6
It had been my plan to go back to New Hampshire to see my grandmother after I left New York, but there wasn’t time for that now.
The original Emily—-you haven’t heard of her; her moment was brief and came to nothing—-was already gone.
I flew to Detroit and took a commuter plane to Traverse City.
The Executive Director of Tom Lake drove the hour and a half north to collect me from the airport, which made about as much sense as Ripley sending a limo.
“It’s awfully nice of you,” I said, wrestling my suitcases into the trunk.
“I don’t pick up actors. I had an eye exam.” He briefly lowered his dark glasses to show me his dilated pupils. “But this gives me a chance to bring you up to speed.”
I stared at him, then bobbed my head a little from side to side. “Can you see?”
“Enough.” His name was Eric, and after that car ride I never crossed paths with him again.
Just because the company was iconic didn’t mean it wasn’t forever on the precipice of financial ruin.
Eric’s job was to bring in major gifts and soothe patrons who were offended by a particular show and make sure the ticket sales were on track.
In a normal season the actors weren’t his problem, but so far this wasn’t shaping up to be a normal season.
Emily had bailed and the Stage Manager, a character actor who’d spent ten years playing the indelible Uncle Wallace on television, had transitioned from a heavy drinker to a worrisome drunk.
Worrisome because Uncle Wallace, otherwise known as Albert Long, was the washed--up marquee name people drove over from other counties to see.
“No Emily and a knee--walking Stage Manager isn’t the best place to start,” Eric said.
I said something sympathetic, but really, I wasn’t listening.
Who can listen to complaints about actors in the presence of so many cherry trees, miles and miles of them in full ceremonial headdress?
“Look at this!” I wanted to cry as we raced down the straight country roads in Eric’s old Volvo station wagon, but surely Eric had seen the trees before.
He told me I would get the other Emily’s salary and better accommodations.
He’d been able to snatch back the program from the printers at the fifty--ninth minute of the eleventh hour.
They’d play up my soon--to--be--released movie and two seasons of unremarkable television.
“If you can think of anything else, that would be helpful,” he said.
I assumed that my Red Lobster commercial ( Everybody LOVES a fried shrimp feast! ) would not be helpful. “I’ll think about it.”
“We deal in embellishment around here,” he said, his eyes on the road, but not on either side of the road where the action was.
He said he hoped I’d stay the summer. The other Emily had been slated to play Mae in Fool for Love after the run of Our Town ended. “We could look for another actress but if you could do it that would be one less headache.”
I had never seen the play, hadn’t read it, but I’d always thought the title was snappy. “Don’t you want to see if I can act first?”
Eric shook his head. “That’s not my job.
If you’ve made it all the way to my car it’s because other people think you can act.
That’s good enough for me. Charlie said you were excellent, by the way.
He said they wanted to cast you in the Spalding Gray production but the backers wouldn’t go for it. They needed a name.”
It was entirely possible that Charlie had been blowing smoke at Eric, or that Eric was blowing smoke at me, but on the off chance it was true and I could have played Emily on Broadway without having to sleep with anybody at the Algonquin, I wished he would pull the car over for a minute and let me throw up.
I stared at the trees instead, that endless expanse of trembling petals. I told Eric I’d stay for the season.
“What’s in the boxes?” I asked.
“What boxes?”
I pointed, thinking his eyes must really be bad. Big wooden boxes were set out among the trees. They were everywhere.
“Bees,” he said.
“They come in boxes?”
He nodded. “Farmers rent bees. They come in an eighteen--wheeler, and when pollination is over, the truck comes back and takes the boxes someplace else.”
“Summer stock,” I said, and for the first time since I’d gotten in the car, Eric laughed.
Tom Lake turned out to be crushingly pretty.
There was a huge covered amphitheater sunk into the rolling lawns.
The musical ran in the amphitheater. They also had a black box theater where they staged the straight plays like Our Town and Fool for Love .
There were tennis courts with a clubhouse that served iced tea and sandwiches.
A smattering of lovely houses—-some that had been turned into administrative offices, some for boarding the actors and designers and technicians, and some where regular people spent the summer—-spread along the shore of a tremendous lake.
Fruit trees bloomed, paths meandered, hills swelled, like someone had clipped pictures out of a pile of magazines and then glued the very best ones together on a single page.
A couple of miles away was a small town that took most of its annual revenue from the summer tourists who came to stay in one of the two hotels, have supper, and spend the next morning wandering through the little shops before coming over with their theater tickets.
The most ambitious ones walked in for a show then caught a shuttle bus back.
They wore Tom Lake T--shirts and Tom Lake hats as they paddled rented canoes past the diving platform and out across the lake.
The whole thing was a fragile ecosystem, as small towns and theater companies usually are, but as far as I could see it was thriving.
I had two suitcases and Eric carried the heavier one up to my room in the company housing, leaving the smaller one for me.
The name of the previous Emily was still on the door.
“You won’t understand how nice this is until you’ve seen the other rooms,” he said.
“We need to build more housing. That’s one of the sixty--two things I’m raising money for. ”
The room was nice in the same way the best dorm room can seem nice: a double bed, my own tiny bathroom, and a window that was open and overlooked the lake.
“I’ll have someone bring the schedule by,” he said. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to hit the ground running.”
I unpacked as soon as he left, hanging up my dresses and putting my shoes in a line on the closet floor.
I arranged my travel clock and a small pile of books on the nightstand.
The girls I’d gone to high school with were married now.
They had little houses in New Hampshire with sofa sets and televisions, forks and knives and spoons, maybe a kid or two.
During those years when they were hanging wallpaper in the nursery, I’d been living in a furnished studio in Los Angeles, a place that came with everything—-sheets, towels, a dish rack.
I had money but no idea of how to spend it, so I didn’t spend it.
I liked the lightness of my life, the feeling that I could leave tomorrow and go where they needed me: New York, Michigan.
Not counting my winter clothes, which were still in the closet of my grandmother’s spare room, my worldly possessions amounted to the contents of these two bags, more or less.
I hadn’t had any real success but every one of those high school girls knew about my life, and as much as they may have had the story wrong, they wished they were me.
In their place, I would have wished I were me, because this unremarkable room with the remarkable view in Middle--of--Nowhere, Michigan, was everything that had ever been written about freedom and possibility.
I pushed the empty suitcases under the bed with my foot, then stood at the window staring, thinking how nice it would be to use the word lush again after such a long time in California.
The light was so much softer here, and still so much brighter than New Hampshire’s.
I would send postcards to Charlie and Ripley tomorrow.
I would tell them both how grateful I was, how much I already loved the place.
Eric had left the door to my room open behind him, maybe so I could get a cross breeze, and when I turned around a tall, slender man was leaning against the doorway. He had been watching me watch the lake.
“Pretty grand, right?” he said.
My mind did that quick mental calculation women must make when they find their exit blocked by a man they don’t know. How far down if I had to go out the window? Too far, I was guessing.
He saw me, he caught it, and took a step back into the hall. He held up a piece of paper. “Schedule,” he said.
“Ah.”
“You can come out or I can come in or I can lay it here on the floor between us.” He leaned over partway to pantomime his intention.
His eyes were dark and overlarge in his thin face, his black hair long and pushed behind his ears.
He stood up suddenly and very straight, the paper still in his hand.
He was wearing a linen T--shirt and very long surgical scrub pants.
“If you invite me in I’ll tell you a story. ”
“Come in then,” I said. His ancient espadrilles were dirty and folded at the heels. “I’ll risk it.”
He smiled. “Oh, good, good.” But he barely came into the room at all. He left the door open wide and leaned against the wall beside it, as if it were exactly the spot he was meant for. “Who picked you up at the airport?”
“Eric.”
He puzzled over this. “Eric who?”
I hadn’t asked his last name, proof that I’d been in California too long. “Eric the Executive Director.”
This seemed to impress him. “I’ve never even seen the Executive Director. I’m assuming he didn’t tell you anything about the lake.”
“He did not.”