To be able to play younger is a great and fleeting gift. I had it once. I could play fourteen at twenty--four. Part of it is in the way you carry yourself, the pitch of your voice, but part of it is pure physiognomy. Nell has that in spades. At twenty--two she is slender and small, and in her faded smock dress that had once belonged to all of us in turn, she could pass for thirteen.
I shake my head. “No. I was just acting, or I had no idea what I was doing.”
“But what would you have done if he’d taken you up on it?” Her face is tilted up and the sun is lighting her eyes and her eyes are the sun.
“I would have run, and he never would have caught me because he would have had to stay and pay the check.”
She turns back to the tree in front of her, giving it fierce consideration. “We talk about these situations in school all the time, about how no matter who you are, there’s always going to be someone with more power than you. They want us to think it out, you know, go through all the scenarios in advance of anything happening so we’ll be ready.”
“Nothing happened to me,” I say. Things happened to me, but not on that day, and not like that. “And for the record, Charlie was a prince.”
She nods but she’s still looking at her hands. “It’s terrifying,” she says quietly, and now I see the tears in her eyes. “The idea that in order to get to do this thing you really, really want, you might be told you have to do the exact thing you’d never want to do.”
I wish I could tell her, Oh, my darling, that’s all behind us now. Those are very old stories about things that don’t happen anymore, but instead I take her in my arms. I want to tell her she will never be hurt, that everything will be fair, and that I will always, always be there to protect her. No one sees us but the swallows looping overhead. She puts her arms around my waist and we stand there, just like that, casting a single shadow across the grass.
6
It had been my plan to go back to New Hampshire to see my grandmother after I left New York, but there wasn’t time for that now. The original Emily—-you haven’t heard of her; her moment was brief and came to nothing—-was already gone. I flew to Detroit and took a commuter plane to Traverse City. The Executive Director of Tom Lake drove the hour and a half north to collect me from the airport, which made about as much sense as Ripley sending a limo.
“It’s awfully nice of you,” I said, wrestling my suitcases into the trunk.
“I don’t pick up actors. I had an eye exam.” He briefly lowered his dark glasses to show me his dilated pupils. “But this gives me a chance to bring you up to speed.”
I stared at him, then bobbed my head a little from side to side. “Can you see?”
“Enough.” His name was Eric, and after that car ride I never crossed paths with him again. Just because the company was iconic didn’t mean it wasn’t forever on the precipice of financial ruin. Eric’s job was to bring in major gifts and soothe patrons who were offended by a particular show and make sure the ticket sales were on track. In a normal season the actors weren’t his problem, but so far this wasn’t shaping up to be a normal season. Emily had bailed and the Stage Manager, a character actor who’d spent ten years playing the indelible Uncle Wallace on television, had transitioned from a heavy drinker to a worrisome drunk. Worrisome because Uncle Wallace, otherwise known as Albert Long, was the washed--up marquee name people drove over from other counties to see. “No Emily and a knee--walking Stage Manager isn’t the best place to start,” Eric said.
I said something sympathetic, but really, I wasn’t listening. Who can listen to complaints about actors in the presence of so many cherry trees, miles and miles of them in full ceremonial headdress? “Look at this!” I wanted to cry as we raced down the straight country roads in Eric’s old Volvo station wagon, but surely Eric had seen the trees before.
He told me I would get the other Emily’s salary and better accommodations. He’d been able to snatch back the program from the printers at the fifty--ninth minute of the eleventh hour. They’d play up my soon--to--be--released movie and two seasons of unremarkable television. “If you can think of anything else, that would be helpful,” he said.
I assumed that my Red Lobster commercial (Everybody LOVES a fried shrimp feast!) would not be helpful. “I’ll think about it.”
“We deal in embellishment around here,” he said, his eyes on the road, but not on either side of the road where the action was.
He said he hoped I’d stay the summer. The other Emily had been slated to play Mae in Fool for Love after the run of Our Town ended. “We could look for another actress but if you could do it that would be one less headache.”
I had never seen the play, hadn’t read it, but I’d always thought the title was snappy. “Don’t you want to see if I can act first?”
Eric shook his head. “That’s not my job. If you’ve made it all the way to my car it’s because other people think you can act. That’s good enough for me. Charlie said you were excellent, by the way. He said they wanted to cast you in the Spalding Gray production but the backers wouldn’t go for it. They needed a name.”
It was entirely possible that Charlie had been blowing smoke at Eric, or that Eric was blowing smoke at me, but on the off chance it was true and I could have played Emily on Broadway without having to sleep with anybody at the Algonquin, I wished he would pull the car over for a minute and let me throw up. I stared at the trees instead, that endless expanse of trembling petals. I told Eric I’d stay for the season.
“What’s in the boxes?” I asked.
“What boxes?”
I pointed, thinking his eyes must really be bad. Big wooden boxes were set out among the trees. They were everywhere.
“Bees,” he said.
“They come in boxes?”
He nodded. “Farmers rent bees. They come in an eighteen--wheeler, and when pollination is over, the truck comes back and takes the boxes someplace else.”