Revenge of the Cootie Girls

by Sparkle Hayter

  “No, you didn’t.”

  In Tamayo’s universe, anything was possible.

  “Nobody ages on the planet, because it is perched right on the edge of a black hole, which is like being on the wrong end of an inverted volcano, a volcano that sucks in instead of spewing forth.”

  “That would … suck.”

  “But the planet isn’t sucked in, because it’s caught equally between the gravitational pull of two competing black holes. It’s a cosmic standoff. This gravitational hammock nestles the inhabitants at such a point that their atoms virtually stop degenerating. Time has almost stopped. The downside is, everyone weighs a lot more,” she said. “Did I tell you about the free-floating inhalable fat molecules that hover about the planet, and during electrical storms the fat gets emulsified and falls to the earth in big mucusy globs, like so much frog spawn?”

  “Stop! You’re making me hungry.”

  She said something else, but I didn’t hear her. I thought I saw Kathy come in with another girl. When they moved out of the shadow of the doorway, I saw they were just a couple of tourist girls, loaded down with bags from Shubert Alley gift shops.

  “It’s almost eight. Where is Kathy? She’s never late,” I said.

  “She knows to come here, right?” Tamayo asked, a note of irritation in her voice.

  “Yeah, we discussed it yesterday and I left a reminder on her voice mail this morning before I left L.A.”

  “Your answering machine at home was off today. Maybe she called, and when there was no answer, she used that as an excuse to flake and go out with some brooding boys instead of her boss.”

  “No, she wanted to go out with us.”

  “Of course she’d say that to you.”

  “She did. I told you, she looks up to me.”

  “Well, yeah, she looks up to you. That’s why she can’t be herself around you. She wants to impress you. What fun is that?”

  For all of a week, I’d been Tamayo’s boss. She just wouldn’t take my being her boss seriously—she literally laughed out loud when I gave her orders—and when it became clear we could be friends or boss-employee but not both, she decided that she should devote herself to comedy. A half-hour before I was told to fire her for yet another smoking infraction, she quit.

  I was ready to go back out to the giant coffee cup when Tamayo sighed deeply and said, “Hand me your phone. What’s her number?”

  She dialed and got Kathy’s answering machine. “Kathy, this is Tamayo, Robin’s friend. We are at Hojo’s and heading down soon to the parade. Then we’re going to get you roaring drunk and we’re going to rumble with some sailors.” Tamayo winked at me. “Call us at—” and she left my cell-phone number.

  “We’re covered now,” she said.

  “I have such a bad feeling …” I said.

  “You worry too much,” Tamayo said, and because I didn’t have enough to worry about already, she tried to distract me with talk of our friend Claire’s problems. Claire had recently broken up with a rising-star congressman, which had made her uncharacteristically hysterical, and shopaholic. The latest news was that a thinly disguised version of Claire was also in Solange Stevenson’s book and Claire was not thrilled about it. (Reportedly and surprisingly, I was not in her book.) As a comic, Tamayo had to be childlike. Union rules. So she was proud to be the standard-bearer for Pippi. But Claire was a high-profile reporter who, of late, had worried about her reputation.

  But between the two, Kathy and Claire, I was more worried about Kathy. For some reason, I thought everything would turn out wonderfully in Claire’s life. I called home. There was one new message, from Mike, saying he’d definitely be in town for the weekend and hoped we could get together.

  I called my voice mail at work and heard: “Robin, this is Kathy.” Kathy was speaking in a loud whisper, sounding like she was trying not to giggle. “I know I’m supposed to meet you, but I’m in this man’s closet and, don’t laugh, his wife just came in and … Oh, gotta go!”

  The machine beeped and I heard: “October 31, 7:54 P.M.”—the time the message was left by Kathy.

  I hung up and said, “She’s stuck in a married man’s closet.”

  “I told you she wasn’t as sweet as you thought,” Tamayo said.

  “Why did she call my voice mail instead of my cell phone, or my home number?”

  “She’s in a closet, which is probably dark; she couldn’t read her address book; so she called a number she knew by heart.”

  “Who is this married man?”

  “None of our business,” Tamayo said. “She’s your intern, not your daughter. It’s a mistake to get too involved in interns’ personal lives. As soon as the husband gets the wife out of there, Kathy can make her escape.”

  “But a married man …” I said. True, Kathy didn’t sound too worried on the phone. Still, I couldn’t help thinking of her, sitting huddled in some dark closet. What if she had to pee while she was in the closet? Or sneeze? Kathy was good at being quiet, though. She sneezed like a mouse, with tiny “tu” sneezes.

  I’d been there—in a married man’s closet, I mean. Just after I moved to New York to go to NYU, my history prof invited me to stop by his place to discuss my grade—he gave me 60 percent for a paper and I felt I deserved at least a 90 percent. I was so naïve that I very innocently got talked into the bedroom, which he called his “study.” Long story short, his wife came home early, because they were trying to have a baby and her temperature was right. So, while I was there, she pulled him into bed and they had sex. I was very likely present for the conception of their first kid.

  “If you ever run into that kid you’ll have to tell her you knew her way back when,” Tamayo said after I told her this.

  “The point is, there could be an innocent explanation for Kathy being in that closet.”

  Tamayo poured herself another gimlet and said, “I dunno. Sounds to me like Kathy’s involved in some hanky-panky that you can’t see through your illusions about her.”

  Granted, maybe I did have a few illusions about Kathy, a petite brunette with curls, big green eyes, an expressive face, and an enthusiasm just shy of religious ecstasy. When I imagined Kathy the intern landing in New York, I imagined her as one of those black-and-white movie heroines from the 1930s and ’40s, the spunky, young, virginal, wide-eyed girl clutching her suitcase with one gloved hand and holding her beribboned hat on her head with the other. Kathy wasn’t quite that, but she sure looked like the 1990s version. No tattoos, no unusual piercings, she dressed in demure, serviceable prep clothes, good sweaters, comfortable shoes. A nice kid, hardworking, and her mother loved her. Just before she arrived, I received a secret letter from Mother Loblaws, asking me to keep an eye out for her “precious first baby.”

  “Kathy is a very trusting, open person so naturally I worry about someone taking advantage of her,” she wrote.

  She was very open and trusting. That’s one of the things I liked about her, that freshness that had her on speaking terms with everyone from Tom, the panhandler who hung outside our building, to George Dunbar, president of the network, or, as Kathy knew them, Mr. Tom and Mr. George. That said a lot about her, I thought, the way she could be both formal with the “Mr.”s and casual with the first names. The Kathy I knew had an easy yet proper friendliness to her—more proper than easy, I hoped.

  As you can imagine, the letter from Kathy’s mom motivated my good intentions. I started off gangbusters, helping Kathy find an affordable summer sublet and a roommate, introducing her to some of the classy, cultural stuff in New York, and taking her to a couple of editorial meetings. But then I got wrapped up in work and in solving the problems of my insane girlfriends, and instead of paying attention to Kathy I gave her a lot of busywork and sent her out in the field with the crew to shoot stock shots. Eventually she found some kind of social life outside of work, and I kinda forgot about her.

  We were about to pay the bartender and head downtown to the Halloween Parade when my phone rang. It w
as Donna, Kathy’s roommate, returning my call.

  “Where’s Kathy?” I said.

  “She had to go meet an old friend of yours about a story on your behalf, because you were going to be late getting in from the West Coast,” Donna said.

  “An old friend of mine?”

  “That was the message she left on our answering machine.”

  “Which old friend?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The last message I got from her wasn’t about that. What else did she say? What kind of story?”

  “A murder story.”

  “A murder story? Do you know where she was supposed to meet this old friend?”

  “Some Irish bar. Paddy Fitzgerald’s. Does that sound right? On Seventh in the 50s.”

  “Yeah. I know the place. Did she say when?”

  “After work.”

  “Donna, was Kathy involved with a man that you know of?”

  “Kathy??? I don’t think so. She never mentioned one.”

  “Did she say anything else in her message?”

  “Just something about how she was going to do it, she was going to take the initiative on a story.”

  After I hung up, Tamayo said, “She went to meet some old friend of yours?”

  “Yeah. I wonder who? It’s supposedly about a murder. I hope it’s not some nutty fan, although I don’t have too many of those since I went off the air.” My most fervently misguided fan, Elroy, was currently in a prison psych ward on heavy medication, and the rest had transferred their affections to other television personalities.

  “Maybe it’s some cranky ex-boyfriend of yours playing a joke,” Tamayo said. “Someone who knows about you and your unhealthy interest in murder.”

  An ex-boyfriend. A terrible shiver went through me at those words.

  Professor Balsam still taught at NYU and from what I heard he still had a thing for young coeds. But I was far too old for him now, so he wouldn’t have contacted me in the first place. Howard Gollis, a dark renaissance-man comic-writer type, wasn’t in town, wasn’t married, and in any event had decided that I no longer existed on his planet. Most of my other ex-boyfriends were more or less happily paired off and/or not the cheating kind. God, I hoped it wasn’t Chuck Turner, my back-home ex-boyfriend, in New York with his wife. Him I could easily see sneaking in a liaison while his wife was at Bloomie’s spending all his money.

  My intern had gone out to meet an old friend of mine about a murder and ended up in a married man’s closet. Naturally, this concerned me.

  3

  THAT ONE WORD, “initiative,” stuck in my head after I talked to Donna. Evidently, Kathy had absorbed a little from me. Just after she arrived, I took her to Buddy’s, an old-timey bar where one of my mentors, Bob McGravy, used to take me when I was a sweet young thing, and I’d given her a whole lot of egotistical hot air about How I Made It in Television News, leaving out the less flattering bits about how I almost blew my career a dozen or so times, and concentrating on the more heroic side of the tale, how I’d taken risks to get this story or that story, etc., etc. If she wanted to get ahead, I practically bellowed, she had to take the initiative, take risks, follow her instincts. At that time, I was still being conscientious about mentoring.

  The trouble is, I’d overlooked her more practical education in my rush to impress her. Damn, I meant to work on her street smarts but never quite got around to it. She hadn’t yet learned all the gimmicks and artifices that can get you through stock situations in New York, like muggers trying to distract you, ex-convicts or married investment bankers trying to pick you up. She had only a little artifice, and a little artifice is worse than none or a lot in this town. It’s like the producer guy says about Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, that she’s a phony, but a real phony. In New York, be real or be a real phony and you can usually get along fine.

  On the walk over, Tamayo talked about her movie, oblivious to the fact that I wasn’t listening to her. I called Claire at ANN and left a message asking her to check my computerized phone log, see where Kathy had called me from, and call me back.

  “I hope we’re not here long,” Tamayo said, peeking in the windows of Paddy Fitzgerald’s. “An Irish bar in New York with lace curtains? Hmmm. And everyone in there is wearing a suit.”

  Tamayo was not enthusiastic about going to Paddy Fitzgerald’s, but the place was so noisy when I’d called that I couldn’t find out anything over the phone.

  “What if she was lured here by some serial killer, you know, the kind who writes letters to the news media?” I said as we went in.

  It had been so long since I’d been in the old Paddy Fitzgerald’s, I couldn’t tell if it had changed much or not, aside from having a different address from the one I’d been to. It used to be in the old Abbey Victoria Hotel, where I stayed during my first visit to New York City.

  It seemed to me it used to be more Irish and convivial, more beery-smelling and less clean, that people used to stand around the piano singing. Now it was upscale. There were lots of suits and a couple of tourists. We were the only people in costume.

  The bartenders directed me to the manager, who said he’d talk to us as soon as he finished seating a couple of large parties. We sat down at a recently vacated table by a window, away from the crush of hollering people at the bar.

  A trim older man in a black Maxwell Smart suit and narrow tie soon came over, sat down, and told us that he remembered Kathy largely because of the murder mystery. About a week earlier, a woman had called up and asked if the bar would participate in a murder mystery for charity. In gratitude, a donation would be made in the bar’s name to a children’s charity called Help for Kids, which he had checked out with New York State. It was a legitimate charity run by some woman named Anne Winston.

  “Marty, can you come here?” a waiter called to the manager.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “It’s some kind of publicity stunt,” Tamayo said. “Now you can stop worrying.”

  “It still doesn’t explain how she ended up in a married man’s closet instead of under the giant coffee cup.”

  “What could happen to her while the wife is there? And at least you know she wasn’t abducted by a serial killer or a space alien.”

  When I opened my mouth to express my concern again, Tamayo said, “Remember when I went out to field-produce the story on the guy who was suing to get his donated kidney back from his alcoholic brother, who was ruining the organ with drinking …”

  “I remember.”

  “… and when the crew showed up to meet me I wasn’t there because I was out late the night before doing stand-up and I fell asleep on the subway and rode it all the way out to Far Rockaway. I couldn’t call you because I didn’t have a cell phone and I couldn’t find a phone that worked.…”

  Yeah, and I’d gone out to the kidney guy’s place and demanded to see my producer Tamayo, because I was convinced he’d made his whole story up in order to abduct young female journalists. Got completely hysterical, practically tore his place apart. This was, I hasten to add, perfectly justifiable, since it came not long after I’d been kidnapped, and not long after I took over the Special Reports unit and became responsible for other human beings.

  The next day Tamayo gave me an apology card inside which she had written: “Did you know that doctors in France once prescribed something called Dr. Raspail’s vaginal camphor cream for female hysteria?”

  No, I didn’t know. And where can I get some?

  “Remember the time I got kidnapped?” I countered, dialing the Help for Kids number. I got another answering machine with what sounded like a computerized voice. After explaining the missing-intern situation, I left my number.

  The manager came back and hurriedly explained, “Today, a FedEx arrived containing a square white envelope and a receipt for a large donation to Hale House. The square envelope was to be given to the customer who came up to the bar and answered a skill-testing que
stion. The young woman with the curly brown hair …”

  “Kathy.”

  “She got the answer right, so I gave her the envelope.”

  “What was the question?” I asked.

  “Where is it? … Who won the Arne Olsen Scholarship in 1978?” he said.

  “I won that scholarship,” I explained to Tamayo.

  “And Kathy knew that?”

  “I may have mentioned it once or twice.” Plus, I had the certificate on my office wall and it was in my ANN bio.

  “She, Kathy, was surprised to hear it was a murder mystery, but she laughed when I told her,” the manager said.

  “So it’s some publicity thing, to get media people to follow clues to something,” I said. In the competition to get media attention in New York City, PR people often sent enticing things designed to grab attention, and they often addressed you in their letters as if you were old friends. They had evidently tailor-made this gimmick to flatter me, I told Tamayo, and probably there were other media people at other places picking up clues after answering skill-testing questions about their own modest accomplishments.

  “What time was she here?”

  “That was, oh, two, three hours ago. I hadn’t been here long, a half-hour maybe, and I start work at five. Can’t be more specific than that. It’s been crazy tonight.”

  “Did she talk to anyone else? A man?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Did she leave with someone?”

  “No, I definitely saw her leave alone.”

  “Did she say anything else?” I said.

  “She asked where Chez Biftek was. I looked it up in the book for her.”

  When he went to look up the address for us, Tamayo said, “I know nothing bad is going to happen to Kathy, because my horoscope promised a fabulous night. Sally has been right on the money about everything this week. You know, I could use this in my UFO movie I’m writing—a young woman is hiding in a married man’s closet when suddenly she gets beamed up to a space ship.…” Then she said nothing. She had fugued, going to whatever planet she came from, and I fugued too, looking out the window at the spot where the Abbey Victoria used to be.