She entered the vestibule of Reggie’s building and pressed the buzzer on the wall. He refused to buzz her in or even speak into the house phone. She was growing annoyed. There seemed nothing left to do but leave when a long-legged redhead in a bloodred patent-leather spring coat glided down the stairway and strode theatrically to the door. It was the cabaret singer, Lorna Dougal, Maggie realized. Though she had never actually met her, she owned several of the singer’s recordings, and Reggie was always gossiping about her cavalcade of boyfriends.
Ms. Dougal lit up in a toothy, slightly cockeyed smile as she opened the door.
“Why, Maggie Darling,” she exclaimed. “Of all people!”
“Why, Lorna Dougal,” Maggie lilted back, as the tension of the preceding hours suddenly yielded to this happy little accident of minor celebritydom.
“I was just readin’ one of your books in the tub.”
“Which one?”
“Fifteen-Minute Feasts.”
“I was listening to your Live at the Oak Room CD just the other day in the car. If they still made them out of vinyl, I would have worn out the grooves by now.”
“Oh, I’m such a fan of yours,” Lorna gushed, her renowned Southern charm evidently as authentic offstage as on. “Reggie never stops talkin’ about you.”
“Is that so?”
“You’re the sun that he orbits around.”
“Gosh.”
“Why, I wish I could drag you upstairs and put on a big pot of coffee and talk recipes, but I’ve got two shows to do.”
“Some other time would be great.”
“Isn’t it queer that we both knew each other without even knowin’ each other?”
“Yes, a little.”
“But that’s New York for you. Isn’t it sumpin’? I never get over it,” Lorna said, squeezing past Maggie in the cramped vestibule. “Bye-bye, Maggie Darling.”
“Break a leg, Lorna,” Maggie called after her.
Meanwhile, she’d kept the inside door from shutting.
Moments later she was upstairs regarding Reggie’s glossy red-painted steel door on the second floor. A blather of television was audible within. She was not particularly surprised that he refused to answer the doorbell, but she was now determined to break his rather cruel and implacable will, and she leaned on the button while she batted on the door with the flat of her hand, crying, “Reggie, open the door right now! It’s me!” It was possible to keep at it for only so long without becoming discouraged, and it was with a final lame gesture of disgust that Maggie angrily shoved the doorknob with a torquing motion, only to feel the door yield inward. It had been unlocked all along.
Across the broad loft, with its supernatural tidiness and eclectic mix of English country, Bauhaus, and Santa Fe furniture, Maggie saw Reggie slumped in an overstuffed armchair with the haze of MTV encircling the back of his head like a high-tech halo.
“Reggie?” she called tentatively. The loft, which was divided into areas rather than rooms, was a good forty feet across. A rap video happened to be playing loudly on the TV, a futuristic aural sludge of rusted chains and buckets slamming and grinding together behind a zombie chant of grievance. “The door was open and I let myself in,” Maggie said, trying to sound both friendly and authoritative.
When Reggie failed to stir, she advanced across the polished hardwood floor. Her sense of dread accelerated with her heartbeat as she flew around the chair to find him unconscious, with a nearly drained vodka bottle between his legs, a plastic prescription container still gripped in a clammy hand, and a tendril of vomit running down his sweater and across a note on letterhead stationery that was neatly pinned to his chest.
Maggie ran wildly around the loft searching for a telephone. She found a cordless handset charging on its stand on the granite prep island in the kitchen and dialed 911.
“Send an ambulance to 327 Vestry Street in Tribecca at once,” she stated clearly. “Someone here has attempted suicide.”
“Is it an elevator building, ma’am?”
“No, second-floor walk-up.”
“Go down and unlock the ground-floor door. Is the individual breathing?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Make sure his air passages are not clogged. We’ll be there in ten minutes or less.” The dispatcher hung up.
Maggie marveled at the system’s efficiency. At least one thing still worked in the United States. She wet a dishtowel and hurried back over to Reggie. He was breathing, she now saw, but shallowly. She wiped the vomit off his face and sweater, removed the note from his sweater, and inserted two fingers into his mouth. No obstructions were evident. By the time she rushed downstairs, the EMTs were hurrying into the vestibule with their equipment. They had Reggie on the stretcher with an airway and a blood pressure cuff inside of thirty seconds.
“His pulse is still strong,” the squad chief told Maggie. He was a very dark, small wiry West Indian with a melodic voice. “Can you tell me if the gentleman is insured and if so with whom?”
“I have no idea.”
“Oh dear,” the chief said. His three associates put the stretcher down.
“Can’t we go over this at the hospital?” Maggie asked.
“Well, you see, there’s a bit of a problem. Unless we can identify the insurer, we are obliged to take the gentleman to Bellevue. How much do you know about the city hospitals, madam?”
“Can’t you take him over to University or Cornell Medical?”
“Ah, I see you understand. There is the matter of the ambulance fee. We must have assurance of payment.”
“How much do you charge?”
“There is the dispatch fee of two hundred dollars and the staff fee of fifty dollars per person, plus equipment, bandages, IV drips, what-have-you.”
Maggie fished her wallet out of her handbag and began extracting fifty-dollar bills. When she had forked over $450, the EMT chief still stood there as though expecting more.
“You haven’t used any bandages or IV drips,” she said.
“There is a surcharge on trips after nine P.M.”
“How much?”
“Fifty dollars.”
Maggie rolled her eyes and gave it to him and then held her wallet open to show that it was empty.
“We are ready to go, madam,” the EMT chief said, folding the bills and sliding them into the breast pocket of his white medical jacket. “Will that be University or Cornell Med?”
11
Fluorescent Tedium
They let her ride uptown in the ambulance, but once inside Cornell Med, the doctors made her wait in a room so blindingly lit with fluorescent bulbs that she felt as though she were trapped inside a television set. In the frightful tedium of the claustrophobic room, she excavated Reggie’s suicide note from inside her brassiere. It was penned in green ink in a highly formal and artistic block handwriting, and it read:
To the Finder,
What you see I have done out of love. A love that fails to adhere. To the one who is my love I bear no curses. You are strong and will survive this petty interruption. I have no other complaints. For instructions as to disposal, et cetera, contact my attorney, Jay Lefkowitz, Esq., 845 Third Ave., and my brother Anthony Chang of Santa Rosa, Calif.
Farewell all others,
R. Chang.
The banality and bad composition shocked her. It seemed unworthy of the man she had known. She was angry at herself for having exposed this streak of shallow sentimentality in someone she wished to regard as a deeper person, and it made her wonder if we ever really know anyone. Combined with the atrocious fluorescent lights, reading the note over and over again gave her a pounding headache.
She kept inquiring about Reggie’s condition at the nursing station, but they had no updates. After an hour of this, wracked with hunger and with nothing else to divert her but some exceedingly old and grubby women’s magazines, she set forth to the hospital cafeteria, where she sat under another powerful bank of fluorescent lights picking at a crusty po
rtion of gray-green vegetable lasagna and a slice of rubbery devil’s food cake. Only the pint of milk tasted like real food. When she returned to the ER waiting area, there had been a change of staff and it took the graveyard-shift nurses twenty minutes to even find out what room Reggie Chang had been assigned to. She was permitted to go see him there only after she had persuaded the charge nurse that Reggie was her son.
He was sleeping very peacefully on his back with a glucose drip running into his arm. The nurse, reading Reggie’s chart, informed Maggie that his stomach had been pumped. His blood levels of Restoril and alcohol were “within a nonlethal range,” and she expected he would be able to go home before lunch the next day. “This was not a serious suicide attempt,” she declared with unconcealed disdain as she flipped the chart closed and left the room.
12
The Patient
As it happened, Reggie woke her up hacking and coughing. Maggie’s neck ached from sleeping in the battered Danish modern hospital-issue chair. Dawn light the color of pocket lint gathered outside the window. Their eyes met in an uncomfortable moment of recognition.
“It’s you,” Reggie croaked.
“Of course it’s me.”
“Why in the fucking hell did they call you?”
“They didn’t call me. I found you.”
“Oh, God.”
“Wasn’t that the whole point? To make me feel bad?”
Reggie turned his face away. She could hear him make a pitiful puling sound like a child.
“Well, I do feel bad. I feel terrible. You see, you’ve succeeded.”
“I failed,” Reggie blubbered.
“Oh, stop it. They say you didn’t take enough of that stuff to kill a rubber duckie.” Maggie was shocked by her own vehemence. All the affronts and difficulties of the past few months suddenly welled up in her as a tsunami of anger that now crested and broke over Reggie. “And what’s more, that suicide note of yours was practically illiterate!”
Reggie stopped blubbering, returned her gaze stonily, and said, “I’m a visual artist, not a fucking author. I suppose you’d be more satisfied if I left a nice set of silver gelatin prints behind.”
“I’ll tell you what will satisfy me: if you stop being a baby about this and get back on board with this book shoot. And quit pretending that you even meant to put this world behind you, you big phony. I’m told you took about five pills and the equivalent of a margarita.”
“I didn’t want to leave a big fucking mess.”
“You think dead people make less of mess when they take a smaller overdose? I never heard anything so idiotic.”
“Oh, leave me alone. I hate you.”
“I won’t leave you alone until you swear you’ll get back on this shoot. I saved your life. You owe me.”
“You didn’t save my life. I didn’t take enough of that stuff to kill a rubber duck, remember?”
“So then tell me why I spent the whole night in this chair?” Maggie hollered back at him.
“Because you’re a fucking saint? How the fuck should I know?”
“No, because you wanted to punish me, you mean-minded little shit.”
“I don’t have to punish you! It’s punishment enough for you to be you.”
“And to have to rescue all the sad-sack, self-absorbed, mean little shits in the world like you.”
“Get out!”
“Get back on the job!”
“I’d rather die.”
“You wouldn’t know how!”
“That’s what you think.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Fuck you and kiss my Chinese ass!”
A nurse fairly burst into the room, a slender and rather attractive, middle-aged African-American woman with a no-nonsense manner and witheringly haughty look of authority that shut up the combatants instantly. She was holding a small plastic garbage bag.
“Just what is all the shouting about in here?” she inquired.
Both Maggie and Reggie merely gawked at her in mortification.
“Do you realize we’ve got sick people down the hall?” she continued and at once set about removing the IV from Reggie’s arm. “You’re out of here, mister. Doctor’s orders. Here are your clothes,” she said, tossing the garbage bag onto the end of the bed. “And you,” she said, turning to Maggie with the cold light of contempt burning in her dark and handsome almond eyes, “can wait for him in the lobby.”
“Don’t wait for me,” Reggie said.
“I’ll wait.”
“Please, don’t bother.”
“You,” the nurse said to Reggie, “shut up and get dressed or I will have you arrested. And you,” she said to Maggie, “well I don’t care what you do, as long as you get out before I finish counting to ten … One, two …”
Minutes later, Maggie intercepted Reggie in the lobby.
“I told you not to wait.”
“Yeah, well, I gave all the money I had to the goddamned ambulance crew and you are going to goddamned well get a cab and take me to the garage on Eighty-fourth Street where I parked my car.”
“How the hell do you know I have any money?”
“Because I took your wallet out of your pants pocket in the ambulance so the orderlies wouldn’t rob you in the hospital.”
“Jeez, that was pretty good thinking,” Reggie observed.
Maggie produced the wallet now—an iguana-skin Julian Vizoon—from her handbag. Reggie took it and peered inside.
“I only have ten bucks,” he said.
“Don’t sweat it,” Maggie said. “That’ll get us to the garage. Then I’ll drop you downtown in my car.”
“Okay, okay,” Reggie said. “You win. I’ll do the fucking shoot.”
Part Eight
An Abominable Ruse
1
Rising to the Bait
Maggie turned down the driveway of Kettle Hill Farm as Walter Fayerwether’s little blond cookie was driving out in their Volvo—just another minor irritant that barely registered, like a single grain of salt in the open wound that Maggie’s life had become. At quarter to nine in the morning, the crickets seemed to be shrieking in the gardens. The sun glared menacingly above the tree line to the east out of an unnaturally brilliant blue sky. The house proved to be unpopulated. Lindy, of course, was not on the premises, nor Hooper or Quinona the maid or Nina.
Nina! The thought of commencing a search for another culinary assistant nauseated Maggie, evoking the spiritual equivalent of a stench like tripe boiled with cabbage (a strange, old-world favorite of her grandma Elsie’s). Meanwhile, it unnerved Maggie to realize she had no idea what day it was. Was this the next stage in a life unraveling? It wasn’t until she entered the kitchen to study the wall-mounted catering manifest that she discovered it was Friday. To her vast relief, the manifest showed no jobs until the coming Wednesday—a luncheon for the Fairfield County League of Women Voters, seventy-five heads, count ’em, a horror, no, an impossibility without Nina and at least two “shiftlings,” as they called the ever changing cast of part-timers. In a panic, she called Nina at home once again, and this time the message said, “Hi, Nina here. Well, actually not here. I will be in Spain and Morocco until June fourth. Leave a message. Get back to you then. Bye.”
Why, the message sounded … blithe! Gone off on a lark! Was this aggression by other means? Was the very blitheness of the message intended to wound her? Maggie wondered, and was further proof needed that Nina had left her employ? It was too, too depressing. Maggie rummaged halfheartedly through the huge Rolodex there on the butcher-block counter. For all the hundreds of cards in it—including many employees past and present—there was nobody she could really depend upon, in the Nina sense of rock-ribbed professional reliability. Each name greeted her with a little stab of anguish as she recalled some special area of inadequacy—too slow, too sloppy, too mouthy, too clumsy, too lacking in imagination, too starstruck. Nina had none of those failings, and now she was gone. Lost! Maggie slumped. The thought of planning a
menu or even a shopping list for the League luncheon heaped her with despair. As the emotion rapidly morphed into more familiar terror, she lunged for the telephone and punched out a number.
“Why, Harold,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Is that you, Maggie?” Harold Hamish said. “I was but momentarily out the door.”
“Really? Where to?”
“Vermont. Remember? The green drake hatch.”
“Yes. That funny little fly with a name like a duck’s.”
“Precisely.”
“I thought you’d be relieved to hear that Reggie Chang is going to shoot those photos for the book after all.”
“That’s grand news. I’m very relieved, indeed. What did it take?— no, forget I asked. I’m just glad to hear we’re on track again. Bully and hip hip hooray and all that.”
“So, you’re going up to the country, are you?”
“I am. Did you care to join me?”
“As a matter of fact, I was thinking about it.”
“Really?” he sounded very surprised. “Think no more before you change your mind. Just pack a bag. I’ll come by and get you in an hour.”
“It’s been a hideous week, Harold. A perfect horror.”
“Let’s see if we can make up for it, then, with a rousing Green Mountain adventure. I’ll be along in an hour or so. Be prepared to depart at once.”
“You’re my knight in shining armor.”
2
A Glandular Exchange
She stuffed a Vuitton weekender with North Woods togs and then assembled a tote bag of potables and comestibles—two each Matrot Meursault, Pouilly-Fuissé, and one really splendid 1988 Criots-Batard-Montrachet. For eats she packed a fat wedge of buttery St. Andre, a tin of foie gras, boxes of oat and water biscuits, a jar of her own chowchow pickle, a pound of prosciutto, a perfectly ripe muskmelon, some green tomatoes from the garden, a jar of toffee-covered cashews, and several big bars of Lindt bittersweet chocolate. She luxuriated in the tub for a while, sloughing off all the grime of the hospital ward, and then threw on a boxy red checkered sleeveless jumper that made her feel sixteen and a half. Just as she clipped a swag of her silvery gold hair in a tortoiseshell barrette, there was Harold down in the driveway, standing beside his restored 1965 crimson Morgan Plus Four Plus with the top down and neatly secured under the leather bonnet, leaning on the horn like one of the high school boys who used to call on her thirty years ago.
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