He had to walk from the station. There was dirty snow on the sidewalk, but the sun had a hint of warmth in it for the first time in two punishingly cold post-California weeks. Nevsky breathed in deeply and wandered through the suburban streets. A lot of serious Jews out here, he noticed: men in black hats, fringes peeking from under their vests, climbing into minivans or hurrying along the sidewalk, heads down; women in snoods pushing strollers. Then all of a sudden artists, with their trademark filthy garments and jobless look, started popping around corners, lurking in cafés, riding by on bicycles. He also stumbled into a small Carribean neighborhood, where the smell of fried plantains wafted tauntingly through the air.
After asking several people and getting deeply lost, Derbhan came on the Bridget Mooney School of Acting, installed in a storefront below a tuxedo rental establishment. He pushed open the glass door and clocked a bombshell, right off the bat. She was straightening papers at the desk. Her hair was glossy, nearly black. Her eyes, when she looked up at him, seemed to be dark purple.
“Can I help you?” she said.
“I’m looking for Bridget Mooney,” Derbhan said. “I’m an old friend of hers.”
“She’ll be here soon,” said the young woman. “She’s out.” This one would need diction class, thought Nevsky.
“Oh, that’s good she can get around,” he said, trying to get a subtle look at the girl’s body, which was well covered in a button-down checked shirt and, he noticed as she stood up, a long black skirt. The girl seemed uneasy, and walked across the room to the filing cabinet, opening the glass door a crack as she passed it, in spite of the cold outside.
“I heard she’d had a stroke,” he said. The girl said nothing, but went about her business as if he weren’t there. Presently another girl glided through the glass door on Rollerblades. She was built like an athlete, with short, strong legs. Her face was red from the cold.
“Hi, Ellie,” said the bombshell.
“I never signed up for scene night,” explained the girl on Rollerblades, grabbing a pencil from a cup on the desk and rolling across the room, where a list of names was taped up on the wall.
“There’s still room,” said the black-haired one, gesturing to the list with a languorous flourish.
“You’re doing Orpheus,” noticed Ellie.
“Yeah,” said the girl.
“Good. See ya tonight,” said Ellie, swinging the door open and gliding out onto the street. The bombshell kept the door ajar, returned to the desk, took out a copy of Orpheus Descending, and started reading, cheek on fist. Derbhan Nevsky sat, his hands pressed between jiggling knees, for a good five minutes. The cold seeping through the open door was beginning to irritate him.
“You mind if I close that door?” he asked. The girl hesitated. “I’ve been living in California for the past eight years,” he explained. “Not used to the cold anymore.” The girl looked up at him, impassive. Nevsky rose and pushed the door to.
“Where you from, exactly?” he asked.
“Farrackaway.” She said it as one word.
“Are you one of Bridget’s students?”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“I’m an old friend of hers. Derbhan Nevsky.”
“Masha,” she said. Nevsky whipped out his hand for her to shake, but she just looked at it.
“Hi,” she said. But she wouldn’t take his hand. Eventually he sat down again. The girl smiled awkwardly, then returned to her book. Nevsky was startled by the sound of the door. He looked up and there was a sixty-year-old version of the voluptuous and caustic Bridget Mooney, limping over the threshold.
“Bridge,” said Nevsky, standing. Bridget didn’t recognize him at first. She tucked her chin into her neck, squinting at him.
“David,” she said.
“Derbhan, but yes.”
“You’re back.”
“Very much so.”
“How did you find me?”
“I ran into Gavin. He gave me your number, but I must have written it down wrong, so then I just looked you up. He said Far Rockaway.”
“I’m impressed. Come on back,” she purred. He followed her, casting one last look at Masha, who was studying her lines.
“I’m starting again, Bridge,” said Nevsky, perched at the edge of his chair, leg shuddering.
“Are you okay, then?”
“Clean, sober, ready to go,” he said.
“Where are you living?”
“Queens, for now.”
“Glad to see you. Sorry I’m not much to look at these days,” she said, holding up her claw. “I was struck by a little brain lightning.”
“You look great,” said Nevsky. “I thought you’d be all scrunched up.”
“Thanks.”
“Bridge, I need help finding some girls. A guy too, maybe. I’m going back into management. You know I’m the best. I just need a break.”
She looked at him doubtfully, lips clamped shut.
“Okay,” he said. His voice was hoarse, as if he had been yelling, though he hadn’t. “Just let me see something—a scene night. Whatever. Let me court you. Them. If you have anyone. Do you? Have anyone? That one at the desk looks amazing, but she’s a little odd. She wouldn’t shake my hand.”
“She’s an observant Jew. She’s not allowed to touch strange men.”
“How’s she gonna be an actress if she can’t touch strange men?”
“It’s a process. That girl is a long story.”
“You know who she reminds me of? A young Judy Garland, but sexier …”
“I’ve thought Judy Garland too,” she said. “But David. Look. No offense. You come here out of the blue, the last thing I heard, you … These kids aren’t ready, anyway, most of them. To go out in the world. I just set up here six months ago. A few followed me out here, some are already working, but the rest are brand-new. I’m not inviting any agents out here yet. It’s not just you.”
“So we’re both rising from the ashes! How ’bout I come as a friend? As a friend! To see what you’re up to. I want to reconnect anyway. I missed you.” And this was true. He had missed Bridget Mooney.
“Okay, okay,” she said, chuckling. “Come back in two weeks.”
“Can I buy you dinner tonight?”
“You don’t have to do that,” she said, wondering if he was good for even a meal. “Truth is, after class I’m exhausted anyway.”
“Lunch tomorrow?” he asked.
“Take it easy. You live here now, right? We have all the time in the world.”
Derbhan Nevsky had been Bridget Mooney’s lover in the late 1970s, when he was still scrabbling his way up a pile of assistants to become a talent agent at the American Artists Agency, and Bridget was an ingénue with a Mae West twist. She had trouble getting work, was the truth of it, because she had a midcentury build—all hips and boobs and lips; the ideal woman had lost about twenty pounds over the past fifteen years, and Bridget had come of age too late: however much she starved herself she couldn’t get Ali McGraw thin. Too big for the serious parts, too pretty for the funny parts, she had to content herself with playing an endless stream of next-door neighbors. They simply wouldn’t employ her to do the work she’d have been great at.
She and Derbhan lived, for the most part, in Bridget’s railroad apartment on Great Jones Street. Derbhan’s given name was David, but he decided, while sitting on Bridget’s fire escape high on acid one Friday afternoon, that his true soul’s name was Derbhan. His inner self, a young man looking just like him but with huge yellow eyes and a lilac silk shirt, walked up the fire escape and told him that he would never achieve his true maximum potential unless he changed his name to Derbhan. He spelled it out and everything. Nevsky, his inner self said, he could keep. Even while he was hallucinating, Nevsky’s practical ambition was turning over, like the idling engine of a getaway car: he wanted a name that no one could forget. He planned on becoming a legend. It’s true, he had an eye for talent. Jane Stamp, Hal Maynard, RoSalind Jones were all to be
come his discoveries. He had a knack for what kind of person was fashionable, who would appeal to the crowd. Once he took someone on as a client, he worked them over, bringing them to parties and charity events, grooming them, putting them on diets, getting their hair extended, teeth straightened, their past made more or less interesting with the help of various publicity agents around town. But all this was after he and Bridget had broken up. They were really only lovers for six desperate months when neither of them had broken through and all they had for consolation was each other and the occasional bottle of Wild Turkey. But once David Nevsky became Derbhan Nevsky, his luck changed; he was promoted to agent within the month. Naturally, Bridget leaned on him to represent her. He, in turn, put so much pressure on her to lose weight, making her eat radishes and cottage cheese for lunch, boiled beef and salad for dinner, Weetabix with apple juice for breakfast, that she became violent with hunger, her rages climaxing when she broke her pitiful lunch plate over his head and ground the shards into the carpet with her platform shoe. Derbhan left then, cottage cheese in his hair, and told her he didn’t represent fat actresses. He was steamed, but he wasn’t bitter; he knew Bridget was a great girl—it wasn’t her fault she was curvy. Bridget was hurt, but she realized the relationship had been doomed, and she really just wanted to teach anyway, and eat what she liked. So they remained friends, grabbing a bite every month or two, as Derbhan rose through the ranks of the agency and Bridget trained to become an acting teacher. They called each other regularly through Bridget’s marriage, the birth of her son, her quick divorce, all the way till Derbhan moved to Los Angeles in the early eighties, when they lost touch. Bridget heard and read things over the years, of course. She saw Derbhan’s feature in Time magazine, where he was proclaimed one of the most successful young agents in Hollywood; she also saw the article in the Daily News that described his sad dismissal from the agency he had helped build. The board of directors had simply fired him—albeit for good reason: he was coked up far past normal behavior patterns pretty much all day, his clients were leaving him in droves, he refused to acknowledge there was a problem, stopped sleeping, and spent all night making manic, unnecessary phone calls to producers in whatever part of the world was awake, ranting on behalf of his clients who were filming in Prague or Australia, making outrageous demands just so he didn’t have to go home to his empty house and the heartbreak of coming down and feeling lousy enough to hang himself. He’d sit there, his feet up on the desk, noose of a tie hanging at an angle, eating Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and calling producers of his clients’ films the way he used to make prank phone calls as a bored kid in Queens, telling women their girdles were ready to be picked up:
“Miss Gory needs a new orchid. In a pot. Every morning. Yes, a fresh orchid. And a plate of ripe mango. Never use the word ‘ready’ when you talk to her either, by the way. Say ‘are you okay to come to set.’ Never ‘ready.’ I’m warning you, now …”
He stayed awake in his office for three twenty-four-hour cycles, shaving and changing his shirt each morning so no one would suspect, which of course they did, until there was an intervention. Six talent agents, accompanied by two drug counselors and Derbhan’s own therapist, swooped down on him one Thursday morning and told him he needed to take a break. Somebody who didn’t like him very much must have called the papers, because there was a bank of photographers ready when he was escorted into the back of a Subaru belonging to the detox facility already booked by the agency. His fall from the golden chair was documented in all the major U.S. papers, then syndicated worldwide. Bridget Mooney read of his humiliation over her morning coffee, her shapely nails glinting in the morning light, green eyes narrowed with pain for a man she had once loved but now only pitied.
Though the Subaru brought him to a large, hushed mansion in the French Provincial style haunted by rich housewives coming off barbiturates, and, of course, celebrities, several of whom Derbhan had once represented, his stay there didn’t really do the trick, because, as well as being an addict, he was having a psychic breakdown that none of the experts seemed to register, they were so focused on getting him clean. The fact that he barricaded himself in his room for much of the day when he wasn’t in group therapy was considered problematic but not psychotic. He was released after three months. So Derbhan left the Waynsedale Clinic straight, but crazy. He returned to his palatial home in Beverly Hills and made it through seventy-two sober, friendless hours convinced that his neighbors had all decided to get together, tie him up, and slit his throat like a pig. Then, on the fourth day, he caved, called his old dealer, bought a little Kilimanjaro of cocaine, dumped it on his coffee table, and lived off it for a month. His savings, already thin on the ground from his extravagant habit, his sudden trips to Europe with very young women he hoped to impress, and his loyal subsidizing of his mother’s gambling habit back in Queens, had wrought havoc on his finances. In short, Derbhan was broke. He had to drain his pool, sell his house, release his birds, fire his housekeeper, and move to a halfway house, where he promised not to do any drugs in exchange for a bed and a roof and the privilege of not living on the street or going back to his mother. In the end, he did go straight, and his mind eased up, but he had to move back in, at the age of sixty, with Silvia Nevsky, his alpha and omega. It would have been depressing if Nevsky hadn’t felt so maniacally happy at the moment. Finding Bridget Mooney again had given him a sense of continuity, safety, hope. Crippled as she was, that woman was solid as an oak tree. And he, shimmering and rustling in the unpredictable wind that was his destiny, would be her foliage.
24
It’s okay, I’ll walk from here,” Masha said, planting her feet on the sidewalk fifty yards from her front door. “I need to think a little.”
“About me?” asked Eli, looking up at her from under the brim of his black felt hat.
“Maybe,” she said, starting to smile.
“My parents … my parents are a little worried about you,” he said. “Yeah? How come?”
“They think you … I don’t know, maybe they think you’re too pretty or somethin’. It’s okay with me, though,” he said.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Yeah.” He looked into her eyes.
“Thanks for lunch, Eli. I had fun,” she said.
“We always have fun,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“’Bye,” she said.
“’Bye.” He turned and walked down the block, looking down at his shoes. Once, he swung around to see her, his hands in his pockets, black hat set back on his head. Then he turned a corner and he was gone. This was it, she thought. She married him or she never saw him again. He had decided, she could feel it.
She walked to her own door, but she couldn’t get herself to go in, even though it was cold out. She needed to think. She should really go home and help with Shabbat preparations. Yet she found herself meandering past her house, down the block, past the synagogue, to the railroad station, her demon hiding under her belt loop. She had never been on the train by herself. Dreamily, she walked a few steps and stood on the open-air platform.
There were only two people waiting for the train: a woman in a long down parka, and a man in a suit and coat, reading the paper. The woman looked professional. Masha wondered what her job was. The train came. The doors opened. The woman stepped into the train. Masha followed her, and sat down beside her. It took a few minutes for the woman to get settled in her window seat. She took off her parka, set it on the empty seat between herself and Masha, then took out some papers to read. She looked like she was Pearl’s age. The conductor strode down the aisle, asking for tickets. The woman handed him hers.
“Change at Jamaica for Penn Station,” he told her. He looked down at Masha.
“Round trip to Penn Station,” she said.
“You coming back off-peak?”
“I don’t know,” Masha said.
“I’ll sell you off-peak. You can pay the conductor the difference if you change your mind,” he said. �
��Thirteen seventy-five.” Masha gave him a twenty. She took the ticket from the conductor and stowed it in a zip pocket of her purse. It took forty minutes to get to Jamaica. Masha stared out the window, watching the houses blur by, wondering about the people who lived in there, the details of their lives. She wished she could pry the doors open and peer inside.
When they reached Jamaica, she followed the professional woman in the parka across the platform, and got onto the Manhattan-bound train. They were there in minutes. At first she tried to follow the woman out of Penn Station, but she walked so fast, she got swallowed up in the crowd.
Masha stepped onto an escalator, followed the light up to the street. She had no idea where she was going. It was almost two. She figured she had an hour before she had to start back home. It would be dark around five. She was fine. I crawled inside the lining of her coat to avoid the cold as she walked along the street. The pale, congested sky seemed very close, bearing down. She felt a raindrop prick her lip. A few people glanced at her long gray skirt peeking out from her red coat. But nobody knew what she was. She passed a few men in black hats or yarmulkes hurrying to the train station to be back in time for Shabbos. They couldn’t get on a train after sundown. Neither could she. It felt odd to be moving in the other direction from them.
She walked down Sixth Avenue to Twenty-third Street. It started to snow. Dopey fat snowflakes sifted through the air, interspersed with glistening needles of rain. Masha stopped in the middle of the street and stared, taking in the strange precipitation. Snowflakes on her eyelashes blurred and magnified the flashing orange, yellow, green lights of store signs and traffic lights, made them seem like glowing jewels. People on the street rushed by her, huddled, frowning, some glancing at her curiously—a young woman with no hat on, coat open, standing in the street, her face wet, mascara running. The neon light of a bar flashed in reflection on the wet pavement at her feet. She turned to look up at it and saw warm light through a window, shadowy forms inside. She walked through the door and into the small brown-paneled place, shrugged off her coat, and scrunched it onto her lap, perching on a stool. Her muscles relaxed in the warmth. She ordered a Coke from the indifferent barman, brushing the dark wet strands of hair from her forehead, and looked around her. A longtime drinker was hunched over his glass at the end of the bar, his toothless mouth collapsed like sunken, parched ground; a group of young men in suits exploded in laughter at a table in the corner. One of them glanced at her pointedly. She turned her back to him. She liked being alone like this, nobody knowing a thing about her, in a strange neighborhood. She could be anyone. She took a sip of Coke.
Jacob's Folly Page 18
