Tom Lake(43)

I loved it when Sebastian was with us. Tom Lake had a good court far from the amphitheater and they kept it lit at night. Pallace and I would drag out canvas folding chairs and sit and watch the two of them play. Sometimes we were the ball girls, -Pallace running for Sebastian, me running for Duke. Pallace and Sebastian happened quickly after they met, though if my relationship with Duke were the benchmark of courtship, they had proceeded with Victorian decorum.

How beautiful those brothers were beneath the floodlights, the two of them dashing across the green rubico. Duke used twice the energy Sebastian did, maybe three times more, smashing out his serves, lunging for balls he could never return, making deep animal sounds that were not unfamiliar to me whenever his racquet connected. All Duke wanted to do was play tennis when Sebastian was there, though I imagine for his brother it must have made Tom Lake a busman’s holiday.

“Doesn’t he get tired of it?” I asked Pallace, our heads moving right to left, left to right, as we followed the bouncing yellow ball.

Once Duke lost the set, Pallace would be up. She hadn’t played much before but she had the strength for it, the grace. I, on the other hand, was hopeless, though Sebastian would bring me on to hit a few at the end of the night, praising me every time I returned his easy lob. Soon enough Duke would get restless watching girls play, and start to make noise about wanting to go back to the house for a drink.

“Sebastian loves it,” Pallace said, her eyes never leaving him, when what she meant was, Sebastian loves me.

Oh, Pallace, I thought. This is summer.

But that wasn’t what I thought about Duke. Duke threw his entire life into everything he did, into every backhand, into the modest role of Editor Webb, into me, into us. He was so sure of us that we’d decided to go to L.A. together once the summer was over. We could rent a furnished apartment in the building where I used to live or in one of the hundred buildings like it. I had talked to my agent, who said he’d have no trouble finding work for me. I told him that surely he could find something for Duke as well. I’d written to Ripley about him twice, asking him if he had any parts. No one in Hollywood looked like Duke, and if anyone had his particular brand of charisma, well, I’d never seen it.

But Sebastian was the actor when it came to the game—-a play in three acts—-so that he was one tennis coach with his competitive brother, another tennis coach with his athletic lover, and a third tennis coach with his brother’s inept girlfriend. He didn’t throw points, but he made it all look harder for him than it was, running and reaching when he didn’t need to do either. He slammed the ball at Duke, hit the ball directly into the center of Pallace’s racquet, and all but handed me the ball in a cup. I bet he did the same for the yacht club wives, for their husbands, and the kids he taught at school: power in accordance with need. At the end of the match his shirt was dry, whereas Duke had pulled his soaking T--shirt over his head and thrown it into the corner of the chain--link fence. Under the bright lights I could see the sweet indentations of his ribs, and how they cast the smallest shadows across his pale torso.

It was the very busiest time. Cabaret had already opened the season at Tom Lake and Our Town was a week out from following them. The rehearsals were all in tech now, ten out of twelve. They put a stiff pomade in Duke’s hair and pinned it in the back so that he looked less like the lead in Jesus Christ Superstar and more like a respectable newspaperman in 1901. At the same time, we’d started the table reads for Fool for Love and at night we ran our lines in bed. Duke had played Eddie once before at Detroit Rep. His Eddie was the reason he’d been hired for Tom Lake. Even as he lay there on his side, his hand on my hip, I could see how scary good he’d be in the part. How it thrilled me to think of going straight from Our Town to that rundown motel room, going from the father and daughter we’d imbued with too much chemistry, to a pair of half siblings who had enough chemistry to burn down a barn. We’d show Tom Lake a thing or two about what it meant to be dark and complicated and grown--up.

We ate and drank and slept our art, pounded our art into the mattress. Actors and dancers, designers and techs of different races from different states and wildly different backgrounds strolled through a utopia of cherry trees when they weren’t being worked to a nub. Men held hands with men. No one gave Sebastian and Pallace a thought. Michigan! Who knew?

“Let’s see you take me home to East Detroit come fall,” Pallace said, her head in Sebastian’s lap. We had just come out of the lake and the four of us were lying on an old cotton blanket Sebastian had brought from home. Duke’s beautiful head was in my lap, his face pressed against my bare stomach.

“Let’s see you take me home to Lansing,” Sebastian said to her.

Pallace shook her head. “I’m not going back to Lansing. I’ve already told my folks if they want to see me they can come to Chicago.” Pallace had stayed in Chicago after finishing her training at the conservatory, though she was hoping Tom Lake would be her ticket to New York.

Duke reached out a finger and ran it down a few inches of Pallace’s thigh and Sebastian leaned over and brushed his brother’s hand away. “Scoot over here,” he said to Pallace, tapping her hip, and she laughed. She stayed where she was, sandwiched between the two of them.

Duke was so happy when Sebastian was there, we were all so happy, but still, Sebastian’s visits unsettled things, almost as if his calmness allowed Duke to be crazier than he usually was, like a kid who’ll throw himself off of ladders once he knows someone’s there to catch him. Duke was showing off for his brother because showing off was Duke’s nature, but the way Sebastian watched him, it was almost like he was waiting for something terrible to happen, and that made me look for it, too. Sebastian was trying to anticipate Duke’s craziness in the hopes that he could circumvent it, and by craziness I do not mean talent or eccentricity but something deeply nuts. When Sebastian was there to see it, it became much harder for me to pass the whole thing off as Duke simply being Duke.