Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Susan Richards Shreve

  But it struck Sam that a person watching Plum & Jaggers on Saturday night, watching alone, someone on the fringe of madness, could have attached himself to a character like Julia, playing roles at the far edge of society—Miriam or Marigold or Flo or Beak—particularly Julia, who had defined the parameters of her own role in Plum & Jaggers years before, when she stripped to her underpants at Gallagher’s Pub. And this television viewer, obsessed with the story or with one of them, could have discovered where the McWilliamses lived and followed them to Bluemont.

  “I think we should move to another part of the city,” Sam was saying after they had parked the van in the usual lot on Sixth Avenue and were walking to their apartment on West Eleventh. “A short-term move.”

  “We’re always moving,” Oliver said.

  “We’ll keep the place on Eleventh Street, but if someone read the piece in Currents, it would be easy to find out where we live now,” Sam said.

  “You’re sounding paranoid,” Oliver said.

  “I am paranoid.”

  In the middle of February, two weeks after the fire, the McWilliamses moved to a sublet on Varick Street in Tribeca, keeping the place on West Eleventh, and got an unlisted phone number.

  The new place, smelling of turpentine and pine-seed oil and paint, belonged to an artist with no interest in cleanliness who was out of the country for six months. There were two loft bedrooms, approachable by homemade ladders, a bathroom whose toilet overflowed on their arrival, and a general odor of gas from the old stove. The place was an unlikely one for the Plum & Jaggers Comedy Troupe, out of the way, a haven for visual artists, but Sam felt lucky to have found it.

  “If someone wants to find us, they will even if we move to Juneau.” Oliver unpacked his small suitcase, hanging his clothes on the plastic hooks lining the wall of the studio, a substitute for closets. “Sam? Are you listening? Do you ever listen?” He gave Charlotte a look of annoyance intended for Sam.

  “I’m working,” Sam said.

  He had set up his books and computer on the long wooden drafting table in the middle of the main room. Beside the computer, the Oxford English Dictionary was open to “paranoia,” and on a sheet of lined paper, among his doodles, line drawings of skinny men with big heads, a single strand of hair sticking straight up from the crown, was the notation: Develop paranoia as megalomania in the character of Sam.

  “What exactly is paranoia?” Julia was asking, leaning over the table reading Sam’s notes.

  “Madness,” Oliver said.

  “Delusions of persecution,” Sam said.

  “If we all believed some stranger was after us, we’d have to rent an attic and lock ourselves in.”

  Charlotte had become an advocate for optimism, dropping her ordinary reserve in favor of positive thinking, trusting in the goodness of the human race. Sam had taken to calling her Pollyanna.

  “Someone needs a level of sanity here,” Charlotte said.

  “That’s Oliver’s job,” Sam had said.

  Julia flopped on the couch, watching Oliver unpack.

  “I don’t understand megalomania in the character of Sam,” she said.

  “I don’t even know exactly what megalomania means!” Charlotte said.

  “Delusions of grandeur.” Sam closed the dictionary, gathered his new script, folding it lengthwise. “Personal omnipotence.”

  “How can you create personal omnipotence in a character who doesn’t even speak?”

  “Silence is power.” Sam put on his jacket and threw a scarf around his neck. “I’m late,” he said, going out the door. “I’ll see you guys at the studio at three.”

  “Pretty soon we’ll be moving every day, packing up, slipping away in the dark of night to the next residence, in disguise, probably masks.” Oliver was looking in the empty fridge, checking the freezer for ice cream.

  “It’ll be fun,” Julia said.

  “It doesn’t sound like fun to me.”

  “I simply don’t think anyone is following us.” Charlotte was sitting on the kitchen counter reading The Portable Chekhov.

  “I didn’t say someone is following us,” Oliver said.

  “I did,” Julia said.

  She was certain. She imagined that one of the peculiar characters, maybe Miriam, maybe Marigold, even Beak, had slipped a hook into the scrambled brain of some calamity out in the wilderness of the world, whose eyes were fixed on Plum & Jaggers, hoping for a personal connection. And that person, whoever he was—in her mind, Julia saw a large, youngish man, possibly deranged—had followed them to Virginia and set a fire in the form of J for Julia. Now he was in New York, close by, thinking about her, probably across the street watching them from the sidewalk.

  “Did you happen to read Sam’s new script?” Oliver was asking.

  “The one with me as Miriam?” Julia asked. “That’s what we’re doing at rehearsal today.”

  “The one in which Miriam is a kleptomaniac with a fetish for yellow kittens.”

  “I read the script last night,” Charlotte said.

  “Did you like it?” Oliver asked.

  “I guess I did.” Charlotte was thoughtful. “But I’d never say anything outright to Sam if I didn’t.”

  “But what did you think of the script?” Oliver asked, finishing unpacking.

  “I thought it wasn’t as funny as he usually is.”

  “Me too. Not sweet,” Julia said. “He’s usually funny and sweet.”

  Oliver closed his suitcase and put it on a shelf in the studio.

  “That’s a worry,” he said, searching through his sports bag for running clothes.

  The move from the Village had been easy, done in a day, including the cleaning of the new apartment, which was a mess. They moved so often from place to place, traveling light, only a few clothes, a picture of them with James and Lucy, a shoreline painting of James’s, some books, the necessities. Vagabonds. The children of vagabonds. They joked about it.

  “Reading Chekhov makes me want to get married,” Charlotte said, coming to the end of “The Lady with the Dog.”

  “I feel trapped.”

  Oliver was putting on running shoes and pants.

  “It’s been harder since we started on television.” He tossed his rolled-up socks at his sister. “Julia has been feeling trapped for months. Right?”

  “That’s the way I was feeling, but ever since the fire I’m just terrified most of the time,” Julia said.

  “You’ll get over it when nothing happens,” Charlotte said. “This is temporary.”

  “I’m going running before the meeting,” Oliver said, stretching his long legs, putting on a sweatshirt. “If I’m not back in forty-five minutes, call the police.” He opened the door to the apartment. “Watch out for O’s. If you see one burning in the middle of Broadway, you’ll know I’m done for.”

  “Shut up, Oliver.” Julia sank into the worn canvas seat of a butterfly chair. “You have the sensitivity of a plastic ball.”

  The apartment in Tribeca was a fifth-floor walk-up, and Oliver ran down the steps, two at a time. At the entrance to the building, he bent over and checked his shoelaces, pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt against the wind, and stretched, his palms flat on the wall of the building. He was stretching his calf muscles, looking down at the pavement, when a young man, his age, maybe older, tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Are you Wade Bull?” the man asked, a gravelly voice, an edginess about him, graying curly hair, medium build. All of this Oliver noticed because the man had moved in so close that even in the cold air Oliver could smell his cigarette breath.

  “No, I’m not,” Oliver said.

  “You look familiar,” the man said. “I thought we might have gone to Columbia together.

  For a moment Oliver started. Perhaps they had gone to Columbia together, but he didn’t recognize t
he man, and he had taken an instant dislike to him. No need, he decided, to begin a conversation on a New York street when he had plans for running.

  “No, we didn’t,” he said, and took off, weaving through the crowds to the far edge of the sidewalk, heading uptown.

  In the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor, where the NBC studios were located, a woman, mid-thirties in a heavy cloth coat, a black hat pulled down on her forehead, was talking about Plum & Jaggers to an older silver-haired man. The couple had gotten on the elevator in the lobby with the McWilliamses but had apparently not recognized them as familiar.

  “The show is worrisome,” the woman was saying.

  “Worrisome?” The man was in a suit, no overcoat, a stack of papers in his arms, as if he worked in the building and had come from another floor.

  “Some of my friends find it too close to the edge,” the woman said.

  “That’s the point of it,” the man said.

  “But disturbing,” she said. “It’s too disturbing.”

  “Then your friends should turn off the television,” the man said, following her out the open doors of the elevator.

  Julia looked at Oliver.

  “What can I say?” he asked quietly.

  Another woman standing in a corner of the elevator was giggling.

  “I guess that woman didn’t recognize you guys,” she said.

  “I guess she didn’t,” Oliver replied.

  “So she must not watch the show very often if she didn’t recognize you. I mean, you look the same in person.”

  “Thank you,” Julia said, following her brother and sister out of the elevator.

  “Why did you thank her?” Oliver asked.

  “I don’t know,” Julia said. “I thought she was giving us a compliment.”

  Jacob Levy was standing in front of the glass doors, his arms folded across his chest.

  “You’re late.”

  “Three-ten?” Oliver asked.

  “You were supposed to be here at three.”

  He opened the glass door for them.

  Jacob Levy was the executive producer for Plum & Jaggers, assigned to the project when the show started on NBC. He was energetic and aggressive, almost frantic in the way that sometimes accompanies a kind of insistent whininess. But he was a good producer, staying current, watching the ratings carefully, attentive to changes in viewer response. He thought of Plum & Jaggers as his wings to a future in television.

  “So,” he was saying, as they followed him down the corridor to the conference room, where the three writers—Sam preferred to think of them as editors—who had been hired on the writing team were waiting, “where’s Sam?”

  “Sam should be here,” Oliver said.

  “He should be, but he’s not.” Jacob opened the door to the conference room.

  The woman called Brill, a long drink of water with pale blond spiked hair, was smoking a cigarette. Two men, Andy and Eric, younger than Julia, straight out of college on their first writing jobs, sat at one end of the table making notes on Sam’s script.

  “He left home at least two hours before we did,” Oliver was saying.

  “Maybe he had errands,” Julia said.

  “Not Sam,” Jacob said. “He’s never late.”

  They took off their coats and sat down around the table.

  “So what are we going to do?” Jacob asked, raising his hands in mock despair. “It’s Monday. You don’t even have the script finished for this Saturday night.”

  “We have it in front of us, Jacob,” Andy said.

  “It’s not a done script. We’ve got to edit before you rehearse. Right?”

  “Of course,” Andy said.

  “And we can’t exactly do that without Sam as far as I can see.”

  “Sam will be here,” Oliver said.

  Jacob looked at his watch. “Three-thirty?”

  “Let’s talk about the script. You’ve read it?” Oliver asked Jacob.

  “Yeah.”

  “I read it,” Brill said. “It’s hilarious.”

  “I loved it,” Eric said. “All those little yellow kittens that anorexic Miriam keeps in the drawer with her bikini undies.”

  “There are some problems,” Jacob said.

  “What kinds of problems?” Charlotte asked.

  “I don’t want to get into it until Sam gets here.”

  They waited, sitting in the conference room talking aimlessly, watching the clock, watching the sun fall behind the buildings.

  “Why don’t you at least call him at home,” Jacob asked.

  “We don’t have the number,” Oliver said.

  “You don’t have the number?”

  “We moved. Sam didn’t tell you?” Oliver asked.

  “You guys are always moving.”

  “We’ve moved again,” Oliver said. He looked over at Charlotte, her elbows on the table, her chin pressed into her fist; her eyes had the startled expression they got when she was afraid. He slid his foot under the table, gently kicking her ankle.

  At five, Jacob dismissed the meeting.

  “Tomorrow, early,” he said. “And when you see Sam, if you see him, ask him to call me. Same number I’ve had for eight years, in case he asks.”

  In the elevator, filled with people leaving work for the day, Julia slipped her hand in Charlotte’s.

  “Worried?” she asked.

  Charlotte looked over at Oliver.

  “Very,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SAM HAD left the apartment early for his meeting at NBC, the new script folded under his arm. The air was cold and sharp, the sun a chilly yellow but light enough to color the day, and he decided to walk uptown. He tied his wool scarf a little tighter on his neck, turned up the collar of his jacket. At the top step of his apartment building, six steps down to the sidewalk, he stopped and looked around, a habit he had taken up in the last week, a residual fear or second sense that he ought to pay particular attention to his surroundings.

  It was surprising how familiar the people passing by seemed to him, like neighbors or acquaintances, owners of the small businesses where he regularly shopped, people on his subway line he’d come to recognize. Or perhaps they were all strangers and over time the stranger simply assumes a common look and becomes a friend.

  A man caught his eye, quite an ordinary-looking man, possibly his age but prematurely gray, medium height and build, a heavy blazer, a long black scarf around his neck. Nothing about him to attract Sam’s attention except familiarity. When their eyes connected as they did, the man’s expression indicated nothing, but Sam watched him pass in front of the apartment building, watched him walk to the end of the block and turn left. Just before he disappeared from view behind the corner building, he stopped, looked back in the direction where Sam was standing, and then he was gone.

  Sam had the feeling that he knew him. Perhaps someone who had glanced off his life at school, or in the theater, or in one of the many places he had lived. But he knew him from somewhere.

  He headed uptown. The script on which he had been working before the fire featured Julia as Miriam, a girl about fourteen, a kleptomaniac with an eating disorder limited to grapes and a fetish for bringing home stray yellow cats, dressing them in baby clothes. In this particular episode Miriam is staying at the McWilliams house while her mother, recently renamed Red Azalea, is walking from New York City to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a group of like-minded white women headed southwest to reclaim their Native American heritage.

  The script was a disappointment. Sam knew that. Charlotte had said she liked the new episode, and Oliver agreed that it was fine, not his best, but nothing wrong with it. They were humoring him, and Sam had a mind to toss the manuscript in one of the trash bins along Broadway, to skip the meeting and head uptown to a coffee bar until the n
ext movie show started.

  He unbuttoned his coat and slipped the script into his inside pocket, headed down the steps at the subway station two at a time, getting off at Times Square, where the offices of the Larkin Press were located. He had thought of this excursion many times, had imagined the whole trip, straight up to the editorial offices on the sixth floor where Rebecca Frankel worked.

  It was close to three, he noted on the clock over the elevators at Larkin. In the Plum & Jaggers studio at NBC, Jacob Levy and the writing team would be gathering. They’d have read the new script in his pocket and the outlines of scripts to come and would be ready to work. Soon Oliver and Charlotte and Julia would arrive.

  The doors opened on the sixth floor, and Sam stepped up to the receptionist’s desk.

  “Rebecca Frankel, please,” he said.

  “Who can I say is here?” the receptionist asked.

  “Sam McWilliams.”

  “Is she expecting you?”

  “No, she’s not expecting me,” Sam said.

  Certainly not. She would be thunderstruck to find him in the lobby of her office. She had gone to a great deal of effort to avoid such a moment, leaving every performance of Plum & Jaggers at the curtain call, depending on postcards, for the same reason that he had avoided meeting her, for the rich perfection of a ghost lover, a consummation without a connection.

  “Her line is busy,” the receptionist said. “Have a seat in the lobby, and I’ll call you.”

  Sam sat down on a couch. There was no reading material except the Larkin spring 1998 catalogue, but he had in mind the conversation he would have with Rebecca and rehearsed it as he waited.

  “I have come for help,” he’d say, kissing her first on the temple, not the lips.

  “Help from me?” she’d ask, running her small fingers through her thick black curly hair, crossing her splendid legs. Sam thought of her as looking like Julia, her eyes deeper, wiser, her hair short. She’d be slender, but with a figure, not rail-thin as Julia was.

  “You started me on the path of comedy in that first letter you wrote me when I was ten years old,” he’d say, leaning toward her, his elbow on her crowded desk. “And now I’ve hit a wall.”