But the moment I heard his voice on the phone, I knew that we would become lovers.
I don’t really know why I thought that. The theater is no place for love. Actresses can’t stand actors, and vice versa. The only men I met who weren’t actors or directors were bankers and lawyers and businessmen on the fringes of the theater. They were perpetually fascinated by and panting for actresses who they thought would provide a new world of erotic and intellectual excitement. It never happened that way. The magic never emerged. I was by now more or less resigned to celibacy.
But how would it be with a man who had nothing to do with the theater?
I said I would be delighted to go out to the racetrack again.
“Malacca,” he said, which was the name of the exercise rider, “will be in front of your house at four thirty tomorrow morning.” Then he hung up.
I turned to Bushy, who had just jumped up for some attention, and was just about to tell him about the Charlie Coombs phone call when the phone started ringing again. This time it had to be my agent. This time I had to let it ring. Or put the damn machine on, which I hated.
But what if it was Charlie with a change of plans?
I picked up the phone. It was Carla Fried.
“Alice, I’m at La Guardia. I have to catch a plane at Newark in three hours. If I go through Manhattan, we can meet for coffee.”
“Where does the bus bring you?” I asked automatically, flustered by her call.
“I take it to Forty-second and Park. We can meet in the bar of the Grand Hyatt, across the street. An hour okay?”
“Fine,” I said. And she hung up. God, that woman had become efficient. It was like dealing with a corporate jet.
Remembering that the bar of the Grand Hyatt was pseudo-posh, I threw on something pseudo-respectable.
Carla was waiting for me at the entrance to the bar inside the hotel lobby. She had taken a cab. The moment we sat down, she started to talk a mile a minute. She was sorry she hadn’t called back after she left Atlanta. Everything about the production was going well. She wasn’t going to pressure me about a decision on the part—there was still plenty of time. Then she sat back and grinned.
“I’m babbling, Alice, I’m sorry. Planes make me crazy.”
We ordered drinks.
“What is going on with you?” she asked.
Her question seemed so absurd I started to laugh and then to cry. How could I tell her what had happened? How could I tell her about the murders? She wouldn’t comprehend or care. How could I tell her about the fear when that little red truck came toward Jo and me?
“What’s the matter, Alice? Are you sick?”
Her face clouded over with such concern that I felt terrible at spoiling our meeting.
“No, no, a man,” I said quickly, recovering.
“A man? I had forgotten all about them,” she quipped. “You mean those people with the funny musculature.”
“I think I’m going to have an affair, Carla. And I’m a little nervous. It’s been a long, long time.”
“Who is he?”
“A man I met at the racetrack. A trainer.”
“It has been so long since I had an affair, Alice, that when I go out for drinks with Waring—”
“Waring?” I interrupted, not remembering the name.
“The millionaire I told you about . . . the one who funded our season.”
“I’m sorry. Of course I remember. Are you sleeping with him?”
“No. That’s my point. He’s smart and handsome and crazy and rich. The kind of man I always dreamed of. But now I just sit and talk theater with him, and not a single erotic thought pops out. You’ll see. He’s in New York. I called him from the airport after I talked to you. He’ll be here to have a drink with us. But I want to hear about your man.”
“Well, Charlie Coombs is not rich or handsome, but he may well be crazy.”
“You can’t have everything,” she said.
Another round of drinks came and we lapsed into one of those wonderful, surreal, lewd, revealing conversations that are basically sexual autobiographies. It was delicious. We laughed. We cried. We remembered.
Suddenly I felt a touch on my shoulder. And then I heard a voice.
“So you’re Juliet’s Nurse,” the voice said. I turned and stared at a man.
“I’m Waring,” he said, and pulled a chair to our table, sitting easily.
Is he the Pope? I thought sarcastically. Only one name—Waring. Maybe all very rich men use only their last names—even in bed. He was tall and skinny. His thinning light hair was brushed back and longish. He was wearing an old brown corduroy suit with a beautiful light blue knit tie on a dark blue shirt. He looked like an academic. His face was lined, with blue eyes. Fifty? Sixty? I couldn’t tell.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to harass you about the part,” he said, “because Carla has been giving me all kinds of etiquette lessons about dealing with actresses.”
His voice had that funny Canadian accent, a flattish inflection which is so difficult to describe and even harder to mimic.
He sat back and beamed at Carla. My curiosity immediately turned to hate. He was looking at Carla as if she were his possession. As if her theater group were his new toy. As if, just as he owned factories and wheat fields and oil tankers and racing cars and yachts and horses and dogs, now he was going to own a little theater and he was going to apply his magic touch and—poof—out would come another Moscow Art Theatre. God, he sickened me. He reminded me of a hundred other theatrical backers I had met over the years, people who shared his arrogance even though they had only one-millionth of Waring’s fortune.
“What’s the matter, Alice? You’re pale. Are you sick?” Carla leaned toward me, her voice and face anxious.
I lied.
“No, I’m fine. It’s just I forgot about an appointment . . . an important appointment. Look, I have to go. Call me! I’m still thinking about the part.”
Then I stood up and walked out of there.
Malacca was waiting for me the next morning in a beat-up van, the back of which was filled with horse equipment, most of which I couldn’t identify. He was a small man, obviously an ex-jockey, and he drove like a lunatic, sailing through lights happily, telling me his life story in violent bursts of energy, then falling silent, then erupting again.
When we reached Charlie Coombs’s barn, the trainer was waiting for me. He smiled, and before I could say a word, he placed a riding hat on my head and buttoned the strap under my chin as if I were a child. Then, taking me by the hand, he led me toward the saddled ponies standing quietly.
“This is Rose,” he said, pointing to the larger one.
I hadn’t been on a horse in fifteen years, but Rose was so gentle that riding her was like sitting on a pillow. Coombs climbed on the other pony and we started to pace forward. I needed a few moments to orient myself, since everything had happened so quickly, but I finally realized that all around us were racehorses—his racehorses—heading out to the track for their workouts.
As we continued to move en masse, I became unnerved. The horses were prancing, snorting, moving in often erratic patterns. Several of them looked crazed, as if they were about to bolt or rear up, and I heard the constant chatter of the exercise riders soothing them in Spanish. From time to time one of the racehorses would come close to my pony, Rose, and make contact with her. Rose was unperturbed. I was tense.
It was still dark, but there were tiny slivers of light beginning to infiltrate the horizon. Charlie brought his pony close to mine. “Okay?” he said. I nodded. He smiled. “Rose likes you,” he said. He was projecting.
When we reached the gap in the track, the racehorses went out in single file. As each one passed Charlie, he gave the rider instructions—gallop such-and-such a distance, work the horse in such-and-such a time. Our two ponies drifted away from the gap and settled behind the rail.
“How do the riders know how fast they’re going?” I asked, perplexed by the sp
eeds Charlie had requested. They didn’t carry stopwatches, and even if they did, they couldn’t read them in the darkness.
“The clocks are in their heads,” he replied.
Horses were now circling the track at different speeds. I couldn’t identify Charlie’s horses, but I saw from the way he was watching that he knew exactly where all of his horses were and what they were doing. Then I too began to watch carefully. The sound of the hooves pounding the track was like a beautifully precise percussion instrument. I could see white froth on the horses’ mouths. I intuited the strength and skill of the riders as they perched on top of their mounts so precarious, so light. The whole scene was packed with a kind of beauty, a kind of energy. Leaning all the way forward in the saddle and laying my head on Rose’s shoulders, I closed my eyes and listened to the beat.
It was all over much too quickly. We rode back to the barn and Charlie took me through the barn area and into the stalls. He showed me how the horses were stripped and cooled off and then bedded down. He introduced me to the grooms and the riders and the barn cats and dogs who roamed freely in and out of the stalls. He showed me the horses that had not worked out that morning, allowing me to give them apples or sugar cubes. He pointed out the feed problems and health problems. And then he led me back to his cluttered office, gave me some coffee and a piece of Danish pastry, and told me to wait until he finished up.
An hour later he was back, the morning work done. Now he looked exactly as I remembered him—underdressed, broad-shouldered, tousled hair, friendly manner.
But he was wearing boots.
“Where are your red sneakers?” I asked playfully.
“I don’t wear them when I’m really trying to impress someone,” he said.
“Well, to be honest, I found them very attractive.”
“Damn,” he said in mock anger, “I always make the wrong move.” He sipped his coffee. Then he noted, “Jo sends her regards.”
“You saw her?”
“No, I spoke to her. I called her and asked permission to call you.”
“My God,” I laughed, “that is old-fashioned.”
“I am old-fashioned in most ways. Anyway, Jo told me you’re no longer looking for Ginger Mauch.”
“That’s right. We gave it up.” I noticed the way he looked at me, was really listening to me. I was flattered and my hand rose unconsciously to pat my hair.
“Jo told me you were both almost killed by a drunken driver.”
“It was close. Very close.”
“I see the scar,” Coombs said, pointing to my forehead. I touched it once and pulled my hand away. I played with the uneaten Danish. I felt good sitting there. He made me feel very comfortable. His maturity was leavened with a kind of childishness. Maybe it came from working with horses.
He leaned over the desk a bit toward me. “By the way, are you a famous actress?”
“Not really. I’m more famous as a cat-sitter.”
“I mean, should I know who you are? Should I have seen you in something?”
“If you were in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in April 1985, you would have seen me do a very respectable Hedda Gabler. I’m not respectable anymore.”
“My father used to tell me,” Coombs said wryly, “that one has to be respectable to make it in the world. But what do fathers know?”
“What do fathers know?”
He didn’t answer my absurd question, but instead looked mournful for a moment. He snapped out of it quickly, though, and laughed. “Do you want me to tell you more horse stories?”
I leaned back. “Tell me whatever you want to tell me,” I replied. We were flirting with each other now, I realized. I didn’t want to do that. What did I want to do?
He started to play with his coffee cup. “I shouldn’t have asked you to come out here on such short notice,” he apologized.
“Actually I like short notices. It seems as if a crisis exists—but there is none. One gets excitement and relief at the same time.”
“There was a crisis,” he said.
“What?”
“You. I wanted to see you.”
“Well, you’ve seen me.”
“Yes, the crisis is over. But I was always good at crises. Actually, that’s why I’m a trainer. The racetrack is about crises. Something bad is always happening. A horse throws a rider. A cinch breaks. A dog bites a horse. A horse bites a vet. A trainer makes the wrong claim. I was always good in crises.”
“Is that why you don’t wear enough clothes in winter?” I asked.
“Right. Stay light. Stay mobile,” he replied, laughing, his rough face crinkling into an incredibly kindly smile.
“Do you come into Manhattan often?” I asked.
“About once a week.”
“Where do you live?”
“I have a small room about ten minutes away from here.”
I looked at his hands holding the coffee cup. I could imagine them wrapped in a rope halter. I had seen them only an hour before, running up the leg of a horse, searching for a swelling. One of his hands disengaged from the cup. He reached it across the table and placed it down, palm up. I reached across and placed my hand in his.
I stood just outside my bedroom door watching Charlie Coombs sleep. I had never gone to bed so quickly with a man, no matter how much I had been attracted to him—except for my brief adventure in promiscuity, which really didn’t count.
The sex had been very good. We had been very good. Perhaps, I thought, my emerging middle age was going to unflower into a new world of eros. I laughed at my own arrogance.
Two sudden darts of light on the bookcase startled me. Then I smiled. It was Pancho, awake and cruising in his particular fashion. “Go to it,” I whispered to him.
I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. The plaster was cold but I was happy. It had been a long time since I had truly experienced intimacy, that sense that one partner was looking out for the other’s pleasure. Charlie was old-fashioned, as he had said. As we made love, he kept telling me how good, how beautiful, how unique I was. It was hokey and charming and ageless and very heady—like a snifter of Napoleon brandy after chocolate cake.
He had, I realized, an ability to give credence to clichés. It was a gift which, oddly enough, I should have had but didn’t—because it was what made actresses great, the ability to transcend a silly fiction, a role, and transform it into something that moves an audience to view the world differently.
There was a flash in the darkness. The eyes on the bookcase had vanished. I scanned the pitch-dark bedroom. I heard a furious but nearly silent rustle somewhere.
Then I located Pancho’s eyes again . . . and lost them again. Then the eyes seemed to flash off and on like a traffic light that has gone berserk. Finally I realized what was happening. Poor dear crazy Pancho was actually playing with sleeping Charlie Coombs. He was bouncing from one end of the bed to the other and then to the floor and then to the bookcase, and he was doing it all so swiftly and quietly and elegantly that the sleeping man was not disturbed.
It was a good omen. I went back to bed.
The weeks of winter began to grind down. I landed a small but lucrative part in an avant-garde German film shot in, of all places, Bayonne, New Jersey. My agent started some “promising” negotiations with “some people” for a possible role as the wife in an off-Broadway revival of Pinter’s The Homecoming. I was asked to teach an acting course at the Neighborhood Playhouse for their summer session. And I landed two new cat-sitting assignments, one of them an overpaying job consisting of visiting and feeding a large, somewhat eccentric Siamese on nine consecutive weekends while her owners took a series of jaunts. Ah, the rich. Anyway, I like German films, I like Pinter, I like teaching, and I love Siamese cats. So things were going quite well.
And Charlie Coombs began to spend at least two or three nights a week at my apartment.
The magic, as they say, was continuing. It was odd. We never spoke about what defined us—the theater or the racetrack
. We did speak passionately and honestly about the stupidest things: candles, flashlights, cats with tiger stripes, vegetarian cats, cheeseburgers, boots, uncles, and the relationship, if any, between brown eggs and white eggs.
We kept speaking nonsense to each other because we were so enthralled with each other—with the wonder of it all. It was so delicious and crazy that I even enjoyed making coffee for him in the morning.
And so it went. I was finally living the life I should have lived twenty years earlier. I mean, everyone deserves at least one fling at a sublime domestic fantasy.
The bubble, alas, burst on the first Monday in March. It was not Charlie’s fault. It was mine. Out of nowhere a face from the past rose up and took me with him.
The bubble burst this way: I was brushing Bushy on the living-room floor. Grooming a Maine coon like Bushy is always a problem, given the thickness of his coat, but the coat itself was a minor chore compared to the cat. Bushy had this peculiar attitude toward being groomed. He acted as if he was about to run away, so one had to hold him firmly. What was worse, he acted as if I was literally torturing him to death.
Once it was finally done and I stared down at my perfectly groomed cat, I had a memory flash so clear and so powerful that I folded my hands like a schoolchild.
I remembered the first time I saw Harry Starobin groom one of his Himalayans.
He had combed the cat out so quickly and so playfully and with such an awesome combination of gentleness, strength, and precision that I had been unable to respond to a question he asked me during the brushing. I had been hypnotized by the perfect harmony of cat and master.
The memory vanished, as they always do, and in its wake came a profound sense of remorse, as if Harry Starobin had risen from the crushed gravel of the Starobin driveway to make a bitter accusation: I, Alice Nestleton, had allowed Harry Starobin to be forgotten.
I could see his craggy, happy, lined face. I could hear him talk. I could see him wearing those green Wellington boots.
The bizarre apparition was so real that I literally started to tell Harry that Jo and I had no choice: we had almost been murdered. But whom was I speaking to? Bushy? Pancho?
A Cat Tells Two Tales Page 7