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.
“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 Dukecame 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.
