First Night

One late afternoon, November 1996, stage actress Becca Lang makes a strange call to Bill Daley's law office. She says she is looking for help regarding an eviction, Daley tries to beg off, saying it is not his area of practice, but the call intrigues him enough to keep him listening, and then to track her play Unwed Blood down, and he books two tickets for that Wednesday night. He puzzles trying to figure out who "van Diamond" is, the man who Becca claims recommended she call Daley.

Daley attends with Helen, his usual companion. They are slightly bothered by Leander, who is sitting in front of them. At the climax of the first act, Becca tells Barry (playing Becca's brother) that she has told his wife about his adultery. And Barry slaps Becca excessively hard, drawing blood, and Becca staggers, almost off the stage.

During intermission, Daley talks to Leander, outside, offering to help him find a job. Leander does not return for the second act. After the show, Helen goes home alone, Daley goes backstage, talks with Barry, then has the empty stage to himself. Becca comes up from the seats to talk to Daley, and after a while, Daley reveals that he is the lawyer she called two days before. They go out for a long night together, and end up at Daley's home. Along the way, Becca talks about herself, her sticky situation, and also very knowledgeably about the history of New York.

In cut-ins, we learn of the night in 1982 when Lotta, a sometime client, calls Daley in the middle of the night because a small earthquake causes some of her ceramic fake art to fall off a shelf and shatter. She intends to sue Connecticut, the location of the epicenter. Unable to get back to sleep, Daley calls Wolf, who invites Daley to Australia for one week, part of an engineering project Wolf will be consulting for. Daley goes, leaving his wife Della with their surprise guest, Ruley Duymens, a banker who is interested in financing Della's dance group.

Daley's interest in Becca increases when he realizes "van Diamond" is Becca's phonetic version of Ruley's name.

First Week

Becca performs for Daley a one-woman autobiographical show, something Becca is thinking of performing for the public. Her life seems to have included ambiguous abuse, possibly incestuous, involving her father and her older brother Bruce, but it's unclear if Becca thinks there is anything wrong. Similarly, Becca returns to Unwed Blood as if the slap witnessed by Daley was just an aberration, not worth being concerned about.

Becca is also under pressure from the play's producer Beck to stay in the show, which he wants to take uptown. Beck is providing, through Bruce, for her large but mostly empty Manhattan loft. They pay a visit to her place. The super shows up, and makes it clear that so far as he knows, her eviction is proceeding.

Daley and Becca develop a casual, Platonic intimacy. They are sleeping together in the nude, yet apparently not having any sex.

First Love

Becca knows something of Daley's involvement with a war atrocity when he served in Vietnam, and Daley, taken aback, tells her the full story, involving three Cambodian POWs, one adult woman Cambodian POW, Than, whom Daley knew, and one tween Cambodian girl. Taken up in a helicopter for transfer, the POWs are bound. Daley is given solo controls for a brief moment, not really knowing what he's doing, and when the pilot takes the controls back, the five Cambodians are gone.

Daley evicts Becca Monday morning. Tuesday morning, at the end of his run, Daley sees Bruce Lang sitting on his step, waiting for him. They talk, and eventually Daley tells Bruce of the time he saw Ruley, during diving lessons for Della, slap her brutally.

Extend

Becca moves back.