Tell-All (5 page)

Within the rim of the toilet swirls a tide of affection and concern, signed by
Edna Ferber, Artie Shaw, Bess Truman
.
The handwritten notes and cards, the telegrams reading,
If there’s anything I can do
… and,
Please don’t hesitate to call
. The torn scraps of these sentiments spin higher and higher toward the brim of disaster, preparing to overflow, to run over the lip of the white bowl and flood the pink marble floor. These affectionate words … I’ve torn them into bits, and then torn those into smaller bits, scraps. All of my covert work is about to be exposed. These, all of the condolences I’ve destroyed during the past few days.

From the downstairs powder room, echoing up through the silence of the town house, the sounds of Miss Kathie’s gorge rises with beef
Stroganoff
and
Queen Charlotte
pears and veal
Prince Orloff
, heaving up from the depths of Miss Kathie, triggered by the tip of a silver spoon touching the back of her tongue, her gag reflex rejecting it all.

“Fuck ’em,” Miss Kathie says between splashes, her movie-star voice hoarse with bile and stomach acid. “They don’t care,” she says, purging herself in great thunderous blasts.

The infamous advice
Busby Berkeley
gave to
Judy Garland
, “If you’re still having bowel movements, you’re eating too much.”

Upstairs, the shredded affections rise, about to spill out onto the bathroom floor. Spiraling upward toward disaster. At the last possible moment I drop to my knees on the pink marble tile. I plunge my hand into the churning mess, the cold water lapping around my elbow, then swirling about my shoulder as I burrow my hand deep into the toilet’s throat, clearing aside wet paper. Clawing, scratching a tunnel through the sodden, matted layer of endearments. The soft mass of sentiments I can’t see.

Downstairs, Miss Kathie heaves out great mouthfuls of gâteau
Pierre Rothschild
. Bombe de
Louise Grimaldi. Aunt
Jemima
syrup.
Lady Baltimore
cake. The wet, bubbling shouts of undigested
Jimmy Dean
sausage.

The plumbing of this old town house shudders, the pipes banging and thudding to contain and channel this new burden of macerated secrets and gourmet vomit.

A “Hollywood lifetime” later, the water in the toilet bowl begins to recede.

The shredded scraps of love and caring, the kind regards sink from sight. Freshwater chases the final words of comfort into the sewers. Those lacy, embossed, engraved and perfumed fragments, the toilet gulps them down. The water swallows every last word of sympathy from
Jeanne Crain
, the florid handwriting of
Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret
, from
John Gilbert, Linus Pauling
and
Christiaan Barnard
. In her bathroom, the purge of names and devotion signed,
Brooks Atkinson, George Arliss
and
Jill Esmond
, the spinning flood disappearing, disappearing, the water level drops until all the names and notes are sucked down. Drowned.

Echoing from the downstairs powder room comes the hawk and spit sound of my Miss Kathie clearing the bile taste from her mouth. Her cough and belch. A final flush of the downstairs commode, followed by the rushing spray noise of aerosol room deodorant.

A “New York second” goes by, and I stand. One step to the sink, and I calmly begin to scrub my dripping hands, careful to pick and scrape the words
sorrow
and
tragedy
from where they’re lodged beneath each fingernail. Already, the lovely bouquet of pink roses and yellow lilies poisoned with salt water, the petals begin to wither and brown.

The next sequence depicts a montage of flowers arriving at the town house. Deliverymen wearing jaunty, brimmed caps and polished shoes arrive to ring the front doorbell. Each man carries a long box of roses tied with a floppy velvet ribbon, tucked under one arm. Or a cellophane spill brimming full of roses cradled the way one would carry an infant. Each deliveryman’s opposite hand extends, ready to offer a clipboard and a pen, a receipt needing a signature. Billowing masses of white lilac. Delivery after delivery arrives. The doorbell ringing to announce yellow gladiolas and scarlet birds-of-paradise. Trembling pink branches of dogwood in full bloom. The chilled flesh of hothouse orchids. Camellias. Each new florist always stretches his neck to see past me, craning his head to see into the foyer for a glimpse of the famous
Katherine Kenton
.

One frame too late, Miss Kathie’s voice calls from offscreen, “Who is it?” The moment after the deliveryman is gone.

Me, always shouting in response, It’s the Fuller Brush man. A Jehovah’s Witness. A Girl Scout, selling cookies. The same
ding-dong
of the doorbell cueing the cut to another bouquet of honeysuckle or towering pink spears of flowering ginger.

Me, shouting up the stairs to Miss Kathie, asking if she expects a gentleman caller.

In response, Miss Kathie shouting, “No.” Shouting, less loudly, “No one in particular.”

In the foyer and dining room and kitchen, the air swims with the scent of phantom flowers, shimmering with sweet, heavy mock orange. An invisible garden. The creamy perfume of absent gardenias. Hanging in the air is the tang of eucalyptus I carry directly to the back door. The trash cans in the alley overflow with crimson bougainvillea and sprays of sweet-smelling daphne.

Every card signed,
Webster Carlton Westward III
.

From an insert shot of one gift card, we cut to a close-up of another card, and another. A series of card after gift card. Then a close-up of yet another paper envelope with
To Miss Katherine
handwritten on one side. The shot pulls back to reveal me holding this last sealed envelope in the steam jetting from a kettle boiling atop the stove. The kitchen setting appears much the same as it did a dog’s lifetime ago, when my Miss Kathie scratched her heart into the window. One new detail, a portable television, sits atop the icebox, flashing the room with scenes from a hospital, the operating room in a surgical suite where an actor’s rubber-gloved hand grasps a surgical mask and pulls it from his own face, revealing the previous “was-band,”
Paco Esposito
. The seventh and most
recent Mr.
Katherine Kenton
. His hair now grows gray at his temples. His upper lip fringed with a pepper-and-salt mustache.

The teakettle hisses on the stove, centered above the blue spider of a gas flame. Steam rises from the spout, curling the corners of the white envelope I hold. The paper darkens with damp until the glued flap peels along one edge. Picking with a thumbnail, I lift the flap. Pinching with two fingers, I slide out the letter.

On television, Paco leans over the operating table, dragging a scalpel through the inert body of a patient played by
Stephen Boyd. Hope Lange
plays the assisting physician.
Suzy Parker
the anesthesiologist. Fixing his gaze on the attending nurse,
Natalie Wood
, Paco says, “I’ve never seen anything this bad. This brain has got to come out!”

The next channel over, a battalion of dancers dash around a soundstage, fighting the
Battle of Antietam
in some
Frank Powell
production directed by
D. W. Griffith
of a musical version of the
Civil War
. The lead for the
Confederate Army
, leaping and pirouetting, is featured dancer
Terrence Terry
. A heartbreakingly young
Joan Leslie
plays
Tallulah Bankhead. H. B. Warner
plays
Jefferson Davis
. Music scored by
Max Steiner
.

From the alley outside the kitchen door, a man’s voice says, “Knock, knock.” The windows, fogged with the steam. The kitchen air feels humid and warm as the sauna of the
Garden of Allah
apartments. My hair hangs lank and plastered to my wet forehead, flat as a
Louise Brooks
spit curl.

The shadow of a head falls against the outside of the window, the pane where my Miss Kathie cut the shape of her heart. From behind the fogged glass, the voice says, “Katherine?”
His knuckles knocking the glass, a man says, “This is an emergency.”

Unfolded, the letter reads:
My Most Dear Katherine, True love is NOT out of your reach
. I flatten the letter to the damp window glass, where it sticks, held secure as wallpaper, pasted there by the condensed steam. The sunlight streaming in from the alleyway, the light leaves the paper translucent, glowing white with the handwritten words hung framed by the heart etched in the glass. The letter still pasted to the window, I flip the dead bolt, slip the chain, turn the knob and open the door.

In the alleyway, a man stands holding a paper tablet fluttering with pages. Each page scribbled with names and arrows, what looks like the diagram for plays in a football game. Among the names one can read
Eve Arden … Marlene Dietrich
…
Sidney Blackmer
… In his opposite hand, the man holds a white paper sack. Next to him, the trash cans spill their roses and gardenias onto the paving stones. The gladiolas and orchids tumble out to lie in the fetid puddles of mud and rainwater which run down the center of the alley. The reek of honeysuckle and spoiled meat. Pale mock orange mingles with pink camellias and bloodred peonies.

“Hurry, quick, where’s Lady Katherine?” the man says, holding the tablet, shaking it so the pages flap. On some, the names radiate in every direction from a large rectangle which fills the center of the page. The names alternating gender:
Lena Horne
then
William Wellman
then
Esther Williams
. The man says, “I’m expecting twenty-four guests for dinner, and I have a placement emergency.…”

The diagrams are seating charts. The rectangles are the dinner table. The names the guest list. “As added incentive,”
the man says, “tell Her Majesty that I’ve brought her favorite candy …
Jordan almonds.”

Her Majesty won’t eat a bite, I tell him.

This man, this same face smiles out from the frontline skirmishes on television, amid the
Battle of Gettysburg—
this is
Terrence Terry
, formerly Mr. Katherine Kenton, former dancer under contract at
Lasky Studios
, former paramour to
Montgomery Clift
, former catamite to
James Whale
and
Don Ameche
, former cosodomite to
William Haines
, former sexual invert, the fifth “was-band,” in crisis about whom to seat next to
Celeste Holm
at a dinner he’s hosting tonight.

“This is an entertainment emergency,” the Terrence specimen says, “I need Katherine to tell me: Does
Jack Buchanan
hate
Dame May Whitty?”

I say that he should’ve gone to prison for wedding Miss Kathie. That it’s illegal for homosexuals to get married.

“Only to each other,” he says, stepping into the kitchen.

I close the alley door, lock the knob, slip the chain, flip the dead bolt.

Whatever the case, I say, a marriage isn’t something one undertakes simply to pad one’s résumé. Saying this, I’m retrieving a sheet of blank stationery from the kitchen table, then positioning this sheet on the damp window so that it aligns with the love letter already pasted to the glass.

“Her Majesty doesn’t have to come dine with us,” this
Terrence Terry
says. “Just tell me who to stick next to
Jane Wyman.”

Using a pen, blue ink, I begin to trace the writing of the original letter as it glows through this new, blank sheet.

“Lady Katherine can tell me if
John Agar
is right- or left-handed,” says this Terrence specimen. “She knows if
Rin Tin Tin
is male or female.”

Lecturing, still tracing the old letter onto the new paper, I suggest he begin with a fresh page. An empty dinner table. Seat
Desi Arnaz
to the left of
Hazel Court
. Put
Rosemary Clooney
across from
Lex Barker. Fatty Arbuckle
always spits as he speaks, so place him opposite
Billie Dove
, who’s too blind to notice. Using my own pen, I elbow into Terry’s work, drawing arrows from
Jean Harlow
to
Lon Chaney Sr
. to
Douglas Fairbanks Jr
. Like
Knute Rockne
sketching football plays, I circle
Gilda Gray
and
Hattie McDaniel
, and I cross out
June Haver
.

“If she’s starving herself,” says
Terrence Terry
, watching me work, “she must be falling in love again.” Standing there, he unrolls the top of the white paper bag. Reaching into it, Terry lifts out a handful of almonds, pastel shades of pink and green and blue. He slips one into his mouth, chews.

Not only starving, I say, but she’s exercising as well. Loosely put, the physical trainers attach electric wires to whatever muscles they can find on her body and jolt her with shocks that simulate running a steeplechase while being repeatedly struck by bolts of lightning. I say, It’s very good for her body—terrible for her hair.

After that ordeal, my Miss Kathie is having her legs shaved, her teeth whitened, her cuticles pushed back.

Chewing, swallowing,
Terrence Terry
says, “Who’s the new romance? Do I know him?”

The telephone mounted on the kitchen wall beside the stove, it rings. I lift the receiver, saying, Hello? And wait.

The front doorbell rings.