What Movies Made Me Do (23 page)

What a toughie. Michael gave this interview yesterday, and today he was here arming himself for a gigantic shutdown. When would he go public?

I shivered from the top of my head to the small of my back and clicked Jack back on the line. He was chuckling. “I’m out of work for two days and some executive puts me on hold.”

A smile pulled up one corner of Ivy’s full mouth. “That fellow’s no uncle,” she whispered, “he’s more like a kissing cousin.”

She’d recognized Jack’s voice. My heart was hammering. I whispered back, “Mum’s the word.” Then I flinched. Some killer executive. I shouldn’t be admitting I was talking to Jack.

“Mum, honey.” Ivy put her forefinger to her lips and she walked out.

“Hey? Hello?” Jack wasn’t on the line. I heard my living-room doorbell chiming in the background. My heart stopped. Cradling the phone, I dashed back into Rosemary’s deserted office and pulled the insurance forms for the movie from her tidy files. I flipped through the clauses. Jack had to be missing from the set eight full days before Michael could make a claim for damages. I slammed the drawer closed. I had five days left.

“Hey, Carol? Somebody wants to fix your bathroom sink.”

“Do me a favor,” I stammered. “Promise me you won’t
leave my place. Don’t answer the door unless it’s a fire. It’s for your protection,” I lied.

“I don’t believe you, Superwoman. Anybody find that passport of mine yet?” He chuckled.

I shivered. “No, and I tell everybody I’ve got three beauty queens on the payroll watching you lose hundreds of dollars at the tacky casino downstairs at the Cairo Hilton.”

“Am I getting laid in Cairo?”

“No, but you’re making bad jokes. You’re fine.”

“I’m never going near the Middle East again.” He sounded defensive.

The reception buzzer vibrated. I had to get out of here. I gave up and put Jack on hold again.

“Where’s Rosemary?” There was a steely edge to Ivy’s voice.

“Gone.”

“Listen, she’s got trouble. Cops.”

I drummed my fingers on the blinking telephone. “Where?”

“On the way over here.”

“Why?”

“They didn’t say.”

I sat in stunned disbelief. Before I hung up I told Jack I had visitors. I told him to nail himself to my apartment.

Ten minutes later Ivy sat behind her huge square desk, her switchboard blinking like a pilot’s console. A policeman in full rich navy strode by her. His partner closed the reception door. I led them back into my office. I pictured Rosemary’s fragile white skin.

The younger one took off his hat and sat on my visitor’s chair. He had short black hair. His knees apart, he took out a note pad. He held his head high, his shoulders squared. He wore a silver ID bracelet, no wedding band. But I pictured his wife, slim, smiling, cooking in her blue jeans, wiping kids’
chins. I envied her. I wished Rosemary had washed her hair last night.

His eyes flickered at my photograph of Jimmy Dean in front of the Indiana barns. “What’s that from?”

“Before your time.
Rebel Without a Cause.
”

The policeman began spinning his hat lightly on his fingertip. “We got a civil case, probably not criminal but touchy. You employed Rosemary Lund for the past thirteen months, is that correct?”

“Is she okay?” I blurted.

“Ma’am, are you okay?”

“Fine.”

“Doorman at 121 Duane Street, in Tribeca, admitted her inside an apartment at five after two this afternoon.”

That was Sam’s building. I was wringing my hands like Rosemary had earlier. The policeman read from his note pad. “Tenant claims she tore up film reels, slashed a projection screen, and smashed a video camera. He plans to press charges.”

I sat on my hands. Rosemary had gone off the deep end. “She’s not hurt?”

“Well, she’s not in custody. A description that fits did come in last night from Times Square. She was loitering.” He glanced at my fingers jammed under my thighs. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but are you aware of a juvenile drug violation before she came to work here?”

“I am.” I folded my hands on my knees. That bastard Sam.

“You see her today?”

I checked my watch. “An hour and a half ago.” I said smoothly, “I sent her to the Forty-second Street Library for some religious pamphlets. She called me twenty minutes ago with a couple index questions. Maybe the doorman was wrong.” I had seen a hundred movies where people established alibis for their pals.

The young cop checked his notebook. Without looking up at me, he said, “You’re aware that Rosemary Lund had a serious drug problem at one time and was questioned for loitering at a bar?”

“That’s a figment of that director’s imagination.”

The cops just looked at each other.

“I know that girl since she went to school in Minnesota.” I couldn’t believe how well I lied. Of course, it’s one of my main job skills. “How long has Mr. Falco known her?”

The cop flipped through a few pages of his notes. “Not long. How’d you know about him and her?”

“What, that they had a liaison?”

“How’d you know, ma’am?” he repeated patiently.

“They both told me,” I said shortly. “He must be very insecure if he figures one night in his bed and a girl wants to wreck his apartment.”

“We dusted for fingerprints.”

“That’s irrelevant,” I said. “She was there with him three nights ago, dancing and watching movies.”

The young cop squared his shoulders more. He was pale; his kids probably got sunburned sitting in their strollers. “But the doorman remembers a big red-headed girl today.”

“He loves big redheads. He dates four,” I improvised.

My phones blinked, all of them. I hoped Ivy was covering the lines.

The cop stood. “If you find her, let us know.”

It sounded like she was on a self-destructive binge.

“Let’s go, Kevin,” said the cop in the doorway, turning away. She wasn’t their biggest case.

Kevin’s hand was warm and plump. “Ma’am, these things have a way of working out.”

“What’s your full name?” I blurted at his back.

He kept walking. “Connell, Kevin Connell.”

“How old are you?”

He turned around with a squinty smile. “Me?”

“Yes.”

“Thirty, why?”

“Just wondering.” I popped my hand over my mouth. I was out of control.

He looked at me steadily while he put on a pair of lopsided green prescription sunglasses. My mind jumped like a frightened bug. I’d get his precinct address from information. I’d write him a formal note. Instead of dating, I’d ask him to make a blind date to get married. He just looked so strong and nice. He’d be upset by our age difference at first, but I’d grow to love him like the sweet and dark-mouthed Delhi girls whose parents arranged their marriages in Satyajit Ray movies.

I smiled at him. He smiled back shyly, seeing something in my eyes that made him want to change the subject. “What’s your job again?”

I told him. He walked back to me. I knew he saw a middle-aged career woman, thin, Jewish, and expensive-looking, clearly overwrought, probably one tough bitch.

“This your secretary’s desk?” He pointed at the closed drawers.

“Yeah.”

“We’ll call you as soon as we hear anything.” He waved goodbye.

Boy, did I need a strong shoulder to lean my forehead into. I tried to imagine Rosemary clutching the telephone with both hands, talking to Sam, then hanging up, crying to herself, rushing out of here, talking her way into Sam’s apartment. I guessed she’d whipped herself into a frenzy, unspooling his movie, draping film over his bed, working up enough fury to drop a camera. Thundering out in a mad dash when she realized what she’d done. A kind of orgiastic ritual, destroying the nest of a rejecting lover.

It was too much to bear. I dialed her home number in
tears. The telephone rang and rang like a broken burglar alarm. I thumbed her Rolodex and dialed her girlfriends. They hadn’t seen her. They sounded frightened.

Her roommate didn’t know if she came in last night. I told the girl to call me the minute she heard from Rosemary.

“Is she in trouble?”

“Not with me,” I said. “Tell her, okay?”

Ivy was madly working the switchboard. “I’ll tell Michael you’re reading at home.” She looked worried.

I walked home in what felt like six seconds. I was on automatic pilot. I didn’t notice traffic lights. I didn’t feel the cold. My knees were weak. A horn blasted in my face. I waited for my elevator in my lobby standing on one foot and then the other. Hysterical. Maybe she came here. No. I wished Jack wasn’t upstairs. I wanted to draw my quilt up to my chin, shut my curtains, pull down my shade, and hide my head under the pillows. What about Rosemary’s boyfriend, that sweet resident at Columbia Presbyterian? I could page him.

On the elevator a couple was bickering because he made her leave a play early. They seemed to have a life without peril. The elevator door lurched behind me and I smelled something familiar cooking, sour pea soup, undoubtedly my neighbor, a rich elderly widow with yellow pearls and a uniformed Irish maid. The smells seeping from her apartment were heavy and poignant like my grandmother’s soup, simmering on her gas stove. My mother chopped Hebrew National hot dogs into her pea soup.

In front of my apartment I leaned against the door and it fell open. Great, he could have been mugged in my bed. It took Rocky a long minute to rush in skidding on his big paws. “Getting a lot of attention?” I knelt down.

His coat was silky and brushed. I peeked into the bedroom, where Jack was sprawled in my unmade bed. He was mumbling into the telephone, the loose sheet over his sweatpants,
pillows folded in half under his neck. He’d shaved, and the tan and pale colors of his face looked blended.

“Honey, don’t worry,” he confided into the phone while waving one hand at me. I was ready to kill him. Hundreds of people were in a tizzy about wasting months and years of their lives, basically because he preferred talking to girls on the phone to working.

I marched into the living room and dialed the police. No news. Kevin was on dinner break. I pulled a flat club soda from the refrigerator. The kitchen was hot. I peered into the oven beyond a blast of heat at a huge flat cookie sheet with rows of bubbling buttery batter.

Great. Rosemary was a missing person, the movie was halted, I was going to be fired, and he was baking cookies and sweet-talking girls on my phone. I sighed. The movie wasn’t made of flesh and blood. Rosemary was.

I let the oven door slam.

He came into the kitchen rubbing Rocky’s ears. “Home early,” he said, stretching his whole body, his elbows high above his head. “Come and visit me in Los Angeles after I sort out my life, I’ll return the hospitality.”

“I thought you were on your way out,” I snapped.

“Just a ruse.” He smiled big at me.

I ignored the flirting and opened the refrigerator, which was crammed with new exotic packages. “Been on the phone all day?” I munched crumbling goat cheese. He must have sent out for it.

He reached around me to the counter and pulled the plastic wrap off a ceramic bowl filled with fragrant chocolate-chip cookies. He shoved one into my mouth. “Be my guest.”

“Not hungry,” I lied balefully.

“I love fresh cookies.” He ate one with his even white teeth. “It cools me out to bake. No matter what part of the world they’ve exiled me to, if I bake cookies for a while I feel like myself.”

I licked crumbs off my lips and fished raisins out of a damp box. They are full of iron and natural sugar.

“How’s the political intrigue?” he continued.

“Let me alone.” After a threatening silence, I added, “I got problems.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“It’s my secretary, she’s missing, and the cops came over.” I didn’t want to cry in front of him.

“It’s not easy living without sharing these responsibilities. Believe me, I understand.”

“You just hang on the phone, flirting, what do you know?”

“Gimme a break.” He leaned against my counter, frowning. “Don’t play the cuckolded wife so quick. That was my sister, and I was telling her how I was safe and in the care of a new friend, no matter how ugly the press stories got.”

I sagged into a chair feeling like a beast. He casually dropped a soft brown cookie into Rocky’s eager mouth. The dog froze. Poor thing was so amazed at his first taste of chocolate and refined sugar after eight years of kibble and water that he held it lightly between his jaws like the retriever his ancestors were, his saliva drooling. He was waiting for the command to drop it.

“Okay, Rock.” I was tired of being a killjoy. Rocky sank down on his front paws, chomping and sucking at his cookie, his tail wagging. Then he licked Jack’s fingers.

“Don’t feed the dog. He’s got a bad stomach.” Rocky kept dragging his pink tongue over Jack’s fingers. Rage flashed behind my eyes.

“Why not let him enjoy himself?”

“Bullshit.”

Jack looked stricken.

“Sorry, I guess I need some time alone.”

He turned and left the kitchen. A minute later the front door slammed. I peered out to see Rocky sniffing under the
door. My knees felt weak. Suppose Jack was gone for good? Too damn bad.

Rocky kept whining in his throat. “Star-fucker,” I said. “Well, it runs in the family.”

A second later I was on the phone paging Columbia Presbyterian, and crossing my fingers. The city lights beneath my window sparkled like cheap rhinestones. Things were so fragile. Rosemary had been sitting right here mooning over Sam this morning.

Dr. Albert Goldman came on the line. “Rosemary?” He coughed a few times. “Been on the ward thirty-six hours, getting a flu. I haven’t heard from her for a couple days now. But listen, she’ll turn up.”

“Sure, I’m sure she’s just home sleeping. She had her hands full while I was away.”

“She’s crazy about the job. She’s always got a pile of scripts on her night table. Sometimes she makes me read them; what do I know?” He was earnest and even-keeled. Not as much fun as Sam in the short run.

I wandered into the bathroom and watched the moisture dripping down the mirrors. An acrid floral smell reminded me of Israel. I dipped my finger in the puddle on the black marble floor. His puddle from the shower. I dropped to my knees and mopped it up with a towel.