Memory (Hard Case Crime) (34 page)

A while later, a physical problem came along to mar his contentment. He tried to ignore it a while, but it just got worse, so finally he turned his head and whispered, “Bathroom.”

“Gotta go wee-wee?”

He nodded solemnly. She nodded to him, and looked judicious, and said, “Come, I’ll show you the way.” She spoke with exaggerated care.

He had trouble getting to his feet, which struck them both funny. They laughed, leaning on each other, and moved across the living room. Cole murmured to himself, “I’m pretty drunk.” He nodded; he didn’t mind being drunk at all. There was no longer anything to worry about.

She said, “What? You said something, honey?”

“I’m drunk.”

“Lord, so am I.”

They moved from room to room, Helen switching on lights as they went, till they came to a bedroom, a huge square room dominated by a double bed covered with a purple quilt. She pointed unsteadily at a door beyond the bed. “Right through there. All the comforts of home.”

“Thank you.” He made a comic bow, and smiled blearily.

All at once she embraced him, folding her arms around him and kissing him hungrily. He smiled through the kiss, thinking it was funny, and closed his arms around her because he was afraid of losing his balance.

“Hurry back. You hear?” Her voice was a husky whisper.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He made it around the bed and through the door to the bathroom. He found the light switch beside the doorway, clicked it on, and shut the door.

He was longer than he’d expected to be, because his coordination was bad. The light was very strong in the bathroom, reflecting from coral tiles all around him. As he stood there, he felt the first twinges of a headache, and squinted. But he still wasn’t thinking clearly.

When he came back to the bedroom, she was supine on the bed, limbs spread out, fast asleep. He stood looking down at her, trying to understand why she was asleep, and trying to decide what he was supposed to do now.

He should go home, probably. He was very very drunk, and he knew it. And so was she; she’d passed out. So he ought to go home.

He sat on the side of the bed and leaned over her and mumbled, “Good night, I had a very nice time.”

She stirred, and smiled, and murmured. Still more asleep than awake, she raised her arms in a slow and fuzzy movement, but the weight of her arms was too much for her; her hands slid down his chest and fell again to her side.

He felt very friendly toward her, very comfortable. He patted her cheek gently. “A very nice time,” he repeated. Then he got up from the bed.

His sense of direction was gone. He wandered around the apartment a while, through all the rooms she had lit on their way to the bedroom, and discovered his coat by accident, draped over a chair in a small room containing a television set and several bookcases. He struggled into the coat, and lumbered on, and found the living room, and from there the front door. He rode down in the elevator, and walked along the mirror-lined hallway, stopping halfway to look at himself and grin. He had lipstick smeared across his face. He rubbed at it with his fingers, but didn’t do much good. He gave his reflection an exaggerated shrug, and a salute, and moved on.

In the foyer, his eyes fell on the mobile, and the square of shiny metal. A sudden rage filled him and he shouted, “Bastard! Rotten bastard!” He ran across the foyer and slapped at the gleaming square, and the mobile rattled and clanged and trembled.

The doorman came, indignantly, and threw him out.

Across the street, something had been torn down, just recently, along the whole length of the block. Behind a temporary fence constructed of green and gray doors, tilting drunkenly, black machines and men in yellow helmets moved minutely across a plain of pulverized brick.

It was Friday, the afternoon after the evening with Helen Arndt, and Cole was on Varick Street in lower Manhattan, a street of warehouse lofts and squat old office buildings. He was on his way to see Robin Kirk, his old acting teacher.

Helen had called this morning a little after eleven. There had been an artificial brightness to her voice, and she had talked jokingly about how drunk they got together last night, and seemed somehow to be asking questions with direct statements, as though she wanted him to tell her something about last night, but he couldn’t understand what. “We’ll have to get together again soon, honey,” she said. “And this time I guess I better not get quite so drunk. I don’t want to miss anything.” And she laughed, a brittle sound.

“I’ve got a real headache myself today,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

They talked—aimlessly, it seemed to Cole—about the evening a while longer, and then she suddenly became brisk, saying, “I called Robin Kirk for you. Remember? I said I would.”

“My old teacher.”

“That’s right. Good boy, you remembered. He said you can come by any time at all. This afternoon, if you want.”

Another chance to get out of the apartment. “That’d be fine.”

“He knows about your accident, so you won’t have to explain anything.”

“Fine.”

She gave him the address and told him to be there around three; that was when Kirk’s afternoon class started.

He left the apartment at two-thirty, stopping on the way to check the mailbox, and found in it a notice from the Screen Actors’ Guild to the effect that he was overdue in his annual dues payment. They would give him thirty days to pay, or he could consider himself no longer a member of the union. When he saw that notice, it seemed to him as though he could feel the moorings begin to slip, as though somehow he were drifting farther and farther away from his goal rather than toward it, as though, in spite of himself, he was methodically closing off and boarding up every room and alley of his former life.

Kirk had to be able to help, that’s all there was to it.

Well, here he was. He’d been walking south on Varick Street from the subway stop, looking at the house numbers, and now he knew the address should be in this block someplace, where across the street something had just recently been torn down. He looked over there, squinting in the cold sunlight—his head still ached a little—and he was angered by the machines and the men, as though they were doing their work simply to annoy him. How could he begin to remember, if they kept tearing things down? In every neighborhood he’d been to it was the same; empty buildings with the white-X’ed windows that meant they were marked for demolition, raw rust-colored holes between buildings where something had just been stripped away, steel frameworks for new buildings rising behind board fences like monkey bars for giants, as though in some enormous auditorium it was intermission and here on stage the set was being changed.

The address he wanted was in the middle of the block, on the side that hadn’t yet been torn down. It was a narrower building than its neighbors, made of stone, five stories high. The first floor was a store, the display windows painted green, and with rubbish stacked in the entranceway. The windows on the upper stories were all blank and uncurtained and covered with dust.

There was a door beside the green display window. Cole pushed it open and climbed steep stairs to the third floor, where a piece of shirt cardboard tacked to a door bore the message:
ROBIN KIRK STUDIO
. It had been carefully lettered with a ruler, the letters filled in with a ballpoint pen.

Nothing yet had stirred Cole’s sluggish memory, not the street nor the building nor the stairwell nor this sign. He opened the door and stepped into a long dim room, and still there was no feeling that he had ever been here before.

The room filled most of the third floor, unpartitioned, with grimy windows at front and back. Wooden folding chairs in rows faced the back, where a table and two chairs stood on a raised platform. There was little light anywhere except at the platform, which was lit by two standing photographer’s spots at the side of the room.

The class had already begun. A dozen boys and girls in bulky sweaters and dark slacks sat near the front, down by the platform. On the platform was standing a fortyish man of medium height, wearing gray slacks and a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. His face was not handsome but strong, lined and firm like the face of a man who spends most of his time outdoors. His brown hair was thick, and wavy, and a little too full and too long, distracting slightly from the masculinity of his face.

Cole recognized him at once; this was Robin Kirk. Images came to him of Robin Kirk on a platform, lecturing, or in discussion in a bar booth, or listening with frowning concentration as they walked together through Washington Square Park. But not this room, this was still alien; he wondered why.

Kirk was talking about emotion: “No matter how many people there are on stage, I don’t care if it’s tragedy or comedy or whatever, one character is always the focal point of emotion. It may shift a dozen times in the same scene, or it may stay with one character throughout a play, but there is always just one character toward whom all emotion is directed, and a part of your job is to determine which character. Who is the emotional center of this scene, and when does it shift to some other character? The amateur plays every line as though the emotional focal point was himself, but the professional knows better.”

A pinched-faced girl with a black ponytail had come to the back of the room where Cole was standing, and now she whispered, “Are you going to audit this class?”

Audit meant watch, he’d learned that already from Nick. He said, “Yes.”

“That’s four dollars,” she whispered.

“I have to pay?”

“Yes, of course.”

He gave her a five dollar bill, and she whispered to him that she would bring him his change later. She had a clipboard with her, and asked him his name; when he told her, she wrote it down, and then slid silently back to the front of the room again.

Cole was irritated at having to pay; he couldn’t remember anything about auditing, or that visitors to the class had to pay. He moved forward and took a seat in the last row of chairs, and watched with a feeling of mistrustfulness.

Kirk finished his lecture on emotion, and said, “Now we’ll go to work. Greta? Robert? Is your scene ready?”

It wasn’t. They offered excuses, too low for Cole to hear, and Kirk was obviously angry. He and the two students bickered a while, and Cole began to wonder if it was all right to smoke. He looked at the students, and then saw one of the boys smoking, so it must be all right. He lit a cigarette, and continued to watch.

The second couple Kirk chose did have their scene ready. Kirk left the platform, going over to sit at the end of the first row, and the students took his place. They were a short and stocky girl with wild black hair and beautiful brown eyes and a prominent jaw, and a tall gangly boy with a shock of carrot- colored hair and a bony nervous face. The boy announced the scene: “
The Cocktail Party
, by T. S. Eliot. Act Two. Celia and Reilly.”

The two arranged the table and two chairs, and explained to the audience that the table was a desk. They sat on opposite sides of it, and began to talk. The boy’s voice was a growl, unnatural and intense, much deeper than the voice with which he’d announced what they were going to do, and the girl’s voice was quietly pleasant, with a hit of the rasp it would assume later in life, and slight indications of the Bronx accent she had almost completely cured herself of.

The talk they did seemed rambling and self-conscious. The boy, particularly, gestured with great wide winglike swooping motions, striving for too much emotional impact in every word. The two of them up there were like little girls walking in their mothers’ high heels. Cole watched, knowing it was bad without any hint in his own mind about how to make it good, and the sense of the words drifted by him untasted.

The couple on the platform finally finished, to scattered and perfunctory applause from their classmates, and returned flustered to their seats. Kirk took over the platform again and led a discussion about what the two performers had done wrong. Each student in turn criticized the performance, and with each in turn Kirk either agreed or disagreed, but in either case amplified the student’s remarks. And this part, too, stirred faint memories in Cole.

Next came the improvisation. Kirk called up two of the girls and told them they were a first-grade teacher and the mother of an unruly child whom the teacher had slapped that day. The mother had come to argue about the slapping of her child. Kirk gave them this information, and then went and sat down again in the front row.

The improvisation was even more like children play-acting in their mothers’ shoes, except that the girls on the platform lacked the unselfconsciousness of children. They ranted at each other, mouthing cliché-filled dialogue and gesturing far too broadly with their hands. When it was done, there was another round of criticism led by Kirk. He wanted to know which of the girls was the emotional center at the beginning of the scene, and if the center shifted at any time, and if the girls had seemed to be aware of the emotional center throughout the scene. No one could seem to agree on where the emotional center lay, and the class ended on a note of incompleteness. Kirk told Greta and Robert they had damn well better have their scene ready next time, and dismissed the group.

Cole waited at the back of the room as the students filed out, talking together enthusiastically but quietly. At the far end of the room, Kirk sat down in one of the chairs on the platform, lit a cigarette, and rested an arm on the table. He looked tired.

When there were only the two of them left, Cole got to his feet. His chair scraped against the floor slightly as he did so, and Kirk looked up, squinting against the lights aimed at the platform. He called, “Hello?” And then, “Paul? Is that you?”

“Yes.” Cole walked forward, down the aisle through the uneven rows of chairs.

Kirk didn’t get up. Watching Cole come forward, he said, “Helen told me you might be around. She told me what happened to you.”

Cole stopped at the edge of the platform. “I remember you,” he said, “and the class. But I don’t remember this place.”