Understudies in the Audience by Jacob Appel

The trouble in Faye Steinbruch’s marriage emerged when they received a pair of theater tickets purchased in the name of their recently deceased neighbor.  This was far from the first time the couple had received mail earmarked for the elderly family therapist in 4C—her name was Hanah Steinbruch and Faye’s husband was Hugh—and usually they slid the offending letters under her door.  But this time, Faye had opened the envelope without checking the address, only to discover two orchestra seats for the opening of Understudies in the Audience at the Public Theater that Friday.  Five minutes later, she was arranging a babysitter for Molly, who had just turned seven, and preparing an argument for Hugh, who she knew would much prefer to watch a British mystery on television.  

Hugh didn’t come home until nearly eight o’clock; one of his transplant patients had been arrested for securities fraud, which meant hours burned ensuring the man could access his anti-rejection medication while detained.  He made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while Faye struggled to interest him in the play.  Her husband’s taste in food hadn’t matured past grade school staples—grilled cheese, pizza bagels, macaroni—a quality that Faye found endearing. 

“We might as well use them,” she suggested.  “What’s the harm?”   

“To begin with, they’re not ours.  Dead people have property rights too,” he replied—still sporting his hospital ID badge around his neck.  “Besides, I have to cover the liver service early Saturday morning and don’t want to stay up late—especially to see some experimental show that nobody has ever heard of.”  Hugh removed his tie and opened his collar.  “I never liked that woman, to be honest, and I’m sure as hell not going to trust her taste in plays.”

He had a point about Hanah Steinbruch:  Their neighbor always struck Faye as disapproving.  She hadn’t said anything directly, but her body language, her sighs, the way in which she squinted at Hugh, then at her, in the elevator—all of it conveyed a critical judgment of Faye’s marriage, her way of living, her very presence on the planet.  More reason, as Faye saw it, to take advantage of the woman’s theater subscription.

“If it’s not good, we can leave at intermission.”

Hugh poured himself a glass of merlot to chase down his sandwich and opened the morning’s New York Times.  “Why don’t we just get tickets for something we both want to see later in the fall? We can afford it.”  He spoke into the pages of the newspaper.  “What’s that musical about Mormons my sister recommended?”       

“I already arranged for Ellen Golden’s daughter to look after Molly,” she said.

Her husband lowered the paper.  “Did you?”  Then he returned to the news without saying more, but he did not ask her to cancel the sitter, which she understood, after twelve years of marriage, was his way of grudgingly assenting.

~

They took a cab to the play.  On the way, Hugh made a remark about Vicky Golden’s attire that irked Faye—the teen was babysitting, after all, not picking up sailors at a saloon—and while she didn’t disagree aloud, she arrived at the theater mildly irritated.  She tried to focus on the novelty of being out on a Friday night together—just the two of them—and once they’d settled into their seats, she squeezed her husband’s arm enthusiastically.  “Isn’t this fun?”

“I wish we were sitting farther back,” Hugh replied, rubbing the base of his skull with one hand and surveying the rapidly filling playhouse.  “My neck is too old for the second row.”

“Well, I’m having fun,” said Faye.

A moment later, the house lights dimmed and the curtain rose on the celebrated couple—married both on stage and in real life—arguing at their kitchen table.   In the drama, Frances and Henry Sinclair (played by Blanche Eversleigh and Sir Basil Ravenshaw) played a fortysomething professional couple who mistakenly receive the theater tickets of their deceased neighbor and, after a fierce row, decide to take advantage of this windfall.  Even more unsettling, Henry was a physician, albeit a neurologist, and Frances a retired dancer. The uncanny similarities sent a chill down Faye’s spine.  She glanced at Hugh, but found his eyes closed.  By the time the audience applauded at intermission, Faye feared she might be hallucinating.

“That’s us,” she insisted.  “It’s our marriage.”

“It’s just a coincidence,” said Hugh.  “A significant one, I’ll concede, but nothing more… Half of the couples in this city are doctors married to ex-dancers.”  

“You weren’t even awake,” snapped Faye.  

“I heard every last word,” Hugh answered.  “The actors interfered with my nap.”

They went their separate ways—Faye to use the lavatory and phone the babysitter, Hugh to check his messages from the hospital—and she returned as the house chimes sounded.  Impulsively, she squeezed Hugh’s hand.  Then, for nearly an hour, they were subject to the disintegration of the Sinclairs’ marriage.  The play that the couple on stage had watched had also been about a husband and wife quarreling over whether to make use of a dead neighbor’s theater tickets, and its consequences, and in both the play and the play-within-a-play, the aftermath of this conflict was a mutual recognition of incompatibility.  Their tragedy left Faye on the brink of tears; when they reached the sidewalk, she was quietly weeping.   “That was awful,” she said.

“On that we can agree,” said Hugh.  

He fought for the attention of passing taxis on Lafayette Street.

“We’re not going to split up, are we?” Faye pleaded.  “We’re not like that…”

She tried to think a joyful moment from their past—the boardwalk at Cape May, the day they introduced the puppy to Molly—but her mind refused to focus.  She viscerally sensed her life slipping away from her like sand through her fingers.   

“Of course not.  We’re fine,” said Hugh.  He kissed her forehead gently to reassure her.  “It’s just a stupid play about stupid strangers.  I knew we should have seen something upbeat.” 

Then her husband cursed at a fellow pedestrian who’d poached his cab, a rather imposing, broad-shouldered man in a safari jacket with a Riviera flair, and the man’s younger female companion shouted back, and Faye gave up on holding back her sobs.

~

Faye slept poorly.  She wanted to wake up Hugh to discuss the play, but if she did, she realized he’d be in no mood to talk.  He was always on edge when he worked weekends.  When her alarm finally sounded—Molly had ballet lessons at nine o’clock—he was long gone.  Then Molly had a playdate on the Upper West Side, and by the time Faye returned home, Hugh had already left for his squash date with his brother-in-law.  Yet he had left behind a dozen red roses in a vase on her vanity—maybe not a declaration of abiding love, but close enough.  Faye nuzzled the soft petals against her cheek and smiled at the fragrance, before returning to the business at hand:  scrubbing chocolate frosting off her daughter’s favorite pair of overalls.

The rest of the evening proved no calmer:  a family dinner at the pizza shop on the corner, the monthly bathing of the dog, an unexpected phone call from her childhood friend in twelve-step rehab, who’d wanted to apologize for a lifetime of minor transgressions.  When they finally had a moment alone to decompress, the day was long gone, and Hugh had already flipped the television to a whodunnit featuring Peter Ustinov and Anjelica Huston.

“Can we talk about the play?” Faye asked.    

  “We’re still on that?” he replied.  “I swear if that old hag hadn’t kicked it already, I’d go down there and strangle her.”  Then his tone softened and he patted the bed at his side, inviting her to join him.  “It was just a nasty play, hon.  That’s all.  Now let’s relax and watch something good.”      

“I’m sorry I’m such a wreck today,” she said.

“It will pass.  Incidentally, they emptied the shrew’s apartment this afternoon while you were out with Molly.  Took all of forty-five minutes.  So we’re done with her for good.”

“I hope so,” Faye agreed doubtfully.

The episode had seemed to her to be far more than happenstance and the notion that they’d survived it unscathed too good to be true.  How could Hugh be so confident?  So certain their marriage wouldn’t disintegrate like the Sinclairs’?  Or so many other couples they knew socially—couples like Zach and Ellen Golden—who appeared happy one day and were filing for orders of protection the next?  But Sunday bled into Monday, and then Tuesday, with no cataclysmic crisis, no process servers armed with divorce papers, and by Wednesday, she’d managed to leave the worst of her anxiety in the past.  Alas, the afternoon mail revived the worst of her fears:  two complimentary passes—again reserved for the dead woman—to the screening of the latest Tomasz Krajewski film at Lincoln Center.

“I swear our letter carrier should be horsewhipped,” said Hugh.  “If anyone wonders why people vote Republican, this is the reason.” 

“But what should we do?”

“We don’t have to do anything,” Hugh replied.  “Just tear them up.  Or slide them under the door and maybe the real estate broker will claim them.”  

“I don’t want to go,” Faye explained.  “But I feel as though I have to.  That I have to see this all through. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Not really.  But if you want to go, let’s go.  I’m off this weekend,” he said.  “And a movie, I can handle.  It can’t be any worse than that play.”

“Really?”

“Sure.  But one thing,” said Hugh.  “See if you can find a different sitter.  I don’t like the idea of Vicky Golden sashaying around our apartment with her knockers hanging half out.”

Faye held her tongue.  She thought Ellen’s daughter was dressed fine—no different from any other teenage girl—and she didn’t like Hugh using the word “knockers” in reference to a fifteen-year-old kid.  But if that was the sacrifice required for her husband to sit through a foreign film, a three-hour Polish film with subtitles no less, she could live with it.  Reluctantly, she phoned the agency, and they agreed to send over a graduate student from Columbia.  

~

The title of the film was Dziecko or The Child.  It starred Krzysztof Malinowicz as a professor of cinema and Agnieszka Rudzka as his actress wife whose infant daughter is accidentally smothered by the couple’s new babysitter while they attended a film festival.   Krajewski had shot in black-and-white with a handheld camera, which rendered many of the subtitles impossible to decipher, but the intense pain in Rudzka’s deep-set eyes, when she discovered the child’s corpse, was unmistakable.  Faye immediately thought of Molly, so lovely and so vulnerable, and of the total stranger to whom they’d entrusted her.  All they knew of the girl, Jasmine, was that she studied cortisol levels in depressive baboons.  Why hadn’t they hired Vicky again?  Did it really matter if she sauntered around the apartment like Jayne Mansfield when nobody was looking—as long as the child she returned to them was still breathing?  On the screen, Malinowicz and Rudzka attended their daughter’s funeral mass; he reached for her hand, but she pulled away and made the sign of the cross.

“Let’s go home,” whispered Faye.  She didn’t mention Molly.  Her husband might pander to her boredom, she understood, but not to her anxiety.

Hugh shook his head.  “I want to find out what happens….”

But they already knew what happened—the part that mattered.  The child was dead.  Who cared what happened after that?  Faye fought to contain her mounting panic as the on-screen couple fought bitterly, had sex in a deserted classroom, attended marriage counseling. To Faye’s horror, the couple’s therapist wore the same coarse features, the identical narrow eyes and perennially pursed lips as their deceased neighbor, Hanah Steinbruch.  Suddenly, the air seemed to ignite around Faye—and she bolted from the theater.  She was still gasping for air when Hugh caught up with her in the lobby. 

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Molly,” cried Faye.  “How could we be so crazy?”  

Soon enough they were in an eastbound taxi, cruising up Broadway and through Central Park at a high rate of speed.  To placate her, Hugh had offered to pay the driver double the meter in cash if he could cross town in under twenty minutes.  Meanwhile, Faye phoned the babysitter, but the call went straight to voicemail.  When Hugh tried to comfort her, she just leaned into his body and let herself weep against his chest.  She could hear his heart beating, slow and methodical, also the knock of the shock absorbers as they lurched over speed bumps.    

“Seventeen minutes,” announced the driver in a thick Arabic accent.  “Forty-two dollars fifty cents.”  She darted toward the elevator, leaving Hugh behind to reckon with the tab.

Jasmine opened the door while she was fumbling with her keys.  “You’re home early,” said the girl.  “How was the movie?”

“Molly!” shouted Faye.  “Where’s my daughter?”

Then the child was standing before her, in her pink kangaroo pajamas, lungs breathing exquisitely as ever.  Faye hugged her in desperation.  She didn’t let go until she heard Hugh behind her paying the perplexed babysitter.  

“Everything okay?” he asked—once the sitter had departed.  “Everybody alive?”

Faye said nothing.  She knew he was judging her—thinking her actions idiotic—but she didn’t care.  She just felt relief.

“Bastard tried to cheat me,” said Hugh.  “Meter was only eighteen dollars.”

~

As though by mutual understanding, they did not discuss the movie incident.  The truth was that Faye didn’t discuss much of anything with Hugh for the next several days—fearful that she might say or do the wrong thing.  Eventually, their life returned to its hectic yet reassuring routine—piano lessons, birthday parties, lunches with Ellen at Maison Delancey—although the routine no longer felt as fully reassuring.  Or, rather, she had a newfound awareness that she required reassurance, that her gingerbread life could easily crumble.  Yet she’d finally clawed herself back to a reasonably good place when the dead woman served up one final blow.  

They had gone for a stroll along the Esplanade—the three of them—to enjoy the autumn breeze and watch the boats headed down the East River.  Molly had brought along a pail to gather acorns, the latest of her newfound fascinations.  Faye was discussing an unusual incident that had occurred several days earlier.  “Do you remember that guy you shouted at about the taxi outside the Public Theater?  The one in the safari jacket?”

“Not really,” said Hugh.  “I shout at lots of guys about taxis.”

“Well, I ran into him on Monday.  His daughter takes piano with Molly’s teacher.  Kind of amazing, isn’t it?”

“That his daughter studies piano?”

“That she has the lesson right before ours,” said Faye.  “Has for months—but we’re always so late that I never noticed.”  

They had stopped under the shade of a scarlet oak so Molly could forage.  On the river, a barge chugged against the current toward the Bronx. 

“He’s actually rather delightful.  I apologized and he took all of us out for ice cream.  Turns out he’s raising his daughter on his own too. Wife wants nothing to do with them.  That woman he was with last month was his niece.” 

Hugh appeared marginally interested.  “That reminds me,” he said.  “On the subject of strange coincidences, we received more tickets from the shrew downstairs today.  But this time they’re for a musical….”

“But she’s been dead for two months.”

“Turns out she was too sick to attend in August, so she requested vouchers,” explained Hugh.  “They just sent a reminder.  We can choose any date that’s not blocked out between now and New Year’s Eve.”

“That’s a change of tune,” said Faye.  “What happened to dead people’s property rights or whatever?   How is this any different?”

“I like musicals,” said Hugh.  “That’s the difference.”

~

Faye did not want see the musical.  Her gut told her that they had to break free of their deceased neighbor before it was too late—although she couldn’t say precisely too late for what.  At the same time, she understood that changing Hugh’s mind was like cracking ice with a feather.  He’d enjoyed a brief moment of minor theatrical celebrity in medical school—performing the lead roles in Pippin and The Music Man with the Hippocratic Players—and he was determined that the dead woman make amends, of sorts, for earlier squandering his time.

They chose a Sunday matinee in mid-October.  Hugh’s sister had offered to take Molly to Connecticut for the day to pick apples.   Faye agreed reluctantly after securing a promise that there would be absolutely no ladder climbing, not even under close supervision.  She’d had a great-uncle who’d died falling from a broken ladder—and although he’d been in his eighties, she wasn’t taking any chances. Then Hugh had to stop at the drycleaner’s to pick up his tuxedo—the medicine department’s annual benefit was fast approaching—so they were among the final audience members seated at Last Fare Til Morning.  A woman behind them announced, much too loud, “For the record, I’m saying we should have seen Smash.”  Only seconds later, the orchestra thundered into full swing, and the company was opening and shutting taxi doors like madmen to a chorus of a zany jazz tune called “I Hailed It First.”  Hugh turned to Faye, grinning, and whispered, “Now this, honey, is my kind of show.”

The plot proved rather straightforward:  A New York City architect hails a taxi, but out of nowhere, another man—a surgeon, the audience later learns—steals it from under him.  The two eventually come to blows.  The cab driver, a Filipino woman who dreams of becoming a NASCAR driver, then croons a melody, “One Quiet Night,” about her perennial prayer that she will survive her shift without encountering violence.  Meanwhile, the surgeon ends up suing the architect over a broken pinkie.  Later, the architect encounters the surgeon’s underappreciated wife when the two discover that their daughters are in the same orchestra concert, and an affair commences.  

The architect and the wife share a romantic duet about fate, and how, if not for the cab fight, they’d have passed by each other like taxis on an avenue.  The following night, the surgeon and his wife attend a Broadway show about a couple whose marriage collapses after they begin using tickets intended for their deceased neighbor, and act one concludes as act two of the play on the stage starts—with the husband rushing off to a surgical emergency at the hospital and abandoning his wife at the theater.  The forsaken wife is seen sitting alone, beside her husband’s empty seat, contemplating her future, as the cacophony of cabs honking rises in the background, and the curtain falls.  

“Well? What do you think?” asked Hugh.

Her husband was in uncharacteristically high spirits.

“It’s something,” she replied.  She was at a loss to say more.

“I have to check my messages.  Duty calls,” said Hugh. “But I’ll be back.”  He pecked her on the cheek.  “I promise.”   

Faye remained seated.  The intermission seemed to drag on eternally.  Then as the house chimes sounded a two-minute warning, she rose suddenly, almost mechanically, and retreated into the shadows.  She was still standing in the darkness, watching, as Hugh settled into his seat—observing his confusion as the curtain rose on act two of the show.

Jacob M. Appel is currently Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.   He is the author of five literary novels, ten short story collections, an essay collection, a cozy mystery, a thriller, two volumes of poems and a compendium of dilemmas in medical ethics.  More at:  www.jacobmappel.com

29 May 2026