Bigfoot Dreams (4 page)

“Fine,” says Mavis. “I’ll be just fine when I get a cup of this.” They stand there staring at the coffeepot like strangers on an elevator watching the numbers light up. Finally Mavis pours two cups and brightens visibly as the coffee works on her like some subtler, less aggressive version of Popeye’s spinach.

Nearing sixty, Mavis looks like one of those European character actresses who play aging ballerinas: taut, as if not just hair but also skin and sinew were pulled back in that perfect graying doughnut at the base of her skull. Once Mavis
was
an actress. At the height of her career, she was Judy Holliday’s understudy in
Bells Are Ringing
. Mavis is nothing like Judy Holliday. Still, Vera can’t look at her without thinking that Judy Holliday would be old now, too, and of how Judy Holliday and Gracie Allen are Lowell’s all-time favorite actresses.

Had anyone but Carmen told Vera that Mavis went from the Broadway stage to a job as a diener in the Medical Examiner’s Office, Vera wouldn’t have believed it. Though Vera can’t help watching for signs of those years spent chainsawing ribcages, sewing cadavers, doing the junky physical work of the autopsy room, the only clue is Mavis’s intimate knowledge of every murder committed in New York during that time, of choice grisly stories—
CRAZED KENNEL OWNER FEEDS STRAYING SPOUSE TO PINSCHER PUPS
—which she recycles endlessly for fresh
This Week
copy. Yet Mavis is anything but a ghoul. When Vera started at
This Week
, she managed the sitter’s sick days by bringing Rosie in to work and parking her with Mavis. And Mavis, who has no children and whose husband had recently died, seemed to enjoy moving everything sharp or halfway important out of a five-year-old’s reach.

Now Mavis says, “How’s Rosie?”

“Fine,” Vera says. “No, that’s not true. Terrible.” But that’s wrong, too. The truth, if she could tell it, would make her life with Rosie sound like a chilly two-career marriage. Most nights when Vera comes home, Rosie’s in her room with the door shut, the radio going, busy with homework, the latest Judy Blume, and Byzantine game plans for Dungeons and Dragons. At dinner, Rosie will either stay silent or chatter on about the summer program. On cranky mornings, they’ll fight about the bathroom floor, crumbs on the table, milk left out to spoil. Then they’ll go downstairs and off in different directions. Put this way, it doesn’t sound so bad, especially if Vera skips over the fact that she can’t recall when Rosie last kissed her hello or goodnight.

“She’s growing up,” says Mavis. “It’s difficult.”

“Difficult isn’t the word,” says Vera. Last week she sat across the subway aisle from a young Puerto Rican father and his baby. The baby was plump and adorable, giggling wildly as its father kissed it up and down the almost invisible bumps of its spine. They were like new lovers; they didn’t care who saw. Vera had to look away and remind herself of how, when her grandmother was alive, Vera complained about Rosie growing up too fast and her grandmother said, “You’d be happier if she stayed the same?” Vera thinks about Peter Pan’s mother. Did
she
like how things turned out?

“I don’t know,” she tells Mavis. “She’s got a big ballet recital Sunday night. I think she’s nervous about it.”

“Sunday?” repeats Mavis, with the peculiar, slowed-down pacing of someone giving you time to include them. So it’s decided: Mavis and Vera will meet at the recital, then Mavis will come back to Vera’s for a late supper.

Making plans helps Vera fight the urge to run back and get Lowell’s letter. What little she knows about Mavis’s long and devoted married life makes her want to show it to her and ask, What about this? Instead she asks if Mavis has heard anything about Shaefer and Esposito going to see their lawyer.

“I haven’t the slightest,” says Mavis. “Let me know.”

“I’ll do that,” says Vera, tossing her cup into the trash and thinking how she likes this about coffee-room conversations. It’s not like having company, or visiting: no getting up, no goodbyes. At any point, you can just leave.

Opening Solomon’s door, Vera walks in on a crouching nun, her mouth wide in a soundless scream. On the wall behind her is the shadow of a man with a knife. If you look closely, you can see that the shadow has a half-dozen cameras around its neck. It’s the kind of detail that makes Solomon’s photos transcend themselves. For even if you don’t notice the cameras, you still unconsciously sense it: After this maniac kills the nun, he’s planning to take pictures.

Solomon has the shutter on automatic so he can get the shot and play Jack the Ripper at the same time. When Vera walks in he puts down the knife and says, “Fuck it, it’s too complicated.”

“I’ll stop back later,” says Vera.

“No no no no no!” Solomon grabs Vera’s hand and drags her into the room. “I need a break. Take ten,” he tells the girl in the nun outfit. She’s a dimply eighteen-year-old, and as she passes, trailing clouds of patchouli, her eyes meet Vera’s and Vera can almost see her figuring out the whole story of how Vera and Solomon were and maybe still are in love. She and Vera could be two female monkeys declaring their intentions—it’s strange, Vera thinks, having that sort of interchange with a nun.

As Solomon rushes around, switching off lights, Vera can see why even an eighteen-year-old might want him. In his close-cropped hair, Hawaiian shirt, and clear-framed glasses, he looks sweet and confident and sexy, an eighties-style fifties hipster, except that he’s probably looked this way for twenty years.

“I told Shaefer yesterday,” he whispers, “these lights get so hot, the wiring can’t take it. We’re gonna burn like fucking crisps.” He knocks on a wooden desk, then moves closer to Vera. Solomon stares into everyone’s eyes; Vera can’t count the waitresses and salesgirls and supermarket checkers she’s seen thrown off by Solomon’s gaze.

“Where have you
been
?” he says. His Hawaiian shirt smells of cigars, and as he squeezes her against the smooth cotton, Vera presses her forehead into those tropical beaches and red sunsets and wishes she could stay there forever.

On the wall behind him is a framed print that looks like a photo of exploding dust, which Solomon claims is the only known shot of his kneecap disappearing at Khe Sanh. Whether or not he has it on film, there’s no denying the lemon-sized depression where his right knee should be; the rest of him seems slightly drawn, as if flesh and sinew and something less tangible has gone into healing it. Now as he runs for the phone, cameras bang together around his neck; his bad leg follows, bouncy and dogged as a younger kid keeping up.

“Who’s this?” he yells into the phone. “Pete? Solomon. Listen, can you do me a favor and stop by in a couple minutes and kill a nun? Great.” He laughs and hangs up.

“
SINGING NUN HITS SOUR NOTE
?” says Vera.

“Close,” says Solomon. “
SADO SLASHER STRIKES SEMINARY SISTER
. One of Mavis’s masterpieces.”

“
SICKO SHUTTERBUG SHOOTS SELF STABBING SISTER
,” Vera says.

“You got it,” he says. “What’s up?”

“Not me,” Vera says. “We’re in for it now. Didn’t Carmen tell you?”

“
We
?”

“Someone’s suing the paper.” It sounds so right, Vera nearly forgets it’s just a guess. “Over one of our stories.”

Solomon grabs Vera’s shoulders and backs her against the wall. “You know what we do to guys who bring bad news?” he says. Then he lets her go and grins. “Are you serious? Every crank with a dime to call a lawyer has sued us fifty times.”

“This one’s had Dan and Frank at their lawyer’s all morning.”

Solomon scratches the back of his neck. “Then it’s a rich crank with fifty cents for a fancy lawyer.”

“We’re supposed to see them after lunch,” Vera says. “I’m going to the morgue to read back and see what I can figure out.”

“Needle-in-a-haystack time,” says Solomon. Then he takes Vera’s hands between his and says, “All right, I’ll make you a deal. If it turns out to be nothing, I’ll buy you dinner Saturday.”

“And if it turns out to be something?”

“I’ll buy you dinner Saturday to cheer us up.”

Vera thinks she has reasons for not wanting to go, but before she can think of one, she sees the little nun, lounging in the doorway, sullen and wary as a high-school girl waiting for the teacher to pass so she can light up. Vera wishes she could, too; the time it would take to light a smoke is exactly the interval she needs to exit with anything approaching grace.

Leaving Solomon’s, the first office Vera passes is Tom Dreier’s. Tom Dreier—of the shiny suits, the three-strand-over-the-bald-spot pervert hair, the ubiquitous briefcase that Vera imagines containing handcuffs and rubber restraints for lunchtime assignations—writes the regular columns that appear near the back of the paper: “Ask Your Doctor,” “You and Your Teenager,” and the most popular, “Take That!” (“You know what I think about the ERA? I think those bra-burners would still be beating their laundry against the rocks if some MAN hadn’t invented the washing machine for them! Take that!”) According to the latest
This Week
readers’ poll, more people than Vera wants to believe buy the paper just for “Take That!” ’s responsible, hard-hitting journalism.

Next door to Tom is Mort Baird, a pleasant little recluse whose office has a certain entertainment value because of the illustrations he draws for every article he writes. The art is primitive, childlike, unprintable. But without it, Mort claims, he can’t work. Vera’s favorite is his drawing for
GOD GAVE ME FIVE BLIND BABIES
—a stick figure Mom with five tiny bundles, each wearing infant-size sunglasses. Visiting Mort reminds Vera of first dates with shy guys who took you to museums. You looked at the pictures while they stood there watching you look; then you both stood there.

Continuing down the hall, Vera almost stops in on Peter Smalley, their resident specialist in the ghost-occult. Lately he’s been turning in articles under the byline Kuldip Kulkarni, bits about modern-day Kali cults and thousands of untouchables tossed down village wells. As usual his door’s closed, bare except for a card with a typed-out quote: “Here we will talk of nothing but God.”—Sri Ramakrishna. Inside, Vera knows, it’s equally spartan, just Peter’s Harvard diploma and a photo of Meher Baba’s “Smile Don’t Worry Be Happy” goofy and comforting grin. But if it’s comfort she’s after, she’d do better smoking a joint with the brothers in the mail room, whose stoned jivy conversation works better than the view of Herald Square to remind her that there are other ways to live besides writing for
This Week
. Any day, Vera can walk into the business office and one of the secretaries will be wearing new shoes or a funny hair clip and they can talk, like normal people, about that. Today, though, Vera just doesn’t feel like discussing funny hair clips.

Three offices combined into one room lined with old papers, the morgue is the closest
This Week
comes to the Dickensian splendor of the Basenji Society. Ever since Mary Alice, the librarian, attended a workshop on newsprint preservation, a whole ecosystem of fans, conditioners, and humidifiers have kept it a perfect temperature, deoxygenated as the cabin of an airplane.

Today Mary Alice is nowhere around. Vera’s on her own. She takes six months of back issues off the shelves and then just sits there, trying to remember one single event from six months ago. She might as well be thinking back to the womb. Somewhat desperately she reassures herself: her problem’s not premature senility but the amnesia of everyday life; she blames it on being so far from Lowell and Louise. Without old friends to verify the past, to remind you of what you’ve forgotten, your whole life could blow away like the breeze from Mary Alice’s fan.

In Vera’s search for some marker in time,
This Week
is no help at all. Its ageless plots could have come from the ancient Greeks. Its
NEW AIR FORCE UFO PICS
might be reprints from a decade ago. It’s no surprise that the only mention of past, present, and future occurs in the syndicated column, “Karen Karl’s ‘I Predict!’”

One night Vera saw Karen Karl on TV, wearing a tenty black cocktail dress with pointy witch’s sleeves. David Susskind ridiculed every word she said, but that wasn’t what made Vera doubt her; she couldn’t believe that a real witch would feel compelled to flirt with Susskind. Now, reading Karen Karl’s March predictions, Vera sees that she’s been batting zero in the intervening months. Castro hasn’t been assassinated, nor has Jackie O. remarried. If the Reagans have become grandparents, why would they keep it from the nation? And she seems to remember Liza Minnelli—twins predicted here—having a rather well-publicized miscarriage. Vera gets no pleasure from Karen Karl’s misses; instead she feels badly for readers who care about such things and who six months ago believed—as Liza Minnelli must have—that there was something to look forward to.

With a batting average like that, it’s a wonder she stays on the team, though probably modern witchcraft has less to do with ESP than with letting Susskind make fun of you. Not that the rest of the
This Week
staff would win any prizes for accuracy. If one of Karen Karl’s predictions came true, she’d write a column about it; if theirs did, it would go round marked “Too close for comfort.”

Vera leaves Karen Karl to her mistakes and starts looking for her own. All and none of the pieces look familiar; it’s a tribute to the staff’s ability to write uniform
This Week
-ese. The first to ring any sort of bell is
DWI ON GOD:

In an unprecedented court case, the Reverend Dewey Smoot of Sump City, Georgia, has pleaded innocent to charges of vehicular homicide on the grounds that he was driving under the influence of visions sent by his guardian angel.

Solomon’s right about needles in haystacks; any one of these stories could be it. Maybe there is a Dewey Smoot testing this very case before a Sump City grand jury, and maybe his guardian angel has sent him the money to hire a smart Yankee lawyer. Would it help to play Where-Did-This-Story-Come-From? All that
DWI ON GOD
brings to mind is a meld of two TV shows—one on Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the other on child evangelists.