Alligators in the Trees

by Cynthia Hamilton

  As much as he appreciated her attentions, and as tempting as it was to whisk her back to his suite at the Amsterdam, something was preventing him from capitalizing on this delightful opportunity. A cloud had settled over his mind, giving him an uneasy feeling, as though he were afraid that he was being spied on. As gallantly as possible, he said goodnight, leaving Eva the Beautiful with a perplexed expression on her exquisite face.

  Though he initially wanted to walk in order to clear his head, Tobias, who had become quite aggravated by his uncharacteristic behavior, grabbed a cab to the hotel. He showered himself with recriminations and unflattering assessments as he rode the elevator to the top floor.

  By the time he unlocked the door to his suite, he was fuming and hell-bent on ridding himself of Priscilla’s bothersome clutter. Whatever weird impulse had prompted him to get involved in her private affairs had passed, and now all he wanted was to be done with it.

  As superstitious as it seemed, he was certain this cumbersome pile of papers had put him in a mental funk. Intent on dragging the whole mess to the hotel garbage chute, he wedged the boxes under his arms and grabbed as many of the bags as he could get his hands on. Unfortunately, one of the bags ripped down the length of its seam, spilling the entire contents at his feet, causing him to stumble and drop the other parcels.

  “Goddammit! Shit!” he swore, as he kicked ineffectually at the mounds of clutter. Thoroughly disgusted with himself, and certain that he was coming unhinged, he held the sides of his head while he attempted to bring himself under control. He went into the kitchen and came back with a large bottle of mineral water, which he drank in big swigs as he surveyed the damage.

  “What the fuck am I doing?” he asked out loud, though even he wasn’t sure exactly what the question was meant to address. He sank to the floor, resigned to the situation in front of him, and began to reassemble the notebooks in a haphazard pile. As he gathered them together, he was assailed by an impulse to flip through them one last time. Grudgingly, he grabbed the closest notebook and cracked it open to an random selection.

  “Mind over Matter”, he read, chuckling harshly. “I guess I could use a dose of that philosophy right about now.” He read the words silently. Then, as their impact set in, he read them out loud to test the fluency of their sound.

  I kept my good eye trained

  On the grey sky out the window

  Watching the rivulets of rain

  As his voice turned me hollow

  If it were my decision

  I wouldn’t be here at all

  But it’s one small incision

  And there’s really no time to stall

  Deliver me

  Save me from the saviors

  Hold them at bay

  Spare me their kind favors

  If this is final

  Why can’t it just be done?

  I don’t need your pity

  I just want to be left alone

  Save your wisdom for

  Some other sorry individual

  And leave me to my

  Private, custom-made hell

  I closed my eyes real tight

  Though it took a while

  Everything turned white

  I couldn’t help but smile

  I hadn’t believed him

  Yet the feeling was so light

  The world seemed less grim

  So I just gave up the fight

  I let the drops of rain wash me away

  Tobias sat for several minutes in reflective thought, as his instincts for tune and melody toyed with Priscilla’s lyrics. He personally enjoyed creating unusual patterns that defied conventional methods, which is why this particular piece interested him. Though it didn’t follow any standard for either song structure or verse, he had little difficulty picking up its natural melodic rhythm.

  He turned to the next page, where he found a more traditional structure. Feeling that his instincts had been right, he turned the page again and found one of a completely different style from the previous two. He read through it quickly, daring the words to disappoint him, but they didn’t. Once more, without effort, Tobias fell into the seductive cadence of her words.

  We knew the rains would come again

  Yet we acted so surprised when they did

  Laughing and running

  Papers over our heads

  Scrambling for refuge

  A small, crowded bar

  With few empty chairs

  I stepped out of time

  To join your fantasy

  When all along

  I thought you’d joined mine

  If I had seen it coming

  I would not have run

  For nothing tempts us like

  Life come undone

  I see now the flush of excitement

  Was caused by the circumstances

  And not by me

  The charged atmosphere

  Of the hostile locale

  The afternoon cocktails

  Prescribed by the heat

  I stepped out of time

  To join your fantasy

  When all along

  I thought you’d joined mine

  If I had seen it coming

  I would not have run

  For nothing tempts us like

  Sins we can’t out-run

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, resting the booklet against his crossed legs as he thumbed through the rest of the pages. It was all good, respectable stuff—not a trite word or cliché phrase in the lot. What had seemed to him earlier in the day as predictable and sentimental, had taken on an entirely new tone.

  It was the seeming innocence of each piece that had initially fooled him. He was also pleased to discover that each page seemed to possess at least the basic elements for an interesting tune. He glanced around him at all the similar notebooks, once again overcome by the sheer volume. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and sighed, then reached without looking for the closest unread edition.

  Tobias squinted his eyes shut after opening them to a sun-filled room. He groaned as he brought his watch close to his face, cautiously easing one eye open to read the time.

  “Ten-forty-three? Christ Almighty,” he yelped, as he awkwardly raised himself to an upright position. This proved to be a costly move, for his equilibrium was not quite up to the task yet.

  He held his head until the room stopped revolving. Slowly, he tested his vision again, this time with better results. He emitted a series of grunts and complaints as he turned over on his knees and raised his aching body off the floor with the assistance of the end table.

  Once semi-erect, he hazarded a glance around the room, which could have doubled for a disaster site without any difficulty. It was more damage than he could undo in his current condition. The most he could manage was picking up the empty scotch bottle, an effort that made his stomach lurch.

  “I’m too old for this shit,” he rightly assessed, as he moved like a zombie to the nearest telephone. “Coffee—black. A large pot. And toast—nothing on it. What? Oh…umm…rye,” he said weakly into the handset. “Do you have any applesauce? No, forget it—I don’t want a baked apple…but maybe a grapefruit—cold, please. Very cold. Yeah, that’s all.” He replaced the receiver with exaggerated care and staggered toward the nearest shower.

  By the time he had eaten his Spartan breakfast, his mind and body were in a less egregious disposition. He still didn’t quite have the wherewithal to properly tackle any housekeeping chores, but he didn’t like the idea of the maid rifling through those valuable notebooks, especially since he had spent more hours than he’d care to think of segregating them into distinct categories: those that had lyrics that were so-so, those with real potential, and those he hadn’t gotten to yet.

  He had meticulously dog-eared every page that caught his fancy, hoping to further distill the group later on. With less skill than was required, he haphazardly shoveled the few notebooks that didn’t interest him into
the shoeboxes, depositing the more promising ones and the unread ones on the sofa, as if that somehow got them out of harm’s way.

  It was almost noon before Tobias was able to focus sufficiently on the day’s agenda. The primary event was meeting Priscilla at her depressing digs at three. He needed to get his act together quickly if he were to pull that off. After a few minutes of intense concentration, he had worked out a plan to help him make his deadline.

  “This would be a whole lot easier if she had a phone like a normal person,” he groused. But then he was forced to concede she was anything but normal. Priscilla Vanderpool was one of the most prolific and gifted lyric writers he had ever encountered, and in his experience, gifted people were seldom normal.

  That was certainly the case with her, considering she slung hash for a few bucks a day, instead of capitalizing on her abundant writing talent. He shook his head as a long wheeze of a laugh escaped him. She was an eccentric, that’s what she was. So eccentric, in fact, she nearly tossed her life’s work into the incinerator. It gave him pause to think how close she had come to destroying this amazing body of work.

  Tobias picked up the phone and got down to business. After much wheedling and cajoling, his attorney agreed to have a release form drawn up and delivered to his hotel by 2:00. His next call was to the manager at his bank, informing him that he was issuing a check to one Priscilla Vanderpool for fourteen-thousand-three-hundred dollars. It was Tobias’s guess she would rush to the bank to cash it.

  After those two important details had been handled, he called and arranged for a car to pick him up at quarter to three. Although he had his own car and driver on retainer, he wasn’t about to put the wife on alert that he was holing up in some hotel less than two miles from home. He was pushing his luck with this disappearing act and soon he would need to come up with a more permanent fix. But one task at a time, he cautioned himself, mentally dragging himself back to the issue at hand.

  “Okay—release form, money, driver…I guess it’s all settled.”

  It was only quarter to one by this time, and now he had the formidable prospect of trying to fill the next two hours. He was too strung out from his all-night read-a-thon to face any more of Priscilla’s lyrics, and he didn’t really feel like hanging out in his spacious yet suddenly claustrophobic suite until the car came to fetch him. Out of habit, he camouflaged himself per the usual and left the hotel, merging seamlessly into midday Manhattan.

  Fifteen

  Priscilla had lain awake the entire night, tossing and turning. The events of the past two days had left her far too agitated and confused for sleep. As the sun rose, she drifted into a tormented slumber, which lasted a little more than an hour and left her feeling drained and disoriented. It chagrined her that Brawny had figured prominently throughout her brief spells of sleep. Groggy and out of sorts, she swung her legs out of bed in preparation for getting up. But she found herself just sitting there, lacking the required impetus to get on with her day.

  She rubbed her temples as the same thoughts that had stolen her sleep mounted a fresh offensive. Her apathy made her vulnerable to the demons currently hounding her, and one by one, or sometimes in combination, they pranced through her brain, each vying for the chance to drive her mad.

  Every issue was a valid concern that she going to have to face, sooner rather than later. Giving in, she shuffled her quandaries as if they were a deck of cards, trying to put them in some hierarchal order, a task that made her feel like a cat chasing its own tail.

  “All right,” she said, hoping that hearing the words out loud would give them more clarity. “There’s moving to Florida, right? Ugh. There’s Phil. Double ugh. And there’s the matter of selling all my songs for enough money for a good start in my new life. Okay, that all works, in theory. Except for the Phil part, and the fact that I sold my most personal thoughts to a famous stranger.”

  On top of those minor glitches, there was the nagging suspicion that she didn’t possess the resolve to forge a new life. Such a brave move would require making decisions and having the commitment to carry them through, two attributes she could hardly claim as her strong suits. She rubbed her eyes vigorously, then began madly scratching herself as though she had fleas.

  “When Tobias Jordan comes today—if he comes today—I’ll just tell him that I’ve changed my mind and I want my stuff back. I’ll have to return the money he gave me, of course. Damn, I wish I hadn’t spent so much on that dress. I wonder if I can return it.”

  She reached for the dress and inspected it for damage, sniffing the armpits for obvious odors. It was in fairly good shape, a little wrinkled, but she could fix that. She hadn’t taken the tag off, the fear of something like this forcing her to endure the scratchiness of it on her back throughout her evening with Phil. But it was a good thing she hadn’t cut it off, for she could hardly afford those kinds of splurges if she was going to run off to the Florida Keys without Tobias Jordan’s money.

  But concern number one had a sub-dilemma: was she really ready—mentally and emotionally—to abandon everything and everyone she knew in favor of a complete unknown? It didn’t take long to answer that. There was no person, place or thing that she wasn’t ready to say goodbye to forever, nor did she think there was anyone who would be devastated by her departure. Except maybe Phil.

  Priscilla sighed heavily and lurched off the bed, padding into the kitchen on bare feet, unrealistically hoping to scare up enough coffee grounds to make a decent cup of coffee. Her findings were even more disappointing than she had suspected, as she had somehow blotted out the clean sweep she had made of the apartment the day before. She flung open each cupboard, confirming that she had tossed out everything, right down to the salt.

  “Crap,” she groaned as she sank onto the battered chrome and vinyl dinette chair, burying her head in her hands. “Well, I guess moving makes sense,” she said with a sad laugh. She idly toyed with the ends of her hair as her ever-present thoughts began needling her again.

  “So, fine—I’m moving to Florida. What other plan do I have? Okay, that’s settled. So, what about Phil?” She sighed. Thinking of Phil always made her sigh. “That should tell me something,” she said, nibbling on a well-chewed nail.

  She became aware of a persistent urge lurking on the periphery of her mind. Out of habit, one ingrained in her since youth, she cast about for a pen and notepad, the way a smoker searches for cigarettes and matches, slavishly bending to corporal needs. She caught herself as she stood, irked by her slip. She felt the impulse to vent her frustrations, but there wasn’t a single scrap of paper remaining in the apartment.

  She lowered herself back onto the chair, feeling vaguely alarmed by the corner she had painted herself into. What had she done? Was her subconscious systematically trying to sabotage every aspect of her life?

  Why shouldn’t she continue to write songs? Everyone needed some sort of outlet. Was there really any harm in what she had been doing all these years? No, there wasn’t. So why had she been seconds away from destroying the work that had kept her sane for so long? She didn’t like the implication.

  “Maybe I should just quit,” she said glumly, though surviving the mother of all nicotine withdrawals would’ve been easier.

  For all the time spent trying to make sense of her actions over the past forty-eight hours, she had only come up with two concrete resolutions: moving to Florida, and returning the expensive dress, though she still didn’t feel one hundred percent sold on the former. She was consoled by the idea of calling off her deal with the roving rock star, though she was half afraid she wouldn’t be given the chance.

  In the event that he was a no-show, she’d have to try and come up with some scheme to get her lyrics back. But how the hell could she track them down living in Florida? She lowered her head to the table top, banging it slowly against the hard Formica surface. All this round and round was making her feel crazy. After the last bounce, she turned her head and let her face rest against the cool tabletop.
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  “Okay, no point sitting around this place till three o’clock,” she said, pushing herself up and staggering to the bathroom. After a quick shower and a reassuring recount of her nest egg, Priscilla bagged the expensive, slightly used dress and left the apartment.

  “Didn’t like the way it looked on me when I got it home,” Priscilla told the clerk with deliberate casualness. She took the cash refund and stuffed it into her pocket, feeling better already. Now she could return all of Tobias’s down payment in exchange for her lyrics, and she no longer felt as though she had squandered any money on her miserable date with Phil.

  Exiting Bloomingdale’s, she was forced to concede that her experimental ‘non-date’ with Phil hadn’t really been so terrible. It definitely had its moments, but as she thought it over, she found she actually enjoyed seeing a different side of him. There was really only so much you can learn about a person while serving them plates of eggs or waffles.

  Without their previous roles of waitress and customer to define their conversations, she had been able to think of him as something other than a man with a high tolerance for bad food. At least he hadn’t mooned over her all evening, which was a tremendous improvement. Aside from the gushing compliment in the beginning, he had managed to keep a leash on any unwarranted flattery.

  With that kind of distraction out of the way, Priscilla was able to get a better idea of what lay beneath his cultured exterior. Until last night, she wouldn’t have believed it was possible to ruffle his precisely arranged feathers.

  Though she felt cruel admitting it, she had actually enjoyed seeing his anguish over the collapse of his famous project. Expressing his anger and shame over the much-publicized event brought him more on par with mere mortals like her.

  It was also refreshing to learn that the light of happiness did not always shine brightly in his hopeful eyes. She had never fully trusted anyone who appeared forever cheerful; it just didn’t seem natural. She’d take someone with a few dents in their chrome over a pristine model any day of the week, not that she was in the mood to ‘take’ anyone at the present, least of all Phil.