A Cat Tells Two Tales

by Lydia Adamson

  “A glass of red wine,” I said. Wine keeps ugly depressions an inch away. Brandy is for anxiety, but wine is for depression. It is like a yellow light in the subway.

  The wine was served in a glass so huge that a full regular glass of wine would fill only one-third of this jumbo goblet. I sipped it. I listened to the laughter from the crowded end of the bar. I stared out onto the street traffic. I watched the bartender ply his trade.

  When I had finished the wine, I began to relax. The danger was receding. As I ordered another glass, I noticed the empty end of the bar was filling up with men and women who obviously were stopping off after work. Who were they? Where did they work? Where did they live? I didn’t know. They carried briefcases . . . they carried small posh shopping bags . . . they carried small, well-wrapped umbrellas . . . and they carried all kinds of crimes in their hearts. The last notion made me giggle a bit. It was poetic. Crimes in the heart.

  Just then two old neighborhood men came in and sat beside me. What were they doing in a posh bar like Brights? Had they lost their way? Did they also need the Brights cure for depression? I removed my hat from the bar stool. One of them gallantly carried the hat to a rack behind the cashier.

  I began to concentrate on what to do next. The idea of going back to the libraries with their infernal microfilm machines in order to track down information on Lord Kelvin and Ask Me No Questions as I had done with Cup of Tea made me ill. And besides, Cup of Tea had been a media star. From what Charlie Coombs had told me about the other two horses, that certainly wasn’t the case.

  I needed someone who knew the racetrack and horses. Charlie Coombs was out of my life now, and besides, he could no longer be trusted. Nor could Nicholas Hill. And Jo, well, I just didn’t want the old woman and her newfound money involved anymore.

  I stared at the second glass of wine. Was Ginger watching me and laughing at me? I grimaced at the thought.

  An argument erupted at one end of the bar, and I heard a woman yell at the man seated beside her. “Don’t tell me what he said. I attended the workshop, not you!”

  Even as I tried to shut out the quarrel, the word “workshop” stuck in my mind and jangled there. God, it was so nice to hear that word again. How long had it been since I attended a workshop? Then a particular name popped into my head: the Dramatic Workshop. I had studied there under Saul Colin in 1970 or 1971.

  Then I remembered Anthony Basillio, their stage designer. He used to bet on horses all the time. I sat back, awed at the strange way things are recalled which seem to have been lost forever. Yes, of course, crazy, wonderful Anthony Basillio would help me. I had met him at a seminar on Brecht at the Dramatic Workshop. The visiting lecturer had been none other than Erwin Piscator, the former director of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. He was an old, brilliant, difficult man.

  Basillio had sat behind me in the seminar. He was tall and skinny, with very bad skin. He was also very funny. Once he brought his cat, Fats, to the seminar in a paper shopping bag, the meanest-looking, most powerfully built alley cat I ever saw. A no-neck, low-slung beastie who was ready to claw. But Anthony told the class not to worry. Fats was really a pussycat. And besides, he was the only cat in Manhattan who could write rock lyrics and pick winners at the racetrack.

  I laughed out loud at the memory, then realized the two old men were staring at me. I sipped my wine sheepishly.

  The seminars, I remembered, were held at the old Dramatic Workshop studios on Fifty-first Street and Broadway, over the Capitol Theatre, and afterward a lot of us used to go to a bar on Eighth Avenue.

  It was a time of great ferment in the New York theater world. Radical theater groups of all kinds were rising and falling. The seminar itself had reflected that diversity—academics, Broadway showgirls, directors, stagehands, technicians, famous actors and unknowns, junkies, critics, reviewers. All kinds of people with all kinds of agendas attended. It was that kind of time.

  In the bar after the seminar, Anthony used to emote on how he was working on a series of stage designs for Mother Courage that would change the way the world perceived Brecht. And sometimes he would have a lot of money on him and buy everyone drinks and cheeseburgers and tell us how he had won the money playing the horses. He used to brag that the only way he could support his theater habit was to make it at the racetrack.

  Once he had become very difficult and started a fight, and we were all thrown out of the bar. After the next meeting of the seminar he had apologized and said he often acted stupid because in a past life he had been a racehorse and everyone knew that racehorses were stupid because they got the same food whether they won a race or not.

  Basillio would know about Lord Kelvin and Ask Me No Questions.

  I paid the bartender and rushed out. A block away I realized I had forgotten my hat. I started to go back, then decided to pick it up another time.

  Once in the apartment, I started to pace, trying to remember who had known Anthony Basillio then and who would know where he was now. I grabbed a pad and the telephone book and sat down by the phone.

  First, names from the past: actors, actresses, directors, producers, teachers—names I hadn’t thought of in years but which now came grudgingly out of the stubby pencil at first, then faster. The names first, then the faces, then the memories.

  Ordinarily I would have been too reticent to call these people out of the blue, but now I had no problem at all. Just dial. And dial again. Some were delighted to hear from me. They wanted to make conversation, fill in the years, meet for lunch. Many had unlisted phones and could not be reached. Others gave me numbers of others who might be able to help.

  But no one in this widening net of reemerging memories knew what had happened to Anthony Basillio, if, in fact, they had known him at all.

  I stared at the clock. I had been on the phone continuously for two hours. My hand was cramped. My throat was hoarse. Each phone call, each opening line, was getting more difficult: “Hello, you may not remember me. My name is Alice Nestleton.”

  Then the inevitable silence, followed by: “My God—Alice. It has been so long.”

  At nine thirty I gave myself six more calls. On the third, I reached Winslow Jarvis, a gay man who had been part of the original Dionysus ’69 group on Wooster Street. He said that of course he knew Anthony Basillio, but he hadn’t seen him in years. He had heard that Basillio now owned a chain of small xerox places in the Village and the Lower East Side. He said the stores had a stupid name, something from Brecht.

  “Mother Courage?” I asked.

  “Right,” he said.

  I thanked him and hung up. That Anthony Basillio now ran a chain of small copier stores struck me as one of the saddest things I had ever heard in my life.

  15

  When I was a child, my grandmother had a house cat named Peter who would refuse to eat food off a plate. My grandmother was quite proud of him, saying that because he wouldn’t eat off a plate, he could be trusted. It always struck me as odd logic, but that was the kind of feeling I had always had about Anthony Basillio.

  Anyway, I started out to find him. The closest branch of the Mother Courage copier chain was on Second Avenue and Third Street. No, the girl behind the counter said, Mr. Basillio’s office is in the Sixth Avenue store—at Prince.

  I arrived there about eleven thirty. It was a larger store, and in the rear was a complex of small offices and cubicles. Three or four young men were behind the counter, servicing a continuous flow of customers. The copy machines, all sizes and makes, were humming.

  I stood off to one side to distinguish myself from the rest of the customers and finally was approached by one of the clerks, who was wearing an absurd leather apron, as if he were an old-fashioned printer. It was, I recalled, the same kind of apron I had seen Jo wearing on that dismal morning we learned that Mona Aspen had been murdered. But when Jo had worn it I had thought it was a blacksmith’s apron.

  “Can I help you, miss?”

  “I’m looking for Anthony Basillio.” />
  “He’s not in.”

  “Can I wait?”

  “To tell you the truth, miss, Mr. Basillio has gone for the day.”

  “What about tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Look, miss, if you really want to see him,” the clerk said, exasperated, “you have to get here early. He leaves every day at about eleven for the racetrack, and he doesn’t show up again until the next morning.”

  He paused, smiled at me, and added, “He doesn’t have to. He’s the boss.”

  I thanked him and left, promising that I would be back the next morning. He stared at me blankly.

  I spent the next twenty-four hours wrapped, metaphorically, in a tourniquet—tense, tight, restricted. I could not proceed without Basillio, and it was necessary to proceed. I went to a movie. I read a few scenes from a Jean Genet play. I groomed Bushy and chased Pancho. I thought of Charlie Coombs with regret and then anger; of Harry Starobin with a kind of bitter adolescent longing; and of Jo Starobin with warmth. It was an exhausting, nerve-racking day that vanished very slowly.

  At eight forty-five the next morning, I stood once again in front of the counter of the flagship Mother Courage copy shop. The clerk with the leather apron remembered me, raised one section of the counter, and waved me through—pointing to a specific office in the back. The door was open. A man sat at a desk, his chair turned to the window. Hearing my footsteps, he wheeled around.

  “My God, the Swede!” He jumped out of his chair.

  I smiled and held out my hand. He had always called me Swede after he found out I was from Minnesota, even though I had told him a hundred times that I wasn’t of Swedish descent. It was just one of his stereotypical Hollywood affectations.

  Basillio really hadn’t changed at all, except for his graying hair and worse posture. He was still thin. His skin was still bad. His smile was still wicked, as if he was perpetually contemplating some kind of mayhem.

  “Look, Alice,” he said in a mock-serious tone, putting his arm around me and guiding me to a chair, “I refused to sleep with you then and I refuse to sleep with you now. So, do you still want to visit, or are you too brokenhearted?”

  I laughed until the tears welled up in my eyes. He represented an old and treasured time for me—when the theater had been much more than just a precarious profession, when it had still been a kind of religious vocation.

  “I see your name around, Swede, but not all that much.”

  “No, not all that much,” I agreed.

  “But at least you’re still in it . . . and you never went showbiz,” he noted with an appreciative smirk.

  “I tried,” I replied. And we both laughed hugely at this most hoary of all acting-class insults. We felt an enormous kindness toward each other.

  “Remember what the master said,” Anthony cautioned.

  “Which master?”

  “Which master? There’s only one, Swede. Bert Brecht. He said, ‘Don’t let them lure you into exhaustion and despair.’”

  “I see they haven’t.”

  “Nor will they,” he affirmed.

  “Tony, I didn’t come here to talk to you about Brecht or the theater. It took me a hundred calls to find you. I need help.”

  Basillio’s eyes narrowed at the word “help.”

  “I need information on horses.”

  “Horses?” he asked, astonished.

  “Racehorses.”

  “You mean you want me to give you tips?”

  “No. Information on their personal lives.”

  “Whose personal lives?”

  “The horses’.”

  “Racehorses don’t have personal lives. They run and they die.”

  “Cup of Tea did.”

  “Cup of Tea was special.”

  “I’m writing a book on Cup of Tea,” I said, using that convenient fabrication, “and I need information on his contemporaries. Not betting information—other kinds. I just broke up with a trainer named Charlie Coombs.”

  “I know of him,” Basillio said, interrupting.

  I continued. “So now that Charlie is gone from my life, I need someone who can talk horse talk.”

  “Maybe, Swede, you’ll just have to hop into bed with another trainer. I mean, they’re the only ones who really know horses’ breeding and conformation and potential. All I know is what I pick up from other gamblers—crazy stuff that may or may not be true. Like how the horse can’t run if the temperature gets over eighty degrees or if he likes beer in his feed or that the horse is really crazy unless a lady jock climbs on his back. That kind of stuff.”

  “That’s what I want, Tony,” I said, realizing that my lies were now spiraling. Charlie and I had never talked about horses—except for the first and last times we were together.

  He whirled around on his chair. “Swede, if there was one woman on earth on whom I would have happily bet my wife, my kiddies, and all my copying stores that she would have never gotten involved with the racetrack, it was you. You were always too elegant, too goddamn classy. Or maybe, at most, a three-day trip to Saratoga in August with a rich lover to watch the horses run in between ballets.”

  He was starting to sound like my ex-husband.

  “Believe me, Tony,” I said, “it’s not a willing involvement. This book I’m writing is a debt.”

  “Bookmakers?”

  “No, the dead.”

  “The dead?” he repeated softly.

  “I want to find out all the information I can about Lord Kelvin and Ask Me No Questions.”

  “Forget the first horse.”

  “Lord Kelvin? Why?”

  “He’s dead. Lord Kelvin was killed in a freak vanning accident in Pennsylvania about a year ago. I know because I met this guy at the track who told me he saw a small notice about it in a Philadelphia paper. He mentioned it to me because we both had made some money on that horse.”

  I wondered why Charlie had never told me that when I asked him about Lord Kelvin. Was it possible he didn’t know?

  “That leaves Ask Me No Questions,” I noted.

  “I’ve seen her run,” Anthony replied. “Look, just give me a few days.”

  I wrote my number on his desk pad. I remembered, as I was writing, that I had done the exact same thing at the racetrack when I first met Charlie. “Thanks,” I said, standing up.

  “Wait, Swede,” he called out with a touch of panic in his voice.

  I turned back to him.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me how sad this all is, Swede? The Mother Courage copier shops instead of the Mother Courage stage sets? Aren’t you going to say how goddamn pathetic it all turned out?”

  “No,” I replied. There was silence. “You told me once in a bar, after a seminar,” I reminded him, “that when all was said and done, gambling was your only passion.”

  “I lied,” he said.

  I wanted to leave. I didn’t know what to say. Basillio picked up on my discomfort and said, “Remember when I brought my cat, Fats, to the seminar in a shopping bag?” We both laughed so loud the customers in the front of the store were startled and peered past the counter toward us.

  I went home and waited for Basillio to call. That he would call, that he would give me information I required, was never in doubt. He was a blast from the past, and the past is always good.

  Sure enough, he called me two days later. He said he was going to the racetrack, but he would meet me in front of the Plaza Hotel at eight that evening and buy me seven dozen littleneck clams, three dozen cherrystones, nine brandies, and a piece of cheesecake in his favorite place—the Oyster Bar.

  “Can’t we meet in a coffee shop somewhere?” I asked.

  His voice was happy, playful, manic: “Don’t provoke me, Swede. It’s the Plaza or nothing.”

  At seven forty-five I was standing in front of the Plaza Hotel. I felt stupid and ill-at-ease; I had provoked another male into adolescent gestures. I was wearing jeans and a sweater, just to be perverse, I imagine.

  He arrived a half-hour
late, flushed, excited. Grabbing my arm in a tight grip, he led me up the steps of the hotel, across the lobby, and then into the Oyster Bar by the back entrance, where we were seated by a man who looked like he had survived prewar Vienna only by the skin of his domed head.

  “Look at the bar, Swede. Don’t you love it? It’s square. I mean, did you ever see another bar with corners?”

  Once we were sitting across from each other, I could tell that he had been drinking before he met me.

  “How did you do at the racetrack?”

  “I lost heavy.”

  “Easy come, easy go,” I said by way of a gentle criticism.

  He smiled at me. He ordered clams and brandy and ale. “So,” he said after it was all settled, “what I found out, you probably already know.”

  “Try me,” I said.

  “Right. Ask Me No Questions was a big, hard-running gray filly. Not much breeding, but she ended up a multiple-stakes winner.”

  “Like Cup of Tea,” I said, remembering that Charlie had told me there was absolutely no similarity.

  “Sort of, but not really,” Anthony hedged, staring at the two plates of beautiful littlenecks and one plate of cherrystones. He began to prepare them carefully—lemon, horseradish, a tiny dollop of hot sauce.

  He explained, “No one ever went from nowhere as far and as fast as Cup of Tea. He went from a dirt track to become the world’s champion grass horse and sire. Ask Me No Questions never started that low or went so high. She won grade-two stakes at best, not the Arlington Million like Cup of Tea.”

  “But something did happen. I mean, there was a transformation, wasn’t there?”

  “Right. Something sure as hell happened. She lost her first twelve races. They sent her back to the farm. She came back as a four-year-old, lost six more races; then went back to the farm with another injury. The next time she raced, four months later, she won an allowance race by ten lengths at odds of sixty-five to one. And she kept on winning.”

  I sat back, exhausted suddenly by the realization that I had at least put one firm piece into the puzzle. “Thank you,” I said.