18

18

The storm is all but played out, the thunder rolling off to a place so far away that not even Hazel is alarmed. It’s only rain now, and not the kind of rain that will drown you if you look up. Maisie and Nell are staring at me, drunk with disappointment.

“Sebastian just—-” Maisie swallows. “Didn’t come back?”

“He went to the greenroom to find them. There was some sort of fight.”

“Who told you?”

“Cat came over with the mending in the morning.”

“You had to sew their clothes?” Nell’s romance with her mother’s summer of summer stock exhales its final breath.

I shake my head. “Cat would never have asked me to sew their costumes. She knew what was going on. Everybody knew what was going on. She said there had been a lot of shouting and shoving and accusations. She said the whole thing was like a Sam Shepard play. Sebastian punched his brother in the face.” Had he ripped Duke’s shirt as well? Anything was possible.

“What about Pallace?” Maisie asks.

“Apparently she hadn’t been drinking that much in rehearsal and then on opening night she went all in. Cat had to get her out of the dress.”

“So two brothers are slugging it out over her and she missed it?”

“She might have missed it.” Cat said Pallace was facedown on that nubby yellow couch in her bra and underpants, crying her eyes out. She wouldn’t let Cat help her get dressed again. Sebastian stormed off and Duke was on the floor and the A.D. was hunting up an ice pack for the side of Duke’s face. Then the A.D. said the face was going to need stitches so he drove Duke to the hospital. Pallace was too drunk to sit up. Duke had been evangelical when it came to the consumption of alcohol being a matter of practice but maybe she hadn’t listened. “I know I shouldn’t be saying this to you,” Cat said to me, “but I felt sorry for her. I wished the tennis player had just picked her up and put her in the car. He could have forgiven her later. That girl’s not up to Duke.” I’d wanted to ask her if she thought I was up to Duke, but whatever the answer was it wouldn’t have been helpful.

“So when did you see Duke?” Maisie asks.

I shake my head. “I didn’t see him.”

“Meaning what?” Nell says, looking like a mad little Frenchwoman. “He ghosted you?”

“We didn’t have the terminology but yes, that’s the general idea.”

Maisie covers her eyes with her hands. “Son--of--a--bitch. I want back every hour of my childhood I spent watching The Popcorn King.”

I stand up. The Popcorn King. What a thought. “Thus concludes the story of the summer your mother dated a famous movie star. Fill your sister in however you see fit. I’m not doing this part again.”

“But he wasn’t a famous movie star,” Nell says, straining to control her voice. “Not then. He was just some asshole actor like all the other asshole actors.”

I shrug. “Some of the actors were nice. Your father was very nice.”

“Which is why he became a cherry farmer.”

Maisie is still sitting there, the dog in her lap asleep. “I want to kill him.”

“Well, you can’t, he’s dead, and anyway, it happened a long time ago.” The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story. Peter Duke is dead and I’m telling them my small corner of what happened.

“So how did you get out of there?” Nell asks.

I turn to the window. Even the rain has reached its conclusion. The sun is everywhere. “Come on. Back to work.”

“You’ll tell us, won’t you?” Nell says to me. “You promise?”

I tell her yes, I promise, but she isn’t going to like it.

Maisie and Nell get their hats, their bug spray, and go out into the great dripping world wearing muck boots. I stay behind to make the lunch, which I should have been working on while I was talking all this time. The past need not be so all--encompassing that it renders us incapable of making egg salad. The past, were I to type it up, would look like a disaster, but regardless of how it ended we all had many good days. In that sense the past is much like the present because the present—-this unparalleled disaster—-is the happiest time of my life: Joe and I here on this farm, our three girls grown and gone and then returned, all of us working together to take the cherries off the trees. Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life and she would never in a million years have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.

Once I finish with the sandwiches and put the bags of cookies and chips in a backpack, I walk out past the kitchen garden. The lettuce and tomato plants and zinnias are already straightening up from the beating they’ve taken. Those tiny periwinkle butterflies are working their rounds. Where do the periwinkles go in rain like that? It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon--to--be--more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true. Our Town taught me that. I had memorized the lessons before I understood what they meant. No matter how many years ago I’d stopped playing Emily, she is still here. All of Grover’s Corners is in me.

By the time I drop off the food in the barn and kiss my husband, the girls have put their buckets around their necks like horses ready to plow a field. They are fully at work.

“He left you!” Emily cries when she sees me coming.

“All caught up,” Maisie says from the ladder.

Hazel has found a filthy tennis ball, god knows where, and brings it to me. I throw it as far as I’ve ever thrown a tennis ball and she tears out down the row of trees, Hazel, who cannot climb the stairs.

“We opted for the abridged version,” Nell says.

“You should have told me this years ago,” Emily says. I don’t know exactly what her sisters have told her but she is miraculously indignant on my behalf, her entire being trembling with sympathy and rage.

“You would have taken Duke’s side,” Maisie says, but she says it lightly.

Emily comes over and hugs me. “What did you do? Did you stay?”

Hazel is back with the tennis ball and after a brief tussle and growl for show I throw it again. She is not a young dog. This will not be our entire day. “I didn’t stay.”

“Are you going to make us guess?” Maisie asks from her high perch.

I start to say no, there’s no guessing this one, when Nell raises her hand like a schoolgirl. “Ripley came and got you.”

“No!” Emily shouts.

I look at my youngest child in disbelief. Nell in her lipstick has figured it out. “How else could you leave? You can’t walk. You don’t have a car and even if you did it’s your right foot so you can’t drive. You haven’t told your family. You just said you didn’t see Sebastian again.”

“Wait, you don’t see Sebastian?” Emily looks up at Maisie. “You didn’t tell me that.”

Sebastian. This is an uncomfortable point on which I have meant to be evasive, but since I have lied I decide to let the lie stand. I have staked out a single day of privacy in the light of this merciless interrogation.

“I would have thought Sebastian would get you out of there but he didn’t. Cat can’t leave Tom Lake in the middle of the season. Elyse Adler isn’t coming back. I don’t think Chan gets you out even though I bet he was in love with you.”

“Give up acting,” Maisie says to her sister. “The FBI needs you.”

“And Ripley wants you back to do publicity. I mean, he really needs you to come to Los Angeles so he’s leaning on you anyway. You’re the star of the movie.”

“I’m not the star of the movie.”

“We’ve seen it a hundred times. You are. So Ripley’s been calling and Duke’s been collecting the messages at the office.” She stops herself to think things through and we wait with her in silence. “Oh my god, Duke called him, didn’t he? Duke called Ripley and told him to come and get you. That’s why Ripley came to Michigan. Otherwise he would have sent the girl, the--what’s--her--name, Ashby, to fly out and bring you back.”

“Why couldn’t it have been Ashby?” Emily asks her. “It doesn’t make any sense that Ripley would be the one to get on a plane.” Emily, who we used to be so afraid of, is trying to put it together.

“Don’t be such a dope,” Nell says.

The day after Fool for Love opened I stayed in bed with my foot up on pillows, smoking cigarettes, sewing spangles and drinking the syrupy frozen vodka from the stash. I had so much to cry about I could have broken it into segments: nine to ten, cry over Duke and Pallace’s betrayal; ten to eleven, cry for wanting Duke back; eleven to noon I would split between the loss of Sebastian and the loss of Pallace, very different feelings yet intermingled; noon to one was the loss of Emily and my acting career; one to two, the frustration of not being able to walk to the bathroom; two to three, the terror over what to do with my life, by which I meant the next day and all the other days. That led nicely back to betrayal, which had kicked the whole thing off. I fell asleep but couldn’t stay asleep; I didn’t eat; I repeatedly pricked my fingers with the needle in my efforts to both sew and cry, which meant hopping to the sink to scrub little dots of my own blood from the fabric. Who knows how long I might have sustained this state had Ripley not arrived, though my guess would be a long time. I picked up a Kleenex, they were everywhere, and blew my nose. “Please don’t be here,” I said to him.

“Hello to you, too.” He stood in the doorway of the cottage, taking measure of the wreckage.

“I’m serious. I’m not my best self right now. I can’t negotiate.”

“Well, that’s fine because I’m not here to negotiate. Do you have any idea how fucking far away this place is? From anywhere? I flew to Detroit, the worst goddamn airport ever built. It took me an hour to walk from the gate where we landed to the gate where I got a flight to someplace called Traverse City in a tiny plane. I hate those tiny planes. Then your maniac boyfriend picks me up at the airport in a Honda that’s missing third gear. He told me he had to shift straight from second to fourth and that I shouldn’t think he didn’t understand that he was supposed to use third, only that third was nonoperational. Somebody’s pounded him, by the way, I’m sure you know that. His right eye’s shut, that would be the eye that’s facing me in the car. It’s got stitches in the corner. Three gears on the car and one eye and the drive takes an hour and a half during which time he never shuts up.”

“Did he say he was my boyfriend?” I ran the edge of the sheet under my eyes. There had been no news of Duke beyond what I’d heard from Cat.

“That’s your question?”

“Just tell me what he said.”

Ripley shook his head, no doubt disgusted by my decimated state. “He said you needed to go to California, that’s what he said.”

“It’s nice that the two of you agree.”

“Well, you’re going. I didn’t come out here for my health. Boyfriend says you’re wrecked, what with your foot falling off and losing the part in the play. He says this place is finished for you, which I took to mean he’s finished with you and would like to see you vacated but that’s not my business.”

I didn’t take this gracefully, and Ripley did his best to avert his eyes. “Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to put a theater in the middle of nowhere anyway?” he said, looking out the window to the courtyard and its poppies.

I sniffled, buried my head in a pillow. “It’s pretty here.”

“It’s pretty in Santa Barbara. Put the summer stock in Santa Barbara so people can find it.”

“Ripley, seriously. I’m sorry you came all this way but I need you to leave me alone.”

This seemed to hurt him, though I wouldn’t have thought Ripley capable of being hurt. Maybe he was tired. He sat on the edge of my bed then, rapping lightly on the cast with his knuckles. “They don’t spare any expense on plaster in these parts, do they?”

“It can’t possibly matter if I do interviews. Nobody knows who I am.” I rubbed my face with the sheet.

Ripley patted my leg, the space between my knee and the top of the cast. “You need to do the interviews. It’s a good film.

You’ll see. It’ll be good for you.”

“I’m not going to be an actress anymore.”

“You’re twelve, you don’t know what you’re going to be, but you have to come back and finish what you started.”

“You flew out here to tell me that?”

“You don’t return my goddamn phone calls, and anyway, I have a sense of, I don’t know—-” He stopped to take in the bright mound of costumes covering the bed. “What’s with the clothes?”

“I’m doing the mending for the costume department.”

He picked up the edge of a silvery leotard then dropped it. “I have some responsibility to you, as crazy boyfriend explained to me on the phone. At the very least I have a responsibility to get you out of here, and that will benefit both of us.”

A bit of clarity seeped into my swollen brain, a sliver of light. Duke had set this up. “He wants you to see the play. That’s why you had to come here.”

Ripley shook his head. “He didn’t even tell me about a play.”

An hour and a half in the car and no mention of Sam Shepard. Duke knew that if he could get Ripley to Tom Lake, I would get him to Fool for Love. Even if I hated him, he knew I’d come through, because he knew I was exactly that kind of fool. Duke was going to be a movie star, but to be a movie star you’ve got to find someone who’s willing to look at you. His brilliance would not be readily evident on a résumé, a headshot, a three--minute audition. He needed to be seen in a play, in this particular play and in its entirety. He was as good as anyone had ever been in Michigan, and now the trick was making sure that someone who wasn’t from Michigan knew that.

Ripley went to Fool for Love without much convincing. Going to see plays was what he did. He asked me to come but I said if we were leaving tomorrow I’d have to pack. I was like one of those clever crows who could use a stick as a tool. I sat in my wheelchair and knocked things off the closet bar with the crutch. What I’d brought didn’t amount to anything more or anything more meaningful than what Uncle Wallace had: a modest amount of clothing, a handful of books I’d already read, a clock. I left my scripts in the freezer with the vodka Duke and I hadn’t gotten around to yet. I took a careful bath, finished the mending, wrote Cat a note. Ripley had his secretary arrange for a car service in the morning, saying we sure as hell weren’t going back to Traverse City in the Honda.

“Sure as hell not,” I said.

I pushed my two swimsuits into the corner of my suitcase. Everything at Tom Lake was finished for me. For all my protesting, I understood that I was wildly fortunate that someone, anyone, had come to pull me out.

The next morning Ripley carried my suitcases to the car as I crutched behind him, leaving the wheelchair in the cottage since it belonged to the prop department. We sat in the back seat in silence, both of us preoccupied by thoughts of the same person for entirely different reasons. The driver put the crutches in the trunk with the bags. I couldn’t quite believe I hadn’t said goodbye to any of them, by which I meant Duke. I hadn’t said goodbye to Duke, who hadn’t said goodbye to me.

Goodbye, theater. Goodbye, cherry trees and cigarettes and vodka. Goodbye, lake.

“How crazy is this guy?” Ripley asked when we were almost an hour into the drive. He’d been staring out the window, probably thinking about how he’d never see Michigan again.

“Crazy,” I said.

“But crazy worth it?”

He wasn’t asking me about my love life but it was hard not to think of it in those terms. “You saw him.”

“What’s his face like, when it’s not bashed in?”

I told him it was a very good face.

He was quiet again for another ten miles or so. “I don’t like working with the crazies,” he said.

“No one does, but if you got rid of them I don’t know who you’d have left.”

Ripley nodded. “I’m assuming the two of you came to a bad end.”

“We did.”

“And that it had something to do with the girl in the play?”

As I have said, their truth was widely evident.

“She was good, too,” he said absently.

“She’s very good, and she dances.” I don’t know what I was trying to sell him, only that I’d spent the long summer marveling at the glory of both Pallace and Duke. I had no idea how a person was supposed to stop that on a dime.

“I might have a part for him.” Ripley didn’t ask me if I minded.

I nodded, wondering if there would be any pleasure in this in the future, the knowledge that I had contributed to something that was bound to happen anyway. I was a conduit in the start of Peter Duke’s meteoric career, a single, shiny cog.

“I don’t love the way he did this,” Ripley said. “Getting me out to fucking Michigan to see him.”

“How else were you going to see him?”

“I don’t know. I suppose he could have troubled himself to come to L.A. like everyone else in the world. Except for you. I had to go to New Hampshire to find you.” Everything had been plotted for his maximum inconvenience.

When we got to the turnoff for Traverse City, I started to think I might call Joe Nelson from the airport to say goodbye. I would tell Joe how I’d lost them, Duke and Sebastian and Pallace, all in one shot.

“What about Pallace?” I asked Ripley.

“Who’s Pallace?”

“The girl.”

He shook his head. “I don’t need a girl. I have too many girls as it is.”

And there went Pallace, tumbling off in the breeze as Duke came with us. I knew what he was telling me, and I didn’t say another word about it.

Ripley put me in the pool house. In the afternoons I sat on a chaise beneath an umbrella in my one--piece and read novels. Ripley’s house contained no end of novels. He said agents sent them to him in boxes, hoping he’d turn the books into movies. “If you come across anything decent, write a treatment,” he said. “You can earn your keep.”

“I’m already earning my keep.” Ashby was still on the payroll, still hoping to be an actress. She took me to have my nails painted and my eyebrows plucked and a few subtle highlights woven around my face. There was a stylist and a media trainer who schooled me in the ways of talk shows and newspaper interviews. I had been made up to get into the business and I would be made up to get out.

“You’re not getting out,” Ripley said.

“That’s a line from a horror movie if ever I heard one.”

“I’m sure it is. So what are you going to do with your life if you don’t do this?”

“There is no this. This is gone. No joke. I’m only here to do you a favor because you did me a favor. When we’re done I may go back to New Hampshire, work in alterations. Maybe I’ll finish college. I wanted to be a teacher before you came along.”

He rolled his eyes. “Give me a break,” he said.

Ripley and I struck up an odd little friendship in the month or so I was there. I never got the story on his personal life other than he didn’t seem to have one. He was good to me though, in spite of my moods. I never knew if it was because he felt sorry for me or grateful because of Duke or if he felt like he needed to keep an eye on me until the movie came out. Maybe he was just a decent man. I had started to think of him as my uncle, just like Charlie had told me he was in the Algonquin all those lifetimes ago. Ripley went out and picked up salads from one fancy restaurant or another and we ate them together in the evening, drank Chablis. Sometimes we watched a movie but just as often we didn’t. He liked to play honeymoon bridge and I knew how. “The only ingenue in Bel Air who plays honeymoon bridge,” he liked to say while I shuffled the deck. I always wanted a cigarette after dinner but the property had been scrubbed of tobacco. Everyone who worked for Ripley had been instructed not to buy them for me. “You look like an eighth grader when you smoke,” he said. “It’s not attractive.”

Which was how I quit. I didn’t mind too much, as smoking made me miss Duke. Ripley didn’t talk to me about Duke but I knew things were in the works. He’d sent a casting director out to Tom Lake to see the play and the next week a stack of headshots were left on the kitchen counter after a meeting and Duke’s was in there, just another pretty boy in a thick stack of pretty boys. I took the picture back to the pool house and cried on it. I was always thinking that he might come for me. He must have known where I was, and showing up was the kind of thing he would do, walking into the pool house in the middle of the night, especially a pool house Ripley owned. “Where’s my girl?” he’d call. “Where’s my birthday girl?”

Ripley told me to keep the door locked but I never did.

My agent got me an appointment to see some big--time California hand and foot specialist who cut off the plaster cast, x--rayed my ankle, examined the incision, and reported with no small amount of wonder that everything looked fine. He replaced the plaster with a lightweight fiberglass cast and gave me a walker, which made me feel born again. I used the crutches for interviews because, as Ripley explained, crutches were sexy and youthful and walkers were walkers.

After two or three days, Ripley arranged a screening on the studio lot and we watched Singularity together with some friends of his and some studio people and some of the people in the movie, though not the famous actress, who was shooting in Quebec.

“She’s not in Quebec,” Ripley said, not bothering to lower his voice. “She just got wind of how good you are.”

I was good, or the person in the film who strongly resembled me was good. She had just finished playing Emily in the University of New Hampshire production of Our Town. She had taken a leave of absence from school four weeks before finishing her junior year and still had every intention of going back. She had never heard of Duke or Sebastian or Pallace, did not know Tom Lake existed. Seeing the movie made me think that it wouldn’t be so hard to get back to that place. Three years wasn’t such a long time.

I did the interviews on crutches and everyone was charmed. I crutched out on The Tonight Show in a hot--pink sleeveless dress, my good foot in a ballet slipper, my arms all muscle and sinew. I crossed a stage with a nice, rhythmic swing and dropped down in the chair next to Johnny Carson. Carson was old by then, tired of the job, but my crutches and cast sparked something in him. “Wow! Will you look at her?” he said. Then I smiled and waved. I’d nailed it before I ever opened my mouth.

The next morning when I called my grandmother she started crying on the phone. “Everybody’s calling me,” she said. “Like I did something.”

I did help the movie, Ripley was right about that. Even if it wasn’t a summer blockbuster, it did better than anyone thought it would and I got the credit, me and my ruptured Achilles. Every interviewer wanted to talk about my tennis game, ask if was I planning to take on Steffi Graf once the cast came off, and every time I laughed like no one had ever made the joke before. Publicity was the most acting I’d ever done in my life, and it did nothing to dissuade me from the idea that I was finished. I didn’t want anyone curling my hair or straightening my hair or telling me to look up while they applied my eyeliner. I didn’t want anyone touching me. All the things that feel reasonable when you’re trying to be an actress feel unbearable once you’ve stopped. Jane Pauley said I was America’s daughter, and I said that was good because I was going home.

Ripley took me to the airport himself in the MG. He was being nostalgic. He never drove the MG. He parked the car and walked me in, pitching ideas all the way to the gate. “You’re making a big mistake,” was the very last thing he said to me. I didn’t know if he meant it or if he was lonely. I knew he liked having me around, but surely other actresses could be found for the pool house. I was done. I gave him a kiss and crutched off into the sunset.