The Woman Who Knew Too Much

by Thomas Gifford

  “My God,” Debbie sighed, “I hope you get this. I’d get to kill you!”

  “But I’d get to come back from the dead and scare your pants off—”

  “Happens all the time,” she laughed.

  “But what brings you to work in this dump?” The off-off Broadway theatre was tucked away, three flights up in a rundown Chelsea office building. The dust in the wings had dust of its own.

  “Shows everyone how committed I am to my art.” She bit a thumbnail, chipping the last of the polish onto her lower lip. “And, you know, the producing thing …”

  “The producing thing?”

  “Universal’s producing. They own the screen rights. If it works, I get the pitcha. It’s worth it, believe me, for a marginal movie star with big tits and iffy legs.” She batted the long lashes that lay like grillwork over enormous brown eyes.

  “Who is also not getting any younger,” Celia added.

  “Aha! That’s where you’re wrong. Three years ago I was thirty-four and you were thirty-four. How old are you now?”

  “Thirty-gulp-seven.”

  “Right. But I am thirty-one! Read it in Liz Smith’s column yesterday in the News. That’s what happens when you have William Morris in your corner. You’ve signed a pact with the Devil, but suddenly you’re getting younger. Soon I’ll be a college girl again, then going to the orthodontist in knee socks, then diapers—I recommend it, dear.”

  The stage manager brought them hot coffee, and they were suddenly chatting easily about the old Hollywood days, the marriage that each had buried in the past, the way things were going now. Celia said: “Sometimes I think about this acting thing and I really do have doubts.”

  “Oh, it’s not much,” Debbie said. “But it’s what we do, my darling. It’s too late for me, I’m in it. Not complaining, mind you, but it ain’t gonna last forever. You could still get out, though. You could do something else.”

  “I can?”

  “Linda Thurston,” Debbie whispered enigmatically.

  “Good Lord! You remember that?”

  “Are you kidding? If I had a Linda Thurston, I’d be gone. Eat all the pasta I wanted, the hell with it. It’d be me and Linda all the way—”

  “I doubt that—”

  “Take my word for it.”

  Then Billy Blumenthal was crying her name, kissing her cheek. “Celia, Celia, last time I saw you, you were engulfed—I mean positively dwarfed—in a fur parka in the snow at the Anchorage airport! And here you are, springy and wearing—da-dum—a skirt! Have I ever seen you in a skirt? Indeed, have I ever set my peepers on those toothsome stems?” She hadn’t set her own peepers on Billy since the Alaska Rep three years ago, and he hadn’t changed.

  “Peepers? Toothsome stems? Ick.” Debbie Macadam made a face.

  “Your chest, darling, and Celia’s legs, the makings of a master race! Come, come, Celia, meet our author, Mr. Levy. Have you had time to glance through this, dear girl? Good, wonderful. Morris, I want you to meet Celia Blandings who’s ready and willing to expire in act one …”

  So they all gathered around a card table under a single dangling light bulb and began reading Celia’s sides. The laughs were there, not quite actor-proof maybe, but close. Levy read some stage directions and Billy cocked a head, eyes closed, listening to rhythms and speech patterns. He’d want just the right contrasts. The physical ones were all in place: dark, active, lean Celia would play just fine off busty, swaggering, fair Debbie. And they read and read and read. The problems were with structure rather than dialogue, which made Levy’s problems sizable but not impossible. There was something worth fixing.

  Celia’s mind wandered off, the lines already sticking in her head. Incredible—Debbie was thirty-one now instead of thirty-seven. What did it all mean? Maybe it wasn’t much of a life, maybe Debbie really had given it some thought. But remembering Linda Thurston! How had she managed that? Debbie had never seemed to be paying any attention, and suddenly a decade later, in a dreary dusty theatre, she trots out Linda Thurston. Clearly, miracles would never cease.

  Celia’s agent, Joel Goldman, was waiting for her, consulting his blade-thin gold watch, when she arrived at the Gotham Bar and Grill on East Twelfth. It was a huge, lofty, understated room, grays and beiges and mauves, with tapestry banquettes and flowers. It was across the street from Fairchild Publications, just down the street from Malcolm Forbes’s magazine empire, at eye level with the opera hangout Asti’s. Wholesale antique dealers nestled like clubs nearby, and the movie theatre in the middle of the block showed classics. It was pure New York. And it was only a five-minute walk from her apartment at the top end of Greenwich Village.

  Joel had already ordered a gin gimlet on ice for her, and she took a greedy drink. “How did it go?” he asked.

  “Okay. Fine, I guess. I don’t know. It always goes fine, you just don’t get the job. I’m gonna need another one of these.”

  Joel beckoned a waiter and pointed to her glass. “Well, Billy was certainly determined to have you in. I think it looks very good, frankly.” He ordered a bowl of mussels for them to share.

  She felt like complaining, and carried it on through the mussels, interrupting herself only once, long enough to order a Jerry’s Enormous, medium well.

  “The point is, Joel, I’m thirty-seven and she’s only thirty-one, and three years ago we were both thirty-four. The point is, it’s just not working, Joel…”

  Joel sipped his Perrier and shook his head. He looked like a grown-up New Yorker in his blue pinstripe suit, Turnbull & Asser shirt, and fresh, trim haircut. He had a better manicurist than she did. He lived on West End with a belt designer called Bruno in what he insisted was an asexual relationship. He was neat and conscientious, and in a general kind of way, the perfect example of a man who had his shit together. He was probably her age, but in his company she always felt like an unappreciative, petulant, jam-spotted child.

  “The point, Celia, let me remind you, is that it does work. You work. Right now there’s a Masha you could pick off just like that—”

  “Where?”

  “Pittsburgh.”

  “Ha!”

  “There’s a Medea in Seattle,” he said patiently.

  “One Medea in this lifetime was enough, thank you.”

  “You’re in a mood, Celia. I can’t talk to you.” He prized one last mussel open and did away with it. “Look, you’re an actress of power, presence, style, even wit when properly motivated. There’s a Design for Living in Denver you could do wonders with—just don’t pout. Bruno arose this morning in what looks like a long-term pout, all because of some buckles that cut through the leather or something. I am a man with a load of troubles, Celia, try not to add to them.”

  “Well, I do love you when you do your Clifton Webb impression.”

  He nodded. “My mother was frightened by Laura while she was carrying me. I understand your frustrations. At least I think I do, but you must understand that I have gifted clients who never work—”

  “I know, I know. I’m a wretch, I don’t know when I’m well off. However, as I slither up on forty, I’m sick of running around to regional theatres. I’m sick of wintering at the Guthrie, and I’m tired of summering at the Alley in Houston and having to change clothes half a dozen times a day. Sweaty in Houston. I’ve done my number in Louisville, Cincinnati, the Arena, ACT, Alaska … I’m done with all the funny little apartments and the mouse droppings somebody else didn’t clean up—I want droppings from a mouse of my own. I’m tired of renting cars from Chrome and Punishment—”

  He burst out laughing. “That’s very clever, Chrome and Punishment. I must remember that. Go on, I cut you off in mid-kvetch.”

  “I’m sick of being a Gypsy.”

  “You are also the Kladstrup Koff Kandy fairy, a very nice job, that. Here, stuff yourself with Jerry’s Enormous.”

  It was her favorite hamburger. Ten bucks of it filled the plate, along with little frizzled onions, corn relish, bits and pieces, all
of which Joel could well afford. He picked at a bit of cold salmon. Looking with some distress at her preparations, he said: “Please, have some hamburger with your ketchup.”

  “I’m really serious, Joel,” she said. “I feel like hibernating for a while—”

  “Fine. If you can afford it. Can you?”

  “In Manhattan? Get serious. Nobody can actually afford a damn thing. It’s all part of the trap.”

  “Well, you could get married.”

  “Oh, God—”

  “A nice doctor, maybe. An investor, a lawyer, even a producer—just not another actor. Merely hire yourself out as a wife.” He reached across the table and patted her hand. “I would be more than willing to volunteer for the position of husband had I not been neutered at an early age by a desperately maladjusted aunt who wanted my mother for herself. Pity.”

  While she mopped up the last of Jerry’s Enormous, she said: “I’m thinking of taking six months off and getting down to my life’s work—”

  “Oh, no, this isn’t what I think it is—”

  “Joel, I’ve wanted to do this all my life. I’ve done a lot of research. This may be the right time. I should give it a chance.”

  “Oh, God, not Linda Thurston…” He searched her face. She grinned fetchingly. “It is, it is Linda Thurston. My worst fears realized.” He sighed dramatically, plucked the lime from his Perrier, and made a face as he began to suck it.

  Chapter Two

  CELIA STROLLED ALONG TWELFTH Street toward the Strand and its famed eight miles of used books, stopping for a moment to gaze at the monster masks in the windows of the science fiction bookshop, Forbidden Planet. The masks were both realistic and intriguingly repugnant, eyeballs bulging bloodily out of cheeks, a face made entirely of tentacles. She was standing at the corner when Vanessa Redgrave and her son, she supposed, came out of the store. The boy was leafing through comic books, and the movie star looked motherly and a little distracted. Watching her, Celia wondered who the boy’s father was. Franco Nero? Well, whoever it was, Ms. Redgrave had survived an admirable career, some unpopular political stances, a great theatrical name … and she had a son. If acting really wasn’t so great, she still had that son. Which put her way ahead of Celia.

  Celia’s husband, Paul Landover, was long gone, though he remained a distant friend, and he skittered across her mind—in his doublet, since he always seemed to be doing a costume thing—for the few seconds it took her to cross the street. Just as well there wasn’t a little Paul Landover, now that she thought about it.

  She’d sat over a second cup of coffee at the Gotham once Joel had departed to conduct bigger and doubtless better business. Once he was gone, of course, she’d thought of plenty of things she should have said while he was blithering on about her wonderful career. She could have recounted all the jobs she’d wanted but hadn’t gotten in the last couple of years because she was too old, too young, too pretty, too ordinary, too dark, not exotic enough, too damn exotic, too tall, too short, too thin, not motherly enough, too damn motherly, not housewifey, and too glamorous. A Vanities, gone, a Talley’s Folly, a Death Trap, a The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a Loot, a Midsummer Night’s Dream, a King Lear—the list went on and on, all productions in or near New York, where she could have maintained a life.

  She sat thinking of all the ripostes she might have made, but after all, they were too ordinary, too obvious, the warp and woof of every actor’s life. So what, Joel would have said, the bottom line is work—and you have worked. It was true. So why wasn’t she just thankful for that? And why didn’t she shut up?

  Presumably because she wanted some kind of settled existence.

  Did that mean she was getting old?

  Of course it did.

  But not that old. Entering her prime, she thought, remembering how she and Debbie Macadam had once played students of Miss Jean Brodie at the U of M.

  Maybe she was tired of always interpreting a role, saying someone else’s words, inhabiting another creature’s body. Unlike some actors, she’d never hidden within a role, had never needed that particular kind of refuge. She’d simply done the work and enjoyed it. But perhaps she was losing something of Celia Blandings in all the transformations she’d accomplished over the years. Maybe that was why so many actors painted and sculpted and jotted down stories and kept diaries and labored over poems. Reminding themselves that they existed once the lights had gone down, the curtain fallen.

  There was something about the act of creation that was never fully present for the actor. Or that was how she felt, anyway. You were bound by the character as written, by the author’s vision; you were bound by the director’s conception. You were controlled by the necessity of tuning your performance to your fellow actors, You were even controlled by the audience, by the need to make them laugh or cry or gasp on cue.

  None of that mattered with Linda Thurston.

  At the Strand she fell upon the tables of review copies like a Hun on a defenseless hamlet of fair damsels. It was midafternoon and there were only a few browsers picking over the three large tables of new arrivals that sold for half price. She let her eyes roam happily over the brightly colored dust jackets, the relatively virgin pages. That was what Debbie Macadam had called herself when they met as sophomores. A relative virgin. And that was how Celia was coming to view the last few years of her life—relatively virginal. Uncomplicated, all work. Which was just the way she’d planned it, except now she didn’t think it had gotten her anywhere. Not anywhere she particularly wanted to go, anyway.

  After giving the tables a onceover, she settled in, noting each title, each author. She was looking only for mysteries. When she traveled, she carted along more of them than clothing, somehow, and it was mainly a case of fearing she’d run out. It was like chocolate for some people. She couldn’t get enough, though she was a discriminating judge. No junk. Not even very much of the stuff that was mainly plot or puzzle oriented. She had, therefore, never become a devotee of Agatha Christie. The characterizations were usually just too thin, too superficial. Her favorites from that classical age were Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey—though she came a bit later—Edmund Crispin, Anthony Boucher, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes… They were less writers of a particular era than of essentially-like minds. However ingenious or fanciful their plots, they dealt in character.

  Today she was in luck.

  Someone must have brought in a load earlier in the day, and she was the first scavenger. She found a Donald Westlake, so funny; a Ross Thomas, so precise and ironic and bemused; a Martha Grimes, the best of the new eighties writers, possessed of a positive genius for doing children, as well as for building her protagonist Richard Jury into a figure of depth and texture; a Robert Parker, whose concentration on Spenser’s relationship with Susan Silverman was as good a disquisition on up-to-date love affairs as she knew; a Simon Brett, because he wrote with such insight and wit of the theatre; a Michael Gilbert, because he was a true master who’d stood the test of time; a Tony Hillerman, because you learned so much about the Navajo culture, and by reflection, your own; a James McClure for the same reason, though South Africa was his turf; and several other books by writers she knew she should try but never had—Rick Demos and Sandra Elliott and Miles Warriner, among others.

  Her shopping bag was full, thirteen volumes. She staggered away and went downstairs, where among the dust and the maze of aisles and the countless tens of thousands of books, much of the staff conducted their strange subterranean existence. There were more eccentrics per square foot in the basement of the Strand than anywhere else in New York. The first thing she saw was a black gentleman seated at a run-down, cluttered desk, carefully inserting pins in a tiny cloth doll while he munched a jelly-filled doughnut.

  “Is Claude around today?” she asked, inquiring after a friend who had once acted with her at the Guthrie before coming to his senses and joining real life full time.

  Slowly a needle penetrated the puffy chest of the doll, then nosed through the
back. The doll didn’t really have a head, just a tied-off topknot. Funny little arms. “Just a minute, lady,” the man said. He slid another needle. Into the crotch. The dark purple black face looked up, grinned. The teeth were filed to points. “Claude?”

  “Look,” Celia said, “who is that doll supposed to be? Young Duvalier or somebody?”

  The face scowled. The man wore a blue sweatshirt with the Miranda warning printed on it in white lettering. “The man,” he said. “The man who owns this place. We of the netherworld, of the underground, we seek release from our captivity. Death to the man. He’s not here.”

  “What?”

  “Claude. He left at noon. Said he was going bowling.” He shrugged. “Different strokes. Now me, if I could get outa this place today, I’d go buy myself a nice chicken. Y’know, feathers, alive, squawking. Then I’d have me a nice little sacrificial rite. I give the gods a goddamn chicken, maybe they’ll deliver unto me the asshole that owns this place.”

  “Right. Whatever you say.”

  She went down one of the aisles, looking to see what might have been squirreled away before landing on the upstairs tables. Two employees were loading shelves, chatting.

  “You say this guy is famous?”

  “Really famous, yeah.”

  “You know this guy?”

  “See, he’s got this collection. Food. He collects real food. But it’s like old.”

  “Old food?”