The Hamlet Trap Read Online Free PDF

lonely in the clearing sky. The air smelled of rain and earth mold and forests and wood smoke. By next month Ashland would smell like a giant wood stove. There was a bite in the air signaling a frost soon, if not this night, then the next, or within a week, probably. Autumn had arrived.
    She walked home without haste, stopped to chat a minute with Jarrel Walsh, who owned one of the best restaurants in town, then stopped again to speak with Darcy Corman, who worked in the bookstore that she passed every day. A clump of people stood near the Elizabethan Theater parking lot, actors and Marguerite Demarie, the costumer. Their season was ending, just as the Harley’s was, and tomorrow night the party would wend from backstage to backstage as all the theater people in town celebrated another good season. For the diehards, there was Ro’s apartment to wrap it all up with a catered breakfast at dawn. She waved; they waved back.
    This was what Peter didn’t understand, she thought, climbing her hill, hardly feeling the strain in her legs. He thought when she said they were like a family that it was simply show-biz jargon and it wasn’t. Any of them could get together at any time and be deep in conversation within seconds and care about the conversation. Right now everyone would be interested in the new director, what he was like, what his routine would be, how he treated actors, stagehands—everything about him, because it could affect any one of them. The actors moved from one theater to the other, stagehands worked both, as did the construction crews. What happened at Harley’s echoed through the Shakespeare bunch, the Angus Bowman bunch, all of them. Every rumor made the entire circuit with startling speed.
    Peter had tried to convince her that it was just like that at the university, at corporations, everywhere. She didn’t believe it. In theater, she had said, every single day you’re laying it on the line again, risking everything again. You can’t get a reputation and coast on it, not for long. No tenure, no security, no tomorrow; only this show, this run, this performance.
    Peter was thirty, and she knew that Gray Wilmot was thirty-one, but he seemed ancient compared to Peter. Theater people all seemed old compared to other people, old and forever young and gullible at the same time. “You can’t expect much from a relationship with another theater person,” Brenda, the sound technician, had said once over lunch. “You’ll be working Toledo while he’s in Las Vegas. But you can’t expect anything from someone from the real world. As soon as they’ve seen the show once, it’s ‘What else is new, honey?’”
    The only reference her uncle had made to Peter had been oblique. “It’s good to know someone from outside now and then, just to remind us what that’s like.”
    She walked up to her door and turned the key in the lock and realized that she was brooding about Peter because this was his last term at school; he would be leaving, and he liked things finished, settled. He didn’t like quitting with things undone. Okay, she told herself, so she would have to make a decision, but not right now, not tonight, or tomorrow. All she wanted right now was a shower and food. God, she thought, she was starving.
    Everything backstage had been cleared away to make room for tables and chairs, for a twenty-foot buffet. A five-piece band played, and when they took a break, someone put on tapes. Upstage was cleared for dancing. On the buffet there were turkey and ham, shrimp Creole, avocados stuffed with crab, chicken breasts in a hot Mexican sauce, potato salad, carrot salad, hearts of palm, mushrooms vinaigrette… There were liquor and champagne and red and white wines, and silver urns of coffee.
    Ginnie danced until she was soaked through and through. Laura danced with Ro, then William, then with whomever came along and asked. She was a