She smiled. “I’ll take that.”
“You want Duke’s brother?”
“He’s not a dancer and he’s not an actor and he doesn’t work in a theater and he has very nice shoulders.”
It turned out that was what she was looking for.
“I understand what Pallace’s talking about,” Nell says, speaking from unreferenced experience. “Nobody should date actors.”
“Except for Mom,” Maisie says. She and I pick up the ladder together and carry it down the row to the next tree so one of us can climb up and clean the top, and by one of us I mean Maisie. Maisie loves to climb. We were always pulling her off the curtains when she was little.
“Why should Mom have to date an actor?” Nell says. “It’s not like it turned out so well for her.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I say. Was it that bad? Yes and no.
Emily ignores this. “If Mom hadn’t dated Duke then what would we be talking about now? Fungicides?”
“We’d go back to listening to the news all day,” I say.
Maisie shakes her head. “No more news.”
Nell agrees. “We’d rather talk about your wedding than a global pandemic,” she says to Emily.
Emily’s wedding. I have not said a word about it to Joe.
“Well, that’s reason enough to date an actor right there,” Emily says, “because we sure as hell aren’t talking about my wedding.”
It is as if every action in my life has been planned for the pleasures of this very afternoon.
Nell takes the bucket from around her neck and dumps her cherries in the lug. She gives herself a minute to roll her shoulders before putting it on again, then turns her face towards the sun, closing her eyes. Sometimes I wonder if the work isn’t too much for her, though she’d sooner die picking cherries than be the weak sister. “I would have dated Saint Sebastian,” she says.
“You’re telling me that you would have turned down Duke, arguably the greatest actor of his generation and certainly the most famous, so that you could date his brother who didn’t make it as a tennis player?” Emily says.
Maisie disagrees. “Oh, come on, that’s not fair. It’s impossible to make it as a tennis player, not to mention the fact that Saint Sebastian was, you know, a saint. That’s a very attractive quality in a man. And even if Duke was famous he didn’t have a happy life.”
“You don’t know that,” Emily says, picking, picking.
I might not have known much about Duke but I knew his life wasn’t happy. I put my arm around Nell’s shoulder. “As insane as this conversation is, I think you’re making the right choice. And anyway, even if Sebastian didn’t make the pros he was still an excellent tennis player. He played McEnroe.”
The three of them drop their hands and I know I’ve finally said something of real interest. I can hear Joe telling me not to get them overexcited. They have to keep working.
“Did he win?” Maisie’s voice is hushed, and Maisie’s voice is never hushed.
“No,” I say. “But it was something he was proud of, just that he got so far as to even be on the same court with him. They were both seventeen. McEnroe was a big deal at seventeen.”
“What was the score?” It was a scrap of information for Emily to add to her collection.
“Six--two, six--o.”
Nell covers her face with her hands and moans. “Oh, Saint Sebastian! I can’t bear it.”
“What are you talking about? He was happy!” I say. “Sebastian never expected to win.”
“He did,” Nell says. “Even if he never admitted it, he thought he might. He wanted to.”
Maybe she’s right. Saint Sebastian was twenty--nine when we met, and it was Duke who told me the story about McEnroe. At seventeen, Sebastian must have thought of himself as someone who would make it. The number of things I’d failed to grasp back then was as limitless as the stars in the night sky.
10
For three seasons of the year, Saint Sebastian was the tennis coach at the University Liggett School in Gross Pointe Woods where he taught U. S. History and World Civilization. In the summers he worked at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club in Grosse Pointe Shores, where the fact that he had once squared off against Johnny Mac made him the stuff of legend. At the yacht club, that match was spoken of in terms of victory, with the score widening in Sebastian’s favor over time. When Sebastian corrected them, and he always did, they took it as further proof of his humility and loved him all the more. He ate his dinner in the bar of the club’s grill where he wasn’t allowed to order steak or the crab cakes and anyone who wanted to rattle on about the game could pull up a chair and join him. Dinner at the grill was part of Sebastian’s job. After work he drove home to East Detroit, because there was still such a place as East Detroit, and whenever he could work enough doubles to swing a few days off in a row, he made the three--hour drive to Tom Lake to see his brother.
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.