A pause. “I have a feeling Norman may be definitive.”
Somehow that didn’t sound right. “Definitive?”
“You told me an assistant director knows everything. And we know he was at Emil’s house. So if he knows the studio people took the print, well, that’s that.”
She’d been standing on top of the Ziegfeld Follies staircase, ready to strut like Lana Turner. And now she was bumping all the way down, smack on her derriere. “Yeah. That would be that.”
“Ceinwen?” He was trying to get her to give up. Knowing she’d been thinking the same thing for days only made it worse. “Is something wrong?”
“Are you rooting for me to fail here?”
“I’m not rooting—that means something else in some parts of the world, by the way—”
“Like what?”
“All I’m rooting for is a final answer, because ‘we’ll never know’ is never going to satisfy you.” Obsessive. He was calling her obsessive again. “Ceinwen.” Gently. “I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Not being content with a question mark. It isn’t bad at all.” He waited, then, “It’s a scientific sort of attitude, in fact.”
“Thank you. I think so too.” She felt herself relax a bit. He’d been out there in Los Angeles doing something for her, not Anna. He didn’t spend his only morning researching the causes of the Great Depression, or whatever it was you did to help out an economist. “I always thought we’re alike in a lot of ways,” she said.
“Maaay-be.” He thought that was funny. Well, let him. “I don’t think I have quite the same obsession with lost causes.”
That word. He’d used it. “That’s because you’re not Irish.”
“So you keep reminding me. Not my fault, is it? God, it really is late. Go to bed. No, wait—promise me you won’t call this old geezer tonight if you find his number.”
“I’m not even going to look for it until this morning.”
“Of course you won’t. What was I thinking? Good night.”
“Wait, I wanted to ask you something.” She grabbed the book beside her bed and opened it to the first dog-ear. “What’s spunk?”
“What?”
“I’m reading Money …”
2.
OF COURSE NORMAN WASN’T IN THE PHONE BOOK. WHEN HE RETURNED, before he’d even shown her the article, Matthew demanded to know how she planned to go about about her search. Ceinwen told him she planned to divide the blocks of Park Avenue in the seventies into sections, go into each lobby and ask to deliver a letter for Norman Stallings, then see what they said. She was expecting him to tell her this wasn’t the way to do it, but instead he said, “That sounds like a nice methodical approach.”
His approval was so unexpected she was reluctant to abandon the plan, but she’d spent all day Monday going door to door, and now it was Tuesday, and she was going on her eighteenth building, and she had realized that while Park Avenue doormen and concierges might not be universally unfriendly—some of them were almost charming—they were universally suspicious. There’s no one here by that name, Miss, ah, Miss … Reilly? What makes you think Mr. Stallings is in this building, Miss Reilly? “I must have written it down wrong.” Nobody looked satisfied with that. She’d taken to crisscrossing up and down the blocks, not letting anyone see her go straight from one door to the next, so they wouldn’t think she was … whatever they thought she was doing. Dunning Norman, maybe. Serving a subpoena.
The supply of Park Avenue buildings had to end at some point, but progress was slow, and she was tired. She was also afraid that maybe the doormen all had coffee together someplace, and if they started swapping notes about the crazy blonde looking for some dude named Norman Stallings, she might walk in to discover they had two men from Bellevue waiting with a butterfly net.
She stood on the corner and tried to rearrange her thoughts. Maybe being methodical like Matthew was the wrong approach. Maybe she needed to treat this the way she treated everything else, by pretending it was a movie. The camera told you which building would be the important one, no matter where it was in the frame. She imagined herself as Delgado. No, Emil.
Pan left. She turned downtown. A dog walker with about a half-dozen animals on leashes nearly trampled her in a storm of fur and yapping. She stepped closer to the curb and re-focused. Pan right.
That was the one to try. The dark-brown brick, with the Deco entrance and the black-and-gold awning. That was the place to hole up with your romantic, glittering Hollywood memories.
The uniformed doorman waved her in and she strode to the concierge. “I have an envelope here for Mr. Norman Stallings.”
“All right. I’ll ring him.”
No time for celebration. This was supposed to be a delivery, not a meeting. The meeting was supposed to come later, after he’d read the letter.
“You don’t have to do that. I want to leave this for him.”
The man paused, hand on his phone. “This is a delivery, am I right?”
“Yes, but—”
He spoke slowly. “When we get a delivery, and the tenant is home, we tell them it’s here. Do you have something for him to sign?”
“No, this is a personal delivery.”
“Then if he wants to accept it, he can do that in person.” Was he looking at her scarf? “As long as you’re sure he wants it.”
“I don’t think he doesn’t want it.” She wasn’t making sense even to herself.
“Good. We’re on the same page.” He dialed. She closed her eyes and heard him say, “Morning, Mr. Stallings. Young lady in the lobby with an envelope she wants to give you …Yes.” She opened her eyes and found him looking her over. “Yes. Very … I’ll have her wait.” He hung up and gestured toward the waiting area. “Have a seat.”
She sat on the edge of an ultrasuede loveseat, trying to look as though she’d stopped by on her way to Henri Bendel. A middle-aged man in the most beautiful black coat she’d ever seen emerged from an elevator and stopped at the desk. His watch shone and so did his briefcase. She contemplated the place where his coat hem hit his calf, thinking it must be tailored. Usually men wore their coats—
“Good morning. I understand you have a delivery for me.” The voice vibrated around her ears and bounced off the painting behind her. A slender old man with white hair the same length as Matthew’s was standing in front of her. She hadn’t heard the second elevator or anything else.
“Yes,” she almost whispered, and handed it over. He took it with one hand without looking at what she’d written. Then, “Pardon me,” he said, and edged past her to a chair. He pulled up his pants slightly as he sat, and seemed to be shifting his back into a comfortable slouch. Then he eyed her position on the loveseat and scooted up, until he was perched the same way she was. He slid his rimless glasses to the edge of his nose and stretched his arm until the envelope was several feet from his face.
“Norman Stallings,” he read. “Check.” He looked back at her face, then at her scarf. Did that mean it did look like Hermes, or that it didn’t? “Park Avenue,” he continued. “Hm. A little vague, but check.” He flipped over the envelope. “By hand. Check.” He held it up next to his ear and rattled the contents slightly. “I don’t suppose this is a check, by any chance?”
“N-no,” she stammered.
“Dommage,” said Norman. “But since this is By—Hand”—he pointed to the words one by one, and she instantly felt that writing them was the gauchest thing she’d ever done—“I had better read it now. Are you authorized to await a reply?”
There wasn’t anything else she could do. “Sure,” she said.
He took a Swiss army knife out of his pocket, sliced across the narrow end of the envelope, and unfolded the paper with a crisp little snap. “This is your letter?” She nodded. “You write a very nice hand.”
“Thank you.”
She watched Norman read until he glanced over the edge, met her eyes and waggled his eyebrows at her. She stared at the concierge, until he met her eye
s too. After that, she looked at the plants.
Norman folded the letter as before and slid it into the envelope. “Emil Arnheim,” he said, precisely as she thought a German would say it. He leaned forward—his knees cracked, he didn’t seem as spry as Miriam—and dangled the envelope by a corner, letting it swing back and forth. “Miss Seenwhen—am I pronouncing that properly?”
“KINE-wen.”
“Ceinwen. When I got up this morning, I had the oddest feeling, and then I dropped a fork on the floor. My late mother—she’s been dead for forty years, so I suppose that makes her unpardonably late—she always said dropping a fork meant we’d have a visitor. So I thought maybe the cleaners would be delivering a day early. Not in my wildest did I picture a fetching blonde come to give me a handwritten letter asking about Emil Arnheim.” He shoved his glasses back up his nose and slid the letter into his shirt pocket. “Isn’t life marvelous. I’m expecting dress shirts, and I get an O. Henry story. By hand. Do you know O. Henry?”
Her mind flailed, then broke the surface with “‘The Gift of the Magi’?”
“Excellent. But that’s not it. In the one I’m trying to recall, a strange woman thrusts a hot buttered roll in a man’s hand and utters one word, ‘parallelogram.’ Does that ring a bell? No? In any event, I think we know what William Sydney Porter would have said. He’d have said, take the hot buttered roll. Tell the young woman, by all means, come upstairs and let us discuss my old friend Emil.” He eased himself to his feet with somewhat more trouble than he’d had sitting down. Granana always did say old people weren’t designed to get off the couch.
“Are you sure?” she asked, dazed.
He swayed slightly as he finished pulling himself upright, and when fully straight he looked down at her. “Are you armed?”
“Am I what now?”
“Armed. Switchblade. Revolver. Hand grenade. Armed.”
“No,” she managed.
“Then yes. I’m sure.”
They took the elevator to the tenth floor, and he asked her about the accent. “Mississippi,” she told him. “Where are you from?”
“New Jersey.”
“New Jersey?” she asked, then realized how rude it sounded. But all he said was, “Princeton.”
When they entered his apartment, she paused at the entrance and had to force herself to walk in as though it were exactly what she’d been expecting. She felt as though she’d spent most of the past six months in apartments that were better than hers—Harry, Miriam, Paru, Steve, Matthew, even Andy if you could look past the paper, which maybe you couldn’t. But this was the limit, the biggest living room she had ever seen, decorated in a style that was almost aggressively masculine—brown, beige, leather, shiny black tables. In a corner a TV set was blaring CNN. Norman picked up a remote control and clicked it off.
“Make yourself at home,” said Norman. “I won’t be a minute.”
She took off her coat, draped it across one end of the sofa and sank into it. Leather was awfully cold. She craned her neck around the room. There was a large, somewhat abstract painting of what seemed to be a biplane crashing into a field. She didn’t want to look at that. On another wall was an arrangement of black-and-white pictures, but it was too far away for her to see what they were. She waited a while, wondering if Norman had gone into the bedroom and fallen asleep, which Granana had been known to do when she said she wouldn’t be a minute. She stood up and walked to the pictures. Norman and another smaller, stouter man, having drinks, lounging on beaches, posing in front of the Fountain of Trevi. In the center of the arrangement was a photograph of a field with something happening in the distance. She looked closer. The something was a horse in mid-canter, and a man’s backside, high up in the air next to it, about to crash to the ground.
“Which one are you looking at, the middle?” Norman was setting a silver tray on the coffee table.
“Um, yes. Who is this?”
“That’s me,” he said. “I used to ride.”
She walked back and sat down. “Do you have other pictures from your riding?”
“What’s wrong with that one?”
“Nothing,” she said hastily. “It’s just that it’s hard to tell it’s you.”
“Anybody can have their picture taken on a horse,” he said. The tray had a crystal pitcher of what looked like lemonade, two cut-glass goblets, cloth napkins, sterling-silver forks, gilt-edged china plates, and an unfrosted loaf cake.
“You don’t have to go to all this trouble,” she protested.
“Oh, but I do. It’s our mutual friend’s training.” She shook her head in bewilderment—did he mean Miriam? “Emil,” he said. He picked up a silver-handled knife, cut off a good two inches of cake, and slid it onto a plate. “Emil always said if you had champagne and a dozen eggs in the house, you could entertain anyone at a moment’s notice.” He handed her a napkin and a fork. “It’s a little early for champagne. I’m not quite that louche anymore.” He poured out a glass for her. “So lemonade it is.” He gave her the plate. “And Emil never said I couldn’t put the eggs in a cake.”
He served himself and she tasted the cake. It seemed to be made almost entirely of butter. It was delicious.
“Are you settled?” She nodded because her mouth was full. “Excellent. While you’re occupied, I wonder if I should refer back to the letter. It was so well done.”
She swallowed. “Thank you.”
“Perhaps that won’t be necessary, though. The idea was simple enough. You heard about Emil through Miriam.”
“Yes. Did she ever mention me?”
“Afraid not,” he said.
It was absurd to feel so disappointed. And worse to have it show, because he said, “You mustn’t think that means anything. Miriam never mentions anyone. Did she mention me, aside from the movie? For instance, that I’m still alive?”
“No,” she admitted.
“And there you are. So you live in her building.”
“One flight up.”
“I’m sorry. What a catastrophe that place is. The noise! The last time I was there, someone was out in the hallway having an absolutely deafening argument about beer.”
“You’ve been there?” She was sure she’d never seen him before. “When was that?”
“1973, must have been. Miriam invited Ira and me to watch her gloat over the Watergate hearings. When Ira died—Ira was my roommate.” He paused.
“I understand,” she said.
“Oh, good. Young people do. Yes, when Ira died I asked Miriam to move in. Logical, yes? This place is a stadium. Everything is at least fifty feet from everything else. Suppose I slip in the bathtub one day and break my—hm. What I can I break in the bath?”
Did he want her to answer that? It seemed he did. “Your hip?”
“Perfect, a hip. I break my hip and agony renders me helpless, and if Miriam were here, she could hear my cries and call the hospital. If we managed to stay healthy we could bake together and play mah-jongg. But she wouldn’t hear of it.”
“She’s very independent,” said Ceinwen.
“That, plus she’s convinced this building is full of Republicans. She doesn’t care that Republicans are quiet. So, because Miriam’s as far left as she ever was, if I shatter my hip I’ll have to make my own pain-wracked way to the telephone. And if that happens, I hope the guilt causes her many a sleepless night. But it won’t.” He sipped his lemonade. “So you live one floor above her, and you somehow parlayed this into an acquaintance deep enough to hear about The Mysteries of Udolpho.”
This was evidently another question. “We just got to talking one night,” she said.
“I rather doubt that. Miriam doesn’t just get to talking with anyone. When she’s really in a mood I can barely manage to find out whether or not she wants coffee. And yet you got all of 1928 and most of ’29 out of her. Are you sure you’re not a reporter?”
“No,” she said firmly. “I’m someone who feels that film is an important part of our legacy
as American citizens.”
He nodded solemnly. “Something to reflect upon the next time I watch Cobra Woman. I believe I’ll consult your letter again, after all.” He adjusted his glasses and read. “‘Miriam was reluctant to talk about certain details, and I didn’t want to press her. But I think our project would be a fine tribute to Mr. Arnheim’s talent, and a way to keep his memory alive. Still, it is probably best not to inform Miriam until such time as our work has a more definite shape.’ That’s sensitively put. Let me see if I understand. I’m not to tell Miriam until you can present her with a fait accompli, because otherwise she’s quite likely to strangle us both with her bare hands.”
“That’s about the size of it,” said Ceinwen.
“The wrath of Miriam. No light matter.” He took another bite of cake and contemplated the chandelier. “Still, I’m not rejecting the idea out of hand. Miriam …” He laid down his fork and his voice took on a gentler tone. “Ah, well. Miriam blamed many people and many things for Emil. And the movie she blamed most of all. But I was very fond of Emil too, you see. All my life my friends have usually been women and … my own kind, you could say. Emil was an exception.” He patted the letter in his shirt pocket. “Once Miriam and I are gone, it’ll be almost as though he were never here. That doesn’t bother her, the little Marxist. But it bothers me.” He sat up and folded his hands. “All right. I’ll answer whatever you like, as long as it’s off the record. No, not merely off the record, I can’t have Miriam in a state. Deep background. That’s the ticket.”
She had no idea what deep background was, but she said, “Sounds good.” He beamed at her. She scrambled in her bag for a notebook and came up with her address book. She poised her pen over the blank XYZ section and said, “First, I’d like to ask about the atmosphere during filming.”
“Tense,” he said promptly, as though firing off the answer to an exam question. “The atmosphere? Really? This is deep background, you know. You don’t have to be nearly that boring. Why not ask me if I slept with Emil?”
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