The Girl of the Lake

by Bill Roorbach

  But, Lou.

  HE DIDN’T THINK HE’D gone overboard, though he could hear a voice saying so: “Off the deep end.” The two of them had been well to do, however, and by now he was very well to do, even if retired, and after the performance Saturday night these talented kids and friends and fans and family deserved the best, and plenty of it. In the rehearsal space, which was huge and ancient—low beams chopped from chestnut, stalls built of native oak, a cement floor at the back where the whole structure opened up to a soaring milking parlor, pulleys and ropes and steel rails still in place, hayloft back over the milking stalls, actual bales of hay up there, also old theater props, all sorts of crazy furniture and backdrops, fascinating—he set up a party of his own devising.

  He filled the old industrial fridge with four cases of assorted beers and ales and twenty bottles of assorted high-end white wines, juice for the children (also soda pop, wouldn’t kill them), and the signature potato salad he’d made that morning, and the five dozen deviled eggs, ditto, also the gigantic cold-cut platter and the vast cheeseboard and the three big vegetable platters and assorted cold salads he’d driven down to Hanover for—you didn’t want grocery store cold cuts and coleslaw when you could have DiGiacomo’s, price triple at least, not to worry given the crusty old-world perfection of DiGiacomo’s baguettes and the wicked Tuscan and Umbrian cheeses, golly. Plus, old man DiGiacomo had helped him calculate how much to buy.

  The ice cream and the ice cream cake he placed in the enormous freezer beside the fridge—old dairy room equipment—also the five hundred pounds of ice he’d collected visiting three gas stations and emptying their ice vaults: you couldn’t have too much ice, that’s what DiGiacomo said, echoing the wise and sainted Lou who, once upon a time (and frequently), had said the same about sex.

  The tables and tablecloths he’d ordered from Frannie DiGiacomo’s Cater Council (the middle generation: they’d done his son’s wedding twenty or more years previous, though not the poor kid’s divorce) arrived right on time, and Frannie herself even helped him set everything up. No one from the Rocky Pond Summer Theater had turned up by noon, and Miller was glad. Frannie DiGiacomo left in a rush—she had a bat mitzvah to attend to. He got the bar set up—rows of DiGiacomo wineglasses, the twenty nice bottles of red wine he’d bought carefully arrayed, two corkscrews handy. He’d found a thick doormat at the hardware store and now he put it on the floor where he’d stand at his task. He’d even thought to bring his suit to change into while act 3 was in progress, crisp white shirt and bow tie. He’d have to hurry to lay out the food just at curtain, as the meats had to be kept cold till the last possible second: no one was going to get sick on his watch. He cut lemons, he cut limes, he dished olives, he put goldfish and jelly beans in bowls for kids. And then he lined up the liquor. Who knew what actors might drink? Patrón tequila, Hendrick’s gin, Bulleit bourbon, old Macallan scotch, a big blue bottle of vodka DiGiacomo said was popular. And then the mixers, whatever they had, you name it. Lou would laugh, that boozy old lunkhead, she’d laugh and love him and hug his neck and kiss him silly.

  No sign of the stage director.

  But when the orchestra leader drove into the lot, Miller collared him, a white-haired guy who looked startled. His bio had included stints in Europe and Japan, and in winter he was concertmeister with the Bridgeport Philharmonic, not kidding around. “Sir, sir,” Miller said. “Do you think some of your folks could put together a little dance ensemble for the party this evening? A thousand bucks?”

  Done.

  When Marcia turned up, she gasped, and Miller saw that he’d gone too far.

  “We’ll have to watch Jack,” she said, pointing at the gin.

  But then, that minor concern aside, she grinned and hugged his neck, kissed his cheek, pure warmth.

  And in the end, what a party, all afternoon, all evening, way past midnight, Marcia beamingly pleased, the actors shouting with laughter, the music divine, Jack Dance holding forth heroically sober (Miller helped him by pretending not to hear his orders), Supergirl surrounded and doing impressions of the others, hilarious.

  In the morning, still energized, Miller cleaned up solo, right down to the puke in the planters. Later, he helped the techies break the set and then Tuesday close the theater, another season done.

  THE ROCKY POND SUMMER theater’s winter headquarters was in a tiny office on Jane Street in Greenwich Village, New York City. There for generations a beleaguered directorship had done fund-raising and held auditions and won over playwrights, negotiated parsimonious royalties. They’d made many a deal to preview new work (once a minor Neil Simon play, woot-toot, overrepresented among the many photos on the walls), rescued the languishing stars of old sitcoms, launched the careers of dozens of newcomers (one of the hobbits was theirs), seduced donors, sold season tickets, held on through thick and thin. But never quite this thin, the financial disaster of the late W years having left an arts desert only slowly growing back to dates and palms.

  The actual troupe was constantly shifting, though two versatile old character actors, sober Jack Dance and perennially tipsy Lois Tremaine (stage names both), had been in the ranks for over twenty years, both of them squirrelly as hell, was Miller’s instant take. He deployed his best compliments, however, and soon felt he had Lois at ease. She’d been in film and you could see why—enunciation, carriage, mane of auburn hair, narrow figure, the most soulful brown eyes. And yet her beauty had become a shell, something to be wrapped around whatever character was at hand, and perhaps whatever man. Miller Malloy remained formal with her, which wasn’t hard—never a thing to talk about except the nearness of a martini bar or shoe store, and plenty of off-putting sexual insinuation, emotional quicksand. Jack Dance, by contrast, had given up alcohol and was no shell, and anything but messy: his characters roasted in the furnace of his psyche, emerged dazed and scorched, annealed: good stuff on stage, not so much in person, where he was bristly and cynical, touchy, trip wired, jagged. He was dashingly handsome face on, sharp featured in profile, intensely sagittal, a hand-forged axe to chop open scenes, relationships, too (or anyway rumors were rife).

  Marcia Case, the woman Miller had met on his first day (Basket Case, as Jack invidiously called her), was the executive director, also the one full-time employee, just as cheerful in New York as on the shores of the actual Rocky Pond. Marcia was at home both places, and many more, spoke a half-dozen languages (which you only gathered as you attended parties with her, or heard her on the phone, she didn’t flaunt it). She took pleasure in kindness, found power in persuasion, let what she thought show on her face plainly, then said it, plainly. With Marcia, you knew where you stood.

  Miller lived up on East Seventh-Ninth Street in the brownstone he and Lou had owned forty years, best investment of their lives, and pretty soon was all but commuting down to the Village, keeping Marcia company if nothing else. She seemed to love having Miller around, but their interactions, hard as Miller tried (he adored her snuggly plumpness), were somehow never flirty, not even on the three occasions when she came to his home for dinner, not even after multiple bottles of wine. He was so old school, she told him, when he was surprised, even shocked, to learn she was gay. She’d only brought it up because he’d asked courtly for a kiss (strongest feeling of Lou watching on some kind of afterlife surveillance cam). Marcia had politely allowed just one, then explained that while being a lesbian might not mean she was entirely unavailable, her long-term relationship did.

  “But I hope desire is not the reason you’ve been so helpful,” she said.

  “It is not,” Miller said truly.

  “You may love me from afar,” she said.

  He didn’t even feel rueful. “I’ll love you right up close,” he said. “And not a thing will change!”

  “Well, then. I suppose I won’t have to report this drunken incident.”

  He’d hoped Lou laughed, too, wherever she might be.

  HE STARTED BY ORGANIZING the office, which was a mess, even donatin
g a couple of up-to-date computers—come on, Rocky Pond, get with the revolution!—and scrubbing everything down to the floors, bucket and sponge, soapy water. He’d never felt so good. And with the romantic angle entirely out of the way, he and Marcia became close indeed. She was huggy and kissy and confiding, and never had he had such a friend.

  He worked on grants: National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, New Hampshire Council on the Arts, various corporate outreach funds to which he had uncommon access, private foundations, banks. That freed Marcia to chase actors. And without being asked, he worked on gifts, hitting up a couple dozen sure old friends for the new Lou Dollwitz Molloy Summer Theater Fund. She’d been universally loved, and everyone he asked dropped money on the fund, which in turn dropped it on Rocky Pond. He set up a Rocky Pond foundation, all the proper bank accounts, legal legwork, all the proper tax forms—easy as pie for him, all his business years—went to work investing everything he’d collected in a freshly booming stock market. Altogether, by midwinter Miller Malloy had increased the troupe’s endowment ten times over and counting.

  And he and Marcia put on parties at his large yet intimate place, thoughtful dinners with Rocky Pond actors new and old, famous and unknown, meteors and has-beens, all of them meeting and putting the touch on donors mostly new—the one percent, all right—eating well, debating, dreaming, drinking hard, even dancing, even making out. But not Miller, who’d become Marcia’s puppy. Marcia, in her capacity as executive director and sole full-time employee, regularly said she loved him, adored him, found him indispensible. That felt nice. Her wife, Deanne, an upscale veterinarian (“Poms, pekes, and poodles,” she joked), seemed jealous—tough little lesbian lady, to put it old-school politely—but Miller won her over, too. And pretty soon they were three for dinner, three for a walk, three holding hands, three talking company finances. Marcia took him to a board meeting late in March. The members applauded him. “I’ve always dreamed of a life in the arts,” Miller told them. “I can’t believe it’s come true.” And, though he was a man who didn’t believe in public display, he wept.

  With Marcia’s approval, Miller traveled up to New Hampshire, stayed happily in the lake house, frozen everything all around, there oversaw a few weeks of renovations on the theater company’s main asset—its gorgeous barn theater. He’d sent out a questionnaire to everyone in the company and to their bigger donors and to the town of Rocky Pond asking what needed to be done. And the answer was lots, from new sound design to new stage surface to new curtains to better dressing rooms to air-conditioning in the box office to properly accessible bathrooms, also fire-code upgrades, big bucks. He enjoyed conversations with the contractor—a guy who’d built Lou’s dream decks and docks and twin bunkhouses and who knew every tradesman in the area, and even donated ten percent of his projected profit to the new Rocky Pond Summer Theater Company endowment fund, a good guy who’d never seen a play in his life and wasn’t going to start.

  But at night, alone in their house, double-lot frontage on the shores of what could only be called Frozen Lake, Miller felt guilty to realize several days had gone by without mourning, that something like happiness was once again welling in him. It seemed too soon, this stage they’d told him about in grief group. Two years only since her sudden death from stroke! He made a point of remembering her, found her face fading in memory, worked through several photo albums, set a place for her the third Saturday night, kept up his end of the conversation. His seventieth birthday had passed without his noticing, he realized, so he sang himself the song, ended the night in puddles of tears. In the morning he figured out the problem: A house on a lake in the middle of winter is no place to be alone. He cut his trip short, left the theater renovation in the contractor’s trusty hands, returned to New York City in his sensible Honda Civic: back to civilization.

  LOU’S SISTER’S OLD ROOMMATE’S uncle was a very, very well-known old Shakespearian, the one and only Sir John Postlewaite. Miller felt no modesty approaching him for the role of King Lear in the company’s yearly Shakespeare production. Rocky Pond had the money to pay a real star now, and in a phone conference with Marcia and Miller the stylish old eccentric bird astonishingly said yes. He just needed permission from the film he’d be working on come that time of year and certain guarantees: he’d have his own dressing room, he’d pick his own director, he’d be in on all further casting, he’d take a cut of the gate.

  “You bet,” Miller told him, though Marcia had not agreed to any of it and stiffened. “But in return for all that,” Miller said carefully, full eye contact with Marcia, “we need a guarantee of full rehearsal and full run, also a donation to the endowment fund to match in its entirety the cut of the gate you’ll take: tax write-off.”

  “I’ll do but one night’s rehearsal. Full run is fine,” said the famous voice. “As for donations, doubtless I’ll be returning more than any cut of the gate! It’s my style, after all.”

  “Three weeks rehearsal,” said Miller.

  King Lear himself spoke: “My good man, push me and I fall off your carriage, no matter how elegant. I’ve been King Lear forever! I’ve been Lear longer than Lear was Lear. I could do King Lear in my sleep. You will rehearse the company with a stand-in. That’s how it’s done. I’ll step in for three nights’ dress.”

  “Two weeks,” Miller said. “We need you to instruct the company, direct the director. But if it’s only going to be two weeks’ rehearsal, then you guarantee us a week more at the other end if we get held over.”

  And, Marcia’s mouth agape, her pleasure rampant, it was agreed.

  JACK DANCE BURST INTO the new company offices, a rough Tribeca loft Miller Malloy had organized and funded permanently through acquaintances at the Corcoran Group. The space was a former truck showroom, enormous elevators opening directly into the Rocky Pond Summer Theater New York City headquarters, room enough for full rehearsals if need be, even space for winter showcases.

  “Goddamn,” Jack shouted. “Goddamn, anyway!”

  “What’s the problem, Jack?” Marcia said, unperturbed: he was only enraged, not drunk.

  “You know what the goddamn problem is. The goddamn problem is you hired John goddamn Postlewaite for goddamn Lear, and not a word to me, not a nod, not a grunt, not a moment’s consideration after twenty-five years with the company, twenty-five!”

  Marcia’s cheeks had gone pink. Her mouth bowed down—a powerful woman—but very quietly she said, “Sir John Postlewaite, Jack. John Postlewaite. He is Lear. You’ve got to feel badly, I understand that you feel badly. But look at it this way: we’ve got Lear himself! Sir John Postlewaite knew Shakespeare in person, for pity’s sake. What’s good for the company is good for the players, Jack. And you’ll be playing opposite God. How can that hurt?”

  He drew himself up, spoke as Lear, or maybe Othello, anyway grand, and no trifling talent (but no Sir John, either): “I goddamn am supposed to be notified and given a goddamn audition.”

  “We thought of you for The Odd Couple,” Marcia said. “You can audition for The Odd Couple. Auditions are in February.”

  “Well, wait,” Miller said. “I don’t see the need for any audition, Marcia. Seeing Jack angry like this. He’s Felix all over.”

  Jack said, “And who the fuck do you think you are?”

  “I understand you’re pissed,” Miller said. “But please don’t say you don’t want the part, all right? I am Miller Malloy. I’m the new development director. And please don’t curse me out.”

  “I remember you. You’re a fucking intern. You’re a fucking caterer. You wouldn’t fix me a goddamn drink!”

  “For which you should thank him,” Marcia said. Pregnant pause. “You want the part. Felix Unger. Believe me. You want it.”

  “I want Lear! Twenty-five years! I. Want. Lear!” He said Lear like the woman’s name Leah, two Boston syllables.

  Miller bit off a smile.

  “It’s Sir John Postlewaite we’re talking about,” Marcia said agai
n. “Royal Shakespeare.”

  “And don’t think I don’t know it: CSI Miami, too, which is the real reason you’ve booked him, goddamn!”

  “Was it Miami?” Marcia said. “I thought, like, Scranton.”

  Jack grinned despite himself, a small crack in the door.

  Miller put his figurative foot in, said, “Jack, we’ve got two student matinees and no Postlewaite for those. How would that be? Lear for two student matinees during the run and of course understudy throughout. And I think everyone agrees you’ll play Kent, no need for an audition there, either, one of the great roles, a dual identity. And Felix Unger—eyes on the prize—later in the summer. But Kent—I see in you his stalwart loyalty!”

  “Well.”

  Miller kept up the pressure: “And this run may well be Postlewaite’s last live performances. You’re part of history, playing Kent opposite that kind of eminence!”

  “Well.”

  “Theater history, Jack!”

  “Well.”

  “You keep thinking on it,” Marcia said doubtfully.

  “No thinking,” Miller said. “This is a beautiful offer, and we can cancel auditions for Felix if you say yes now, Felix in the summer comedy, and then put you up as Kent.”

  Jack carefully acted the role of a man making a decision. Finally, stealing a breath of epic proportion, he found his answer: “All right,” he said bravely. And then he said it again, this time a hint of brio: “All right.”

  They shook hands all around, hugged as a group. And Jack left, a definite spring in his step. Kent was a plum, no matter how you stewed it.

  “You’re a genius,” Miller said to Marcia.

  “I’m a genius?” she said amused. “You and your reverse psychology. I’m a workhorse. You’re the genius. And oh, by the way, we don’t have student matinees.”

  “We do now. Plus, we’ve got our understudy for Lear.”

  “Jack once did time for injuring an ex-wife,” Marcia said. “I think you should know. Very serious injuries.”