Vivian In Red (3 page)

I was strolling back uptown, pondering whether to stop for a bite or get a cab home so Esme could make me a sandwich. Then what I saw made me stop so quick the top half of me wobbled forward, even though my feet had stuck down hard.

Her shiny dark hair peeked out from under her hat, and she had one gloved hand touching the brim, like she was adjusting it, or keeping it from blowing off in the wind. Her long dress was the scarlet of lipstick and stoplights; the hem was fluttering even though I didn’t feel a breeze at all. When I raised my astonished eyes from her rippling hem to her smooth face and her red, red lips, she winked at me. Took those arresting green eyes, angled her delicate chin slightly away, and winked at me, with a tiny one-sided smile in the bargain.

And that’s the last thing I remember seeing, because that’s when everything went dark, and all I heard were cries of alarm and surprise, and at first I thought all of them had seen the same thing as me: Vivian, winking on Broadway and 52
nd
, looking as gorgeous as she ever did in 1934, but here in 1999, when she should’ve been ninety or dead.

W
ith my phone in my hand, and Uncle Paul’s voice terse on the other end—not his secretary, not Aunt Linda, usually in charge of all things family—I think of the time I saw a scaffolding fall, because of the sensation in my chest: a raucous collapsing. I can almost hear the clanging.
Someone’s dead.

The guy on the scaffolding had been up there doing something to the masonry on one of those woebegone crumbly old buildings which seem to have been forgotten amidst all the jutting glass and steel. The man was fine, other than that he probably pissed himself with fear. His harness thing caught and he grabbed the side and sort of rode it down. No, the amazing thing was the sound, a series of metallic clangs as the platform smashed its way along the metal supports and bounced off that stone façade. The racket was loud enough and long enough for pigeons and pedestrians to scatter. We—the other commuters and I safely across the street—stood mesmerized by the slow-motion nature of the destruction. For a while I got nervous walking under scaffolding but like everything else, you get used to it again.

“Eleanor,” Paul says now, jerking me out of the memory, into the grim reality of whatever news he has to deliver. “Your grandfather collapsed this morning.”

“Oh, no. How is he? He’s not…?”

“He’s at Lenox Hill Hospital now. They’re not sure what happened, but apparently he was walking home from the office and he just fell down on the sidewalk. It looks like he had a stroke.”

“It’s so hot today! Why didn’t he take the car?”

“You’re telling me. I don’t know why not. I’m on my way down there.”

“Is anyone with him now?”

“Joel was already there on rounds, so he’s checking on him. I’ll be there soon. Don’t feel like you have to rush right over right this second. They’re running tests and things now and it’ll be some time before you can see him, I just wanted you to know right away, because… Well, you know. Anyway. Gotta go, Ellie.”

My fingers dial before I can decide not to, before I’ve even realized the note with Daniel’s new phone number is in my hand.

“Eleanor?”

I loathe caller ID. Daniel’s voice is already rich with suspicion, even dread.

“Grampa Milo collapsed today.”

“Oh, geez, honey.” His voice instantly softens. “Is he okay? Are you?”

“I’m not sure, and I don’t know.”

“Umm…”

He could have an audition, but he might be headed to a temp job. His degree is in English and so far that’s gotten him proofreading gigs here and there, sometimes he answers the phones and makes copies. Better than pouring Budweiser for tourists, he always says. I also know he pushes back against actor stereotypes, and that includes the standard-issue actor-waiter. In this suspension of time I wish I hadn’t called. He’s an ex now, and what am I supposed to expect from him?

“Which hospital?” he says now, and I tell him Lenox Hill.

“I can be there in an hour. Do you have your cell phone on you?”

“No, forget it, I shouldn’t have troubled you…”

“You called me for a reason, Ellie. I’m not going to leave you hanging like this. See you soon.” He hangs up, and it requires two shaky tries for me to replace the receiver back into its cradle before I sink into my desk chair.

I know he won’t leave me hanging, and somehow his kindness makes this worse.

It was not quite a week ago that Daniel greeted me with the famous “Can we talk?” line.

I’d been at my desk then, too, chewing the tip of my pen to a flattened, gnarly triangle as I stared at notes for my next interview. What followed was one of those tedious, excruciating talks where one just wants it all over with, and the other wants to understand. I played the role of the one seeking understanding, though I really did know. It just felt necessary to ask, anyway, like we really were on stage somewhere, and the audience was expecting certain things from us before curtain.

This feeling was heightened when I made some remark about, “Can’t believe you’re leaving me” and he retorted, “You’ve been leaving me for a long time.”

“Ha,” I answered back, though it came out lifelessly, without the sting that I’d wanted. “That’s from a play. I know because I ran the lines with you.”

Finally, Daniel rose and said he was sorry for hurting me by leaving, but that he didn’t think I’d hurt so long, anyway. And he closed the door carefully and locked it from the outside, because he was always considerate like that. Even though we lived in a doorman building, he wasn’t going to leave me vulnerable behind an unlocked door.

When I finally hauled myself up out of the chair, dazed like I’d been sucker-punched, my gaze lighted on a slip of paper on the coffee table.
Staying at Tom’s,
he’d written, and then included the phone number. He hadn’t written it during our talk. He’d prepared it ahead. How far ahead? How many nights did he sit with me over takeout, watching
Seinfeld
, planning this?

I tried to tell myself Daniel couldn’t be expected to memorize my work schedule, that he had no idea he was ripping my life in half just before an important assignment.

Daniel likely didn’t realize that I’d spent the previous five days talking myself up for that interview like a prizefighter, all but dancing back and forth and jabbing the air. That this assignment from
Skyscraper
magazine was a coup. I’d be interviewing a grieving mother in Brooklyn, who was demanding police take action in the supposed accidental death of her son. The authorities had written off his death by car crash as a sadly common tragedy: kids don’t look where they’re going, do they? But his mother smelled something rotten in how fast they came to that conclusion in favor of the wealthy driver of that glossy black BMW. It looked to be my toughest interview yet, by a mile and then some.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Maybe it was already written in the book of life that I’d start shaking as the mother started yelling at me.

My editor, John, had reminded me that I couldn’t just accept her rendering of the facts, sympathetic though she was. I had to be as thorough with Mrs. Ashanti Greene as I would with the police later. It was because of this coaxing from John that I’d written the questions in my notebook like a script, so I could read the words one by one and not chicken out. So I read from my script and asked, “How can you be so sure it wasn’t simply an accident that your son was run over? Kids do get run over sometimes, especially if they dart out in the road.”

So that’s when she started with the yelling, and I started with the shaking and crying.

She hollered, “How dare you cry when it’s my son that’s dead? When all I’m saying is truth, how dare you?”

Breakup or not, perhaps it was already ordained I’d bolt from that grieving mother’s kitchen without another word. That I would throw up in a garbage can and wipe my face with a piece of paper from my notebook before running through Bed-Stuy until I could find a cab.

So when John fired me—much as anyone can fire a freelancer—perhaps that was inevitable, too. I thought he might give me an easier assignment, one like I’d been doing before. Everyone loved my profile of a guy who gave popular, impromptu performances from his West Village fire escape. Likely because it was Rat Pack jazz and not rap, the cops yelled out requests instead of shutting him down.

No nice, friendly profile assignments for me. John said I needed a good long break.

I’d been making a paper clip chain while John made me wait for him in his office, and I’d for some reason still had the thing in my hand as I drifted out of the offices and plopped down under a tree in Bryant Park to get my bearings. It would have been foolish to return a handful of paperclips, and would I unlink them first? It seemed wasteful to throw them away. So I carried them home with me, into the apartment, here they still are, strewn over the notebook I’d clutched in that Brooklyn kitchen with its curling linoleum and faux wood grain table with the one short leg.

Now I pick them up, those paperclips, and I find myself passing them through my fingers like a Catholic with a rosary, as I pace this apartment in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows meant to give the illusion of space in this city where we’re crawling all over each other like ants in a hill.

Since Uncle Paul’s call just minutes ago, I’m bowled over with regret that I bolted from the last family dinner so quickly; if I’d only known that Grampa was about to… I try to absolve myself:
how could you have known?
But then:
he’s almost ninety. Any day could be the last day.
Grampa had been holding court as usual, recounting the funniest opening night mishaps he could recall, including the time a corpse started giggling on stage. The actor had apparently felt a sneeze coming on, and was holding it in while making like a dead body, and somehow it struck him funny what it would look like if he did indeed sneeze. The sneeze, the nerves, trying not to breathe too obviously, it all struck him so hilarious he could no longer stop himself. “The schmuck should have just sneezed!” Grampa cried, and everyone roared with laughter. I should have stayed and enjoyed the fun, even though I’d heard that story maybe a dozen times. Instead I chose to evade family interrogation over the absence of Daniel.

Anyway, soon enough they’ll get a hold of me, and it will go like this: What could have gone so wrong? He was such a nice young man, and worked so hard (implied afterthought:
for an actor
).

For the sake of something like dignity, I would refuse to divulge the existence of lithe, pretty Moira with her cap of black hair and her eyes blue like lapis. I’d come back weakly with, “We’ve grown apart” and my aunt would retort, “Nonsense! You have so much in common!” by which they mean, “You’re both nice Jewish kids and you’d make adorable babies so get to it already.”

Daniel had already taken his things, which we’d arranged in one brief, brittle phone conversation. I’d arranged to be out at a show so he’d have several hours. When I came back to the apartment—really Uncle Paul’s place, he lets me live here at a laughably low token rent—and saw it denuded of my ex’s scripts, leather jacket, books, and vinyl records he never played but liked to thumb through, I sighed, dusted my hands, and thought,
that’s that.
This wasn’t painless for me, of course, but had anyone seen me, they might have thought so. Daniel has accused me more than once of too easily shutting down. I could never convince him that some people—those of us not actors, those of us not show-offy hams who advertise every fleeting emotion to the world—feel things quietly, internally. I feel plenty, I just don’t feel it’s everybody’s goddamn business.