City of Ash Read Online Free PDF Page A

it must be soon, or I would be destined to playing seconds, and then old ladies and heavies, for the rest of my career.
    I’d dreamed of acting since I was six years old, watching rehearsals while my father painted sets in the background. I’d studied actors and actresses as if I could inhale their tricks, as if my own muscles could hold their memories. To act was all I’d everwanted, and I knew I was good enough for the juicy lead parts, the star turns. I knew I was not meant to linger in obscurity. I loved it too much for that—surely God wouldn’t have given me this passion if he meant not to honor it. But my climb had taken longer than I’d anticipated; too many missteps and compromises, too often fucking managers who never had any intention of moving me up, or actors who had less power than I’d thought.
    I’d grown up around the theater, so it wasn’t as if I didn’t know the methods everyone used to get ahead. The first time I’d used one myself was when I was a member of the corps de ballet at Niblo’s, when I waxed the soles of Marie Denbroeder’s slippers so she couldn’t keep her feet onstage. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, and she’d tried to get me out of the way first by putting an emetic in my coffee so I’d been unable to move more than a couple steps from a chamber pot. So I waxed her slippers, and she fell down four times that night and burst into tears, and she was gone the next day and I was kept on. I didn’t feel the least bit guilty for it either, as she would have thrown me to the wolves if she’d got the chance.
    It was just the way things were. It was expected, you know, that an actress would fuck the manager or the lead actor to get a better part, and damn if the managers and actors didn’t use that to their advantage. The worst of them played actresses off each other, so you not only had to fuck them, you had to be better at it than the next girl. And as much as I hated to admit it, talent didn’t count for much; you could quote every line from
School for Scandal
or cry waterworks on cue, and it mattered less than how pretty you were, or what you were willing to do, or how many costumes you had. There were times when I’d almost given up, but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t walk away. It was too much a part of me for that.
    What you learned quickly enough was not to trust anyone, that you had to make your own success, that you were a fool if you counted on anyone to help. I knew that in my bones. But when Stella Bernardi came along and acted as if she could hardly cross the street without me … well, I thought I knew all the tricks. I thought I was an expert at playing the game. But Stella had a trick I didn’t know, and she understood how to play me. Ifancied myself a kind of mentor to her, as pathetic as that sounds. She asked my advice, and I thought what a fool she was for trusting me, and I meant to protect her from herself
—and
prove I was worthy of her trust too and that’s even more pathetic, I know—and so I was honest with her. I thought I was building up a cache of goodwill, but all I was doing was putting blinders on.
    One night we were both staring out my window at the moon rising high in the sky, half obscured by the smoke from the mills and the steamers that always hazed the harbor beyond. We shoved up beside each other and rested our elbows on the narrow sill, and leaned out to smell the city—the tang of tar and the rotting sulfur scent of the tideflats at low tide, smoke and the odor of garbage and manure in the streets, and always, always, the stink of wet sawdust.
    “Do you really think Arabella will leave?” she asked me, swirling the pale green cloud of absinthe in the glass we shared.
    “I’d say it’s certain she will,” I told her. “She’s blinded by the limelight.”
    “And then
you
will take her place.”
    “I hope so. I think so. Yes.”
    “Lucius will move you up. You’ve been around so long. The rest of the company