To the immersive theater experience you wear a slinky black dress, a hat with a tiny birdcage veil, fishnet stockings, T-strap heels. You curl your hair and color your lips scarlet. Your husband got snippy with you one night on the subway when he thought the neckline on your sheer turquoise t-shirt was too low, but you get a semi-enthusiastic You look nice out of him tonight. And you feel like a Hitchcock dame stepping outside, even if you’re stepping out of your apartment in a long row of dumpy ticky-tacky duplexes in Queens.
You travel to the immersive theater experience on the subway in a snowstorm. People will talk about it for years, that freak Halloween Eve snowstorm. You have a coat, but your legs in their fishnet stockings are still cold, your T-strap heels wobble. Still, you don’t consider going home to change. It’s Mischief Night at the immersive theater experience, and guests have been asked to dress for a certain naughtiness. You’re surprised that your husband consented to go. You think he must have some desire, still, even if he hasn’t acted on it in almost a year. He used to like the sheer low-cut t-shirts and the T-strap heels. You used to go to shows of bands you barely liked and plan insightful observations to share on the way home. You saw foul-mouthed comics in basements at Edinburgh Fringe together. Tonight would be a return to form were it not for whatever darkness opened in him and occasionally roars out of him threatening to swallow you down with it.
You have to—everyone has to—wear a black mask at the immersive theater experience, masquerade ball-style. Lace for the women, velvet for the men. The gender-expansive have to pick a side. So do you, as it will turn out. But to begin, you accept your husband’s offer to help tie the mask on. You should feel something—there should be some kind of frisson as he does so. You can imagine it: a lover pulling the grosgrain ribbon snug around your head, tying a firm knot, caressing your jaw or kissing your neck as they do so. (Lace or velvet mask for the lover? Who knows?) You could conjure a scenario, a roleplay. A stranger in a mask at a ball. And you should feel something, but you don’t. His own mask has an elastic band and he puts it on himself.
The immersive theater experience is situated in an old warehouse, and you move through it Choose Your Own Adventure style. It is dark, occasionally lit dimly in a perverse primary palette: ember red, dusty gold, cobalt blue. There are notes on smoky yellow paper to be unfolded or slipped out of old manual typewriters, messages scrawled on cracked walls in lipstick or kohl, telegrams and ticker tapes, heavy rotary phones that don’t stop ringing. Everything is fascinating and full of potential, but your husband wants it to be linear, wants to figure out the right way to pass through each room and hallway to see if the show lines up with the old stories on which it is based. You don’t know or care if you’re going the right way. You just want to read the old notes and read the desperate scrawls and see how, or if, they converge.
In this way you keep losing each other in the immersive theater experience. The disheveled rooms speak of violence that tore through moments before, though you never see it. All the actors are instead walking with light heads, looking through their masks at dark corners and nearly stumbling; or, in some cases, pouring tea with studied expressions, straightening books on a shelf, folding baby blankets, sorting mail, determined to maintain the double illusion that everything is real and nothing is wrong. You are both of these classes of actors with each other, you and your husband.
There’s a bar in the middle of the immersive theater experience, but it doesn’t serve drinks, not in the way you’d expect. There’s a bartender, but only one glass, which he dries slowly and interminably. There is sawdust on the floor and a single amber spotlight. There are bottles of liquor, all unlabeled and still. And there is a tinny jukebox— Billie Holiday singing Johnny Mercer, “If You Were Mine.” And there is a dancer in a velvet mask, a waistcoat, shirtsleeves. And he takes your hand and pulls you into the center of the room, and other guests recede toward the bar, including your husband.
He takes a small wooden box from a plinth in what you suppose is a dance floor, there in the bar at the immersive theater experience, and opens it. Inside is a shotglass on a bed of wood shavings, and he offers it to you, and you bolt it without thinking—tequila, maybe? And then, If you were mine/I would live for your love alone/To kneel at your shrine/I would give up all I own, Billie confesses in her inimitable croon, and with one hand the dancer holds your hand to his heart while he encircles your waist with the other. He is warm, a bit sweaty. Between the mask and the dim light there’s not much to see of his face, but you can see dark hair that might need a trim, scruff on the chin. And you know that he can’t see much of you either, that the scarlet lips and curled hair are doing a lot of work, and you know he must have done this half a dozen times already tonight and will probably do it half a dozen more, but your hand is on another man’s chest, feeling his heart beat, in full view of your husband and all the other guests who Chose Their Own Adventures and found themselves there with you, with the dancer. The liquor was strong, and the dancer is warm, and the spotlight has found you—your cheeks are hot, and the Johnny Mercer song is short and sweet but Billie makes it sting, and the dancer bends his neck and lays his mouth beside your ear and whispers something you don’t understand, and then he lets you go and spins you back into the wave along the bar and he dances away into the dark.
You can’t look at each other for a minute or two, you and your husband, at the immersive theater experience. You know it wasn’t real, right? That the dancer was an actor, that you don’t know what he told you? That’s what you tell your husband when he asks you, eventually, and you’re telling the truth when you say you don’t know. And you make your way through the rest of the dark warehouse and gather with the rest of the guests to watch the finale, a heap of bodies in various states of undress and unrest, the lights finally clear and icy alongside gasps and whispers.
The snow is still on the ground when you leave the immersive theater experience. You shrug into your coat, your husband shrugs into his. That was something, he says finally. Yeah, you say, wild, slinging your purse back over your arm. For some of us, he adds, giving you a look. Oh, that, you say. Part of the show, I guess. And he rolls his eyes and hails a cab, and you say little in the cab on the way back to the duplex in Queens, where he doesn’t watch you undress or put on some Billie Holiday or dance you into bed, where he just rolls over and goes to sleep and leaves you staring at the dark ceiling wondering if you will ever touch another man’s chest and hold his heartbeat ever again.
It will be almost a year to the day after the immersive theater experience when you will leave him. You’ll never go to another immersive theater experience, but you won’t need to. You’ll give yourself time to linger among curious lighting and the smell of good books. You’ll drink audacious liquors. You’ll wear a white dress that makes another man say you look like an angel. You’ll know what the dancer said after all.
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