The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

the daughter of a woolens manufacturer whom his father expected him to marry.
    "He's done it all before, whether he likes to talk about it or not," Rosen said. "But you, Andras, you've never done it."

    "That's a lie," Andras said, though it was true.

    "Paris is full of girls," Rosen said. "We should arrange an assignation for you.
    One of a professional nature, I mean."

    "With whose money?" Ben Yakov said.

    "Didn't artists at one time have benefactors?" Rosen said. "Where are our benefactors?" He stood and repeated the question at full volume to the room at large. A few of the other patrons raised their glasses. But there was not a prospective benefactor among them; they were all students, with their pots of tea and two biscuits, their left-leaning newspapers, their threadbare coats.

    "At least I have a job," Andras said.

    "Well, save up, save up!" Rosen said. "You can't stay a virgin forever."

    At work he ran from one task to another like a sous-chef assisting in the preparation of a twelve-course meal, each task ending just as another was beginning, all of it under the mounting pressure of time. Claudel, the assistant stage manager, was Basque and had a temper that often expressed itself in the throwing of props, which would then have to be fixed before they were needed onstage. As a result the props-master had quit, and the props had fallen into disrepair. Claudel terrorized the prompters and the stagehands, the assistant director and the wardrobe mistress; he even terrorized his own superior, the stage manager himself, Monsieur d'Aubigne, who was too afraid of Claudel's wrath to complain to Monsieur Novak. But particularly Claudel terrorized Andras, who made a point of being close at hand. Andras knew he didn't mean any harm.
    Claudel was a perfectionist, and any perfectionist would have been driven mad by the confusion of the Bernhardt backstage. Messages got lost, the masterless props lay about at random, parts of costumes were misplaced; no one ever knew how long it was until curtain or the end of intermission. It seemed a miracle that the show could be performed at all. His first week there, Andras built pigeonholes for the exchange of notes between stage manager, assistant stage manager, director, cast, and crew; he bought two cheap wall clocks and hung them in the wings; he knocked together a few rough shelves, lined up the props upon them, and marked each spot with the act and scene in which the prop was to be used. Within a few days, a sense of tranquility began to emerge backstage.
    Whole acts would pass without an outburst from Claudel. The stagehands commented upon the change to the stage manager, who commented upon the change to Zoltan Novak, and Novak congratulated Andras. Emboldened by his success, Andras asked for and received seventy-five francs a week to stock a table with coffee and cream and chocolate biscuits and jam and bread for everyone backstage. Soon his mailbox was stuffed with notes of gratitude.

    Madame Gerard in particular seemed to have taken a special interest in Andras.
    She began to call upon him not only to perform her errands, but also for his company.
    After the show, when the rest of the actors had gone, she liked to have him sit in her dressing room and talk to her while she removed her makeup. Her demaquillage took so long that Andras came to suspect that she dreaded going home. He knew she lived alone, though he didn't know where; he imagined a rose-colored flat papered with old show posters. She spoke little about her own life, except to tell him that he'd guessed her origins correctly: She had been born in Budapest, and her mother had taught the young Marcelle to speak both French and Hungarian. But she required Andras to speak only French to her; practice was the best way to master the language, she said. She wanted to hear about Budapest, about the job at Past and Future , about his family; he told her about Matyas's penchant for dancing, and about Tibor's impending