The Himalayans abandoned the paper bag. They had found nothing of value there.
Amos walked into the house, through the large living room, and into the kitchen. He didn’t greet us.
I heard all the Himalayans moving toward him. They were hungry. I heard him preparing their food. Before I fell asleep on the sofa I remember thinking that they sure feed cats early in Old Brookville.
20
I opened the cat carriers the moment I closed the apartment door behind me.
Bushy ambled out. Pancho flew out to begin his frantic dashes in order to find, identify, and flee from the many enemies that had invaded Manhattan while he was away.
I walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out a container of low-fat milk, and poured myself half a glass. I sat down at the tiny table. My body felt as if all the musculature had been sucked out.
The green light on the phone machine indicated there had been messages while I was away. Pancho’s enemies. I ignored them.
I sipped the milk. My hands were shaking. I was becoming agitated.
Reaching for pencil and pad, I made a soothing list:
1. Pick up hat left in bar
2. Write nice note to Charlie Coombs
3. Call Anthony Basillio and thank him again
4. Buy saffron rice for Pancho
5. Cash check
6. Buy toothpaste and regular cat food
I put the pencil down. It was musty in the apartment. I left the kitchen and walked to the windows in the living room—heaving both of them open as far as the cracked wood allowed.
Turning back, I saw the paperback copy of Romeo and Juliet on the long table.
Poor Carla Fried, willing to do anything for anyone to fund her dream of a theater. Poor, sick, crazed Carla.
I went back to the kitchen to finish my milk.
Strange thoughts came to me as I sat there.
What if Carla’s theater group in Montreal had already been funded?
What if, in spite of the fact that Thomas Waring and his associates would be convicted of murder, the funds were already in place, in possession of the theater group, inviolate?
What if the season would go on as planned . . . without Carla Fried . . . without Thomas Waring?
What if they would still need an actress to imaginatively interpret the role of the Nurse in a Portobello production of Romeo and Juliet?
I picked up the pencil and added another item to the list:
7. Contact Carla’s theatrical group in Montreal
A part is a part, I said to myself grimly.
And Portobello would appreciate my interpretation of the Nurse as a middle-aged woman whose eccentricities hid the fact that she loved Romeo just as passionately as Juliet loved him. Portobello would find the idea intriguing . . . chewable . . . dramaturgically innovative.
“I’ll discuss it in detail with Bushy before I discuss it with Portobello,” I said to the pencil in my hand. Then I walked into the living room to join Bushy on the sofa.
A Cat of a Different Color
1
The woman, whose name was Francesca Tosques—she was vaguely attached to the Italian legation—had told me before I started the cat-sitting assignment that Geronimo was a lovely cat but he had some peculiarities.
“Don’t go near the fireplace,” she said mysteriously. “Fine!” I replied. Francesca was going to be away for three days: Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. All I had to do was go up to her large old apartment on West End Avenue and Ninety-seventh Street in Manhattan . . . feed Geronimo . . . talk to Geronimo . . . kill some time. That’s all. A very good assignment as these things go.
I arrived on Sunday at three in the afternoon, walking all the way from my East Twenty-sixth Street apartment, through the park. It was hot outside but the apartment was cool without air-conditioning, utilizing only one large, slow ceiling fan. The view from the apartment was spectacular: out over the Hudson to Jersey, or north up the Hudson, or downtown. Pick a window, pick a view. She had left me twenty-three notes on the dining-room table, complicating the simplest procedures. But I was used to that.
As for Geronimo—I was expecting a Balinese or a Cornish Rex or some other exotic feline, but when I finally met him—he was lying on the Formica kitchen table—well, Geronimo was simply an old-fashioned black alley cat. You couldn’t call him anything else. He was big and brawny and ugly, with scars up and down his flanks, and he walked—when he did walk, like alley cats do—as if he had some kind of testicular problem, to put it kindly.
That first day, I stayed in the apartment about an hour, talking to Geronimo, who really wasn’t listening. After eating, he had gone back to the Formica table and I had to almost shout to get my points across. I joshed him, telling him that I was a famous actress, a famous sleuth, and above all, a famous cat-sitter, and I’d be damned if he was going to be standoffish. I just wouldn’t tolerate it.
On the third day, we weren’t any friendlier; it was live and let live. Anyway, on that third and last day of the assignment, Geronimo was beginning to irritate me. And my pride was hurt. Everyone always said I had a magical way with cats. Ask my own cats—Bushy and Pancho. They’ll tell anyone. So it started to bother me about what his mistress had told me—that I should not go near the fireplace. Very strange. The fireplace was an old large one, set in the north wall of the apartment. It was obviously a working fireplace but it was also obvious that it hadn’t been used in a long time. I had kept away from it because of what she had told me and because it was in a far part of the apartment. I mean, one really had to want to go there to end up there. So I sat and stewed at the living-room table, staring at Geronimo, who was staring at me from the kitchen table. Instead of a forty-one-year-old woman, I was thinking like a twelve-year-old adolescent. Something had been denied me. Authority had spoken. It was necessary to subvert authority. It was a decidedly adolescent impulse.
I got up slowly, theatrically, elegantly, and sauntered over to the fireplace. Reaching it, I placed one hand gently on the mantelpiece and smiled.
A moment later a blur seemed to explode across the room. And then I felt a short intense pain in the thumb of the hand resting on the fireplace.
Startled, I looked down. Geronimo was standing there. He had flown across the room and bitten me. Can you imagine that?
Then the cat turned and sauntered back toward the kitchen table, very much the macho alley cat.
In a state of semishock from the attack, I stumbled into the bathroom and let running cold water clean the small wound. Geronimo stared at me from his kitchen table, bored, implying that I had been duly warned and that since I had obviously wanted to play with fire, it was simple justice that I got burned.
After I washed and dressed the wound I felt exhausted. I walked into Francesca Tosques’ bedroom and lay down on the bed, closing my eyes and flicking on the radio. The station was set on 1010 WINS—news all the time.
I lay there wondering why Geronimo attacked people who stood in front of the fireplace. It was very perplexing. I must have dozed off and then awakened with a start. My mouth was dry. A bad dream? No. A name on the radio was being repeated, and I knew the name. The announcer was saying that one of the last famous Greenwich Village bohemians was dead. Arkavy Reynolds had been shot to death on Jane Street. Reynolds, the announcer said, was a well-known denizen of the lower Manhattan theater scene. He was a producer, publisher of a theatrical scandal sheet which he hawked himself from coffee shop to coffee shop, and one of those outrageous individuals who at one time were so much a part of bohemian life in New York. The announcer ended with the comment that the police were investigating the murder but had no leads or witnesses at this time.
Poor Arkavy! I had bumped into him often over the years and we always chatted, or rather I listened to his monologues. He was a huge fat man who seemed to roll down the street. In all seasons he wore the same outfit: a cabdriver’s hat, white shirt and flamboyant tie, vest, farmer’s overalls with shoulder strap
s, and construction-worker shoes. Of course, he was quite mad. Rumor had it he came from a wealthy family. He was always looking for space to perform some play far off-off Broadway. He was always talking about some brilliant new playwright whom no one had ever heard of. And his newsletters were often about people who simply didn’t exist. Each issue of his newsletter also carried reviews written by him, which were filled with typographical excesses—he loved asterisks and exclamation marks and dots and dashes.
I got up from the bed and walked into the kitchen. There was Geronimo. He no longer interested me at all. I ignored him. I opened and closed the refrigerator a few times absentmindedly, thinking of Arkavy, trying to remember the exact time I had last seen him. It might have been on East Fourth Street and First Avenue one night in the fall of 1989. I was going to a dramatic reading by an East German woman. Yes, it might have been then.
I left the kitchen and walked back into the living room, where I fell wearily into a chair. My wound was beginning to throb. Geronimo was still looking at me. It dawned on me, right then, that if Arkavy and Geronimo had by chance met, they might have become the best of friends. After all, poor Arkavy was a man who had spent his life looking to be bitten.
2
It was ten o’clock in the morning. I was standing in front of the public school on Eighty-first Street and Madison Avenue, staring across the street at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, where poor Arkavy Reynolds’ body could be viewed in the coffin before burial. The public had been invited to pay their last respects. Well, that was what I intended to do. He perpetually had been a fresh breath of lunatic air in the New York theatrical world. Time had passed him by . . . the New York theater was now showbiz or high finance—all aspects of it—and I owed it to him to stare at his corpse.
The Times printed a small article about him in the theater section, not the obituary section. The reporter had called it just another senseless New York tragedy. Arkavy, it seems, had fought with a panhandler at Sheridan Square on the morning of his death. The police speculated that the panhandler got a weapon, went looking for Arkavy, found him on Jane Street, and shot him five times in the chest. The reporter said Arkavy Reynolds’ last-known residence was a seamen’s shelter down near South Street Seaport. And then the article went on to recount some of the more colorful “Arkavy” stories—such as his predilection for taking cabs and then paying the meter with off-off-Broadway theater tickets from shows that had closed years ago.
Why didn’t I just cross the street and walk inside the funeral parlor? Why was I hesitating? I don’t know, but I dawdled there for the longest time. The morning was sunny and warm but without humidity, and there was a gentle early-August breeze blowing up Madison Avenue.
I waited until I saw a group of people who might be theater folk enter the funeral parlor and then I crossed quickly against the light and went in on their heels. I had my long gray-gold hair pulled up in a bun and I was wearing leather sandals and a long loose white dress with marigolds on it.
Inside was all marble and gentility. A well-dressed man with a carnation inquired as to the name of the deceased and, once given, pointed me to the stairs. I walked up swiftly and found the room.
Arkavy Reynolds was laid out in a brass coffin. There were only eight or nine people in the room, moving awkwardly from wall to wall. Great bunches of flowers were present, still wrapped in their cellophane delivery shrouds.
I walked to the coffin, close up, and stared down. Arkavy was lying there in some sort of garment. He looked so thin in death. He had little hair on his head, which surprised me, but then again, I had never seen him in life without his hat. The moment I looked at him, I realized how stupid and sentimental I had been in coming. Arkavy would have found it too funny for words.
“A nice man,” I heard someone say very close to me.
I turned. An old woman with a pink straw hat was standing with the help of a cane and looking past the coffin at the wall.
“A very nice man,” she repeated, and then added, “and he was so good to his mother before she died. Did you know his mother?”
I shook my head.
“Did you know his family is from Albany?” she asked.
“No.”
“Yes, Albany,” she affirmed, smiled, and then hobbled away. I looked at the coffin again. It was all too sad. Who knows what dreams Arkavy had when he arrived in New York all those years ago from Albany . . . thirsting for the theatrical life, which was then the bohemian life . . . for beauty and truth through artifice . . . for épater la bourgeoisie. Did he really think New York would be like the Paris of Baudelaire? The fool. I turned away and walked quickly out of the viewing room to the stairs.
I hadn’t gone three steps down when a young man walking up loomed in front of me and barred my path.
He had thick black curly hair and equally thick eyebrows laying over very radiant blue eyes. He was wearing the ugliest Hawaiian sport shirt I had ever seen, hanging loose over his belt. My first thought was: How did they let him in?
He grinned at me and didn’t move aside. He said: “Beneath this rock there doth lie all the beauty that could ever die.”
I stared dumbly at him. Something about him was very familiar.
“Ben Jonson,” he said, identifying the quote.
And then I uttered a long, exasperated groan. Of course I knew him. What bloody bad luck! I had just started teaching a course in the second summer session at the New School. The class had met only once so far. And this young man had already become a pain in the posterior. A severe pain. It was just the introductory session of the course, so I had thrown out to the class a childish bone—what came into their minds when the word “theater” was mentioned. This young man, the one now blocking my exit, had leapt up and launched into a long violent diatribe about the American theater, quoting and approving and expanding upon Brecht’s comment that Broadway was simply one segment of the international drug trade. He had immediately alienated all the other students to such a degree that they started yelling at him . . . and my fine, gentle introductory session had turned into a shambles.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“Paying my respects to a madman, Professor, just like you.”
“May I pass?” I asked, my voice growing angry.
He stepped aside and bowed low in an Elizabethan flourish, his grotesque shirt billowing, showing the lean muscular stomach underneath.
“May I introduce myself?” he asked, grinning.
“No need,” I replied, and walked swiftly down the stairs and out of the building.
Once outside, on Madison Avenue, I breathed deeply. What a fiasco! I wanted very much to be back in my apartment with Bushy and Pancho. I wanted very much to be far away from that sad dead man and that obnoxious young man. So I took a cab home.
3
One cannot control one’s students. At least I never could. Worse, I inspire them, always, the wrong way.
“Is it true that most actors are lousy lovers?”
I stared at the heavyset girl in the second row who had asked me that question. Was she serious? Was it a serious question?
I tried not to make a face, but I was disgusted with the question. This was a summer-school course at the prestigious New School for Social Research—an elite institution. It was supposed to be a serious course; about the theater and the actress in New York City . . . how they interact . . . how each enlightens, cripples, and modifies the other.
But all I had gotten during the first three sessions was a series of stupid questions. In fact, there were only six sessions left. When would I gain control of the course? When would I be able to move the students to a higher level? I had taught a few classes in the past . . . in acting schools . . . and some at City College. Some of them had turned out to be memorable. A professor at City College once told me that my lecture on Waiting for Godot was the best and most exciting piece of Beckett analysis he had ever heard. I had brought a homeless woman to the class to show my students
that Beckett’s portrayal of tramps had nothing to do with any reality whatsoever . . . that the tramps in Beckett’s great play were in disguise. And then, with the class’s participation, I began to peel off the disguise . . . to discover who those tramps really were. Where had they worked? What were their medical problems? What country were they from? The class was in an uproar. It was the most remarkable explosion of good chemistry I had ever experienced. But that was then. And the times were different. And the milieu was different. And perhaps I was different. None of that good chemistry had emerged so far in the New School class.
Maybe it was futile, I thought, as I also thought of a way to answer the lousy-lover question. I had obtained this teaching job, in fact, only because of a stupid article about me buried in the theater section of the Sunday New York Times. So maybe they expected me to field stupid questions. Anyway, the opening paragraph of that article had read:
At forty-one, Alice Nestleton is still an unknown to the general public, but in the inner circle of the New York theater world her recent interpretation of the Nurse in a Portobello production of Romeo and Juliet in Montreal is considered a brilliant dramaturgical exploration. In addition, Miss Nestleton has a very interesting hidden life—crime. She has recently received a commendation from the Nassau County Police Department for her help in solving several grisly murders on the North Shore of Long Island, which took her into the rarefied atmosphere of the thoroughbred-horse world.
The article then went on to briefly document the roles I had played in the past and to discuss my interpretation of the role of the Nurse.
A Cat Tells Two Tales Page 14