14

14

I am fifty--seven. I am twenty--four. After dinner the girls head out with Hazel, some blankets, and a six--pack of beer. They have plans to sit in a field far away from their friends and watch The Promised Man just as the last of the fireflies flickering in the tall grass turn out their lights. The movie is a cause for merriment, not because it’s happy—-in fact, I remember it as soul--crushing—-but because activities unrelated to work are few and far between these days. Benny will meet them there. On this windless night, the Otts have strung a king--sized sheet between two trees and pulled it taut. They have a video projector. They call to ask if Joe and I would like to come, but I decline. They have no idea we’re living our own version of the Peter Duke film festival over here.

“That one?” Joe stacks the dishes in the sink once the girls have gone.

“I don’t even like to think about it.” I open the back door and shake out the placemats, wipe off the table.

“It’s a beautiful piece of work, though. Certainly Duke’s best.”

My husband’s sleeves are rolled and the hot water steams his glasses. It’s so easy to forget what Joe is capable of, so easy to remember. “Were you ever sorry?”

He laughs. “We could be living in Los Angeles now.”

“You could be on your third wife.”

“Come dry.” He holds out a towel to me.

It’s not as if I don’t understand. It’s exactly what the girls have been saying to me: Are you sorry? Don’t you wish? But Joe was better than I was. Sometimes I wonder what he would have done had he stayed. “You were so good.”

He shakes his head. “You are so good,” he says, correcting me. “That’s what you’re supposed to say.”

“Were and are, both things are true.”

“You’re spending too much time in the past.” He passes me a dripping Pyrex casserole dish.

“So tell me how to get out of it.”

He shakes his head. “There’s no way out but through.”

“You were a very good Stage Manager.”

“I was no Uncle Wallace.”

“You were different, that’s all. You were your own man.” It’s true that no one else would ever be the Stage Manager for me—-Uncle Wallace took the part with him—-but Joe had a radiant optimism and health that no amount of gray shadow beneath his eyes could diminish. No one thinks of the Stage Manager as a young man but why shouldn’t he be? God can be anything. “You were strapping.”

“And you—-” He turns and looks at me, a wet plate in his hands.

I start to put the glasses away. I wait for him to finish his thought but nothing comes. “What was I?”

“You were Emily. I could have watched you forever and never understood how you did it. I believed you every minute you were on the stage. Everyone did.”

I stretch up on my toes to kiss him and he meets me. “We were in that play together. It really is miraculous when you think about it.”

“Those drives back and forth three times a week.” Joe takes the towel from me and dries his hands. “I wanted to kill Uncle Wallace for drinking and I wanted to kill Lee for being himself.”

“So why did you do it?” I ask. “I mean, I know Gene was leaning on you and everyone was in a pinch, but we were living in a summer town full of actors. You can’t tell me that no one else at Tom Lake had ever played the Stage Manager before. Somebody could have pulled it together. You could have done one performance and then made Gene take the part.”

“That was the plan.”

“What was the plan?”

“I told Gene I’d do it once, two times at the most. I said I’d give him that much time to find someone for the part and then I was done.”

All the help that Ken and Maisie needed: the books, the trees, the taxes, the house, every piece of it called for his attention. I understand it now in a way I could never could have understood it the summer I met them. Joe was a life raft coming to save them. He didn’t have five minutes to spare, much less three shows a week. “So why did you change your mind?”

My husband stood there. How many performances had there been between the time when Uncle Wallace dropped out and when I dropped out? How long were Joe and I in the play together anyway? A week? Not two weeks. “Me?”

“I liked being on the stage with you.”

“You liked being on the stage with me but you weren’t in love with me?”

He closes his eyes, smiling. “I was young. I don’t remember what I was.”

“You were in love with me!”

He shrugs. “I might have been,” he says.

Uncle Wallace’s room turned out to be a small cottage behind the company housing where we lived, a fairytale bungalow made for sheltering iconic television stars. I’d never seen it before, but then my room faced the lake. If Duke was sleeping with me in order to upgrade his accommodations, he would have done better to sleep with Uncle Wallace. The cottage had a fireplace in the sitting room with a comfy chintz sofa and a television. Who knew such inequities existed in the world? A painting of a greyhound in profile hung over the fireplace. There was a bathtub, a kitchenette, a small stone terrace ringed with red poppies. Duke had no interest in going to the hospital but he couldn’t wait to get inside the cottage.

The door was unlocked because everything at Tom Lake was unlocked. The place was so tidy that my first thought was that the management must have already sent someone over to take care of things. But after a few minutes I started to see what was his: a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on the nightstand, a wristwatch beside it. Uncle Wallace carried a pocket watch in the play. His black leather dopp kit was on the bathroom sink. Duke poked through the contents with one finger and came up with two bottles of interest.

“Put those back,” I said. “He might need them.”

“I might need them.” Duke fell back on the bed, his arms stretched wide, an orange prescription pill bottle in each hand. “Uncle Wallace is in the land of limitless refills now.”

I opened the dresser drawer, found his underwear, his socks.

“Come here.” Duke rattled the bottles like little maracas.

I went to the bed, then got down on my hands and knees to look beneath it, finding two empty suitcases.

“Since when are you no fun at all?” he asked, lifting his beautiful head.

For whatever reason, I took this to be a serious question. Had I been no fun at all since Uncle Wallace vomited a bucket of blood in my lap? No, wait, it was before that. Since I realized that I didn’t have the talent to play Mae but I was going to play her anyway? Since I realized that soon I’d be too old to play Emily, the only part I was good at?

“Jesus, are you crying?” Duke put down the pill bottles and sat up to take my hand. I shook my head. He pulled me into his lap, kissed me.

“Okay, cricket,” he said. “Here’s the plan: first, we’re going to smoke a cigarette. Ah! Don’t look at me like that. He’s never coming back so he isn’t going to know, not to mention the fact that Uncle Wallace smoked a few himself. Listen to me. We’re going to smoke a cigarette and then we’re going to pack everything up. Judging by the looks of the place that should take all of four minutes. Once we’ve got his stuff in the suitcases we’re going to put this bed to use as it has never been put to use before. Okay?” He gave me a squeeze and then a better kiss. He bounced me on his knees. “Doesn’t. Take. Much.”

He lit two cigarettes and gave me one, and when we’d finished he got up according to plan. He opened the first suitcase and put in the book and the bedside clock, though for all I knew the clock belonged to Tom Lake. He wrapped the watch in Kleenex and snugged it in the side pocket of the dopp kit so nicely I thought it made up for taking the pills. I opened the closet and took out the two suits, the dress shirts, the casual pants. I found a tidy stack of twenties in the nightstand and folded them in his suit pocket. I found his pajamas. I swear they were the same pajamas he’d worn on television, or at least the same style, a crisp blue and white stripe. He was wearing those pajamas when the orphans brought him breakfast in bed on Father’s Day. He was wearing them when the little girl woke him in the middle of the night, crying from a dream about her dead mother. “Come on,” he’d said, and held up the covers, scooting over to make a place for her in his bed.

I continued with the dresser drawers and Duke went to the kitchen. I wouldn’t have thought to check the kitchen. Then I heard him whistle, long and low.

“What?”

The freezer was full of vodka, proud Russian soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder beside the ice maker. I came and stood next to him to see. The cold air was beautiful. “Therein lies the problem,” I said.

Duke peered inside. “I always thought he was a gin man.”

“I think he is. I think that’s why the vodka’s still here.”

Duke took out an open bottle, twisting off the cap to drink. He closed his eyes and shivered. “To Uncle Wallace,” he said. “Za lyubov.” He raised the frozen bottle in salute then handed it to me. The day was hot and I touched it to my forehead before bringing it to my lips.

This would be as good a time as any to talk about alcohol.

Duke’s drinking did not distinguish him from anyone else at Tom Lake that summer. Drinking was what we did to pass the time when we weren’t onstage, and while he would be the first to say he drank more than most (though less than Uncle Wallace), he wasn’t in imminent danger of rupturing anything in his esophagus.

But Fool for Love tipped the balance. Fool for Love could just as easily have been called Fool for Tequila, the bottle being the central prop in much of the action. It’s Eddie’s bottle, and it starts the play full and ends the play empty. Eddie drinks a lot; Mae, who’s on the wagon, drinks a good bit, and the other two characters, the Old Man and Martin, both drink some. Duke believed that if the stage directions said the character was drinking tequila, then it was his responsibility as an actor to drink tequila.

I was a lousy drinker.

“That’s because you don’t practice,” Duke said. “Look how much better your smoking has gotten!”

Everybody smoked through rehearsals now. Ten o’clock and I was halfway through my third cigarette.

“Eddie has a problem,” he said to Cody in rehearsal. “Mae has a problem. The Old Man has a problem but he also has his own bottle.” The Old Man drank whiskey, though he gets a shot of tequila along the way.

“What about me?” the guy playing Martin asked. “Do I have a problem?” The guy playing Martin was a Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa named Homer. He was cracking himself up. “You need to find your own backstory.” Duke handed him the bottle he’d bought for rehearsal.

Cody was stumped. Cody took Sam Shepard’s stage directions to be the Nicene Creed. He listened to Duke’s madness while having no clear understanding of how a group of actors could function on that much booze. “Are you wanting to do this in rehearsals, too?” he asked.

“Rehearsing means getting ready to play the role,” Duke said. “No one drinks their first bottle of tequila on opening night and expects to survive. That’s what I’ve been telling Mae here. You have to work up to it.”

I wanted this to work. I would have done anything to be good in the part, to be as good as Duke was. I even wanted to please Cody, who I couldn’t stand. I just didn’t want to drink tequila first thing in the morning.

Cody, nibbling the end of his pencil, was intrigued. “It’s verisimilitude.”

“It is not verisimilitude.” I looked to him to be the adult in the room, like Joe had been the adult. “Verisimilitude is the appearance of something being real. Verisimilitude means putting tap water in an empty tequila bottle.” The problem with being the only woman in a play in which the three other characters were men and the playwright was a man and the director was a man was that no matter what I said, I sounded petulant, female. “It’s one bottle. It isn’t one bottle for Eddie and one for Mae. If you’re drinking yourself blind then you’re consigning the rest of us to the same fate.”

Homer shrugged, and the Old Man, who was played with great authority by a former junkie named Sal, said he was all in. The prop master should bring him a bottle of whiskey, preferably Jim Beam.

“I guess it wouldn’t kill us to try,” Cody said. Early as it was in rehearsals, Cody already hated me.

Duke smacked the table. “Now you’re talking!”

I looked over at Pallace, who was sitting in the corner doodling on her script. “Help,” I said very quietly when she raised her eyes.

She shook her head. Doomed, she mouthed to me.

The introduction of Jose Cuervo into morning rehearsals made me even worse in the part than I was, if such a thing were possible. Instead of tossing it back and slamming it down, I fiddled with my glass and tightened my lips. As hard as I tried to relax, I never stopped looking like I was faking it, because I was faking it. I was thinking about the evening’s performance of Our Town. Nobody wanted to see a drunk Emily.

The men, however, were another story. All three of their performances were radically improved by alcohol. They blossomed. They were lit. They raged when rage was called for, and then retreated to their moody silences. Duke, who’d been good in the part all along, was roaring now. He was taller, looser, stronger. He was dangerously real. He lassoed the bedposts one at a time. He threw me to the ground and covered me with his body. I could feel his erection pressing into my leg through his jeans. I was miles behind.

“Try drinking,” he said when I screamed in frustration.

And so I tried. I drank a fraction of what the men drank and still I wobbled and forgot my lines. Cuervo didn’t have those sad little worms curled up in the bottom of the bottle but I thought about them every time I tipped the bottle back, the bile rising in my throat.

I won a single battle in that war, and it may well have been the battle that saved us all. The directions say a bottle of tequila but they don’t say what size it is. Duke swore it was a fifth. I said a pint.

“A pint?” Duke asked.

“Or maybe it’s a half gallon,” I said. “Get something with a handle.”

Cody, for once, took my side. “I think a pint makes sense.”

Duke put up a little argument then let it go. A fifth was hard to control, even if he wouldn’t admit it. I wasn’t drinking my share and he was left to pick up the slack. Like it or not, the bottle had to be empty by the end of the show. “Drinking is a muscle,” Duke liked to say. “And you have to keep that muscle in shape.” He had no end of theories as to how to avoid the repercussions, though mostly it came down to gallons of water and three prophylactic aspirin, which he insisted on chewing for best results. After his incandescent rehearsals, he took a long swim and pulled himself together for the evening’s performance of Our Town. I always went with him to the lake to make sure he didn’t drown, having no idea what I would do if he did. My swimsuit was never completely dry in those days. Whenever I pulled it on it was still clammy from the swim before.

I had no idea how Duke managed to drink so much and be so good. I was desperate to be good, but all that did was make me look desperate.

After we finish cleaning up, Joe says he’s going to check on the goats and just take care of a few more things out at the barn. He says he’ll only be a minute and I say, okay. I say, tell the goats good night for me. After a respectable amount of time has passed, I take a flashlight from the basket by the door and head in the direction of the Otts.

The leaves on the cherry trees are silvered with moonlight, with flashlight, the branches bent beneath the cherry weight. They make me think of cows aching to be milked. I take the quickest way, not on the road but through the orchard, feeling like I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing. But what shouldn’t I be doing? Going to see a movie? Joe wouldn’t care.

Joe would have come with me had I asked him, and the girls would gladly make room for me on their blanket. But I want to have a thought, an action, a memory that I haven’t run past anyone. I want to see a little bit of the movie by myself.

At the bottom of the hill I go past the pear trees, those difficult, unlovable pears. The Otts have five children, and when they were young each of my girls had an Ott of similar age to play with—-sleepovers back and forth, campfires and homework dates, all of them ultimately disrupted by the gnarled pear trees. One by one our girls became evasive about the Otts. They loved them in the summer, but as the days got shorter and colder, they started to cancel their plans at the last minute, and in the winter they would have nothing to do with the Otts outside of school. I might have suspected something amiss at our neighbors’ house were it not for the fact that the seasonal disenchantment worked in both directions: Young Nelsons would not visit young Otts, and young Otts wouldn’t come to see young Nelsons once the weather turned cold. One day I picked up two of the Ott girls from school and brought them home with us. I don’t remember why but it wasn’t an uncommon situation: We all picked up other people’s children and they picked up ours. Maybe Patsy Ott was taking her older boy to have his braces tightened or maybe two of our children had partnered on a science project, but when it came time to go home they cried. They could not stop crying.

“What?” I asked them. “I’ll walk with you.”

They would not be walked and would not be consoled. Finally, Maisie, who might have been nine, gave me a high sign to follow her to the bathroom. She shut the door quietly behind us and sat down on the toilet lid, pulling up her knees to make herself small. “Drive them,” she whispered.

“Drive them next door?”

She looked at me, her green eyes huge. Maisie was about to cry herself.

“Why? What’s out there?”

Some kind of oath was involved in all of this. I never got that part straight. The dangerous thing was infinitely more dangerous if you spoke its name. But Maisie was hard up against it now, and she wanted to save her friends. “Pear trees,” she said.

“What about them?”

She closed her eyes, shaking her head in despair. “We can’t walk past them and there’s no other way to get there.”

It was true, they weren’t allowed to walk on the road.

In the summer the pear trees were fine. In the summer, all that is hideous about a pear tree is hidden by leaves and pears. But once those disguises were removed they were nothing but acres of murderous psychopaths emboldened by darkness. To cross the naked pear orchard at night was to run the gauntlet of death. The branches jutted with dark knives: child snatchers, child killers. Turns out it wasn’t just the Nelson children and the Otts who believed this about pear trees. Nearly everyone who grew up on an orchard in Grand Traverse County had had issues with them at one point or another, and then they forgot, or, worse, remembered and thought it was funny. I gathered up all the children, theirs and ours, and told them we were going to the Dairy Bar for soft serve. A week from now the Dairy Bar would close for the season, and so we needed to get in all the frozen custard we could, even if it meant spoiling our appetite for dinner. When all of us were sticky and full, I drove the Ott children home, their dignity intact.

“It’s the pear trees,” I whispered to their mother at the handoff. I could see the memory cross Patsy Ott’s face, pear trees.

Maisie announced her plans to sleep between us that night, certain the trees would march up the hill and smash their horrible branches through her bedroom window to carry her away. But as soon as the lights were off she bolted up. “They’ll take Nell!” she cried.

Joe, who had come in late to the story, put his arms around her. “They won’t take Nell,” he said. “Not if they’re looking for you.”

“Daddy, they’re trees,” she gasped. “They don’t know the difference.”

So Joe got up and brought back her sister, sound asleep. We made a space for both of our younger girls in the bed. We didn’t think of Emily because Emily had her own room and surely, pear trees knew better than to mess with her. It all comes back as I walk through the orchard at night, the four of us in bed, and how quickly we fell asleep.

When I crest the hill it’s Duke I see, his enormous face rising like a moon in the distance. Across the Otts’ field the farmers and their families and the pickers all sit apart from one another, one family to a blanket, maybe two dozen blankets spread around, the light of Duke pouring over them. I’m too far away to hear what he’s saying but I can make out the sad cadence of his voice, which blends into the soundtrack, which folds into the evening saw of crickets. He is a movie star, an actor. He is incalculably more than the person I knew, and he is that person as well.

I don’t remember exactly what part of the movie we’re in. He’s staring out at a barren landscape. He says something to the woman beside him without facing her. Her hair is long and tangled and it blows in her eyes. I saw The Promised Man ten years ago when it first came out and I never wanted to see it again. I don’t remember the character’s name, but everything we need to know about the trouble he’s in is there in his face. He loves his wife, his two beautiful daughters, of this I am certain. His family doesn’t know he’s lost his job. They don’t know how much he’s been drinking. He’s been making mistakes, then stealing to cover them up. The action of the film takes place in the brief window of time between the people Duke is working for finding out what he’s done and his family finding out. He’s trying to give his family a few perfect days before it all goes to hell, or he’s trying to maintain his denial for as long as he can. Even this far away I cannot bear to see how afraid he is. That had always been Duke’s magic, that with all his beauty and charm he was able to let the audience see how small he was, how terrified, how deeply in love.

We never had time to go to movies when the girls were young, or not the kind of movies that required a babysitter. The concept of date night had yet to reach northern Michigan, so the few movies we saw in the theater revolved around singing cartoon dogs. Because Emily was at the height of her fervid misconceptions about her paternity then, she insisted on seeing Duke’s new film, and since it was rated R, we said no. Every morning she’d leave another review on the kitchen table that she’d printed off and highlighted so I would know that not only was it Duke’s best film, it was a culturally important film. He was long past his stints in cop shows and family features by then. He was a serious actor, and this was the picture that would forever cut his ties to that earlier career we had all enjoyed.

I told Emily she wasn’t going.

“How can you tell me not to see it when you don’t even know what it’s about?”

“That’s why there’s a rating system, because parents don’t have time to see every single movie in advance of their children.”

“I’m not asking to see every single movie. I’m asking to see this one.”

Around and around. I used to wonder if this was what parents felt like trying to shield their daughters from Elvis. Duke was everywhere: His picture in the paper, his voice on the radio, his reruns on television, his movies in the movie basket. I don’t know why I tried to fight it. Maybe I should have taken her to the theater and bought two tickets, because I had no sense of whether I wanted to keep her from seeing an R--rated movie, or if I wanted to keep her from seeing another Duke movie, or if I just wanted to prevent her from having something she wanted because she tortured me every minute of the day.

“Let’s just go and find out if it would be okay for her to see it,” Joe said finally, the two of us in bed. “It wouldn’t kill us to go to a movie.”

“That movie?”

Joe folded me in his arms. “We’ve seen Swiss Father Robinson seven hundred times and it didn’t kill us. At least this one is supposed to be good.”

And so we drove to Suttons Bay for a noon matinee on a Tuesday when the girls were in school. You can do things like that when you’re the ones who own the farm, and anyway, it was winter. We thought our biggest risk was that a foot of snow would fall while we were inside and bury the car. We never considered that the movie might destroy us. I started crying halfway through and kept up a steady weeping until the end. Joe handed me his handkerchief in the dark but then later took it back. We stayed through all the credits, the closing song, trying to pull ourselves together before walking back out into the blinding winter sun.

“I didn’t see that coming,” Joe said, using a stack of thin paper napkins he had taken from the concessions stand. He gave half to me and I mopped my eyes.

“Was it sad because we knew him or would anyone have been destroyed by that?”

“Both,” he said.

What I had felt, standing out in front of the Bay Theater with the wind whipping off the lake, was that I had seen Duke’s end, his shame and his failure, his letting go.

But of course that wasn’t it at all. It was a movie, an incredibly convincing performance in a movie. Duke was nowhere near his end. He was an actor at the top of his game, and the fact that he could make me so believe him when I knew better only proved how good he was. This was the role he’d win his Oscar for. Viola Davis opened the envelope and said his name. He took the stairs two at a time and embraced her, whispered something in her ear that made her laugh, then turned to the audience, holding the golden statue above his head.

“Sebastian!” he cried.

I remember it now.

We never told Emily we saw the movie. We stuck by our original answer: It was R rated and she couldn’t go. So when she managed to talk the Holzapfels into taking her and Benny, telling them she had our permission, she didn’t tell us either, at least not for a long time. We all carried around the shattering grief of that performance by ourselves.

Times are hard in Michigan, as times are hard everywhere. The Otts have had the wonderful idea to arrange an activity where people could do something together other than harvesting cherries, but they might have shown The Popcorn King instead. I understand that The Promised Man is a better film, but so was Taxi Driver, so is The Deer Hunter. That doesn’t mean we’re up for it.

The woman projected up on the sheet has sold Duke crack. He has lost his job but he still has his family. He is an alcoholic but he still has his family and they love him. They would gladly reach down into the darkest hole and use all their strength to pull him up. But he doesn’t go to them. He goes to this woman instead. And when he is back in his car we realize that things are much worse than we had understood. He has a pipe and he lights it and when the flame pulls down we can see the drug hit him, the color draining from his face, his nose and eyes streaming, and then the look of relief that breaks over him, a violent gratitude, like he wasn’t sure it would come for him this time and it came.

I want someone to tell me how that was acting. I want someone to tell me how many people were on the set, and how many of them understood what was happening. They had to wait until the golden hour when the light was perfect because there could be only one take. He couldn’t do this thing twice. I wonder if Sebastian was there, but he couldn’t have been. Sebastian would never have let that happen.

All these years later, I feel like I let it happen. I didn’t refuse to drink even though I knew what the drinking was doing to him. I didn’t pour out the tequila and replace it with water. I didn’t walk Uncle Wallace off the stage. It’s nothing but foolish self--aggrandizement, I know. No summer girlfriend ever changed the course of a movie star’s life. But still, I am sorry I didn’t try.

The evening air is sweet and the warmth of the day rises up from the grass. When I can’t stand to look at Duke’s face another second I look out over the dark field, trying to find four people and a small dog, but I can’t find four people and a dog because it’s five. Joe is there. For once he’s put the goats to bed and left the barn as planned. Emily, Maisie, Nell, Benny, and Joe, all of them together, with Hazel wandering off to sniff at other people’s picnic dinners. I stand on the hill for a long time and watch them instead of the movie. I think about walking down to join them but I remember how the movie ends and I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to walk home past the pear trees when it’s over, each of us dissecting the merits of Duke’s performance. I want to be asleep when they get back. I want them all to keep their voices down for fear of waking me.