9 #3
We headed back up the hill to the theater, Duke lit up in his happiness.
He carried his shirt and espadrilles in one hand, and kept his other hand on his brother’s back.
How was the drive and had he had lunch? Sebastian could sleep in his room in the dorm because he was bunking with me.
Duke hadn’t dried his feet and now they were coated in dust. He never brought a towel to the lake because he always just used my towel, but today, for whatever reason, I’d forgotten.
“Are you in the third act?” Sebastian asked Duke as he held open the door to the theater.
“Where’s my girl?” Duke called out as we walked into the darkness. “Where’s my birthday girl?”
None of us knew we were at the beginning of anything but this was where the four of us started.
After rehearsal, Duke took his brother back to his room to get him settled, and for the first time it struck me that I had no idea where Duke’s room was.
My room—-he was always telling me this—-was so much better.
I walked out of the theater alone and thought about what I should do with my time.
I never had time. I should write letters, or at the very least postcards, and let everyone know how well things were going.
My intention was to go straight to my room but I heard music through an open window.
“What good. Is sit-- ting . A lone in your room?” the singer asked.
The accompanying piano felt tinny and stale, exactly right.
The words were less a question than a directive.
“Come to the Ca-- ba-- ret , old chum...” I went inside and stood against the back wall of the rehearsal room.
I’d left Grover’s Corners, where we sat in a row of chairs in the cemetery, staring ahead, and arrived at the Kit Kat Klub, where the dancers straddled their chairs with intention, stood on chairs bending forward, asses offered to the light.
Pallace draped backwards across the seat of one, the top of her head touching the floor, her legs scissoring up in time with the music.
She was still wearing her red swimsuit, all the dancers were wearing some variation of swim wear, and it all looked vaguely obscene so far away from the lake.
Upside down and sideways they were singing, dancing, grinding away while a man at an upright piano played along, darting up a hand to turn the sheet of music then coming right back to playing again.
It would be easy to describe Pallace as the most beautiful, most talented person I had ever seen, but Tom Lake was bristling with her equals.
I suppose a few attractive duds had snuck in here and there, the kid playing George being one, but for the most part the performers had a magnetism that required no practice whatsoever—-either you’ve got it or you don’t.
Duke had a truckload of it. He had it when he spoke the dullest lines of Editor Webb, or ordered coffee, or took me to bed.
If Jimmy--George from high school knew how to look at a person, Duke knew how to make a person look at him.
The Kit Kat girls were no slouches in that department either.
I had come in to watch my friend, but confronted with the whole lot of them I hardly knew where to rest my eyes.
They all looked hungry. I went from Pallace to some others I’d met at dinner or in the lake, a few I didn’t know, and finally came to rest on Sally Bowles, who stood in the middle of the stage like a diamond set in a ring.
Sally Bowles, her leg slung shamelessly over the back of a chair, extended an invitation to the cabaret that no one could refuse.
Just as I’d started to think I could act, I found myself wishing I could sing and dance. I wanted to climb up on one of the Kit Kat chairs, to be a woman rather than a girl.
When they were finished, Pallace used that same striped towel to dry herself again, laughing with the other dancers as she pulled on her dress. I waved to her, and when she saw me, she smiled like I was the person she was most hoping to see. “You’re here!” she said.
“I want to be your understudy,” I said.
She fell breathless into the folding chair beside me, bending over to unbuckle her high--heeled shoes. “How much do you know about the brother?”
“Until a few hours ago I didn’t know he had a brother. That’s how much I know about the brother.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He’s staying for a couple of days.”
“Did he say anything about me ,” she said, the perspiration shining at her hairline.
I thought for a minute. What had Sebastian said? “He was impressed with your running.”
She smiled. “I’ll take that.”
“You want Duke’s brother?”
“He’s not a dancer and he’s not an actor and he doesn’t work in a theater and he has very nice shoulders.”
It turned out that was what she was looking for.
“I understand what Pallace’s talking about,” Nell says, speaking from unreferenced experience. “Nobody should date actors.”
“Except for Mom,” Maisie says. She and I pick up the ladder together and carry it down the row to the next tree so one of us can climb up and clean the top, and by one of us I mean Maisie. Maisie loves to climb. We were always pulling her off the curtains when she was little.
“Why should Mom have to date an actor?” Nell says. “It’s not like it turned out so well for her.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I say. Was it that bad? Yes and no.
Emily ignores this. “If Mom hadn’t dated Duke then what would we be talking about now? Fungicides?”
“We’d go back to listening to the news all day,” I say.
Maisie shakes her head. “No more news.”
Nell agrees. “We’d rather talk about your wedding than a global pandemic,” she says to Emily.
Emily’s wedding. I have not said a word about it to Joe.
“Well, that’s reason enough to date an actor right there,” Emily says, “because we sure as hell aren’t talking about my wedding.”
It is as if every action in my life has been planned for the pleasures of this very afternoon.
Nell takes the bucket from around her neck and dumps her cherries in the lug.
She gives herself a minute to roll her shoulders before putting it on again, then turns her face towards the sun, closing her eyes.
Sometimes I wonder if the work isn’t too much for her, though she’d sooner die picking cherries than be the weak sister.
“I would have dated Saint Sebastian,” she says.
“You’re telling me that you would have turned down Duke, arguably the greatest actor of his generation and certainly the most famous, so that you could date his brother who didn’t make it as a tennis player?” Emily says.
Maisie disagrees. “Oh, come on, that’s not fair. It’s impossible to make it as a tennis player, not to mention the fact that Saint Sebastian was, you know, a saint. That’s a very attractive quality in a man. And even if Duke was famous he didn’t have a happy life.”
“You don’t know that,” Emily says, picking, picking.
I might not have known much about Duke but I knew his life wasn’t happy. I put my arm around Nell’s shoulder. “As insane as this conversation is, I think you’re making the right choice. And anyway, even if Sebastian didn’t make the pros he was still an excellent tennis player. He played McEnroe.”
The three of them drop their hands and I know I’ve finally said something of real interest. I can hear Joe telling me not to get them overexcited. They have to keep working.
“Did he win?” Maisie’s voice is hushed, and Maisie’s voice is never hushed.
“No,” I say. “But it was something he was proud of, just that he got so far as to even be on the same court with him. They were both seventeen. McEnroe was a big deal at seventeen.”
“What was the score?” It was a scrap of information for Emily to add to her collection.
“Six--two, six--o.”
Nell covers her face with her hands and moans. “Oh, Saint Sebastian! I can’t bear it.”
“What are you talking about? He was happy!” I say. “Sebastian never expected to win.”
“He did,” Nell says. “Even if he never admitted it, he thought he might. He wanted to.”
Maybe she’s right. Saint Sebastian was twenty--nine when we met, and it was Duke who told me the story about McEnroe. At seventeen, Sebastian must have thought of himself as someone who would make it. The number of things I’d failed to grasp back then was as limitless as the stars in the night sky.