Memory (Hard Case Crime)

by Donald E. Westlake

  Another chance to get out of the apartment. “That’d be fine.”

  “He knows about your accident, so you won’t have to explain anything.”

  “Fine.”

  She gave him the address and told him to be there around three; that was when Kirk’s afternoon class started.

  He left the apartment at two-thirty, stopping on the way to check the mailbox, and found in it a notice from the Screen Actors’ Guild to the effect that he was overdue in his annual dues payment. They would give him thirty days to pay, or he could consider himself no longer a member of the union. When he saw that notice, it seemed to him as though he could feel the moorings begin to slip, as though somehow he were drifting farther and farther away from his goal rather than toward it, as though, in spite of himself, he was methodically closing off and boarding up every room and alley of his former life.

  Kirk had to be able to help, that’s all there was to it.

  Well, here he was. He’d been walking south on Varick Street from the subway stop, looking at the house numbers, and now he knew the address should be in this block someplace, where across the street something had just recently been torn down. He looked over there, squinting in the cold sunlight—his head still ached a little—and he was angered by the machines and the men, as though they were doing their work simply to annoy him. How could he begin to remember, if they kept tearing things down? In every neighborhood he’d been to it was the same; empty buildings with the white-X’ed windows that meant they were marked for demolition, raw rust-colored holes between buildings where something had just been stripped away, steel frameworks for new buildings rising behind board fences like monkey bars for giants, as though in some enormous auditorium it was intermission and here on stage the set was being changed.

  The address he wanted was in the middle of the block, on the side that hadn’t yet been torn down. It was a narrower building than its neighbors, made of stone, five stories high. The first floor was a store, the display windows painted green, and with rubbish stacked in the entranceway. The windows on the upper stories were all blank and uncurtained and covered with dust.

  There was a door beside the green display window. Cole pushed it open and climbed steep stairs to the third floor, where a piece of shirt cardboard tacked to a door bore the message: ROBIN KIRK STUDIO. It had been carefully lettered with a ruler, the letters filled in with a ballpoint pen.

  Nothing yet had stirred Cole’s sluggish memory, not the street nor the building nor the stairwell nor this sign. He opened the door and stepped into a long dim room, and still there was no feeling that he had ever been here before.

  The room filled most of the third floor, unpartitioned, with grimy windows at front and back. Wooden folding chairs in rows faced the back, where a table and two chairs stood on a raised platform. There was little light anywhere except at the platform, which was lit by two standing photographer’s spots at the side of the room.

  The class had already begun. A dozen boys and girls in bulky sweaters and dark slacks sat near the front, down by the platform. On the platform was standing a fortyish man of medium height, wearing gray slacks and a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. His face was not handsome but strong, lined and firm like the face of a man who spends most of his time outdoors. His brown hair was thick, and wavy, and a little too full and too long, distracting slightly from the masculinity of his face.

  Cole recognized him at once; this was Robin Kirk. Images came to him of Robin Kirk on a platform, lecturing, or in discussion in a bar booth, or listening with frowning concentration as they walked together through Washington Square Park. But not this room, this was still alien; he wondered why.

  Kirk was talking about emotion: “No matter how many people there are on stage, I don’t care if it’s tragedy or comedy or whatever, one character is always the focal point of emotion. It may shift a dozen times in the same scene, or it may stay with one character throughout a play, but there is always just one character toward whom all emotion is directed, and a part of your job is to determine which character. Who is the emotional center of this scene, and when does it shift to some other character? The amateur plays every line as though the emotional focal point was himself, but the professional knows better.”

  A pinched-faced girl with a black ponytail had come to the back of the room where Cole was standing, and now she whispered, “Are you going to audit this class?”

  Audit meant watch, he’d learned that already from Nick. He said, “Yes.”

  “That’s four dollars,” she whispered.

  “I have to pay?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He gave her a five dollar bill, and she whispered to him that she would bring him his change later. She had a clipboard with her, and asked him his name; when he told her, she wrote it down, and then slid silently back to the front of the room again.

  Cole was irritated at having to pay; he couldn’t remember anything about auditing, or that visitors to the class had to pay. He moved forward and took a seat in the last row of chairs, and watched with a feeling of mistrustfulness.

  Kirk finished his lecture on emotion, and said, “Now we’ll go to work. Greta? Robert? Is your scene ready?”

  It wasn’t. They offered excuses, too low for Cole to hear, and Kirk was obviously angry. He and the two students bickered a while, and Cole began to wonder if it was all right to smoke. He looked at the students, and then saw one of the boys smoking, so it must be all right. He lit a cigarette, and continued to watch.

  The second couple Kirk chose did have their scene ready. Kirk left the platform, going over to sit at the end of the first row, and the students took his place. They were a short and stocky girl with wild black hair and beautiful brown eyes and a prominent jaw, and a tall gangly boy with a shock of carrot- colored hair and a bony nervous face. The boy announced the scene: “The Cocktail Party, by T. S. Eliot. Act Two. Celia and Reilly.”

  The two arranged the table and two chairs, and explained to the audience that the table was a desk. They sat on opposite sides of it, and began to talk. The boy’s voice was a growl, unnatural and intense, much deeper than the voice with which he’d announced what they were going to do, and the girl’s voice was quietly pleasant, with a hit of the rasp it would assume later in life, and slight indications of the Bronx accent she had almost completely cured herself of.

  The talk they did seemed rambling and self-conscious. The boy, particularly, gestured with great wide winglike swooping motions, striving for too much emotional impact in every word. The two of them up there were like little girls walking in their mothers’ high heels. Cole watched, knowing it was bad without any hint in his own mind about how to make it good, and the sense of the words drifted by him untasted.

  The couple on the platform finally finished, to scattered and perfunctory applause from their classmates, and returned flustered to their seats. Kirk took over the platform again and led a discussion about what the two performers had done wrong. Each student in turn criticized the performance, and with each in turn Kirk either agreed or disagreed, but in either case amplified the student’s remarks. And this part, too, stirred faint memories in Cole.

  Next came the improvisation. Kirk called up two of the girls and told them they were a first-grade teacher and the mother of an unruly child whom the teacher had slapped that day. The mother had come to argue about the slapping of her child. Kirk gave them this information, and then went and sat down again in the front row.

  The improvisation was even more like children play-acting in their mothers’ shoes, except that the girls on the platform lacked the unselfconsciousness of children. They ranted at each other, mouthing cliché-filled dialogue and gesturing far too broadly with their hands. When it was done, there was another round of criticism led by Kirk. He wanted to know which of the girls was the emotional center at the beginning of the scene, and if the center shifted at any time, and if the girls had seemed to be aware of the emotional center throughout the sc
ene. No one could seem to agree on where the emotional center lay, and the class ended on a note of incompleteness. Kirk told Greta and Robert they had damn well better have their scene ready next time, and dismissed the group.

  Cole waited at the back of the room as the students filed out, talking together enthusiastically but quietly. At the far end of the room, Kirk sat down in one of the chairs on the platform, lit a cigarette, and rested an arm on the table. He looked tired.

  When there were only the two of them left, Cole got to his feet. His chair scraped against the floor slightly as he did so, and Kirk looked up, squinting against the lights aimed at the platform. He called, “Hello?” And then, “Paul? Is that you?”

  “Yes.” Cole walked forward, down the aisle through the uneven rows of chairs.

  Kirk didn’t get up. Watching Cole come forward, he said, “Helen told me you might be around. She told me what happened to you.”

  Cole stopped at the edge of the platform. “I remember you,” he said, “and the class. But I don’t remember this place.”

  “This is new. We used to meet up on Carmine Street. In the basement, remember?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I’d have to see it, I guess.”

  “It’s torn down. They’re putting up one of their ugly co-ops. Beehives for drones, society’s cattle. Come up here and sit down.”

  Cole took the other chair; the table was between them. Kirk’s face, seen up close, looked weaker and more tired, lined not by strength but by exhaustion. Kirk studied him a minute and said, “You’re changed. The arrogance is gone.”

  “Was I arrogant?”

  “In a good way. You were sure of yourself, proud of yourself.” Kirk shrugged carelessly. “You had reason to be.”

  “I guess I’m not sure of myself anymore.”

  Kirk motioned disgustedly at the empty chairs. “Did you see what I’ve got this time? Not a spark in a carload. Drones with big ideas, killing time on their way from their parents’ homes to their childrens’ homes. I keep waiting for one of them to show me something, but they never will.” He made a face and shook his head. “Do you know how many reasons there’ve been since you? Two. In three years, just two of them.”

  “Reasons? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You forget that?” Kirk grinned sardonically and looked out at the empty room. “You’re a walking symbol of man’s futility now, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, Mister Kirk—” at least he’d remembered that much, that no one was ever permitted to call this man by his first name, but only Mister Kirk “—I don’t remember very many things.”

  “You’ve been to a doctor?”

  “I had my X-rays the other day. I don’t remember what you mean about reasons, would you tell me again? If you tell me, maybe I’ll remember it.”

  Instead of answering, Kirk got to his feet and walked to the edge of the platform, where he stood gazing down the length of the room to the dimness at the far end. After a minute, he said, “You make me uncomfortable now, Paul. Helen said she thought I might be able to do something for you, help you some way, but I don’t know. There’s an atmosphere of hopelessness around you, like a cloud. You come near me, and I begin to wonder what use I am. Then you ask me about my reasons, and that in a way is pretty comic.”

  Kirk stepped down off the platform and began to walk this way and that amid the rows of chairs. His hands were in his hip pockets, bunching up his coat-tail, and he talked as he wandered, not looking at Cole as he talked but gazing upward at the ceiling. His voice was unnaturally loud, as though he were addressing an assembly.

  He said, “I am an acting teacher. Robin Kirk, professor of dramaturgy, instructor of the hopeful, tutor to tomorrow’s stars, keeper of the flame, confidence man. You saw my present crop, my pitiful pupils? Not a one of these, not a single solitary one of these, will ever be an actor of the slightest talent or integrity or meaning. Not a one. But they pay me four dollars an hour to tell them they have talent, and I do it. Simply by letting them sit in this room, simply by taking their money, I tell them they have talent and promise and a brilliant future.” He stopped, and looked suddenly over at Cole. “Did Marcia charge you for auditing?”

  “Yes.”

  “She shouldn’t have, I’ll give you your money back.” He turned away again, and roamed some more. “You’ll get your money back,” he told the ceiling, “though you’re the one who’s an actor. The rest don’t get their money back ever, not even when they give up their idiotic dreams and go home where they belong. Four dollars an hour, one hour a week, thirty-two students in three classes, one hundred twenty-eight dollars a week. It keeps me alive, it keeps me alive. One hundred twenty-eight dollars a week keeps me alive. But I’ll tell you something,” he called to the ceiling. “If the only justification I had for keeping alive was to go on lying to those stupid drones for more money to keep alive to keep lying, I’d stop it, I’d stop the cycle and lie down in the gutter and die. I’ve got to have a better reason for living than living itself, and I do have one, and you are it, Paul Cole, you and the others, less than a dozen over the years, two in the three years since you.”

  Cole sat watching him, listening, trying to understand and through understanding to remember. Kirk’s voice was getting louder and louder, and in his ramblings back and forth amid the chairs he was moving farther and farther away into the dim opposite end of the room. Except for the one question about money, he hadn’t looked at Cole at all.

  “Every once in a while,” he called, walking around and around, “through that door over there comes an actor. Every once in a while, every once in a great great while. Not one of these pale idiots who wants to be an actor, can you think of anything more foolish? It’s like wanting to fly, isn’t it, you can or you can’t and that’s an end to it, wanting has nothing to do with it. You can even want not to fly, but if you’ve got the wings you’ll fly, one way or another, and wanting has nothing to do with that.”

  He stopped again. He was now very near the door, standing facing it with his hands on his hips in a belligerent way. He talked now at the door, but loudly enough for Cole to hear him, with a slight echo in the words. “These young fools come in here with their feeble desires and chip away at my life! Like woodpeckers. What sort of a useless stupid appendix of the emotions is desire, what has desire ever done for anybody but turn him into an embarrassing fool? How can you want to be an actor? You are or you aren’t, and ninety-nine percent of them coming through the door are not. But then there’s the one who is.”

  Kirk’s voice had lowered on the last sentence, so that Cole could barely hear him, and now he turned back and came walking straight toward the platform, looking directly at Cole now as he spoke: “That’s what I live for, Paul, that’s the reason for my existence. I sit here and wait and wait and wait, and every once in a while an actor comes through that door back there, a boy or a girl who’s been an actor from the minute he was born, whether he knew it or not. They come to me, and I give them the rudiments, I give them the terms for what they already know how to do, and I give them freely from my own poor store of contacts in the theatrical world, and I watch them discover themselves, discover their own powers and the gulf that yawns between them and the poor fools sitting around them in class, and I start another scrapbook with another name at the clipping service. Did I ever tell you about the scrapbooks? I keep them on all my birds, on all the rare ones with wings; I have one for you. I’m a midwife, Paul, I’m a teacher. What do you think a teacher is?”

  Kirk waited, but Cole could think of nothing to say, and shook his head.

  But Kirk didn’t answer the question; instead, he said, “There’ve been damn few of them, Paul, but they’re my reasons for existence, my only only reasons. And you were one of them, I saw it in you from the very first day and saw it grow in you, the way it always does.” He was standing at the edge of the platform, staring intently at Cole. “God help me,” he said, “I don’t see it there now.”

  “
It will come back,” Cole told him shakily. “When I get my memory back, I’ll be my old self again.”

  “Make it soon.” Kirk turned away, glaring out over the empty chairs again, and then looked back at Cole. “Will you try something?”

  “What?”

  “An improvisation. You remember how they work?”

  “I saw one today.”

  “That isn’t how they work.” Kirk shook his head in disgust. “That’s how they don’t work. Will you try one with me? We’ll see if Helen’s right.”

  It was important to Kirk, so Cole felt he ought to try. He nodded reluctantly and said, “I don’t know if I can, but I’ll try.”

  “Good.” Kirk moved suddenly with speed and determination. He came up on the platform and grabbed the chair he’d been sitting in before and carried it away, to put it over in a corner. He came back and made sketching gestures in the air. “A jail cell,” he said. “Death row. Tonight at midnight they electrocute you. Your cot there, and this table and chair. A window high in the wall there, door of bars over here. I the attendant bringing you your last meal. I am the one guilty of the murder for which you are to die tonight, and you know it. You can’t prove it, and no one will believe you, and you’ve given up trying to convince people. We will be alone together for just a minute now, as I bring the tray in. You won’t try to attack me, because you know there are half a dozen guards just down the corridor. All right?”

  Cole frowned, trying to absorb the information, which was like pieces of foam rubber. What was he supposed to do? Doubtfully, he said, “All right.”

  “Take a minute,” Kirk told him. “Get into the character.”

  Cole sat pensive at the table, trying to think about it, but he could get no clue. It wasn’t real. Was this supposed to have happened sometime? But it didn’t make sense. Why would the attendant come into the cell alone? Why should he kill anybody, why should he be in jail? The thought of jail was frightening, with an image like quicksand. Bars, and cold rooms, and sneering faces, and squares of bright metal. What was he supposed to do?