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.
I swam out to Duke, looped my arms around his neck, looped my legs around his waist in the deep water. He held me up.
“You two are going to break something,” Pallace said, swimming past us. “The people in the first ten rows are going to have to wipe their glasses off.”
“Jealous girl,” Duke said.
She laughed, then glided away. When Duke started acting like he was being eaten by a shark, I untangled myself and swam after Pallace. I was in love with the play and in love with Tom Lake, and maybe I was in love with Duke, and certainly I was in love with Pallace, her red bikini every bit as insubstantial as my own.
“You must be bored to tears having to sit there all morning,” I said when I caught up to her. Just our heads were sticking up above the water. The blue sky was her backdrop and the sunlight was her lighting; it caught the gold hoops in her ears.
“Nothing boring about it,” she said. “I’m watching you.”
I thought about those auditions in high school, and how I put together my idea of Emily by watching people play her wrong. Wouldn’t it be a different thing entirely to watch someone doing her right? If, in fact, Pallace thought I was doing her right. “Now I’m going to be nervous.”
“You are many things, Emily Webb, but nervous isn’t one of them.”
“You seem pretty relaxed yourself.” My arms worked back and forth across the surface of the lake.
She shook her head. “Dancing and singing is all about working your ass off so that people think you just roll out of bed dancing and singing. I mean, acting is like that too, but it’s less physical for the most part.”
Duke and I had missed breakfast again. We were perfecting the craft.
“Anyway, being your understudy is teaching me things,” she said. “Half the day I’m playing a little country girl in a town full of white people, doing the whole thing in my head, then the other half of the day I’m playing a hooker in a German night club and I’m doing the whole thing in my body. That’s why I like to swim in the middle. It helps the transition.” The water was so clear I could watch the graceful mechanics of her legs as she treaded.
“Fool for Love is going to be a lot more work,” I said, though she was the understudy for that as well so she already knew.
“Or a lot more fun. You and Duke in Fool for Love.” She laughed, swimming a gentle lap around me. “That’s a lucky piece of casting if I’ve ever heard one. They’ll have to hose out the theater. Good thing you’re not going up against that dopey George again. Not the guy you’d want slinging you into bed every night.” She shaded her eyes with her hand and watched Mother Gibbs as she walked out of the lake. “Is it time?” Pallace called.