“Spalding Gray sells tickets.”
“Well, you’ve got to be able to help out Mr. Gray.”
I put my hands on the table as well. I kept them on my side of the candle but I thought they made my intention perfectly clear without looking like I was hosting a seance. He was twice my age, give or take. I looked at him the way Jimmy--George used to look at me. The way he used to look at Veronica. “Tell me what I need to do.”
Then Charlie laughed, not a nervous laugh but a great, unexpected guffaw. Into that moment the timely waitress returned with his Diet Coke and my Perrier. He wiped his eyes with his thumb, then took a sip of his drink to calm himself. “I’ve known your uncle since before you were born,” he said. “Did you know that? Ripley and I used to play racquetball together at the Y out in Hollywood Hills. Fierce backhand, that guy. Nearly broke my goddamn nose once.”
“It was always his game.” As nice as it was of Ripley to safeguard my honor in absentia, it would have been even nicer had he remembered to tell me.
“I’ll get to the point.” Charlie tapped the table lightly and then took his hands away. “I’ve done some work with Tom Lake over the years. The artistic director is an old friend.”
“You have a lot of friends,” I said stupidly because, god, I was so stupid.
“You know Tom Lake?”
I nodded. I did not know.
“They’re doing Our Town this summer.”
“Seems like everyone is.”
“They just lost their Emily. She did the first table read then got a call from her agent telling her to pack up. It’s a big film, and the studio is covering her cancellation clause. My friend asked me to keep an eye out since he knew we’re auditioning. They’re going to need someone who can step right in.”
“That would be me.” Why was I only now remembering that Perrier tasted like salt?
“I think it is you. That’s why I asked you to meet me. I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea.” He allowed himself one final chuckle—-this crazy business!—-then brushed the smile off his face with his hand. “You’d have to go immediately. Can you do that? Do you have anything else going on?”
I shook my head. Having played easy to get, I forfeited the chance to play hard to get.
“Go to Tom Lake for the summer. Send me a postcard and thank me. Have you ever been to Michigan? Christ, you won’t believe how beautiful it is. Do the play. Once you see all the people who’ve come through that place you’ll realize what a break this is. Everyone needs at least one season of summer stock under their belt, I don’t care who you are. Do the play and then, who knows? They’re starting rehearsals now and we’re at least a year out. Obviously Emilys vanish, or they get bad reviews and wind up needing to be replaced. You, in the meantime, will be impressive. And you’ll be seen. They’ve always got theater scouts there. Then your movie will come out. You never know where you’ll wind up after that.”
He had a way of making it sound like things had gone my way after all. I would play Emily at Tom Lake, renowned summer stock theater, and I hadn’t had to go upstairs to get the part. One more lucky day.
He paid the check and asked if I wanted him to get me a cab. I shook my head. “Go back to the hotel,” he said. “Order room service and wait by the phone. I’m going to have them call you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re very good, Lara. Really, you are. I think Michigan is going to mean big things for you.”
We walked out to Forty--Fourth Street where it was just getting dark. Traffic was at a standstill and I was glad I’d forgone the offer of a cab. Then, because he was a friend of Uncle Ripley’s, Charlie kissed the top of my head and said good night before turning in the opposite direction.
I would go on but Joe arrives on the Gator to collect the lugs. “Sorry to break up a party,” he says. “But I’m going to need at least one of you to help in the barn.”
Sweets don’t hold up in the sun once they’re off the tree. We field run the cherries, which means sorting them on the conveyor belt and pulling any fruit that’s spotted or cracked, then sending them to a packing plant in the lugs, stems and all. He needs Emily but he won’t say it, fearing the appearance of favoritism. Joe would swear in front of a firing squad that he has no favorite daughter, and while there may be no favorite, one of them is indisputably more useful than the other two. Emily is faster than the rest of us put together. Maisie checks her phone and says it’s time for her to go back to the house anyway. She has a conference with one of her professors and the cell reception is better there. “Drop me,” she says, shifting a couple of lugs so that there’s just enough space to climb onto the flatbed of the Gator, the way we never let the girls do when they were young. Even now I want to tell her no.
“Go slow,” I say to Emily as she gets behind the wheel, her father sliding in beside her.
“I’m not going to risk the cherries,” Emily says. When she puts the thing in drive, Hazel leaps up and Maisie catches her. Who knew?
“Don’t tell anything good while we’re gone!” Maisie calls, removing the hat from her head and tossing it to me.
“Don’t tell anything at all!” Emily shouts.
“Where’s the story now?” I hear Joe ask Emily, and Emily says, “Michigan.”
“Ah,” Joe says. “The good part.”
I watch until they’ve crested the low hill, Maisie waving like the Cherry Queen on her float, Hazel safe beneath her other arm. That’s another thing we’ve lost this year, the Cherry Festival. Any of our girls would have looked smart in a tiara.
“Two--thirds of my audience gone, just like that,” I say to Nell as we wave goodbye.
“Three--fourths if you count the dog,” she says.
“I should count Hazel.”
Plenty of empty lugs remain and we’ll leave them in the grass once they’re full. Emily will drive back later to pick them up.
For a while we say nothing. I’m tired of talking, and of the three, Nell is the best at being quiet. The thing about picking cherries is that you can look only at the tree you’re on, and if you have any sense, you’ll just look at the branch you have your hands in. The peekaboo ladder is up, waiting for us to clean off the top. We won’t look down the rows at what seems to be an unbroken field of red dots, a pointillist’s dream of an orchard. If we opened our minds to all the cherries waiting to be picked, we’d go home and back to bed.
“You weren’t really going to go to bed with him,” Nell says after a while. It is not a question.
But I am here again, back on the farm, and for a minute I have no idea what she’s talking about. “Who?”
“The guy,” she says. “Charlie.”
To be able to play younger is a great and fleeting gift. I had it once. I could play fourteen at twenty--four. Part of it is in the way you carry yourself, the pitch of your voice, but part of it is pure physiognomy. Nell has that in spades. At twenty--two she is slender and small, and in her faded smock dress that had once belonged to all of us in turn, she could pass for thirteen.