Vicky and Keanu
PART I: A BIG MISTAKE
Vicky had auburn hair and a round, dimpled face. You could tell she had once been quite pretty. But now she was nearing fifty and had lost her looks. I thought she must’ve had a pretty good body too, in her younger years, but now she was rather heavy. An actress, Vicky had worked sporadically in plays and commercials, but lately the work had dried up, and now for the most part she was unemployed, living off food stamps and various forms of public assistance. She lived in a tiny, junked-up apartment with her little boy, Keanu, a child she had had late in life. The father was no longer in the picture, nor had he ever really taken much interest in the child.
Vicky was pretty much helpless, having relied on her looks to get men to do everything for her throughout her whole life. One day I was helping her put an air conditioner in her window, since the maintenance people no longer responded to her requests.
“It’s impossible to get anybody to do anything around here,” she said.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I keep asking them to put a better lock on the bathroom door so the junkies can’t break in, but they ignore me.”
“Do you pay your rent?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“There’s your biggest mistake. Don’t ever give them a cent. I haven’t paid my rent in seven years.”
“Seven years!?” I exclaimed, incredulous. “And Stanley Bard hasn’t said anything? He hasn’t tried to throw you out?”
“Well of course he’s said something, “ Vicky said, as if I were an idiot. “Stanley bothers me all the time. But he wouldn’t dare throw me out. He knows I’d sue the pants off him!”
Seven years was approximately the age of her little boy. I found myself wondering if maybe Mr. Bard had refrained from evicting her because he didn’t want to put the child on the street. (Less charitably, I wondered whether in fact Vicky might have had the child in order to avoid being thrown out.) Vicky said that Stanley was overcharging her on her rent and therefore she didn’t have to pay anything.
One time Susan and I were drinking in the bar of the El Quijote. Vicky came in, Keanu in tow, and sat next to us and ordered a martini. After a while, a man started cursing and carrying on at the end of the bar.
Keanu looked around his mother and asked me, “Why is that man acting like that?”
“He’s drunk,” I said.
Keanu nodded his head in assent.
Strangely, Vicky got mad at me. “Don’t talk that way in front of my child!” she snapped. “He doesn’t know what that means.”
Actually, Keanu did seem to understand. And he had made a point of asking me instead of his mother, as if perhaps he couldn’t expect a straight answer from her.
PART II: THE PAYOFF
A few months afterwards,Vicky asked me to help her carry some boxes down to a friend’s car; she was moving most of her stuff to storage. “We have to move out, but I got ten thousand dollars out of the old skinflint,” Vickie said. “I could have gotten more if I’d decided to take him to court. That’s what he was really afraid of.”
So Stanley paid her off to get rid of her, I thought. “Ten thousand dollars,” I said. “That sounds pretty good.”
Actually, while it appeared quite generous under the circumstances, it didn’t seem all that good for Vicky. She would have to find a job pretty quickly, since her new landlord was probably not going to be quite so understanding as Stanley Bard. I thought it would probably take her a considerable chunk of that money just to get established. And I had a feeling she might have been exaggerating the amount as well. “So what are you going to do now?” I asked. “Do you have any leads on any apartments?”
“I’m going to Hollywood to work in the movies,” Vickie said. It didn’t make much sense to me: here’s a forty-nine-year-old woman, out on the street with a young child, and she’s planning to move to Hollywood to become a movie star.
“I’ve always wanted to do it, and now I’m just going to go for it,” Vickie said. “I know it’s going to be tough, but I have a lot of experience in the theater and I’m really going to work hard.”
“Good luck,” I said. “Break a leg.”
“She’s so cute,” Keanu said, expressing his faith in his mother, I suppose, or perhaps just repeating what she had told him.
Three months later Vicky and Keanu were back in town, having run through the ten thousand already. She told me that she and the child were sleeping on fold-out cots in a friend’s kitchen on the Upper East Side. But they were already wearing out their welcome, and Vicky was wondering where they would go next. I got the distinct feeling that she was hinting around that maybe I should let them camp out for a week or two in my apartment.
By the end of that week,Vicky and Keanu were hanging out in the lobby of the Chelsea. When I talked to her,Vicky seemed kind of defensive, as if people had been asking her—though I hadn’t—what she was doing back in the hotel. “I told Keanu that this wasn’t our home anymore, but he wouldn’t accept that. He kept wanting to go home. He kept saying, Mommy, when can we go back to the Chelsea. I had to bring him here to show him that this wasn’t our home anymore.”
Keanu wasn’t saying anything. He was looking at the ground and seemed embarrassed. I doubted that this had really been his idea.
It soon became clear that Vicky had come to ask for her old room back. “I have to let Keanu see that there’s no possibility of us coming back to live here again,” she said. “He made me promise to ask Stanley if we could come back, and I agreed in order to show him it was impossible. I think it’s important for him to have some closure so he can move on.”
I don’t know what Mr. Bard said to her, because he wasn’t around at that moment. Vicky went up to the front desk to try to persuade the desk clerks to take her side in the matter, but they laughingly told her not to bother, since there was no way in hell Stanley was going to let her come back.
