A Cat Tells Two Tales (10 page)

15

When I was a child, my grandmother had a house cat named Peter who would refuse to eat food off a plate. My grandmother was quite proud of him, saying that because he wouldn’t eat off a plate, he could be trusted. It always struck me as odd logic, but that was the kind of feeling I had always had about Anthony Basillio.

Anyway, I started out to find him. The closest branch of the Mother Courage copier chain was on Second Avenue and Third Street. No, the girl behind the counter said, Mr. Basillio’s office is in the Sixth Avenue store—at Prince.

I arrived there about eleven thirty. It was a larger store, and in the rear was a complex of small offices and cubicles. Three or four young men were behind the counter, servicing a continuous flow of customers. The copy machines, all sizes and makes, were humming.

I stood off to one side to distinguish myself from the rest of the customers and finally was approached by one of the clerks, who was wearing an absurd leather apron, as if he were an old-fashioned printer. It was, I recalled, the same kind of apron I had seen Jo wearing on that dismal morning we learned that Mona Aspen had been murdered. But when Jo had worn it I had thought it was a blacksmith’s apron.

“Can I help you, miss?”

“I’m looking for Anthony Basillio.”

“He’s not in.”

“Can I wait?”

“To tell you the truth, miss, Mr. Basillio has gone for the day.”

“What about tomorrow?” I asked.

“Look, miss, if you really want to see him,” the clerk said, exasperated, “you have to get here early. He leaves every day at about eleven for the racetrack, and he doesn’t show up again until the next morning.”

He paused, smiled at me, and added, “He doesn’t have to. He’s the boss.”

I thanked him and left, promising that I would be back the next morning. He stared at me blankly.

I spent the next twenty-four hours wrapped, metaphorically, in a tourniquet—tense, tight, restricted. I could not proceed without Basillio, and it was necessary to proceed. I went to a movie. I read a few scenes from a Jean Genet play. I groomed Bushy and chased Pancho. I thought of Charlie Coombs with regret and then anger; of Harry Starobin with a kind of bitter adolescent longing; and of Jo Starobin with warmth. It was an exhausting, nerve-racking day that vanished very slowly.

At eight forty-five the next morning, I stood once again in front of the counter of the flagship Mother Courage copy shop. The clerk with the leather apron remembered me, raised one section of the counter, and waved me through—pointing to a specific office in the back. The door was open. A man sat at a desk, his chair turned to the window. Hearing my footsteps, he wheeled around.

“My God, the Swede!” He jumped out of his chair.

I smiled and held out my hand. He had always called me Swede after he found out I was from Minnesota, even though I had told him a hundred times that I wasn’t of Swedish descent. It was just one of his stereotypical Hollywood affectations.

Basillio really hadn’t changed at all, except for his graying hair and worse posture. He was still thin. His skin was still bad. His smile was still wicked, as if he was perpetually contemplating some kind of mayhem.

“Look, Alice,” he said in a mock-serious tone, putting his arm around me and guiding me to a chair, “I refused to sleep with you then and I refuse to sleep with you now. So, do you still want to visit, or are you too brokenhearted?”

I laughed until the tears welled up in my eyes. He represented an old and treasured time for me—when the theater had been much more than just a precarious profession, when it had still been a kind of religious vocation.

“I see your name around, Swede, but not all that much.”

“No, not all that much,” I agreed.

“But at least you’re still in it . . . and you never went showbiz,” he noted with an appreciative smirk.

“I tried,” I replied. And we both laughed hugely at this most hoary of all acting-class insults. We felt an enormous kindness toward each other.

“Remember what the master said,” Anthony cautioned.

“Which master?”

“Which master? There’s only one, Swede. Bert Brecht. He said, ‘Don’t let them lure you into exhaustion and despair.’”

“I see they haven’t.”

“Nor will they,” he affirmed.

“Tony, I didn’t come here to talk to you about Brecht or the theater. It took me a hundred calls to find you. I need help.”

Basillio’s eyes narrowed at the word “help.”

“I need information on horses.”

“Horses?” he asked, astonished.

“Racehorses.”

“You mean you want me to give you tips?”

“No. Information on their personal lives.”

“Whose personal lives?”

“The horses’.”

“Racehorses don’t have personal lives. They run and they die.”

“Cup of Tea did.”

“Cup of Tea was special.”

“I’m writing a book on Cup of Tea,” I said, using that convenient fabrication, “and I need information on his contemporaries. Not betting information—other kinds. I just broke up with a trainer named Charlie Coombs.”

“I know of him,” Basillio said, interrupting.

I continued. “So now that Charlie is gone from my life, I need someone who can talk horse talk.”

“Maybe, Swede, you’ll just have to hop into bed with another trainer. I mean, they’re the only ones who really know horses’ breeding and conformation and potential. All I know is what I pick up from other gamblers—crazy stuff that may or may not be true. Like how the horse can’t run if the temperature gets over eighty degrees or if he likes beer in his feed or that the horse is really crazy unless a lady jock climbs on his back. That kind of stuff.”

“That’s what I want, Tony,” I said, realizing that my lies were now spiraling. Charlie and I had never talked about horses—except for the first and last times we were together.

He whirled around on his chair. “Swede, if there was one woman on earth on whom I would have happily bet my wife, my kiddies, and all my copying stores that she would have never gotten involved with the racetrack, it was you. You were always too elegant, too goddamn classy. Or maybe, at most, a three-day trip to Saratoga in August with a rich lover to watch the horses run in between ballets.”

He was starting to sound like my ex-husband.

“Believe me, Tony,” I said, “it’s not a willing involvement. This book I’m writing is a debt.”

“Bookmakers?”

“No, the dead.”

“The dead?” he repeated softly.

“I want to find out all the information I can about Lord Kelvin and Ask Me No Questions.”

“Forget the first horse.”

“Lord Kelvin? Why?”

“He’s dead. Lord Kelvin was killed in a freak vanning accident in Pennsylvania about a year ago. I know because I met this guy at the track who told me he saw a small notice about it in a Philadelphia paper. He mentioned it to me because we both had made some money on that horse.”

I wondered why Charlie had never told me that when I asked him about Lord Kelvin. Was it possible he didn’t know?

“That leaves Ask Me No Questions,” I noted.

“I’ve seen her run,” Anthony replied. “Look, just give me a few days.”

I wrote my number on his desk pad. I remembered, as I was writing, that I had done the exact same thing at the racetrack when I first met Charlie. “Thanks,” I said, standing up.

“Wait, Swede,” he called out with a touch of panic in his voice.

I turned back to him.

“Aren’t you going to tell me how sad this all is, Swede? The Mother Courage copier shops instead of the Mother Courage stage sets? Aren’t you going to say how goddamn pathetic it all turned out?”

“No,” I replied. There was silence. “You told me once in a bar, after a seminar,” I reminded him, “that when all was said and done, gambling was your only passion.”

“I lied,” he said.

I wanted to leave. I didn’t know what to say. Basillio picked up on my discomfort and said, “Remember when I brought my cat, Fats, to the seminar in a shopping bag?” We both laughed so loud the customers in the front of the store were startled and peered past the counter toward us.

I went home and waited for Basillio to call. That he would call, that he would give me information I required, was never in doubt. He was a blast from the past, and the past is always good.

Sure enough, he called me two days later. He said he was going to the racetrack, but he would meet me in front of the Plaza Hotel at eight that evening and buy me seven dozen littleneck clams, three dozen cherrystones, nine brandies, and a piece of cheesecake in his favorite place—the Oyster Bar.

“Can’t we meet in a coffee shop somewhere?” I asked.

His voice was happy, playful, manic: “Don’t provoke me, Swede. It’s the Plaza or nothing.”

At seven forty-five I was standing in front of the Plaza Hotel. I felt stupid and ill-at-ease; I had provoked another male into adolescent gestures. I was wearing jeans and a sweater, just to be perverse, I imagine.

He arrived a half-hour late, flushed, excited. Grabbing my arm in a tight grip, he led me up the steps of the hotel, across the lobby, and then into the Oyster Bar by the back entrance, where we were seated by a man who looked like he had survived prewar Vienna only by the skin of his domed head.

“Look at the bar, Swede. Don’t you love it? It’s square. I mean, did you ever see another bar with corners?”

Once we were sitting across from each other, I could tell that he had been drinking before he met me.

“How did you do at the racetrack?”

“I lost heavy.”

“Easy come, easy go,” I said by way of a gentle criticism.

He smiled at me. He ordered clams and brandy and ale. “So,” he said after it was all settled, “what I found out, you probably already know.”

“Try me,” I said.

“Right. Ask Me No Questions was a big, hard-running gray filly. Not much breeding, but she ended up a multiple-stakes winner.”

“Like Cup of Tea,” I said, remembering that Charlie had told me there was absolutely no similarity.

“Sort of, but not really,” Anthony hedged, staring at the two plates of beautiful littlenecks and one plate of cherrystones. He began to prepare them carefully—lemon, horseradish, a tiny dollop of hot sauce.

He explained, “No one ever went from nowhere as far and as fast as Cup of Tea. He went from a dirt track to become the world’s champion grass horse and sire. Ask Me No Questions never started that low or went so high. She won grade-two stakes at best, not the Arlington Million like Cup of Tea.”

“But something did happen. I mean, there
was
a transformation, wasn’t there?”

“Right. Something sure as hell happened. She lost her first twelve races. They sent her back to the farm. She came back as a four-year-old, lost six more races; then went back to the farm with another injury. The next time she raced, four months later, she won an allowance race by ten lengths at odds of sixty-five to one. And she kept on winning.”

I sat back, exhausted suddenly by the realization that I had at least put one firm piece into the puzzle. “Thank you,” I said.

He grinned at me wickedly and pushed the clams across the table. The one I ate was cold, tart, delicious.

“Do you want to see her?” he asked.

“Of course! Can I see her?” It had never dawned on me that I would have access to Ask Me No Questions.

Triumphantly he pulled a small piece of paper out of his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and slid it across the table to me the same way he had slid the clams. It read: “James Norris Stables, Far Hills, New Jersey.”

“They retired Ask Me No Questions to become a brood mare. But there was something wrong with her. She couldn’t conceive, and when she finally did, she couldn’t deliver a live foal. So they sold her to that stable in Far Hills. They’re going to make a Grand Prix show jumper out of her—you know, going over seven-foot fences for ten thousand dollars first-prize money contributed by Volvo or BMW. For all I know, she’s a jumper by now.”

“You told me what I need to know,” I said thankfully.

“I wish you’d stop thanking me, Swede. After all, I’m not a happily married man and you’re going to damage what remains of my libido. Besides, you don’t think for a minute that I believe all that nonsense about you writing a book on Cup of Tea.”

I was barely listening to him now. An absurd little ditty was bouncing around my head:

Three little racehorses

Hanging on a wall

Two hung straight

But the third took a fall

I wasn’t finished with Anthony yet. “Did anyone mention to you an exercise rider named Ginger Mauch?”

“You mean someone who used to ride Ask Me No Questions?”

“Yes.”

“Never heard the name. But, then again, exercise riders are anonymous unless they’re name jockeys and doing a favor for the trainer. Is this Ginger a jockey?”

“No,” I answered, trying a cherrystone this time, remembering that Dr. Johnson used to feed oysters to his cat. I started wondering if Bushy and Pancho would like clams, speculating how best to remove them in their half shells from the Plaza.

Basillio started a monologue about how the racetrack was the closest thing around to Brecht’s conception of theater. The brandy was obviously getting to him.

“How do I get out to Far Hills?” I asked him.

“By car. Take the George Washington Bridge. Then some kind of highway you pick up there—84 or 80 or 287—I forget which.”

I began to look around for the first time since I had sat down. There were only out-of-town faces, like mine had been so many years ago.

“Do you know what, Swede?” Basillio asked, now desperately trying to get a waiter’s attention for coffee.

“What?”

“I think you’re going to ask me to do you another favor. So, before you ask, I’m going to offer it. Not because I’m a good guy or anything like that, but because it was so damn wonderful to see you again and I don’t want it to be another seventeen years before we see each other again. So, I’ll take you to Jersey. No big deal. I live in New Jersey—Fort Lee. I’ll take you to see Ask Me No Questions.”