South of Broad (15 page)

PART TWO

CHAPTER 8
Knock on the Door

T
here is a knock on my door. I check my calendar: it is April 7, 1989. I have written down no appointments on my schedule today. Everyone in the newsroom knows I close my office door only when I am writing a column, and I consider those hours of creation sacrosanct. On my door, I have a printed sign hanging from a picture hook that says, LEO KING IS HARD AT WORK ON THE COLUMN THAT HAS MADE HIM FAMOUS IN CHARLESTON WHILE THE REST OF HIS COLLEAGUES LABOR IN WELL-DESERVED OBSCURITY. IN OTHER WORDS, I AM BUSY WRITING LITERATURE THAT WILL NEVER DIE, AS LONG AS THERE ARE MEN AND WOMEN WHO LOVE THE HUMAN SPIRIT. KEEP YOUR SORRY BUTTS OUT OF HERE UNTIL I’VE FINISHED. Then I signed it with a flourish, “That godlike man, Leo King.” My colleagues have defaced the sign with the vilest graffiti over the years, making it increasingly difficult to read. The knock grows louder and more insistent, and I can hear a crowd gathering outside. I stop typing, make a note to myself about the train of ideas that is now derailed, and walk to the door. I fling it open, fully prepared to shoo away the intruder.

A woman stands outside my door, and her presence in the newsroom could not have surprised me more. The woman’s face is well known all over the world; her exquisitely proportioned body has appeared on dozens of movie posters half-clothed in both lingerie and animal skins, and in one infamous shot involving a rock python as she strutted her admirable stuff in her birthday suit. She has no appointment nor is she in the habit of needing to make them. She is wearing a white dress that barely seems sufficient to contain the voluptuous curves of a body that now seems old-fashioned when most actresses are intent on looking underfed. She had obviously vamped her way across the newsroom, attracting twenty or so curious souls, mostly rutting males, but several starstruck females who are mesmerized by all things Hollywood. If you do not know that Sheba Poe is a movie star in 1989, you are admitting to a monastic life. There is a very good chance you don’t subscribe to the
News and Courier
, which reports every Sheba-related event, no matter how outlandish or scandalous. Sheba is the only major movie star who has ever come out of Charleston, South Carolina. We cover our dream girl with the reverence we think she deserves. Charleston never did Mexican food very well, but when we exported Sheba to the West Coast, we sent them a fiery jalapeño-stuffed enchilada.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I say. “But I’m writing a column, and I’m working on deadline.”

Behind her, the reporters boo me roundly. The crowd has begun to swell as the rumor of Sheba’s appearance makes its way through the building. I can think of nothing more combustible than Sheba and a crowd.

“How do I look, Leo?” she asks, playing to the crowd. “Be honest.”

“Good enough to eat.” I regret the words as soon as I speak.

“Promises, promises,” she says, and the crowd roars in appreciation. “Introduce me to some of your friends, Leo.”

I want to defuse the situation quickly, so I choose a few faces in the crowd.

“That horny one is Ken Burger, down from the Washington bureau. Beside him is Tommy Ford. Over there is Steve Mullins. That’s Marsha Gerard who’s about to ask you to sign her bra. Over there’s Charlie Williams, who wants you to sign part of his body, but the part’s so small you’ll just have to initial it.”

“I’ll write a love letter on it, Charlie,” Sheba says.

The movie critic, Shannon Ringel, cries out, “I better get a damn interview, Leo. Don’t hog her.”

“Are you the bitch who panned my last movie?” Sheba says, silencing the room. She possesses a voice that can meow or send a pride of lions out to hunt water buffalo. There is no “Here kitty, kitty” in her question.

Shannon gamely says, “I think you’ve done far more distinguished work.”

“A critic,” Sheba sneers. “I call pest control every time I meet one.”

“Sweet Sheba,” I say. “Please excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Poe has had a long day making lifelong enemies wherever she drifts. And I still have a column to write.”

“Leo and I were high school sweethearts,” Sheba says.

“We were not,” I reply.

“He’s hung like a rhino.”

“I am not.” I quickly lead Sheba into my office and shut the door.

Sheba has developed the planetary ego that keeps her star bright among the Milky Way of ambition that brings the prettiest girls and handsomest boys spilling into Hollywood every year, an endless river of hormones and wishfulness that is always for hire. But when I shut the door, Sheba sloughs off her diva role and transforms herself into the teenage girl who brought so much joy and mystery into my senior year of high school. She pinches me on the butt as I walk back to my desk, but does it in a playful, not a seductive, manner.

“You’re still uptight about sex, Leo,” she says.

“Some things never change,” I say. “I haven’t heard from you in six months. None of us has.”

“I was making a movie in Hong Kong with my new husband, the moody auteur.”

“I haven’t met your last two husbands.”

“Believe me, you didn’t miss anything. I just came from the Dominican Republic, where I got the quickest of quick divorces.”

“So Troy Springer is history?”

“His real name is Moses Berkowitz, which is fine, but he had a mother who made Mrs. Portnoy look like June Cleaver or that Swedish broad from
I Remember Mama
. The bitch changed her name to Clementine Springer. I caught her sonny boy in bed with the sixteen-year-old actress who was playing my daughter in the movie.”

“Sorry, Sheba.”

“Men. Say something in defense of your sex,” she challenges me.

“We’d be fine ’cept they gave us dicks.”

The crowd has not broken up completely outside of my doorway, and I can still hear the murmuring of disappointment among the reporters as they begin to drift back to their desks. As I listen to Sheba, who begins to talk easily to me, I study her at my leisure. It is easy to forget about Sheba’s thoughtless cargo of pure sex appeal. Her voice, husky and familiar, sounds like one of the most seductive forms that lovemaking can take. She has taken possession of the entire building by the simple fact that she entered it.

Only one person has noticed that her entrance was unauthorized. There is a peremptory knock on my door without a trace of caution behind it. Blossom Limestone, the gladiatorial gatekeeper who checks visitors in and out of the newspaper with all the efficiency of the marine drill instructor she once was, has muscled her way through the crowd and walked right into my office. She places a muscular black hand on Sheba’s right shoulder, but looks at me when she scolds, “Your fancy friend did not go through proper channels—again.”

“She hasn’t been here in three years, Blossom,” I say.

“She can sign in at the front desk just like everyone else.”

“I love the feel of your hand on my shoulder, Blossom, darling,” says Sheba, taking the large hand and holding it against one of her own ample breasts. “I’ve always loved the gentle lesbian touch. They and they alone know how to make a woman feel right. They get right to the point—no gamesmanship, no role-playing.”

Blossom snatches her hand away as though it touched a burning coal. “Lesbian?” she asks. “I got three sons, and you’s barren as a dump truck last time I checked. Now, sign this piece of paper and the time you got here.”

Sheba signs with a flourish, her signature taking up four spaces on the log sheet, and there is boldness even in its illegibility. Then she says, “I came in where the delivery trucks load up. My brother and I used to help Leo on his paper route. I was a regular here long before you came, Blossom, angel.”

“So I’ve heard,” Blossom says. “Sign in with me next time, Miss Poe, just like everyone else.”

“I thought it was so cute the last time,” Sheba says. “You sold my signature for fifty bucks. Or was it sixty?”

Blossom looks shaken by the revelation, then recovers. “I sell it or someone steals it.”

Again, a small crowd has gathered at the doorway watching the fireworks between the two strong-willed women. Sheba has not noticed the audience until she turns around and sees their hushed, expectant faces. I prepare myself for the worst, and the worst comes as I am forming the thought.

“Let me sign your left tit, Blossom. No telling what you could get for that,” Sheba says.

The reporters by the door exhale audibly. They would have laughed out loud except for their deep respect for Blossom, who fields the responses of the crazies who charge her reception desk at the first appearance of an article that offends their paranoid sensibilities. I can see that the remark has cut Blossom deeply. “She didn’t mean that, Blossom. Sheba can’t help playing to the crowd. She’s a nice girl.”

“She might be a lot of things, Leo. A nice girl is not one of them.” Blossom snorts. “She’s come back to you because she’s after something. You watch yourself.”

I clap my hands and order, “All of you, get out of here. I’ve got a column to write for Sunday and a deadline to get it in.”

When we are alone again, Sheba looks up with the only expression of hers that can pass for shyness. Then both of us laugh and hug like a brother and sister. “I’m sorry I act like that, Leo.”

“I’ll get over it.”

“I do it to everybody, I promise. You’re not the only one,” she whispers in my ear.

“I know, Sheba. You can be anything you want around me. I know who you are; don’t forget that. Why are you in town?”

“Besides the fact that I’m washed up? Used up like a snot rag? My agent hasn’t had a call for a starring role in over a year. I’m thirty-eight. For a woman in Hollywood, that’s like being a thousand.”

“That may all be true,” I say. “But that’s not why you’re here.”

“I came back to see my old friends,” she says. “I need to get back to what I once was, Leo; surely you can understand that.”

“But none of us has seen you more than ten times since we graduated.”

“But I call. You’ve got to admit I’m good about checking in by phone.”

I cover my eyes with my hands. “You phone drunk, Sheba. You phone stoned. Do you know you asked me to marry you the last time you called?”

“What did you say?”

“That I’d divorce Starla and gladly marry you.”

“You and Starla aren’t really married, and you never have been.”

“I’ve got the papers to prove it,” I say.

Sheba says with a cruel, bladelike quality, “It was a sham love affair. A worse than sham marriage. And it’s caused you to live a sham life.”

“You can’t fool me. You came back just to inflate my ego,” I say. “Before you arrived, Sheba, I was feeling kind of successful here in Charleston.”

“None of my Hollywood friends has ever heard of you.”

“Are they the same ones who quit calling your agent?”

“The same ones.”

“You’ve been nominated for two Academy Awards for best actress,” I say. “You won an Oscar for best supporting actress. That’s a great career.”

“But I didn’t win best actress. A nomination means zip for your career. It’s like choosing to sleep with the gofer or the best boy on location, instead of shacking up with the leading man.”

“You’ve done okay with leading men,” I say.

She smiles. “Married four of them. Slept with all of them.”

“Can I quote you?” I ask, moving toward my typewriter.

“Of course not.”

“Okay, Sheba. I ask very little of you. Just give me enough salacious gossip and unexpected rumor so that I can knock off a column for Sunday. Then we can blow this joint and get drunk with our friends.”

“Ha!” she says. “You’re using me. Exploiting my world fame.”

“It hurts me you’d even imply such a thing.” My fingers hang over the keys of my typewriter.

“No one knows about my divorce from Troy Springer. That’s breaking news,” she says.

“Was he your fourth or fifth husband?” I ask while typing.

“Why’re you so fixated with numbers?”

“Accuracy. You’ll often find that among reporters. Why’re you getting divorced from Troy?
People
magazine called him one of the handsomest men in Hollywood.”

“I bought a vibrator that has more personality and does its job better.”

“Give me something I can use in a family newspaper,” I say.

“Our careers had been growing apart, especially after I found him banging the kid in the hot tub.”

“You took that as a bad sign?”

“Yeah, I was trying to get pregnant at the time,” she says.

“Can you remember all of your ex-husbands’ names?”

“I can’t even remember what half of them looked like.”

“The worst person you ever met in Hollywood?”

“Carl Sedgwick, my first husband,” she says without hesitation.

“The best person?”

“Carl Sedgwick again. That’s how illusory and contradictory that city is.”

“What keeps you there?”

“The belief that I’ll one day be given the best role ever handed to an American actress.”

“What keeps you from going mad while you wait?”

“Big peckers. Strong drink. A ready access to pharmaceuticals.”

“You can get the liquor here in Charleston.”

“A martini tastes a lot better when you hear the Pacific crashing into the cliffs below you.”

“Can I just say you’re dating a pharmacist?” I ask.

“You most certainly cannot!”

“What do you miss most about Charleston?”

“I miss my childhood friends, Leo. I miss the girl I was who first drove into this city.”

“Why?”

“Because I had not laid waste to my own life then. I think I was a nice girl then. Didn’t you think so, Leo?”

I look up at her, and still see the lost girl she is talking about. “I never saw a girl like you, Sheba. Before or since.” As I watch her, the journalist inside me wages war against the young boy who was Sheba’s first friend in this city. The journalist is a cold man, bloodless in the pursuit of his profession, paid to be a voyeur and not a participant in the passion plays I enter with my notebook open. Detachment is my theme. As I watch her open up her wounds, I do not mourn for the girl she misplaced on the day we met, but instead for the disappearance of that offbeat, miserable boy who took a batch of benne wafers across the street to welcome a pair of long-suffering twins to the neighborhood. In turning myself into a reporter, I extinguished all the fires that boy displayed as proof of his worth and humanity. Though I can be objective about Sheba’s life, I have long ago lost any ability in taking stock of my own. She continues to talk with a nakedness of spirit I have never seen in Sheba.