He yawned like a lion, showing me his molars, his fillings. “We start at nine.” He took my face in his hands and looked at me with great seriousness. “You shouldn’t be late, the star, her first morning. You’ve got to be disciplined. Either breakfast or sex. Not both. You have to choose.”
I was making good choices these days, which meant that by the time we rolled apart there wasn’t even a moment for coffee, and no time for Duke to go back to his dorm to change. “Lend me something,” he said.
I was pulling my favorite dress over my head, the smocked one with the daisies and the wide pockets that my grandmother had made for me to take to Los Angeles. “You can’t wear my clothes.” Small female, large male, I could think of so many reasons why it was inappropriate.
“I’m not going to rehearsal dressed in something I wore yesterday.”
I looked at him. “No one remembers what you wore yesterday.”
He threw off the sheets, leaping up. Duke, naked and twenty--eight, opened the dresser: underwear, socks, and two nightgowns in the first drawer, T--shirts, shorts, and two swimsuits in the second. “Your organization is impeccable.”
“Put your clothes on,” I said. “We have to go.”
He chose my Disneyland T--shirt, just that word in swooping pink script on a bright white background. I had wanted to go to Disneyland when I first went to L.A. and so Ashby had taken me. The two of us spun in teacups and had our picture taken with giant mice. “This,” he said, tugging it over his head like a butterfly trying to stuff itself back inside the papery chrysalis.
“I don’t think—-” I started to say, but it was already done. He was back in his surgical scrubs, his espadrilles, the T--shirt straining to hold itself together across those wide, bony shoulders where so recently I had slept. He took my hairbrush from the dresser, my toothbrush from the sink.
“You’re using my toothbrush?”
He stopped his brushing. “This is not intimacy,” he said, holding the toothbrush up, the toothpaste foam sliding down his hand. And he was right, of course. He was even right about the Disney shirt, which was cute on me but was on him both scandalous and spectacular.
We came down the hall behind a Black girl wearing shorts and a Boy Scout shirt. I remembered her from the table read, her face but not her name. Or not even her face—-I remembered her legs. Never had one person been in possession of such preposterous legs. She was an average height—-by which I mean taller than me and shorter than Duke—-but all that height was in her legs.
Nell raises her hand.
“What?”
“You’re objectifying her.”
“Pallace? What am I doing wrong now?”
Maisie agrees. “She’s a person. She isn’t a great pair of legs.”
“If you’d give me another minute I plan to establish that.”
“But you can’t just lead with a body part.”
“Have you ever met dancers? Have you ever heard them talk about their legs? About other people’s legs?”
Nell thinks about this for a minute. “She may have a point.”
“Get back to the story,” Emily says.
Pallace dropped down the stairs three at a time, and when she got to the bottom, turned around. “Are we late?” she asked Duke.
“Right on time,” he said.
Then she saw me, one stair behind him. “Emily!” she cried.
“Pallace,” Duke said, holding his hand out to her by way of introduction.
She looked at us standing there together. “Seriously?” she said to Duke. “She must have been here for what, twenty minutes? Did you go to the airport and stake out the plane?”
“I didn’t like my room,” he said, his voice oddly prim.
“That explains why he didn’t try to sleep with me,” Pallace said. “The dancers are in the attic. The view is great but it gets really hot up there.”
“Walk, please,” Duke said, lighting the morning’s first cigarette.
I was trying to keep up. My room? “You’re a dancer?” Of course she was a dancer.
Pallace extended her left leg at a ninety--degree angle from her body and lifted up on the ball of her right foot, her little red tennis shoe straining in the point.
“Showboat,” Duke said.
“Not Showboat, you fool, Cabaret. But I’m studying acting, too. Right now I’m studying your acting.”
“Pallace is your understudy,” Duke said.
I hadn’t thought about that. Of course there would have been an understudy in place already. “So why aren’t you playing Emily?”
“Because then I’d be in Cabaret four shows a week and Our Town three shows a week and at the end of the summer I’d be dead. Anyway, Tom Lake’s idea of racially progressive casting is to let me be the understudy, not the lead. It’s a big step for them.”
“Better not get sick,” Duke said to me.
“That last Emily—-” Pallace began.
“Piece--of--work Emily,” Duke offered.
Pallace nodded. “That piece of work dropped out soon enough for the company to find a nice new white Emily.” She held an open hand in my direction.
“New and improved.” Duke put his arm around my shoulder.
“Very improved.” Pallace tossed me a smile. “And anyway, can you imagine it? A stage full of Caucasians with me standing right in the middle looking all lonely?”
Duke lowered his eyebrows, lowered his voice. “Whose town is this, anyway?”
“Not our town,” Pallace answered brightly.
“I don’t think—-” I started to say. What was I going to say?
“If you like things just a little weirder, I’m also your understudy on Fool for Love. Oh! and I’m the understudy for your mother, which is stupid. Your mother should have gone to a swing.”
“My mother?” My mother in New Hampshire?
Duke took back his arm. “I didn’t know that! That means if Mrs. Webb gets sick you’ll be my wife.” The kiss he gave her then had more intention than the kiss he’d given to the woman who was presently playing my mother. “Someday we’ll have to tell Emily she’s adopted.”
“What happens if Mrs. Webb and I are both sick on the same night?” Mrs. Webb, my mother. I couldn’t remember her name.
“Then whichever one of you is less sick will pull your shit together and go on anyway,” Pallace explained. “Dancers always go on. If you ever see a notice that a dancer’s out, you can bet money that she OD’d on whatever painkillers they gave her to keep dancing.”
“The show really must go on,” Duke said.
I stopped on the path. We were almost to the theater, actors arriving from every direction, understudies and swings, all of them with coffee in hand. I would have given a lot for a coffee.
“Do you two know each other?”
Duke and Pallace looked at each other. “Do we?” she asked him.
“No more than we know anyone else.”
“But not less than we know anyone else,” Pallace added.
“The way you talk.” I turned from one to the other. They were both beautiful, unusual, overly animated, the way actors and dancers are. This was something else though. “It’s like you’ve come out of the same improv group.”
Pallace laughed, her teeth as perfect as Duke’s were stricken. “Do you think? Maybe that’s because we came out of the same improv group.”
“The great state of Michigan,” Duke said.