The Fourth Wall

by Barbara Paul

  “It’s a mess, Abby,” Leo shook his head. “I went over after the performance last night—it was on the six o’clock news. That’s something else you’re going to have to face. Those blood-sucking reporters are all over the place. Lieutenant Goodlow chased ’em off, but some of them got pictures. They’ll be after you.”

  “Are they there now, do you think?”

  “I expect so. Is there a back entrance?”

  I said yes, but there was no way to get to it except by going around the building from the front. Leo nodded and told the cab driver to look out for a phone booth. “I promised Ian Cavanaugh I’d let him know when you got in.”

  “Call from my place,” I said, not thinking.

  Leo looked away. “Your phone’s not working.”

  Oh.

  The main entrance to my part of the brownstone was at the side of the house, at the head of an exterior flight of stairs and recessed into an alcove which offered protection from the weather. The back entrance opened on to a fire escape. As the taxi pulled up I could see two camera crews waiting. Leo took my suitcase and hustled me through a crowd that had gathered and up the side stairs to the main entrance where a policeman stood guard. There I stopped and stared at the door.

  The lock trick had worked; all five locks were solidly in place. The invader of my home had simply taken an ax and hacked his way through.

  I stepped into an ankle-deep layer of paper and refuse and stopped again. The first thing I saw was the paint—angry blood-red splotches, so many of them the room looked diseased. Next I saw the broken pieces of furniture sticking up at odd angles—a table leg here, a chair arm there. Then I stared for a long time at the layers of paper everywhere. Horrible!

  Whoever had done this hadn’t just pulled the books off the shelf and poured paint over them. Pages were torn out, some ripped in half; he must have spent hours just tearing up books. An oil portrait of my grandfather lay ripped to shreds. The stereo system was a heap of battered metal; all the records had been removed from their jackets before the paint was dumped. A small desk I’d used for paying bills had been reduced to a pile of rubble. An antique bookcase with glass doors—the only valuable piece of furniture I owned—was splintered almost beyond recognition. Sofa, dining table, china cabinet, chairs, drapes. Even the bookshelves hadn’t escaped—they’d all been smashed, one at a time.

  And over it all like a curse lay the smell of hatred—vicious, vindictive, insane hatred. A madman had invaded my home and told me what he thought of me. How could anyone hate me that much?

  “The paint’s dry,” Leo said. “You can walk on it.”

  I picked my way through the paper litter and looked over the rest of the floor. Bedroom, spare room, bathroom, hallway, kitchen, storeroom—all were a total wreck. One blood-red room after the other. Unreclaimable. I steeled myself and climbed the stairs to my workroom.

  Lieutenant Goodlow and two other men were in the workroom, but I couldn’t talk to them. All my notebooks, years of writing, outlines for future work, years of correspondence, manuscripts, years of work—all lay in shreds like so much garbage. As if someone had walked through my mind and threw away what he found there.

  And the books.

  I dropped to my knees and began to sift through the mess. Samuel French editions of individual plays, hundreds of them, in little bits and pieces. The cover of one volume of Glynne Wickham’s Early English Stages. A page of Flaminio Scala’s Commedia scenarios. A few pages of the Mermaid edition of Philip Massinger’s plays, its pages yellowed and uncut when I’d bought it. Oddest thing: for some nonsensical reason I sat there on my heels in the midst of the chaos thinking about the clerk at Dauber and Pine who’d sold me the two-volume set, how she’d insisted on pronouncing the playwright’s name Massin-jay instead of Mass-ing-er, as if he were French.

  I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there before I became aware of a hand shaking my shoulder. Lieutenant Goodlow was saying, “There’s nothing you can salvage, Ms James. Believe me. Please get up. Come on, now.”

  I stood up and blinked at the Lieutenant. His face was lined and heavy, as if he’d never smiled in his life. He started talking in a flat, airport-dispatcher voice to discourage any tendency to hysteria I might have. “What we think happened was this. The married couple who occupy the first two floors both work—whoever did it waited until they’d both left so he’d have the house to himself. Then he must have tried the side door first but couldn’t get it unlocked. That alcove would have kept him hidden from the street.”

  “As if anyone would notice,” one of the other policemen muttered.

  Lieutenant Goodlow frowned at him. “Then he must have tried the back. Same results. He got in by breaking a window in the back. That’s how we knew about it—one of your neighbors, a Mr. Goodwin, spotted the broken window and called us. He’d seen you leave with a suitcase the day before. So this guy got through the window, but he still couldn’t get either door open, not knowing which lock was the trick one. So rather than haul all his stuff through the window, he just chopped down the door.”

  “His stuff?”

  Lieutenant Goodlow puffed out his cheeks. “A sledge hammer. A light hammer or two. Couple of knives. An ax. Gallons and gallons of paint. He must have had goggles to protect his eyes from splintering glass. And certainly work gloves.” He looked around at one of the other men. “Anything else?”

  “An ice pick,” the man said. “Some of the gouge marks couldn’t have been made by a knife.”

  “Quite a load,” said the Lieutenant. “And we’ve found someone who saw him. A Dr. Vollmer was driving by and saw a workman carrying paint up those outside steps. He didn’t see his face, he just saw a workman wearing coveralls.”

  “So how is that going to help?” I asked dully.

  “If one person saw him, then someone else could have seen him too. We’re still checking. Look, Ms James, why don’t we go downstairs? I don’t think you should stay up here. Besides, there’s something in the living room I want to show you.”

  Leo Gunn stayed upstairs and I went down with the Lieutenant. When we reached the living room we could hear Ian Cavanaugh at the door, trying to persuade the policeman standing guard to let him in. Lieutenant Goodlow nodded to the policeman, and Ian came over to me and stood awkwardly. Leo Gunn had the kind of personality that would let him give me a hug when I needed one, but Ian was too restrained for that.

  “Abby, I know you’re stunned now,” Ian said, “but when you can start thinking of what needs to be done, let me know. I’ll help. I want to help.”

  I thanked him and turned to Lieutenant Goodlow to see what he had to show me.

  “Don’t you want to leave that case with the officer at the door?” the Lieutenant said. “You’ve been carrying it ever since you got here.”

  I hugged the attaché case to me with both arms. “It’s my new play.”

  Lieutenant Goodlow hesitated, and then nodded. “What I want to show you is over here. It turns out that not everything was destroyed—one thing was left untouched. Look.”

  The television set.

  “Not a scratch or a drop of paint on it anywhere,” the Lieutenant said. “He must have covered it with something while he was smashing up the rest of the room. Now why would he do that?”

  “A sadistic joke,” I said. “Everyone who knows me knows how annoyed I get with television.”

  “Um. I had the bomb squad check it out, and it’s clean. Still works, too.” He switched on the set and a picture swam into focus. It was a rerun of one of the Uncle Tom sitcoms—black folks playin’ de fool to make de white folks laff. Then the picture changed and there was Jay Berringer’s impish face grinning out at me, deliriously happy under the lather of some man-scented shaving cream. Jay had only one line in the commercial, so he did a lot of acting with his eyebrows.

  Lieutenant Goodlow hit the off button. “Can’t stand that little fag,” he said.

  “Berringer?” said Ian, surprised. �
�He’s no fag.”

  “You know him?”

  “Jay Berringer. And he likes the ladies.”

  “Really likes them? Not just putting up a front?”

  “Really likes them. He’s been married … four times?” Ian glanced at me.

  “Five, I think.”

  “Five marriages—a bit much for putting up a front, wouldn’t you say?” Ian asked.

  The Lieutenant agreed.

  The word “fag” had reminded me. “Lieutenant, I’ve got something to tell you.” I told him of my visit to Loren Keith, and Loren’s information that Michael Crown had had a male lover of long standing. I pointed out that the lover would be middle-aged by now.

  Lieutenant Goodlow looked like a pointer scenting his prey. “How many middle-aged homosexuals are there in the Foxfire company?”

  Ian and I looked away from him and said nothing.

  “Only one,” said Leo Gunn. “Me.”

  I hadn’t heard him come down the stairs. It was an awkward moment, which Lieutenant Goodlow ended by asking, “Did you know Michael Crown?”

  Leo didn’t answer him but instead spoke to me. “Do you think I did this, Abby?” He waved an arm at the shambles around us. “Do you think it was me?”

  “No, I do not,” I said truthfully. “I know you didn’t do it, Leo. I’m certainly not accusing you.”

  “Neither am I,” said Lieutenant Goodlow, “but I have to ask you this. Were you Michael Crown’s lover?”

  Leo sighed. “I never even met the man until he showed up at Manhattan Rep with that play he stole. I never worked one of his plays, and he never came backstage at any of the plays I did work. Our paths just never crossed.”

  “Had you heard that Crown was gay?”

  “No, I didn’t know anything about him at all.”

  Lieutenant Goodlow shot a glance at Ian and me and motioned Leo to follow him into another room. I was unreasonably irritated by this ostentatious display of tactfulness. What was the Lieutenant going to say that Ian and I mustn’t hear? Was he going to ask Leo to inquire around “the homosexual community” to see if he could pick up anything about Michael Crown? Poor Leo.

  All of a sudden I felt heavier than lead. I wanted to sit down but there wasn’t any place to sit. I leaned against the scarred wall and just drooped. Shock and fear and anger were getting to me.

  Ian tried to buck me up. “Try not to feel too badly, Abby. Start rebuilding your library. Right away.”

  “I never feel badly,” I snapped. “Nothing wrong with my fingertips.”

  “What?”

  “When you’re feeling something with your hands and doing a bad job of it, then you’re feeling badly. The rest of the time you just plain feel bad.”

  He stared at me in astonishment. Then his face crinkled into a sad smile, understanding.

  I was well aware of the absurdity of it. Here my home had just been destroyed and I was standing there snarling at Ian about his grammar. I began to giggle, something I hadn’t done since I was a little girl. Ian chuckled, and the two of us stood there laughing at each other until Lieutenant Goodlow came in to see what was so funny.

  “Diversionary tactic on my part,” I explained. “A way to keep from SCREAMING!”

  Lieutenant Goodlow winced, nodded, and went back out.

  “I mean it, Abby,” said Ian. “I think you should start rebuilding immediately. Don’t wait.”

  Just then a policeman came in from outside and asked where Lieutenant Goodlow was. Ian pointed, and he disappeared into the next room. Almost immediately the Lieutenant was back in the living room, followed by Leo and the policeman.

  “I’ve just gotten word,” Lieutenant Goodlow said, “that my request for round-the-clock protection for you two has just been approved.” He meant Ian and Leo. “You’re the only ones from the Manhattan Repertory governing committee who haven’t been hit yet. It took this”—he waved his hand at the wreckage—“to convince the Superintendent that it’s the Manhattan Rep people this nut is after. So there’ll be two police officers with each of you from now on, and I sure as hell hope there’s no objection because you’re going to be guarded whether you like it or not.”

  Neither man objected.

  “Good,” said the Lieutenant. “Now Ms James. We’ll need to talk, but it doesn’t have to be today. Where will you be staying?”

  Leo and Ian both offered me a room, but I veered off at the idea of two targets under the same roof. Maybe our mutual enemy was finished with me now, but I couldn’t convince myself that I was safe. Walk into a pile of rubble that was once your home and see how safe you feel. I briefly considered calling a friend in no way connected with the theater and asking her to put me up for a while. I decided against it. For the same reason John Reddick had broken up with his girl friend—reluctance to endanger another person. I was contaminated now, and I was afraid of spreading the contamination. How did Typhoid Mary feel when she learned the truth about herself? In the end I decided to go to a hotel.

  Since Ian and Leo had to wait for their protection to arrive, Lieutenant Goodlow asked one of the police officers to drive me to a hotel. The officer picked up my suitcase and said, “Stick close to me, Ms James. I’m going to barrel right through that mob outside.”

  That mob. I’d forgotten the reporters waiting with their cameras and their notebooks and their microphones. Their voices were audible the minute I stepped out through the door. I followed the officer down the stairway and grabbed his elbow as he shouldered his way through the crowd toward a police car. He was fast, but not fast enough. Somebody pushed his body between me and the officer and two somebodies thrust mikes into my face. Everyone was talking at once, asking questions, yelling to make themselves heard. The noise level kept rising and I was becoming disoriented. The shrillest voice cried, “Why was this done to you and what are you going to do about it?” A woman moved along with me through the crowd, screaming these words over and over.

  That was two questions, wasn’t it? Which should I answer first? And what did she mean, what was I going to do about it? I wondered if she—whoa. What was I doing?

  “Don’t bother me at a time like this,” I said angrily. “Get away. Don’t bother me!”

  And then I was in the police car, pulling away from the curb, and the voices finally stopped.

  9

  Ian Cavanaugh managed to convince the owner of John Reddick’s apartment that since he, Ian, was now paying the rent, he was entitled to a key. And so I had a place to stay. Ian also found a cleaning service that was willing to flush out my Augean stables for only a small fortune.

  The first thing I did in John’s apartment was look around for a place to hide The New Play. I couldn’t find any place that looked safe enough, so I decided to put it in a safety deposit box in a bank. But the strangest thing happened: when I put my hand on the doorknob to go out, I couldn’t make it move. I couldn’t make my hand move. I don’t know how long I stood there gripping the knob, terrified of leaving my sanctuary.

  A little time, that’s all I needed. I sat down and opened the attaché case, checking once again to make sure the play was all right. I took out the one book I owned, the paperback about codes and ciphers. Not in the mood for that. I got up and looked through John’s books, selecting an anthology of Spanish plays. I sat staring at the same page for a while before I realized the plays were in Spanish. Which I can’t read.

  In the kitchen I found half a carton of cigarettes. I’d quit smoking six years earlier, but suddenly I wanted, needed, a cigarette. I tore off the cellophane strip from a pack and watched it wrap itself around my finger. A sudden memory from childhood: my mother placing a red cellophane fish in the palm of my hand, saying, “Watch it curl.” The cigarette was stale and made my mouth foul.

  I turned on the television and sat down to gaze at a blank screen. I’d forgotten: the set wasn’t working. The broken set was what had sent John to my place to watch Ian in “Murphy’s Law,” the last time I’d seen him. />
  Then I let it in. For the first time I thought, really thought, about how much I’d lost. In one day twenty years of my life had been wiped out—twenty years of study and work and putting together a library. Over six thousand volumes maliciously and senselessly destroyed. In another twenty years I could build up another library, but what of my notes, my papers? How do you recapture a pattern of thought from, say, ten years ago?

  Toby, you know that I love you. The line was so clear in my head that I actually turned around to see who had sung it. It was from Menotti’s The Medium, an opera I hadn’t heard or thought about for years. But suddenly the line was there: Toby, you know that I love you.

  “He hit you where it hurts,” Lieutenant Goodlow had said. My God, how right he was! I didn’t own any jewels or furs or cars—but I loved my library. I was proud of it. Perhaps too proud? Had I made the possession of books too important?

  Suddenly Miss Flora Morgan’s face flashed into view. Miss Flora had taught the combined first and second grades in the same room in the small river town where I was born. She was a witch, a harridan, a lady ogre, and we all lived in mortal terror of her. This was in the days before corporal punishment had been declared the eighth deadly sin, and Miss Flora kept a yardstick handy to enforce her lessons. If you spilled your crayons on the floor—whack! If you misspelled a word you’d learned last week—whack! If you said “ain’t”—whack! whack! whack! But if you did something good, like getting all the arithmetic problems right, she’d smile and hand you some special book to read, a book no one else in the class had. Good teacher, Miss Flora Morgan.

  The line from The Medium kept repeating in my head, like a phonograph record stuck in one place: Toby, you know that I love you. Never the line before or the line after, just Toby, you know that I love you. I couldn’t even remember what the lines before and after were.