Attack of the Theater People (22 page)

Thirty-two

I look across First Avenue,
where Natie’s still on the phone, or appears to be. Traffic zooms past. I wave my arms at him, pointing to the building, and making a series of gestures I hope communicates that Chad has come home and Hung needs to get out now. Natie waves back in a way I cannot interpret.

The light changes and I dash across the street in time to see Natie hang up the phone.

“Were you talking to Hung?” I ask.

“Yeah, he—”

“Did you tell him to get out?”

“No, why?”

“Chad’s back.”

“What?” Natie says. “Why’d you tell me to hang up?”

“I wasn’t—Never mind.”

I grab the phone and dial Chad’s apartment, praying that the volume on his answering machine is turned up.

“Hung’s not going to answer,” Natie says. “I told him to call back in five minutes.”

“Shut up. I’ve got to think.” Chad’s answering machine message finishes and I say, “Chad, uh, hey, it’s Edward. I just called your office and they said YOU WEREN’T THERE so I figured I’D CATCH YOU AT HOME. So give me a call when you get there WHICH SHOULD BE ANY SECOND NOW.”

I dash across First Avenue again to rejoin Ziba at her phone booth. She sucks on a cigarette with unaccustomed energy.

“Any sign of him?” I ask.

“No.”

Five impossibly long minutes drip by. Any second I expect a squad car to pull up and Hung to be led away in handcuffs, which will lead inexorably to my being arrested and sent to jail, where I’ll be gang-raped in the group shower until my asshole becomes Moon River, which is to say, wider than a mile.

Ten minutes. What will I do if I go to jail? I can’t even pee in front of other people. I’ll die of a burst bladder. Or some awful urinary tract disease that comes from not peeing. Or else suffer the pain and indignity of forced catheterization.

Both Ziba and I are staring so intently at the building we don’t notice someone coming up behind us. That is, until we hear a voice say, “You’re under arrest.”

I take back what I said about peeing. I nearly wet my pants. Gritting my teeth, I turn around and there they are: Natie and Hung.

We all start talking at once:

“Jesus, you scared me.”

“You shoulda seen your face.”

“You boyzzz.”

“What happened? Did you hear my message?”

“You were like, ‘Waaaaah.’”

“Let’s get out of here before someone sees us.”

We flee the scene in a cab as Hung explains what happened.

“
Whell
,” he says, “it appears Miss Chad is packing up.”

“No,” I say. “That’s just the way he lives.”

“With moving boxes?”

“Moving boxes?”

“With a Swiss address.”

“A Swiss address?”

“Is there an echo in here?” Hung says.

“I don’t unders—”

“Ssh,” he says, placing a finger to my lips. “All will be revealed.” He goes on to explain that he did a quick scout around—Chad leaves whiskers in the sink and doesn’t lift the toilet seat when he pees—then started sifting through papers on the coffee table.

“What were they?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. Motioning to Natie, he adds, “I was just asking him when you told him to get off the phone.”

“I didn’t tell him to—”

“You went like this,” Natie says, making a cutting gesture across his throat. “That’s the Internationally Recognized Signal for ‘Cut it short.’”

“Yes, but then I pointed to the building and mimed Hung walking out.”

“Oh, I thought you were being a drum majorette.”

“Why would I be a drum majorette?”

“I wondered the same thing.”

“Hello?” Hung says, pointing to himself. “Attention must be paid.”

“Sorry.”

He continues. “Imagine the scene: I’m standing in the middle of the apartment when I hear a key in the lock….”

“Didn’t you hear my message?” I say.

“Shaddap. I work alone.”

“Sorry.”

“There I am, trapped like a…well, like something small and defenseless that gets trapped….”

“Mice?”

“Rats?”

“Bugs?”

“Forget it,” Hung says. “I’m not telling the story.”

We cajole him with repentant entreaties until he finally relents, like an opera diva who has to be talked into singing a little something at a party, then performs “The Ride of the Valkyries.”

“So there I am,” he says, “helpless, mere seconds to spare, and nowhere to hide but the closet, which, as you undoubtedly realize, I haven’t been in since I got caught blowing Conrad Birdie backstage at my high school production of
Bye, Bye, Birdie
. Anyway, I hop in, wrap myself in a yummy cashmere coat while you squawk on the answering machine. Then Chad picks up the phone and calls his travel agent to book a red-eye to Geneva on April eleventh.”

“That’s the night of my cousin’s party,” Ziba says.

Hung explains how he sneaked out when Chad went to the bathroom, taking the stairs to the basement, where a door led him out the back of the building, but I’m already playing chess in my mind. I’ve got no evidence to implicate Chad, and he’s preparing to flee the country.

Checkmate.

Luckily, Natie was the president of our high school chess club, such a Nudelman thing to do. By the time we’ve arrived at Sanderland and ordered pizza, he’s already devised a characteristically risky solution.

Based on the fact that I can’t get near Chad, Natie decides we need to lure him to us. And he wants to use Bruce Springsteen as bait. Not the real Bruce, of course—Almost Bruce. Since Ziba’s uncle has already hired Doug to convince a roomful of unsuspecting Persians he’s the real thing, Natie suggests we invite Chad to the party, telling him that Bruce needs a new broker. Then, while Doug is interviewing Chad (in a suitably dim room), he’ll get Chad to admit on tape that he’s used insider trading to get ahead. Hopefully without playing “Corner of the Sky.”

Hung and Ziba think it’s a terrific idea, despite its depending on Chad both accepting the invitation and admitting to a rock ’n’ roll legend that he broke the law. What’s more, we’re not even sure Doug is willing or able. I mean, Lucky McPuddles and the
Caribbean Destiny
are one thing, but this stunt requires some real acting. Still, it’s the only plan we’ve got.

Since Doug only receives his mail once a week when the ship returns to port, we agree not to call Chad until we confirm that Doug’s on board, so to speak. Plus, we don’t want to give Chad too much time to think about it. Unfortunately, that leaves me plenty of time.

Worse still, I get another letter from the SEC saying that they’re subpoenaing my bank account. My bank account! I don’t even know how to balance my checkbook, depending as I do on the bank machine to tell me what I’ve got. Anytime I’m overdrawn, I just close the account and start over again.

If the SEC knows where I bank, they must know where I work. So, once the March twentieth deadline passes, I simply stop ushering, choosing instead to sit at home with the shades drawn, leaping out of my skin every time I hear a rat in the wall. Which, in my apartment, is often. Willow tries to engage me in her usual late-night musings from her hammock in the living room (“What do the Chinese call Chinese food?” “Do you think Daffy Duck and Donald Duck are related?” “Why do we say ‘tuna fish’? We don’t say ‘chicken bird’”), but she might as well be a thousand miles away.

Meanwhile, to add insult to insanity, my father sends me an article about the returns on the investment in education. Apparently, by middle age physicians earn a sixteen percent return on the money they spent on school, surgeons eighteen, lawyers twenty-three percent, and businessmen twenty-six percent.

He underlines that last one.

Days become nights
and nights days. I spend all my time in the private tree house of my loft bed, subsisting on cereal and Agatha Christie mysteries. I have agitated, looping dreams where I wake up sweaty and panicked: I’m in high school and have forgotten to go to biology for a semester, and now I’ll never graduate; my teeth disintegrate into powder and fall out of my mouth; I’m chased by an angry mob until I fall off a cliff and hang on by the tips of my fingers.

I’m in Sedona. Everywhere I turn I see jagged mountains so red they look like they’ve been left outside to rust, a Martian landscape filled with hundreds of teepees. I approach one of them looking for my mother, but I can’t find the way in. I circle it, rubbing my hands along the leather, searching for the opening, but none of the flaps gives way.

“Mom?” I cry. “Where are you?”

I can hear her voice calling me—“Edward?”—but I can’t find her. Is she in this teepee? Or the next one? Or the next?

“Mom?”

“Edward?”

“Mom?”

“Edward?”

“Edward!”

I open my eyes, squinting to adjust to the light, and there she is, her mane of hair backlit like a halo.

Paula.

She clacks across the hardwood floor and throws open the shade, a shaft of white-hot daylight piercing the gloom. I recoil like a vampire.

“Rise and shine, rise and shine!” she singsongs, suddenly Southern.

I roll over.

“Oh, come on,” she says. “You know the line.”

I do. It’s from
The Glass Menagerie
. Paula and I played mother and son my sophomore year of high school.

“I’ll rise but I won’t shine,” I mutter.

“
Splendid
,” Paula says. “Now suit the action to the word.”

I prop myself up on my elbows to get a better look. Her fleshy body is poured into a yellow sundress the color of an Easter peep.

“Yikes,” I say, shielding my eyes. “Turn off your dress.”

She smiles. “Fuck you very much.”

I flop back on my pillow. “How’d you get in?”

“Willow loaned me her keys. We had lunch and she said you hadn’t left the house.”

“Did she say why?”

“If she did, I couldn’t tell. You know Willow.” She drums her hands on the side of my bed. “Now, up. Stop stalling.”

“I can’t.”

“You can and you will. We’re going to see Barbara Cook.”

“The singer?” I ask.

“No, the bag lady. Of course Barbara Cook the singer. Her one-woman show is in previews at the Ambassador. We’re going to second-act the matinee.”

“I don’t know,” I say, draping myself consumptively off the side of the bed.

Paula puts her hands on her hips, never a good sign. “Don’t make me climb up that ladder in heels.”

“We haven’t second-acted since that time we got kicked out of
Sunday in the Park with George
.”

“Please. That was
ages
ago.”

I glance at the window. So much sunshine. Do I risk being seen?

“I don’t think so.”

Paula stomps her tiny foot in frustration. “What is going on? Ever since you left Juilliard you’ve been so distant. You don’t return my calls. You don’t come see my shows.” She sniffs back her emotion. “Don’t you want to be friends anymore?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then why won’t you come?”

I look at my old friend, her moonbeam skin so pale it’s as if she’d bleed milk. Keeping a secret from her is almost physically painful.

Okay, maybe if I wear a hat.

The key to successful second-acting
is to blend in with the intermission crowd, which isn’t easy when one of you is wearing a battered Sinatra fedora and the other resembles a well-fed canary. It’s even more difficult when one of you is ranting about the faculty of the finest drama school in the country.

“I’ve lost nine goddamned pounds,” Paula says, “and
still
they’re on my ass to lose weight, which, considering the size of my ass, is a lot of ground to cover.” She fans herself with her
Playbill,
which is actually from
Starlight Express
, but the ad on the back is the same. “I’ve done everything I can, positively
everything
—taking those ridiculous pills, eating that wretched soup—and all it did was turn me into a jittering, farting madwoman. I tell you, Edward, there’s just no pleasing them. And now, with
The Music Man?
canceled and Marcus so depressed, I find dieting nearly impossible.”

“What?” I say. “You canceled
The Music Man?
”

“Didn’t I tell you? It just
imploded
. There are only two actors left who are even speaking to Marcus. I feel so sorry for him. He never should have tried to direct.” She shakes her head with pity. “If he could just find a role worthy of his talent.”

The nutty scent of a hot-pretzel vendor wafts by. “C’mon,” she says. “Let’s go in before I accost that pretzel man.”

As the rest of the audience returns to their seats, we see that we’re in luck, having our choice of empty rows in the back of the orchestra. While I’m glad to have my pick of seats, it also makes me mad. The choo-choo musical is selling out, but you can’t fill a theater to see a Broadway legend, the woman who originated the role of Marian in
The Music Man
thirty years ago, the woman who sang the E flat above high C in “Glitter and Be Gay” eight times a week in the original production of
Candide
.

Candide.
Of course. As we slip into a pair of seats on the aisle, I pull Doug’s postcard out of my pocket. It’s not like I carry it around with me everywhere; it just so happens that Doug got home last night and I’m going out to Jersey City tonight.