The lake, which stretched two miles in length and a half mile across, was right in front of us.
“Is Nelson famous?” I asked Duke as we crossed the grass, down the hill, towards the water.
Duke stretched up his neck to startling length then tipped his head. “He’s not Francis Ford Coppola, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.” The day was just then beginning to soften towards dusk. I had woken up in a New York hotel room that morning.
“Well, all right, if you aren’t asking if he’s a very famous Hollywood director, if you’re willing to lower the bar, then yes, I suppose Nelson is famous. By the standards of Tom Lake he’s famous.”
“Meaning what?”
Duke took my hand and started swinging it so as not to appear tender. I could feel the current of his life flow into my fingers and up my arm and travel into the muscle of my heart. “Nelson has directed several plays for a well--established theater company in Chicago we need not name, and last summer he directed in Sag Harbor, and he’s had one play Off Broadway. Something you’ve heard of.” He turned his face away from me and whispered the name of the play in the direction of the lake so the breeze could carry it away.
“Then what’s he doing here?” Even if I had yet to establish the parameters of the assembled talent, I knew enough to know that an Off Broadway play exceeded them.
“It’s a mystery. He’s only directing one play, and once it opens, he’s out of here. Everyone’s trying very hard to make a good impression in hopes he’ll take us with him when he goes.” He stopped. “I don’t mean us. I mean them. I’m not trying to make a good impression. Uncle Wallace is trying to make a good impression. Rumor has it he very badly wants off the dinner--theater circuit.”
“How would a person make a good impression on Nelson?” I wondered if I would make a good impression.
“Acting, I guess. Acting well. Don’t tell that to Uncle Wallace though. You’d break his heart.”
Uncle Wallace may have been a goose but he was certainly acting well. Based on one table read I would count him as an excellent Stage Manager, not that Duke wanted to hear that from me. Duke, I cleverly surmised, would rather hear about Duke. “So you’re making a good impression if you want to or not. You were wonderful.”
It was the strangest moment, like I was telling him something he hadn’t heard before. He stopped and rested one elbow on my shoulder, pushing his hair back behind his ear where it belonged. “You’re just saying that because of the lake and the cherry blossoms.”
“No,” I said. “You were wonderful.”
Then he kissed me, a first--day sort of kiss, very hesitant and sweet, the way George might have kissed Emily had a kiss been written for them. It was not, however, a kiss between an editor and his daughter.
“Thank you,” Duke said.
“Thank you,” I said, or thought I said, then he took back my hand. We walked the path along the lake for a while and then turned back. We lacked both the time and ambition to go all the way around.
“Do you swim?” he asked me.
“Like a fish.”
“Then we’ll go swimming sometime.”
I stopped. He knew what I wanted to do before I knew it myself, because as soon as he said it I wanted to go swimming more than anything. “Let’s go now,” I said. “I’ll tell you, this has been one hell of a day. Let’s go swimming.” It was northern Michigan in the summer. There would still be enough light.
He looked at me. “We’re busy now.”
“We are?”
He nodded, moving a piece of hair from my forehead with his thumb. “We have plans.”
It sounded so much like a line from a play. We were going to go back to my room, and to pretend otherwise would have been acting.
He took out a pack of Marlboros and offered me one.
I shook my head. “I don’t smoke.”
“Would you try?”
“Smoking?”
He nodded. “It’s something we could do together. Just think how nice it would be to go outside during breaks and sit on the lawn. We could look at the lake and smoke.”
He lit two cigarettes with a single match, and then, exhaling, handed one to me. Jimmy--George had nothing on this guy. Nobody had anything on this guy. I took a small drag and coughed. My first cigarette.
“Just a couple of puffs or it will make you dizzy,” he said. “You’ve got to build up your lungs.”
We were walking again. I had a cigarette in one hand and his hand in the other. I couldn’t imagine Emily smoking, and I wondered if the director would have an objection, though surely I wouldn’t be smoking by the time the audience arrived. The way the embers brightened when we inhaled made me think of fireflies. When Duke stopped again we were back at the house where I was living. He took the cigarette from my fingers and put them both out in a pot of geraniums on the porch. Maybe I was a little dizzy. I hadn’t noticed the flowers when I came in or when I went out. That we were walking up the stairs holding hands seemed like the most natural thing in the world. For all I knew he had gone upstairs with the other Emily as well, the one who’d lasted only a day. He may have been taking me back to a bed he’d already slept in, and I couldn’t have cared less because it was my bed now.
“This is odd,” Joe says when he comes in the back door. The dishes are done and I’m on the couch sewing bits of everyone’s castoff dresses and favorite sheets and the random cloth napkin into quilt squares while Hazel sleeps. Thirty years from now I’ll have enough squares to make a quilt for each of our daughters.
“What’s odd?”
“We’re the only two people in the house.”
“Where’s Nell?”
“She went to Emily’s. I guess Maisie’s still trying to plug the calf.”
It might not sound like an overture but I stick my needle in the tomato--shaped pincushion all the same. People with children are attuned to the inherent sexual possibility of an empty house. For years we tried to schedule activities for all three girls at the same time: the weekly dance class, the 4-H meeting, the algebra tutor. A scant hour of overlap was all we were hoping for, but even when those bright stars aligned, one daughter so often refused to leave. There always seemed to be one girl who wanted nothing but to crawl into my lap for an hour while the other two were away. And so I would hold her. You don’t forget that, even if your daughters have grown and been gone for years and then come home.
“I would have thought they’d all rush back for the story.”
“We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”
“How far have you gotten?”
What came after that first night? “Well, I’m at Tom Lake, we’ve had the first table read, so I guess we’re up to Pallace.”
Joe shakes his head. “Oh, Pallace. Don’t you wonder about her?” He cuts a piece of the strawberry cake I’ve left on the counter. I wish he’d eat the whole thing. As thin as he gets in the summer, he should eat a cake every day. “Pallace and then Sebastian.”
“I never should have started.”