Duke peered inside. “I always thought he was a gin man.”
“I think he is. I think that’s why the vodka’s still here.”
Duke took out an open bottle, twisting off the cap to drink. He closed his eyes and shivered. “To Uncle Wallace,” he said. “Za lyubov.” He raised the frozen bottle in salute then handed it to me. The day was hot and I touched it to my forehead before bringing it to my lips.
This would be as good a time as any to talk about alcohol.
Duke’s drinking did not distinguish him from anyone else at Tom Lake that summer. Drinking was what we did to pass the time when we weren’t onstage, and while he would be the first to say he drank more than most （though less than Uncle Wallace）， he wasn’t in imminent danger of rupturing anything in his esophagus.
But Fool for Love tipped the balance. Fool for Love could just as easily have been called Fool for Tequila, the bottle being the central prop in much of the action. It’s Eddie’s bottle, and it starts the play full and ends the play empty. Eddie drinks a lot; Mae, who’s on the wagon, drinks a good bit, and the other two characters, the Old Man and Martin, both drink some. Duke believed that if the stage directions said the character was drinking tequila, then it was his responsibility as an actor to drink tequila.
I was a lousy drinker.
“That’s because you don’t practice,” Duke said. “Look how much better your smoking has gotten!”
Everybody smoked through rehearsals now. Ten o’clock and I was halfway through my third cigarette.
“Eddie has a problem,” he said to Cody in rehearsal. “Mae has a problem. The Old Man has a problem but he also has his own bottle.” The Old Man drank whiskey, though he gets a shot of tequila along the way.
“What about me?” the guy playing Martin asked. “Do I have a problem?” The guy playing Martin was a Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa named Homer. He was cracking himself up. “You need to find your own backstory.” Duke handed him the bottle he’d bought for rehearsal.
Cody was stumped. Cody took Sam Shepard’s stage directions to be the Nicene Creed. He listened to Duke’s madness while having no clear understanding of how a group of actors could function on that much booze. “Are you wanting to do this in rehearsals, too?” he asked.
“Rehearsing means getting ready to play the role,” Duke said. “No one drinks their first bottle of tequila on opening night and expects to survive. That’s what I’ve been telling Mae here. You have to work up to it.”
I wanted this to work. I would have done anything to be good in the part, to be as good as Duke was. I even wanted to please Cody, who I couldn’t stand. I just didn’t want to drink tequila first thing in the morning.
Cody, nibbling the end of his pencil, was intrigued. “It’s verisimilitude.”
“It is not verisimilitude.” I looked to him to be the adult in the room, like Joe had been the adult. “Verisimilitude is the appearance of something being real. Verisimilitude means putting tap water in an empty tequila bottle.” The problem with being the only woman in a play in which the three other characters were men and the playwright was a man and the director was a man was that no matter what I said, I sounded petulant, female. “It’s one bottle. It isn’t one bottle for Eddie and one for Mae. If you’re drinking yourself blind then you’re consigning the rest of us to the same fate.”
Homer shrugged, and the Old Man, who was played with great authority by a former junkie named Sal, said he was all in. The prop master should bring him a bottle of whiskey, preferably Jim Beam.
“I guess it wouldn’t kill us to try,” Cody said. Early as it was in rehearsals, Cody already hated me.
Duke smacked the table. “Now you’re talking!”
I looked over at Pallace, who was sitting in the corner doodling on her script. “Help,” I said very quietly when she raised her eyes.
She shook her head. Doomed, she mouthed to me.
The introduction of Jose Cuervo into morning rehearsals made me even worse in the part than I was, if such a thing were possible. Instead of tossing it back and slamming it down, I fiddled with my glass and tightened my lips. As hard as I tried to relax, I never stopped looking like I was faking it, because I was faking it. I was thinking about the evening’s performance of Our Town. Nobody wanted to see a drunk Emily.
The men, however, were another story. All three of their performances were radically improved by alcohol. They blossomed. They were lit. They raged when rage was called for, and then retreated to their moody silences. Duke, who’d been good in the part all along, was roaring now. He was taller, looser, stronger. He was dangerously real. He lassoed the bedposts one at a time. He threw me to the ground and covered me with his body. I could feel his erection pressing into my leg through his jeans. I was miles behind.
“Try drinking,” he said when I screamed in frustration.
And so I tried. I drank a fraction of what the men drank and still I wobbled and forgot my lines. Cuervo didn’t have those sad little worms curled up in the bottom of the bottle but I thought about them every time I tipped the bottle back, the bile rising in my throat.
I won a single battle in that war, and it may well have been the battle that saved us all. The directions say a bottle of tequila but they don’t say what size it is. Duke swore it was a fifth. I said a pint.
“A pint?” Duke asked.
“Or maybe it’s a half gallon,” I said. “Get something with a handle.”
Cody, for once, took my side. “I think a pint makes sense.”
Duke put up a little argument then let it go. A fifth was hard to control, even if he wouldn’t admit it. I wasn’t drinking my share and he was left to pick up the slack. Like it or not, the bottle had to be empty by the end of the show. “Drinking is a muscle,” Duke liked to say. “And you have to keep that muscle in shape.” He had no end of theories as to how to avoid the repercussions, though mostly it came down to gallons of water and three prophylactic aspirin, which he insisted on chewing for best results. After his incandescent rehearsals, he took a long swim and pulled himself together for the evening’s performance of Our Town. I always went with him to the lake to make sure he didn’t drown, having no idea what I would do if he did. My swimsuit was never completely dry in those days. Whenever I pulled it on it was still clammy from the swim before.
I had no idea how Duke managed to drink so much and be so good. I was desperate to be good, but all that did was make me look desperate.
After we finish cleaning up, Joe says he’s going to check on the goats and just take care of a few more things out at the barn. He says he’ll only be a minute and I say, okay. I say, tell the goats good night for me. After a respectable amount of time has passed, I take a flashlight from the basket by the door and head in the direction of the Otts.
The leaves on the cherry trees are silvered with moonlight, with flashlight, the branches bent beneath the cherry weight. They make me think of cows aching to be milked. I take the quickest way, not on the road but through the orchard, feeling like I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing. But what shouldn’t I be doing? Going to see a movie? Joe wouldn’t care.