For at least the tenth time in the last twenty minutes, Amanda Porter looked at the clock that hung on the wall of the kitchen—which was also the living room, her studio, and the only room in this shabby, stifling, non-air-conditioned second-floor apartment that wasn’t a bedroom or a bathroom.
Five fifty-two. Were this an ordinary matinee, Tommy would have been back by now. He was obviously still saying his good-byes.
The ceiling fan took another spin through the same hot air it had been futilely recycling all afternoon. She sighed, appraising the painting she had been halfheartedly jabbing at, knowing she was too distracted to give it the kind of attention it demanded.
Was this one headed for the trash? She tossed way more than she kept. For months now she had been sending photos of her completed work to Hudson van Buren, the proprietor of the Van Buren Gallery and one of the most influential voices in the business. He didn’t need to see the bottom ninety-eight percent of her work. Only the top two, thank you very much.
When people met Amanda Porter, they immediately underestimated her, because she had this cute southern twang; because she was five foot two, blue-eyed, and adorable, with her wavy strawberry-blond hair, her button nose, her freckles; because she was twenty-seven but could get carded buying a lottery ticket.
Those looks belied the fierceness with which she attacked her work. No one looked at her and thought scrappy, but that’s how she thought of herself. She was the scrappy girl who had made it from this little nowhere town in Mississippi to a scholarship at Cooper Union—and now to the brink of artistic stardom—by outworking everyone and refusing to compromise. She poured her drive for perfection into her art. It was excellence or nothing.
And this piece in front of her was . . . maybe okay? She was in no state of mind to decide. She put down her brush, ran the back of her hand across her damp brow, and then subconsciously tucked a curl behind her left ear.
She thought about Tommy, about this next step in their lives. Her concern for at least the last year—if not the entire time they had known each other—was that their relationship had never really been tested. It had all been too easy, like a canvas that practically painted itself. And what good was that? What was art without struggle? What was life without struggle? If she had learned anything during her escape from Plantersville, Mississippi, it was that anything worth having needed to be earned.
They had met at one of those strange New York parties for the rich, beautiful, and eclectic, all of whom had been haphazardly tossed together in some rich guy’s Park Avenue penthouse.
Amanda was there because the host had discovered one of her paintings. She felt very much alone and conspicuously southern, afraid to open her mouth. Her accent marked her as some kind of exotic mutant. She didn’t dare tell anyone she grew up in a small town in Mississippi; or that the biggest, most cosmopolitan place she ever got to visit was Tupelo, where the Elvis Presley Birthplace and Museum was considered the pinnacle of culture.
Tommy, the former Broadway star, had found Amanda in the corner, her preferred location in a large crowd. As the youngest, poorest, and least-connected guests, they had bonded over how out of place they felt. They had both been raised by single mothers, not quite hand to mouth but also pretty far from the summer-in-the-Hamptons set.
She liked him immediately. He was a little short, sure. But he had a nice smile and a nicer ass. He was clearly in great shape. And smart. And interesting. And interested. And . . . well, who could ever really put their finger on human attraction? Amanda later told a friend that the moment she got around Tommy, it was like there was a bowl of Rice Krispies somewhere nearby: Everything went snap, crackle, pop.
He kept asking her questions, and before she knew it, she was the one dominating the conversation. Even though she frequently chose not to, Amanda Porter could talk. She even liked to talk, especially about art, and especially when she felt like the guy listening was (a) actually listening and (b) understanding what she was saying. Oh, and (c) not just trying to get her into bed.
At the hostess’s insistence, Tommy sang “Love Changes Everything” from Aspects of Love, which was cheesy and wonderful and brought the house down. His voice was rich, warm, full of life and character.
Before long, they were discussing the similarities between their seemingly disparate passions.
“We’re both performers,” he told her at one point. “You just perform on canvas.”
They talked until two A.M., and then he started walking her home when they couldn’t find a cab. By that point, she had moved onto hoping he was trying to get her into bed. Her deepest concern was that this gorgeous, talented guy—who worked out a lot and sang beautifully—had to be gay. Her friends always teased her that growing up in the Bible Belt had endowed her with a deficient gaydar (her defense being that no one was allowed to be gay in Plantersville, Mississippi). Had she spent the evening flirting with a guy who would be more interested in her brother?
Then she decided not to wait until they reached her place to find out. They ended up making out for two hours on a park bench.
No, not gay.
Subsequent explorations of his ardor and stamina only confirmed it.
They quickly became inseparable. He would spend long hours just watching her paint—“This is better than any show on Broadway,” he insisted—and she became a de facto member of whatever cast he was in.
Each of them had other friends, but they quickly fell away. Tommy’s were constantly being scattered to the acting winds. Amanda’s came in two groups: her fellow scholarship kids, who had mostly retreated back to their respective Mississippis, Missouris, or Maines to teach art and attempt to sell their paintings locally; and the rich kids who could afford to stay in the New York area but whom Amanda had never felt especially close to.
So, really, it was just the two of them. Which was fine as far as both were concerned.
He proposed after three months, just as he was about to hit the road with a touring company. She made all kinds of rational arguments about why it was too soon. He swatted them away by borrowing a line from one of her favorite movies, When Harry Met Sally: “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
She said yes. He suggested they trek down to city hall the next day. She resisted.
Wait, she said. Just wait. Until the time was right. Until she was more established as an artist. Until they passed over the line—and, surely, it would be a bright, white one—that demarcated the end of extended postcollegiate adolescence and the beginning of stable, stolid, sensible adulthood.
That was two years ago. Every now and then, he would ask her about setting a date. She always demurred. Her go-to line became, “Honey, if it’s ’til death do us part, what’s the hurry?”
She couldn’t bring herself to tell him she still had her doubts about them. She wanted to know what they would be like as a couple when the newness wore off, when the real relationship began. It was just difficult to discern because, with Tommy, there was always something new. A new show. A new role. A new city.
It was like a perpetual honeymoon. They had never even gotten in a serious fight, as ridiculous as that sounded. Even when she was despondent from her failure with another painting or just plain crabby, Tommy was nothing but sweet, thoughtful, and impossibly good to her. He insisted he had never found it so easy to be nice to someone.
And in some ways, it was great. A dream. It certainly occurred to her that maybe, just possibly, it always would be like this.
Except there was that unanswered question about whether Tommy would be like her own father, a man she barely knew because he bolted the second things got difficult.
And make no mistake: Things were about to get difficult.
At quarter after six, the door downstairs opened. Then she heard the stairs creaking gently, which immediately told her something was up.
When Tommy was being Tommy—flush from a great performance, filled with the energetic joy that gave him—he charged up the steps and burst through the door, primed to share his triumph; or to see the progress she had made on her latest attempt at a painting; or, if nothing else, to lure her into bed.
When he was off for some reason, he didn’t charge. He crept.
He once told her that one of the reasons he fell in love with her was that, unlike other women he had dated, he couldn’t hide his feelings from her with his acting ability.
“You read me like a book,” he always told her.
It’s not that hard, she often thought.
Something must have happened during the last show. He flubbed a line. The audience was flat. She’d find out soon enough.
She quickly picked up her brush and pressed it to her painting, like that’s what she had been doing the whole time he had been gone. She was still sweating. The ceiling fan may have actually been making the room hotter.
He entered quietly, shutting the door softly behind him.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey. How’d it go?” she asked, already seeing the uncertainty in his eyes.
“Fine,” he said. Then: “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“That’s funny, there’s something I need to tell you, too.”
“You want to go first?” he asked. “Mine’s pretty big.”
She swirled her brush in a cup of murky liquid, damp-dried it with a rag, and said, “No, you go ahead.”
They sat in plastic chairs, bellied up to a circular plastic folding table that had been their one furniture splurge for this apartment. Then Tommy related his bizarre encounter with two FBI agents, one of whom was a childhood friend. Tommy was incapable of telling a story without performing at least a little, though Amanda got the sense he was working very hard to give her the unembellished version of the events.
She didn’t say a word as he spoke, letting him continue his presentation, which finished with, “So, what do you think?”
Amanda’s hands were folded in front of her. Theirs had been a peripatetic relationship, with Tommy’s next gig serving as the driver, deciding where they went next. He would just come home and announce, It’s a regional theater in Cincinnati, or It’s a touring company for Phantom of the Opera, or whatever.
She had never said no. As long as they were together, and as long as she didn’t have to go back to Plantersville, what did it matter? She could paint anywhere.
This felt immeasurably different.
“So let me get this right,” she said. “They’re sending you to prison.”
“Yeah.”
“Like an actual prison. With bars and skinheads and guys named Bubba.”
“It’s minimum security. Bubba Lite.”
“But it’s still prison.”
“For six months, yeah.”
She stared down at the hard plastic top of the table, trying to assemble her thoughts.
“But how does it actually work?” she asked, looking back up. “You knock on the door of a prison and say, ‘Hey, y’all mind if I bunk up here?’ And then after six months, you’re like, ‘Oh, j/k. See y’all later.’”
“They’re the FBI. I’m sure they can pull some strings.”
“And they think this guy is going to spill his guts to you? You. Some kid he doesn’t know.”
“Well, obviously, I’m going to have to find a way to get close to him, earn his confidence. I’m sure the FBI can get me assigned to his work detail or whatever. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll tell him I’m trying to escape and ask him if he knows a place where I can lay low for a while and then he’ll tell me about his cabin.”
“And if that doesn’t work, they come get you after six months. Win or lose.”
“Right.”
“And this is worth a hundred thousand dollars to them.”
“I guess so, yeah. This guy Dupree is big-time. You know how much the government spends fighting drugs? A hundred grand or two is like tip money.”
“What if something bad happens? Someone beats you up or, I don’t know, something happens to me or . . . or your mom.”
“I don’t know. I assume they’ll just come and get me,” Tommy said. “But if it’s before six months, I forfeit the second fifty thousand.”
“So you could take the fifty, stay for a day, then come home.”
“I could, yeah. But then I’d be walking away from a shot at another hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
It was unnecessary to emphasize the point. Amanda’s mother cleaned houses. Tommy’s mother was a school secretary. They had both worked their entire lives and never seen that number in their bank accounts.
“And this Danny guy, how well do you really know him?”
This was another part of growing up poor: natural suspicion of those in power.
“We go about as far back as you can,” Tommy said. “Kindergarten, I guess? We called him ‘Danny Danger’ because he would blow up Matchbox cars with cherry bombs or wear camo pants. Like that made him a tough guy. But he was basically a good kid, you know?”
“Would you trust him with your life?”
Tommy rocked backward, looking like he had just bitten a lemon. “It seems a little melodramatic when you put it that way. This isn’t my life we’re talking about.”
This made Amanda only more fervent. “Yes, it is. It’s your life and my life. It’s . . . it’s this family’s life.”
Tommy paused. Amanda had never referred to them as a family before.
“Well, yeah, I know him as well as I know anyone,” Tommy said. “And I guess, yeah, I trust him.”
Amanda let out a long, slow breath. “So you really want to do this?”
“It’s not that I want to, believe me. I can think of things I’d rather do for the next six months than worrying about what’s going to happen every time I bend over to pick up the soap. But think of it as an acting job that happens to be in, I don’t know, Botswana or something. Someplace you can’t go with me. An acting job that’s really, really lucrative.”
“I’m not with you because I want to be rich,” Amanda said. “I’m with you because I want to be with you.”
“Of course. But this . . . This could be a short-term inconvenience that could really set us up long term. If nothing else, it’ll give us some breathing room. You’ll be able to keep painting—”
“And you’ll be able to keep acting,” she said.
Busted, she thought. The yearning that immediately came to his face when she said it had been unmistakable. It was like telling a man who had been fasting that there was an all-you-can-eat buffet next door.
“Don’t tell me that didn’t cross your mind,” she said.
But it clearly was now. The Amanda Porter who could read Tommy like a book was now seeing whole chapters springing off the page. They could rent an inexpensive place in Jersey, something near his mother. He could keep auditioning. He could do a real agent search instead of just making phone calls. He could find people who remembered him in Cherokee Purples or one of his other triumphs and felt he deserved another shot.
For that matter, with a hundred grand or more in the bank, he could take a stab at what had always been his most audacious dream: take a year or two off and write his own musical—one where a short guy played the lead.
“Look, let’s just take this one step at a time,” he said. “Is this something you think I should pursue or not? I’ve got until Tuesday, but I can always call him and say, ‘Thanks but no thanks, go find someone else.’”
“And lose out on a hundred grand,” Amanda said.
“Right. Though now you’re arguing out of both sides of your mouth.”
“I’m not fixin’ to argue either side, honey. I just . . . Going to prison on a wild-goose chase for six months sounds utterly insane. But passing up on all that money is pretty nuts too.”
She stopped there. They spent a moment just looking at each other, doing one of those couple checks, where you stare at each other for a few quiet seconds and decide everything or nothing—but either way, it happens together.
The moment lasted longer than usual.
Finally, he broke the silence. “What do you say we sleep on it and see how we feel in the morning? If we both think it’s something I should pursue, I’ll call Danny and tell him we at least want to see the contract. There’s no harm in looking. Nothing is going to happen until I sign it.”
“Okay,” she said, releasing a big breath. “I guess that makes sense.”
“Good,” he said. “Anyhow, you said there was something you wanted to tell me?”
“Yeah. I’m pregnant.”