West Wing FF: This Wartime Morality (Sam/Toby, PG-13, AU)
Title: This Wartime Morality
Fandom: West Wing
Pairing: Sam/Toby (and background Josh/Donna, CJ/Danny and Jed/Abbey)
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama/AU
Length: 10,000 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin&Wells.
Spoilers: None, other than some very loose character history
Podfic Version: Here. Just tell me if the link doesn't work.
Summary: Theatre AU in 1950s Chicago for zauberer_sirin in TWW AU Ficathon. Play-writing during McCarthyism, and how to hide yourself in art.
AN: Title from "Loving in the War Years" by Cherrie L Moraga. ("this war time morality/ where being queer/ and female/ is as warrior/ as we can get) Inspiration, obvious and sadly otherwise, from Good Night and Good Luck, DC's New Frontier, The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol.3, FiftiesWeb, Encyclopedia of Chicago, and the people who have been kind enough to let me production manage their shows. Any remaining errors or anachronisms are the fault of me, creative licence, or possibly Wikipedia!
Chicago, August 6th 1956
“Toby!”
“I don’t need help.”
“Toby.”
“Yes?”
“You need help.”
“Leo-”
“You promised us something weeks ago. You got Jed all fired up about how great this was going to be. It’s been a tough year - if you can’t get it done on your own, let me get someone in to give you a hand.”
“I don’t need a hand.”
“Well that’s fine, Toby. But he’ll be here in twenty-six minutes, and I expect you to at least be civil.”
“Leo!”
“No more arguments. Get it done.”
“Leo. What’s his name? The kid?” Leo handed him a sheet of paper. “Samuel Norman Seaborn of Huntington Beach, Orange County, California. Sounds like just the kind of man who needs the aid of gainful employment in the theatre. Toby Ziegler, Leo McGarry, and Samuel Norman Seaborn-”
“Josiah Bartlet.” Jed had followed Leo to Toby’s office. “Or does that not fit with your view of the theatre as a refuge for the downtrodden immigrant population? You realise that Leo’s worth more than I am? And CJ’s from California too, should I tell her that her services are no longer required?”
“Mr Bartlet,” Toby said.
“Be civil, Toby. He’s just a kid.”
“I make no promises.”
Sam, in fact, turned up within fifteen minutes. He took Toby’s hand with a slight smile and explained, “I was worried I’d be late.”
* * * *
Leo looked at Jed, catching his shoulder as Sam trotted ahead, and Toby lagged back. “You’re sure about this?”
“Leo? When have I ever steered you wrong?”
“You really want to start on that now? Because I don’t think we have that kind of time.”
Jed glared, and then shook his head pityingly. “Leo, Leo, Leo… One of these days, maybe some day soon, you’re going to see what I’m doing here. And on that day, I’m gonna be just as condescending about my foresight as you are about your hindsight.”
“I’ll take that under consideration. Now - Toby?”
“Toby needs someone to talk to.”
“Because he’s in the sixth grade?”
“You see what he’s like, locked up in that office. He needs help.”
“I’m not disputing that, but when he asks, I don’t want you to tell him that you hired him a new friend. Come to think of it, don’t tell the producers that either.”
Sam breathed in sharply when they came into the auditorium. He trailed a hand lovingly over the plaster and gold mouldings. Jed watched as Sam’s gaze drifted, inexorably, to the stage. It was set up for a touring company at the moment - Lear, which seemed an odd choice for mid-summer, but that wasn’t his call. With the working lights on, the set looked over-painted, gaudy, but the kid didn’t seem to care.
Backstage, a door opened. “Is somebody there?” the voice called.
“Claudia Jean,” Jed answered.
“Hello, Mr Bartlet.”
“Would you come down here a moment?”
She ducked her head to get through the door in the set, closing it with the care of someone who knew exactly how fragile it was. “Hi, Leo. Toby”
“Good morning, CJ,” Leo answered. “This is Sam Seaborn - he’s helping Toby out with the new show.”
She grinned, and came lightly down the steps onto the carpeted floor. Extending a hand, she introduced herself. “Hey Sam. I’m the Production Manager of this little circus. So I’m the one - sadly - who’s going to be forced to tell you that we can’t burn Rome every night, no matter how dramatically satisfying it would be. Ditto a rainbow of lights, a seventy-two piece orchestra, and any moving piece of set larger than a small car. No boats,” she added as an afterthought.
He smiled back at her. “You’re not a fan of pyrotechnics?”
“I’m a huge fan of them, as it happens. Just not in my theatre. You want to blow things up, go to Broadway, where someone not me can stop it setting the curtains on fire.”
“I’ll bear that in mind. But, really, I’m just here to help Toby - he’s the one you’d need to warn.”
“CJ,” Jed broke in, “Stop scaring my writers.”
* * * *
Toby scared Sam a little. This was not entirely unexpected. Toby Ziegler was a genius - one of the few writers outside of New York so renowned as to warrant a permanent place in a company. That was the first thing he was known for. The second was his inability to work with others.
“Writing isn’t a collaborative process,” he had bitten out in Mr Bartlet’s direction, as they had toured the theatre.
Sam restrained himself from an instinctive response - listing of all the current writing partnerships in theatre. He understood, really, that what Toby had meant was that he didn’t want a collaborator. That writing scripts was personal; the creation of something unique and crystalline and perfect. It didn’t lend itself to introductory chatter around the water cooler, or even over the cups of coffee that the blushing redhead brought in after them.
“Thank you,” he said. “Sam Seaborn.”
“Ginger,” she answered. “I’m Toby’s secretary. And yours too?”
“I don’t know…”
Toby said, “Ginger’s the one who knows how to use the mimeograph. If you need copies of your pages of the script.”
“I’ll be right outside. If you need something,” she said.
“A copy of the script so far?”
Sam didn’t miss the querying look she gave Toby, who nodded, and gave her leave to bring him the work-in-progress.
Toby looked Sam up and down. “Is there a reason you’re standing there looking at me?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Sit down.”
Sam had noted the other desk as he came in, but not connected it to himself. It had obviously been recently cleared - the pile of books and papers on the floor had been swept off it hurriedly. The typewriter was unused, its cover still lying beside it on the desk. He sat down behind the desk and held his fingers above the unworn keys.
“If you can start writing without knowing the plot, then maybe you are as good as Jed kept telling me,” Toby said dryly. His accent was just distinct enough to be noted, no awkward pronunciations or missteps. That fitted.
“Do you want to tell me the plot? Or, I’m sorry, how much you still need to do?”
“It’s a script. It’ll be done when it’s done.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, I agree with you? But Mr Bartlet seemed to be under the impression that you were stuck at a particular point.”
“It’ll be on the desk by lunch. Why don’t you go for a walk? Find your way around the theatre.”
Sam took the dismissal as it was intended, and stood to leave. The keys of Toby’s typewriter made a clattering counterpoint to the door closing behind him.
He met CJ again on the way backstage. Her smile was sympathetic as she led him to the techies’ domain. Margaret, another tall woman, another redhead, greeted CJ with a numbered list of concerns about the prop store. This was CJ’s stage manager. Sam found himself having to duck into doorways and press himself against walls as black-clothed people hurried up and down the narrow corridors.
The company actors, CJ explained, were mostly out of the building at the moment, while the tour was in the theatre. The technicians and production team were still here. She shoved a rail of costumes out of the way before pushing him ahead of her up the steps to the stage. Sam stood in the dimly-lit wings, reading the cheerful graffiti on the offstage side of the wooden set. Opening the door was like walking into the auditorium all over again.
CJ placed a hand on his elbow. “Don’t worry about Toby.”
“I wasn’t…”
“Sam.”
“I was just admiring the theatre.”
CJ smiled, different from the laughing grin or pitying quirk of lips he had warranted before. She walked downstage with him to the mark on the forestage, as if they would share a soliloquy. He could imagine an expectant hush, the painted rafters waiting to be hit with sound.
She touched his arm again. “Yeah, you’re gonna fit in fine. Don’t worry about Toby.”
* * * *
August 7th 1956
The morning after he had been given a partner without his consent, Toby got in late. His office - their office, he reminded himself - was empty.
There was a stack of pages on Sam’s desk. He recognised the script from the shape of the words on the front page. What he didn’t recognise were the tight curves of black ink climbing up the margins. It wasn’t Jed or Leo, neither of whom could be sending notes at this stage anyway. It had to be the kid, but he checked anyway, reaching for the abandoned black jacket on Sam’s chair for something to make a comparison. Toby put a hand into the inside pocket before he had thought about it, bringing out a battered reporters notebook.
The handwriting matched - of course it did. He checked the script again. Sam had been given, assuming Ginger had given him all that she had been given, most of the first act, and the middle scenes of the second act. He had left behind annotated copies of the first act, and the latest scene of the second. With three pages, now that Toby was shuffling them, of dialogue that hadn’t been given to him by anyone. It was titled, handwritten rather than typed, Act 1, scene v.
“Ginger!”
She poked her head around the door. “Yes?”
“Where is he?”
“I’m sorry?”
Toby waved at the empty desk. “Our new addition.”
“He got in before I did this morning.”
He waited patiently. “And where is he now?”
“He went for a cup of coffee an hour ago. He didn’t say when he’d be back.”
“Ginger?”
“Toby?”
“This wouldn’t be the first time you’ve felt obligated to hide someone who fully deserved my ire.”
She shook her head, fine red strands brushing rapidly over her face. “I don’t know where he is, Toby, I’m sorry.”
There were plenty of places within a block’s radius that served good coffee. Still, Toby went down the two flights of stairs and found CJ.
“Have you seen Sam Seaborn?”
“The new one?”
“Well, he’s the only Sam Seaborn, CJ, but he started yesterday, yes.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I’ve seen him.”
“Recently?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to, perhaps, tell me where he is?”
“Not particularly.”
“CJ…”
“Follow me.”
She led him down the backstage corridor to where the steps went back up to the auditorium level. CJ pushed him upwards, and didn’t follow after.
Toby saw the movement and heard the scrape of the pen before he could make out the shadow as a person, crouched under a backstage light. Sam was sitting in the corner of the stage left wing, lit in low blue and surrounded by taped coils of cable and stage weights. When Toby got close enough he became pretty sure that Sam was actually sitting on a stack of weights.
A pale face turned up to look at him. “Toby.”
“Tell me why you changed this,” Toby said, standing in front of Sam and giving him one of the altered pages.
Sam was looking at him through the haze of the light, still halfway lost in the pages on his knee, the pages Toby now wanted to read. His eyes were very blue, shuttered in the next moment by a slow blink. “I only added three lines.”
“Why did you add them, and why those three?”
“Were they wrong?”
“Sam.”
“Because I think you dodged the point. You hovered around it, and the audience need to hear it out loud, if the rest is going to make any kind of sense to them.”
“I see we’re not crediting the audience with a good deal of intelligence.”
“Toby.”
“Which point is it, then, that I’m missing?”
“Not missing,” Sam was quick to correct. “Just not writing. He’s alone, Toby. In the middle of people who have no idea, and he can’t explain it to them. But unless you let the audience in, just a little…” His hand jerked awkwardly, as if he had been about to wave it in Toby’s direction, to draw a peak across the stage. “Then they’re just more people who have no idea.”
“Get up.”
Sam stood, bracing himself nervously against the wall.
Toby left the stage, hearing Sam follow close behind him.
“Ginger!” he said, climbing the stairs to their office.
She appeared at the top of the staircase and looked down at them curiously. “Coffee?”
“Yes, also, I need a copy of this with the amendments.” Toby passed her the page that Sam had changed.
In the office, Sam sat on the edge of his desk, watching Toby. Waiting for something, and this time Toby allowed it.
“You need to remember that we’re not the actors,” Toby said.
“Okay.”
“Josh Lyman will be playing the lead. They’ll audition, but he’ll get it, because he’s the best male in the company. Don’t ever tell him that.”
“Okay,” Sam repeated.
“He’s… He doesn’t need as many words as we do. Your three lines are enough - he’ll run with that, and you’ll get the audience wherever you want them. But you were right.”
“Excuse me?”
“We needed the three lines. Now talk to me about this scene you want to add.”
* * * *
August 9th 1956
Charlie came into the office. “Mr Bartlet?”
“Yes, Charlie, what is it?”
“There’s a man on the telephone looking to talk to you about Sam Seaborn.”
“Did he say what it was about?”
Charlie shrugged. “He said he was Sam’s landlord.”
“Transfer the call in.” Charlie nodded, and left the office. Jed picked up the phone as it rang. A few minutes later, hanging up, he called Charlie back in. “Get Sam Seaborn up here, would you?”
Sam responded to the summons with gratifying speed, looking worried. When he was pointed towards a seat, he looked even more concerned. “Sir?”
“Asking you to call me Jed isn’t going to help right now, is it?”
“I’m sorry?”
Jed sighed, and adjusted the top-button of his vest. After a moment, he pointed towards the telephone. “I just received a very strange call from your new landlord.”
Sam tried to speak.
Jed interrupted, “Among other non-specific concerns, he wanted to check that you were, in fact, one of my employees. Something about having to hunt in the corners of your wallet to come up with the deposit.”
“Mr Bartlet, I’m very sorry that you had to waste your time on a call like…”
“Sam. I didn’t bring you up here to tell you not to use the company as a reference. You’re employed here - I’m entirely willing to confirm that fact to your rather suspicious landlord.”
“So, if I may, why did you want to see me?”
“Are you doing alright?”
“I’m sorry?”
“We haven’t really had a chance to talk since you started here, Sam. New city, new job, you have to share an office with Toby Ziegler who, on his best days, eats new writers for breakfast… Do you need an advance on your wages?”
“Excuse me? No, sir, I’m fine, thank you for the offer, but no. It’s fine.”
“Damn. I really thought if I threw that on the end there you might not notice.”
Sam continued to watch him, face flushed now, hands curled tight around the edge of the desk. Wounded pride and something else.
“Okay then. Do you want to sit in on some auditions in a few weeks?”
The abrupt change of topic took Sam by surprise, and he took a long moment to answer, “For this show?”
“Yes indeed.”
“Don’t you need a completed script for that?”
“Well, that would help, but - and don’t tell anyone this - Toby scares me. I don’t think I’d make it out of your office intact after asking that question. We’re auditioning new actresses for the company. Josh needs a new playmate - he sent the last one running for flirting with him during the show.”
Sam laughed, and covered it up with his hand.
“I see you’ve met our lead actor?” Jed asked.
“Not yet, Mr Bartlet - just stories.”
“Josh is a good kid. But his track record with his leading ladies… We need someone who can stand up to him. Otherwise it all ends up like the first act of Kiss Me Kate. You’ll come along?”
“I don’t know what I’d contribute,” Sam equivocated. He paused. “But, if you’d like me there, of course I-”
Jed drummed his hands on the table. “Good, that’s settled then. Now, you should go back downstairs before Toby comes looking. I wouldn’t want to damage the creative process.”
Sam stood up from the chair, still looking like someone who knew he had dodged a bullet, and wasn’t sure how.
Jed waited until the young man was almost out of the door before he spoke. He didn’t look up from his papers, didn’t want to see the look on Sam’s face. “Sam. Do you know why this theatre is in Chicago? It’s because I was training to be a priest. And then, even though I didn’t keep it up, I taught in a school that trained other young men to be priests. In the course of which I decided that I was unwilling to enter the army, or to encourage the boys in my care to do so. The theatre is in Chicago because when it became obvious that the family finances were not going to be bequeathed my direction, a good friend of mine asked me to come to his hometown and do what we had always talked about doing.”
“Mr Bartlet.”
“I won’t ask you again, son, but you know where I am if you need me.”
A long, charged, silence that could have gone either way, and then: “Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
* * * *
August 10th 1956
It was long past the point where Sam could pretend that he had just lost track of the time. The streets outside their window were almost silent - gone were the drunks and partygoers; he felt as if they might be the only people awake in the city.
But he couldn’t get up, couldn’t leave. Not when Toby’s words were tied around him, binding his wrists as close as shackles, holding him to his desk: caricature of the author-as-zealot. Chains that ran slender as the ink from Toby’s pen; his beautiful, transcendental prose burnt into Sam’s skin. Made of words but tying him unbreakably to this man of flesh. Toby sighed.
“Okay?” Sam asked in a whisper.
“You’re too quiet.”
“You told me to be quiet.”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“Not this quiet. It’s unnerving.”
“I’m sorry?” he tried, though Toby didn’t seem to place much worth on his apologies.
It didn’t matter, Toby was talking out loud, something he had been doing more and more, recently. “We have a setting.”
“New England, mid seventeenth century.”
“We have a cast-list.”
“We do?”
“We have most of a cast-list.”
“We have half a script.”
“And therein lies the problem,” Toby said.
“Yes.”
“There’s no third act.”
“No,” Sam agreed.
“This is the biggest problem.”
“What happens in the third act?” Sam asked.
“What happens…? Sam, nothing happens in the third act - there is no third act! It doesn’t exist in some magical…”
This, sadly, was not the loudest Toby had yelled at him tonight. That had come after an incident with the overuse of adverbs and a too-long delay between cups of coffee. It was, Sam hoped, a testament to Toby’s still-unexplained desire to keep him around the building that he hadn’t been fired yet. As was the fact that he had not yet commented on Sam moving the desks to face each other. He tried again. “What do you want to happen in the third act?”
Toby sighed. “If I knew that, Sam…” He looked down at his legal pad.
Sam’s worry was that Toby knew exactly what was supposed to happen next. Their script and Toby’s story, Sam’s story too, though Toby didn’t know it - he could see the lines. The connections that twisted angry and raw from Toby’s flight from his own home, from Sam’s exile, into their words of loss and homelessness and pilgrimage. Their immigrant story. That was why their lead wasn’t a pilgrim, wasn’t one of the celebrated American heroes who they were taught had built the country. Instead he was one of those who came later, to a place already formed that had left no room for him.
The play needed an ending to make sense of all that, and neither of them could see that far yet. Not when reality blared through the radio and television each day in the form of hearings and news-reports, intruding into their proscenium-arched idyll.
Toby was absent-mindedly twisting the ring on his wedding finger.
“Toby?” Sam asked. “I meant to ask.” (Not quite a lie, he had meant to ask, but he had been afraid. Had decided against so foolish a move.)
“What?”
“Are you married?”
“I was.”
“You’re divorced?”
“Widowed is the term, I would think.”
“God, Toby, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“I know.”
“Was she…?” And this was the question there really was no way to ask, so he simply trailed off, leaving Toby to answer or not, as he chose.
Toby coughed, and passed a fist over his eyes. “She died giving birth to our son. Sometimes these things just happen. It isn’t always grand tragedy, Sam. Sometimes just a little one.”
“It’s not…”
“It was a long time ago. A year before I left, and that will be twenty years ago by the time this show opens. If it ever gets so far. But I think we should call it a night.”
“Toby, if I… I’m sorry.”
A hand was dropped heavily on Sam’s shoulder as he sought more words. Toby patted his arm, above the rolled-up shirtsleeves. “It’s okay. I’ll see you on Monday.”
* * * *
August 13th 1956
Sam had moved the desks, Toby thought. Where once they had both pointed loosely at the open door, now the second was tilted towards Toby’s own.
When he looks up now, it is often to find Sam watching him with a curiously intent expression. Expectant, Toby would call it, if he knew what to do with that piece of information. Happy, sometimes, if that word could encompass the moment just before Sam looked down, aiming a smile at his typewriter instead. As if Toby would ignite under the full strength of that smile, the unabashed admiration of this man who has talent of his own to burn.
So yes, perhaps, occasionally, the watching is somewhat mutual. Toby looks up and is distracted by the slant of Sam’s shoulders curled towards his notebook - stance that would seem awkward in anyone else. Maybe Toby had simply already got used to seeing him like that - head bent low over the script, and chewing on his pen.
He didn’t notice her entering the office.
“I hear you have a part for me.”
“Mrs Bartlet.”
“Abbey, Toby, please. How long have we known each other? Now: part?”
“I’m sure you could play whichever part you’d like, ma’am.”
“Very flattering, Toby, very nice, but I hear you have a part suited to my particular talents? As opposed to the talents of the poor girl who has to play opposite Joshua?”
He nodded, but she was already looking past him to the back of the office. Sam had raised his head to watch the byplay, still with a pen dripping ink in his hand.
Abbey walked over to him. “And this must be the young wordsmith.”
Pink crept along Sam’s high cheekbones. “I’m helping Toby, ma’am, yes.”
“Don’t be so modest, Sam.”
“I don’t know what Mr Bartlet has told you, ma’am, but-”
She leant in close over his shoulder, and Toby could hear clearly what she whispered in his ear. “My husband wasn’t the one to say it.”
Toby ducked away from the pointed look she gave him; from Sam’s confused expression.
“Abbey,” he said. “The town-founder, yes?”
“You couldn’t get me a nice role as a Governor?”
“If you want me to change history, yes. Otherwise…”
“So instead I get to be Elizabeth Poole?”
“She isn’t-”
“If you’re trying to tell me that your inexplicably female town-founder is not in some way based on the first female town-founder in this country, Toby, then I’m-”
“The fact that she existed allows me to posit a second, yes, Abbey. But you aren’t playing Elizabeth Poole. As her purported perpetual virginity would hinder her role as mother of our love interest somewhat.”
“Don’t get smart with me.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t ma’am me either. And be nice to Sam.”
Toby turned to look at Sam without intending to. Sam had been watching their interplay with interest, and Toby suspected that he might have been taking notes. When he looked back at Abbey, she was smiling at him.
“I’ll see you later,” she said. “Have fun.”
* * * *
August 14th 1956
He didn’t know why he had lifted the newspaper up. Toby read The New York Times and Washington Post, but he also read The Forward, and Sam’s knowledge of Yiddish began and ended with Toby’s insults. But it was another late night, and he had begun flicking through the paper while Toby read over their latest scene.
He recognised the picture with the heavy black border, and the Gregorian dates were given. “Toby?” Sam said.
“Yeah?”
Sam passed him the paper. “Brecht died.”
They disagreed about Brecht. More specifically, they disagreed about how Toby felt about Brecht’s plays. Toby claimed to like them, where Sam insisted that it could be no more than admiration for the method. Sam didn’t believe in alienation, he didn’t believe in deliberately cutting off the audience’s emotional reaction in favour of the critical response. But then he and Toby disagreed about a lot of things.
Toby had read the article. “They say he lied to the Committee. ”
“Even Galileo recanted,” Sam said quietly.
“Did you see-?”
“In LA? Yeah.”
“Even Brecht-“
“He didn’t-“
“He said he had never been a member.”
“And so would I, if they asked - that doesn’t mean I’m a coward, it means I wasn’t a member.”
“He was.”
“Sam.”
“He was, Toby. Brecht? He was a member. Maybe he wasn’t when he died, but before? He lied to the Committee. But that’s not important - they all promised not to answer the question.”
The look in Toby’s eyes was almost pity, and Sam could hate him for such knowing condescension. He knew his words were childlike; an atheist’s declaration of broken faith. He knew his world was supposed to be subjective, a defence of the multiplicity of believing - right up until the moment when an action was simply wrong. And Toby smiled.
“What?” Sam asked.
“Nothing, Sam.”
“There are things worth...”
“Sam.”
“…worth dying for.”
“I’m sure the committee would agree with that sentiment. You’ll be able to ask them yourself if you keep talking like that.”
“Toby.”
“Don’t talk to any reporters, Sam, okay? Not like this.”
He took a deep breath, and forced a laugh. “The reporters never want to talk to me, Toby. Unless it’s to ask when Toby Ziegler’s latest opus is going to be done. I’m not going to get you into trouble.”
Toby put the paper behind him on the floor and pulled his chair close to Sam’s, sharing the script. “Not what I’m worried about,” he muttered.
* * * *
August 17th 1956
“Toby?” The voice on the line was small and young and took a moment to place. (Liar: the half second of breath had been enough to tell.)
“Sam. It’s…” Toby looked at the clock beside his bed, “too late for whatever this is.”
“Toby. Toby… please, can you come get me?”
His back creaked as he rolled out of bed, but there was no other adequate response to such a request. “What did you do?”
“Toby. I need… I need you to bail me out.”
Toby swore quietly into the silence of Sam not explaining himself, and not laughing it off. “Sam.”
“No, Toby, it’s fine, I’ll get someone else to…”
“One phone call, Samuel, or am I misreading the subtext here? You want to tell me what you did before I get down there?”
“I didn’t do anything! There was… I was in a bar.”
“And then you miraculously reappeared in a jail-cell?”
“Toby. Please can you just…? I’ll get you the money, I promise, but can you please come and get me? I’m-”
“Sam. Sam! Stop talking. I’m on my way. I’ll be there soon.”
They exchanged four sentences in the time between Toby’s arrival at the station and the car pulling up in front of Sam’s building. Toby followed Sam up to the apartment because he wasn’t sure what else to do.
The outsides of the buildings were completely different, but the inside of Sam’s apartment nonetheless looked something like Toby’s. Brighter, perhaps, and certainly smaller, but close enough. Books piled up in the absence of adequate shelving, and a pen on every surface even though Toby knew - could see, in fact - that there was another pen in Sam’s jacket pocket.
Toby thumbed the spines of the books on the shelves while Sam hung up their coats.
“Sam,” he said, stuck on the unbelievable stupidity of this.
“Yeah?” Sam’s voice was still quiet.
“The manifesto? Seriously, Sam, you can’t leave this out here. You shouldn’t…”
“It’s just a book, Toby.”
“It is not just a book, Sam. It’s just a book that could get you blacklisted.”
“Yes, well, up until today, there wasn’t much of a reason to raid my apartment.”
“Sam…” Because he hadn’t asked yet, or hadn’t got the answer, and the officer at the station hadn’t been inclined to tell him why Sam had been pulled in.
“Do you know what the book is sitting beside?” Sam asked, ignoring Toby’s question. “Locke wrote about the right to revolution too, you know. As did… if I published the Declaration of Independence today, I would be arrested. ‘The right of the people to alter or abolish…’”
“Sam!” Breathing too hard now, because there was either too much trust, or too little care. He could ruin the kid with less than what he had just confessed. This new weight, unasked for and undesired, hung round his neck. Toby asked the next question anyway: “Why were you pulled in?”
“I told you. I was in a bar.”
“And…?”
“A guy.” The furtive look, a down-turned face when Sam always looked him defiantly in the eye. “Invited me out to a bar to get a few drinks after work. The police came. That’s all.”
“What happened to the guy?”
Sam looked up, caught out in a moment of surprise at the question. He looked down again. “I don’t know. I think he got out when the police turned up.”
“Doesn’t sound like a great friend.”
“We’d only just met.”
“And he asked you out for beer?”
“I don’t know a lot of people, Toby! I just… he asked, and I was… I’d had a long day, and I don’t know anyone in Chicago.”
“You know what you do next time? You say: ‘Toby, it’s been a long day, why don’t you come get a drink with me?’”
“Toby.”
“You do not, you do not follow strange men to bars that get raided by policemen!”
“Toby, would you please-?”
“This is both of us, Sam.”
“Toby?”
“If you… if they came into this place, they could stop you working. There are too many people up the chain between you and me, and getting our show on the stage. And they aren’t all… What you told me, what you let me know, if it hadn’t been me you were telling…” He stopped. “They could stop the show opening.”
The words still hung between them. All unsaid, and nonetheless present for that. He put a hand to Sam’s mouth, before the ones he couldn’t take back would leave it.
“Next time,” Toby said, “ask me.”
Sam nodded against the palm of Toby’s hand, the motion curling Toby’s fingers around his cheek like a caress.
* * * *
August 20th 1956
There was only so long that Jed would be willing to wait without hearing the rest of the script. The final scenes still weren’t ready, but telling him that hadn’t dissuaded him. He sat in their office, taking up too much space, too loud and too vivid for their quiet little room. Sam was in high school again, wanting to hide from the bright spotlight of adult attention.
“I don’t suppose either of you feel inclined to tell me what it’s about? Of course, what do I know, I’m only the director...”
Sam wasn’t entirely sure how to answer. He wasn’t entirely sure they had a plot, yet.
Toby twisted his hands where they lay on the desk, and didn’t say anything.
Jed looked from one of them to the other.
“It’s about…” Sam tried, “about a man emigrating from…” Mr Bartlet already knew this part, but he didn’t know what else to say.
Toby passed him the pages they had written today. “You read Charles.”
“I… you’re Cha…”
“You read Charles,” Toby said again.
His voice jumped and stuttered over the words, as if they were not his own - his and Toby’s - as if he couldn’t read them. Sam closed his eyes and recited; without seeing the uneven type and Toby’s even stare, he could get to the end of the speech.
He felt, rather than saw, Jed take the page from his hands. With his eyes open again, Sam watched Mr Bartlet scan the rest of the scene.
“This is where you are right now?” Jed asked.
“There’s one scene finished to go after this. We don’t have the ending,” Toby answered.
“Get it done, Toby.”
“Mr Bartlet.”
“This is good. It’s going to be great. And I want to know how it ends. Get it done.”
Toby nodded sharply. When Mr Bartlet finally left, there was space to breathe again, but the afterimage of his presence remained. Toby looked at Sam. “I need a drink.”
Sam laughed and nodded down into his chest.
“Sam,” Toby said pointedly. In the lamp-lit office his pupils were blown and his eyes were black and liquid. Even his voice seemed all darkness, leaden with some hidden question. “It’s been a long day. Come and get a drink with me.”
* * * *
They were both woven into this now, the black filigree of Sam’s words tangled with his own like a cat’s cradle draped from the walls of their office. No escape for either of them that they did not make together, and no completion of the pattern either.
Sam’s words were sweet on his lips, would be sweeter on Josh’s, but they were unusable. Sam didn’t believe that art should be a hammer; it needed to be no more than a mirror to illuminate what was and what could be with perfect clarity. And as the world was flawed, so the reflection was also, and Sam’s blindness was in his unwillingness to disguise this.
How to explain to Sam about hiding in your work? About turning your message, turning your story, into something you would be allowed to publish. Their setting had to be the colonisation, because it had to be beyond reproach. They couldn’t be Jewish, couldn’t be anything else but what their audience would be too, or the whole structure would fall down around them. Sam seemed to think that the leeway they bought themselves there gave free rein to say anything. How to explain the compromise?
How to explain to Sam, who might as well have ars gratia artis tattooed over his heart; his own bohemian cut free in time. Sam longed for a garret to starve in; Montmarte or Venice Beach, lost in a haze of absinthe and whispering muses. The whiskey in front of him on the bar, and the silence between the two of them, would never be enough.
Sam tapped his glass, and the note rang out pure before he spoke. “We need an ending.”
“Sam.”
“You want to kill him,” he said dully.
“I don’t want to kill him, Sam, it needs-”
“You said the story wasn’t independent of the writers. If he dies at the end it’s because you wanted to kill him.”
“You don’t believe that.” Toby ran a finger along the delicate bone of the one Sam tapped on the bar, stopping its motion.
Sam froze, and then shook his head, agreeing with Toby.
“The end of a play isn’t arbitrary, Sam. End it three days earlier and you end on a happy couple, make it a year later and maybe they’re both unhappy, maybe they’ve buried the child she’s pregnant with, maybe she’s the one that died.”
“And happy endings?”
“Sam. Do you really think that’s what this ends on?”
“It might.”
“Not here. But it doesn’t end on the death,” Toby said. “It ends afterwards, with the woman and the son.”
He could see understanding dawn when Sam’s fingers made an instinctive reach for his notebook. “You didn’t tell me,” Sam said.
“I didn’t know.”
“You’ve known where it ended for weeks.”
“No.” Because before Sam he might have ended it on the death, on the wanderer homeless and without mourners. Sam believed that the new world which had eluded their protaganist was within touching distance, and when he said it, Toby wanted to believe him. Not enough to write it as reality, but enough to leave the space for it, the space that those who came after them might fit within.
“Come on.” Sam pulled Toby up by the elbow, throwing down the money for their drinks.
He looked at Sam in question.
“Let’s go back to the office.”
“You’ve rediscovered your talent?”
Sam’s smile was blinding through the smoke and haze of the evening. “We can write anything tonight.”
* * * *
August 21st 1956
They were asleep in their chairs, but over the same desk. Sam’s shirt was rucked up awkwardly on his back, and Toby’s suspenders were pulled taut over his shoulder. The fingers of Sam’s left hand brushed the tips of those on Toby’s right; holding down the pages that hadn’t been written last night. Jed had three daughters, and it was the work of a moment to silently remove the script from the men’s grasp.
He took the pages to his own office, instructing Charlie to keep everyone out.
When he opened the door again, Charlie looked up and smiled slowly.
“What is it?” Jed asked.
“You look like we have a show.”
“Get Leo for me, would you? And read this.”
Charlie protested, “Mr Bartlet, I’m really not… you should wait for Leo.”
“You’ve been working here as long as I have, Charlie - I’m pretty sure you can tell good writing from bad at sixty paces. And I need a second opinion.”
Charlie read the last scene with Jed Bartlet rereading over his shoulder. When he had finished, he handed them back to his boss with the same smile. “We have a show.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Leo, finally called up from whatever he had been doing in the bowels of the theatre, announced himself on the way upstairs, “Jed?”
“He did it.”
“Who did what?”
“Toby. He wrote the play he’s been carefully not writing since you brought him here. Him and Sam.”
* * * *
August 27th 1956
Sam met Josh Lyman for the first time during the auditions. An arm was slung companionably around his shoulder and he heard the voice before he had time to turn around and find who it belonged to.
“You’re the writer,” Josh said warmly.
“I work with Toby,” Sam said.
“Hey, great job on the script. You too,” he called across the room.
Sam looked around to see Toby entering the rehearsal room.
“Josh,” Toby acknowledged.
Sam hadn’t been able to work out how Toby viewed Josh, a curious mixture of fondness and condescension. But when Josh saw Toby, he moved across the room and gripped Toby’s arm tightly, pulling the two of them together for a brief embrace. Sam couldn’t make out Josh’s words, but Toby nodded.
Jed, Leo and Charlie arrived all at once through the doors. “There are at least forty-eight young women in the lobby,” Jed observed.
“You know that they won’t all be actresses?” Leo said. “Charlie does his best to weed out the crazies, but some of the lunatics in love with Josh always get through.”
“I think I should be offended,” Josh murmured.
But, true enough, some of the girls were clearly there for the opportunity to get a closer look at the famous Josh Lyman. There were also, Sam noted to his amusement, quite a few who fluttered when they had to shake Mr Bartlet’s hand, or who watched Toby with a wary awe. He had never been close enough to the stars to see this firsthand before, so Sam was still people-watching when the girl walked in.
Donnatella Moss was a slim blonde who evoked all the stereotypes of ‘those poor deluded females’ (CJ’s words) without appearing to embody any of them. She met Jed’s eyes when they shook hands, and made a point of smiling at Sam and Leo as well as Toby and Josh.
When handed the audition piece and told to stand in front of Josh, she closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them and nodded. She was reading Tennessee Williams, but Sam could hear how Toby’s words would sound in this woman’s voice. Donna looked nothing like the Catherine who had inhabited his head for these long weeks, but when she turned her back to Josh, without the self-conscious blush of some, without the forced hysteria of the others, he knew.
When she left, Josh spoke first, “Do we have to see the others?”
“Josh,” Leo admonished.
“Leo, that’s her. She’s… she’s the girl, I can tell.”
“You’re always convinced of your ability to ‘tell’, Josh.” Jed watched him pointedly. “That’s why we’ve had a new lead actress twelve shows running.”
“Mr Bartlet,” Josh said.
“All of these young women came out here today looking for a fair chance. I won’t deny them that.”
Josh couldn’t disagree with that, and neither could anyone else. They heard the remaining ten girls. And then, afterwards, when they sat around the table with stacks of notes, Josh looked up. “Donnatella Moss?”
“She’s the girl,” Jed agreed. “Don’t screw it up.”
* * * *
September 3rd 1956
The first draft of the script was complete and circulated, the cast was finalised, and Danny Concanon was hanging around the stage door. Ostensibly to convince the actors to reveal some details of the script, or to provoke Donna and Josh into one of their hair-pulling, ear-pinching arguments, but in reality to continue his long-running courtship of their production manager. It was a month before they opened.
This early in rehearsals, the theatre itself was still occupied by the tour company, so they were in the room used in auditions. More like a classroom than a studio theatre, the room’s walls were lined with chairs for directors, writers, and any actor not currently on stage.
Sam rushed in, late, but bearing two coffees, one of which he brought straight to Toby. He sat down in the chair next to the other writer, and produced a notepad. “Do you usually change much this late on?” he asked.
“If Jed thinks something isn’t working, he’ll change it. If that means a rewrite the day of the opening night, then so be it.”
“Really?”
“Just keep your notebook out.”
Josh walked into the room, almost unrecognisable in a bulky coat and with his head hanging low. He walked to the centre of the room, nodded at Jed, and turned his face up to an imaginary spotlight. He opened his mouth.
Sam’s arm jerked out reflexively and his hand gripped Toby’s wrist; white bone circle scorching a brand onto cool skin. Toby didn’t move away, didn’t dare speak; he sat beside Sam, and listened to their words for the first time.
* * * *
September 10th 1956
Production meetings tended towards strangeness. For one thing, CJ got to explain technical processes in great detail to a credulous audience who believed anything she said. The first few were fun, and she got her kicks, but at some point someone always did something that made her want to stab them with her screwdriver.
“CJ. Please stop brandishing that.”
“Toby, so help me God…”
“It was a question.”
“It was not a question. It was an accusation. An aspersion, in fact, on my abilities, and/or my integrity.”
“CJ!”
“You can have a forest of bad trees, Toby. Or one good tree. Or a forest of good trees and no other props. And no actors.”
“That’s a real breadth of choice you’ve given us there, CJ,” Leo said.
She was unrepentant. “You didn’t hire me to be demure. Those are the options.”
“Margaret?” Leo asked.
“I’m assuming that you’re asking me from a props point of view?”
“Given that you’re the stage manager, that would seem a safe bet, yes.”
“There have been, in the past ten years, enough shows with period sets that we could cope with mostly refurbishing what we have.”
“So we’re good?”
“Yes,” she assured him.
CJ twirled her screwdriver again. “Are we done here? I have set to cannibalise. Or possibly a forest to destroy. You think anyone would notice if we stole Hyde Park?”
“I think it might be remarked upon,” Leo said. “Let’s keep that as Plan B.”
“Okay then,” Mr Bartlet said. “Let’s try not to need another one of these meetings for a little while.”
* * * *
September 13th 1956
Josh said it first. “We’re missing something here.”
“Josh?” Jed asked, watching his lead actor who had stopped in the middle of the rehearsal.
“We’re missing a scene.”
Sam looked up from his notebook in surprise. Toby’s pen stopped scratching. It wasn’t like Josh to pick at the script. Largely because Toby would tear him apart while Sam watched. Sam replayed the last few scenes in his head, and could not discover what it was that Josh had objected to.
“Or a line, or a few lines, or something,” Josh continued. “Donna, back me up here.”
“Josh, I’m not sure,” she said.
“No, he’s right,” Jed finally said. “Something between this scene and the next one, or something new in one of those scenes. We need something…”
“What kind of something?” Leo asked.
“Something that explains why this girl marries this guy,” he answered, gesturing between Donna and Josh.
“And again: should I be taking offence here?” Josh asked no one in particular.
Sam had started gathering his notes before Mr Bartlet had spoken up, and stood to hold the coffee while Toby collected his own notes. They left the rehearsal room without a word, Josh trailing after them.
After only a few minutes in the office, both he and Toby were studiously ignoring Josh, who was hovering by the window, trying not to be distracting.
“More explicit,” Sam suggested.
“Stop saying that. I swear, Sam, if it’s not ‘Our Town’, you don’t think it’s explicit enough.”
“We’re on this again?”
“Until you stop watching musicals, yeah.”
“Toby.”
“If you had your way, this show would end with a happy number about how fun it is to meet new people and then marry them.”
“Toby, have you ever seen ‘Our Town’?”
“Why?”
“Because Emily dies? It’s not… ‘Threepenny Opera’ ends like that, and you like it. And ‘Our Town’s’ meta-theatre!”
“The ending of ‘Threepenny Opera’ is parody. Of shows like ‘Our Town’, in fact.”
“You, me, Cole Porter.”
“Okay,” Toby promised vaguely. “As soon as we’re done reinventing American theatre I’ll get right on that. I need,” he snapped his fingers in the air. Sam nodded and tossed the rolled typewriter ribbon into Toby’s waiting hand.
At the window, Josh coughed. “You guys are weird, you know that, right?”
“What?” Toby asked.
“Yes,” Sam answered. He ripped the page from his typewriter and passed it, folded, to Toby. After giving Sam his own in return, Toby opened the page. They repeated this three more times before moving to one page.
Sam passed up the new sheet to Josh for his approval. He watched Josh read it through quickly once, and then, slower, twice more.
“You just did this?” Josh asked.
“We’re not actually withholding material from you,” Sam answered. “You have what we have.”
“You guys really are-”
“Weird. You said that already,” Toby said, hoisting Sam up by the arm. “Back to rehearsal.”
* * * *
September 17th 1956
Danny was grinning at something over her shoulder. CJ resisted the urge to turn around (it wouldn’t be beyond him to do this just to bug her) and looked at him pointedly instead.
“They should be in the movies,” he said.
CJ turned around, to see Josh and Donna having a quiet but apparently heated argument down the hallway. Josh waved one hand in the air which Donna promptly caught and jabbed back at his chest.
Danny was openly laughing now. “Seriously, get Toby to write them something funny. They’re a screwball comedy waiting to happen.”
“Only if they live that long,” she muttered in response. “Josh!” Danny covered his ears as she turned around. “Take that somewhere else! Preferably separate dressing rooms.”
“Hey, Sam,” Danny called brightly, when the young writer wandered past him. Sam raised a hand and smiled. When CJ turned back to face Danny, he cocked his head to one side. “You know he was arrested last month?”
“Danny!”
“Yeah?” he answered casually.
“Don’t say things like that. Don’t come into my theatre, and throw around accusations about my writers while we’re in the middle of my get-in! I have a set to build, I have lamps to rig, I have sound-checks, and prop-checks, and-”
“CJ! I’m not doing anything with the information. I’m not actually interested in the information. I’m a theatre critic, I have no interest in whatever petty reasons the Chicago Police Department had for dragging your writer into what I believe was very temporary custody.”
“So why the hell did you say it?!” she asked.
“I was making conversation.”
“Don’t!”
“How d’you think the dress rehearsal tomorrow’s going to go?”
“Please don’t talk to me.”
* * * *
September 18th 1956
“Don’t trip,” Margaret instructed Josh sharply.
“I’m sorry? ‘Don’t trip’? Like that’s something I do on purpose?”
“I have noticed that on the nights that I remind you not to trip, you do tend, Joshua, to be more careful. I’ve counted, and you mess up your entrances at least fifty percent more often when you haven’t been given prior warning.”
“Have you considered, maybe, that the reason I don’t trip is because instead of thinking about my performance I’m thinking about the crazy woman in the wings?”
He swept past her to peer out into the theatre.
“What’cha looking at?” CJ asked, from the shadows.
“CJ!”
“That was a very masculine squeal there.”
“You were lurking in your spy-gear.”
She looked down at her black slacks and sweater. “This is backstage, Josh, we don’t need to wear outfits that scream ‘here I am’. In fact, that’s generally what we’re trying to avoid.”
“Yeah. Is there a reason, by the way, that they’re not sitting with each other?”
“Who?” CJ came beside him to look through the stage door.
“Shakespeare and Marlowe.”
“In the course of your becoming an actor, did you study any theatrical history at all?”
“CJ.”
“They distract each other. If they sit together they end up writing each other notes.”
Josh looked down at the stalls, and then up at the circle. Both Toby and Sam had notebooks on their laps, and Sam was already scribbling in his, though God knew what he had found to write down.
CJ’s eyes had followed the same path as Josh’s. “Yes, but this way they’re taking notes on what actually happens onstage. Rather than what they usually end up doing, which is where they start rewriting the script. I think they want to see you act this time round.”
“Is that a compliment?”
She touched his arm lightly. “First dress rehearsal, Josh. We’re nearly there.”
* * * *
September 24th 1956
His nightmares had been filled with empty houses and cat-calling. Sam met Toby in the Gods, the only seats available to them. They had sold out.
“We owe Danny Concanon a drink,” Sam said.
Toby shrugged, and pointed at his watch.
“After the show.” Sam agreed.
Sam could remember almost nothing between the first black-out and the last, when the actors took the stage for the curtain-call and the wall of sound climbed to reach them in the circle. Josh had stumbled on one of his entrances and Toby had sworn at him; Abbey had been every inch a Governor, and she would have to tone that down; everything had turned quiet for the third act monologue; Donna had been as beautiful and tragic as he had ever seen her in the last scene; the audience had clapped.
Jed Bartlet outstretched an arm in their direction from his place centre stage. The audience turned and applauded, and it took Toby’s hand on the small of his back to remind Sam that he should bow.
Jed and the actors left the stage in blackout again, the audience still in standing ovation. In the darkness before the house lights came up, Sam reached for Toby. It was a clumsy impact of chest on chest, arms not allowed to be close enough to tangle. Sam’s smooth cheek pressed against that place where Toby’s beard ran into the cords of his neck. If the lights had stayed down, he would have whispered into that rough edge. As it was, Sam returned to his own space, and knelt to pick up the hats.
* * * *
It was not yet three-fifteen, and they waited for the early editions in the bar. Jed had his wife at his arm, Josh and Donna had either reconciled or were taking advantage of the adrenaline high, and CJ looked like a goddess.
“What?” she asked, when everyone had turned to look her up and down.
“You look great, CJ,” Sam said.
She smiled at him, and glared at Josh. “Yes, I do own dresses.”
“And heels,” he observed quietly.
“Those too. What do you think I wear when I’m not climbing ladders and hammering set together, Josh?”
“It never crossed my mind,” he said.
She laughed, low in her throat, and spun around. Her dress twirled about her legs, and the bracelet on her wrist caught the light.
“And now that you have the attention of every man in the room?” Abbey asked, with a wicked grin.
“I see if it helps me get to the front of the drinks queue. Anyone else?”
CJ recited back the long list of orders without difficulty, and promptly made her way to the front of the crowd. Toby had to smile at the double-take the bartender made when he saw the woman leaning confidently over the counter-top.
A multitude of glasses were assembled in front of her, and when she gestured impatiently at their tables, most of the group went to help her carry.
Toby watched, amused, as Sam reached a hand backwards, not looking. He didn’t have to move his own hand to meet Sam’s, just turned it palm-upwards.
Only now everyone else had gone to get their drinks did it become obvious just how close they were sitting to each other. Where it had been the writers sandwiched in between the actors and the directors, now it was simply them - Sam’s thigh and shoulder pressed tight against his own in the smoky bar.
Toby lifted his left hand to point at himself, at Sam, at their hands still together underneath the table. “We’re everything they hate, you know.”
Sam smiled and, for a moment, dipped his head even closer to Toby’s to tell his secret, “Not tonight.”
He knew that Sam was high on the applause, the way it sounded only in the theatre, one pair of hands at a time, filling a building normally so full of echoes and whispers with a roar of sound.
Toby couldn’t help but wait for the other shoe to fall. Charlie came into the bar with the newspapers.
Sam’s hand twitched within Toby’s.
They arrived back at the table one by one. Jed kissed his wife’s cheek and smiled at her. “You were wonderful tonight.” He looked around at the cast and crew assembled at the tables. “We did a great job, and we’re going to keep doing a great job. The audience loved the show. Nothing in these pages takes anything away from that.”
Jed reached a hand out and took the papers from Charlie.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” he said. “Ziegler’s latest effort stands up against the best Chicago theatre can produce... Joshua Lyman is, as ever, fearlessly committed to the role, as is Abigail Bartlet in one of the few great female roles you’ll see this year. Donnatella Moss is a revelation in the other.” Jed paused. “You know, I think they liked us.”
Donna’s face was buried in Josh’s neck; he patted her back with a look of shellshock.
Abbey reached for another newspaper. “Modest, Jed? 'Bartlet’s restrained, intimate direction draws every nuance from the Ziegler/Seaborn script, letting its words stand alone where they should, and against the Lyman-Moss intimacy where they shouldn’t.'”
Charlie coughed, “This is one for CJ: 'CJ Cregg’s always-professional production management is shown at its best in the set and lighting design. It effortlessly evokes a bygone era, without relying on rose-coloured nostalgia or overwhelming the actors’ naturalistic portrayals of their seventeenth-century protagonists.'”
CJ turned on her heel, looking at the door. “Effortless?”
“Appearing effortless, then,” Danny amended, joining the party. “You’re looking beautiful by the way.”
“I am indeed, Daniel. And I believe that I am finally able to take you up on that offer.”
“CJ?”
“Dance with me.”
The piano notes hung, languid and sultry, about the two of them as CJ spun in Danny’s arms. Jed rose from the table and gallantly offered his wife his arm, which she took with a smile. Their lead actors took no more time to find their way to the impromptu dance-floor.
Sam had picked up one of the newspapers. “Ziegler and Seaborn,” he read, his voice low and intense, “are both known, officially or unofficially, as partisans of the left. The audience would be forgiven for expecting a politically-charged polemic. What they have produced, however, is more than allegory - it is a timeless piece of theatre, a reminder of our great past with a note of even greater hope for our future. Soon to be regarded as a modern classic.”
“Five stars.” Toby read.
“Toby.” Sam dropped his head against Toby’s shoulder, pulling it back up after a long breath of relief. The brief moment of contact brought back the memory, a few hours earlier, of Sam’s lips on the corner of his mouth, as if he had been about to speak.
“We’re going to get a breath of air,” Toby said, addressing the crowd around them.
Jed caught them both around the shoulders on the way to the door. “Congratulations are in order.”
“And to you,” Sam replied sincerely.
“We all had a good night,” Jed agreed. “But you two really earned your pay these past few months. Enjoy your night. You deserve it.”
“Thank you,” Toby said. He steered Sam out of the bar, through and around the rest of the company and their attempts at back-slapping and appreciation.
The city was quiet, and the streets were almost empty. Toby dragged Sam into the side-alley as gently as he could manage. Still, his breath was pulled from him when Toby steered him against the wall, cradling the back of Sam’s head to protect it from the brickwork. Through the shadows of the fire-escape, their shapes would be indistinct. Sam opened his mouth to ask a question, and Toby covered it with his own.
Sam worked his hands under Toby’s jacket, warm and quick rubbing along the lines of Toby’s ribs. His breath when they broke apart was a sudden, rushing gasp that blew a sweet whiskey-taste over Toby’s lips.
“Toby?” Sam asked.
“Yeah?”
“What happens tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow? Tomorrow we write.”
AN2: Not that it matters, but the wife Toby mentions isn't Andy. In my head it's the wife raedbard thinks he had who died before he remarried. And, zau, I don't know if you wanted more sex, or even more kissing, but it just wouldn't go there! I think I may have been inspired by the 50s setting to hint at more than I wrote, so I hope you aren't too disappointed. And thank you for the wonderful prompt - I knew the moment I saw it that it was the one I wanted to write!
Fandom: West Wing
Pairing: Sam/Toby (and background Josh/Donna, CJ/Danny and Jed/Abbey)
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama/AU
Length: 10,000 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin&Wells.
Spoilers: None, other than some very loose character history
Podfic Version: Here. Just tell me if the link doesn't work.
Summary: Theatre AU in 1950s Chicago for zauberer_sirin in TWW AU Ficathon. Play-writing during McCarthyism, and how to hide yourself in art.
AN: Title from "Loving in the War Years" by Cherrie L Moraga. ("this war time morality/ where being queer/ and female/ is as warrior/ as we can get) Inspiration, obvious and sadly otherwise, from Good Night and Good Luck, DC's New Frontier, The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol.3, FiftiesWeb, Encyclopedia of Chicago, and the people who have been kind enough to let me production manage their shows. Any remaining errors or anachronisms are the fault of me, creative licence, or possibly Wikipedia!
Chicago, August 6th 1956
“Toby!”
“I don’t need help.”
“Toby.”
“Yes?”
“You need help.”
“Leo-”
“You promised us something weeks ago. You got Jed all fired up about how great this was going to be. It’s been a tough year - if you can’t get it done on your own, let me get someone in to give you a hand.”
“I don’t need a hand.”
“Well that’s fine, Toby. But he’ll be here in twenty-six minutes, and I expect you to at least be civil.”
“Leo!”
“No more arguments. Get it done.”
“Leo. What’s his name? The kid?” Leo handed him a sheet of paper. “Samuel Norman Seaborn of Huntington Beach, Orange County, California. Sounds like just the kind of man who needs the aid of gainful employment in the theatre. Toby Ziegler, Leo McGarry, and Samuel Norman Seaborn-”
“Josiah Bartlet.” Jed had followed Leo to Toby’s office. “Or does that not fit with your view of the theatre as a refuge for the downtrodden immigrant population? You realise that Leo’s worth more than I am? And CJ’s from California too, should I tell her that her services are no longer required?”
“Mr Bartlet,” Toby said.
“Be civil, Toby. He’s just a kid.”
“I make no promises.”
Sam, in fact, turned up within fifteen minutes. He took Toby’s hand with a slight smile and explained, “I was worried I’d be late.”
* * * *
Leo looked at Jed, catching his shoulder as Sam trotted ahead, and Toby lagged back. “You’re sure about this?”
“Leo? When have I ever steered you wrong?”
“You really want to start on that now? Because I don’t think we have that kind of time.”
Jed glared, and then shook his head pityingly. “Leo, Leo, Leo… One of these days, maybe some day soon, you’re going to see what I’m doing here. And on that day, I’m gonna be just as condescending about my foresight as you are about your hindsight.”
“I’ll take that under consideration. Now - Toby?”
“Toby needs someone to talk to.”
“Because he’s in the sixth grade?”
“You see what he’s like, locked up in that office. He needs help.”
“I’m not disputing that, but when he asks, I don’t want you to tell him that you hired him a new friend. Come to think of it, don’t tell the producers that either.”
Sam breathed in sharply when they came into the auditorium. He trailed a hand lovingly over the plaster and gold mouldings. Jed watched as Sam’s gaze drifted, inexorably, to the stage. It was set up for a touring company at the moment - Lear, which seemed an odd choice for mid-summer, but that wasn’t his call. With the working lights on, the set looked over-painted, gaudy, but the kid didn’t seem to care.
Backstage, a door opened. “Is somebody there?” the voice called.
“Claudia Jean,” Jed answered.
“Hello, Mr Bartlet.”
“Would you come down here a moment?”
She ducked her head to get through the door in the set, closing it with the care of someone who knew exactly how fragile it was. “Hi, Leo. Toby”
“Good morning, CJ,” Leo answered. “This is Sam Seaborn - he’s helping Toby out with the new show.”
She grinned, and came lightly down the steps onto the carpeted floor. Extending a hand, she introduced herself. “Hey Sam. I’m the Production Manager of this little circus. So I’m the one - sadly - who’s going to be forced to tell you that we can’t burn Rome every night, no matter how dramatically satisfying it would be. Ditto a rainbow of lights, a seventy-two piece orchestra, and any moving piece of set larger than a small car. No boats,” she added as an afterthought.
He smiled back at her. “You’re not a fan of pyrotechnics?”
“I’m a huge fan of them, as it happens. Just not in my theatre. You want to blow things up, go to Broadway, where someone not me can stop it setting the curtains on fire.”
“I’ll bear that in mind. But, really, I’m just here to help Toby - he’s the one you’d need to warn.”
“CJ,” Jed broke in, “Stop scaring my writers.”
* * * *
Toby scared Sam a little. This was not entirely unexpected. Toby Ziegler was a genius - one of the few writers outside of New York so renowned as to warrant a permanent place in a company. That was the first thing he was known for. The second was his inability to work with others.
“Writing isn’t a collaborative process,” he had bitten out in Mr Bartlet’s direction, as they had toured the theatre.
Sam restrained himself from an instinctive response - listing of all the current writing partnerships in theatre. He understood, really, that what Toby had meant was that he didn’t want a collaborator. That writing scripts was personal; the creation of something unique and crystalline and perfect. It didn’t lend itself to introductory chatter around the water cooler, or even over the cups of coffee that the blushing redhead brought in after them.
“Thank you,” he said. “Sam Seaborn.”
“Ginger,” she answered. “I’m Toby’s secretary. And yours too?”
“I don’t know…”
Toby said, “Ginger’s the one who knows how to use the mimeograph. If you need copies of your pages of the script.”
“I’ll be right outside. If you need something,” she said.
“A copy of the script so far?”
Sam didn’t miss the querying look she gave Toby, who nodded, and gave her leave to bring him the work-in-progress.
Toby looked Sam up and down. “Is there a reason you’re standing there looking at me?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Sit down.”
Sam had noted the other desk as he came in, but not connected it to himself. It had obviously been recently cleared - the pile of books and papers on the floor had been swept off it hurriedly. The typewriter was unused, its cover still lying beside it on the desk. He sat down behind the desk and held his fingers above the unworn keys.
“If you can start writing without knowing the plot, then maybe you are as good as Jed kept telling me,” Toby said dryly. His accent was just distinct enough to be noted, no awkward pronunciations or missteps. That fitted.
“Do you want to tell me the plot? Or, I’m sorry, how much you still need to do?”
“It’s a script. It’ll be done when it’s done.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, I agree with you? But Mr Bartlet seemed to be under the impression that you were stuck at a particular point.”
“It’ll be on the desk by lunch. Why don’t you go for a walk? Find your way around the theatre.”
Sam took the dismissal as it was intended, and stood to leave. The keys of Toby’s typewriter made a clattering counterpoint to the door closing behind him.
He met CJ again on the way backstage. Her smile was sympathetic as she led him to the techies’ domain. Margaret, another tall woman, another redhead, greeted CJ with a numbered list of concerns about the prop store. This was CJ’s stage manager. Sam found himself having to duck into doorways and press himself against walls as black-clothed people hurried up and down the narrow corridors.
The company actors, CJ explained, were mostly out of the building at the moment, while the tour was in the theatre. The technicians and production team were still here. She shoved a rail of costumes out of the way before pushing him ahead of her up the steps to the stage. Sam stood in the dimly-lit wings, reading the cheerful graffiti on the offstage side of the wooden set. Opening the door was like walking into the auditorium all over again.
CJ placed a hand on his elbow. “Don’t worry about Toby.”
“I wasn’t…”
“Sam.”
“I was just admiring the theatre.”
CJ smiled, different from the laughing grin or pitying quirk of lips he had warranted before. She walked downstage with him to the mark on the forestage, as if they would share a soliloquy. He could imagine an expectant hush, the painted rafters waiting to be hit with sound.
She touched his arm again. “Yeah, you’re gonna fit in fine. Don’t worry about Toby.”
* * * *
August 7th 1956
The morning after he had been given a partner without his consent, Toby got in late. His office - their office, he reminded himself - was empty.
There was a stack of pages on Sam’s desk. He recognised the script from the shape of the words on the front page. What he didn’t recognise were the tight curves of black ink climbing up the margins. It wasn’t Jed or Leo, neither of whom could be sending notes at this stage anyway. It had to be the kid, but he checked anyway, reaching for the abandoned black jacket on Sam’s chair for something to make a comparison. Toby put a hand into the inside pocket before he had thought about it, bringing out a battered reporters notebook.
The handwriting matched - of course it did. He checked the script again. Sam had been given, assuming Ginger had given him all that she had been given, most of the first act, and the middle scenes of the second act. He had left behind annotated copies of the first act, and the latest scene of the second. With three pages, now that Toby was shuffling them, of dialogue that hadn’t been given to him by anyone. It was titled, handwritten rather than typed, Act 1, scene v.
“Ginger!”
She poked her head around the door. “Yes?”
“Where is he?”
“I’m sorry?”
Toby waved at the empty desk. “Our new addition.”
“He got in before I did this morning.”
He waited patiently. “And where is he now?”
“He went for a cup of coffee an hour ago. He didn’t say when he’d be back.”
“Ginger?”
“Toby?”
“This wouldn’t be the first time you’ve felt obligated to hide someone who fully deserved my ire.”
She shook her head, fine red strands brushing rapidly over her face. “I don’t know where he is, Toby, I’m sorry.”
There were plenty of places within a block’s radius that served good coffee. Still, Toby went down the two flights of stairs and found CJ.
“Have you seen Sam Seaborn?”
“The new one?”
“Well, he’s the only Sam Seaborn, CJ, but he started yesterday, yes.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I’ve seen him.”
“Recently?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to, perhaps, tell me where he is?”
“Not particularly.”
“CJ…”
“Follow me.”
She led him down the backstage corridor to where the steps went back up to the auditorium level. CJ pushed him upwards, and didn’t follow after.
Toby saw the movement and heard the scrape of the pen before he could make out the shadow as a person, crouched under a backstage light. Sam was sitting in the corner of the stage left wing, lit in low blue and surrounded by taped coils of cable and stage weights. When Toby got close enough he became pretty sure that Sam was actually sitting on a stack of weights.
A pale face turned up to look at him. “Toby.”
“Tell me why you changed this,” Toby said, standing in front of Sam and giving him one of the altered pages.
Sam was looking at him through the haze of the light, still halfway lost in the pages on his knee, the pages Toby now wanted to read. His eyes were very blue, shuttered in the next moment by a slow blink. “I only added three lines.”
“Why did you add them, and why those three?”
“Were they wrong?”
“Sam.”
“Because I think you dodged the point. You hovered around it, and the audience need to hear it out loud, if the rest is going to make any kind of sense to them.”
“I see we’re not crediting the audience with a good deal of intelligence.”
“Toby.”
“Which point is it, then, that I’m missing?”
“Not missing,” Sam was quick to correct. “Just not writing. He’s alone, Toby. In the middle of people who have no idea, and he can’t explain it to them. But unless you let the audience in, just a little…” His hand jerked awkwardly, as if he had been about to wave it in Toby’s direction, to draw a peak across the stage. “Then they’re just more people who have no idea.”
“Get up.”
Sam stood, bracing himself nervously against the wall.
Toby left the stage, hearing Sam follow close behind him.
“Ginger!” he said, climbing the stairs to their office.
She appeared at the top of the staircase and looked down at them curiously. “Coffee?”
“Yes, also, I need a copy of this with the amendments.” Toby passed her the page that Sam had changed.
In the office, Sam sat on the edge of his desk, watching Toby. Waiting for something, and this time Toby allowed it.
“You need to remember that we’re not the actors,” Toby said.
“Okay.”
“Josh Lyman will be playing the lead. They’ll audition, but he’ll get it, because he’s the best male in the company. Don’t ever tell him that.”
“Okay,” Sam repeated.
“He’s… He doesn’t need as many words as we do. Your three lines are enough - he’ll run with that, and you’ll get the audience wherever you want them. But you were right.”
“Excuse me?”
“We needed the three lines. Now talk to me about this scene you want to add.”
* * * *
August 9th 1956
Charlie came into the office. “Mr Bartlet?”
“Yes, Charlie, what is it?”
“There’s a man on the telephone looking to talk to you about Sam Seaborn.”
“Did he say what it was about?”
Charlie shrugged. “He said he was Sam’s landlord.”
“Transfer the call in.” Charlie nodded, and left the office. Jed picked up the phone as it rang. A few minutes later, hanging up, he called Charlie back in. “Get Sam Seaborn up here, would you?”
Sam responded to the summons with gratifying speed, looking worried. When he was pointed towards a seat, he looked even more concerned. “Sir?”
“Asking you to call me Jed isn’t going to help right now, is it?”
“I’m sorry?”
Jed sighed, and adjusted the top-button of his vest. After a moment, he pointed towards the telephone. “I just received a very strange call from your new landlord.”
Sam tried to speak.
Jed interrupted, “Among other non-specific concerns, he wanted to check that you were, in fact, one of my employees. Something about having to hunt in the corners of your wallet to come up with the deposit.”
“Mr Bartlet, I’m very sorry that you had to waste your time on a call like…”
“Sam. I didn’t bring you up here to tell you not to use the company as a reference. You’re employed here - I’m entirely willing to confirm that fact to your rather suspicious landlord.”
“So, if I may, why did you want to see me?”
“Are you doing alright?”
“I’m sorry?”
“We haven’t really had a chance to talk since you started here, Sam. New city, new job, you have to share an office with Toby Ziegler who, on his best days, eats new writers for breakfast… Do you need an advance on your wages?”
“Excuse me? No, sir, I’m fine, thank you for the offer, but no. It’s fine.”
“Damn. I really thought if I threw that on the end there you might not notice.”
Sam continued to watch him, face flushed now, hands curled tight around the edge of the desk. Wounded pride and something else.
“Okay then. Do you want to sit in on some auditions in a few weeks?”
The abrupt change of topic took Sam by surprise, and he took a long moment to answer, “For this show?”
“Yes indeed.”
“Don’t you need a completed script for that?”
“Well, that would help, but - and don’t tell anyone this - Toby scares me. I don’t think I’d make it out of your office intact after asking that question. We’re auditioning new actresses for the company. Josh needs a new playmate - he sent the last one running for flirting with him during the show.”
Sam laughed, and covered it up with his hand.
“I see you’ve met our lead actor?” Jed asked.
“Not yet, Mr Bartlet - just stories.”
“Josh is a good kid. But his track record with his leading ladies… We need someone who can stand up to him. Otherwise it all ends up like the first act of Kiss Me Kate. You’ll come along?”
“I don’t know what I’d contribute,” Sam equivocated. He paused. “But, if you’d like me there, of course I-”
Jed drummed his hands on the table. “Good, that’s settled then. Now, you should go back downstairs before Toby comes looking. I wouldn’t want to damage the creative process.”
Sam stood up from the chair, still looking like someone who knew he had dodged a bullet, and wasn’t sure how.
Jed waited until the young man was almost out of the door before he spoke. He didn’t look up from his papers, didn’t want to see the look on Sam’s face. “Sam. Do you know why this theatre is in Chicago? It’s because I was training to be a priest. And then, even though I didn’t keep it up, I taught in a school that trained other young men to be priests. In the course of which I decided that I was unwilling to enter the army, or to encourage the boys in my care to do so. The theatre is in Chicago because when it became obvious that the family finances were not going to be bequeathed my direction, a good friend of mine asked me to come to his hometown and do what we had always talked about doing.”
“Mr Bartlet.”
“I won’t ask you again, son, but you know where I am if you need me.”
A long, charged, silence that could have gone either way, and then: “Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
* * * *
August 10th 1956
It was long past the point where Sam could pretend that he had just lost track of the time. The streets outside their window were almost silent - gone were the drunks and partygoers; he felt as if they might be the only people awake in the city.
But he couldn’t get up, couldn’t leave. Not when Toby’s words were tied around him, binding his wrists as close as shackles, holding him to his desk: caricature of the author-as-zealot. Chains that ran slender as the ink from Toby’s pen; his beautiful, transcendental prose burnt into Sam’s skin. Made of words but tying him unbreakably to this man of flesh. Toby sighed.
“Okay?” Sam asked in a whisper.
“You’re too quiet.”
“You told me to be quiet.”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“Not this quiet. It’s unnerving.”
“I’m sorry?” he tried, though Toby didn’t seem to place much worth on his apologies.
It didn’t matter, Toby was talking out loud, something he had been doing more and more, recently. “We have a setting.”
“New England, mid seventeenth century.”
“We have a cast-list.”
“We do?”
“We have most of a cast-list.”
“We have half a script.”
“And therein lies the problem,” Toby said.
“Yes.”
“There’s no third act.”
“No,” Sam agreed.
“This is the biggest problem.”
“What happens in the third act?” Sam asked.
“What happens…? Sam, nothing happens in the third act - there is no third act! It doesn’t exist in some magical…”
This, sadly, was not the loudest Toby had yelled at him tonight. That had come after an incident with the overuse of adverbs and a too-long delay between cups of coffee. It was, Sam hoped, a testament to Toby’s still-unexplained desire to keep him around the building that he hadn’t been fired yet. As was the fact that he had not yet commented on Sam moving the desks to face each other. He tried again. “What do you want to happen in the third act?”
Toby sighed. “If I knew that, Sam…” He looked down at his legal pad.
Sam’s worry was that Toby knew exactly what was supposed to happen next. Their script and Toby’s story, Sam’s story too, though Toby didn’t know it - he could see the lines. The connections that twisted angry and raw from Toby’s flight from his own home, from Sam’s exile, into their words of loss and homelessness and pilgrimage. Their immigrant story. That was why their lead wasn’t a pilgrim, wasn’t one of the celebrated American heroes who they were taught had built the country. Instead he was one of those who came later, to a place already formed that had left no room for him.
The play needed an ending to make sense of all that, and neither of them could see that far yet. Not when reality blared through the radio and television each day in the form of hearings and news-reports, intruding into their proscenium-arched idyll.
Toby was absent-mindedly twisting the ring on his wedding finger.
“Toby?” Sam asked. “I meant to ask.” (Not quite a lie, he had meant to ask, but he had been afraid. Had decided against so foolish a move.)
“What?”
“Are you married?”
“I was.”
“You’re divorced?”
“Widowed is the term, I would think.”
“God, Toby, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“I know.”
“Was she…?” And this was the question there really was no way to ask, so he simply trailed off, leaving Toby to answer or not, as he chose.
Toby coughed, and passed a fist over his eyes. “She died giving birth to our son. Sometimes these things just happen. It isn’t always grand tragedy, Sam. Sometimes just a little one.”
“It’s not…”
“It was a long time ago. A year before I left, and that will be twenty years ago by the time this show opens. If it ever gets so far. But I think we should call it a night.”
“Toby, if I… I’m sorry.”
A hand was dropped heavily on Sam’s shoulder as he sought more words. Toby patted his arm, above the rolled-up shirtsleeves. “It’s okay. I’ll see you on Monday.”
* * * *
August 13th 1956
Sam had moved the desks, Toby thought. Where once they had both pointed loosely at the open door, now the second was tilted towards Toby’s own.
When he looks up now, it is often to find Sam watching him with a curiously intent expression. Expectant, Toby would call it, if he knew what to do with that piece of information. Happy, sometimes, if that word could encompass the moment just before Sam looked down, aiming a smile at his typewriter instead. As if Toby would ignite under the full strength of that smile, the unabashed admiration of this man who has talent of his own to burn.
So yes, perhaps, occasionally, the watching is somewhat mutual. Toby looks up and is distracted by the slant of Sam’s shoulders curled towards his notebook - stance that would seem awkward in anyone else. Maybe Toby had simply already got used to seeing him like that - head bent low over the script, and chewing on his pen.
He didn’t notice her entering the office.
“I hear you have a part for me.”
“Mrs Bartlet.”
“Abbey, Toby, please. How long have we known each other? Now: part?”
“I’m sure you could play whichever part you’d like, ma’am.”
“Very flattering, Toby, very nice, but I hear you have a part suited to my particular talents? As opposed to the talents of the poor girl who has to play opposite Joshua?”
He nodded, but she was already looking past him to the back of the office. Sam had raised his head to watch the byplay, still with a pen dripping ink in his hand.
Abbey walked over to him. “And this must be the young wordsmith.”
Pink crept along Sam’s high cheekbones. “I’m helping Toby, ma’am, yes.”
“Don’t be so modest, Sam.”
“I don’t know what Mr Bartlet has told you, ma’am, but-”
She leant in close over his shoulder, and Toby could hear clearly what she whispered in his ear. “My husband wasn’t the one to say it.”
Toby ducked away from the pointed look she gave him; from Sam’s confused expression.
“Abbey,” he said. “The town-founder, yes?”
“You couldn’t get me a nice role as a Governor?”
“If you want me to change history, yes. Otherwise…”
“So instead I get to be Elizabeth Poole?”
“She isn’t-”
“If you’re trying to tell me that your inexplicably female town-founder is not in some way based on the first female town-founder in this country, Toby, then I’m-”
“The fact that she existed allows me to posit a second, yes, Abbey. But you aren’t playing Elizabeth Poole. As her purported perpetual virginity would hinder her role as mother of our love interest somewhat.”
“Don’t get smart with me.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t ma’am me either. And be nice to Sam.”
Toby turned to look at Sam without intending to. Sam had been watching their interplay with interest, and Toby suspected that he might have been taking notes. When he looked back at Abbey, she was smiling at him.
“I’ll see you later,” she said. “Have fun.”
* * * *
August 14th 1956
He didn’t know why he had lifted the newspaper up. Toby read The New York Times and Washington Post, but he also read The Forward, and Sam’s knowledge of Yiddish began and ended with Toby’s insults. But it was another late night, and he had begun flicking through the paper while Toby read over their latest scene.
He recognised the picture with the heavy black border, and the Gregorian dates were given. “Toby?” Sam said.
“Yeah?”
Sam passed him the paper. “Brecht died.”
They disagreed about Brecht. More specifically, they disagreed about how Toby felt about Brecht’s plays. Toby claimed to like them, where Sam insisted that it could be no more than admiration for the method. Sam didn’t believe in alienation, he didn’t believe in deliberately cutting off the audience’s emotional reaction in favour of the critical response. But then he and Toby disagreed about a lot of things.
Toby had read the article. “They say he lied to the Committee. ”
“Even Galileo recanted,” Sam said quietly.
“Did you see-?”
“In LA? Yeah.”
“Even Brecht-“
“He didn’t-“
“He said he had never been a member.”
“And so would I, if they asked - that doesn’t mean I’m a coward, it means I wasn’t a member.”
“He was.”
“Sam.”
“He was, Toby. Brecht? He was a member. Maybe he wasn’t when he died, but before? He lied to the Committee. But that’s not important - they all promised not to answer the question.”
The look in Toby’s eyes was almost pity, and Sam could hate him for such knowing condescension. He knew his words were childlike; an atheist’s declaration of broken faith. He knew his world was supposed to be subjective, a defence of the multiplicity of believing - right up until the moment when an action was simply wrong. And Toby smiled.
“What?” Sam asked.
“Nothing, Sam.”
“There are things worth...”
“Sam.”
“…worth dying for.”
“I’m sure the committee would agree with that sentiment. You’ll be able to ask them yourself if you keep talking like that.”
“Toby.”
“Don’t talk to any reporters, Sam, okay? Not like this.”
He took a deep breath, and forced a laugh. “The reporters never want to talk to me, Toby. Unless it’s to ask when Toby Ziegler’s latest opus is going to be done. I’m not going to get you into trouble.”
Toby put the paper behind him on the floor and pulled his chair close to Sam’s, sharing the script. “Not what I’m worried about,” he muttered.
* * * *
August 17th 1956
“Toby?” The voice on the line was small and young and took a moment to place. (Liar: the half second of breath had been enough to tell.)
“Sam. It’s…” Toby looked at the clock beside his bed, “too late for whatever this is.”
“Toby. Toby… please, can you come get me?”
His back creaked as he rolled out of bed, but there was no other adequate response to such a request. “What did you do?”
“Toby. I need… I need you to bail me out.”
Toby swore quietly into the silence of Sam not explaining himself, and not laughing it off. “Sam.”
“No, Toby, it’s fine, I’ll get someone else to…”
“One phone call, Samuel, or am I misreading the subtext here? You want to tell me what you did before I get down there?”
“I didn’t do anything! There was… I was in a bar.”
“And then you miraculously reappeared in a jail-cell?”
“Toby. Please can you just…? I’ll get you the money, I promise, but can you please come and get me? I’m-”
“Sam. Sam! Stop talking. I’m on my way. I’ll be there soon.”
They exchanged four sentences in the time between Toby’s arrival at the station and the car pulling up in front of Sam’s building. Toby followed Sam up to the apartment because he wasn’t sure what else to do.
The outsides of the buildings were completely different, but the inside of Sam’s apartment nonetheless looked something like Toby’s. Brighter, perhaps, and certainly smaller, but close enough. Books piled up in the absence of adequate shelving, and a pen on every surface even though Toby knew - could see, in fact - that there was another pen in Sam’s jacket pocket.
Toby thumbed the spines of the books on the shelves while Sam hung up their coats.
“Sam,” he said, stuck on the unbelievable stupidity of this.
“Yeah?” Sam’s voice was still quiet.
“The manifesto? Seriously, Sam, you can’t leave this out here. You shouldn’t…”
“It’s just a book, Toby.”
“It is not just a book, Sam. It’s just a book that could get you blacklisted.”
“Yes, well, up until today, there wasn’t much of a reason to raid my apartment.”
“Sam…” Because he hadn’t asked yet, or hadn’t got the answer, and the officer at the station hadn’t been inclined to tell him why Sam had been pulled in.
“Do you know what the book is sitting beside?” Sam asked, ignoring Toby’s question. “Locke wrote about the right to revolution too, you know. As did… if I published the Declaration of Independence today, I would be arrested. ‘The right of the people to alter or abolish…’”
“Sam!” Breathing too hard now, because there was either too much trust, or too little care. He could ruin the kid with less than what he had just confessed. This new weight, unasked for and undesired, hung round his neck. Toby asked the next question anyway: “Why were you pulled in?”
“I told you. I was in a bar.”
“And…?”
“A guy.” The furtive look, a down-turned face when Sam always looked him defiantly in the eye. “Invited me out to a bar to get a few drinks after work. The police came. That’s all.”
“What happened to the guy?”
Sam looked up, caught out in a moment of surprise at the question. He looked down again. “I don’t know. I think he got out when the police turned up.”
“Doesn’t sound like a great friend.”
“We’d only just met.”
“And he asked you out for beer?”
“I don’t know a lot of people, Toby! I just… he asked, and I was… I’d had a long day, and I don’t know anyone in Chicago.”
“You know what you do next time? You say: ‘Toby, it’s been a long day, why don’t you come get a drink with me?’”
“Toby.”
“You do not, you do not follow strange men to bars that get raided by policemen!”
“Toby, would you please-?”
“This is both of us, Sam.”
“Toby?”
“If you… if they came into this place, they could stop you working. There are too many people up the chain between you and me, and getting our show on the stage. And they aren’t all… What you told me, what you let me know, if it hadn’t been me you were telling…” He stopped. “They could stop the show opening.”
The words still hung between them. All unsaid, and nonetheless present for that. He put a hand to Sam’s mouth, before the ones he couldn’t take back would leave it.
“Next time,” Toby said, “ask me.”
Sam nodded against the palm of Toby’s hand, the motion curling Toby’s fingers around his cheek like a caress.
* * * *
August 20th 1956
There was only so long that Jed would be willing to wait without hearing the rest of the script. The final scenes still weren’t ready, but telling him that hadn’t dissuaded him. He sat in their office, taking up too much space, too loud and too vivid for their quiet little room. Sam was in high school again, wanting to hide from the bright spotlight of adult attention.
“I don’t suppose either of you feel inclined to tell me what it’s about? Of course, what do I know, I’m only the director...”
Sam wasn’t entirely sure how to answer. He wasn’t entirely sure they had a plot, yet.
Toby twisted his hands where they lay on the desk, and didn’t say anything.
Jed looked from one of them to the other.
“It’s about…” Sam tried, “about a man emigrating from…” Mr Bartlet already knew this part, but he didn’t know what else to say.
Toby passed him the pages they had written today. “You read Charles.”
“I… you’re Cha…”
“You read Charles,” Toby said again.
His voice jumped and stuttered over the words, as if they were not his own - his and Toby’s - as if he couldn’t read them. Sam closed his eyes and recited; without seeing the uneven type and Toby’s even stare, he could get to the end of the speech.
He felt, rather than saw, Jed take the page from his hands. With his eyes open again, Sam watched Mr Bartlet scan the rest of the scene.
“This is where you are right now?” Jed asked.
“There’s one scene finished to go after this. We don’t have the ending,” Toby answered.
“Get it done, Toby.”
“Mr Bartlet.”
“This is good. It’s going to be great. And I want to know how it ends. Get it done.”
Toby nodded sharply. When Mr Bartlet finally left, there was space to breathe again, but the afterimage of his presence remained. Toby looked at Sam. “I need a drink.”
Sam laughed and nodded down into his chest.
“Sam,” Toby said pointedly. In the lamp-lit office his pupils were blown and his eyes were black and liquid. Even his voice seemed all darkness, leaden with some hidden question. “It’s been a long day. Come and get a drink with me.”
* * * *
They were both woven into this now, the black filigree of Sam’s words tangled with his own like a cat’s cradle draped from the walls of their office. No escape for either of them that they did not make together, and no completion of the pattern either.
Sam’s words were sweet on his lips, would be sweeter on Josh’s, but they were unusable. Sam didn’t believe that art should be a hammer; it needed to be no more than a mirror to illuminate what was and what could be with perfect clarity. And as the world was flawed, so the reflection was also, and Sam’s blindness was in his unwillingness to disguise this.
How to explain to Sam about hiding in your work? About turning your message, turning your story, into something you would be allowed to publish. Their setting had to be the colonisation, because it had to be beyond reproach. They couldn’t be Jewish, couldn’t be anything else but what their audience would be too, or the whole structure would fall down around them. Sam seemed to think that the leeway they bought themselves there gave free rein to say anything. How to explain the compromise?
How to explain to Sam, who might as well have ars gratia artis tattooed over his heart; his own bohemian cut free in time. Sam longed for a garret to starve in; Montmarte or Venice Beach, lost in a haze of absinthe and whispering muses. The whiskey in front of him on the bar, and the silence between the two of them, would never be enough.
Sam tapped his glass, and the note rang out pure before he spoke. “We need an ending.”
“Sam.”
“You want to kill him,” he said dully.
“I don’t want to kill him, Sam, it needs-”
“You said the story wasn’t independent of the writers. If he dies at the end it’s because you wanted to kill him.”
“You don’t believe that.” Toby ran a finger along the delicate bone of the one Sam tapped on the bar, stopping its motion.
Sam froze, and then shook his head, agreeing with Toby.
“The end of a play isn’t arbitrary, Sam. End it three days earlier and you end on a happy couple, make it a year later and maybe they’re both unhappy, maybe they’ve buried the child she’s pregnant with, maybe she’s the one that died.”
“And happy endings?”
“Sam. Do you really think that’s what this ends on?”
“It might.”
“Not here. But it doesn’t end on the death,” Toby said. “It ends afterwards, with the woman and the son.”
He could see understanding dawn when Sam’s fingers made an instinctive reach for his notebook. “You didn’t tell me,” Sam said.
“I didn’t know.”
“You’ve known where it ended for weeks.”
“No.” Because before Sam he might have ended it on the death, on the wanderer homeless and without mourners. Sam believed that the new world which had eluded their protaganist was within touching distance, and when he said it, Toby wanted to believe him. Not enough to write it as reality, but enough to leave the space for it, the space that those who came after them might fit within.
“Come on.” Sam pulled Toby up by the elbow, throwing down the money for their drinks.
He looked at Sam in question.
“Let’s go back to the office.”
“You’ve rediscovered your talent?”
Sam’s smile was blinding through the smoke and haze of the evening. “We can write anything tonight.”
* * * *
August 21st 1956
They were asleep in their chairs, but over the same desk. Sam’s shirt was rucked up awkwardly on his back, and Toby’s suspenders were pulled taut over his shoulder. The fingers of Sam’s left hand brushed the tips of those on Toby’s right; holding down the pages that hadn’t been written last night. Jed had three daughters, and it was the work of a moment to silently remove the script from the men’s grasp.
He took the pages to his own office, instructing Charlie to keep everyone out.
When he opened the door again, Charlie looked up and smiled slowly.
“What is it?” Jed asked.
“You look like we have a show.”
“Get Leo for me, would you? And read this.”
Charlie protested, “Mr Bartlet, I’m really not… you should wait for Leo.”
“You’ve been working here as long as I have, Charlie - I’m pretty sure you can tell good writing from bad at sixty paces. And I need a second opinion.”
Charlie read the last scene with Jed Bartlet rereading over his shoulder. When he had finished, he handed them back to his boss with the same smile. “We have a show.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Leo, finally called up from whatever he had been doing in the bowels of the theatre, announced himself on the way upstairs, “Jed?”
“He did it.”
“Who did what?”
“Toby. He wrote the play he’s been carefully not writing since you brought him here. Him and Sam.”
* * * *
August 27th 1956
Sam met Josh Lyman for the first time during the auditions. An arm was slung companionably around his shoulder and he heard the voice before he had time to turn around and find who it belonged to.
“You’re the writer,” Josh said warmly.
“I work with Toby,” Sam said.
“Hey, great job on the script. You too,” he called across the room.
Sam looked around to see Toby entering the rehearsal room.
“Josh,” Toby acknowledged.
Sam hadn’t been able to work out how Toby viewed Josh, a curious mixture of fondness and condescension. But when Josh saw Toby, he moved across the room and gripped Toby’s arm tightly, pulling the two of them together for a brief embrace. Sam couldn’t make out Josh’s words, but Toby nodded.
Jed, Leo and Charlie arrived all at once through the doors. “There are at least forty-eight young women in the lobby,” Jed observed.
“You know that they won’t all be actresses?” Leo said. “Charlie does his best to weed out the crazies, but some of the lunatics in love with Josh always get through.”
“I think I should be offended,” Josh murmured.
But, true enough, some of the girls were clearly there for the opportunity to get a closer look at the famous Josh Lyman. There were also, Sam noted to his amusement, quite a few who fluttered when they had to shake Mr Bartlet’s hand, or who watched Toby with a wary awe. He had never been close enough to the stars to see this firsthand before, so Sam was still people-watching when the girl walked in.
Donnatella Moss was a slim blonde who evoked all the stereotypes of ‘those poor deluded females’ (CJ’s words) without appearing to embody any of them. She met Jed’s eyes when they shook hands, and made a point of smiling at Sam and Leo as well as Toby and Josh.
When handed the audition piece and told to stand in front of Josh, she closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them and nodded. She was reading Tennessee Williams, but Sam could hear how Toby’s words would sound in this woman’s voice. Donna looked nothing like the Catherine who had inhabited his head for these long weeks, but when she turned her back to Josh, without the self-conscious blush of some, without the forced hysteria of the others, he knew.
When she left, Josh spoke first, “Do we have to see the others?”
“Josh,” Leo admonished.
“Leo, that’s her. She’s… she’s the girl, I can tell.”
“You’re always convinced of your ability to ‘tell’, Josh.” Jed watched him pointedly. “That’s why we’ve had a new lead actress twelve shows running.”
“Mr Bartlet,” Josh said.
“All of these young women came out here today looking for a fair chance. I won’t deny them that.”
Josh couldn’t disagree with that, and neither could anyone else. They heard the remaining ten girls. And then, afterwards, when they sat around the table with stacks of notes, Josh looked up. “Donnatella Moss?”
“She’s the girl,” Jed agreed. “Don’t screw it up.”
* * * *
September 3rd 1956
The first draft of the script was complete and circulated, the cast was finalised, and Danny Concanon was hanging around the stage door. Ostensibly to convince the actors to reveal some details of the script, or to provoke Donna and Josh into one of their hair-pulling, ear-pinching arguments, but in reality to continue his long-running courtship of their production manager. It was a month before they opened.
This early in rehearsals, the theatre itself was still occupied by the tour company, so they were in the room used in auditions. More like a classroom than a studio theatre, the room’s walls were lined with chairs for directors, writers, and any actor not currently on stage.
Sam rushed in, late, but bearing two coffees, one of which he brought straight to Toby. He sat down in the chair next to the other writer, and produced a notepad. “Do you usually change much this late on?” he asked.
“If Jed thinks something isn’t working, he’ll change it. If that means a rewrite the day of the opening night, then so be it.”
“Really?”
“Just keep your notebook out.”
Josh walked into the room, almost unrecognisable in a bulky coat and with his head hanging low. He walked to the centre of the room, nodded at Jed, and turned his face up to an imaginary spotlight. He opened his mouth.
Sam’s arm jerked out reflexively and his hand gripped Toby’s wrist; white bone circle scorching a brand onto cool skin. Toby didn’t move away, didn’t dare speak; he sat beside Sam, and listened to their words for the first time.
* * * *
September 10th 1956
Production meetings tended towards strangeness. For one thing, CJ got to explain technical processes in great detail to a credulous audience who believed anything she said. The first few were fun, and she got her kicks, but at some point someone always did something that made her want to stab them with her screwdriver.
“CJ. Please stop brandishing that.”
“Toby, so help me God…”
“It was a question.”
“It was not a question. It was an accusation. An aspersion, in fact, on my abilities, and/or my integrity.”
“CJ!”
“You can have a forest of bad trees, Toby. Or one good tree. Or a forest of good trees and no other props. And no actors.”
“That’s a real breadth of choice you’ve given us there, CJ,” Leo said.
She was unrepentant. “You didn’t hire me to be demure. Those are the options.”
“Margaret?” Leo asked.
“I’m assuming that you’re asking me from a props point of view?”
“Given that you’re the stage manager, that would seem a safe bet, yes.”
“There have been, in the past ten years, enough shows with period sets that we could cope with mostly refurbishing what we have.”
“So we’re good?”
“Yes,” she assured him.
CJ twirled her screwdriver again. “Are we done here? I have set to cannibalise. Or possibly a forest to destroy. You think anyone would notice if we stole Hyde Park?”
“I think it might be remarked upon,” Leo said. “Let’s keep that as Plan B.”
“Okay then,” Mr Bartlet said. “Let’s try not to need another one of these meetings for a little while.”
* * * *
September 13th 1956
Josh said it first. “We’re missing something here.”
“Josh?” Jed asked, watching his lead actor who had stopped in the middle of the rehearsal.
“We’re missing a scene.”
Sam looked up from his notebook in surprise. Toby’s pen stopped scratching. It wasn’t like Josh to pick at the script. Largely because Toby would tear him apart while Sam watched. Sam replayed the last few scenes in his head, and could not discover what it was that Josh had objected to.
“Or a line, or a few lines, or something,” Josh continued. “Donna, back me up here.”
“Josh, I’m not sure,” she said.
“No, he’s right,” Jed finally said. “Something between this scene and the next one, or something new in one of those scenes. We need something…”
“What kind of something?” Leo asked.
“Something that explains why this girl marries this guy,” he answered, gesturing between Donna and Josh.
“And again: should I be taking offence here?” Josh asked no one in particular.
Sam had started gathering his notes before Mr Bartlet had spoken up, and stood to hold the coffee while Toby collected his own notes. They left the rehearsal room without a word, Josh trailing after them.
After only a few minutes in the office, both he and Toby were studiously ignoring Josh, who was hovering by the window, trying not to be distracting.
“More explicit,” Sam suggested.
“Stop saying that. I swear, Sam, if it’s not ‘Our Town’, you don’t think it’s explicit enough.”
“We’re on this again?”
“Until you stop watching musicals, yeah.”
“Toby.”
“If you had your way, this show would end with a happy number about how fun it is to meet new people and then marry them.”
“Toby, have you ever seen ‘Our Town’?”
“Why?”
“Because Emily dies? It’s not… ‘Threepenny Opera’ ends like that, and you like it. And ‘Our Town’s’ meta-theatre!”
“The ending of ‘Threepenny Opera’ is parody. Of shows like ‘Our Town’, in fact.”
“You, me, Cole Porter.”
“Okay,” Toby promised vaguely. “As soon as we’re done reinventing American theatre I’ll get right on that. I need,” he snapped his fingers in the air. Sam nodded and tossed the rolled typewriter ribbon into Toby’s waiting hand.
At the window, Josh coughed. “You guys are weird, you know that, right?”
“What?” Toby asked.
“Yes,” Sam answered. He ripped the page from his typewriter and passed it, folded, to Toby. After giving Sam his own in return, Toby opened the page. They repeated this three more times before moving to one page.
Sam passed up the new sheet to Josh for his approval. He watched Josh read it through quickly once, and then, slower, twice more.
“You just did this?” Josh asked.
“We’re not actually withholding material from you,” Sam answered. “You have what we have.”
“You guys really are-”
“Weird. You said that already,” Toby said, hoisting Sam up by the arm. “Back to rehearsal.”
* * * *
September 17th 1956
Danny was grinning at something over her shoulder. CJ resisted the urge to turn around (it wouldn’t be beyond him to do this just to bug her) and looked at him pointedly instead.
“They should be in the movies,” he said.
CJ turned around, to see Josh and Donna having a quiet but apparently heated argument down the hallway. Josh waved one hand in the air which Donna promptly caught and jabbed back at his chest.
Danny was openly laughing now. “Seriously, get Toby to write them something funny. They’re a screwball comedy waiting to happen.”
“Only if they live that long,” she muttered in response. “Josh!” Danny covered his ears as she turned around. “Take that somewhere else! Preferably separate dressing rooms.”
“Hey, Sam,” Danny called brightly, when the young writer wandered past him. Sam raised a hand and smiled. When CJ turned back to face Danny, he cocked his head to one side. “You know he was arrested last month?”
“Danny!”
“Yeah?” he answered casually.
“Don’t say things like that. Don’t come into my theatre, and throw around accusations about my writers while we’re in the middle of my get-in! I have a set to build, I have lamps to rig, I have sound-checks, and prop-checks, and-”
“CJ! I’m not doing anything with the information. I’m not actually interested in the information. I’m a theatre critic, I have no interest in whatever petty reasons the Chicago Police Department had for dragging your writer into what I believe was very temporary custody.”
“So why the hell did you say it?!” she asked.
“I was making conversation.”
“Don’t!”
“How d’you think the dress rehearsal tomorrow’s going to go?”
“Please don’t talk to me.”
* * * *
September 18th 1956
“Don’t trip,” Margaret instructed Josh sharply.
“I’m sorry? ‘Don’t trip’? Like that’s something I do on purpose?”
“I have noticed that on the nights that I remind you not to trip, you do tend, Joshua, to be more careful. I’ve counted, and you mess up your entrances at least fifty percent more often when you haven’t been given prior warning.”
“Have you considered, maybe, that the reason I don’t trip is because instead of thinking about my performance I’m thinking about the crazy woman in the wings?”
He swept past her to peer out into the theatre.
“What’cha looking at?” CJ asked, from the shadows.
“CJ!”
“That was a very masculine squeal there.”
“You were lurking in your spy-gear.”
She looked down at her black slacks and sweater. “This is backstage, Josh, we don’t need to wear outfits that scream ‘here I am’. In fact, that’s generally what we’re trying to avoid.”
“Yeah. Is there a reason, by the way, that they’re not sitting with each other?”
“Who?” CJ came beside him to look through the stage door.
“Shakespeare and Marlowe.”
“In the course of your becoming an actor, did you study any theatrical history at all?”
“CJ.”
“They distract each other. If they sit together they end up writing each other notes.”
Josh looked down at the stalls, and then up at the circle. Both Toby and Sam had notebooks on their laps, and Sam was already scribbling in his, though God knew what he had found to write down.
CJ’s eyes had followed the same path as Josh’s. “Yes, but this way they’re taking notes on what actually happens onstage. Rather than what they usually end up doing, which is where they start rewriting the script. I think they want to see you act this time round.”
“Is that a compliment?”
She touched his arm lightly. “First dress rehearsal, Josh. We’re nearly there.”
* * * *
September 24th 1956
His nightmares had been filled with empty houses and cat-calling. Sam met Toby in the Gods, the only seats available to them. They had sold out.
“We owe Danny Concanon a drink,” Sam said.
Toby shrugged, and pointed at his watch.
“After the show.” Sam agreed.
Sam could remember almost nothing between the first black-out and the last, when the actors took the stage for the curtain-call and the wall of sound climbed to reach them in the circle. Josh had stumbled on one of his entrances and Toby had sworn at him; Abbey had been every inch a Governor, and she would have to tone that down; everything had turned quiet for the third act monologue; Donna had been as beautiful and tragic as he had ever seen her in the last scene; the audience had clapped.
Jed Bartlet outstretched an arm in their direction from his place centre stage. The audience turned and applauded, and it took Toby’s hand on the small of his back to remind Sam that he should bow.
Jed and the actors left the stage in blackout again, the audience still in standing ovation. In the darkness before the house lights came up, Sam reached for Toby. It was a clumsy impact of chest on chest, arms not allowed to be close enough to tangle. Sam’s smooth cheek pressed against that place where Toby’s beard ran into the cords of his neck. If the lights had stayed down, he would have whispered into that rough edge. As it was, Sam returned to his own space, and knelt to pick up the hats.
* * * *
It was not yet three-fifteen, and they waited for the early editions in the bar. Jed had his wife at his arm, Josh and Donna had either reconciled or were taking advantage of the adrenaline high, and CJ looked like a goddess.
“What?” she asked, when everyone had turned to look her up and down.
“You look great, CJ,” Sam said.
She smiled at him, and glared at Josh. “Yes, I do own dresses.”
“And heels,” he observed quietly.
“Those too. What do you think I wear when I’m not climbing ladders and hammering set together, Josh?”
“It never crossed my mind,” he said.
She laughed, low in her throat, and spun around. Her dress twirled about her legs, and the bracelet on her wrist caught the light.
“And now that you have the attention of every man in the room?” Abbey asked, with a wicked grin.
“I see if it helps me get to the front of the drinks queue. Anyone else?”
CJ recited back the long list of orders without difficulty, and promptly made her way to the front of the crowd. Toby had to smile at the double-take the bartender made when he saw the woman leaning confidently over the counter-top.
A multitude of glasses were assembled in front of her, and when she gestured impatiently at their tables, most of the group went to help her carry.
Toby watched, amused, as Sam reached a hand backwards, not looking. He didn’t have to move his own hand to meet Sam’s, just turned it palm-upwards.
Only now everyone else had gone to get their drinks did it become obvious just how close they were sitting to each other. Where it had been the writers sandwiched in between the actors and the directors, now it was simply them - Sam’s thigh and shoulder pressed tight against his own in the smoky bar.
Toby lifted his left hand to point at himself, at Sam, at their hands still together underneath the table. “We’re everything they hate, you know.”
Sam smiled and, for a moment, dipped his head even closer to Toby’s to tell his secret, “Not tonight.”
He knew that Sam was high on the applause, the way it sounded only in the theatre, one pair of hands at a time, filling a building normally so full of echoes and whispers with a roar of sound.
Toby couldn’t help but wait for the other shoe to fall. Charlie came into the bar with the newspapers.
Sam’s hand twitched within Toby’s.
They arrived back at the table one by one. Jed kissed his wife’s cheek and smiled at her. “You were wonderful tonight.” He looked around at the cast and crew assembled at the tables. “We did a great job, and we’re going to keep doing a great job. The audience loved the show. Nothing in these pages takes anything away from that.”
Jed reached a hand out and took the papers from Charlie.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” he said. “Ziegler’s latest effort stands up against the best Chicago theatre can produce... Joshua Lyman is, as ever, fearlessly committed to the role, as is Abigail Bartlet in one of the few great female roles you’ll see this year. Donnatella Moss is a revelation in the other.” Jed paused. “You know, I think they liked us.”
Donna’s face was buried in Josh’s neck; he patted her back with a look of shellshock.
Abbey reached for another newspaper. “Modest, Jed? 'Bartlet’s restrained, intimate direction draws every nuance from the Ziegler/Seaborn script, letting its words stand alone where they should, and against the Lyman-Moss intimacy where they shouldn’t.'”
Charlie coughed, “This is one for CJ: 'CJ Cregg’s always-professional production management is shown at its best in the set and lighting design. It effortlessly evokes a bygone era, without relying on rose-coloured nostalgia or overwhelming the actors’ naturalistic portrayals of their seventeenth-century protagonists.'”
CJ turned on her heel, looking at the door. “Effortless?”
“Appearing effortless, then,” Danny amended, joining the party. “You’re looking beautiful by the way.”
“I am indeed, Daniel. And I believe that I am finally able to take you up on that offer.”
“CJ?”
“Dance with me.”
The piano notes hung, languid and sultry, about the two of them as CJ spun in Danny’s arms. Jed rose from the table and gallantly offered his wife his arm, which she took with a smile. Their lead actors took no more time to find their way to the impromptu dance-floor.
Sam had picked up one of the newspapers. “Ziegler and Seaborn,” he read, his voice low and intense, “are both known, officially or unofficially, as partisans of the left. The audience would be forgiven for expecting a politically-charged polemic. What they have produced, however, is more than allegory - it is a timeless piece of theatre, a reminder of our great past with a note of even greater hope for our future. Soon to be regarded as a modern classic.”
“Five stars.” Toby read.
“Toby.” Sam dropped his head against Toby’s shoulder, pulling it back up after a long breath of relief. The brief moment of contact brought back the memory, a few hours earlier, of Sam’s lips on the corner of his mouth, as if he had been about to speak.
“We’re going to get a breath of air,” Toby said, addressing the crowd around them.
Jed caught them both around the shoulders on the way to the door. “Congratulations are in order.”
“And to you,” Sam replied sincerely.
“We all had a good night,” Jed agreed. “But you two really earned your pay these past few months. Enjoy your night. You deserve it.”
“Thank you,” Toby said. He steered Sam out of the bar, through and around the rest of the company and their attempts at back-slapping and appreciation.
The city was quiet, and the streets were almost empty. Toby dragged Sam into the side-alley as gently as he could manage. Still, his breath was pulled from him when Toby steered him against the wall, cradling the back of Sam’s head to protect it from the brickwork. Through the shadows of the fire-escape, their shapes would be indistinct. Sam opened his mouth to ask a question, and Toby covered it with his own.
Sam worked his hands under Toby’s jacket, warm and quick rubbing along the lines of Toby’s ribs. His breath when they broke apart was a sudden, rushing gasp that blew a sweet whiskey-taste over Toby’s lips.
“Toby?” Sam asked.
“Yeah?”
“What happens tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow? Tomorrow we write.”
AN2: Not that it matters, but the wife Toby mentions isn't Andy. In my head it's the wife raedbard thinks he had who died before he remarried. And, zau, I don't know if you wanted more sex, or even more kissing, but it just wouldn't go there! I think I may have been inspired by the 50s setting to hint at more than I wrote, so I hope you aren't too disappointed. And thank you for the wonderful prompt - I knew the moment I saw it that it was the one I wanted to write!