A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix) (9 page)

“And if it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have gone back into the theater. Which hasn’t exactly been easy, Swede. I have about as much chance of making it as a stage designer now as you have of finding Peter Dobrynin selling pencils on Columbus Avenue.

“Plus, you give me mixed signals. On the one hand you like having me around to help out with your work. On the other hand you shut me out of other things in your life. On the one hand you sleep with me once in a while. On the other, I’m highly expendable. I can be replaced, and I know it.

“So where do I stand? Huh? That’s why I want an answer to that one lousy question: Why don’t you love me?”

But rather than wait for an answer, he went on making his case.

“I’m a smart guy—right? Imaginative? Oh, I know I’m crazy, but I’m not dangerous, right? I’m crazy in an interesting way. We like the same things—the same actors, the same plays, the same food. And best of all, I . . .
know
you. I know how you feel, I know how you think, I even know
what
you’re thinking usually. So what the hell else is there? What’s missing?”

He leaned close to me, the pain so clearly etched in his face that I had to look away.

“So, Alice”—his voice was low and hoarse—“why don’t you?”

“Because, Tony,” I said at last, “there’s love . . . and there’s love.” And that’s all I could manage. I reached across the table and took his hand. Nothing more to say. But I knew I would take him home with me that night.

***

“I think that was the best night I’ve had since 1978,” Tony said sleepily.

The early-morning light looked muddy as it came in through my small bedroom window, more like the residue of the sun than the real thing.

“What happened in ’78?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

He reached for me under the blanket.

“It was great, Swede. We got it right, didn’t we?”

“Um,” I said.

I looked into Basillio’s eyes and smiled indulgently. I have never understood some men’s compulsion to rate sex, as if it were just another ball game with scores and hits and errors. Sure, it was good. But wasn’t it supposed to be? It was exciting and tender and all that. But there was no reason to quantify it, was there?

His hands were warm against my skin, moving, tightening. “I think we’re on a roll here, Swede,” he said, mouth close to my ear. “Let’s start the day right.”

I thought about it for a second. “Let’s not,” I said gently. “Time to get to work.”

I felt a thump at the foot of the bed. Sitting up, I was astonished to see Pancho regarding us—more accurately, regarding
Tony
—closely.

It would not have surprised me in the least to see Bushy there; after all, he often slept with me. And in fact, hurt that someone had supplanted him in my bed, Bushy had spent the night in the bathroom, next to the heating pipe. But Pancho! He had never sat still long enough to learn the pleasures of warm covers.

“Panch, what
is
it?” I asked.

His yellow eyes were fixed on Tony, gleaming madly.

“Is he going to kill me?”

“Don’t be silly,” I told Basillio. But Pancho did look almost lethal sitting there, the muscles in his flanks and shoulders twitching from time to time. Is it possible, I found myself musing, that Pancho believes Tony to be the enemy who has been pursuing him all his life in my apartment? The cause of his perpetual flights through the house? Is it possible that, having cornered his pursuer at last, he’s going to turn the tables on his enemy?

“Tony’s a friend,” I assured the cat, and reached out to stroke Basillio’s head.

But whatever Pancho had been planning, my sudden movement spooked him out of it. He flew off the bed and went zooming down the hallway.

“Your apartment is getting dangerous, Swede. Wonder how many guys have been trapped in here and eaten alive by that monster. And what does the vain one do—watch?” I made coffee and brought it to Tony in the shower. Over breakfast, we laughed a lot.

***

By nine o’clock we were at the Seventy-second Street entrance to Riverside Park. This ribbon of a park, which stretches four miles along the Hudson River, from where we stood up to Trinity Cemetery on One Hundred Fifty-third Street, has long been a haven for homeless people. They tend to congregate at the intersections where the park widens to absorb traffic circling onto Riverside Drive: at Seventy-second, Seventy-ninth, Eighty-sixth, and Ninety-sixth streets. In these sections of the park, there are labyrinths of tunnels and slopes and rock outcroppings.

The first two hours of our investigation that morning were futile. We talked to ten or twelve of the homeless, most of them staying warm in cartons or lean-tos under the viaduct at Seventy-second Street. None of them recognized the photos we showed them.

Our luck changed as we walked north on Riverside Drive. A fat man was panhandling at a bus stop around Seventy-fifth Street. He was doing it in a unique fashion. He had propped himself up against the bus shelter with the help of a single crutch, the better to expose one very ugly, swollen, and battered leg to the passersby. In his hand he held a styrofoam coffee cup, which jangled with change as he shook it. The exposed leg was supposed to induce sympathy, and it couldn’t have done otherwise—it was truly a horrible sight to behold.

The portly man was wearing one of those woolen stadium caps, on which was printed
SAN DIEGO CHARGERS
. He was a long way from San Diego. His beard was ragged and dirty and he wore several vests, randomly buttoned. His eyes were bloodshot, and there was a stench of sour wine about him.

“Excuse me, do you know this man?” Tony asked him, trying to keep a safe distance from the infected leg while still getting close enough to let the man get a good look at the photos. The fellow plucked one from Tony’s hand, turned Dobrynin’s face upside down, then said “Nope” and grinned nastily.

Angry, Tony pulled the photo away from him, righted it, and gave it back—this time accompanied by a ten-dollar bill.

The fat man stared at the money for a minute before pocketing it. “Lenny used to give me a fifty,” he said contemptuously.

“What?” Tony said, foregoing caution and edging a bit closer to the man and his leg.

“You knew Lenny?” I asked.

“He even used to give me a hundred sometimes.”

Another crazy turn in this crazy case. When Dobrynin had dropped out, he might or might not have gone around the bend. We didn’t know for sure. But everyone agreed that he had been broke. Yet if this man was to be believed, our “Lenny” had gone around handing out hundred-dollar bills.

The fat man only sighed when we pressed him for more information about Lenny. “Don’t ask me,” he dismissed us. “Talk to Fay. She knows more than I do.”

Fay, it turned out, “lived” near the boat basin. He pointed us in that direction, telling us to say that Harry had sent us. “Yeah, Harry,” he repeated impatiently. “That’s me. Just ask Fay.” And he went back to rattling his cup, the vile, puffy leg still shamelessly exposed.

We hurried along. Because it was winter, the only boats moored at the basin were houseboats. On the benches that lined the walkway to the water dozens of men lay sleeping, eating greasy lunches, smoking, drinking from bottles in paper bags. They all knew Fay. One directed us right to the hillock on the northern limit of the docking basin.

She was seated on the frozen ground, on folded newspapers. Next to her was a banged-up shopping cart filled with her possessions—or at least that’s what I assume they were. The sheer bulk of the cart’s contents was overwhelming. I didn’t study them very closely.

In fact, seeing Fay in another context, one might not have known immediately that she was one of the army of homeless. She was clean, quite presentable, but there was something discombobulated about her appearance nonetheless, and she wore a frightening amount of rouge. Her coat appeared to be a real fur, in decent shape, but upon closer inspection I could see that its collar had been taken from some other garment and haphazardly sewn on. On her feet were plush-lined bathroom slippers—odd enough in itself, considering the temperature—but under them were wildly mismatched men’s socks.

There was no question that Fay had known Lenny. The minute Tony flashed Dobrynin’s photograph, her eyes lit up in recognition. And in something else—love, perhaps. She took the photo and held it close to her cheek, almost cooing his name.

“Lenny! I’ve been waiting for him,” she said breathily. “Where
is
Lenny?”

We lied to Fay. Tony invented a story about Lenny’s having been hit by a car. We were old friends of Lenny’s, trying, he improvised, to gather some background information to help an attorney sue the driver of the automobile. Lenny would be well in a few months, Tony said. He was on the mend.

Fay’s distress at the news shamed me. But I couldn’t tell her the truth.

“I hope he gets back soon,” she finally said. “His babies are hungry. I don’t have the money to feed them.”

That one really stumped me.

“What babies are you talking about, Fay?” I managed to ask.

“
His
babies!” she replied brusquely. “He always gave me the money to buy food for them. Delicious food. Oh, he takes good care of those babies. Sends me over for the best stuff. Chicken Kiev’s their favorite.”

Basillio was taken with a violent coughing fit. He turned his back to us for a minute.

“Lenny gives me the money,” Fay continued, “and I go over to that Russian place to get their food.”

“You don’t . . . by any chance . . .” I asked haltingly, “mean . . . the Russian . . . Tea Room? On Fifty-seventh?”

“Yes,” she sniffed. “What do you think I mean? Grand food he gives them. And us, too. Lenny feeds us all. Now you just tell him those babies are hungry.”

When I asked her to take us to the babies, Fay was reluctant. “What for? You wanna hear ’em crying?”

A couple of our tens got her on her feet. Tony had handed me the money wordlessly, all the time shaking his head in wonderment.

We were led across the hillock, through one of the small stone tunnels that dot the park, and emerged in front of a large rock outcropping surrounded by an iron rail fence. Here we came to a halt.

“See any babies?” Tony asked me. “I don’t.”

Fay began to rummage around in her cart. At length she pulled out a huge stainless-steel spoon, something that I guessed they were still looking for at one soup kitchen or another.

She stepped up close to the fence and pulled the spoon noisily along the rails. It made quite a racket. She stepped away from the fence and smiled at us.

There was a blurry movement on the rocks on the other side of the fence, and then a big, battered tomcat came into view. He approached the fence slowly, as if each step were a hardship.

Then another cat appeared, this one a dingy calico. Then another. And another. They began to arrive in pairs after that. They kept coming and coming, in an unhappy procession. They all looked cranky and underfed. All expectant.

“See?” Fay said without satisfaction. “There’s all the hungry babies. See ’em?”

“Swede,” Tony whispered to me, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore. This is the last straw.”

I only half-listened to him. I was paying more attention to Fay, who went on, “And tell him the other ones are hungry, too. The ones up at a Hundred and Third. Tell Lenny we need some money right away.”

The desolate cats set up a wailing chorus.

“Oh, I can’t stand it when they cry!” Fay whined, stuffing the spoon back into the cart and starting to move off. She called back to us, “You tell Lenny, if he can’t come out here to leave some money in his apartment! I’ll go and pick it up!”

I rushed over to her, keeping up with her surprisingly energetic pace. “Just a minute!” I said. “Lenny has an
apartment
?”

Fay snorted. “Now look here, sister! Lenny is a gentleman! You ever know a gentleman who didn’t have a place? Why, he’s got a mansion! A big, blue mansion. I know . . . I been there.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the cats slowly moving off. The signal for food had sounded. They’d been called to supper. But they were going away hungry.

Chapter 15

While Fay was giving me directions to the “blue mansion,” Tony just stood nearby, whistling to himself. When I told him where we were off to he said this whole thing was getting insane, but I insisted we go looking for the apartment, which was reportedly on upper Broadway, on the border of Harlem.

We stopped at one of the many new watering holes “gentrification” had brought to the vicinity—this one at One Hundred and Twelfth Street. Tony wolfed down a hamburger while I had soup. The barstools were plush and comfortable, and the place was soothingly lighted. A jukebox in the back was playing a woman vocalist’s unusual—in fact, downright acidic—version of the old classic “Stay as Sweet as You Are.”

Tony’s skeptical head-shaking had only increased by then. It was as if he had a mosquito trapped in his ear.

“I know, Basillio, I know,” I told him. “We’re in Never-Never Land. But you said you were going to stay with me on this.”

“I’m staying!” he protested, chuckling. “I’m staying.”

We sat drinking for a while.

“You know what’s bothersome?” he asked a few minutes later. “I mean, what
else
is bothersome, putting to one side our close encounters of the third kind today.”

“What?”

“Isn’t it weird how all that stuff his so-called friends said about him is turning out to be worthless?”

“Explain what you mean,” I said, sipping my Bloody Mary, which was too sharp for my taste.

“Well, for openers, they all just
knew
that he had been a homeless derelict for the past three years. It turns out he had an apartment—excuse me, a ‘blue mansion.’ ”

“We don’t know that for sure, not yet, anyway. We’ll find out in a few minutes whether Fay was telling the truth about that.”

“Humph. And what about the money? The money everybody said he didn’t have. The friends told you he’d squandered it all—didn’t have a dime—that he hit them up for money. But he had enough for a mansion. He had enough to buy cat takeout from the Russian Tea Room!”

“You’ve got a point there, Tony.”

“And the way they all said he was an egotistical maniac, a user who lived only for his own perverse gratifications, whatever the hell they were. Turns out he went out of his way for some of these . . . poor unfortunates. Lavishing chicken Kiev on a gang of stray cats, for god’s sake! Sounds to me like he was on his way to sainthood.”

I nodded, not sure whether he was right on that last point. After all, as every actor knows, people are endlessly complex and contradictory. One trait does not a whole character make. A man can, theoretically, be a self-involved bastard yet still care about stray animals.

I gave up on my drink and ordered a cup of coffee. I thought of the cats in the park who had so suddenly appeared when Fay rasped that spoon across the railing. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Peter Dobrynin had been the Mother Theresa of the feline world just because he’d fed them expensive Russian cuisine. I don’t know why I felt that way. Maybe because stray cats who live in the park always do better than strays in abandoned buildings and alleys. It’s the latter whose existence is so sad and so problematical, so filled with terror and danger from vehicles and starvation—and heartless people. Those are the cats I wish he’d seen to first. There are countless numbers of them only a block outside the park. And they certainly don’t need gourmet food; all they need is commercial cat food.

Thinking about all the strays made me depressed. Over the years I had spent hundreds of hours with various short-lived volunteer programs, trying to rescue stray cats. It’s hard to catch the poor things, even those who are hurt or emaciated. And once you catch them it’s harder still to find homes for them, unless they’re kittens. And if you can’t place them—what then? Give them to the animal-welfare agencies? That often means death. I finished my coffee and pushed the cup away. If I stayed in the bar I would begin to remember specific strays. And I didn’t want to do that.

Tony and I walked uptown on Broadway, past the Columbia University campus, past the seminaries and music schools. We crossed under the elevated subway station on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, then turned west on One Hundred Twenty-sixth.

It was a dingy street of squat factory buildings one right after the other. I looked searchingly up the block. Then I heard Tony say, “Well I’ll be damned.”

We saw the blue building. At least, it had once been blue. The paint had come away from the brick in great hunks, and the structure was now a speckled blue-and-rust.

We entered through double steel doors and found ourselves in the small lobby, aged marble all around. The old building directory indicated that there were only two tenants remaining in the place: a metal-spinning firm on the second floor, and an auto-parts wholesaler. It didn’t appear that anyone lived in the building, just those two industrial tenants.

“What are you doing here?”

Tony and I whirled to the right, where the voice had come from. A gray-haired man in taped-together spectacles stood inside the open fire door. He was holding a plumber’s snake and some other implement I couldn’t name.

“Who are you?” he demanded, coming near us.

“Who are
you
?” I retorted, sounding equally suspicious.

“I’m the super,” he said, gripping the tools more tightly.

Tony spoke then, pleasantly. “We’re Lenny’s friends.”

At that the super relaxed, even treated us to a smile. Obviously, he liked Lenny.

“Where’s he been?” the super asked. “Haven’t seen him in a while.” Then a worried look crossed his face. “Something happen to him?”

Tony launched into essentially the same story he’d made up for Fay’s benefit. “Well . . . yes,” he answered, serious but not overly grave. “There was an accident. He’s in Beekman Hospital, downtown. But he’ll be okay.”

“Oh. Sorry to hear that,” the man said. “Lenny’s the best tenant I ever had—except when he brings those bag people around sometimes.”

“Yes,” Tony went on. “Lenny’s good people. He really cares, doesn’t he?”

I decided it was time for me to jump in. “I’m so relieved we were able to find you. Lenny didn’t have a thing on him when he was hit. No keys, no money, or anything. He wanted us to pick up a few clothes and things for him. Could you . . .?”

The super set his things on the floor, extracted an out-sized ring of keys from his back pocket, and led us up the stairs. When we’d reached the third floor we walked down a gloomy hallway, at the end of which there was a solitary door.

“Right here,” the super said, trying one key and then another until he’d found the right fit. He pushed the door open, switched on the light, and told us he’d meet us downstairs when we were ready to leave.

Basillio and I were equally dumbfounded by what we saw before us.

The room was brilliantly lit by a series of spotlights overhead. The floor, a beautiful parquet newly waxed and shining like a gem, had been coated, it seemed, with a gripping agent.

Dobrynin-Lenny had fitted the room out as a ballet studio, complete with a practice barre and a mirror that ran the length of one wall. There were two towering armoires in the room—both filled with leotards, toe shoes, leg-warmers, sweatpants, all sorts of dance paraphernalia—as well as a stereo system and a shiny black grand piano.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Tony mumbled as he looked around.

I walked along the opposite wall, looking at the mats and blankets scattered on the floor. No doubt, the bag people the super had mentioned stayed over once in a while.

“Swede, look at this!” Tony called. “There’s a video here in the VCR.”

I went over to join him. He was grinning. “I wonder what kind of stuff your friend liked to watch.”

“He wasn’t my friend, Basillio. I never met the man.”

Tony flicked switches to turn on the TV and set the videotape in motion. A moment later a couple appeared on the screen.

“Now, why doesn’t this surprise me?” he said, leering.

It was obviously a home-made video, shot, it quickly became clear, exactly where we were standing. The man and woman on the tape both had beautiful bodies—dancers’ bodies. And they were both completely naked.

“Is that the great Lenny . . . or should I say, Dobrynin?” Basillio asked, his eyes riveted on the screen.

“Yes,” I said.

The couple were dancing now, fluidly, wonderfully. It was eerily beautiful. I found myself shivering.

“Know who the woman is?”

I didn’t answer.

Tony looked up quickly at me, then turned back to the television set, his face up close to the screen. “Who is it, Swede? And what are they doing?”

I recognized what they were “doing,” thanks to some of those long-ago rehearsals I’d attended with Lucia Maury. They were dancing one of the early scenes from
Giselle.
Giselle and Albrecht execute four
ballotés
and then a
balloné
and a
grand jeté.
I could almost hear the old rehearsal mistress calling out the steps.

“Come
on
, Swede,” Tony demanded, his voice full of urgency, as if the video were disturbing him in some way.

“Do you know who that woman is or not?”

“Her name’s Melissa Taniment,” I said.