Based on a True Story (11 page)

Frances’s seatmate nudged her. “Are you friends with Kit Gallagher, then? What do you reckon her and the stewardess get in a scrap? Maybe tear some clothes?”

Augusta batted the flight attendant’s hand away, knocking a man’s reading glasses off his head. “I will return to my seat,” she said, “when I have what I need.”

“Ma’am,” the flight attendant said in a voice perfected through several Dealing With Difficult Passengers seminars, “I will only ask you once more. You are posing a hazard to yourself and to the security of this flight. Resume your seat.”

Her colleagues scurried to her aid, surrounding Augusta like a ring of sheepdogs around an angry bull. One of them carried a handful of plastic restraints.

Augusta had reached down to autograph a man’s arm, although from his terrified expression it seemed he hadn’t requested the service. As the plane lurched once again, she fell, laughing, onto his lap.

“Christ’s sake, darling!” Frances heard her screech. “You’re well upholstered.”

“That’s it,” the flight attendant said, and reached down to take Augusta’s arm.

“Hands off, you mad bitch!” Augusta’s voice was muffled by the man’s lap, her pointed toes kicking out at anyone within reach. “I know my rights! I am a British citizen! You just want to fondle my . . .” The words were lost as the other the flight attendants descended to form a protective circle. “Get your hands off . . . sue you . . . Sober as a judge, I tell you. As a judge!”

“Miss Bleeker? Ma’am?”

With a great effort, Frances unpeeled her eyes. The police officer was standing before her, arms crossed over a barrel chest. Was it the same one who’d escorted her past all the open-mouthed passengers? Nothing was clear at the moment; she was looking at him through a veil of fog.

“Yes,” she managed. Had she been eating peanut butter? She could barely get the words through her dry lips. She coughed, pulled herself upright on the plastic chair. “Yes, officer.”

Lodged in the crevice between his chest and one beefy bicep was a gold badge:
POLICE OFFICER,
it said in purple script above the words
AIRPORT POLICE. LAX
was embroidered on his uniform, above the badge. Lax? There was nothing lax about his grip.
Oh
. The clouds in her brain parted slightly, and she remembered where she was. Home.

“I wanted to return this to you, Ma’am.” The officer held out her bag, which she’d left behind in the chaos.

Frances reached out, but there was an odd disconnect in her brain, and the bag wasn’t where her hand thought it should be. She pawed the air for a moment until, with a sigh, he bent down and placed it in her lap. A curled piece of paper had come unstuck from the wall behind his head:
PLEASE ASSIST LOS ANGELES WORLD AIRPORTS POLICE IN THEIR ENQUIRIES. INCIVILITY AND ABUSE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.
She giggled, but it sounded very far away. “Thank you, officer,” Frances said carefully. “Am I three to go? Free to go, I mean? With my friend?”

“My colleague is still questioning your associate, ma’am.” The officer frowned at her, and Frances felt that in an earlier age he would have wagged a finger, or worse. “Disrupting a flight is a serious offence, especially these days. A federal offence.”

“Absolutely, yes, I understand,” said Frances. “I appreciate the seriousness of the situation, officer.” She added weakly, “I’m American. British people sometimes don’t understand our rules.”

He watched for a minute as Frances tried to rub feeling back into her face. “I’ll keep you apprised of our progress. Meantime, there’s a water cooler over there.”

She waited for a moment, not trusting her feet. Sure enough, when she stood, one knee buckled and she sat back down with a graceless thump, her chair screeching against the linoleum. Two agents, huddled over a printout, turned to look her way.

Frances closed her eyes again, giving in to the pull of sleep. There was something unfamiliar about this tumble into darkness, a hallucinatory quality she’d never felt before. At the edge of her consciousness people who only wanted the best for her gathered: her father, her mother, Stanley. Oddly, Augusta was there, gazing at her with concern.

Frances jerked awake and felt for her purse. It had slid from her lap onto the next seat over, lodged against an elderly man in a cherry-red suit, whose shirt was open to reveal a profusion of white chest hair. He turned to her and slung an arm over the back of her chair, smiling appreciatively. “How you doing?”

Slowly, Frances managed to unpeel her lids. The police officers at the end of the hallway were gone. She realized, with a start, that the old man in the red suit was standing in front of her.

“Would you like to join me for a coffee, my dear?”

Someone had poured grit in her eyes while she slept. How long had it been? The hallway was still filled with sunlight streaming from the mesh-covered windows.

“I’m fine, thanks,” she said, though her voice was rusty. “I don’t think we’re meant to leave this . . . station, or whatever it is.”

He shrugged, and walked down the corridor. Still no sign of Augusta or the two cops who had ushered her off the plane. Frances found she didn’t much care; she was wrapped in a delicious blanket of calm. Somewhere in her head a tiny voice urged her to be furious with Augusta, but it was coming from another room.

A female police officer walked by, escorting a man whose face was surly under a baseball cap: “Sir, it is illegal to have a loaded firearm in your car when you come to the airport.” Her voice rose as they passed Frances. “I understand that, sir, but the law does not make exception for birthday presents.”

“Here you are, young lady.” The man in the red suit had returned, and he was bending over, solicitous. “You looked like you could use this.”

It was a plastic cup of water, warm and slightly murky. Frances felt a prick at the back of her eyes. When would she ever stop misjudging people, and crying when she did?

“Thanks,” she said, and smiled up at him. “It’s very kind of you.”

“It’s my pleasure,” said the old man, with a half-bow. “Maybe you’d like to give me your number?”

Frances sighed. “I don’t think so.”

She closed her eyes again, but it was only a moment before she heard a door opening at the end of the hall. Augusta emerged, her hair a wild cloud, the wine stain like a wound over her left breast.

Frances stared. She’d been expecting a diminished Augusta, worn down by exhaustion, drink, and an abrading conflict with American security. Instead she radiated satisfaction, as if she’d just read the critics’ reviews of her latest performance and they were all in awe. Behind her, one of the police officers rubbed dark-ringed eyes.

Augusta sailed toward her with the two cops in her wake. “How kind of you to wait, Frances, while this misunderstanding was sorted out.”

As if I had a choice
, Frances thought.

“Once I explained to Officer Cruz,” she indicated the younger of the two, “about the mixup over my medication, they were most understanding.”

“Your medication,” Frances repeated.

“My epilepsy medication,” Augusta nodded. “And how distraught I was when I thought I’d left it at home. How I had perhaps one more glass of wine than I ought. For my nerves.”

“Absolutely,” said Frances.

“And when I explained to Officer Cruz that I was here to meet fans of my show . . . well, it turns out he has seen
The Blood Bank
. On the Internet.” She turned to the younger officer, put a hand on his forearm. “I will be sure to have all of the episodes sent to you.”

Seeing his partner’s scowl, Officer Cruz cleared his throat.

The older officer glared at Augusta over his half-rims. “You are free to go with a warning this time, Miss Price.” As Augusta nodded meekly, his frown deepened. “This time. We take all disruptions in federal air space very, very seriously, whether they constitute a security threat or not. It remains the airline’s prerogative to lodge a formal complaint against you for defamatory remarks.”

Augusta nodded, eyes to the floor.

“Well, then,” said the older man. “We have your contact details. We’ll be in touch if there are further developments.”

He turned to leave. His partner raised his fingers in a half-wave at Augusta, and followed.

As soon as they were gone, Augusta rolled her eyes and flopped onto the seat next to Frances. “Dear God, now I know why you moved from this place. These people are so . . . officious.”

“Maybe that’s because they’re officials.” It sounded to Frances as if she was speaking from the bottom of a deep pool.

Augusta leaned back in her chair, gave Frances a long, hard stare. Finally, she said, “How many did you take?”

She had no energy to waste on a lie. “Two,” she said.

Augusta made a sound that was half cough and half laugh. The old man in the red suit joined in with a high cackle of his own.

“Four milligrams of Ativan and you’re still conscious,” she said, and slung Frances’s bag over her shoulder. “Maybe we’re meant to be together after all.”

eighteen

The flowered sheet that hung across the apartment, dividing the warring combatants, was laundered to almost transparent delicacy. It carried Deller back forty years to his grandmother’s kitchen, where wet linen lay draped over a wooden rack in one corner, drying as stiff as cardboard.

The elderly woman sitting on one side of the sheet, though, belonged to a different species from his nan, who was a champion of stoicism, her mouth grimly clamped shut in the face of joy and sorrow. Ken’s grandmother could suffer for Britain. Myra Rosen, now sitting in front of him, eyes glittering under hoods of powder-blue shadow, seemed never to have let a grievance pass unspoken.

“And so I asked him, ‘If you’re going to use the bathroom when it’s not your time on the schedule’ — and I understand, these things happen, I’m not a monster — I said to him, ‘Could you please at least give me some warning?’ — so maybe I can find my way to the bedroom and not have to witness him tramping across my floor.” She leaned across the table, pushing aside a plate of cherry Danishes, and whispered: “It’s his prostate, you know how it is with old men, the
shvantz
is the first thing that goes —”

“I can hear you! My ears are still working, thank you very much!”

The aggrieved bellow came from the other side of the sheet. Kenneth could hear Mr. Rosen shuffling around in the hidden kitchen, emitting an operatic chorus of groans and sighs to accompany his wife’s narrative.

Estranged wife, Kenneth corrected himself. But were they estranged when they still shared an apartment, if not a life? A bulletin board was nailed to the wall. It laid out, in ten-minute slices, precisely when Myra was allowed on her husband’s side of the curtain to access the kitchen, and when he was allowed on her side to relieve his overburdened bladder.

“Well,” Kenneth said, with false brightness, “it’s a bit like
It Happened One Night
.”

Myra Rosen reared back in her chair so that her golden chandelier earrings tinkled. “Are you suggesting that one is Clark Gable?” She jabbed a thumb at the curtain.

There was a snarl from the other side: “And the man in the grocery store mistakes you for Claudette Colbert?”

“Maybe once I did look like Claudette Colbert,” said Myra, gazing at herself in the polished surface of the table, “till Mr. Vampire sucked my youth away.”

“There’s a good place to start,” Kenneth said hastily. “Tell me how it began.”

He couldn’t look at his watch, but he was acutely aware of the time slipping away, of the thousand things that were swirling around in his brain: Augusta in the same city and Charles pretending it meant nothing; and his publisher’s latest email inquiring about the state of his book, which had strayed from passive-aggressive into purely aggressive.

“It was when I heard you on the radio,” Myra continued, “and you were talking to a lady whose husband was a useless lump —” (behind the curtain, a bitter laugh) “and your advice made me think. So I had my neighbour look you up on the cyberspace.”

“No,” said Kenneth, “I mean your beginning, as a couple. You and Mr. Rosen.”

“Oh,” she said. “So long ago, really.” Her eyes were unfocused, lost in the past. There were no family photos on the walls, Kenneth noted, unless Paul Robeson and Cesar Chavez counted as family. “My cousin and I were at an
SWP
meeting in Long Beach —”

“That’s the Socialist Workers Party,” Martin Rosen called over.

“Yes, I know,” said Kenneth. “I’m from Manchester.”

“Anyway,” Mrs. Rosen continued, “I saw him arguing with Ben Faber across the room. Jabbing him in the chest like this.” She leaned forward to stab Ken with her scarlet talon. “My cousin thought Marty was too short, but I liked the way he was yelling at Faber about the Hungarians. So it was 1956, I guess.”

“It was after,” Mr. Rosen yelled through the sheet.

“I’m the one doing the telling!” Mrs. Rosen yelled back. “So I talked to him when he came over, even though he was clearly a Trotskyite. More fool me.”

“Look who’s talking!” A pot slammed hard on the stovetop. “You never even believed in the revolution.”

As they bickered about which faction had betrayed the proletariat fifty years ago, Kenneth looked at his watch. He cast his eye around the apartment; sometimes there were clues buried in the silt that gave some hint about the roots of a marital dispute. Sometimes there was just a lot of detritus.

“Okay,” he said, his voice rising to be heard above theirs. “Okay, Mr. and Mrs. Rosen!” More quietly, he said, “I’m not actually a therapist. And I think that you both may benefit from counselling. Obviously, you’d have to leave the apartment and go together.”

“Never.”

“Not in this lifetime.”

Where to begin? He reached for a cherry Danish, his second. Really, he shouldn’t, but they were astonishingly delicious — and chewing always helped him think. He brushed some crumbs off his shirt and said, “What I usually ask couples when they come to me is this: What would you like to achieve from our time together?”

There was silence from the other side of the curtain. Mrs. Rosen stared at him as if he’d spoken gibberish, and finally spread her hands wide. “We just want what you give other couples. What you say you can deliver.”

“Which is …?”

Now she was looking at him like he really was crazy. “To rekindle the romance, of course.”

Kenneth nearly spat out his Danish. Quickly he took a gulp of coffee to wash it down. The kohl around Mrs. Rosen’s dark eyes was starting to smudge and he realized, with a heavy heart, that she had begun to cry. Crying he could handle, though; intractable disputes based on age-old grievances he could not.

“Mrs. Rosen.” He leaned over to take her warm, lined hand, feeling the heavy weight of her rings against his palm. He spoke in his soothing-nervous-brides voice, pitched only for her ears: “May I be frank?”

She nodded, her lips trembling. On the other side of the sheet there was expectant silence. “There are . . . issues at the heart of your marriage.”

“Issues?” she whispered.

“Yes, Mrs. Rosen, issues. I think you need more help than I can provide. Perhaps the way forward” — he really was ninety percent American these days — “is along the professional route.”

Mrs. Rosen pulled back, her dark eyes suspicious. “You’re not a professional?”

“I’m . . .” He thought for a moment. “I’m a paramedic, not a heart surgeon. You might be better off in an operating room.”

She leaned back in her chair and looked over at the fabric wall dividing her life. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “You’ve been in love?”

They always wanted to know this. Was he married? For how long? Why not? The taint of bachelorhood hung over him.

“We’ve all been in love, Mrs. Rosen.”

“But have you been in love here,” she thumped her fist against her chest, the other hand clamped to his wrist, “so that it hurts? Even when you know you shouldn’t? Even when you know it’s over? And only one of you is still in love?” The rivulet of tears was a full stream now.

From the other side of the sheet Martin Rosen called, “What are you saying over there? Are you bothering that poor man, Myra?”

But neither one of them answered him. They sat in silence, staring at each other, and in her crumpled face Kenneth saw a mirror of his own.

At the bottom of the hill below the Rosens’ apartment building he found a bench by the curb and sank onto it. A public service ad covering the backrest told him, under a photo of a grim-faced man, that cases of syphilis had skyrocketed. Someone had spray-painted the man’s crotch green. Who would pose for a syphilis ad, anyway? You’d have to be on your last pint of milk.

The same kind of desperation
, he thought,
that drives people to abandon semi-respectable careers in broadcasting in order to reinvent themselves in utterly absurd ways far from home
. Sweat plastered his shirt to his chest, and he shrugged off his corduroy jacket. Even this close to winter, the sun refused to relent.

In the strip mall across la Cienaga a dusty-windowed gym was sandwiched between an Arby’s and a 7-Eleven.
YOU DON’T PAY TILL IT DROPS AWAY
said the bright-yellow sign on the door.
YOUR LOSS IS OUR GAIN.
His stomach grumbled, and Kenneth hauled himself to his feet and began walking down the hill to his car.

Perhaps when he got home he’d reward himself with a few minutes on YouTube. Just a few, no more: viewed too often, the images became stale and lost the power to stop his heart. When he was being good, he’d restrict himself to only reading about Augusta. The Google Alert he’d set up to follow her made him feel like a dirty-trousered old pervert, but shame had less power than desire. He’d been walking to the radio studio, idly scrolling through emails, when an alert informed him that Augusta would be coming to town to speak at Fantasmagoria™. He’d had to sit down for a minute, staring at his phone in joy and disbelief.

One night, after hours of bored searching, following Augusta’s name deeper and deeper into the bowels of recorded information like Theseus in the labyrinth, he’d found a clip. Clicking on a link, he was suddenly confronted with a young Augusta on the rust-and-brown set of the
BBC
chat show
West Country Now
. His breath had caught. He remembered every flower on Augusta’s short tunic, every dirty throaty laugh, as if he’d been there. Because he
had
been there.

In those days, his pride had been a malleable thing. When she rang after weeks of silence to ask for a drive to Bristol, he did not give voice to his first thoughts —
Piss off, where have you been, some of us have to work, you lazy cow.

Instead, he said: “When should I collect you?”

In those days before she had Charles, her mood was reliably buoyant, so long as she knew pleasure was guaranteed. They stopped off in Notting Hill on the way, and he slipped out of the car to pick up her tiny package from a sullen bloke in a greengrocer’s in Lancaster Road. She sat with one foot on the dash and the window open as he drove, her tiny dress swirling and dancing so that several times he’d nearly gone off the road.

With one hand she’d rummage in the little paper bag and with the other she would reach out to touch his hair — but not often enough, not nearly often enough.
Still
, he thought,
maybe, maybe.
At one point she reached over and she put something smooth and round against his lips, and he opened his mouth, not caring what entered his body as long as he could feel her fingers on him.

They’d found the
BBC
studio on the edge of Bristol and she’d dragged him toward the doors, her little hand damp in his. The producer, a safety-pin-pierced anomaly in exile from London, greeted Augusta with something like worship: she’d recently starred in a production of
The Cherry Orchard
set on a council estate in Brixton. It had closed after two weeks, but not before every tabloid in the country had denounced its depravity.

“Please come with me, Miss Price,” the producer simpered. “Not you,” he said to Kenneth. “Guests only. You can wait in the lobby.”

The producer put his hand up as warning, a wee white smudge against Ken’s barrel chest, and for a minute Ken considered taking it and bending the fingers back until they snapped. The blood roared in his head, and elsewhere. What had she given him in the car?

“Darling,” said Augusta, slipping between them and curling her arm around Kenneth’s waist, “this is my navigator. He goes where I go.
E pluribus unum.
Besides, he’s one of you. He works for the
BBC
.” When the producer continued to scowl at Kenneth, she added imperiously: “In London.”

“Fine, then.” He turned to wag a finger in Kenneth’s face. “But no talking to the other guests.”

“I shall try to restrain myself,” Kenneth said.

The producer flounced ahead of them down a series of corridors lined with posters of steamships and finally came to a stop before a green door. He held it open.

“You’re the final guest, Ms. Price,” he said, beaming at her. “That was my idea. It’s like Christmas lunch — saving the best for last.”

“You are too kind, darling. Just one thing. It’s been a long journey: Loo?”

“Oh!” He pointed down the corridor. “The ladies’ is just there. I’ll come back for you in about twenty minutes.”

Once he was gone, they turned to greet the other chat-show guests, seated on a nubbly orange sofa: a local rugby champion who appeared to be missing most of one ear and the lower half of the other, and an ancient, wizened Cornish farmer who had grown a potato that looked like Ted Heath.

“I am in exalted company,” Augusta whispered, as the rugby player stood to offer her a seat, or a drink, or something more.

“Thank you, love, no,” she said. “It’s been a very dusty ride in from London, and I fear I’ve got something in my eye. Ken, do you think you could help me remove this fearsome speck, before I go out there and terrify the good people of Bristol?”

She lifted a hand to the rugby player and the ancient Cornishman, and with the other dragged Kenneth out the door and into the corridor.

“Augusta, wh —” But he didn’t have time to speak before she had shoved him against the wall and pulled his face down to hers. He felt her lift onto her toes to reach him. For some reason, he always found this tiny action thrilling: as if in this one way, he had power over her; it was the only time she ever exerted herself for him. He pulled her tight, one hand cupping her bottom.

At the end of the corridor came the dull clap of a door shutting and he pushed her away, though it nearly killed him.

“Augusta,” he whispered. “That little prat is going to come looking for you in just a few minutes.”

“Just enough minutes,” she whispered, and rocking forward she lifted up to gently bite his lower lip.

He was sure the rugby player and the old codger could hear his groan through the wall. Augusta hooked a finger in his belt loop and began creeping backwards, beckoning him with her other hand like a crone in a fairy tale.