Tell-All (4 page)

Among the urns, a silver picture frame lies facedown on the shelf. Next to it, a tarnished tube of
Helena Rubinstein
lipstick. A slow panning shot reveals an atomizer of
Mitsouko
,
the crystal bottle clouded and smudged with fingerprints. A dusty box spouts yellowed
Kleenex
tissues.

In the dim light, we see a bottle of vintage 1851
Château Lafite
. A magnum of
Huet calvados
, circa 1865, and
Croizet cognac
bottled in 1906.
Campbell Bowden & Taylor
port, vintage 1825.

Stacked against the stone walls are cases of
Dom Pérignon
and
Moët & Chandon
and
Bollinger
champagne in bottles of every size …
Jeroboam
bottles, named for the biblical king, son of
Nebat
and
Zeruah
, which hold as much as four typical wine bottles. Here are
Nebuchadnezzar
bottles, twenty times the size of a typical bottle, named for a king of
Babylon
. Among those tower
Melchior
bottles, which hold the equivalent of twenty-four bottles of champagne, named for one of the
Three Wise Men
who greeted the birth of
Jesus Christ
. As many bottles stand empty as still corked. Empty wineglasses litter the cold shadows, long ago abandoned, smudged by the lips of
Conrad Nagel, Alan Hale, Cheeta the chimp
and
Bill Demarest
.

Miss Kathie’s mourning veil falls back, covering her face, and she drinks through the black netting, holding each bottle to her lips and swigging, leaving a new layer of lipstick caked around each new bottle’s glistening neck. Each bottle’s mouth as red as her own.

Sydney Greenstreet
, another no-show at today’s funeral.
Greta Garbo
did not send her sympathies.

What
Walter Winchell
calls “stiff standing up.”

Here we are, just Miss Katherine and myself, yet again.

Brushing aside the black rice of mouse feces—in this strange negative image of a wedding—my Miss Kathie lifts the silver picture frame and props it to stand on the shelf,
leaning the frame against the tomb’s wall. Instead of a picture, the frame surrounds a mirror. Within the mirror, within the reflection of the stone walls, the cobwebs, poses Miss Kathie wearing her black hat and veil. She pinches the fingertips of one glove, pulling the glove free of her left hand. Twisting the diamond solitaire off her ring finger, she hands the six-carat, marquise-cut
Harry Winston
to me. Miss Kathie says, “I guess we ought to record the moment.”

The mirror, old scratches scar and etch its surface. The glass marred by a wide array of old scores.

I tell her, Hit your mark, please.

“Are you absolutely certain you phoned
Cary Grant?”
says Miss Kathie as she steps backward and stands on a faded X, long ago marked in lipstick on the stone floor. At that precise point her movie-star face aligns perfectly with the scratches on the mirror. At that perfect angle and distance, those old scores become the wrinkles she had three, four, five dogs ago, the bags and sumps her face fell into before each was repaired with a new face-lift or an injection of sheep embryo serum. Some radical procedure administered in a secret Swiss clinic. The expensive creams and salves, the operations to pull and tighten. On the mirror linger the pits and liver spots she has erased every few months, etched there—the record of how she ought to look. Again, she lifts her veil, and her reflected cheeks and chin align with the ancient record of sags and moles and stray hairs my Miss Kathie has rightfully earned.

The war wounds left by
Paco Esposito
and
Romeo
, every stray dog and “was-band.”

Miss Kathie makes the face she makes when she’s not making a face, her features, her famous mouth and eyes becoming a
Theda Bara
negligee draped over a padded
hanger in the back of the
Monogram Pictures
wardrobe department, wrapped in plastic in the dark. Her muscles slack and relaxed. The audience forgotten.

And wielding the diamond, I get to work, drawing. I trace any new wrinkles, adding any new liver spots to this long-term record. Creating something more cumulative than any photograph, I document Miss Kathie’s misery before the plastic surgeons can once more wipe the slate clean. Dragging the diamond, digging into the glass, I etch her gray hairs. Updating the topography of this, her secret face. Cutting the latest worry lines across her forehead. I gouge the new crow’s-feet around her eyes, eclipsing the false smile of her public image, the diamond defacing Miss Kathie. Me mutilating her.

After a lifetime of such abuse the mirror bows, curved, so sectioned, so cut and etched so deep, that any new pressure could collapse the glass into a shattered, jagged pile of fragments. Another duty of my job is to never press too hard. My position included mopping up Paco’s piss from around the commode, then taking the dog to a veterinarian for gelding. Every day, I was compelled to tear a page from some history book—the saga of
Hiawatha
, written by
Arthur Miller
as a screenplay for
Deborah Kerr
, or the
Robert Fulton
story, as a vehicle for
Danny Kaye
—to pick up yet another steaming handful of feces.

I drag the diamond in straight lines to mimic the tears running down Miss Kathie’s face.

The diamond shrieks against the glass. The sound of an instant migraine headache.

The mirror of
Dorian Gray
.

Then footsteps echo from offscreen. The heartbeat of a man’s leather shoes approach from down the corridor, each
step louder against the stone.
Van Heflin
or perhaps
Laurence Olivier. Randolph Scott
or maybe
Sid Luft
.

In the silence between one footfall and the next, between heartbeats, I place the mirror facedown on the shelf. I return the diamond ring to my Miss Kathie.

A man’s silhouette fills the doorway to the crypt, tall and slender, his shoulders straight, outlined against the light of the corridor.

Miss Kathie turns, one hand already reaching for the tarnished tube of lipstick. She peers at the man, saying, “Could that be you,
Groucho?”

A bouquet of flowers emerges out of the gloom, the man’s hands offering them. Pink
Nancy Reagan
roses and yellow lilies, a smell bright as sunlight. The man’s voice says, “I’m so sorry about your loss.…” The smooth knuckles and clear skin of a young man’s hands, the fingernails shining and polished.

What
Hedda Hopper
calls a “funeral flirtation.”
Louella Parsons
a “graveside groom.”
Walter Winchell
a “casket crasher.”

Webster Carlton Westward III
steps forward. The young man from the dinner party. The name and phone number on the burned place card.

Those eyes bright brown as summer root beer.

I shake my head, Don’t. Don’t repeat this torture. Don’t trust another one.

But already my Miss Kathie wipes a fresh coat of red around her mouth. Then tosses the old lipstick to rattle among the tarnished urns. Among the empty wine bottles that people call “dead soldiers.” My Miss Kathie lowers the black mesh of her veil and reaches one gloved hand toward something coated with dust, something abandoned and long forgotten
among her dead loves. She lifts this ancient item, her red lips whispering,
“Guten essen.”
Adding, “That’s French for ‘never say never.’ ” Her violet eyes milky and vague with the drugs and brandy, Miss Kathie turns to accept the flowers, in the same gesture slipping the dusty item—her diaphragm—deep into the sagging slit of her old mink coat pocket.

Clare Boothe Luce
once said the following about
Katherine Kenton
—“When she’s in love, nothing can make her sad; however when she’s not in love, nothing can make her happy.”

We’re playing this next scene in the bathroom adjacent to Miss Kathie’s boudoir. As it opens, we discover my Miss Kathie seated at her dressing table, facing three mirrors angled to show her right profile, her left profile, and her full face. The bouquet of pink
Nancy Reagan
roses and yellow lilies delivered by
Webster Carlton Westward III
occupy a vase, those few flowers reflected and reflected until they could be a florist shop. An entire garden. This single bouquet, multiplied. Made infinite. Not left at the crypt to rot.

Dangling from the bouquet, a parchment card reads:
Our love is only wasted when we fail to share it with another. Please allow the world to share its limitless love with you
. Some gibberish plagiarized from
John Milton
or
Mohandas Gandhi
.

Reflected in the mirrors, my Miss Kathie pinches the slack skin that hangs below her chin. Pinching and pulling the skin, she says, “No more whiskey. And no more of those damned chocolates.”

Chocolate poisoning, it fits all the earmarks. Shame on Miss Kathie for neglecting an entire box on her bed, where
Loverboy
would be bound to sniff them out. The caffeine contained in even a single bonbon more than sufficient to bring about a heart attack in a dog of that size.

The parchment card, signed,
Webb
. The Westward boy, what
Cholly Knickerbocker
would term an “opportunistic affection.” Next to the roses on the polished top of her dressing table rests the rubber bump of Miss Kathie’s diaphragm, pink rubber flocked with dust.

Peeling off her false eyelashes, Miss Kathie looks at me standing behind her, both of us reflected in the mirror, multiplied into a mob, the whole world peopled by just us two, and she says, “Are you certain that no one else sent their condolences?”

I shake my head, No. No one.

Miss Kathie peels off her auburn wig, handing it to me. She says, “Not even the senator?”

The “was-band” before Paco.
Senator Phelps Russell Warner
. Again, I shake my head, No. Not
Terrence Terry
, the faggot dancer. Not
Paco Esposito
, who currently plays a hot-tempered, flamenco-dancing Latin brain surgeon on some new radio program called
Guiding Light
. None of the was-bands have sent a word of condolence.

Pawing the makeup from her face with cotton balls and cold cream, Miss Kathie snaps the elastic wig cap off the crown of her head. Her movie-star hands claw the long strands of gray hair loose. She twists her head side to side,
fast, so the hair fans out, hanging to the pink, padded shoulders of her satin dressing gown. Fingering a few wispy gray strands, Miss Kathie says, “Do you think my hair will hold dye again?”

The first symptom of what Walter Winchell calls “infant-uation” is when Miss Kathie colors her hair the bright orange of a tabby cat.

“Optimism,” says H. L. Mencken, “is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.”

Miss Kathie cups a hand beneath each of her breasts, lifting them until the cleavage swells at her throat. Watching herself in the angled mirrors, she says, “Why can’t that brilliant Dr. Josef Mengele in Munich do something about my old-lady
hands?”

At best, this young Westward specimen is what Lolly Parsons calls a “boy-ographer.” One of those smiling, dancing young gadabouts who insinuate themselves in the private lives of lonely, fading motion-picture stars. Professional listeners, these meticulously well-groomed walking men, they listen to confidences, indulge strong egos and weakening minds, forever cherry-picking the best anecdotes and quotes, with a manuscript always ready for publication upon the instant of the movie star’s demise. So many cozy evenings beside the fire, sipping brandy, those nights will pay off with scandalous confessions and declarations. Mr. Bright Brown Eyes, without a doubt, he’s one of those seducers ready to betray every secret, every wart and flatulence of Miss Kathie’s private life.

This Webster specimen is obviously a would-be author, looking to write the type of intimate tell-all that Winchell calls an unauthorized “bile-ography.” The literary equivalent
of a magpie, stealing the brightest and darkest moments from every celebrity he’ll meet.

My Miss Kathie scoops a finger through a jar of
Vaseline
, then rubs a fat lump of the slime, smearing it across her top and bottom teeth, pushing her finger deep to coat her molars. She smiles her greasy smile and says, “Do you have a spoon?”

In the kitchen, I tell her. We haven’t kept a spoon in her bathroom since the year when every other song on the radio was
Christine, Dorothy
and
Phyllis McGuire
singing
“Don’t Take Your Love from Me.”

Miss Kathie’s goal: to reduce until she becomes what
Lolly Parsons
calls nothing but “tan and bones.” What
Hedda Hopper
calls a “lipstick skeleton.” A “beautifully coiffed skull” as
Elsa Maxwell
calls
Katharine Hepburn
.

The moment of Miss Kathie’s exit in search of said spoon, my fingers pry open a box of bath salts and pinch up the coarse grains. These I sprinkle between the roses, swirling the vase to dissolve the salts into the water. My fingers pluck the card from the bouquet of roses and lilies. Folding the parchment, I tear it once, twice. Folding and tearing until the sentences become only words. The words become only letters of the alphabet, which I sprinkle into the toilet bowl. As I flush the lever, the water rises in the bowl, the torn parchment spinning as the water deepens. From deep within itself, the commode regurgitates a hidden mess of paper trapped down within the toilet’s throat. Bobbing to the surface, bits of waterlogged paper, greeting cards, the tissue paper of telegrams. It all backs up within the clogged bowl.