The brownstone, p.15
The Brownstone, page 15
Sissy had spent a lot of time smartening her up. She picked out her wardrobe, rearranged her hair, selected her boyfriends. Sissy had always said, “It doesn’t make any difference if you’re right or wrong—just as long as you’re positive.”
Positive. How long since she’d lost the power to be really positive? Lost the power to be herself? Sissy would help her, she thought. Sissy would help her just like she used to. Chandal started walking, suddenly in a hurry to get home.
Justin had left the brownstone earlier that morning with the rotten taste of being poor in his mouth. After scraping off the front steps and emptying the garbage, he walked downtown “dialoging it” all the way. The hammer blows of the workmen patching up Broadway rattled the windows and shook the streets. He left word on the service for Chandal to meet him at the Sacred Cow at seven P.M. for dinner. The Sacred Cow was their favorite restaurant, class at affordable prices. A theatrical crowd, singing waiters, people they knew at the bar. Billy had introduced Justin to the Sacred Cow. They had a lot of memories there. The guy at the bar who was writing a novel on bar napkins. He’d been writing the same novel for twenty years, he said. They’d tried to figure out how many napkins that would be. Billy had sprung for dinner the night before Justin and Chandal were married. Justin and Chandal and Billy and what’s-her-name. An agreeable blonde with a commendable figure. Another name on Billy’s long list. Memories. A lot of memories.
Thirty minutes late for casting, Justin stumbled into the dark and jammed rehearsal studio at Seventy-second.
“You’re late,” said the stage manager, making a note on his clipboard beside Justin’s name.
Justin turned and focused on the thin, fanatical face. Jesus, after all these years in the business, fooled again. Yesterday the guy had looked like a gem. Good credentials, intelligent, good-natured, and now—damn. Like a thousand other bums, he was one more with the gift for pretending to be other than he was.
The stage manager’s weak eyes glittered behind his glasses. “They’re waiting for you,” he said and glanced at Fein, who sat silently with tight lips, legs crossed, arms folded, beside the small table. A row back sat Bernie Stark, a tense smile hovering on his lips. His hand fluttered in greeting.
Good ole Bernie, thought Justin. Trying to make the best of a piss poor situation.
“Get me a cup of coffee, will you?” he said to the stage manager, who lifted his brow disdainfully. Justin didn’t give him a chance to challenge him, as he took his seat at the table.
Fein pushed over the list of actors, his diamonds catching the light. “It doesn’t look good, keeping these people waiting,” he said stonily.
Justin glanced at the sheet of paper as he lit a cigarette. “Sorry, I got hung up. If they get the job, they won’t care.” Justin forced a grin. “How you doing?”
“Okay.” Fein relaxed. “Glad you got here.”
Bernie looked happier. He took a package of Life Savers from his jacket and put two into his mouth. “Want a mint?” he asked.
“No, thanks.” Good God, thought Justin, listening to Bernie suck the mints, his heavy breathing filling the room. Was he going to have to listen to that all day? Fein and Stark. The Shuberts, they weren’t. “Come on; let’s go,” he said. “Who’s first?”
The stage manager called an actress who hustled up to the table trying to look sexier than she was and handed Justin a five-by-seven index card. Justin eyed her coldly.
“Miss Richards. Sit down, please.”
“Thank you,” she said, dropping herself into the chair like a bundle of loose rags. “Gee, I really like the script. It’s great, you know.”
“Tell me, Miss Richards—”
“You can call me Billie.”
“Sure. How tall are you?” asked Justin, his mind elsewhere.
“Five-ten.”
Justin never heard the answer. By some untraceable miscalculation, he had not seen Magdalen since Thursday, or was it Friday? He could not remember. “Here, read this.” He handed Billie a script. Magdalen’s image kept flashing before his eyes. With an effort, he concentrated on the actress as she read for the role of Carole, a repressed lesbian. Looking away, he watched Stark lean forward, Life Savers in hand—he was clearly impressed. Justin’s lips tightened and he made a cryptic note on her card. This actress uses tricks. With her—what you see is what you get. He looked up—the actress put a hand on her hip and gave a practiced toss of her head, sending her mop of long tangled hair swirling around her face. Justin shook his head. Harvey gave a significant nod to Justin—Justin felt like laughing in his face. Goddamn empty people, he thought. “Okay, that’s enough.” The actress sat down. “Do you have previous theater experience?” he asked.
“Mainly modeling, but I’m willing to learn.” She gave Justin a coy smile and adjusted the straps of her bra.
Justin angrily glanced at the two producers. After ten years in the theater, he was still dealing with amateurs! He looked back at the girl and smiled. “Would you remove your clothes, please?” Justin’s smile grew wider as Fein and Stark squirmed in their chairs.
“Hey, wait a minute—whaddya mean take my clothes off?” she asked.
“I’m curious to see how you look in the nude.”
She considered. “Do I have to take my pants off, too?” she asked.
“I want you to disrobe completely,” Justin said offhandedly, tossing his felt pen on the table. She’s a real bitch, said the voice within him. Make her suffer.
The girl unbuttoned the top button of her blouse. “Is it artistic nudity?” She moved down to the second button.
“Oh, sure,” said Justin. Behind him, Stark sucked in air noisily, absorbed in the girl’s hand as it finished undoing the blouse.
Billie Richards giggled, shrugged a shoulder free. “Am I doing okay?”
Harvey put his hand on Justin’s shoulder. “Miss... uh... Richards, would you mind waiting outside, please...?”
The girl looked hurt, moved out of the room, still half-dressed.
Justin shrugged Fein’s hand from his shoulder. “The next time you put a hand on me—”
“Ssh! Calm down,” said Fein, his face darkening. “Listen, Justin, we have our reputations on the line here....”
“Can it.” Justin picked up his pen, his cigarettes.
“Let’s talk about it.” Fein continued to plead his cause, showing calculated humility, learned no doubt from his rich father. Stark brooded silently in a corner. Justin allowed himself to be appeased. Casting continued. By lunchtime, Justin had seen thirty actresses, none of whom he liked.
***
It was getting more difficult for Chandal to relate to her surroundings. Standing in the hallway of the brownstone, she had the feeling that she’d never been there before.
Mechanically, she stared down the long tunnel-like hallway. She pictured Justin wandering from the kitchen to the spare room directly opposite. Did the spare room door just close? She wasn’t sure. Did she wish to believe that it had? No, that would mean she was hallucinating. Living room to her left, door open—it all looked familiar now. Bedroom to the right. Reality, no matter how grim, was better than illusion, she thought. None of this connected. Without knowing why, she felt a kind of panic. The nursery! Crushed between the spare room and the living room, it remained womb-like, hidden. A room of secrets, she thought. Without removing her coat, she approached the nursery door, paused, and then entered.
Again, as before, Chandal felt another presence within the room. Her conflict welled up inside her and she felt at the end of her resistance. She knew she wasn’t imagining it—the covers on the bed had again shown the impression of a frail body. She was positive that she had straightened the bed before leaving the room this morning.
The next moments were lost in a mumbling confusion. She was half-convinced that Justin was all part of this, but she didn’t understand exactly how.
She closed the nursery door, opened the bedroom door.
The picture was exactly where she’d left it. In the lower drawer of her dresser. She stared at the face in the picture for a long time. Then, without realizing it, she began to hum a song to herself that she’d never heard before. She was still humming ten minutes later and rocking unsteadily, back and forth on her feet, when the doorbell rang.
When Sissy entered the front door of the brownstone, she couldn’t believe what she saw. Chandal had large, black circles under her eyes and her hair was wind-blown and disheveled. With coat half-on, half-off, she stood trembling and barefoot, twisting one foot on top of the other.
“Oh, my God! Chandal, what’s wrong?”
Chandal could not move from the doorway. Yet, she wanted to run. Her face was flushed and tears streamed down her cheeks, but her legs remained rooted.
“Oh, baby—here, let me help you,” Sissy soothed.
She removed Chandal’s coat and sat her down in the living room. After helping her force down two aspirins, Sissy went into the kitchen and put on a kettle of water for tea. Then she called her office and told them that she would be unable to return to work. All this took twenty minutes.
Placing a hot cup of tea in front of Chandal, Sissy brushed a few hairs away from her face. “Come on, drink this.”
Chandal stared at her.
“What’s wrong, for heaven’s sake? Come on, you can tell me.”
“Sissy, I think I’m going out of my mind,” she finally said.
“Why—what’s happened?”
“Come with me. I want to show you something.” Chandal took Sissy by the hand and led her to the bedroom where the picture lay on the bed. She picked it up and stared at it for a moment and then handed it to Sissy. “This picture—what do you see?” she asked.
Sissy looked at the picture blankly. “I don’t see much of anything.”
“A face—you don’t see a face in that picture?”
After carefully considering the possibility, Sissy’s answer was still no.
Chandal snatched the picture back, threw it into the dresser, and slammed the drawer shut. It took Sissy the next ten minutes to calm Chandal down.
“You don’t understand—it’s not just the picture,” said Chandal. “There have been things, other things. Incident after incident. First the bell; next the voices; then Justin acting funny—none of it makes sense!”
“But I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” Sissy felt helpless—Chandal wasn’t making any sense.
Suddenly Chandal insisted that they leave the house, that she was sure people were listening to their conversation. She put on her shoes. They moved outside and walked toward the park. Chandal looked back over her shoulder every third step.
They went to the playground and Chandal walked around for a while, breathing in the crisp air. It was a sharp, frosty day and she started to feel a lot better. She watched two boys on the parallel bars and thought they looked like little bears, all bundled up from head to toe in their woolen outfits.
Sissy sat on the bench and talked to a stranger while Chandal explored the entire playground alone. From time to time, Sissy would glance around to see if Chandal was all right. She was surprised to see Chandal playing ball with the children. There were three of them, and the very dark boy yelled out for Sissy to join them.
“I don’t know how!” she shouted.
“Don’t worry, I’ll show you!”
After throwing the ball around, Sissy missing it on every occasion, Chandal decided that they should all go to the zoo. The boys declined. “How about you?” asked Chandal.
Sissy smiled. “Why not?”
The afternoon sun touched the plateglass windows and turned them a pinkish-gold, the kind of gold found in the early days of color films. The girls kept shifting from one side of the street to the other trying to keep warm.
They entered the zoo at Sixty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue and were immediately hit in the face with a balloon. The Yum Yum hotdog man was doing a great business, having positioned himself alongside a green and moldy sign that read: “TO THE ZOO AND CAFETERIA.” The next sign told them that they had to be out by seven P.M. Chandal hadn’t said much, but it was obvious that she grew more relaxed as she removed herself from the vicinity of the brownstone.
The closest building to the entrance was the Monkey House. “Let’s go inside,” said Sissy. “I think I have some relatives in here.” What she came up with was her grandfather. The sign said that this unique creature was a Wanderoo, but Sissy declared that she knew otherwise. His face was covered with a huge mop of gray hair that resembled a beard, and his two bloodshot eyes rolled around in his head in search of all the answers.
“Yep, that’s Gramps, all right. I’m sure of it!” Sissy laughed and they moved on to the next cage, where the mandril was wolfing down a handful of lettuce. The sign explained that his colorful markings helped to make him sexually more attractive to the dully colored female.
“With a face like that, he needs a little color!” Sissy exclaimed.
Chandal suddenly felt a hard gaze on the back of her neck. She turned and discovered a huge chimpanzee staring at her from the next cage. He looked middle-aged and appeared to be going bald. He expressed surprise at seeing Chandal, then fear and anger. Something akin to the emotions Chandal had experienced in the last two weeks. He had hands for feet and made her feel very uneasy.
“Sissy?”
“What?” She turned to face Chandal.
“Do you believe in the supernatural?”
“The supernatural?” She shrugged. “Like what?”
“You know, things we know nothing about. Things that you can’t see, but that you know are there.”
“I don’t think so—why?”
Chandal smiled weakly. “Nothing. It’s not important.”
They stood outside for a moment and watched a young man who wore clown-face makeup passing out free balloons with a big sign across his chest which read: PLEASE TIP. People would pass him a quarter and he’d go into his routine, that of making clever remarks while shaping a balloon into a small animal—a mouse, a dog, or a lion. He accomplished this in a matter of seconds.
Chandal had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Sissy insisted that she eat something. Five minutes later, they sat inside the cafeteria. Sissy had French fries—the salt was nowhere to be found—a flat beer, and a cheeseburger, too well done.
Chandal ate very little. “I don’t think Justin loves me anymore.” She had a hard time looking at Sissy.
At first Sissy laughed, sure that Chandal must be joking. Then she discovered how serious she really was. “Don’t be silly—you’re imagining things.”
“I am not imagining things!” Chandal slammed her cup on the table, then glanced around. Her voice was starting to carry and people were paying attention.
As Chandal bent low to speak with her, Sissy asked the usual list of pious, disrespectful questions. “Is he seeing another woman?”
“I think so—yes.”
Sissy paused. “My ex...” she said in a trembling voice. She removed a Kleenex hastily from her bag and dabbed around her eyes. Just the mention of Sissy’s ex-husband was enough to evoke tears, and Chandal stared at her, wondering. Two years since their divorce was final, and still Sissy—sensible, intelligent Sissy—could go blurry-eyed at the mention of Kevin Steele’s name. “When it comes to other women,” Sissy went on, sounding like she had a cold, “don’t trust a husband. Not any husband. Men are such dreamers. Marriage, even the best marriage, isn’t...” Her voice went on and on about married men and Kevin Steele, most specifically, who had been caught after an office party making love to a temporary secretary.
Chandal’s mind started to wander as Sissy talked on. Men and women... She found her gaze fixed on a little brown-haired girl who played with the tail of a bronzed lion. Another child rode the lion’s back, pretending that the ears were reins. A third little boy came over and slapped the lion in the face in open defiance of all who looked on.
“But in your case,” Sissy continued, “you’re about to have his baby.”
And Chandal said, “It wouldn’t mean anything if he didn’t love me.” She changed the subject. “By the way, how did it all work out? With the man, I mean. The one you met at our party.”
“Oh, that. He was tacky,” brooded Sissy.
“Oh, I don’t know. I thought he was rather nice.”
“He had a cheap little image of me in his mind that I didn’t like.” She paused. “My book—did you like it?”
“What?”
“The book of poetry I gave you at the party.”
“Oh, yes. It was all right.” She hadn’t read it.
“What do you mean, all right?”
“You know me. I’m not usually much interested in anything that doesn’t have a plot.”
“Pity.” Sissy shook her head in honest bewilderment as a young Puerto Rican boy came through the cafeteria, the disco music on his radio ripping through the air like a buzz saw.
“Look, let’s get out of here, okay?” Chandal said.
They left the cafeteria.
“You’re not thinking of divorce, are you?” asked Sissy.
“No!” Chandal ducked into the Elephant House. Sissy followed after her. They stopped in front of an Indian elephant named Tina, who was sucking up hay faster than it could be laid down.
“Then what are you going to do?” persisted Sissy.
“I don’t know. What would you do?”
“Leave him, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“Who is she—do you know her?”
Chandal didn’t have the answer.
They moved outside, past the First-Aid/Lost Children station and ended up looking at Ginny, who was eating up every dry leaf she could scrounge. She was, it was noted, a female eland who was presented to the zoo by Gordon’s Dry Gin Company, March 23, 1976.
“Sissy, I want you to do me a favor.”
“Sure, anything.”
“I want you to stay at my place for a couple of nights, okay? It’s important to me.”
Sissy agreed and they started to walk again, past the golden pheasant, the wood duck, the Barbary sheep, and the antelope. A little boy said good-bye to the antelope; the antelope seemed to regret the child’s departure. Sissy said good-bye to Chandal and left. She would return to the brownstone at eight.
