Tom Lake(97)

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.





21


There are always four or five days when picking the last of the sweet cherries overlaps with the start of shaking the tart cherries, when things get so busy you can’t find your own hand. The crew we have kept our distance from this summer, the crew who has kept their distance from us, comes closer as we bring out the giant mechanical shaker. Together we unspool the tarps beneath the tree and then attach the shaker. Ten violent seconds later all the cherries are on the ground. The tarps are then rolled back, dumping the cherries into a long, mobile conveyor belt so the whole operation can move forward—-unroll, shake, roll up—-tree after tree, acre after acre. When the conveyor belt fills, the cherries progress into a giant tank full of water. We climb to the top and use our old tennis racquets to skim off the branches and leaves that have fallen in. There is no talking over all the noise, no extra moment in which to remember the past or examine how we feel about anything. There is work and only work, and with a lot of help, we get it done.