Unlike Chan, who left me parked behind the last row, Sebastian picked me up and carried me down the stairs. To be fair, it never crossed my mind that Chan might offer to carry me anywhere, and I don’t think it occurred to him either, but it was comforting to be in Sebastian’s arms again. “You know I wouldn’t do this if you were a normal--sized person,” he said, and I laughed, glad for once to be small. This was the big night, and we’d come early for the privilege of sitting in the center of the second row.
The lights were up as the house started to fill. I told Sebastian about the sewing I’d taken on and the things I’d found in people’s pockets. He asked where I learned to sew and so I told him about my grandmother and how I’d been in her shop since a time before memory. Then he told me about his lessons for the week, about a fourteen--year--old boy named Andy with a canny backhand who was the best student he’d ever had. The boy’s parents had joined the Yacht Club just so he could take lessons with Sebastian. The excitement in his voice when he talked about this kid was moving to me. More than once he told me Andy was his best.
I don’t think Sebastian and I had talked about anything much before he took me to the hospital but we were different now, we counted each other as friends. I was, for those few remaining minutes, happy just to be with him. When in the future I would think of Saint Sebastian it was always at that moment in the theater before the curtain went up, his white shirt and navy blazer, his smile as he leaned over to whisper something about the woman who was standing in the aisle, complaining that all the good seats had been taken when the play was set to start in five minutes.
Fool for Love is complete in one act. Sam Shepard in his infinite wisdom knew that, if given an intermission, too many people would make a run for the door. I don’t mean the play was bad. As much as I hated it, I knew it wasn’t bad, but it ran a person ragged, both the actors and the audience. Even if you weren’t the two people in the second--row center waking up to the fact that everything you loved was lost, it was hard to watch. When Eddie and Mae started kissing, Sebastian covered my wrist with his hand and kept it there for the rest of the performance, his eyes straight ahead. Duke was gone and Pallace was gone and all we could do was sit there and wait for the show to be over.
But while we waited we watched them. We understood that there had never really been a world in which Pallace would have stayed with a tennis coach from East Detroit, never any world in which Duke would stay with anyone at all. We were members of the audience and they were slender gods, brilliant and terrifying. They lit the room with the lightning of their drunken grief and extravagant love. How could they get to the end of that show without going home and slamming one another up against the wall, the floor, the bed? Surely some actors in the past had managed, the same ones who swapped the tequila for water, but Duke and Pallace were just kids. Prodigiously talented kids.
When finally it was finished, the audience leapt to their feet to applaud and Sebastian pushed his way down the row and was gone. It was the last I would see of him. I sat there in the pale blue dress my grandmother made and my enormous plaster cast and waited. I hadn’t understood that Pallace and I were in a race but we were, and she had won. The cocktail of grief and humiliation and longing battered my heart with such violence I was sure I could feel the muscle tear. When people asked if I needed any help I told them no, my friend was coming right back, but after another half hour, after every other person had trickled away, I had to concede that not even good old Saint Sebastian was coming to get me. That was when I saw how the backs of theater seats could provide a stable means of transfer. I stood and held one and then the next and the next, hopping my way to the aisle and then hopping my way up the stairs row by row, all the way back to where my wheelchair was waiting. I used the chair as a walker, pushing it through the door until I got outside and got myself seated and got myself very slowly back home in the dark. Funnily enough, this turned out to be the thing that saved me: the knowledge that I could get back by myself.
18
The storm is all but played out, the thunder rolling off to a place so far away that not even Hazel is alarmed. It’s only rain now, and not the kind of rain that will drown you if you look up. Maisie and Nell are staring at me, drunk with disappointment.
“Sebastian just—-” Maisie swallows. “Didn’t come back?”
“He went to the greenroom to find them. There was some sort of fight.”
“Who told you?”
“Cat came over with the mending in the morning.”
“You had to sew their clothes?” Nell’s romance with her mother’s summer of summer stock exhales its final breath.
I shake my head. “Cat would never have asked me to sew their costumes. She knew what was going on. Everybody knew what was going on. She said there had been a lot of shouting and shoving and accusations. She said the whole thing was like a Sam Shepard play. Sebastian punched his brother in the face.” Had he ripped Duke’s shirt as well? Anything was possible.
“What about Pallace?” Maisie asks.
“Apparently she hadn’t been drinking that much in rehearsal and then on opening night she went all in. Cat had to get her out of the dress.”
“So two brothers are slugging it out over her and she missed it?”
“She might have missed it.” Cat said Pallace was facedown on that nubby yellow couch in her bra and underpants, crying her eyes out. She wouldn’t let Cat help her get dressed again. Sebastian stormed off and Duke was on the floor and the A.D. was hunting up an ice pack for the side of Duke’s face. Then the A.D. said the face was going to need stitches so he drove Duke to the hospital. Pallace was too drunk to sit up. Duke had been evangelical when it came to the consumption of alcohol being a matter of practice but maybe she hadn’t listened. “I know I shouldn’t be saying this to you,” Cat said to me, “but I felt sorry for her. I wished the tennis player had just picked her up and put her in the car. He could have forgiven her later. That girl’s not up to Duke.” I’d wanted to ask her if she thought I was up to Duke, but whatever the answer was it wouldn’t have been helpful.
“So when did you see Duke?” Maisie asks.
I shake my head. “I didn’t see him.”
“Meaning what?” Nell says, looking like a mad little Frenchwoman. “He ghosted you?”
“We didn’t have the terminology but yes, that’s the general idea.”
Maisie covers her eyes with her hands. “Son--of--a--bitch. I want back every hour of my childhood I spent watching The Popcorn King.”
I stand up. The Popcorn King. What a thought. “Thus concludes the story of the summer your mother dated a famous movie star. Fill your sister in however you see fit. I’m not doing this part again.”
“But he wasn’t a famous movie star,” Nell says, straining to control her voice. “Not then. He was just some asshole actor like all the other asshole actors.”
I shrug. “Some of the actors were nice. Your father was very nice.”
“Which is why he became a cherry farmer.”
Maisie is still sitting there, the dog in her lap asleep. “I want to kill him.”