Nine Years of Wings

You learn a strange profession when you understudy long enough. You learn the part perfectly and you learn, equally perfectly, not to want it, because wanting it every night for nine years would hollow a person out like a spoon does a melon. So I unlearned the wanting. I got good at the unlearning. I'd stand in the wings in the same costume as Diana, my mirror in a slightly cheaper fabric, and I'd watch her do the speech, my speech, her speech, and I'd feel — and this is the part nobody tells you — I'd feel nothing. A clean professional nothing. I'd go home and water my plants. Nine years. Then on a wet Tuesday in October Diana's understudy got a phone call at half past six, and the understudy was me, and the phone call was the call, and I stood in my kitchen holding it and I waited for the wanting to come rushing back. It didn't come. That was the first frightening thing.