Crystal (14 page)

It wasn’t so much what Joe Sidney had done as it was what he had said. “Do you see me and do you see you?” he had asked. “And what you should see when you see you is just another pretty face…” And it was the grin, the grin that said that he knew everything that was going to be. That he knew everything about her. Crystal looked up and saw the traffic flashing by. There were a few older women looking at her from the corner.

She looked for a subway. She would go to the hospital and tell Rowena about Joe Sidney. Rowena would laugh. They would be girls again, not models, not even beautiful or sexy, just girls.

Rowena had asked her if she wanted to be friends, and it hadn’t meant very much to her then. Now it did. Now it meant that there was someone to talk to who would know how she felt. She would tell her about Joe Sidney. She would tell her how stupid he looked with his big cigar dangling from his mouth. How mad he had been when Crystal had opened the car door to get out.

Crystal imagined what Rowena would say about Sidney. She would laugh at him, but knowing Rowena, she would find a way to like him. Crystal clutched the script tighter under her arm and wondered if she would find a way of liking him, too.

The “E” train rattled through the tunnel, jerking the faceless passengers from side to side as it raced crosstown through Manhattan toward Queens. The crowd thinned out at Lexington and again at Ely Avenue. Crystal tried not to think. She read the ad cards over the seats. One card advertised Preparation H in Spanish. The card next to it, in English, showed a girl’s rear end lifted high in a pair of jeans. She thought she recognized the girl. She looked closely. It was one of the girls she had worked with before. She had a dark wig on and earrings that hung almost to her shoulders.

Crystal changed trains and took the “G” to her stop.

“Rowena,” she said.

The white-haired volunteer flipped through a patient card index and announced that they didn’t have a Rowena.

“That’s that model the guys from housekeeping were talking about.” Another white-haired volunteer flipped through the cards. “I don’t see her card here, but she’s listed as DeLea, something like that. Are you a model, honey?”

Crystal nodded.

“You’re very pretty,” the woman said. The magic words. “Why don’t you go right up.”

Crystal started for the elevator. Behind her, one of the ladies said something about “them” using a lot of colored models. A small boy on the elevator peeked around his mother and smiled at Crystal, and Crystal smiled back.

“My father broke his arm,” the boy said. The mother smiled.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Crystal replied.

“He was drunk,” the boy said.

The mother’s face hardened instantly. She pushed the boy behind her and looked at Crystal with instant hate. Crystal looked away.

“May I help you?” said a hospital volunteer, a bit over-weight with a soft neck that ran into her chin. She would look terrible on television, Crystal thought.

“Rowena?” Crystal pointed toward Rowena’s room.

“Oh!” The girl turned to the nurse on duty.

“You’re a friend of hers, aren’t you?” It was the red-haired nurse from before.

“Yes, how’s she doing?” Crystal asked.

“I’m afraid we have some rather bad news for you.” The nurse came around the counter. Her large blue eyes found Crystal’s and held them.

“Rowena?”

“Could you get us some coffee?” The nurse spoke, moving her head ever so slightly toward the volunteer to indicate to whom she was speaking.

She took Crystal by the shoulders and led her into a small room. Another nurse was doing a crossword puzzle at the table. She got up and walked silently away.

“She just seemed to give up,” the nurse said.

“Did anything happen?” Crystal heard herself stammering. “What…?”

“I don’t know what happened,” the nurse said. “I’m so sorry.”

Rowena dead?

“But I just spoke to her yesterday!” Crystal’s voice broke as she spoke. “It was just about…” She looked at the clock over the file cabinet. The face of the clock broke up through her tears. The hands moved in uneven orbits.

“Here’s the coffee.” The volunteer put two cups on the table.

Crystal looked at the girl, who was probably a year or two older than she was. The girl tried to force a smile and then turned away.

Crystal cried. Her shoulders shook with the sobs and her eyes burned with the tears. The nurse held her tightly, squeezing her shoulders as if she were going to squeeze every bit of sorrow from her.

The wind lifted bits of paper from the sidewalk and flung them against her legs outside of the hospital. Where would Rowena be? Crystal remembered
ER
, the television show. Rowena would be in some cold room. There would be conversations going on about her that she could not hear. There would be lights glaring down at her. She would be still. Her face not made up. Rosa, at the last.

Tears. Crystal leaning against the dark-brick corner of the hospital. A policeman stood on the sidewalk not far from her. He looked at his watch and turned away.

She went into the subway. For a moment, she was confused. The nurse had asked her to stay until her mother could come. But what would her mother have said? That it was a shame? That she couldn’t dwell on what had happened to Rowena?

Where was she? That was the important thing. Where was she?

Crystal looked into her pocketbook. She had forty
dollars in her wallet and fifteen dollars in her pockets. Where would she go?

She wanted to run home and tell her father. She wanted to say “Daddy, Rowena is dead.”

“Dead?” he would say. He would look at her and his forehead would move. He would search her face. Maybe he would lift her chin. “Who’s Rowena?” he would ask.

“A model,” she would say. “A model like me.”

“How she die?”

“She tried to kill herself,” Crystal would say. “And then she just gave up trying to live.”

“Why?” he would ask.

He would ask why, and she knew he wouldn’t be thinking about Rowena. He would be thinking about her.

“I don’t know, Daddy,” she would say. “I just don’t know.”

Then he would grab a beer and storm around the house, dark and brooding. It was his way. He would pound the walls with his fists and with his eyes flashing the anger he felt.

She would feel sorry for her father. Sorry for his anger and his frustration. But it would be her mother, sitting in the kitchen, her face tightened in the shadows, who would say the things that would push Crystal on to the next day.

“If you have a chance, honey,” she would say, “you have to take it. We’re like people drowning in our own history. We can’t turn down our chances when they come.”

Her lips would find words of sorrow for Rowena, and then they would say that Rowena was Rowena and Crystal was Crystal. It wasn’t where she had come from, it wasn’t her history that had failed Rowena, it was the “look” that she had lost. She should have had her eyes fixed. Maybe,
even, gone to Europe.

Crystal thought of going to Rowena’s mother’s house. She would go there and knock on the door. But then there would be nothing to say. Just pain to be rolled around the mouth and offered through lips lined with a shade slightly lighter than her lipstick to make her lips appear less full.

Crystal stopped at a phone booth and called home. The phone rang several times before she heard her mother’s voice announcing that it was the Browns’ residence.

“Rowena’s dead, Mommy.”

“I know, honey,” her mother answered softly. “Loretta called earlier and told me. She suggested that we might all get together for dinner tonight. Of course, your father won’t be able to make it.”

“I saw Joe Sidney—”

“Yes, Loretta said he called her.” Her mother’s voice raised in tone the way it did sometimes when she was excited. “He said you read for the part very well. Loretta thinks he must have got the money. Are you on your way home now?”

“Not yet,” Crystal said. “I have something to do first. Then I’ll be home.”

“Loretta was thinking about dinner between seven-thirty and eight….” Her mother’s voice trailed off.

“I’ll try to make it by then,” Crystal said.

She hung up the phone, hung on to the receiver for support for a long moment, then dropped in another quarter. She made another phone call, then hailed a cab.

The driver had asked her three times if she had the money for the cab ride from Queens into Manhattan. Crystal
knew it was the crying. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t stop the flow of tears or her shoulders from shaking. The driver was angry. When they reached the address on Bedford Street that Crystal had given him, he jerked the cab to a halt.

“That’ll be twenty-seven fifty!” he said.

Crystal took thirty-two dollars from her wallet and gave them to the driver. He looked at the money and at her as she left the cab. He called out his thanks. Crystal wasn’t interested.

The stairs to the brownstone were spotless, no graffiti marred them. The brass fixtures at the door were polished and the black grillwork freshly painted. Crystal looked at the address on the script. The top of the two addresses was Joe Sidney’s office. The bottom was his home.

“Come in.” He stepped away from the door.

Crystal entered.

“I thought you would change your mind,” he said. “You gotta be smart in this business and you impress me as nobody’s dummy.”

“I’ve made up my mind,” Crystal said.

“Sure, that’s why you’re here,” Sidney said. “Look, why don’t you go into the bathroom and fix yourself up. You look a mess. I’ll make us a couple of drinks. We can relax.”

“I don’t drink,” Crystal replied.

“Whatever.” Sidney took a cut-glass bottle of Scotch from the bookshelf. “The bathroom’s over there. Make yourself look nice, honey. You know how to do it.”

“I don’t want the part,” Crystal said. She didn’t want to cry again, either, but the tears came. “I want to give you back your script and then it’s over.”

“What are you talking about?” Sidney downed his drink and poured another one.

“I’ve made up my mind.”

“You’re upset,” Sidney said. “Get Loretta on the phone. Come on, hurry up! Get that agent of yours on the phone!”

Crystal had planned to say that she didn’t like what she had to do or who she had become. She wanted to say something about Rowena, that the girl she had come to know, whom she had walked down the street with, whose mother she had visited, wasn’t just a “look” that had passed. She was more than a pretty face, or a sexy look, or something that made clothes look good or men feel good. And so was she, Crystal.

But none of the words came, and she stood in front of Joe Sidney, the tears streaming down her face, leaving streak marks where they ran over her foundation.

“Look, we’ve got a commitment.” Joe Sidney put down the drink. “We’re going to Italy, we’re going to make a film; and you’re going to be a star in spite of yourself! Now—”

Crystal turned away and started toward the door. Sidney got to it first and slammed the palm of his hand across the carved panel.

“You can throw your career away if you want to,” he said, his face reddening with anger, “but you’re not throwing my living away in the process! You don’t have to come across if you don’t want to, but you
are
making the movie. I’ve got the money in place and you
are
making the movie.”

Crystal ran the back of her hand under her nose and tried to pull Joe Sidney’s hand away. She couldn’t budge it. She looked into his face. He was smiling.

“Please let me out.”

“Look, no one is going to hurt you,” he said softly. “Why don’t we just sit down and talk about this whole thing? Now doesn’t that sound more reasonable than you standing in the middle of the floor crying your friggin’ eyes out?”

The doorbell rang.

“That’s my friend,” Crystal said.

“You told somebody to come here?” Sidney looked at her.

“I told her if I wasn’t out of here in five minutes after she got here to call the police!”

Sidney looked at her. His face calmed; he shrugged.

“So leave,” he said. “But this is going to be one of those moments you’re going to remember, girly.”

Crystal opened the door that led into the vestibule. She could feel Joe Sidney behind her.

“This is one of those moments that you’re going to look back on when you’re working in some fast-food joint!”

The words followed her out of the front door and down the steps as she went past Sister Gibbs.

“Crystal!” Sister Gibbs caught up with her on the street. “Are you okay, baby?”

“I’m fine, Sister Gibbs.”

“That fool didn’t touch you, did he?”

“No. I just made up my mind about something, and he didn’t like the way I made it up.”

Sister Gibbs turned back toward the well-kept brownstone in time to see Joe Sidney close the door.

“Who that man, anyway?”

“He’s the one that wants me to make a film in Italy.”

“You don’t think we should call the police or nothing?” she asked.

“No,” Crystal said, taking Sister Gibbs’ hand. “And thanks for coming.”

“Girl, when you call me and tell me to meet you over in this neighborhood because you need somebody to be with, I was worried sick,” Sister Gibbs said as they started toward the avenue. “Just look how I run out the house looking!”

“You look just fine, Sister Gibbs,” Crystal said as she took the older woman’s arm. “Just fine.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table. Carol Brown was in a housecoat, balancing a cup of coffee on her upturned palm. Crystal sat opposite her father.

“I need you to tell me about this,” her father said, “and I need you to tell me what you want to do. I’ve been telling myself that I didn’t understand your opportunities and I didn’t want to mess anything up. Now, I still don’t know everything that’s involved in this business, but I don’t have to. I see you’re not happy in it. Any time you got to call Sister Gibbs instead of one of your folks, things ain’t right.”

“I just thank God that you’re all right,” Carol Brown began. “I should have realized that she needed more help with the pressures. I should have realized it.”