Seen It All and Done the Rest (27 page)

FIFTY-SIX

M
iss Thing, the town is on fire!” Howard said. “I thought I said do nothing until you hear from me and now I get back from Paris to find all hell has broken loose.”

“Good,” I said. “They deserve it. Welcome back.”

“Welcome back? Do you know what this means?”

“It means I told the truth and let the devil take hindmost.”

“A charming saying from the old country,” Howard said, “but hardly relevant. The board is furious about the story that fool wrote after he interviewed you.”

“They’re furious? I’m the one who should be furious.
Medea,
Howard? They’re going to let her close with
Medea
?”

“Of course they’re wrong, and trust me, there was no way it would have happened, before this! Now it will be a miracle if they don’t set your things out on the street!”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“They are demanding an apology, Miss Thing. And right away!”

“An apology? For what?”

“Oh, maybe for calling them all a bunch of idiots who wouldn’t know good theater if it bit them on the ass!”

“That’s not what I said!”

“Then what did you say, sweetie? And make it good. I’ve got to do some serious damage control if we’re going to pull this thing out. First thing you have to say is you’re sorry!”

The idea was inconceivable. “I can’t apologize, Howard. Everything I said was true.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute, and then he sighed. “I know that, and you know that, but truth ain’t all there is to it, sweetie. They’re positioning you as the aging American diva who doesn’t want to pass the baton to the new generation.”

I winced. “An aging American diva?”

“I’m sorry, sweetie. It’s a mean old world, but if you want this gig to support you,
and me
, in our old age, you gotta bend a little.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Are you sulking?”

“She told the man I had been too old for
Medea
for more than a decade,” I said. “Don’t I get to respond?”

“She would have told the man you had two heads if she thought it would get her a lead,” Howard said. “And of course you get to respond, sweetie pie, every time you set foot on that stage and not a moment before.”

“I just don’t understand why she had to say all that. She made me sound like a washed-up hag.”

“She made herself sound like an ungrateful wretch,” he said. “But that’s just the way of it. Remember us when we were thirty?”

“We were dedicated idealists,” I said. “We wanted a theater that would change people’s lives so they would change the world!”

“We were ruthless little fiends,” Howard said, “who wanted nothing more than a chance to holler our unappreciated genius at the moon.”

He was right, of course, but I wasn’t that way anymore.
I didn’t deserve this.

“I miss you so much,” I said. “Am I ever going to get to come home?”

“I miss you, too. Don’t worry. I’ll figure out something. Just don’t do any more interviews, okay?”

“I still want that, you know?”

“Want what, sweetie?”

“That howling at the moon thing.”

“And you shall have it,” he said soothingly. “I promise.”

“I believe you,” I said, because he expected me to, but the truth was, I was beginning to have my doubts.

“Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“Your genius will never be unappreciated. You are still, and always will be, a star.”

FIFTY-SEVEN

B
etty Causey called to tell me that Daisy Turner, one of her neighbors, got robbed last night. They cut her alarm and came through an unlocked back window. They didn’t have to break anything to get in, so the woman slept through the whole thing. She didn’t even know she’d been robbed until she got up this morning and realized her television set was gone. The one in her bedroom. The thought that somebody had been in her room scared Daisy so badly she fainted and hit her head on her dresser. Now she was staying at Betty’s, scared to go home, vowing to take whatever she could get for what she was now calling “that little broke-up piece of house” and go move in with her daughter.

Although Betty said that wasn’t likely since they had never gotten along very well, and probably weren’t going to start now, the point was everybody was scared, and Betty thought I ought to know. I thanked her and she told me there was one more thing she wanted to tell me. Greer Woodruff had called Daisy yesterday to repeat her offer to buy the house. Daisy had refused and gone to bed early, but Betty didn’t think it was a coincidence that the break-in had happened later the same night, and what did I think? I told Betty I didn’t believe in coincidence. She said she didn’t either.

This was not working out like it was supposed to at all. I only came here to check on Zora and wait out the storm back home. After that, my round-trip ticket was supposed to take me back to my real life. The one I made up from scratch and nurtured and shaped and poked and polished until it looked just like me. And now, here I was, working like a young slave, paying a homeless guy to live at my house so he could earn his way back into his mama’s heart, and trying to help save a neighborhood that couldn’t be saved.

The real problem was none of this stuff was going to help us attract any buyers. People weren’t watching us on the Internet because they wanted to live here. They were watching us because they were glad they didn’t.

FIFTY-EIGHT

Z
ora tried to talk me out of it, but I knew Greer Woodruff was the kind of woman who probably liked to get an early start, so I drove over to her office at seven thirty. I pulled into the almost empty parking lot and went upstairs. The glass door was still locked, so I pounded on it as hard as I could without breaking it, to let her know she had company.

Greer Woodruff emerged from her inner sanctum with a small frown to let whoever was knocking at her door with such determination know that she did not appreciate being disturbed. When she saw me, the frown got bigger.

“Ms. Evans,” she said, opening the door a little, but not inviting me inside. “You’re out early.”

“They know it’s you,” I said.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m sure you do.” I stepped into the office even though she didn’t want to step aside to let me pass, content to let me stand in the hallway and plead my case. “And this is where it’s going to stop.”

“Do you want to tell me what you are raving about?”

“I’m not raving,” I said. “I’m talking about terrorizing old women in their beds.”

“As you recall, I told you there were other people interested in those properties. Perhaps you ought to take your complaint up with them.”

“I’d be glad to,” I said. “Who are we talking about?”

She narrowed her eyes slightly and I could see her debating how she wanted to play this. “You know I had pretty much convinced everybody to sell before you got here, and now, all of a sudden, people are canceling contracts and having second thoughts.”

“Second thoughts? None of these women wanted to sell their houses any more than I did.”

“That’s their choice,” she said.

“Then why don’t you let them make it? There must be other properties your client could buy. This city is full of vacant houses.”

She smiled her non-smile. “But that would be a different deal that would in no way benefit me or my company.”

There was not a shred of compassion in her voice. “Is that all that matters to you?”

Her face was hard and her tone was cold. “The thing about you is that you’re used to lots of options. Lots of offers to do what you want to do. That’s not my experience. I’ve had to make my own luck. Opportunities like this don’t come along often at our age.”

If she thought we could bond on the basis of our proximity to the golden years, she was as wrong as she could be.

“This is the deal that will secure my future and the future of my company. The one that makes up for all those years when the boys wouldn’t let me pull up a chair at the table. When they made their deals on the golf course and expected me to be a minor partner whenever they decided to throw me a crumb.”

This was a woman with a lot of axes to grind. It was clear that our little houses were having to bear the weight of a lot of other stuff that didn’t have anything to do with us or our properties.

“This is the deal that will guarantee that I’m not one of those broke old ladies who lived longer than they were supposed to and don’t have anyplace to go to come in out of the rain,” she said. “It can do the same thing for you.”

“I’m not broke and I’m not old,” I said.

She smiled as if to say
not yet.
“At this point, I am prepared to offer you considerably more than our initial discussions might have indicated.”

Her partners must really be leaning on her. “How much more?”

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

The irony of it was that if she had made the same offer the first time I came into her office, I would have taken it, grabbed Zora, and headed back to Amsterdam in style. But there was no way to take it now, even if she had offered a hundred thousand. She had made herself the villain of this story we were telling. My character was the
shero
. That meant I could never, ever make a deal with the devil. Even a bad script would never make a mistake like that.

“I don’t care how much you offer me,” I said. “Nobody is going to run me off.”

Jesus!
I sounded like a Hollywood western, but it felt good. It felt real good to say it that way.

“If I want to sell it, I will. If I want to live on it, I will. If I want to roam the world just because I can, I will, but as long as my name is on the deed, that house and that garden belong to me and nobody is going to run me off,” I said, heading back out into the hallway and punching the button for the elevator. “Not even you.”

She just watched me through the glass as the doors hissed closed behind me. Walking out to the parking lot, I was exhilarated. I had practically told her to get off my land by sundown. I was just sorry Zora wasn’t here to get it on video. John Wayne would have been so proud.

FIFTY-NINE

L
ate that night, after our swim when we were sitting beside the pool, wrapped up in our robes, reviewing the day, Zora made a great suggestion.

“You know it’s fine to go shake your fist in Greer Woodruff’s face…”

“I didn’t shake anything in her face.”

Zora looked at me. “Okay. It’s fine to
verbally
shake your fist in her face, but that’s not going to do much for those old women.”

“Daisy filed a police report.”

“I know,” Zora said, “but I think they need to be a bigger part of the story.”

“
Our
story?”

“It’s their story, too,” Zora said, turning on her side to face me.

“Aren’t you the one who said people don’t just buy a house, they buy a neighborhood?”

Zora was getting as good as Abbie at casually tossing my own words back in my face. I always made sense when they quoted me, which was part of the frustration. How can you argue your own good sense just because you’re moving through a moment of weakness when it’s hard to keep an eye on the big picture?

“Aren’t you the one who cringed at the idea of trying to save the whole neighborhood instead of just our little piece of it?”

Zora sat up and hugged her knees, gazing into the pool where the mermaid, as always, maintained her mysteriously aloof watch over the proceedings.

“That was before all this stuff started happening,” she said slowly.

“I don’t think they can hold out if we don’t help them.”

“I’m not sure they can hold out even if we do,” I said. “But what did you have in mind?”

“Well, we’re still telling the same story, right? The good guys rescuing this corner from the bad guys? Like the westerns?”

“In a nutshell,” I said.

“And isn’t part of that story the townspeople rising up and deciding to fight back, even when the bad guys are scary?”

She had that right. There’s no payoff in a story where the hero stands up and nobody stands up with him. Or in this case, with
her.

“Go on.”

“I think we should invite them to join us. I’ll get some video of them describing what they’ve been through, telling us about their personal journeys from wherever they came from, to this very moment when everything they have is being threatened.”

There was no denying that their story would add some depth and texture to our own. Betty was a great character, and nobody could hear Daisy talking about the break-in and not feel angry and protective, two emotions guaranteed to pull you into the story and refuse to let you go.

“What makes you think they’ll let you tape them?”

She turned to me and smiled. “Don’t worry, Mafeenie. I’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse.”