Music for Chameleons (22 page)

MARY:
Dear Lord, in your mercy. Please, Lord, help Mr. Trask to stop boozing and get his job back. Please, Lord, don’t leave Miss Shaw a bookworm and an old maid; she ought to bring your children into this world. And, Lord, I beg you to remember my sons and daughter and my grandchildren, each and every one. And please don’t let Mr. Smith’s family send him to that retirement home; he don’t want to go, he cries all the time …

(Her list of names is more numerous than the beads on her rosary, and her requests in their behalf have the earnest shine of the altar’s candle-flame. She pauses to glance at me.)

MARY:
Are you praying?

TC:
Yes.

MARY:
I can’t hear you.

TC:
I’m praying for you, Mary. I want you to live forever.

MARY:
Don’t pray for me. I’m already saved. (She takes my hand and holds it) Pray for your mother. Pray for all those souls lost out there in the dark. Pedro. Pedro.

II

Hello, Stranger

TIME:
DECEMBER
1977.

Place:
A New York restaurant, The Four Seasons.

The man who had invited me to lunch, George Claxton, had suggested we meet at noon, and made no excuse for setting such an early hour. I soon discovered the reason, however; in the year or more since I had last seen him, George Claxton, heretofore a man moderately abstemious, had become a two-fisted drinker. As soon as we were seated he ordered a double Wild Turkey (“Just straight, please; no ice”), and within fifteen minutes requested an encore.

I was surprised, and not just by the urgency of his thirst. He had gained at least thirty pounds; the buttons of his pinstripe vest seemed on the verge of popping loose, and his skin color, usually ruddy from jogging or tennis, had an alien pallor, as though he had just emerged from a penitentiary. Also, he was sporting dark glasses, and I thought: How theatrical! Imagine good old plain George Claxton, solidly entrenched Wall Street fellow living in Greenwich or Westport or wherever it was with a wife named Gertrude or Alice or whatever it was, with three
or four or five children, imagine this guy chugging double Wild Turkeys and wearing dark glasses!

It was all I could do not to ask straight out: Well, what the hell happened to you? But I said: “How are you, George?”

GEORGE:
Fine. Fine. Christmas. Jesus. Just can’t keep up with it. Don’t expect a card from me this year. I’m not sending any.

TC:
Really? Your cards seemed such a tradition. Those family things, with dogs. And how is your family?

GEORGE:
Growing. My oldest daughter just had her second baby. A girl.

TC:
Congratulations.

GEORGE:
Well, we wanted a boy. If it had been a boy, she would have named him after me.

TC
(thinking: Why am I here? Why am I having lunch with this jerk? He bores me, he’s always bored me): And Alice? How is Alice?

GEORGE:
Alice?

TC:
I mean Gertrude.

GEORGE
(frowning, peevish): She’s painting. You know our house is right there on the Sound. Have our own little beach. She stays locked in her room all day painting what she sees from the window. Boats.

TC:
That’s nice.

GEORGE:
I’m not so sure. She was a Smith girl; majored in art. She did a little painting before we were married. Then she forgot about it. Seemed to. Now she paints all the time.
All the time
. Stays locked in her room. Waiter, could you send the maître d’ over with a menu? And bring me another of these things. No ice.

TC:
That’s very British, isn’t it? Neat whiskey without ice.

GEORGE:
I’m having root-canal. Anything cold hurts my teeth.
You know who I got a Christmas card from? Mickey Manolo. The rich kid from Caracas? He was in our class.

(Of course, I didn’t remember Mickey Manolo, but I nodded and pretended yes, yes. Nor would I have remembered George Claxton if he hadn’t kept careful track of me for forty-odd years, ever since we had been students together at an especially abysmal prep school. He was a straight-arrow athletic kid from an upper-middle-class Pennsylvania family; we had nothing in common, but we stumbled into an alliance because in exchange for my writing all his book reports and English compositions, he did my algebra homework and during examinations slipped me the answers. As a result, I had been stuck for four decades with a “friendship” that demanded a duty lunch every year or two.)

TC:
You very seldom see women in this restaurant.

GEORGE:
That’s what I like about it. Not a lot of gibbering broads. It has a nice masculine look. You know, I don’t think I’ll have anything to eat. My teeth. It hurts too much to chew.

TC:
Poached eggs?

GEORGE:
There’s something I’d like to tell you. Maybe you could give me a little advice.

TC:
People who take my advice usually regret it. However …

GEORGE:
This started last June. Just after Jeffrey’s graduation—he’s my youngest boy. It was a Saturday and Jeff and I were down on our little beach painting a boat. Jeff went up to the house to get us some beer and sandwiches, and while he was gone I suddenly stripped down and went for a swim. The water was still too cold. You can’t really swim in the Sound much before July. But I just felt like it.

I swam out quite a ways and was lying there floating on my back and looking at my house. It’s really a great house—six-car
garage, swimming pool, tennis courts; too bad we’ve never been able to get you out there. Anyway, I was floating on my back feeling pretty good about life when I noticed this bottle bobbing in the water.

It was a clear-glass bottle that had contained some kind of soda pop. Someone had stoppered it with a cork and sealed it with adhesive tape. But I could see there was a piece of paper inside, a note. It made me laugh; I used to do that when I was a kid—stuff messages in bottles and throw them in the water:
Help! Man Lost at Sea!

So I grabbed the bottle and swam ashore. I was curious to see what was inside it. Well, it was a note dated a month earlier, and it was written by a girl who lived in Larchmont. It said:
Hello, stranger. My name is Linda Reilly and I am twelve years old. If you find this letter please write and let me know when and where you found it. If you do I will send you a box of homemade fudge
.

The thing is, when Jeff came back with our sandwiches I didn’t mention the bottle. I don’t know why, but I didn’t. Now I wish I had. Maybe then nothing would have happened. But it was like a little secret I wanted to keep to myself. A joke.

TC:
Are you sure you aren’t hungry? I’m only having an omelette.

GEORGE:
Okay. An omelette, very soft.

TC:
And so you wrote this young lady, Miss Reilly?

GEORGE
(hesitantly): Yes. Yes, I did.

TC:
What did you say?

GEORGE:
On Monday, when I was back in my office, I was checking through my briefcase and I found the note. I say “found” because I don’t remember putting it there. It had vaguely crossed my mind I’d drop the kid a card—just a nice gesture, you know. But that day I had lunch with a client who likes martinis. Now, I never used to drink at lunch—nor much any other time, either. But I had two martinis, and I went back
to the office feeling swivel-headed. So I wrote this little girl quite a long letter; I didn’t dictate it, I wrote it in longhand and told her where I lived and how I’d found her bottle and wished her luck and said some dumb thing like that though I was a stranger, I sent her the affectionate wishes of a friend.

TC:
A two-martini missive. Still, where’s the harm?

GEORGE:
Silver Bullets. That’s what they call martinis. Silver Bullets.

TC:
How about that omelette? Aren’t you even going to touch it?

GEORGE:
Jesus Christ! My teeth
hurt
.

TC:
It’s really quite good. For a restaurant omelette.

GEORGE:
About a week later a big box of fudge arrived. Sent to my office. Chocolate fudge with pecans. I passed it around the office and told everybody my daughter had made it. One of the guys said: “Oh, yeah! I’ll bet old George has a secret girl friend.”

TC:
And did she send a letter with the fudge?

GEORGE:
No. But I wrote a thank-you note. Very brief. Have you got a cigarette?

TC:
I stopped smoking years ago.

GEORGE:
Well, I just started. I still don’t buy them, though. Just bum one now and then. Waiter, could you bring me a pack of cigarettes? Doesn’t matter what brand, as long as it isn’t menthol. And another Wild Turkey, please?

TC:
I’d like some coffee.

GEORGE:
But I got an answer to my thank-you note. A long letter. It really threw me. She enclosed a picture of herself. A color Polaroid. She was wearing a bathing suit and standing on a beach. She may have been twelve, but she looked sixteen. A lovely kid with short curly black hair and the bluest eyes.

TC:
Shades of Humbert Humbert.

GEORGE:
Who?

TC:
Nothing. A character in a novel.

GEORGE:
I never read novels. I hate to read.

TC:
Yes, I know. After all, I used to do all your book reports. So what did Miss Linda Reilly have to say?

GEORGE
(after pausing a full five seconds): It was very sad. Touching. She said she hadn’t been living in Larchmont very long, and that she had no friends, and that she had tossed dozens of bottles into the water, but that I was the only person who had found one and answered. She said she was from Wisconsin, but that her father had died and her mother had married a man who had three daughters of his own and that none of them liked her. It was a ten-page letter, no misspellings. She said a lot of intelligent things. But she sounded really miserable. She said she hoped I’d write again, and maybe I could drive over to Larchmont and we could meet someplace. Do you mind listening to all this? If you do …

TC:
Please. Go ahead.

GEORGE:
I kept the picture. In fact, I put it in my wallet. Along with snaps of my other kids. See, because of the letter, I started to think of her as one of my own children. I couldn’t get the letter out of my mind. And that night, when I took the train home, I did something I’d done only a very few times. I went into the club car and ordered myself a couple of stiff drinks and read the letter over and over. Memorized it, practically. Then when I got home I told my wife I had some office work to do. I shut myself in my den and started a letter to Linda. I wrote until midnight.

TC:
Were you drinking all this time?

GEORGE
(surprised): Why?

TC:
It might have some bearing on what you wrote.

GEORGE:
Yes, I was drinking, and I guess maybe it was a pretty emotional letter. But I felt so upset about this kid. I really wanted to help her. I wrote her about some of the troubles my own kids had had. About Harriet’s acne and how she never had a single
boyfriend. Not till she had her skin-peel. I told her about the hard times I’d had when I was growing up.

TC:
Oh? I thought you’d enjoyed the ideal life of an ideal American youth.

GEORGE:
I let people see what I wanted them to see. Inside was a different story.

TC:
Had me fooled.

GEORGE:
Around midnight my wife knocked on the door. She wanted to know if anything was wrong, and I told her to go back to bed, I had an urgent business letter to finish, and when it was finished I was going to drive down to the post office. She said why couldn’t it wait until morning, it’s after twelve. I lost my temper. Married thirty years, and I could count on ten fingers the times I’ve lost my temper with her. Gertrude is a wonderful, wonderful woman. I love her heart and soul. I do, goddamnit! But I shouted at her: No, it can’t wait. It has to go tonight. It’s very important.

(A waiter handed George a pack of cigarettes already opened. He stuck one in his mouth, and the waiter lit it for him, which was just as well, for his fingers were too agitated to hold a match without endangering himself.)

And Jesus Christ, it
was
important. Because I felt if I didn’t mail the letter that night, I never would. Maybe, sober, I’d think it was too personal or something. And here was this lonely unhappy kid who’d shown me her heart: how would she feel if she never heard one word from me? No. I got in my car and drove down to the post office and as soon as I’d mailed the letter, dropped it into the slot, I felt too tired to drive home. I fell asleep in the car. It was dawn when I woke up, but my wife was asleep and she didn’t notice when I came in.

I just about had time to shave and change my clothes before rushing off to catch the train. While I was shaving, Gertrude
came into the bathroom. She was smiling; she hadn’t mentioned my little temper tantrum. But she had my wallet in her hand, and she said, “George, I’m going to have Jeff’s graduation picture enlarged for your mother,” and with that she started shuffling through all the pictures in my wallet. I didn’t think anything about it until suddenly she said: “Who is this girl?”

TC:
And it was the young lady from Larchmont.

GEORGE:
I should have told her the whole story right then. But I … Anyway, I said it was the daughter of one of my commuter friends. I said he’d been showing it to some of the guys on the train, and he’d forgot and left it on the bar. So I’d put it in my wallet to return the next time I saw him.