I gaped at his innocence. “An actor doesn’t want to mess up his face.”
“Was he a friend of yours?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer this. The scene had a dreamy artificiality about it, and my emotions had simply shut down. I couldn’t feel a thing. DiBanco was a professional; he hung on my answer with actor-worthy concentration. What should I tell him? Should I begin on the Jersey shore? At last I punted. “I hadn’t seen him in a long time,” I said.
“So he just dropped by your dressing room to kill himself?”
I searched for a shorthand version. “His wife is in the play,” I said. “We were lovers, he was jealous. I think he planned to shoot me, but he didn’t have the courage.”
Detective DiBanco pulled down the corners of his mouth, nodding his head ponderously, for all the world like a cop in a TV drama. “Did he threaten you?” he asked.
“In a way. Yes. I’d say he did.”
He gazed up at me; he had to lift his chin to do this, and I noticed a red notch on the jawbone where he’d nicked himself shaving the thick stubble that surged over his chin. “He left a kind of note,” he said. “But it doesn’t make any sense. Maybe it will make sense to you.”
“A kind of note?”
“I’ll show you,” he said, pulling the tape aside. Reluctantly I followed him, keeping as much distance between my feet and the blood as I could. Guy’s blood, I thought, and a reflex of nausea fired an acrid shot of vomit into my throat which I swallowed back manfully.
“It’s on the mirror,” DiBanco said, unnecessarily, for as he spoke my eyes discovered Guy’s final condemnation. He’d used a brown liner crayon to draw a picture frame with a small rectangle at the base, like a title plate, in which he’d carefully inscribed my name. Above the frame, scrawled in startling red lipstick, was a single word: INGRATE.
I took my place as he’d known I would, so that I filled the frame. It made me smile, this last joke of Guy’s; it was so sophomoric, so ridiculous, so totally Guy.
“I see it makes sense to you,” Detective DiBanco observed.
“A long time ago,” I confessed, “Guy Margate saved my life.”
At my apartment, to my relief, there was a phone message from Peter Smythe, which I returned at once. “How is she?” I asked.
“She’s asleep,” he said.
“Does she know what happened?”
“It’s very strange,” he said. “She’s calm, but she doesn’t know anything, who I am, where she is. I don’t think she recognizes her own name, but she’s decided to believe I know it.”
“This is terrible,” I said.
“I called a shrink I know. He said she may snap out of it. She said she was tired, so Mary gave her a gown and a toothbrush, showed her the guest room, and she went to bed. The door is open; we’ll hear her if she gets up in the night. Are you OK?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Can you do the matinee tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can do it.”
“Call me in the morning,” he said. “We’ll figure out what to do. Do you know Madeleine’s family?”
“No,” I said. “Guy knew her mother. I never did.”
“Jesus, what a thing to do. What was wrong with that guy?”
“Guy?” I said. “I guess he snapped. He couldn’t get a job.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s a hell of a profession,” Peter said. “We’re all crazy from it.”
“That’s true,” I agreed.
After I hung up the phone I switched off the lamp and sat in the dark for a few minutes. I could hear Guy laughing at me. “We called you the warm-up act.” Was that the last thing he said to me? Was there any possibility that it was true, that he and Madeleine were in some sort of complicity against me, that there was another cruel story I didn’t know anything about? Or was it just another of Guy’s ploys, right there at the end, to shake my confidence, to get even with me because I had succeeded and he had failed?
Naturally I preferred the latter proposition, but I also admitted that I would probably never be sure, as Guy was gone and Madeleine, if she could even remember her story, would have a strong personal interest in sticking to it.
Guy is gone, I said to the empty darkness pressing against me. But I hadn’t seen his body. They’d taken him and the backpack and the pistol away sometime during the last act. A sinister doubt crept in from the dime-store-mystery plotting lobe of the brain: What if Guy wasn’t really dead? Then the police would have to be in on it, also Peter, who had identified Guy. Impossible, right? But no sooner had the thought crossed my mind than a creak and crunch issued from the bedroom, as of someone rising from the bed. My trembling fingers shot out for the lamp switch, but it wasn’t where it had always been. “Christ,” I muttered, feeling around until I found it exactly where it had always been.
The light blasted my eyes. The bedroom door was ajar. I could see the empty bed and the dresser, just as I had left them, but I had to get up, cross the room, and look behind the door. That was when I decided to go out. It was midnight and it was chilly; people with sense were all in bed. I didn’t want to talk to strangers; I didn’t want to be alone. I called Teddy.
He was awake; he had, he said, just come in, and how was I.
“Not great,” I said. “Guy Margate shot himself in my dressing room during the show tonight.”
“My God,” Teddy said. “Are you serious?”
“Yes. He’s dead, and Madeleine doesn’t know who she is.”
“Ed,” Teddy said. “Where are you?”
“I’m in my apartment, but I can’t stay here. I’m too creeped out. I need a drink. Can you come out and meet me somewhere?”
“Hold on,” he said. He talked to someone, Wayne no doubt, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. “I’ll meet you at Phebe’s,” he said. “I’ll leave right now.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
Teddy was waiting on the porch but as soon as he saw me he came out and steered me into the small room behind the bar. He had evidently spoken to the bartender, for a bottle of whiskey and two glasses with ice cubes melting in them were set up on a table. This dark room wasn’t ordinarily open unless the crowd overflowed, so we had it to ourselves. “I would have told you to come to the apartment,” Teddy said, “but Wayne invited some people from the opening in for drinks. Do you want something to eat?”
“Wayne had an opening?” I said.
“No. It wasn’t his. A friend. Awful pictures.” He poured the whiskey over the ice, his eyes moving from his hand to me and back again, animated by solicitude. He slid the glass to me. After I swilled a good draught, I thumped the glass down on the table with a sigh. “Thanks,” I said. “That helps.”
Teddy sipped his drink thoughtfully. “So Guy is dead,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I can hardly believe it.”
“Me neither.”
“And what did you mean; Madeleine doesn’t know who she is?”
“She just lost it all,” I said. “Right in the middle of the third act. We heard the shot and she was sobbing in my arms and she kept repeating her line over and over. We had to get her offstage and then I gave her my handkerchief and she asked me if we’d ever met.”
“What was the line?”
“What?”
“What was the line she was repeating?”
“What?” I took another drink, washing back the impatience I felt at this question. “I’m not as bad as you think.”
“That was the line?”
“Yes,” I said. “That was the line. I’m not as bad as you think. Why is that important?”
“Where is she now?”
“Peter took her home.”
“Peter?”
“Smythe. The director. He said she doesn’t know who she is. He called a psychiatrist who said she might snap out of it. She went to sleep.”
“This is awful,” Teddy said.
“I don’t know what I�
��m going to do,” I agreed.
“No,” Teddy said. “I’m sure you don’t.”
“For one thing, the understudy has a completely different interpretation of Elena. It’s all vanity and irritation. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it’s just completely different. I’ll have to start from scratch.”
Teddy was quiet, rotating his glass on the coaster, drying the moisture from the bottom before he lifted it for another cautious sip. His eyes rested upon me with a distant, friendly curiosity, such as one might show for a child who has charmingly botched a recitation.
“I know that sounds incredibly callous,” I admitted.
“Well,” Teddy said, “it is one of the things you’ll have to worry about.”
I slept poorly and arrived at Peter’s apartment fifteen minutes early. He came to the door in his robe and slippers, his eyes bleary, his mop of hair sticking out in all directions. “Come in, come in,” he said. “What a night. I didn’t get back from the hospital until four.”
“What hospital?” I said, looking about the gloomy living room. Why was it so dark?
“Bellevue,” Peter said. He shuffled to the window and pulled the curtain cord, vaporizing the gloom. “God it’s bright out there.”
Bellevue. My legs went rubbery and I sank onto a handy hassock. “Oh no,” I said.
“We didn’t have any choice. She woke up screaming and we couldn’t calm her down. She wanted to get out of the apartment, didn’t know who we were, said someone had stolen a baby, at least I think that’s what she said. Mary called Dr. Hershey and he said to call 911 and meet him at Bellevue. So that’s what we did.”
“Did she calm down?”
“They gave her a shot. Then she was just moaning.”
I stood up, making for the door. “I’ve got to see her.”
“They won’t let you see her,” Peter said. “Sit down, have a cup of coffee.”
“What will they do to her?”
“It’s a hospital. They’ll take care of her. You can call Hershey later. She’s his patient now. She needs help, psychiatric help. Hershey said she was in a fugue state.”
I sat back down again. So Guy was right, I thought. Madeleine was fragile. I hadn’t believed it because she was so ambitious and talented and beautiful and sexy, but he knew it, probably from the start, which is why his suicide is so completely inexcusable. He knew what it would do to her; he even made sure she would bear a crippling weight of guilt. He’d kept her up all night, berating her, threatening to kill himself if she left him, and then he sat in the dressing room listening to the play on the intercom, waiting for that moment when her lips met mine, and then he pulled the trigger. When she heard the shot she knew exactly what it was. In the annals of suicide has there ever been a more ignoble performance? If there was any justice and if there was a hell, I thought, Guy was surely in it. I would not waste a moment’s pity on him.
Peter brought me a mug of coffee. “Do you want milk?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Black is good.”
“Are you sure you can do the matinee? We can get the understudy if we call him now.”
“No,” I said. “I can do it.”
———
The matinee was a shambles. We were running on nerves, parroting our lines like politicians, all save the understudy, who was in the unenviable position of benefiting from another actor’s misfortune. She’d decided to throw herself at the role with a passion that was at odds with the character she was playing. She shivered and fidgeted, had starts and fits. The audience, composed of blockheads with hearing aids, thought she was terrific.
After the show I headed uptown to the offices of Dr. Seymour Hershey, a dour, bespectacled individual with heavy dark lips like two prunes folded under his big nose. He greeted me indifferently, even disappearing behind the desk to pick up a pencil while I inquired about Madeleine’s prognosis.
Amnesia, he explained, is a rare condition, usually brought on by an injury, such as a blow to the head. In such cases the effects were sometimes reversible, though not, as so often happens in fiction and film, as the result of a second blow. In Madeleine’s case the loss of memory was the result of a psychic trauma. “Typically,” he said, “these patients were sexually abused as children. Do you know anything about her childhood?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “She didn’t like her mother.”
“Well,” he said, psychiatrically, “she would have buried that too.”
“She’s an actress,” I said. “There’s nothing buried in there. She has complete access to her emotions. That’s what actors do.”
“Pretending to have emotions you don’t feel doesn’t open the portals of the unconscious,” he said.
“We’re not pretending. That’s the point,” I countered.
He probed his chin with his thumb, scanning his desk for something of interest. “Actually in my experience, actors are extremely unstable personalities,” he said.
“Will she get her memory back?” I asked.
“If she wants to,” he said. “But her memory loss is the least of her problems.”
“Will she get well?”
“If she wants to,” he repeated maddeningly.
“So your deep professional wisdom is that Madeleine wants to be extremely unstable.”
He ran his eyes over me critically, like an antique dealer inspecting a table, checking for cracks in the veneer. “Not consciously, of course,” he said.
“Can she come home?”
“Oh no. Not now. She needs to be clinically evaluated. There are medications that may help. I can recommend a mental health facility that should be able to take her.”
“An asylum?”
“We don’t actually call them that anymore.”
“Where is it?”
“In Westchester. It has an excellent reputation. It’s called Benthaven.”
I sputtered. “Benthaven?”
He removed his glasses and rubbed the lenses with a square of red cloth he kept on the desk for just that purpose. Absolutely humorless, I thought. My poor Madeleine. “Once we get her stabilized I can have her transferred there,” he said.
“Can I see her before she goes?”
“Oh, yes. You can see her. It might be helpful; I don’t think it can hurt. You should bring her some food. She’s refusing to eat anything they offer her at the hospital.”
“Why does she do that?”
He gave me another long, magnified look, opening and closing his prune lips a few times like a fish trying to catch a wafer of food in an aquarium. “Why do you think she would do that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Then what makes you think I would know?”
“You’re her doctor.”
“And you’re her what? Her friend? More than that?”
I had to think this over. Whatever I was, I knew I was committed to getting Madeleine out from under the thumb of Dr. Seymour Hershey.
“I’m the one who knows what she likes to eat,” I said.
In the days that followed, Teddy and I began the process of freeing Madeleine from the mental health authorities. Hershey was having a picnic because Madeleine wasn’t capable of making decisions and we couldn’t find anyone related to her who was. I knew her father had died when she was in high school and Teddy’s investigations revealed that her mother too had died of cancer the previous year. Madeleine was a widow and an orphan.
By the time I got to see her, she was “stabilized,” but she hadn’t, as hoped, snapped out of it. She wasn’t hysterical or frightened, she was unfailingly polite, but she didn’t recognize either Teddy or me, nor did she understand why she was in a hospital. Mostly she was hungry, but, as Hershey had told me, she wouldn’t touch anything that didn’t come from outside. Teddy and I took turns bringing meals from nearby restaurants. One night, as I was opening another white carton of her favorite Chinese takeout, she confided, “If you eat the food they make here, you can never leave.”
�
��So it’s not that you don’t like it,” I said, handing her the box.
She stabbed a water chestnut with the plastic fork. “I’m sure it’s perfectly nice,” she said in her new affectless voice.
“They make it nice,” I suggested, “to tempt you to eat it.”
She sent me a conspiratorial glance over the carton. There was just the flicker of a smile at the corners of her mouth as she lifted a long noodle above the edge. “Exactly,” she said.
She’s still in there, I thought. I just have to find a way to get her back.
Teddy helped me with the other problem that (I can’t resist the pun) gravely needed clearing up, which was the earthly remains of Guy Margate. He too was without traceable relations. “We can’t just leave him to the city to dispose of,” Teddy said. “Should we buy a plot somewhere?”
“I want him cremated,” I said.
“Should we scatter his ashes?”
“No,” I said. “I want him cremated and in an urn and buried. I want him put to rest.”
Teddy, puzzled by my vehemence, acquiesced. “I can arrange that,” he said.
Getting Guy out of the morgue and into a grave proved a complicated and expensive process. Teddy took on the funerary arrangements and, with the help of Detective DiBanco, I navigated the murky legal channels. In the process I had to sign a document that made me responsible for Guy’s interment, an obligation that gave me a full moment’s pause.
“Do you want to see him?” the detective inquired.
“No,” I said, scribbling my name on the dotted line.
“We’ll release his stuff to you. The backpack has keys in it; must be to his apartment. We’ll keep the gun.”
“Yes, do. Please,” I said.
“We checked him out from his license. He didn’t have a record.”
“That’s comforting.”
“You know where he lives, right?”
“Lower East Side,” I said. “But I don’t know where exactly.”
He took up a pen and jotted down the address on a yellow pad. “You actors are an odd bunch,” he said. He ripped off the sheet and held it out to me.
“In what way?” I asked. I had the sense that he was about to make some deep and revelatory observation, so I gave him my full attention.
Valerie Martin Page 22
