Page Turner Pa (20 page)

"Rome?" Joseph asked.

"I think maybe you three ought to talk in here," Tushi said, very efficiently moving across the floor to hold the bedroom door open for them.

 

There was no place to sit. The bed was covered with coats. So they stood, all three of them in postures of discomfort, Pamela pulling at her fingers, Kennington and Joseph leaning against the window, their arms wrapped tightly over their chests.

"Where is Paul?" Pamela once again demanded. "I want my son. I've come to get my son."

"I'm sorry, but I don't have any idea."

"Don't lie to me. Especially after Rome—"

"What is this about Rome?" Joseph thrust in. "Richard, how on earth do you know this woman?"

"We met when I was there in June. Just by chance."

"And who are
you?
" Pamela interrupted. "How do
you
know my son?"

"I'm Mr. Kennington's agent. And I only know Paul because before Christmas I ran into him in the elevator in my building. I—"

"What was he doing in your building?"

"He has a friend downstairs from me. And he remembered me from San Francisco, and we got to talking. Later I asked him if he'd like to turn pages at a little recital I was hosting. This was when you were in Japan," he added to Kennington.

"Why didn't you tell me this?"

"What was the point? I didn't know you'd met these people in Rome."

"I don't see why you're bothering with all these lies. It's no use," Pamela said, sitting down on the coats.

"Mrs. Porterfield, Pamela, I'm telling you the truth. I honestly haven't seen Paul since June."

"And I'm telling you I know you're lying. I found your address in his address book. I saw the picture."

"What picture?"

"The one you gave him. The one you signed to him."

"But I never gave him any picture! This is insane!"

"You're wasting your time. I
saw
it."

"Well, maybe he bought a picture somewhere. Sometimes I sign them after concerts—"

"
That
picture? I don't think so."

"What was the picture?" inquired Joseph.

"It was of him in Rome. At the Trevi Fountain. No doubt you got a kick out of my humiliation that night."

Joseph turned, gazed at Kennington, who sat next to Pamela on the bed.

A hush descended.

"There's a party going on," Kennington said presently. "We can't stay in here all night."

"Yes," Pamela said. "Far be it for a mother to get in the way of some highbrow party. But you needn't worry because I didn't come here to spoil your fun. I came here for Paul. And so if you'd just be kind enough to tell me where I might locate him—"

"Pamela—"

"Have you tried his apartment?" Joseph suggested.

She shook her head. "He's never there. He's always practicing. He
claims.
"

"It's at least worth giving a call." Kennington handed her the telephone.

Reluctantly she accepted it, dialed, waited.

Soon enough her expression changed.

"Hello, Teddy? This is Mrs. Porterfield. I'm fine, how are you? Good. Listen, honey, is Paul there? No, there's no message. All right, I'll call back later."

She hung up. "Any other bright ideas?"

"He might actually be practicing," Joseph said. "Or, there is one other possibility." He glanced at Pamela, who still held the phone. "May I?"

"Be my guest."

She handed it to him. He dialed 411.

"Yes, have you got a listing for an Alden Haynes, please? H-A-Y-N-E-S. On Central Park West. Thank you."

Pushing down the little buttons on the cradle of the phone, he dialed again.

"Hello, Alden? Joseph Mansourian here. Fine, fine. Yes, far too long. Listen, I'm sorry to bother you at this hour, I realize it's rather awkward, but I'm looking for that young friend of yours, Paul Porterfield. I don't know if he mentioned that we met in the elevator ... yes. It's rather urgent that I speak to him, you see, I have his mother here, and she's been searching all over town for him ... He is? Good, good. Thank you."

He handed the phone to Pamela, whose face had over the course of the conversation grown rather flushed.

"Hello, Paul? Hello. Darling, I'm so glad to see your voice. Hear your voice, I mean. Gosh, I'm nervous." Again, she smiled. "Well, guess what, sweetheart? I'm in New York. I'm at Richard Kennington's apartment."

"You're
where
?" Kennington heard Paul shouting.

"I'll just go and make sure everything's all right outside," Joseph said, stepping carefully over Kennington's knees and out the door.

 

Together, they deposited Pamela and her suitcase in a cab, then got into the elevator.

"Why didn't you tell me you'd met these people?" Joseph asked as the doors shut.

"Why should I? Is it my duty to report to you every time I meet someone?"

"No, of course not. And yet if this woman's to be taken seriously, your involvement with her had to have been quite a bit more than just a conversation in the street. You had to have—"

"I helped her out when some gypsies tried to steal her purse. That was all."

"And the son?"

"We got to be friends. He's a fan."

"Did you sleep with him?"

"Joseph!"

"You've got to tell me. After all, I'm the one he stole from. And you have to admit, you've never been very astute at judging these sorts of situations, Richard. I mean, don't you remember San Francisco? He knew everything about you. Who's to say he didn't
arrange
to be in the elevator that day, just so that he could inveigle his way into my apartment, so that he could—"

"Joseph! You're the one who asked him to page-turn."

"Has he called you? Written you any letters?"

The doors to the elevator opened. "Darling," Tushi called, rushing from the apartment. "Is the madwoman gone?"

"She's gone," Joseph said. "We put her in a cab."

"I must tell you," she continued, clapping an arm around each of their backs, "when I first saw her, I thought she was some sort of deranged fan."

"She's not a deranged fan," Kennington said. "She's not any kind of fan at all."

"She's just an unhappy woman who wants her son," Joseph added.

"Oh, her son. I meant to ask you. Who is her son? She said something about San Francisco."

"The page turner," Joseph said. "The well-dressed page turner."

"That's her son? Oh, dear. Well, happy birthday!"

"Happy birthday!" the crowd echoed, as Tushi's young man, for the second time, carried in the cake, which was in the form of a piano.

"Make a wish!" he cried, after they'd finished singing.

Kennington did. He blew out the candles.

"Chocolate and white chocolate," Joseph said. "Your favorites."

"Yes, my favorites," Kennington repeated, and plunged the knife into the soundboard.

A
LL THE OTHER GUESTS
had left the party, and Tushi and her young man were dancing. They were dancing—she'd put one of Kennington's Billie Holiday CDs on the stereo—and so they did not hear the noises from the kitchen, where Joseph was helping Kennington clean up.

Kennington's kitchen, though small, was very fancy. It had Carrara marble countertops, polished birch cabinets, a Sub-Zero fridge, and Thermador ovens. It had a clever little revolving cabinet in the corner, and pullout spice racks, and a disposal, into which Kennington was at the moment furiously scraping stale vegetable mousses and celery ends. Periodically he would switch the thing on, so that its roar might further abstract his and Joseph's conversation, already muted, for Tushi and her young man, by the voice of Billie Holiday, the scratchy sinuous tonalities of a blues band.

"I'm telling you," Joseph was saying, "you've got to call the police. To protect yourself."

"And I'm telling you there's no need."

"Are you kidding? Don't you remember what happened to that girl, that actress, in California? Or Versace, for God's sake."

"Joseph, listen to me. You are overreacting. There's no reason to think—"

"Easy for you to say, when it's my apartment he was prowling around in. And God knows what else he pawed over."

"Please give me some credit as a judge of character. Paul's not like that."

"Then why did he steal that picture?"

"I don't know. He admires me. Anyway, stealing a picture doesn't mean he's packing a revolver."

"I'm not saying it does. I'm just saying you can't be too careful these days,"

Kennington thrust a bowl under the tap, scrubbed at it, put it in the dishwasher.

"I hope you realize I'm only bringing all this up because I want to protect you," Joseph went on. "Because I'm worried about you."

"Are you?"

"Why else would I make such a fuss?"

"I don't know. Maybe because you're jealous."

"Do I have reason to be jealous?"

"No."

"Good."

"Still, that hasn't stopped you before."

"Wait a minute. This isn't about jealousy. It's about the fact that clearly you became much more involved with these people than you've let on, otherwise that demented woman would never have—"

"Pamela's not demented. She's in the middle of a divorce. And anyway, she's not Paul."

"They could be working together. They could—"

"Will you keep your voice down? None of this is their fault. If it's anyone's fault, it's mine."

"So you did sleep with him. Was he underage?"

"That never stopped you."

"And what about the picture? If he was underage..."

"I don't know. Jesus, it's just a snapshot, Joseph. It was days before you even noticed it was missing, and now you're acting like he committed grand larceny." Kennington breathed shakily. "I'll say this one last time. Paul Porterfield is a perfectly decent, somewhat naive boy who—"

Joseph laughed. "You can really be so naive sometimes—"

"Don't talk to me like that."

"That boy really took you for a ride, didn't he? He had you thinking he was Little Mary Sunshine. Didn't it ever occur to you it might be a tactic?"

"Did it ever occur to you that not everyone in the world is out to get something?"

Joseph grimaced. "There's no way around it. I have to tell you."

"Tell me what?"

"He did it to me too."

"Did what?"

"Came on to me." Joseph hesitated, as liars are inclined to do. "Of course I knew better than to take him up on it—"

Kennington stepped back. He laughed.

"I've only kept it from you to protect you. But now we have to face facts. After he turned pages for Thang that evening, he stuck around."

"Joseph—"

"It was hard to get rid of him. And I'm sure we're not the only ones. A boy like that never barks up just one tree. Later, I saw him at a concert. I introduced him to Harry Moore. For all I know Harry might—"

"I don't want to hear this."

"You have to. You're not a child anymore. Today you're forty. You've got to accept that people will try to use you."

"Do you have to be so loud?" Hurrying toward the sink, Kennington switched on the disposal.

"Oh, so it's going to be that again, is it?" Joseph yelled over the noise. "The disposal game?"

"No."

"You're too old for that now. Too old—"

"Please shut up. Can't you shut up?"

Joseph was silent. Crossing the room very calmly, he switched off the disposal, so that once again the voice of Billie Holiday penetrated into the kitchen.

 

Oh my man I love him so,
he'll never know
all my life is just despair
but I don't care...

 

In the living room, Tushi leaned her head into the young man's shoulder. "I hope they're all right," she said.

"I'm sure there's nothing to worry about," he answered, nuzzling her ear.

Again, the disposal switched on.

Nothing to worry about,
Tushi repeated to herself.

And they continued dancing.

T
HE TAXI
had dropped Pamela
off,
and she was once again alone on a sidewalk, in a neighborhood—if this was possible—even more sinister than Kennington's. Dirty buildings rose up around her, the bricks gaudy under yellow streetlamps. A homeless woman, wrapped in cardboard and blankets, lay asleep on Paul's stoop, while near the corner several boys, their jeans drooping at the buttocks, stared at her, legs restless as they shuffled amid the dirty snow heaps. One of them held a boom box from which dance music pulsed like a faint and harrowing heartbeat.

They were staring at her, not so much malevolently as assessingly, which was perhaps worse.

Picking up her suitcase, she stepped carefully over the sleeping pile of blankets and rang Paul's bell. Instantly the door clicked open, for which she was grateful; just as quickly she let herself through and shut it behind her, causing the glass pane to rattle so loudly she feared it might break. But it didn't. Safe, for the moment, she breathed. The corridor was narrow, lit by a popover-shaped lighting fixture inside of which several insect corpses reclined. The walls smelled of smoke, of unwashed hair.

Footsteps sounded overhead. She could hear the loud tripping of boyish feet taking the stairs three at a time. Then two faces were laughing in front of hers. One of them she recognized as belonging to Teddy Moss. The other reminded her, inexplicably, of a chipmunk.

"Teddy!" she cried in relief, and kissed him. "Oh, it's so good to see you, sweetheart!"

"Good to see you too, Mrs. Porterfield. This is my friend, Bobby Newman."

"Pleased to meet you, Bobby."

"Likewise, I'm sure."

"Well, shall we? I'm afraid there's no elevator."

"That's all right, I'm strong."

"Let me take your suitcase," Bobby said as they started climbing. "That's a pretty perfume. Wait, let me guess. L'Air du Temps, right?"

"In fact it is. My, you've got a good nose."

"I know my fragrances," Bobby said. "Especially the classics. I always prefer the classics. For instance, have you tried the new Chanel? Allure? My feeling is that it's too—"