Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  “Get out there and dance, youngsters! Try your luck, everybody, do the duck, hey, hey, do the duck. Come on, Pooh Bear!” Ryan, black curly hair tipped with gray, chest swelling under the burgundy cashmere turtleneck, danced his son in a circle, then backstepped in a long slide down the hall toward the roar of the party.

  “Amazing,” said Steve. “How old is he?”

  Theo shrugged. “Fourteen, fifteen maybe.”

  “Must have been weird to have a dad like that. ‘What does your dad do?’ ‘He’s a rock ’n’ roll singer.’” Steve hoisted his small frame up onto the long oak refectory table in the center of the kitchen, ducking copper pots hung from the ceiling. “My dad sold cardboard containers.”

  Bette snapped a radish with her teeth. “I wish Benny would keep in mind that I’m a lesbian.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s told him,” Theo explained.

  “I’ve told him.” She washed the radish down with mineral water.

  Dan made one of his rare remarks, most of which sounded ironic but weren’t. “I guess it hasn’t sunk in.” He went back to scooping troughs with a celery stalk through a mound of chicken liver pâté, his fat white hairy hand steering graceful curves around the coiled pimientos.

  The kitchen door crashed open, Lorraine Page banged through it carrying a platter of dirty plates littered with shrimp tails and gnawed chicken bones. “Don’t anyone make a move to help, Theo, thank you very much!” she said with an immensely bright smile, and jabbed the platter at him as he raced forward. “Dan, stop playing in that pâté. Your mother wants you. She can’t find her antidepressants.” Dan hurried away, pear-shaped in pale blue trousers, knocking his shoulder into the door frame as he left.

  “God, he should rake a handful of those pills himself!” Theo’s mother shook her head, the strawberry curls throwing off glints of artificial gold. With a colorful batch of bracelets and earrings, she wore a black silk sleeveless pantsuit; at the ends of its flowing trousers, red-painted toenails wriggled impatiently. “Theo, go rescue Inez Bernheim. Your stupid father’s spinning her all over the furniture like a rag doll. They already broke a lamp. Not that it wasn’t a piece of junk.”

  The door banged open again. A good-looking woman whose ample breasts quivered dangerously at the edge of a stretchy red bodice teetered a weaving course up the kitchen hall in absurdly high heels. “Where’s my husband?” she asked, looking about the room.

  Lorraine said pleasantly, “Why, Ziti, darling, I don’t know. I haven’t had him for years.”

  At this, the woman doubled over with gasps of laughter, exposing her breasts to the riveted stares of the two younger men. Helplessly she swiveled, still bent double, and hobbled laughing back down the hall.

  Later, in came a short svelte man with thick spectacles whom Theo called “Uncle Wally,” although they weren’t related; the man fished an ice cube out of his scotch glass. There was a big fly in the cube. “Lorraine, this is disgusting!” he said in a high exaggerated lisp.

  “Oh, cut it out, Wally.” She handed him back the cube.

  “I’m gonna puke!” he shouted. Clutching his stomach, he gagged long and noisily, bent over, then pointed at the floor where lay a large viscous blob of pink vomit. “I told you!”

  “Good God,” said Steve Weiner.

  Theo picked up the blob—it was rubber—and stuffed it in the pocket of the man’s red tuxedo jacket. “Hi, Uncle Wally.”

  Two decks of cards suddenly appeared in the man’s hands. He fanned and twirled them like a Spanish dancer. “Theo. Pick a card.” He grinned.

  Theo showed Steve the ace of spades, then returned it to the deck. “They’re all aces of spades,” he whispered.

  “Says who?” Wally closed the fans, shot his hands up in the air, and instead of cards, red and blue paper flowers floated all over the kitchen.

  Lorraine brushed them out of her hair. “Wally, get out of here. Go saw Ziti Klein in half.”

  Steve laughed nervously as Wally’s hand (it was rubber) came off in his when he shook it good-bye.

  “Stephen, if I cared what you thought of us, darling!” Lorraine wheeled on Bette who sat in the breakfast nook reading Architectural Digest. “Don’t spare me!” she told her. “How much would it cost to throw out everything in this whole goddamn apartment and start over?”

  “Including Benny?” smiled the interior decorator.

  Lorraine caroled a merry scale of laughter, at the end of which Benny himself reappeared at the end of the kitchen hall, calling out like the Philip Morris bellboy: “Guys and Dolls. Theo’s back on! Videotape of Guys and Dolls again.”

  Lorraine said, “I could care!” and violently banged the top of a jar of caviar on the sink edge.

  Theo’s father sang, “Oh, Rainie, you’ve watched it twice already! Pooh, you’ve got my vibrato! Last call! Guys and Dolls!”

  Later still, crashes, shouts, and song blared from the living room. Thudding shook through the floors. A man in a satin vest ran in and hauled on Bette, “We need you, okay?”

  “Jesus,” she sighed, and let him drag her out.

  A big gray-haired black man wearing jeans, pointed metal-tipped boots, and a pink Brooks Brothers shirt rolled to his biceps, squeezed past them into the kitchen. “They’re wild out there,” he said in a rumbling bass. “That big Chinese vase on the coffee table’s gone for good, Lorraine.” He made a hurling motion with a long sinewy brown arm.

  “Goddammit.”

  Theo introduced Steve to the former child star Sweets Pudney.

  “Good God.” Steve shook hands eagerly. “I just saw you a week ago on American Movie Classics. Mr. Pudney, I’ve got a friend who teaches a cultural studies course with a lot of those M.G.M. movies of yours in it.”

  Lorraine laughed. “That’s you, okay, Sweets, a cultural study.”

  Steve was earnest. “A course on ‘Transgressions of Race and Gender.’”

  “Well, I got those covered.” Pudney grinned.

  “You ought to come down to Cavendish someday and do a guest lecture for her.”

  Pudney smiled his old movie smile. “Lawsie, Mistuh Steve, you mighty flatterin’ to ole Sweets. You tell your friend for one thousand dollars, I’ll reminisce about race and gender, and for two thousand, I’ll spit watermelon seeds just like in the old days.”

  Unfazed, Steve grinned back. “Hey, for fifty bucks, I’ll catch ’em in my teeth.”

  “Deal.” They shook hands again.

  Lorraine was flipping spoonfuls of caviar at one cracker after another. “Why isn’t Andrew here? He said he was coming. Oh!” She paused, spoon raised. “Did he get that part! Is he in L.A.? Oh, the lucky shit!”

  Pudney rubbed the same side of his head he’d always rubbed in the movies. “He’s home pouting. We had a little snit-fit last night and he’s not talking to me.”

  “Divorce the son of a bitch” was Lorraine’s advice.

  He rubbed her arm with old affection. “After thirty-odd years, makes you look kind of dumb you didn’t do it sooner.”

  “You’re telling me? The only reason I don’t is I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.” They laughed together bitterly.

  Pudney rearranged a row of crackers, then held out his hand, palm up, at Theo. “Theo, baby, when you either gonna get yourself a girl or a guy?”

  Theo slapped the large long hand. “I’m still looking for the right one, Uncle Sweets.”

  “Lookin’ both ways?” The deep laugh rumbled off down the hall.

  “Sweets Pudney!” mused Steve. “Maybe Jorvelle could get him down to talk at Cavendish.”

  “Cavendish, Cavendish. Shut up about Cavendish!” Lorraine sprayed onion slivers on the caviar dabs. “Bad enough it had to steal my son.”

  “Right, Mom.” Theo shook his head. “Six months, you didn’t even know where I was. You thought I wa
s in North Dakota.”

  “North Carolina, North Dakota—hicks in the sticks. Bad enough they pay you bupkis. Bad enough you had to meet Ford Rexford.”

  “You set it up!”

  “He had to drive you crazy so you’re chasing him all the way to ridiculous London. He quit Dr. Ko, did you know that, Steve?”

  “Mom! She told me to!”

  “You’re so much healthier than I am? I’ve been in therapy twenty years, and I haven’t even scratched the surface. If you’re so healthy, why do you keep breaking up with your girlfriends? It breaks my heart. Look, tears.”

  “It’s the onions,” Theo said.

  She wiped her eyes. “At least you got Mahan off your back ’til September. The anxiety attack you were having this morning, you acted like he was going to repossess your house.”

  “Who told you he’s off my back?”

  “Stephen, who else.”

  Steve shrugged off Theo’s scowl. “See, Rosie, if it wasn’t for Cavendish, we’d never have met.” Steve was the only person Theo had ever known to call Lorraine Page by her given name.

  “Don’t!” she snapped. “Don’t defend that place after what it’s done to you. Your wife runs off to work for George Bush.”

  “We can’t blame Cavendish for that.”

  “And Marcus Thorney’s going to be chairman! The prick that tried to stop Theo’s promotion.” She darted toward Steve, leaving the pink imprint of her lips on his cheek. “What a frankly stupid thing, letting yourself get beaten out by that reptile. There’s no justice.”

  Steve held up his arms, shrugging. “So, Rosie, who thought there was?” He winced. “Anyhow, it was a long shot.”

  “You deserve what happened,” she said, her small ringed hands a flurry of motion as she dealt more crackers like a hand of solitaire across the tray. “You and Theo both. Moving down there with toothless hillbillies. When they start burning crosses on your lawn, maybe you’ll take that job at Columbia like I told you two years ago. Is my table a chair? Off, off.”

  “At least down there I’ve got a lawn.” Steve slid away to pick at a skeleton of smoked salmon.

  “You wanna talk lawn?” She licked caviar from the spoon. “Look out my windows. Central Park. That’s a lawn.”

  “Yeah, but mine’s not full of junkies and joggers.”

  “No, it’s full of redneck sheriffs wearing white sheets over their heads. Theo!” Lorraine grabbed him by the arm and shook it. “Go mix with your guests. They came to see you.”

  “Really?” Theo cupped his hand to his ear. “Sounds to me like they came to boogie down with Dad.”

  Reverberant thuds rattled the copper pots on the ceiling. A drum set had been added to the piano.

  “Go tell your idiot father that if Mrs. Schultz calls the cops again, it’s on his head.” She pushed her son toward the hall. “And if he’s got his long Irish nose back in Ziti Klein’s cleavage, he’s a dead man.”

  Theo allowed himself to be nudged along. “You’re trying to get rid of me so you can worm stuff out of Steve. I can’t imagine what else you think there is. He’s already blabbed my whole life to you.”

  “God, I hope not,” she snapped. “I hope there’s more to it than that!”

  “Thanks, Mom.” At the door, Theo gave Steve a significant glare. “Do not mention the clergy. Understand?”

  Lorraine threw her hands to her temples. “Great. My beautiful son’s become a goddamn priest. I want babies! I’ll never have grandchildren.”

  “Rosie, you’re such a fake.” Steve laughed. “If anybody ever called you Grandma, you’d slit your throat.”

  The small woman put her hand to her throat and slowly felt it. Her eyes darkened, filling with tears. “Probably,” she said with a nervous smile. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Theo called. “Steve’s kidding.”

  Steve patted her bare slender shoulder. “God, I’m sorry, Rosie.”

  “It’s onions,” she said.

  “Oh, Mom.”

  Chapter 19

  Exit Disguised and Muffled

  He shall with speed to England.

  —Hamlet

  Most of the Ryans’ furniture had been toppled into corners. A gray-haired couple cuddled on an overturned couch. A rainsoaked portly man straddled precariously the ledge of an opened window, calling to pedestrians fifteen stories below—who couldn’t possibly hear him—“Come up! Come up!” Bette’s father in a half-crouch at the piano pounded out “Life Is a Cabaret” on the baby grand. At an ottoman beside him, Bette beat on a drum set—one abandoned decades ago by Theo—as if she hoped to demolish it. She was good, though clearly took little pleasure in her talent. Theo’s cousin Dan stood in a corner sucking clam dip off potato chips. Despite (or because of) their relatively advanced years, everyone else in the room appeared to have adopted the song’s philosophy without reservation—dexterously smoking, drinking, and eating while singing and dancing, as if life might not continue to be a cabaret after tonight. In front of the mantel, Benny Ryan and five women in their sixties, with arms linked on either side, high-strutted with precision.

  “There’s no people like show people,” Theo shouted to Dan, who now wore a polyester raincoat buttoned to the neck that made him look like a flasher.

  “what? i’m waiting for mama. she wants to go home. this kind of thing depresses her, i guess.”

  “why do you think i become an academic?” Theo bellowed.

  “what?”

  “take it easy dan.”

  There was another guest who, like Dan’s mom, wasn’t convinced that life in a cabaret was worth living. In a chair shoved sideways to the dining room wall, a lank freckled man with badly dyed jet-black hair and a long morose rubbery face sat feeding olives to a wooden dummy. He’d literally push the olives down the dummy’s throat. This was Theo’s relative Buster McBride, the first ventriloquist to throw his voice on live television while drinking water. Buster, catatonically shy, spoke only through his dummy, the Latin lover Rudolph Fernando-Teeno—who, far from timid, accosted every woman in range with machismo vaunts and gross flattery. “Besame, besame, mi cariña. Your boobies are so boootifull!”

  “Hi, Buster,” Theo said. “Hi, Rudy.” He shook the dummy’s hand. “You like olives?”

  Rudy stroked with a tiny wooden hand his slick black lounge lizard hair. “How else ees eet I geet my olive skin complexion, muchacho?”

  “Ah, of course.” Theo laughed obligingly. “So how’s life been, Rudy? Fighting the women off?”

  “Weeth dees wheep!” He slapped the tiny whip glued to his other hand against his gaucho pants. “Dee weemons, dey lovvve me!”

  Two women from the chorus line walked through the dining room then, circling the table to nibble at desserts. Rudy became extremely agitated, bouncing about on McBride’s knee and blowing kisses with his hands. “Kees mee, corazon. I got dee hots for you,” he cooed. The women made kissing noises back at him. Buster McBride looked shyly away.

  “Take it easy, Rudy.” Theo patted the dummy’s back with affection. He’d known him since he was a baby.

  It was growing late. Theo walked down the long hallway, took his bags from his childhood bed—still varnished with decals of scenes from Shakespeare plays—and carried them back to the foyer. Hearing sobs coming from his parents’ room, he peeked in. On the edge of their bed, he found Sweets Pudney comforting Catherine Cassell, a large-boned woman with a flat broad face that was now wet with tears. It struck him that he had few memories of the former soap-opera star when she wasn’t crying, either about her disastrous love life (three husbands had run off with floozies after robbing her blind) or her lost career (she’d never found another role like that of the long-suffering mother in The Salt of the Earth).

  “I never even…regained…consciousness!” she heaved in sobs, as Sweets rocked
her in his arms. “Those fucking writers!”

  “Honey,” crooned Sweets, “that was five years ago. You got to get over it. Hi, Theo.”

  “Theo, sweetie!” The big woman hauled him down to her other side, and clutched him to her.

  “What’s the matter, Aunt Catherine?”

  “She’ll be all right.” Sweets nodded. They all three rocked back and forth together as the black man soothingly asked, “Now, Cathy, didn’t I hear you had a movie deal?”

  “It’s a horror film,” she howled. “I’m a cleaning lady, and I’m hacked to pieces!”

  Sweets rocked her (and consequently Theo) in a gentle rhythm. “Well, you got any lines?”

  “Just ‘What was that?’ and ‘Who’s therrrrre?’” she wailed. “Then he’s at me with the saw!”

  “Hey. You can do a lot with those lines. Can’t you, Theo?”

  “Sure you can,” Theo agreed. “A lot.”

  After learning how someone named Hector or Chester had given Catherine’s chinchilla coat to someone named Mona or Magda, Theo extricated himself from her embrace and made his way to the library. There were not many books in it, but there were a great many shelves of scripts, tapes, and records. The walls, too, were covered with memorabilia of his parents’ long careers in “the business.” Centered among the photos, posters, plaques, and laminated reviews were Lorraine’s Obie and Emmy, Benny’s two gold records, and a large happy oil painting of the three of them. The artist had painted it one summer from a composite of snapshots while Theo’s mother was in New Haven at the Shubert, his father was in Miami at the Coconut Grove, and he was at camp, striking out in softball games. It had always seemed to him an apt symbol of their lives together.

  Stepping inside the room to look at the painting, he saw two men seated on the couch. Across from them, on the television a young Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn were tearing around silently (the sound was off) in a manic hysteria so extreme that in the real world they would have been forcibly subdued by tranquilizers. One of the men said, “Look at that timing.” He pointed at Grant hyperbolically seething.