by Bill Scheft
That was the problem. There was no cat. The Fecters were allergic, which, with a name like Fecter, shouldn’t surprise anyone. This was a plant-watering/mail pick-up job for Sheila. The Fecters were in Boca for the entire month of January, like all good Fecters. They had left everything behind, including the cat they did not own. Wrong pad.
Sheila would be honest for the last time. “Ah, I don’t have a cat.” “Brad” was suitably relieved. “Thank God,” he said. “I’m allergic.”
The sex was what you might expect from and with a Wall Street guy: A lot of excitement at the very beginning and very very end and no real credible explanation for what went on or why. The only thing that disappointed Sheila was her own level of cool detachment. Not nearly enough, but that would take some practice. She did appreciate being with someone who didn’t pass out after he came. Except for the conversation, which seemed to be required, it was a nice change.
“Now I’ll have to take you out for a much more expensive meal than I’d planned,” said “Brad” while searching for his second sock.
Sheila leveraged. “No. Just give me the hundred dollars and get yourself a slice.”
“What?”
“Come on,” Sheila said. “Alexa told you I was a hooker.”
“No, never.”
“Well, then. I must not have been able to resist myself,” she said, and laughed that great laugh. Another line much better than “I walked into a door.”
That was it for “Brad,” who could now answer yes to the question “Have you ever gone to a prostitute?” on those yearly “Thirty-five things to do before you’re thirty-five” surveys in Esquire. But “Brad” would turn out to be “John Zero,” the original source referral to the dozen or so guys who Sheila judiciously scheduled over the next six-plus years, no more than twice a week. Three times during the holidays or if she wanted to do some remodeling in her apartment. Her real apartment.
She kept the whole operation low-key and her appearance decidedly unescortworthy. Sweaters. Everyday slacks. Low heels. Just enough make-up for any straight guy to swear she never wore makeup. After six, she might throw on a scarf or refresh whatever perfume lay around whatever empty apartment was in play. She’d put on one of three stylish trenchcoats (white cotton, chocolate suede, black leather), her only real surrender to glamour. And then Sheila Manning would leave 301 East Sixty-fifth and go outside to wait, looking like the best-looking over-thirty-five woman headed for the supermarket, which she might have been, or the best-looking cleaning woman on Second Avenue, which she was. All rendezvous took place outside 301 East Sixty-fifth. In front of whatever Northern Italian restaurant was Grand Opening! on the corner. In front of the Beekman. In front of Tower Chemists. Sheila Manning never buzzed a client up to an apartment. Too Butterfield-8. She walked him from wherever they met to the service entrance at 301 East Sixty-fifth Street and they took the service elevator, usually riding with some delivery guy from China Fun or the Regency Deli. The doormen were never directly involved, but she tipped them anyway because that’s what you do, even if you ain’t a hooker.
After “Brad,” her fee jumped to $250 and stayed there, with no cost of living increases. For $250, you got two jumps or two hours, whoever comes first. That line, “whoever comes first,” always received the uncomfortable “Hah, ho, heh, ihhh” quasi-chuckle from every first-timer who thought he had an idea what the arrangement would be. Sheila liked uncomfortable. The uncomfortable man was the man who did not stay two hours. Which meant just about everyone. Sure, there was the occasional Wall Street wanker who’d realized he had stumbled onto this victimless Valhalla. That he could get laid and forfeit the second go-round for a diatribe about his boss or his wife or the less empathetic hookers in town. When she sensed the end of sex and the beginning of real intimacy—the yakking—Sheila usually suggested they head out for a drink. No sense taking complete advantage of 301 East Sixty-fifth Street. She’d come back to clean up the next day. The drink, by the way, never lasted longer than the end of Hour Number Two. Never.
Guys. The poor things. So misunderstood. All of them equally and in the exact same fashion. What were the odds? Ten years ago, Sheila had been at Catch a Rising Star with Jerry and she’d heard a woman comic do a bit about how you know you’re dating a married guy when he has the Band-aid around his ring finger. “Cut myself shaving,” the woman comic had the guy saying. And then she added the aside, in her own disdain, “Yeah, my razor doesn’t understand me.” Sheila loved that line, “My razor doesn’t understand me,” like she loved few lines. Shit! That would have been perfect to say at the Roosevelt Emergency Room. “How’d you get the black eye and the broken nose?”/“My razor doesn’t understand me.” Then the doctor would have said, “Huh?” He would have misunderstood! It was too perfect. Why hadn’t she thought of that? Well, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going back to a fucking hospital ever again. Not even as a fucking visitor. Until this.
Five years of free blow jobs to Morton Martin Spell represented his reward for being unlike any man who had been in Sheila’s life. Other than that, they meant absolutely nothing.
Sheila was not in the habit of lugging around too many memories from childhood, but going to work one October day with her mother at age five survived like a playground rhyme. She sat quietly at two strange tables, one eye on her crayoned lore, the other on her mother, humming some vague Irishy trill as she glided from room to room, the tumult of her antiseptic wake eventually settling down to the glassy, crisp stillness of clean. Helga McCall made two promises to her daughter: If she sat quietly and watched, the next time, she could be her mother’s helper. And if she sat quietly and watched, at four, when Mr. Spell’s apartment was finished, they would cheat dinner and head for Schrafft’s on Fifty-eighth and Madison. The only thing a five-year-old knows about Schrafft’s is that grown-ups become five-year-olds when talking about Schrafft’s. Diligent, reserved people, people never known to exaggerate, people like Helga McCall, end up saying things like “Schrafft’s is a magic place where angels make the best ice cream in the whole wide world.”
By three, Helga was giving ETD updates. Sheila sat with her hands folded and eyes closed, trying not to look at the clock she couldn’t read. Her mother began trying to recite the roster of ice cream flavors as she wiped down the roomy insides of the single man’s refrigerator. At either quarter to Schrafft’s or half-past peppermint stick, the fumbling around the front door lock started. Helga McCall let it go on long enough before saving another false alarm call to Trafalgar Locksmiths. She flicked the knob to the right and Morton Martin Spell came half-tumbling in like the cop who hit crosstown traffic and just missed the big vice raid. He came to a complete stop and returned to his original locked and upright position two feet past the narrow hallway to the bedroom. Eddie Foyer Jr.
“Well, that was too easy,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Spell,” said Helga. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Nor should you, and I apologize.” Mort Spell saw Sheila for the first time. “I, I, hope I didn’t make you look bad in front of your supervisor.”
“This is my daughter, Sheila.”
“Yes, um…Well, I shan’t be here long. You deserve an explanation for this behavior. I need, what I need is both those items sitting on this desk here and then I’ll be out of your hair…. By the way, you’re looking awfully well today.”
Sheila marveled at how this man treated her mother like he was working for her. And Sheila loved how he looked at her when he saw her looking at him. Frightened. It was a nice change.
“We’re going to Schrafft’s,” Sheila blurted.
“Don’t rub it in, kid,” said Morton Martin Spell.
“Sheila, don’t bother Mr. Spell.”
“My mommy says Schrafft’s is a magic place where angels make the best ice cream in the whole wide world.”
“The angels make a pretty damn good hot dog, too, kid.” Mort whisked a five-dollar bill out of his pocket and stuffed it in She
ila’s crayon box.
“Mr. Spell, please don’t do that.”
Morton Martin Spell, dually startled by Sheila’s beam and her mother’s chagrin, grabbed a pair of glasses and a manila envelope and rushed for the front door. His front door. He poked his head back in, after he’d come up with something.
“I’ve owed her that money since the end of the war,” he said. “Well, good-bye.”
The door slammed and Sheila and her mother both giggled like twin five-year-olds. Twin five-year-olds headed for Schrafft’s.
She would return to the Guggenheim Pavilion tomorrow during visiting hours. Around lunchtime. She’d bring a couple of hot dogs. Good ones.
13
“You the nephew?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Spell will be discharged Wednesday morning.”
“Okay.”
“Ten A.M.”
“Fine.”
“You can pick him up then.”
“Okay.”
“Or we can put him in a cab.”
“No, I’ll be here.”
“You’re very brave.”
College Boy would ask the nurse at the admitting desk what that last remark meant later, when he got up the nerve. He knocked on Mort’s door with his cast.
“Mort?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Those bastards roughed you up too, kid?”
“No, I…” The “two cops hassling a black kid” line would definitely be inappropriate here. Definitely.
“Kid, we’re going over the wall. Get my clubs.”
“Mort, you’re being released Wednesday. And you don’t have any clubs.”
“Right. They’re being regripped. I should have them back Wednesday.”
“You’re being released Wednesday.”
“Well, that worked out quite well, didn’t it?”
The first thing College Boy noticed was the tie. In a room which by its very whiff made the least convincing argument that its occupant was recovering, one would be hard pressed to find anything sicker than Mort Spell’s tie. College Boy couldn’t keep his eyes off it, which worked out because it made it seem like he was listening intently. Worked out quite well.
There are many cheap analogies you can make, and feel free to make them, but let’s just say this: If Morton Martin Spell’s tie was in a museum, several groups would be out front protesting the exhibit.
When did I buy this thing, College Boy asked himself, Friday? Yes, Friday. Today was Monday. Still. How can you do that much damage to one article of clothing in three days? But to be fair, the tie hadn’t really been an article of clothing since shortly before lunch on Saturday. It had become a mottled swatch of bacteria basking on a field of defiance.
Mort’s tie was now sheathed in plastic, which would be replaced after every meal, just as soon as Mort’s hands could be strapped down. What had been a serviceable four-in-hand was now distilled to a straining polyp of silk that appeared trapped by Mort’s neck rather than vice versa. It was a knot which could only have emerged from a struggle and could only be removed by court order or decapitation. Okay, maybe not decapitation, but had the Guggenheim Pavilion fourth-floor staff voted, that would have been the overwhelming write-in winner.
Two male orderlies finished cello-wrapping and left just after Mort could begin to try and tip them. And just before he said, “How about those folks at the Saran Wrap Company?”
“Mort, you can’t be comfortable,” College Boy said.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were talking philosophically.”
“I was talking about your tie.”
“Because if you’re talking philosophically, I agree.” Mort cleared his cordoned throat. His mouth would frequently go dry from whatever they’d been giving him to detox from the Valium. This old school noose couldn’t help. “No man can ever be comfortable. No free-thinking man anyway. I don’t know about those jackasses at the University Club, who think I must be mistaken when I say ‘Bring me another glass so I can get rid of all this goddamn ice.’ Or Red Auerbach, who can eat—”
“Mort, the tie. It’s too tight. It looks like you want people to ask you about your tracheotomy.”
“I don’t, but if they had some manners, they might ask.”
“You didn’t get a tracheotomy.”
“Well,” said Mort. “That worked out quite well, didn’t it?” He put his hand to the side of his mouth and pointed to the aide, another ample black woman who would have had to have been in another room to be paying less attention to him. “Knows nothing about track and field,” he whispered.
“See, I think—”
“You know Bob Creamer?” Mort interrupted. “He wrote the fine Babe Ruth book I loaned you?”
“Robert Creamer, yeah. That was thirteen years ago. I gave it back to you. And I gave you his book on Stengel for Christmas. In ’87, I think.”
“He wrote that book on Stengel?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s led a perfect life.”
“So?”
“You made your point. I stand corrected,” admitted Morton Martin Spell.
“Huh?”
“I’m pretty sure he could be comfortable.”
College Boy asked the aide to leave and figured he had about an hour. To think he had any more time would be to admit he had nowhere to go on a late Monday afternoon, and he hadn’t had nowhere to go on a late Monday afternoon since March. So he had an hour. He checked the watch he couldn’t wear. Maybe he’d have a friend draw a watch on the cast, like Dreyfuss in The Big Fix. Who did he know who could draw?
For fifteen minutes Mort talked, mostly about how he wasn’t going to the Summer Olympics in Barcelona because he didn’t feel like getting shoved by “those cretins” from NBC in Spain. Australia, well, that would be a different story. He didn’t mind getting shoved in Australia. Better weather, nicer people, great golf courses, and they didn’t have television there yet.
“Mort, I think they have television in Australia.”
“You might want to check on that, kid.”
Television had not come to the island continent when Morton Martin Spell was there for the 1956 Games. And that’s where he was now. Melbourne. November, 1956. Just about the furthest point on the globe from a bed in the Guggenheim Pavilion. (Actually, the furthest point would be Perth, Australia’s western port, but Mort had no business there. Then or now.)
Mort looked past College Boy and saw runners easing into blocks for the first heat of the first event of the decathlon, the hundred meters. There was “the fine Negro” Milton Campbell, silver medalist at Helsinki and back in the decathlon only after he’d failed to qualify for the 110-meter hurdles. Young Rafer Johnson, the world record holder nursing an injured left knee, would be in the next heat. So would Johnson’s teammate from UCLA, C. K. Yang, now wearing the elegant white singlet of Taiwan. Due up to the starting line were a couple of Russians, Kuznyetsov and Palu. But Mort was savvy enough to know if either was going to be a factor, it would always be the Soviet with the more difficult last name. So, he’d keep his eye and eraser on Vassily Kuznyetsov. He and Palu were keeping each other company in a remote corner of the infield, just past the pole vault runway. “Their heads are down, like the world hates them.” Thirty-five years later, Mort still spoke in the present tense.
The decathlon is ten events sadistically spread out over two days. Mort made it through recounting the first five events in just under thirteen minutes before falling dead asleep.
The nurse at the admitting desk gave College Boy a pair of scissors.
“You gonna cut that tie off, aren’t you?”
“He’s asleep now.”
“You’re very brave,” she said. Again.
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“Honey, did you get a tetanus shot?”
“No.”
“Then,” the admitting nurse laughed, “you can’t do this.” She called behind her, “Tamara, take the
desk for a second. We’re going to circumcise Dracula’s tie.”
Now everybody was laughing. The admitting nurse, Sara, told College Boy the story of Dracula. He’d bitten his first nurse Saturday morning, when she tried to take the tie off before breakfast. “It was more snap than bite, with no real breakage of skin,” she said, “and that’s when we decided to cover it with plastic and not deal with it.
“Now with the orderly, Francis, there he got freaky. They had to get the tie off Sunday night, before the surgery. And Francis, he’s always so nice, very quiet. Your uncle calls him ‘Oscar.’ He started to take Mr. Spell’s tie off, and then I hear him yelling and calling for Preston, the other orderly.” By now Sara had grabbed onto College Boy to keep her propped up and convulsed.
“Preston comes running, and Francis walks out of Mr. Spell’s room. He keeps wiping his hand on his whites. There’s blood—not a lot, but enough—and we’re all a little, like, what’s up with this ting? And then Francis, and this is when we all lost our shit, said, ‘Old Mr. Belvedere-acting motherfucker bit me!’”
College Boy did not expect the ‘Mr. Belvedere’ line. He shrieked.
“That’s what we all did!” said Sara. “And it’s ten and everybody on the floor is pushing the call buttons and we’re running around trying to get to them, but we’re laughing. And then—” College Boy waited while she caught her breath. “I see Preston walk into Mr. Spell’s room and say, ‘Dracula, what’s happening? Don’t make me build no damn cross.’”
College Boy and Sara were now holding each other up. He was envious. Why had he missed this display? Where had he been Saturday night at ten-thirty, when it all started? Oh, right. Getting Mort’s glasses….
“Did you get the tie off him for surgery?” he asked.