A Cat Tells Two Tales (16 page)

6

John Cerise grinned when he saw me at the door of the hospital room. Once again he was dressed in white. The left side of his face was discolored and there was a bandage over his left eye. He looked smaller in bed, much, much smaller, like a kitten in a high chair. He made a motion with his hand and I approached.

“Did you find the cat?” he whispered. The discoloration was like a brilliantly painted bruise—red and black and purple.

I shook my head. The cat had vanished. The detective had surmised that the cat had run out of the apartment, down the steps, and onto the street.

An old man in evident pain lay on the other bed in the room. He made a valiant effort to wave at me. I patted him gently on the arm as I made my way between the beds. What else could I do?

“I’m sorry I got you into this mess,” I said to John.

He shook his head with as much vigor as he could summon, to assure me he bore me no grudge. Then he seemed to gulp air. He finally said: “Alice, Clara is not an Abyssinian. But she is a lovely cat. She looks like an Abyssinian. She walks like an Abyssinian. She talks like an Abyssinian. . . .” He sat up with some effort, raising his hand for emphasis. “But there is no such thing as a white Abyssinian.”

I pushed his arm down to his side and helped him back down.

“The police told me,” I said, “that a thief must have known Mrs. Oshrin went away, and then broke in, not knowing anyone was there. It was just one of those odd coincidences; you being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He nodded. He twisted in the bed. He started to get up again, thought the better of it, and said pathetically: “I never saw who it was, Alice. I was in the living room. Clara was on the rug. We were getting to know each other. I heard a noise. It sounded like someone was fumbling around near the door. But I thought it was you. I didn’t even turn around. And then I felt a terrible pain here. . . .” He gestured to the side of his face. “And then everything went black.”

“You were hit with one of Mrs. Oshrin’s antique candleholders,” I told him.

He closed his eyes.

“It could have been worse,” I quipped. “You could have been hit with Mrs. Oshrin.”

He grinned, his eyes still closed. The sun was streaming into the room.

“I’ll be out of here tomorrow,” he said.

“Do you want me to come here tomorrow to help you check out?” I asked.

“No need. I’ll be fine.”

I walked around his bed and sat down on the chair by the window. Cerise seemed to doze. A painkiller, I thought.

It was bizarre how things got out of hand. A stupid young man falls in love with a teacher. He gives her a cat. The teacher places the cat with a neighbor. The neighbor is unhappy. The teacher calls a friend to look the cat over. A thief breaks in and almost murders the friend, who has absolutely nothing to do with anyone or anything in that apartment.

The absurd chain of events horrified me. But something else about the whole mess was just plain peculiar. The detective had said that the thief panicked when he saw Cerise, hit him, and fled. That’s why nothing had been taken from the apartment.

I had the nagging doubt, suspicion, feeling—call it what you will—that the thief had broken in to steal Clara. That is what I felt; but the logic escaped me.

Sitting on the hospital chair, thinking those thoughts, I did feel stupid. Clara was a lovely cat, but why would anyone break into an apartment to steal her? No, the detective was right: it was simply an aborted breaking and entering, aborted by an unexpected guest in the apartment. So then why did I have that feeling? Oh, glorious, delicious, irrelevant paranoia. Alice Nestleton, the quirky out-of-work actress, the New School lecturer, the well-known cat-sitter, the obscure crime solver—getting delusional once again over a rather dim-witted feline.

Cerise was talking to me. I had been so lost in my thoughts that I hadn’t heard a word he said. Then I realized he was asking me where I really got the cat. He had known all the time I wasn’t telling him the unvarnished truth.

“From a lovesick student,” I admitted.

“Still breaking hearts?” he asked.

“The young man isn’t old enough to be my nephew. I’m teaching a class at the New School. And there he was, an obnoxious young man of about twenty-odd years with a very bad case of arrested adolescence.”

“You didn’t want the cat?”

“John,” I explained, “he dumped it on my landing in a box—his conception of a love offering, I suppose. I didn’t even know it was a cat. I thought it was just a large box with a muffler or something like that inside, or maybe an extended love poem.”

“Cat in a box,” he mused, and then winced. Too much talking obviously hurt the side of his face.

“John,” I said, “stop talking. Anyway, what is there to talk about? I don’t even know if it was his cat. Maybe he found it on the street.”

“Poor Clara,” he whispered.

I leaned back in my chair. The next class at the New School was in forty-eight hours. If that young fool Bruce Whateverhisnameis didn’t show up, I was determined to find out his last name even if I had to pester the New School’s administrative staff. He had already caused the pain of a dear friend, the alienation of a treasured neighbor, and the disappearance or even worse of a lovely white cat with black spots on its face and rump. His only redeeming trait seemed to be that he had taken the time to pay his last respects to a pathetic New York theatrical legend named Arkavy Reynolds.

7

The lovesick troublemaker, again, didn’t show up in class. I waited twenty minutes, then told the class to keep itself busy, and walked resolutely to the administrative office. Only a clerk was at the desk, usual in the evenings.

I asked to see my class roster. She refused. I demanded. She waffled. I cajoled. She averted her eyes. I begged, hinting that I was only asking because of a health emergency. She didn’t ask me to elaborate. That was sufficient. She showed it to me.

His name was Bruce Chessler. He lived at an address on East Fifth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A.

Then, armed with this information, I went back to the class and gave one of the most boring and irrelevant lectures in the entire history of adult education. At the end of the class I felt ashamed of myself, cursing Bruce Chessler again because it was his fault . . . everything was becoming his fault.

I went home and conversed with my cats. Bushy seemed quite understanding, even favoring me with four or five paw swipes.

There was no Bruce Chessler listed in the Manhattan phone book at that address. I called information. There was no phone of any kind listed to any individual with that name.

Was I being obsessive? The thought occurred to me. Why didn’t I just leave it alone? The cat was gone, God knows where. John Cerise would be okay. Mrs. Oshrin would forgive me. Yes, indeed—why didn’t I leave it alone!

I began to pace. Then I walked to the hall mirror and stared at myself. Still thin, still lovely, still more golden than gray. Was that it? A middle-aged woman really fascinated by a young man who had fallen in love with her. No, I wasn’t that stupid.

My antennae told me a crime had been committed. What was the crime? Simple. Someone had stolen Clara. That was what I believed from the first moment the detective had recounted his version of the events. There was no real proof . . . there was no real evidence.

But the logic of my belief was becoming more and more apparent as I thought about it.

Mrs. Oshrin had left on the trip very suddenly.

If her apartment had been targeted, she would have had to be under twenty-four-hour surveillance.

Why would someone be waiting for her to leave? She had absolutely nothing of value in her apartment.

It didn’t make sense.

No, it was either a random break-in or a theft of the cat. One or the other. If it was a random break-in, any one of seven hundred individuals in my neighborhood could have been guilty. If it was a cat theft—who? The young man stealing his cat back? Absurd. A ring of cat thieves? But how would they know a cat was living with Mrs. Oshrin—in fact, had just arrived in her apartment? And why would they want Clara?

The whole thing was very strange, very perplexing, very engaging.

There was no doubt about it. I was going to pay a visit to young lovesick Bruce Chessler and find out all about vanished Clara. But I didn’t want to go there by myself. I wanted company.

The next morning I called Anthony Basillio at his place of business—the Mother Courage Copying Shop.

Basillio was an old acting-school friend of mine who had long ago given up the theater in his head—but not in his heart. He had helped me out with the Long Island murders, and even though he sometimes got carried away . . . even though he still called me Swede . . . even though he still propositioned me ever so subtly . . . even though he still looked like a long-lost refugee from a long-haired ashram—I trusted him very much and I appreciated his kind of manic intelligence. To him, two and two were rarely four—but they were rarely five either. More important, he had that intense free-floating anxiety that made him long to do something, anything, which is, I suppose, why he gambled too much and probably did a lot of other things too much.

We agreed to meet at a coffee shop on East Eighth Street just before noon.

I got there about eleven thirty. He was waiting and very happy to see me again, blowing into his hands as if he was about to embark on something extremely pleasurable—almost juicy. He looked exactly the same. His hair was getting longer. His face was breaking out again. How could a forty-year-old man continue to look so unfinished? Actually, I found it charming.

“Swede, Swede, Swede,” he said as we sipped our Mexican coffees. I had long since given up any hope of him discarding that traditional nickname. No matter how many times I told him I was not of Swedish descent, he never believed me. But then again, Basillio probably calls all people who come from Minnesota originally Swede.

“I have been longing, Swede, to hook up with you again. You’re the only lady who brings me back.”

“Back where, Tony?”

“Who the hell knows?”

We laughed.

“Who do you have to find?”

“A young man who was in my class at the New School. It’s a long story,” I replied.

“Tell it to me.”

I told him.

“Are you afraid of this character?” he asked. I didn’t answer for a while. He had a point. Why, in fact, was I afraid to find him alone? I knew the neighborhood. He hadn’t been violent—only crazy.

“I’m very nervous around young men who are passionately in love with me,” I replied. But that really wasn’t the reason. I simply couldn’t articulate the threat.

“Then you should be afraid of me, Swede.”

“A married man with children?” I replied.

He grinned and changed the subject. “What’s new with you? Any parts? Anything happening in the great beast?”

“I’m reading a crazy script—about a family of rats.”

“Why not?” He laughed.

We finished our coffee and left. Five minutes later we stood in front of Chessler’s four-story tenement building. It was like a hundred thousand others in the East Village.

The day had become very hot and very muggy. It was the kind of August day in New York when you want to think only about distant galaxies. Nothing will ease your torment other than the vision of enormous explosions and implosions on a cosmic scale.

The building had two step-down stores on either side of the entrance. One was boarded up. The other was a shoemaker.

“Do you remember that fat woman who used to live down here?” Basillio asked. “The one who was in the Dramatic Workshop with us. I think it was in seventy-four. She was from North Carolina. She used to give parties. I think it was on Fourth Street.”

I didn’t remember. That was a long time ago. And if I did remember, it would probably be very depressing. There is nothing as sad as doomed theatrical careers. They are so predictable.

We walked into the small lobby. There was a panel of bells but the names next to them were so faded or mutilated that they couldn’t be made out. No matter how intensely I stared at all those letters, none of them seemed to combine into “Chessler.”

“We can wait until someone comes down and ask,” Basillio said.

Suddenly the outer door opened and a Hispanic woman with an enormous bizarre wig moved inside the small lobby with us.

“Who you? What you want?” she demanded. Her tone was very aggressive. She was carrying a large pail with sponges floating around on top.

“I’m looking for Bruce Chessler’s apartment,” I said.

She crossed herself.

“All his stuff now in cellar. I couldn’t wait longer. No longer. Very sorry. It all downstairs. Owner told me to put it there. I put it there.”

“But where is he?” I asked, confused by her comments.

She crossed herself again.

“I thought you his family. Young man dead. Murdered in bar on Eighth Street. Few days ago. You not his family?”

“Murdered?” My chest felt like a bellows.

“Boom! Boom!” she said. “Shot in head. Dead.”

I leaned against the wall, suddenly dizzy. Basillio pulled me away because my shoulders were pushing five bells at once.

8

Next to Chessler’s building was a building with an orange stoop and on that stoop Basillio and I sat for a very long time in the humid air. The breeze was fetid.

I had gotten over the initial shock. After all, I hardly knew the young man. I could barely remember his face. But there was a lingering disturbance . . . a kind of blanket over the head, very light, very well-knit, very hard to shake. What had he said to me in the funeral parlor? Something from Ben Jonson: “Beneath this rock there doth lie all the beauty that could ever die.” Or was it “stone” rather than “rock”?

“We should look over his stuff,” Basillio said.

“Why? We didn’t even know him.” The bitterness in my own voice astonished me.

“Because,” Basillio explained, “if he’s been dead a few days and nobody came for his stuff, it may mean his family doesn’t know . . . that the cops couldn’t locate next of kin. So we should look through his stuff, find out who he is . . . I mean who he was . . . and contact his people.”

Basillio was absolutely right. It was the proper thing to do. But I wasn’t able to move. It was suddenly nice sitting there. There was all kinds of activity on the street to take my mind elsewhere. It was, in fact, what I had come to New York for, originally, from Minnesota, many years ago—for action, for all kinds of action if I may use that very ugly but very descriptive word: action in life, action in love, action in theater.

I was wearing one of my long country dresses, the kind that accentuates my already excessive height, the kind that my ex-husband used to say made me look like an erotic fantasy out of Virginia Woolf. I realized that I fit quite well in the East Village.

“There she is,” Basillio said.

The woman with the wig was standing in front of the house staring at the door as if deciding whether or not it had to be cleaned.

We got up. We walked toward her. She knew what we were doing. She pulled a large key ring from her pocket, shook the keys at us, and we followed her through the door into the lobby, through the hallway, and down a very steep staircase that led to a cellar filled with more junk than I had ever seen in my life.

We heard scurrying among the objects. Cats? Rats? Derelicts? Junkies? Ghosts?

“Pigeons,” said the woman leading us, with a broad grin. I couldn’t tell whether she was being sarcastic or truthful. I realized also that she was not Hispanic, that the accent was something like Lebanese.

We walked through another door to a less-cluttered and better-lit space which had obviously once been the coal room and still had the partitions. She led us to one partition, piled with cartons and clothes and posters and toasters. She crossed herself and held out a hand in explanation—that this was what was left of Bruce Chessler. Then she was gone.

Anthony Basillio shook his head slowly as he stared at the stuff.

“We should, I suppose, be looking for something that identifies his family,” he said.

I nodded. It seemed the intelligent way to proceed. A single overhead uncovered bulb burned ferociously down on the remains.

We started on the first large carton—Tony on one side and me on the other, emptying the contents carefully, almost religiously. About thirty seconds into the emptying, I was overwhelmed with such a sense of sadness, of futility, of hatred of whatever had extirpated him, that I just sat down on a low carton and started to cry. Above all, I couldn’t deal with the memory of what the landlady or janitress had said. She had said: “Boom! Boom!” The young man had been shot to death. It was like an earthquake had been telescoped into one inconceivable splatter of violence. Steel. Noise. Blood. Pulp.

Basillio kept on, happily leaving me alone. I had the absurd notion, sitting there as I wept, that Clara, the white cat Bruce had given me to express his infatuation with an older woman—wherever Clara was now, she knew and was weeping also, as cats weep, from the stomach.

I could see Basillio removing book after book and flipping pages—waiting for that telltale postcard or check stub used as a page marker which would identify him further. Then the magazines and the records and the pieces of a life on paper—menus, clippings, God knows what.

I wanted to help but I couldn’t. Now I was beginning to see his face . . . and that sport shirt . . . and hear his caustic classroom mode . . . but now it was not threatening . . . death had given him a certain élan in my mind . . . the tragedy was becoming personally more intense, more intimate.

There were clothes and hats and beat-up sneakers. There were old check stubs and some canceled checks from the Chemical Bank branch on Eighth Street and Broadway.

Then Basillio pulled out a very fat white envelope, sealed with a thick ugly rubber band. He pulled the rubber band off, opened the envelope, and peered inside.

“Here,” he said, bringing it over to me, “this is very sad.”

Indeed it was. There were dozens of photographs in the envelope. Some of Bruce Chessler. Some of unidentified people. Some of Bruce in a group. It was his photo album of sorts.

In some of them he posed, wearing that chip-on-the-shoulder smile . . . the kind that said: I’m smarter and tougher and hipper than you and you’d better know it. Some of them showed a more pensive side, particularly when he was photographed with someone else. And sometimes, in the younger photos, he looked just plain desperate.

I came to the photo of an old woman.

I stared at it—the woman wore braids wrapped around her head. She wore a high-necked, very old-fashioned dress with a large ornament around her neck on a thick chain.

I moved on. Then suddenly I shuffled back to the old woman. The woman was old, but the photo was not. Maybe five years old at the most—the sides were still white and crisp.

The more I looked at the photo, the more I realized that I knew the old woman.

The hair, the ornament, the dress—they were all familiar.

Then I remembered.

“Tony,” I said, “come here for a minute.”

He came back over. I showed him the photo.

“Do you know who this is?” I asked.

“No.”

“Look hard!”

“I’m looking. But I don’t know.”

“Does the name Maria Swoboda mean anything to you?”

He cocked his head and screwed up his face. He was going through his thinking contortions.

Then he snapped his fingers: “The old acting teacher.”

“Right,” I confirmed, “the Method-acting teacher from the Moscow Art Theatre. She had a studio in New York in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies—on Grove Street. For a time she was the rage. I remember when I first came to New York I was able to get a few lessons from her, and I considered myself in the presence of a high priestess.”

Yes, I remembered that crazy, wonderful old lady very well. But Method acting had long since gone out of vogue and I had no idea whether she was still alive, much less still teaching. She had not been a young woman when I went to her.

“Was Chessler an actor?” Basillio asked.

“Well, he was taking my class; he obviously had some interest in the theater. But he didn’t talk like an actor. He talked like a political radical. You know . . . a lot of passion . . . a lot of hate . . . a lot of Brecht—like you used to talk, Tony. And he did show up at Arkavy Reynolds’s funeral. You knew he died, didn’t you? He got into a fight with a homeless man who murdered him on Jane Street. Two fools. Do you remember that fat man?”

Basillio nodded and went back to his work. I kept staring at the picture. God, how the memories surfaced . . . of Madame Swoboda, which was what she was called . . . speaking about Stanislavski and the vision they all had . . . speaking about the character being inside of the actor . . . speaking of how the character can only emerge authentically if the actor utilizes his own creativity, his own beauty, his own suffering to project the character from within to without. It was heady stuff. It was glorious.

Basillio interrupted my memories. He handed me a sheaf of papers that had been rolled and fastened with another rubber band.

“This is even sadder,” he said.

I held the top and bottom of one sheet so it wouldn’t fold. It was a handwritten letter.

It was addressed to me.

Dear Alice Nestleton:

You think I’m an idiot, don’t you? You think I torment you in class to cause you grief. Don’t you realize I must differentiate myself from all the others in any and every way possible? Don’t you understand that I am the only one in this stupid class who knows you are a great actress? I love you very much and I am afraid to tell you. I have a fantasy about you . . . a sexual fantasy . . . all the time . . . we are in a house built of reeds . . . it is high above some body of blue water . . . the house is on stilts and we are making love and you are wearing a beautiful . . .

I didn’t want to read any further. I crumpled the sheaf of papers and thrust it into my bag. Basillio was right. Was there anything sadder than unsent love letters from a dead boy?