Vivian In Red

by Kristina Riggle

  “So, now I’ve never told this story before, so listen up. Get your notebook back out. I was, what, sixteen years old, I guess, when I told the teacher I had a headache and left school early. I was always a rotten student. My mom was out shopping, and the other kids were still at school. And I come in the door, and without even really noticing, I was whistling ‘Love Me, I Guess.’ You know it, obviously. That song had legs; people kept recording it for years. My dad hollered at me. I couldn’t believe it. My dad was nothing like a yeller, ever. But he hollered at me to ‘quit whistling that goddamn tune’ and said ‘that goddamn Short cut me loose and let me drift and it’s all his fault.’

  “I was scared, I tell you. I froze right in the middle of the room. He hadn’t shaved, and he smelled bad. I don’t think he’d bathed in a long time. He was so puffy, too, and looked sorta yellow. Now I know it was his liver giving out, but I didn’t understand then. I’d never heard him talk bad about Milo before, so that made me stick around, instead of running back out the door or hiding in my room. So then he tells me, ‘It was all because of that broad. She ruined Milo and ruined everything. She made him nuts and ruined him and that ruined me. Look how ruined I am!’ He banged the keyboard then with his left hand, and these deep, booming clashing notes came out, and seemed to startle him as much as me. It was like he suddenly remembered who exactly I was, who he was talking to. He shook his head, real slow, and started plinking out notes like he did all day, every day, all the time, looking for a song that would never come.”

  I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “Then what?”

  “Nothing what. I scooted away to my room, and put on an Elvis record and tried to pretend I hadn’t heard a thing. Two weeks later he was dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That was years ago, of course, but thank you.”

  “I wonder who that could have been? The ‘broad’?” The old-fashioned word feels strange in my mouth. Grampa Milo always said Grandma Bee was his first and only love. It was family legend, affirmed at every anniversary, every time someone else got married, anytime weddings came up in conversation, for that matter.

  “That I don’t know. But you’re literally writing the book, so I hope you can figure it out. I’ve always wondered, all these years.”

  “Why didn’t you ask him, ever? My grandpa, I mean.”

  “Well, I was a kid, wasn’t I? I was just some kid and I wasn’t about to go grill the famous impresario about why he’d let some broad ruin his writing and drive my dad to his early death. Then I got older and I still wondered, sure, but what did it matter then? My dad was gone, and honestly, he picked up his own bottles.” Jerry waggles his drink and the dregs slosh. “Same as I do my glasses.”

  I take a sip of my own drink, watery now from the ice. “Then why tell me now? If it doesn’t matter.”

  “Because you asked. Because you seem like you really want to know, because I’m getting old myself and things I never knew are starting to bother me. Because I’m starting to wonder if it could happen to me.”

  “If what could happen?”

  “If I could be ruined by someone else. See, we like to think we set our own course, but that day, drunk at the piano, my dad told me how your gramps and some lady were at the wheel and steered him into the ditch.”

  I straighten my spine. “As you said, he picked up his own bottles.”

  “That’s right. As I said.”

  The loft door swings open, and a younger man strides in, how much younger shocks me. The wiry rope of his arm muscle is visible all the way to where I’m sitting on the couch. His dark hair flops forward as he bends down and kisses Jerry full on the mouth. I glance away, then feel stupid for doing so. But it wasn’t squeamishness that made me look away. It was the possessiveness, with a dash of aggressive intimacy: I’ll kiss him if I want, and to hell with you.

  Jerry sighs when his boyfriend lets go of his face and disappears into the partitioned off bedroom at the far end of the loft. Jerry’s face registers no love, no passion, no happiness. He looks tired, and haggard. The pink scarf has slipped down his arm. “As if he cares so much, him with his strange phone calls and coming and going at all hours.”

  “Oh,” is all I can think to say.

  “Yet I don’t want him to leave, so I pretend I don’t notice, and he goes along with the pretending that I don’t notice. That’s off the record, please.”

  “Of course. It’s not your life I’m interested in.”

  “That makes two of us, dear. Cheers.”

  The entrance of the partner has ruptured the intimate cocoon we’d formed over whiskey and soda and memories of Milo. I begin to pack my things up. “I wonder if I could find her.”

  “Who?”

  “The broad. The one that your dad thought ruined everything.”

  “Ask my mother.”

  I freeze with my recorder over the top of my bag. “What?”

  “My mother is still alive and kicking. Well, alive anyway. She’s a little nuts and not always herself, but you might catch her lucid.”

  “My uncle didn’t…”

  “Oh, he probably forgot her. She’s so old most people assume she’s dead. I mean, you did.”

  “You really think she’d know?”

  “If my dad told his teenage son on a drunken rant two weeks before he croaked, it’s entirely possible he was sober long enough to tell his wife at one point in the many years before that.”

  A voice sings out from the bedroom. “Jerry!” the boyfriend calls. “Could you send your little girlfriend home, please?”

  Jerry sighs again and straightens his scarf. “I’ll see you out, dear.”

  New York, 1934

  Milo didn’t register the knocking at first; he was too busy amusing his sister by playing on the piano whatever song came over the wireless on Bing Crosby’s show, and doing his best—which meant scrapy and cracked—attempt at crooning. In his months at work, he’d gotten better yet at hearing a song, identifying it in a few bars including the key, then jumping into playing it. It was both parlor trick and damn good practice.

  So the knocking was obscured at first by Milo tinkling away at “Paper Moon.” Max and his father were next to him going on about the shop and how to make more profit without skimping on the parts that mattered. Leah coughed and laughed along with Milo’s playing, though soon enough she’d get tired of the game and tell him to hush up so she could hear Bing.

  Finally his mother called, “Moshe! Answer the door before they break it down!”

  Milo hustled to the door wondering who would be knocking this time of night, and yanked it open to see his friend Allen, wavering on the doorstep like a sapling in a buffeting wind.

  “Milo! Mrs. Smith gave me your address.”

  “If you just came from work, why do you smell like a still?”

  “I didn’t. I phoned her. She’s a little perturbed with me because I interrupted her bath.”

  “Why does she have my address?”

  “Will you invite me in already, or do you want me to stand in the hallway and have an interview?”

  Milo waved him in, frowning through the introductions. Leah perked up: a real live songwriter! She wanted to know which famous people he’d met and Allen rattled off a list that Milo knew was at least half fabrication. Allen may have been recently promoted to junior manager at TB Harms, but he wasn’t exactly rubbing elbows with Al Jolson.

  Mrs. Short performed an obvious sniff in Allen’s vicinity, and disappeared back into the kitchen with a curt nod. Max and his father nodded but resumed their discussion, poring over the accounts kept in Max’s precise, tiny script.

  For lack of space, he pulled up a chair close to the sofa in the far corner from where Leah sat swooning next to the wireless, and finally asked Allen what he wanted. Allen asked for a drink and Milo shook his head.

  “Okay, like I said,” Allen began, his hands working themselves into a frenzy as he talked, pulling at his own fingers, th
reading them through each other, kneading his own palms. “Like I said, Mrs. Smith told me where you live. That gal remembers everything she ever typed, I swear, it’s uncanny. Anyhow, this is why I’m here. I got us a job.”

  “We got a swell job already.”

  “Not like this we don’t.” In the yellow light of the table lamp, Allen’s eyes glittered and crinkled up with his gleeful smile. “I got us a job writing a Broadway show.”

  “What? Go on.”

  “Not kidding. Listen up: the big bosses were going to this party over at the Gershwins’.”

  “Wait—”

  “Yes, those Gershwins. You thought I was lying just now when I told your sister I’d met them, eh? Now listen. So the bosses ask me to tag along, probably because I happened to be at the office later than anybody, course I was working on my own stuff but they were none the wiser about that part. So I call my wife and she’s hopping mad because it’s her birthday, but listen. So I’m there and I somehow get to talking with all these fellas, including one Max Gordon, and before you ask, yes, that Max Gordon. And he’s telling us about this revue he’s working on and how he wants to tear his hair out, how he had to fire two sets of songwriters, and he’s only got enough tunes for half a show, only they open in eight weeks out of town. And no one wants the job, he rattles off names of every songwriter you can think of who all told him, ‘Not on your life would I take that job.’ But he’s got enough money sunk in already hiring the cast and already building sets that he doesn’t want to give up. Says he wants it to be topical, current, smart. I tell him, half-joking, but not all the way joking, that I’ll do it. He turns to me and says, ‘Oh yeah? What do you write, pal?’ So I sing to him…” Allen paused, held up his arm, and giggled into his elbow, “…I still can’t believe I did this, I think I was a little tight already. So I sing to him, ‘Let’s Live On Hilarity.’ And he laughed! Said he’d hire me to do it if I could stand the situation.”

  “Stand what situation?”

  “I told you. They open in eight weeks. They got a few tunes they can use, but they need almost a whole show’s worth of songs, immediately. Yesterday, if they could. We’ll have to work nonstop, then go along to the out of town tryouts to fix it up it as they go…”

  “Where’s the ‘we’ come in? Seems to me this was offered to you only, my friend.”

  “You have to do it with me. Write the lyrics. You wrote ‘Hilarity,’ didn’t you?”

  “Sure, and it was rejected by Harms and Remick and Berlin … shall I go on? I’m not a lyricist, I just make up silly words. I did that Hilarity thing to humor you.”

  “Consider me humored. C’mon, you humored me into hiring a half-blind piano player.”

  “Are you quitting TB Harms to do this?”

  “Haven’t you been listening? They need this music pronto. Unless I give up sleep entirely, it’s one or the other: a shot at writing a Broadway revue, or continuing to churn out sugary old-fashioned slop so that the lyrical geniuses over there can rhyme June, moon, and swoon.”

  “I’m just a plugger. There must be a hundred better lyricists than me who would jump at this.”

  “Maybe there are, but I don’t want them. I want to work with you, and only you.”

  Milo became aware of silence filling the room around their discussion. The wireless was off. His dad and brother had stopped talking to each other and were now nakedly staring. Even his mother had come in from the kitchen with a dishtowel in her hands.

  “C’mon, Allen. Let’s take a walk”

  “It’s cold out there.”

  “It’ll be good for the constitution. Let’s go.”

  Allen took his wavering farewells, oblivious to the figure he cut with his ruddy face and alcoholic emanations. Only Leah was impressed by him, and she didn’t know any better, hardly seeing anyone outside the apartment or the deli down the block.

  Milo pounded down the stairs well ahead of Allen, who had to pick his way carefully, no doubt having to determine which one of the wavering staircases in his drunken vision was the real one.

  Milo turned on him out in the sidewalk. “Whaddya mean by coming here to my family’s place and saying all that?”

  Allen’s brow knitted up, and he bit his lower lip. “What? Offering you the chance of a lifetime?”

  “Chance to give up a steady job for the likelihood of making a fool of myself and subsequent ruination. You saw my little sister in there, who thought you were so swell? How’d you like to see her coughing her guts out in a shack? My piano getting rained on out on the sidewalk after we all get evicted?”

  “How’d you pay the rent before you got this job?”

  “The shop was holding its own. But the landlord just raised the rent again, and people aren’t coming in like they used to. We’ve got customers in the neighborhood but they can’t always afford to pay us right off, and we aren’t exactly putting their feet to the fire.”

  “All the more reason.”

  “I said, get someone else. Plenty of people could do it better.”

  “Even if I grant you that—which I don’t—I don’t care. I don’t want anyone else.”

  Allen’s words were puffing out into clouds in the frosty December night. Allen was staring right into Milo’s eyes with such pleading and hope that it liked to break his heart.

  “I can’t.”

  “I won’t do it without you. And my big chance will go up in smoke. Poof!” Allen puffed out a cloud on purpose then, laughing at his own joke, steadying himself on a lamppost. “Could you hurry up and agree with me? I think I’m sobering up, which is a deplorable state of condition to be in condition of.”

  “Why’d you go and get so liquored up anyhow?”

  “I told you, I was at a party. And I stopped for a belt on the way here. Courage.”

  “You needed courage for the West Bronx?”

  “What if I needed courage to ask you?”

  Milo plunged his hands deep into his coat pockets. There was a hole in the bottom of the left one; he’d have to ask Max to stitch it up. “I still don’t understand why it has to be me.”

  Allen grabbed the lamppost in both hands like he was going to throttle it, then regarded it with passionate ardor: “It had to be you, it had to be you, I wandered around, and finally found somebody who…”

  Milo looked up and down the block to see if his neighbors were seeing this nonsense. He grabbed Allen’s arms and yanked them down from the lamppost; it was surprisingly hard given his lubricated state.

  “All right, Miss Marion Harris, that’s enough.”

  “So you will?”

  Milo looked up at the glowing windows of his family’s apartment. “We’ll be failures. You know that, don’t you?”

  “And what if we aren’t? Jeez, Milo, if you thought like that before, we’d have never even met and I wouldn’t be here bothering you now. But you showed up for that job that day anyhow.”

  Milo sang to himself, almost whispered, really, bits of the song that caught the ear of Max Gordon.

  When a guy comes by to give you a dime, just say no to that charity! Tell us a joke, sing us a song, and let’s live on hilarity!

  “I think I could tinker with the rhymes a bit…”

  “’Course you could, and you will, and it’ll be a smash. I’m getting out of here before you change your mind.”

  And with that, Allen hustled off into the night, slipping in the slush but somehow not losing his footing, as if his ebullient mood had wrung the booze right out of his body.

  Milo shook his head. A Broadway show, with him as lyricist. He’d just agreed to do it—more or less, at least he’d stopped objecting, which Allen took as a victory—yet it seemed as likely as having dinner with Clark Gable.

  His brother greeted him at the door, talking low to him. “What is the matter with that man?”

  “Other than being a little tight? Nothing at all.”

  “Was he offering you a job?”

  “More or less.”

>   Max shook his head. “Madness. You got so lucky to have the job you do, and now he wants you to throw it away on the stage.”

  “I’m not saying I would quit Harms.”

  “No? Two jobs, then?”

  The rest of the family had drawn into their conversation. Milo felt surrounded, so he stepped down into the sunken living room and allowed them all to gather around him. By the end of ten minutes, he had them convinced he’d keep his job at Harms during the day and work on the show at night, with Allen, over at the theater.

  Leah was enraptured, demanding to know who would be starring. Max harrumphed and sewed Milo’s coat pocket. Yosef Schwartz nodded, and bent back over the ledger book.

  Milo’s mother folded her arms across her chest. “With all this working and songs, don’t forget to eat.”

  Milo chanted to her,

  Forget to eat, how could I! The food you cook is so good I

  “Can never stop ’til I’m stuffed to the brim

  And so fat they say, ‘Why, it can’t be him!’

  Perish the thought, I’ll never forget to eat your scrumptious…uh…”

  Fish eye?” giggled Leah from her corner.

  Max handed back Milo’s coat. “Your pocket’s fixed, genius.”

  The next day at Harms, Milo was whistling the tune to “Hilarity” as he sauntered through the door and hung up his hat and coat. He’d been thinking up new verses all night, seeing how he couldn’t sleep anyway. He smiled broadly at the newest secretary, former Macy’s perfume salesgirl Vivian Adair, who’d turned up to visit Milo at the office after she had been well and truly canned. Vivian looked up from her book she’d half-hidden under some files, and cocked one slim eyebrow at him.