The Placebo Effect

by David Rotenberg

  Decker had charged him very little. He seldom charged needy actors very much since his truth-telling business was supplying all the money he needed.

  “How’re the kids?”

  “Growing like weeds.”

  “And Joan?”

  “Her Little Princess Dance Studio is a huge hit with the girls way out here in nine oh five land. Suburbia can’t get enough of her.”

  Decker understood why. Joan had a real gift with kids and kids’ dreams. He envied her that.

  “So what can I do for you, Decker?”

  “Do you know your way around Akwesasne?” Decker heard Charles take a deep breath. Akwesasne was the Mohawk reservation that straddled the Canadian-American border south of Montreal.

  “Yeah, but the politics on that reservation are dangerous as hell. What is it that you want, Decker?”

  Now it was Decker who took a deep breath. “I need you to get me across the U.S. border.”

  “Without the Americans knowing, I assume?”

  “You assume correctly. Don’t ask me why because I won’t tell you.”

  Charles laughed.

  “What?”

  “I thought you were going to ask for something difficult. Like horseback riding or something.”

  Now Decker laughed. Charles Cleareyes was the only First Nations person that Decker knew who was violently allergic to horses. So much so that in film after film Charles appears on horseback—bare chested, beautiful, and regal—and Benadrylled out of his mind to stop himself from sneezing throughout the take.

  An hour and twenty minutes later Decker was on the late night bus to Montreal. Early the next morning he transferred to an Eastern Township bus line—and as the cold noon sun finally broke through a low hanging bank of clouds, Decker, for the third time in his life, walked into Officer Matthew’s office.

  The intervening years hadn’t reduced the officer’s waistline, although they had added a brilliant red sunburst of broken capillaries across his left cheek and forehead. Hank Williams had been replaced by early Neil Young, but essentially the man had not changed. He was as immutable as the granite that was quarried just north of his town.

  Officer Matthews didn’t offer Decker a seat or a smile or say a word of any sort.

  So Decker launched in. “I believe that Carrie Kimmel was carrying Bobby Irwin’s child. I assume she had it aborted before the boy was murdered by—if not directly, then indirectly—the girl’s father or someone else in that family. And I believe that a law firm in New York City has been paid to get information about the matter.”

  Officer Matthews spat a thick line of tobacco juice just past his outstretched left cowboy boot and expertly into the circular trash can upon whose rim the heel of his boot rested. “That’s a whole lot of believing you got there.”

  “So?” Decker asked, not knowing exactly what the “what” was in the “so what” question he had posed.

  “So, I think you have a lot of it right.”

  “But not all of it?”

  “Nope. You got the law firm part wrong.”

  “They weren’t representing the girl’s family?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nope?”

  “Nope.” He spat a second time—another swish. “The girl used her mother’s maiden name for when she played hockey—don’t ask me why. The girl’s real last name is Charendoff. Carrie Charendoff.”

  Just for an instant Decker closed his eyes, felt the cold approaching, and saw perfect parallel lines cross his retina. When he opened his eyes Officer Matthews was reaching for a much-used cardigan sweater.

  “Cold all of a sudden,” he said as he dug into his desk drawer and pulled out a business card. He put it on the desk, stood, and left the room.

  Decker picked up the card: Singer, Rubin and Charendoff, Attorneys-at-Law, Patchin Place, New York City—the very firm that first employed him. But Ira Charendoff was not representing Carrie Kimmel’s family—he was her father.

  Six hours later Charles Cleareyes walked Decker across the Canada-U.S. border inside the Akwesasne Reserve and helped him into the trunk of the car of a First Nations friend heading to Albany. Once they were past what the Mohawks referred to as the “last spying place,” the car stopped and Decker joined his host in the front seat.

  From Albany he took a bus to New York City. Seven hours later he stood outside the entrance to Patchin Place off Sixth Avenue at Tenth Street as he had almost four years ago when he was first prepared by a lawyer named Ira Charendoff for his interview with Officer Matthews of Stanstead, P.Q.

  The phone rang on Yslan’s kitchen table. She picked it up before the first ring had completed its cycle. “Yes. Good. Where?” She listened for a moment. “I’ll be there in three hours—don’t lose him.”

  25

  RETURN TO MANHATTAN

  “WHERE TO?” THE CABBIE ASKED—WELL, DEMANDED. IT WAS New York after all.

  Decker wasn’t ready to deal with Charendoff. The U.S. Mail wouldn’t have delivered his four packages yet. He’d have to give it a few more days to be sure that they arrived. He yelled over the roar of the traffic, “Columbus and Sixty-ninth.” To himself he whispered, “The old homestead,” then he pulled out his key ring and examined the old keys there.

  As Decker’s directing career had heated up, the modest Upper West Side had become complicated for him. Over and over again he had bottles of beer slammed down on the bar in front of him—actors who tended bar remembered directors who didn’t cast them much better than directors remembered actors whom they had not cast.

  And when a store opened on Columbus selling antiques and cheese, Decker knew it was time to move.

  Through his wife’s brother they found a rent-controlled apartment on Fifty-eighth Street beside a ramp to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Real people lived on the East Side—people with nine-to-five (well, in New York, eight-to-seven) jobs and families. And he and his wife started theirs with a boy—Seth by name.

  Seth sat on Decker’s lap many an evening on the stoop of the building. Together they saw Hulk Hogan when he first came to visit Cyndi Lauper in the building beside them. The boy took a special joy in learning the names of fancy cars as they disgorged their rich drivers in front of the private dining club nearer the river as well as the names of the more mysterious vehicles parked in front of the high-end whorehouse near Second Avenue.

  Decker directed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Chicago and Cincinnati and Seattle and Williamstown and on occasion in New York, and Seth grew, and his wife got unaccountably thinner and frailer until the day that Seth held his hand as the doctor pronounced the death sentence of ALS. And the web that would eventually encase his wife wrapped the first of its slender but adamantine threads around her thin shoulders, and she began the voyage inward that would ultimately end her life.

  Sitting across Columbus Avenue from their old place Decker watched the parade of Manhattanites as he ate his Cuban rice and beans and allowed himself once more to be amazed by the energy and life that was New York City—one of the crowning achievements of the West. An achievement wrought from guts and hard, hard work and belief.

  The waiter brought the bill, the price of which tempered Decker’s approval of Manhattan. He resisted the impulse to lick the remains of his rice and beans from his plate, paid for the meal and, after satisfying himself that his keys still worked, began the journey first to the East Side then downtown—back to Patchin Place.

  The law office of Singer, Rubin and Charendoff was located in the secluded mews below Eleventh Street off Sixth Avenue, Patchin Place. It was an address one didn’t soon forget—Eugene O’Neill wrote The Hairy Ape in one of the houses in this exclusive enclave, and eccentric Djuna Barnes bemoaned her lack of fame as Theodore Dreiser and E. E. Cummings tapped away at their typewriters across the way. Now Patchin Place was a principal address for therapists. Decker couldn’t help feeling that going from great writers to tillers of the fields of the mind was a move in the wrong direction.

&n
bsp; But as Decker walked the cobbled stones of the mews he sensed history rise from the ground all around him. Although he had lived in a turn-of-the-century house in the Junction, history was both deeper and more profound in New York. More souls had both trod these stones and, more important, left their indelible marks here than in the city of his birth. At times he thought it was a matter of focus and New York’s active looking for the next big thing. After all, he had taken a show that he opened as a simple song cycle in a bar on Tenth Avenue—when Tenth Avenue was somewhere that you avoided—and two years later had a $2 million Broadway musical. But even more important, New York mythologized itself; writers wrote about it, composers put it into song, painters endlessly portrayed it. Decker couldn’t imagine what a song about the Don Valley Parkway would sound like, or who the hell would paint the vista down Dupont Avenue. Yet here, streets and bridges and buildings had entered the ethos—become a part of being in the West. Of the achievement of the West.

  Decker passed by the front door of Singer, Rubin and Charendoff, then took a position across from the white door and opened his copy of the Times and waited. Shortly a burly man, clearly a lawyer, and what was just as clearly his secretary—not his admin assistant, a secretary—stepped out. “It’s fuckin’ cold!” the man announced. In the manner of a great many New York City lawyers he spoke loud enough so that people within a half-mile radius could hear and understand how very important he was. The secretary read something off a notepad and the lawyer responded, “What do you mean no one down there will accept a collect phone call? We represent their damned country. Peru is our client. So they have to accept a fuckin’ collect call.” A black limo edged its way down the narrow roadway and pulled up. The lawyer and his secretary hopped in. The lawyer’s final words to her seemed to float on the cold air: “Call the lying cunt, she’ll have to wait to cash the last alimony check, call her and…”

  Decker was grateful that he couldn’t hear the end of the command. But, then he didn’t care. This guy wasn’t the one who’d sent him to Stanstead.

  Decker contemplated what to do next. In fact, he hadn’t thought much past getting to Manhattan.

  He needed information. Better still, he needed someone with access to information.

  Decker was not a cop or a detective or an investigator of any sort. He had a powerful talent but it was limited. If he cared about the person his gift didn’t work at all. Recordings often caused him to make mistakes. He needed to hear the person speak—and it helped if he could also see the person as he spoke. Somehow he had to arrange to overhear a conversation in real time with this Charendoff guy. Not so simple with a high-profile lawyer. Especially one who had already seen Decker twice and would be understandably suspicious if Decker were just to show up at his door asking questions.

  So he needed a surrogate—no, an ally. Decker wasn’t good at such things—he remembered the “doesn’t play well with others” statements on his grade-school report cards. It was hard for him to trust. He trusted Eddie. He trusted Leena. But in neither case did he trust them with everything about himself.

  But he couldn’t do this on his own. He needed a partner. Decker had done important service for dozens of people who now lived in New York City. He preferred a partnership based on trading service to one based on any notion of personal duty or responsibility. It was cleaner—more predictable. Besides, free was often the most expensive. He allowed his mind to roam over his New York contacts. The producer who lived in Chelsea whom he had helped twice in the past with actors who were resistant to their directors but had big contracts and couldn’t be fired; his old lighting designer, whom he had set up with a job in academe; the four actors who had leads in shows whom he prepped for big episodes.

  He ran the names of the actors in his head and envisioned each. All four liked him—no, that’s not necessarily true, they used him when they needed to. All four were on the rise, but only one was a real star. And only a star could get a big-shot lawyer to take his call and then get him to attend a meeting at the place of his choosing.

  Lawyers and stars—yeah, that fit. He opened his small phone directory and turned to the J page—he always listed actors by their first names.

  He walked back out to Sixth Avenue and approached a bank of phones. Much to his surprise one of the three was actually in working order and not occupied by a bearded creature calling on Jesus for a loan or some other sort of favour. He pumped the thing with coins, dialed and waited through the inevitable generic message. When the beep finally arrived Decker said, “Hey, are you too big a star to pick up the damned phone?”

  There was a pause. Decker considered hanging up but he knew that he needed help if he was ever going to get close to the lawyer who had sent him up to Stanstead. Then he heard the still remarkably youthful voice of Josh Near—star of the NBC series The Extraordinaries. Now in its fourth season, the show was really a phenomenon. Huge ratings despite the fact that it was in the gritty territory into which usually only HBO dared venture. Decker really liked the show, partially for its acting and writing but even more so because it seemed to show the New York City that Decker knew—the New York City before Disney had made it safe for Midwesterners. Shit, they have the rest of the country—why did they need New York as well?

  Decker remembered sitting down beside Josh at a showing of Heaven at the Toronto Film Festival—in the years before it became so tony that he couldn’t bear sitting with those folks to watch a movie. Decker had spotted the young actor and took the seat beside him. As he did, a woman came down the aisle in a backless summer dress—she had one of the six or seven great female backs in the Northern Hemisphere. Both of them had noticed, and despite their age difference they had seemingly bonded over that. When Josh headed south across the border, he had kept in touch with Decker, who prepared him for a great many of his important auditions.

  Decker had also prepped Josh for his four biggest episodes in The Extraordinaries’ first season that launched both him and the show into the stratosphere—TV talk-wise.

  “Decker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How are you, I haven’t heard from you…”

  “…in quite a while. Look, I need a favour.”

  “Sure, you need a place to stay in New York?”

  “Maybe, but that’s not the favour.”

  “Okay, so what can I do ya?”

  Decker resisted saying “That LA talk doesn’t suit a good Canadian boy” but chose to say, “Invite me over—I haven’t had lunch yet.”

  “Sure. You know where I live?”

  “Oh, yeah, a little hard to forget your address.”

  One Fifth Avenue was as fancy as its address suggested. Josh lived in a corner apartment with a view of Washington Square. Not the one that Henry James wrote about, since it was now filled with NYU students and tourists and Haitians and Zimbabwean refugees hawking designer goods with misspelled names such as Goochie and Pravda.

  “You look good,” Josh said.

  “Thanks. And you look obscenely young for someone your age.”

  “Thanks back at you for that.”

  “How goes the show?”

  “I’m doing my best not to let it become just work.”

  “A good idea.” In fact a very good idea, because when acting becomes just work—an art descending into a repetitive craft—then there really is no point in doing it at all.

  “Coffee, beer, wine?”

  “A beer would be good.”

  “Lager, ale, dark, light—”

  “Just a fuckin’ beer, Josh. Jeez, we may have to pull you out of this town before you become one of them.”

  “Truth? I like being one of them. Or at least being taken for one of them.”

  Decker understood this idea in his bones, but it was something you only admitted to a fellow Canadian living south of the forty-ninth.

  “So you wanted a favour, Decker?”

  Decker hesitated. How well did he really know Josh Near? He knew him as an actor, as a stu
dent—as a fellow admirer of female backs. “Yeah,” Decker said, accepting the proffered bottle of French beer. He took a sip. It tasted of something that should not be put into beer. “I need you to play a role for me.”

  Josh’s thin blond eyebrows rose to form a perfect inverted V. “You have a film to direct, Decker? I thought that—”

  “No. It’s not a film. It’s a slice of life.”

  “Oh? And who do I have to play?”

  “Yourself. Josh Near, TV star.”

  “I think I can handle that. When’s showtime?”

  “Tomorrow at Bob’s Big Ol’ BBQ on Twenty-third, if you can arrange it.”

  “Consider it done.”

  Less than an hour after Decker left the posh apartment with a commitment from the young actor, Josh found himself staring out at Washington Square Park and thinking about the obligations of friendship—and the nature of betrayal. He liked Decker. In some very real ways he owed Decker for a lot of his success. Decker had supplied advice and prep time as Josh negotiated the complex waters leading up to his big chance at NBC. But there was a problem. A cocaine problem. A pending charge in Toronto that despite huge sums of money he’d already paid his attorney just wouldn’t go away. Josh tapped out a smallish mound of coke on the mirrorlike black slate countertop then cut it into lines with an Amex Platinum Card and thought about Decker’s odd request to call a lawyer in Patchin Place then interview him in a restaurant with a script that Decker would provide. It all sounded a little—no a lot—fishy.

  He cut then snorted a thick line. When his head cleared he looked out the floor-to-ceiling window. The view of Washington Square wasn’t great, but it was New York—and the chicks dug it. Dug him! Or was it just his access to so much coke? He didn’t bother working his way through that. He had more important matters to deal with.