“It must have been strange though, to be onstage with Uncle Wallace one night and Dad two nights later. They must have been so different.”
We are nearing the end of my brief career as an actress, and I’m still trying to remember what acting was like. “They were as different as chalk and cheese but they were both right for the part. I stood so close to them. That’s what I remember. The audience is far away but the people you’re acting with are so close. You can smell them. Uncle Wallace smelled like mouthwash and Royall Lyme cologne. And then your father—-” What did Joe smell like? It was nothing like mouthwash and cologne.
“Daddy smells like this.” Nell closes her eyes for a minute, sniffing the breeze.
“Like what?” Emily asks.
“He smells like the cherry orchard,” Maisie says.
“Yes.” I’d been too young to understand it then. He smelled like the cherry orchard.
When it came to breaking rehearsal early, Cody was the uncontested champion. Maybe he was right to let us go. The entire cast was only four people after all, one act, and if those people were all drinking tequila and if the director wanted to run a scene a second time, a great deal of thought had to go into marshaling resources. On the days we had Our Town—-Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday—-he had to be especially careful to keep the drinking in check. Other people knew what was going on over at Fool for Love, and while some actors might have found our methods gritty and inspired, the management saw us for the ticking time bomb we were. We could not slip up, which was to say Duke could not slip up. He drank his flooding amounts of water and shook the aspirin straight from the bottle into his mouth. He dove down into the bottle of tequila, dove down into the glittering lake, then swam back up, breaking the surface with the full force of his life.
We never knew when Sebastian was going to be there. Probably Pallace knew. Everyone wanted to play tennis in the summer. The Grosse Pointe Yacht Club was right on Lake St. Clair and the breeze blew gently across the courts, just enough to dry the sweat from a player’s brow but never enough to alter the trajectory of the ball. Every hour of Sebastian’s weekends was booked in advance, so weekends were out, but as soon as he could cobble two days together he drove up to see us, or he drove up to see her. I don’t even think Duke had much to do with it anymore. Sebastian must have gotten up in the dark to be there so early on a Tuesday morning. I saw him sitting in the back of the theater with Pallace, his arm around her, her head tipped towards him, the two of them watching us drink and slam and scream at one another. I didn’t care about the rest of them anymore but I hated that Sebastian was there. I suspected that Cody called the rehearsal early that day because he couldn’t stand to see me act anymore, but maybe it had something to do with Sebastian. Like Pallace, Cody had a weakness for quiet, handsome men who weren’t actors.
“Saint Sebastian!” Duke shouted when he saw his brother. “Tennis!”
“Too hot,” Pallace called from the comfort of her boyfriend’s shoulder. “I want to go swimming.”
“He was mine first,” Duke said. “And anyway, you’re off tonight. You can swim all you want.” One night Our Town, one night Cabaret. We worked and then Pallace worked and on Monday everyone was off. It dawned on me then that Sebastian must have driven up last night. He’d come in and hadn’t told us.
“Okay.” Sebastian leaned over to give Pallace a kiss. “We’ll play a game.”
How could he have stood all that tennis? It was hot and I wanted to swim too, but like Pallace, it never occurred to me that we could have just gone without them. If our boyfriends played tennis then we would sit at the edge of the court and watch them play. Cody tagged along for the first set but Pallace and I ignored him so completely he finally said something about having work to do and went away. Duke was getting creamed.
Sebastian pulled back as convincingly as possible but Duke was missing the lobs. This must have been what every day was like for Sebastian—-hitting balls to talentless automotive engineers hellbent on winning. Duke stopped abruptly, his racquet straight down, his head tipped back. The yellow ball bounced twice then rolled away.
“Peedee?” Sebastian asked, all of us thinking that Duke was about to start screaming, but instead he went briskly out the gate and vomited in the grass by the walkway. I understood. The heat of the sun and the fast--moving ball made everything tilt. I went to stand beside him. I was getting good at this.
Turned out an afternoon swim and an afternoon game of tennis registered differently when the morning had been spent drinking tequila. Duke hadn’t known that before and now he did. Sebastian appeared with a bottle of water and Duke rinsed his mouth then vomited again, his hands braced against his knees, his black hair wet and clinging to the sides of his face. Sebastian waited another minute before giving him a towel. Tennis pros had bags like doctors.
“Let’s get you back to the room,” Sebastian said.
Duke shook his head very slowly so as not to upset his equilibrium further. “I’m going to lie down for a minute,” he said, meaning on the ground.
I thought Sebastian would object but he patted his brother’s back and then walked him onto the court where Duke stretched out parallel to the fault line.
“Keep playing,” he said, his voice subdued, his hand making a little circle in the air. “I don’t want to ruin the afternoon for everyone.”
“Too late,” Pallace said.
“Do you want to play a set?” Sebastian asked her.
She shook her head, lifting up her leg to flex and point her foot. “Ankle,” she reminded him. Pallace had a flare--up of tendinitis in her left ankle and if she wasn’t dancing she tried to rest it. She was sitting on the court near Duke’s head but had nothing to do with him.
Sebastian turned his racquet at me. “You’re up.”
I hadn’t had that much to drink but it took very little. Despite Duke’s predictions, my muscle for consumption remained weak. “Let’s go to the lake.”
Duke had his arm across his eyes, the tender underside of his wrist turned towards the sun. “You can’t move me and you can’t leave me here. You might as well get a lesson out of it.”
Now I was sorry for having chased Cody off. Cody would have sold his mother to play a game of tennis with Sebastian. I asked Duke how he was feeling.
“Potentially better. Not better right this minute but I can see how this could really help in the long run.”
“Oh, fantastic,” Pallace said. “Now you’re bulimic on top of everything else.”
“Quiet,” Duke whispered.
“Come on.” Sebastian handed me a racquet. “Unless you’ve been drinking, too.”
“A little bit,” I admitted.
Duke gave his head a very slow shake. “She fakes it.”