“Is it settled?” she asked. “Did they put up the money? Who are they?”
“Not a fortune,” said Paul. “They’re a middle-aged woman with a trust fund.”
“An amateur? How did you find her? Are you sure she won’t meddle?”
“I have total control,” answered Paul. “We start casting on Monday.”
Frances bounced up and down on the bed in an outburst of glee.
“Cut it out,” complained Paul. “I’ll get seasick. I want you to quit.
“You have only to ask,” answered Frances, and kissed his right foot.
“Not my feet!” shouted Paul. “Watch it, Frances! My feet are off limits!”
“Love knows no limits,” said Frances, and grabbed for the left one.
Paul was frightened of feet, which he claimed had a life of their own. He had laid down a rule that all love play stop short at the ankles. Once, Frances had succeeded in nipping Paul’s penis with her toes. She tried it again, but Paul pinned her down on the mattress. In the scuffle that ensued, Frances squashed the last morsel of sandwich.
“Let me go,” panted Frances. “I’ll be good. I’ve got cheese on my elbow.”
“You went for my jewels,” grumbled Paul.
“My feet made me do it.”
Paul sat up and released her. He covered his parts with his hands. Then he covered himself with the tray, for extra protection.
“No more tricks,” ordered Paul. “Back to business. Let’s settle your quitting.”
“Quitting,” she repeated. She brushed crusts of bread off the covers. She plumped up the pillows and tucked in the blanket and sheets.
“Stop fussing,” said Paul. He tugged at the top of the blanket. “I need you to help with the casting. That gives you a week.”
Frances folded the quilt. She stood very still, looking upward, as if she were listening to a broadcast from Pluto or Saturn. At first the emission was muted and broken by static; then the message came through loud and clear, forcing Frances to hear it. In moments of crisis, Frances chose flight over combat. She poised for retreat, like an animal sensing a predator.
“When you’re not taking notes,” Paul went on, “you can work on the costumes.”
“No,” she said, stalling. “I hate sewing. I never could sew.”
“The budget is tight,” answered Paul. “You have to pitch in.”
“I can’t,” whispered Frances.
“All right, don’t!” Paul was growing impatient. “You can help paint the sets. Or do props. Find me parts from wrecked cars.
Frances lacked practice in pitting her will against Paul’s. Paul made requests in the name of higher values. “No” was a word that rarely escaped her lips; refusal could prove more costly than compliance. If Frances refused him, how would Paul perceive her? As the enemy of art and man’s best aspirations? In her own little way, she did her bit for art; she worked for writers and fostered their ambitions. Where Paul was concerned, she had an established record. An efficiency expert, studying Frances’s schedule, would have to conclude that Paul was her real employer. Only forty hours in her week belonged to Harwood; one hundred and twenty-eight belonged to Paul. What did Paul want? Dear God, what did Paul want? She felt like the map of Europe as seen by Napoleon, with every country invaded except for England.
Frances was naked. Her nakedness lacked distinction. In order to give her statement weight and value, she draped a blanket around her like a toga. Paul was cleaning his toenails, using the tines of a fork. He dug too deep and gave a yelp of anger.
“Please listen,” begged Frances. “I don’t want to quit. I love Harwood.”
“Suit yourself,” said Paul. He rubbed the offended toe. He bent the fork and shaped it into a circle. “You’re a very strange person, Frances. Why didn’t you say so?”
Life with an artist is training for living alone. It is also good practice for living with more than one person. An artist belongs to his work, not to his sweetheart. His work shares their space, like a roomer with kitchen privileges. Paul’s suicide play had outgrown their crowded lodgings and moved to the Center Street Theatre. Since Paul was joined to his play at the hip and the navel, Frances went down to the theatre in order to see him. The suicide play had expanded to fill its new quarters, like a goldfish transferred from a bowl to an outdoor pond. It grew fatter from scene to scene and act to act, ingesting large groups of players, non-speaking and speaking. It seemed to derive its substance from Paul’s own body, sucking fat from his cheeks and muscle tone out of his torso. Directing the suicide play was a form of suicide. By opening night, Paul Treat might be a shadow but the play would be sleek and resplendent and surging with blood cells. As the play grew in scale, it also grew in genius, fed as it was by the steady drip of Paul’s vital fluids. It was less of a suicide play than a suicide circus, a magic show, macabre and vaudevillian. Jugglers displayed the instruments of self-murder: daggers, revolvers, and barbers’ straight-edged razors. Sword-swallowers swallowed glass, coins, bolts, and crosses. Acrobats leapt from platforms or dangled from nooses. Act II, Scene 2 portrayed the exceptional cases, daft or creative attempts, unique in the annals. Paul had imported magicians to stage these illusions: the boy who sawed through his neck with a hacksaw; the man who drove nails into his skull with a blacksmith’s hammer; and the woman who drowned, upside down, in a bucket of water.
Frances attended every evening rehearsal, carrying a satchel of token work from Harwood. Down at the theatre, surrounded by unionized experts, she wondered why Paul had imagined he needed her services. During each break, she offered her help to the staff, who turned her down flat or invented small jobs to appease her. Once in a while, the stage manager sent her for coffee or the costume designer allowed her to give him a neck rub. When the assistant director knocked over a box full of paper clips, Frances fell to her knees and proved her good will by retrieving them. Competing with Frances for marginal or amateur employment were various unknown volunteers, who had snared the best jobs. Several nights in a row, a woman in a hat took Paul’s notes. This woman was replaced by another one, with long hair and glasses. One night Frances took notes. She noticed a third volunteer, a tall, wide-hipped woman with a chignon, who was cuing the actors. Frances wore glasses herself, for distance and driving. She found them at the bottom of her satchel and set them on her nose. One earpiece was broken and the lenses were spotted and streaky, but Frances could see that the three volunteers were one person. Using her glasses as a kind of outlandish lorgnette, Frances also observed that this person possessed some authority. The lighting director hailed her and showed her a diagram. The wardrobe mistress approached her and gave her a cashbox.
An elbow nudged Frances in the ribs. Paul snatched at her clipboard. “Did you get that? The cues for the strobe lights? If you didn’t, you’ve had it.”
“Who’s that lady?” asked Frances.
“I thought so. You took them down garbled.”
“Over there,” pursued Frances. She poked him. “Carol gave her some money.”
“Kip Hillyer,” said Paul. “Can’t you print? Your writing is terrible.”
Since Paul was aggrieved, Frances tried to maintain a low profile. She took notes in a round, childish hand and incurred no more censure. When Paul left his seat to solve crises or demonstrate blocking, she kept the elusive Kip Hillyer under constant surveillance. Miss Hillyer, or Mrs., took a seat near the back of the theatre. She followed the action on stage with a copy of the script. She made marks on the script and pasted red tabs on odd pages. When the actors were resting, she appeared to be filling out bank checks. Even a novice detective on her very first stakeout would be forced to conclude that Kip Hillyer was Paul’s unnamed backer, the “middle-aged woman with a trust fund,” to use Paul’s own phrasing. Frances believed in the trust fund. The signs were explicit: the coat with a rip in the seam; the absence of jewelry; the comfortable shoes with scuffed toes; the plaid Scottish kilt. When applied to Kip Hillyer, however, “middle-aged
” was a spurious description, unless you computed the term of her life span at seventy. Her person showed signs of neglect, but no signs of decay. Kip Hillyer was older than Frances by five or six years. She was plainer than Frances, but her plainness was akin to her shoes, a cover designed to protect her from classification. To Frances, who was practiced in hiding her light under bushels, these tactics did not seem demure, but contrived and deceitful. Frances was briefly ashamed of her bristly responses. Why was she casting Kip Hillyer in the role of her rival? Kip Hillyer, like Frances, was working to further Paul’s interests. Kip Hillyer was Paul’s benefactress, and therefore her own.
As rehearsals wore on, Frances found herself banished to the sidelines. She had nothing to do, and her lack of employment embarrassed her. The costume designer brought his dog, a toy poodle, to the theatre. Asleep in his basket, the dog had more purpose than Frances. The costume designer supplied his pet poodle with biscuits. He took her for walks and stooped over to ruffle her topknot. Frances’s presence went largely unnoticed by Paul, unless she dozed off in her chair or began to read manuscripts. Confined to her seat, she had time to watch Paul watch Kip Hillyer. During run-throughs he gave more attention to Kip than to his actors. He seemed finely attuned to each change in expression or gesture, a difficult task, since Kip’s face was by nature expressionless. If she happened to yawn, he leaned over and questioned her urgently, forgetting that yawning was normal as the hour approached midnight. If she shifted position or stretched out a kink in her neck, Paul called for a break and asked someone to bring her an aspirin. Riding home in the taxi with Frances, he reviewed the day’s progress, recalling improvements or setbacks from Kip Hillyer’s viewpoint: “Kip thinks we should find a replacement for Melanie Lambert.” “Kip agrees that the Ferris wheel works if we move it upstage.” Kip this, Kip that, Kip paste-it-in-your hat, thought Frances, who found that this ditty restrained her from making rude comments. She had frequent occasion to murmur this useful refrain, since the name of Kip Hillyer was never too far from Paul’s lips. Paul’s behavior caused Frances anxiety as well as resentment. In the days before Kip, Paul ignored or insulted his backers. The reversal of roles between artist and patron was wrong; it was up to the patron to humble herself to the artist.
By the start of the third week, Kip Hillyer had grown more exacting. She telephoned Paul late at night to propose new ideas. She telephoned Paul on days off and requested long meetings. She pre-empted Paul’s dinners and began to make inroads on breakfast. When the telephone rang and Frances was the person who answered, Kip asked for Paul Treat as if she were calling an office. When Frances complained, Paul referred to Kip’s pitiful childhood. She had lost both her parents before she had cut her first tooth. A succession of guardians had met their reward, like her parents, leaving nine-year-old Kip to be raised by an elderly servant. Perhaps these sad facts explained her reliance on Paul, since directors are classic authority figures, like fathers. Kip’s telephone calls were no longer concerned with the theatre. Paul was summoned to deal with domestic and psychic emergencies. One Sunday she discovered a water bug the size of a grapefruit taking his ease in the soap dish attached to her bathtub. On and off, for a week, she heard footsteps that crisscrossed the roof. A man, who might well have been one of her telephone breathers, followed her into the subway and stared at her bosoms. Most recently, Paul had been wakened at four in the morning by a weeping Kip Hillyer who threatened to cut off her hair. “Let her,” said Frances, who was not at her best before breakfast. “She could hurt herself, Frances,” said Paul as he sped on his errand.
The art of detection is a mixture of insight and logic. Logic suggested that Paul and Kip Hillyer were lovers. From a logical standpoint, Frances had cause to be jealous, but try as she might, she felt only confusion and pique. Being jealous of Paul was a useless and laughable notion; it was as if Isaac Newton had been jealous of the forces of gravity, or the oceans believed that they governed the phases of the moon. No woman who mates with an artist can own him entirely; she is lucky to get him on a yearly renewable lease. Frances made a game effort to imagine Paul mating with Kip, to see if the picture would stir up unbearable feelings. She tried to envision their coupling in graphic detail: in and out, up and down, back and forth, back to front, side by side. Her effort was a failure: Kip Hillyer stayed clothed, as did Paul, like a girl doll and a boy doll whose garments were painted on their bodies. Intuition told Frances that Paul did not act like a lover. A lover would be sly and forgetful; Paul was rattled and eager to please. Sexual fidelity was a lot to expect from an artist, since artists required a rich diet of varied experience. When Paul was unfaithful he would not choose the likes of Kip Hillyer, whose hair was so drab, while Frances was as blonde as a jonquil. Whatever bound Paul to Kip Hillyer was stranger than sex; unless, of course, Frances was bent on denying the obvious. Frances needed a rest from her thoughts, which were ruining her sleep. During meetings at Harwood, she dozed without closing her eyes. Ruthanne believed Frances was suffering from faulty nutrition, and brought her yeast tablets dissolved in a glass of tomato juice. Frances swallowed the yeast; but Gus Stafford was better than vitamins. Augustus (“Gus”) Stafford was a prize-winning mystery novelist, a man of great honor who declined to accept his awards. Judges and critics delivered the same solemn verdict: Gus had turned mysteries into a genuine art form. Gus Stafford wrote novels that dealt with the problem of evil. His murderers were plagued with a conscience; his detectives disliked playing God. At the climax, the latter gave the gift of free choice to the former; the sound of the killer’s own pistol rang out from offstage. Gus blurred the line between felons and servants of justice. His victims were tarred with the same shade of guilt as his culprits. He was writing a book that was set in a Catholic convent, a departure for Gus, since he rarely placed women in the foreground. As his editor, Frances had given him some valuable pointers regarding the gift for disinterested friendship in females. Since his wife had deserted him, Gus had been wary of women. His wife was an actress with a yearning for personal glory. Gus had wanted to prevent her from degrading her art and her talent. He had tried to convince her that work was its own best reward. She had paid for her sins, although Gus took no pleasure in saying so: Mrs. Stafford found fame as the girl in the nose-drop commercials. Both Frances and Gus had been orphaned, in a sense, by the theatre. She esteemed him for keeping a chivalrous face on his sorrows, such a grave, handsome face, with its well-modeled profile and jawline. From what she could tell, she had earned his respect in return. No other writer had ever acknowledged her services. The Sisterhood Murders was dedicated to Frances Girard.
Gus Stafford was full of good values, like bread made with whole grains and seeds. Frances found herself scheduling extra appointments with him, and using these meetings as doses of moral refreshment. At the end of a day, when they finished their line-by-line editing, Gus began asking Frances to join him for coffee and a sandwich. At first, Frances ate and drank quickly and rushed to the theatre; then she lingered and chewed her food slowly, which helped her digestion. She arrived at rehearsals half an hour late, then an hour. Her absence was no more significant than her attendance. When rehearsal was over, she had always met Paul in the lobby, but for several nights running, he left and forgot to collect her. Later, Paul was contrite, but he told her to get home without him; he needed the time after hours to calm panicky actors. One evening Gus Stafford asked Frances to eat a real dinner, several courses with wine in a restaurant with cloths on the tables. She saw no good reason for declining this kind invitation. She could skip one rehearsal with a record of sitting through twenty.
Dining with Gus was a novel experience for Frances. She had picked up a lot of bad habits from eating with Paul. She finished her soup before Gus had dispatched the first mouthful. She found herself watching the level of broth in the soup bowl; the level dropped slowly, since he laid down his spoon between sips. When the lobster arrived, Frances went for the claws and the tail, courting sure disappointment
by eating the choicest parts first. Gus Stafford ate lobster the way he conducted his life, with the rare self-command born of wisdom earned slowly and painfully. He began with the small legs of the lobster, which add up to eight, sucking meat, but more air, through the pencil-thin tubular shells. He spooned out the coral, which Frances had downed in one bite. He chopped it and added the mince to his hot melted butter. Delaying his pleasure, he next went to work on the body, finding minuscule shreds of good meat between the tough feathers. If this were his birthday and the lobster a gift to be opened, Gus would smooth out the wrappings, refold them, and wind up the ribbon, and then, only then, would he let himself look at his present. In the matter of opening gifts there were two kinds of people: savers, like Gus, and rippers and tearers, like Frances.
Gus had finished his meal and was ready to make conversation. He looked proud and contented, aware he had given his utmost, just as he looked when he turned in his recent book manuscript. Like a child who loves hearing the same story over and over, Frances asked him to tell her why writers should never give interviews, and why they should stay underground till their character is formed. “Do you read your reviews?” Frances asked, though she knew Gus’s answer. Gus did not read reviews; he kept every one in a big box, waiting under his bed while he grew in detachment and balance. Gus believed, with the sages of China, in conducting his triumphs like a funeral. This maxim held true in reverse, but Gus had no reason for testing it. Since his books were successful, his behavior was doomed to be sober. It was Frances’s duty, as his editor, to urge Gus to help with publicity. When their coffee arrived, she brought up the question of photographs. Would Gus allow Harwood to feature his picture on the jacket? “My work has to stand on its own,” answered Gus in refusal. Gus compared writing books to a child making toy paper boats. Once the vessel is launched with a prayer on a current of water, neither author nor child can insure that the craft will stay upright. Alone among artists, Gus Stafford was free from ambition. Most artists, like Paul, had to wrestle the fearsome beast daily. Frances was honored that Gus seemed to wish for her friendship. Too rarely did editors make friends with authors they cared for. Many authors saw editors as maids-of-all-work or valets; others perceived them as governesses, tutors, or wardens. Gus gave Frances her due as an equal; he neither exploited nor feared her. If the truth can be told, Frances felt more at ease as a menial. Being equals with Gus was a burden as well as an honor; she might lose his respect if they differed on matters of dogma.
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