Hazel rushes the door just as it’s closing and Maisie turns and pushes her gently inside. “Stay, stay. I’ll be right back.”
But Hazel doesn’t believe her. When they’re gone she scratches and cries until finally I crouch down and pet her ears. “Hazel,” I say to her very quietly. “Hazel. She’s coming back. I’ll stay here until she does. Hazel, listen to me. I’m going to tell you something important, you need to be brave.” I then explain to the dog how I have told myself for so many years that my career fell apart because I wasn’t any good, but now I’m starting to think it all fell apart because I had ceased to be brave. “If this were a movie, I’d be drowning in regret now. But I’m telling you, Hazel, it doesn’t feel anything like regret. It feels like I just missed getting hit by a train.”
The entire life span of summer stock is four months—-four months birth to death—-so time must move faster now. Duke was the person I knew best at Tom Lake. We had been alone together in my room. I had seen him act and felt moved and surprised by what he was capable of. He had seen me act and so waited for me at the door while the others said good night. We had known each other for a matter of hours, but they were summer--stock hours, which in the outside world would have translated to a solid six months.
“I promised I’d show you the lake,” Duke said.
“Did you?”
“I know it’s a lot to manage,” Nelson said to me at the door, “getting thrown in this way. Let me know if I can help. Not that you need help.” Nelson had a thick brush of hair that must have been blond when he was a child, and his eyes behind his glasses were blue and bright. Directors as a rule did not lead with such friendliness, and I was interested to see if it could work.
“She doesn’t need help,” Duke assured him. Duke who was now my agent. “Unless she needs help finding the lake.”
“I think we’ll all remember the switching--Emilys--debacle as a lucky break.” Nelson shook my hand again. “My number’s on the schedule.”
I thanked him. I told him good night.
“?‘My number’s on the schedule’,” Duke said once we were well out of the building. “As if that isn’t the oldest line in the book.” He shook his head in disappointment.
“No,” I said, “?‘I promised to show you the lake’ is the oldest line in the book.”
If the implication was that the director was trying to pick me up, I had missed it. Duke was trying to pick me up, and that was all that mattered. Uncle Wallace had given it a shot as well, saying that he knew a lot more about where the lake was because this was his fourteenth summer here. “Let me show her the goddamn lake,” he said.
The lake, which stretched two miles in length and a half mile across, was right in front of us.
“Is Nelson famous?” I asked Duke as we crossed the grass, down the hill, towards the water.
Duke stretched up his neck to startling length then tipped his head. “He’s not Francis Ford Coppola, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.” The day was just then beginning to soften towards dusk. I had woken up in a New York hotel room that morning.
“Well, all right, if you aren’t asking if he’s a very famous Hollywood director, if you’re willing to lower the bar, then yes, I suppose Nelson is famous. By the standards of Tom Lake he’s famous.”
“Meaning what?”
Duke took my hand and started swinging it so as not to appear tender. I could feel the current of his life flow into my fingers and up my arm and travel into the muscle of my heart. “Nelson has directed several plays for a well--established theater company in Chicago we need not name, and last summer he directed in Sag Harbor, and he’s had one play Off Broadway. Something you’ve heard of.” He turned his face away from me and whispered the name of the play in the direction of the lake so the breeze could carry it away.
“Then what’s he doing here?” Even if I had yet to establish the parameters of the assembled talent, I knew enough to know that an Off Broadway play exceeded them.
“It’s a mystery. He’s only directing one play, and once it opens, he’s out of here. Everyone’s trying very hard to make a good impression in hopes he’ll take us with him when he goes.” He stopped. “I don’t mean us. I mean them. I’m not trying to make a good impression. Uncle Wallace is trying to make a good impression. Rumor has it he very badly wants off the dinner--theater circuit.”
“How would a person make a good impression on Nelson?” I wondered if I would make a good impression.
“Acting, I guess. Acting well. Don’t tell that to Uncle Wallace though. You’d break his heart.”
Uncle Wallace may have been a goose but he was certainly acting well. Based on one table read I would count him as an excellent Stage Manager, not that Duke wanted to hear that from me. Duke, I cleverly surmised, would rather hear about Duke. “So you’re making a good impression if you want to or not. You were wonderful.”
It was the strangest moment, like I was telling him something he hadn’t heard before. He stopped and rested one elbow on my shoulder, pushing his hair back behind his ear where it belonged. “You’re just saying that because of the lake and the cherry blossoms.”
“No,” I said. “You were wonderful.”
Then he kissed me, a first--day sort of kiss, very hesitant and sweet, the way George might have kissed Emily had a kiss been written for them. It was not, however, a kiss between an editor and his daughter.
“Thank you,” Duke said.
“Thank you,” I said, or thought I said, then he took back my hand. We walked the path along the lake for a while and then turned back. We lacked both the time and ambition to go all the way around.
“Do you swim?” he asked me.
“Like a fish.”
“Then we’ll go swimming sometime.”
I stopped. He knew what I wanted to do before I knew it myself, because as soon as he said it I wanted to go swimming more than anything. “Let’s go now,” I said. “I’ll tell you, this has been one hell of a day. Let’s go swimming.” It was northern Michigan in the summer. There would still be enough light.
He looked at me. “We’re busy now.”
“We are?”
He nodded, moving a piece of hair from my forehead with his thumb. “We have plans.”
It sounded so much like a line from a play. We were going to go back to my room, and to pretend otherwise would have been acting.
He took out a pack of Marlboros and offered me one.
I shook my head. “I don’t smoke.”
“Would you try?”
“Smoking?”
He nodded. “It’s something we could do together. Just think how nice it would be to go outside during breaks and sit on the lawn. We could look at the lake and smoke.”
He lit two cigarettes with a single match, and then, exhaling, handed one to me. Jimmy--George had nothing on this guy. Nobody had anything on this guy. I took a small drag and coughed. My first cigarette.