THOUGHT for several moments.

"I don't think Eve disliked Billy --- she just didn't want to see him after you were born. I guess he went along with that." The birth itself had gone smoothly, according to Eve; within a matter of weeks, she'd found a babysitter and returned to her job as a landscaper. "When your grandfather got sick, your mother had to move back to the city."

Whatever Eve's plans might have been up to that point, they'd been altered in 1974 by her father's illness. Danny was six months old when Dan was diagnosed with advanced emphysema. Sarah, who'd grown infirm physically and mentally, was completely unable to handle him. My father wasn't around; he'd bought a small house in New Jersey in 1970 and seldom came into Manhattan.

I remembered phoning Eve to relay the information about Dan. She and her parents had barely spoken for a number of years. My news must have surprised her, yet she betrayed nothing of what she was feeling. Within a week she'd shown up in New York and begun making arrangements for her parents' care. I hadn't been prepared for such bustling efficiency. My memories were of a headstrong teenager with a messy bedroom.

During Dan's illness, Eve and Danny stayed with friends in a walk-up in the Bowery. They came to the West Village only when Eve needed to be at the family apartment. Her tousled hair restrained by a bright silk scarf, Eve moved with the easy assurance of a woman who took the swell of her hips for granted. She dressed casually yet fashionably, favoring snug jeans, V-neck shirts, and boots with high heels.

Eve had struck me as an assured yet oddly detached parent. She seemed not to have succumbed to that helpless infatuation most new mothers experience. Right from the start, she was glad to accept my babysitting offers whenever I made them. I was twenty-five and single, with little but work --- at an antiques shop --- to occupy me. It was fine by me to pick Danny up on a Sunday morning, take her for a stroll or over to my place on Cornelia Street, and return her later in the day. I enjoyed being with her. She was an unfussy baby.

Not until several years later did I realize that Eve had begun collecting, on those days I freed up for her, a set of partners on whom she could rely, men for whom sex had as much weight as a bubble. Sex had always been a kind of remedy for Eve, and if her child had to be made to disappear regularly so she could obtain it, that was a cost she'd pay.

Dan died about eight weeks after Eve's arrival. After his death Sarah was installed in a nursing home. She'd gone willingly, relieved to drop the pretense of family unity now that her husband was gone. At that point I'd expected my cousin to head back upstate, but Eve surprised me by announcing she'd decided to stay in the city for good. She'd found a cheap rental, she said, and was planning on opening a gardening shop in Chelsea. She was coming home.

IT WAS time for me to quit shuffling my deck of memory cards. Danny awaited some sort of statement about Billy Deveare.

"If you want me to tell you what kind of man your father was, I can't," I said. "Honestly, I think he was just some guy who impregnated your mother. Since Billy hadn't meant much to her in the first place, she must've thought it'd be a mistake to give him a role in raising you."

"Apparently." Danny shifted sharply in her seat, recrossing her legs. Her fingers returned to her hair, worrying its elastic band. "But who the hell knows what my mother really wanted?" She redid her ponytail, the movements of her hands practiced and aggressive. "You ever meet anyone --- anyone --- more clueless about herself than Mom was?" The elastic band fell into place with a short, loud snap.

"Well, look," I said. "Eve did know she wanted a kid. She could have terminated her pregnancy, right?"

I'd hit a nerve. "Oh, fuck her wanting me," Danny said. Turning her head slightly to indicate that I wasn't to involve myself, she wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. Then she fumbled around in her backpack.

"I've got something for you." She drew forth a Polaroid snapshot. "My parents," she said, handing it to me.

THE SNAPSHOT showed a man and woman standing far enough away from the camera that their full bodies were visible. I turned the picture over, looking for a date. There it was: October 31, 1973, written in ballpoint in Eve's strong hand. Next to it were the words Danny's father.

"Where'd you find this?" I asked.

"With a bunch of other photos," Danny answered. "In Mom's study. I'd seen the others before, but not this one."

I returned to the picture. Eve was recognizable after a few moments of uncertainty; she was wearing a long, close-fitting skirt, a hip-length blouse (not tucked in but tight enough to reveal her curves), and flat, ballerina-style shoes. The man next to her was of indeterminate age, tall and slender. I noticed his clothing first. He wore a fedora hat that hid his hair. His trousers were a narrow cut, and the wide collar and placket of his pullover flattered his shoulders. Of his face I had little impression, for he was wearing one of those classic black eye-masks.

"Of course," I said to Danny, pointing at the mask. "They must've been going to a Halloween party."

"Yeah," said Danny. "Recognize Billy?"

I peered again at the photograph, then lay it down on my desk. "No. But why would I? I never met him."

Danny reached over and gave my forearm a shake. "Cam --- there must have been someone who did. . . . Your father, maybe?"

The question surprised me. Danny rarely alluded to Jordan.

"I doubt it," I said. "Anyway, it doesn't matter if my father did meet him. He's gone." Waiting a beat, I decided to state the obvious, to make her contend with it. "They're all gone, Danny."

WE SWITCHED gears at that point, talking about other things. A client had given me a pair of tickets for the latest Robert Wilson production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—was Danny free, did she want to go to BAM with me? She did, and seemed to brighten at the idea.

By this time it was nearly seven. I opened my shop's front door while Danny wiggled her arms through the straps of her backpack. We stepped outside. Placing my hands on her shoulders, I rotated her gently so she was facing in the direction of the subway, then gave her a light shove.

"Fix yourself a decent dinner," I said. "Have a bath and go straight to bed, okay?"

She rolled her eyes, blew me a kiss, and took off toward Sixth Avenue. Watching her stride gracefully off, I summoned an image of her with Sam and myself --- the three of us holding hands, walking along Bedford Street. Sam and I used to spend a lot of time with Danny when she was young. Even then, she was already tall and wonderfully loose limbed. Distractible, too, the way kids are if they're lucky.

After she'd rounded the corner, I went back inside. On the far wall of my office is a dartboard, which I conceal behind a puppet-theater curtain I found in a flea market in Los Angeles. The curtain is made of black linen; stenciled across its center is the French word cabotinage, which refers to theatrical barnstorming but also implies over-the-top self-advertising. It's a funny word—I like it.

I pulled the curtain aside, then went to my desk. In its top drawer I keep a bunch of small photos --- head shots --- along with a set of brass darts. The darts are beautifully knurled, with glittery silver flights, those feathery bits at the end. I love their midair shimmer and the nice thud they make when they enter the board's cork.

Choosing three photos of Eve, I affixed them to the board, slipping their edges under the wire rims demarcating the board's score zones. Then I stood back, took aim, and threw. After missing the first couple of times, I hit my stride and struck all three targets regularly, including the one nearest the bull's-eye. Yes, I hissed after each toss, just as Eve taught me to do when we played darts in the central hallway of the family apartment. Yesss!

After a while I took down the photos, replaced them and the darts in their drawer, and drew the curtain across the board. Glancing at my desk before pulling my office door shut, I saw Danny had left the picture of her mother and her man. Slipping it into my bag, I locked up and headed home.

INTERLUDE

ENLIGHTENING THOUGH it is, Camilla's account thus far leaves certain questions unaddressed, and I'm not fond of loose ends. So I'll pause her narration briefly --- as I shall from time to time, in the interests of clarification.

Upon first encountering her, I saw that Camilla took the physical particulars of theater seriously. (Her storefront windows, for instance, were dressed with an exceptional pair of burgundy-colored velvet curtains salvaged from a defunct theater in Lucca, Italy.) People who collect memorabilia of any kind covet idiosyncrasy, and Camilla, keenly aware of this fact, offers her patrons all manner of objets that are extremely difficult to find or duplicate --- items for which a true fan of the stage will pay plenty. Her taste in collectibles runs the gamut from the exquisite to the whimsical, even the grotesque.

My favorite example of the last sits in a corner of The Fourth Wall. It's a prop from a regional theater's production of Little Shop of Horrors: a small mahogany griffin, the usual half-lion, half-eagle creature, but with an odd twist. A carved bit of spittle drips from its mouth, as if it had just chomped down on something juicy. If you look closely, you can see a tiny set of toes, apparently human, sticking out at one side of the creature's mouth. Such delightful perversity! It's one of the few objects Camilla refuses to sell.

Observant she definitely was. I noticed this about Camilla right away. She'd have to be, in order to make her living --- which is entirely respectable. But this trait hadn't translated, I also saw, into anything close to clear self-perception. She wasn't in the habit of examining the obstacles to her happiness and doing something to dismantle them. Basically, she was bumping into herself coming and going.

I USE the term "happiness" advisedly. Too often it sends people bounding in the wrong direction, like eager dogs with impaired snouts. All sorts of foolish schemes are devised for obtaining happiness, as if it could be procured like an item on a supermarket shelf, when in fact it's merely a subjective climate. It arrives and departs, and the aleatory music of its coming and going is as strange as a loon's cry.

This brings me to a related matter: fearfulness. Few people who utter the words "I know myself" say them with confidence. Like children trying to ascend the slick surface of a playground slide, adult human beings scrabble in vain for a purchase on their identities. They're afraid of contradiction, the crisscrossing vectors of their desires, even the mixedness of their physical bodies, whose genes reflect such turbulent blending. This fearfulness explains why many people can't see past their own noses, and why happiness keeps skipping away from them.

On top of which there's a wild card in the game, love, which tends to subvert whatever humans assume is true about themselves. I'm this sort of person, I'm not at all like that: such statements go out the window when love shows up! I'm not speaking solely of romantic love, by the way. Family enmeshments can have similarly deranging effects --- as they did with Camilla.

And then there's love of country. Talk about upheaval! Ah, I'm in memory's grip now. I'm revisiting Meyerhold in his prison cell, where he is contemplating his life's work, Russia's future, his own fate . . . Well, I suppose the time has come for a condensed version of his biography.

SEVA DIDN'T start out Russian. His father was a Silesian German whose forebears were in all likelihood Jewish, and his mother was from a German family in Riga, Latvia.

Seva was baptized a Lutheran and given the name Karl-Theodor Kasimir. At twenty-one he renounced his religion and changed his name. He ceased being German-Russian and Lutheran, and he no longer called himself Karl-Theodor Kasimir Meyergold but rather Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold. He was thus a man accustomed to changes in mask and costume. Moreover, though he could sometimes play the role of the imperious artist, he was a tolerant human being --- much more so than most Russians. And he was drawn to talented outsiders.

Seva's father owned a liquor distillery in Penza, a small Russian city located four hundred or so miles from Moscow, where the Meyergolds lived a comfortably bourgeois life. Although Seva mistrusted everything his father stood for, he loved hanging around the distillery. The place had good sets --- bright, noisy workrooms, a big cafeteria where everyone ate lunch --- and the action there was always lively. The distillery was known for its own brand of vodka, called Meyergoldovka. It also produced delicious cordials made from fruits --- red currants, black currants, strawberries --- which were harvested locally and crushed in huge cisterns. All his life Seva could summon to memory the exhilarating odor of those fermenting berries.

THE FIRST time I beheld Seva, he struck me as such an interesting-looking man. Had I been asked, that's how I would've described him. It was only after we began collaborating that he became, in my eyes, so terribly handsome. Ah, that sounds ridiculous! Where's the word, the one right word?

Gorgeous: Seva became gorgeous.

He had a magnificent nose. In caricatures the St. Petersburg press portrayed Seva as a man with a pronouncedly hooked beak, but actually the curve of his nose was quite refined, like a straight line tugged ever so slightly downward at each end. Above his upper lip (that lip with its wanton cleft, the mouth's voluptuous décolletage!), the flesh pitched steeply outward to meet the base of the nose. All the angles of Seva's face aimed powerfully forward, suggesting the man's strength of character. Seen straight on, his finely arched brows and lustrous brown eyes lent his face a warmth that both compelled and cautioned, like that of a banked fire that retains more than enough heat to leap alight and burn hard.

When I first met him, he was tall and slender, but as time passed he put on weight. His despair settled in his belly. He ate too much, and in this he had an accommodating mate. Where food and drink were concerned, his wife, Zina, tended toward excess. She adored her blini slathered with smetana, and she gradually grew plump as a city pigeon, which made her even more desirable in the eyes of many men.

She wasn't the most faithful of wives, though she did love Seva—more than she liked to admit, in fact. He knew right from the start that she'd be unreliable as a sexual partner but forever fidele as an artistic one, and the second loyalty mattered more to him than the first. After all, he could have had other women whenever he wanted, though he wanted few. I'm not alluding here to what's called "sexual preference," one of those Americanisms that dispel any possibility of randiness or complication. The fact is that Seva always liked women and never sought men, though they certainly sought him. After his first marriage ended, he commenced a routine with Zina that continued throughout the course of their relationship. They made love a few times each week, with sufficient exuberance to satisfy him, if not her. Her ego had a prodigious need for stroking, and sometimes she confused one need with another. It's a common enough mistake. Seva could tell when she was being unfaithful, and either humored her or simply ignored her. He knew she'd be back, and she knew he wouldn't leave. It worked for them.

HOW DID Meyerhold and I become partners? Serendipitously.

Actually Seva wasn't consciously seeking a double. It was Vladimir Telyakovsky, his boss at the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, who insisted that Seva find himself a pseudonym under which he could carry out his extracurricular activities.

By this time --- the year was 1910 --- Seva had established a solid name for himself. He wasn't content, however, designing and directing lavish productions of familiar dramas at the state playhouses. It was mostly hackwork, and who had time for that? St. Petersburg was ripe for a venue in which experimentation would be celebrated.

Thus was born the Interlude House. Seva overhauled the former Skazka Theater to create a lively cabaret atmosphere, installing old café tables and a set of stairs that connected the low, small stage with the auditorium. When its makeover was complete, the place exuded a shabby unpretentiousness that everybody liked. It was instantly popular.

The opening show, Columbine's Scarf, was a pantomime full of strident music and outrageous, clownish costumes. The set evoked nastiness and excitement at the same time, and everyone was impressed, including Telyakovsky. Nonetheless, Seva's boss insisted it was unseemly for Meyerhold to continue his directorial work at the Interlude House unless he could do so under an assumed name.

Telyakovsky had a point. Seva's official job wasn't terribly demanding; he was seldom required to undertake more than two big works in a season. Malicious eyes were on Meyerhold, waiting for him to get into trouble. Telyakovsky didn't want all of St. Petersburg to know that his star director was moonlighting.

WHAT TO do? A writer friend of Seva's suggested that perhaps a certain character in a short story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German author of fantasy tales, would provide a good cover for Seva's unofficial activities.

Hearing this, Seva perked up. He was familiar with Hoffmann's popular stories, whose grotesqueries made for memorable late-night reading. He wasn't aware, however, of a tale entitled "Adventure on New Year's Eve." Seva's friend gave him a copy and ordered him to read it, which he did. He was enchanted.

It's a story about a married painter, Herr Spikher, who, while in Italy, temporarily loses his ability to cast a reflection in a mirror. This doesn't happen by accident: it's the nefarious work of a beautiful, enigmatic woman named Giulietta and a strange individual named Dr. Dapertutto. Giulietta convinces Spikher to surrender his reflection in return for her love --- not a bad deal, according to Dapertutto (who slyly tells Spikher, "Your wife will have all the rest of you, while Giulietta will have only your shimmering dream-self!"). Spikher finally manages to pull himself together and fend off the evil pair, using the scriptural command for banishing the Tempter.

Who knew what any of it meant? But Seva was taken with the description of Dapertutto, "a tall, thin man with a pointed hawk's nose, sparkling eyes, and a maliciously twisted mouth." Seva didn't mind that this fellow was the embodiment of the tale's most sinister implications; he liked the man's charm and boldness. Here, he decided, was a mask he could use.

"Dapertutto it is, then," he told his friend. "Seems I actually resemble the man, too, except for that twisted mouth of his. He can direct my work at the Interlude House and write a couple of articles I've been meaning to publish. Maybe I'll open an even bigger studio-theater, and he can run it."

Thus, in a fun-loving spirit, was I called forth as the director's double.

THE INTERLUDE House closed after an embarrassing rout in Moscow, to which it traveled. Far too refined for their own good, Seva's Muscovite audiences failed to get the point of farces and pantomimes. He was frustrated by this reaction, but he also realized that the time had come to try something new.

He wasn't prepared to give up being in St. Petersburg --- not yet, anyway. Seva loved his adopted city. (It's impossible to dislike a place so decrepitly beautiful! Could one ever hate the ravishing and malodorous Venice? The two locales elicit the same response, a kind of shock: here, love and death have merged seamlessly.) Seva responded strongly to St. Petersburg's contradictions. The city's canals are peaceful, but its river is another matter. The Neva is disturbingly animate. Even in the dead of winter, when the river's surface freezes into a broad swath of white immobility, its waters continue their roiling below. In the springtime they smell of danger, and one fears falling into them. (Moscow's waterways are less compelling, which is one of the reasons Seva liked to visit the capital from time to time. There he could focus on the city's great wide sky, shape-shifting clouds, and magisterial light.)

So St. Petersburg was home—at least for a time. Seva started his days with a cup of tea fortified with a dollop of sweet gooseberry jam, which he bolted down at six in the morning. Most of his daily labor involved directing and set design. But he was a committed teacher, too, and because he sought to communicate his enthusiasms as widely as possible, he decided he needed a new atelier.

Thus was launched Dr. Dapertutto's Studio, Seva's private acting workshop, in 1913. On top of this came a new medium, film. In 1915 Seva oversaw the production of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and it was splendid. He'd have made a wonderful filmmaker had he chosen to go that route, but he surrendered the screen to Seryozha Eisenstein --- a born film director and a good friend. (It was Eisenstein who hid some of Seva's papers in his own dacha in 1938, after Seva's theater had been liquidated. Seryozha suspected, rightly, that things would start disappearing unless countervailing measures were taken. Of course plenty of things vanished anyway. People, too.)

UNTIL THE civil war got going and Seva went off to Yalta --- where he was arrested by the Whites, escaped, and joined the Reds --- he worked indefatigably as a director.

He liked artistic puzzles and difficulties. Whenever he was trying to work out a technical or aesthetic problem, I served as his audience. I'd lob into the air a variety of questions, ideas, and options that Seva would then juggle. Had someone entered Dr. Dapertutto's Studio during such sessions, he or she would've found Seva's behavior confusing, to say the least. It would have looked as if the director had drunk too much vodka, when in reality he was undertaking a much-needed refinement of theatrical principles.

How, wondered Seva one afternoon, might he make all the eager actors auditioning for places in his studio understand that he was sick of watching them try to portray merriment or sadness without ever stopping to consider that perhaps both emotions ought to be communicated at once? This he found very frustrating. In the large, bright room where his students undertook their physical exercises, he began experimenting with solutions to this pedagogical problem.

"Come on, come on, come on," he intoned to himself, snapping his fingers noisily. "What should I get them to do? Pranks—I need some good pranks . . ."

This was my cue. Hamlet, I prompted. Handsprings.

Seva grinned, spun around once, and instantly assumed the aspect of the melancholy prince. "To be," he began sonorously, then quickly inverted himself --- hands flat on the ground and feet pointing skyward --- as he performed the play's famous soliloquy upside down. It amazed me to see how long and easily he could stand on his hands.

Fetal position, I offered next. Seva brought his feet to the floor, went immediately into a crouch, tucked his head, wrapped his arms around his knees, and fell to his side, his entire body clenched into a ball. "A ghost!" he squeaked, the pitch of his Hamlet-voice unnaturally high. "Doesn't anybody else see him?" Breaking into childish laughter, he rolled his body in a tight circle on the floor.

Fencer's pose, I suggested. Seva leapt to his feet, pulled an imaginary mask over his face, and stiffened one outstretched arm as if he were brandishing a foil. He then proceeded to mime Hamlet's death-fight in slow motion, making it look beautifully balletic. "Follow my mother," he commanded his invisible opponent, the stabbed Claudius, at the end. As soon as the words left his mouth, his entire affect changed again; this time he was waddling and quacking like a duckling in pursuit of its mama. A few seconds later the duck became a long-necked swan as Seva's shoulders pulsed and he hissed at an invisible enemy.

 

A musical instrument, I inserted into his improvisation. Abruptly the swan fell silent, replaced by a sleepy-eyed owl. "For O, for O," Seva murmured, mimicking Hamlet in conversation with Ophelia. Then he began playing an imaginary flute, whistling its music. After a few lively bars, the tune ceased as Seva extended his make-believe flute before him. "Yet you cannot make it speak," he ended quietly in the prince's voice: half accusatory, half elegiac, wholly credible. A wonderful deep silence ensued while Seva bowed. Then he shouted, Bravo!, clapping as if at someone else's performance, and the happy noise of his applause filled the studio.

To me such afternoons represented the best of what Seva and I did together --- carefree collaboration, playfulness for its own sake. If I could erase those sessions from memory, I would, but I cannot. They persist, inescapable reminders of my derelictions. I ought to have encouraged Seva to take a harder look at his love for his country, which impelled his art; I could have pushed him to question whether there was something profoundly self-annulling in that love. I might have read the early writing on the dark wall . . . But I simply looked the other way, as doubles do.

WITH THE advent of World War I, many of Seva's acting students went off to fight against the Austro-Hungarian forces. The studio was forced to share its quarters with a temporary military hospital that set up beds for convalescing soldiers on the ground floor. Occasionally these men served as an audience for the students' efforts. Seva liked their frank, unpretentious reactions; he considered them ideal spectators.

Civil war was brewing, too. It broke out in St. Petersburg on February 25, 1917, the same day Seva staged the premiere of Lermontov's Masquerade at the Alexandrinsky. Not far from the theater, the czar's men were peppering the proletariat with machine-gun spray. One critic, disgusted by the lavish staging and costumes of Seva's production, failed to perceive its underlying grimness. In his review the next day, he wrote scornfully, "What is this, Rome after the Caesars?" --- as if Seva were impervious to the calamities unfolding outside the theater.

He wasn't, of course. A few months later, Seva accepted an invitation to a Bolshevik-sponsored conference on reorganizing the arts in Soviet Russia. That was a risky thing to do, as the Bolsheviks weren't yet assuredly in power. Then, after breaking his contract with the State Opera, he staged Mystery-Bouffe, a play by Volodya Mayakovsky --- Seva's poet-playwright friend, and a real piece of work.

I've never encountered anyone as hugely smart and difficult as that man! Mystery-Bouffe gave me my first look at Volodya in high gear. His play had been underwritten by the Commissariat for Enlightenment (nicknamed Narkompros), which clearly wasn't expecting what Mayakovsky offered—an amusing, heady parody of the Noah's Ark story. At one point during the final dress rehearsal, several Narkompros representatives in the audience shifted uneasily in their seats while Volodya (playing three parts himself) actually climbed an iron fire escape behind the proscenium arch, hooked himself onto a rope, and jumped into space while declaiming his lines. Given how big he was, this was like watching Goliath play Tinkerbell. Seva nearly fell over laughing.

TIME FLIES, they say, when fun is being had; and when there's war, and marital discord, and falling in love, and moving from one city to another.

Much changed in Seva's life between the start and end of the civil war. He moved to Moscow in 1920, and he and Olga, his first wife, parted in 1921. That was a year of drought and famine across Russia, and the marriage was another victim, one could say, of the general desiccation. Its demise was necessary for both parties.

Seva married Zina a year later --- the same year Stalin took the helm of the Party and Mussolini seized power in Italy; the same year James Joyce published Ulysses and T. S. Eliot brought out The Waste Land; the same year Cocteau did Antigone in Paris and Brecht did Drums in the Night in Munich. The same year, too, in which Seva formed the Actors' Theater, got himself appointed artistic director of the newly formed Theater of the Revolution, and took charge of the State Institute of Theatrical Art, itself soon housing a separate Meyerhold Workshop, which actually ran the Actors' Theater. Seva's professional life had become a multi-ring circus.

The Twenties were his most fruitful years; his work deepened, as did his collaborations with other artists. In the performing arts, miraculous things were happening, and Seva stood at the center of them, their lead innovator. Most of the time he was too busy to be distraught about anything more than the difficulties of keeping his facilities in good running order. Money and supplies were tight, and like everyone else, Seva had to make do with very little. Now and then he'd grow discouraged, and his discouragement would swell beyond the particulars into a general dismay, an intuitive foreboding about the political situation.

AT THESE moments I'd step in. The first thing I did, invariably, was to suggest certain behavioral modifications that might relieve his tension. In addition to directing him toward physical outlets, I was also attempting to dislodge certain of Seva's unproductive mental habits.

Usually my preliminary tactic was to get him to dance by himself. He was a graceful man who loved movement of all kinds; rhythm was the key to his method as a stage director. He had a keen sense of the power of pauses or rapid shifts in tempo, of movements that anticipate or lag behind speech. Seva developed his own system of exercises, which he called biomechanics, to help his students discipline their bodies and better appreciate the ways in which actions and words could be harmonized and counterpointed.

I knew right away when he'd begun imagining a new gesture or movement. First his shoulders would soften and his knees would flex lightly. Then, turning his back on anyone who happened to be present, he'd begin performing whatever he was envisioning. Sometimes he'd end up on the floor; at other times he'd work mostly with his upper body, his legs immobile. He had exceedingly expressive hands, and some of his movements were limited entirely to them --- manual dances. After he'd played with his ideas for a while, he'd run to find his journal and make notations. In these moments he was more purely content than at any other time. Even the pleasures afforded him by Zina's companionship couldn't compete with the quiet joys he derived from his own explorations of movement.

And so whenever he grew unusually distressed, I'd begin by encouraging him to shut his door and move around a bit. Although this usually worked, there were occasions when it was unavailing, and I'd urge him to listen to music instead. If Mitya Shostakovich was around, a few minutes of his piano playing might be enough to turn the tide. Mitya liked to improvise, and Seva was always fascinated by what came off the tips of his fingers, as it were.

But if no one, not even Zina, was in the theater (which was often the case, as Seva liked to work at odd hours), I'd go so far as to suggest that he engage in a bit of onanistic activity. Sometimes this was just the ticket. Like so many work-obsessed people, Seva could be curiously insensitive to the promptings of sexual desire in himself. I'd drop the hint, let it take hold, and leave him alone to please himself as he saw fit.

When neither movement nor music nor masturbation sufficed, I knew Seva was in a rough spot. At these moments I had recourse to my best aid, the oldest human sense --- smell --- which can sway any mood. To Seva's nostrils I'd introduce first the slight sharpness of ripe currants, then the dulcet scent of just-picked strawberries. Instantly he'd be transported to the countryside near Penza, to the Sura River and the fields in Oukhtomovka, where as a boy he used to chase swallows. He'd exhale a sigh of relief.

I made sure, however, never to bring to his nose the scent of Solanum dulcamara, a climbing vine with delicate purple flowers and bright red berries that grows across much of Europe and parts of Russia. A member of the nightshade family, it looks enticing but is actually deadly; ingested, its berries can quickly poison a person. It's called bittersweet. Seva, I knew, would be drawn to it because of its name.

I could see dimly where things were headed, and I didn't want to give Seva any ideas. His world was in a bad way. Just how bad I couldn't have known; I'm no clairvoyant.

WHEN MEMORY brings me to this juncture --- to those magical afternoons with Seva in the theater, just the two of us, the air backstage redolent with the scent of red berries --- I become a little desperate and must switch gears. Otherwise I start thinking about my burden of failure, about how I should have made Seva say something at the trial—something that would have redeemed him in their eyes—though for the life of me I don't know what that would have been, what might have worked, what could possibly have swayed them . . .

Enough, then. Nothing further needs to be said now about my former partner or our partnership. Back to where we left off! Reenter Camilla, into whose next dream her father was once again inserted. Along with Seva, for a brief cameo at the end.

Excerpted from Thirty-Three Swoons © Copyright 2012 by Martha Cooley. Reprinted with permission by Little, Brown. All rights reserved.

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