I began to pace. Then I walked to the hall mirror and stared at myself. Still thin, still lovely, still more golden than gray. Was that it? A middle-aged woman really fascinated by a young man who had fallen in love with her. No, I wasn’t that stupid.
My antennae told me a crime had been committed. What was the crime? Simple. Someone had stolen Clara. That was what I believed from the first moment the detective had recounted his version of the events. There was no real proof . . . there was no real evidence.
But the logic of my belief was becoming more and more apparent as I thought about it.
Mrs. Oshrin had left on the trip very suddenly.
If her apartment had been targeted, she would have had to be under twenty-four-hour surveillance.
Why would someone be waiting for her to leave? She had absolutely nothing of value in her apartment.
It didn’t make sense.
No, it was either a random break-in or a theft of the cat. One or the other. If it was a random break-in, any one of seven hundred individuals in my neighborhood could have been guilty. If it was a cat theft—who? The young man stealing his cat back? Absurd. A ring of cat thieves? But how would they know a cat was living with Mrs. Oshrin—in fact, had just arrived in her apartment? And why would they want Clara?
The whole thing was very strange, very perplexing, very engaging.
There was no doubt about it. I was going to pay a visit to young lovesick Bruce Chessler and find out all about vanished Clara. But I didn’t want to go there by myself. I wanted company.
The next morning I called Anthony Basillio at his place of business—the Mother Courage Copying Shop.
Basillio was an old acting-school friend of mine who had long ago given up the theater in his head—but not in his heart. He had helped me out with the Long Island murders, and even though he sometimes got carried away . . . even though he still called me Swede . . . even though he still propositioned me ever so subtly . . . even though he still looked like a long-lost refugee from a long-haired ashram—I trusted him very much and I appreciated his kind of manic intelligence. To him, two and two were rarely four—but they were rarely five either. More important, he had that intense free-floating anxiety that made him long to do something, anything, which is, I suppose, why he gambled too much and probably did a lot of other things too much.
We agreed to meet at a coffee shop on East Eighth Street just before noon.
I got there about eleven thirty. He was waiting and very happy to see me again, blowing into his hands as if he was about to embark on something extremely pleasurable—almost juicy. He looked exactly the same. His hair was getting longer. His face was breaking out again. How could a forty-year-old man continue to look so unfinished? Actually, I found it charming.
“Swede, Swede, Swede,” he said as we sipped our Mexican coffees. I had long since given up any hope of him discarding that traditional nickname. No matter how many times I told him I was not of Swedish descent, he never believed me. But then again, Basillio probably calls all people who come from Minnesota originally Swede.
“I have been longing, Swede, to hook up with you again. You’re the only lady who brings me back.”
“Back where, Tony?”
“Who the hell knows?”
We laughed.
“Who do you have to find?”
“A young man who was in my class at the New School. It’s a long story,” I replied.
“Tell it to me.”
I told him.
“Are you afraid of this character?” he asked. I didn’t answer for a while. He had a point. Why, in fact, was I afraid to find him alone? I knew the neighborhood. He hadn’t been violent—only crazy.
“I’m very nervous around young men who are passionately in love with me,” I replied. But that really wasn’t the reason. I simply couldn’t articulate the threat.
“Then you should be afraid of me, Swede.”
“A married man with children?” I replied.
He grinned and changed the subject. “What’s new with you? Any parts? Anything happening in the great beast?”
“I’m reading a crazy script—about a family of rats.”
“Why not?” He laughed.
We finished our coffee and left. Five minutes later we stood in front of Chessler’s four-story tenement building. It was like a hundred thousand others in the East Village.
The day had become very hot and very muggy. It was the kind of August day in New York when you want to think only about distant galaxies. Nothing will ease your torment other than the vision of enormous explosions and implosions on a cosmic scale.
The building had two step-down stores on either side of the entrance. One was boarded up. The other was a shoemaker.
“Do you remember that fat woman who used to live down here?” Basillio asked. “The one who was in the Dramatic Workshop with us. I think it was in seventy-four. She was from North Carolina. She used to give parties. I think it was on Fourth Street.”
I didn’t remember. That was a long time ago. And if I did remember, it would probably be very depressing. There is nothing as sad as doomed theatrical careers. They are so predictable.
We walked into the small lobby. There was a panel of bells but the names next to them were so faded or mutilated that they couldn’t be made out. No matter how intensely I stared at all those letters, none of them seemed to combine into “Chessler.”
“We can wait until someone comes down and ask,” Basillio said.
Suddenly the outer door opened and a Hispanic woman with an enormous bizarre wig moved inside the small lobby with us.
“Who you? What you want?” she demanded. Her tone was very aggressive. She was carrying a large pail with sponges floating around on top.
“I’m looking for Bruce Chessler’s apartment,” I said.
She crossed herself.
“All his stuff now in cellar. I couldn’t wait longer. No longer. Very sorry. It all downstairs. Owner told me to put it there. I put it there.”
“But where is he?” I asked, confused by her comments.
She crossed herself again.
“I thought you his family. Young man dead. Murdered in bar on Eighth Street. Few days ago. You not his family?”
“Murdered?” My chest felt like a bellows.
“Boom! Boom!” she said. “Shot in head. Dead.”
I leaned against the wall, suddenly dizzy. Basillio pulled me away because my shoulders were pushing five bells at once.
8
Next to Chessler’s building was a building with an orange stoop and on that stoop Basillio and I sat for a very long time in the humid air. The breeze was fetid.
I had gotten over the initial shock. After all, I hardly knew the young man. I could barely remember his face. But there was a lingering disturbance . . . a kind of blanket over the head, very light, very well-knit, very hard to shake. What had he said to me in the funeral parlor? Something from Ben Jonson: “Beneath this rock there doth lie all the beauty that could ever die.” Or was it “stone” rather than “rock”?
“We should look over his stuff,” Basillio said.
“Why? We didn’t even know him.” The bitterness in my own voice astonished me.
“Because,” Basillio explained, “if he’s been dead a few days and nobody came for his stuff, it may mean his family doesn’t know . . . that the cops couldn’t locate next of kin. So we should look through his stuff, find out who he is . . . I mean who he was . . . and contact his people.”
Basillio was absolutely right. It was the proper thing to do. But I wasn’t able to move. It was suddenly nice sitting there. There was all kinds of activity on the street to take my mind elsewhere. It was, in fact, what I had come to New York for, originally, from Minnesota, many years ago—for action, for all kinds of action if I may use that very ugly but very descriptive word: action in life, action in love, action in theater.
I was wearing one of my long country dresses, the kind that accentuates my al
ready excessive height, the kind that my ex-husband used to say made me look like an erotic fantasy out of Virginia Woolf. I realized that I fit quite well in the East Village.
“There she is,” Basillio said.
The woman with the wig was standing in front of the house staring at the door as if deciding whether or not it had to be cleaned.
We got up. We walked toward her. She knew what we were doing. She pulled a large key ring from her pocket, shook the keys at us, and we followed her through the door into the lobby, through the hallway, and down a very steep staircase that led to a cellar filled with more junk than I had ever seen in my life.
We heard scurrying among the objects. Cats? Rats? Derelicts? Junkies? Ghosts?
“Pigeons,” said the woman leading us, with a broad grin. I couldn’t tell whether she was being sarcastic or truthful. I realized also that she was not Hispanic, that the accent was something like Lebanese.
We walked through another door to a less-cluttered and better-lit space which had obviously once been the coal room and still had the partitions. She led us to one partition, piled with cartons and clothes and posters and toasters. She crossed herself and held out a hand in explanation—that this was what was left of Bruce Chessler. Then she was gone.
Anthony Basillio shook his head slowly as he stared at the stuff.
“We should, I suppose, be looking for something that identifies his family,” he said.
I nodded. It seemed the intelligent way to proceed. A single overhead uncovered bulb burned ferociously down on the remains.
We started on the first large carton—Tony on one side and me on the other, emptying the contents carefully, almost religiously. About thirty seconds into the emptying, I was overwhelmed with such a sense of sadness, of futility, of hatred of whatever had extirpated him, that I just sat down on a low carton and started to cry. Above all, I couldn’t deal with the memory of what the landlady or janitress had said. She had said: “Boom! Boom!” The young man had been shot to death. It was like an earthquake had been telescoped into one inconceivable splatter of violence. Steel. Noise. Blood. Pulp.
Basillio kept on, happily leaving me alone. I had the absurd notion, sitting there as I wept, that Clara, the white cat Bruce had given me to express his infatuation with an older woman—wherever Clara was now, she knew and was weeping also, as cats weep, from the stomach.
I could see Basillio removing book after book and flipping pages—waiting for that telltale postcard or check stub used as a page marker which would identify him further. Then the magazines and the records and the pieces of a life on paper—menus, clippings, God knows what.
I wanted to help but I couldn’t. Now I was beginning to see his face . . . and that sport shirt . . . and hear his caustic classroom mode . . . but now it was not threatening . . . death had given him a certain élan in my mind . . . the tragedy was becoming personally more intense, more intimate.
There were clothes and hats and beat-up sneakers. There were old check stubs and some canceled checks from the Chemical Bank branch on Eighth Street and Broadway.
Then Basillio pulled out a very fat white envelope, sealed with a thick ugly rubber band. He pulled the rubber band off, opened the envelope, and peered inside.
“Here,” he said, bringing it over to me, “this is very sad.”
Indeed it was. There were dozens of photographs in the envelope. Some of Bruce Chessler. Some of unidentified people. Some of Bruce in a group. It was his photo album of sorts.
In some of them he posed, wearing that chip-on-the-shoulder smile . . . the kind that said: I’m smarter and tougher and hipper than you and you’d better know it. Some of them showed a more pensive side, particularly when he was photographed with someone else. And sometimes, in the younger photos, he looked just plain desperate.
I came to the photo of an old woman.
I stared at it—the woman wore braids wrapped around her head. She wore a high-necked, very old-fashioned dress with a large ornament around her neck on a thick chain.
I moved on. Then suddenly I shuffled back to the old woman. The woman was old, but the photo was not. Maybe five years old at the most—the sides were still white and crisp.
The more I looked at the photo, the more I realized that I knew the old woman.
The hair, the ornament, the dress—they were all familiar.
Then I remembered.
“Tony,” I said, “come here for a minute.”
He came back over. I showed him the photo.
“Do you know who this is?” I asked.
“No.”
“Look hard!”
“I’m looking. But I don’t know.”
“Does the name Maria Swoboda mean anything to you?”
He cocked his head and screwed up his face. He was going through his thinking contortions.
Then he snapped his fingers: “The old acting teacher.”
“Right,” I confirmed, “the Method-acting teacher from the Moscow Art Theatre. She had a studio in New York in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies—on Grove Street. For a time she was the rage. I remember when I first came to New York I was able to get a few lessons from her, and I considered myself in the presence of a high priestess.”
Yes, I remembered that crazy, wonderful old lady very well. But Method acting had long since gone out of vogue and I had no idea whether she was still alive, much less still teaching. She had not been a young woman when I went to her.
“Was Chessler an actor?” Basillio asked.
“Well, he was taking my class; he obviously had some interest in the theater. But he didn’t talk like an actor. He talked like a political radical. You know . . . a lot of passion . . . a lot of hate . . . a lot of Brecht—like you used to talk, Tony. And he did show up at Arkavy Reynolds’s funeral. You knew he died, didn’t you? He got into a fight with a homeless man who murdered him on Jane Street. Two fools. Do you remember that fat man?”
Basillio nodded and went back to his work. I kept staring at the picture. God, how the memories surfaced . . . of Madame Swoboda, which was what she was called . . . speaking about Stanislavski and the vision they all had . . . speaking about the character being inside of the actor . . . speaking of how the character can only emerge authentically if the actor utilizes his own creativity, his own beauty, his own suffering to project the character from within to without. It was heady stuff. It was glorious.
Basillio interrupted my memories. He handed me a sheaf of papers that had been rolled and fastened with another rubber band.
“This is even sadder,” he said.
I held the top and bottom of one sheet so it wouldn’t fold. It was a handwritten letter.
It was addressed to me.
Dear Alice Nestleton:
You think I’m an idiot, don’t you? You think I torment you in class to cause you grief. Don’t you realize I must differentiate myself from all the others in any and every way possible? Don’t you understand that I am the only one in this stupid class who knows you are a great actress? I love you very much and I am afraid to tell you. I have a fantasy about you . . . a sexual fantasy . . . all the time . . . we are in a house built of reeds . . . it is high above some body of blue water . . . the house is on stilts and we are making love and you are wearing a beautiful . . .
I didn’t want to read any further. I crumpled the sheaf of papers and thrust it into my bag. Basillio was right. Was there anything sadder than unsent love letters from a dead boy?
9
It was like a scene from an Edwardian melodrama. I sat on the edge of the bed. The love letters were scattered over the sheet in disarray. I was literally unable to read them except for very tiny snatches. It was too painful. He obviously hadn’t known me at all. He was fantasizing. The saddest parts of all were his erotic fantasies, which he described in painful detail. There were twenty-two letters in all.
The first one was obviously written immediately after he attended the first class in the New School. He described
what I wore and what I said during that first class. Bruce Chessler was older than I had thought—about twenty-five. And it was obvious to me now that his bizarre behavior in class was a function of his condition. He was unable to make contact with the object of his deranged love—me—so he could only attack me. He understood that he was causing me distress, and his letters were full of apologies.
I wanted to read them thoroughly and carefully but I couldn’t.
Basillio called me about twenty minutes before midnight. He told me that he had checked out Swoboda, my old teacher, whose picture was inexplicably in Bruce Chessler’s belongings. She had died four years ago in Lakewood, New Jersey. When he hung up I gathered the love letters in a fury of frustration and literally stuffed them into one of my chests. The young man was dead. He had no family or friends. His cat, given to me out of disjointed love, was gone. At least John Cerise was fine.
I couldn’t fall asleep until two, and when I did fall asleep I had a whole series of dreams about my first boyfriend in Minnesota and necking in one of the dairy barns while my grandmother was twenty feet away behind the partition and didn’t know a thing was going on.
The first thing I thought of when I woke up was retrieving the love letters and reading them carefully. I fought back the impulse. It obviously had something to do with the dream.
I spent a great deal of the next hour staring out of my living-room window onto the street, hoping for a glimpse of Clara. Perhaps she had just run out onto the street and was living from garbage can to garbage can. Perhaps she was now living feral in one of the overgrown backyards that run like a scar between the two rows of houses that front the street—and can be reached and seen only through the basement apartments or the interior hallways on the ground floors or by fire escapes from the roofs. Why not? Maybe she was there. But I saw no beast that resembled the strange white cat Chessler had delivered to me.
When I finally pulled myself away from my obsessive nonsense of staring out the window to find Clara, I slipped into a very agitated depression. I started to pace back and forth across the living room, stepping over Bushy each time. I was pacing so quickly in my agitation that Pancho even aborted one of his rushes to stare at me reflectively. Maybe he was thinking: Ah, the fool now knows what I go through twenty-four hours a day. She finally realizes they are after her as well.
A Cat Tells Two Tales Page 17