“Let’s just go and find out if it would be okay for her to see it,” Joe said finally, the two of us in bed. “It wouldn’t kill us to go to a movie.”
“That movie?”
Joe folded me in his arms. “We’ve seen Swiss Father Robinson seven hundred times and it didn’t kill us. At least this one is supposed to be good.”
And so we drove to Suttons Bay for a noon matinee on a Tuesday when the girls were in school. You can do things like that when you’re the ones who own the farm, and anyway, it was winter. We thought our biggest risk was that a foot of snow would fall while we were inside and bury the car. We never considered that the movie might destroy us. I started crying halfway through and kept up a steady weeping until the end. Joe handed me his handkerchief in the dark but then later took it back. We stayed through all the credits, the closing song, trying to pull ourselves together before walking back out into the blinding winter sun.
“I didn’t see that coming,” Joe said, using a stack of thin paper napkins he had taken from the concessions stand. He gave half to me and I mopped my eyes.
“Was it sad because we knew him or would anyone have been destroyed by that?”
“Both,” he said.
What I had felt, standing out in front of the Bay Theater with the wind whipping off the lake, was that I had seen Duke’s end, his shame and his failure, his letting go.
But of course that wasn’t it at all. It was a movie, an incredibly convincing performance in a movie. Duke was nowhere near his end. He was an actor at the top of his game, and the fact that he could make me so believe him when I knew better only proved how good he was. This was the role he’d win his Oscar for. Viola Davis opened the envelope and said his name. He took the stairs two at a time and embraced her, whispered something in her ear that made her laugh, then turned to the audience, holding the golden statue above his head.
“Sebastian!” he cried.
I remember it now.
We never told Emily we saw the movie. We stuck by our original answer: It was R rated and she couldn’t go. So when she managed to talk the Holzapfels into taking her and Benny, telling them she had our permission, she didn’t tell us either, at least not for a long time. We all carried around the shattering grief of that performance by ourselves.
Times are hard in Michigan, as times are hard everywhere. The Otts have had the wonderful idea to arrange an activity where people could do something together other than harvesting cherries, but they might have shown The Popcorn King instead. I understand that The Promised Man is a better film, but so was Taxi Driver, so is The Deer Hunter. That doesn’t mean we’re up for it.
The woman projected up on the sheet has sold Duke crack. He has lost his job but he still has his family. He is an alcoholic but he still has his family and they love him. They would gladly reach down into the darkest hole and use all their strength to pull him up. But he doesn’t go to them. He goes to this woman instead. And when he is back in his car we realize that things are much worse than we had understood. He has a pipe and he lights it and when the flame pulls down we can see the drug hit him, the color draining from his face, his nose and eyes streaming, and then the look of relief that breaks over him, a violent gratitude, like he wasn’t sure it would come for him this time and it came.
I want someone to tell me how that was acting. I want someone to tell me how many people were on the set, and how many of them understood what was happening. They had to wait until the golden hour when the light was perfect because there could be only one take. He couldn’t do this thing twice. I wonder if Sebastian was there, but he couldn’t have been. Sebastian would never have let that happen.
All these years later, I feel like I let it happen. I didn’t refuse to drink even though I knew what the drinking was doing to him. I didn’t pour out the tequila and replace it with water. I didn’t walk Uncle Wallace off the stage. It’s nothing but foolish self--aggrandizement, I know. No summer girlfriend ever changed the course of a movie star’s life. But still, I am sorry I didn’t try.
The evening air is sweet and the warmth of the day rises up from the grass. When I can’t stand to look at Duke’s face another second I look out over the dark field, trying to find four people and a small dog, but I can’t find four people and a dog because it’s five. Joe is there. For once he’s put the goats to bed and left the barn as planned. Emily, Maisie, Nell, Benny, and Joe, all of them together, with Hazel wandering off to sniff at other people’s picnic dinners. I stand on the hill for a long time and watch them instead of the movie. I think about walking down to join them but I remember how the movie ends and I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to walk home past the pear trees when it’s over, each of us dissecting the merits of Duke’s performance. I want to be asleep when they get back. I want them all to keep their voices down for fear of waking me.
15
No one’s around when I get up in the morning. When does that ever happen? I make so many sandwiches and take them to the barn, then head to the orchard where I find my girls already hard at work. The work is always biting at our heels. “Good morning,” they say, keeping their eyes on their hands. We talk about how many rows we mean to pick today. We talk about the weather. Emily says some neighbors have posted that they’ll be selling whitefish this afternoon and we decide that whitefish is today’s answer to the eternal question of dinner. No one says anything about the movie. My guess is that they can’t make sense of what they saw, or maybe it just made them too sad. Maisie’s already been back to the Otts’ early this morning because the Otts think that Happy, their ancient yellow Lab, has had a stroke. She’s walking in circles, Maisie tells us, holding her head at an angle, one eye closed. She’s vomiting, falling over.
“Oh, not Happy!” Emily says. “She came by the blanket last night.”
“It’s not a stroke,” Maisie says. “At least I don’t think it is. I’m pretty sure she has old--dog vestibular disease.”
“Happy’s dizzy?” I ask.
Maisie nods. “I called her vet and they’re going to fill some prescriptions for her. She should get straightened out, unless I’m wrong, in which case it’s probably a brain tumor.”
“You saved Happy’s life!” Nell says. The girls have known Happy since earliest puppyhood. No one is interested in the possibility of a brain tumor.
Joe comes by on the Gator to collect the first round of lugs. He whistles at our productivity.
“We haven’t been talking as much this morning,” Nell says.
“Well, that’s a first,” Joe says. “I would have thought you’d be taking the movie apart.”
The three girls look at him, stricken, and it occurs to me that they must have stayed up half the night doing exactly that.
“I can’t blame you,” he says, answering what has not been said. “I have regrets about seeing it again myself.” He looks at me. “Was it that sad the first time?”
“It was,” I say, and then wonder if he knew I was there.
We help him put the lugs in the back, grateful to use our bodies some other way even for a minute, then he waves and is gone.