by Nina Siegal
“Yeah. I think Curtis got us out of the woods.”
“I hope so.” She took a long drag off her butt. “It’s why we put young people like you on the Obit desk, you know. To keep abreast of this new generation.”
She looked about to spit. We both knew the real reason they put people like me on Obits. Battinger stubbed out the last of her cigarette on the hydrant. “I got a call today from some character who wouldn’t leave his name. Said he was interested in an obit that ran today. Unbylined. I told him that probably meant you wrote it. You hear from him?”
I swallowed. “Yes, I think so.”
“Think so?”
“Yes, I talked to him.”
“Any problem there?” she said. She stared me dead in the eyes.
“No. He just had some questions.”
“He sounded like he might be upset about something.” She flicked her butt into the gutter. “But when I pressed him he said he’d take it up with you. Asked me a lot of questions, though. How long were you on Obits; did you write for other sections; were you working with Metro? Guy was damn curious.”
That raccoon coat started to weigh tons.
“I guess you spoke to him,” she continued when I didn’t answer. “So, if it’s a problem, I’m sure we’ll hear about it tomorrow. Meantime, you’re looking a little haggard. You should get some zzzz’s.”
“You too,” I said, and then tracked back. “I’m beat.”
But the truth was, I was as alert as a hummingbird. I wanted to know what Cabeza had told Battinger. Had he already sold me out? She walked past me and, maybe sensing this question, looked back before she hit the revolving door. “Anything else?”
“No. No, Jane. Mrs. Battinger. Have a good night,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Hopefully that’s the last of it.”
“Hope so.” I turned quickly on my heel and headed west.
On another night like this, nearing midnight with the sky so phosphorescent, I probably would’ve called a private car to dash me off to Asia de Cuba for grilled baby octopus and balsamic portabellos. In my Style days. Or if I was feeling chatty, I might’ve headed down to Chelsea to meet the post-art-opening crowd at Lot 61 to sit on a high stool and flirt with the gay barman.
Tonight, I had nowhere to go, nothing to do. I heard the patter of feet, the crunch of rubber through wet potholes, the burst of horns forcing their way out of Times Square. I moved into the crowd toward Eighth Avenue.
A group of teenagers in matching pink tank tops and low riders pushed past the door of the local welfare hotel, linking arms and screaming a show tune. An old woman stepped out, wearing a housecoat stained in wide circles under the arms. A wiry Indian man sat on a lawn chair next to a tree stump and sucked on a brown bidi. At the corner, a family in long shorts, big tees, white Reeboks, and socks piling up their ankles stood outside Ben & Jerry’s. As I passed, the little girl in a pink overall dress said, “Look at all those little lights up there, Mommy. Do people really live up that high in the sky?”
The whole family—Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa—gaped up, their plastic spoons pressing their tongues into their mouths. I looked up to see what they were seeing. They weren’t looking at anything, just skyscrapers filled with little lights, all the little boxes where we New Yorkers make our tiny lives. It didn’t look like much, did it? A whole lot of people in their little rooms, each of them trying so hard to light up the sky. Ultimately, each one would shut out their light, but the New York sky would still be filled with eight million more. So what was the point?
After playing tourist, my neck hurt. I turned off Forty-third Street and onto Eighth Avenue, where walkers and diners and laughers and smokers cluttered the sidewalk. I pushed on, watching my feet chew up the wet pavement, watching the marquee lights swirl in onyx puddles. Up ahead of me, there was a darkened stoop. A man in a trench coat leaned forward, his face hidden under the shadowed brim of an old fedora. I saw the red tip of his cigarette, smoke obscuring the lineaments of his face.
Cabeza, I thought. He’s followed me. I saw the green lantern of the subway stop and, just as I realized I was being paranoid, took the stairs quickly down.
I pushed my key into the door on Broadway near Eightieth Street, and smelled fresh-baked bagels from the H&H bakery below. The foyer was dark and empty, the brown and tan tiles polished to a patent sheen. I collected my mail—nothing but circulars and bills—and began to climb the narrow stairway.
The first landing smelled of untended cats and I could hear the grunts of our resident Deadhead investment banker either catching the game or getting lucky. A bag of garbage had pushed a door ajar on four, and I could see a couple chopping vegetables on the floating butcher block in their duplex. I counted the eight stairs between each landing until the sixth floor, where I caught my breath. I found my keys and opened the door to my studio. It had to be about 110 degrees inside, as I’d forgotten to open the windows and turn on the fans. I locked all four Yale locks and kicked my way through balled-up socks and piles of laundry to get to the windows and flick on the A/C.
For six months, I’d submitted to the cruelty of an ordinary life: the hollow echo of the dripping faucet in a barren apartment, the alarming, persistent hum of a midsize refrigerator, the mismatched dishes piling up in the sink. I’d tasted sobriety and I didn’t like it. It had the rubber texture of sushi from the corner deli, looking for takers since noon.
My new apartment had all the charm of the inside of a tennis shoe. Five hundred square feet of wall and floor divided by white Sheetrock; a mini-bake oven; a refrigerator large enough for condiments; a place to blow your nose. It was all one room: half bedroom, half dining room, and half kitchenette, which left minus one half for living.
I’d moved uptown to get away from all the people who had known me when things were swell. But I hadn’t really committed to the place yet. The walls were bare and the bookcases empty. Most of what I owned was still in boxes piled on the floor. There were four pieces of furniture: a sofa, a coffee table, a chair, and a mattress on the floor. The phone rang, and I kicked away some boxes to answer it. No one was on the line. I listened for a while, wondering whether I’d hear that smoky voice, but finally it was a dial tone, and I put down the phone.
The apartment’s best asset was a large picture window that overlooked the Broadway Mall, a strip of grass and cobblestone where, at the moment, some neighborhood drunks were passing a bottle in a brown paper bag and I felt jealous. I had no pals; I was officially off the booze. My new nightlife was all on the small screen. I’d started watching old movies again, famous black-and-whites. But this time, I passed over the screwball comedies that made the city swirl in gleeful symmetry. Instead, I traveled to the dark side of the screen. My new companions were fedora-clad detectives, dames pursing cigarette holders between (presumably) bloodred lips, cackling mobsters, faceless trench coats silhouetted in the hall. They weren’t pretty and they didn’t end happily. I’d adopted them all from the gap-toothed VHS peddler down the block. The titles dropped me deeper and deeper into the darkness.
Tonight I had Sweet Smell of Success. I needed only a Vanitini. I gazed out the window at my drunken neighbors on the median. Oh, hell. Just one wouldn’t kill me. I went to the cupboard and pulled down a tumbler. I lifted the ice tray out of the freezer, cracking it hard. The Russian landlord had left me a bottle of Vladimir, as some kind of welcome gift. I’d saved it for a moment like this, when I wanted to leap headlong off the wagon. So what if it wasn’t top shelf? I poured some vodka into the martini shaker. Then I remembered the grenadine, but I didn’t have any. So I poured out some of the juice from the maraschino cherry jar. No vermouth, either, but I had a tad of cooking sherry, so I waved it over the top of the shaker, and rattled it up fast.
I downed my Vanitini—the first one I’d had in months. It was definitely a sad pour. The cherry juice made it sweet, but its aftertaste bit back. Still, it reminded me of a feeling I hadn’t had in months: weightlessness. I mix
ed myself another, rattled it up, and slugged it back. I pressed Sweet Smell into the VCR.
The opening credits rolled and the jazz blared. Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, screenplay by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman. I went back to the kitchen and poured myself a third Vanitini as the soundtrack swelled. I drank that one standing up. Pouring myself another, I moved to the couch and kicked off my shoes. A city skyline full of bright lights. The camera comes up on the back end of a printing press as workers throw stacks of newspapers into delivery trucks. Blaring horns grow louder as the truck bumps through Times Square, past the blinking CANADIAN CLUB sign, past the hot lights showing off showgirls, past the dime stores and all-night hot dog stands.
Sidney Falco walks onto the screen. He’s a pretty boy with slicked-back hair and a starched shirt, but his pretty is the menacing sort, the kind you know means trouble. He yanks one of the papers out of the stack on the sidewalk and scans a gossip column by J. J. Hunsecker. Whatever he’s looking for isn’t there, and Falco scowls and dumps the rag into the trash. He is a flash of nerves as he climbs the stairs to his second-floor office, where his name, SIDNEY FALCO, PRESS AGENT, is taped on the door. He moves into the back room, where he coincidentally also sleeps, and changes into his clothes for an evening on the town. His girl Friday follows him into the bedroom, sits primly on the edge his bed, and stares up at him, doe-eyed. “Where do you want to go, Sidney?”
On my couch, in my Vanitini haze, I recite the words along with Curtis:
“Way up high, Sam, where it’s always balmy. Where no one snaps his fingers and says, ‘Hey Schmitt, rack the balls,’ or ‘Hey mouse, mouse, go out and buy me a pack of butts.’ I don’t want tips from the kitty. I’m in the big game with the big players. My experience I can give you in a nutshell and I didn’t dream it in a dream, either: Dog eat dog. In brief: From now on, only the best of everything is good enough for me.”
I tipped my head back to get one last sip out of my tumbler, but nothing was coming. My head fell into the cushions and the glass tumbled to the floor. The blue shadows of the TV light danced on my plaster ceiling. It was beautiful and wild, a fantastic waltz of light against the darkness. The best of everything.
Then everything went black.
4
Shoot the Works
The scene: a housewarming party at my very own three-thousand-square-foot loft. Glitterati on the davenport, fashionistas on the fire escape. Uptite shows a humming brood of design aficionados through the room. Caviar on the medical sideboards, crudités on the gurneys. I’m playing hostess in a fitted silk gown that plunges back and front. But tasteful. Understated. Hot. My hair is coiffed by Jules Freelove, Broadway stylist. My barman is handing me a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
Not a VHS-induced dream. It happened. That was me, back then, when I was shiny spanking new, and it was all my own, my own, my own.
And Jeremiah Sinclair Golden Jr. walked through my door. He was bracketed between two sets of silicone implants he’d filched from a Penthouse party uptown. He was grinning, and who could blame him, given what he had on each arm?
It’d been a year since he’d left me on the East Fifth Street curb, and since then, my tabloid study had informed me that his Astor heiress left him at the altar. She’d complained to Liz Smith that his $20,000 budget on her gown “simply wasn’t sufficient,” but the scuttlebutt had it she’d become aware of his extra-premarital affairs. Jeremiah rebounded fast, and the string of socialites he’d dated since would’ve made a mighty pricey necklace.
Now he walked right up to me, and said, “May I?” He took the champagne from my hand and popped the cork. The fizz spilled down the neck of the bottle and onto his hand. He licked it off, saying, “That’s tasty.” When he caught my grimace, he added, “I’m enchanted to finally meet this Valerie Vane I’ve been hearing so much about.”
He was looking right at my face. He could’ve read the birth-marks on my neck like tea leaves. He was close enough to smell my Obsession. And he didn’t recognize a thing. “It’s amazing we’ve never met,” he said.
Amazing, indeed. In a sense, though, he was right. That girl he’d left on Fifth Street, the one who’d wept into her pillow while her roommate stuck needles in a voodoo-doll Golden, was playing banjo elsewhere with Holly Golightly’s pre–alter ego, Lulamae Barnes. I’d shed Sunburst Miller’s skin when I’d put that cotton-candy gown down my incinerator shaft. And now, I didn’t even blame Jeremiah for the way he’d spun me and let me fall. I blamed that bumpkin I’d been, so ripe for a grifter’s scam.
I poured Jeremiah a glass of Veuve Clicquot and he and his silicone twins worked the room. I watched them admire Uptite’s design, the chrome surfaces, the glass beakers, the framed forceps and scalpels. The Three I’s assembled—“Isn’t he…Ohmygod, that’s totally Jeremiah Golden…Yikes, lose the bim bos!”—and prattled. They were still my posse in spite of the exposé, since all press was good press, as publicists all agreed.
Eventually, Jeremiah circled back. “I’d like to get a delivery here, if you don’t mind,” he said.
I knew what kind of delivery he meant, but I told him it was okay. Plenty of people had already suggested doing lines off my medical cabinetry—the irony, it seemed, was far too inviting. By the time his dealer arrived, his silicone sweethearts had already huffed out the door. At five a.m., my glass coffee table was powdered white and Mr. Golden was a fixture on my Eames settee. I was too bemused to complain.
“You ever try one of these?” he said, taking a cigar out of his jacket and pointing its obscene length at me. “My D.P. brought this Cohiba back from Cuba, but I haven’t had a good reason to smoke it yet. I thought I’d save it to celebrate something, and now seems like the right moment.”
I took the cigar from him and twirled it between my thumb and forefinger, sizing it up. “What are we celebrating?”
“It seems to me,” he said, looking from one end of my loft to the other, “you’ve got plenty to celebrate.”
“And what about you?”
He took the cigar back, cut the tip with a silver cigar razor, and considered. “My good luck in meeting you. I’ve been reading your column,” he said. “You’ve managed to skewer all my favorite people. And boy, did they deserve it.” He laughed at his own joke for a minute, but I didn’t join him. “You don’t just feed the beast,” he added, “you really draw a picture of the city, you give a sense of the whole scene. I bet you’re a native. Am I right?”
My cynicism was so thick I could’ve cut it like a cake. This was the same exchange we’d had so long ago, only in reverse.
“Native?”
“Native New Yorker. Am I right?”
“What makes you think so?”
“Ha,” he laughed one note. “Only a native New Yorker would take offense. And, of course, the column. You know everyone in town.”
“I’m not on the column anymore,” I said. “They’ve got me on features now.”
“They had to!” he declared, his voice cracking oddly. “With what you know, you could be filling that entire magazine. Am I right? The gossip stuff is good, but you’ve got real insight.”
I put the cigar to my lips and wondered if I’d really been quite so blind to flattery in the past.
“Light it,” he said. “Go on. I think you’ll like it. It’s actually sweet.” He moved next to me and pressed a hand to my thigh. It was as familiar as an old song you played over and over for a month until you got sick of it and tossed the whole CD. He flipped open a Zippo and I inched toward its blue flame.
“You know how to do that? You’ve got to puff it a few times and don’t inhale. Just go slow, sweetheart. There you go.”
A plume of smoke enveloped me. The taste was tart and strong and it nipped my tongue. Not exactly sweet. I knew I’d be coughing something awful in the morning. I politely passed it back to Jeremiah, and then I moved a little away. He was a charmer; that was a fact. But he no longer looked like a Larrabee. He didn’t hold that sway over me, becau
se now I could hold my own. He no longer had his Astor. And I wasn’t about to let him get close enough to let me down again.
“It’s been a long evening,” I said, yawning.
“Of course, of course,” he said, standing fast. “I’ve overstayed my welcome.”
“Not at all,” I said. “But it is getting late.”
“Of course,” he said again, pulling on his jacket and nervously patting the pockets. “I’d love to take you out to dinner some evening. Could I? Might I take you somewhere nice?”
Well, wasn’t that touching? Suddenly he had time for dinner dates. “I don’t really do dinner very often these days,” I said. “I’m so busy.”
“I guess that’s a no, then?” he said, turning it over like a foreign currency he’d never used. “You don’t hear that very often.”
“You don’t?” I led him to the door. “It was lovely to meet you,” I added, suppressing, the “again.” I let him kiss my hand.
After I heard his footsteps make the ground floor, I went back to the settee. I surveyed my new loft. Everything was in its place. I picked up Jeremiah’s Cohiba where he’d left it burning and put it between my teeth. Maybe it did taste a little sweet.
The next morning, The Paper came calling. I was padding around my loft in socks picking up empties when the phone rang. Burton Phipps introduced himself and said he’d been following my work in Gotham’s Gate. He wanted to know if I had any interest in newspaper work “of the slightly more urbane sort.
He said, “Why don’t you come over and have lunch? There aren’t any jobs here at the moment, but we should get to know each other in case something opens up. They call Zachariah Zip, over there, don’t they?” he said. “I love that. If it makes you feel more at home, you can call me Buzz. Some of the reporters here do already. It’s kind of a tease.”