The World Outside, 24

Pagliacci

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NOW

Joanna’s birthday fell on a Saturday that year. Mike had scheduled a marathon, long-term planning session for the morning; when they were done, he offered to treat her to lunch at Mae’s Café downtown.

Mae’s was busy, as it always was on sunny, pleasant, getting-warmer Saturdays. It took the two of them a few extra minutes to order, receive their food, and find a seat; as soon as they did, Mike leaned forward and said, “Tell me what you want for your future, Jo. Wait—” he added, holding up a finger when he saw her reaction. “Let me explain. I’ve officially been approved to offer you a contract for next year, with a few more hours and a bit of a raise. But I know you were unsure at this point last year. I don’t want to lock you into another year if you don’t want it or aren’t sure.”

Joanna sat back for a minute, considering. She came back to what she always came back to: she wanted to know which decision was least likely to be a mistake. She wanted to make sure she would be okay.

“Can I think it over for a few days?”

“Of course,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee. Then, “What are your plans, just generally?”

“Nothing specific. I just…can’t figure out what decision is the right one.” Mike didn’t say anything to that, and Joanna picked at her sandwich for a minute and then asked him, “When you were my age, did you ever feel, like, this pressure to figure it out?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…like, if you screwed it up, you wouldn’t get another chance. I mean, my whole life, in school and everything, if I screwed up on a homework assignment or a test, I could just do it again. As long as I’ve followed the rules, I’ve always pretty much gotten as many chances as I wanted. But this is…life. I don’t get a second chance. If I make a decision for this year, and it’s the wrong one, I don’t get the year back. I don’t know—did you ever feel like that?”

Now Mike sat back and thought for a minute, staring off into space, sipping his coffee occasionally. Joanna waited, her foot tapping anxiously against the leg of her chair.

Finally, Mike leaned forward with his arms crossed on the table in front of him. “Jo. What do we tell the kids to do when they’re in the middle of a scene and someone drops a line?”

“We tell them to call for a line.”

“What if they can’t call for a line? What if it’s opening night? What do we tell them to do?”

Joanna saw where he was going with this; she played along. “We tell them to keep the goal of the scene in mind and to improvise until they get back on solid ground.”

“Right. And when they do that—even if they do it well—does the scene ever go exactly the way it’s scripted?”

“No,” she said, smiling indulgently.

“Does anyone in the audience ever notice?”

“No.”

“Does it ruin the play?”

“No.”

“Okay, let me ask you this: even if you see a show where everything basically goes as planned, are there ever two performances that are exactly alike?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” She raised her shoulders in a shrug and then dropped them. “Because…the play is about telling a story, not following a formula. And sometimes, the way we tell a story is different from what we think it will be.”

“Okay. Do you think it could be that way in life too?”

Joanna squinted her eyes at him. “Maybe…?”

“Well, hear me out,” he said, scooting his chair closer to the table. “Maybe your life is also about telling a story and not following a formula. When you were sixteen years old, before Josh died, you thought the story was going to look a certain way. And it’s starting to look different. Right now, you’re on stage, it’s opening night, and you’ve just forgotten your next line. But if you can remember to relax, to follow where the story is leading you, I really think that, ultimately, your life—the ‘show’—will end up the way it’s supposed to. Either way, I can tell you without a doubt that if you spend these years too afraid of ‘losing a year’ to actually do anything, you’ll definitely miss out on telling the story you should be telling. Make sense?”

“Huh,” she murmured meditatively. His words weren’t overly complicated. She’d heard a version of them her whole life. And, if she were being honest with herself, there was a part of her that had always thought of the mentality they represented as a consolation prize for people who were too stupid or lazy to just follow the rules in the first place.

She was beginning to think that maybe she needed a consolation prize—or maybe that she’d been wrong to think of it in those terms to begin with.

“If I were you, Jo,” Mike continued, his voice slipping seamlessly into that mentor quality Joanna loved so much, “I would cut out anything that’s illegal, immoral, or irresponsible. Beyond that, simply allow yourself to decide what you want. Do you want to stay here? Fine—make it happen. Do you want to be somewhere else, for a while or for forever? Fine—figure out a way to make that happen. But don’t do it or not do it because you’re afraid of losing this year. You’ll lose it anyway.”

An hour or so after Joanna got home—having spent the intervening time trying to absorb Mike’s counsel—she came to her first major decision of the day. She sat down at the computer, opened a new email to Mike, and typed I’m in—bring it on!

+++

After that, she had to hustle. Erik had planned a birthday evening that he refused to tell her anything about, other than that she should dress nice and be ready by three. She showered and put on the new dress she’d bought as an early present to herself—red with tiny white flowers, long sleeves, mid-thigh, cinched waist—and her old denim jacket. When Poppa called up to her that Erik was waiting downstairs, she was just slipping her red heels on. Hurriedly, she pinned her hair away from her face, letting it hang down in the back, and dug the old J necklace out of the box she’d stashed it in years earlier and fastened it around her neck as she skipped down the stairs.

“Wow…look at you,” Erik said slowly, a smile spreading across his face, when he saw her.

“Look at you too,” she replied. He was wearing dark jeans and what looked like new, dressy shoes. He'd gone the extra mile and was wearing the same button-down shirt he’d worn for Mary’s wedding, the one that set off his eyes so well, but he’d rolled the sleeves up and left the top button undone in that way that made her absolutely nuts for him.

Erik didn’t answer any of her questions about their evening, but he merged onto Route 1 going south, so she figured they were heading either to Brunswick or Portland. Either way, she was excited; he was willingly taking her out for an evening in the city, and he was willingly dressing up for it? She was dying to see what he had up his rolled sleeves.

They parked in a garage near the Nickelodeon theater, and Erik led Joanna to a restaurant she’d never heard of, close enough to the water that they could watch the waves breaking as they ate. He’d even made a reservation, which touched her, especially given the fact that it was only 5:30 on a Saturday night, and the dining room was practically empty when they arrived. They had a nice time, but Erik seemed on edge throughout the meal, constantly checking his watch and forgoing dessert.

“The real surprise is coming,” he assured her as they left, sans the cheesecake she’d been dying to try.

“What are we doing here?” she asked about thirty minutes later, as they walked through the entrance of Merrill Auditorium. Erik had a smug, satisfied smile on his face; when she looked at the program the usher handed her, she gasped. Pagliacci. Her first opera! She stared openly at Erik; he pretended not to notice as he handed over the tickets and thanked the usher, but the grin on his face was obvious. This guy, the one she’d known her entire life, had truly surprised her.

They were a little late, so the house lights had already fallen by the time they took their seats, meaning Joanna didn’t have an opportunity to read through the program before being thrust into the action. She couldn’t understand the lyrics, but the experience of it was breathtaking. When the curtain fell on the last notes of “Vesti la giubba,” and the house lights came on for intermission, she was too astonished even to applaud or wipe the tears off her cheeks or smooth the hairs on her arms.

This is why stories matter, she thought to herself as she dug the bulletin out of her purse. She devoured the explanation of what she’d just witnessed; Erik chuckled, kissed her on the cheek, and left to see if they were selling any beer in the lobby.

The second act was as overwhelming as the first had been, and when they walked out into the night—dark now and heading towards chilly—Erik asked if she still wanted her birthday cheesecake. They found a place that was still open and ordered two espressos and a slice of cheesecake, slathered with strawberries and whipped cream, to share.

Who is this guy? Joanna kept wondering, stealing glances at him. If his goal had been to sweep her off her feet, he’d succeeded.

“What made you plan all this extravagant stuff?” she asked him when they got back to the truck.

“Well, two things,” he told her. “I don’t want you to think I don’t care at all about the stuff you like, and two, I wanted to remind you that there’s plenty of it here, too.”

Joanna laid a hand on his cheek and kept it there for a minute, loving the way he drove with such easy concentration.

Just before Erik pulled onto Joanna’s street in Grace, he suggested that they head to the boat launch for a little while first. When they got there, he laid down on the pier and looked up at the stars. She laid down next to him, nestling her head in the crook of his shoulder and breathing in deeply as he wrapped an arm around her.

“Remember when you were ten and got lost at the mall?” he asked out of the blue. Joanna snorted and nodded into his shoulder.

“Oh, I was so scared. I thought I was going to die at that mall!”

“You were scared! Josh and I thought Poppa would kill us. Thank God we found you when we did.”

“You found me,” she corrected him, remembering the look she’d seen on his face and the relief she’d felt when she’d finally spotted his familiar face across the Food Court. She’d vowed never to walk away from them in a crowd again, a vow she’d mostly kept through the rest of her childhood. “What made you think of that?” Joanna felt Erik shrug under her cheek.

“I’ve just been thinking a lot about things that happened when we were growing up,” he said quietly.

“Feeling nostalgic?”

“Not nostalgic, exactly. Just—it’s not nothing that you and I have known each other forever. Not everyone has that.”

“Erik, you’re starting to sound like a romantic,” Joanna teased him.

They watched the stars for a minute, quiet now, and then Erik sighed and said, “I actually do have one other present for you, but you have to stand up for me to give it to you.”

It took her a moment, settling her dress around her and adjusting her jacket, but she stood. Erik smiled and rolled up to a sitting position, then to a kneeling position. A beat passed, and Joanna realized that he was still down there, on one knee in front of her, a large and nervous smile on his face.

“Erik, what the hell…?” Her voice trailed off.

He cleared his throat and dug into his pocket, pulling out a small velvet box.

“Holy shit,” she breathed, bringing her hands up slowly to cover her mouth.

“Nice—that’ll make for a good story,” he laughed quietly.

“I just—” She brough her hands back down and wrapped her arms around her stomach. “Is this—I mean…I don’t…” Then she covered her mouth again, in an effort to cut herself off, but she kept talking through her fingers anyway. “I’m sorry…it’s just that—I mean, what am I…? But no—you should, I mean—” She took a deep breath and finally bit down hard on her bottom lip.

Erik was looking up at her, amused. “Are you done?” he asked. She nodded. “You sure? You want to ramble a little bit more, or should I go ahead?” Joanna shook her head, tears stinging her eyes. “Okay, then.” He cleared his throat, shifted his weight a little bit, and opened the box. He was staring at Joanna, all serious now. “The last time I did this, I screwed it all up,” he began. “This time, I want to do it right. So—” He blew out a short puff of air and said simply, earnestly, “Joanna Marie Beaulieu, I have loved for my entire life. Will you marry me?”

Classic Erik.

Joanna burst into tears, and then the tears just kept coming. She was crying so much more than she’d expected to at a moment like this, but she couldn’t stop herself. This felt like the culmination of a lot more than just the previous year. She wiped her eyes and looked down at Erik—still smiling, but a little nervous now, because she had yet to answer him—the yearning on his face like a physical force. She nodded slowly, then quickly, and he jumped up, grabbing her and kissing her so hard that their teeth knocked together.

“Here,” he said when he pulled away. He slipped the ring onto her finger. She held up her hand to admire it. It was dark, but she could see well enough to see that it was beautiful: a thin, silver band with a portion of coiled silver in place of a setting. Dainty, elegant, unique. Perfect. Erik put a hand on the back of her neck and pulled her close to kiss her again.

The World Outside, 25: Plans —>