Tom Lake(38)
9
Yes, it was true that Uncle Wallace was a drunk, and his understudy hid in the farthest corner of the theater where not even the light could find him, but plenty of other things were true as well, such as the fact that Albert Long embodied the Stage Manager as completely as he had embodied that long--ago bachelor uncle. Duke might have made fun of him—-dinner theaters, bombastic speeches, lecherous asides—-but when he was onstage there was nothing to complain about. Uncle Wallace never had to reach for a line because the lines were written inside him, just the way Emily’s were written into me, the difference being he’d found a part he wouldn’t age out of. When, in the third act, Uncle Wallace took me back to my mother’s kitchen, he looked at me with so much compassion it stung my eyes. So what if he smelled like gin? So what if he went out for a cigarette and wandered away? The A.D. always managed to find him, guiding him back like an errant lamb. On the stage he was able to bring himself into focus, so that even as the people who knew him said he was different this year, said he was so much worse, we continued to bank on the fact that he had never missed a show. Why wouldn’t the past be the future as well?
After rehearsal, Duke and I stretched out on the grass beside the lake, sharing a cigarette and a beer. “The man takes every bit of joy out of alcohol,” Duke said, tipping the bottle back. “I could hate him for that alone.”
“Somebody told me he plays Lear at another summer stock at the end of the season, that he’s always trying to get them to do a production of it here but he can’t get anybody at Tom Lake interested in Shakespeare.”
Duke lifted an eyebrow. “He’s the one who told you that.”
“Maybe.” I took another drag. One week and my smoking had already vastly improved. “I think he’d make a wild Lear, stomping around screaming. He’d be completely heartbreaking in the end.”
Duke sat up and pulled me into his lap. “And you’d be his little Cordelia, is that what you’re thinking?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“Put down the cigarette.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re dead. You’re Cordelia and you’re dead and I’m going to show you how Uncle Wallace plays Lear.”
I twisted the cigarette into the grass and died right there in his arms. Duke held my lifeless body against his chest, rocking me gently as his hand snaked up under my T--shirt. “Never, never, never, never, never,” he whispered in my hair, squeezing my left breast gently with every declaration. Truly, it was all we could do to make it back to the room.
Our Town contains a single kiss and it’s not between Emily and George but between Emily and her father, the newspaperman. She pecks his cheek in the first act. There’s also exactly one erotic moment in the play, in the second act, just before George and Emily marry. Emily begs her father to run away with her so that they can build a life together, just the two of them. “Don’t you remember that you used to say—-all the time you used to say—-all the time: that I was your girl! There must be lots of places we can go to.”
I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d planted that kiss, said those words, and never given any of it a thought.
Nelson interrupted the scene. Nelson who showed up for work in a collared shirt with the sleeves turned back and nice khaki pants, while the rest of us wandered the stage in cut--offs and Phish T--shirts. “Peter, Lara,” he said calmly. “If you could come up with a slightly more wholesome interpretation, it would be appreciated.”
Everyone laughed. Uncle Wallace, waiting to officiate the union—-by which I mean the union of George and Emily as opposed to the union of the editor and his daughter—-cleared his throat. Nobody was pretending that Duke and I weren’t happening. They were only asking that we tone it down.
Every day at Tom Lake was a week, every week a month. We spent hours in a dark theater, saying the same things to the same people again and again, finding ways to make the world new. In high school and college I’d gone to rehearsals a few times a week, but at Tom Lake rehearsals were our life. Where we stood and how we stood and how we placed our chairs and looked into the lights and spoke to one another and listened, all of it mattered. Uncle Wallace had been right about Nelson. Every day he directed each of us towards a better performance.
Our schedule included precious little free time but we made excellent use of what we had. We wore our swimsuits under our clothes and ran to the lake in lieu of eating lunch. With advanced planning we could get from the stage to being nearly naked and fully submerged in four minutes flat. I owned two suits, the one my grandmother had ordered me from L.L. Bean and the bikini I had not returned to costume the day I was instructed to swim in the backlot pool. I never questioned which one to wear. Pallace came to the lake with her dance partner, Auden, and Auden’s Korean American boyfriend, Charles, who we called W.H. because we never saw one without the other. W.H. was another dancer and also a swing. Mother Gibbs and Mrs. Webb swam in the lake but Mrs. Webb wouldn’t put her head under water and neither would Pallace. They swam like women in classic Holly-wood movies, smiling, with lip gloss. Some days Pallace even wore a hat. The water was cold and none of us cared and all of us screamed. Duke was always the first one in. Maybe that’s all that needs to be said about Duke: he was forever the first one in, cutting long strokes out to the swim platform while the rest of us waded in up to our knees then stopped to watch the little fish trying to make sense of our enormous feet. He would disappear and then pop up again someplace far away, pushing his wet black hair out of his face. “Where’s my girl?” he bellowed. “Where’s my birthday girl?” It was his favorite line in the play and he got to say it twice in the third act. He said it at night when he folded back the sheet and slipped into my bed.