The Day the Bozarts Died Read online

  Clapper was using up all the good karma, the way one guy wins the Megabucks and a million losers are left lounging in the gutter. Even so, had he showed the simple decency of leaving Rose behind (and why not, with his happynormal marriage and his moat and all?) I would have been fine with the deal. I’d have helped him load.

  Not that he needed help, what with Precious Cargo Moving crating up the kingdom of bronze. When their big red trucks convoyed across the drawbridge to his castle, I had no doubt Clapper would come chugging right behind them in the VW bus, his ongoing affectation. Right over here, fellas, this way to the photo-op.

  Had he left Rose behind, she and I could have woken to the same bright promise as had the newborn world in Genesis. (Adam and Eve, man, and the hell with Darwin.) It might take a month, it might take a year, but the outcome there was pretty much inevitable. Propinquity, they used to call it back in the days before Internet mating, and you could pretty much take it to the bank, even if you were not Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.

  But Rose was going (“cheap rent” was what she cited, wink wink) and I watched her hump those tubes and crates down the fire escape just as I had watched her humping them up five or six years earlier. Apparently, she still needed the exercise (not that you would say so, to look at her), still insisted on doing it all herself. Say this much for my ex-next true love, she had no truck with Precious Cargo.

  Perhaps recalling my kindnesses toward Hagler, she did knock on my door that morning to bid farewell. She looked beautiful—less Hepburn than a younger slimmer Ingrid Bergman, lit and polished for Bogey’s delectation. Her skin had been toasted by a dozen Nantucket Sundays, her chestnut hair sunthreaded with bright strands of copper. I was bowled over, back in love. But this visual spectacle would have to serve as shorthand for the year of propinquity we were denied.

  “I’m sorry we never got to know each other better,” she said, preposterously, as if the matter had been left to chance all this time.

  “We’re not dead yet,” I countered, and Rose laughed, though it was not a laugh line. I had intended it neither as a joke, nor as a parting remark, though she took it as both. Laughed at the joke it wasn’t, then waved from close range (not even the trace of an embrace) with a finality I had not imparted. Why was I making happy noises as she walked away, when she had just finished sucking the happiness out of me?

  Naturally that would be the week Barney tried to fix me up with a lady lawyer from his firm. My first shot in forever, as Barn’s “referrals” had tapered off pretty much to zero. Even before Nina, they were coming cloaked in a secrecy of the don’t-let-this-get-back-to-Chloe sort, for she had expressly forbidden them. But the lady lawyer had been through a nasty divorce, was just the right age (which to Barney turned out to mean 48) and had expressed interest when my name came up. (“You know him?” was the quote, like I was Oscar Wilde.) It seems the dear had done some acting in college; and she had seen my play performed!

  I might have been game to give it a shot. Maybe Portia was a 48-year-old lawyer who looked like a 38-year-old dancer. And maybe not. In the immediate wake of Rose’s farewell, it didn’t matter. I was a man hopelessly in love with yet another girl of 28, and hadn’t the heart for a middle-aged divorcée. It’s always about timing.

  “You have been depressed for a year, maybe five years, and this strangely behaved child says hello to you—or goodbye, actually. Goodbye is what she really said, Stan. And you are ready to miss out on something that could be real?”

  “Love is real, according to you. For that matter, depression is real.”

  “Barn only helps those who help themselves,” he snapped, and by the time we spoke again the divorcée had been snapped up, presumably by someone willing to help himself. Impressed that she had gone so quickly (almost pre-market) I asked to see a photo of her. Isn’t that natural, to be curious what you’re missing? Not to Barney.

  “Chloe’s right, you are an asshole,” he said, coldly. “Incorrigible was her word, actually, so say incorrigible asshole.”

  “Because I am in love and able to acknowledge it?”

  “Love,” my old friend spat back, with such a gust of disgust I barely recognized him. For this was weeks later and he was still in a negative head.

  None of these vicissitudes mattered to Lucy Young or her readership. Only the part about Clapper and Rose disembarking would be relevant there, and this was the part I laid out for her as we settled in for our second interview, on Thursday October 12th. I was more than ready to debate the Devil.

  I had even done the math for him: under a roof where 58 talented artists had flourished, exactly one remained and it was me. Or I was it. And as in the forgotten game of tag, to be “It” was to be a target, to be chased and erased.

  “Okay,” said the Devil’s advocate, channeling through Lucy Young, “but Cloud and Gately weren’t kicked out. They found a better spot, no?”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “What’s another? That someone bribed them to go, and bought their silence?”

  “Someone? Would it surprise you to learn that a dozen people directly connected to the Canterbury Institute of Technology have received those Genius Grants? And might one not therefore reasonably conclude that C.I.T. has a fairly direct line to the Genius Grant people by now? How big a stretch is it to imagine them wielding a fraction of that influence?”

  “Gately didn’t get a grant.”

  “Indirect beneficiary.”

  “She could have stayed.”

  “She went. The building is empty.”

  “Kristen Dane swears they tried to fill every vacancy. Servalle says the same thing.”

  “Who the hell is Servalle?”

  “Rick Servalle. The agent who replaced Kristen Dane at Hargrove.”

  “Sure he did. Look, Lucy. Suppose you work at a newspaper, call it the Telegram. And for years the newsroom has been tailing off, the staff dwindling. Compositors, editors, photographers, janitors. There were 50 people on your floor, and then 20, and 10, until finally there is exactly one. You. Yet the Kristen Dane of the Telegram says Golly gee, we just hate that this keeps happening. Do you believe her, or do you apply a little common sense?”

  There is a certain reserve I associate with beautiful women. Poised, withheld, they can allow the female face in repose to serve as a complete response. The French actress Emmanuelle Béart is a good example of this. “She doesn’t give much back,” Nina once said about her. “She doesn’t need to,” said I.

  Somehow, Lucy Young has this quality. By no means a beauty, she maintains the bearing of one, and she has the knack of keeping her face so quiet for so long that you forget exactly what it is she isn’t giving back.

  Then she shrugs: “So you honestly believe it’s Custer’s Last Stand here.”

  “If it’s okay with you, I’d prefer Davy Crockett at the Alamo—for our historical metaphor, I mean. After all, Custer was the bad guy.”

  “Wasn’t the whole point of the Alamo to secure Texas for rich Republican oilmen?” she came right back. Amazingly, she was rolling with the joke.

  “Davy didn’t foresee that unfolding. I think holding the fort was pretty much an existential business for him and Colonel Travers.”

  Lucy was relaxed and unhurried, content to kid around before she started nailing down her factoids. Her karma seemed as quiet as her face. Until all of a sudden she was standing, exactly as she had by way of concluding our earlier session and even more prematurely.

  “Any chance we could keep talking outdoors?” she said. “Walk and talk? If you can do two things at once.”

  “Me? I can do three or four things at once.”

  “Don’t tell me what they are,” she said.

  Suggestively? Certainly her facial expression was sly. Lucy Young had her ways of taking charge, and she did like to keep you off balance. So we were not done, we were taking it to the streets.

  But there was no talking as we did our walking, across the River Can
terbury and then down the Riverway to the Esplanade. She nodded toward the water, where the cerulean blue of the sky and the rainbow array of turning leaf-work were rewritten Post-Impressionistically on the palette of a gentle tidal current. Lucy guided us toward the footbridge, occasionally emphasizing the gag order by pointing at sights: a cluster of ducks floating in the backwater, a cluster of joggers stretching in their inevitable spandex. She was still relaxing and unhurrying.

  And maybe it was inadvertent, maybe this was just a spot she favored, but when she steered us to a bench by the boathouse, I thought I finally saw the point. We were staring directly across the water at the entire Tech District, a 10-square-block phalanx of big bad boxy architecture, not a single instance of which had been there in 1979, when God created the Bozarts. Now we had this grim inorganic Baby Huey skyline of “progress.” It could not be plainer that I was right: it had been war, they had won, we had lost.

  And now Lucy spoke. “Isn’t it a good thing, though? In a way?”

  “That city of hell over there?”

  “No, sorry. I meant the notion of you as the lone survivor at #4. Isn’t that the ultimate, the romantic ideal of the artist? Perfect solitude in which to forge the unconscious whatever-it-is of the race?”

  Romantic ideal? Exhibit A, which she had brought me here to see, evoked no such phrase. For a moment, I could only sit stunned at the anomaly. Then I remembered the summer of love.

  “Have you ever visited one of those artists’ retreats, Lucy? Greengage, or the Intervale Colony?”

  “Sorry to disillusion you, Mr. Noseworthy, but I’m not quite in that weight class. My pieces are read by an estimated 5000 souls.”

  “The best and the brightest,” I assured her. “But you do know what those places are like. The artist’s sanctity religiously guarded. Unseen hands depositing box lunches on your doorstep, so the Work can continue unabated.…”

  “If elected, I will serve. But in the meanwhile, your point would be?”

  “.… then it’s later, dusk, and the day’s harvest is in. Solitude has served it’s purpose and now a whole different ideal takes shape. Now you have a community of interesting people hanging out, toasting the sunset, walking in the glade …”

  “The hanky panky must be coming next.”

  “So much the better if it does. But what I’m trying to describe is this notion of a romantic ideal. A month in Utopia.”

  Which surely it was, that thin slice of time after A Cup of Kindness put me on the map and before Fingersmith erased me. Everywhere I turned during that month upstate, I was kissed by the gods. Never been to a racetrack in my life, for instance, yet with coaching from Lilly-Ann Weaver (who was sequestered on the floor above) I cashed a $60 ticket on my maiden wager. The next day I hit something called a trifecta simply by betting Wade Boggs’ batting average (.356 as of that morning) and before long Lilly-Ann had begun rubbing my head for luck, following my dumb hunches instead of her informed opinions.

  She also began slipping into my room by starlight, so we could rub up against each other off-track. You were not supposed to indulge such impulses (there were time-hallowed rules against it and a form you were compelled to sign) but such dalliances were a given. No one ever lifted a finger in protest, much less prevention, so long as discretion was observed.

  Lilly-Ann Weaver was not 28 years of age at the time, and maybe she never was, but this was not going to be a relationship, it was just a hit-and-run accident. The impediments were not minor. She really did wear that forbidding frost of cosmetics, and she really did sport the silver sweep of hair you see in photographs. She looked like a Nieman Marcus shopper.

  But she looked no such way coming from the shower and she was as brilliant with towels as Salome with her veils. After a few days of seeing the two versions of her, I hardly knew which one was the illusion.

  Moreover, she had come by the bizarre entanglements in her books firsthand. Lilly-Ann had moves. That French setup where an older woman takes a younger man under her wing is worth a look. Not that I considered myself so very young at the time of that “retreat” (and may every monk be so lucky) or so hidebound, but you see that stuff in the Kama Sutra and you think Nah, no way. So much arranging to do, so little spontaneity. But with Lilly-Ann, her jug of wine, and the whole night at your disposal—unhurried, let us say—the wheelbarrow or the bird-on-a-wire can make surprising sense.

  “But summer’s lease hath all too short a date?” said Lucy Young. “Is that your point? A month is just a month?”

  It’s true I might have died young had Lilly-Ann continued her edifying visits for even one entire month. Her tenure ended a week before mine, though, and when she left my luck left with her. A few of us kept going to the racetrack, where every horse I picked ran out of the money. At night I would lie alone and listen to the drone of 10,000 mosquitoes swarming in the dark muggy room. And I never managed to get much done—that month or ever since, really. I guess the gods had changed their minds.

  “Actually, I was getting at something else,” I said. “What Greengage and the Bozarts have in common is that they both value art highly, in a culture where it’s rare for an artist to be valued even slightly. It’s a romantic ideal, for sure, but those places don’t even try to sustain it. They make it a prize you can win, a summer treat. Whereas here we had something every bit as extraordinary that felt perfectly ordinary. We had the solitude and we had the community, and it wasn’t for a month. It was permanent. It was just the life we were living.”

  “It was just Utopia,” said Lucy. “Which by historical example is never even close to permanent.”

  “To me it was, and is, worth fighting for,” I smiled.

  “Remember the Alamo,” she smiled right back.

  What I was remembering instead was a lovely summer night in maybe 1992, when everyone gathered in Bea and Beryl’s studio to read my play Strawberry Wives. Forget about Cup of Kindness, Strawberry Wives was the best thing I ever put together and that unprofessional, unrehearsed reading was its only performance anytime, anywhere. Which made it special to begin with. But it was special anyway, because we were so together then, we had such fun, and that was one of the last great blasts of Bozarts unity, even if we didn’t know it at the time.

  Everyone took a part. (Even Monk, in his way. He decided he would portray The Audience and, as such, he “responded” in various ways, as when, at the end, he stomped and cried Author Author.) Richie played the corrupt judge and Monica was his silent disapproving wife. Clapper was the judge’s righteous twin brother and Celia was his wife, voluble and disagreeable. I was the cleaning woman who found the gun and had to testify in court. A blast.

  And though it was precisely the thing I hoped to show Lucy, I couldn’t. It didn’t fit into the conversation, partly because there was no conversation any more. We were back to walking, walking back. As we retraced our route over the bridge to Canterbury, strolling side by side through the orange and green and golden world, through the singing sailing air, I almost believed she heard me think it, or absorbed the truth of it through osmosis. We just felt closer, more connected—so much so that it seemed almost unnatural not to take Lucy’s hand. It seemed wrong. There it was, inches from mine, swinging free in the autumn breeze. And perhaps I should mention that by now Lucy was a good deal more attractive to me than she had been at first sight. This journalist was a little tricky, and one of her tricks was that she could look better when she wanted to.

  I jammed my hands in my pockets; she folded her arms across her breasts. Journalists and their sources ought not hold hands.

  “Here we are, back at the fort,” she said, as we reached the corner of Thalia and Blaisdell. She gestured toward the Alamo-style facade of the Bozarts, and faux though that façade may have been, I felt a jolt of renewed commitment to the old bulwark. It was shabby but it was important, dammit, and I pictured Crockett and Travers and Sam Houston up there in filthy bandannas and eight-day beards, swinging their spent rifles.

&n
bsp; Lucy was still in her wry, poking mode, but I was going with the Hollywood uplift, a visceral surge toward battle-readiness. Then I remembered the denouement that Davy Crockett shared with George Armstrong Custer: both were badly outnumbered and neither of them got out alive.

  “So, shall we get started?” said Lucy, tapping her tape recorder like a watch.

  Strangely, I thought a lot more about Lucy Young in the weeks to follow than I did about Rose Gately. Maybe this was just the temporal aspect of that for which propinquity was the spatial, but a handful of hours spent chatting with Lucy had for the moment eclipsed the years I had spent obsessing in futility over Rose.

  I had not “fallen” for Lucy, nothing of that sort. She had proved to be surprisingly good company, that’s all, and she was the only company I’d had in a long while. So after she alerted me to expect a call “sometime soon,” it was not so surprising I found myself expecting it pretty much fulltime, listening for the phone to ring. Which (especially when Barney is pissed at me) it almost never does—much less “soon.”

  My willingness to die fighting on the parapets did not mitigate the fact that the Bozarts was now one darksome lonesome bastion. Indian Summer was history, the clocks were turned back, the days were shorter, the weather turned downright nasty. Day after day, we were allotted the same damp freezing fog, so I was not venturing outdoors a lot. I was sleeping a lot, listening for the phone, and (when I remembered) ordering my portion of PizzaIndianChinese. Delivered.

  One morning stayed so dark that I did go outside at noon just to see if the world had ended. Eerily, like something in a Bergman movie, an old woman was coming toward me out of the fog, waving and smiling fatuously. My scalp tightened as she came closer, for I was dead certain this was Beryl Baines’ ghost: she had died in Florida and now her shade was returning to the Bozarts.

  Even when it turned out to be Beryl herself, alive and well, I could not completely shake the dread that had poured through me like ice water. Maybe it was Bea who had died.…