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Summary
Chapter 8
At breakfast the next morning, Maisie and Nell discuss what they did the previous night; Maisie talks about a calf with diarrhea, and Nell about going to Emily and Benny’s place. She went there to borrow a copy of Moby Dick, but they ended up playing a board game. As she chats, Nell casually reveals that Emily and Benny plan to marry. Lara tries (and fails) not to seem upset that Emily hasn’t mentioned this to her. Nell explains that it’s not official, just something they’re considering, but Lara isn’t soothed by her downplaying the news. When Emily comes to meet them, she immediately confirms her plans with Benny, which solves the issue. She’s very stressed about the idea of planning a wedding, and while they pick cherries, she asks Lara if she had ever considered marrying Peter Duke. Lara quickly says no and then recalls waking up in shame next to Duke after they have sex for the first time. The pair go to rehearsal, and the director introduces Lara to Pallace, her understudy for Emily. Albert is late, so his lackluster understudy Lee steps in. In the present, Nell asks why the theater company would hire a bad actor as an understudy. Lara explains that he came from a wealthy family who helped fund Tom Lake and that he really just wanted to be around actors.
Chapter 9
It grows increasingly obvious that Albert has a terminal drinking problem. However, he still delivers strong performances as the play’s lead role of Stage Manager, so people let it slide. As the cast spend time together and relationships develop, Lara and Duke’s romantic relationship becomes obvious to everyone. Lara is deliriously happy, developing a strong bond with the area and with several other cast members. She’s in love with her life as well as Duke. Duke’s brother, Sebastian, eventually joins the set, which Peter is ecstatic about. The girls start to interject and to discuss Sebastian, a tennis pro whom fans called Saint Sebastian. Lara spends time watching Pallace rehearse for Cabaret and is energized by her beauty and talent. Pallace is also romantically interested in Sebastian, whom she likes because he’s different from the self-centered actors who surround her. In the present, the conversation shifts to how awful it is to date actors and to Sebastian’s tennis career, and the girls discuss how he once lost catastrophically to John McEnroe when he was 17.
Chapter 10
Sebastian becomes a much bigger part of Lara, Duke, and Pallace’s lives from this point onward. He teaches at the nearby school in Grosse Pointe Woods, coaches tennis, and drives over to Tom Lake whenever he has a free moment. He and Pallace have also begun dating and spend a lot of time with Lara and Duke. Rehearsals for the imminent premier of Our Town continue, and the cast also begin began reading for their second play, Fool for Love. During this time Lara realizes that Duke must have some deep underlying psychological problems—at one point he smashes through a glass door, and he and obsessively deconstructs and analyses his characters, staying up late and filling pages of notes about the tiniest things. In the present, the girls interrupt Lara to scold her for using pejorative language; when Lara asks how she can describe Duke’s problems without calling him insane, they suggest using the phrase “mentally ill” as an alternative. Emily then tells the group that she knows Benny has asked Joe for permission to marry her. Emily insists she wants the wedding to be as simple and as small as possible. Lara is horrified when Emily and Benny then state that they don’t want children.
Analysis: Chapters 8-10
Lara’s expectation of how her daughters should see her doesn’t always correlate with reality, as this section shows. Unfortunately, regardless of how hard Lara tries, the work she’s put into raising her children doesn't always lead to them behaving as she wants them to. Emily chooses not to tell Lara about her plans to marry Benny but feels comfortable discussing the matter with her sisters. When the subject comes up, Lara feels like Emily is ungrateful for the love and dedication she’s put into raising her. She feels that by not confiding in her, Emily is showing a lack of trust and appreciation. Regardless of Emily’s intentions, telling Nell and Maisie first excludes Lara from an important moment in her eldest daughter’s life. Ironically, Emily’s decision to withhold this information, even (as it turns out) unintentionally, parallels Lara’s own tendency to keep parts of her past from her daughters. Just as Lara editorializes her past to flavor her narrative, Emily selectively shares details of her future. Lara doesn’t see it, but the hypocrisy in her loving concern is clear to the reader. It’s not fair that Lara’s hurt, but she’s hurt all the same.
Read an in-depth character analysis of Emily Nelson.
The scene where Emily asks Lara whether she ever thought about marrying Duke demonstrates Lara’s inability to recognize she’s being unfair. She tells Emily a partial truth about Duke, just as Emily told her a partial truth about Benny by not explicitly saying they planned to marry. While Lara insists that she never seriously considered marrying Duke, it’s clear that she pictured a life with him and that their love was very important to her development as a person. The evasive, awkward way she answers Emily’s direct question mirrors the way Emily and Benny have discussed their future with Lara and Joe. In the present day, Emily’s revelation that Benny asked Joe for his blessing to marry her creates another parallel between Emily’s choices and Lara’s. While Lara ultimately chose a stable life with Joe that she knew could involve children, Emily and Benny’s decision not to have children is intended to support their own stability.
The question of whether Lara sees a future with Duke is also complicated by how all-encompassing their love affair was for her. It’s about more than just Peter Duke himself. Lara’s love for Duke gets all mixed-up with her overall love for Tom Lake and for Our Town. Her affection for the peaceful, beautiful place and her friendships with Pallace and others create a sense of belonging, and Duke is inextricable from that dreamy togetherness. In addition to this, the lovely camaraderie with her companions and her romantic associations with Michigan persist even as her relationship with Duke becomes more complicated. The former two things don’t change, even as Lara’s story introduces the more troubling side of Duke’s personality. In this section of this novel, Lara first begins to see signs of Duke’s obsession with his roles, his deteriorating mental state, and his erratic behavior, all of which foreshadow a tumultuous future. He gets overly invested in the characters he plays, so much so that he assumes their problems and pathologies as he plays them. When he plays an alcoholic, he begins to drink too much; later in life playing a drug addict will have a similar effect. He’s also emotional and destructive when he loses his temper, at one point frightening Lara and Sebastian by punching through a pane of glass. Lara doesn’t know how to identify these warning signs, and she stays with him despite his escalating unreliability.
