“Ha! The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but with a twist!”
“Mock if you will, but I thought it was awfully clever.”
“Oh it is. Just please don’t tell me you carried a straight razor on stage.”
“No, because that would be literal, and literal is totally uncool.”
“And you were the growling front man, channeling Eddie Vedder as you draped yourself over your mic stand, hanging onto it like it was keeping you from drowning in your own tortured ennui.”
“I hate Eddie Vedder.”
“Jim Morrison.”
“We did do a killer cover of ‘Light My Fire.’ And you are changing the subject.”
In fifteen minutes, I catch him up on my own hapless career, arranged mostly by the interference of my bossy cousins. And how I almost managed to become a solid interviewer. My quiet presence was just enough to get people talking about anything, it seemed.
“And yet, I’m totally a fraud in this,” I explain to Alex. “I’m non-threatening, and not confrontational, and I let people forget they’re being interviewed. It’s not even by design, it’s just how I’m wired, and for a while I could get by like that. But it also means I don’t ask the tough questions when they should be asked, so someone who’s savvy, or angry… not a stoned poet or an earnest community reformer, but the source for a real, gutsy story… then it all goes to hell, as it did in dramatic flame-out fashion not too long ago. I was never a real journalist, and I knew it all along.”
I look down at the floor and clunk my beer on the table. “I envy people who know what they want, like my cousins. And why should that be so hard to know?”
Alex’s answer is interrupted by the pizza, and by now the gentle rain is full-on monsoon so I tip extravagantly.
I stick the pizza on the kitchen pass-through counter. “Listen to me going on about ‘oh woe is me I don’t know what to do with my life’ and that guy has to bike around delivering food in a frigging rainstorm for a few dollars an hour.”
“Other people’s problems don’t mean yours don’t exist. Anyway, maybe he loves his job.”
Naomi has said as much to me more times than I can count, after pointing out all the ways the Short family is charitable, which is all true as far as it goes, but the guilt is comforting to me. It’s like my ticket of admission to the life I have; it’s all good as long as I feel properly conflicted. Of course, I feel guilty about this, too.
We make small talk about the flight over the pizza, and finally I’ve eaten all I can manage, and Vivian’s box of keepsakes is still there, still large in my imagination.
Alex shoves the pizza box into the fridge with the leftovers, and helps me gather up napkins, rinse the plates. We line up our four empty beer bottles neatly along the tile backsplash.
He dusts off his hands and turns to me. “Are you ready now?”
“No. But here goes.”
I stop in the bedroom doorway, and Alex bumps into me lightly. He steps back and just waits there. I brace my hands in the doorframe as if he’s about to shove me through, though he has not moved or said a word.
I swallow, and my tired eyes unfocus a little and I let them. The rain tinks against the glass, the sky now the color of concrete, and looking about as solid, too.
“What if this turns my grandfather into a stranger?”
“Whatever all this means, it was sixty years ago. People don’t carry around their same selves for six decades. He’s still the same grandpa, to you.”
I pull in a long, steadying breath and let it gust out, before I step fully into the room.
New York, 1936
Milo leaned against a lamppost, stretching his collar to let in some air. He tried to pick out which window was Vivian’s in the brick building. He’d circled the block now three or four times, having tried to form the resolution to walk up and ring the bell each time he rounded the corner.
He should make himself go home, just go to his own apartment and work on the song and forget Allen for now, just work, hard work could cure anything, just like hard work got his parents out of the ghetto and into the Bronx while Milo still had baby teeth. Hard work got them to write all those songs on that impossible deadline for Hilarity… Allen. He couldn’t shake off Allen. He was everywhere he looked, even in his nose, Allen’s shaving lather blended with the tang of summer sweat.
Filmy curtains blew lightly in the open windows of what Milo guessed was Vivian’s place. The curtains weighed nothing and they writhed like dancers. A man in a hurry then pushed his way out of the front door to the building, swinging it hard in his rush. Milo trotted up to the doorstep and grabbed the door before it swung closed. He found the second floor, found the hall, and was trying to remember which door, until he noticed the mezuzah on one door frame. He went to the other and knocked, much harder than he’d meant to.
In the crack under the door he saw the shadow of her feet and nearly turned around and left, but she opened the door with alacrity. “Milo!” she cried. “Come in, just give me a moment to put myself together.”
Milo dutifully stared the opposite direction as Vivian walked away from him in a cloud of roses and cigarette smoke.
His heart seemed as loud in his ears as the roar of the El and he wondered for a crazy moment if Vivian could hear it.
“Take off your hat and stay a while, why don’t you?” she sang out, sweeping back into the room. Milo turned and caught her in the act of fastening the belt of her shirtwaist dress. She was bare-legged and shoeless. “I’m going to be very daring and naughty by not putting my stockings on now. You would not believe what that feels like to have all that fabric covering every inch of your legs! They get jealous that my arms are free and bare.” Vivian flapped her arms briefly, birdlike, and laughed. The girlishness was endearing. “I would ban stockings if I were president. At least in summer.” Vivian seemed to only just notice him. “Oh! You look terrible, what’s wrong? Are you sick?”
Milo shook his head, putting his hat down on a fussy wood-carved table draped in lace.
“Here, let me get you a cold drink. I’ve just made some lemonade. Sit, please! You’ve come to my rescue so many times, I think it’s only fair I return the favor.”
Vivian interrupted her lemonade-fetching to take Milo by the wrist and lead him to a curvy divan near a phonograph. She inspected the record, flipped it over, and an orchestra poured out into the room. In a mere heartbeat she returned, placing the lemonade on the small round table next to the divan. She knelt in front of Milo, and with her slender fingers, stopped him from straightening his necktie. Instead, she tugged on the knot and began loosening it for him. “Now, we are not going to stand on formality, seeing as I’m not even wearing my stockings. Estelle would be horrified.”
“Who’s Estelle?” Milo managed to ask, not trusting his shaky hands to pick up the glass. Something inside him shivered at letting this woman take his tie off. Her caretaking wasn’t soft, like his mother’s. It was commanding, and strangely hypnotizing. She tossed the tie on the floor, over her shoulder.
Before she rose, Milo caught a glimpse of lacy slip under her dress.
“Estelle’s my older sister. My parents died of influenza. Well, really my mother died of the flu, but my father found a way to die quickly enough by getting drunk on a construction job. Anyway, so that left Estelle and me, and oh, she’s a tough nut, that one. You know she told me that going to New York would kill me?” Vivian trilled a tinkling laugh. “Imagine! Do I look dead to you?” Vivian put one hand on her hip, one eyebrow raised, and pursed her glossy red lips, just lightly. She’d done her makeup in a hurry, it seemed, because the line was uneven around her mouth.
Vivian settled herself on the other end of the divan, and tucked her bare feet under her. Milo was distracted by even part of her being nude, wondering when he’d ever seen a girl other than Leah without stockings. At the shore? The Shorts weren’t beach people, and he probably hadn’t been to Coney Island since he was a boy, though it was only a short
train ride away.
Vivian stretched her arms, languid and long, over her head. “I’m forever telling myself, ‘Estelle would be horrified.’ It’s such fun. So what’s gotten into you, then?”
Milo’s mouth fell open, the whole sordid story heavy on this tongue, primed to fall out, to be expelled, to get it out of his mind and out of his body. “It’s Allen, see…”
He turned to face Vivian, her face bright and flushed in the July sun that rioted around them, the breeze from the open windows stirring her gentle brown curls.
No. Vivian was no blushing innocent but there were some things you did not tell a woman.
“We had a fight.”
“Oh no. Over the show? Or over the drinking. He’s drinking again, I knew it, that lousy souse.”
Vivian took his tragic silence as answer.
“Curse that man, doesn’t he understand what he’s doing to everyone else? If he can’t handle his liquor he needs to leave it alone before he ruins the show. This is your big chance for a show where you’re promoted, you’re important! Not just a last-minute afterthought.”
“The show is okay, actually, the last part is my own part. It’s the words to the last song, they’re not coming.”
“Ah, so you’re stuck and he’s drunk. A fine kettle of fish if ever there was.”
Milo smiled sadly. “That sounds like a lyric.” He chanted, “‘A fine kettle of fish if ever there was.’”
“So it does. What can I do, poor Milo Short? You preserved my reputation in Boston, and saved me from joblessness and destitution no less than twice.”
The beers and the heat and the apartment made Milo thoughtless. “You might be destitute again when the honeymooners get back.”
Vivian jumped off her seat and stomped in her bare feet over to her kitchen. “I need a drink and I’m getting you one, too.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you. But I don’t think I can save you this time, so what are you going to do?”
Vivian smacked the bottle on the counter. “I wasn’t asking you to, and none of your business. I have plans. I always have plans.”
After a moment, Vivian smacked a clear drink down in front of Milo so hard that it sloshed over her hand and she wiped it on her dress, leaving a smear of wet across her bosom. “Men love to tell a woman how to live, don’t they? You think I should crawl back to Estelle, don’t you? I’d rather throw myself in the East River. Do you know I stood on the Brooklyn Bridge once and wondered if I could hike my dress up high enough to get over the rail? But no. I have plans, don’t you worry.”
Milo sat forward, gripping his drink hard. “Geez, kid, you wouldn’t do that, would you? Jump off a bridge?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Why would I need to do a thing like that?”
She took down her drink in one gulp and dragged the back of her hand across her face, smearing her lips.
Milo took out his handkerchief. Vivian flinched just slightly when he reached for her face. He took her chin in his left hand, just gently, and dabbed at her smeared lipstick with his handkerchief.
“Geez. I’m sorry, kid.”
“For what.” Vivian swept back into the kitchen and tried to pour herself a drink. She seemed unable to manage pouring, so she swigged right out of the bottle.
“For getting you worked up.”
“I need a bath. It will calm my nerves. Enjoy the phonograph, have a drink, and I’ll see you in thirty minutes.” At the thought of Vivian in the altogether, in her tub, Milo felt a red flush creep over his ears, and he bit his lip hard against an urge to moan aloud.
After that tantalizing announcement, she walked by him, her pace somehow regal and assured, despite her bare feet, wet dress, and red lips half wiped clean.
New York, 1936
With nightfall came rainfall, the sound like a soothing hush of a mother calming a baby, and the air turning so delicious that Milo wanted to stick his head out the window and gulp down huge chunks of it.
He may have been delirious, but if he was, that suited him fine.
Vivian had emerged from the tub with her skin pink and eyes bright, wearing no makeup at all that Milo could see, her hair damp around the frame of her face. She’d come out in a long white gown, wearing a filmy robe over top. At first, Milo had flushed crimson to the tops of his ears, because he knew this was a nightie. But after peals of gay laughter, Vivian had persuaded him that she was more covered up wearing the long gown than she was in her normal day dresses, and that it was the coolest, most pleasant thing in her wardrobe.
“Pleasant” it may have been for her, but Milo found it intensely distracting and he could not look at her straight on for too long lest he take complete leave of his senses.
They’d subsisted all afternoon on sandwiches, lemonade, and gin, while they talked over the latest gossip from The High Hat and other Broadway shows, and cracked each other up reading Winchell’s columns out loud in the best rapid-fire newsman voice either of them could muster. They talked over their favorite songs, and Vivian confided that she’d once thought of becoming a singer until she realized her voice was only fair, and it would take much more than a fair voice to get on stage.
“I’ve heard many a merely fair voice put over a song huge on stage,” Milo had retorted, with his sock feet stretched out in front of him and his shirttails out.
“Ah, but you also have to hustle. I didn’t even have enough hustle for the perfume counter.”
She could not be roused to sing for him, even after another glass of gin.
In a lull of their conversation, when the rain hushed down, and automobiles splashed by, Vivian asked to see his lyrics for the new song. “Could I see what you have so far?”
Milo’s memory flashed on an image of his notebook, abandoned at Allen’s place, on top of the upright piano. His stomach churned up to recall the scene, and now he’d have to get the notebook back. He shook his head as if to clear it. “I don’t have anything but the first two lines.”
“Seems to me like you need some help.”
“Aw, not now, kid, I’m not feeling up to much work right about now.”
“If not now, when? I know an excellent musical secretary.”
She rummaged through a large handbag until she came up with a pencil and a steno book, then perched on the edge of a tufted chair, crossed her knees, and assumed a parody of secretarial readiness. “I await your dictation, Mr. Short.”
“I don’t have a thing to dictate, Miss Adair.”
“Just as well. This is an eyebrow pencil.” She laughed, and tossed the pencil aside. “Let me get a proper pen and get this thing done, shall we?” Vivian swept grandly out of the chair, toward a rolltop desk near the door.
“I told you, I don’t feel like working now.”
“We’ll make it fun. And look, this way you won’t have to keep hanging around that souse, Allen. Get the songs done and you’ll only have to see him at the theater, and then you can wash your hands of him.”
Even that morning, Milo would have shouted down any notion of washing his hands of his friend. He might not have signed up to be his brother’s keeper, and keep him off the sauce for a lifetime, but he’d never have turned his back on Allen, who in point of fact had dragged Milo into his current success. In that way, he had Allen to credit for the fact that his family was all snug in a Bronx apartment with its own bathroom and running water, and not cheek-by-jowl with a dozen other families crammed into a tenement.
Without Allen’s pushing and nudging, Milo would still be plinking away tunes for a few dollars a week. In fact, Milo recalled as he swirled the dregs of his drink, Allen had helped him keep that job even though he could barely see the sheet music.
Milo’s stomach flipped over. Everything now looked different, sinister. Did Allen have…designs on him? Was that why he was so willing to make allowances for a guy who couldn’t see so well, when there were no doubt any number of starving piano players who’d have been able to do the job regular? Was that why he’d gott
en them canned at Harms, because he needed Milo at his side? And not just at his side, but dependent on him? Because without a composer, and with no connections outside the ones Allen provided, Milo wasn’t worth spit, clever rhymes or not.
Every reference to Cole Porter, all the times Allen needled him about his love life, was he trying to figure out if Milo was … was game for that kind of business?
And now they were stuck together. A team, Short and Allen, Allen and Short. Their success was together and that’s what people would want more of if The High Hat was another hit, and how could it not be? With John Garnett in the lead?
Allen had trapped him into his funny predilections. Naïve Milo Short who barely understood what all that meant, and for certain didn’t want to think about it.
“Milo? Are you coming up with genius lyrics, is that why you’re so quiet?”
Milo sat up on the couch, tossed his glasses on the table, and put his head in his hands. Then he thought about that being how Allen was sitting, just as Milo got the hell out of his apartment. He grimaced; would he ever be rid of Allen’s thin lips crawling around on his neck?
The soft rustle of fabric made him open his eyes. Vivian had crouched down next to him. She smelled of roses and soap with a hint of gin. Her face was all concern, her big green eyes wide, her eyebrows knit together, making a little V-shaped crease just above her nose. She reached one hand into the crook of his elbow.
“Milo, what’s wrong? You look terrible. Is everyone all right at home? Is Leah sick?”
Milo’s voice, when it came out, was abraded and raw, as if he hadn’t spoken in weeks. “I can’t talk about it.”
“Then don’t.”
Her green eyes grew huge as she approached him, and her long dark lashes flickered down, her lips touching his, just barely, that for a moment he thought he imagined it. Then he knew he wasn’t imagining it, and her lips were real, and so was she, and Milo felt he was waking from a century long sleep when he reached for her waist and lifted her like she weighed nothing, onto his lap.
Vivian In Red Page 24
