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Months after the conflagration, certain parties simply would not let it go and remained convinced that it could have been worse. Such at least was Dierdre Lehane’s considered opinion, which she would voice on alternate Saturdays of the post-blaze era under one of the dryers at “Maxine’s Pin ‘n Curl,” successor to “Darlene’s Snip ‘n Clip,” while also treating herself to mani- and pedicures.
The hint of tint that was both the subject and predicate for these appointments would either take or not, Dierdre’s roots being especially stubborn. But regardless of the outcome, the bi-monthly dye-jobs were accompanied by Lehane’s invariable squawk of “Sure and it could have been worse!” Our Lady’s stalwart rose from her chair, emitting that strange Celtic keening, while the high school kid who oversaw her nail jobs Friday afternoons or Saturday mornings looked on indulgently, and the shop’s other patrons retreated from their wash-and-sets, while taking pot-shots at this overloud conscience of the neighborhood.
“You Irish horse’s ass!”
“Go back to where you came from!”
“And wasn’t I there to know what I’m sayin’?” The graduating senior needed her job as the loopy housekeeper whipped herself into a fine Gaelic frenzy. “Wasn’t I there, girl, when that ambulance come to fetch poor Mister Damon? Spillin’ his blood like the good Lord Jesus! Cut to ribbons by that winder glass!”
“Give it a rest, crone!”
But Lehane continued fearlessly. “And those poor Chinese people . . .”
“Max-ine!” cried one offended party, whose hair was being wrapped in a post-wash towel.
“Crawling into their dry-cleaning machines for safety in that wee shop they ran. Before the fire trapped them!”
“Max-ine!”
“Melting their skin like yellow crayons!”
“Max-ine!”
“Melting it so awful, you couldn’t pry them off!”
“Max-INE!”
“Melting them so awful, they had to bury them that way! Stuck inside those machines!”
“Max-INE!”
“And those machines so blasted heavy! They needed a crane to lower them into the Chinese peoples’ graves!”
Needless to say, Dierdre wasn’t ordinarily one to swear and was about to describe the overpowering stink of the smoking remains that had resulted from the fire at Dieter Lang’s exotic bird emporium when Maxine herself rode to the rescue. She swooped in from a distant Chair One to tell the sobbing teen beautician that she’d take it from here, as she flipped back the hood on the housekeeper’s bonnet-dryer.
“I think you’re done, doll. Now lace up your Keds, go home and help the Father.” She shielded Spike’s housekeeper from a few lobbed magazines as they made their way to the front door. Taking her by the elbow half a block down the sidewalk, she also let her know that the work she’d had done today was on the house because of all she’d seen and been through. “It’s the least we can do, hon.”
“Ah,” sniffed Lehane, “too kind, too kind. . .” in pale imitation of Florence Nightingale. But Maxine was no longer there to hear, and Dierdre found herself in the thick of a weekly spectacle that had grown from practically nothing to a huge local draw in a matter of weeks.
Anticipation ran high and spectators crowded half-a-dozen deep behind saw-horse barricades, waiting for an Umbrella Man-sponsored high school marching band to pass by in glittering uniforms playing the Chopin Funeral March, the same tune that had been endlessly repeated throughout President Kennedy’s final voyage to Arlington National Cemetery. But that group’s achingly beautiful grim music was only a warm-up to the real star of the show, a glass-walled glamour golf cart sort of affair that inspired spectators on one side of the street to temporarily blind those on the other with Instamatic flash bars.
Piloting this odd craft, Tinkerbell fought off an impulse to wave as the crowd not so much surged as was magnetically drawn forward. His free foot pumped a treadle linked to a lever that operated a pulley that, somehow, drove an invisible wire arrangement up and down inside the vehicle’s viewable cargo area that kept the JFK-style rocker on display in a continual gentle motion and, in turn, kept the hands of the chair’s comatose occupant hard at work opening and closing a large umbrella, exactly as his nightclub’s namesake had done in Abe Zapruder’s haunting footage.
It’s funny how sometimes dreams never die but live on to become waking nightmares. Donny Damon would be exhibited Saturdays at 11 a.m. (like some martyred saint’s finger on parade) on his weekly 10-block circuit (like the fighting frigate “Constitution” circling Boston Harbor) in accordance with Groak’s detailed instructions and in full view of the local police, who knew exactly what his deal was but would never arrest him. Drawn by advance publicity, crowds of the curious would gather, then be worked into near-hysterics by the sight of this famous vegetable, paraded among the people in his improvised pope mobile.
Turning a corner, the procession, with its borrowed hagiography, neared the end of its journey. Magnificently rebuilt with the help of shameless plugs in Hoagland’s Family Newells column, The Umbrella Man would be cast in shadow by the spires of Our Lady. And the marching band’s leader would call out “Hit it, Fellahs!”, a cue for the first trumpet to substitute New Orleans swagger for Polish dirge, breathing life back into Damon’s fan base with “Tiger Rag.”
The rest of Donny’s weekly ride was always a party. Directed by Groak and with crisp new payoff bills lining their pockets, the cops let the crowds cross the barricades and spill into the streets to misbehave like they would at the peak of Mardi Gras, then be led to the club like sheep to stand in line for hours and pay scalper’s prices for Trayne’s “sold-out” Saturday matinees. The publicist himself never tired of these choreographed displays and watched them from a balcony he’d built into the scaffolding of the club’s electric sign. Looking as if this man behind the curtain were pulling each of the huge UMBRELLA MAN letters out of thin air.
Every now and then, Groak would let vanity get the better of him and laugh at the public dancing to his tune, with no memory of how grim the neighborhood had been just the blink of an eye ago. He peered down from his perch past Spike’s unscathed church and into a velvet-roped line of waiting patrons snaking along the sidewalk. His gaze took in The Umbrella Man’s past entrance (now part of the club’s sleek mirrored wall). Past the former site of Golden Luck Cleaners. And finally to the club’s current entrance and the pavement to the curb that Tinkerbell and Donny had agreed to shovel and salt whenever it snowed.
There on a fateful night months before, Spike, noticing Dieter Lang inspecting the smoldering remains of his rare bird emporium, had taken the downcast German by the shoulder to tell him that he had “terrible news.” Groak, meanwhile, unseen by the priest, tossed the owner’s favorite love bird into the fire, causing Dieter’s soul to shatter and his body to keel over dead just as Beaks ‘я Us collapsed into a pile of bricks, flame, feathers and smoke.
“Jeez, that was close!” Spike gasped, saved from destruction by a well-timed yank from Groak. Just as months down the road, watching from outside Our Lady, he would titter, “Gee, that was neat!” whenever one whole side of The Umbrella Man split open like the Bat Cave, letting Donny and his custom ride roll to the center of the nightclub, while allowing Sadasia’s vocal stylings to float out over the neighborhood:
Away down a-yonder in Yankety-Yank,
A bullfrog jumped from bank to bank,
‘Cause there wasn’t nothing else to do.
He stubbed his toe an’ in he fell,
An’ de neighbors all say dat he went to—well!
‘Cause he hadn’t nothing else to do.
Tinkerbell sometimes wondered if Trayne’s voice, which could sometimes break a touch on the squeaky side, wasn’t out of place in such a high-tone ceremony. Groak quashed this heresy by reminding the freak how much cash she was bringing in, but this also confirmed suspicions that all this fuss over Sadasia had its roots in someone’s unrequited romantic longings.
Unclean from the start, Connie’s “love” for the singer triggered something of a sexual tailspin within him as it blossomed. Trayne, on the other hand, strung the smitten publicist along for as long as it amused her. Given such a standoff, things were bound to turn ugly sooner or later.
“Hey, boyfriend!” Sadasia waved, lounging on stage, post-matinee, a vision of Cleopatra from the Abe Beame era.
Groak caught her spicy greeting and, steering clear of the pickled Damon, bounced toward her holding a dozen long-stemmed roses.
“For me?”
The tech rats killed the power on their lighting and sound boards. Tinkerbell ran a broom down the aisles, scraping gum off club seats with a spritz of Carbona.
“Who else?” Connie mumbled, tongue-tied in her presence.
Trayne called him “Pookey-Bear,” her go-to come-on. But rather than encourage these attentions, she picked up her shoulder bag, knocked back the flat remains of a Tab and asked her biggest fan to “Put ‘em in water, would’ja? Gotta run!” she would later whisper, blowing him a kiss.
Groak wanted to say, “Hurry back!”, but he was no good at small talk when his guard was down. Instead, he’d regroup and let his actions do the talking. He decided that he’d make his big move tonight after Trayne’s last performance. God willing, his inamorata would then be willing to at least consider the idea.
In the meantime, the publicist and Tinkerbell busied themselves emptying colostomy and pee bags then switched the bottles on Donny’s intravenous setup while Sadasia was already halfway home in her usual curious fashion. Heading south/southeast in the first of many cabs an obsessive’s need for secrecy demanded she take.
“Wha’s your numbah, honey?” hack after hack would ask her, following four or five short trips that randomly crisscrossed and zig-zagged Manhattan with an eye to ensuring that she wasn’t followed. “Here you go!” Trayne grinned as she exited (letting them peer down her blouse in lieu of a tip) and imagined the looks on their faces when they realized the number she’d given them was the NYPD’s Sexual Assault Hotline.
The last stop on these dizzying pinball journeys was always Church and Park Place, in the shadows of both the Woolworth Building and World Trade Center, atop Chambers’ cacophony of West Side subway stations. Sadasia would dash downstairs to the northbound 8th Avenue Line to catch either the A express or C local, detraining at West 4th. From there it was only a short hop, skip and a jump across the street for the New Jersey-born 27-year-old to reach the latest in her ongoing series of illegal Village sublets, a cramped one-bedroom halfway down Cornelia.
“Perfect,” she said, seeing more take-out menus dumped on her “Welcome” mat. The singer undid the front door’s Gordian knot of locks, threw her bag on the daybed, keys on the mantel, fruit stand groceries onto the counter. Dust and cat-hairs from decades of previous tenants clouded the pre-war’s interior as she padded through its rooms, opening windows and pulling drapes shut, kicking off her shoes and tossing clothes in a closet already choked with unwashed apparel beginning to get crusty.
She rinsed herself more than washed but made certain her nails were sparkling. After hitching on a towel, she wolfed some cereal and fixed a nice cup of tea. Then she sat down in front of the clock radio that she always played low on the kitchen table like the downtown apartment was Occupied Europe, whipping its tuner through the lineup of college stations that were key to keeping her act above water.
Some rich brat Connecticut DJ opened his set with a phlegmy hack from too many L&Ms, then announced that the station’s gala tribute to Cliff Edwards, “Ukulele Ike” to aficionados, would now continue. Trayne switched on her battered cassette recorder just in time to catch the kid’s reminder that, “We’ve just heard Cliff’s most famous studio cut, actually a soundtrack, featuring him as Jiminy Cricket, singing ‘When You Wish Upon a Star,’ from the 1940 Disney animated classic, ‘Pinocchio.’” (“No kidding. . .” Trayne said into her tea.) “Now we’d like to turn the clock back to 1934 and check in with the Uke Man during his heyday. Ladies and gents, may I have your attention, please, for Cliff Edwards warbling a sweet little ditty whose naughty lyrics may surprise you—an’ lemme tell ya, they certainly got my attention!”
Trayne’s coal black eyes nearly misted over as she heard the phonograph needle cartridge kick up blessed static as it slipped into the grooves of a Great Depression 78. “Wow,” she marveled, hearing in that old recording what for many was throwaway nostalgia, but that she had always experienced as a vital soaring present.
I’m just a bashful boy in love with Mary Breen.
She is just the sweetest gal that I have ever seen.
I’ve always lacked the courage to even squeeze her tight
But I’ve resolved to do myself when I see her tonight!
I’m going to give it to Mary with love!
I’ve got something that she’s fondest of!
Now I know that she has had it before,
And Mary’s a gal that all the fellahs adore.
I’ll let her take it right in her hand!
Because I know she’ll stroke it so grand!
Like Jack and Jill, we’ll both get a thrill!
When I give it to Mary with love (my little kitten)!
I’ll give it to Mary with love!
More importantly, tunes lifted from artists like Ukulele Ike were the musical staff of life that Sadasia could mimic to perfection. And that uncanny ability put boxes of Post Grape Nuts and 2% quarts of milk on her table at least twice a day.
I’m gonna give it to Mary with love!
She’s my sweet little cute turtle dove!
About my lovin’ she’s always been keen.
She says when I give it, it’s the finest she’s seen!
She’ll think of it long after I’m gone!
I’m gonna put it right where it belongs!
Like Cleo and Marc, we’ll spoon in the dark,
When I give it to Mary with love (I mean a necklace)!
I’ll give it to Mary with love!
I’m gonna give it to Mary with love!
When I do it, I may need a shove!
Because, you, see, I’m so bashful and she,
I’m afraid she’ll take from some other guy!
I want to be her number one man!
And give it the best that I can!
I’ll be darin’ and dashin’, for she’s my passion!
When I give it to Mary with love (I mean a diamond)!
I’ll give it to Mary with love!
After jotting down a few notes to herself about the ancient disc, Sadasia decided the emotionally drained sensation that inevitably followed these listen-and-learn sessions would be better remedied by exercise than sleep.
Turning those good intentions into action, she wrestled her trusty old three-speed from the wall, bumped it down the stairs and set off on an invigorating ride that took her south to Varick, ringing the little handlebar bell, east on Spring, north on Greene, west on Houston, north again on LaGuardia Place then around Washington Square Park half-a-dozen times, where her continued focus on Cliff Edwards instead of prevailing traffic led to several near-collisions.
After polishing off twin papaya drinks at her favorite hot dog stand, Sadasia and her Schwinn crossed paths closer to home with a late-start funeral. Close to the parlor entrance beside the arrivals bay, one of those guys in uniform with a short-visored cap was helping the widow into a limo. Sons in dark suits and daughters with covered heads dotted the sidewalk, while stray relatives fished their pockets for car keys.
Tall top-heavy floral pieces emerged from the mortuary followed by the casket and pallbearers. All of them walked in a slow shuffle, so that only the soft-geared ratchet of Trayne’s bike could be heard and, seconds later, the screech of her front wheel as the preoccupied singer sideswiped the coffin.
“What the...?” gasped the funeral director. Moments later, he’d told the pallbearers to hold on a sec, dropped to a squat, then announced to the cortege that the damage wasn’t serious. This was close to the truth, barring the ugly scuff on the mahogany finish, which wasn’t bad enough for him to break out the rags and bottle of furniture restorer.
Hey!” the widow asked. “Aren’t you?”
But she got no answer because Sadasia had already mounted her two-wheeled steed, peddled like wildfire, unlocked her apartment door and, once inside, marched herself straight to bed, where she probably should have stayed in the first place.
* * * * *
A DOWNPOUR AT TWILIGHT came as a complete surprise, steaming up the city like a hot shower in a closed room and flooding the streets with a smell combining fish and stale newsprint.
Something about the storm spared the lights but also pulled the plug on The Umbrella Man’s sophisticated climate control system. Donny’s frozen features called for ice that Tinkerbell supplied. But Sadasia, sensing a challenge, welcomed the hothouse atmosphere and went through her musical paces twice that evening, as she usually did, on top of the earlier matinee, with excited perspiration dripping from every pore.
At each show’s conclusion, the expected barrage of hoots and hollers, whistles and cheers rose wall-to-wall from the audience but at an intensity never heard before. Which would have provided Trayne with great personal satisfaction if a Long Island truck driver hadn’t ruined it for her, reaching onstage for a sweat-soaked keepsake, and got his skull bashed by a bone-white guitar.
Sadasia meted out this musical justice twice before tossing the crowd the broken neck of her instrument. She then waved like a wind-up doll, yelled “G’night, everybody!” While the audience continued its insane chant of “BRAVA! BRAVA!”, she fled upstairs, through a door at the back of the stage, to take refuge in her dressing room, where a bathrobe and shakerful of cocktails were waiting.
“Beasts!” she spit (fangs fully bared) and buried her face into a warm, wet facecloth that, strangely, was a comfort on that hot wet night. She wrapped herself in her terry and stopped shaking but only after downing three pink squirrels in as many minutes.
“Feeling better?” The singer hadn’t heard him, so Groak asked again and was shocked to observe his dreamboat’s face blotched hairline to chin, her makeup pulling away in the cloth like the veil of Veronica.
“I need another drink.”
“Let’s see what we can do.”
Sadasia raised her eyes to the glass she’d already raised for a refill and through its pink film noticed Groak coming toward her in a badly fitting notched-collar tux. It made him look like Gatsby, embalmed with mothballs. “Pretty fancy, huh?” But the singer’s thoughts remained on the stage below. “Beasts!” she repeated, morbidly fixated on the crowd that had forgotten their place and tried invading hers.
“Let it pass.”
“Didn’t you see them?”
Sure he had, just as he could see the latest tokens of his affection, still lying gift-wrapped on her vanity in an unappreciated jumble. The self-absorbed little diva had pretty much bled him dry. (“Need a refill?”) Reason enough, perhaps, to put a little romance on tonight’s menu, at least as he saw it. One moment more and Groak’s nose hairs had begun turning somersaults as his right hand drifted over the cliff of Sadasia’s shoulder in search of a crack in her cotton kimono.
“Sure, why not?” Trayne took the drink she was offered, tried to let go, but with her nerves still exposed back on that stage, felt anger welling up into a fury. “I don’t get it, Connie. You share your gift with people and they think they own you!”
“Do they really?”
“Yeah, like you wouldn’t believe. Some of them even think they created you in the first place!”
“That’s just ridiculous,” the publicist assured her. “They didn’t make you, sweetheart, I did!” And with that pithy statement, the wanna-be Don Juan made what is commonly known as a “lunge” (from the French allonge, “an extension”). Ringing her waist with one arm, he drove the wrist of the other under Sadasia’s lapel, where delights untold set his fingertips trembling.
Sadasia had been expecting this unwelcome move at some point, but was still caught off guard. She may have been a bit slow on the upswing because of the holy hell fans had put her through that evening. But once she recovered her bearings, Connie got his just desserts swiftly and with withering efficiency.
“I don’t need this kind of crap!” she told him. Then, to Groak’s amazement, she whirled around to deliver high and low kicks to his body, knocking him flat; then aimed her shakerful of pink and poured its sticky contents dead-center over the publicist’s classic tux; grabbed his notch-edged collar and listened to him choke as she dragged him from the dressing room, down the hallway, up a flight of stairs and into a nearby “STAFF ONLY” toilet.
Nursing his wounds in that last stop, the flack, if he had any sense at all, would have learned his lesson, remained still until the pain subsided, kept his hands to himself going forward and steered well clear of Sadasia’s career, life and loves. Except none of that fit this publicist’s M.O..
* * * * *
THE OVERHEAD FLUORESCENT refused to blink on, so Mr. Groak struggled blindly on the pot, ridding his crotch of tea rose pigment for what felt to be hours on end.
Trayne, meanwhile, a chair wedged tightly against the door for safety, lounged comfortably in her dressing room, felt New York’s ungodly heat and collected stray thoughts into the wee hours until instinct told her to call it an exhausting workday.
Stripping off her robe before a mirror, the singer, martial arts enthusiast and neurotic perfectionist was disgusted to see wrinkles and fat where none existed. She promised to take better care of herself, and got a leg up on the future by unzipping a large navy duffle bag with red straps and piping, pawing through its contents like an Aztec human sacrifice and extracting from those dark recesses a truly wondrous elixir, “Dickinson’s Witch Hazel: A Home Remedy for Generations,” which she soon applied freely to her Groak-ravaged parts.
Flipping up the plastic spout, Sadasia’s long squeeze of the pint bottle’s cooling 14% alcohol content dramatized the 2:00 a.m. drafts that were whispering through the dressing room. As the astringent dripped, Trayne became an unthinking wall of gooseflesh. This was something she could ill afford and, to her credit, fought against, by reaching back into the duffel for a pair of rose denims that were comfortably snug where they ought to be, roped shut with a wide strip of hand-tooled leather and fastened by a silver belt buckle daring all comers to “Meet Me Under the Mistletoe.” The summons was in raised holiday letters and whose finishing touch was a bough of the shrub with a striped ribbon executed in green and red enamel.
The buckle’s broken surface brought Trayne’s fingers to life like obscene paragraphs hiding in a Braille novel. Certain she was alone, Sadasia’s musically savvy thumbs dipped inside her jeans, while the flesh and bone remaining outside brushed against the buckle in a slow dance rhythm. She moved from the hip before the full-length looking glass, caught a glimpse of herself and knew she was wasting her time flying solo. Lizard-skin boots, a frayed oatmeal sweater, mirror shades and a carrot-orange wig were donned, adjusted, then regarded with satisfaction. Incognito, Sadasia was on her way out.
The fire escape offered the quickest exit to this very late evening’s fun and games. Sadasia leapt from that perch, convinced her reward was well worth the risk. Hitting the ground, her Umbrella Man getaway became the relatively simple matter of outflanking her admirers, then dodging the southbound alleyway’s water rats and empty packing cases. She was anxious to get her social life off the blocks and onto steel-belted radials as quickly as possible. Ignoring her worst fears and best instincts, Trayne threw caution to the wind and took a single arrow-straight cab ride to the destination she’d chosen for her single-gal’s bacchanal.
Down by the docks, her cabby drove away without a tip and licking his lips over a bogus phone number. Meanwhile Sadasia made a well-practiced beeline down the last few empty streets to “Sonia’s. Sonia Little Elk, Prop.” A mild-mannered kind of place from the look of it outside, its interior featured cream-cheese lighting, spotless chintz covering the windows with insides to match, glowing wood floors and brass gimcracks that some of its patrons could actually shave in. The furniture gave off a warm, easy smell like home cooking.
The walls decorated with photos of women’s basketball legends with an impressionist ghost dance mural splashed across the wall directly opposite the bar. A web of tarnished cowbells that hung over the doorway rang as Trayne entered, enhancing the laid-back atmosphere for which the club was justly celebrated in certain whispered circles.
Strangers and friends who had gathered in the niche tavern looked Sadasia over, then greeted her with open smiles and honest faces. Some suggested she dance a bit or join them at their tables. Blooming in this seller’s market, Trayne sat down with a mixture of old and new. These were professional people, mostly, who didn’t pry and generally avoided funny drinks and filtered smokes.
“How ya be?” a nicely packed blond attorney named Val wanted to know, making her pitch through real cute dimples.
Sadasia said she couldn’t complain and was spared going into further detail by the bouncing arrival of Sonia herself, a great plain of a woman who eccentrically mixed Birkenstock sandals with immaculately tailored Chanel suits. She expertly maneuvered a huge tray of appetizers onto their cramped table.
“Nice job, Sohn!”
“Thank you all so very much, ladies! And now, for my next trick!” The comment cracked all of them up, especially Sadasia. Off went her fright wig and aviator shades, as her companions began demolishing the mountains of wings and tater tots that lay before them. “Another round?”
“Give me a second,” one of them answered as she pondered. “Bourbon and ginger?”
“So that’s bourbons all around?”
“Double vodka for me,” said another.
“Peppermint schnapps here!” It was brandy for Babs. Nikki chose aqua vitae. Lorna risked Cointreau. While Mavis, the designated prig in the group, stuck to straight sake.
“Anything else?”
The girls shot embarrassed glances around their circle.
“No, huh,” Sonia canned the remains of her signature maize-on-the-cob appetizer tray that the girls had demolished, handed out dental picks and swabbed the table to a rich moist luster.
While they were waiting, someone kicked a quarter in the boogie-box. This begged the question, which Nikki brought up with Val, while Mavis collared Nora with a snuzzle. A few in the room sat it out. And Babs put her dancing hooks into Sadasia, as she often had before. Old friends, so they said, who whirled ‘round the floor when the music was right, blowing away other couples who, in turn, happy to be outclassed, called it quits and watched them from their favored lairs, be they table or bar. They egged Babs and Sadasia on, sensing their excitement through the hot blur of heels.
Over the lavatory sinks, however, “Mother of Christ!” and “Call out the cavalry!” loomed large among the sneers of the powder room’s new arrivals. The reason was simple. Stopping at its entranceway door, they had noticed a familiar woman whose remarkable tapered visage put you in mind of Mr. Ed or the streamlined locomotive Henry Dreyfuss had designed for the 20th Century Limited, hiding in the shadows and setting her sights on the up-and-coming singer. Most of the crowd at Sonia’s had sampled this woman’s equine/art-deco charms, earning her the coveted title of “Miss Conviviality” within the club’s confines.
“Couldn’t you just die!” they all cackled, or else cracked the old chestnut, “Why the long face?” But it was impossible to hide the deep-seated envy when their collective ex- bellied up to the juke and pressed the button for one of those lazy-heaven slow numbers, cut in on Babs, took Sadasia in her arms and rubbed the small of her back as she would a pup’s belly.
The taker of this cheek-to-cheek’s first step didn’t schmooze like a legend, but word on the street had it that she very much was. Or if not, then at least an inspiration to countless women of Trayne’s impressionable age and unquenchable ambition. Although strangely, until this encounter, Sadasia had heard nothing about this celebrity with a capital C’s amazing rise from obscurity into a life of loose cars, fast steaks and thick women.
A decade or so earlier, the entertainment world’s future force of nature had breezed into The Big Apple from an Indiana dune town where yellow jackets outnumbered registered voters and probably had a higher standard of living. A mixture of clueless and chi-chi, Gaul and the wandering tribes, this new transplant at twenty-two was non-denominational but open-mindedly slutty, “interested in the arts and theater,” a voracious reader and, rounding things out, burningly sure of her vocation as “A” if not “The” Great American Novelist.
“How nice for you, dear,” people told her at parties.
Settling in the outskirts of Brooklyn, light years from Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe and Norman “The Blade” Mailer, Capers Greenbergér took her grating voice center stage whenever she could but often offended the very folks she wanted to impress. With a small job in publishing that impressed no one at all, she hobnobbed at cocktail parties with literary agents who seemed more interested in polishing their Clifton Webb impressions than in Capers’ magnum work-in-progress. She diligently frittered away five years of her spare time on that effort only to discover most of it would never jell, while the parts of it that did were termed “sucky” by students in the Continuing Ed. creative writing classes she’d had to take out small loans to be able to afford.
Trying her luck at screenplays seemed the logical next step. But her unemployment ran out after Capers was fired for fleshing out scenarios on company time, and she hocked virtually everything she owned without selling a single script. The dispirited artiste then packed 25-odd feet of nylon rope that she’d purchased from the neighborhood Ace Hardware into her Amelia Earhart suitcase, headed to Prospect Park, where she’d always found inspiration, and searched for a tree not too far off the beaten path that would help her cobble together a memorable final exit.
Like everything else she wrote, her instructors would have labelled this last scene of her life’s little drama “derivative” or “in questionable taste.” Dressed in her best (a fetching ensemble of ballet slippers, leotard and Star of David Irish fisherman’s sweater, a gift from mom), Ms. Greenbergér wobbled atop her one piece of luggage with a noose around her neck, waiting for an “Oops! I lost my balance!” end to this veil of tears. “Count to three,” she decided, tired of a world that continued to ignore her and, by and large, had been unsparingly rude. She shut her eyes on “Two,” but apparently not her ears, which picked up some fracas a split second before voicing the fatal number. “What’s all the hubbub?” she called to a Good Humor man who’d been selling frozen treats steps away from her makeshift gallows.
“Dunno,” he said. “But I guess Jew-boy over there must’ve said something he shouldn’t.” Which may or may not have been true but regardless seemed justification enough in this defiantly individualistic outer borough for the savage beating that an old Hasidic scholar was receiving from a small mob of marauding teenagers. They came in a dazzling array of ethnicities but still managed to combine their efforts in a seamless frenzy of hate. “One out of many,” as the saying goes.
Feeling awed that fate might have unexpectedly dropped a lifetime’s work into her lap, Capers asked the frozen treat vendor for help getting down from her awkward perch, so she could move in close and transcribe the mind-altering abuse being heaped on the victim, who was now beyond pain having thankfully expired.
This detail didn’t deter his assailants from their onslaught of rocks, fists and bench slats, although they did eventually tire, wandering off in search of other victims, which allowed Capers to make a quick sketch of the body.
Twisted or not, Capers fell head over heels with the obscenity she’d just witnessed, as if she’d thought of it herself. Filled with such passion, what else could such a creative girl do but follow her heart?
“Come here often?” Mr. Frosty asked her.
“Not often enough!” was her ecstatic reply. She bought a toasted coconut bar, two nutty-buddy cones and a rocket pop for a big-time gorge that left her fingers sticky, then went back to her apartment with a groundbreaking TV pilot in mind.
The work went quickly until a desperate group of network programmers, stuck with a mega-bomb called “Kitty Cameron: Combat Nurse,” gave their undivided attention to the apparent madwoman who appeared before them one morning, completely unannounced, in Conference Room A, spec script in hand and with French tip nails ready to slash as many throats as needed if they didn’t hear her out and turn their prime-time schedule upside-down to suit her every whim.
Within minutes, the nutcase’s reading held them spellbound. “Let’s do this!” they decided. They put the network’s powerful shoulder to the wheel, so that on a Saturday night just two months later, a trustworthy voice let a nationwide audience know that “Kitty Cameron” had bitten the big one, then asked them all to “Please, stand by.”
The blank screen that followed, when it came into focus, presented a comforting vision of small-town America, right down to the Turtle Wax, Diet Pepsi, Ivory soap and Little Chief Smoker.
A slow crane shot lovingly panned over these iconic images until finally settling on a white picket fence from behind which slowly rose (theme music gently cueing) a stiff beaver hat, pair of rimless spectacles and a greasy black pair of signature ringlets.
Pu-shy. . . offensive !
Vul-gar. . . and smelly !
They live. . . next to us!
“Those Fucking Kikes!”
Can’t stand. . . to see them!
Hope they. . . get cancer!
Oh, Christ. . .please help us!
“Those Fucking Kikes!
Moved to. . . the neighborhood,
Never. . . had it so good.
Then things. . . went up in flames!
“Those Fucking Kikes!”
Mazzu. . . zuhs on their doors.
Strange foods. . . stocked in the stores.
Pollution on our shares!
“Those Fucking Kikes!”
Was! Nu?
Can’t! Stand! He-brews!
Gimme some boots and I’ll go bash them!
Gimme a whip and I’ll go lash them!
Gimme a club and I’ll go smash them!
Gimme a chance and I’ll gas en mass them!
Gimme a break! Gimme a break!
From Those Dirty Fucking Kikes!
It went without saying that the half-hour sitcom’s plot was crude and, even at its best, so to speak, patently offensive, centering on Henry Ames, a typical working stiff, blessed with a wackily average American family, whose worst nightmares come true when shifty Orthodox Jews inexplicably buy the house next door.
“Shut that thing off.” somebody said in Rhode Island.
But no one else complained. By the end of the program’s 30-minute run-time, luckless, endearingly tubby Mr. Ames had been wrenched awake by noxious smells and obnoxious chanting, learned his altar boy son had been kidnapped, been victimized by usurers, seen his home converted to a temple, his daughter married to a kibbutznik, local mayors and congressman elected on the Protocols of Zion ticket and, worst of all, watched his seat on the local Knights of Columbus being lost to an obvious psychotic called “Rabbi.” At his wit’s end, Henry (“Hank” to friends) turns to the camera and screams the show’s title at the top of his lungs. Cue closing credits to canned applause and a laugh track also prominent throughout the rest of the show.
“A Civilization’s Worth of Entertainment in Just Half an Hour!”
Even with this tag line running as the centerpiece of a national ad campaign, the network switchboard never lit up, except to register kudos for the program’s “courage” and “integrity.”
“Thanks for revealing our ‘dark side’,” one caller sobbed, before slapping his own children good night.
The show’s creator was far more honest in explaining its success. “Jew jokes always sell,” she said.
History records that “Kikes!” went on to become the network’s top money maker as both a first-run project and in syndication for many seasons to come.
The spin-off 45 performed by a mop-top pop group was also a great success.
These and other triumphs made Capers Greenbergér, erstwhile attempted suicide, embarrassingly wealthy virtually overnight, able to relocate in what she considered grand style to a very exclusive neighborhood and, thanks to her new-found fortune and fame, second-to-none as the gay gal bar scene’s catch d’estime, if that was even a thing.
“Are those your wheels?” The fawning couple had cut out of Sonia’s, serenaded by an obscene duet based on “Moonlight Becomes You.” Now down the street at an all-night parking lot, Sadasia had already mentioned that she just loved writers and was a bit perplexed to discover that her companion was the proud owner of one of Detroit’s most celebrated lemons (also one of the most celebrated casualties of the fashion designer craze): the incomparable “Picchionetti Spyder.” A sports car crafted bumper-to-bumper, or more accurately heel-to-toe, by Elio Picchionetti, Jr., scion of a legendary Italian shoe-design house, who took what he knew best, powered it with an ear-splitting lawn mower engine and, laughing all the way to the bank, launched his high-priced creation on the American market, where it received hideous reviews (‘He couldn’t fit all that style into a sneaker,’ “Car & Driver” had said.) and quickly sank without a trace from the market.
“Hop in!” Capers ordered, without a trace of a smile. Which Sadasia thought a little off, but well within the limits of first-date behavior. “Fasten that seatbelt!”
“OK.”
“C’mon!”
“I said, ‘OK’!”
“Shut your mouth!” Capers cranked the ignition, unleashing a sound like a tinny jack hammer and the two of them were suddenly borne aloft, after a run past the Fulton Street fish market, over the East River via the Brooklyn Bridge. Tires sending up that strange high whine that comes from a metal roadway. “Some honey, huh?”
Trayne watched her beloved Manhattan recede. “Yeah, sure,” she answered, entertaining second thoughts and not hearing at all. The ridiculous car made its way to the off ramp, then negotiated turns leading who knew where. “Mind if this goes on?”
“Help yourself.” The driver let her fiddle with the dial, but in the end, poor reception forced Sadasia to settle for one of those All-News/All-The-Time formats, which only upped her skittishness. They’d been driving for nearly half an hour through DMZ streets. “Know why I chose out here?”
“You mean in the middle of nowhere?” Sadasia mumbled, thinking how it figured. “Mind if this goes off?” Traffic was picking up out here, too. Probably graveyard shifts, so maybe there was still hope for the Brooklyn business revival she was always hearing about.
“None of your hassles,” Capers announced. “Rent’s next to nothing. Got my own house. The Mob runs everything that hasn’t already been stolen. Nobody bothers you. It’s really a sort of paradise on earth.”
Trayne guessed you could call it that. She’d once heard that entire populations willingly live in deserts.
“And best of all’s the people, they’re picturesque as hell.”
She didn’t find that hard to imagine. But with no buildings in sight, she noticed headlight beams on parallel roads and began to wonder. “O, give me land! Lots of land, dum-da-dum-ta-duh-duh-dum!”
“‘Don’t Fence Me In’?” The driver suddenly looked like a game-show contestant. “Am I right?”
“What?”
“That’s a song, right? It’s famous!”
Sadasia said nothing but answered by lighting one of her Newports, holdovers from the previous afternoon.
“No need to do that,” she was told. “We’re almost there. I don’t know why people smoke.”
Trayne knew she would never understand but kept it to herself as the Picchionetti dragged its steel-belted heels through a heavy iron gate set in a high spiked fence, the sole entranceway to an unbelievable old pile set in fire-bombed surroundings. The place rose five stark stories high, with an astonishing collection of widow’s walks, gables, mansard roofs soaring out of view, gargoyles, drainpipes and, though you’d never guess it, six-foot-thick walls.
“Built to be bomb-proof,” Capers explained.
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. . .”
Sadasia slammed the passenger-side door, then almost hurt herself craning that sweet neck but happy to stretch her legs.
“Know who used to own it?” The pair had already climbed the wide front steps and swung the entrance door open. Trayne didn’t have a clue. “The King!” Capers boasted but didn’t mean Elvis. Carrying herself over the threshold with her head held high like Ozymandias.
“Gaze upon my shit show, ye Mighty. . .”
Sadasia momentarily blanked when she saw that the door still hadn’t closed. “Who?” she asked.
“‘The King of Clean,’” her hostess hinted with a smirk. “You don’t read the papers?” Nothing past the North Star’s “Family Newells” column. “Suffice to say, I bought this place from a grade-A asshole, then screwed his wife just to show I could.”
With that self-serving boast a wrap, Greenbergér started climbing her house’s many stairs, shooting Trayne an over-the-shoulder come-on as she sidestepped the sumptuously sprayed, three-quarter-size, injection-molded statue of Diana the Huntress, classical Roman goddess, complete with bow, quiverful of arrows and pet deer, standing in Capers’ foyer, and that she routinely tripped over in the dark or when she’d had too much to drink, smearing her with the gold-colored glitter that inexplicably covered it. Maybe later she’d give the full guided tour. Just now, though, she had bigger fish to fry.
Eager to boil in the same oil, Sadasia caught up and accompanied Capers, holding tight to the filthy curving banister and feeling her gut churning as the ground and upper floors slipped by. There was almost no furniture in the rooms they passed. Just stacks of old newspapers and what seemed to be camping equipment, motor oil and wiper fluid for the Picchionetti. Though on floor number three she noticed an oversized wing chair, plucked from Goodwill, with a plate of rotting food perched on its seat.
“Sorry it’s such a mess. Hope you’re not tired.” Not especially, even in this heat, but Trayne would have been tempted to call a halt to this upward slog if the house had been any higher or if the stairway hadn’t suddenly ended five floors up in an eerie blue glow coming from the master bedroom. “How about those babies?”
“Why do you have them?” The boudoir was littered with gadgets resembling props from horror films.
“Oh, I just love my bug zappers,” Capers answered, giggling as the electrified flying insect killers doled out death through azure sparks and crackles. “Take it from me, they sure beat having mosquito bites wallpapering your ass!”
Hadn’t this woman ever heard of window screens? But instead of giving more thought to the question, Sadasia found herself drawn to the reproductions of Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo and Egon Schiele paintings that decorated Capers’ bedroom walls. Hung up alongside them were MTA bus advertisements promoting her sitcom. (“I thought up the idea myself!”) and a framed retrospective poster from the Museum of Modern Art, spot-lit in an alcove, featuring Marcel Duchamp’s “Mona Lisa with a Mustache,” underscored by the motto ‘L.H.O.O.Q.’
“A gift from a ‘friend,’” Greenbergér explained. “And the best review I ever earned of me in the sack.”
“Christ on a bike,” Sadasia thought, beautiful when bad taste took her breath away, “give it a rest.” But that was before Trayne noticed the newly filled and chilled oversize cocktail shaker, vulvic in concept, whose contents proved Capers could mix drinks with the best of them.
“Sake-tinis, m’dear.” The savage drink that time forgot. She added “Mmm-mmm” in-between swigs. And when she noticed that Trayne had softened, much in the manner of a ripe brie, moved on her quarry in a surprisingly brusque, business-like manner. To which Sadasia succumbed and found it well worth the wild ride from Ms. Toad that had brought her to this sideshow bed.
The zappers popped insistently until the hookup’s excitement wore down and carried them into the next morning, the next afternoon, and late Sunday evening. Until finally the two women had nothing left to run through but a sort of Kiner’s Korner (the wrap-up show for their multi-night stand) over bacon, eggs and coffee.
“I still don’t get it,” Trayne said with youthful hurt in her voice, draining a third cup of joe. She’d surprisingly gotten a little ahead of herself and now seemed half-smitten with her hostess. “Why don’t you want to know me?”
“That’s kind of missing the point,” the TV comedy legend explained. “I brought you here to fuck me, plain and simple.”
Trayne thought she didn’t care but still took the trouble to protest, “It’s not that I don’t want to! I’m just sore is all.” Like Greenbergér wasn’t. “What’s your hurry?” she asked.
“I got an afternoon flight to L.A.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Actually today since we’re in the wee hours. Out of JFK. I’m hammering out the details on another sitcom deal. This time with dykes. Don’t you just love it! People always tell me, ‘Write what you know!’” Her companion left the bed before Sadasia could respond and went hunting for something on the top shelf of the armoire she used to store her treasures.
“That still leaves us time!” Trayne blurted, fearing rejection.
“You had your chance!” Capers called back, using a popular street gesture to emphasize her point because she’d bagged her quarry, volumes of her private journals and scrapbooks. “I need to time to breathe!” Soon she was carrying a select few of these intimate archives to the middle of the room, searching for a unique moment of her past. “Then I’ll need to pack.”
This tripped Sadasia up en route to delivering a bear hug. “When will you be back?”
“No idea. Maybe a week.” You could never tell, maybe she’d meet somebody and stay a bit longer. The sitcom creator found what she’d been looking for and immediately misted over. “Rebbe Hymowitz!” she recalled, peering at a yellowed New York North Star clipping that recounted a tragic day long past in Prospect Park. “Boy!” she snorted. “Does this take me back!
“To when?” Back when she didn’t have a pot to pee in. “Or a window to throw it out of?” Sadasia guessed. This brought the two women closer than they’d been since they’d met. They lay together in awkward, improvised closeness. Holding hands, exhausted heads together. “Tell me the truth,” Sadasia mooned, “am I your first love?”
The Sitcom Queen thought that one took the cake. Departure time was drawing near. Trayne’s disrespect for boundaries ruined any chance they might have had for any real intimacy, so Capers turned the question back on its source.
“Mine, you mean?” Trayne’s breathing slowed. Anyone else would’ve tried to hide her feelings. “You know, it must be ages.”
“Since you woke up to women?”
“Yes,” she blushed, “though it feels like only yesterday. I’d slept with men, way too early, but then I developed this problem when I was in college.”
“Great.”
“I was upset and became a-sexual. Then I started going to readings on campus, where I met people who really seemed to like me and would talk to me like I was a human being.”
“Not a piece of meat?”
“Some of those people were women who put me on to a group. A ‘collective,’ they called it.”
“Like a ‘klatch’?” Capers teased, but Sadasia didn’t notice.
“It served our community’s needs through lectures, counseling, voter registration, consciousness-raising and some really nice social events.”
“Dyke dances?” Capers was rooting around, hoping for a sitcom freebie.
“Sure those, but not everyone in our group was gay. Women’s needs are too diverse for any single focus.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Orientation has its role in liberation. But careers, politics, and our unique artistic voice also should figure in the equation.”
“Rah-rah-rah!” the writer thought dismissively. And why not? She’d made it to the top all by her lonesome. “So where’s your big romance fit in with all this?”
“Remember I mentioned lectures? One of the best was the Rape Rap we presented at the library. Lucy on our board joked that the venue’s ‘No Talking’ rule was right on target because no one discussed that kind of thing back then, so she expected to learn as much herself that day as we would. We gave her a hearty round of applause, which made our guest speaker nervous. Lucy was such a hard act to follow!
“The speaker was a police officer but didn’t dress like one.”
“Plainclothes, you mean?”
“That’s right,” Trayne answered. “On the tall side, taller than girl height and she didn’t look much older than us in the cute holiday jumper she wore. She thanked everyone for coming and began by comparing rape with other violent crime statistics. I don’t remember the numbers, but she stressed how anyone can be a victim and used her fingers to show how we could all fight back.
“Pretty obvious,” Capers said.
“Maybe,” Sadasia agreed, “but she also made a fist after counting 5 and raised it above her head like those Black athletes did in Mexico City. ‘That’s what POWER against sexual assault really means!’ she said. And you better believe it made an enormous impression on me and everybody else who attended that day.
“I volunteered to work with her establishing goals for a 24/7 On-Campus Student Response Group.
“I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to get a worthwhile project like that off the ground and make a real difference in women’s lives. I also loved it because it let me spend hours with the officer, on campus and at her downtown office. As the project moved to its later stages, we even began hanging out off the clock. I’m not sure exactly when she became aware I was interested in her romantically, but she didn’t discourage me once she did, even though she was shy and awkward about it. I was the one who had to make the first move at her apartment after a dinner with wine that I was still too young to legally drink.
“So funny to think of it now! She was almost 30, and I was the one who had to pounce because she had no experience!
“So there we were, sleeping together all of a sudden. Then I moved in on weekends and we got to be pretty serious, even though we couldn’t tell anyone about our relationship. We even went to visit her folks together.”
“Her parents?” Greenbergér asked incredulously.
“That’s right,” Sadasia replied, smothering a muffin with jam.
“What did Daddy do? For a living, I mean.”
“Oh,” she munched, “he ran a Christmas shop. Selling wreaths, snow globes and other souvenirs to tourists. Up by Lake George.”
“Mummy too?”
“Yep.”
“Year-round?”
“Sure, but I was only up there once.”
Capers’ face froze into one of its more astonished masks.
“No need to get jealous,” Trayne said consolingly. “It wasn’t bad and I sort of liked it. Especially after we’d put in all those hours driving the twisty roads. It was kind of nice pulling into their parking lot, sliding down man-made snow drifts, checking out the 24-hour live creche and doing it all in this knock-you-over smell of pine. There were rows of spice candles with NOEL on them.”
“Big on Santa, were they?”
“Oh, yes! And in sizes you wouldn’t believe! Everything decorated with elves and little reindeer. Personalized chimney stockings. Imported ornaments!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yes! And this person kept reminding me to keep our relationship quiet. And just in time, too!. Because here, coming around the mistletoe aisle, was her mum and dad, dressed exactly like Mr. and Mrs. Santa. And they said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ And I said ‘Fine, nice to meet you.’ Then, ‘Have you been a good girl all year?’ And what could I say? And they said, ‘Maybe it’s time for you to meet the rest of the family.’
“So we went out the back door, into the woods, with this dirt road running off to the side, near what they called a salt lick. And I think, ‘What is this?’ And this person says that I’d better keep quiet. Because, right then, the holiday couple shook some sleigh bells. Then shook them again, only harder, like they meant it. And you suddenly heard this rustling in the bushes and a pair of deer antlers rose up from behind them. Santa and the Mrs. let out this whistle, called ‘RU-DEE!’ and this little kid, no more than 12 or 13, trots out of the bushes, into the clearing, in these buckskins, with a pair of antlers tied to his head and, I swear, sort of a red phosphorescent nose roped in place over his own.
“Well, as you can imagine, I get the giggles pretty bad from this. Until I noticed what exactly it was they had to live with. Behind the clown’s nose was a sloped forehead and that sharp drippy smile. So I think, ‘Oh, Christ!’ And next thing I know, this mongoloid kid is hugging my leg. And Santa says ‘Sadasia, this is Rudy.’ And I say ‘Hi.’ And Mrs. Santa tells me how she thinks it’s cruel to keep them tied up or in the house all day. How it’s really better to let them roam free because they can take care of themselves up to a point. The two of them show me this sign they made the state put up by the side of the road, ‘CAUTION! RETARDED CHILD AT PLAY!’ And I think, ‘Wow, what’s this world coming to?’
“But later, over roast goose and eggnog, with mashed yams for Rudy, I think better of it and figure maybe it’s the thought that counts. And this person tells me she’s pleased because her folks seem to like me, even if they do have an inkling of what’s up between us.
“Then it’s Sunday before you know it. We drive back to town in this torrential downpour. The roads are just awful but we don’t care. We’re feeling all lovey-dovey and warm inside. Even got the radio on.
“It’s going so good now and has been for a while, so we think maybe we’ll try living together full-time, in that shoebox apartment of hers, where you had to put up with barking dogs all the time. Which, even so, was fine with yours truly since I hated my sucky dorm room so much.
We pretended we were roommates to keep the super in the dark and because she wanted to keep our relationship as quiet as possible. Mostly because of her job. Which was good for me as well since I was in transition. I chucked the shrink I’d been seeing and was beginning to play my music again. Making progress.
“But wouldn’t you know? This person starts spending a lot of time bucking for promotion. Hitting her books. Growing distant from me though she could still be affectionate and turn on the charm to the point where I thought nothing had changed between us. She even said so to my face when the kitchen table was full of all these forms to fill out. When she bought an expensive new fountain pen to do them with, I asked what was up, and she told me she’d be upstate studying for the summer.
“‘How come?’ I wondered.
“Because her captain told her she’s ‘going places.’ She’s gotta attend some police training center up near Binghamton.
“But I’m told I shouldn’t worry since I can visit anytime. Just keep the house spic-’n-span until she gets back.
“Stupid here thinks nothing of it. Kick in my half of the rent on top of utilities. Deposit the checks she sends me. Pretty much write her every day. Until I hear she’s got a free weekend coming up between exams. I head down to Port Authority, take a bus, show up there early. And this person looks terrific in one of those cute blue uniforms that cops have. She’s even wearing her gun! Gives me a kiss, seems glad to see me.
“Only we don’t go to her room. We hit the mess hall instead, like I’m her maiden aunt or something. She introduces me around to these other officers, one more butch than the other. They all talk what I guess was shop, and I’m left playing with my Jello and carrot salad.
“Things keep going on like this. She shows me the library and the firing range. We see some old Katharine Hepburn movie on campus and then run over to Dairy Queen before it closes for a strawberry sundae.
“A busy day for sure, then we go back to her room, I’m thinking for fun and games, only there’s this cot there from linen service. First I say to myself, ‘OK, there’s appearances.’ But dammit, the thing’s made up and just about bowls me over because we haven’t done anything all day.
“I’m no fool. I steel myself for the worst. Waiting to see what’s clogging the pipes. Or maybe learn that she’s hooked up elsewhere.
“The big surprise is that she beats me to it. Asking, no, telling me to ‘Sit down, Daisy!’ of all things! So I do. She takes my hand, like I’m five. Says she thinks it’s time we had a talk, she’s got something to tell me. And I say I figured. I shouldn’t take any of what she’s going to say personally but she’s felt uncomfortable ever since I moved in full-time. Not because of me, understand. But her job’s taking more and more out of her these days and she’s just feeling ‘a-sexual,’ she guesses. That’s the word. A-sexual. Like I didn’t know how that felt myself!
“Of course, she’s getting undressed as she says this. Which makes things doubly tough on me. So I make a grab for her. She freezes and says ‘Please, don’t. . .’ Like I’m supposed to shut my feelings down completely.
“I flop down on the cot facing the wall. She puts her arms around me saying try not to take things so hard. That it’s nothing I’ve done and if she wanted to be with anybody that way it would be with me. Except she doesn’t.
“When, talk about timing, there’s this knock at the door. Judy Lee somebody-or-other hops in, in a loose floppy robe, with a Scrabble set under her arm. And don’t the two of them seem awful chummy?
“We play three-handed. Of course, I lose. When Judy Lee leaves this person tells me not to be ridiculous: I just have a filthy mind. Which shuts me up good because she’s so damn earnest and believable, though that’s no big comfort for me riding home on the bus. Or when I’m in the apartment again because that’s so chock full of her, it’s agony, though at least it’s paid for through the rest of the summer.
“But I’m still not sure and I still don’t buy it. After all we had together? So I keep on writing her. I get an occasional postcard back with nothing really personal on it. I call her and get the old run-around about things being hectic and that she had finals coming up. But maybe we’ll think about it afterwards.
“Which puts my heartache on hold maybe just a little bit. Let’s me go back to playing my guitar. Learning songs and continuing to call her. More than I can afford. And then there’s the long Labor Day weekend looming up right in front of me. And I start thinking, maybe hock the guitar and scoot on up there. Everyone likes surprises.
“But you know me, stupid. I had to call first. And for a while, I hope I’m dialing the wrong number. Only I’m not and know it. Sweetheart’s out there, somewhere, with someone else. And I can guess who.
“You know how you can get sometimes when you’re really hurting? Manic? Whatever you want to call it. That was me. I decided I’d call every hour, half-hour, 15 minutes, then God knows how often. Then switching the number of rings. And smoking, which I normally didn’t do then. Emptying the liquor cabinet, too, which landed me over the toilet heaving my guts out. It’s pretty far into the next week when she finally picks up, and I can hear she’s in tears.
“Terrific, I figure! At least the little two-timer’s feeling guilty. So maybe some good is coming out of all the misery she’s put me through.
“I make up some story about my weekend like I’ve been really busy. Then slyly I ask her how she’s been doing. And she tells me ‘Fine. . .’ Like, you know, she wants to get off the phone real bad. Only I won’t let it go. I mention, in my extra special way, that I rang her up once or twice back there and got no answer.
“And she says, ‘That’s right.’ She went home for the weekend.”
“So then how come she didn’t call and tell me?”
“And I find out from her that it’s none of my business anymore where she goes.
“‘Oh,’ I say, ‘is that so?’
“‘Yes,’ she says, ‘exactly right.’
“‘And why is that?’ I ask. It wouldn’t be because she’s shacked up with that tramp I met.
“Well, let me tell you, that seemed to get her right where she lived. Because she clams up. Except to say how dare me! And, get this, calls me ‘just about as sick as they come.’
“Which I don’t cotton to.
“Then she comes back telling me how she’d already told me where she’d been, at home. Which only busts her faucets wide open again. Until she finally clears her head enough to ask me if I had any idea what she’d been through over the last few days? “And I say ‘No, babe, but I can guess.’ Why doesn’t she try me? After all, I’m all ears. And you really do have to be a listener with her.
“Well, she says, she went home all right. Visiting her folks like the two of us did that time. And everything was going about as well as can be expected for such a rainy rotten weekend.
“Until Mrs. Santa says, ‘Let’s sit down to dinner.’”
“And Santa goes out back to round up Rudy. But he guesses the little bugger’s out of earshot since he doesn’t come running when he’s called.
“And the Mrs. guesses he’s marched his little white tail deer tail over to the spring in the woods like he does sometimes to talk things over with his chipmunk pals.
“And no one says a word more about it. Figuring he’s OK.
“But this person I know gets this creepy feeling, watching Rudy’s supper get cold and the water in his dish get tepid. And that awful feeling only gets worse after dinner, when the family’s in the parlor singing carols and stringing popcorn for next year’s trees.
“When, oh, say, around 10:00, 10:30, the phone rings, scaring everyone half to death, and Santa lays down his popcorn, strokes his long, white beard and, I swear, says something like, ‘I wonder who that could be?’ Mrs. Santa says she doesn’t know either. So he goes to the phone, picks up the receiver, screws it in his ear and finds out it’s the police calling. Tells his wife that. Hears they’re sorry to let him know Rudy’s been hit by a car at a deer crossing four miles or so up the road.
“Santa says, ‘Hang on!’ they’ll be right on over, fast as they can. And the three of them hitch up their enormous red sleigh, what with I don’t know, the one that’s got bright-painted wheels on it for summer. And they scoot straight to this country-bumpkin police station. Where they learn from the desk sergeant that it looks like a simple case of hit and run, though you can’t much blame the driver for leaving the scene under these circumstances. And that Rudy’s been taken to county general for emergency treatment, or maybe to the animal hospital, one of the guys coming off duty thought.
“At which point, Mrs. Santa gets all hysterical (problem children are always the favorites). And off they dash, with her crying, and find it’s not the vet’s Rudy’s been taken to at all. So Santa has to explain who he is to the head nurse running the emergency room at the regular hospital. And, well, first she gets the security guard, who’s a pretty burly guy and brings his night stick to the party. And it's only later that a real doctor takes charge, who seems to know what’s what and who’s who. And it’s this kindly M.D. who ushers the family into someplace very private around a corner to give them the bad news. Which is that their darling Rudy’s shown up DOA. But not to worry, chances are he hadn’t felt a thing.
“Just like you’d expect, Santa starts to look on the bright side of things. Like saying, ‘At least he’s out of his misery.’ He thanks everyone concerned. Even slips candy canes into the doctor’s lab coat pocket. And eventually gets around to asking after his son’s personal effects. Which arrive in a pathetic dented cardboard case, no bigger than a shoebox, with everything accounted for except Rudy’s little antlers.
“And this person wonders out loud if maybe some ghoul isn’t prowling the premises for morbid souvenirs. But her father calms her, saying they probably just flew off on impact. And you know, it took that family almost three whole days to find those damn antlers in a hollow tree trunk off the side of the road. Surrounded by chipmunks, pointing at them with their little paws.
“And this person just sobbed and sobbed on the phone when she told me that story. Sobbed like I’d never heard her do before. But somehow, and I don’t know why, I just couldn’t relate to what she was feeling. Because I was just so, what do I want to say here? Happy? Yeah, I guess that’s it. Just so happy about her not screwing around on me that I started telling her how wonderful she was. How she shouldn’t worry, I forgave her. And how if she wanted, like I knew she did, I could fly right on up there and hug her troubles away.”
Here, well, what could you really say?
It seemed Sadasia’s verbal batteries had run down, leaving her emotionally down for the count. She was silent and still as a statue, signaling her story’s completion. But Greenbergér still wanted to know what happened next? How it all ended. Whether Trayne finally went up to Binghamton or what?
“Nah-uh,” Sadasia told her, in a voice that seemed to have already nodded off. “I couldn’t reach the school in time. Because she’d lied to me about their schedule. They’d already headed home like happy campers.
“After that, well, I guess I only heard from her through her attorney. Who wrote me saying I could stay in the apartment until the dorm opened for my sophomore year. But only on condition I never contacted this person again.”
“Well,” came the obvious question, “did you?”
“What do you think I am? Of course not! I couldn’t stand the place, not with all those memories floating around! I just left. . .”
“To go where?”
“That’s for me to know.”
“Yeah, and me to find out.”
“You know I don’t mean that.”
“Sure,” Capers humored, “anything you say.” But she knew in her heart that they’d reached a sort of impasse. Lying on the bed, she was ready to sleep a big sleep after their marathon tryst but needed to use the john really bad. “Gotta pee,” she explained, rising to answer nature’s call. “Maybe I’ll shower. Or soak.” Or just sit on the pot planning her next moves—while dovey also satisfied her need for slumber—and filing Sadasia’s whale of a tale under her own Works in Progress. “You gonna be OK?” Probably not, Greenbergér saw, so she hunted in her medicine cabinet and returned with a few gentle yellow pills. “Bottoms up,” she chirped. “To make you sleep.”
“Hope I can keep them down.” And those were the last words Trayne spoke until the drug wore off.
Capers, meanwhile, made herself comfortable on her premium-quality padded toilet seat, uncapped one of her pricey Montblanc pens, opened a custom-made foolscap notebook and, shifting her hams, started to write. “Way too fast,” some might say. But finding she was interested, she churned out copy as fast as her little fingers could whip through the pages, effortlessly finding a way to perfectly capture all her thoughts that morning.
In the other room, doped Sadasia slept the sleep of the nervous and found it fitful at best, plagued as it was by abdominal pain, cramps from what she believed to be incipient diarrhea and, most troubling of all, by a man’s soft-featured face, framed in a pageboy haircut and macho man mustache, that seemed to stare right through her from under a police patrolman’s hat.
Sadasia woke when the drug wore off, more abruptly than she would have liked, and knew that her neck lay oddly, like an old slipper carelessly flung in a corner. She salved her ache by turning while her long strong-muscled fingers hung on the sheet, tips down. Her mouth was pasted over and her veined silk underlids sensed light as weight. It was a long way yet for pain to translate into glare, but close enough for her to fight back, scrunch her head in the pillows and draw her knees up into relative coolness, the cool of country stores and blue antique bottles.
Pooled in the covers, her body heat seeped away, leaving Trayne in childish comfort. She kept her eyes closed and clutched the pillow like moss to her cheek, though she was pricked by the tip of a feather that had somehow stuck through.
Sadasia now could pick up the sounds of the breeze through the curtains, far-off cars and Greenbergér’s zappers, which had kept a rough sort of time throughout her deep drowse. Behind them, there was the soothing whoosh of a shower spraying, which brought her up off her pillow to do a fair St. Francis imitation. “Hello, room. Good morning, sky.”
The light just then had that special pre-noon slant. A sharpness that went a long way toward soothing Trayne’s soul into a domestic lull. Then she noticed Capers’ bags packed by the doorway.
“Well,” she thought, “that’s nothing.” She would never come between Greenbergér and her work and modestly looked toward the comfort station. One hand wrapped itself in the lip of the topmost sheet and drew it up into an Amish smock, covering what countless eyes had hoped and strained to see at The Umbrella Man. A little queasy while she got her land legs back, but able to notice through the drifting shower mist that Capers had tidied up her scrapbooks, closed the armoire doors and made the bedroom they’d shared appear far more presentable. It looked like a great place to work and sip cocoa.
Sadasia turned a corner to face a door on which she knocked, got no answer, but found that the porcelain knob, complete with Dutch mill, was nicely warmed. The singer swung it inward, calling “Hello?” to see if anyone was home, which she knew Capers was, although she probably couldn’t hear much over the water.
No answer?
Well.
Sadasia lifted the toilet lid and sat down, a trifle ill at ease since she lacked the clothing usually hiked down at these moments. “Hey!” she chanted, into the mirror-blearing cloud. “You gonna be long?”
No answer?
Well.
No matter, really, because the tush-cush there was comfy, padded and all. And she could kill some time batting at the humidity with one of the issues of “Country Life” and “Better Homes and Gardens” that she’d found in neat stacks next to the pot.
A bubbling in her gut was an awful reminder and Trayne, looking to the future (“How long you gonna be?”), felt what might have been piles coming on and tried to lighten her distress by making sense of the intricate design that appeared on Greenbergér’s shower curtain.
The songbird’s intuition told her that the black plastic wall depicted a full night sky with the various constellations done in white. But a closer inspection of the curtain showed its printed luminaries to be of something less than cosmic origin.
“Well, what do you know?”
The singer’s bowels seemed ready to perform their God-appointed function, with perhaps less distress than she’d expected, but then surprised her by emitting only a loud discharge of gas. This left her free to concentrate and look at the curtain once again. Viewing an Auntie Mame hat crowning a pair of terrorized and transfiguring eyes, it suddenly clicked in Sadasia’s head, and she placed the face of Mrs. Woolf in some kind of context: Next, that is, to Gertrude Stein’s sour puss and Alice B. Toklas’s smarmy visage; next to Jane Austin, looking like a cool million; and Jean Rhys; and hippo-poetess Amy Lowell, reclining in great bulk and pince-nez; next to the Bronte sisters, like three queens; and beach-combing Sappho, skipping stones on the beach; and Red Emma, gritting her teeth; and off to one side, Landowska and Hess tickling their ivories.
“You gonna be much longer?” she whined, mottling pink in the steam from the shower and squatting uncomfortably, almost in the face of all of those sister greats.
Nature took its revenge yet again with another loud blast from down below. “C’mon already!” she whimpered. A moment later, she drew back the curtain and the shower stung her face. But that discomfort hardly mattered because Sadasia Trayne had entered a state of clinical shock.
The hooks supporting the shower curtain stopped their whining. Virginia Woolf’s lithographed portrait stretched and jiggled before her, while a curious, barely human image lay on the shower mat, like well-rinsed lo mein in spots, only thicker. It still defied classification after a second look, so harsh was the atmosphere, until a providential drop in the water’s temperature cleared the steam and Trayne, not yet daring to touch the carcass, could begin to make out a map of swelled pores and, down a ways a bit, black debris, distinct points, like little spent match heads, the tearful aftermath of a brutal shave. Legs and arms and head were missing, but the torso still had Capers Greenbergér written all over it.
Sadasia turned off the shower Before she even knew it, she had thought back to the white toy nurse’s bag her folks had given her. “Funny,” she thought, “how these things crop up.” You’d open that bag, pulling it apart at top, and that pull and pretend dive into medicine, she remembered, gave the same previously unimagined thrill as now. The carcass lay pale and, of course, deathly silent on the bottom of the tub, the skin on it stretched like a blue-balled sailor. Sadasia swallowed and set about analyzing her situation. She decided that she would first access the full extent of the physical damage. It just lay there, in a calm and hopefully detached manner. Then, in her mind’s eye, she brought up the focus, just to get a better look at the wounds. Especially at the crotch, which the forensic boys had a flair for describing.
Fainter hearts might have fled, slower speech might have stopped and milder manner might have melted. But Sadasia Trayne, faced with her recent lover’s brutalized remains, stuck to her post, leaned deeply into that cistern tub, swirled the lo mein with bitten nails and wondered why Capers hadn’t cried out in her death-wash.
There was no sound but the tendrils swishing, a terrible stillness. But Sadasia Trayne heard nothing at all. She palmed the poor top of the torso like a cap-snaffler and knew she would have screamed if someone had snuffed her. She would have struggled.
But this. . .
This piece of meat, still so scornful! This ripe fruit, still biting life like a viper with a cold marbled beauty. Nothing as white as those cold stiff flanks. Nothing as black as that stuff down here. When it had been hair, the singer had kissed it a thousand times, but now, when touched, it had a funny feel and a burning to it that might have dissolved her own skin if the singer hadn’t struggled with the faucets and let the cool water cut her pain down to a tingling, a soreness, down to next to nothing.
Sadasia drew the curtain, working her hands through the guest towels, and then gripped the rack they hung on, trying to her staunch her nausea.
She would have used the toilet, right then and there. But before she could reach it, noticed that it was occupied. And that it had been before, by a too-familiar visage, like a ginormous tiger eye in a smudged porcelain setting and looking the worse for wear. Its eyes swollen shut, like in the movies. And an incongruous excrement helmet (most likely human) running down its ears into the slightly open mouth. Hadn’t someone once said love has a bitter taste?
Sadasia closed the lid, closed her heart to that love and, again like something they sometimes did in the movies, closed the bathroom door behind her with a chapter-ending thunk. She strode into the bedroom they had shared. The zappers were still at it, and Greenberger’s luggage was still packed and ready. But with what?
The crimson-stained carpet underneath gave a sinister hint, which Sadasia took to heart. Threw her stuff together. Saw through a window that the Brooklyn desert completely ruled out conventional escape. Then, still without a stitch on, she remembered a number best not called in the best of times. But which Sadasia now dialed from an antique phone as if her life depended on it.
The call went through, a desk sergeant buzzed and Trayne convinced her party not to hang up. She followed through on her S.O.S. directly across from a closet in which Mr. Groak, in his glory, watched her every move through the eyes of the Christian martyrs and the pirouetting nose hairs of Alvin Ailey.