The Twenty-Year Death (58 page)

“It’s all right I came?”

“It’s swell you came. It’s better than all right. I’ve been alone too much. Your mind dwells on things...”

He rocked on his heels, uncomfortable.

I put my whole arm around him then. “Come on, come in.” I led us into the nearby sitting room. There was a sideboard with
a small wet bar, and just the sight of the alcohol made me stand up straighter. I’d been very near a teetotaler since coming to Great Aunt Alice’s, but now I had a guest, I could have a drink. I went across to the bar and flipped over two glasses.

He looked around for where to sit, and settled on a delicate colonial couch with two-tone yellow upholstery. He perched on the edge. “It’s really okay I’m here...?” he said.

“Of course. Of course. What’ll you have?”

“Oh, none for me. I’m fine. I’m just here to pay my respects.”

“Don’t make me drink alone.” And I made us each a Gin Rickey. I crossed the room, handed him his drink, and sat in one of the armchairs, an uncomfortable Louis XIV.

He held the drink in both hands, and stared into it, not drinking. Then he looked up at me with equal parts reverence and embarrassed concern. It was how I’d had the strength to go talk to Joe, that look, and you know where that had led. Remembering that made me shift in my seat. He looked down again. “You probably think I’m crazy. Coming like I have a right to visit you. I’m probably ruining my chance to work with you. You probably won’t be staying in Calvert much longer anyway.”

“Probably not,” I said, trying to remember what he meant, ‘work with me.’ And it hit me that we had been writing together that night, a play. Me, writing.

“Well even if we don’t work more together, it’s been a real honor.” He met my eyes and his were just beaming, and it really made me feel like the rottenest person that ever lived, him looking at me like I was sacred, and me knowing that I was a philandering alcoholic hack screenwriter killer.

“Yeah, it’s been an honor for me too,” I said, and took another drink so I didn’t have to decide what expression to give to my mouth.

He swallowed, looked for a place to put his glass down, and settled on the floor beside his foot. “I shouldn’t even say anything,” he said, “but even if we’re not going to work together, I brought along something I worked up...if you don’t mind, it’d mean a lot to me if you looked at it.”

I didn’t want to look at it. I was too tired. But there was something in his fawning that made me feel like somebody again. And with just that glimmer of self-worth, I started to think, I wasn’t bad. I’d just ended up in a compromising situation. And not for any gain. That was the thing. It had been self-defense. This kid would believe that. He knew I was a good guy. So I leaned forward, and held my hand out for whatever it was he’d written, and said, “Sure, why not?”

His face lit up, and he pulled out his pad from his inner coat pocket, the same pad from the bar. He started to flip through it. “It’s just an idea for a scene I think would come at the end of Act I.” He handed it over, and at first I just stared at the script unseeing. “It hit me what you were saying about the Furies being mortal. And I thought if one of them killed the other, you see, if one Fury killed another Fury, that would be like a sister killing a sister, and then that’s exactly one of the things the Furies punished people for, killing a family member, you know, in the old myths.” My face must have changed colors, because he stopped and said, “Mr. Rosenkrantz, are you all right? I’m sorry if, well I knew I shouldn’t say anything about the play. My mom would kill me if she knew I was here acting like this with you having just lost your son.”

I shook my head and held out a hand when it looked like he might try to get up. “It’s fine, it’s all right. I want to read it, I do,” and to prove I did, I started reading. I could feel him watching me and then looking away and watching me again, but I furrowed
my brow and focused on what he’d written. And it was pretty good. It was really good, actually, and I felt some of the excitement I had felt with him in the bar the other day. I finished my drink and balanced the glass on the arm of my chair, and flipped through to the end of the scene. It was only four handwritten pages, but it was really good. “I like it,” I said, handing the pad back to him.

His eye opened wide. “You do? I mean, you really do?”

“Yeah, it’s a great idea. It’s a great way to end the first act.”

His smile was open and giddy.

“I’d cut that crying and laughing part at the end there.”

He knit his brow and stuck out his lower lip in seriousness, nodding. “Sure, I could see that.”

“A small action carries a lot of weight on a live stage. And you have this murder. That’s going to be big enough. You just let the other two sisters stare at the body in shock. They lead the audience, you see. Everyone’s in shock. Because you
are
in shock when it happens. You’re looking down and thinking, this couldn’t be, it doesn’t—it just couldn’t. You’re in shock, you see.” I realized what I was saying, and I got up to fix another drink.

“I see what you’re saying,” he said, writing something down. “Yeah, that’s better than the murdering sister breaking down, if she just looks at her sister’s body, and then the third one looks at her accusingly, their eyes meet, and the murderer runs off the stage, lights out.” He was writing the whole while he was talking.

I drank half my drink on my way back to my seat. “And then when the innocent sister seeks vengeance on the murdering sister, then she’s only left the choice to do the same thing, to kill her sister, and then she’s no better off than the other one. Because really, we’re all guilty in the end, right? It’s not just one
person who’s guilty, but everyone, because they let it happen, they made it too.”

He wasn’t quite following me there, and I wasn’t even following myself, I wasn’t making any sense. “I like it,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Here give me that,” I said, reaching for the pad in order to hide my own confusion. He handed it back to me. “And a pen.” He handed me that too. I looked at what he’d just written, and I started to jot some dialogue down. It just came to me:

“Don’t you accuse me. How dare you accuse me. She would have killed me if she’d had the chance.” “Do you think self-defense is an excuse? How many times have we ended a life even when self-defense has been invoked?” “I’ll never let you get to me. I’ll get to you first.” “And that’ll be self-defense too?” “It will.” “Well you have to get to me first.”

It felt good, the dialogue flowing like that. And you read it now, and I know what you’re thinking, that I was trying to make excuses for myself. Only I didn’t see that at the time. At the time it was just a play I was writing. And the important thing was that I
was
writing. And not the nonsense I’d written in the hotel the other day, but actual dialogue that fit into a play. Montgomery would take care of patching it all together, like the script doctors that come in and touch up a screenplay after you’re finished with it.

I looked up for a moment, and saw that Montgomery was watching me with fierce intensity. It made me self-conscious, and I lost the flow of what I was writing. I handed back the pad and mixed myself another drink. He looked at what I had written and then immediately started writing something else down. I watched him work and it was exciting to see his enthusiasm
and self-confidence. I wondered what had happened to my own self-confidence. If only I had a young man like that with me, I’d be unstoppable again.

And then I found myself wishing again that Montgomery had been my son. I would have been a different person with a boy like that looking up to me like I was king of the world. With a son like that you could really make something of yourself. You just about had to with a son like that, because he had you so great that you’d bend over backwards to prove he was right. But Joe had said that he thought the world of me as a kid, and what did I do? I made him think I was worse than I was and it seemed like I had proven him right in the end too.

But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was up and awake and my mind was sharp.

He started talking. I offered him a drink, and he waved it off, and went on about another plot point in the play, and then we really were working again, just like the night in the bar. Everything else fell away. All of my guilt, my anxiety, my self-loathing, those things evaporated in the creative flow of hashing out murder and drama on the stage. It was so much easier on paper than in—But I couldn’t think like that.

I kept drinking and finished the bottle. Montgomery nursed the first drink I had given him, learning from his mistake the last time. He took the role of secretary so I didn’t have to worry about my handwriting. We hashed out most of the second act in what must have been something like four hours. I’m not sure how long it was. It wasn’t dark yet outside, but it was getting there, that late evening summer twilight.

Montgomery filled up his pad at some point, but he had another one. He’d really come prepared; he was that eager and hopeful. To him, I really was somebody, even if everyone else in
the literary establishment had forgotten me, and my call girl girlfriend didn’t want to see me, and I owed money all over, and the police were probably going to arrest me any day. No, for him, I was a big-time writer. And we had that perfect give-and-take you need to get something good. I could feel it was good as it was happening. And maybe, I’m not ashamed to say it, maybe I began to believe it too.
The Furies
by Shem Rosenkrantz and Taylor Montgomery! The new smash hit! Yeah, we wrote.

And I didn’t once think of Joe or anybody else.

That was Tuesday, and the funeral was set for Thursday. Montgomery and I wrote all that Wednesday with only two notable interruptions that I guess I should mention. The first was a letter from Vee telling me to meet her at the hotel’s luncheonette first thing Friday morning. She didn’t know when she could get away so I was to just go and wait. Then we could figure out what we were going to do, and get the hell out of Calvert.

The second was two phone calls back to back, so if you count that as two things, then I’d have to say three things happened that Wednesday. The first phone call really threw me for a loop. Connie announced that someone was on the line for me, and I ran upstairs to take it in my room, expecting that it was Vee and I would need some privacy. But when I picked up, a familiar man’s voice came through the line, “Shem Rosenkrantz, I can hardly believe it’s you.”

I sat heavily on the bed. “Hub.” Hub Gilplaine was a nightclub owner and pornographer in S.A. who I used to pen smut books for. We’d been friends, but I soured that the second I asked to borrow money. How had he found me?

“Shem, how long have we known each other?”

“A lot of years,” I said.

“A lot of years. So you know what I hate more than anything, don’t you?”

“For someone to waste your time.”

“For someone to waste my time. That’s right. So how come I
find out that you’ve skipped town and I’ve got to waste precious hours getting you tracked down?”

“Hub, I haven’t skipped town. Quinn died, and then Joe—”

“How come?” He’d raised his voice. Then I knew it was personal. He never raised his voice.

I was silent.

“Huh?” He waited for me to answer. “How long have we been friends? You’re afraid to call me?”

“I’m coming into some money—”

“Money! Money...”

I could hear him shaking his head through the wire. So he was going to take this offended compatriot act through to the very end.

“Shem, I had to put your name out in a lot of places to track you down, and we’ve already established that my time is too valuable for that. When somebody offered to buy up your debt, I didn’t say no. You and I are square as far as money goes. It’s not my problem anymore. I’ve washed my hands of it.”

“But, you don’t understand, I’m coming into a lot of money. That’s why I’m here.”

“Then you’ll have no trouble paying your new creditors off.”

I had no answer for that.

“That’s all I wanted you to know,” he said, “that you have someone else to pay back now, Shem. Someone less patient than I’ve been.”

“Hub...”

“I’m sorry, Shem, I gave you all the time I could.”

“Sure. Yeah.” But he’d hung up.

I put the receiver down and just sat there, unable to get up. All of the energy that Montgomery had brought out in me in the previous thirty-six hours was gone, just pulled right out of
me and across the country. Who was I kidding writing a play? I couldn’t get away from my life. In America, you got one chance, and if you hit it big then you hit it big, but if you fell, there was no climbing back up. You might as well just die or go off somewhere where you weren’t in the way. Yeah, I might have come into a lot of money, but I owed a lot of money too. And now some gangster had bought up my debt... Who knew how much he’d expect from me? There was no pretending. I was on my way out, not up.

But thoughts like that were doing me no good. I picked up the phone again, and got the Enoch White clinic on the line. I asked for Clotilde, and the nurse on the other end got icy and told me to hold on, and then the phone delivered me a voice that was as relieving as the last voice had been frightening.

“Shem, you haven’t called.”

“I know, baby. I’ve been real tied up out here. Joe died.”

There was quiet, but not quite silence. She squeaked out, “No,” and I sank again. She was supposed to comfort me, and now I’d have to comfort her.

“It’s okay, honey, listen...”

“Shem, where are you?”

“I’m still in Calvert. The funeral’s tomorrow. Then I’ll come home.”

“I miss you.” She was crying, but quietly.

“I miss you too.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too. Listen, baby, it’s going to be okay. I’m getting the money now. The whole thing, the estate. I’ll be able to pay Philips. You’ll be set up for a long time.”

“Oh, Shem, I’m so happy,” but she sounded just the same as she had a second before.

“It’s all going to be okay now.”