CELIA STROLLED ALONG TWELFTH Street toward the Strand and its famed eight miles of used books, stopping for a moment to gaze at the monster masks in the windows of the science fiction bookshop, Forbidden Planet. The masks were both realistic and intriguingly repugnant, eyeballs bulging bloodily out of cheeks, a face made entirely of tentacles. She was standing at the corner when Vanessa Redgrave and her son, she supposed, came out of the store. The boy was leafing through comic books, and the movie star looked motherly and a little distracted. Watching her, Celia wondered who the boy’s father was. Franco Nero? Well, whoever it was, Ms. Redgrave had survived an admirable career, some unpopular political stances, a great theatrical name … and she had a son. If acting really wasn’t so great, she still had that son. Which put her way ahead of Celia.
Celia’s husband, Paul Landover, was long gone, though he remained a distant friend, and he skittered across her mind—in his doublet, since he always seemed to be doing a costume thing—for the few seconds it took her to cross the street. Just as well there wasn’t a little Paul Landover, now that she thought about it.
She’d sat over a second cup of coffee at the Gotham once Joel had departed to conduct bigger and doubtless better business. Once he was gone, of course, she’d thought of plenty of things she should have said while he was blithering on about her wonderful career. She could have recounted all the jobs she’d wanted but hadn’t gotten in the last couple of years because she was too old, too young, too pretty, too ordinary, too dark, not exotic enough, too damn exotic, too tall, too short, too thin, not motherly enough, too damn motherly, not housewifey, and too glamorous. A Vanities, gone, a Talley’s Folly, a Death Trap, a The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a Loot, a Midsummer Night’s Dream, a King Lear—the list went on and on, all productions in or near New York, where she could have maintained a life.
She sat thinking of all the ripostes she might have made, but after all, they were too ordinary, too obvious, the warp and woof of every actor’s life. So what, Joel would have said, the bottom line is work—and you have worked. It was true. So why wasn’t she just thankful for that? And why didn’t she shut up?
Presumably because she wanted some kind of settled existence.
Did that mean she was getting old?
Of course it did.
But not that old. Entering her prime, she thought, remembering how she and Debbie Macadam had once played students of Miss Jean Brodie at the U of M.
Maybe she was tired of always interpreting a role, saying someone else’s words, inhabiting another creature’s body. Unlike some actors, she’d never hidden within a role, had never needed that particular kind of refuge. She’d simply done the work and enjoyed it. But perhaps she was losing something of Celia Blandings in all the transformations she’d accomplished over the years. Maybe that was why so many actors painted and sculpted and jotted down stories and kept diaries and labored over poems. Reminding themselves that they existed once the lights had gone down, the curtain fallen.
There was something about the act of creation that was never fully present for the actor. Or that was how she felt, anyway. You were bound by the character as written, by the author’s vision; you were bound by the director’s conception. You were controlled by the necessity of tuning your performance to your fellow actors, You were even controlled by the audience, by the need to make them laugh or cry or gasp on cue.
None of that mattered with Linda Thurston.
At the Strand she fell upon the tables of review copies like a Hun on a defenseless hamlet of fair damsels. It was midafternoon and there were only a few browsers picking over the three large tables of new arrivals that sold for half price. She let her eyes roam happily over the brightly colored dust jackets, the relatively virgin pages. That was what Debbie Macadam had called herself when they met as sophomores. A relative virgin. And that was how Celia was coming to view the last few years of her life—relatively virginal. Uncomplicated, all work. Which was just the way she’d planned it, except now she didn’t think it had gotten her anywhere. Not anywhere she particularly wanted to go, anyway.
After giving the tables a onceover, she settled in, noting each title, each author. She was looking only for mysteries. When she traveled, she carted along more of them than clothing, somehow, and it was mainly a case of fearing she’d run out. It was like chocolate for some people. She couldn’t get enough, though she was a discriminating judge. No junk. Not even very much of the stuff that was mainly plot or puzzle oriented. She had, therefore, never become a devotee of Agatha Christie. The characterizations were usually just too thin, too superficial. Her favorites from that classical age were Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey—though she came a bit later—Edmund Crispin, Anthony Boucher, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes… They were less writers of a particular era than of essentially-like minds. However ingenious or fanciful their plots, they dealt in character.
Today she was in luck.
Someone must have brought in a load earlier in the day, and she was the first scavenger. She found a Donald Westlake, so funny; a Ross Thomas, so precise and ironic and bemused; a Martha Grimes, the best of the new eighties writers, possessed of a positive genius for doing children, as well as for building her protagonist Richard Jury into a figure of depth and texture; a Robert Parker, whose concentration on Spenser’s relationship with Susan Silverman was as good a disquisition on up-to-date love affairs as she knew; a Simon Brett, because he wrote with such insight and wit of the theatre; a Michael Gilbert, because he was a true master who’d stood the test of time; a Tony Hillerman, because you learned so much about the Navajo culture, and by reflection, your own; a James McClure for the same reason, though South Africa was his turf; and several other books by writers she knew she should try but never had—Rick Demos and Sandra Elliott and Miles Warriner, among others.
Her shopping bag was full, thirteen volumes. She staggered away and went downstairs, where among the dust and the maze of aisles and the countless tens of thousands of books, much of the staff conducted their strange subterranean existence. There were more eccentrics per square foot in the basement of the Strand than anywhere else in New York. The first thing she saw was a black gentleman seated at a run-down, cluttered desk, carefully inserting pins in a tiny cloth doll while he munched a jelly-filled doughnut.
“Is Claude around today?” she asked, inquiring after a friend who had once acted with her at the Guthrie before coming to his senses and joining real life full time.
Slowly a needle penetrated the puffy chest of the doll, then nosed through the back. The doll didn’t really have a head, just a tied-off topknot. Funny little arms. “Just a minute, lady,” the man said. He slid another needle. Into the crotch. The dark purple black face looked up, grinned. The teeth were filed to points. “Claude?”
“Look,” Celia said, “who is that doll supposed to be? Young Duvalier or somebody?”
The face scowled. The man wore a blue sweatshirt with the Miranda warning printed on it in white lettering. “The man,” he said. “The man who owns this place. We of the netherworld, of the underground, we seek release from our captivity. Death to the man. He’s not here.”
“What?”
“Claude. He left at noon. Said he was going bowling.” He shrugged. “Different strokes. Now me, if I could get outa this place today, I’d go buy myself a nice chicken. Y’know, feathers, alive, squawking. Then I’d have me a nice little sacrificial rite. I give the gods a goddamn chicken, maybe they’ll deliver unto me the asshole that owns this place.”
“Right. Whatever you say.”
She went down one of the aisles, looking to see what might have been squirreled away before landing on the upstairs tables. Two employees were loading shelves, chatting.
“You say this guy is famous?”
“Really famous, yeah.”
“You know this guy?”
“See, he’s got this collection. Food. He collects real food. But it’s like old.”
“Old food?”
“That’s what I’m tellin’ ya, man. A cheeseburger seven years old—”
“Gross. Can he prove it?”
“Ya look at it, you believe. Gross but neat. The thing is,” lowering his voice to a whisper, “I’m startin’ my own collection.”
“Of what?”
“Food. What else we talkin’ about, man? I mean, if it made this guy famous, got him on Letterman, why not me? I got a piece of Ray’s pepperoni pizza a week old already, you might call it the keystone of my collection, it’s where I’m startin’ from, buildin’ my collection from this simple piece of pizza—”
“You actually know this famous guy, then?”
“Well, I know a guy knows his roommate. We’re gonna go over to see his whole collection sometime. Got a nine-year-old piece of wedding cake.”
“Really? Nine years old?”
“Yeah, he says it’s already lasted five years longer than the marriage…”
Celia went back to the main floor, where she set down the thirteen books on the counter.
“Wow, you want all these?”
“Here’s my Visa.”
The guy behind the counter brushed long black hair out of his eyes with his fingertips. Celia had once had a typing teacher who made exactly the same gesture.
“You must be a real mystery buff.”
She watched the total rise as he flipped through the books, punching out half the list price.
“Yes, I guess that’s what I am.”
“Me too. Always thought I’d write one, but I never had the time—”
“Takes more than time,” she said.
“Think so?”
“It’s hard, writing a mystery.” Then, without really thinking about it, she blurted out: “I’m writing one myself.”
“Hey, really? That’s great. I suppose you’re right, I could never concentrate that long, like we’ve got this nut in the basement here. You’re not gonna believe this, he’s collecting old food. Like art. Now that doesn’t take any concentration … well, let’s see here, you’re putting quite a dent in a hundred bucks.”
She left the bookstore, stood blinking in the sunlight, waiting to cross. She couldn’t believe it, but she kept hearing the words.
I’m writing one myself.
She felt as if she’d slipped out of gear and the motor was racing. She’d never actually said it before, without qualifiers and conditional clauses hanging all over the place. But now, out of the blue, she’d just said it.
She lugged her books in the red-and-white Strand bag over to the drugstore, where she picked up some toothpaste and a new brush. A girl of ten or so with blond hair in two pigtails tied with blue yarn was tugging at her mother’s skirt, pointing at Celia. Celia smiled down at her. The big blues were stuck on Celia’s face.
“You’re the cough-syrup fairy.”
“Me?”
“Mommy, the cough-syrup fairy!”
The woman smiled at Celia. “You are—”
Celia shook her head and smiled. Not me, she thought, testing the words in her head, I’m a writer.
The girl gazed up at her, ducking behind her mother’s skirt.
“Louanne, she looks like the fairy. But she knows who she is. Don’t you?” She winked at Celia.
“I’m not altogether sure,” Celia said.
She left the drugstore and walked on the sunny side of the street, feeling determined and fresh and even a little silly.
It was time she sat down with Linda Thurston.