The Last Act Page 4

  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.”

  CHAPTER 5

  For a protracted moment, I gaped at her, stupefied.

  Two words, neither longer than two syllables, and yet I still couldn’t resolve them. I’m pregnant. Preg-nant. That’s . . . As in . . . Hang on, I know I can work this out—

  Then? Boom.

  Like a happy grenade went off.

  Clasping both hands to the sides of my face, I yipped, “You’re pregnant?”

  Suddenly, I was out of my seat. The chair had spilled behind me, and my feet were no longer attached to the ground. I was jumping up and down in the middle of the kitchen, yelling, “We’re pregnant! We’re pregnant! Oh my God, we’re pregnant!”

  This news was so incredible it simply had to be shared. Immediately. With someone. There was a guy trudging along the street outside. I ran over to the open window and shouted, “Hey! We’re pregnant!”

  He gave me a thumbs-up and a hearty, “Good job, buddy.”

  Then I started racing around the apartment and—apropos of absolutely nothing—started singing John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” undeterred by its lack of lyrics. I was the brass section. I kept time by banging my hands together.

  On the second lap, I grabbed Amanda from out of her chair and led her in this sloppy promenade that was a mash-up of a waltz and square dancing. Tommy Jump wasn’t a triple threat for nothing. She was laughing—I may have been coming off as a bit of a lunatic—which just made me want to twirl her more.

  Then, abruptly, I stopped.

  She wasn’t on the pill. And there had been a night not long ago when her diaphragm slipped. But still—

  “Wait,
” I said, “are you sure?”

  Never one for an excess of exposition, Amanda led me into our cramped bathroom, where she had stashed the three at-home pregnancy tests she had taken.

  Still dazed and a little light-headed from my frenetic celebration, I was soon looking at the evidence our lives were about to change drastically, and it came in the form of three pen-size plastic dipsticks, lined up next to the sink. One had a plus sign on it. Another displayed this thick pink line. The third, the most unambiguous of all, simply read, YES.

  Yes.

  Yes!

  I could feel my love for Amanda doubling and tripling. I could feel my love for the baby, this human being I didn’t even know yet, this thing that was no more than a lump of cells in my fiancée’s uterus but suddenly represented everything I ever really wanted from life. Forget the theater. Forget pretending to be someone else.

  Being a dad. Being the father to this child that neither of us ever had. Now that was the role of a lifetime.

  My heart was jackhammering, but it was also growing, expanding to make room for a new person in our family. Our family. We weren’t merely a couple anymore. We had become something infinitely greater, something as big as love itself.

  I was about to strike up the band for another stirring rendition of Mr. Sousa’s march when Amanda said, “We don’t have to keep it.”

  Bewildered, I looked at her, standing before me, vulnerable and filled with doubt. I had never fully convinced Amanda to see herself as I did: gorgeous, brilliant, and on a fast track toward artistic greatness. Part of her was always this poor girl from Mississippi, the daughter of a woman who cleaned other people’s houses—like that even mattered—who believed anything good that happened to her today was likely to be taken away tomorrow.

  “What do you mean we don’t have to keep it? I thought we wanted kids.”

  “We do. But the timing is awful.”

  I gently grasped her by the shoulders and spoke with more passion than I had ever summoned in twenty years onstage.

  “The timing is always awful. It was awful when we met. It was awful when I proposed to you. It was awful when you made me the happiest man ever and said yes. But you know what’s not awful? You and me together. And you know what’s even less awful? You and me bringing a baby into this world. She’ll be a little girl and she’ll look just like you and we’re going to love her and hold her and teach her everything we know, and she’s going to blossom into an incredible woman and we’re going to grow old together watching her and it’s going to be the most wonderful, most awe-inspiring, most magical thing we’ve ever seen.”

  I was looking straight into her eyes, which were so clear and blue they still sometimes startled me. I pulled her a little closer and kept going.

  “And I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, because you’re always the one who tells me that nothing easy can be worthwhile. But you’re going to be an incredible mother. And I’m going to be the best goddamn father I can be. And you’re going to paint, and I’m going to do whatever I have to do, and we’re going to look back on this moment in this crappy little apartment, in this crappy little town, and someday we’re going to say that slipped diaphragm was the best thing that ever happened to us.”

  There was this moment of stillness, when everything in the room—every sound, every movement, even our breathing—seemed to stop.

  Then, in relatively short order, three things happened.

  One, she burst into tears.

  Two, I burst into tears.

  And, three, we ended up making love. It was a deeper, more meaningful experience than all the other times we had made love, like we were rewriting the history of our baby’s conception. This was no sloppy accident. This was an intentional act by two devoted parents who wanted nothing more than to bring forth new life.

  As I lay there afterward, watching the late-summer afternoon shadows creep along the scuffed wooden floors of our tiny bedroom, I found myself gaining fresh clarity on my circumstances. Gone were all the existential questions—the why-am-I-here, what-does-it-all-mean kind of hand-wringing that sometimes troubles actors and other people who have too much time on their hands. Transcendentalism has no place in the contemplations of a man whose fiancée has just informed him she’s knocked up.

  My thoughts and priorities were now much more concrete. I wasn’t the most important person in my own life anymore. I wasn’t even in second place. The baby mattered more than anything. And the baby’s mother mattered more than anything besides the baby.

  Supporting them. Making sure their needs were met. That was the reason I was taking up space on this hot, crowded planet.

  Amanda could humbly insist we didn’t need to be rich, and it was true to a certain extent. I had hung out with some stupidly wealthy people in the theater world, and there was nothing self-actualizing about owning four houses. On some level, it was just more toilets that might someday require you to call a plumber.

  But the fact remained that—beyond the basics of food and shelter—this child would need piano lessons. I simply couldn’t abide my daughter laboring under the same handicap as her father, who went into musical theater and never learned to do anything more than plunk out a single-line melody.

  And there was no question piano lessons would be a lot more attainable with a hundred grand or two in the bank.

  I turned my head toward Amanda, who was nestled against my side, her unruly blond hair spilled across my chest. She was tracing her fingers across my biceps. I took in a deep breath and then said what I now knew to be true:

  “I think I have to do this FBI thing.”

  Her caresses didn’t stop. She just said, “I know.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The next morning, we were back at the diner: Danny, Rick Gilmartin, and I.

  Different waitress. Same place mats.

  The agents were again wearing suits, the government kind, bought on sale from a place that was never not having a sale. We small-talked until after we ordered breakfast, at which point I was antsy enough that I moved us on to the business at hand.

  “So how does this work exactly?” I asked.

  Danny looked at Gilmartin, who reached down for his briefcase and produced roughly six stapled legal-size pages. He slid them across the table.

  “AGREEMENT, made between Thomas Henry Jump (the ‘Informant’), whose address is”—and there was a blank where I, the itinerant actor, would have to figure out something to fill in—“and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (the ‘Employer’), whose offices are at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC . . .”

  And so on. I picked it up and skimmed, slowing down on the part that dealt with the money. It was “fifty thousand United States dollars” on going in, and “fifty thousand United States dollars” on getting out. It was even tax-free “per Attorney General’s directive in consultation with the Internal Revenue Service”—whatever that meant. Plus there was another “one hundred thousand United States dollars” if information I provided led to further indictments.

  I looked up from the paper. Amanda and I had agreed that if anything seemed off about the agreement, I’d walk away. This was the first thing to give me pause.

  “You guys need to be able to get an indictment before I get paid the bonus?” I said.

  “That’s right,” Danny replied.

  “What if I tell you where that cabin is, you get the documents, but you can’t get an indictment for some unforeseen reason? That hardly seems fair.”

  “Oh, we’ll get the indictments,” Danny said. “We have a saying that you can indict a ham sandwich. If we find those documents, we’ll have more indictments than we’ll know what to do with. Plus, I’d argue the more open-ended wording is in your favor. Say you don’t get the location of the cabin or any documents but Dupree tells you something else we can use. Even if all he does is implicate his secretary—
which, believe me, is not what we’re hoping for out of this operation—you still get the hundred g’s.”

  “Yeah, but why can’t it say ‘arrest’? I shouldn’t lose out on my bonus because some prosecutor messes up.”

  “Again, I’d tell you that’s not in your favor,” he said patiently. “We don’t always arrest someone. Sometimes they turn themselves in. Sometimes we indict them but never catch them, so there’s no arrest. The way we have it worded now is better for you, trust me.”

  Trust me. Already I was hearing the echo of Amanda’s voice asking, Would you trust him with your life?

  I returned my attention to the agreement. Paragraph after paragraph passed under my gaze. The final page was embossed with the FBI seal and signed “Jeff Ayers, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “Who is Jeff Ayers?” I asked.

  “He’s a deputy director,” Danny said.

  “Why am I not just signing this with one of you guys?”

  “Because we’re not high-enough level,” Gilmartin said. “Confidential informant agreements at this dollar amount need to be blessed by someone deputy-director level or higher. Chances are excellent you’ll never meet Jeff Ayers.”

  “Don’t worry,” Danny assured me. “You’re not missing much.”

  Gilmartin was again reaching into his briefcase.

  “We also have these two,” he said, procuring a pair of documents, both of them thinner than the main agreement.

  The first one read “Nondisclosure Agreement.” Its words were prickly, basically saying that if I revealed the nature of my work for the FBI, I would forfeit any payments due to me and would be liable for any damages that might arise out of my carelessness.

  The next one read “Exoneration Agreement.”

  “What’s this for?” I asked.

  “This is probably the most important thing we’ll sign,” Danny said. “It’s your Get Out of Jail Free card.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would I have to be exonerated when I didn’t actually do anything?”