I'll Love You When You're More Like Me (19 page)

“Necessity relieves us from the embarrassment of choice,” I said.

“Now that's a line from the show,” he said. “Isn't that some line from the show?”

“So what?” I said.

“So you're doing a number again,” he said. “Why can't you just come up with a normal answer?”

“Like what?” I said.

“Huh?”

“What's a normal answer for why I'm about to call Milton Tanner?”

“Jesus!” he said.

“Because I'll be happy to come up with it if you'll tell me what it is.”

“Oh God,” he said.

“Then you'll love me because I'll be more like you,” I said.

“You don't want anyone to love you in the ninth place,” he said.

“No, I want to call Milton Tanner,” I said.

It was almost midnight by the time I reached him. I explained who I was and that I was ready to do the interview anytime, and Wally stood across from me punching his forehead with his fist and making faces.

“I'm sorry it's so late,” I said.

“I'm an insomniac, anyway,” he said. “What's your address?”

“Are you humoring me, too?” I said. Wally shut his eyes and grimaced.

“Am I humoring you?” Milton Tanner said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Yeah, I'm humoring you,” he said. “I'll see you in twenty minutes.”

Next I called Mama.

“Well isn't that just ducky,” Mama said. “That's just ducky that you called Milton Tanner. Be sure and make him right at home. Is Wally with you?”

“Why did you lie, Mama?” I said.

“I asked you if Wally was with you?”

“He's with me,” I said. “You could have told me you met
Lamont at The New School.”

“You tell Wally his mother's looking for him,” she said. “You hear?”

“All those lies, Mama. All the times you laughed at Lamont with me and you were—” I couldn't even say it. “With him.”

“The next time you read my mail, put it back in order. Try to have a little mystery about you, Maggie. Is your stomach all right?”

“The way you have mystery about you?” I said.

“Maybe I should have told you but as it turned out I didn't,” Mama said.

“And that's all you're going to say?”

“No, that isn't all I'm going to say, but it's all I'm going to say
ce soir
, Maggie, because I've got a load of dishes to do and I've had it with you just taking off when you feel like it!”

“Just one lie after the other,” I said.

“You never liked anyone I picked,” Mama said.

“Maybe because your taste is terrible.”

“It's the one thing that's all mine, though, Maggie.” I didn't say anything. I could feel things beginning to crumble inside, as though instead of internal organs there was a house of cards under my skin, and the top card had slipped.

“Tell Wally to call home,” Mama said, “and call me in the morning. You're on your own now, Maggie.”

“Wait,” I said, but I heard the click, then the dial tone.

I was still in my bedroom staring at the Will Barnet print over my bed when I heard the doorbell, and then Wally talking to someone. Mama and I have a lot of Will Barnet prints and there are always cats in them. I remembered a cat
I had once back in The Dark Ages, a tabby I called Loser, because he always positioned himself under this birdhouse that was on top of a long iron pole. There was no way he could ever catch a bird from that birdhouse, but he never tried another position, and he wouldn't even come in out of the rain once he stationed himself there afternoons.

Sam, Sam used to holler at me, “You better get that word ‘loser' out of your vocabulary, baby doll! You and your mother use that word about other people a little too much! There's such a thing as winning and losing, but there's no such thing as winners and losers. We all take turns at it. You'll see, someday.”

I glanced up at the ceiling. “Okay, Sam, Sam,” I said.

I got up from my bed and went toward the living room. I could hear Wally saying softly, “ . . . not herself, so you'll have to—”

“Have to what?” I said from the doorway. “Have to what?”

“Hi, I'm Milton Tanner.” He looked a lot like Telly Savalas, tall and bald, with green-tinted lenses in silver frames. He had his hand out.

We shook.

“Now where can have some privacy?” he said.

“In my bedroom?” I said.

Wally was slumped on the couch, holding a can of beer.

“Lead the way,” Milton Tanner said.

He sat down on my chaise lounge, kicked off his loafers and put his feet up.

“Do you have a tape recorder on you?” I said.

“No, I don't use one.”

“Because I don't want to talk into one,” I said.

“I don't use a tape recorder.”

I stood there, and he sat there, and we both seemed to be waiting.

Then I sat on the chair in front of my dressing table and said, “There are some rumors that I'm leaving the show but I'm not.”

“Okay,” he said. He looked at me, waiting again.

I said, “Mr. Tanner?”

“You can call me Milton.”

“Milton?”

“What?”

“I had a fight with my mother. I found something out.”

“Well?”

“Well listen, I'd better tell you something first.”

“What's that?”

“I think I'm going crazy.”

“No you're not,” he said.

“Yes, I think I am, Mr. Tanner, and I mean that.”

“You're not going crazy, Sabra,” he said. “You already are. You always have been. You have to be in this business. This is a business for crazy people, see.”

“I believe my own storyline.”

“You better believe it, you wouldn't be any damn good if you didn't.”

“I say things some writer wrote for me instead of what I feel.”

“Neither does anyone, really. Neither does an audience. You and the writer tell them what they feel.”

“I don't think I'm getting through to you,” I said.

“You're coming in loud and clear, Sabra,” he said. “Now that kid out there in the other room isn't crazy. He's
some nice kid who's worried about you, but he needn't be. Someday something you'll say, or someone like you will say, will stick in his head, and he might even act on it, be better for it, but he'll never be able to show it to someone else quite the way you showed it to him. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Normal people are self-conscious. They can't act out. They wait for someone mad to interpret what they feel, someone who'll step forward and say The hell with how this looks to other people, I'm going to show you yourself and myself and him and her, watch me! Now only a crazy risks that because you can wind up with egg on your face.”

“Etta Lott, on
Hometown
, said you have to step out of line to give the world something special,” I told him.

“Oh yeah, way out of line. . . . Daisy Harrow played Etta, didn't she?”

“I was trying to remember her name just this afternoon.”

“She got a part in a series,” he said, “something Gene Reynolds is putting together for CBS. Honey, can we shut off your phone? In about ten minutes I'm going to be bothered with calls from the coast. I left this number like a damn fool.”

“Someday I'd like to do a series,” I said, switching off the phone.

“Someday you will,” he said. “Where were you born, anyway?”

“New Hope, Pennsylvania,” I said. “Mama and my dad were doing a show up there that summer.”

“Sure, at the Bucks County Playhouse.”

“That's right,” I said.

He took out a pack of Camels and offered one to me. I
reached for it saying, “I shouldn't. I have an ulcer.”

“Then don't,” he said, putting the pack away. “I had one of those once. They go away. . . . Was your mother acting that summer at Bucks?”

“Was she ever! I was practically born on stage. That's quite a story in itself,” I began.

19. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.

On the first day of my last year at Seaville High, there was a funeral for Priscilla Sigh, only survivor and sister of Mr. Sigh; he died the night I was in New York with Sabra.

Instead of going to the school cafeteria for lunch, I went home to help Charlie, who was in charge of the services and burial.

While Charlie was mingling with the bereaved in our chapel, I grabbed a peanut-butter sandwich in the kitchen.

“At least poor Prissy didn't linger on long after she lost him,” my mother was saying as she fixed herself a salad.

“Do we
have
to live with that thing?” I asked her, pointing to the cornucopia on the top of our refrigerator.

“Charlie's mother brought that over today,” my mother said, “and yes, we have to live with it, if Charlie wants it. I rather like it, and I want Charlie to feel right at home here.”

We could hear the strains of “Abide With Me” as Mr. Llewellyn played the organ in the chapel. My father was on his way to the Hauppauge morgue to pick up our new guest, a Mrs. Fabray. A.E. was in school.

Mr. Trumble was still in Southampton Hospital, recovering slowly from a heart attack he'd had the same night Mr. Sigh died.

I often wonder what would have happened if Milton Tanner hadn't shut off the phone that night, and my mother
had been able to reach me. I only know what wouldn't have happened. Charlie wouldn't have offered to help out, and my father wouldn't have gotten the idea to ask Charlie to come into the business with him.

Things can change overnight…or as Monty Montgomery had put it a few days ago at Current Events: “Chance makes a football of man's life, Withered Heart. … A woman has
everything
: a good man, a good home, a faithful dog, and chance blows a lathe operator from Commack her way—and she gives it all up! For
what
?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe she needed a change.”

“A change from what?” he said. “She had the world on a string. . . . Oh, I'll get along all right. Lunch and I'll get along all right, won't we, fellow?”

The dog looked up at him from the floor and opened his good eye, then rested his head on his paws and sighed.

“It's Martha who's in for it,” Monty said, “and I blame all this women's liberation crap she came across in all these ladies' magazines.”

I reached for a radish from my mother's salad and she said, “Don't, Wally. Your father always says radishes are just as strong on the breath as onions. You'll have to help Charlie with the bereaved. It's his maiden voyage, after all.”

I washed my sandwich down with a glass of milk and went down the hall toward our chapel. Charlie was standing just outside, in the alcove, talking on the telephone. He was wearing a new blue suit, white shirt, and dark blue tie. He was wearing the gold tie clasp with the crown on it that he'd won in the dance contest Labor Day weekend. Mrs. St. Amour and Charlie took first prize doing an old dance called the Lambeth Walk.

Sabra never returned to Seaville. The last time I saw her was when I woke up on her couch in their apartment. It was around ten in the morning and she was fixing a pot of coffee for Milton Tanner. I got on the phone and called the Long Island Railroad to find out what time I could get a train back to Seaville.

“We talked all night,” she told me. “I'm sorry if I worried you, Wally, but Milton says a chaotic temperament is a natural to an actress.”

“I don't have any quarrel with that,” I said. “Goodbye, Sabra.”

“Never say good-bye,” she said, taking my hand, closing her eyes for a moment, opening them and looking deeply into mine. “We'll meet again in another time, in another place, who knows when? But until we do it's not good-bye, not for you and me ever. Say it isn't.”

“It isn't,” I said.

“Take long steps and by all means look back,” she said. “You'll see everything behind you getting smaller, and eventually passing completely out of view.”

“Nice,” I said. “Who wrote it?”

Sabra laughed. “Who cares?” she said. “
I
said it.”

Yesterday when my mother came home from Mr. Jim's Beauty Parlor, she had this clipping she'd torn out of
The Examiner
, from a gossip column on soap operas:

          
From “Hometown” comes news that young Sabra St. Amour will have a registered nurse in attendance while she is on the set, due to a precarious health problem she is doing her best to lick. Her fans will be pulling for her,
as she makes a heroic effort to go on with the show. . . . Meanwhile, “Mama's” being seen around town with a certain bigwig writer from the coast, who's rumored to be doing a book about Sabra. Good luck to all of them!