Death in The Life (3 page)

“Maybe.”

“You wear a…” He mimed a complicated headdress.

“A fez.”

“No fez—when a woman wears a fez—bad luck. A veil—mysterious—deep thoughts.”

“That’s too much hokum.”

“Hokum, fokum. You could make a buck.”

Julie took a bite of the honey-dipped cake. “It’s great.”

“Them goddamned Italians. They know what’s good, huh?
Finikia,
you know what that means? It means Venice. That’s where it came from. Venice to Greece to Sullivan Street.” He got up. “You got the Tarot cards already?”

“Not yet. I’m just thinking about it.”

Gus grinned. “First you should get somebody to tell your fortune.”

“Very funny.”

“You want to know where to buy such cards?”

“Okay.”

“I got a friend. I will write his name down for you on Eighth Avenue. He’s got a shop. Everything. You tell him Gus is your friend. How’s the big newspaperman?”

“Fine.”

“He’s out there somewhere else?”

“Cairo.” She wasn’t sure. Last week it was Cairo.

“He don’t ever like to come to Gus’s Corner, right? Too many flies, he said last summer. In Egypt he don’t mind the flies. How come?”

“You tell me, Gus.”

The Tarot wasn’t something you could master overnight, Julie discovered. Not by reading a single book, especially without the cards. What did happen, her reading set up a chain reaction: she went again and again to the books in Jeff’s own library,
their
own library. Jeff always said every book she read automatically became hers as well as his. He had a considerable collection on the occult; it ran more to the origins of beliefs and their webbing into both social and artistic fabrics than to formulas for practice. Which was great. She was learning something new, and since it had no practical use whatsoever, she learned more quickly.

Toward midnight she remembered that she ought to write her weekly letter to Jeff. She turned on the radio and lit a cigarette. The music was wild, coming up from a muted drumbeat. She started her letter: “I’ve been reading about the Great Zoroaster in OUR library.
Zoroaster and His World
by Ernest Herzfeld, and, Jeff, the funniest thing just happened. I turned on the radio and what do you think was playing? a pop version of
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
which, as you know, is another name for Zoroaster. Crazy, but somebody really dug those drums. You’d hate it. I kind of like it. It’s like pulling the old man’s beard. But how’s that for coincidence? Me telling you what I was reading, and somebody out there spinning platters tuned in on the same subject. I didn’t go to the Briscoe dinner party tonight. Don’t worry. I phoned and said all the right things. Anne said to tell you you were doing marvelously. Doctor Callahan read your Sunday article too, I think…”

Doctor Callahan: Julie decided not to tell Jeff about the therapy hiatus until the next letter. About Madame Tozares maybe never… Tozares: Z-o-r-o-a-s-t-e-r. Hey!

T
HE WEST FORTIES HAD
been a kind of home away from home for Julie. In the two years she had tried to make it as an actress, much of her life centered around the Actors Forum which was headquartered in a desanctified church. She thought she might stop by there after visiting Mr. Kanakas and see what was on the bulletin board. Or who. Some of her best friends were actors. And some were ordinary people who still lived in the neighborhood where they had grown up. They walked dogs, shopped at the market stalls on Ninth Avenue, and raised plants on the window sills. You could see these people in the daytime, even on Eighth Avenue, with their shopping carts and prayer beads. The older women almost all wore hats. If they came out at all at night, they got lost among the shady traffic, the highs and lows on drugs and alcohol, the whores and pimps, the “porn” shills and their customers. Julie had never been afraid there, night or day, though a lot of people told her that she should be. But then there were not many places where she was afraid. In blue jeans and sneakers and her old raincoat, a scarf around her head, which was her habitual garb, when Jeff was away—except on her trips to Doctor—she was not a likely cop to any pimp, nor worth the risk to a mugger.

She greeted Mary Ryan where the woman was tying up her dog on the fireplug opposite a fish store.

“Julie, is it? I’ve missed you lately. Have you been out with a play, love?”

She was tempted to say she had been and to make up an adventure. Mrs. Ryan had ushered for years at the Martin Beck Theater. “Just busy.”

“Say hello to Fritzie. We lost his brother last winter, did you know? It’s been terrible lonesome. I don’t know what I’ll do if anything happens to this one.” To Fritzie, who was vaguely dachshund, she said, “You remember Julie.”

“Hi, Fritzie.”

He was about as interested in her as was Anne Briscoe.

“Will you come up and have a nice cup of tea with me? Do you remember Mrs. Monahan? She was the one who read our tea leaves for us?”

“I do remember her.”

“She’s dead, poor soul. She was getting daft at the end, saying she had to get a chop for Michael’s supper and him dead and gone before I ever knew her. Will I walk you as far as the actors’ place?”

“I have to stop first at Mr. Kanakas’s.” Julie nodded toward the shop a couple of doors away. Dead and gone. Dead was not enough for some people.

Mrs. Ryan tucked a stray wisp of gray hair back under her hat. “Do you know, I’ve always wanted to go in there but there never seemed to be a good excuse. Do you mind if I come with you?”

What could she say? “Why not?”

“Will you stay here and behave yourself for a few minutes?” Mrs. Ryan said to the dog.

Mr. Kanakas dealt in everything from theatrical makeup to ancient coins to magicians’ supplies. The place smelled of damp cloth and dye. An old man with the look of a tired eagle came halfway to meet them. His nose drooped down between enormous moustaches.

“Mr. Kanakas? A friend of mine—Gus on Sullivan Street—said you could help me. I’m looking for a good deck of Tarot cards.”

“Ask for the Marseilles. They’re the most interesting,” Mrs. Ryan whispered.

“This is my friend Mrs. Ryan.”

“I know Mrs. Ryan. Two dogs.” He said it with the air of an offended person.

“Only one now. His brother died.”

“My condolences. The good Marseilles deck is hard to find. You are lucky, Miss. I have one.” He brought a paper bag and tore it open. The cards were wrapped in a faded yellow silk cloth. “If you knew the history of these you could write a book.” He cleared a place on top of the counter and wiped it with his sleeve. “Help yourself.”

The cards were worn and frayed at the edges, the backs yellowed from what might have been centuries of use. The faces had that old look of dwarfs.

“Aren’t they interesting?” Mrs. Ryan ventured. “I prefer old cards myself.”

“How much, Mr. Kanakas?’

“You’re a friend of Gus, you can have them for twelve dollars.”

“Twelve dollars!” Mrs. Ryan said. “You can hardly see the faces on some of them.”

“I was thinking of ten dollars at the most,” Julie said.

“Take them,” Kanakas said with a great sigh. Then: “Maybe I got something else you would like to see. A crystal ball? I got a friend, a cop, you know? When somebody goes out of business in the neighborhood he tells Kanakas. There was this old gypsy woman on Forty-fourth Street…”

Ten minutes later, having collected Fritzie, Julie and Mrs. Ryan approached the vacant first-floor shop on Forty-fourth Street,

“It’s crazy. Wild. It’s like somebody up there had a hand on my shoulder.” Julie set the shopping bag Mrs. Ryan had loaned her down carefully on the sidewalk. Crystal was heavy and the ball was real crystal. You could look through it and practically see the microbes crawling around underneath. Even Jeff would approve its purchase.

“I know what used to be here,” Mrs. Ryan said. “It was a Chinese laundry for years and years. They’re all going out of the business. It’s the Communists getting the upper hand, making them think they’re too good for it. I wonder was it the gypsy woman my friend Mrs. Monahan used to come to? There’s lots of people like to have their fortunes told them now and then. It cheers them up.”

Julie shaded her eyes and tried to see through the dirty window. There was a break in the plaster on the back wall the shape of a dragon. “What if the fortune’s bad?”

“Nobody’s fortune is that bad.”

“Want to bet?’

“You can print up cards and I’ll distribute them at the next Bingo.”

“Hey, I didn’t say I was going into the business.”

“All the same. It would be a very good thing for an actress between engagements.”

Between engagements. That’s me all right, Julie thought

“And didn’t you tell me once you were writing a play?”

“I was thinking about it.” She had told Doctor she wanted to write a play. Or something.

“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.”

“T
HE 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.”