What Movies Made Me Do (19 page)

“Not the way I look.”

I waggled my finger. “Watch out, your face is changing. I mean that curl in your lip might turn mean.”

He frowned, scratching at the short hairs on his cheek. “It’s rude the way you comment on my looks.”

I flushed. My nerves were shot. “Well, you’re a movie star whose image has been pressed into visual field.” I peered at his book. “
Othello
, you want to make a Shakespeare movie?”

“I’m not going near a movie set.” He spoke savagely.

I buttoned my lip.
Call Vicky.
She’ll carry my rumors to Michael Finley’s boss. It was Michael’s work against mine. I’d just keep saying everything was perfect. I’d snoop around and find out what Michael Finley was doing in New York.

Jack glanced at me, closing the book on his forefinger. I was gaping at him. “Okay, what’s happening?” he asked.

For a split second he looked like an ordinary, weary, disheveled man, badly in need of a shave. “Sorry, for a minute I didn’t recognize you.”

He yawned. “Lately, I don’t recognize me either.”

At his hotel I handed the cabbie a large American bill. It felt good to be dealing again in money I recognized. The spurting fountains in Columbus Circle were surrounded by snow and honking, smoking cars. I looked apprehensively from face to face, but nobody noticed him. I elbowed the revolving door to the hotel.

He moaned behind me. I turned and gasped as he slumped over in slow motion. I grabbed him at the middle, my
knees buckling, and struggled to hold him upright, looking around wildly. The lobby was deserted except for two white-haired women on canes who watched horrified while he clutched his ribs. I was muttering, “Just let me get you through this. I can get you through.” I was grinding my teeth. “I’ll try and be a better person. I just want you safe.”

His body sagged. I stumbled trying to support him and he flipped forward onto his knees, his face squeezed with pain, saying, “I don’t believe this,” and whamming one shoulder on the floor. His shopping bag tore; books and a wrinkled black undershirt rolled out. I couldn’t see his face. He twisted my fingers off his brow. “Lean me against the wall,” he whispered, “just give me a second, I’m sorry.”

“Hey, you’re okay.” My voice was an imploring whisper.

I locked my elbows under his armpits, pulling him up from behind until he finally stood, scraping his fingernails on the pink cloth wallpaper. A teenage black boy ran by and scooped Jack’s books back into the torn shopping bag. “Thanks.” What a mess.

Sagging against the wall, he started crying, hiding his eyes with his forearm. I was overwhelmed with fear. I didn’t recognize this Jack Hanscomb at all. “It’s only five minutes to my house,” I told him. “Come on, don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.”

I put his arm across my back and a deep muscle pulled inside my shoulder while we inched step by step, blocking an impatient bellhop pushing a piled cart of matched luggage.

“Please give us a hand.”

“Ten minutes, ma’am.” The bellhop winked. “He had one too many?”

I kicked the revolving door and squeezed into Jack’s triangle, holding him as he leaned his cheek against the icy glass. His fresh sweat smelled like burning rubber. He was frightened. The cabs were lined up outside, gleaming like a
long yellow snake with their toothy grilles, grinding engines, and tank bodies.

I planted him against a cab and flung his arms across the roof for support. My apartment was up the street, but he couldn’t walk it. I tugged open the door, my heart pounding, turned him to face me, and sat him down on the edge of the torn plastic seat. “This has never happened to me,” he whispered, his eyelids closing.

The driver looked at him. “Roosevelt Hospital?”

“No, just that apartment at the corner.” I scurried around the taxi to the other door.

My orange canopy looked large and artificially colored to my eyes. My mind went back to miles of serene, rippling beige sand. These people looked overdressed in big colored coats. The city was loud. I couldn’t remember my life here. How did I manage to survive the chaos? I wanted to cover my ears from the pounding, drilling noises. There was no hiding from the city, no solitude. I couldn’t hear myself think.

After I handed the cabdriver a five-dollar bill, he tipped his hat and got out of his cab to lend an arm around Jack. “We’re almost there. Hang on.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack mumbled, his teeth chattering.

My doorman walked toward us. I couldn’t let him see Jack. “No problem,” I said. He looked away. A single woman needs privacy.

Upstairs, I was pushing my keys at my lock when the doorknob moved from inside. Behind me I heard Jack slipping to the floor with a sigh of relief.

I dropped the keys and grabbed his lapels but his weight took me slowly down with him, his head falling between his knees as I sprawled over him. “Stay cool,” he said. “You’re all I got, Superwoman.”

I heard Rocky barking and somebody unbolting the chain. “Who is it?” came a high familiar voice.

I braced Jack’s shoulders. “Open up, Rosemary, quick.”

Her plump face appeared at the door. “Holy smoke.”

She looked pale and large to me after all the Israelis. She clutched my white terry-cloth bathrobe at her neck. Jack groaned as I let him fall slowly back against the wall. “You sick or something?” I asked Rosemary.

“No, just mad,” she said, leaning into one side of the doorway as Rocky leaped past her, his paws hitting my shoulders, his hindquarters wagging. I scratched his curly graying neck until he rolled his huge head back, his pink tongue lolling in silly joy.

Rosemary was wiping her nose surreptitiously on her hand. I reached over and tucked some loose red hair behind her ears. She still looked like an alien ice princess. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, let me alone.”

Behind me Rocky licked Jack’s chapped ear. “Hey, gimme a break. I’m not that easy,” he mumbled. Rosemary’s head snapped up. But she didn’t recognize Jack.

“Help me with him. Michael Finley bugging you?” I tucked one of Jack’s arms around my back.

“Nope.”

“I’m not going to fall,” Jack said in a loud frightened voice.

Then Rosemary got a real look at him and she rolled her pale blue eyes at me. Her forehead went pink. “What’s going on here?”

“It’s a long story.”

She slung Jack’s other arm over her shoulder. “I’m sleeping in the spare room. I’m willing to share my bed.” She grinned. “Just kidding.”

“Let’s put him in my room until I figure this out,” I said.

“After all, you bagged him,” she chuckled. “But did you have to drug him and knock him unconscious?”

We edged Jack into the marble foyer. I smelled oatmeal
cooking. Rocky galloped away down the corridor. Poor dog had too many people in his territory. Jack grunted with relief when we let him fall slowly on his back onto the white covers. My bed looked familiar but too big. Traveling had scrambled my brain. I pulled a heavy quilt over him.

“Thanks,” he said weakly, clasping my hand and swinging it slightly. “You always put personnel in your bed?”

“Every chance I get.” I felt my face heat up in front of Rosemary’s piercing gaze. She popped her hand over her mouth, pointing at my framed photograph of him on the wall.

“I got nothing to hide,” I said. I plumped a soft pillow under his head.

She sat down on my silk chaise, her untied sneakers pointing at each other, and asked forlornly, “What hit him anyway?”

“Virus. Hey, why don’t you get dressed?”

She saluted me and disappeared, closing the bedroom door softly. He was breathing in shuddering gasps of cold. I touched his throat and felt his swelling glands. “How do you feel?”

“Hollow,” he whispered.

“When did you eat last?”

“A couple of days ago.” He tried to smile.

Out by the kitchen, Rosemary finished buttoning up her white Irish wool sweater and began wringing her hands. Her eyes were unfocused. “Promise you’ll tell me the whole story.”

“Okay, but soup first.” I pulled some fresh celery, carrots, and onions out of the refrigerator. I found a raw chicken drumstick behind the orange juice container.

When I heard Rocky push open the bedroom door with his nose, I dashed to my room. Rocky was prancing on the bed like a big circus pony, sniffing Jack’s skin.

“Beat it, Rocky, bad dog!” The bedspring creaked as he jumped off and licked my palm unrepentantly. Jack was talking with his eyes closed. “I’m gonna get me a big mutt. Up till now I been running off to location too much to take care of a dog.”

I stuck a thermometer in his mouth, then silently read 102. Rosemary stood gingerly at the edge of the bed, her hands behind her back, watching him as if he held the answer to every one of life’s mysteries.

He opened his eyes, flinching at her close scrutiny. “Hey, like Greta Garbo once said, ‘Don’t I look great when I’m near death?’ ”

“She told you that?” Rosemary looked more awed.

“No, it’s in
Camille.
What do you do?”

She inclined her head at me. “Her assistant.”

“You two could win a contest.”

“What for?” we both asked too eagerly.

“Staring.”

Rosemary giggled. I twisted the thermometer in my fingers. I hadn’t read the line of mercury wrong. “Rosemary, take my purse and buy all the patent medicines with yeast in fluids and jellies from the all-night drugstore on Lexington at Forty-ninth. Nobody else is open yet. Pick up a tuna sandwich for me,” I added. “And something for you.”

She walked reluctantly into the foyer, counting dollar bills in her wallet. I followed her. “Honey, tell me what’s wrong?”

“When I get back,” she said sadly. “How you doing?”

“Confused, but I’m happy to be back home.”

I stumbled into my sun-dappled kitchen. My new copper kettle, dark with water spots, shone on a burner. A wet dish towel hung drying on the spigot, and she’d left an empty box of Kellogg’s bran flakes on my butcher block. My yellow pot holder was stained with ketchup. The place looked like a suburban ad for Campbell’s soup.

I filled a big dented tin saucepan, a wedding gift, and set it on the stove. I threw in the chopped vegetables, a dash of spices, chicken stock, and began sautéing the chicken leg. I wondered why I was cooking. Usually I order up from midtown restaurants. I squinted out the window. Across the alley a candle flickered on two nude men making love. Their
pale flesh twisted and I held my breath, staring. It was early. They must be really into it. My neck prickled. Suddenly I knew how my horrified Philadelphia relatives saw me and my sexual freedom. I pressed my nose against the glass. Sometimes I think my aunts and uncles are jealous because parts of my life are more fun. But children are the necessity, and a big stake in the future. Like me, my gay neighbors weren’t doing their biological duty. We weren’t helping to continue the human race. That was probably why I was so afraid of dying.

I turned away, surprised that my life had brought me here to this kitchen, where I was cooking chicken soup for a movie star whom I had once slept with, run away from, dreamed about, and who was now working for me.

The chicken was golding in butter. I lowered the flame under the boiling soup. In the bathroom, I unfurled a sheet, dropping it into the empty tub. My grandmother used to kneel by her curving old tub with claw feet and fold me in wet sheets to contain the heat of the water. I loved inhaling the steam and the yeast she added. She fussed over me like a sleeping princess, calling it bathing Russian style. Grandpop tsked with his teeth and told her to stop telling me
bubbe-mysehs.
I loved her gnarled witchlike hands wrapping the sheets around me under the water. She made my whole body feel relaxed and floating and loved.

I rummaged into my vitamin shelf and found a jar of yeast tablets. I shook the flat yellow pills into the sheets steaming in the hot water and watched the pills flake away.

Ten minutes later he leaned a hand on my shoulder and dipped one brown foot into the heated water. Rosemary and I sat on our knees shaking lotions and more tablets into the marble tub. We were soaked and sweaty and silent. He was still wearing his dungarees. They smelled musty in the damp bathroom, like our cigarette-choked airplane.

He wrinkled his nose. “It smells like my granddad’s barn when I was a kid.”

“My grandmom gave me baths like this.” We smiled at each other.

When Rosemary and I peeked in five minutes later he was lying under ballooning wet sheets. He looked like a drowning pigeon. Rosemary stifled her chortles and snorted. I ducked my head down, hugging her, and got a fit of giggles. “I wish I had a camera,” she hissed into my ear.

“Hey, I’m cold! Close the door, you two!”

“Sssh,” I told Rosemary. We crept forward into the bathroom without looking at each other and knelt, patting wet sheets over his body to keep air out of them. The sheets billowed and sank.

He grinned at me, his face shining with perspiration and steam. His eyebrows and lashes were moistly dark and seductive. “Women’ll do anything to get my clothes off.”

Rosemary blushed. “I think you initiated this,” I said, kneeling over his feet.

“Could be worse,” he sighed in the relaxing heat.

I wiped my wet hand across my forehead and sat back on my heels. It was amazing. I had made this man into a gigantic rejecting figure whom I had carried around in my head for years. And here he was, life-size, in my bathtub. It was silly, but it felt like my grandmother’s ritual had shrunk him.

“You feeling better?”

“Hot and wet.” He yawned.

“You look boiled.”

“Ladies, please leave so I can get out.” He shivered and splashed a small wave at my soaked dungarees. I brandished my big white terry bathrobe at him.

A minute later he was leaning against the sink so I could rub his hair with a towel. When I stopped he smiled at me, flushed, clean, and nearly asleep. I got goose bumps remembering my father drying my hair like this when I was little. Rosemary was staring at us, looking sad.

“Let me sleep for a week. What a drag,” he said with a warm sigh as we helped him under the covers.

I leaned over to touch his forehead. Cooler. The phone rang in the living room and Rocky pranced to it like a rocking horse. I ran after him to hear my service answering. I flinched as one of Ronald’s copy assistants at the
Times
said, “Tell her emergency.”