Dorothy Parker Drank Here (2 page)

2007

I
t was late—well past closing—and the Algonquin Hotel's Blue Bar tavern was shadowy and still. Angel Ruiz hesitated at the doorway, but only for a second. So what if there was a strange shimmer below the one dim light on the wall? And who cared if the Haitian guys in the kitchen had sworn they'd seen
le fantôme
sitting by the bar late at night? It was his first day on the job and he refused to be scared. Besides, the staff at these old hotels always believed the places were haunted.

He clicked on the soft neon bulb over the bar and unlocked the cabinet. The drunk in room 1207—some famous writer in hiding, they said—had ordered three martinis and the night kitchen manager had instructed Angel to mix and deliver them. “The old man,” she had promised, “tips big.”

Angel stopped and listened to the deserted quiet, feeling the silence deep inside his ears. He went back to work, gently placing what he needed on the bar.

After pouring the carefully measured gin and vermouth into the metal shaker, he held the lid tight and turned it over and back, over
and back. He gave it one last shake, then filled the three fancy glasses he had placed on the tray.

The darkness played tricks on his eyes. Was that a swarm of gnats hovering near the bar or just floating dust particles? He blew them away and focused on his task.

Las aceitunas
, he thought. Olives. He looked around and saw a mini refrigerator under the bar. He had to kneel to see inside and found a large round jar in the back, the green orbs floating in liquid like detached eyeballs.

Angel hated olives and hoped he wouldn't have to fish them out with his fingers. As he rose, he was thinking about finding a fork he could use to pluck the slimy orbs from their cold bath and how his grandfather used to pop them in his mouth like candy. Disgusting.

And then he saw something. The tiny swarm had grown. It was now a mass of swirling dust particles floating over one of the barstools. As he stared, transfixed, they took on a recognizable shape, joining together until they weren't separate specks but one solid image.

The jar fell from his hand and crashed, shattering the silence. It was her—the phantom. And right before his eyes, she became a real woman, with dark impish eyes and a small hat.

Angel jumped back, almost slipping on the wet floor. He grabbed on to the bar and froze, unable to do anything but blink at the space that had been empty only seconds ago.

“Just as well,” she said, peering over the bar at the olives rolling across the floor. “He likes his martinis with a twist.”

He rubbed his eyes. She couldn't be real, could she?

The apparition picked up one of the drinks he had just made and took a sip. “Not bad . . . Angel. You may have a future here.”

“You . . . you know my name?” A chill danced down his spine.

She pointed a dainty finger at his name tag.

“What do you . . . want from me?” he asked.

She tipped back the martini and finished it. Then she picked up another. “You'll need to make more of these. Cheers.”

Angel watched as she sipped the drink, closing her eyes in delight. “I hope you have cigarettes in that pocket,” she said. “I'm positively desperate.”

“Cigarettes?”

“If you tell me they're bad for my health, I may scream.”

Angel pulled a pack of Marlboros from his jacket, placed it on the bar, and stood back. She looked down at the cigarettes as if she expected him to do something. Finally, she extracted one and put it between her lips.

“A light?” she said.

He swallowed hard and took a disposable lighter from his pocket, but his hands were so damp from fear he couldn't get it to ignite. He tried again and again.

“I have all the time in the world,” she said. “Literally.”

Finally, a short flame rose and he carefully leaned forward to light her cigarette. She took a long drag.

“Delightful,” she said, exhaling. She took another puff and blew smoke rings. Angel stared as she continued smoking and drinking. What
was
she?

The ghost flicked ashes into the empty martini glass, then shot him a glance and sighed, as if bored by his awe. Still smoking with her right hand, she held her left hand toward him, palm down. He looked at it, wondering what she wanted him to do.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“Miss?”

“You're wondering if I'm real,” she said. “So touch me.”

Her hand was small and feminine, with fingernails filed into points. Angel lightly poked it, hoping she was nothing but air, light, and dreams. But she was solid—flesh and blood.

“Now that we have that out of the way,” she said, “my request.
You see that book over there, inside the case?” She pointed to the dim wall light, and Angel noticed that the shelf it illuminated held some kind of antique book inside a glass display box. “Please bring it here.”

He did as he was told, stepping over the olives to approach the shelf and examine the case. It was a heavy piece, with a mahogany platform and frame. The glass panels afforded a clear view of the book inside, which was open to a page of old-fashioned signatures written with the thin ink of a fountain pen. He lifted the hinged top, removed the book, and carried it back to her, placing it carefully on the bar.

“This,” she said, pointing over the open page, “is me.”

Angel scanned the names. They were all men except for one.

“Dorothy Parker?” he said.

“I don't suppose you've heard of me?”

He shook his head.

“Lucky you,” she said. “Now, when you deliver the drinks to Mr. Shriver you will bring him this as well.”

“You want me to bring the book to him?”

“Am I not being clear?”

“No. I mean, yes. But why?”

“My dear,” she said, “where this book goes, I go. And I need to have a little chat with Ted Shriver. We are old acquaintances.”

“I'll get in trouble.”

“Nonsense. You'll come back in an hour and return the book to the shelf. No one will ever know. But first, clean up this nasty spill; it's never a good idea to leave a mess behind. Trust me on that.”

A
ll things considered, a hotel wasn't a bad place to die. You didn't have to see anyone, didn't have to shave, and once you emptied out the minibar, you could call room service and have a tray of martinis delivered right to your door.

On this particular night, Ted Shriver had ordered three, and drank the first one quickly. Then he took a Vicodin and lay down in bed to quiet the pounding in his head. In a short while he would be in a loose haze, and could spend the rest of the night sipping the other two.

He didn't expect to fall asleep—it was such an elusive prize these days—but he drifted into a light slumber and dreamed a living dust cloud was traveling about his chamber. The weak and weary nightmare seemed straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. Minutes later, a female voice roused him.

“I haven't got all night.”

What the hell?
Ted Shriver lifted his head and squinted to see a woman seated in the gold chair in the corner of his room. And damn if she didn't look like Dorothy Parker, who he interviewed back in 1967. Only, this woman seemed as if she were plucked from an earlier
era. How many Vicodin had he taken, anyway? He picked up the bottle to check the contents.

“You are not hallucinating,” she said.

He lay back down. “The hell I'm not.”

“We have to talk.”

He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. This was a brand-new symptom—one his doctor hadn't warned him about. “I need another drink,” he said.

“Of course you do.”

He ignored the vision and approached the room service cart, which was right next to the chair where she sat. He picked up another martini and addressed the hallucination, wondering if it would respond to everything he said. “Pardon me if I don't
offer
you one.”

“Quite all right. I'm way ahead of you.”

Figures,
he thought.
I've invented a vision that drinks.
Ted considered how he might describe the vividness of the image. Not that he planned to tell anyone, but as a writer he was prone to translating his experiences into prose, searching for the perfect adjectives, verbs, and similes. He leaned over to stare at her up close. She looked as real as the nervous waiter who had wheeled in the cart. Only, if he squinted, he thought he could see a soft shimmer outlining her form.

“This is a hell of a goddamned brain tumor.” He closed his eyes, rubbed them hard, and looked at her again.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Trying to turn you into Gina Lollobrigida.”

“Really, Teddy. How tiresome.”

“Teddy,” he repeated, smiling, as if he'd won a point against the mass growing in his head. “It knows my name.”

“Of course I do. We've met.”

“But you wouldn't remember that.”

“And why not? It wasn't every day a handsome young man came to interview me. You wore a cheap suit, but you were a dream to look at.”

Ted closed his eyes, recalling the day he had gone to interview the famous Dorothy Parker, shortly before her death and long after her glory days as one of America's most famous and audacious wits. She was living alone at the Volney Hotel, drunk and bitter, but not as depressed as he had expected. He was on staff at the
Atlantic Monthly
then, the pages of his first novel,
Dobson's Night
, still tucked away in the bottom drawer of his desk.

“You flirted with me,” he said. In the article he had described it as “playful banter.”

“Of course. You were a lovely, if ill-mannered, young man.”

“I would have fucked you if I thought you were serious.”

“My dear, I
was
serious. But I was over seventy years old. Even your grandfather wouldn't have fucked me.”

Ted laughed—something he hadn't done in over a year, and it felt luxuriant. But it was fleeting. He sank into the chair next to hers. “I'd make it up to you,” he said, looking into his lap, “but that ship sailed when this brain tumor docked. Cheers.” At any other point in his life, impotence would have struck him as the harshest sentence, albeit well deserved. But now, his energy level as flaccid as his libido, the loss registered somewhere between nostalgia and sentimentality, like the memory of a rowdy old drinking buddy.

He took another sip from his glass, focusing on the familiar burn in his gullet. It was like coming home. He finished the martini in a few gulps.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

“Not yet.” He reached for the last drink.

“When you do, we'll have a pleasant little chat.”

“A word of caution against getting your hopes up,” he said. “I'm not a fun drunk.”

“Don't flatter yourself, dear. You're not much better sober.”

He shrugged. It was true enough, though there was a time when he could turn it on if he wanted to. “I impressed you back then, didn't I?”

“You brought me Chinese food,” she said. “That amused me.”

He remembered. “Chicken chow mein and egg foo yong,” he said. “Old-school Chinese food.”

“Old-school?”

“It's 2007, Dot. Everything we liked is out of style. Tell me, is there egg foo yong in heaven? Give me something to look forward to.”

She ignored his question. “You look dreadful.”

He couldn't argue. His gray hair was wild and overgrown, and the illness had ravaged his face. He ran his hand over his chin—the stubble was now practically a beard. One thing he knew for sure: he would not leave a pretty corpse.

“I'm dying,” he said.

“So I've heard.”

“What? No sympathy?”

“Everyone dies,” she said, “but I understand you're leaving behind a few decent books. That makes you luckier than most.”

Lucky?
It wasn't the word he would use to describe himself. Lately, in fact, he was almost pathologically regretful, replaying seventy years of mistakes, trying to figure out which one had led him to this—dying alone and unlovable in a Manhattan hotel room. Cheating on his first wife, Marlena, right after the miscarriage was probably one of the shittier things he had done, but telling her about it was the part he regretted. That look on her face never left him. It was more than the hurt of betrayal. It was the realization that beneath his curmudgeonly exterior there was no heart of gold. He witnessed the light leaving her eyes as the delusion vaporized and she saw the truth: she hadn't fallen in love with a misunderstood artist after all. She had fallen in love with a beast.

With Audrey, he had meant to redeem himself. She was his one chance at . . . well, maybe not happiness, but as close as he could hope to get. Her vulnerability had touched the softest part of him, and he had convinced himself that he could save them both. Of
course, he screwed that up even worse. And then the whole damned mess with the book just annihilated any chance of getting back on track.

“I'm not sure history will be that kind to me,” he said.

“I beg to differ.”

“Haven't you heard? I'm the lowest form of life. A
plagiarist
.”

“I assumed that was just a rumor.”

“What difference does it make? Everyone believes it.”

“Not everyone.”

“Even my fans have their doubts,” he said, wondering why he was bothering to argue with a hallucination. Did he really need to remind himself of his own dark reality?

“And yet you don't defend yourself.”

“Why should I?”

“One simple public statement, Teddy. How much trouble could that be?”

Ted shrugged. He had never defended himself and wasn't about to start. He wondered how hard it would be to fall back asleep now.

“You are a stubborn man,” she said.

“I've been called worse.”

She went quiet, staring straight at him as if she expected him to elaborate. He didn't.

“Well?” she finally asked.

He stood, frustrated that his hallucination could be so coy—a trait with which he had little patience. “If you have a question, spit it out.”

“Fine,” she said. “How did it happen? How did three paragraphs from another man's book wind up in yours?”

He went to the bed and sat. “Fuck you, Dorothy Parker.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “I assumed you wanted to talk about it.”

He lay back, his feet still on the floor. “It happened after you died,
so there's no logic to the turn this conversation has taken. My brain tumor is an idiot.”

“My dear, I've been hovering about the Algonquin for many years. People talk.”

“So you're not a hallucination, is that what you're saying?”

“Correct.”

Ted closed his eyes and imagined the tumor growing, taking over. He hoped it would be fast—no hospital nights, no helpless shitting himself, no needing to be fed like an infant.

“It was Audrey,” he said without opening his eyes.

“Audrey?”

“The plagiarism.”

“I thought you didn't want to talk about it.”

“Habit. I've been keeping the secret a long time. But what's the point of having a hallucination if you can't confess all your sins, right? It's not like you can hold a press conference.”

“Go on.”

He opened one eye, looked at her, and closed it again. He had never uttered the words aloud, so it was hard to find the language. But it was a simple story, and all he had to do was begin. He took a shallow breath.

“I finished the manuscript for
Settlers Ridge
and let loose—blind drunk for a whole week. I don't remember much, but I know I cheated on my wife, probably numerous times. It was my second marriage, the one I was supposed to get right. And Audrey was hellfire—somebody you just didn't fuck with. Smart, too. She planted the paragraphs, pulling them from a book I'd used for research. Of course, I didn't reread the book when they sent me proofs, and I never bothered to look at it again. I didn't know about the plagiarism until the
New York Times
article.”

“And you never published another book? Never set the record straight?”

“Damned right.” He sat up and rubbed his face, then went to the window and gazed into the New York night. Manhattan never got truly dark.

“Why haven't you told anyone?” she asked.

“Because I was a piece of shit. Because Audrey would have been dragged through the mud and I'd done enough to hurt her.”

“That's almost noble.”

His shoulders dropped. “Please.”

“She destroyed your career.”

He glanced at her, and saw more intelligence in her eyes than he expected. For a moment, he felt exposed. “I had a good run.”

“Do you have a cigarette?”

“That's it? You're not going to try to convince me to go public? To do a publicity junket and clear my name?”

“It's nothing to me,” she said. “But I really would like a smoke.”

He sat in the chair, trying to decide if he felt lighter now that he had unburdened himself to this figment of his imagination. “Quit five years ago,” he said. “For my health. Feel free to laugh.”

“Is this when you start getting maudlin?”

“This is when we talk about death. Tell me what it's like.”

“Like this,” she said, indicating the space they occupied with a wave of her hand. “Awful. Lonely.”

“No call from a ‘higher power' beckoning you to the great beyond?”

“It has no appeal for me,” she said.

“And why not?”

“An eternity with ‘loved ones'? No thank you.”

“Loved ones,” he repeated, the words as sharp as glass splinters. “I'd rather gnaw my own leg off.”

“I've been counting on that,” she said, and cleared her throat.