The Way of All Fish: A Novel (35 page)

The next stop had taken him through the Golden Triangle out to East Liberty, where he’d knocked on the door of an old, somewhat run-down house, set back off the street and looking squashed on either side by a newish apartment building. This psychic, whose name he had taken down as Elizabeth Gumm, called herself a clairvoyant. Was there any real difference? he wondered as he rang the bell.

The woman in the gray cardigan who answered the door caused him to take a quick step back. Her uncanny resemblance to the actress who’d played the insane wife in
Séance on a Wet Afternoon
was unnerving. Even the little hitch at the corner of her mouth, not a real smile but a mouth thumbing its way to a smile, was spot-on in its resemblance to the actress’s. The faux smile, like that of a hitchhiker hoping you’d stop for poor her so she could climb in the car and thrust the knife between your shoulder blades—

“May I help you?”

Darkness behind her in the foyer, no slant of light. He was terribly tempted to ask for Mr. Gumm, to see if she had a husband who looked like Richard Attenborough.

Paul explained that he had found her name on the Internet, on Facebook (not commenting on why a psychic would need Facebook for anything).

With an overly dramatic gesture of the arm, she swept him in.

He followed her through the dark foyer to the dark hall to the dark parlor. This lack of light he forgave her for, as it was probably owing not to her psychic’s aura but to the buildings that had been thrown up on either side, shutting out light.

The house revealed its age at every turn, or at least what Paul could see of the turns. Hairline cracks in the gloomy plaster of the ceiling; wallpaper that seemed to be pulling away from the wall from either dried-up glue or distaste; shivery-glassed windows that rattled a little without the help of wind; and the claw-footed, bun-footed, snake-footed furniture. It was in one of these ball-and-claw-footed chairs that she indicated he should sit. Furniture with feet worried him; it looked as though it might beat him to the door if he made a break for it.

The way she looked at him made him wonder if she’d get to the door before either the furniture or him. She sat sturdily on the horsehair love seat opposite, regarding him with a kind of spacey look that people in her line of work perhaps cultivated. She reached up and switched on a lamp, and he wished she hadn’t. He had no desire to see the sinister room in bolder relief.

“Now, you say you have need of a psychic. I am, to be a bit more specific, a clairvoyant.”

“That’s okay,” he said, instead of what she probably wanted to hear, something on the order of “Ah! How much better!” Paul merely went on to tell her what he wanted her to do.

“Mr. Giverney—” She pronounced it with a hard G.

And she calls herself a clairvoyant, he thought.

“—you want me to
fake
a séance?” Her look was both disbelieving and condescending.

“Right.” He had jettisoned any wish to have her as medium almost from the beginning. He didn’t want to sit surrounded by her footed furniture any longer than necessary.

“To
pretend
I’m in touch with a spirit?”

“Uh-huh.”

He was not cooperating fully in her supposed outrage. “To
counterfeit,
to
forge,
to
tamper
with the experience?”

Paul looked quickly at the sofa to see if she had an open thesaurus beside her, but no, just the old horsehair. “All those things, correct.” He sat back and relaxed. Too soon.

“How much?”

Paul sat up. “What?”

“How much are you paying for this deceitful display?”

Quickly, Paul ramped down the dollars from five thousand. “A thousand.” Then he thought, hell, that was too much for her to turn down. “Naturally, for that, I’d expect you to supply a few players—”

She frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

“I need some extras. Maybe your husband and—?” He was still dying to check out any Richard Attenborough resemblance. “A couple friends? You’d be splitting the money with them.”

Ah! That got the required result. Swiftly, she rose.

Out of the corner of his eye, Paul thought he detected a movement of the snake-head stool. He got up. “I take it that’s a no?”

“I don’t know how you’d have the nerve to present such a plan. What poor soul have you targeted?”

Really. “Maybe the same poor souls you have. Thank you, Mrs. Gumm.”

Speedily, Paul made it to the door. All the way down the walk and to his car, he could have sworn he heard the tap, tap, tap not of a cane but of little wooden feet.

He and his car shuddered all the way back to downtown Pittsburgh.

H
e decided to forgo McKees Rocks and the dubious pleasure of meeting with psychic number three. He figured if two hadn’t done the trick, three—like a triple dose of Ambien—probably wouldn’t get him into dreamland.

Paul checked in to the Renaissance Hotel and thought things over as he changed from a cotton shirt into a flannel one. It was quite cool outside. While he stuffed his shirt into his pants, he stared out of the window at the Allegheny River streaked with September sunlight; the Sixth Street bridge, one of the several that joined the South Side to the North Side; and PNC Park, so perfectly positioned in its basin that it looked done by a master landscaper.

Paul wondered what in hell he’d been thinking, to attempt to hire a “real” medium/psychic/clairvoyant. For one thing, he wouldn’t have control over the situation, even if such a person agreed beforehand to do what he wanted.

He had researched Actors’ Equity in Pittsburgh and found a couple of out-of-work actors (basically a tautology) to take part in the séance. Their names were in his address book, and he looked up their numbers: Toby Marseille (there was a name for a marquee) and Rebecca Bloom (not much better). He tapped in Toby’s number and got him immediately (Toby no doubt waiting right by the phone for his agent’s call). Toby was happy to meet Paul for a drink, and yes, he would bring Rebecca along. An hour later, they were in the bar drinking chardonnay (Rebecca) and Level vodka (Paul and Toby).

Toby was fairly tall, very sturdy, and good-looking, with a flinty profile that he liked to present fairly often by looking a quarter turn
away as he smoked his cigarette. Rebecca was quite pretty in an insipid way, with a transparency of blond hair and an equal transparency of white blouse.

It was not absolutely necessary to have five participants, but Paul thought it would look more authentic to L. Bass if there were a couple of total strangers in attendance. Toby and Rebecca were two actors “resting between parts,” meaning currently out of work. Paul thought offering a thousand to each simply to sit at a table was a profitable way for them to spend an hour or so. Both were happy for the gig and “dying to know” the details.

“Like, what will we be doing, man?” said Toby.

“Nothing,” said Paul. “You’ll be taking part in a séance.”

They looked at each other and laughed. Rebecca said, “You must want us to do something, like pretend we’re communicating with spirits, or something, right?”

“Wrong. That’s the job of the medium. There’ll be only five of us: you two, the medium, me, and one other person.”

“So you’re stitching somebody up, right? Listen”—Toby leaned across the table, looking with hot eyes at Paul—“I am really good at laying down a scam; I can really—”

“No, you can’t. Not this time. I just need two more people at the table. That’s you.” He looked from one to the other. “That’s all.”

Said Toby, “I think I do a lot more than fill a chair.” He had a helmet of hair falling over his eyes and an untraceable accent (Jersey? London? Brooklyn?). He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that put his pecs on display. Maybe he was the new Brando.

Paul said, “Let’s be clear: I’m paying you to sit down and shut up.” He was not at all bothered by Toby’s six feet two or his gym physique. The last time Paul had worked out was when the elevator in his building had a power outage.

Toby leaned back hard, as if offended. “For what you’re payin’ us—”

“Right. A thousand each. Just to sit there.”

Now Rebecca spoke. “It would make me feel, well, guilty.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” Paul lifted his glass. “Cheers.”

The Andy Warhol Museum was located just across the Sixth Street Bridge, and that was where Paul went after his meeting with Toby and Rebecca.

Inside, the museum looked as if it were all angles and sharp edges, as if Andy were stiff-arming the patrons. Paul paid the entry fee to a pretty girl at the curving ticket counter and took the elevator to the top floor.

The rooms seemed almost stark in their total absence of furniture; there were no convenient benches placed in the center of the rooms where patrons could sit and muse over the paintings. There were practically no patrons. But it was a weekday in midafternoon, so the lack of customers wasn’t all that surprising.

Paul stood looking at one of Warhol’s self-portraits. He had always liked Andy Warhol, for some reason, that is, liked him when everyone he knew was dissing him, calling him artificial and superficial. Paul didn’t think he was either. Maybe he liked Warhol for the drama, not the personal-life drama but the artistic drama. His technique struck Paul as tantamount to scenery chewing. Indeed, all of Andy seemed made for the stage or Hollywood.

Paul took the stairs down, from gallery to gallery. He stopped in one room where Warhol’s “bent line” method was being displayed on video. Although complicated in its execution of transferring images from paper to paper, the bent line was Warhol’s slick little way of producing a series of images, all using the same outline of a shoe or a face. Hannah, Paul thought, would like this and would claim to be as good at it as Andy Warhol.

There were no security guards as such, just pretty young women, like the one at the downstairs counter, at the empty doorways, swaying a little, like flowers on stalks.

Perhaps because there were so few people and so much empty space, the place seemed almost forlorn. Forlorn. What a great word, he thought, looking into a room of skulls. Skulls, identical except for variations in color, hung on all four walls. That was the only image.

What interested Paul was that there was an actual sitting place in the middle of the room. He would have thought, had a couple of people not been sitting on it, that the couchlike object was itself an art installation. It was the size of two small sofas, back to back, but lower and longer and covered with parachute material. He went in.

He flopped down on the thing, and it sank beneath him. This was Tempur-Pedic before Tempur-Pedic was invented. Under the parachute silk was nothing but old foam or sponge, a vast sponge. He wanted one for his office. On the other side of the sponge, two people were also lounging. Apparently, he could sit here and enjoy his view of the skulls for as long as he wanted. The girls on stems didn’t appear to mind.

Sighing, he got up and, from the doorway, looked at the parachute couch. He wondered how many people could sit on it at the same time. Certainly five. Paul chewed his lip, thinking.

He walked into another room, where one of Warhol’s conceptions of Elvis hung. The
Elvis 11 Times
. Elvis as a cowboy with a six-shooter. Paul reckoned (falling into cowboy idiom) there could never be too many Elvis Presleys. In this repetitive image, he wondered what the point was and was sure Andy Warhol would tell him there was no point.

He doubted that and let his eye trail over the eleven slightly different images again. He wondered if, by the time the viewer came to number eleven, Elvis had backfired and left the building.

Paul felt the blow and left, too.

On his walk back to the hotel, he took from his pocket the scrap of paper on which he’d listed the psychics’ names and dropped it in a trash can at the end of the bridge. In the middle of the bridge, he stopped and leaned against the railing and thought about hiring another actor to play the role of the psychic. Considering his encounter with Toby and Rebecca, that struck him as tedious. He didn’t want to deal with another ego. But he was intrigued with the Warhol Museum, with the sponge couch and the skulls. He did not want to jettison the séance.