He shakes his head. “You are so good,” he says, correcting me. “That’s what you’re supposed to say.”
“Were and are, both things are true.”
“You’re spending too much time in the past.” He passes me a dripping Pyrex casserole dish.
“So tell me how to get out of it.”
He shakes his head. “There’s no way out but through.”
“You were a very good Stage Manager.”
“I was no Uncle Wallace.”
“You were different, that’s all. You were your own man.” It’s true that no one else would ever be the Stage Manager for me—-Uncle Wallace took the part with him—-but Joe had a radiant optimism and health that no amount of gray shadow beneath his eyes could diminish. No one thinks of the Stage Manager as a young man but why shouldn’t he be? God can be anything. “You were strapping.”
“And you—-” He turns and looks at me, a wet plate in his hands.
I start to put the glasses away. I wait for him to finish his thought but nothing comes. “What was I?”
“You were Emily. I could have watched you forever and never understood how you did it. I believed you every minute you were on the stage. Everyone did.”
I stretch up on my toes to kiss him and he meets me. “We were in that play together. It really is miraculous when you think about it.”
“Those drives back and forth three times a week.” Joe takes the towel from me and dries his hands. “I wanted to kill Uncle Wallace for drinking and I wanted to kill Lee for being himself.”
“So why did you do it?” I ask. “I mean, I know Gene was leaning on you and everyone was in a pinch, but we were living in a summer town full of actors. You can’t tell me that no one else at Tom Lake had ever played the Stage Manager before. Somebody could have pulled it together. You could have done one performance and then made Gene take the part.”
“That was the plan.”
“What was the plan?”
“I told Gene I’d do it once, two times at the most. I said I’d give him that much time to find someone for the part and then I was done.”
All the help that Ken and Maisie needed: the books, the trees, the taxes, the house, every piece of it called for his attention. I understand it now in a way I could never could have understood it the summer I met them. Joe was a life raft coming to save them. He didn’t have five minutes to spare, much less three shows a week. “So why did you change your mind?”
My husband stood there. How many performances had there been between the time when Uncle Wallace dropped out and when I dropped out? How long were Joe and I in the play together anyway? A week? Not two weeks. “Me?”
“I liked being on the stage with you.”
“You liked being on the stage with me but you weren’t in love with me?”
He closes his eyes, smiling. “I was young. I don’t remember what I was.”
“You were in love with me!”
He shrugs. “I might have been,” he says.
Uncle Wallace’s room turned out to be a small cottage behind the company housing where we lived, a fairytale bungalow made for sheltering iconic television stars. I’d never seen it before, but then my room faced the lake. If Duke was sleeping with me in order to upgrade his accommodations, he would have done better to sleep with Uncle Wallace. The cottage had a fireplace in the sitting room with a comfy chintz sofa and a television. Who knew such inequities existed in the world? A painting of a greyhound in profile hung over the fireplace. There was a bathtub, a kitchenette, a small stone terrace ringed with red poppies. Duke had no interest in going to the hospital but he couldn’t wait to get inside the cottage.
The door was unlocked because everything at Tom Lake was unlocked. The place was so tidy that my first thought was that the management must have already sent someone over to take care of things. But after a few minutes I started to see what was his: a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on the nightstand, a wristwatch beside it. Uncle Wallace carried a pocket watch in the play. His black leather dopp kit was on the bathroom sink. Duke poked through the contents with one finger and came up with two bottles of interest.
“Put those back,” I said. “He might need them.”
“I might need them.” Duke fell back on the bed, his arms stretched wide, an orange prescription pill bottle in each hand. “Uncle Wallace is in the land of limitless refills now.”
I opened the dresser drawer, found his underwear, his socks.
“Come here.” Duke rattled the bottles like little maracas.
I went to the bed, then got down on my hands and knees to look beneath it, finding two empty suitcases.
“Since when are you no fun at all?” he asked, lifting his beautiful head.
For whatever reason, I took this to be a serious question. Had I been no fun at all since Uncle Wallace vomited a bucket of blood in my lap? No, wait, it was before that. Since I realized that I didn’t have the talent to play Mae but I was going to play her anyway? Since I realized that soon I’d be too old to play Emily, the only part I was good at?
“Jesus, are you crying?” Duke put down the pill bottles and sat up to take my hand. I shook my head. He pulled me into his lap, kissed me.
“Okay, cricket,” he said. “Here’s the plan: first, we’re going to smoke a cigarette. Ah! Don’t look at me like that. He’s never coming back so he isn’t going to know, not to mention the fact that Uncle Wallace smoked a few himself. Listen to me. We’re going to smoke a cigarette and then we’re going to pack everything up. Judging by the looks of the place that should take all of four minutes. Once we’ve got his stuff in the suitcases we’re going to put this bed to use as it has never been put to use before. Okay?” He gave me a squeeze and then a better kiss. He bounced me on his knees. “Doesn’t. Take. Much.”
He lit two cigarettes and gave me one, and when we’d finished he got up according to plan. He opened the first suitcase and put in the book and the bedside clock, though for all I knew the clock belonged to Tom Lake. He wrapped the watch in Kleenex and snugged it in the side pocket of the dopp kit so nicely I thought it made up for taking the pills. I opened the closet and took out the two suits, the dress shirts, the casual pants. I found a tidy stack of twenties in the nightstand and folded them in his suit pocket. I found his pajamas. I swear they were the same pajamas he’d worn on television, or at least the same style, a crisp blue and white stripe. He was wearing those pajamas when the orphans brought him breakfast in bed on Father’s Day. He was wearing them when the little girl woke him in the middle of the night, crying from a dream about her dead mother. “Come on,” he’d said, and held up the covers, scooting over to make a place for her in his bed.
I continued with the dresser drawers and Duke went to the kitchen. I wouldn’t have thought to check the kitchen. Then I heard him whistle, long and low.
“What?”
The freezer was full of vodka, proud Russian soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder beside the ice maker. I came and stood next to him to see. The cold air was beautiful. “Therein lies the problem,” I said.