Dear Digby

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  Then he pulled the trigger; the top cushion blew apart, lifting right off the bottom one; the side split open, stuffing pouring out. The windows shook in their frames for a while; the sound echoed through the apartment and out into the hall. He stepped back, the smoking gun at his side, and knelt before me. He held his palms out flat, voilà. He was still shaking.

  I tried to speak. “You killed Matthew Kallam? You never told anybody?”

  “Only one other person. I told your father that night.”

  I felt dizzy. “What did my father say?”

  The phone started ringing again. My neighbors were calling to ask what the noise was. I made no move to answer.

  “First I thought he was going to strike me. Then he sat there and he put his head in his hands. He told me to tell you but carefully. He said not to spring it on you all at once. And he told me to go to the authorities. But I couldn’t do that. All these years I was trying to get to this. To do what he asked me to do outside the tent that night: to watch out for you.”

  I stared at him. I thought I heard the apartment door open, but I was too far gone to pay attention.

  “One spring I went up to Carlisle,” he said. “I used my press credentials, and I gained access to the autopsy file photographs at the morgue. I managed to get a copy of one, don’t ask me how.” He produced a large manila envelope from his prop bag. A black-and-white 8 by 10. Matthew. A few hours after death, lying on a steel table, his arms folded calmly across his chest. Just before the electric saw, I thought, and held on. He looked so small and forthright, his eyes wide open, looking at me. Absolved of all his eleven-year-old terrors: a little kid. He had a broad forehead and wide-set eyes, but they were the door to an unformed face. He still had baby fat on his cheeks and arms. The only adult thing about him was the silver dog tags around his neck. His father’s, from some war or other. Blood had congealed on his collarbone, where a bullet had grazed him. Under his left armpit there was a much larger, black wound; blood still seeped from it. “Upper thoracic, entry from the left,” Danny pointed out, over my shoulder. “You don’t need a degree in ballistics to read that story.” I looked for a long time at the perfect concentration of his childish features, the disappeared light in his eyes. After twenty-three years I wept for him, someone’s little boy, lost forever.

  “What I need is someone to forgive me,” Danny said. He looked at me and reached out for the photograph. Then we both jumped as the Japanese screen fell over with a crash. Iris Moss stood in the doorway framed by light. Her rolling eye caught a beam like clear glass marble, and her strange mouth opened and closed, hissing. She was talking to herself. On her head was the Afro wig and on her body was a gold Lurex running suit with spangled epaulets. She held the .38 at an odd angle in her prosthetic hand.

  “Don’t move!” (“molve,” in fact) she cried to Danny, who reeled to his feet in shock and horror, turning to run. I watched Iris take a cop-show stance, legs apart, brace-hand. I was screaming at her to stop, but she didn’t hear; she took aim and shot—the bullet hit a brass music stand my mother had given me, then ricocheted, whining, struck The Watcher plumb in the left buttock.

  Sixteen

  “I’M CONVINCED NOW that Death looks like Crazy Eddie,” Page said. We were jogging down the old West Side Highway. The sun was setting over New Jersey. We had started at 59th Street and were running to the West Village. We were about at 34th Street.

  It was two days after my showdown with The Watcher. I was just starting to feel normal again. I was glad Page had suggested this jog. She was trying to be discreet, but discretion was hardly her natural style. She kept shooting odd interrogatory looks at me as she chatted breathlessly. Because she was talking so much, each mile seemed to get a little harder for her; every so often she had an attack of little hiccups.

  “As I was drifting off to sleep the other night, he was on the tube, casually sledge-hammering a nineteen-inch color TV. I had a dream that he was an archangel and his job was to sneak to the room where the person was dying with dignity and smash the TV screen. Then God would appear on the cracked screen and thank Eddie, as if he were an Oscar emcee, and then God would give a commercial for heaven. I don’t remember much about heaven, but there was a Tiki village colored-water fountain and mariachi bands.” She pushed her sweatband back on her head and grimaced.

  “Who did God look like?” I asked.

  “God looked exactly like Margaret Rutherford.”

  “I don’t think Death looks like Crazy Eddie, and I don’t think you see a light that asks you questions about your conduct. I think it’s all chocolate pudding after they pull the plug,” I said.

  “You came pretty close to the Big Dessert the other night.” She glanced sideways at me. She’d finally brought the subject up. She’d called the cops after Minnie had insinuated a form of my message about PAPARAZZI to her. But when she’d arrived at my apartment building, there was a police cordon outside in the street, and they wouldn’t let her in. I’d spent the whole following day with police and Brookheart people—this was her first chance to catch up, beyond what had been on the news and a brief phone conversation, wherein I’d given her The Watcher’s background.

  “When I saw Iris with the .38, I thought we’d all bought it,” I said. We slowed down a little, settling into a “long talk” stride.

  “But then, after the smoke cleared, I checked Danny’s wound—his name is Danny Hayburn—and it looked superficial. I got him some bandages and tried to clean it out. He was kind of in shock and moaning a lot. Iris was just standing there, holding the gun with both hands, looking amazed. After I stopped the bleeding, I went over to her, and she told me she had only meant to fire a warning shot, like the cops do—she said she was trying (for some reason) to hit the stereo. I took the gun and emptied the bullets out—and then all hell broke loose. Whizzer came crashing in, then the police, then Lupé with about fifteen Witches.”

  Page slowed down again and pushed at her sweaty headband.

  “What about Terence? Where was he?”

  “All night long I’d been waiting for him to throw open the door and beat his chest and swing in on a vine. Right after the play was over, he was due at my apartment, which was, ironically, right around the time Iris did arrive.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened? What happened was that he drove the play, he told me, about a hundred and fifty miles per hour. He cut the last act short, so short the other actors were left without lines in place. They were furious. There was murmuring in the audience, he said, even a boo or two. He raced off the stage at three minutes after ten—he’d taken nine minutes off the time. He put his head in the sink to get the makeup off—he wasn’t even going to shower—grabbed his bag and hit the dressing room door. There was a man standing there, blocking it, he said, very distinguished-looking, foreign. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to the guy, ‘I’m trying to get somewhere fast!’ The guy said, ‘Yes, I noticed. I’ve never seen so much frantic energy onstage before, you were obsessed!’”

  Page looked at me. “Okay. Who was he?”

  “Miloslav Kuchera, the famous Czech film director.” Page stopped running. I stopped running and we faced each other.

  “He told Terence he had only an hour or two before flying back to Prague. He had never seen such a performance, and he wanted to talk to Terence, over drinks, just for a moment, about the possibility of Terence appearing in his new film.”

  Page began to laugh. I began to laugh. We leaned against each other, laughing.

  “What time did he finally get there?”

  “Midnight.”

  “Jesus.” She hiccuped, out of control.

  “Yeah.” We started jogging again. “I was so ready for him to walk through that door, I was going to let him have it. Iris was still with me. The cops decided to let her stay, in my guardianship, till the Brookheart personnel got there, which was much later. They took Danny with them, limping and weeping—Whizzer left, the Witches left, Iris and I
were having a beer. So Terence walks in, saying, ‘What’s happening?’”

  Page hooted. “Did you get out the .38 again?”

  I looked at her. “No. No, I didn’t. You know, I was ready to kill him, but when I saw his face, I felt terrible for him. He was devastated. He felt he’d failed me miserably—”

  “Well, Christ, Digby, he had.”

  “He sat down on the couch and started to cry.”

  “Jesus, Digby! I told you—never trust a guy who cries—they’re sadists to a man.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I felt different about everything at that point. I mean, you have to remember I’d just had my whole life story rewritten that night. Page, I couldn’t help thinking—how much did I care if he wasn’t perfect? He told me that he refused to have a drink with Kuchera, but invited him to talk on the cab ride down to my apartment. When they couldn’t find a cab in the after-theater crush, they hopped on the subway. And it got stuck between stations. Terence said Kuchera couldn’t believe him. Terence was beating on the subway walls and pacing. Kuchera paced along with him—he kept repeating, “Ob-sessed. You are ob-sessed!”

  “And you believed this story?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, it was a bizarre night. Where was it written anyway that he had to save me? In what fairy tale? And Jesus—all my life, I realized, I’d been waiting for some man to save me! I couldn’t believe it, but there it was. Well, I saved myself—or rather, Iris saved me—from Danny, who was also trying to save me. Wasn’t he? Terence just didn’t get there in time to save me from the other savers. My God, I felt so good—I could forgive Terence, I could show him a little mercy. He was a hero, in his own weird way. Like everybody else that night. Do you know how strange I felt, standing there in my living room, watching Terence sob and Iris try to do her best to comfort him?”

  “Yeah?”

  “She asked him for a recent photograph, she brought him a handkerchief, she cut out a piece of his hair—a big piece—to put in her ‘fan’ scrapbook. Then the three of us sat there, Terence crying, me dozing, Iris mumbling to herself—holding hands for a while. It was very peaceful.”

  Page hiccuped again.

  “After a while the Brookheart staff people arrived and picked up Iris, and then Terence and I sat there on the couch till dawn, holding hands and staring, like the last two people left on earth.”

  Page stopped running suddenly and crossed zigzaggedly over the highway line and sat down on the curb. The cars whizzed by below us, shaking the rickety foundation. “My heart is fluttering weirdly,” she said.

  I sat down next to her. I put two fingers on her wrist. “I can’t get a pulse.”

  “It’s okay. I don’t think I have one. I’ve never been able to find it.”

  “Put your head between your legs,” I said. She sat with her head between her herringbone leg warmers, her lovely red-brown hair falling onto her running shoes. “I’m okay,” she said in a muffled voice. “I just don’t want to die alone.”

  “What?”

  There was a stifled sigh. “I’m fine. I’ve been thinking about the future. I don’t have kids and I won’t have kids—I doubt if I’ll ever marry and all that’s the way I want it. I just don’t want to die all by myself.”

  She pulled her head up and looked at me. Her eyes were bright brown. “Would you promise, Digby, to sit by my bedside when I’m dying?”

  I took her hand in mine. “Page. What are you talking about? Why do I think that this has got something to do with Dresden Bostec?”

  Dresden Bostec was a very young eighty-two. She visited the SIS office regularly with terrible-tasting home-baked pies and peckish moral support. Her older sister had been a suffragette, and she loved to talk about the Cause. She wore a coolie hat and smoked Camels. (“Hi, kids, I’m here to take the suffer out of suffragette!”)

  Once when she was in her seventies, Dresden Bostec had been hospitalized and told that she was dying. “And I thought I was, honey,” she’d holler at anybody who was listening. She was lying in a bed alone in a hospital room, watching her life go by on the ceiling, and she pulled herself up and buzzed for a nurse. When the nurse came, she asked to hold her hand while she died, because, as she said, “there appears to be nobody else right now.” The nurse took her hand and sat for a while. Dresden felt life draining from her and held tight. Then the nurse looked at her watch, told Dresden she had coffee break at six thirty. Dresden pulled her hand away and hoisted herself up. She peered at the nurse’s watch; it said ten minutes after six. “I’ve decided not to die yet,” she told the nurse. “I was too pissed off,” she would confide later to her listeners. “Honey, I absolutely refused to croak just in time for her Sanka!”

  Dresden lived on, but the deathbed scene did tend to stay with one. To have to grope hopelessly for a comforting hand at the end of the escalator was too cruel.

  Page shrugged at me. “I’d ask Dresden, but she might be busy baking something that day.” She sighed. “Or worse, she might bring me one of her pies in the hospital! I’m okay now,” she said a little sheepishly. “This body is made of tensile steel.”

  I took her hand.

  “I will write you a letter,” I said. “A formal commitment signed, sealed, delivered. Saying that I will be by your side to take your hand on that sorry day.”

  She made a face at me, but she didn’t take her hand away. “Thanks, Digby.”

  “Unless, dear pal,” I said, “I’ve gone on ahead.”

  Seventeen

  DEAR IRIS,

  I know what you mean. I suppose it was inevitable, though, that Danny was sent to Brookheart for psychiatric observation. I think it’s kind of encouraging that you’re taking Classical Ballroom Dancing and Low Impact Aerobics together. And I’m positive that he is not the one who’s smearing the Balm on the sanitary napkins. That sounds more like Dr. Bush.

  As for me—well, ever since That Night, I’ve fallen asleep early in the evening and slept dreamlessly for ten, eleven, sometimes twelve hours. It’s as if I’d satisfied my nightmare quota for the next thirty years. I get to sleep easy—no debts, no terrors. No more dreams of guns or babies. I still talk to Lily, but that’s different. It’s like you talking to God—she guides me.

  Yes, Terence is still around and I’ve conveyed to him your desire for another photograph. And yes, I did notice that he looked at you with “stars in his eyes.” Who wouldn’t? He is being very solicitous to me too—he is still thankful that I am alive (as opposed to being, say, Republican), and therefore we are getting along well. He is feeling better himself. Have you ever noticed that physical threats to the loved one always quicken ardor? I think it’s because there is a stand-in for one’s own desire to maim or kill the loved one, thereby clearing the stage for protestations of devotion. I refer to the state that Terence and I are presently in as NYD, Not Yet Divorced. I prefer that description to, say, “desperately in love” or “inseparable” or “terminally gaga.” If we can stay NYD for maybe two or three more years, I’ll register my china pattern at Bloomingdale’s. We are, in fact, living together and even discussing the act of procreation together, since that is what the Holy Father says sex is for. Oh, well, I can’t fool you. Maybe we will stay together. Maybe we will have a kid one day. “Climb Mount Fuji, but slowly, slowly!”

  And there’s more news on the SIS front. Minnie W-W-G has changed her name to Solange. Just one name. No more hyphens, no more abbreviates. Just plain old Solange. The reason she changed her name is because she just broke off her engagement with a recalcitrant hyphenate.

  Other SIS news: Bob Hargill so far has not sued me—in light of my now-somewhat-justified reasons for carrying a .38—but he has held a press conference, in which he accused me and W.I.T.C.H. of “urban terrorism.” He has correctly identified W.I.T.C.H.’s intent as “invasion of privacy” and asked the city to “deal harshly” with any further such invasions. He has asked me for a public apology, which I intend to give him in a press conference of my own. W.I
.T.C.H. has kindly engaged the services of a “hair reconstructionist,” who will appear with me at the press conference and offer timely information to Bob (with visual aids) on his personal cosmetic (read Dome Shag) problem.

  Needless to say, I have been inundated with letters, running about sixty-forty pro and con my new column. Holly has given me the okay to continue, at least for now. I finally met Dino Pedrelli, who showed up to shake my hand the other day—and to offer his services as a bodyguard. Since he’s about four eleven with bifocals, I didn’t leap at the opportunity—though he did point out to me that he owns a huge silver whistle that he uses to rout muggers, as well as to attract the attention of headwaiters, cabdrivers, and as he puts it, “people who are ignoring” him.

  Yes, I was subpoenaed to testify in the Brookheart hearings, as expected. We’ll probably be on the stand together. What they keep asking me is what made me answer your letter in the first place. Why wouldn’t I? Everyone who writes to me expects to have an answer. Are we not supposed to answer people who say outrageous, outspoken things? No, we’re not, we’re supposed to all sound alike, all write alike, all make love alike. I promise not to preach—but what do you think about wearing matching plaid bloomers and gilt wedgies to court? Women’s Wear Daily might be there, you never know.