“Okay,” I said. “Seth, read your line again and try to put some real affection into it. Then touching her face will come from a whole context of emotions and might not feel so forced. Go ahead. The actual proposal.”
I’d discovered, in the short time I’d been a play director, that acting had as much to do with psychology as with stage technique and vocal production. This had come as a relief to me, as I had much more experience with being an armchair psychologist than with teaching amateur actors to become juvenile De Niros and Hepburns.
Seth’s tall frame hunched a little as he first read the words silently, then attempted to speak them. “Will you marry this foolish, frightened old man, who needs you more than he can bear to say, and loves you even though he hardly knows how?”
“To which you reply, with feeling . . .” I prompted Kate.
She dutifully said her line. “Okay. Just this once.”
It was the Edsel of proposals, the Pacer of all things intimate. “All right, Seth,” I sighed, “what do you think was wrong with that?”
He looked at me as if I’d asked him for the square root of an astronomical number.
I tried another tack. “What’s missing that would make it sound like an adult man who is finally—at long last—asking the woman he loves to marry him?”
“How’s he supposed to know?” Kate asked in frustration. “He’s not a man yet!”
I was just about to lecture her on respecting her castmate when she caught sight of something over my shoulder and rose from the table, waving her arms.
“Hey, Coach Taylor! Coach Taylor!”
I froze. In fact, I think my lungs might have suffered some sudden-onset frostbite because for a moment there, they felt like they didn’t really want to work anymore.
“What’s up?”
I turned to find Scott sauntering up to the table in a tracksuit and a knit hat. I assumed my best nonchalant voice. “Kate, I’m sure Coach Taylor has other things to—”
“If you were an adult man . . . ,” Kate interrupted, blushing when Scott tilted his head a little and gave her a look. “I mean, since you are an adult man, tell us how you would do it if you were proposing to a woman who was dying of cancer.”
“Sounds cheerful.” Poor Scott. He did a great job of not, say, busting out laughing and leaving the cafeteria as fast as he could. He did, however, get that I’m-about-to-launch-into-a-yodel look I’d seen before, so I knew there was some laughter in there somewhere. I felt a little sorry for him, but I felt sorrier for myself. I just wasn’t very good at real-life awkward situations. I preferred them on a stage.
“Please feel free to tell Kate to find another guinea pig,” I told him. What I really wanted to say was, “This was not my idea and I’d really rather not have to deal with you.” I turned on Kate. “This isn’t Coach Taylor’s problem, Kate; it’s yours and Seth’s. So how ’bout we concentrate on the two people who can actually do something about it?”
“What are the lines?” Scott asked, pulling a chair up to the table and sitting on it backward.
“Don’t you have a practice to run?” I asked as Seth handed him his script and Kate pointed to Lewis’s proposal.
“They’re running the Wolfsschlucht,” he said, referring to the cross-country course in the woods behind the school. “Besides, I haven’t been in a play since high school, so this might be fun.”
“You used to act?” This from Seth—with a little more desperation than he’d probably intended.
“Scott, really, if—”
“Wow. Pretty serious stuff,” he said, ignoring my second attempt at allowing him to leave. He glanced at Seth. “So you’re telling her you want to marry her?”
“He’s supposed to be,” Kate interjected.
“And you’re supposed to love her—I mean really love her. Like a guy who finally gets the guts to propose. Right?”
“Guts is the key word there, Seth. Guts.” Kate was on a roll.
I, on the other hand, was not. My body was anchored to my chair and so, apparently, was my brain. I wasn’t sure what was most traumatic at that moment: Kate’s behavior, my inability to change the situation, Seth’s bordering-on-physical discomfort, or the fact that Scott—whom I really did not want to know—was about to utter intimate words in what I feared would be a powerful way. I didn’t want to be there to witness it. At all. But I did have an overwhelming craving