Pallace came to see me but found the floor of the cottage to be blistering hot. Try as she might, she couldn’t stand on it for more than a minute. She arrived with a bottle of Orangina from the cafeteria, a bag of pretzels: small offerings to lay on her altar of guilt. Clearly, she was tortured, and I was foolish enough to think she felt bad about taking my part—-two parts! A low fog of tequila settled around her.
“When’s Sebastian coming back?” I turned the open bag of pretzels in her direction but she shook her head. Pallace was thin and getting thinner. I knew because I’d already taken in the red dress she would wear in Fool for Love. Sebastian was very much my hero in those days, and I’d be so much happier once he came back. If Sebastian were there the teams would be even: two actors and two non--actors.
Pallace tipped her head, bit her lip. “He took too much time off. He got in trouble at work. He’s going to be busy for a while catching up on the lessons he missed.” She shifted her weight from side to side, very nearly lifting her feet to keep them from burning. “I should go,” she said, her face aglow. “I’ve got so many lines.”
“Practice here!” I patted the empty space beside me where Duke slept. “You can climb up in the big fluffy bed and we can run lines.”
Oh, Pallace, such a good actress, and yet she couldn’t fix her face to make me think that things were fine, that she was my friend and would return. She all but ran to get away from me.
In retrospect, my inability to put it together was its own sort of gift. I would understand what they were doing soon enough, at which point I would finally understand what I had done to Veronica. Veronica had such a small part in the story and still I loved her more than everyone at Tom Lake put together. She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.
Attending those three remaining performances of Our Town was an exercise in endurance. I watched George and Emily up on ladders, talking about their homework, talking about the moon.
George and Emily at the soda fountain talking about their future. There they are at their wedding ceremony and Pallace is asking Duke to take her away. Hadn’t he always said she was his girl? The next thing you know it’s the third act and she’s sitting in the graveyard with the rest of the dead. For all the times I was in the play, I don’t think I ever fully understood just how fast it went. Chan very kindly came back to the cottage and wheeled me over for all three performances, but after that first night I told him he didn’t have to stay. I could ask any stranger to push my wheelchair back across the campus of Tom Lake when the night was black and full of stars. Over time I would have built up my confidence with the wheelchair but it was so hilly and the thought of tipping over in the dark when I was alone and breaking a shoulder or cracking a knee put the fear of god in me. Duke loved to set me on the front stairs of the company housing late at night when he got home, then race around in my wheelchair, making it spin in crazy circles. Then he would take it down the hill, going faster and faster until he threw his up hands and screamed, his head tipped back, his eyes closed. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand to watch him and so I closed my eyes.
The part of this story in which I lived in the cottage and sewed for Cat, the part where Our Town was still in performances and Fool for Love was still in rehearsal and Duke was still in my bed, couldn’t have lasted much more than a week, eight or nine days at most. But they were long days, summer stock days. For me, it may as well have been a geological age.
Saint Sebastian returned for the opening of Fool for Love. Oh, how I’d missed him! It is so clear to me now that he was the best of us. At first glance a person would have thought it was Duke who ruled the orbit, with Sebastian and Pallace and me as the circling moons. But Sebastian was the one who was necessary. His interest in what we said made us interesting, covered up our deficits. I missed the four of us and all the places we were together—-the lake, the tennis court, the car. So often my mind went back to that day at the Nelsons’ farm.
“Look at you!” Sebastian held out his arms to me when I crutched to the open door to meet him.
But look at him, his white Oxford shirt starched and ironed, his navy summer blazer. No doubt it was the same shirt and blazer he wore to the bar of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, but tonight he was wearing them for Pallace, for the opening of the play that starred his brother and his best girl.
Sebastian brought the wheelchair around and knelt to lift my cast onto the footrest. “It’s going to be so much easier for her now,” he said, reflecting on Pallace. “When it was Our Town one night and then Cabaret the next night and then rehearsing Fool for Love all day, I thought, she’s never going to make it.”
Why hadn’t I thought of it this way? All the pressure she was under because of me, her boyfriend made to stay at work because of me. Small wonder she could barely stand to be in my room. “Pallace is tougher than the rest of us,” I said, by which I meant Duke and myself, not Sebastian.
“That’s why she told me not to come up for a while,” he said.
“She told you not to come?”
“I understood. She didn’t have the time. I mean, when you think about her schedule there wasn’t one minute. I wanted to see her in everything. I can tell you that. I really wanted to see her in Our Town again, even if it meant driving up and turning around to drive back after the show, I would have done it but she said it was too much.” He was so careful to avoid any obstacles or breaks in the walkway as he wheeled me to the theater.
“It would have been a lot.”
“Joe did it.”
Joe Nelson! I hadn’t said goodbye to him after the last performance. I forgot that I wasn’t going to see him again. “Maybe we can all go back to the Nelsons’ farm,” I said, thinking I could get another chance. We could live the entire day again! Lunch with Maisie and Ken, the napkins, Sebastian and Pallace holding hands when we went into the woods, Duke running across the beach, Duke lying down in the thick cemetery grass to smoke. I would take all of it.
“We can go anywhere you want as long as we get her here in time for the curtain.”
Her, he said, not him. So recently it would have been Duke’s schedule Sebastian kept his eye on. “Let’s go to the Yacht Club for lunch,” I said. “The three of us could come down in Pallace’s car and meet you.” Duke loved to talk about the Yacht Club, he loved to say the word yacht, to say how Sebastian ruled the world in his tennis whites.
Sebastian stopped at the place where the view of the lake was best, the place where you turned off to take the path to the theater, the place we ran past day after day as we barreled down the grassy slope in the afternoon heat to throw ourselves into the water.
“The club is no place to go,” he said.
A heron raked across the surface of the lake just as we were watching, wetting his toes and coming up empty. “Look at that!” I said. We were both so excited to see the bird. I could have asked him what was wrong with having lunch at the Yacht Club but I already knew. Sebastian wanted to protect her from everything, including the place where he worked.