“Who’s Pallace?”
“The girl.”
He shook his head. “I don’t need a girl. I have too many girls as it is.”
And there went Pallace, tumbling off in the breeze as Duke came with us. I knew what he was telling me, and I didn’t say another word about it.
Ripley put me in the pool house. In the afternoons I sat on a chaise beneath an umbrella in my one--piece and read novels. Ripley’s house contained no end of novels. He said agents sent them to him in boxes, hoping he’d turn the books into movies. “If you come across anything decent, write a treatment,” he said. “You can earn your keep.”
“I’m already earning my keep.” Ashby was still on the payroll, still hoping to be an actress. She took me to have my nails painted and my eyebrows plucked and a few subtle highlights woven around my face. There was a stylist and a media trainer who schooled me in the ways of talk shows and newspaper interviews. I had been made up to get into the business and I would be made up to get out.
“You’re not getting out,” Ripley said.
“That’s a line from a horror movie if ever I heard one.”
“I’m sure it is. So what are you going to do with your life if you don’t do this?”
“There is no this. This is gone. No joke. I’m only here to do you a favor because you did me a favor. When we’re done I may go back to New Hampshire, work in alterations. Maybe I’ll finish college. I wanted to be a teacher before you came along.”
He rolled his eyes. “Give me a break,” he said.
Ripley and I struck up an odd little friendship in the month or so I was there. I never got the story on his personal life other than he didn’t seem to have one. He was good to me though, in spite of my moods. I never knew if it was because he felt sorry for me or grateful because of Duke or if he felt like he needed to keep an eye on me until the movie came out. Maybe he was just a decent man. I had started to think of him as my uncle, just like Charlie had told me he was in the Algonquin all those lifetimes ago. Ripley went out and picked up salads from one fancy restaurant or another and we ate them together in the evening, drank Chablis. Sometimes we watched a movie but just as often we didn’t. He liked to play honeymoon bridge and I knew how. “The only ingenue in Bel Air who plays honeymoon bridge,” he liked to say while I shuffled the deck. I always wanted a cigarette after dinner but the property had been scrubbed of tobacco. Everyone who worked for Ripley had been instructed not to buy them for me. “You look like an eighth grader when you smoke,” he said. “It’s not attractive.”
Which was how I quit. I didn’t mind too much, as smoking made me miss Duke. Ripley didn’t talk to me about Duke but I knew things were in the works. He’d sent a casting director out to Tom Lake to see the play and the next week a stack of headshots were left on the kitchen counter after a meeting and Duke’s was in there, just another pretty boy in a thick stack of pretty boys. I took the picture back to the pool house and cried on it. I was always thinking that he might come for me. He must have known where I was, and showing up was the kind of thing he would do, walking into the pool house in the middle of the night, especially a pool house Ripley owned. “Where’s my girl?” he’d call. “Where’s my birthday girl?”
Ripley told me to keep the door locked but I never did.
My agent got me an appointment to see some big--time California hand and foot specialist who cut off the plaster cast, x--rayed my ankle, examined the incision, and reported with no small amount of wonder that everything looked fine. He replaced the plaster with a lightweight fiberglass cast and gave me a walker, which made me feel born again. I used the crutches for interviews because, as Ripley explained, crutches were sexy and youthful and walkers were walkers.
After two or three days, Ripley arranged a screening on the studio lot and we watched Singularity together with some friends of his and some studio people and some of the people in the movie, though not the famous actress, who was shooting in Quebec.
“She’s not in Quebec,” Ripley said, not bothering to lower his voice. “She just got wind of how good you are.”
I was good, or the person in the film who strongly resembled me was good. She had just finished playing Emily in the University of New Hampshire production of Our Town. She had taken a leave of absence from school four weeks before finishing her junior year and still had every intention of going back. She had never heard of Duke or Sebastian or Pallace, did not know Tom Lake existed. Seeing the movie made me think that it wouldn’t be so hard to get back to that place. Three years wasn’t such a long time.
I did the interviews on crutches and everyone was charmed. I crutched out on The Tonight Show in a hot--pink sleeveless dress, my good foot in a ballet slipper, my arms all muscle and sinew. I crossed a stage with a nice, rhythmic swing and dropped down in the chair next to Johnny Carson. Carson was old by then, tired of the job, but my crutches and cast sparked something in him. “Wow! Will you look at her?” he said. Then I smiled and waved. I’d nailed it before I ever opened my mouth.
The next morning when I called my grandmother she started crying on the phone. “Everybody’s calling me,” she said. “Like I did something.”
I did help the movie, Ripley was right about that. Even if it wasn’t a summer blockbuster, it did better than anyone thought it would and I got the credit, me and my ruptured Achilles. Every interviewer wanted to talk about my tennis game, ask if was I planning to take on Steffi Graf once the cast came off, and every time I laughed like no one had ever made the joke before. Publicity was the most acting I’d ever done in my life, and it did nothing to dissuade me from the idea that I was finished. I didn’t want anyone curling my hair or straightening my hair or telling me to look up while they applied my eyeliner. I didn’t want anyone touching me. All the things that feel reasonable when you’re trying to be an actress feel unbearable once you’ve stopped. Jane Pauley said I was America’s daughter, and I said that was good because I was going home.
Ripley took me to the airport himself in the MG. He was being nostalgic. He never drove the MG. He parked the car and walked me in, pitching ideas all the way to the gate. “You’re making a big mistake,” was the very last thing he said to me. I didn’t know if he meant it or if he was lonely. I knew he liked having me around, but surely other actresses could be found for the pool house. I was done. I gave him a kiss and crutched off into the sunset.
19
A cool breeze stirs the trees and brushes off the rain left clinging to cherries and leaves. The orchard is glistening, and I am done. I’ve laid out the entire summer at Tom Lake with bonus tracks on either side. I’ve given my girls the director’s cut.
Nell shifts her feet in the wet grass. “You don’t ever think you made a mistake?” she asks.
“Oh, come on. All that and you still think I should’ve been an actress?”
“I think being an actress sounds like a nightmare,” Emily says.
The three of us look to Maisie to break the tie. “I’d take the shitting calf any day,” she says.
So I have won over two of my girls. As for the third, Nell thinks everyone secretly longs for the stage.