“Don’t be such a dope,” Nell says.
The day afterFool for Loveopened I stayed in bed with my foot up on pillows, smoking cigarettes, sewing spanglesand drinking the syrupy frozen vodka from the stash. I had so much to cry about I could have broken it into segments: nine to ten, cry over Duke and Pallace’s betrayal; ten to eleven, cry for wanting Duke back; eleven to noon I would split between the loss of Sebastian and the loss of Pallace, very different feelings yet intermingled; noon to one was the loss of Emily and my acting career; one to two, the frustration of not being able to walk to the bathroom; two to three, the terror over what to do with my life, by which I meant the next day and all the other days. That led nicely back to betrayal, which had kicked the whole thing off. I fell asleep but couldn’t stay asleep; I didn’t eat; I repeatedly pricked my fingers with the needle in my efforts to both sew and cry, which meant hopping to the sink to scrub little dots of my own blood from the fabric. Who knows how long I might have sustained this state had Ripley not arrived, though my guess would be a long time. I picked up a Kleenex, they were everywhere, and blew my nose. “Please don’t be here,” I said to him.
“Hello to you, too.” He stood in the doorway of the cottage, taking measure of the wreckage.
“I’m serious. I’m not my best self right now. I can’t negotiate.”
“Well, that’s fine because I’m not here to negotiate. Do you have any idea how fucking far away this place is? From anywhere? I flew to Detroit, the worst goddamn airport ever built. It took me an hour to walk from the gate where we landed to the gate where I got a flight to someplace called Traverse City in a tiny plane. I hate those tiny planes. Then your maniac boyfriend picks me up at the airport in a Honda that’s missing third gear. He told me he had to shift straight from second to fourth and that I shouldn’t think he didn’t understand that he was supposed to use third, only that third was nonoperational. Somebody’s pounded him, by the way, I’m sure you know that. His right eye’s shut, that would be the eye that’s facing me in the car. It’s got stitches in the corner. Three gears on the car and one eye and the drive takes an hour and a half during which time he never shuts up.”
“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 toFool 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 toFool for Lovewithout 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: amodest 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.
