2

“SERVE GOD TONIGHT, not the devil,” screeched a guy with a plastic bloody fetus on a chain around his neck, as I stood under the giant Eight O’Clock Bean Coffee cup in Times Square, crossroads of the cosmos, waiting for Kathy the intern, who was uncharacteristically late. The nutballs were out in force tonight. It was kind of hard to tell who was in Halloween costume and who was just looney toons. After apprising me of my mission to fight the Evil One, the fetus guy pointed his finger at me, shook it angrily, and then stomped off to do the same thing to a woman clutching her purse tightly to her abdomen and a man clutching her tightly to him.

My location made me easy prey for every free-floating prophet with Mr. Microphone and a sandwich board. “Ya na goverim Engleski,” I said to each comer who wanted to save my soul. It’s the only sentence I know in Serbo-Croatian, but it’s a mighty handy one.

By seven-twenty, it was seriously dark and the big bright lights were on all over Times Square. The giant Coke bottle popped its cap and a big straw came out at regular intervals. Neon blinked, sirens whined, horns honked, some guy drummed on an overturned plastic bucket, the preachers and firebrands screamed from their soapboxes. The whole city smelled like the inside of a bus station. It was giving me a headache.

Where was Kathy the intern? I wasn’t sure what costume she was wearing, but I was easily recognizable. Hard to miss a tall, undead woman with rusty Brillo Pad hair, even in Times Square.

The reason I had arranged with Kathy to meet here before going to Hojo’s was so I could brief her a little more, tell her not to mention NBC, rival comedian Noriko Mori, or sumo wrestling to Tamayo Scheinman. Claire Thibodeaux was anchoring tonight, and would be meeting up with us later, so I had plenty of time to tell Kathy not to mention Jess, Washington, or the British embassy to Claire. Since Sally wasn’t coming, I didn’t have to tell Kathy not to bring up dead pets, bad boyfriends, or medical experiments. Maybe I worry too much, but you never know what might come up in conversation and send a sensitive and vulnerable friend into a tailspin.

By seven-thirty, after a full-frontal assault by the Jews for Jesus, one of whom answered me in Serbo-Croatian, I gave up and went to Hojo’s. Kathy would figure it out. We’d picked the Hojo’s restaurant in Times Square because it was central and we all liked it for different reasons, Kathy because it looked just like the one in her hometown in rural Florida, with the same decor, the same trademark orange-and-turquoise color scheme. She found it surprising to find anything in New York City that was just like back home. Tamayo and I liked it because it was such an anachronism. We liked to sit at the bar in the back, right out of 1962, and share a pitcher of anachronistic cocktails, like Rob Roys and sidecars, which were hyped on orange-and-turquoise placards on the windows.

Kathy was nowhere to be seen, but Tamayo was at the bar, with her Walkman on, dancing in her seat, singing along audibly to every third word. She was dressed like Marilyn Monroe.

“Hey, you old hooker,” Tamayo said, loudly enough that people in the restaurant turned to stare at me. It would have been nice to be unobtrusive, but hard to be, looking the way I looked and with Tamayo announcing me.

We hugged. If anyone looked like a hooker, it was her. What a sight she was, Japanese face, platinum-blond wig, all five foot four of her poured into a replica of Marilyn’s Happy Birthday Mr. President dress, her thin arms in sparkly white gloves. We both had a fondness for long gloves. There just aren’t enough occasions in life to wear them.

“We’re the only people in here in costume,” I said.

“I’m not in costume.”

I laughed. “Have you seen my intern Kathy?”

“No, but I don’t know what she looks like.”

“She knows what you look like. She’d introduce herself.”

The bartender put a full pitcher of something greenish in front of Tamayo and she said, “Bartender, another glass for my dead friend.”

“No thanks. I’ll just have a coffee.”

“No gimlet?” Tamayo said.

“I don’t want to get drunk. Not even tipsy.”

“But it’s Halloween.…”

Tamayo had that special light in her eyes, the “Let’s crash a debutante ball and then go throw money and roses at gay male strippers” light.

“Listen,” I said. “Kathy is a nice kid, she’s very serious.…”

“So what?”

“I just don’t want anything like the dance-theater incident … or the bar brawl …”

“But we didn’t start that brawl, Robin. We tried to walk away.…”

“I thought maybe we could try being lower-key tonight. The kid looks up to me, no shit, and it wouldn’t do for her to see me drunk, swinging my bra above my head in a biker bar, for example.”

“Hogs and Heifers isn’t a real biker bar,” Tamayo said.

“Nevertheless, the keyword for tonight is ‘decorum.’”

“Decorum,” Tamayo said, puzzled, cocking her head slightly like a dog, pretending she didn’t know what it meant. “What’s the intern like?”

“Young, sweet, and twenty, so she’s not even old enough to drink.”

“There are two kinds of women in the world, Robin, those who laugh at fart jokes, and those who don’t. Does your intern laugh at fart jokes? Quality fart jokes, I mean.”

“I really have no idea. Pulleeze don’t get me into any trouble tonight. I’m really tired—it’s been a day from hell—and I just don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep up with you.”

Going on a tear with Tamayo requires a lot of energy, and a working woman like me needs a course of B-12 shots in preparation. The last spree I went on with her started with her one-woman show at La Mama, segued into a raucous NYU summer-school party, cruised through a couple of weird East Village bars, and ended with us getting in a bar brawl with a bunch of no-neck recently thawed cavemen from somewhere in Staten Island where toxic waste had apparently contaminated the groundwater and caused stunted brainstems and general necklessness. (There ought to be a telethon.) The cops were called, and it ended up in the gossip columns the next day. I didn’t need that kind of publicity either.

Besides. I was getting a little old for barroom rough-housing.

“Here, take one of these,” Tamayo said, slipping me a big fat pill.

She showed me the bottle.

“Doc Nature Seniors. Tamayo, these are vitamins for senior citizens.”

“Mega, time-release vitamins for senior citizens. Really powerful. You can get a serious vitamin buzz off them,” Tamayo said. “They’re all natural, with important amino acids and herbs and all that. They’re even better than those special New York Formula vitamins.”

I took it with my coffee.

“I had a rough day too,” she said. “Got up at one-thirty, ate Count Chocula with chocolate milk, watched the cartoon channel for an hour, had a tarot reading with Sally, then did my Comedy Central taping,” Tamayo said.

It was just a tad annoying to a grownup like me to be friends with people who could sleep until the afternoon and get away with it, especially at a time when I had been working very hard to get and stay in touch with my inner grownup. Nigh thirty, and Tamayo still lives like Pippi Longstocking, which is why she was rumored to be chapters one and seven in ANN TV psychologist and best-selling author Solange Stevenson’s upcoming self-help book, The Pippi Longstocking Complex: Girls Who Won’t Grow Up.

“How was your taping?” I asked.

“Good, did three promos, that’s where I got this costume. I’m up to cohost a new show for them.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah, and a producer is interested in my movie.”

“Man, when I left, things weren’t going so good for you.”

“That was then. This is now,” she said, and she began to tell me about the UFO movie she was writing, inspired by one of the special reports we did on alien abductions. It was about a young woman who gets abducted by a UFO and is taken to a planet where she and other humans are farmed for bodily fluids used to make an inhalable aphrodisiac.

“There are three genders on this planet,” she said. “All three are needed to procreate, and marriages are arranged by the government. Thus the need for aphrodisiacs, inhalable, because the creatures on this planet have a combination nose and mouth. A big face hole. Did I mention they communicate not with words but with a combination of high-pitched squeaks and foul smells?”

“No, you didn’t.”

In Tamayo’s universe, anything was possible.

“Nobody ages on the planet, because it is perched right on the edge of a black hole, which is like being on the wrong end of an inverted volcano, a volcano that sucks in instead of spewing forth.”

“That would … suck.”

“But the planet isn’t sucked in, because it’s caught equally between the gravitational pull of two competing black holes. It’s a cosmic standoff. This gravitational hammock nestles the inhabitants at such a point that their atoms virtually stop degenerating. Time has almost stopped. The downside is, everyone weighs a lot more,” she said. “Did I tell you about the free-floating inhalable fat molecules that hover about the planet, and during electrical storms the fat gets emulsified and falls to the earth in big mucusy globs, like so much frog spawn?”

“Stop! You’re making me hungry.”

She said something else, but I didn’t hear her. I thought I saw Kathy come in with another girl. When they moved out of the shadow of the doorway, I saw they were just a couple of tourist girls, loaded down with bags from Shubert Alley gift shops.

“It’s almost eight. Where is Kathy? She’s never late,” I said.

“She knows to come here, right?” Tamayo asked, a note of irritation in her voice.

“Yeah, we discussed it yesterday and I left a reminder on her voice mail this morning before I left L.A.”

“Your answering machine at home was off today. Maybe she called, and when there was no answer, she used that as an excuse to flake and go out with some brooding boys instead of her boss.”

“No, she wanted to go out with us.”

“Of course she’d say that to you.”

“She did. I told you, she looks up to me.”

“Well, yeah, she looks up to you. That’s why she can’t be herself around you. She wants to impress you. What fun is that?”

For all of a week, I’d been Tamayo’s boss. She just wouldn’t take my being her boss seriously—she literally laughed out loud when I gave her orders—and when it became clear we could be friends or boss-employee but not both, she decided that she should devote herself to comedy. A half-hour before I was told to fire her for yet another smoking infraction, she quit.

I was ready to go back out to the giant coffee cup when Tamayo sighed deeply and said, “Hand me your phone. What’s her number?”

She dialed and got Kathy’s answering machine. “Kathy, this is Tamayo, Robin’s friend. We are at Hojo’s and heading down soon to the parade. Then we’re going to get you roaring drunk and we’re going to rumble with some sailors.” Tamayo winked at me. “Call us at—” and she left my cell-phone number.

“We’re covered now,” she said.

“I have such a bad feeling …” I said.

“You worry too much,” Tamayo said, and because I didn’t have enough to worry about already, she tried to distract me with talk of our friend Claire’s problems. Claire had recently broken up with a rising-star congressman, which had made her uncharacteristically hysterical, and shopaholic. The latest news was that a thinly disguised version of Claire was also in Solange Stevenson’s book and Claire was not thrilled about it. (Reportedly and surprisingly, I was not in her book.) As a comic, Tamayo had to be childlike. Union rules. So she was proud to be the standard-bearer for Pippi. But Claire was a high-profile reporter who, of late, had worried about her reputation.

But between the two, Kathy and Claire, I was more worried about Kathy. For some reason, I thought everything would turn out wonderfully in Claire’s life. I called home. There was one new message, from Mike, saying he’d definitely be in town for the weekend and hoped we could get together.

I called my voice mail at work and heard: “Robin, this is Kathy.” Kathy was speaking in a loud whisper, sounding like she was trying not to giggle. “I know I’m supposed to meet you, but I’m in this man’s closet and, don’t laugh, his wife just came in and … Oh, gotta go!”

The machine beeped and I heard: “October 31, 7:54 P.M.”—the time the message was left by Kathy.

I hung up and said, “She’s stuck in a married man’s closet.”

“I told you she wasn’t as sweet as you thought,” Tamayo said.

“Why did she call my voice mail instead of my cell phone, or my home number?”

“She’s in a closet, which is probably dark; she couldn’t read her address book; so she called a number she knew by heart.”

“Who is this married man?”

“None of our business,” Tamayo said. “She’s your intern, not your daughter. It’s a mistake to get too involved in interns’ personal lives. As soon as the husband gets the wife out of there, Kathy can make her escape.”

“But a married man …” I said. True, Kathy didn’t sound too worried on the phone. Still, I couldn’t help thinking of her, sitting huddled in some dark closet. What if she had to pee while she was in the closet? Or sneeze? Kathy was good at being quiet, though. She sneezed like a mouse, with tiny “tu” sneezes.

I’d been there—in a married man’s closet, I mean. Just after I moved to New York to go to NYU, my history prof invited me to stop by his place to discuss my grade—he gave me 60 percent for a paper and I felt I deserved at least a 90 percent. I was so naïve that I very innocently got talked into the bedroom, which he called his “study.” Long story short, his wife came home early, because they were trying to have a baby and her temperature was right. So, while I was there, she pulled him into bed and they had sex. I was very likely present for the conception of their first kid.

“If you ever run into that kid you’ll have to tell her you knew her way back when,” Tamayo said after I told her this.

“The point is, there could be an innocent explanation for Kathy being in that closet.”

Tamayo poured herself another gimlet and said, “I dunno. Sounds to me like Kathy’s involved in some hanky-panky that you can’t see through your illusions about her.”

Granted, maybe I did have a few illusions about Kathy, a petite brunette with curls, big green eyes, an expressive face, and an enthusiasm just shy of religious ecstasy. When I imagined Kathy the intern landing in New York, I imagined her as one of those black-and-white movie heroines from the 1930s and ’40s, the spunky, young, virginal, wide-eyed girl clutching her suitcase with one gloved hand and holding her beribboned hat on her head with the other. Kathy wasn’t quite that, but she sure looked like the 1990s version. No tattoos, no unusual piercings, she dressed in demure, serviceable prep clothes, good sweaters, comfortable shoes. A nice kid, hardworking, and her mother loved her. Just before she arrived, I received a secret letter from Mother Loblaws, asking me to keep an eye out for her “precious first baby.”

“Kathy is a very trusting, open person so naturally I worry about someone taking advantage of her,” she wrote.

She was very open and trusting. That’s one of the things I liked about her, that freshness that had her on speaking terms with everyone from Tom, the panhandler who hung outside our building, to George Dunbar, president of the network, or, as Kathy knew them, Mr. Tom and Mr. George. That said a lot about her, I thought, the way she could be both formal with the “Mr.”s and casual with the first names. The Kathy I knew had an easy yet proper friendliness to her—more proper than easy, I hoped.

As you can imagine, the letter from Kathy’s mom motivated my good intentions. I started off gangbusters, helping Kathy find an affordable summer sublet and a roommate, introducing her to some of the classy, cultural stuff in New York, and taking her to a couple of editorial meetings. But then I got wrapped up in work and in solving the problems of my insane girlfriends, and instead of paying attention to Kathy I gave her a lot of busywork and sent her out in the field with the crew to shoot stock shots. Eventually she found some kind of social life outside of work, and I kinda forgot about her.

We were about to pay the bartender and head downtown to the Halloween Parade when my phone rang. It was Donna, Kathy’s roommate, returning my call.

“Where’s Kathy?” I said.

“She had to go meet an old friend of yours about a story on your behalf, because you were going to be late getting in from the West Coast,” Donna said.

“An old friend of mine?”

“That was the message she left on our answering machine.”

“Which old friend?”

“I don’t know.”

“The last message I got from her wasn’t about that. What else did she say? What kind of story?”

“A murder story.”

“A murder story? Do you know where she was supposed to meet this old friend?”

“Some Irish bar. Paddy Fitzgerald’s. Does that sound right? On Seventh in the 50s.”

“Yeah. I know the place. Did she say when?”

“After work.”

“Donna, was Kathy involved with a man that you know of?”

“Kathy??? I don’t think so. She never mentioned one.”

“Did she say anything else in her message?”

“Just something about how she was going to do it, she was going to take the initiative on a story.”

After I hung up, Tamayo said, “She went to meet some old friend of yours?”

“Yeah. I wonder who? It’s supposedly about a murder. I hope it’s not some nutty fan, although I don’t have too many of those since I went off the air.” My most fervently misguided fan, Elroy, was currently in a prison psych ward on heavy medication, and the rest had transferred their affections to other television personalities.

“Maybe it’s some cranky ex-boyfriend of yours playing a joke,” Tamayo said. “Someone who knows about you and your unhealthy interest in murder.”

An ex-boyfriend. A terrible shiver went through me at those words.

Professor Balsam still taught at NYU and from what I heard he still had a thing for young coeds. But I was far too old for him now, so he wouldn’t have contacted me in the first place. Howard Gollis, a dark renaissance-man comic-writer type, wasn’t in town, wasn’t married, and in any event had decided that I no longer existed on his planet. Most of my other ex-boyfriends were more or less happily paired off and/or not the cheating kind. God, I hoped it wasn’t Chuck Turner, my back-home ex-boyfriend, in New York with his wife. Him I could easily see sneaking in a liaison while his wife was at Bloomie’s spending all his money.

My intern had gone out to meet an old friend of mine about a murder and ended up in a married man’s closet. Naturally, this concerned me.