Chapter I

There were seven people and one ghost in the theatre that night. There had been eight people, but the ghost, Vivien, had scared off Isabel Lorenz, who had been commissioned to write a play for the company. Now the six actors and their director, Carmine, sat around the ghost light and tried to problem solve. It was a very tense room, as I’m sure you can imagine, what with Vivien hovering and eavesdropping, and fiddling with the room’s temperature and color scheme, as ghosts are apt to do.

The play was to be about Aurelia Bacchus, who was a sensational young woman, a medical student wanted by the police.  But each time Isabel Lorenz or one of the actors made mention of Aurelia, Vivien would begin to howl, and, in a tearful voice, croak out funeral hymns. And, try as they might, the actors and Carmine could not hear one another above these lugubrious, tuneless wailings. Esther, an actor, suggested that they abbreviate the evening and find a new rehearsal space. Jacob, another actor, suggested that they hunt the ghost with the mock swords in the properties closet. Just then, an unprecedented hailstorm descended.

The precipitation threatened the studio’s thin roof, and made it more difficult yet for the members of the theatre troop, who had years of experience projecting their voices, to be audible. Before they knew it, the actors were screaming to compete with the noise pollution, and could not distinguish their own voices from Vivien’s wild shrieks. Something had to be done.

But what? The company now had exactly three weeks to put together an original production for the upcoming theatre festival. They had no play, and no playwright. With a collective sigh, the group disbanded, arranging to meet tomorrow afternoon in Union Square. They filed out the door one by one: first Carmine, followed by her daughter Imogene, then Esther, Seth, and Wilson. Jacob lingered near the doorway, watching Rivka gather up her things and gyrate absently across the stage, feeling her body in space. “Jake,” she said finally, “Perhaps we should call this off.”

Jacob hesitated, unsure as to whether Rivka was referring to the theatrical production or something else. He watched her pirouette around to face him, and felt himself instantly ensnared in her bold, searching stare. He could not live there long, however, for Vivien had taken up a harmonica and was playing herself some vitriolic lullaby. Rivka laughed somberly, and walked with Jacob into the humid breeze of gloaming. They kissed, briefly, and parted.

Rivka turned left and made her way across the intersection. On the other side, the road dissolved into a sandy path that weaved its way to the riverside. Rivka followed it to its end, and clambered up onto the embankment of large, triangular rocks that greeted the storming tides. Her green eyes turned to blue as she watched what was left of that day’s sun flicker upon the river’s ripples, accenting the expanse of teal with its silver penmanship. She considered her present predicament. She was thirty-three. It had been years since she had played a heroine, or an ingénue, or a femme fatale. It seemed that nowadays she was cast exclusively in the role of the villainess. She enjoyed her parts, more than anything else in the world, except maybe the river aglitter with sunset. She only wanted to play the leading lady one more time before she permanently resigned herself to the more grotesque parts. Then, after she’d indulged herself in a final moment of fresh, romantic performance, she would dutifully retire the coveted roles to some younger, newer actress. But she was not ready for that yet.

...

Jacob disentangled his arms from around Rivka, and turned right.  He strode down Wythe Street, swinging his arms, aware that they were still prickling from the embrace. There has to be some way to get rid of that ghost, he thought.

...

Aurelia Bacchus had the look of a librarian, though she was a doctor, and tended to speak with a British accent, though she was not British. Her tall, lean body had sunken into itself, giving her a slightly concave appearance. Her short, rutilant curls were pulled back behind her angular, inscrutable face, which, on this morning, strained forward with her long and purposeful stride down Montague Street. There was nothing obscure in Aurelia’s agenda for the day, which included changing her name, affect, and appearance; in short, assuming a new identity. She did not anticipate that this operation would take more than a couple of hours; she was a very efficient woman, and she hoped to attend a women’s health rally later that afternoon. Stratus clouds occupied the whole length of her sky, but there was sun enough that when she closed her eyes to brace the mid-May rainfall, she could see checkered patterns flicker beneath her lids. She would catch an uptown train into Manhattan, she concluded.

Aurelia had very recently moved to New York, after something of a scandal back up in her home state, Pennsylvania. She caught on very quickly, though, to the nature of big city life, which she preferred infinitely to the false warmth and quiet ostentation of the suburbs.

…

After a less than pleasant trip to City Hall, Aurelia set off at once to buy a wig. She scurried down the street, taking note of her stride, trying to inure herself in every possible way to the challenge of becoming someone else. She tried on various facial contortions, and finally settled temporarily on pursed lips and wide eyes, an arrangement that, while relatively easy to maintain, would never be associated with her former self.

The wig shop was a small boutique located in the back of a posh beauty salon. Aurelia, tight-lipped, shuffled across the floor, which was not easy, considering that the floor had been waxed four times in the past two hours.  Entering the back room, she found wigs of every color, cut, size, and texture perched on the heads of pasty mannequins. Aurelia eyed these plastic women with her chin outstretched, and they eyed her back with commensurate suspicion.

Nina and Simon, the co-operators of the shop, hesitantly approached Aurelia, who whirled around and grinned broadly into their stern expressions. To the shopkeepers, Aurelia’s crescent-moon smile seemed vaguely familiar, though neither of them could place how. And Aurelia, still agleam like a Cheshire cat, caught herself.

The pair introduced themselves or something, but Aurelia couldn’t hear a word of it over the sound of adrenaline pulsing in her blood. “How may I help you?” Nina asked for the second time, rousing Aurelia from her trance with a sharp, unwavering glare. Aurelia blinked once and turned to leave, uttering several mismatched words of apology on her way to the door. Leaving a sentence unfinished, she slipped back into the beauty parlor and crossed hastily back to the cobblestone street. Although she would never be back to this neighborhood, Aurelia would for a time linger over Nina’s severe expression, and agonize over it for minutes at a time, trying to replicate it for her own guise.