Stages (28 page)

“Her. She’s weird,” Pete said. “She comes from Florida, I think. The panhandle. Nobody lives there.”

“Come on,” said Brett to Melanie. “Let’s do a few lines.”

“When I finish my book,” Melanie said. “I’m right at one of the most interesting parts.”

“But you’re looking at a picture book,” Pete said.

“Of course,” Melanie replied. “This book is about L.A.”

“Okay, suit yourself,” Brett said. “If I’m not back in an hour, though, come and get me. I don’t want to get so high I start believing what people say.”

“God forbid,” said Melanie. “That’s how they do deals in L.A.” She turned back to her book and went on paging through the photographs, imagining for her friends ultimate destinies like those in
Hollywood Babylon.
Scotch always had this effect on her. But then, blessedly, she had a tendency to forget everything after a certain point. There was something to be said for booze that cleaned up after itself.

At one point a groupie named Ruthie sat down beside Melanie and said, “Hey, Mel, what’s happenin’?” Ruthie had a way of settling on you like a piece of fine ash, but that quality was typical of the groupies. It was as though Hard Liquor’s concerts ignited something in them that by dawn had to be burned out completely. Of late Ruthie had been sleeping with Pete. His hair was a foot longer than hers, and her bottom was skinny as a boy’s, so from the rear they made a couple who could have been anything.

“Melanie!”

Startled, she turned around. It was Pete. He looked frightened.

“Hey, babe,” Ruthie said with a stoned smile.

“What the matter?” Melanie said. She held up her hand to shut off Ruthie.

“It’s Brett,” Pete replied. “We think he snorted a little too much coke. They’re walking him around.”

Melanie felt gripped by ice. She got up and ran, pushing her way through the crowd. Pete stumbled after her, with words falling out of him.

Don’t
panic, Mel. It’s okay. I said it’s okay.

But Melanie didn’t hear him. She was filled with a terrible dread, and even as she was running toward Brett she felt him being swept away from her by a flood faster than her heartbeat and broader than her reach.

When she got to him, he wasn’t walking at all. Teddy and Dave were holding him up, and his feet were dragging, the toes of his cowboy boots furrowing the carpet.

Rushing up to him, Melanie put her hands on his cheeks. His face was gray. His eyes were milky, and didn’t see her.

“Call an ambulance, somebody!” Melanie shrieked.

They put him on a sofa, and Melanie sat there with him, stroking his hair, pleading with him to hang on. He was breathing in spasms, like a cat Melanie had once seen that had been struck by a car and had breathed for a time just like this, its paws jerking in the air.

Brett stopped breathing five minutes before the paramedics arrived. Pete tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He was still trying when the paramedics came. One of them pounded on Brett’s chest. Another put an oxygen mask over his mouth.

Melanie was still sitting on the sofa. She felt weak with nausea. She leaned over, with her head touching her lap, taking slow deep breaths.

Then there was nothing. Until Melanie came to. Her eyes opened, and she saw a wall of leather-bound books. She was disoriented for a moment, but a moment later the nightmare returned, and she gasped.

Pete was standing over her, and Ruthie had hold of her hand.

“Mel, I’m
sorry,
” Pete said.

46

Brett had been pronounced dead on arrival.

He hadn’t been snorting cocaine at all. The packet they’d given him had contained pure heroin.

That night Melanie had wanted to be dead too. Several of them had offered to stay with her, but all she wanted, she’d said, was to be taken back to the motel.

That night Melanie sat on the roughly upholstered armchair in the motel room for a long time. She stared at Brett’s guitar. She stared at his Hawaiian print shirt, hanging on the back of a chair.

Her whole life had simply emptied out.

Her spirit kept welling up in her, struggling to get to Brett, to touch him again, to hold him.

But he wasn’t there.

Brett was a dead body lying in the basement of a hospital.

And Melanie’s body was buckling under her sobs.

The tears drained away, though, and when they did there were just the walls of this motel room, and outside, the universe, vast and utterly empty.

Melanie would try to pull herself together, and then she would think,
Why? For what?

Without him, what could her own life be but a long wait for her own death, just
waiting.
Alone.

He had been her reason for living. Without him there was no reason for anything, no meaning, no purpose. Nothing, just misery. And you could only be truly miserable having truly known, once, happiness.

Brett had said that he wanted to be cremated. His family got the body, though, and they had him buried. Had they been married, Melanie could have had his wish carried out. Yet at his funeral, where she sat a stranger to everyone, Melanie knew that it didn’t matter now what they did to him. He was already so far, far away.

The dead vanished into thin air. Life was only a rumor, a whisper, an aching that would pass. There was barely a breath of substance to it. A day was a few hours, a year a few days, a lifetime no time at all.

Standing before Brett’s flower-covered grave, alone, after the rest of them had gone, Melanie said—out loud—because she was no longer sure even of her own existence, “I loved you so. I really did….

“And I was going to write you a song.”

47

Veronica Simmons’s parents had never told anyone about that awful night: the phone ringing at 2:00
A.M.
and their having to get up and get dressed and drive into Manhattan. Where their daughter was being held at a police station.

The shock of getting the call wasn’t enough. Then they had to see her there, in this little bit of a leopard-spotted halter dress and wearing fishnet stockings and gold-colored shoes that looked like they’d been bought in the subway.

She was
just sitting there,
snapping gum and looking at her fingernails. She hadn’t even given the police her right name.

While her father paid her bail, Veronica’s mother sat beside her, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief and asking what failure of hers was responsible for this.

“You were okay, Ma” came the reply, in a flat Brooklyn accent that struck terror into her mother because she thought her daughter had now developed a third personality.

They got her into the backseat of the car somehow, and Veronica’s mother said, “Paula, you’ve got to come home with us and stay, until we find a place where you can go for professional help—oh, that stupid woman we sent you to, I’d like to hear her explanation for this!”

“I was good,” said the frightful creature in the back, this time in Paula’s voice.

“What is she talking about?” her father asked.

“You concentrate on your driving,” said her mother. “Or we’re going to have an accident on top of everything else.”

“I left some things in my hotel room,” Paula said. “I’d like to pick them up.”

“What hotel room?” her mother said. “What about your apartment?”

“The room only costs twelve dollars—for half a night, that is. It’s a
very
transient hotel. Right off Eighth, though, so it’s convenient to work.”

“What work?”

“My character’s. She’s a hooker. I got a part in a play, a really good part, and I’m not going to just play this part. I’m going to
become
it.”

“You mean to say you’ve been out walking the streets!”

“No, mostly I was just standing on the corner. And I don’t mind telling you I was getting a little worried. I’d been standing there for a half hour, and nothing was happening, and I was getting this awful feeling that these street people had spotted me as a fake—a police decoy or something—and I thought,
Oh, shit, this isn’t working, I’m just not convincing.
And then, what a surprise I got. I felt this
stab
in my rear end and I realized I’d just been kicked in the butt and I wheeled around and there was this black hooker about six feet tall screaming in my face, ‘You get the hell offa my block!’”

“You could have been killed!”

“What a wonderful feeling it was, to hear those words.”

“Insanity, what you did was sheer insanity.”

“Daddy, couldn’t we stop at the hotel and pick up my stuff? Then I won’t have to go back there tomorrow, and I’ll have that much more time to be studying my lines. You can come in with me. I’d love to have you meet the manager—he’ll try to charge me five dollars extra because he’ll think you’re my ‘guest.’ You just wait and see.”

“Your father and I will have no part of this!”

“You should meet the manager of this place too, Ma. He wears a short-sleeve shirt with a T-shirt under it, just the way Uncle Herb does.”

“This is madness, all perfect madness. And we won’t be dragged into it.”

“No, it isn’t, Mother,” said the voice in the back, which had now taken on the cool aloofness of the second personality. “This is what my life is going to be.
This
is the
art
of
Veronica Simmons.
”

A little more than six months after this dreadful night, the Rubins were attending a party that followed the presentation of the Obie Awards. Their daughter Veronica Simmons had been given an Obie for the best performance by a leading actress, which she would be adding to an Outer Critics Circle Award and a scrapbook full of glowing reviews.

Mrs. Rubin noticed, with some annoyance, her husband
kvellmg
all over the place. He was getting a little drunk, and he was actually enjoying himself with these people, who couldn’t say enough good things about his daughter. To Mrs. Rubin they all looked like a bunch of nuts, except for Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. You had to wonder what such nice, normal-acting people were doing in such a crazy business.

“Is it true that Ed Sullivan’s wife is Jewish?” Mrs. Rubin said to Anne.

48

“I don’t know how to act with people like this,” Kathy said as Aaron switched off the headlights.

“Just be yourself,” Aaron replied. “The only difference between the Borises and you and me is that they’re older, so they have a lot more money.”

“Really,” Kathy replied. “I don’t think that we exactly fit the Great Neck mold.”

“This isn’t Great Neck, it’s Sands Point,” Aaron pointed out. The Borises’ stone and glass house loomed before them.

“I never know how to respond to
art
,”
Kathy said. “Children, dogs, needlepoint pillows, a copper plate with a rabbi on it that one of their mothers brought back from her trip to Israel—those things I can handle,” Kathy said. “But Abstract Expressionism? Forget it.” As they walked up to the front door, Kathy saw a Japanese garden full of carefully contrived and softly illuminated shapes.

“Look at
that
,”
Kathy said. “Do you remember that bonsai plant I bought in the supermarket? I watered it just the way the directions said, and I had it in just the right light. And after a month it looked like something that had been drying for three thousand years. Boy, this is going to be some swell time. Art I can’t relate to, plants I couldn’t grow to save my life—I’m probably going to make a complete fool of myself.”

“Listen,” Aaron said. “You let them talk about whatever their thing is, and then you talk about your thing.”

“Going to the laundromat at six-thirty in the morning so I can beat the crowd?”

Aaron rang the doorbell decisively.

A dark-skinned maid with one of those South American faces that look like pre-Columbian pottery let him and Kathy in and took their coats. Kathy had a moment to smooth her Lord & Taylor dress in front of an ornate mirror.

The maid showed Kathy and Aaron into the drawing room, where the Borises were waiting to greet them. He was a man of fifty-five or so, balding, and every inch a lawyer, though he was only about five-six. Mrs. Boris was around the same age. She had one of the best blond dye jobs that Kathy had ever seen, and skin so smooth that Kathy wondered what she’d gone through at Elizabeth Arden’s—certainly more than enough mud to build a pueblo for the maid. Her dress looked like a Geoffrey Beene. Kathy knew Geoffrey Beene’s style. His things were what her mother had always beaten the bushes for at Loehmann’s. No doubt Mrs. Boris thought Loehmann’s was a bakery.

“I’m so happy to meet you,” she was saying to Kathy. Kathy had no reason to believe that she wasn’t. Mrs. Boris had the effortless charm of someone who has always had money, the way most people always have the television on.

“What a lovely home you have,” Kathy said to her. She felt like a timid saleslady, offering her remarks to her hostess as if they were pairs of shoes.