Broken for You (21 page)

"There," he said finally. "That's good."

Wanda opened her eyes and watched him descend the ladder.

There was no denying that Wanda Schultz had long known and admired the musculature of men. She had observed with interest the physical changes that occurred in her male cousins' bodies over the years, as their marshmallowy limbs, torsos, and backsides transformed in
to some
thing taut and sinewy, like saltwater taffy. Wanda knew men's bodies. She knew them well. And she was fully capable of appreciating bodies— especially those of her male coworkers—without engaging her libido.

Troy turned to face her. "Are you okay?" he asked.

Wanda frowned and swiped her palm across her forehead. Damn that cake. "Yeah, of course. Why do you ask?"

He started folding up the ladder.

She noted, reluctantly, certain attractive paradoxes contained in his hands: long-boned, graceful, callused, competent. "I never thanked you, by the way," she said, in the interest of politeness.

"For what?"

"For the flowers. Last night."

"You're welcome. I never thanked you for the card. And the candy bar."

She shrugged. "Most boys like chocolate."

He surprised her by laughing—she had no idea why, but it was a nice laugh and she liked what it did to his face—and then he moved the ladder backstage.

Stepping carefully around the furniture, Wanda surveyed the set; it was a meticulously detailed, realistic representation of a dining room in a nineteenth-century tavern, and there were drinking glasses and bottles everywhere. "You remember Margaret? My housemate?" she called out, addressing the stage right wing space. "The woman who's not my mother?"

She could hear him backstage, putting the ladder away. "Mrs. Hughes."

"Yeah. She'd like to invite you over sometime. For dinner, maybe. Or dessert."

There was a long, eerily silent pause. Wanda stopped moving. She squinted offstage. Finally, Troy emerged from the darkness and stood in the stage right door frame. "Really," he said.

Wanda began tracing her fingers across the complex contours of a decanter. "Most people give roses on opening night."

He stayed where he was and regarded her from a distance. "I suppose that's true."

He looks like a casting agent's idea of a cop,
she thought,
or a cowboy. That's it! He looks like a goddamn cowboy. Right off the Texas range.

As he walked toward her
(
Howdy, pardner. Yee-haw. Please don't come any closer),
she noticed the square set of his jaw and the faint tracings of
lines in his lean face: a pair of parentheses around his mouth, the beginnings of crow's-feet at the corners of his heavy-lidded, sage-colored eyes. Lines that evidenced the laughter she'd just heard, wry humor, kindness. She suddenly had a clear vision of what he would look like when he was thirty, forty, even fifty.
A cowboy poet,
she thought, and then frowned.
He's too damn tall. He needs a hat. And a horse.

He didn't stop walking until he was six inches too close. "You don't strike me as a roses kind of person," he said.

"No?"

"No."

"I strike you as a daffodil kind of person, I guess." Her voice sounded strangely immature and breathy, nothing like the way she intended. It was at this point that she realized they were standing on level ground, inside the theatre, talking in full sentences about matters which had nothing to do with theatrical collaboration.

"You strike me as someone who's hardy and surprising and beautiful," said Troy.

She studied his work boots. Size eleven. He'd need a half-size larger in a pointed toe.

'"Daffodils,"' he said, '"that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty.'"

His boots took a step toward her. She backed up and bumped into a table. The glass decanter wobbled. His hand reached out and grasped it.

"See you in the booth," Wanda said, exiting stage right.

Several hours later, she was calling the cue for Nora's special, the cue that he'd adjusted earlier in the evening. It wasn't until that moment that she realized where she'd heard his words before: years ago, while stage-managing a production of
The Winter's Tale.
The words were from Perdita's flower speech. In praise of her, the cowboy poet had quoted Shakespeare.

After the show, he walked her to the car as usual. They said nothing about the earlier events of the evening. On this night, they said nothing at all. These late night walks found her feeling more and more apprehensive. Within the past few days he'd ravished her hand, recited poetry—and that while they were still inside the theatre, where their
respective roles should have kept her safe. Who the hell knew what he was going to try next, when they were outside under a campfire sky? The show had a three-week run, for chrissakes.

Her wariness was further heightened by a certain insidious smell in the night air. An early spring smell. A smell of things emerging which stirred a peculiar restlessness in her chest.

In an attempt to diffuse these tensions, she began to whistle "Old Chisum Trail" in a breathy, exuberant way that made her sound as if her mouth were full of saltines. After a few blocks, she suddenly noticed that Troy wasn't smoking. He was chewing cinnamon-flavored gum. This struck Wanda as extremely ominous.

They arrived at the car.

"Good work tonight," she said briskly, giving Troy a chummy punch to his upper arm. She turned and fumbled with the keys. "See ya!"

Before he could make any reply, Wanda slid onto the seat, pulled the door closed, and started up the car. She caught a glimpse of Troy's face in the rearview mirror as she sped off: he was staring after her with a somber, surprised longing—as if she were the Lone Ranger.

Wanda drove to a small, secluded park at the top of Queen Anne Hill. It overlooked the Space Needle and most of downtown Seattle. Peter was out there, somewhere. She popped a chocolate-covered espresso bean into her mouth and sighed expansively.
Finally,
she thought,
I
can really loo
k
for him.

She knew Peter. She knew his habits, his addictions. She had a precise, detailed, orderly plan which she intended to follow to the letter and whic
h
commenced tonight. Nothing could interfere with that, because the need to find Peter was not superfluous or trivial. It was an injunction, a genetic imperative. It felt like a medical condition.

It was opening night all over again—her opening night. She'd developed a character, physically modeled after the actress who played Charlie Parker's wife in the movie
Bird
—a movie she'd watched with Peter no fewer than six times. She'd given her character a name, an identity, authentic-looking props, a costume. She'd evolved a voice for her, a manner of speaking, physical traits, objectives, tactics. She'd plotted
the parameters that would contain her improvisations. This was guerrilla street theatre, and she was ready.

Her black dress, silk stockings, and high-heeled shoes were still in the car. She changed into them while the radio played Rosemary Clooney singing "May I Come In?" She tucked her hair into a glossy black, pageboy-style wig. She put on a pair of black-rimmed, 1950s cat's-eye glasses which she'd stolen from the Seattle Rep costume shop and taken to one of those while-you-wait places, where she'd had the prescription lenses replaced with clear glass. She fastened on Margaret's pearl earrings. She put on some cassis-colored lipstick. After retrieving her red and black book, she wrote for ten minutes nonstop,
I am going to find him.

Then she pulled a Seattle map out of her backpack. As she studied the city's confusing layout, she pondered the impact of landscape upon personality. She wondered if Midwesterners owed at least some of their steadiness and New Yorkers their ambition and drive to the fact that they live on a flat terrain overlaid with predominantly perpendicular streets. Wanda's study of native Northwesterners thus far hadn't done much to either confirm or refute this theory. She wasn't sure she'd even met any native Northwesterners. Everyone here seemed to be originally from somewhere else. Except Margaret. She had a certain haziness of disposition that might have come from growing up in a place where hills and bodies of water forced streets to curve, intersect at odd angles, disappear completely.

Wanda considered the possibility that she'd been bewitched by these insidious topographical forces. Maybe at least a small part of her current condition could be blamed on Seattle itself. A person could lose sight of things in a town like this. A person could have her sense of direction obliterated. Get behind the wrong hill, take the wrong turn, and—poof! You could disappear. You could wind up wandering around in circles. If you couldn't catch sight of the Space Needle, you'd be doomed.

Wanda shivered in her party dress. She pulled out the thermos of hot coffee she'd brought along and poured a cup. It was just the fortification she needed.

She regarded her map again with a renewed, right-angled confidence. In red Magic Marker, she had circled the location of every store in the greater Seattle vicinity which sold vintage jazz LPs. Each circle enclosed
a number, written in black marker, which was cross-referenced on a sheet of paper from Wanda's clipboard. The sheet contained the names, addresses, phone numbers, and operating hours of each of the stores; there were over thirty of them. Wanda had spent hours planning the exact sequence in which she would visit these stores, and they were numbered accordingly. Many of the stores, catering to their clients' nocturnal tendencies, were open late; those that weren't she'd visit during the day. She'd be most likely to find Peter at one of the night-owl places, though, between the hours of eleven and two. Some of the circles and numbers on Wanda's map were clustered together, forming complex intersections; other circles stood alone.

Wanda ceremoniously pointed to the circle enclosing the number i. "YOU ARE HERE," she announced.

She started the car, feeling rejuvenated. She wouldn't let this town and its waffling curvaceousness deter her. She knew how to behave like she was in Chicago or Manhattan, where the streets were long and flat and set at perfect right angles, you weren't ambushed by the likes of callow cowboy poets, and your feet always took you exactly where you wanted to go.

She got to the first store in no time. Situated at the bottom of Queen Anne Hill, it was called Blissed on Bop. After perusing the bin of Charlie Parker LPs and stealing glances at the clientele, she sauntered to the checkout counter.

The clerk was a small man, probably in his early twenties. He wore wire-rim glasses. His hair was straight, strawlike, and parted unflatteringly in the middle; he looked like he was wearing a small thatched and gabled roof. He had on a dark blue, badgeless Boy Scout shirt. He was reading Kerouac.

She greeted the clerk in a quiet, husky voice. She asked his name. It was Dermot. She told Dermot it was nice to meet him. She asked if he was the owner. Dermot said no, he just worked here. She told Dermot that she hoped he'd be able to help her anyway; she could really use some help. Dermot looked at her legs. He said he'd be happy to help if he could.

She then introduced herself as Detective Tink Lorenzini, an undercover cop on assignment with the Seattle PD. She flashed a detective'sbadge and ID. She wondered if Dermot would be willing to answer a few questions. She was looking for a man in connection with a B&E charge.

"B&E?" Dermot asked. He was staring at her lips.

Detective Lorenzini pouted. "Breaking and entering," she said.

Sure!" replied Dermot. "Whatever I can do, Detective."

The detective held a finger to her lips, pressed her hips against the counter, and gestured Dermot closer. "Dermot, please," she half-whispered, using the kind of voice that sells lingerie and 1-900 phone calls. "We're going to be working closely on this. Why don't you call me Tink."

Dermot nodded. His mouth was open. Droplets of sweat popped up on his nose.

The detective asked Dermot if he'd seen a man in his early forties, six foot four, heavy build, long blond ponytail.

"No," said Dermot. "I don't think so."

She supplied more details: The man probably looked at the more obscure bebop recordings. No run-of-the-mill stuff. He may have even struck up a conversation. He would've been knowledgeable. A real expert.

"Everybody that comes in here is an expert." Dermot said with a sigh.

Detective Lorenzini started chewing her lipsticked lips.

"He has beefy hands. But artistic-looking, you know?"

No," said Dermot. "That doesn't ring a bell."

"He smells like virgin olive oil, rosemary, and Guinness?"

"That doesn't sound familiar, either."

"He looks like a pugilist monk."