The Crane Test

The ladder up the crane leg was the worst thing I had climbed in years, and I climb things for a living, sort of. Noel went first, calling down foot positions as a tour guide with a grudge might. I was forty-three years old and my knees had their own judgments, but I kept them to myself because he was already twenty rungs up and laughing.

"Left foot on the bolt plate, not the loose one," he called. "The loose one lies."

"Everything about this is a lie," I shouted up at him. "You told me we were getting coffee."

"We are getting coffee. There's a thermos up top."

"You live in a crane leg now? That's the most actor thing you've ever done."

He stuck his head over the catwalk rail, upside down, grinning at me. "I don't live in it. I just know the guy who has the keys."

"That's worse. That's somehow worse."

He reached down and gripped my wrist as I came over the last rung, and for a second I was hanging there with my whole weight on his arm, and he hauled me up onto the platform like I weighed nothing, which was flattering and also a lie. The catwalk was narrow and gritty, rusty grit under my shoes, and the wind came through the steel around us with this low hum, like the crane was humming to itself about something. Below us the ferry terminal sat in the glare, all the little cars lined up waiting. The air smelled like salt and old grease.

"Okay," I said, catching my breath. "Okay, fine. The view is stupid good. You win."

"I always win. That's my whole personality." He had a folding stool, an actual folding stool, and he set it down and sat on it like a man on a bus stop bench. "Sit. Careful of the ledge, there's gear on it."

I sat on the rail side, which he probably would have told me not to do, and looked out at the water. Noel was forty-two now, and the last time I'd seen him we were both in our twenties, in an improv group in Florence that met above a dry cleaner. He'd gone some practical direction I never expected from him. Wildlife survey work, in Tuscany, of all places. He looked the same mostly. Same easy slouch. Gray coming in at the temples like he'd earned it on purpose.

"So," I said. "Wildlife trust. Explain the job again, because last time you texted it to me I assumed it was a joke."

"It is not a joke. It is a career." He held up one finger, deadpan, the old improv hold-up-the-scene gesture. "I survey wolf scat. For a Tuscan wildlife trust. I hike transects, I find scat, I log the scat, I send the scat data to people with better degrees than mine."

"You are proud of this."

"I am extremely proud of this. Do you know how hard it is to find wolf scat? Wolves are secretive. I am good at finding things that don't want to be found. It's a skill. Some people do crosswords."

I laughed, harder than the joke deserved, honestly, and he knew it and looked pleased. That was Noel's defining trait. He always knew exactly how funny a moment was and calibrated himself to it.

"Eighteen years," I said, before I could stop myself. "Eighteen years of auditions where they say 'great, thanks, we'll be in touch' and then they are never in touch. I did a commercial last month where I had to smile at a jar of sauce for four hours. The sauce got a name. I did not get a name."

"Ouch."

"Three lines in a thing that shot two days and my scene got cut. My agent stopped returning calls, which I think is her way of returning calls. I'm in Pienza for a short film that may not even be a film, it might be a very long ad. So." I spread my hands. "That's the state of Shelly. Dry spell, professionally. Utterly, historically dry."

"Professionally dry is the worst kind," he said gravely, and I laughed again.

He reached over to the ledge and picked up something, holding it up between two fingers. It was a flat, curved piece of bone, smooth, about the length of my hand, shaped a little like a butter knife that had given up.

"What is that?"

"Bone folder. For smoothing leather straps on my gear. Camera harness, pack straps, you burnish the edges so they don't chew your shoulders. It's older than both of us and it works better than anything plastic."

I picked it up off the ledge. It had a good weight, warm from sitting in the sun, and it fit my hand exactly right, and something old lit up in my brain, some muscle from the dry cleaner loft that had not been used in years.

"En garde," I said, and held it out like a rapier.

"Oh no," Noel said, delighted.

"No, no, wait!" I dropped into a stance that was ninety percent memory and ten percent knee pain. "'Thou art a villain, sir, and I shall brook no, ' what's a word. 'No scat-based slander in my house.'"

"My house," he said, standing. "It's my crane."

"The crane is my house now. Possession. Eighteen years of boulevard theater technique, Noel, do not test me." I lunged, an absurd little lunge, and he batted the bone folder away with one finger and I did a slow, dignified stumble into the rail.

"You're rusty," he said.

"I'm antique. There's a difference. Antiques are valuable."

"You're valuable," he agreed, and something in the way he said it hung there a half second longer than it needed to. I sat back down and put the bone folder in my lap like a trophy.

That was when my phone buzzed in my pocket, and I nearly dropped it over the side getting it out. I read the alert twice.

"Ferry's canceled," I said. "Rogue wave warning. They closed the terminal."

"Rogue wave warning," Noel repeated, in the voice of a man receiving excellent news he had not earned. He leaned back against the crane leg with his arms crossed, grinning at me like the cat from the storybooks. "Guess you're stuck with me."

"The wind is howling through this leg like a kazoo choir and you're grinning."

"I'm grinning because you're stuck with me and I have a thermos."

The mood did shift, I'll say that. Not dramatically. It was more like the light changed when a cloud went over, and you notice it without being able to say when. We were two adults, forty-three and forty-two, sitting in a steel tube over a closed ferry terminal, and we had both remembered, at the same moment probably, the party at Matteo's place, all those years ago, the brief tipsy kiss against a wall of coats that neither of us had ever mentioned since. I didn't mention it now either. I looked at the water instead, which was not behaving.

Noel poured coffee into the thermos cup and handed it over, and I drank it even though it was terrible, because manners.

"So," he said. "Since we're stuck."

"Since we're stuck."

"I have a test for you. A performance test. Half joke, mostly joke, but a test."

"Noel."

"A line-read test. One line. Any scene, any play, you pick, doesn't matter which. But the rule is you deliver it as close to me as you can get. Right up close. That is the entire test. Can you still act at point-blank range, or has the sauce jar ruined you."

I looked at him. He was doing the deadpan face, the one from the old days, where he proposed something insane with total calm and dared you to be the one to make it weird. He was very good at making insanity feel safe.