by Joseph Glenn
“I see,” she said, though she was aware there was still a degree of shock in her speech. She introduced her assistant and they followed Carl up the stairs. A lifelong smoker, Meredith was winded when they got to the fifth floor. She leaned on Bill for support as she looked down the hallway. This floor was also inadequately lit, but despite the lack of illumination, unmistakable in his doorway was Tyler. Meredith forgot her fatigue and rushed towards him. “Darling!” she exclaimed. She said more, but her words were muffled by his shoulder.
“Hello,” Tyler said after the embrace. He drew her into his home. It was a small one-bedroom apartment, boxy and unimaginative in its layout.
Meredith heard Bill, following her prearranged instructions, as he caught Carl by the elbow before he had the chance to follow them into the apartment. “Why don’t we give them a little time alone?” he suggested. He pulled the door shut with himself and Carl on the outside of the residence.
“I won’t patronize you, you look just awful,” Meredith said to Tyler as she took a seat in the small living room. She studied his face, then made him stand up and turn around before permitting him to rejoin her on the love seat. “I hate to say it, but you’ve lost something. Your joie de vivre, I’m afraid.”
“There’s tres little joie around here,” he noted, no emotion detectable in his deflated statement.
“And this place is worse than I remember it. Did it get smaller? And how did everything fall into such disarray? The whole park I’m talking about. Everything seems so uniformly old. Almost like it was planned that way—like a movie set.”
“Everything is exactly fifteen years old. It was all purchased or built at the same time.”
“And what’s up with the staff?” she continued. “As the conservatives say, where the hell are my tax dollars going? Does no one work here anymore? And how do you eat if you can’t climb the stairs? Do they airlift your medication and other necessities to you?”
He chuckled at her onslaught of questions, none of which she had given him an opportunity to answer. “I make it down the stairs for meals,” he said, holding up his hand like a traffic cop, as though telling her to hold her questions so he could complete his response. “I get out a couple of times a day. A van picks me up and takes me to the West Dining Hall. Carl brings me food when I’m not up to the demands of a trip. We keep some food here at home.” Meredith suppressed a convulsive shudder as he described the living space as a “home.” “Carl helps out a lot with everything, of course, but I try to do as much as I can—”
“While trying to battle diabetes and chronic obstruct—“” she stammered, “emphysema we called it in my day. Why haven’t you demanded a ground floor apartment? Carl said something about a waiting list. They should have put you on the top of that list the very first time those Goddamned elevators stopped working!”
Tyler Travers shook his head and blinked away tears. She did not know what was coming, but knowing the man as well as she did, she expected he might say any number of things to calm her down.
“Hi, Mom.”
She fell silently into his arms and cried, softly at first, then more like a cathartic sobbing.
She apologized when she was able to collect herself. “First time I’ve seen you in a decade-and-a-half and I have to behave like this.”
“Did you think you wouldn’t? If you’re going to visit your boy once every fifteen years, it’s bound to be emotional.”
“It’s hard to see you living like this.” He found her some tissues and she set about repairing her face as best she could without the use of a mirror.
“It isn’t so bad,” Tyler said. “It’s amazing what a person can get used to. I’ve been here fifteen years—we’ve been together for almost twelve. And the stairs issue has been a problem for quite some time. I’m sure I’ll still be able to handle them—and the mold, and the frigid water, and the drafts—for at least another fifteen years. Let’s put it this way: it won’t be this apartment that kills me.” He stopped here; she suspected he was conscious of the gasp his last sentence produced. “I’m not going to spend my final days—years!—fighting losing battles. I don’t care anymore. And what’s the good of talking about it?”
Meredith just shook her head at the middle-aged man. Any discussion of his death—imminent or otherwise—was out of the question. She, like all parents, was unable to fathom the possibility that she might outlive him, for Tyler was, in fact, her son.
“I’m just glad you’re here,” he said. “I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again. Let’s not waste the little time we have talking about the deplorable living conditions here. You’re only here a week; it would take months to catalogue all the deficits of Fallow Park. And you haven’t told me how much we’ll get to see of each other. I tried to read between the lines in your letters, but I couldn’t figure out too much. I’ve surmised you’re here to be part of this documentary celebration thing. But I knew that much from the grapevine—and the limited communications we get from the people at the top.”
His dispassionate acknowledgement of his mortality still hung about them, lingering and inhabiting the room as strongly as the park’s general odor of neglect. And though his words felt like a kick in the stomach, necessity forced her to press on.
“We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and I don’t know how long they’ll let us talk.”
“Well, you’ve certainly piqued my interest,” he said, matching her ominous tone. “So much for formalities, right? Just ‘pow!’ right into it.”
“Tell me what you know or think you know, but talk fast: I’ve got a crew of twenty-two and there’s your awful Dr. Mouthpiece and staff to contend with, too. The stupid director wants to film everything and then edit it down to an hour-long special. Frankly, I’m surprised he isn’t here now.”
As Meredith later came to realize, Austin Green was only minutes behind her. He was now climbing the stairs to Tyler’s floor, company in tow. It had taken him two minutes to re-plan the afternoon schedule and organize his staff. He realized the reunion of Meredith with her former hairstylist, and filming him working on her hair, might work well.
Meredith and Tyler heard a crescendo of voices beyond the front door of the tiny apartment. Tyler had thus far told his mother that he suspected something was going on, but her cryptic messages were hard to decipher. He and Carl had made games of them, challenging each other to create increasingly bizarre and complicated scenarios out of her minimalist language. As each egged the other on to come up with a more far-fetched hypothesis, Tyler confessed they got further and further away from the practical task of figuring out what she was trying to convey. Ultimately, he told her, they had concluded that Meredith was planning to run for an elected office, or that Pots of Luck was going to be revived, probably for first-run syndication.
Carl burst into the room and just as quickly shut the door behind him. “They think they’re coming in here,” he said hysterically, looking from Tyler to Meredith and back again.
“Get Bill in here and lock the door!” Meredith commanded. “This is ridiculous. They can’t barge into your private area.”
“Oh, yeah, they can,” Carl corrected her. “If management okays it, these folks can go wherever they like.”
“Well, I think that is just outrageous!” she exclaimed. She turned to Tyler. “On the subject of battles, losing or otherwise, I have to pick mine carefully, and I’m afraid we’re too early into this week for me to start throwing my weight around—in fact, it’s unclear just how much I have to throw. Let’s concede this battle and talk later. I’ve got a lot of things to tell you, far too much to unload on the two of you in a matter of seconds.” They were both wide-eyed at her promise of a revelation. “I’m not running for Congress. I can at least tell you that.”
Tyler said, “Oh?” and Carl appeared disheartened by Meredith’s pronouncement. Though she might have been flattered by their disappointment under different circumstances, the impending arrival of Austin Green and the crew
commanded her immediate attention.
The inevitable knock—three swift, officious taps—drew all four pair of eyes to the door. Meredith silenced the others with emphatic waving gestures.
“Who is it?” she asked as she sprinted to the door. She opened it without waiting for an answer.
Like a thousand clowns—an analogy that appealed to Meredith—the intruders stepped in. Some gently pressed against those who had already gained access. More industrious ones wormed their way around those in the entryway and retreated, scampered almost, to the furthest corners of the room. She thought at once of cockroaches exposed to light, but insults would have to wait. In any event, it would be unfair to blame the crew for Austin’s or this Dr. Makepeace’s edicts.
Austin Green went about assuming his duties as the director. He lacked a megaphone or other means of amplification, but was nevertheless able to assert himself. “Now, everyone who does not need to be here should wait out in the hall,” he said in the most booming of voices. He peered down at Carl, which was easy to do because Carl stood about five-and-a-half feet. “You don’t have a purpose here,” Austin said to him.
“He lives here!” Meredith shot back at him. She had made no effort to conceal her disgust with Austin’s invasion and his decision to behave in such an imperious manner. The room fell silent at once, peopled as it now was by a crew that recognized a star exercising her prima donna muscles—and the importance of taking it seriously. “He stays,” she continued. “If you want to film my hairstylist—in his own home yet!—you’ll film his partner as well.”
Austin exhaled with frustration. “Okay,” he finally said, “but stay seated,” he told Carl. “There are just too many bodies trying to move around in this tight space.”
“That’s because the place is too small,” Meredith explained with a smile and quick nod of her head to one of the cameras. “Don’t blame the occupants for that. I don’t believe they were consulted by the architect who designed the—” She allowed the sentence to linger unfinished.
“Meredith,” Austin said in a solemn, get-down-to-business voice, after enough of a lapse to permit a switching of gears. “I need you to look happier. Remember, this is your hairstylist and you haven’t seen him since he moved here. Talk about how you met and what it was like working together all those years ago. Think back to those happy times. What you should be feeling is a sense of nostalgia, but no more than a tinge of melancholy. You should be upbeat; that’s the appropriate response at this moment. Make the audience feel that this is a personal and moving event.”
Meredith resisted the urge to roll her eyes or let out an expletive. She made eye contact with Tyler and his quick smile told her he knew she did not appreciate the director’s attempt to explain her motivation to her. Tyler understood; that was enough. She met the camera’s cold lens, cleared her throat, and brushed her hands together as though rubbing them clean. “I hardly know where to start,” she answered. “You tell the story Tyler.”
Tyler began to fuss with Meredith’s hair, producing from she knew not where a spray bottle which he pumped as much to punctuate his sentences as to style her hair. “Well,” he began, “Meredith and I are from the same hometown—Ravenna, Ohio. Meredith lived across the street from us. Well, not directly across the street, like over two houses—that’s where we met.” He paused a moment, stepped back from Meredith to evaluate his handiwork, then began again to tinker and primp at her hair. “Anyway, she used to baby-sit once in a while. My parents were friendly with hers. They had been for years by the time I was born.”
“They knew each other for years? I would have thought your parents would have been a good deal younger,” Austin observed.
“Oh?” Meredith asked, simply because her natural instincts told her she was supposed to take offense at any speculation about her age.
“Well, just based on the age difference between you and Merry.”
“No, not really,” Tyler said. He read distress in his mother’s face, but stayed in character as he appraised his work. “Uh, that is I was a surprise baby; my parents were well into their forties when I…came along.” He was speaking too fast. Meredith could tell he was aware of this, but he seemed unable to stop. She tried to flash him a look of curiosity, hoping he would realize he was drawing attention to a story that should be conveyed as though it were blasé, scarcely worthy of the effort of telling. “And, of course,” he fumbled on, “Meredith’s parents were so young when they started their family. Were they even out of high school?”
“Oh, yes,” Meredith said in a calm, reassuring, deliberately slow-paced manner with the fervent wish that he would follow her example. “They’d even made it out of college, but only just.”
“Jump ahead,” the director instructed, irritation evident in his command. “So after Meredith started acting you stayed in touch and that’s how you wound up working together?”
“Yes. She was doing a series of TV movies at the time. This was before Pots of Luck. She was in a bunch of detective movies with a paranormal psychologist—You’ll Die Tomorrow, I Knew You in Another Life, what have you—and she was getting big enough to request the hair and make-up people who worked with her.”
“I played Ginger Caldwell, P.I.,” Meredith jumped in. “These little films were the last hurrah of the old movies-of-the-week. We were almost picked up as a series,” she added with a mix of feigned self-importance and a bit of genuine pride.
“I loved those movies,” Carl said. His voice must have taken some in the room by surprise; this was the first he had spoken. He seemed to take notice of the attention his enthusiastic remark had, because he continued in a quieter, almost embarrassed manner: “The opening credits were the best.” In a shaky voice, he elaborated, his speech growing fainter with every word: “Especially the part where you walked up and down the stairs in your apartment.”
Meredith jumped in to save him. “It was a duplex,” she clarified to those on the crew too young to know the films. “I was in a short skirt and fishnet stockings; Ginger was working undercover as a lady of the evening. I wound up getting a pantyhose endorsement deal on the strength of that opening segment: ‘Would These Legs Lie to You?’”
Austin continued with his questions. If his face could be read, it seemed to say he was finding none of this footage useful. “And when did you first realize that you wanted—” he appeared to be struggling for words, or worse, seemed as if he wanted to give the impression he was choosing his words with great care. “When did you know you were meant to be a hairstylist?”
“Are you for real?” Tyler looked about the room. Meredith joined him, looking to see what reaction could be detected as they read the faces of the crew members. “No, I’m serious,” Tyler said, “I’m trying to figure out if your question is on the level or just a rib. I always knew I was gay,” he said this last part with some degree of annoyance noticeable in his words. “And if that’s what you’re driving at why would you use such nineteen fifties code words?”
“No, no!” Austin vigorously objected. “That’s not what I meant; the question was sincere. I wasn’t trying to draw you out about your, what do you call it, your ‘orientation’.”
Meredith had returned her attention to Tyler, her concern focused on his reaction to Austin’s explanation, but Austin’s pause and tone were enough to inform her that this last word was punctuated with air quotes.
“Why would I?” Austin continued. “Obviously, everyone who lives in Fallow Park is gay. I only meant did you choose the profession or did the profession, by way of Ms. St. Claire, choose you?”
“Oh,” Tyler said, letting go of the accusatory voice he had assumed. “Well, I had dropped out of college and was in a cosmetology school when I got the call from Meredith. So, I guess I chose the profession and then I got lucky.”
“And then you were with Ms. St. Claire for—”
“Through Pots of Luck and the next couple of years after.”
“And then you came here?” Austin
asked.
“I was one of the first,” Tyler told him, and by extension, as he smiled at one of the cameras, told the future television audience. “I actually came voluntarily, some people watching this show thing you’re putting together might not remember, or aren’t even old enough to know, that a lot of people did that back then. That was before it became mandatory. It wasn’t always compulsory. It’s hard to believe now that anyone would choose to live here. Of course, it was a nicer place back then. I had high hopes. The way things have fallen—”
“I’ve got to cut you off right there,” Austin said to little surprise to Meredith or, as far as she could tell, anyone else in the company. “I was warned by Makepeace in his letters, but also Dorette at Chrysalis Park and Jergen at the park in Wyoming that there is a small group of residents who have an agenda they’ll try and push. We’re not getting into any of that.”
“Small group?” Carl interrupted, again surprising the group with his unfamiliar voice. He laughed. “Just what kind of a documentary are you making? And to what extent do you think the people who live here are going to play along?”
“I find it hard to believe everyone here is dissatisfied,” the director countered. When this did not prove to sufficiently quell the conversation, he added, “Now, I look at someone like you Tyler; you’re obviously an industrious fellow; you’re a hearty, robust man of what, forty-something?”
“Forty-three. I have diabetes and respiratory issues.”
“Really?” Austin paused at this as though giving it some consideration. “You look so healthy. But my point is still a good one: you’re a worker, anyone can see that; and, if you could have, you would have continued to be a part of the work force. Am I right?” He pressed on when he got no response. “Your life here has got to be better than the life you knew as a working stiff, cutting other people’s hair, wondering how you were going to make the rent. Not to mention all the perils gay people faced on the outside. When you consider the life you’ve been spared—and by that I mean more than just the hardships we all have to balance, but the danger, the clandestine, dark-alley lifestyle, well then, things here don’t seem so bleak, do they?” Again Tyler made no reply. “Let’s be honest,” the director continue, “all things considered, this is a pretty good gig. And if you hadn’t come here, what would have happened to you? It wasn’t long after the parks opened when there was no life for someone like you anywhere else. No jobs, no homes. It was a pretty desperate existence. You might not even be alive today. Shit, half the gay guys—and a lot of the gay gals—wound up in real prison for one offense or another. How old were you when you moved here?”
