I had made the mistake of telling Duke about Ripley calling me at the hospital. He saw the movie as the answer to everything: the loss of Emily, my one--footedness. “Why should I call him when he never listens to me?”
“If you’re saying something stupid he shouldn’t listen.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said.
“Welcome to the world. You’ve got a movie coming out. This isn’t the part where you start burning bridges.”
I touched his arm, the silky skin stretched over muscle. The round red scar where he had put out the cigarette still had the last vestige of a scab. “Would you do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Do you think you could rig up some sort of ironing board over the bed?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want to iron the mending. That’s how you finish the job. But I can’t iron if I can’t stand up. If I had an ironing board that went over the bed, just a little one—-” I was thinking of the Veit ironing table with suction and blowing my grandmother and I used to dream about. What I was asking for was nothing like that. I had just finished sewing the sash on a muslin apron that I knew belonged to Mrs. Gibbs. I wanted to make it look nice.
He pushed my hair back from my forehead with the flat of his hand “You’re losing your mind, cricket.”
I looked at him, his crazy beauty. “Go,” I said kindly.
Duke was so happy now that Our Town was almost over, now that he was almost Eddie full--time, now that he was taking Pallace back to the room that had once been mine after they swam in the lake. I didn’t know the last part at the time but I understood that everything was shifting. Duke was on his way up and I was on my way out. Neither of us could have said those words but we knew.
Pallace came to see me but found the floor of the cottage to be blistering hot. Try as she might, she couldn’t stand on it for more than a minute. She arrived with a bottle of Orangina from the cafeteria, a bag of pretzels: small offerings to lay on her altar of guilt. Clearly, she was tortured, and I was foolish enough to think she felt bad about taking my part—-two parts! A low fog of tequila settled around her.
“When’s Sebastian coming back?” I turned the open bag of pretzels in her direction but she shook her head. Pallace was thin and getting thinner. I knew because I’d already taken in the red dress she would wear in Fool for Love. Sebastian was very much my hero in those days, and I’d be so much happier once he came back. If Sebastian were there the teams would be even: two actors and two non--actors.
Pallace tipped her head, bit her lip. “He took too much time off. He got in trouble at work. He’s going to be busy for a while catching up on the lessons he missed.” She shifted her weight from side to side, very nearly lifting her feet to keep them from burning. “I should go,” she said, her face aglow. “I’ve got so many lines.”
“Practice here!” I patted the empty space beside me where Duke slept. “You can climb up in the big fluffy bed and we can run lines.”
Oh, Pallace, such a good actress, and yet she couldn’t fix her face to make me think that things were fine, that she was my friend and would return. She all but ran to get away from me.
In retrospect, my inability to put it together was its own sort of gift. I would understand what they were doing soon enough, at which point I would finally understand what I had done to Veronica. Veronica had such a small part in the story and still I loved her more than everyone at Tom Lake put together. She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.
Attending those three remaining performances of Our Town was an exercise in endurance. I watched George and Emily up on ladders, talking about their homework, talking about the moon.
George and Emily at the soda fountain talking about their future. There they are at their wedding ceremony and Pallace is asking Duke to take her away. Hadn’t he always said she was his girl? The next thing you know it’s the third act and she’s sitting in the graveyard with the rest of the dead. For all the times I was in the play, I don’t think I ever fully understood just how fast it went. Chan very kindly came back to the cottage and wheeled me over for all three performances, but after that first night I told him he didn’t have to stay. I could ask any stranger to push my wheelchair back across the campus of Tom Lake when the night was black and full of stars. Over time I would have built up my confidence with the wheelchair but it was so hilly and the thought of tipping over in the dark when I was alone and breaking a shoulder or cracking a knee put the fear of god in me. Duke loved to set me on the front stairs of the company housing late at night when he got home, then race around in my wheelchair, making it spin in crazy circles. Then he would take it down the hill, going faster and faster until he threw his up hands and screamed, his head tipped back, his eyes closed. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand to watch him and so I closed my eyes.
The part of this story in which I lived in the cottage and sewed for Cat, the part where Our Town was still in performances and Fool for Love was still in rehearsal and Duke was still in my bed, couldn’t have lasted much more than a week, eight or nine days at most. But they were long days, summer stock days. For me, it may as well have been a geological age.
Saint Sebastian returned for the opening of Fool for Love. Oh, how I’d missed him! It is so clear to me now that he was the best of us. At first glance a person would have thought it was Duke who ruled the orbit, with Sebastian and Pallace and me as the circling moons. But Sebastian was the one who was necessary. His interest in what we said made us interesting, covered up our deficits. I missed the four of us and all the places we were together—-the lake, the tennis court, the car. So often my mind went back to that day at the Nelsons’ farm.
“Look at you!” Sebastian held out his arms to me when I crutched to the open door to meet him.
But look at him, his white Oxford shirt starched and ironed, his navy summer blazer. No doubt it was the same shirt and blazer he wore to the bar of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, but tonight he was wearing them for Pallace, for the opening of the play that starred his brother and his best girl.
Sebastian brought the wheelchair around and knelt to lift my cast onto the footrest. “It’s going to be so much easier for her now,” he said, reflecting on Pallace. “When it was Our Town one night and then Cabaret the next night and then rehearsing Fool for Love all day, I thought, she’s never going to make it.”
Why hadn’t I thought of it this way? All the pressure she was under because of me, her boyfriend made to stay at work because of me. Small wonder she could barely stand to be in my room. “Pallace is tougher than the rest of us,” I said, by which I meant Duke and myself, not Sebastian.
“That’s why she told me not to come up for a while,” he said.