Purgatory Gardens

by Peter Lefcourt

  “I mean, here I am, sixty . . . and I’m still making bad choices with men. You’d think I would have learned to recognize the danger signs by now.”

  “You’re sixty-seven.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s in your SAG paperwork. We’ve got to start off with the truth. Here in this room, at least.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Age is just a number, Marcy.”

  “Maybe for shrinks it is, but not for actresses.”

  “When’s the last time you acted?”

  “You mean, like a job?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know . . . a year, maybe a year and a half ago . . .”

  “Then why isn’t your insurance current?”

  “Okay, two years, maybe three . . .”

  “So if that’s the case, can we really say that you are still an actress?”

  “Why not? How does it hurt?”

  Janet Costanza gave her the look that Marcy hated. The therapist held her eyes and said, without words: Let’s cut the shit, shall we?

  “Okay, fine. So I’m not sixty, and I’m not an actress. What am I then?”

  “You’re a sixty-seven-year-old woman, living in Palm Springs and doing something positive with your life, I hope.”

  “Jesus. You make me sound like a statistic.”

  “I just want us to work within the real world, Marcy.”

  Marcy nodded her compliant nod—a nod that meant you’re right, and fuck you for being right.

  “Okay, so tell me about these men that you’re involved with.”

  “I’m not really involved with them. I mean, not yet.”

  “Okay, so what are you with them?”

  “I’m considering them.”

  “For what?”

  “For involvement.”

  “Uh-huh . . .”

  Marcy leaned back into the spongy cushions of the wicker couch that faced Janet’s rocking chair. She didn’t want to talk; she wanted to be comforted. She wanted a cup of chamomile tea, a good cry, and a prescription for Zoloft. But she knew that there was no way of getting out of this house that lightly. So she let go.

  “I need a man in my life. Someone to take care of me. I’m sorry if that’s anti-feminist or something, but it’s what I need. I’m not sure I can make it alone. I don’t have enough money. Or enough strength. I’m frightened at night that someone is going to break into my condo. I’m starting to have trouble driving at night. I’m constipated. I haven’t had sex in so long I can’t even remember what it feels like. I’m scared shitless of getting old and sick and having no one to take care of me, and winding up on the street like a bag lady . . .”

  It had come pouring out of her like some underground lava stream that had been bottled up for a long time. And with it came the tears. Sobs, not tears. Her body shook with the convulsions. Janet let her go on for five minutes before saying (softly, for a change), “Didn’t that feel good?”

  Marcy sniffled and nodded simultaneously.

  “The psyche cries for the same reason that the stomach vomits. It’s a protective mechanism. It helps you get rid of the poison. And that’s the first step to healing. So . . . now tell me about these men.”

  Marcy grabbed handfuls of tissues from the box sitting purposefully beside the couch, crumpled them in her hand.

  “They’re both my neighbors at Paradise Gardens. I almost said Purgatory Gardens. That’s what Stanley used to call it. Remember Stanley, my gay neighbor?” She smiled dimly at the memory.

  Janet nodded. She had the ability, like most good therapists, to remember the supporting characters in a patient’s life.

  “They’re both, I don’t know, about my age—maybe a little older. It’s hard to tell with men. They age better than we do. Fuck them, right?”

  The therapist actually smiled—a rare occurrence. Janet was maybe a few years younger than her and, as far as Marcy knew, not with a man. There were no family pictures in the office, except for her dog. Marcy had gotten a gay vibe from Janet, but she couldn’t be sure. Maybe she was asexual. Maybe she was a nun or a cross-dresser . . . but what the fuck difference did it make?

  “Anyway, so both of them are interested in me. I mean, I’m pretty sure they are. And what’s really kind of cute is that they’re competing. It’s actually funny—they’re like two dogs trying to hump my leg.”

  “Have you had sex with either of them?”

  “No!”

  “How come?”

  “What do you mean, how come? You think I sleep with every man I meet?”

  “You have a pretty good batting average, Marcy.”

  “Thank you,” Marcy frowned.

  “Just calling ’em as I see ’em.”

  Janet and her goddamn baseball analogies. It was hard enough for Marcy to get her insides vacuumed without having her problems translated into situations in a sport she barely understood.

  “So I hired a private detective to look into these guys.”

  “Really? Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

  “There’s a lot at stake.”

  “I don’t understand. You hired a detective to check a man before you sleep with him?”

  “For chrissakes, no!”

  The process was clearly working. The therapist was getting her prepped for the transference process, in which she became her mother and Marcy became the spiteful fifteen-year-old daughter she was feeling like at the moment.

  “Then what’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is . . . the rest of my life . . .” And she started to cry again. By the time she was calm again, she had depleted the Kleenex box.

  “Okay,” Janet said in her most soothing voice, which wasn’t all that soothing. “Let’s take it from the top. It’s the seventh inning—all right, we’ll say the bottom of the sixth—and you’re already worrying about the ninth. The ninth inning is three innings away. A lot can happen in that time.”

  “Can we lose the baseball metaphors, please?”

  “You’re creating anxiety about issues that may not even exist.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t. But you haven’t told me anything yet that I see is a problem. Once there is a problem, we can address it. Look, I can’t do anything about the fact that you’re sixty-seven and alone. Now, tell me, what are you really anxious about? Beside the fact that you’re going to die someday. Because, let me let you in on a secret, we all are.”

  Marcy glanced at the clock. There were eleven minutes left. Time to cut to the chase. “Okay, according to the detective, both of these men have some sort of shady past. One of them may even be in witness protection. Sammy, the Jew—he claims to be a retired cement company owner, but I don’t buy it. And he may not even be Jewish. I mean, what kind of Jew is in witness protection? The other guy is an art dealer. He’s African. Black. My parents would turn over in their graves. Apparently he was involved in some weird stuff in France in the 1980s. There’s no way of knowing. And here’s the thing—both these guys have no ex-wives, or families, or anything. I think they’re both bullshit artists.”

  Janet sat in her rocking chair digesting this information. To her credit, she didn’t rock. But she did nod her head slowly, as if she were sifting the information through her various filters.

  “Okay. Worst-case scenario, the Jew’s an ex-mobster and the African was some sort of warlord, or gunrunner, or whatever. And here they both are, living in Palm Springs, your neighbors. They’re interested in you. Romantically, we hope. Or at least sexually. So you succumb to their charms, go to bed with one, maybe both, and it’s nice. You have a good time. You haven’t forgotten how to make love. You like both of them. It’s an embarrassment of riches. What’s so bad about that? I’ve got women in here younger than you who would give anything to have one man, not to mention two, interested in them. See it as win/win. Pick the guy who takes the best care of you. See where it goes. Who knows? Maybe you’ll keep both of them on the hook. Sou
nds pretty good to me. You ask me, you’re at the plate with a 3-0 count. You’re in the catbird seat.”

  Marcy plowed her way home through heavy traffic on the San Bernardino Freeway, without a prescription for Zoloft. You don’t need medication; you need new lingerie. As usual, she left Janet’s feeling worse than she’d felt before the appointment. This isn’t a massage, this is work. If your muscles don’t hurt after a workout, you’re not doing it right.

  She decided that she would try to enjoy her life in the catbird seat, wherever the fuck that was. There was a Victoria’s Secret outlet store in Palm Desert. She’d stop off on the way home and see what she could find. Though it didn’t look like either of these guys needed much enticement.

  The question was—which one of them should she try out first? Though they were entirely different types, they both dialed about the same number on her chemistry gauge. Neither one was Brad Pitt, but she had to be realistic. Brad wasn’t on her dance card. In her late sixties—God, she hated that number—she was looking at guys her own age, and likely older, who might be interested in a woman of mature charms.

  Marcy walked out of the Victoria’s Secret outlet with a push-up bra and a lacy peignoir with a pair of sheer panties. She passed on a thong. Not even on a good day. At the Fragrance outlet, she sprayed her wrist with a dozen scents before settling on a two-ounce bottle of Lady Gaga’s “Fame.”

  Then she stopped off in town for a bottle of Piper-Heidsieck and some chocolates stuffed with truffles. All in, she had almost two hundred dollars invested in this seduction, and she still hadn’t decided which of the two and when. She would let circumstances determine the outcome. The first one who got in touch with her, she would invite over for dinner.

  As it turned out, neither of them called that day or the next. They weren’t at the pool or in the exercise room. It was raining on and off, one of those November rains that hits the desert just as people were starting to forget that it ever rained at all. She began to wonder if they were out of town. There she was, all dressed up and no place to go.

  And then, of course, when they finally got in touch, it was within fifteen minutes of each other. Didier invited her for a Scrabble game, and Sammy invited her to go shopping with him. The times conflicted, as if they had done it on purpose, as if they had each other’s brain tapped and knew when they were going to make a move.

  The next day, Sammy knocked on her door around four in the afternoon. She had just gotten back from taking Klaus for a walk and was in sweatpants and no makeup. It was not the right moment for the champagne or the chocolates, and, as it turned out, he had come on business. He had some sort of construction contract for a new patio deck that he wanted her to co-sign.

  She signed it. Why not? She didn’t have any money anyway, so what difference did it make if someone went after her? But it made her even more aware that he seemed to have buried his past. You would think he could get someone to co-sign the contract for him without his having to hit up a retired actress—or, as Janet would say, a sixty-seven-year-old woman living in Palm Springs, trying to do something constructive with her life.

  That night she went to a karaoke bar with Didier and did a Peggy Lee version of “Fever” that killed. But when she got home, she was tired and didn’t feel up to sex. She pleaded a headache and didn’t invite him in. And then, ten minutes later, she regretted it.

  She went to bed, resolved that she would wake up the next morning, flip a coin, and invite the winner for Piper-Heidsieck, chocolates, and a private showing of her Victoria’s Secret collection. She was tired of all this equivocation. One of them, at least, would be road-tested.

  But the next morning, before she could even flip a coin, let alone put her makeup on, she was woken by a loud knock on her door. Two Palm Springs police detectives were standing there.

  “Miss Gray?” said the thin one, who resembled Jack Webb in a herringbone sports jacket that she wouldn’t have let Klaus sleep on.

  For a moment she thought of denying it, looking the way she did, but they obviously knew who she was.

  “Something the matter?”

  They told her. Ten minutes later she was back in bed, hugging Klaus, sick with worry. There was a killer on the loose, murdering animals. If she had to use the Töten! command, she was ready.

  Both of her suitors showed up at the emergency meeting that evening to discuss the security problem at Paradise Gardens. Sammy was flip about the dead cat, which she found totally inappropriate, and Didier moved up a notch. Not that she was in any frame of mind to break out the Piper-Heidsieck, in any event.

  The police had suggested that the target might not have been the cat, but rather an occupant of the condominium complex. How creepy was that? As if she didn’t have enough on her mind these days without having to worry about poisoned take-out food. A community watch deal was proposed, with the tenants taking turns patrolling the grounds, looking for suspicious activity.

  “What kind of suspicious activity?” someone asked.

  “Anything out of the ordinary,” Ethel Esmitz replied.

  “You mean, like take-out pizza?” Sammy asked.

  Again with the sarcasm. She was starting to favor Didier, until he moved into the doghouse, along with Sammy, by speaking out against the tenant patrol.

  “We are not trained law-enforcement people, n’est-ce pas?”

  This was no time for French skepticism.

  The motion passed on a voluntary basis, and Marcy was assigned the 4 to 6 p.m. shift, along with Chris and Edie.

  She took Klaus with her for protection—more from the swingers than from the murderer. As they patrolled the grounds looking for suspicious activity, Edie asked if she wanted to join them in the sauna. These people never gave up.

  “Chris and I smoke a joint, go in there and unwind. By the time we’re done, we’re seriously mellow.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Come join us some time. And bring Sammy, or Didier. We’ll have a little party.”

  Marcy nodded rhetorically, hoping they would drop the subject.

  “So which one of them are you doing?” Chris asked her. “Edie thinks it’s the Jew, but my money’s on both.”

  “Neither of them, thank you very much, Chris.”

  “Right. . . .” The two of them shared a look.

  “It’s none of your business, anyway,” Marcy said, petulance in her voice.

  “Hey, sorry. No offense meant, babe. It’s just, you know, a looker like you . . . I mean, it’s a shame not to share the wealth.”

  “We believe in corporal communism. You know, from each according to his means to . . . whatever,” Edie said, and the two of them laughed loudly. They were clearly stoned.

  Over the next two hours, most of which was spent sitting by the pool listening to Chris and Edie talk about their sybaritic lifestyle, the only suspicious activity they observed turned out to be someone’s new cleaning lady leaving the laundry room. When they asked her for i.d., she dropped the basket of clothes she was carrying and ran. It turned out that the woman was an illegal Honduran who thought they were the immigration police.

  The next day, Sammy called to find out if she were all right. She was touched by his concern and moved him out of the doghouse.

  “You looked kind of upset last night.”

  “I was. You know, it’s upsetting, this thing with the cat.”

  “Yeah. Anything I can do?”

  For a moment, she thought about inviting him for champagne and chocolates, but decided against it. She had gained three pounds since she had bought the peignoir, compulsively eating junk food to deal with her anxiety, and she could use a mani-pedi, not to mention a bikini wax.

  “Thanks, Sammy. That’s sweet of you, but I’m a little under the weather. Tell you what, though, why don’t you come over for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday? I’ll invite Didier. And Charlie Berns, too.”

  He said he would, but there was a lack of enthusiasm in his voice, as if he’d had something e
lse in mind. So had she. But if she really was going to plunge back in after all this time, she wanted it to be under optimal conditions. She wanted to be thin, or at least thinner, and well-coiffed. Maybe she’d go for a landing strip. The thought of getting her pubic area trimmed into a narrow rectangle made her laugh so heartily that she actually felt better. Why not get a full Brazilian, while she was at it? She was in the fucking catbird seat, right?

  Marcy decided to cook up a storm for Thanksgiving. It had been a while since she had been motivated to bother making something special. Too lazy to cook for one person, her evening meals consisted largely of take-out or deli counter dishes in front of Jeopardy. Not since Stanley was alive had she spent any appreciable amount of time in her kitchen.

  She had learned a lot from her former neighbor, who would teach her tricks he had learned during his student year in France. It’s not the meat; it’s the sauce. Just like French women. No tits, no ass, but they know how to garnish themselves. God, she missed him.

  The boys showed up within two minutes of one another, bearing gifts. Sammy and Charlie brought wine, and Didier presented her with one of the sculptures from his gallery.

  “An authentic Yoruba talisman,” he told her. “It will bring you good luck.”

  “I could use it,” she said.

  “Now, now, we have much to be thankful for,” Didier tried to reassure her.

  “Right,” Sammy quipped. “We could be starving in Africa.”

  “Not everyone is starving in Africa, Samee.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s the per capita income of Darfur?”

  “Hey, guys, this is a day to give thanks, not to bicker.”

  Marcy suggested that they join hands around the table and give thanks before they started eating. The three men reluctantly agreed, and they spent a moment pretending to be thankful for something—that is, everyone but Marcy, who decided that she really was thankful to have three men around her table for Thanksgiving dinner.

  Sammy carved. Beautifully. His manicured hands sliced through the turkey with dexterity. On his right index finger, a large ruby reflected the light from the candles that Marcy had put in the sterling silver candlesticks that she hadn’t used since the days of her marriage to Neil.