A Cat Tells Two Tales (9 page)

As the train left Hicksville station I pulled out a paperback copy of
Romeo and
Juliet
, promising myself that I’d use the train ride to give some serious consideration to Carla Fried’s offer to play the Nurse. But I got only as far as Act I, Scene ii, before I shut my eyes. I started to doze, then woke, then dozed again.

When the train reached Jamaica, I sat up with a start, looking around desperately. Should I change trains? The conductor assured me it was a through train to Manhattan. I relaxed and realized that while I was dozing I had dreamed about those two horses whose paintings had hung in Mona’s bedroom.

What were their names? I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the auctioneer’s list that had been handed to me the moment I entered the house. I ran down the paintings for sale. There they were, at forty-seven hundred dollars each!
Lord Kelvin
and
Ask Me No Questions
.

What funny names racehorses are given! I was about to crumple and throw the list away when I remembered the empty space on the wall next to the two paintings, where obviously another painting had once hung.

Curious, I looked at the next entry. Superimposed over the name was a rubber-stamped
sold
.

The third painting on the wall was
Cup of Tea
.

13

At noon the next day, Charlie Coombs called. It had been a good week for him. His horses were winning. He wanted to come early and buy me an opulent dinner. I suggested an Indian restaurant in the area. He said that he had never eaten Indian food in his life, but for me he’d do anything.

He came over at four and we sat around and talked to each other, then talked to the cats, then made love, and then went out to eat.

It was one of those small Indian restaurants on Lexington Avenue. The outside was innocuous, but inside was a bizarre profusion of colors: black candles, pink tablecloths, gaily patterned flower plates. Charlie studied the menu carefully, almost compulsively, but he was obviously not really interested in the food.

It was odd. I could understand his relationship to me much better than I could understand my relationship to him. I knew how I impinged on his life. But there it stopped.

Being with me, in any mode, exhilarated him. I turned him into an adolescent.

He wanted to do much more with me than just make love to me—but he couldn’t bring that “more” off. He sensed that I was distant, always distant, and that I would fade away because he was essentially without the substance that bonds permanently. And he needed me forever. I elicited a kind of adolescent inferiority in him, which may or may not have been warranted. I had no idea of his worth even if I could measure such a thing in a man.

He wanted to tell me about his life, his work, his hates . . . but he always pulled back. There was always the thought that I wouldn’t truly be interested . . . that I was beyond him . . . thinking other thoughts.

I knew that he loved my body, my face, my long hair, the way I cocked my head before I spoke, the way my face became blank during rapid mood swings which I couldn’t control. I knew he wanted to ravage me and protect me at the same time. Poor, desperate, kindly man. I knew he hallucinated that I was aging with just the right mix of head and heart—like good horses age.

I knew all of that—but I knew little about how his feelings for me impacted on me. And what I did know I could not articulate.

Charlie decided on a dish with lamb and spinach. And a mango drink.

I selected an assortment of breads and small appetizers and avoided a main dish.

It felt good sitting across from him. I appreciated his harmless affectations, one of which was dressing like a hayseed horse trainer—short denim jacket under which were a dress shirt and tie, light-colored flannel pants, and his red sneakers.

“I have some more horse questions for you,” I said after we had both ordered and settled in.

“Shoot. That’s my business.”

“Did you ever hear of a horse called Lord Kelvin?”

“Sure. One of my horses ran against him in Philadelphia Park—the Keystone Stakes, a seven-furlong race. Lord Kelvin won, my horse came in sixth.”

“Is there anything peculiar about the horse?”

“Peculiar? What do you mean?”

“I mean like Cup of Tea—a rags-to-riches story.”

“That I don’t know,” Charlie said, adding, “Lord Kelvin was just a good stakes horse, not a ‘horse of the year.’ I don’t even know if he’s still racing.”

Other couples were beginning to enter the restaurant. A low, gentle buzz surrounded us.

“What about Ask Me No Questions?”

Charlie arched his eyebrows. He was a bit confused by those names coming out of the mouth of a lady who didn’t know a thing about the racetrack.

“A pretty horse. A filly, a big gray filly, about sixteen hands high. She used to run in Gulfstream Park, in Florida. A stakes horse, she won a big filly race two years ago when she shipped into Belmont.”

“Anything strange about her?”

“Other than her color, nothing at all that I know of. I remember that she didn’t do well as a two-year-old; she didn’t even break her maiden until she was four years old. But then she turned out real good. Billy Patchen trained her.”

I nodded and concentrated for a moment on one of the appetizers which the waiter had just brought. I could sense that my casualness in stopping and starting the questioning was beginning to infuriate Charlie. He always wanted total disclosure. But there was nothing I could do. I was groping for information and I didn’t even know what kind of information.

“Should I know more?”

I smiled at him but didn’t speak.

“Hell,” he said, his irritation rising, “I don’t know much. I don’t even know where you were all day yesterday. I tried to call you for eight hours straight.”

My fork hung in midair. I had never heard him so upset before.

“I guess,” he continued sarcastically, “that I’m not supposed to know about the travels of Alice Nestleton. I mean, after all, all we do is sleep together.”

I put the fork down and stared at it.

Why had he used the word “travels”?

Had he
known
that I had been out to Long Island for the auction of Mona Aspen’s furnishings?

How could he have known?

Had he really tried to get me for eight hours, or was that just a cover for his knowledge?

What if Charlie Coombs was not who he pretended to be—just my lover? It was odd that he had arrived at the same time—the exact same time—I had begun investigating Harry Starobin’s murder. And it was very possible that he had known Ginger Mauch a lot better than he claimed . . . maybe as well as old Harry knew her.

“I’d like you to answer me,” Charlie said in a low but threatening voice.

What if the whole affair between Charlie and myself had been orchestrated to keep watch on me?

Or to deflect my interest in the murders?

I could not dispel the growing horror I felt that Charlie Coombs was somehow tied to the whole mess—to the deaths of Harry Starobin and Mona Aspen.

The appetizers lay in a semicircle in front of me. They now looked uniformly loathsome.

“If you don’t give me the dignity of a goddamn answer, Alice, I’m walking out of here and you’ll never see me again.”

I thought: Answer? What was the question?

His voice had started to quake with fury, and perhaps shame.

I couldn’t look at him. But I felt him. It was as if he had grown larger and larger; as if he was hovering over the table—over . . . under . . . behind. I closed my eyes. Then I could feel him inside of me . . . in a sexual sense . . . as if we were making love. I could feel a kind of synchronicity, like the rhythm of love. For a moment I hated him more than I had ever hated anyone in my life. For a moment I loved him, as if my life hinged on his every move. It was a crazy few minutes. For the first time since I had known him, I was reciprocating, unconsciously, his passion. But it was all about betrayal.

“Walk,” I said, smiling grimly at my fork.

And he did.

14

I stared at the contents of the tall closet in the hallway, the one that contained all my clothes. A depression was coming on, I could feel it—one of those bone-crushing, brain-deadening depressions that turn limbs and will to jelly. I had to get out of the house—to be among people.

Hour after hour I had been analyzing the breakup with Charlie Coombs. But it was too exhausting and too confusing. Of course I knew that I had provoked it by my attitude, and my attitude in turn had originated in my fear and suspicion that he was part of the conspiracy. My attitude alone, however, could not account for gentle, kindly, mature Charlie Coombs’s sudden transformation into an abusive, jealous lover.

It was as if someone else had popped out of his body full-blown, like a moth. I didn’t want any part of the new Charlie Coombs, under any conditions.

I pulled out of the closet a long white lace Blanche DuBois kind of dress. I pulled from a box on top of the closet a wide-brimmed floppy hat with a black ribbon around the crown. From the bottom of the closet I pulled a pair of red leather shoes.

It was six thirty in the evening when I stepped out in my antidepression wardrobe, and I had hardly gone a block when the stares of passersby enlightened me to the fact that I was dressed oddly for my age and for the season. It was a young woman’s outfit to be worn on a very hot day. The stares didn’t deter me. I had a destination, a new restaurant on Twenty-third Street called Brights.

I had never been in there before. I couldn’t even conceive of a single reason why I would go in there. But to fight a depression that is about to engulf you, one is forced into very strange alliances.

Brights was done in the latest minimal style; very brightly lit, much space between wooden tables. All of it was done in hard-edged style which was designed to do something, but that something was never articulated. And interspersed in all that minimal confusion, like peaches on a dessert, were a few garish wall paintings.

When I entered I saw that the end of the bar was crowded with people and the other end was empty. I slipped onto a stool midway between the extremes, removed my hat, and placed it on the stool next to me.

The bartender, a young man with well-coiffed red hair and an open white shirt, placed a napkin in front of me and smiled. The name of the restaurant was embossed on one corner of the napkin. In fact, everywhere I turned, I saw the name embossed—on the matches, on the stirring sticks, on the clocks.

“A glass of red wine,” I said. Wine keeps ugly depressions an inch away. Brandy is for anxiety, but wine is for depression. It is like a yellow light in the subway.

The wine was served in a glass so huge that a full regular glass of wine would fill only one-third of this jumbo goblet. I sipped it. I listened to the laughter from the crowded end of the bar. I stared out onto the street traffic. I watched the bartender ply his trade.

When I had finished the wine, I began to relax. The danger was receding. As I ordered another glass, I noticed the empty end of the bar was filling up with men and women who obviously were stopping off after work. Who were they? Where did they work? Where did they live? I didn’t know. They carried briefcases . . . they carried small posh shopping bags . . . they carried small, well-wrapped umbrellas . . . and they carried all kinds of crimes in their hearts. The last notion made me giggle a bit. It was poetic. Crimes in the heart.

Just then two old neighborhood men came in and sat beside me. What were they doing in a posh bar like Brights? Had they lost their way? Did they also need the Brights cure for depression? I removed my hat from the bar stool. One of them gallantly carried the hat to a rack behind the cashier.

I began to concentrate on what to do next. The idea of going back to the libraries with their infernal microfilm machines in order to track down information on Lord Kelvin and Ask Me No Questions as I had done with Cup of Tea made me ill. And besides, Cup of Tea had been a media star. From what Charlie Coombs had told me about the other two horses, that certainly wasn’t the case.

I needed someone who knew the racetrack and horses. Charlie Coombs was out of my life now, and besides, he could no longer be trusted. Nor could Nicholas Hill. And Jo, well, I just didn’t want the old woman and her newfound money involved anymore.

I stared at the second glass of wine. Was Ginger watching me and laughing at me? I grimaced at the thought.

An argument erupted at one end of the bar, and I heard a woman yell at the man seated beside her. “Don’t tell me what he said. I attended the workshop, not you!”

Even as I tried to shut out the quarrel, the word “workshop” stuck in my mind and jangled there. God, it was so nice to hear that word again. How long had it been since I attended a workshop? Then a particular name popped into my head: the Dramatic Workshop. I had studied there under Saul Colin in 1970 or 1971.

Then I remembered Anthony Basillio, their stage designer. He used to bet on horses all the time. I sat back, awed at the strange way things are recalled which seem to have been lost forever. Yes, of course, crazy, wonderful Anthony Basillio would help me. I had met him at a seminar on Brecht at the Dramatic Workshop. The visiting lecturer had been none other than Erwin Piscator, the former director of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. He was an old, brilliant, difficult man.

Basillio had sat behind me in the seminar. He was tall and skinny, with very bad skin. He was also very funny. Once he brought his cat, Fats, to the seminar in a paper shopping bag, the meanest-looking, most powerfully built alley cat I ever saw. A no-neck, low-slung beastie who was ready to claw. But Anthony told the class not to worry. Fats was really a pussycat. And besides, he was the only cat in Manhattan who could write rock lyrics and pick winners at the racetrack.

I laughed out loud at the memory, then realized the two old men were staring at me. I sipped my wine sheepishly.

The seminars, I remembered, were held at the old Dramatic Workshop studios on Fifty-first Street and Broadway, over the Capitol Theatre, and afterward a lot of us used to go to a bar on Eighth Avenue.

It was a time of great ferment in the New York theater world. Radical theater groups of all kinds were rising and falling. The seminar itself had reflected that diversity—academics, Broadway showgirls, directors, stagehands, technicians, famous actors and unknowns, junkies, critics, reviewers. All kinds of people with all kinds of agendas attended. It was that kind of time.

In the bar after the seminar, Anthony used to emote on how he was working on a series of stage designs for
Mother Courage
that would change the way the world perceived Brecht. And sometimes he would have a lot of money on him and buy everyone drinks and cheeseburgers and tell us how he had won the money playing the horses. He used to brag that the only way he could support his theater habit was to make it at the racetrack.

Once he had become very difficult and started a fight, and we were all thrown out of the bar. After the next meeting of the seminar he had apologized and said he often acted stupid because in a past life he had been a racehorse and everyone knew that racehorses were stupid because they got the same food whether they won a race or not.

Basillio would know about Lord Kelvin and Ask Me No Questions.

I paid the bartender and rushed out. A block away I realized I had forgotten my hat. I started to go back, then decided to pick it up another time.

Once in the apartment, I started to pace, trying to remember who had known Anthony Basillio then and who would know where he was now. I grabbed a pad and the telephone book and sat down by the phone.

First, names from the past: actors, actresses, directors, producers, teachers—names I hadn’t thought of in years but which now came grudgingly out of the stubby pencil at first, then faster. The names first, then the faces, then the memories.

Ordinarily I would have been too reticent to call these people out of the blue, but now I had no problem at all. Just dial. And dial again. Some were delighted to hear from me. They wanted to make conversation, fill in the years, meet for lunch. Many had unlisted phones and could not be reached. Others gave me numbers of others who might be able to help.

But no one in this widening net of reemerging memories knew what had happened to Anthony Basillio, if, in fact, they had known him at all.

I stared at the clock. I had been on the phone continuously for two hours. My hand was cramped. My throat was hoarse. Each phone call, each opening line, was getting more difficult: “Hello, you may not remember me. My name is Alice Nestleton.”

Then the inevitable silence, followed by: “My God—Alice. It has been so long.”

At nine thirty I gave myself six more calls. On the third, I reached Winslow Jarvis, a gay man who had been part of the original Dionysus ’69 group on Wooster Street. He said that of course he knew Anthony Basillio, but he hadn’t seen him in years. He had heard that Basillio now owned a chain of small xerox places in the Village and the Lower East Side. He said the stores had a stupid name, something from Brecht.

“Mother Courage?” I asked.

“Right,” he said.

I thanked him and hung up. That Anthony Basillio now ran a chain of small copier stores struck me as one of the saddest things I had ever heard in my life.