The Man Who Loved Women to Death (20 page)

Lulu was waiting outside for me on the cold hard ground, her teeth chattering. Heidi was in the kitchen, watching me through the window. I tapped on the back door quietly. She opened it.

“You haven’t come across an old typewriter around here, have you? Packing up, I mean.”

She looked at me curiously. “We still have my old one from college, but nobody uses it anymore. The kids have their own computers.”

“Is it an Olivetti?”

“No, a Royal.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. It’s a Royal Safari. I typed enough papers on it, okay?” She started to close the door.

“Ever shop at Hold Everything, Heidi?”

“Well, yeah. I’ve ordered from their catalog. Why?”

“Did you tell Ezra?”

“That I’ve ordered from Hold Everything?”

“That you don’t want to move to Oregon.”

She sniffled. “We don’t talk about it much. He’s afraid that he’s become a failure in my eyes.”

“Has he?”

“Christ, no! I don’t care how much he makes. I just want him to be happy. I
told
him that.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he couldn’t remember the last time he was happy.”

“May I make a small suggestion? Take him to dinner and a show in New York. Broadway needs all the help it can get right now. And so does Ezra. Also get a new pair of slippers.”

“For him?”

“For yourself.”

She looked down at her fuzzy green feet. “These are brand new.”

“Heidi, I hate to give Nike any credit but … Just Do It.”

She stood there looking at me. “You’re being a help.”

“Don’t sound so surprised. I like to spread a little joy wherever I go.” I grinned at her.

She didn’t say anything about how nice my teeth looked. She didn’t say anything at all. Just closed the door on me.

I went back down the driveway to the street. She was watching me from a darkened front window now. I could see her outlined by a light behind her. She stayed there watching me as I got in the Jag and started it up. She was still watching me as I drove away into the night.

TANSY SMOLLET,
The Garden Lady, lived and worked in an old yellow brick warehouse that she owned down in Tribeca where Duane Street meets Staple Street. It’s a quiet neighborhood at eleven o’clock at night. The streets were deserted and slick, the skies clearing up above. The name Staple Street comes from when this was the city’s chief marketplace for eggs, butter, etc. Her place had been a coffee warehouse. It was neo-Flemish in design, six stories high, with all sorts of gables and dormers and weathered copper details at the roof. At the street level there was a garage door situated in the middle, somewhat like a large, square mouth. The mouth was open. I had phoned ahead.

News radio was reporting one arrest by Feldman’s undercover task force. A female officer had run in a shady character who’d tried to pick her up outside the White Horse Tavern. The suspect had been released after questioning when it turned out he was a rabbinical student at Yeshiva who truly
was
looking for the nearest subway station.

I pulled in, the steel door automatically lowering shut behind me, and nuzzled the Jag up alongside the car Tansy had driven for as long as I’d known her. It was a 1957 Porsche 356A Speedster, silver with a black top and black leather interior. She did most of the repair work on it herself. Spent a year in Germany learning how. That was Tansy. Her small fleet of Garden Lady panel trucks and pickup trucks was parked in there, too, a dump truck, a Chevy Suburban—all of them painted silver and bearing her garden fork insignia on their doors. Bags of manure and peat moss were piled everywhere, pallets of brick and bluestone, railroad ties, redwood two-by-fours, terra-cotta pots, hoses, garden tools. If you lived in a penthouse on Fifth or Park and you wanted a garden on your terrace, you called The Garden Lady. She did design, she did installation, she did maintenance. She also worked out of Bridgehampton, where she kept a cottage.

It was cool and damp in there, and it still smelled like coffee beans. In the center of the old warehouse there was a steel-caged freight elevator. This went up to her third-floor offices, where Tansy employed a dozen designers and project managers, and then on up past that to her loft. Tansy had taken the top three floors and blown out the walls and turned it into five thousand square feet of what the realtors would call highly dramatic living space. There was a center atrium fifty feet high, with a glass roof under which the living area, dining area and kitchen all flowed into each other. A pair of spiral staircases flanked the atrium. One led up to her bedroom loft, where she had a gymnasium, a sauna and a drop-dead view of the Hudson. The other led to her studio, where she designed gardens for people. There were no rugs in Tansy’s apartment, no paintings and almost no furniture save for the precious handful of pieces her brother Curtis had made of native Vermont hardwoods, each a work of art in itself. All lighting was recessed, all counters granite, all floors polished cherry. There was no clutter, nothing but bare surfaces and light and tranquillity. It was not a home for a baby and a dog and laughter. Actually, Tansy’s place was not a home at all. It was more like being inside a work of minimal art.

New Age music greeted me when the elevator door opened. Harps and flutes, tubular bells, sounds of waves breaking gently on the shore. And then Tansy came gliding across the room to meet me, tall and lean and lithe. I forced a big brave smile onto my face and kept it plastered there the way one does when visiting a terminally ill patient. Because the sight of her was so terribly unsettling. Not that they hadn’t done a wonderful job on her face. They had. I can’t remember whether it took eight or nine operations to put Tansy back together again. There had been endless bone grafts. Thirty titanium microscrews and seven titanium plates held her cheekbones in place. The incisions had been made inside her upper lip and her lower eyelids, so there were no scars. At least none that showed. She looked almost exactly as she had. The slightly uptilted blue eyes, delicate nose and jaw, those exquisite cheekbones that had the modeling agencies salivating when she was a kid. Tansy looked the same.

Except she didn’t. Because the pale white skin was somehow drawn tighter across the bone and the eyes were sunk deeper and something had happened to the muscles or the nerves, because she couldn’t move her mouth like she did before. Oh, they had given her nice new teeth and she could talk and chew solid food and all of those things so-called normal people could do. She could do everything but smile. Her face just wouldn’t work that way anymore. Not that this was too much of a problem in her case. See, there had been internal injury as well. She’d blown a fuse somewhere—the one that powered her spirit. Tansy Smollet had been a lively, animated person before Tuttle Cash put her in the hospital. Now she was a subdued and somber one. There was a heartbreaking sadness about her, a deep and profound melancholy.

It didn’t help that she’d cropped her lush, luxuriant blond hair so close that she looked like one of those French women who consorted with the Nazis.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.

“No, no … I was working,” she said, her voice thin and halting.

“And how is that going?”

She considered her answer carefully. “Fine. I’m very busy. For some strange reason I seem to have cornered the market on rich gays with bad taste.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“It’s a small, exclusive clientele. But my own.”

“Why, Miss Smollet, I’d swear you’re getting your sense of humor back.”

“No, it’s you—you’ve always brought out my zany side,” she said, totally deadpan. Eternally deadpan. “God, Hoagy, it’s so good to see you.”

She put her cool, dry lips against my cheek and knelt to pat Lulu, who was circling her excitedly and whooping. Lulu adored Tansy, which I’d always found most surprising. She ordinarily detests any woman she regards as potential competition for Merilee. It was my personal belief that Merilee had once sat her down and told her that if she, Merilee, were ever killed in a plane crash, Tansy had a better than decent shot at being her new mommy. Or maybe Lulu just sensed this. Dogs generally do. And Lulu is one, whether she admits it or not.

“I like your new look, Tansy,” I said, referring to her sleeveless dress of brown wool. She was a Zoranian now, a disciple of the minimalist Yugoslavian designer Zoran Ladicorbic, who dressed the likes of Candice Bergen and Lauren Hutton in monkish tunics and shapeless dresses that ran in the many thousands. You bought into a whole look when you went Zoranian. Tansy’s haircut was all about that, as were her absence of jewelry and makeup, her short, unpainted fingernails, her shoes that were plain and flat. She was still an inch or so over six feet in them. Her arms were bare and well muscled. Her long legs were bare, too, and very white, which accentuated their nakedness. There were some scratches on her hands from wrestling with something thorny. There often were.

“I got tired of playing the victim,” she said flatly. “I was a classic fashion victim. Whatever they told me to do, I did. I dressed in black, I dressed in white, I dressed in pumpkin. I was a cowgirl, a Paris tart, a British aristocrat. I’ve just said no to all of that. Enough. I mean, think of it, Hoagy—people are actually wearing Hush Puppies again.”

“No one we know, fortunately.”

“I’ve made tea. Or would you rather have wine?”

“Tea would be fine.”

“Is it still milk, no sugar?”

“It is.”

“Go sit in front of the fire. I’ll be right there.”

There was seating for exactly one in front of the brick fireplace—one graceful, perfect rocker. There was nothing else in the vast space, unless you counted the cheery fire or the cheery Eskimo death mask from Hooper Bay, Alaska, that was mounted over the mantel. Lulu stretched out in front of the fire. I took the chair. Tansy came in with two mugs of tea and handed me one and curled up on the floor at my feet, face to the fire, back resting against my knees.

Briefly, I felt that same tingle of excitement I’d always felt when I was alone in a room with Tansy and close to her. From the beginning, it had been there. For her, too. Every once in a while over the years I’d catch her staring at me from across a dining table or a crowded room, wide-eyed, as if she’d just discovered something shocking about me. I’d meet her gaze, and she’d look away. Not that anything had ever happened between us. When Merilee and I split up that first time, she and Tuttle were in heaven. When she and Tuttle split, Merilee and I were, well, not in heaven but making it work. Our timing had always been off, Tansy’s and mine. And I’m convinced that timing has as much to do with whether two people end up together as desire does. And if you were to say to me that timing is just another word for fate, then I’d say to you, okay, I guess I believe in fate.

We sat there gazing at the fire. Lulu decided Tansy’s lap would be more comfortable than the floor, so she moseyed over and plopped down in it. Tansy petted her. Lulu responded by going to work on Tansy’s long, lovely fingers with her long, unlovely pink tongue. Lulu licked and she licked. She licked with an intensity that bordered on the feverish. I told her to cut it out. She just kept on licking, as if Tansy’s fingers were an ice cream cone about to melt in the hot sun.

“It must be my new hand cream,” Tansy commented mildly. She didn’t seem to mind this tongue towelette. “I just put some on.”

“What’s in it?”

“Nothing but organic ingredients. A farmer up in Maine makes it. There’s rosemary, verbena, olive oil …”

“Keep going.”

“Um, beeswax, sage leaves …

“Keep going.”

“Lemongrass—”

“Bingo. Good thing you don’t moisturize your hands with tartar sauce or you’d be minus a finger right now.”

She let out a laugh. Or at least it almost sounded like one. “Oh, God. I can’t remember the last time I did that.”

“You do happen to be in the presence of a charter member of the Soupy Sales Society. Very few people can keep a straight face around me.”

She turned her straight face to me, her teeth digging into her lower lip. “How is he, Hoagy?”

“I don’t see much of him anymore, Tansy.”

“Is it true what I hear about him?”

“Only the bad stuff.”

“All I hear is bad stuff.”

“What do you hear?”

“That he may lose his restaurant.”

“It’s not his to lose.” I sipped my tea. It was Irish Breakfast, strong and hot and good. “I understand he’s been writing you.”

Her sunken eyes went back to the fire. “He has,” she acknowledged unhappily. “Almost every day.”

“What does he say?”

“I wouldn’t know. I tear them into little pieces and burn them.” She stroked Lulu, who was drifting back into the land of Nod. “He’s completely losing his grip, isn’t he?”

I didn’t respond, just looked at her.

“Okay, okay. Maybe I do read them before I burn them.”

“What does he say?”

“That he feels it all slipping away. That he sees nothing ahead of him that is positive or good. That he w-wants me back.… I-I try to tell myself he’s nothing more than what the Japanese housewives call a
nure-ochiba,
which, loosely translated, means a wet fallen leaf that sticks annoyingly to your leg, but—” She broke off. “I suppose you think I should give him another chance.”

“Not even maybe. Are these letters he sends you typed or handwritten?”

“Handwritten.”

“Whatever happened to that old Olivetti of his? Did he get rid of it?”

She had to think about this a moment. “Yes, I believe he did. He put it out on the street so some homeless person could take it and sell it. I remember him saying there was no point in having it around anymore because, unlike you, he had nothing to say. He always admired that about you, you know. He said you had courage.”

“He’s the one who drove a race car at two hundred miles per hour in heavy traffic. How can he say I’m the one with courage?”

“Because you’re willing to risk humiliation.”

“Hell, I risk that every time I open my mouth. That’s no big deal.”