ST. VINCENT’S HOSPITAL ON WEST 11th Street is staffed by nurses, mostly Irish and Italian, who are supervised by pale, winged creatures called Sisters. These angels glide through the corridors on crepe soles and peer at patients with God-haunted eyes. The rest of the time, I believe, they spend in the hospital’s rococo chapel praying for victory over Satan, dust, infection and malpractice suits.
The attendant who flipped me onto a tea cart and trundled me up to surgery also brought me down an hour later. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he asked. Professional cheer, a conspiracy to deny pain, I thought, and if I’d been able to speak – my larynx was too sore for that – I would have disagreed. I reminded myself to tell him later that I didn’t mind having a tube run up my nose and down my throat but I hated being told it was nothing.
The verdict was delivered by a resident named Dr. Marshall later the same day, while Angela Michaels was sitting by my bed. “Bruce, we found a low-grade infection in your lower lobar region. A touch of PCP. Antibiotics will fix it.”
“See, there’s nothing to worry about,” Angela chimed in.
More false cheer. What was it about hospitals that turned everyone into bearers of disinformation? I turned toward Angela. “Nothing to worry about unless I want to live more than a year.” My voice was still croaky.
“Now, now,” Dr. Marshall put in, taking a Charm from her pocket, unwrapping it and popping it in her mouth. “We have some very effective drugs.”
She named several. They sounded like science-fiction titles. The Seven Moons of Septra. The Ant-People of Dapsone. The Prophecies of Clindamycin. I would take Septra intravenously for 24 hours. After that I would go home and pop it in pill form.
We discussed allergenic reactions to the IV – nothing to worry about there either, staff standing by to prevent anaphylactic shock. She winked at me when she said this. Obviously I was being treated to the private lingo of the trade, a sign of esteem. Finally I nodded and she left, secure in my acquiescence.
I know why hospitals brought out an old, ugly side of me. It wasn’t just the pain and indignity of tubes and syringes and taps, it was the humiliation of having your body treated like a piece of meat. You check something precious at the door of any hospital – yourself. You’re reduced to a set of entrails and ganglia, bowel movements and wounds. I used to hate being sick at home with my mother – it increased her power over me ten-fold. And here I was, pinned to a bed while two nurses wheeled in the IV apparatus. One nurse held my forearm, the other kept a blood pressure gauge in place as she inserted the needle in the back of my hand, taped it tightly, observed the life-giving ichor flowing into my veins.
“Well now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she chirped. I had a sudden idea for a hospital cantata – choruses of health-care workers singing that line in a five-part fugue.
“It was okay,” I murmured.
“Now your friend can sit here again.”
Angela continued dispensing her particular brand of optimism. “Bruce dear, you’re lucky to be in St. Vincent’s. I spent three weeks here when I had my radical, and they couldn’t have been nicer.”
Her voice rose slightly. Her face, once slender but now, in her late forties, round and slightly jowly, beamed with good will. It was true – she had spent three awful weeks here while they cut off her left breast, some years back. But she had survived. What did I have to complain about? Yet.
“Now I want you to work on some positive imaging. You know what that is?”
I shook my head.
“They have a lady who comes around three days a week and teaches it. It’s a mind-control thing.”
I groaned. I might have known.
Angela rummaged in her tote bag. “I also brought you something from Integral Yoga.” She cast a look at the door. “I know you’re not supposed to eat anything from outside.” She took out some small objects. They looked like shrunken human heads. “Shiitake mushrooms,” she said, “dynamite for the immune system. They cost eighteen dollars a pound. I could only afford three.” She looked around again. “I’ll slip them in the drawer here. You nibble on them when you feel like it.” I closed my eyes, hearing the drawer in the nightstand open and close. When I opened them again, Angela was sitting demurely, smoothing her skirt. Supervisor Sister had just glided in and was looking at us suspiciously. “Gifts of food are not encouraged,” she said.
“I know that, Sister.”
A pause. Maybe it was against their creed to catch someone in a lie. A nod and she glided off. Angela put her hand over her mouth. A school kid who had just evaded punishment. I had to laugh – my first laugh of the past few days. “Angela,” I said, “who gives the best hug in the world?”
It was an old joke. She stood up. “I do, you silly twerp.” She proceeded to demonstrate her talent. It was a little tricky with the IV stand, the slithery feed lines, my prone position, but she managed. Her face against mine smelled of cucumber soap – she was addicted to vegetable cleansing agents. A wave of sensuality went through me. I wasn’t ready to give up the smells of the world, not by a long shot.
“Did you bring some music?” she asked, disengaging.
I pointed to my Walkman and a pile of tapes.
“When you’re tired of those, I’ll bring some of my own.”
Angela had a gorgeous alto voice and soloed regularly at churches around town. She had also given a couple of song recitals. She was especially notable for her Schumann – Der Nussbaum could break your heart. After one of her church solos, I had been introduced by mutual friends. After that, music kept us together.
“I have to go now,” she whispered, “I have an audition.”
Another chaste kiss on my forehead. She turned. That’s when I noticed it. “Angela!”
She stopped, swiveled her head slowly around “Ye-e-e-e-s?”
“What’s that?”
She giggled. “That’s my mouse tail. I thought you’d get a kick out of it.” She reached down and touched the wiry grey fabric dropping below the hem of her skirt.
I began to laugh. She looked deliriously happy. “It’s from my days in the Wicca coven. The mouse was my totem animal.”
My lungs hurt from laughing.
“I didn’t mind most of it but walking through the park at dawn on the summer solstice was too much. We might have been killed.” She batted her eyes. “I guess you could call me a recovering witch.”
And she was gone.
I slept for a while, the Valium still working in my veins. It was a pleasant sleep, inside a soft white haze. When I came out of it, Miles Halloran was standing in the doorway. It was late in the afternoon. He arched an eyebrow under his henna pompadour and brought forth a nosegay of violets. “I came to see if you’re still alive,” he said.
I motioned him in, and he oozed forward in an eel-like motion. Yet he was surprisingly graceful. He had been a dancer in The Red Shoes. He was British by birth.
He peered down at me. “Not dead yet?”
“No.”
He sighed. “Stubborn as usual.”
He dropped the nosegay in my water glass. He gestured toward the chair. “May I?”
He sat down and crossed his long legs. I thought, not for the first time, that he looked like one of those elongated figures by El Greco. But he was tanned, not a ghostly white – the result of numerous trips to Puerto Rico. He kept an apartment there.
“Tell me what they’ve done to you.” He nodded toward the IV stand. “Besides fill you with their lethal mixtures.”
I told him, briefly, about the procedure, my voice still hoarse. He seemed uncomfortable. It struck me for the first time that he might be one of those people made nervous by illness.
“I found a note from David Donnenfeld under my door last night. He said you’ve been making no end of trouble.” He paused. “I got back just in time.”
That was my cue, very welcome, to change the subject. “Where were you, Miles?”
“Idra. Or should I say Hydra? I think the latter. I’ve never climbed so many steps in my life. The whole place is one giant staircase.”
I remembered the island. I had gone there once, in another life, when Tim Currier and I were living together.
“I was in Athens,” he went on, “and I thought, why not visit Andrew Bullard? He has a house on that wretched island at the top, it turned out, of a stairway designed for Titans. You know, he writes those dreadful novels about the British Secret Service.”
I nodded. Miles knew a lot of writers. He himself wrote gothic romances.
“He couldn’t have been kinder. Not only did he give me an excellent lunch, entirely devoid of squid, but invited one of the locals in for some postprandial entertainment. It was marvelous. After he left, I told Andrew the young man had cost me a chapter.”
“Thank you, Balzac.”
“Oh dear, caught in another plagiarism.”
I thought about Miles’s chapters. He’d come to fiction late in life – a dozen years ago when he was still in his fifties, long after his dance career had ended. He had a knack for baroque plots – ancient curses, poison bracelets, sliding panels, the whole bit. A master of the marvelous. He had published a few, paperback originals mostly, but then the offers had dried up. His books didn’t sell, or there were disputes with the editors – he never told me exactly – but I gathered he was no longer in demand. And yet he never stopped manufacturing plots. They dropped fully-formed into his mind at the oddest times.
I recalled an afternoon we had spent in Central Park, waiting to see a performance of Titus Andronicus. He had made up, quite easily and on the spot, a complicated story about an aged ballerina who had poisoned her various husbands, enslaved her handsome servant (“Looked just like Erick Hawkins in his prime, my dear, if you can remember back that far”) and had built a theater in the wing of her estate in Somerset. There, each Saturday at midnight she danced the great roles of her youth – Giselle, Aurora, Odette/Odile – with her Slavic beauty of a houseboy as partner.
I had lain on the warm grass listening, no longer aware of the shouts of the baseball players, the soccer teams, the kids with their frisbees, as Miles spun out his absurd melodrama in a clipped, controlled voice. I was his captive. When he finally finished I sat up, hypnotized. Even Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, coming up, would probably fascinate me less. I had to shake my head, like a dog coming out of water, to rid myself of his fantasies. “How on earth do you dream these things up?” I’d asked, but he had pooh-poohed my admiration and deprecated his talent. “I just let my unconscious take over,” he’d said.
Now, looking at him in the hospital room, I couldn’t help contrast his henna rinse, his plucked eyebrows, the light line of mascara circling his cloudy blue eyes, with his powers as a spinner of tales. There seemed to be a contradiction. Or was there? Maybe he represented some shamanistic power that dated back to the first tribes, that straddled the sexes, that derived its power from androgyny.
“Now tell me about your plans. When you get out of this morgue.” He fluttered his eyelids.
I started in on my new medical schedule, but once again I had the impression he wasn’t listening. Finally I asked, “Are you going to see David soon?”
It was Miles, after all, who had sent David Donnenfeld to the Longacre School. I had never quite fixed the nature of their early friendship, but they had kept in touch over the years.
“As a matter of fact, I expect him for dinner this evening. I called him after I read his note and invited him. The dear boy has brought me a gift from Mexico City.”
“He brought me something too. Probably the same thing.”
He lifted a hand. “Don’t tell me.”
I lifted my hand too, but the wrong hand and the wrong gesture. The IV fell out. My hand started to bleed. “Oh my God.” I sank back.
“I’ll get the nurse, shall I?”
I motioned to the signal pull, but he was gone.
After they stuck me again, Miles watching intently, I expected him to mutter some apology and leave. He hadn’t seemed comfortable. But to my surprise he sat down again. “I thought you might like to hear a story,” he said.
I glanced at him. His eyelids had flanged down, a new somnolence had come over him. He was going into his story-telling mode. I recalled the yarn he had spun as we waited to get into Titus Andronicus, and then another window opened and I remembered that when I was sick as a child, my mother would sometimes read me a story. We would merge, at least for the duration of the tale, and I would imagine that safety was possible between us.
In reflex, I closed my eyes too and settled back.
“I thought of it on the way here,” he began. “The subway is so depressing, and there’s that Cretan labyrinth at 59th Street. I suppose that’s why my best ideas come to me underground – I don’t dare absorb the surroundings. Of course, I’ll go home and write it down, but maybe you’d like a preview.” He paused. “If it bores you, you must stop me.”
And so he started, in his precise, controlled voice, never hesitating, never groping for a phrase or a figure of speech. I thought perhaps Homer had relayed his epics with the same sureness – or Isak Dinesen. It was the mark of someone who understood that surfaces, artfully arranged, light up the depths most clearly.
“There’s a man who lives, shall we say, in New Jersey, your home state. The town of Hasbrouck Heights, perhaps, a community of hardworking people who commute to New York, where they work in a variety of unglamorous trades. Our man, whose name is Bill Peppier, is in the printing business. He owns a small company, consisting of three multiliths, and specializes in leaflets, publicity brochures, quarterly reports, and so forth. But Bill is not your usual ink-stained pressman. He has a secret ambition. He wants to be a writer. Yes, a writer. These dreams started when he was young, when his father read The Wind in the Willows to him, or perhaps the tales of Andersen and Grimm. And so this urge, this itch to scribble, has stayed with Bill through youth and into middle age, diverting his attention from his business, from his wife and two children, from the community problems of Hasbrouck Heights. You see, he is a marked man, an artist.”
Miles paused. I could sense him peering at me. Had I fallen asleep? I opened one eye. “American parents don’t read The Wind in the Willows to their kids.”
“Of course. How careless of me. What shall it be?”
“Dr. Seuss. The Oz books.”
“Thank you. To proceed. Bill has ambitions, but great difficulty in carrying them out. He can’t concoct a plot. He’s good at dialogue, character, setting, but not the story line. He simply cannot think of interesting occurrences in sequence.”
Another pause. I was quite interested now, the IV, the soreness in my hand, my raw throat, forgotten.
“And then someone moves into their neighborhood who precipitates a crisis. He is a single man, a spinster, of rather flamboyant aspect. His name is Stefan duPene, although everyone, the ladies especially, suspect that this is a made-up label, a nom de plume. It so happens that Stefan, unlike Bill, is a master of invention. He can plot a short story in an hour. He can dream up a novel in an afternoon. He is, in fact, an American version of Miss Barbara Cartland, but without the Jacobean manor and the ancient oak tree from which she plucks acorns to gild for important visitors. Not only can Stefan duPene fabricate these fictions, he can turn them into saleable books. He has an agent and a publisher. He is, in short, a mildly successful writer of ladies’ romances.”
I turned to glance at him. His eyes were still half-closed.
“To continue. One day Stefan knocks on the door of the Peppier home. His refrigerator is broken and he has been told that Bill, like so many American men, is good at engine repair. Bill, who is rather good-natured, agrees to run down the street and look at it. While there in Stefan’s house, he discovers a cache of story ideas – hundreds of three-by-five cards, each with a dense, complicated plot waiting to be fleshed into prose narrative. Bill’s heart starts beating fast. His palms turn icy. This is exactly what he needs. With these cards, these ideas, his dream of being a writer could become a reality. He would earn his father’s posthumous esteem, the respect of his colleagues, his wife’s love – to say nothing of getting his name in the Hasbrouck Heights Herald. Of course, he does not mention this to Stefan. But after repairing the fridge, he goes home in a state of utter confusion.”
I heard a sharp, in-drawn breath. Miles was excited by his story. I was too. “What happened then?” I asked – the question, I realized, of millions of children at millions of bedtimes who understand that the world is not only explained by stories but that the stories themselves are the world.
“Well, let me see. It was about here that the subway train arrived and I had to get off.” He shifted position. I watched his eyes come slowly into focus. He was back in the present. “There will be a theft of the story cards and perhaps a murder. Murders are so important in fiction. The American public seems to demand them. Proof that life in this country is really a blood sport.”
“Who’s going to get murdered?”
“Stefan, obviously. Bill Peppier, you see, has certain Mafia connections through his printing company – not that any of them can read very well – and he hires someone to steal the shoeboxes containing the three-by-five cards. But something goes wrong. Stefan smells a rat. There are complications. Perhaps drugs are involved – I’m not sure.”
“Then the murder doesn’t take place?”
He shivered and sat up. “I don’t know. I probably won’t find out until I take that wretched subway home. Do you want me to call you later and tell you how it comes out?”
I shook my head, laughing. “I can live without it.”
“Of course you can.” He stood up and came to the bed, leaning over me. His eyes, in the late afternoon dimness, were dark blue – almost a midnight color. “You know you must get well and stay well, Bruce.”
The force of his good will enveloped me. “I’ll try, Miles.”
“A great many people depend on you. You must pull yourself together.”
I almost laughed at his simplistic recipe – but again the force of his kindness overwhelmed me. I recalled that, after sending David to us at the music school, Miles had paid all his lesson and tuition fees for several years. “I’ll do what I can,” I replied, lamely. “We’ll see.”
“Yes, we’ll see.” He stood up straight, his aplomb asserting itself. “You haven’t tiddled your last wink, my dear, I’m quite sure.”
He raised his hand in blessing, spun around and slithered out. Oddly, I felt optimistic for the first time in weeks. If there was any magic to be applied to my condition, Miles Halloran would supply it.
An hour later, a nurse woke me, asking if I wanted to use the pisspot.
§ § §
Angela Michaels came to take me home the next afternoon, Tuesday. She had removed her mouse tail and was wearing slacks. The best part was the lifting of the IV stick. I almost levitated out of bed and into my clothes. The humiliation, the invasion of privacy, was over for now. My customary self was waiting for me downstairs next to the Cashier’s Office – a coat of many colors I couldn’t wait to fling around my shoulders.
Clutching my overnight bag and my vial of Septra pills, I insisted that we walk the three blocks to Twelfth Street. Angela put her arm through mine and kept up a steady stream of chatter as we walked. I stumbled once at the curb, and her grasp was like iron. The hint of a new, unwelcome dependency assailed me, but I put it out of my mind. When I reached home everything would be okay.
Once inside, I was filled with quiet joy. I looked around the living room – a dream-grotto filled with the mementoes of a life in music. Not only scores and records and tapes and piano but framed recital posters from school, publicity stills signed by our more illustrious graduates, a few relative rarities like a Rubenstein autograph and a Flagstad letter, both framed. This was the second skin of my superimposed identity. Not that it was all of me, not by a long shot, but it was a valued part, I started to express some of this to Angela, but she heard something in my tone she didn’t like – self-pity maybe – and cut me off. Angela believed in staying in the present. She was right, of course. We switched the topic to groceries. She would go shopping for me.
When she came back, with a few additions of her own (a lethal mixture of tofu and sun-dried tomatoes, among other things), she had the afternoon Post, my least favorite tabloid, notoriously homophobic. The front headline was absurd and I resolved not to open it.
After putting away the groceries, Angela came into the living room. “I hope you’re doing your visualizing, honey.” I assured her I was.
“Do you want me to fix you something to eat?”
“No thanks.”
She didn’t want to leave but finally she did, with more warnings about proper diet. After she left, I found an old can of El Paso chili and heated it up. Full of deadly fats and chemicals, I thought, spooning it up ravenously. Just what the doctor ordered. It was the perfect antidote to those beets and baked potatoes at St. Vincent’s.
I don’t know why I opened the Post after all. Maybe I was momentarily bored. Maybe there were vibrations in the room. Maybe the information was looking for me. At any rate, I turned the pages idly, noting the screaming heads, the lurid photos, the tawdriness of it all. And then my eye landed and I knew that it was for me.
WEST SIDE WRITER FOUND MURDERED
Death of Mystery-Romance Author
Resembles One of His Own Plots
I read quickly. Miles Halloran – but why had I known it was Miles before I saw his name? – had been discovered by a neighbor this morning, in his apartment on 81st Street. The neighbor, Mrs. Alberta Jaeckel, had noticed the front door ajar. There were no signs of forced entry and a preliminary search of the premises revealed nothing missing. Halloran had been listening to a music tape at the time of his death. His body had been badly hacked by a large blade. Death had been due to loss of blood. An investigation was being handled at the 20th Precinct. There were certain questions about the victim’s lifestyle.
I read the story three times, numbly. I had seen Miles only yesterday afternoon in the hospital. He had passed on his blessing, a wish for my recovery, and now he himself was gone, another witness to the fragility of things. I stood up and started pacing around the apartment, touching certain objects as if they were talismans and could save me, or save Miles. It wasn’t my first brush with murder in New York, not after all these years, but it cut the closest. Who could replace Miles in my life? Who could supply that rare blend of cynicism and magic? Even though our paths crossed only occasionally, we were always aware of the other’s presence. The tie went deep – I couldn’t begin to explain why – and now it had been severed.
The next minute I thought of David. Hadn’t Miles said he was due for dinner last night? I was just starting toward the phone when it rang.
“Bruce?” The voice was low, rushed, the familiar calm gone.
“David.”
“You heard?”
“Just now, in the Post.”
“My God, that reporter must have walked in with the cops. Mrs. Jaeckel called me right after she called the police.”
“Who’s she?”
“She lives across the hall. I’ve known her for years, through Miles. I gave one of her kids lessons for a while.”
“Do they have any idea …?”
The reply was fainter. “Miles knew hundreds of people. They’re going through his address book. They might even call you.”
“Do they have any leads?”
There was a pause, the pain humming along the wire. “I was at his place last night. He fixed dinner. I … I left the program from Mexico City there. You know how he likes to know what I play. The cops saw it right off. They called me at noon today.”
I was too surprised to respond for a moment. “They don’t think you had something to do with …?”
“I don’t know what they think. But they know I was on the premises last night. I … I think I should have a lawyer.”
My mind went into overdrive. I reviewed some contacts and promised to supply a name within the hour. Then another thought hit me. “Maybe you should come over here and spend the night, David. Maybe you shouldn’t be alone.”
He vetoed that idea, said he’d be okay, and the next minute he was sobbing into the phone. Miles and David – it was a connection, a relationship – that went back to David’s first explorations of the world of professional music. His loss was much greater than mine. Miles, in ways unknown to me, had seen him through the first growing-up time.
I listened to him weep, urging him to let it all out, until he came to the end of it. Again he refused to come over and spend the night. But after I hung up, I found the apartment, my safe place, filled with images of death again.