The Day the Bozarts Died Page 12

My campaign to rejoin society had lost a little steam, but that ceased to matter when finally we got a break in the case. I had caught someone’s attention at The Baskin Reader. I know, I hadn’t either, which is probably why they pick up the phone. Still, one reference librarian did tell me the Reader enjoyed an “inching-up cachet” and was quoted or excerpted regularly in better known periodicals.

  I pretended not only to have heard of them but to have selected them, singled them out for their trenchant, unbought analysis. Why not take my story to the Times or The Washington Post? Wellsir, are not such publications part of the problem, where you folks at the Reader are part of the solution?

  I was invited inside their nerve center (which looked like a former broom closet) above the campus radio station at Cheltenham College. Jameson Barlow, Editor and Publisher, said he liked the “shape” of the story and was convinced I was onto something. I was convinced that Jameson Barlow was 12 years old (14 tops), notwithstanding the several references to his “earlier years in mainstream journalism.” Earlier? Like when he was six?

  “Let me talk to Lucy about this one,” he said, as we shook on the deal. “She would be perfect for this story.”

  Hey, so would Charlie Brown or Linus. But I got a good vibe off the little dude. I believed he would talk to Lucy and I believed, sight unseen, that Lucy would take my case. Which meant the trickledown might have to trickle up, but what can you do? Journey of 2000 steps, you still start with step one, no?

  Strolling back across the sunny quadrangle, I stopped in front of the new Cheltenham Science Center to check out Clapper’s notorious “Darwin and Eve.” (Darwin in heavy British tweed, and Eve, on his arm, in her birthday suit.) The sun pounded Eve’s hip and thigh muscles, extracting the unalloyed copper from the bronze. One of Darwin’s heavy wrinkled sleeves distorted one of Eve’s smooth unfettered breasts. What the hell, I conceded, Professor Cloud can truly do it.

  And may a thousand dogs be set peeing on the base.

  * * *

  “The Day The Bozarts Died,” by Lucy Young, reprinted from The Baskin Reader:

  .… Monk Barrett only outlasted Kenniston by two months. “Opportunity knocked,” says Barrett about the decision to move in with his ailing father on Hilton Head Island. Both Elwood Barrett Sr. and Elwood Barrett Jr. (Monk) understood the deal. Junior would shop and clean, fetch things, and “monitor the medical shit.” In exchange, when Senior died, Junior would get the beachfront condo and whatever cash was left. It was way too baldfaced, Celia Firestone contends, to merit inclusion in The Collected Scams.

  Everything felt different at #4 Blaisdell Street. The ground floor was a bustle of architects, engineers, contractors, and subcontractors, coming and going. FedEx drivers pulled in hourly, recalls Cloud, to pick up or deliver “big tubes containing big plans. The parking lot was jammed with F-350 pickup rigs that had more chrome than car and wheels so big they had to be on steroids.”

  Meanwhile, upstairs, too many rooms were empty. Things were very quiet at the old Hotel. Recalls Beryl Baines: “I sometimes felt we were on a magic raft, floating above the real world. That we were living our happy little dream, but if they discovered we were still up there they would just come and let the air out.”

  Stanley Noseworthy warned that C.I.T. was maneuvering to take back the building without openly avowing as much. He was convinced they simply shredded applications from prospective tenants. And while his was the extreme stance, no one was unconcerned. “I certainly didn’t agree with Stanley,” says Ed Bellingham, “but I couldn’t swear he was wrong, either. Then Rosie came in and we all relaxed about it.”

  “Rosie” was Rose Gately, the first new tenant in six years and the youngest tenant by nearly 30 years. Gately struck everyone as a throwback to the pioneer days. Fresh from art school, she was fiercely dedicated to her work, ceaselessly riveted to her easel. She wore her hair long, bicycled around town, waitressed for a living. Deirdre Wright, who met Gately just once, mentions one notable difference. “Back then, I would come home from a night at The Ship’s Lantern reeking of red sauce and cigarette smoke, with 25 bucks in my pocket. Rose was coming home from Recipes with 200, minimum. And no smoke.”

  Gately represented the “next generation” in a more literal sense: Arnie Cloud is her uncle. (Cloud’s sister, the cellist Myra Clapperberg, is Gately’s mother.) It was Cloud, Gately’s godfather and lifelong mentor, who convinced her she was ready for her own studio and that Blaisdell Street was the right place to rent one. He knew his niece was driven and hoped that by being close by he could monitor her claustral days, perhaps induce her to stop for lunch “or at least remember to breathe.”

  “I felt responsible for her, of course, especially for the expense she was taking on, and would have been happy to foot the bill. I mean, I was suddenly just lousy with money. But Rosie insisted on paying her own way.”

  A time did come when Recipes closed for renovations and Gately, feverishly mounting her first one-woman show, did allow her uncle to advance the rent money. “She paid me back every penny,” says Cloud, shaking his head. “Which was just silly, like carrying coals to Newcastle. As I say, I was richer than Scrooge McDuck, and Rosie was still day to day.”

  Niece and uncle each laid down one non-negotiable condition before Gately agreed to sign the lease. Hers was that no one be told she and Cloud were related. She would not be seen as a charity case, or a legacy. “I love Arnold,” she says. “I just did not want to be given anything because of him. I wanted to pay my dues.” And her rent, when she could.

  Cloud’s condition was that she steer clear of the house lothario, “sex addict” Stanley Noseworthy. Noseworthy might stand on his head to impress her but in the long run, Cloud counselled, the only question was whether he would waste five months of her life or five years. “Whatever,” Gately smiles and shrugs, “though it did piss me off a little at the time. Because what did he think, that I was this fragile little bird? It’s not like I never had a boyfriend, not like I hadn’t been both dumper and dumpee. Plus the guy was just, you know, not going to be an issue.”

  Even with Gately on board as what Ed Bellingham took to be “living proof of our ongoing existence,” the attrition would resume soon, and tragically, when Tad Smith, the extraordinary chronicler of Third World cultures, died of AIDS at 39. Gately felt cheated that she never met him; Noseworthy felt cheated by the drop in population. “I’m not saying they killed Tad, only that they were delighted he went so quietly. They never did replace him. Or her.”

  “Her” was Celia Firestone, who went that same month, though she did not choose to go quietly. She threw herself a ritzy going-away party at Harvest Thyme in Canterbury and an even ritzier welcome-back fête at Carney’s Big Room in Manhattan. It would seem that Firestone went on her own terms, although Cloud recalls that “Stanley was convinced her canvasses were being bought up by C.I.T. That they knew if her career flourished she would move back to New York, so they were pumping up her sales to get rid of her. A grand conspiracy, of course.”

  Why bring in Gately, then? “A classic bait-and-switch,” says Noseworthy. “They bring her in and hold up their hands to show us how clean they are.”

  Why buy up Firestone’s work and not Barrett’s? “Even more obvious. Success for Celia meant she would go. Success for Monk would have meant staying.”

  Where Noseworthy saw a conspiracy against the arts, and where Cloud saw in the quarter-century arc of the “Hotel Beaux-Arts” a symptom of broader cultural change and disintegration, Bea Jasperson saw nothing new and nothing to be alarmed about.

  “Would you want it to be any different?” Jasperson asks. “Have every third citizen a practicing artist? Have artists endorsed and supported by the government? I mean, it is supposed to be a struggle. It has always been a struggle and the artist must always be an outsider, an absolute flyspeck to the bean counters and a thorn at best to the powers-that-be. Don’t you agree?”

  But then Jasperson was about to take her part of the
struggle south to the sunbelt. Even before all the invoices were in for Firestone’s champagne and shellfish soirées, Jasperson and Baines would be riding their magic carpet out of town right behind her.

  * * *

  As promised, they sent me Lucy, and they sent her just in time, on a glorious late September afternoon I had pretty much dozed through. There is nothing sweeter and sadder than a glorious autumn day with its profoundly mixed suggestions, fond memories of childhood stirred in with a melancholy sense of the dark seasons ahead, and of life closing down.

  And I recall thinking that if I had no human response halfway worthy of such a magnificent offering from the heavens, I should probably just go ahead and kill myself. “As gently lay my head/ On my grave as now in bed.” But I had none, and sometime before noon (reluctantly, shamefully) I gave way to sleep. All my efforts to save the Bozarts from extinction had shriveled down to a single interview and I damn near missed it clean.

  It was pure luck that I woke at half past three, with barely time to straighten my tie, so to speak. Then again, all this may have been ordained (the Lord moving in mysterious ways, as he is reputed to do, his wonders to perform) because I did wake refreshed, and far more alert than I had been in months.

  The scenario at hand took clear shape in my mind. I would stroll this earnest journalist down the shedrow of empty studios (their histories writ in spattered paint and clay, in the tape scars and unbleached rectangles where Monk’s undulant four-dimensional landscapes and Richie’s sagging anthropomorphic tenements had hung for so many years) and I would say nothing. No voiceover needed.

  Let her see for herself what it looks like in the wake of art. Let her draw her own conclusions as to what our nation will look like 20 years from now, after Bush 3 and Bush 4 have ruled, as our pantheon of presidents now mimics our other cultural choices, which is to say really bad stuff brought back by popular demand. (Bush 2, Rocky 3, Chucky 4.…)

  Waiting for Lucy Young, feeling the blood begin to move inside me, it was as though I had risen not simply from yet another useless snoozle, but from a long chartless torpor over the course of which I had lacked the essential illusion of life, namely that anything I did could possibly matter. That this world would be even microscopically different for my having done or not done, created or not created.…

  Even eaten or failed to eat. I had lost 10 pounds in the last year, losing weight at the rate therefore of half an ounce a day. I had lost weight eating the sort of food that makes you fat, junk food and takeout. Mindful of those cereal box panels listing the vitamins and minerals required daily, I had to wonder if I had consumed a decent vitamin or mineral all year. What vitamins are in coffee? What minerals in a small cheese with pepperoni? Given the gazillions of calories in those greasy pizzas, I had to fear the half-ounces were being sheered off my soul, not my body.

  But now The Baskin Reader had taken my brief and all of that torpor was in the past. I felt viable again, chemically transformed, as though injected in my sleep. Had there been but world enough and time, I would have sprinted to the river, run my old three-mile route, then sprinted back for a long hot shower. Bring on the endorphins!

  It was four o’clock sharp, though, and here she was, stepping from a white Skylark, a sturdy young woman with a slender briefcase: Lucy Young, girl reporter. There was a straightforwardness to her posture, a field hockey forward’s solidity. Not that she wore them, but I could picture her stickhandling bandy-legged toward the goal in knee socks and kilt. Her hair was pragmatic, a tight crown of mousebrown waves.

  “Stanley Noseworthy,” I said, as she reached the landing. At closer range, I saw alert blue eyes gazing out with a better-than-hat-trick clarity. Her dressed-down jeans and sneakers stood contrapuntal to a necklace of lapis lazuli lozenges that enriched the blue ore of those laser eyes.

  “I know. I mean, here we are,” she said, but she seemed distracted, transfixed by the dense enclave of C.I.T. facilities surrounding us on all sides. “Can’t say you have much of a view. Is any of it non-toxic?”

  “Not a molecule. Whatever you do, don’t breathe.”

  Outwardly, the air was matchless. Bea’s min-max thermometer, still pinned to the lintel, showed a sweet ideal, both the min and the max at 67, and Lucy Young seemed reluctant to step inside, still intrigued by the view that was not much yet just as certainly told much of the Blaisdell Street story. All that scarifying state-of-the-art science, the DNA and RNA, electron bombardiering, and God knows what-all gerbil cloning. How innocently we had once imagined a few vats of acid, potions, tended by a quaint, almost benign manifestation of the mad scientist, good old Boris Karloff in his lightning-lit Carpathian mountaintop laboratory.

  “What exactly goes on over there? Do you know?”

  “According to Dave, my old acquaintance from #3, even the people working there don’t know. And that even if they did know, they wouldn’t really know.”

  “Please elaborate,” she said, mock-journalistically.

  “Just that they can’t know the true outcome—benign or malign—for at least 100 years. According to Dave.”

  “Because of unforeseen side effects and so forth.”

  “Sure, if the end of the world is a side effect. Nukes was his favorite example for dummies like me. The Bomb—which is bad?—may in fact have saved the world for a while. Whereas nuclear power—which is good?—ultimately may be what destroys it.”

  “At the hands of terrorists.”

  “Them. Or us. Or brute chance. Dave was very big on brute chance.”

  I had not quoted Dave inaccurately. A scary guy, saying shit like that deadpan as he smoked his way through two quick Tareytons in the parking lot. But also I had seen Lucy Young’s terrifying article in the July Baskin Reader on the vulnerability of 17 (count ’em, 17) coastal power plants, standing buck naked in the plein-aire all day and all night in America. So I was serving her up this tasty hors d’oeuvre.

  “What Dave really hoped to discover was that filter-tipped Tareytons were somehow good for the lungs.”

  “Maybe he can get the tobacco companies to fund his study.”

  We both smiled, as we traveled indoors to the freshly refurbished coffee room—refurbished by me, the day before. I had mucked it out, arrayed the gerania in a stream of sunlight, and scoured the pot so there could be coffee in the coffee room. It was a stage set, really—bring on Charlie Fucking Rose or Big Tim Russert. Except that it was Lucy Young, girl reporter, stickhandling her way to the creamer.

  “I imagine you can guess my first question,” she said, setting a tiny tape recorder down on the table between us, and though I could not guess the question, I did admire the interviewer’s gambit. Lesson one: Engage your subject. The question was why I, “a storyteller of sorts,” wanted someone else to tell my story. Which gave me opportunity (I already had motive) to heap further encomiums on the muckraking marvels performed monthly at the Reader, and on the street cred they provided.

  Her second question (“So what exactly has been going on around here for the last 25 years?”) would take us through the next two hours. As I blathered my way down the paths of glory, Lucy Young listened, nodded, and listened some more. She interrupted only once, when with a gentle smile she prodded, “Wasn’t there anyone here who was just ordinary—or bad?”

  “A few,” I said, and fed a couple of the Forgettables to her. Didier Blaine was ordinary; his buddy Brunson was bad.

  I was barely launched down the long annals of decline and decimation (prepared to rage on into the sunset) when abruptly she flicked the tape recorder off and stood. “Good,” she said—her first sentence in an hour—and began getting organized to go.

  “Let me leave you with a couple of questions the Devil’s Advocate might ask,” she said. “True or false, no Blaisdell artist has ever been evicted. And true or false, you and Mr. Cloud have gone about your business unbothered since Jimmy Carter was in the White House. These will be questions for next time.”

  “Why not now?” I s
aid, eager to have at these well-worn canards.

  “I’m afraid I’m away the next couple of weeks,” she said, ignoring my question as she leafed through her datebook. “How does Thursday the 12th look for you?”

  “My calendar is pretty open that week,” I said, with no need for leafing. “I hope you’re going somewhere nice.”

  “I hope so too,” she laughed, revealing not one thing.

  With my calendar so wide open I wasn’t even scheduling your basic three square meals a day, I would have protested the delay had there been any way of doing so. I had already endured a delay of 11 months getting this campaign off the ground. But the timetable would prove to be a blessing in disguise when, two days before our next scheduled interview, the Bozarts took a hit to shred the Devil’s smokescreen completely and provide his advocate a crystal clear answer regarding the true nature of Tech’s intentions. Thursday the 12th was our meeting, Tuesday the 10th was the day Precious Cargo Movers showed up to move the Clapper out.

  This was a terrific shock to my system, and a killing blow to the Bozarts, and yet it could not have been more pluperfectly probative to my pending hearing with the press. Talk about plot points, or the Lord moving in mysterious ways. The blackguards had handed us a smoking gun.

  Clapper was still on a roll, to put it mildly. Before the guy was done, he would be circumnavigating the globe in a private jet. For now, he had been handed a building in the East End, a “drafty old brick warehouse that needs pointing,” he dared complain, yet sufficient to house his Rube Goldberg contraptions, his current platoon of life-sized statues, and his oversized ego into the bargain. “My shabby castle,” he called it, donning the familiar mask of false humility.

  Old King Cloud had his castle and his queen (you guessed it, pretty Rosie was going with him, square in the teeth of his happy-normal little marriage) and just for pudding they handed him the Genius Grant too, the cool million with the no-strings-attached. Clapper could afford to put a big fucking moat around his shabby little castle.