Playland Page 3

  Then he pressed the remote and Lizzie disappeared from the screen.

  It was the last time I saw her.

  That’s exactly how it happened.

  More or less.

  I thought, What if Lizzie had died of a lingering illness and not in an automobile accident? A lingering death gives both the victim and the survivors time to prepare, to put on a serious courageous face, to define grace under pressure. So long, it goes without saying, as death was not postponed for such an inordinate period of time that friends and family got bored with the idea and began finding excuses not to visit the patient with their offerings of succor and praise. And after a while left for the weekend without giving a number where they could be reached in the event of the inevitable. Time enough to read about it on the obituary page, society’s scorecard, and mull the reasons why the deceased appeared below the fold, or without a photograph.

  A reasonable time frame, then. Something out of a movie. People dying in movies did not have catheters inserted into their urethras. Nor did they have dementia. And no drooling and no incontinence and no shit on the sheets, those crosses of the terminal illness. Six weeks. A strain, but not too much. Time to remember Lizzie’s virtues and gloss over her faults. Which of course were so few they did not bear mentioning, except to elucidate that she was not perfect, but then who was? How is she, Jack? I hope when I go, he would answer, that I show as much … and his voice would trail off. Jack is really bearing up well, people would say.

  What kind of six-week terminal illness then? Lizzie’s last mammogram showed her breasts to be fibrocystic, but the only mass was a benign cyst that the oncologist aspirated in his office. But what if the lump had not been benign. Breast cancer, detected late. A CAT scan and a spinal tap. A small locus of the renegade cells had taken residence in the meninges. No. The liver. The liver does not regenerate. An operation was out of the question, the oncologist would have said. Let him be a cancer bureaucrat, and be affected with the professional coldness of the breed. Just vamping now. Lizzie would ask to see him, a half hour of his time to let him explain all the options she had available, and to let her put into words all the fears that were rattling around in her imagination.

  “I have sixty patients,” he would say to her coldly. “I am a very busy man, and if you think I have a half hour to discuss your case alone with you, I suggest you get another doctor.”

  No. No doctor would ever say that. On the other hand, a deathbed speech was always good value.

  “Dr. Korn,” Lizzie would say (a perfect name, Korn, Bernard Korn, M.D., P.C., file that), “we are discussing cancer, and with it the possibility of my death.” Of course this was not the way Lizzie talked, even at the end, when we were only speaking monosyllabically. Her style ran in the direction of, You know, it’s been ten days since we fucked. Not accusingly. A statement of fact.

  Back to the plot line.

  “I have always been terrified of cancer,” Lizzie would say, “because I have always been terrified of death. I believe in certainties and death is the great unknown. I hate unknowns. To you I am a patient, an abstraction. A humanoid, not a human being. One does not have a half hour to discuss fear and death with a humanoid. The humanoid should get another doctor. So be it. You are hereby dismissed as my doctor.” Could she have ever talked in that way? No. But it plays. “I do not wish you ill. I only hope that when you are forced to confront your own death that you will be frightened, as frightened as I am now, and that you are alone. That is perhaps sentimental of me. I do not care. Please leave.”

  It needs work, Jack thought, but it has possibilities. Cut from, “You are hereby dismissed as my doctor” to “Please, leave.”

  Oh, Christ, Lizzie, it would have been a better way to go.

  “You ever think of therapy, kid?” Marty Magnin asked. Marty was a movie producer with whom I had worked off and on for over twenty years. He called me kid and he called me pal, and in a way I guess we were pals. Or what passed for pals in Hollywood. Lizzie never could stand him.

  “No, Marty, why?” I said.

  If it had to be an accident, this one might have been better:

  When I walked into the TWA terminal, the notation next to Lizzie’s flight number on the Arrivals monitor said, “See Agent.” I turned around and left the building immediately, not knowing exactly why I had to see the agent, but knowing I would find out on the car radio soon enough. I had seen the scene too often on television—the minicam holding on “See Agent,” then the cut to the special room the airline had set aside for the people who had come to the airport to pick up those loved ones who would never arrive. The grief managers would move in, and strangers would hug each other, and promise to keep in touch, and the airline would try to get us to sign release forms. I even knew how much the figure was—$75,000, and an agreement not to sue.

  The accident was in February. In March I began to write letters to public figures:

  Hon. Clifton Mayo

  United States Senate

  Washington, D.C. 20510

  Dear Senator Mayo,

  On Saturday last, I saw you and a young woman in a mink coat who I would hope was your wife, although she did not look like your wife’s photographs, checking into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Later that same evening, I happened by coincidence to be dining at Michael’s Restaurant in Santa Monica and saw you sign the check for a party of eight. There were by my count four bottles of Cristal Roederer champagne consumed at your table. According to the sommelier, the Cristal Roederer was of the 1979 vintage and is listed at $125.00 per bottle. As I am not aware of any Senate business that was being conducted in Los Angeles that weekend, and as you are an elected representative of the people of Utah, I would like to think that you were not staying at the most expensive hotel in Beverly Hills on the public tit, nor that you charged the taxpayers of America for a $1,400 private dinner with French champagne when the domestic wine industry is currently in such difficult straits.

  I look forward to your prompt reply.

  John Broderick

  “He’s not really a shrink,” Marty Magnin said. “He’s what they call a psychological counselor.”

  “Who?”

  “Say again?”

  “Who calls him a psychological counselor?”

  “Everybody. Morty Wishengrad swears by him.”

  “Morty Wishengrad’s an agent. You’re taking testimonials from agents now?”

  “I’m just saying you got to get over this Lizzie thing.”

  “What Lizzie thing is that, Marty?”

  “Jack, she’s dead.”

  “I know. I saw her on the monitor.”

  “Jack, you need help.”

  “I’m moving, Marty. Picking up stakes. Leaving Cheyenne.”

  “You live in Brentwood, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Marty, did you know that every Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’?”

  II

  I found a nine-month sublet on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street. A landmark building, the real estate woman said. “A City Home for People with Country Houses” was its advertising slogan when it opened its doors in 1909, the smallest apartment having seventeen rooms. The real estate woman had that nervous conversational tic that did not allow for dead air. Woody Allen used the exterior in Hannah and Her Sisters, it’s one of his favorite buildings in New York, that’s high praise, no one knows New York like Woody, you must know him, you’re a screenwriter, it’s such a small world, isn’t it, Mark Hampton decorated it, he doesn’t do many apartments on the West Side, I love chocolate cut velvet, don’t you? No, not really, but the apartment had good space, four and a half rooms, two baths, twelve-foot ceilings, original moldings, and I didn’t have the heart to look at any of the other buildings on her list, or, more to the point, the will to listen to any more of her irrelevancies.

  “So how are you, kid?” Marty Magnin said. Every other Monday I was on his list of calls. Marty kept in touch with me a
s he kept in touch with his broker and his bookie. His telephone had twelve buttons and speed dial. I was not on speed dial. “Getting much?”

  “Enough.” Meaning none at all.

  “You working?”

  “On a novel.” Why not? “How’s this for a first line?” I could always come up with a first line. The second line was always a pain in the ass, but first lines—ready, aim, fire: “ ‘It was the kind of hotel that looked like you could bang the waitress in the coffee shop, which I did.’ ”

  “Film noir.”

  “That’s what I had in mind.” God, I loved dealing with Marty Magnin. You put out bait, he would always bite.

  “Good area. You need a couple of vedettes, only one of them a gross player, and you keep production costs down.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Listen, I’m interested. Fax me the story line, I’ll tell you if there’s a picture there. But keep it down to a page, you wouldn’t believe the amount of reading I have to do every weekend.”

  STEEPLES

  He called her Steeples because, he said, that was what her nipples reminded him of when they made love. Through the years, he would send her postcards of church steeples, e.g., Cologne Cathedral or a New England church spire, with no message and no signature. It was how they kept in touch.

  “What the fuck is this?” Marty Magnin said.

  “You told me to fax you what I had.”

  “That’s it? What about the chick in the coffee shop the guy boffs.”

  “This is just a possible back story I’m playing around with.”

  “To tell you the truth, Jack, I don’t think there’s a picture in it.”

  CHOCOLATE

  I went to bed exhausted one night. The chambermaid had put two little chocolate mints with gold foil wrapping on my pillow. In the middle of the night, I had to pee. When I staggered back to bed, there was a huge spot of dried blood on the bed, right under where my stomach would have been. I panicked, felt around my body for a stab wound. There was nothing there. Finally I found the lamp on the bedside table and turned it on. The spot was not dried blood after all. One of the chocolate mints had slipped under my body, and during the night, my body heat had melted it.

  “Jack, no more faxes, okay? The fruitcake letters made more sense than this shit.”

  “It’s incident, Marty, part of the weave. I’m just giving you a taste.”

  “Listen, kid, my taste buds tell me you keep on like this you’re going to end up in the bin.”

  I began to sing. “ ‘She dwelleth in the Ground—Where Daffodils—abide—’ ”

  “You’re singing songs now?”

  “Emily Dickinson. Remember I said you could sing all her poems to ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’ ”

  “Leonard Fox, Jack. He’s the one to call. The best shrink in New York. Sydney Allen swears by him.”

  “I’ll make a note of it, Marty.”

  “You getting it regular?”

  “Regular.”

  “That’s swell. Lizzie would’ve wanted you to get laid.”

  “I know that, Marty.”

  “Great, Jack. Really great. I come to town next time, we’ll schmooze.”

  “I look forward to it, Marty.”

  III

  Then a monday six weeks later.

  I knew she was going to get her purse snatched. Knew it with an absolute certainty the moment I first set eyes on her on West Fifty-eighth Street. I had just bought some sheets at Bergdorf’s. Some people wait for the white sales—Lizzie always did—others get their sheets at Abraham & Straus or the discount houses on Delancey, but I said fuck it, so it cost $331 for two sets of plain white New York king-sized sheets and twelve pillow slips, Bergdorf’s was only a block away, and my time, when I was working, was valuable. It was even possible to say, and I was happy to do so in the discourses with myself that had become my primary mode of conversation (even on the street, where I was no longer embarrassed when other pedestrians gave me that strange sideways look they give to people they catch talking to themselves in public), that with the time factor, I was saving money; I had also learned from the saleslady at Bergdorf’s that New York king-sized beds were shorter and wider than Los Angeles kings, which were longer and narrower, and information, even as trivial as this, was power, although this was a proposition, as it pertained to bed linen, that I was not prepared to argue too strenuously while talking to myself on my daily constitutional.

  It was the first time I had ever bought sheets, and I had not realized how heavy they were, like a load of bricks, so heavy that as I walked up Fifty-eighth Street toward my apartment I had to keep switching the shopping bag from hand to hand. I was switching hands when I noticed the young woman. Nice legs, sensible pointy tits, and I would wager the barbered rectangular trim that had become, now that I was back, however hesitantly, in circulation, my new benchmark for measuring erogenous indulgence. The uniform tailored blue suit and the uniform white silk blouse with two gold buttons at the neck and the uniform black Mädler briefcase and the oversized Bottega Veneta bag swinging from a shoulder strap. Mistress, she thought, of all she surveyed, and no one knew how wrong she was more than the slender young black with the dreadlocks and the bombed-out Stevie Wonder look trailing just a few paces behind her, the one who also knew, as did I, that if she had an ounce of brains she would be walking on West Fifty-seventh Street or on Central Park South and not on Fifty-eighth between Sixth and Seventh, a street that looks like a tunnel, even at high noon on a sunny day in July, which this was not.

  Smash and grab. He had that bag off her shoulder and was heading east on Fifty-eighth like a DB high-stepping toward the end zone with an interception. Neon Deion. This was where I made my mistake. I decided to be a hero. No, not decided, it’s not something you decide, any more than the grunt who throws himself on a hand grenade to save Lou and Tiny and Leroy and Geraldo and the other joes in his platoon decides to be a hero. It is something done by instinct, and if I had time to think it over rationally I would have said no way, Jose, fuck you, Lou and Tiny and Leroy and Geraldo. It just happened that I was switching the Bergdorf bag full of sheets from left hand to right as he passed, and without thinking I hauled off and hit him in the face with it. You get hit with $331 worth of sheets and pillow slips, it tends to get your attention. In this case, the bag of sheets upended him, ass over tea kettle. His head bounced off the sidewalk, like someone was dribbling it, and then he just lay still. Of course he dropped the young woman’s bag. She didn’t even have time to scream, and now this spade is stretched out cold and her bag is sitting there on the sidewalk, and what does she do? She picks up the bag, puts it over her shoulder, and continues on her way as if nothing has happened.

  Wait a minute, I said, call the police, I’ll watch this guy. And she said, not breaking stride, I don’t want to get involved, fuck him, and I said, He could be dead, and she said, That’s your problem, and I said, Jesus, lady, and she said, flipping me the bird, Up yours, and with that she heads for Sixth Avenue under a full head of steam and disappears around the corner, gripping that bag of hers like grim death, and if she had done that in the first place, the dumb bitch, none of this fucking nightmare would have happened. I was just left standing there, no victim, no bag, and this spade Stevie Wonder clone is lying on the sidewalk with blood coming out of his ears. I didn’t have Lizzie’s nurse info, but I knew that blood pouring out of the ears was not a good sign. Then from out of nowhere this yuppie Rambo in a three-piece suit blindsided me with a cross-body block, and he says, I saw you hit that black man, and someone else said, Racist, and a third person said, Murderer, and a fourth said, Call the police, and the long and the short of it was that I wound up at the precinct house on West Fifty-fourth Street, where I was interrogated, picked out of a lineup by three eyewitnesses, informed of my rights, fingerprinted, photographed, and finally after twelve hours booked for assault with intent to kill.

  It was like a bad dream. The arresting officer hung a number around m
y neck when they took my mug shots, full face, left and right profiles, and in every angle I looked furtive, cornered, in need of a shave, my asshole screwed tight as if I was already anticipating the buggery awaiting me when I was transported by bus to the Riker’s Island lockup. Even today I find myself waking up in the middle of the night reciting the number—NYPD-45-23-9387. The reason for the bust and the charge sheet was that when the purse snatcher—John Doe in the initial paperwork, later identified as one Shaamel Boudreau, no known address, but with a yellow sheet showing twenty-three arrests and six felony convictions—hit his head against the sidewalk, his brain was so rotted with crack and smack and booze and by assorted traumas he had picked up at Attica and other resorts maintained by the New York State Department of Corrections that the knock on the noggin took care of him. Bought him the farm.