Hart & Boot & Other Stories (8 page)

Billy dropped his bag and got into bed with her. He held his mother in his arms and cried with her. “No, Mom, I won’t run away, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“Never leave me, Billy,” she said, her voice muffled against him. “Just stay with me, don’t go, never ever go away.”

Never?
Billy thought.
Never ever?

He held his mother close.

He said, “Shh.

Terrible Ones

The Greek Chorus first appeared on Thursday night, as Zara lugged two paper bags full of groceries into the gravel public parking lot. The Chorus members wore tattered togas made from faintly flower-patterned, oft-washed bedsheets, and their faces were painted white with greasepaint.

Since she was in Berkeley, Zara assumed the Chorus members were performance artists of some kind, and didn’t pay much attention when they drifted from out of the bushes and among the parked cars to stand in a loose semicircle a few feet behind her. As she unlocked her trunk and wedged the grocery bags between a box of mismatched shoes and a broken lamp she’d never gotten around to throwing out, the Chorus said—in a single voice, from many throats—“Crazed with rapture, she sings and trills, dark bird that loves the night.” The line sounded familiar—Zara was an actress, and she’d done several classical plays—but she couldn’t quite place it.

Zara straightened, slammed her trunk, and looked at the Chorus. The fading light and white make-up smeared their faces into blank anonymities. They might have been looking at her expectantly. “Fuck off,” she said. “You’re in my way.”

One of the Chorus members cupped his ear theatrically. “What did you say? Never mind, I heard—as I hear your destiny. Weeping, cacophony, cries that assault the ear.”

Zara got into her car, locked the doors, and threw it into the reverse. The Chorus scattered like pigeons making way for a bus. Once she’d backed past them, they reformed in front of her car, and their eyes shone in her headlights. She flipped up the high beams, and they shielded their faces from the brightness. Zara turned the wheel and drove away, leaving the Chorus to stand in the cloud of dust her wheels threw up from the gravel.

***

The Furies were old in those days. Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera lived together in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, in an apartment building decorated with chipped carvings of lizards, between a strip club and a three-story liquor/erotic book store combination. Sometimes they became confused and lived for a while, cuckoo-style, in someone else’s home. The rightful residents would go on drunken benders, or crack their skulls on curbs, or suffer hysterical blindness—whatever the specific cause, the effect was ignorance of the presence of the Furies in their midst. Eventually, inevitably, the ladies would look around and realize they’d been sleeping in strange beds, eating someone else’s saltines and vanilla wafers, and they would leave, allowing the people they’d disrupted to recover their senses and resume their lives. Those intruded upon by the Furies in this way tended to throw open their windows and bundle their sheets down to the laundromat, for the ladies left a smell of dried blood and rancid olive oil behind when they departed.

Alecto was the most practical of the three. She did the shopping and kept the ants out of the kitchen. Megaera muttered darkly to herself, and walked the streets at night, hoping to be attacked—all she wanted was an excuse to do violence in self-defense. But in a place where murders were commonplace, no one ever threatened Megaera, who shuffled along in her housecoat until dawn. Tisiphone tended to stay closer to home. She went down the stairs fifteen or twenty times a day to check their brass-and-glass mailbox in the lobby, even on Sundays, though they never got anything other than take-out restaurant menus and pamphlets from upstart religions. Once, years before, when they were more self-aware, they received a jury-duty notice, addressed to the apartment’s previous occupant. The ladies had a good laugh over that.

One day, while Alecto stood dropping dried scorpions and seahorses into a pot of boiling water on the stove, and Megaera sat staring out the window at the drug dealers and college students thronging the sidewalk, Tisiphone went down the creaking stairs to their mailbox. She opened the box with a tarnished key, and inside found a thick piece of parchment, folded in thirds, sealed with a dollop of red wax. The symbol embossed in the wax was a monstrous face, mouth gaping; an oracle’s face.

Tisiphone broke the seal and opened the parchment. It was what she’d been waiting for, what they’d all been waiting for. A letter of commission.

Weeping a little, for reasons she could not have fully named, for happiness and anxiety and simply because the worn-down gears in her mind refused to mesh properly anymore, Tisiphone went back up the stairs, clutching the parchment, afraid it would disappear or transform into a Thai restaurant menu. She had to tell Alecto and Megaera. They had to prepare.

Zara got home, and kicked off her shoes, and hurriedly put her groceries away. She only had a few moments to eat before leaving for rehearsal. The red light on her answering machine blinked at a seizure-inducing rate. There were so many messages since this morning that even the machine appeared to have lost count. She pushed the button on her way to the kitchen, and Doug’s voice emerged from the tinny speakers, calm and rational, a financial analyst’s voice, saying, “I need you to beat me with a bamboo cane,” and “I need you to plug my ass and lash me bloody.” One message after another, a continuous litany—whenever the machine cut him off, he just called back and resumed his patient pleading. Zara rooted through her fridge for mold-free cheese, and cursed as she listened—this was the second day he’d called, and apparently he wasn’t going to give up easily.

One of those assholes at the club must have given Doug her home number, probably for a substantial bribe. At least he wasn’t calling her cell phone. She wondered, briefly, if he had her address, if she should worry. But if he showed up here, she could play along, get him naked and tied up, then shove him out in the hall, or call the cops, or try to reach his wife—surely someone like Doug, middle-management pillar of the financial district, would have a wife, someone who wouldn’t approve of him going to clubs like Damien’s Basement, or of his more expensive private play-partners, like that of her own summer-job persona, Mistress Zara.

Mistress Zara was just a role she played, no different than Ophelia, Medea, or Blanche DuBois—though she did enjoy whipping assholes like Doug, she had to admit, and it paid better than temping. She’d made enough money working at Damien’s over the summer to concentrate on theater for the rest of the year. At the time, it seemed like the perfect job. She hadn’t realized Doug would get so attached. He didn’t understand that their relationship, such as it was, stopped when she put down the whip. She’d have to do something about him, eventually—get one of her big, tattooed friends to pay him a visit at work and tell him to fuck off, for instance—but she didn’t have time to worry about it right now. Final dress rehearsal was tonight, and the show opened tomorrow.

Zara ate a cheese-and-wheat-bread sandwich while standing up at the counter, followed it with a gulp of lowfat milk, grabbed her bag, and slipped out of the apartment, with Doug still droning on her machine about how he
needed
her, she
owed
him, they had a
connection
.

In the empty apartment, a new voice spoke from the machine, another message hidden among Doug’s. It was a woman’s voice, smoky, throaty, like a torch-singer past her prime. “I know you won’t hear this, Zara, but I’ve got to give you warning, and this counts, by the rules. There are three old ladies coming to see your play tomorrow night, and they’re harsh critics. Maybe you should let your understudy play the lead. There. Advice dispensed. Nice and fair.”

A click, and then it was Doug again, demanding all the torments he thought Zara owed him.

***

Zara ran to catch the BART train from the East Bay into San Francisco, thinking briefly that if Doug saw her dressed like this (in running shoes, a t-shirt, and loose cotton pants) instead of a leather corset, knee-high boots, and several silver piercings, it would help disabuse him of his illusions about their relationship. She went into the tiled, brightly lit station and headed for the escalator, only to encounter a blockade of scaffolding, sawhorses, and yellow tape—the escalator was closed. A crudely hand-lettered sign with an arrow directed her around the blockage. Cursing, sure she would miss her train, she followed the signs, walking along a passageway of covered scaffolding farther than seemed reasonable—was the train station really so
big?
—until finally reaching a stopped escalator that led, apparently, up to the platform for San Francisco-bound trains. She began to wish she’d driven, even though parking was nearly impossible in the part of the Mission district where the theater was.

After she ran up the escalator, she found the platform wholly deserted. She said, “Fuck,” because there should be
some
people waiting, even on a Thursday night, unless she’d just missed the train. Which meant she’d have to sprint for the theater to make rehearsal on time. She hated making people wait on her, because she knew what it was like, sitting around waiting for the lead actress, thinking what a bitch prima donna she was—Zara didn’t want to be seen that way, not even by the cast of a little experimental theater that could only seat about fifty people, tops. She crossed her arms and looked out at the darkened overpass and the Oakland hills beyond the platform. Odd—there should have been lights from the houses on the ridges, but the hills were just dark shapes in the moonlight. Were they doing rolling blackouts again? And why was there no traffic on the overpass? Was it closed for repairs, too?

Then a train pulled in, surprising her—there had been no announcement of an oncoming train on the PA system. Still, it was headed in the right direction, so when the doors slid open she got on.

There was only one other passenger, sitting in one of the sideways-facing seats with a newspaper held open in front of her face. Zara dropped down into the seat opposite, glancing at the woman’s newspaper. It was written in Greek, which she couldn’t read, and Zara shifted her gaze to the blackness beyond the windows as the train slid away from the station.

The woman across from her tossed her newspaper onto the carpeted floor. “Nothing but bad news,” she said in a smoky, throaty voice, smiling. The woman was in her forties, probably, dressed in a tailored black business suit, her hair blonde and stylishly short.

“Oh,” Zara said, not really in the mood for conversation.

“I’m Nikki,” the woman said.

Because it was going to be a long ride under the bay and into the city, she said, “I’m Zara.”

“Good to meet you.” Nikki crossed her legs. “I’m a talent scout.”

“Oh?” Zara said, feeling a stir of interest. “Like for a record company?” She had lots of friends in bands, some of whom would happily sell out in a heartbeat.

“For an agency, actually. We represent musicians, dancers... actors. We’re always on the lookout for new clients.”

Zara didn’t say anything. She was ambivalent about the very concept of agents. She was more interested in the art than the marketing, which perhaps meant she
needed
an agent; on the other hand, perhaps it meant she didn’t need one at all. Agents might want her to do things like audition for commercials. They might want her to get a tan.

“Are you a performer?” Nikki asked.

“Sometimes,” Zara said.

“Actress?”

Zara nodded. Nikki looked at her expectantly. “I’m playing the lead in
Medea
,” Zara said. “It’s a contemporary version, set in the suburbs, very minimalist, but with some almost
Grand Guignol
touches at the climax.”

“It sounds fascinating,” Nikki said, and she sounded like she meant it. Zara wondered that Nikki could sound sincere no matter what she actually felt—maybe from one moment to the next she didn’t even
know
what she was feeling. That had to be part of her profession, right? Sociopathology as an occupational hazard. Except for a talent scout-slash-agent, it wouldn’t
be
a hazard, but an advantage. As her friend Dave the unemployed programmer liked to say, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

“It’s a good role,” Zara said.

“I’ll come see it,” Nikki said decisively. “Has it opened yet?”

“Opens tomorrow.”

“Where?”

Zara told her the address.

“I’ll be there,” she said.

“Okay,” Zara said, shrugging.

Nikki frowned, as if she’d expected something more—most young, hungry actors probably dropped to kiss her boots at the merest whiff of interest, Zara supposed.

“Medea,” Nikki said. “That’s the one about the woman who murders her children, right?”

“That’s the one,” Zara said.

“I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” Nikki said, more decisively. The train stopped, and the doors hissed open. Zara didn’t recognize the platform—it was underground, with marble walls, Doric columns, and stone benches. She didn’t see a sign anywhere—was it the 12th Street station? If so, it had been extensively remodeled. It seems like she would’ve noticed that on another one of her trips. “See you,” Nikki said, and left the train. The doors closed behind her, and the train pulled away into a dark tunnel.

Zara leaned her head back against the window, and closed her eyes. It took twenty minutes or so to get from Oakland to the Mission, and she’d left home in such a hurry that she hadn’t brought anything with her to read except her script, which she had down cold at this point, and didn’t want to look at anymore. She’d always been good at remembering lines. When she was really into a role, speaking her lines didn’t even feel like recitation—it just felt like
talking
, saying what came naturally. That was her favorite feeling.