The Empty Glass

by J. I. Baker

  “Except they’re not mine.”

  She kept waving for the waiter.

  “Jo, someone else’s monogram is on this shirt. Whose monogram is it?”

  “What,” she said, “do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros?”

  “You know the answer to that one.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s embarrassing. I didn’t buy them new.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I got them secondhand. Over on Melrose. But they’re beautiful. That’s all that matters. Okay, so I’m not as swell as I’d like you to think.”

  “Your hands are shaking.”

  “I never know what to do with my hands,” she said. “I need something.”

  “Light a cigarette.”

  She did and took a drag, squinted against the smoke, and stared at something over my shoulder. “Wait a second,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t turn around until I tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “I said, don’t turn around.”

  I kept staring. She dragged on that cigarette, blowing the smoke out.

  “Your hands,” I said. “They’re—”

  “Now.”

  He was a tall stout man with gray hair that was Brylcreemed and combed in a way that made it look almost plastic. He wore round dark sunglasses and a serge double-breasted bespoke jacket. It was unbuttoned over his gut. His nose was thin and long. He had rings on both hands. He was smoking a cigarette, extending his right pinkie in a way that would have seemed effete if he hadn’t seemed so menacing.

  That’s the word: menacing. He had what I later learned was called the Mafia stare: You don’t look someone in the eyes. You look at their forehead and don’t blink.

  “I saw him in the grocery store this morning,” Jo said.

  “You go grocery shopping?”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t strike me as a coupon clipper.”

  “Who said anything about coupons?”

  “Jo, you hardly eat.”

  “Cigarettes. Will you listen?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You know how supermarkets have those kind of geometric stacks of canned peas and things? Marvels of engineering the Egyptians might envy?”

  “I don’t know if the Egyptians—”

  “Humor me.”

  “Okay.”

  “I passed a stack of canned peas and there he was, holding one of the cans up at me.”

  “So.”

  “He asked if I wanted the peas, and I said no. He said the peas were good for you and also delicious. I said I wasn’t interested and please leave me alone. I was only looking for cigarettes and maybe some Ovaltine. He said the Ovaltine was in aisle seven. Said I was in the wrong aisle. Well, I wanted to get out, so I went to the checkout and looked behind me. I didn’t see him—until I went out to my car.”

  “Your car.”

  “He was staring through the window.”

  Now the man dropped a dime into the jukebox, hit some letter-number combination, and turned toward us as the vinyl spun.

  “Young World” began playing.

  “Come on,” Jo said. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “The Dairy Queen,” she said. “Where else?”

  33.

  The Tall Man followed us from Ciro’s, still smoking. He pretended not to see us but stepped to the edge of Sunset and dropped his cigarette.

  He was Italian, Doctor.

  There was valet parking. The monkey attendant showed up, grabbed Jo’s ticket, and ran down the lot to her car. When he pulled back up with Jo’s DeSoto, she handed him a dollar and thanked him.

  “Come on, darling.” She grabbed my hand. “What are you waiting for?”

  “My car.”

  “Shh!”

  She pushed me into the driver’s side, because of course the man would drive, and I fumbled with the stick and looked into the rearview mirror to see the Tall Man staring after us as we pulled into the traffic.

  “Hang on,” Jo said. “Don’t go too fast.”

  “It’s a stick.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know how to drive a stick.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t give me the chance.”

  I was on Cienega when Jo’s hands started shaking again.

  “It’s nothing,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The lights in the car.”

  “Which?”

  “The one behind us.”

  It was a Ford Fairlane. And not just any Ford Fairlane—it was the one with dice dangling from the rearview mirror. I assumed it belonged to the Man from Ciro’s, but I couldn’t be sure. Later, I was sure. The point is that we didn’t go to the Dairy Queen. We didn’t go to Schrafft’s or Schwab’s.

  We drove through a red light, snaking through the side roads until it seemed clear I had lost him. Or I thought I had: When I pulled up in front of the Savoy, I saw his car again.

  It was parked across the street from my hotel.

  34.

  The Savoy is not a hotel. Look, I know I just called it that, Doc, but I didn’t mean to, so strike that from the record and note only that we parked down the block from the Fairlane and waited to see what the driver would do.

  The lights were coming on up and down Wilshire. The DeSoto dashboard glowed. Jo had nothing to do with her hands, until she reached for the silver crucifix that dangled between her breasts and felt it with her fingers like a rosary. I hadn’t seen it before. Well, of course she was Catholic. So was I. Emphasis on was.

  The engine ticked.

  The man in the Fairlane hardly moved. His left arm dangled from the window, fingers flicking ash from a butt. But he didn’t leave the car. In fact, he wasn’t doing anything except listening to the radio. We heard the “Boom Boom” song.

  “What do you suppose he’s doing?” Jo asked.

  “Waiting for me.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s followed me before.”

  “So?”

  “So you can’t save me, Jo. You might as well tell me what Jeanne said.”

  I won’t go into what it took to get the information. It was incomplete anyway. She hadn’t even heard Jeanne’s whole story, in part because I had interrupted it. But it involved the fact that, toward the end of her life, a paranoid Marilyn, believing she was bugged, would (Jeanne said) make and take certain calls only from pay phones, which she haunted around the clock. But very late at night, in bed, washing pills down with champagne, she called her best friends—Jeanne among them. She had done this on her last night, when she sounded “strange,” Jeanne had said.

  “She was scared,” Jo said. “She wanted Jeanne to come over.”

  “Why?”

  “She wouldn’t say. That’s what Jeanne said. She didn’t want ‘them’ to hear.”

  “Who was ‘them’?”

  “Whoever had tapped the phone. Whoever was listening through the walls. Whoever was wiretapping her, making the tape of her life. And death. Someone kept calling her—a woman—saying, ‘You stay away from Bobby.’ She was scared—no, terrified. So she begged her to come over. But Jeanne was tired. She said her own phone rang one last time that night, after she’d talked to Marilyn. Well, it must have been Marilyn, she said. It just kept ringing. For minutes, it rang. Until it stopped, that small ting lingering in the house long after she’d hung up. Jeanne took the phone off the receiver, took another pill or two, and fell asleep.”

  It was dark. I looked out the window. The man wasn’t leaving.

  I opened the car door.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going up there,” I said.

  “What if he follows you?”

  “Honk the horn three times and call the cops.”

  I stepped onto Wilshire.

  “Ben.”

  I crossed the street and went into the lobby. It was empty, the bar clo
sed, the elevator out of order.

  It was always out of order.

  So I took the stairs.

  35.

  I heard the radio from the bedroom when I opened the door. Someone had opened the cupboards in the kitchen. Someone had opened the refrigerator and taken out the milk. The bottle sat on the low piece of wall that separated the dining area from the kitchenette. A cloudy empty glass sat on the table.

  I went into the bedroom.

  “You’re late,” Rose said.

  She was sitting on my bed. She wore a new dress: a gray Norman Norell that was as neatly pressed and folded as a restaurant napkin. She wore a simple strand of pearls. She had dyed her hair a simmering blond and wore a slick of bold red lipstick. A postcard-sized patent leather clutch sat on her lap.

  Max played with Monopoly pieces on the floor.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “You have custody tonight. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “I don’t want custody.”

  Max looked up.

  “Jesus, Ben, that’s rich.” She stood. “First you fight me, then say you don’t want him. How’s he supposed to take that?”

  “It’s not safe here. For Max.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying all along: this place. How can you live like this?”

  “Please, Rose. Take him.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m late.”

  “For what?”

  “A date.”

  “The guy in the Fairlane?”

  “None of your business.”

  “You hire him to follow me?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Rose?”

  • • •

  I took Max to the movies. It was a new type of movie that used three projectors showing three versions of the same film on a curved screen. Did you see This Is Cinerama? I didn’t, either. Rose saw it with Max and for weeks afterward all she could talk about was that damn roller coaster. It impressed Maxwell, too, which is why he wanted to see The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm at the Warner.

  I was running out of cash, but I bought balcony seats for $1.45 each. The whole thing gave me a headache, which wasn’t helped by the fact that I couldn’t stop wondering about everyone else in the theater. There was, for instance, the solitary man who sat behind us. The theater was almost empty. Why did he sit behind us?

  “Come on, Max,” I whispered. “Let’s move.”

  “Why, Dad?”

  “I don’t like these seats.”

  So we got up and moved.

  Max loved the movie, which was the whole point. He kept talking about the movie’s train ride as I drove back to the Savoy. He was talking about the ride when I began barricading the apartment door. I put a chair up under the doorknob, then moved the couch against the door.

  “What are we doing, Dad?”

  “Building a fort.”

  I tucked him in, the thimble in his fist.

  “Mind if I ask you a question, sport?”

  “You just did.”

  “Who’s your mom’s friend?”

  “Uncle Daddy.”

  “Daddy? Really?”

  Max nodded.

  “You like him?”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s nice to you?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “Makes books.”

  “He’s a writer?”

  “I don’t know. They’re about horses.”

  “What kind of horses?”

  He didn’t answer.

  He was already asleep.

  I went to get the Wild Turkey.

  • • •

  Morning flipped on like the jump-cut beginning of a movie after minutes if not hours of a black screen. There were no dreams behind it. I couldn’t remember any, sitting up with the light through the window. It was too bright, the sun too high.

  It was 2:15.

  “Hey,” I said. “Max.”

  I stood, still in my clothes. The barricade was undisturbed. I walked to the dining area just off the kitchen. I saw a half-empty bowl of Trix on the table. The spoon hung from the edge. His thimble sat in the milk that spattered the tablecloth.

  “Max?”

  I walked down the hall, touching the walls, then stopped with my hands on the frame of the door looking into my bedroom, the room where he slept.

  The bed was unmade, but Max wasn’t in it.

  “Max?”

  I thought of it then. I hadn’t before.

  I turned to the bathroom.

  “Max.”

  The Sony is a standard reel-to-reel, and for a long time it records nothing. It just turns. We have already gone through ten tapes. You tap the last cigarette in the ashtray; the smoke rises in a long line to the bulb. It breaks apart in the paddles of the ceiling fan.

  Your pack of Chesterfields sits on the table.

  “What happened to your son?” you ask.

  “You tell me.”

  “You’re under arrest.”

  “I shouldn’t have done what I did,” I said. “I shouldn’t have gone to Ciro’s. I should have taken up knitting instead.”

  “What happened to your son?”

  I say nothing.

  You stand, pushing the chair away, and walk to the door, where you call for the guard.

  Again there is a hollow booming, the jangling of keys, the dark shape opening the door. You turn once to look at me. “Think about it,” you say as you step into the hall.

  And you are gone again.

  The headline on the paper you have left behind is large and black:

  U.S. GETS READY TO ATTACK

  At some point I fall asleep on the floor.

  I dream through the pain as the pills wear off, the image of the woman on all fours behind my eyes: crawling around, James straddling her and lifting her up, blasted out of her mind, Sinatra saying, “These are pretty sick, aren’t they?”

  Yes they are: really sick.

  The wait is worse this time. Maybe two or three days. The hunger for the bitter pills is growing; so is the pain—until “Okay,” I say in (what?) my third day? I can’t tell. “Okay,” I say. “You’ve won.”

  No sound.

  I turn the Sony on and press RECORD.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 16

  36.

  He was lying on the bathroom tiles, looking like a crumpled heap of laundry in his rumpled T-shirt and accordioned corduroys, his head turned toward the cabinet under the sink, arms raised against the floor, as if saying, “Don’t shoot!” The brown hair was damp and curled against his neck. His shirt was hiked up in the back, so that I could see his precious skin.

  I’ve never felt such a rush of dread. Everything went red. Outside sounds disappeared, replaced by my heart pumping, blood through ventricles and veins, which was all I heard as I picked up my son.

  He was blue.

  “Max!”

  I don’t remember what happened. I can piece it all together in retrospect, knowing the numbers I must have called, the people I’d spoken to and seen, the lights in the room and against the windows of the ambulance outside.

  All of this is a matter of record. But the memory itself has gone, so entirely that I wish that someone would tell me exactly what happened on the morning when I sat, holding the thimble, in the waiting room. I lit a cigarette, though there was no ashtray, and the woman who sat behind the desk rose like an angry nurse, because she was an angry nurse, and told me to put it out.

  Tomorrow would be Day One.

  I walked outside, standing under the awning staring into the lot and the highway past the trees that edged the lawn. There was the sound of traffic. I finished the cigarette and flicked it into the bushes.

  The taxi pulled in, Rose lurching with her pocketbook onto the sidewalk.

  “Rose.” I stepped toward her.

  Her eyes were blind with fury. “You go to hell!” she screamed.

  I took
the thimble from my pocket and held it out to her.

  She closed it in her fist and turned away.

  I followed her through the doors that led to the room where the people were waiting on stretchers. She knew where she was going. She was allowed to go. But I was brought back to the emergency room by the nurse who said, as she had said before, that I was not allowed.

  “I’m his father,” I said.

  “The doctor is still questioning.”

  I see the tape turning on the table now. I look up and see the metal door, still locked. I turn back to the tape and shout into the microphone: “Are you listening? You asked what happened, and I’m trying to tell you: He was poisoned, for Christ’s sake. Are you listening?”

  I’m not sure how much time passes. It seems like hours. It is possibly, probably, more like minutes. I am waiting for you, of course, Doctor; at some point, I hear the clanking down the hall, the jangling of keys.

  The metal door opens, and you step inside.

  You sit, as always, across from me and nod. It looks as if you have washed your hair, even if you haven’t.

  “I see that you’re recording already,” you say. “Very diligent of you.”

  “I’m a diligent guy.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  From your pocket you withdraw a vial of Novrils.

  I reach—

  “Tell me what happened to Max first.”

  “They were in the cereal.”

  “What?”

  “The Toy Surprise was supposed to be a purple dinosaur. That’s what it said on the box. But the real Surprise was gone. And in its place—”

  You don’t believe me, but I am telling the truth—and the truth is that, after I carried Max, like a rag doll, to the couch, and made certain he was breathing, and after I rushed to call the ambulance from the lobby, I ran back to the apartment and saw the Trix spilled on the floor in the dining room, the milk in the bowl streaked with all those unnatural colors.

  And mostly the color was yellow.

  37.

  I waited all afternoon in the emergency room, where I didn’t think of Marilyn Monroe. I was doing what Curphey had told me to do. I didn’t think of Marilyn when I paced between the packed rows of plastic seats and didn’t think of Marilyn when I heard, at three, that Max was finally awake. I didn’t think of Marilyn when the cops arrived and asked if I was Ben Fitzgerald.