A Cat Tells Two Tales (6 page)

9

“Only one more landing to go,” I said to Jo as we both hovered on the cusp between the third and fourth landings, exhausted, still dazed. Jo had a large bandage on one side of her face. I had a dressing across the top of my forehead, right at the scalp line.

Noticing that one of the tenants still had a Christmas wreath on the door, I snarled. Why hadn’t it been removed? Christmas was over and done with. And as I stood there between landings, holding Jo, I remembered some lines from a play I had once appeared in. A woman faces a hated husband and says, “What I’d like on this ominous Christmas Eve is a visitation from Baby Jesus, or at least a Christ in some highly recognizable form.”

What was the name of the play? The playwright? The character? I could remember nothing, only those lines.

I touched my thigh gingerly. It hurt very badly. The doctors in the emergency room at Beekman Downtown Hospital had said nothing was broken, just bruised.

The police had told us the truck had crashed into a lightpost, destroyed a parking sign, smashed the windows of the Chinese restaurant, destroyed a hydrant, spun around twice���and driven off. They told us we were very lucky. Drunk drivers like that one usually ended up killing or maiming people—and both of us had been only inches from death. It was a miracle, they said, that we had escaped with only superficial wounds from the flying glass.

We started up the final flight to my apartment, Jo in front, my hand lightly on her back to make sure she didn’t fall. Or perhaps my staying behind her was not altruistic. When I had gained consciousness I had seen one side of her face drenched in blood from dozens of tiny glass cuts. And her cropped white hair had been flecked with blood. The sight had made me ill.

Finally, sanctuary. We both dropped onto the sofa like stones. We didn’t move. We didn’t speak.

It was already dark outside and there were no lights in the apartment. I realized I should turn on a light, but for the moment I couldn’t intellectually locate the switch.

When I finally did turn it on and returned to the sofa, I saw Bushy and Pancho sitting calmly, side by side, staring at us. It was a very unusual pose for Pancho. He seemed to be assessing the situation. It must be our bandages, I thought. The white bandages must fascinate him.

“Can I get you something, Jo?”

“Nothing.”

I stared at Pancho. I longed to cuddle with that crazy cat. For a brief moment I contemplated making a grab for him. But I didn’t. Pancho was always too swift for me. He simply didn’t want to cuddle. I smiled at him. His body was less relaxed. His curiosity was almost satiated. He would get back to business shortly—flight from the enemy.

Jo laughed, and I looked at her. Her hand was feeling her bandaged face. “I was just thinking,” she explained, “how ridiculous it is to come into Manhattan and almost get killed by a drunk driver. I thought all the drunk drivers were on the Long Island Expressway.”

“How do you know he was drunk, Jo?”

“Well, the police said he was drunk.”

“Yes, they did.”

“You have to be drunk to climb a curb and run your truck into a restaurant window.”

We were both alive. It was time to deal with the facts. “He wasn’t drunk, Jo. He was trying to kill us.”

She barked a small, nervous laugh. “Alice, how do you know that?”

How did I know that? I closed my eyes and re-created the moments before. The driver of the red pickup truck had been idling his vehicle when we came out of the restaurant. He had crossed over from his double-parked position to the empty side to gather speed and then made a straight run toward us. I had seen him. I had known he was coming for us.

“He was trying to kill us, Jo.”

“Why would anyone want to kill us?” she asked, skeptical, confused, disturbed.

I didn’t answer her question. I looked at the cats. Pancho was gone. Bushy was stretched out. My thigh was throbbing as if there was a frog under the skin.

The little red pickup truck had splintered all my idealistic pretensions. It had made me realize that my life was still precious to me. Sure, I had not become a great actress doing great roles, but there was still my craft, and my cats, and my apartment, and the hundreds of tiny things that constitute a life . . . and which I loved very much.

The red pickup truck had put the question forthrightly: Was I prepared to sacrifice it all to find out who murdered Harry Starobin?

No, I was not.

“Jo,” I said as gently as possible, “they tried to murder us because we wouldn’t let your husband rest in peace.”

“I don’t believe that, Alice. I have a right to find out who murdered Harry.”

It was such a naive and ludicrous statement that I reacted sharply. “Don’t be stupid, Jo. I’m not talking about rights. I’m talking about all that cash in your vault and God-knows-what elsewhere. I’m talking about people who murder other people. Do you want to die, Jo? Those people, whoever they are, tried to kill us. And they’ll try again if we don’t stop.”

She didn’t respond. She leaned her head back against the sofa pillows. A tiny speck of blood was seeping out of her bandage.

I knew what she was thinking, that her good friend Alice was abandoning Harry. Yes, I was doing that. I was abandoning Harry and saving my life and hers. We had both gotten in too deep. We had both scratched the surface of something that was very dangerous.

“So you just want us to stop,” she said, “to leave it all to that terrible Detective Senay who doesn’t know a thing about Harry . . . who doesn’t care about Harry.”

“Yes.”

“I should just go home and forget all about Harry’s papers and his death and that money, and all about Mona. Is that what I should do?”

“Just proceed with your life, Jo.”

“What life?”

“Any life you can make.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Alice.”

She started to get up, but the effort was too much.

“Please don’t be mad at me, Jo. Please.”

She flailed her arms in the air and then brought them to her lap. “I’m not mad at you, Alice. I’m . . . it’s just that . . . poor Harry.” And she began to mumble incoherently.

I covered her with a blanket and sat close to her. She had, I knew, accepted my decision, and I was relieved. I knew she was not capable of carrying on an investigation alone. We would both be safe if we distanced ourselves from Harry’s corpse . . . or rather his gravel-strewn ashes. But along with the relief came no small amount of shame. I had, after all, quit. The role was too difficult for me. The consequences were potentially too dangerous. I was too old for a fling like that. Pancho flew by along the far wall, heading toward the windowsills. I was safe. We were all safe.

10

It was the first day of February, a brooding, frigid day. I had just returned from a lunch meeting with my agent and “some people.” As usual, this kind of meeting had agitated me. I was not well-known enough as an actress to be offered parts like pieces of fruit, but I was too experienced and well-thought-of to be asked to read for many parts that I would have been delighted to read for. So, hoisted on that peculiar contradiction, I was always forced to have those strange, frustrating lunches with “some people” who were about to do a play or a movie or a PBS special.

The whole thing was a sham anyway, because I hadn’t done any straight theater for a long time. I wasn’t interested in that stuff anymore. I was looking for parts that stretched the imagination, that took reality apart, and one didn’t find them with “some people.” I never left a lunch with them without muttering, “God bless cat-sitting.”

So there I was, sitting on the sofa, indulging my latest bad habit—touching the small crescent-shaped scar which remained on the top of my forehead after they removed the bandage.

A variant of my usual theatrical fantasy was beginning to form. I was appearing as a guest artist in some exotic foreign company like the Moscow Art Theatre. My role was minor, but as the play unfolded, I spoke my lines and exhibited such awesome stage presence that my character totally overwhelmed the major characters in the play. At the end, roses were flung at me—large bloodred roses—as if I were a ballerina. It was such an egotistical adolescent fantasy that it always embarrassed me—but it never went away. And the fantasy always afforded me, during its course, intense joy, and why not?

It was a magical, mystical, lunatic fantasy, and in each reenactment the vehicle changed. It was a Victorian costume drama. It was a sleazy detective drama. It was a Brechtian interpretation of the Theban Cycle.

“Oh, Bushy,” I said, “how stupid and weary I am . . . and how bizarre my whole life has become—lunches and fantasies and kitty litter.” Bushy understood. That is what cats are all about.

The phone rang. I figured it was my agent calling to tell me how the lunch had gone, how those “people” were excited by my talents. I let the phone ring a long time because I really didn’t want to talk to her. She was a nice, foolish woman but she had begun to harp on my stopping all that avant-garde nonsense and going back to where I “belonged”—Eugene O’Neill? And I kept saying, “Sure, get me some skinny Colleen Dewhurst parts.” Both of us were lying.

When it didn’t stop ringing, I picked it up. It wasn’t my agent. It was Charlie Coombs, the trainer.

He said he had something even better than horse stories to tell me. He said that an exercise rider who works for him lives in my neighborhood and will drive me out to the track in the morning to see how a great—
chuckle
—trainer like himself really trains racehorses.

I stared at the phone. For the past few weeks I had thought about Charlie Coombs many times, but only in relation to Jo and her troubles, and I had not heard from Jo since she returned to Long Island, disgruntled at my defection.

But the moment I heard his voice on the phone, I knew that we would become lovers.

I don’t really know why I thought that. The theater is no place for love. Actresses can’t stand actors, and vice versa. The only men I met who weren’t actors or directors were bankers and lawyers and businessmen on the fringes of the theater. They were perpetually fascinated by and panting for actresses who they thought would provide a new world of erotic and intellectual excitement. It never happened that way. The magic never emerged. I was by now more or less resigned to celibacy.

But how would it be with a man who had nothing to do with the theater?

I said I would be delighted to go out to the racetrack again.

“Malacca,” he said, which was the name of the exercise rider, “will be in front of your house at four thirty tomorrow morning.” Then he hung up.

I turned to Bushy, who had just jumped up for some attention, and was just about to tell him about the Charlie Coombs phone call when the phone started ringing again. This time it had to be my agent. This time I had to let it ring. Or put the damn machine on, which I hated.

But what if it was Charlie with a change of plans?

I picked up the phone. It was Carla Fried.

“Alice, I’m at La Guardia. I have to catch a plane at Newark in three hours. If I go through Manhattan, we can meet for coffee.”

“Where does the bus bring you?” I asked automatically, flustered by her call.

“I take it to Forty-second and Park. We can meet in the bar of the Grand Hyatt, across the street. An hour okay?”

“Fine,” I said. And she hung up. God, that woman had become efficient. It was like dealing with a corporate jet.

Remembering that the bar of the Grand Hyatt was pseudo-posh, I threw on something pseudo-respectable.

Carla was waiting for me at the entrance to the bar inside the hotel lobby. She had taken a cab. The moment we sat down, she started to talk a mile a minute. She was sorry she hadn’t called back after she left Atlanta. Everything about the production was going well. She wasn’t going to pressure me about a decision on the part—there was still plenty of time. Then she sat back and grinned.

“I’m babbling, Alice, I’m sorry. Planes make me crazy.”

We ordered drinks.

“What is going on with you?” she asked.

Her question seemed so absurd I started to laugh and then to cry. How could I tell her what had happened? How could I tell her about the murders? She wouldn’t comprehend or care. How could I tell her about the fear when that little red truck came toward Jo and me?

“What’s the matter, Alice? Are you sick?”

Her face clouded over with such concern that I felt terrible at spoiling our meeting.

“No, no, a man,” I said quickly, recovering.

“A man? I had forgotten all about them,” she quipped. “You mean those people with the funny musculature.”

“I think I’m going to have an affair, Carla. And I’m a little nervous. It’s been a long, long time.”

“Who is he?”

“A man I met at the racetrack. A trainer.”

“It has been so long since I had an affair, Alice, that when I go out for drinks with Waring—”

“Waring?” I interrupted, not remembering the name.

“The millionaire I told you about . . . the one who funded our season.”

“I’m sorry. Of course I remember. Are you sleeping with him?”

“No. That’s my point. He’s smart and handsome and crazy and rich. The kind of man I always dreamed of. But now I just sit and talk theater with him, and not a single erotic thought pops out. You’ll see. He’s in New York. I called him from the airport after I talked to you. He’ll be here to have a drink with us. But I want to hear about your man.”

“Well, Charlie Coombs is not rich or handsome, but he may well be crazy.”

“You can’t have everything,” she said.

Another round of drinks came and we lapsed into one of those wonderful, surreal, lewd, revealing conversations that are basically sexual autobiographies. It was delicious. We laughed. We cried. We remembered.

Suddenly I felt a touch on my shoulder. And then I heard a voice.

“So you’re Juliet’s Nurse,” the voice said. I turned and stared at a man.

“I’m Waring,” he said, and pulled a chair to our table, sitting easily.

Is he the Pope? I thought sarcastically. Only one name—Waring. Maybe all very rich men use only their last names—even in bed. He was tall and skinny. His thinning light hair was brushed back and longish. He was wearing an old brown corduroy suit with a beautiful light blue knit tie on a dark blue shirt. He looked like an academic. His face was lined, with blue eyes. Fifty? Sixty? I couldn’t tell.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to harass you about the part,” he said, “because Carla has been giving me all kinds of etiquette lessons about dealing with actresses.”

His voice had that funny Canadian accent, a flattish inflection which is so difficult to describe and even harder to mimic.

He sat back and beamed at Carla. My curiosity immediately turned to hate. He was looking at Carla as if she were his possession. As if her theater group were his new toy. As if, just as he owned factories and wheat fields and oil tankers and racing cars and yachts and horses and dogs, now he was going to own a little theater and he was going to apply his magic touch and—
poof
—out would come another Moscow Art Theatre. God, he sickened me. He reminded me of a hundred other theatrical backers I had met over the years, people who shared his arrogance even though they had only one-millionth of Waring’s fortune.

“What’s the matter, Alice? You’re pale. Are you sick?” Carla leaned toward me, her voice and face anxious.

I lied.

“No, I’m fine. It’s just I forgot about an appointment . . . an important appointment. Look, I have to go. Call me! I’m still thinking about the part.”

Then I stood up and walked out of there.

Malacca was waiting for me the next morning in a beat-up van, the back of which was filled with horse equipment, most of which I couldn’t identify. He was a small man, obviously an ex-jockey, and he drove like a lunatic, sailing through lights happily, telling me his life story in violent bursts of energy, then falling silent, then erupting again.

When we reached Charlie Coombs’s barn, the trainer was waiting for me. He smiled, and before I could say a word, he placed a riding hat on my head and buttoned the strap under my chin as if I were a child. Then, taking me by the hand, he led me toward the saddled ponies standing quietly.

“This is Rose,” he said, pointing to the larger one.

I hadn’t been on a horse in fifteen years, but Rose was so gentle that riding her was like sitting on a pillow. Coombs climbed on the other pony and we started to pace forward. I needed a few moments to orient myself, since everything had happened so quickly, but I finally realized that all around us were racehorses—his racehorses—heading out to the track for their workouts.

As we continued to move en masse, I became unnerved. The horses were prancing, snorting, moving in often erratic patterns. Several of them looked crazed, as if they were about to bolt or rear up, and I heard the constant chatter of the exercise riders soothing them in Spanish. From time to time one of the racehorses would come close to my pony, Rose, and make contact with her. Rose was unperturbed. I was tense.

It was still dark, but there were tiny slivers of light beginning to infiltrate the horizon. Charlie brought his pony close to mine. “Okay?” he said. I nodded. He smiled. “Rose likes you,” he said. He was projecting.

When we reached the gap in the track, the racehorses went out in single file. As each one passed Charlie, he gave the rider instructions—gallop such-and-such a distance, work the horse in such-and-such a time. Our two ponies drifted away from the gap and settled behind the rail.

“How do the riders know how fast they’re going?” I asked, perplexed by the speeds Charlie had requested. They didn’t carry stopwatches, and even if they did, they couldn’t read them in the darkness.

“The clocks are in their heads,” he replied.

Horses were now circling the track at different speeds. I couldn’t identify Charlie’s horses, but I saw from the way he was watching that he knew exactly where all of his horses were and what they were doing. Then I too began to watch carefully. The sound of the hooves pounding the track was like a beautifully precise percussion instrument. I could see white froth on the horses’ mouths. I intuited the strength and skill of the riders as they perched on top of their mounts so precarious, so light. The whole scene was packed with a kind of beauty, a kind of energy. Leaning all the way forward in the saddle and laying my head on Rose’s shoulders, I closed my eyes and listened to the beat.

It was all over much too quickly. We rode back to the barn and Charlie took me through the barn area and into the stalls. He showed me how the horses were stripped and cooled off and then bedded down. He introduced me to the grooms and the riders and the barn cats and dogs who roamed freely in and out of the stalls. He showed me the horses that had not worked out that morning, allowing me to give them apples or sugar cubes. He pointed out the feed problems and health problems. And then he led me back to his cluttered office, gave me some coffee and a piece of Danish pastry, and told me to wait until he finished up.

An hour later he was back, the morning work done. Now he looked exactly as I remembered him—underdressed, broad-shouldered, tousled hair, friendly manner.

But he was wearing boots.

“Where are your red sneakers?” I asked playfully.

“I don’t wear them when I’m really trying to impress someone,” he said.

“Well, to be honest, I found them very attractive.”

“Damn,” he said in mock anger, “I always make the wrong move.” He sipped his coffee. Then he noted, “Jo sends her regards.”

“You saw her?”

“No, I spoke to her. I called her and asked permission to call you.”

“My God,” I laughed, “that is old-fashioned.”

“I am old-fashioned in most ways. Anyway, Jo told me you’re no longer looking for Ginger Mauch.”