“Did he say he was my boyfriend?” I ran the edge of the sheet under my eyes. There had been no news of Duke beyond what I’d heard from Cat.
“That’s your question?”
“Just tell me what he said.”
Ripley shook his head, no doubt disgusted by my decimated state. “He said you needed to go to California, that’s what he said.”
“It’s nice that the two of you agree.”
“Well, you’re going. I didn’t come out here for my health. Boyfriend says you’re wrecked, what with your foot falling off and losing the part in the play. He says this place is finished for you, which I took to mean he’s finished with you and would like to see you vacated but that’s not my business.”
I didn’t take this gracefully, and Ripley did his best to avert his eyes. “Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to put a theater in the middle of nowhere anyway?” he said, looking out the window to the courtyard and its poppies.
I sniffled, buried my head in a pillow. “It’s pretty here.”
“It’s pretty in Santa Barbara. Put the summer stock in Santa Barbara so people can find it.”
“Ripley, seriously. I’m sorry you came all this way but I need you to leave me alone.”
This seemed to hurt him, though I wouldn’t have thought Ripley capable of being hurt. Maybe he was tired. He sat on the edge of my bed then, rapping lightly on the cast with his knuckles. “They don’t spare any expense on plaster in these parts, do they?”
“It can’t possibly matter if I do interviews. Nobody knows who I am.” I rubbed my face with the sheet.
Ripley patted my leg, the space between my knee and the top of the cast. “You need to do the interviews. It’s a good film.
You’ll see. It’ll be good for you.”
“I’m not going to be an actress anymore.”
“You’re twelve, you don’t know what you’re going to be, but you have to come back and finish what you started.”
“You flew out here to tell me that?”
“You don’t return my goddamn phone calls, and anyway, I have a sense of, I don’t know—-” He stopped to take in the bright mound of costumes covering the bed. “What’s with the clothes?”
“I’m doing the mending for the costume department.”
He picked up the edge of a silvery leotard then dropped it. “I have some responsibility to you, as crazy boyfriend explained to me on the phone. At the very least I have a responsibility to get you out of here, and that will benefit both of us.”
A bit of clarity seeped into my swollen brain, a sliver of light. Duke had set this up. “He wants you to see the play. That’s why you had to come here.”
Ripley shook his head. “He didn’t even tell me about a play.”
An hour and a half in the car and no mention of Sam Shepard. Duke knew that if he could get Ripley to Tom Lake, I would get him to Fool for Love. Even if I hated him, he knew I’d come through, because he knew I was exactly that kind of fool. Duke was going to be a movie star, but to be a movie star you’ve got to find someone who’s willing to look at you. His brilliance would not be readily evident on a résumé, a headshot, a three--minute audition. He needed to be seen in a play, in this particular play and in its entirety. He was as good as anyone had ever been in Michigan, and now the trick was making sure that someone who wasn’t from Michigan knew that.
Ripley went to Fool for Love without much convincing. Going to see plays was what he did. He asked me to come but I said if we were leaving tomorrow I’d have to pack. I was like one of those clever crows who could use a stick as a tool. I sat in my wheelchair and knocked things off the closet bar with the crutch. What I’d brought didn’t amount to anything more or anything more meaningful than what Uncle Wallace had: a modest amount of clothing, a handful of books I’d already read, a clock. I left my scripts in the freezer with the vodka Duke and I hadn’t gotten around to yet. I took a careful bath, finished the mending, wrote Cat a note. Ripley had his secretary arrange for a car service in the morning, saying we sure as hell weren’t going back to Traverse City in the Honda.
“Sure as hell not,” I said.
I pushed my two swimsuits into the corner of my suitcase. Everything at Tom Lake was finished for me. For all my protesting, I understood that I was wildly fortunate that someone, anyone, had come to pull me out.
The next morning Ripley carried my suitcases to the car as I crutched behind him, leaving the wheelchair in the cottage since it belonged to the prop department. We sat in the back seat in silence, both of us preoccupied by thoughts of the same person for entirely different reasons. The driver put the crutches in the trunk with the bags. I couldn’t quite believe I hadn’t said goodbye to any of them, by which I meant Duke. I hadn’t said goodbye to Duke, who hadn’t said goodbye to me.
Goodbye, theater. Goodbye, cherry trees and cigarettes and vodka. Goodbye, lake.
“How crazy is this guy?” Ripley asked when we were almost an hour into the drive. He’d been staring out the window, probably thinking about how he’d never see Michigan again.
“Crazy,” I said.
“But crazy worth it?”
He wasn’t asking me about my love life but it was hard not to think of it in those terms. “You saw him.”
“What’s his face like, when it’s not bashed in?”
I told him it was a very good face.
He was quiet again for another ten miles or so. “I don’t like working with the crazies,” he said.
“No one does, but if you got rid of them I don’t know who you’d have left.”
Ripley nodded. “I’m assuming the two of you came to a bad end.”
“We did.”
“And that it had something to do with the girl in the play?”
As I have said, their truth was widely evident.
“She was good, too,” he said absently.
“She’s very good, and she dances.” I don’t know what I was trying to sell him, only that I’d spent the long summer marveling at the glory of both Pallace and Duke. I had no idea how a person was supposed to stop that on a dime.
“I might have a part for him.” Ripley didn’t ask me if I minded.
I nodded, wondering if there would be any pleasure in this in the future, the knowledge that I had contributed to something that was bound to happen anyway. I was a conduit in the start of Peter Duke’s meteoric career, a single, shiny cog.
“I don’t love the way he did this,” Ripley said. “Getting me out to fucking Michigan to see him.”
“How else were you going to see him?”
“I don’t know. I suppose he could have troubled himself to come to L.A. like everyone else in the world. Except for you. I had to go to New Hampshire to find you.” Everything had been plotted for his maximum inconvenience.
When we got to the turnoff for Traverse City, I started to think I might call Joe Nelson from the airport to say goodbye. I would tell Joe how I’d lost them, Duke and Sebastian and Pallace, all in one shot.
“What about Pallace?” I asked Ripley.