All of the lions were present now. And, as I would have guess from his reputation, the king of the jungle was the last to arrive, swirling in with his cute-boy assistant trailing behind him, juggling all of the paraphernalia the "great man" traveled with. I gotta admit that I was disappointed that Creighton Masters lived up to his reputation on first look. In fact, he was even more so. We were gathering in the dimly lit dance practice hall on a gloomy late afternoon, the overhead lights fifteen feet overhead doing little to illuminate the blueprints and note cards strewn across the rickety card table in the middle of the polished hardwood floor.
But once Creighton Masters appeared at the double doors at the far end of the room, bellowing his, "Hi ho, Lenny" and his "Oh no, don't bother to rise" Milo, the room took on a luminance that was astonishing. I smiled when I looked up at the window and saw that the sun had emerged from the clouds over the nation's capital just at the moment, but I didn't discount that the Master had planned that for his grand entrance.
Leonard Handelsman and Miloslav Cersenka had risen, their faces beaming and broadcasting their pleasure, their feeling of completeness, as Creighton Masters strode down the length of the room toward them, his oversized trench coat flapping about him like angel's wings. Of course they stood in homage; he had told them not too, but he knew they would, for Masters was the Master.
"It's good to see you again, Lenny," Masters nearly bellowed, as he swept his Stetson hat off his head with a flourish and flipped it off to the side, on the hardwood floor. He grabbed for one of the half dozen free folding chairs haphazardly scattered about, all within ten feet of the card table, turned it to where its back almost touched the side of the table across from where Handelsman had been seated and to the left of where Cersenka had been sunk into his chair at the table. With a grand motion of both arms held out wide, Masters motioned for the two to return to their seats, which they did, turning their faces toward Masters as if he was going to deliver a sermon they ached to hear.
Masters turned to Cersenka. "And you are looking very well, Milo."
"Thank you, and you too, Mr. Masters," Cersenka murmured in his heavy Czech accent.
I thought this was pretty ironic. Cersenka looked like shit. His health seemed to have deteriorated sharply in the two years since my own boss, Handelsman, and he had worked on that Broadway musical that had the misfortune of opening the night a major freak Hurricane roared down the canyoned streets of New York City. The musical had been saved, but that largely was on the reputations of the show's director, Handelsman, and its dance master, Cersenka. Shortly after that run, Cersenka was rumored to have entered a private hospital, not to be heard again until called forth for his momentous production.
Cersenka was still lithe and well-muscled and moved with a grace that was the hallmark of a premier dancer. But he was gaunt, his cheeks hollow, and his head bald for the first time I'd ever seen him. It was highly unlikely that Masters had missed the change in him in these two brief years.
"No, 'Mr. Masters' now, Milo," Masters said, with a jocular, almost genuine smile. "I'm so happy you have signed on with our little venture here."
"You call and I come," Cersenka answered.
"I could not have conceived of doing it without you," Masters answered.
I wondered if the Cersenka could discern that Masters was full of shit on this point as well as I could. I handled all of Handelsman's correspondence. I knew that Masters had tried to engage someone else entirely for this production for months and had only given in to Handelsman's begging that Cersenka be given the nod, that it was a production that he ached to do.
I thought on one of Masters's last letters to Handelsman on the subject in which he said he didn't want a dance master who would die in the middle of rehearsals. So I knew he knew that Cersenka wasn't well. And Handelsman knew that too.
I looked over at Handelsman to see his reaction, and he was smiling worshipfully at Masters, oblivious to the elder man's deceit. I remembered to punish the stage director for that when we'd gotten back to the yacht that night.
I'd heard that Masters, the playwright, and Handelsman, the stage director, had once had a close mentoring relationship some fifteen years earlier when the director was in his twenties and the playwright in his forties—that Masters had given Handelsman a leg up on Broadway by insisting that he be given productions of Masters's plays—and I knew Handelsman's proclivities—intimately—so perhaps something was becoming clear to me here. I took a moment to decide what that meant to me, whether I was jealous. But no I wasn't. My principal duty as Handelsman's "right-hand boy" might be to sleep with him and fuck him regularly. But I couldn't say that it bothered me that someone had been there before me. Not as long as he paid me well.
"So, what do we have here?" Masters, the playwright, asked as he leaned over the card table and looked at the pile of papers strewn around there.
"We didn't know what you planned," Handelsman, the stage director, answered, so we have collected various configurations for the stage. "We're gathered now. Perhaps you can tell us—"
"You want to know what I have in my little case here that's worthy of the last production at Arena Stage before they close down for a total rebuild?" Masters asked. His eyes were twinkling; he was enjoying the grand tease.
Masters raised his arm and snapped his fingers without looking back behind him, and the young man who had followed him into the room, burdened down with cases and scrolls and unidentifiable lengths of material, materialized and pulled three bound manuscripts from a briefcase, and, at Masters's sweeping direction, bestowed one each on the stage director and the dance master, and gently, almost reverently, set the third one down on the table in front of where Masters was setting. He then turned, set part of his burden down, pulled another folding chair up to a place about six feet behind Masters and to the side and settled in the chair. He dug into the briefcase and extracted a fourth manuscript and perched it on his lap, pen in hand, ready to take notes.
Masters continued teasing the other two, admonishing them not to open the manuscripts yet, and giving them an interminable running story on the "intolerable" plane trip down to Washington, D.C., from New York. Handelsman's hands were trembling as he fingered the edges of the manuscript cover. Cersenka's face bore a somewhat pained look, as if a flash of heartburn was shooting through his chest.
I took these moments of tease to size up Masters's assistant, as I viewed the tableau at the card table from where I was standing in the shadows, not really in the group, leaning on the practice piano. He was small but well formed. Blond, curly haired, a face that was as much pretty as handsome. Broad, sensual, Bryonesque lips. Startling blue eyes. I at first thought he was a teenager, but now that I looked at him more closely, I could see that he was just small of stature. And he had the grace in his movements of a dancer. I bet myself that's what he'd been when Masters took charge of him.
One thing was very clear. He worshipped Masters as much as the other two men at the table did. He hung on every word Masters said, ever ready to be there, serving his every need, if summoned. And the gaze he trained on the back of Masters's head wasn't just one of subservience or respect. It was a look of love.
It seemed quite likely to me that Masters was fucking him—if I was right that Masters and Handelsman had such a relationship a decade and a half ago. If so, I envied Masters. He looked quite fuckable to me too.
Masters's voice boomed out, signaling his change of topic, and I returned my attention to the card table tableau.
"You may open the manuscripts now," he said. He was so self-important that I wished someone would take him down a notch. This was really Handelsman's show. When the five-decade-old Arena Stage, the acclaimed regional theater located at Washington, D.C.'s, southeast waterfront, decided to completely demolish its once-revolutionary theater complex, dominated by one of the nation's first theaters in the round, and totally rebuild, in a two-year process, it had wanted to go with a bang. The theater was famous for discovering new acting and playwrighting talent and second productions straight on to Broadway. For a last play in this complex, it wanted to extend that tradition in such a way that its reputation carried it through the dormant reconstruction years. And they had turned to Handelsman, a Broadway director at the height of his fame, to put together that production.
Bringing in Masters had been Handelsman's doing. Masters hadn't had a hit in several years, and, as much of an icon in the theater that he was, he probably would not have quickly sprung to the minds of the ever-experimenting, edgy Arena Stage board for this particular play slot.
It would seem that Handelsman had picked well, though, because even as he and Cersenka were turning the cover board of the manuscript, I heard them gasp in harmony—and it was a gasp of appreciative delight.
