Entr'acte (12 page)

The man put a stiff forearm against the door and began to apply pressure, keeping the same amused look on his face. His voice was even, almost soothing.

“Why can’t I come in? You afraid of being seen letting a black guy into your apartment? We got to talk. I won’t hurt you.

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Anyway, you have a gun,” he said, nodding down at the weapon Joyce held tightly against her thigh.

She had forgotten she was holding it. Joyce stepped back and the young man strode into the middle of the living room, stopping in the center and looking around appraisingly.

“Verrr…y nice,” he said, and flopped onto the settee. Joyce eyed him warily as she took up a position on the other side of the room, on the upholstered side chair.

“What the hell happened to us?” the man said. He sounded like a rejected lover trying to mend a relationship. Joyce just continued to stare at him.

Finally, she spoke. “How did you find me?”

“It wasn’t easy,” the man said pleasantly. “A lot of people seemed to have been hit by cars around here. I had your name from your purse, and one hospital said they did admit you as a patient, but that Joyce isn’t your real name. I got your address by swiping the nurse’s chart.”

“What’s your name?” she asked her visitor.

“Maurice. Maurice Daly. Sounds Irish, but I’m not. Not even black Irish,” he smiled.

Joyce continued to stare, and Maurice’s voice and demeanor softened. “Look lady, are you all right? I came to give you back your purse. I thought we could help each other. Something really weird is going down.”

He extended his arm and Joyce reached out hers, but the purse still did not come within her range. Joyce cautiously got up and walked toward the settee, grabbing the purse out of the man’s hand at the first possible moment.

The amused grin was back on Maurice’s face. “Have a lot of home boys come calling, do you?”

“You like making people feel uncomfortable, don’t you?”

Joyce shot back. She opened the purse and went through it, 108

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pulling out her keys, the bottle of pills and stacks of paper and cards.

“Everything’s there,” Maurice said.

“Then why did you take it?” Joyce asked. She waved the hand with the gun in it as she spoke, and they both watched the weapon trace circles in the air.

“Come on. You want the sociological story, that I’m a member of a permanent American underclass who knows no other way to get by? Or the topical one? Do you want to hear I’m a crack addict, or maybe that I have AIDS?”

Those terms, in this room, seemed vaguely unreal, and both of them almost shivered involuntarily.

“How about the truth? You do know what that is, don’t you?”

Joyce demanded.

“I mug people who are stupid enough to go down a busy street with their arms full of packages or a dog tugging on them,”

Maurice said. “Their attention wanders, they lose track of where they are and their money is in relation to where I am.

“I do it because it’s easier than working,” he said mildly. “The police don’t have time to bother with me.” He sat back to watch Joyce’s reaction.

She slowly filled with rage, and looked around the room for something to throw. “How dare you, you bastard! You’re able-bodied and judging by the way you talk you’re not stupid. Preying on other people…”

“So I’m not Mother Theresa. I like you, you have fire in the belly.” Sitting back against the settee, the black man said, “Got anything to drink?”

Joyce shook her head.

“Come on, I’ll drink out of a paper cup,” Maurice said.

In spite of herself, Joyce felt her face grow hot. “It’s not that,”

she stammered.

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“Sure. You probably think this room smells funny too,” he said. “You probably can’t wait to air it out.”

Joyce stood up. “You people all do the same thing…”

“Ohh. You people…” Maurice mimicked her.

“If you can paint everybody as a racist it’s easier to excuse your own behavior, but I am no racist. I have a problem with criminals of any color and people who tell me it’s easier to mug someone than work.”

Maurice opened his mouth to speak, but Joyce waved him silent.

“Do you realize that more black men your age are in jail than in college? It’s attitudes like yours that keep your people down.

Every new immigrant group that has come to America has started at the bottom and passed you because they worked hard,” she said. Joyce idly waved the gun while she spoke, and Maurice’s eyes stayed fixed on it.

“Blacks got too used to public assistance. Well, let me tell you, it was a trap.”

“Are you through?” her visitor said. His face was an inscrutable mask.

“Not yet. As long as blacks would rather feed off white guilt, and look for entitlement programs instead of jobs, you’ll always be mired at the bottom. Nobody alive today—or at least in our own time—had anything to do with slavery. I don’t owe you anything.”

“You’ve been waiting to say that a long time,” Maurice observed. “Can I get some Coke or Pepsi?”

Joyce went into the kitchen and came back with some soda in a fruit jar. She handed one of the jars to her guest, who clinked it against hers.

“Cheers,” he said. Then he took a swallow and said, “I miss Diet Coke.”

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Joyce laughed, and sat back down in her chair. She took one of the Depakote tablets with her soda.

“I couldn’t figure out what those were,” Maurice said. “I thought they might be tranquilizers or something—not that you need tranquilizers,” he quickly added with exaggerated sincerity.

“Actually, you could have gotten really messed up if you’d taken these,” Joyce told him. “It’s medicine for brain seizures, and if you take it and you don’t need it, you can get a stroke.

“The kicker is, this stuff hasn’t been discovered yet, and if I don’t get back in time to get my prescription refilled, I could end up being certifiably crazy,” she said. The thin plastic vial was about half-full with small, pink pills.

“You’d go nuts?” Maurice was curious.

“Actually I’m not sure what would happen. But if my symptoms return—I mostly get confused and disoriented—

they’d have no effective way of dealing with it. I could end up making pot holders at some ‘happy farm’.”

“We have to get back,” Maurice said. “I spent a lot of time pinching myself, after I was sure I hadn’t wandered into an amusement park or something. This shit is really happening. I assume we went back in time somehow.

“I figured since the same nightmare is happening to both of us, maybe if we went back to the same spot…,” he said. “I’ve been through that alley already myself, several times, but nothing unusual happens.”

“I think, a friend of mine who studied this told me, that what might have happened is we passed through a worm hole,” Joyce said. She had tucked her feet up under her on the chair.

“A worm hole?” Maurice gestured for her to continue, a puzzled look on his face.

“Yea. Imagine that the universe is bathed in foam, with tiny 111

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bubbles in it. Those bubbles are holes that are short cuts from one point in time to another.”

“This has been proven?” Maurice leaned forward in his seat.

“Actually, no. It’s all theory, but supposedly all of the math holds up; it OUGHT to be true, given what we know now—or what they know in 2007,” Joyce said.

Maurice smiled and drained his glass. “I know. I keep doing that too. I went into a bar and to make conversation I said to some guy, “What about those Mets, huh?’ He looked at me as if I were crazy.

“I take it these holes are not in the same place all the time. Did it have something to do with that storm? That was weird.”

“I don’t know what was going on there, but especially after your experience going back to the alley, I’d say the hole has moved. I have no idea how to find it,” Joyce said.

“So, whose place is this?” Maurice asked. “You got set up pretty quick. I’ve been meaning to get some new stuff. It’s bizarre but everybody treats me like I’m some kind of cripple with these on,” he said, hefting a Nike onto the coffee table.

“That’s because sneakers here are black, with white laces, and made with real rubber,” she said. “They’re pretty ugly. Your shoes do look kind of…orthopedic.”

Joyce told her visitor about finding her grandmother living in 1939. He asked how she took the news, and Joyce grimly explained the rest: that her grandmother has mistaken her for her missing sister, Joyce’s great-aunt.

She left out the part about Connie being murdered in just three days, and the obvious danger of being mistaken for Connie. No need to say more than was necessary to a stranger.

“Surely you must have some family that would welcome you, even if you couldn’t tell them who you were,” Joyce said. Then, a sudden inspiration hit her.

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“If you were to look up your family, and they just assumed you were another relative, who happened to be missing…”

Maurice leaned forward again, his face mirroring Joyce’s intent expression.

“It would mean that we are TAKING THE PLACE of someone in our families, the missing relative.” She was slightly winded from the excitement in her voice.

“Maybe my great aunt Connie is up in Maine right now, getting the summer place ready for the season. Or working my shift at Moody’s. Or maybe she went to my casting appointment for the industrial show.

“I’m an actress, or I’m trying to be,” Joyce finished lamely.

“Uh-huh.” Maurice did not know what to make of all this. “Is your aunt just supposed to be away someplace, or did she run off?

We never had anybody disappear in my family that I knew about.”

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He told Joyce that his grandfather had grown up in rural Georgia, married there, and moved the family to The Bronx after World War II. Maurice was the last of his parents’ seven children.

“I never knew my grandfather, let alone where in Georgia he was from,” the young man said. “But there’s hard times on now, and the last thing they’d need is another mouth to feed.

“From what I heard, I don’t want to go back there anyway. I don’t think I could adjust to it,” he said.

Joyce caught his meaning right away. “How has it been for you here? I would assume there is a lot of bigotry. The civil rights movement hasn’t come…do you have to sit at the back of the bus?” she blurted out.

“Actually in some ways it’s better here,” Maurice said. “Sure they call me nigger, but they do it to my face. Back…home, for lack of a better word…they’re more subtle.

“That’s more dangerous, not to even see the hand that’s holding the knife. There are no Jim Crow laws up here, like separate drinking fountains and all that. But some places, the so-called “better” restaurants and hotels, won’t serve me.

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“Of course, I could work there if I could mind my manners,”

he said. “Servile Uncle Toms are always needed.”

“Being black must be,” Joyce started, but Maurice cut her off.

“The polite term now is “colored.” Don’t ever assume you know anything about what it is to be black. Maybe you’re not a racist, but you’re not going down the same road as me either.”

Joyce dumped the contents of her purse on the coffee table.

The bank book, check book and automatic teller card were still there.

She looked up at Maurice, and he smiled sheepishly back at her. “That stuff’s no good here. Can’t find an ATM anywhere, and your bank doesn’t exist yet.”

“I didn’t think of that. I’m broke too,” she mused.

The envelope her grandmother’s attorney had given her in Maine lay on top of the pile. “This could be a clue to what’s going on,” Joyce said, getting excited again.

“Try to follow this,” she said. “The woman who lives here, my grandmother, just died in 2007, and she left me this envelope.

Maybe, if all of time is logical and sequential, she somehow knew about this weird visit from me, even though she doesn’t know it yet, and has left some information.”

“Why didn’t she just tell you?” Maurice asked.

“What would she have said? “Remember when you came to visit me in 1939?’ What would your reaction be if someone said that to you?”

“I guess you’re right,” he conceded. He stood next to Joyce’s chair as she opened the envelope. Inside was a photograph. “Is that you?” he asked.

Joyce had that eerie feeling again. There were two women in the cracked, black and white photograph, in some elaborate theater costumes. One, on the left was clearly Muriel. The woman on the right had lighter hair, an enigmatic smile, and green eyes.

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On the back was stamped “The Gondoliers’ by Messers.

Gilbert and Sullivan. The Casino, March 1938.” The ink pad had been red, faded to almost pink. Next to the stamped caption someone had written in blue ink, “Muriel and Constance Pettit.”

A much newer inscription, written by the same person with a shakier hand, read, “My beloved granddaughter Joyce, who inherited all of my best qualities, including my modesty: I wish for you what you wish for yourself.”

“What does it mean?” Maurice asked.

“This woman on the right is my great-aunt that I told you about. The one on the left is my grandmother,” she said.

The young man let out a low whistle. “You sure do look alike.”

Joyce studied the photo carefully. There were strong similarities, but there were differences too in the way that Connie and Joyce looked. If this is me, why don’t I remember doing “The Gondoliers’? she thought.

“Can you tell us apart? You wouldn’t think this woman was me, would you?”

Maurice scanned the photo for a long moment, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Your eyes are a little further apart, and she has more lines around her mouth. But you really have to look.”

Joyce was already sighing in relief when he added, “of course, it could just be the picture. In the movies when characters from different times switch places, all of their photographs change too.”

She shot him a pained expression, and Maurice quickly backed off that idea. “Of course that’s not you. There’s only one of each of us. I’m definitely not buying the business about somebody taking our place.”