But Sebastian was the actor when it came to the game—-a play in three acts—-so that he was one tennis coach with his competitive brother, another tennis coach with his athletic lover, and a third tennis coach with his brother’s inept girlfriend. He didn’t throw points, but he made it all look harder for him than it was, running and reaching when he didn’t need to do either. He slammed the ball at Duke, hit the ball directly into the center of Pallace’s racquet, and all but handed me the ball in a cup. I bet he did the same for the yacht club wives, for their husbands, and the kids he taught at school: power in accordance with need. At the end of the match his shirt was dry, whereas Duke had pulled his soaking T--shirt over his head and thrown it into the corner of the chain--link fence. Under the bright lights I could see the sweet indentations of his ribs, and how they cast the smallest shadows across his pale torso.
It was the very busiest time. Cabaret had already opened the season at Tom Lake and Our Town was a week out from following them. The rehearsals were all in tech now, ten out of twelve. They put a stiff pomade in Duke’s hair and pinned it in the back so that he looked less like the lead in Jesus Christ Superstar and more like a respectable newspaperman in 1901. At the same time, we’d started the table reads for Fool for Love and at night we ran our lines in bed. Duke had played Eddie once before at Detroit Rep. His Eddie was the reason he’d been hired for Tom Lake. Even as he lay there on his side, his hand on my hip, I could see how scary good he’d be in the part. How it thrilled me to think of going straight from Our Town to that rundown motel room, going from the father and daughter we’d imbued with too much chemistry, to a pair of half siblings who had enough chemistry to burn down a barn. We’d show Tom Lake a thing or two about what it meant to be dark and complicated and grown--up.
We ate and drank and slept our art, pounded our art into the mattress. Actors and dancers, designers and techs of different races from different states and wildly different backgrounds strolled through a utopia of cherry trees when they weren’t being worked to a nub. Men held hands with men. No one gave Sebastian and Pallace a thought. Michigan! Who knew?
“Let’s see you take me home to East Detroit come fall,” Pallace said, her head in Sebastian’s lap. We had just come out of the lake and the four of us were lying on an old cotton blanket Sebastian had brought from home. Duke’s beautiful head was in my lap, his face pressed against my bare stomach.
“Let’s see you take me home to Lansing,” Sebastian said to her.
Pallace shook her head. “I’m not going back to Lansing. I’ve already told my folks if they want to see me they can come to Chicago.” Pallace had stayed in Chicago after finishing her training at the conservatory, though she was hoping Tom Lake would be her ticket to New York.
Duke reached out a finger and ran it down a few inches of Pallace’s thigh and Sebastian leaned over and brushed his brother’s hand away. “Scoot over here,” he said to Pallace, tapping her hip, and she laughed. She stayed where she was, sandwiched between the two of them.
Duke was so happy when Sebastian was there, we were all so happy, but still, Sebastian’s visits unsettled things, almost as if his calmness allowed Duke to be crazier than he usually was, like a kid who’ll throw himself off of ladders once he knows someone’s there to catch him. Duke was showing off for his brother because showing off was Duke’s nature, but the way Sebastian watched him, it was almost like he was waiting for something terrible to happen, and that made me look for it, too. Sebastian was trying to anticipate Duke’s craziness in the hopes that he could circumvent it, and by craziness I do not mean talent or eccentricity but something deeply nuts. When Sebastian was there to see it, it became much harder for me to pass the whole thing off as Duke simply being Duke.
Maisie holds up her hand. “I’m sorry, I have to interrupt. You can’t say crazy.”
“And you really can’t say nuts,” Nell says. “Unless you’re talking about pecans.”
“But he was crazy. Nuts. He really was.”
“Duke had things to overcome in his life but he wasn’t crazy,” Emily says firmly.
I shake my head. “I’m going to overrule you on this one.”
“It’s not that you can’t say Duke is crazy,” Maisie explains. “I mean you can’t use that word anymore. It’s pejorative.”
“I know crazy is pejorative. I mean for it to be pejorative, insofar as I don’t mean it was a positive attribute.”
“You need to find a better word,” Nell says.
“Insane?”
The three of them shake their heads.
“What am I allowed to call it then?”
Maisie gives a long exhale, which means that I am old and she can’t explain anything to me. Nell tries to explain. “You could refer to whatever was wrong with him by using his diagnosis: He had schizophrenia, for example. He had a bipolar disorder.”
“But you really shouldn’t talk about another person’s diagnosis,” Maisie says. “Unless he wanted you to.”
“He wasn’t schizophrenic or bipolar!” Emily is suiting up for battle. I can see it.
“You can’t say a person is schizophrenic anyway,” Maisie informs her sister. “He wasn’t a disease. You wouldn’t say ‘He was cancer.’？”
“I might,” I say.
“Stop it.” Emily is in no one’s corner but Duke’s.
“So you want me to tell you about Duke without mentioning that he was crazy? I’m already leaving out the sex. I’m not sure how much of a story is going to be left.”
This brings us to an impasse. They very much want to know about Duke having sex without ever wanting to know about me having sex, which is fine because I’m not telling them.
“I think it’s okay to say mental illness,” Nell says.
“Maybe,” Maisie says. “If it’s just the four of us.”
“We’re in a cherry orchard.” Emily raises her voice. “Who’s going to cancel us? The dog?”
“Maybe you should just tell us what happened,” Nell says. “Just the facts, without attaching any judgment to it.”
And so I relate the following without the attachment of judgment:
—-I would wake up in the middle of the night to an empty bed and go downstairs and find him on the love seat in the front hall, writing furiously in a notebook, page after page after page of notes on Editor Webb: his childhood, the girl he’d liked in middle school, his newspaper route, his secondary education, his college years majoring in English, what his parents thought about him going to college to major in English, that his parents wanted him to stay and work on the farm, his first job on a newspaper in Concord, the books he read, when he met Myrtle who would later become his wife, the birth of their daughter Emily, the birth of their son Wally. He was on his third notebook. I’d found the first two in the nightstand, his handwriting a microscopic block print, all caps. I got a headache trying to read it. Then I found the notebooks on Eddie and Fool for Love.
—-He forced himself to stay awake for an entire weekend because he’d heard it was a better high than getting high. Then he tried to punch Sebastian when Sebastian wouldn’t give him the car keys so that he could drive to the all--night diner in town for coffee. He didn’t succeed in punching Sebastian though, because all Sebastian had to do was step aside and then catch Duke when he pitched forward, like some sort of unfunny comedy routine they’d been rehearsing for years.