Death in The Life Read online

  “All kinds of people. Think of them, with all their troubles. You wouldn’t believe it if they didn’t tell you themselves. Don’t you see, they’d be coming to you for advice.”

  “Let’s go back now and have our tea while you think about it. I’ll take down the agent’s phone number just in case.”

  While she rummaged in her purse for a pencil the dog lifted his leg and gave the door front a brief sprite.

  “Hey, Fritzie,” Julie said.

  “That’s for luck, dear, and I dare say it’s the last drop he has in him.”

  5

  “THE THING ABOUT THERAPY, you can’t expect spontaneous combustion, right? I mean until you try to make it work, how can you tell?”

  “I don’t know, Julie. I’m down on shrinks these days. Not that I was ever very high on them. But I’m on a downer, period. I guess it goes with the territory.”

  Pete Mallory’s territory was theater, particularly stage design. She supposed that was the territory he spoke of. Maybe not. Pete designed the productions for the Actors Forum which was where she had known him and where she had met him again that day. They were walking the block’s distance to her newly acquired premises.

  “Territorial imperative,” Julie said.

  “What?”

  “I was free associating. I do it all the time. Sometimes the weirdest things come out.”

  “It ought to be useful in the racket you’re going into.”

  “I don’t think of it as a racket exactly.”

  “No offense. Most things are or get to be, one way or another. What are you going to call yourself?”

  “How about Madame Allure?”

  “You’re in the right neighborhood, baby. Seriously. I mean if you can be serious about something like this. Are you serious? Or are you putting me on?”

  “Well, you know, Pete, I’m more than half-serious. ‘Friend Julie’: how does that sound?”

  “Like a Quaker meeting.”

  “That’s all right too.”

  “There’s a difference, little girl.”

  “Don’t call me little girl. I’m not anymore.”

  “Honey, at seventy-five.”

  They arrived at the cleanest window on the block. It had taken six buckets of water, a bottle of ammonia, and a roll of paper towels. “Welcome to Friend Julie’s.”

  “How about Sister Julie?” Pete suggested.

  “Too much like Sister Carrie.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “You’re illiterate, Pete.”

  “It comes natural where I hang out.”

  “It hangs out where you come natural.”

  “Don’t talk dirty. And nobody comes natural anymore.”

  Oh, boy. Julie turned the key in the door. “We’re going to get a blast of pesticide. We’ll leave the door open.”

  “I do know who Sister Carrie was. Laurence Olivier seduced her.”

  “Too late,” Julie said.

  “That’s what I thought too. My God, Julie, what are you paying for this dump?”

  “A hundred fifty. The second month’s free if I’m around long enough to paint it at my own expense.”

  Pete touched his fingers to the damp wall. “Paint is out. Did he say paint?”

  “Decorate.”

  “We’ll decorate.”

  “I don’t have much money left, Pete, not this month, and I want to make this on my own if I can. It certainly isn’t Jeff’s thing.”

  Pete looked down at her with amusement. He threw back the swatch of brown hair that made him look younger than he could possibly be. “Actually?” he mocked.

  “Jeff’s my husband.”

  “Oh, I remember.” Which Julie found odd since she could not remember any occasion from which he could draw the recollection. “Who said anything about money? Money makes me impotent. Let me tell you the way it works for me…” His eyes explored the ceiling, the walls, the window, the second room, while he talked. “I do all these great things at the Forum, for example. I materialize sets for them out of thin air. I work my ass off doing odd jobs for a living so that I can pour my creative genius into their crummy, dehumanized crap. I keep hoping that somebody over there someday is going to write a play about people. All right. I do get the reviews: Why isn’t he on Broadway? But I don’t want to be on Broadway. Can you believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re the exception. Or maybe I am. And when I do get a job off-off doing something I like, I wind up twenty-five bucks in the red which I have to pay out of my own pocket because the producer is even more broke than I am. I’m supporting a habit, that’s what I’m doing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you mean, yeah?”

  “Well, this thing about a habit, you’re really doing what you want to do, aren’t you? You said yourself, you get the reviews. Everybody says, What would the Actors Forum do without Pete Mallory?”

  “It’s bloody well the truth.”

  “You’ve got things all your own way. Does anybody ever say to you, Pete, this set stinks?”

  “It just happens the grande dame of theater said those very words to me last week.”

  “And what did you say to her?”

  “Fuck you, ma’am.”

  “Even I know you got to pay for a trip like that, Pete.”

  “But I was right.”

  “Then especially.”

  He looked at her darkly, but the frown had no foundation. He grinned and it disappeared. “Who’s complaining?” Then half-seriously: “What are you going to charge a session, Sister Julie?”

  “Friend Julie. Five bucks a reading. Strike the word session. Five bucks till I get started.”

  “What do you mean, till you get started? You’re already started. You must have been a con artist at sixteen.”

  “You bet,” Julie said, but the remark hurt, no matter how Pete had intended it. Which had to mean it was something to think about. On her own. No more, “Doctor, this friend of mine said…”

  “So? What about this friend?”

  Pete measured the walls and said that he was going to Dazian’s that afternoon in any case. He would see what he could pick up in the way of material, something light that wasn’t quite see-through.

  “Do you want some money?”

  “Read my horoscope for me.”

  “Okay.” As though she could. Until she read the book. She was a con artist.

  “Sagittarius,” he said from the door. “In case you want to look it up.”

  Julie pulled on her rubber gloves and set to scrubbing the floor. A real con artist would have somebody doing it for her. From the age of sixteen. At sixteen she was a junior at Miss Page’s School, getting ready to come out. Ready plus one. She had taken off that spring without telling Mother or Miss Page on a peace march to Washington and in one weekend had experienced pot, sex, and politics. After which coming out didn’t mean even the little it had meant before. She chose her college and Mother decided on a different kind of husband for her little girl than she had had in mind till then. Everybody’s little girl. Except Father’s. Father was the con of cons, an Irish diplomat who conned the pope into annulling his American marriage. Look, Papa Paul, the child doesn’t count, an immaculate conception. Or a Magdalene’s daughter… Hey! What a title for a book, Magdalene’s Daughter.

  She got up and removed the gloves and went into the back room where she had set up the card table and the two director’s chairs she had been on the verge of giving to the Salvation Army, they were so rarely used on Seventeenth Street. She turned on the gooseneck lamp and opened a new notebook where she made a first entry, the beginning of… What?

  Pete returned with several bolts of shimmery green material and then went on to the Forum to get scissors, needles and thread, hammer and nails. Julie got a can of spackle and patched the major wounds. By late afternoon the walls were hung with a limpid camouflage.

  “It’s going to work marvelously,” Julie said.

  “I
like the way you put that—it’s going to work. Something that always riles hell out of me, and also scares me, is when people applaud a set before the play starts. How do they know if it’s any good until they see the play in it?” To heighten the drama, Pete proposed to borrow a couple of floor spotlights. He demonstrated the effect he wanted using the gooseneck lamp, an illusion of movement.

  Julie said, “No belly dancing in the aisle, please.”

  “Oh, how nice,” Mrs. Ryan said from the doorway. “I’ve brought you a thermos of tea. You don’t mind Fritzie, do you?”

  “Do you know Pete Mallory, Mrs. Ryan?”

  Pete remained on his haunches, but saluted the older woman. “How are you, Mrs. Ryan?”

  “What a grand surprise, Peter. I don’t suppose I’ve seen you since Laura Gibson’s funeral. We do miss her so, poor soul… I dare say you do, too.”

  “Yup.” Pete got up and put the lamp back on the table in the back room.

  “That’s a lovely shade of green,” Mrs. Ryan said of the walls. “As soft as an Irish mist.”

  Pete said, “What’s the latest disaster at the Willoughby?”

  Mrs. Ryan lived at the Willoughby Apartments.

  “You wouldn’t believe the things that go on there nowadays. I don’t know if you’d remember Mr. Bourke, the quiet little man down the hall? He was asked to leave.” She laid a confiding hand on Pete’s arm. “Boys.”

  “Shocking,” Pete said solemnly.

  Mrs. Ryan picked up the mockery in his choice of words. “I forget. Was he a friend of yours?”

  “Is,” Pete said.

  “Well, you never know. Mind he’s a nice enough man when you meet him.” She sat at the table and poured tea into the two thermos cups. “I’ve had my cup. This is for the two of you.”

  “No thank you, Mrs. Ryan,” Pete said. “I’ve got to go. I’ll stop by in a day or so, Julie, if I can get the lights from Mr. Bourke.”

  Mrs. Ryan pursed her lips at the name.

  “Pete, I do thank you,” Julie said.

  “You owe me a horoscope. I’d leave the front windows clear, except for a sign, whatever you say on it. Let all the mystery hang back here. The reception room’s for the come-on. Stick a chair out there and see who turns up. I’ll be interested.”

  “Me too. Come back soon.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.

  A trigger response: “How about dinner tonight? Some come-in-as-you-are place?”

  “I’d love it.”

  He said he would come by for her at six. They would return the borrowed tools to the Forum and go on from there. Instead of having to say anything more to Mrs. Ryan—or so seemed his purpose to Julie—he stooped down to pet Fritzie. The dog scooted away. “See you,” Pete murmured to no one in particular.

  Mrs. Ryan sat back and sipped her tea. Julie put the second chair out front as Pete had suggested and herself sat cross-legged on a newspaper on the newly scrubbed floor, the thermos cup in both hands.

  “Now isn’t that interesting,” Mrs. Ryan said, “that he’d be a friend of Mr. Bourke’s?”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Just interesting. I’ve never properly understood Peter. He’s a very nice young man, but I do believe he’s doomed.”

  “What’s ‘doomed’?”

  “Well, he hasn’t got on very far, has he, for one of the most promising young designers in American theater? They used to call him that.”

  “Don’t they still call him that?”

  “I don’t know how long you can be promising, Julie, but I do know you can’t be young forever.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mrs. Ryan gave that little pinch to her lips that portended a confidence not altogether pleasant. “Did you know he studied for the priesthood?”

  The church was all around her. Universal. “It figures,” she said, more in response to her own thoughts than to Mrs. Ryan.

  “Did you notice? He didn’t want to talk about my friend Laura Gibson.”

  Julie didn’t especially either; she had only seen the actress perform once and she had thought her pretty awful.

  “They were very close,” Mrs. Ryan went on. “She would introduce him as her nephew sometimes, though I don’t think they were related at all. In any case, he had gone to school to the Jesuits, and I do believe he entered their novitiate somewhere out in the Midwest. All before he got into theater, of course.”

  “The church makes pretty good theater.”

  “Oh, my dear, not like it used to,” Mrs. Ryan said with melancholic fervor. She lifted her shopping bag from the floor to her lap. “I brought you something. I don’t know whether you can use it or not.” She dug out a cardboard sign: Beauty Consultant. “It belonged to my friend Mrs. Russo. She used to run a beauty parlor on Ninth Avenue. You could cut away the word Beauty.”

  “Or add Truth. Consultant in Truth and Beauty.”

  “There isn’t enough room to say all that.”

  Julie got Pete’s scissors and cut off the first word. It left a very naked Consultant. Ambiguous, to say the least. She punched holes in the top corners and suspended the sign on a length of heavy thread. Then, climbing precariously onto the arms of the chair, she hammered a nail above the window and hung it up. She came down to the floor face to face with a grinning black man outside the window, a white yachting cap pushed back on his head. He pointed to himself, to the sign, and then to her.

  “Oh, hell,” Julie said and motioned him away.

  He shook his head.

  Julie shrugged.

  He started for the door and Mrs. Ryan came from the back room. As soon as the man opened the shop door, Mrs. Ryan said, “Sic ’em, Fritzie!” Fritzie set up a wild yapping and ran around and around, not sure of what he was sicced on, for the would-be visitor backed out in a hurry and closed the door. He made a rude gesture and disappeared. It took quite a while to convince the dog that he had already done what was expected of him.

  Mrs. Ryan suggested that Julie ought to get a dog. Jeff was of the same opinion. “I’ll take karate. Why don’t you like Pete, Mrs. Ryan?”

  “Aren’t you quick now? Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. That’s because he’s changeable himself. He can be very abrupt. And I think he’s queer.”

  “You mean he’s gay?”

  “I’m old-fashioned and I like the word gay for everyone.”

  “I’ll bet Pete does too… if he’s gay. I’m not so sure he is.”

  “Of course you are, dear, or you wouldn’t be going out with him. You are still married?”

  “That’s right,” Julie said. Score one for Mrs. Ryan. Half a point: Pete wouldn’t have asked her if he thought something was going to be expected of him. Nope. Score one and wait for the next round.

  Mrs. Ryan gathered the thermos cups and bottle. “My friend Mrs. Russo may stop in. She loves a throw of the Tarot. Her husband is a precinct detective. Fritzie, bring your leash, love.”

  Julie went outdoors with Mrs. Ryan and watched her and the dog meander down the street. She looked at the Consultant sign from the outside. It had but one thing to recommend it: it was so small you had to come up close to see what it said.

  She caught a reflection in the glass of the black man in white cap swinging along the opposite side of the street in her direction. He started to cross and then danced back from the oncoming traffic. She remembered his parting gesture. For which he could not be entirely condemned, having had a dog sicced on him. Nevertheless, it was not a benevolent gesture. Okay, Friend Julie, confront. She folded her arms and waited.

  “Thought I’d drop by again and give you a break, Miz Julie.” He flashed his teeth at her.

  “Thanks.”

  He wore a huge gilded cross nested in the hair of his chest, his shirt open to the navel. He flopped his fingers beneath the cross in case she’d missed it. The polished nails fell like drops of pale blood. “Just an evangelical call.”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s a chick like you doing in a s
etup like this?”

  “Like what?”

  He screwed up his eyes and peered at the minute sign. “Consultant. What’s your main line? My name’s Goldie, by the way.”

  “I don’t think we’re in competition, Goldie.”

  “I don’t compete. My girls come to me.”

  “Lucky girls,” Julie said.

  “I got style, right?”

  “You bet.”

  “Can’t we go inside for this conversation?”

  “I’m fumigating in there.”

  “All right. I’ll buy you a drink while the place cools off.”

  “I’m waiting for a friend,” Julie said.

  “I’m a friend.”

  “An invited friend.”

  The smile turned upside down. “Don’t smart-ass me, little girl. This is my turf and I just want to know who’s setting you up in business.”

  “Me. I’m a marriage counselor.”

  “No kidding.” The smile turned up again.

  “Among other things.”

  “That’s for sure. You don’t make money on marriage around here. Unless you’re me, if you want to look at it that way. I don’t know what I’d do if it wasn’t for the institution of matrimony.” He touched a buckled shoe to a cigarette butt, nudging it into a crack in the sidewalk. “The old lady who used to operate out of here, you know her?”

  “Only from hearsay.”

  “Did you know—I’ll bet you didn’t or you wouldn’t keep Goldie shuffling his feet—she made her rent off’n me? A kind of referral service. A couple of tricks a week, it kept her going.”

  “That old lady?”

  He gave a whinny of phony laughter. “I said referral. Don’t you know what that word means? There’s Johns don’t like to pick up a ‘ho’ on the street or in a bar. They think everybody’s spying on them. So I figured a connection house, see what I mean?”

  “You don’t miss a trick,” Julie said, not sure the moment she had said it that she had intended the double entendre.

  “Julie, chile, anybody on the street’s going to tell you, don’t smart-ass Goldie.”

  “Okay, I’ll remember that,” Julie said. She did not want to provoke him, only not to seem intimidated by him. In fact, vaguely and very briefly, in view of the idea she’d had for a story, she thought of the connection’s possibilities.