Ripley went to Fool for Love without much convincing. Going to see plays was what he did. He asked me to come but I said if we were leaving tomorrow I’d have to pack. I was like one of those clever crows who could use a stick as a tool. I sat in my wheelchair and knocked things off the closet bar with the crutch. What I’d brought didn’t amount to anything more or anything more meaningful than what Uncle Wallace had: a modest amount of clothing, a handful of books I’d already read, a clock. I left my scripts in the freezer with the vodka Duke and I hadn’t gotten around to yet. I took a careful bath, finished the mending, wrote Cat a note. Ripley had his secretary arrange for a car service in the morning, saying we sure as hell weren’t going back to Traverse City in the Honda.
“Sure as hell not,” I said.
I pushed my two swimsuits into the corner of my suitcase. Everything at Tom Lake was finished for me. For all my protesting, I understood that I was wildly fortunate that someone, anyone, had come to pull me out.
The next morning Ripley carried my suitcases to the car as I crutched behind him, leaving the wheelchair in the cottage since it belonged to the prop department. We sat in the back seat in silence, both of us preoccupied by thoughts of the same person for entirely different reasons. The driver put the crutches in the trunk with the bags. I couldn’t quite believe I hadn’t said goodbye to any of them, by which I meant Duke. I hadn’t said goodbye to Duke, who hadn’t said goodbye to me.
Goodbye, theater. Goodbye, cherry trees and cigarettes and vodka. Goodbye, lake.
“How crazy is this guy?” Ripley asked when we were almost an hour into the drive. He’d been staring out the window, probably thinking about how he’d never see Michigan again.
“Crazy,” I said.
“But crazy worth it?”
He wasn’t asking me about my love life but it was hard not to think of it in those terms. “You saw him.”
“What’s his face like, when it’s not bashed in?”
I told him it was a very good face.
He was quiet again for another ten miles or so. “I don’t like working with the crazies,” he said.
“No one does, but if you got rid of them I don’t know who you’d have left.”
Ripley nodded. “I’m assuming the two of you came to a bad end.”
“We did.”
“And that it had something to do with the girl in the play?”
As I have said, their truth was widely evident.
“She was good, too,” he said absently.
“She’s very good, and she dances.” I don’t know what I was trying to sell him, only that I’d spent the long summer marveling at the glory of both Pallace and Duke. I had no idea how a person was supposed to stop that on a dime.
“I might have a part for him.” Ripley didn’t ask me if I minded.
I nodded, wondering if there would be any pleasure in this in the future, the knowledge that I had contributed to something that was bound to happen anyway. I was a conduit in the start of Peter Duke’s meteoric career, a single, shiny cog.
“I don’t love the way he did this,” Ripley said. “Getting me out to fucking Michigan to see him.”
“How else were you going to see him?”
“I don’t know. I suppose he could have troubled himself to come to L.A. like everyone else in the world. Except for you. I had to go to New Hampshire to find you.” Everything had been plotted for his maximum inconvenience.
When we got to the turnoff for Traverse City, I started to think I might call Joe Nelson from the airport to say goodbye. I would tell Joe how I’d lost them, Duke and Sebastian and Pallace, all in one shot.
“What about Pallace?” I asked Ripley.
“Who’s Pallace?”
“The girl.”
He shook his head. “I don’t need a girl. I have too many girls as it is.”
And there went Pallace, tumbling off in the breeze as Duke came with us. I knew what he was telling me, and I didn’t say another word about it.
Ripley put me in the pool house. In the afternoons I sat on a chaise beneath an umbrella in my one--piece and read novels. Ripley’s house contained no end of novels. He said agents sent them to him in boxes, hoping he’d turn the books into movies. “If you come across anything decent, write a treatment,” he said. “You can earn your keep.”
“I’m already earning my keep.” Ashby was still on the payroll, still hoping to be an actress. She took me to have my nails painted and my eyebrows plucked and a few subtle highlights woven around my face. There was a stylist and a media trainer who schooled me in the ways of talk shows and newspaper interviews. I had been made up to get into the business and I would be made up to get out.
“You’re not getting out,” Ripley said.
“That’s a line from a horror movie if ever I heard one.”
“I’m sure it is. So what are you going to do with your life if you don’t do this?”
“There is no this. This is gone. No joke. I’m only here to do you a favor because you did me a favor. When we’re done I may go back to New Hampshire, work in alterations. Maybe I’ll finish college. I wanted to be a teacher before you came along.”
He rolled his eyes. “Give me a break,” he said.
Ripley and I struck up an odd little friendship in the month or so I was there. I never got the story on his personal life other than he didn’t seem to have one. He was good to me though, in spite of my moods. I never knew if it was because he felt sorry for me or grateful because of Duke or if he felt like he needed to keep an eye on me until the movie came out. Maybe he was just a decent man. I had started to think of him as my uncle, just like Charlie had told me he was in the Algonquin all those lifetimes ago. Ripley went out and picked up salads from one fancy restaurant or another and we ate them together in the evening, drank Chablis. Sometimes we watched a movie but just as often we didn’t. He liked to play honeymoon bridge and I knew how. “The only ingenue in Bel Air who plays honeymoon bridge,” he liked to say while I shuffled the deck. I always wanted a cigarette after dinner but the property had been scrubbed of tobacco. Everyone who worked for Ripley had been instructed not to buy them for me. “You look like an eighth grader when you smoke,” he said. “It’s not attractive.”
Which was how I quit. I didn’t mind too much, as smoking made me miss Duke. Ripley didn’t talk to me about Duke but I knew things were in the works. He’d sent a casting director out to Tom Lake to see the play and the next week a stack of headshots were left on the kitchen counter after a meeting and Duke’s was in there, just another pretty boy in a thick stack of pretty boys. I took the picture back to the pool house and cried on it. I was always thinking that he might come for me. He must have known where I was, and showing up was the kind of thing he would do, walking into the pool house in the middle of the night, especially a pool house Ripley owned. “Where’s my girl?” he’d call. “Where’s my birthday girl?”
Ripley told me to keep the door locked but I never did.
My agent got me an appointment to see some big--time California hand and foot specialist who cut off the plaster cast, x--rayed my ankle, examined the incision, and reported with no small amount of wonder that everything looked fine. He replaced the plaster with a lightweight fiberglass cast and gave me a walker, which made me feel born again. I used the crutches for interviews because, as Ripley explained, crutches were sexy and youthful and walkers were walkers.
After two or three days, Ripley arranged a screening on the studio lot and we watched Singularity together with some friends of his and some studio people and some of the people in the movie, though not the famous actress, who was shooting in Quebec.