Chapter 43 – The Opera
Tommy and I sat on the stage and talked about chess while we waited for the crew to show up. He told me he had a friend he played with a lot in Bryant Park, behind the main branch of the New York Public Library, who used all sorts of tricks to try to break his concentration, especially when he was winning.
"They work?" I asked.
"Sometimes."
"I'd like to me him, learn them."
"Her."
"Oh." Then I told him about the giant borzoi dog that used to tear around the theater, running up and down the aisles chasing imaginary rabbits and Siberian wolves. The dog is owned by the rich Russian couple that financed the ballet production, and the dog was how they discovered the lost musical score.
"How'd that happen?" Tommy asked.
"They live in a huge beach house on Sullivan's Island, and the dog gets to run loose on the beach because the owners can pay the fines no matter how much they add up to over time, but one day they had been gone all day and the dog was cooped up, started running around the house, slipped on the polished wood floor and did a header into the side of an old desk; busted a hole in it. Borzois are lovable but not too smart. When the owners came home, they found the secret compartment in the desk, and that's where Stravinsky had hidden the score when he left Saint Petersburg in 1914. He didn't return to Russia for fifty years, and by that time the desk was in the Hermitage.”
"How'd these friends of yours get the desk?"
I was saved from having to fabricate an answer to that when we heard the rear door open, and Gale, Jinny, and the rat from next door came onto the stage, along with the dog. I really have to stop thinking of Richard as a rat, because he is Anna's boyfriend, and Anna is one of our crew and best friends, even though we met her at three o'clock in the morning, creeping up the stairs of our house with a Walther PPK in her hand. Long story. The dog acted differently from the wild borzoi, going to the front of the stage, sitting down and looking out at us in the seats. Gale followed him, also looked at us, and said, "Wha'dya know, they managed to get their clothes back on," turned around and went back to talk with Jinny.
The dog said, "I don't think she's as pissed at you as she seems; she's just putting up a front. The whole way over here she talked about that movie where the handsome rich guy steals the money, twice. You think we can rent it some time?"
Tommy said, "What movie's that?"
"It has a dumb title, I can't remember, but Gale thinks it's pretty cool."
I yelled up to the stage for them to come down to the seats, went back to the booth and loaded the video of the rock opera. It started with Paul introducing his backup band: David Gilmour (Pink Floyd) on guitar, Christine McVie (Fleetwood Mac) on organ and backup vocals, Alicia Keys (solo) on piano and backup vocals, and last but not least, Ringo Starr on drums. They broke right into a lovely version of a new song, "Hosanna." Then McCartney introduced the woman who had been locked up with him for eight weeks while he wrote all the new songs for the opera, and who he now was in love with, Renee Fleming, the greatest female singer, of any genre, on the planet.
As we watched the show I told Tommy I'd tell him the story over lunch of how the two of them got locked up together. The dog was as enthralled by the show as much as us, and had demanded that we put one of the seats down for him to climb up on, he didn't want to watch from the floor. I showed a shortened version of this production too, about an hour. When it was over Tommy looked at me and said, "Now I know I'd rather have been here for one of the performances rather doing what I was doing in South America." I smiled, and he asked, "You have any other productions like this lined up?" I shook my head, No, and he said, "So what have you been doing for excitement lately if you're not doing the impresario thing?"
I said, "I see you learned some tricks from your chess playing friend up in New York."
He smiled and started to say something, but we heard pounding on the stage door and knew it was the McCrady's boys. They trooped in, knowing the routine, got the folding tables and rolling chairs from the wings, laid out the table cloths and vase of flowers and plates and wine glass and platters of cold cuts and salads. The boss opened three bottles of wine and poured them into decanters: a Spanish rioja, and Washington State cabernet, and an Argentinian malbec. I thanked him and his crew and walked them out to their truck.
Back inside the others were sitting around the tables with Jinny pouring the wines and Gale dishing out the food; they'd had a lot of practice doing that during the two productions. Tommy started to offer a toast to the good life, us holding up our glasses, when the dog interrupted. "Hey, wait a second. You forget someone?"
Richard said, "Oh, shit, sorry." He set down his wine glass, got up and went to the backpack he'd brought with him, took out a covered plastic bowl and brought it to the table, opened it, picked out a slab of meatloaf with a serving fork, put it on one of McCrady's china plates, and set it on the floor in front of the dog.
When the dog said, "That's better, but where’s the garnish?" we again picked up our wine glasses for the toast.
Tommy toasted, “Two great shows, and may there be a third.”
Gale the Mouth mouthed off, as usual, unable to control the link between her mind and her mouth: “How’s she going to produce more shows if you throw her into the slammer?”
The dog stopped scarfing up the meatloaf and Tommy, Jinny, Richard, and I all halted the trajectory of our wine glasses towards our mouths, instead starring at Gale, the big mouthed fashionista.
Cool as ever, Tommy replied, “Who said I’m trying to throw her in jail? We’re just having a little fun together.”
Gale hadn’t had a single drink today and already she was in protective mode. “Wait’ll Roger gets home. Then the real fun will start.”
I looked at Jinny as if it was his responsibility to keep a lid on her about this stuff, him being the big brother, most of the time, excepting under those conditions described earlier. He said to Tommy, “She’s just lookin’ out for Gwen. She doesn’t mean it, and Roger’s not the jealous type because he doesn’t have to worry about that. At least I don’t think he does.” Looking at Gale he said, “Girly, give it a rest. Enjoy the lunch and the wine. When you get home later, give that Confederate guy a call, have some fun yourself.”
Instead of giving it a rest she geared it up a notch, though I detected mischief rather than malice. “Like hell he doesn’t. Roger gets back he’s gonna kick those blue eyes all the way back to New York. Then the South shall reign again in the June household.” And she knocked back her glass of malbec.
Tommy also saw the lack of malice and played the duck, letting Gale’s warning slide off his back into the water. He said, “What else happened during the McCartney production, other than him and Renee Fleming hooking up?”
Now Jinny lit up, him having been involved in the non-artistic aspects of the production. He said, “Not much else happened, other than the shit with the fucking butler kidnapper asshole and his boss the bitch with the rod up her ass; and of course the morons from Idaho.” He looked at Gale and said, “We ain’t seen them around here since then, have we?” Gale shook her head, No.
Tommy asked, “What’s the story about the butler and her boss? I didn’t know butlers still existed except on PBS shows.”
I looked at Richard, the rat writer, and said, “Why don’t you tell him. You made a big thing about it.” I didn’t disparage the dog for having squealed the story to Richard, because unlike us, he, the dog, hadn’t politely interrupted his eating to continue the discussion, but was working on the meatloaf like a hyena at a carcass.
Richard put down his fork and said, “I had a great time writing that book. Half of it was about Paul and his daughter and Anna being kidnapped by the butler and the straight walking woman, and the other half was about Jinny hunting down these three neo-nazis from Idaho who had kidnapped Gale and hassled me and were making a nuisance of themselves. They
ended up scrubbing the grime off the outside of a synagogue with toothbrushes for a couple of weeks, guarded by a blind guy and his German shepherd ninja attack dog.” He took a sip of his Washington State cabernet, and went on, “The butler guy and his boss weren’t badass like the morons, but they were pretty weird, in an interesting way, and they got what they wanted.”
Tommy was ready to ask what it was they got when the dog swallowed the last hunk of meat, looked up at the table and said, “What a minute, wait a minute. What’s this about a German shepherd? I never heard this part. No one ever told me about him.”
Jinny said, “It wasn’t a him. It was a her dog. Shalome was her name, ninety pounds of muscle and jaws like lobster claws. Grabbed one of the morons by the crotch one time, the guy froze like a statue.”
Tommy said, “And....?”
“He did the right thing, not moving, not even breathing. If he had so much as twitched, he’d a bin eunuchized. No one’d ever called him a putz again, not that many of his friends up in Idaho know much Yiddish. Shalome just held him there for two minutes, then the blind guy gave her the command to stand down. The moron lost a pound of sweat each of those two minutes.”
Barely had Jinny gotten out these last words than the dog swiped his paw at the plate on the floor, sending it off the stage and crashing to the floor below. “What?” he shouted. “A her shep, and you guys didn’t tell me? Kept that to yourselves? What kinda friends are you?”
I looked at Jinny and said, “You didn’t tell him about Shalome?”
Jinny said, “Umm, I hadn’t been initiated into the world of dog telepathy back them. Neither had Gale, so don’t blame us.”
The dog looked at me and I said, “Sorry. We had a lot going on. Sorry.”
Which brought up another point, if the dog hadn’t squealed to Richard about Shalome, who had? I looked at Richard, accusingly, and said, “Who told you about her? About the morons cleaning the synagogue with toothbrushes?”
Richard waited a few seconds, debating, then did the twisting of the fingers in front of the lips thing symbolizing locking the vault. Jinny, quick as a whip, said, “If it wasn't any of us, it must have been....”
Oh, damn, now I had a rat of a husband. First the dog, then the neighbor, now my hubby. Can’t anyone around here keep a secret?
The dog said, “You gotta be careful about sheps, they can be twitchy, but man, do they know how to have fun. You like it physical, they know physical.”
We looked at him, thinking about the last comment, then moved on with Tommy asking, “What about the other kidnappers? What was it they got?”
Richard said, “They weren’t malevolent kidnappers like the morons, they were more like benevolent kidnappers. The butler had a gun which he waved around at first, but then Anna made a deal with him.”
Tommy said, “Which was?”
“Which was if he stopped waving it around in her face she wouldn’t take it away from him and stick it up his ass.”
Tommy looked at Jinny for explication. “Not only is Anna a babe, but a very tough Russian broad. She was being gentle when she told him that.”
Richard went on, “The benevolent kidnappers wanted two things: money of course, Paul being worth multi-millions, but the woman wanted something....unusual, at least in terms of a kidnapping demand. She told Paul she was going to lock him up in an old World War II concrete bunker on Sullivan's Island next to her house, and he had to write the world's greatest rock opera.”
Tommy said, “And that’s what I just saw?”
We all nodded, acting like it happened every day.
“And you wrote that in a book?”
Knowing how I feel about his chickenshit books, Richard didn’t brag or even answer, but sipped on his cab.
At this point we gave up on the talking and attacked the McCrady's food, except the dog who’d eaten his in the blink of an eye, and now went out in the alley to do whatever they do out there, still pissed at us for not introducing him to Shalome, and I can’t say I blame him. That was an oversight. When we’d finished eating and Jinny had filled our glasses with rioja, we sat looking at each other. Finally Tommy said, “So what’s it take to get involved in one of these productions? How’s that happen?”
We shot-gunned him. Jinny said, “To be considered for the team generally the candidate would not have designs on consigning any of the other team members to prison.”
Gale erupted, “To be considered for membership on the team, generally speaking, the candidate would not constantly be trying to get into the pants of any of the other team members who are happily married to another team member, like you are, you rotter!”
I looked at him and said, “To be considered a candidate a person couldn’t very well be a resident of any state or municipality geographically located above the Mason-Dixon Line, and especially not in that faraway and foreign country known as New York City.” And I smiled. “You ready to give that up?”
Tommy smiled back and said, “Ya never know.”
Gwenny June's Tommy Crown Affair Page 43