Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “I suppose,” Brenda said. “Though she’d be pissed as hell that I made her from Kingston instead of Port of Spain.”

  Late-night cable was hardly Hollywood or prime time. In the beginning, faced with two hours’ worth of “dead air” on live television, Brenda had her friends call in pretending to be clients, the station waiving our per-minute fee. Once, I was “Roberta Wozniak,” a lovelorn Amway saleswoman. Another time, “Lulabelle Ludlow.” When Joey’s old fraternity brothers came over for a barbecue, we put on the Channeling Channel and took turns dialing the 900 number to have her channel our dead pets.

  “Thank God nobody really watches. Talk about ‘theater of the absurd.’ But I have to say, artistically, it is a gold mine,” Brenda confessed one day. We spoke every few weeks, late at night, when I finally got Austin to sleep. Brenda would usually just be getting back from the studio, Joey would be snoring away. I’d tiptoe down to the kitchen, pour myself a tumbler of chardonnay, dial her home phone.

  “I’m getting so many ideas for characters from my callers, I could write a one-woman show,” she said. “My contract is up just before Thanksgiving. So I’m going to hand in my notice, buy a new laptop, and voilà.”

  Five days later, two jet planes torpedoed the World Trade Center.

  The night after September 11, Madame LaShonda Peyroux’s on-air hotline was inundated: Please, can you channel my Danny? He was with Ladder Company 3 in Lower Manhattan.

  Madame LaShonda, my daughter was a flight attendant on United Flight 93. Can you tell me? Did she suffer much?

  My boyfriend, Guillermo, he is, like, only fifteen months in this country. He is busboy at Windows on World. Can you tell me if he is still alive?

  Days of it, weeks, months. Even the FBI called. Sometimes, it turned out, the bureau quietly used psychics to help them develop leads in investigations. Madame LaShonda Peyroux, it seemed, had developed quite the reputation by then. For all of her theatrics, Brenda had proved startlingly adept and accurate as a medium. Two agents wanted to know: Did she have any sense as to who might have mailed envelopes full of anthrax to Senator Tom Daschle’s office and NBC News?

  In its panic, in its grief, in its insomnia, a reeling nation turned not just to its vast cache of pharmaceuticals and booze, but to its psychics—particularly, to the serene Jamaican woman with the caramelized voice who reassured them that their murdered loved ones, did, in fact, live on in another realm.

  The Channeling Channel anointed Brenda its “national spokes-psychic” and emblazoned her face on billboards high above freeways in Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles. Newspapers across the country began running a syndicated column with Madame LaShonda Peyroux’s picture and byline. She appeared (always in character) on several late-night talk shows. QVC, for a brief period, carried an “exclusive, limited” line of Madame LaShonda Peyroux’s “authentic” Jamaican hot sauce and “homemade” jerk seasonings. Joey and I saw her gap-toothy photo on the front pages of supermarket tabloids: “Madame LaShonda Peyroux’s Psychic Forecast for 2003! Make the Most of Your Personal Past Lives!”

  “Wow,” Joey said, staring at her pixilated grin, “She’s really making a killing off that bit, isn’t she?”

  The fact that I was friends with such a celebrity eventually became my children’s favorite and most-respected thing about me.

  Not surprisingly, however, the more famous Brenda got, the less we saw of each other. I told myself it was because she had grown so busy—we were now worlds apart—what could she possibly want with me anymore—blah, blah. Though in my dirty little heart, I knew better.

  The last time we’d gotten together, Brenda had been in Chicago for a talk show; I’d driven five hours from Michigan to spend the evening with her afterward. Brenda arrived at the Drake looking slightly unreal in her television makeup, apologizing profusely for her lateness, clad in a leopard-print coat and saucer-sized black sunglasses that at once redacted her face yet marked her unmistakably as a celebrity.

  “Mon Dieu, I’m so happy to see you,” she said, hugging me tightly. “Finally. What do you say we go to Gibson’s for steak? Courtesy of the Channeling Channel, of course.” While we were waiting for our table, I swallowed one Hennessy, then another. She turned to me on her barstool and clasped my hands warmly in both of hers. “So, milady. Talk to me. How are you? How’s Monsieur Joey? The kids?”

  “Oh, Brennie.” Her coat alone, I suspected, cost more than our monthly mortgage payments. “You don’t want to hear about my boring little life.” That morning back in Michigan, a shelf in our pantry had collapsed. Three jumbo jars of marinara sauce from Costco had smashed into thousands of little pieces of glass, splattering and staining everything. While I’d been down on my knees scrubbing up the jagged, acidic mess, Austin’s kindergarten teacher had called to say she was concerned that he was having trouble forming letters.

  I signaled the waiter for a refill.

  “Please. I’m not here to be entertained,” Brenda said. “I’m here for the real. Seriously. Talk to me, Donna.”

  Reluctantly, I started to explain about Austin being tested for dyslexia. A large blond woman charged over. “I’m so sorry. I am so sorry,” she said breathlessly, honing in on Brenda. “But I have to ask. I just bet my girlfriend over there. Are you Madame LaShonda Peyroux?”

  Three more times during dinner, we were interrupted at our table. With an apologetic sigh, Brenda set down her fork and dutifully signed autographs. Politely, she listened to fans recount word-for-word how she’d predicted something that had subsequently come true for them (And just like you said, he got accepted to Purdue University the very next week! Two years later, I was promoted to manager!). She’d ordered an astonishingly expensive bottle of Silver Oak Cabernet, and I poured myself one glass, then another, then a third. I refilled Brenda’s glass, too, as she nodded and smiled. “Please,” a fan pleaded with her. “Do the voice! Do the voice!”

  Finally, Brenda sighed. “Hey, do you mind switching?” Awkwardly, we traded seats so that I was now sitting on the banquette. Once she had her back to the room, the interruptions ceased. It came as an enormous reprieve. “Okay, so. Listen,” Brenda said finally, leaning in. “I’ve got some big news. News you, in particular, will appreciate. Now, it’s very preliminary—and it might not happen—but. You know the one-woman show I wrote, based on all the different characters who’ve called in to the hotline? Well, I’m currently in negotiations with HBO. The Steppenwolf Theatre here, they’ve got this New Plays Initiative? The plan is to perform the show here first as a sort of trial run, then adapt it for television.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s really something.” I smiled at her intensely. I was very drunk, I realized.

  “And I’ll be playing all the characters myself, Donna. Writing, producing, starring—all of it! An entire one-woman enterprise!”

  “Well, wow again,” I said. “Yes. Yay for you.” Even though my glass was half full, I poured some more wine into it.

  “I mean, Donna.” She pressed her hand to her throat. “This is huge. This is what parlays me into serious actress territory. And as a black woman? Usually, it’s, like, there’s a quota. ‘Well, we’ve already got Anna Deavere Smith.’ This is it, sweetie! My proverbial big break! We have to celebrate!”

  I signaled the waiter for a second bottle of Silver Oak Cabernet, though I found I could barely taste it. As Brenda elaborated on the details—what her agent said, the concept, the money—I found myself engaging a little trick that I used to do as a child where I tried to hear words merely as collections of phonetics, peeled away from all meaning. Once…once, I had been up onstage, of course, writhing ecstatically in the white-hot spotlight; once, audiences had applauded for me. And the more Brenda smiled her dazzling smile, and gripped my hand across the tablecloth, and informed the waiter, “Yes, we’re having dessert!” the more I found myself feeling sickened and reeling. As soon as Brenda excused herself to the ladies’ room, I swallowed the rest of my wine in a single glug, wobb
led to my feet, and staggered over to one of the tables where her fans were finishing up their steaks. “I’ll just have you know,” I announced, “that Jamaican accent of hers? I did it first. In college. And her first callers on her show? All of those characters, all of them were me. Look at you, fawning over her. You’re pathetic. Pathetic fucking nobodies, that’s who you are. Nobodies and fucking sycophants.”

  The minute I stumbled back to our booth and slammed myself down onto the banquette, I was overcome with shame and self-loathing. I was a terrible, ugly person. When Brenda returned from the restroom, I told her I thought I had food poisoning and needed to go back to the hotel. Grabbing my purse, I polished off the remainder of the wine and handed my glass to a busboy on my way out. After that, my memory was sketchy: a town car, a piano bar, lights binging above a gilded elevator.

  Back in Michigan afterward, I could barely watch HBO for fear of coming across some news about Brenda’s show. Like a baby who thinks that if she covers her eyes, the world disappears, I secretly hoped that if I simply ignored Brenda’s success, it might just go away. When the phone rang late at night sometimes, I found myself tensing, though, invariably, it turned out not to be her.

  Nobody ever talks about the breakup of a friendship. It can feel as haunting and painful as the end of any romance. For months, I was relieved not to have contact with Brenda. And yet, she was also a phantom limb. The echo of her presence—and my longing for her—never fully vanished, either.

  Now, in the Laundromat, Brenda’s old home phone number rang and rang. Outside, a garbage truck ground by. A jackhammer started. I was just about to hang up when there came a sudden click: “Hello? Mom, is that you?”

  “Brenda?” Though I hadn’t meant to, I hesitated. “It’s me. Donna. Donna Koczynski.”

  “Wow. Birthday Girl. I don’t believe it.” I heard a snap. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “You were?” Well du-uh. What did I expect? She was psychic.

  “Well, sure, when I saw it was October 6 this morning. Joyeux anniversaire, mon amie. Wow. Donna. Talk about a blast from my past.”

  In my head, I’d rehearsed an opening. Adopting a light, generous tone, I’d planned to say, “Shylock, it’s Dreadlock,” or “Bonjour, milady.” Yet the moment I heard Brenda’s familiar, Brahmin voice, it was like the saddest violin chord plucked within me. “Oh. Brenda. You’re there. I am so glad. God—I’m so sorry, Bren—I didn’t mean to call you like this. It’s just—hey, guess what? Guess where I happen to be? New York City. The Big Apple. All by myself.”

  “You’re here? Right now?”

  “Just footloose and fancy-free. A girl’s weekend. Just for one. I don’t really have a plan yet—you know me, all wild and spontaneous. Rock ’n’ roll! God, I can’t fucking believe you remembered my birthday, Bren. You know you’re the only one who did?”

  “Donna?” Brenda interrupted, not unkindly. “Sweetie, have you been drinking?”

  I felt a wallop of shame. Of course, Brenda had only ever known me as a drunk. A vague memory stirred like a fish beneath the surface from our evening in Chicago.

  “No, no, Bren. I was just out driving, you know? Just going along in the car, and the Ramones came on the radio—‘Rockaway Beach’?—or a different one, but it was so funny—it was like this message, you know? To go to New York—and I was thinking of you, Bren, the entire time— It was like you were there beside me, for some reason—and I just really wanted to see you, you know? I mean, oh, God, Bren. I’m sorry that I’ve been so out of touch, I’ve been a bad friend— It’s just, I slept in my car—and I ate all these chicken wings—”

  “Okay, okay. Hang on a minute,” Brenda said distractedly. “Donna, I want you to do something. Take a deep breath. Can you do that for me? Inhale?”

  Over the phone, I nodded. I took a deep breath.

  “Okay. Good. Now, exhale, slowly.”

  Again, I obeyed.

  “Now. Tell me: Where are you?”

  “You mean, literally?”

  “Literally.”

  I glanced around. A woman in a hairnet and flip-flops was bent over a dryer, shoveling hot clothes into a mesh cart.

  “A Laundromat. Somewhere near Rockaway Beach? I don’t know what it’s called. Wash’n’Dry, I think?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Brenda exhaled. “There’s no way we’re meeting there. Can you access Google Maps or a GPS?”

  “I’m at a pay phone. My cell died. I’m sorry, Bren. I know it’s last-minute.”

  “But you’ve got a car?” For a moment, she seemed to put the phone down and I heard some whispering and a faint clicking. “Look, I’ve only got an hour or two this morning,” she said when she returned. “I’m going to give you directions. Waze is telling me that with traffic, it’ll take you about an hour. Do you have something to write with?”

  I yanked a flyer off the bulletin board, dug in my purse for a pen. The one time I’d visited Brenda in New York, years ago, she’d been living in a luxury condominium on the thirty-second floor at the very tip of Manhattan. I could see the Statue of Liberty from her living room. The interior was bone-white, all clean lines and stark, modernist furniture. Although I’d joked to Joey that it looked like it been decorated by a Swedish gynecologist, I was secretly awestruck how elegant her life was. Now, Brenda had moved up even farther on the success ladder; her new address was on nothing less than Park Avenue.

  When I arrived, she instructed, I was to double-park and ring upstairs. She’d come down to direct me to the garage herself. “Okay. This is workable. We’ll have a birthday breakfast,” she said. “Sorry, but you’ve caught me at a really crazy time.”

  “Oh, Bren. Thank you. I mean it. Thankyouthankyouthankyou.”

  In the background, I heard sirens. “Okay then.” She took a deep breath. “Godspeed, milady.”

  Hanging up the pay phone, I cleaned myself up as best I could in the ladies’ room. I looked terrible. My face was like melted putty, my eyes the color of lox. Maybe the Muslim women were really onto something, I thought: Just throw a big piece of cloth over yourself and be done with it. Maybe there was something truly liberating in that. I was ashamed of how disheveled I was going to appear to Brenda—of how little I had to show for myself after all these years—how wide the gap in our fortunes had continued to grow. I kept ruminating over that reading she’d done for me in college—she’d seen something significant in those cards—I was sure of it now—but she hadn’t been able to elaborate on it because I was too fucking stoned—Oh, I was a fool! Would Brenda remember what she’d predicted? She had to—Brenda was psychic. For all I knew, she’d known all along the radical missteps I was going to make, how far off course I’d been straying from myself.

  She had done so well for herself, Brenda. Despite all my past jealousy and begrudgery, I was enormously proud of her. She had, in fact, made it big; she was living out her grand, artistic dreams. Certainly, one of us should. Root, root, root for the home team: What else was there in the end? Maybe this was getting older. Maybe this was sobriety.

  My fabulous, famous, long-forsaken best friend. Long ago, she’d predicted a critical breakdown in my life. Now, I could only hope she’d remember what she’d foreseen for me—and maybe, just maybe, how I could fix the mess I had made.

  Chapter 7

  Driving through New York City was like electroshock therapy. I’m sorry, but who the hell decides to push a burrito cart diagonally across a four-lane expressway while wearing headphones and talking on their cell? By the time I reached Manhattan, I was shattered. I passed an office building resembling a giant chunk of rebar, then a battery of brutalist high-rises. An elevated track loomed overhead. It was obvious I’d written down the wrong house number entirely because when I arrived at what was supposed to be Brenda’s address, there was only a liverish tenement, old air-conditioning units hanging out its windows like tongues.

  A heavyset woman trundled by, pulling a large vinyl suitcase behind her. “Excuse me?” I called out
. “I’m trying to find Park Avenue?”

  She glanced at me with tortoise-like indifference. A gold plastic crucifix hung around her neck on what looked like red yarn. “You on it.”

  “But—” I’d seen Park Avenue before in photos, in movies. “Is this, you know, the Park Avenue? Is there, maybe, another one someplace?”

  “Hmph.” A look of contempt settled across her face. “You hear that?” she announced to no one in particular. “White lady here wants to know if there’s another Park Avenue.”

  Finally, I put on my hazards and climbed out of the Subaru. A train rumbled and clanked somewhere above. I didn’t know what else to do except look in the building to see if it offered some sort of clue, but the front door was locked. Peering into the vestibule, all I could see was a narrow greenish corridor, subaquatic-looking in the murk. A horrible thought struck me: Had Brenda given me a fake address? In college, we used to give out bogus phone numbers all the time to guys we weren’t interested in. Then I noticed a line of buzzers by the doorframe. Beside 5C was a piece of masking tape reading PEEBLES.

  A sense of foreboding came over me. Ringing the bell, I half expected the building to detonate. Instead, a voice crackled over the intercom: “Donna? Hey, I can’t come down right now. Go two blocks farther north, hang a right, and you’ll see a garage called CJ’s.”

  CJ’s Body Shop wasn’t a garage so much as a lot fenced with razor wire. After I parked, I gathered up my drugs and my Walmart bag full of underwear and stuffed them into my guitar case—though I left the nine boxes of shoes in the backseat. Fuck it. Let somebody steal them. Happy Halloween.

  When I arrived at the fifth floor of the tenement (a walk-up), Brenda’s door was propped open with a tennis shoe. In a high-ceilinged living room, a pull-out sofa bed lay open and unmade, a pile of dirty sheets clumped on the floor. A wall of shelves was crammed with books, extension cords, coffee mugs, piles of old Vogue and O magazines, little wooden puzzles in the shapes of fantastical animals, stained glass candles, intricate sculptures of body parts: mandibles, kidneys, ears; clear-plastic storage containers stuffed with office supplies and bungee cords, a faded blue-and-maize felt flag reading MICHIGAN. Most disturbingly, a life-sized replica of a human skeleton hung suspended from a hook in the corner like a cadaverous mobile. Someone had draped a Harry Potter cape over it and an old gold-and-violet Hermès scarf that I recognized as Brenda’s from our college days.