3 #3
Had it been before or after we took the kitchen wall out to make a family room that Joe told the girls about Duke?
It must have been after. Emily must have been twelve, which would mean that Maisie and Nell were more or less ten and eight.
Maybe it was Christmastime. I know it was winter.
Maisie had dug The Popcorn King out of what we referred to as the movie basket.
They had seen it who knew how many times before and that’s exactly what made the experience appealing to them, the repetition, the pleasure of anticipating what came next.
They chimed in on the best lines, No BUTTER?
and cracked themselves up. Winters were so long, and we leaned into the movie basket and the books on the low shelves beneath the window to save us.
Yes, this was definitely after the expansion because I remember standing at the wide white sink doing dishes while the three girls braided their hair into a single fat rope.
Their conversation consisted of one of them telling the other two to hold still, and then another one complaining the others were pulling and would mess everything up.
The movie’s soundtrack became their soundtrack, the insistent violins that lagged half a beat behind Duke’s feathery alto.
Mostly his voice was lost to the water running in the sink and the girls’ laughing, though every now and then I heard him sing the word Popcorn!
quite distinctly. He’d done a lot of family movies after the cop show, after the astronaut movie, before he reinvented himself as a Very Serious Actor, though the popcorn movie was already old on the night of this particular viewing, and he was already a Very Serious Actor.
We’d lost the cardboard sleeve to the VHS tape.
This was the only one of the family movies in which he’d been made to sing and dance, and while he didn’t do either of those things naturally, the immensity of his charisma provided sufficient cover.
I knew the movie as well as the girls did.
I knew that we were at the scene where he was dancing on a floor covered in unpopped kernels, dancing and sliding, arms windmilling wildly, nearly falling and never falling, his perfect physicality overwhelming in its abandon.
I used to watch that scene and wonder how many times they’d made him dance on popcorn.
How many days did they ask him to do it again so that there would be enough footage to splice the number together?
On that night I struggled to scrub a crust of lasagna off the bottom of a pan.
Baked--on, burnt--on mess . What was that a commercial for?
Some tool meant to free me from labor. I did not turn around to watch him in his bowler hat and pearl--gray suit.
I was staring out the window above the sink.
I did not turn towards his voice, nor, had I been facing in the direction of the television set, would I have turned away.
Duke had been famous for as many years as we had been apart.
Had every sight or sound of him sent me off on a pilgrimage of nostalgia or excoriation I would have lost my mind years before.
We coexisted peacefully, Duke and I, or I coexisted.
Into this scene of braiding and scrubbing and movie and dancing came my husband, stamping the snow from his boots.
He stood behind the couch where our three girls were firmly tethered together as one daughter, Nell facing the television and Maisie and Emily each facing out to the side, the backs of their heads touching.
They were thrilled by what they had accomplished, the end of the braid secured by a rubber band.
Joe stood and watched the screen with them for a minute.
The kernels beneath Duke’s feet were just starting to pop and he scooped up handfuls and flung them into the air like snow.
That was when Joe said, “You know your mother used to date him.”
Imagine braiding the tails of three mice and then throwing in a cat.
I don’t think he realized their heads were fastened, or that they would all begin to scream and claw so violently in an attempt to separate themselves and get to me.
I don’t think Joe was thinking. He had seen Duke dancing on popcorn as often as the rest of us, but for whatever reason on that night he offered commentary.
One of the girls, I’d bet it was Maisie, thought to tug off the rubber band, and in a matter of seconds they were apart, their long hair flashing into shields.
They were loud in that piercing way of girls, and Joe, as if to amend his poor judgment, picked up the remote and paused the movie, thus silencing not the children but the topic of discussion.
Duke froze there, the bowler nearly slipping off his loose, dark hair, his mouth open, his eyes half--closed in a moment of mock--sexual ecstacy I could have done without.
Emily said that Daddy was making it up. Nell wanted to know if Duke and I had gone to school together.
Maisie asked when he was coming to our house, the very thought of which lit the three of them from within, their favorite movie star soon to arrive on a winter night because why else would their father have picked this moment for the great reveal? When is he coming? they cried.
What was it Lear says at the end? Never, never, never, never, never.
We might as well have cut each girl a heavy slice of chocolate cake soaked in espresso, then stood back to watch them lick the plates. They were relentless. How had it happened, they wanted to know. Why hadn’t I married Duke instead?
On that long ago night our girls were still years away from having boyfriends of their own.
I tried to remember what I thought dating meant when I was their age: ice cream, movies, walking home from school, the dread and desire that surrounded the mystery of kissing.
In summer stock, Duke slept in my bed because I had the infinitely superior room—-a closet, a dresser, a window that looked out over Tom Lake, my own tiny bathroom with a shower we could just barely fit into together.
We lay in that double bed and ran each other’s lines.
We lay in that bed. When ambition overcame us, we played tennis or swam in the lake.
We got drunk after shows or got high. We ate the pita bread I kept in the nightstand for the times we were hungry and couldn’t bear the thought of getting up.
Sometimes he would go for coffee and bring it back to bed, or I would go.
We were on the stage or in that bed, forgotten cigarettes burning down to the filters in the ashtray. We were dating.
My three little girls stared at me, paralyzed by expectation. Winter, and they had seen every movie in the basket three dozen times. It appalled them to think there was a story in this house they didn’t know.
“We were in a play together,” I said. Truth. And they already knew that for a brief time when I was young I had wanted to be an actress. We had a VHS of that as well.
“So you didn’t date him,” Emily corrected. “You knew him.”
I shrugged. The girls believed we were so old then, their father and I, that they took into account we might not remember our own lives. “We dated while we were in a play.”
He carried my books. He walked me home. We kissed.
When they finally went back to watch the end of the movie, Duke was no longer just the Popcorn King. He was the man who had once eaten ice cream with their mother. “Don’t you want to watch with us?” Maisie asked.
“I’ve seen it,” I said.
“That doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “It’s good.”
“Maybe it’s upsetting to her,” Emily said in a stage whisper, though it was Emily who insisted they start the movie over once it had ended because she wanted to be able to think about Duke as someone I knew in the first part of the film as well as the last. In the beginning, Duke is the banished King of Popcorn who returns in disguise so that he might overthrow the interloper and reclaim his rightful place.
That always struck me as the most ludicrous part of the story, the idea that, despite the newsboy’s cap and ragged jacket, anyone would fail to recognize Duke.
Nell looked away from the screen to see how I was holding up. She mouthed the words I love you , information not intended for anyone else.
Joe said it too, when, after more and more of the same, we at last wrestled our children into bed.
“I may have to kill you just to make sure it never happens again,” I said to him, pulling my sweater over my head, that terrible moment when the warmest article of clothing comes off.
“I don’t think a mistake of that magnitude could be made twice.”
“Let’s not find out.” I was shaking with cold and he took me in his arms.
“I had no idea they would care,” he said. “Or at least I didn’t think they would care that much.”
“Or you didn’t think at all. You just said it.”
I could feel his chin nodding against the top of my head. “That’s what it was.”
The high tide of Duke hung around the house for weeks after that, and while it slowly receded, it never went away.
The girls began spending their allowance on People magazine, Duke being a reliable fixture for paparazzi: at the opening of the Met season, coming home from the gym with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, with an admirable mutt on the beach, with an admirable starlet on the beach.
The girls started watching his cop show, Rampart , in reruns.
They devoted themselves to the Duke movies that were already in the basket because I refused to buy more.
Their favorite was a boneheaded remake of The Swiss Family Robinson called Swiss Father Robinson which featured a mostly shirtless Duke on a gorgeous desert island, his snug pants tattered just above the knee.
His wife claims that Duke, an internationally famous architect, scarcely knows his own children, and so she stays in Zurich while he takes their four adorable offspring on a sailing adventure by himself.
After the brief inconvenience of a shipwreck, he builds his family a chalet in the trees, with a slide that drops the plucky little ones into the bay when they need a bath.
A bright red parrot with a yellow breast sits on his shoulder while he splits open coconuts for breakfast, the toddler secured to his back with a sarong.
Despite his complete lack of experience, Duke turns out to be a miracle of a father, teaching the children to read and love the land and master carpentry.
The most disappointing scene in the movie is when his wife finally shows up to rescue them from paradise.
Disappointment, the children learn early on, is embodied by the mother.
Two years later, Emily decided Duke was her father, Maisie decided Emily had been possessed by Satan, and Nell decided she wanted to be an actress who would never come home again, though that might have happened anyway.
Thanks to his ubiquitous presence in the world, the man I’d spent a summer with took up residence in our home, and still I thought of him remarkably little.