“Pallace? What am I doing wrong now?”
Maisie agrees. “She’s a person. She isn’t a great pair of legs.”
“If you’d give me another minute I plan to establish that.”
“But you can’t just lead with a body part.”
“Have you ever met dancers? Have you ever heard them talk about their legs? About other people’s legs?”
Nell thinks about this for a minute. “She may have a point.”
“Get back to the story,” Emily says.
Pallace dropped down the stairs three at a time, and when she got to the bottom, turned around. “Are we late?” she asked Duke.
“Right on time,” he said.
Then she saw me, one stair behind him. “Emily!” she cried.
“Pallace,” Duke said, holding his hand out to her by way of introduction.
She looked at us standing there together. “Seriously?” she said to Duke. “She must have been here for what, twenty minutes? Did you go to the airport and stake out the plane?”
“I didn’t like my room,” he said, his voice oddly prim.
“That explains why he didn’t try to sleep with me,” Pallace said. “The dancers are in the attic. The view is great but it gets really hot up there.”
“Walk, please,” Duke said, lighting the morning’s first cigarette.
I was trying to keep up. My room? “You’re a dancer?” Of course she was a dancer.
Pallace extended her left leg at a ninety-degree angle from her body and lifted up on the ball of her right foot, her little red tennis shoe straining in the point.
“Showboat,” Duke said.
“NotShowboat, you fool,Cabaret. But I’m studying acting, too. Right now I’m studying your acting.”
“Pallace is your understudy,” Duke said.
I hadn’t thought about that. Of course there would have been an understudy in place already. “So why aren’t you playing Emily?”
“Because then I’d be inCabaretfour shows a week andOur Townthree shows a week and at the end of the summer I’d be dead. Anyway, Tom Lake’s idea of racially progressive casting is to let me be the understudy, not the lead. It’s a big step for them.”
“Better not get sick,” Duke said to me.
“That last Emily—” Pallace began.
“Piece-of-work Emily,” Duke offered.
Pallace nodded. “That piece of work dropped out soon enoughfor the company to find a nice new white Emily.” She held an open hand in my direction.
“New and improved.” Duke put his arm around my shoulder.
“Veryimproved.” Pallace tossed me a smile. “And anyway, can you imagine it? A stage full of Caucasians with me standing right in the middle looking all lonely?”
Duke lowered his eyebrows, lowered his voice. “Whose town is this, anyway?”
“Not our town,” Pallace answered brightly.
