“But she couldn’t go last year,” Sebastian says. “She was sick.”
“I meant the year before,” his father says.
“She didn’t come the year before.”
“Sure she did.”
“I remember. She cried because she couldn’t come.”
Her brother faces her father, flushed and indignant. The moment ripples out into other moments. Sebastian picks up his sword stick and smacks it on the ground until it shatters into pieces.
“Okay, Sebastian,” he says. “You’re right. It was just pretend.”
As they race back to the house, the world rips away, open rolling fields and fences, thickets of houses and mailboxes, all of it too fast to make an impression. And the front passenger seat is still empty.
1986
Susan flings her arms around a man she has never met. She holds him for a lifetime of a moment, and the two of them sway together as though they have done this a thousand times, as though they are remembering a long-gone slow dance from their youth.
“Are you okay?” she asks softly.
“Sure,” he says. They pull away and she searches his great green eyes, runs a hand over his tanned and shapely arms.
“Is this just a onetime thing?” she asks. The words bubble out of her mouth as though they are her own words, as though they have always been hers, as though she means every one of them.
“No,” he says. “Well, I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to Sharon.”
Tears well up, but she doesn’t release them. “Sure,” she says.
“You know I love you, right?”
She nods. She presses the back of his hand. “I know.” Her eyes follow him out of the door. “Merry Christmas,” she says softly, as though there is no one else in the room, as though she is as alone now as she will ever be.
A smattering of applause from behind a plastic table.
“That was lovely, Susan.”
Now she smiles, relieved—charmed, even—and registers the three faces illuminated by the top-floor window of the Burbank studio. Two men and a woman. Mark Flowers: the producer, small mouth and large tinted frames. Rip McFee: a writer, mullet, dimples. Shona Sussman: casting director, Texas accent, swiveling back and forth on her chair.
For Susan, it is almost too easy to become an ingenue again. The transition is a wading into water. She slipped into it at thirty thousand feet, pouring out a small bottle of wine and watching America present itself,green patchwork fields and silver cities. She offers it now to the starry, searching faces across from her, that heady mix of hope and potential.
“We have a few more people to see today,” Shona says tentatively. “But as I said on the phone, I’m looking for that person who just sets me on fire.” She cracks a bright giveaway grin.
“Why don’t we meet later for a drink,” Mark says. “To talk next steps.”
Susan is beaming, repeating the name of a place on Sunset Strip.
Even as she crosses the holding pen full of similarly dressed women, all gossiping or muttering lines or sitting silently while they wait for their call, she knows she is set apart. The only trick will be convincing Al.
He never stopped calling her. Without coyness or any of the wait-by-the-phone assholery she was used to, he asked for her time. They drove out to the mountains, camped under the stars. Both of them carried the same native injury, a disappointment in the people who raised them, a deficiency of love. These were wrongs he was determined not to repeat. When they met babies, Al spoke to them so seriously, and it made her lust for him, his solid sense of self.
Late at night, he practiced his lectures with her. Though she could hardly follow the jargon, she coached his presentation:slow down, talk from your stomach, look at my face. He improved. The Harvard undergraduates started calling him Blister, which he said he hated, but she could see he really loved. He’d never had a nickname before.
As the romantic spontaneity subsided, he began to reveal his habits. He studied religiously from nine in the morning to noon, and then wrote in the afternoon from one to six, permitting no disturbance. On Sundays, he drove to visit his mother in Rockport up on Cape Ann, always bearing flowers and an excuse to leave. He took Susan to his favorite sandwich bar, where all of the options were named after poets and everyone behind the counter greeted him with the warmth of a regular; he had been coming since it opened twenty years ago. She began to see that Boston had shaped him intimately, and he held an almost mystical understanding of its layers. He populated the harbor withbillowing ghost ships, extracted hidden spires and domes from the sheet glass and concrete. Everywhere they went, he pointed out the ancient haunts of intellectuals and politicians, talked about their interests and ideas as though they were as alive in the world as anyone else.
Susan didn’t have a savings account. She didn’t have a car. He gave her one of the small black notebooks he used to manage his own finances, and drew a line down the middle of the page: one side represented what would come in, the other what would come out.
“I’m so bad at this.”
