Death Is a Lonely Business (5 page)

"No," I said at last.

"Well, there you have it. You're still in shock. You don't know what life is. I was born and raised in the morgue. This is the first real touch of marble slab you ever had. So why don't you quiet down and go away."

He heard his own voice getting much too loud, shook his head, and said, "No, why don't I quiet down and go away."

Which he did. He opened the car door, jumped in, and before I could reinflate my balloon, was gone.

Cursing,
 
I
 
slammed into
 
a
 
telephone booth,
 
dropped a dime in the slot, and called across five miles of Los Angeles. When someone picked up at the other end I heard a radio playing "La Raspa," a door slammed, a toilet flushed, but I could feel the sunlight that I needed, waiting there.

The lady, living in a tenement on the corner of Temple and Figueroa, nervous at the phone she held in her hand, at last cleared her throat and said:

"Que?"

"Mrs. Gutierrez!" I shouted. I stopped, and started over. "Mrs. Gutierrez, this is the Crazy."

"Oh!" she gasped, and then laughed.
"Si, si!
You want to talk to Fannie?"

"No, no, just a few yells. Will you yell down, please, Mrs. Gutierrez?"

"I yell."

I heard her move. I heard the entire ramshackle, rickety tenement lean. Someday, a blackbird would land on the roof and the whole thing would go. I heard a small Chihuahua tap-dance on the linoleum after her, built like a bull bumblebee and barking.

I heard the tenement outer porch door open as Mrs. Gutierrez stepped out onto the third floor and leaned to call down through the sunshine at the second floor.

"Aai,
Fannie!
Aai!
It's the Crazy."

I called into my end, "Tell her I
need
to come visit!"

Mrs. Gutierrez waited. I could hear the second-floor porch creak, as if a vast captain had rolled out onto its plankings to survey the world.

"Aai,
Fannie, the Crazy needs to visit!"

A long silence. A voice sprang sweetly through the air above the tenement yard. I could not make out the words.

"Tell her I need
Tosca!"

"Tosca!"
Mrs. Gutierrez yelled down into the yard.

A long silence.

The whole tenement leaned again, the other way, like the earth turning in its noon slumbers.

The strains of the first act of
Tosca
moved up around Mrs. Gutierrez. She spoke.

"Fannie says...”

"I hear the music, Mrs. Gutierrez. That means 'Yes'!"

I hung up. At the same instant, a hundred thousand tons of salt water fell on the shore, a few yards away, with exquisite timing. I nodded at God's precision.

Making sure I had twenty cents in my pocket, I ran for the next train.

She was immense.

Her real name was Cora Smith, but she called herself Fannie Florianna, and no one ever called her otherwise. And I had known her, years ago, when I lived in the tenement, and stayed in touch with her after I moved out to the sea.

Fannie was so huge that she never slept lying down. Day and night she sat in a large-sized captain's chair fixed to the deck of her tenement apartment, with bruise marks and dents in the linoleum which her great weight had riveted there. She moved as little as possible, her breath churning in her lungs and throat as she sailed toward the door, and squeezed out to cross the hall to the narrow water-closet confines where she feared she might be ignominiously trapped one day. "My God," she often said, "wouldn't it be awful if we had to get the fire department to pry me out of there." And then back to her chair and her radio and her phonograph and, only a beckon away, a refrigerator filled with ice cream and butter and mayonnaise and all the wrong foods in the wrong amounts. She was always eating and always listening. Next to the refrigerator were bookshelves with no books, only thousands of recordings of Caruso and Galli-Curci and Swarthout and the rest. When the last songs were sung and the last record hissed to a stop at midnight, Fannie sank into herself, like an elephant shot with darkness. Her great bones settled in her vast flesh. Her round face was a moon watching over the vast territorial imperatives of her body. Propped up with pillows, her breath escaped and sucked back, escaped again, fearful of the avalanche that might happen if somehow she lay back too far, and her weight smothered her, her flesh engulfed and crushed her lungs, and put out her voice and light forever. She never spoke of it, but once when someone asked why there was no bed in her room, her eyes burned with a fearful light, and beds were never mentioned again. Fat, as Murderer, was always with her. She slept in her mountain, afraid, and woke in the morning glad for one more night gone, having made it through.

A piano box waited in the alley below the tenement.

"Mine," said Fannie. "The day I die, bring the piano box up, tuck me in, hoist me down. Mine. Oh, and while you're at it, there's a dear soul, hand me that mayonnaise jar and that
big
spoon."

I stood at the front door of the tenement, listening. Her voice flowed down through the halls. It started out as pure as a stream of fresh mountain water and cascaded through the second to the first and then along the hall. I could almost drink her singing, it was that clear.

Fannie.

As I climbed up the first-floor steps she trilled a few lines from
La Traviata.
As I moved on the second flight, pausing, eyes shut, to listen, Madame Butterfly sang welcome to the bright ship in the harbor and the lieutenant in his whites.

It was the voice of a slender Japanese maiden on a hill on a spring afternoon. There was a picture of that maid, aged seventeen, on a table near the window leading out onto the second-floor tenement porch. The girl weighed 120 pounds at most, but that was a long time ago. It was her voice that pulled me up through the old stairwell, a promise of brightness to come.

I knew that when I got to the door, the singing would stop.

"Fannie," I'd say. "I heard someone singing up here just now."

"Did you?"

"Something from
Butterfly."

"How strange. I wonder who it could have been?"

We had played that game for years, talked music, discussed symphony / ballet / opera, listened to it on radios, played it on her old Edison crank-up phono, but never, never once in three thousand days, had Fannie ever sung when I was in the room with her.

But today was different.

As I reached the second floor her singing stopped. But she must have been thinking, planning. Maybe she had glanced out and seen the way I walked along the street. Maybe she read my skeleton through my flesh. Maybe my voice, calling far across town on the phone (impossible) had brought the sadness of the night and the rain with it. Anyway, a mighty intuition heaved itself aware in Fannie Florianna's summer bulk. She was ready with surprises.

I stood at her door, listening.

Creaks as of an immense ship blundering through tides. A great conscience stirred there.

A soft hissing: the phonograph!

I tapped on the door.

"Fannie," I called. "The Crazy is here."

She opened the door to a thunderclap of music. Great lady, she had put the shaved wooden needle on the hissing record, then surged to the door, held the knob, waiting. At the whisk of the baton
down,
she had flung the door
wide.
Puccini flooded out, gathered round, pulled me in. Fannie Florianna helped.

It was the first side of
Tosca.
Fannie planted me in a rickety chair, lifted my empty paw, put a glass of good wine in it. "I don't drink, Fannie."

"Nonsense. Look at your face. Drink!" She surged around like those wondrous hippos turned light as milkweed in
Fantasia,
and sank like a terribly strange bed upon her helpless chair.

By the end of the record I was crying.

"There, there," whispered Fannie, refilling my glass. "There, there."

"I always cry at Puccini, Fannie."

"Yes, dear man, but not so
hard.
"

"Not so hard, true." I drank half of the second glass. It was a 1938 St. Emilion from a good vineyard, brought and left by one of Fannie's rich friends who came clear across town for good talk, long laughs, better times for both, no matter whose income was higher. I had seen some of Toscanini's relatives going up the stairs one night, and waited. I had seen Lawrence Tibbett coming down, once, and we had nodded, passing. They always brought the best bottles with their talk, and they always left smiling. The center of the world can be anywhere. Here it was on the second floor of a tenement on the wrong side of L.A.

I wiped tears on my jacket cuff.

"Tell me," said the great fat lady.

"I found a dead man, Fannie. And no one will listen to me about it!"

"My God." Her round face got rounder as her mouth opened, her eyes went wide, then softened to commiseration. "Poor boy. Who?"

"It was one of those nice old men who sit in the ticket office down at the Venice Short Line stop, been sitting there since Billy Sunday thumped the Bible and William Jennings Bryan made his Cross of Gold speech. I've seen them there since I was a kid. Four old men. You felt they'd be there forever, glued to the wooden benches. I don't think I ever saw one of them up and around. They were there all day, all week, all year, smoking pipes or cigars, and talking politics thirteen to the dozen and deciding what to do with the country. When I was fifteen one of them looked at me and said, 'You going to grow up and change the world only for the best, boy?' 'Yes, sir!' I said. 'I think you'll do it,' he said. 'Won't he, gents?' 'Yes,' they all said, and smiled at me. The old man who asked me that, he's the one I found in the lion cage last night."

"In the cage?"

"Under water, in the canal."

"This calls for one more side of
Tosca.
"

Fannie was an avalanche getting up, a tide flowing to the machine, a mighty force cranking the windup arm, and God's whisper putting the needle down on a new surface.

As the music rose, she came back into her chair like a ghost ship, regal and pale, quiet and concerned.

"I know one reason why you're taking this so hard," she said. "Peg. She still in Mexico, studying?"

"Been gone three months. Might as well be three years," I said. "Christ, I'm lonely."

"And vulnerable," said Fannie. "Shouldn't you call her?"

"Christ, Fannie, I can't afford. And I don't want to reverse the charges. I'll just have to hope she'll phone me in the next day or so."

"Poor boy. Sick with love."

"Sick with death. The awful thing is, Fannie, I didn't even know that old man's name! And isn't that a shame?"

The second side of
Tosca
really did it. I sat there, head down, with the tears running off the tip of my nose into the wine.

"You've ruined your St. Emilion," said Fannie gently, when the record ended.

"Now I'm mad," I said.

"Why?" Fannie, standing, like a great pomegranate mother, by the phonograph, sharpened a new needle and found a happier record. "Why?"

"Someone
killed
him, Fannie. Someone stuffed him in that cage. There was no other way for him to have gotten in."

"Oh, dear," she murmured.

"When I was twelve, one of my uncles back east was shot in a holdup late at night, in his car. At his funeral, my brother and I vowed we'd find the murderer and do him in. But he's still in the world somewhere. And that was a long time back in another town. This time, it's here. Whoever drowned the old man lives within a few blocks of me in Venice. And when I find him...”

"You'll turn him over to the police." Fannie leaned forward in one massive but tender motion. "You'll feel better after a good sleep."

Then she read my face.

"No," she said at my funeral, "you won't feel better. Well, go on. Be the fool all men are. God, what lives we women lead, watching the fools kill each other and the killers kill the killers, and us over on the sidelines yelling stop and nobody listening. Can't
you
hear me, love?"

She put another record on and let the needle down like a loving kiss to the grooves, and came surging over to touch my cheek with her great pink chrysanthemum fingers.

"Oh, please, do be careful. I don't like Venice. Not enough streetlights. And those damned oil wells pumping all night long, no letup, with a case of the moans."

"Venice won't get me, Fannie, or whatever it is wandering around Venice,"

Standing in halls, waiting, I thought, outside old men's and old women's doors.

Fannie became a giant glacier standing over me.

She must have seen my face again, where everything was given away, nothing hidden. Instinctively, she glanced at her own door, as if a shadow had passed outside. Her intuition stunned me.