Johanna Worth exited stage left and the Cuban entered. He led Joe through some confusing halls and stairs to a common area the size of a large bedroom. There were two couches littered with clothes, stuffed animals, some sports equipment, school books. An empty TV table stood in the corner. One wall was sliding glass doors opening onto a swimming pool. On the opposite wall, a half-open door showed a bathroom. Opposite him, two doors were closed. The Cuban knocked on each and left. One door opened and a girl about 12 entered wearing khakis, a white Ralph Lauren polo tee shirt, and loafers and carrying a book. She cleared a place on a couch and said "I'm Lizzy, please sit down." The other door opened, "And this is Tanya" Lizzy added. Tanya was a tanned blond like her mother and wore a tight red shirt that said "Tommy" across the front and something he could not make out beneath it, bootlet jeans, and high-heeled boots. Tanya seated herself on the arm of the couch. Joe cleared space for himself on the other couch.
"Would you like us to tell you what our favorite TV shows were?" the younger asked.
"Sure," Joe said
The girls looked at each other.
"I like La Femme Nikita," Tanya said.
"What do you like about it?" Joe asked.
"She's a sexy bitch," Tanya replied, "and always wins."
Lizzy kept the book closed with her finger in the place. "I liked Sabrina best," she add. Joe asked her what it was about. "The teen-aged witch", she said. When he asked what she liked about it she answered, "I love to see her use her powers."
"Is there a show you watched together?" Joe asked.
They looked at each other. "California Dreams," Lizzy admitted.
"I don't know it," Joe said.
"It's about these kids who have their own rock band," Lizzy said.
Joe asked why they liked it. "They do their own thing," Tanya said.
Joe asked if they had ever seen live theater. Yes, they had been with their parents to road productions of Cats and Les Miserables in Miami. When he ask them what Les Miserables was really about, they shrugged. He asked them if there was drama in their school and they answered yes, but they were not friends with the kids in the drama club.
"Mom said you played in a war?" Lizzy asked.
"We were touring in Europe. We played in Sarajevo during the siege. We were playing an improvisation based on The Trojan Women—that's an old Greek play about how bad war really is for the women. We played in the cellar of a restaurant with bare bulbs strung from the beams. We played the first night to the European ambassadors and their yes-men, an audience of pigs. We should have lain on metal tables and made them do autopsies on us." Tanya smiled. "The next evening when we came in, we saw a shell had blown a hole in the wall of the building so we could look out on the sidewalk. The seated audience was artists and intellectuals, but a bunch of teenagers crowded around the hole. They were great. They yelled stuff like "Fuck the Greeks and fuck the Trojans!" and "What is he to Hekuba?"
"Sometimes in English. A lot of people in Europe speak English. At the end of the show everyone clambered out through the hole onto the sidewalk, and we ran though the street, because of the snipers, to a place where we drank wine the rest of the night. The next night some of them came back and we gave them parts in the play." Tanya swung her leg over so she was sitting astride the arm of the couch and inched a little forward. Joe saw that the way to draw the girls in would be to put them in the play. All his life he had been trying to get people out of the audience mindset into the passion; in this gig he would be able to work the same people every day.
He asked them if they had been outside the United States. They had been to resorts in the Caribbean and once to London, but had not gone to the theater there.
"Mom said you had been in prison?" Tanya asked.
"She'd studied up on us," he said and told them about their imprisonment in Guadalajara.
"How did you get out?" Tanya asked.
"A rich friend paid a bribe," Joe answered.
"How long do you think you'll last with Mom?" Lizzy asked.
"I don't know, maybe three months if you help me," Joe said.
Joe walked from the front door a little way along the palm-lined drive to where his companions waited in the battered Volvo bus that had carried them from Elsinore to Sarajevo, crossed from Le Havre to Vera Cruz, and then carried them from Vera Cruz here. He thought he had been on this road forever, at first a celebrity, then a classic, now three-quarters forgotten, meeting people he did not understand, unable to discern the outlines of motivation, disconcerted by the greed for violence and power, seeing figures that looked like battered cars, the motor failing, the fender falling off, and the emergency brake intermittent, trekking on a great highway where no one was sure of his direction. He imagined stopping someone to ask the way to the next town and hearing grammars plucked from a language beyond scholarship. Everything falling, like in Revelations, bumbling, directionless on this crowded road, refugees toting trunks of belongings, baskets, bundles, going north and south, tired, crazed with sleeplessness. The only hope: "I love to see her use her powers".
