“Nope.” He set his napkin beside his plate. “Sorry.”
When silence descended on the table, he didn’t break it.
“Have you chosen your next role?” his father finally asked.
With his thumb and middle finger, Marcus fiddled with his water glass, turning it in endless circles. “Not yet. I’ve had a few offers, and I’m looking over some scripts.”
Lawrence had given up on the last scraps of his own lunch and was now watching his son from across the round table. In the breeze from the open window, his white hair—still reassuringly thick, which augured good things for Marcus’s future ability to score silver fox roles—fluttered. Using his fingers, Lawrence carefully combed the wayward strands back into place.
Just before leaving for college, Marcus had finally noticed the pomade under the lone bathroom’s sink. That old-man brand of hair product certainly hadn’t belonged to him, and he’d held the jar in his palm, wondering at it. Confused, until he’d realized the truth.
His father did care about appearances. At least a little.
Back then, Marcus had exulted in the evidence that Lawrence had his own vanities, however minor compared to his son’s seeming obsession with good looks and good grooming. Marcus had taunted his father about that damn pomade for months, to Lawrence’s clear discomfiture, and he’d done so using his father’s own pet phrase.
“Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas, pater,” he’d singsonged whenever possible.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, father. Spoken in Latin for extra spite.
Each repetition of that smirking gibe had tasted sweet and bitter both, like the kumquats he ate whole from the struggling tree in their small front yard.
He wasn’t a defiant, heartsick teen anymore, though. He might be tempted, but he wouldn’t mention the proffered role he would never, ever take, not given the director’s reputation when it came to women on set and the movie’s truly terrible script.
“I’m still considering my options,” he told his parents honestly.
“Hopefully you’ll pick something we care to watch this time.” His mother shook her head, lips pursed. “Before we retired, Madame Fourier insisted on telling us about that horrid show every week. In great detail. Even though the narrative defied history, mythology, literary tradition, and all common sense.”
Lawrence sighed. “She enjoyed torturing us, once she found out you were involved. The French can be très passive-aggressive.”
His parents looked at each other, rolled their eyes, and chuckled at the memory.
Something in that fond amusement, their easy, shared dismissal of seven years of grinding work and effort and hard-won accomplishment—
One time on set, a careless fall from Rumpelstiltskin had cracked a couple of Marcus’s ribs. This felt like that, somehow. Like his chest had caved in, just a little.
Before today, his parents hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. Hadn’t shared a meal with him for longer than that.
For all their supposed desire for his company, had they truly missed him for a single moment? Could he even call whatever emotion they felt for him love, when they didn’t either understand or respect anything he did, anything he was?
His mouth opened, and suddenly he seemed to be telling them about that one role. That one script they’d hate, if possible, even more than Gods of the Gates.
“I’ve been offered the part of Mark Antony in a modern-day remake of Julius Caesar.” His voice was breezy. A lazy taunt. Unpleasantly familiar to all of them. “The director intends to make Cleopatra the main protagonist of the story.”
In the worst, most exploitative possible way, of course. Marcus had told his agent he’d rather return to bartending than work with that director and that script.
Watching R.J. and Ron willfully misinterpret E. Wade’s iterations of Juno and Dido for seven years had been painful enough. He didn’t need to lend his time and talents—such as they might be—to yet another story ready to equate women’s ambition with instability and evil. The violent sex scenes, numerous and full of dubious consent at best, had only been the poisonous icing atop a cake already tainted by toxic masculinity.
No, he wasn’t going anywhere near that misogynistic train wreck of a movie, or that genial predator of a director.
Somehow, though, he was still talking, talking, talking. “They’re all vampires, of course. Oh, and Caesar comes back from being staked somehow, intent on revenge, and starts killing senators one by one, in the grisliest possible fashion.” His most vapid smile in place, he ran his fingers through his hair. “Stylistically, it’s very Marc Bolan and David Bowie, so I’d be rocking guyliner, and in the ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ scene, I’d only wear a strategic coating of glitter and a smile to give my big speech. I figure I’d better start putting some chicken breasts in my pockets now, right?”
A deathly silence fell over the dining room, and he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.
Fuck. Fuck.
Apparently, he was still an asshole teenager. Striking out when hurt. Playacting the Worst Possible Son. Phrasing the truth to inflict maximum distress, then making shit up, anything he could imagine that would horrify his parents.
He was a thirty-nine-year-old man. This had to stop.
“You’re . . .” His father visibly swallowed. “You’re considering that role?”
He almost said it. Almost shrugged and answered, Why not? The director says I’d look fantastic in the costumes.
His water glass was going to break if he kept gripping it so tightly.
He put it down very gently, removing his fingers from the fragile glass shell one by one.
The truth. This time, he would tell them the unvarnished truth, with no affectations adopted for self-protection.
“No, Dad.” His voice was even. Toneless, verging on bored. It was as much grace as he could muster in that moment. “No, I’m not considering the role. I had my agent turn it down immediately. Not because it violated Roman history, but because I deserve better as an actor, and I demand better in my directors and my scripts.”
His parents glanced at each other again, lost for words. Stunned, perhaps, that he considered himself someone who had standards.
“I’m glad you’re considering your choices more carefully this time,” his mother finally said, offering a cautious smile. “That Julius Caesar remake excluded, almost anything would be an improvement over your last project.”
No wonder they considered him the stupidest member of their family. He still hadn’t learned.
The chair screeched beneath him when he rose to his feet.
“I’d better go,” he told them. “Thank you again for lunch.”
They didn’t protest as he left the dining room, gathered his jacket and keys, and dispensed generic good wishes with a rictus smile. His father gave him a polite dip of the chin in the postage-stamp entry hall, which Marcus returned.
He was at the door, almost gone, when his mom reached out for . . . something. Some sort of contact. A half hug, a kiss on the cheek, he didn’t know.
It didn’t matter, honestly.
If she touched him right now, if either of them did, he thought he might shatter like that water glass.
He stepped back from her.
Her hand fell to her side, her green eyes stricken behind those familiar glasses.
Late one winter night, when he’d sneaked out of bed to eavesdrop at the cracked door to their tiny bedroom, he’d heard her weeping. In a tear-choked voice, she’d haltingly explained to her husband how much she missed teaching the kids in her prep school, missed working alongside him. She’d admitted that she found it nearly unbearable to sit across a table from their son day after day, trying in vain to reach him in ways his kindergarten and first-grade teachers hadn’t, couldn’t, while Lawrence shone in the brightness of the outside world.
She’d never make the same amount of money as her husband. Never have his seniority in their department, even if she got her position back.
“I’m feel like I’m l-losing essential p-pieces of myself hour by hour, Lawrence,” she’d sobbed. “And I love Marcus, but I’m not getting through to him, and sometimes I want to shake him, but instead I just have to keep trying to get him to learn—”
The words had tumbled over one another, near hysterical, and Marcus couldn’t doubt the truth in them. He’d carried that truth with him back to bed that night and every night.
Even as he suffered, she did too. Because of him.
So despite the bile in his throat now, he gathered her in his arms. Kissed the top of her head, and let her kiss his cheek. Offered her a wave from inside his car window.
Then he got the fuck out of there, with no idea when or if he’d ever return.
JULIUS CAESAR: REDUX
INT. CLEOPATRA’S BEDROOM – MIDNIGHT
CLEOPATRA stretches out naked on a round, velvet-covered bed, pale in the candlelight. She is everything a man wants. Beautiful and insatiable and a sultry mystery, her ample breasts perky and firm and promising all the world to any hapless man who falls under their sway. MARK ANTONY lies beside her, insensate from pleasure. She literally has him by the short hairs.
CLEOPATRA
Caesar must die. Again.
MARK ANTONY
No! Such treason would besmirch my honor!
CLEOPATRA
You must stake him!
She leans over him, her breasts speaking of sexual frenzy, and he cannot look away from their pendulous swing. No man could, in the face of Eve’s temptation.
MARK ANTONY
If you insist, my treacherous flower.
CLEOPATRA
Fear not that he might rise from the dead once more. No twice-murdered, unnatural creatures have taken blood-soaked revenge on their enemies since the last Ides of March, exactly a year ago today.
MARK ANTONY
Woman is the most unnatural creature of all.
10
THEY WERE DOING THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF POSING AND preening at an indoor water park. Still, Marcus hadn’t objected. Hadn’t asked if their plans were meant to serve as a test of some sort, although he suspected they were.