“Well, you’ve got it now so stop hitting me,” I shout. I hear a knock on the bathroom door.
“Everything all right in there?” Thomas asks.
“Oh, yeah,” I say, “I’m . . . getting . . . warmed up. I’ll be right out.” Goodie is sitting on the edge of the sink wearing a brand-new dress. A sunburst yellow affair, fringed with some sort of feathers—parakeet possibly?
“I’ll say you’re getting warmed up,” he says. “You’ve got to get over this. You can’t keep crying and moaning over me being gone. And it’s fine for you to do your show for the kids and this and that, but you’re a singer, Maggie, and you need to be in a club with a baby grand piano and spotlight with a pink amber gel singing your little ole heart out. I mean it’s flattering, all this crying over me, but it’s enough, time to grow up—you can’t be an ingénue forever—take off the gingham and put on some sequins.”
“Are you saying I’m getting old? Is that what you were sent back to do? Humiliate me so I become an old woman? So I just give it up?” I say.
“Surrender Dorothy, that’s all I’m saying, Mags. You’ve been playing little girls for so long you’ve forgotten you’re a full-blooded woman with a sultry voice and plenty of pain to sing about—sing the blues, sing swing, sing rock and roll. I don’t want to see you turn into Bette Davis in What Ever Happened—”
“Shush! You don’t need to rub my face in it, Mr. Smartie-Barbie-Pants. Don’t think I haven’t sat in front of the makeup mirror and had the same thought. Why just last week—”
“All right,” Goodie says, cutting me off. “Now stop talking and get out there and sing from your soul, from deep down in the dark corner of your heart. Make me cry, Maggie, make me feel it.” Goodie flies right in my face and chucks me under the chin with his tiny forefinger. “What do you say, Maggie Magnolia?”
“I’ll try,” I say in a teeny tiny voice, “but nobody plays piano like you.”
“But I’m not here anymore, Mags, not really,” Goodie say in his own teeny tiny voice. His little forehead is against mine, “So I want you to sing like the diva you are and stop doubting yourself. Make me proud of you.”
“Why can’t you come back, Goodie?” I say. “Why can’t you drink a gallon of Miracle-Gro and come back to me like before?”
“It doesn’t work that way, lovey, I wish it did,” Goodie says with a sigh. “You think I don’t miss it?”
“Do you?”
“God, yes, I miss my life,” Goodie says, and a tiny crystal tear-drop rolls down his cheek. “I miss it all, but now I’m somewhere over the rainbow, like the song says, and believe me, it’s a whole new thing, so I keep going, I keep on strutting right down the yellow brick road.”
“And nobody could strut like you, Miss Goodie-Two-Shoes,” I say, nuzzling Goodie’s little neck, “nobody, nowhere . . .”
“No how!” Goodie squeals and then stands tall on the lip of the sink with hands on hips. “Now let’s go out there and sing.” I turn off the faucet and we leave the bathroom. Goodie perches himself on the piano for a while and taps his plastic-stiletto-encased foot and smiles at me and encourages me, and then at some point I realize he is gone and I’m still singing—singing in my grown-up deep-down voice with a vibrato that purrs real pretty when I let it.
For the rest of the session Thomas and I work through the songs, and I let him offer suggestions. A few times I have to stop and dab my eyes and nose, but all in all I sing as best I can. “It’ll be easier next time,” Thomas says at the end of the hour.
“Thank you,” is all I can manage as I gather my things and leave. When I get on the street I feel as if I’m going to collapse into an emotional pile of mush right there on the corner of Twenty-second and Eighth Avenue.
I punch in the number of Charles’s gallery on my cell phone. Tosh, his assistant, picks up.
“Is Charles available?” I ask. “It’s Maggie.”
“Maggie—hold on,” Tosh says. “I’ll see. I think he’s finishing up with a client.”
Ethel Merman bursts into song when Tosh puts me in the hold loop. Charles always has show tunes piped into his phone system. My mind wanders to the message from Jack. It sounds like the beginning of the end. You know the old where-is-this-going-I-like-you-a-lot-but-maybe-we-can-just-be-friends discussion. I wonder if Jack and I will end up very good friends. I have a feeling not, as we don’t live in the same generational neighborhood, much less zip code. Tears start to well up again.
“Mags,” Charles says, breaking in on Ethel Merman singing “No Business like Show Business.” “What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering if you were free for lunch.”
“Are you in the neighborhood?”
“No, I’m in Chelsea, on Twenty-second Street, but thought I would come down. I haven’t seen the gallery in ages.”
“I’d love to see you, darling, but I do have plans for a late lunch with a new client.”
“Everybody’s a fucking client.”
“Why so much anger so early in the day, Mags?” Charles asks in an even tone.
“I just had my first session with a new accompanist.” My voice breaks just slightly. I don’t mention Goodie. I don’t want Charles to know that I’m angry and crazy.
“I see. Come on down, my lunch isn’t until three. Let’s have a glass of wine. I think you need a port in the storm.”
“Thanks, Charles. That’s exactly what I need.”
I walk over to Seventh Avenue and take the number 1 train downtown. It’s very crowded. I stand and hold on to the metal bar above my head. The man sitting in front of me is smacking his chewing gum and reading the New York Post. The woman next to him is rolling her eyes and cursing under her breath. A trio of black men sing, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine,” in three-part harmony and pass a hat as they move through the car. The train arrives at the Franklin stop and I get off. Charles’s gallery is on Walker Street. I stop at a deli and buy a 3 Musketeers candy bar. I eat as I walk and am once again struck by how perfect the consistency of the 3 Musketeers center filling is. I love it. I dig in my bag and find a cigarette; sugar and nicotine, nicotine and sugar—what more can I say? I arrive at the gallery in a pleasant haze. Charles hands me that promised glass of Chardonnay and I accept. I take two sips and settle back on his couch as the combination of substances kicks in.
“So what’s the new piano player like?” Charles asks as he pours himself some wine.
“He’s great. Everything is great.” I inhale the rest of my wine and reach for the bottle. “I’m a funny valentine, let me tell you. I’m a funny little valentine.” I pour another glass. “Things couldn’t be more terrific. Have I told you about my guy? The twenty-eight-year-old?”
“Well you’ve hinted, but do tell all.” Charles is a big sucker for a good romance.
“He calls me Sweet Pea and he gives me massages.”
“The massages sound great, Sweet Pea is questionable.”
“And he lives at home with his dad.”
Charles chokes slightly.
“And he smells like fresh mowed grass.”
“Does he live on a golf course?”
“Queens.”
“Hmmm,” says Charles as he refills my glass.
“Sometimes I stare at the back of his neck because I love the way his hair grows in a comma at the nape and the way the muscles of his neck look like two strong ropes suspending a colossus.”
“A colossus. How big is this young man?”
“Plenty big.”
“I see,” says Charles with a grin.
“And when he leans down to kiss me his eyes are always wide open so he doesn’t miss a thing, and it makes me not want to miss a thing.”
“Oh my, Mags, you’re, as they say, ‘head over heels.’ What’s happened to that tough outer shell you always wear so fetchingly?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No, not at all. It’s great to be in love, to be infatuated. Enjoy it. Just don’t
expect it to last forever.”
“Like you have to tell me that.” In my head I count to ten, take a deep breath, and light a cigarette. “I know all about things not lasting forever,” I say, exhaling smoke out of my nostrils like I saw Joan Crawford do in a 1940s film.
“And then yesterday while we were waiting on the corner for the light to change,” I continue, “he started talking to a little girl in a stroller. She was about a year old and she cooed and laughed at Jack, and he cooed and laughed back, and I had this outrageous thought. I thought, I want to have this man’s child.”
“What’s so outrageous about that?”
“First of all I’ve only known him a few days, barely a week.”
“Love happens fast,” Charles says, holding his wineglass up in a salute to the heart.
“And second of all, that’s not my thing, the mother thing, that’s not who I am. I’m a nonmaternal type woman. I wasn’t born with the mommy gene, at least I don’t think so, and if I was it is very recessive. I’ve never wanted to have a child. I didn’t even play with dolls when I was a kid.”
“Not even Betsy Wetsy?”
“No, I played dress-up and then I played detective, and sometimes my friend Ann and I played bomb shelter because she had lots of miniature canned goods and paper products.”
“Oh, that sounds fun.”
“We put Barbie and Ken in a cardboard box alone with the canned goods and waited for the all clear siren.” I wonder to myself if that is why Goodie decided to haunt me in Barbie attire. He knows it strikes a chord.
“Well, maybe it wasn’t the all clear siren you were waiting for,” Charles is saying as I tune back in, “maybe it was your biological clock and now it has sounded and it’s time for Barbie and Ken to stop waiting and get to work.”
“Funny. That’s funny. You forget I’m on the flip side of forty.”
“Everyone has babies in their forties now. Besides, you’re barely on the other side.”
“Well, I’m not everyone, and I’m not having a baby.”
“Oh go on. It will be fun. It will be a hoot. I’ll give you a baby shower.”
“This is easy for you to say. I’m not sure I have any viable eggs anymore. They could all be rotten by now. Dried up.”
“I think you’d be surprised. I bet a couple of survivors are in there just waiting for a chance to meet the right Mr. Sperm.”
“What’s happened to your tough outer shell, for goodness sake? You sound like a besotted grandmother.”
“Here’s to babies,” Charles says, raising his wineglass. “Here’s to sweet round cuddly babies.”
“To babies,” I say reluctantly and click Charles’s glass.
Charles’s client shows up for lunch and I head back uptown. I’m more than a little tipsy and can’t wait to lie down and take a nap. On the subway stairs a woman is struggling with a baby stroller. I offer to help and she gratefully nods. I grab the bottom half of the stroller and start down the stairs. The boy sitting smugly in the seat kicks his work boots and hits me square in the forehead and giggles with baby glee. The mother apologizes. I shake my head and smile sweetly as in don’t worry about it. At the bottom of the stairs I put my end of the stroller down and rush off to catch the train, my head throbbing from the impact of baby’s boot.
I sit on the train. My head is not only throbbing but pounding as well. I wasn’t completely truthful with Charles about the baby issue. I had considered having a baby before—years ago. I was actually pregnant for five months and seventeen days. And I was married. I often forget that detail of my personal biography. The marriage. It was brief, ill advised perhaps, but ultimately fairly painless. Fairly, except for the miscarriage. A late miscarriage. Something went wrong and the baby had to be aborted. It was a girl. She died in vitro and fortunately the doctor was able to do the procedure immediately. Sometimes when it happens, the nonviable fetus, as it is referred to, has to stay put for a time and then labor is induced and the baby is delivered, a nightmare I was lucky enough not to have to endure.
I was twenty-six. Hugh, my husband, was twenty-seven. He was a graphic designer. He had a sheepdog named Ernie and lived in a duplex apartment on the Lower East Side. We met in Tompkins Square Park on a Saturday afternoon. I was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and smoking a joint.
“That’s a great book,” Hugh said as he sat down next to me on the bench. “I’ve read it four times.”
“Wow,” I said and offered him a toke of my joint and thus began our relationship. We were inseparable for six months, I moved my things into his duplex apartment, then I got pregnant and we went to city hall one Thursday afternoon and got married. I never even told my family. I figured I would surprise them the following Christmas. Most of my friends didn’t know because Hugh and I spent all of our time one on one. We picked out names for the baby; Hugh worked on freelance assignments; I stopped getting high and made beaded bracelets that I sold on commission out of a shop on Eighth Street.
Then at five months, just after I started to show, I experienced some pains and went to the doctor and three days later was in Roosevelt Hospital having the procedure. Hugh was devastated. I was numb. The doctor told us it was a girl. We named her Abigail and then had her little nonviable body cremated. Hugh, a lapsed Catholic, still believed, if not in God, at least, in the power of ceremony. I put some of the ashes in a locket. Hugh had an urn made for some and the rest we took to St. Luke’s on Hudson Street and scattered on the rose garden next to the parish house. I still visit the garden at least once a year when the roses are in bloom. At the time I didn’t know why we decided to put ashes there, Hugh’s love of ceremony perhaps, something guided us, maybe Abigail herself, but for whatever reason, I’m grateful we did. The train stops at Eighty-sixth Street. I’m so lost in thought I almost miss my stop, but I manage to get out just as the doors are closing. I make my way out of the station and into the daylight again.
Hugh got a job offer in Chicago a month after the event as we came to call it. He decided to take it. I stayed in New York and got cast in a tour of Godspell, and three months later I filed for a divorce. It was a mutual decision. A month after that I ended up in the psych ward of a hospital in Des Moines, Iowa. That came about because one night during the tour I started screaming and couldn’t stop, so the company manager took me to the emergency room of the local hospital and from there I was admitted to the psych ward and spent a month putting together jigsaw puzzles and talking to a shrink once a day. Hugh flew out from Chicago and got me out and took me back to New York and life went on. I have never told Charles about any of this. I think he would be shocked to learn how fragile that tough outer shell he says I wear so fetchingly actually is.
8
Do you want mushrooms?” Jack asks, standing in the middle of my living room, buck naked, with his cell phone pressed to his ear.
“Sure, and extra cheese.” I am sitting on the toilet with the door open a few inches so we can talk. “And get some beer.”
Jack came over about eight o’clock. The minute he walked in the door he took off his shirt, I took off my blouse, he took off his jeans, and I took off my pants. It was like strip poker without the cards. We made love on the couch and on the chair and on my grandmother’s maple Ethan Allen coffee table.
“And ask them to put in lots of napkins. I’m all out.” I wash my face and apply lotion and then quickly powder and put on some blush and a little lipstick. I have a feeling the conversation is coming and I want to look pretty. Hell, I want to look drop-dead gorgeous. I squint into the mirror and realize that pretty will have to do. I slip into my Victoria’s Secret red silk bathrobe (on sale for $24.95) and fluff my hair.
“Mags,” Jack says, looking up from the paper as I enter the room and head for the kitchen. “Let’s go downtown and hear some music later.”
“Great,” I say, reaching into the kitchen cupboard and pulling out a bottle of scotch.
“Want some scotch?” I ask.
/> “Scotch?”
“Yeah, you want a shot of scotch?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I pour two glasses.
“Straight up or on the rocks?”
“Straight up, baby,” Jack says with a laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. There is nothing funny about a shot of scotch.”
I hand him his glass and sit down in the chair across from him.
“Cheers.” I drain the glass. Jack does the same.
“Another round?” I ask.
“It’s your call, Sweet Pea.”
I go into the kitchen and get the bottle and pour us two more shots and set the bottle on grandma’s coffee table.
“Here’s looking at you, kid,” I say.
“And you too, kid,” Jack says.
And we look at each other like gunfighters in a face-off. We finish the drinks. Jack picks up the bottle and pours again.
“Mud in your eye,” he says.
“Mud in yours,” I say. We finish at the same moment and slam the glasses on the table.
“We are getting drunk,” Jack declares with a slur. I pour another round and look him hard in the eye.
“What did you want to talk about, Jack?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your message this morning. You said and I quote, ‘You and I have to talk.’ ”
“Ahh, yes,” he says and, of course, just then the buzzer rings.
“It’s the pizza man,” Jack says getting up too quickly. He takes a moment to steady his balance and then crosses to the door.
“You got any money, Sweet Pea? I don’t think I’m going to have enough.”
“I have a little money. Just a tiny bit. Four dollars and thirty-seven cents.”
“So precise,” Jack says, opening the door. The delivery guy is holding the pizza and a brown bag with a six-pack of beer. Jack hands him a couple of twenties that he got out of the jeans he quickly stepped into on his way to the door. He gets the change and closes the door with a flourish.
“Pizza, at your service,” he announces placing the box on the coffee table.
Dorothy on the Rocks Page 8
