20 #3
The room was smoky and crowded with people hunched into corners, trying to exchange sentences without being overheard.
It was the saddest bar in the world, the one in which no alcohol was served and everyone was waiting for the check so they could settle up and go home.
Two women with clipboards were making the rounds, asking questions, marking people off.
Magazines were piled on every surface and I picked one up because no one could find communion with George Eliot in those circumstances.
The caption beneath the picture of the famous model on the cover said she was looking for honesty.
Beneath the room’s only floor lamp I thumbed through the pages that had already been thumbed to thinning velvet: an article about a former child star fallen on hard times; an article about a beagle who nursed an orphaned chipmunk in with her own litter of puppies; a picture of Peter Duke on the Santa Monica Pier, eating an ice cream cone and holding hands with someone named Chelsea who was identified as his wife.
The only gossip I knew about Duke I knew from standing at the checkout in the grocery store.
I didn’t buy the magazines because they were not good for me, but a certain amount of information entered my consciousness by proximity.
Somehow, miraculously, Chelsea had not come in. I closed the magazine, closed my eyes.
“You could have been friendlier.” Duke dropped down beside me, taking my hand.
“I could have been—-” I started and then closed my mouth, suddenly overwhelmed by the knowledge that I would cry.
He leaned over and kissed me, missing my mouth by several inches. Let it be known that the last person to kiss me with romantic intent was this same man. Despite the daily offers I received while walking to fittings in Times Square, I had remained alone. “I’m glad you came,” he whispered.
I could not say I was glad. He seemed to understand this.
“Do you want to smoke?”
I shook my head. I asked him how the marriage was working out.
His fingers gently picked at the knee of my tights. “The marriage is no more. The lawyers have seen to that, or they are seeing to that.” He tilted down his head. “Where’s my girl?” he said quietly. “Where’s my birthday girl?”
Truly, I did not think I would survive.
He pulled me up from the couch. “Come on, I’ll show you around.
The full ten--cent tour.” He kept his arm around my shoulder, pressing me into his chest as if to keep me safe.
We went back to the reception area. A man who looked like someone’s sad father was in the fish tank now, and when I caught his eye he looked away.
Duke stopped in front of an empty room with a circle of yellow folding chairs and an enormous chalkboard.
“This is where we have the meetings. Lots and lots and lots of meetings. And that’s the snack pantry.
” He pointed to a wide closet. “They’re very generous with snacks but we aren’t allowed to take them ourselves.
We have to ask for them so that everything can be properly inventoried and recorded.
I would like a bag of Cheez--Its, please.
” He steered me back across the lobby to stand outside the open door of a large, dark room where seven single beds were arranged in a haphazard manner.
“This is where the dwarves sleep. I’m Happy, but only compared to the other six.
We’re not allowed to go into the bedroom until bedtime.
We may not put our foot in there. Sleeping in the daytime is bad for depression.
Did you know that? No closing the door either because there is no door. ”
A yelping came from the room we’d just been in and I was glad I wasn’t there to see who it was.
“That’s the bathroom.” He pointed to a white door. “No lock there either but people are respectful about knocking. Make a mental note of that.” He walked me in a slow circle around the reception again.
“Do you have to stay here?” I asked, when what I meant was, Do I have to stay?
Duke nodded vigorously. “Oh, I do, I do. If I don’t stay I lose my job.
I lose my contract. I become uninsurable, which means the movie can’t start, which means I can’t be in the movie.
I’m going to be an astronaut. Did I tell you that?
I’m going to be in a big white suit with a glass bubble on my head, floating in the darkness.
Every single day feels like research for that one.
People start taking you seriously once you’ve been an astronaut.
Have you noticed that? It’s a rite of passage. It means you’ve really got something going on.”
“I never thought about it.”
“Well, you need to. You need to get back in the game. They’re plenty of good parts for women in space these days but you’re going to need to put yourself out there.”
“I’m done,” I said, though I imagine the scope of those two words were lost on him.
He shook his head. “I saw Singularity .”
“You did?” I couldn’t imagine it.
“You’re very beautiful, cricket, and by that I don’t just mean you’re pretty, which you are. You have a real beauty that shows up on the screen. Pow. I found you mesmerizing. I find you mesmerizing.” He was pressing me closer now, holding on to me like a raft. I was holding him up.
“We’re going to go back and sit on the couch,” he said in that same low voice used by every inhabitant of the room who wasn’t screaming.
“In two minutes you’ll get up and go to the bathroom and I’ll stay where I am.
We get checked off every fifteen minutes.
It’s almost time. Once I get checked off I’ll come and meet you there. ”
I looked at him in horror but he ignored it. Clearly it was an emotion whose expression had lost its impact in this place.
He squeezed my arm gently. “Do this for me.” There was so much need in his voice.
Then he went back into the den. I suppose I could have gone back to the glass door and banged on it with my fists until someone came to let me out, but instead I went to the bathroom and took off my tights.
I thought about that first day when he said he was going to show me the lake, and then I walked into the lake and I swam, farther and farther away, until I couldn’t hear anyone anymore.
I stood with my back to the sink, to the mirror. There was no condom dispenser in the bathroom. I’d bet there never are in these places. For this event I relied on the birth control favored by all women in such circumstances: luck. It works maybe half the time.
Duke came into the bathroom a minute later and lifted me up on the sink.
He was facing the mirror. I couldn’t stop thinking about that.
He was looking at himself. “Not exactly ladies’ night,” he said once he had finished.
He kissed the top of my head and then hustled back to make his next fifteen--minute check off.
I straightened myself up as best I could, then found a woman with a clipboard to let me out of the building.
The light had shifted while I was inside and I was trying to get my bearings, trying to make a space in my mind for bus schedules while my mind kept wandering back to Duke trying to make a list of who he could call who might come to New England on a cold autumn night and fuck him in the unlocked bathroom of a locked ward.
Pallace? What a preposterous thought. Chelsea?
I didn’t know her, but why would she come if there were already lawyers involved?
So many actresses and makeup artists and wardrobe mistresses to choose from, so many fans, and still, I was the only person he could absolutely count on.
My hands were shaking and I thought it was from the cold so I dug through my bag to find my mittens.
A spectacular orange light reflected off the windows of the building in front of me that made the glass look like beaten sheets of copper.
A man in coveralls was raking leaves while another man bagged them up and put them on the back of a John Deere Gator nearby.
I wanted to go and open up every bag and dump them out because didn’t they know the leaves were the nice part?
I stood there, taking in the sharp air and waiting until the feeling passed so I could walk by them without speaking.
Another man sat on a park bench on the other side of the open lawn and watched me watch them.
Maybe he had special privileges. Then he stood and I remember thinking how tall he was.
“Lara?” he said.
There were two ways to go: I could have run or I could have cut a straight path towards him, straight into his arms. I was crying when I walked into his arms.
Sebastian was on the visitors’ list but I got there first and a patient could have only one visitor at a time.
The night was cold and clear but he had a warm coat.
The traffic had been bad driving from Boston where he was staying for the month, and so he decided just to sit and wait, see who came out.
Sebastian visited his brother every day.
“Do you want to go in?” We were sitting in his rental car in the parking lot. “I can wait.” That wasn’t true, I couldn’t wait, but I could leave while he was inside and that might be the best thing anyway. I had stopped crying and I was trying very hard to keep it together.
Sebastian shook his head. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”
I was starving. He drove quite a way, out of the small town the hospital was in and into the small town beyond it, like we were scraping the whole thing off our shoes.
When we walked into the restaurant an old man with a white short--sleeved shirt and black tie smiled to see us.
He took two menus from the rack and led us into the dim room.
“I’ve got a nice booth in the back,” he said.
“All the young lovers want a booth in the back.”
Sebastian’s hand was on my shoulder and he took it away. We laughed like a couple of lunatics but we were glad for the booth, glad for the privacy, glad most of all to be together in some Italian restaurant in a town I didn’t know the name of.
“Here’s to drinking.” He raised his glass of wine to me. The old man had been quick with the wine. He brought it without our asking.
“To drinking,” I said, and touched my glass to his. I was desperate for a drink.
“There’s something about the place. I seem to sponge up everyone’s desire for alcohol and carry it with me out the door.”
I drank down half of what I had and let the warmth spread through me. I had never been so cold, not even in New Hampshire. Sebastian refilled my glass.
“The list of things I feel like I can’t ask you,” I said, shaking my head. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
“Let’s see how far I can get without you asking then.
I never went back to Tom Lake. I didn’t see Pallace again, never heard from her.
Duke and Pallace, I don’t know how long that lasted.
I know that when Duke went to Hollywood on a ticket your friend Ripley paid for she didn’t go along.
Once Rampart caught on, Duke started getting in over his head.
He was going on ride--alongs with real cops at night and he kept making friends with the guys in the back of the car, the criminals.
Duke wanted me to come see him but I was teaching and I was still.
..” He stopped. “It’s very hard to put a word to it.
Duke’s my brother and I love him. You think the thing that hurt you is going to hurt you forever but it doesn’t.
” He looked at the menu because he couldn’t look at me anymore. I believed that he was my true friend.
“Eggplant parmesan,” I said.
He nodded. “It’s good.”
“How do you know it’s good?”
“This is my place. Whenever we go to a new town I find a place.”
Wood paneling halfway up the wall, black and white photographs of Frank Sinatra and Robert De Niro and Jimmy Durante. His place. “Do you miss teaching?”
He didn’t answer the question. The little candle in a bumpy red glass globe burned between us. “You know what I think about all the time?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter.” He picked up a book of matches and tapped it on the table. “I was an hour on the road going home before I even thought about you sitting there, waiting for me to take you back up the stairs.”
“I worked it out.”
He nodded. “You were the smart one.”
Oh, Sebastian, if you only knew, though he’d been around from the start. Maybe he did know. I opened my hands. “Look where it got me,” I said.
We had been given an opportunity to make things so much worse, Sebastian and I, and no one would have blamed us except for Duke, and Duke never would have known.
The flame of that little candle sat between us for the rest of the night but through some holy kindness we felt for one another, we let it burn out.
He drove me all the way back to New York, four hours in the car that went a long way towards setting my life to right.
I told him about my grandmother dying and my time in New Hampshire, how I stayed around too long and became embarrassingly proficient on the monogram machine.
I told him about not being an actress anymore.
He told me about not playing tennis, or not playing tennis as a job.
He still liked to play. And he liked California.
He said Ripley had been good to him. He was getting him work on projects that had nothing to do with Duke.
“He’s trying to make sure I stick around. ”
“I bet he is.”
“Man, was he ever in love with you.”
“Duke?”
Sebastian glanced over, taking his eyes off I-95 for just a second. “Sorry, no, Ripley.”
I laughed.
“I mean it. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. He told me once he was waiting for you to grow up, you know, so it wouldn’t seem so weird.”
But everything was weird, everything but me and Sebastian in the car, the lights of Connecticut shooting past us.
We had chosen not to make a hard thing harder, which made it slightly easier when I counted up the days six weeks later and realized that my luck had run out.
I still had enough money in my savings account left over from when I made actual money.
I didn’t have to call anyone. I didn’t have to ask anyone for permission or help.
A nurse stood beside me and held my hand and I’m here to tell you, I felt nothing but grateful.
There was always going to be a part of the story I didn’t tell Joe or the girls.
What I did was mine alone to do. I tore the page from the calendar and threw it away.