The Day the Bozarts Died Read online

  The nagging fact remains that neither Dane, Servalle, nor anyone else currently at either Hargrove or the Institute can (or will) say why those 11 units stand empty. Nor will anyone say whether or not future plans for the building exist, or have come under discussion. Mum does seem to be the word.

  For now, Noseworthy endures. Digging in at what has become a one-man cooperative, he has made a new commitment to the theatre, and hopes to mount a production next summer called “The Day The Bozarts Died,” which he describes as a “post-postmodernist anti-scenario veering past Beckett into pure gesture and shadow. And darker, much darker than anything you have seen.”

  Invited by a reporter to name the precise day the “Beaux-Arts” passed away, Noseworthy proved recalcitrant, puckishly so, perhaps with a mind to the box office. “Place your bet,” he said, while citing such prime candidates as the day the Co-op opened in 1979 (“since every birth implies, or guarantees, a death”), the day they were “cut off at the waist” in favor of the Ravello Brothers, and the day Baines and Jasperson, the housemotherly grey panthers, “went south, with our souls in their suitcase.”

  Just do not ask him to rate the day this past December when he stood on what he likes to call the “parapets”—the last working artist in a facility where so many have worked—and appeared an isolated, confused, and beaten man. “It’s about love,” says Cloud, sympathetically. “All you need is love? But Stanley never got that memo. He seems to think that life is a play and maybe he’s right. If it is, though, I’m afraid the curtain came down on him some time ago.”

  As the house lights dimmed that night before Christmas, the requiem, if that is what it was, fell to a roving choir of gaily attired carolers. “How still we see thee lie,” they sang to Noseworthy as he stood in the flooding snow, with his fire escape for a stage and feeling perhaps (in his own mind, ever attuned to dramaturgic cross-reference) like Lear abandoned to the storm.

  * * *

  Having broken up with Hesh (and two more since, apparently), Maisie was between boyfriends and slightly out of touch with her old high school crowd. This meant she and I could resume our mothballed palship and become a pair again. For me, it was a reprieve of sorts.

  She had the car, I bought the gas, we moved around. Zipped down to Long Wharf to take in a Rob Handel play, slid over to Uncasville for a night of blackjack and floorshows of a sort I thought had gone out, or at least gone west to Vegas, decades ago. We caught a midnight movie when my sister and Rick were roughly halfway between their absurdly early bedtime and their painfully early wakeup. “In an earlier life,” says Maisie, “I’m pretty sure my progenitors were chickens.”

  We crept out, suppressing giggles; later crept back in, raiding the kitchen in an elaborately mimed silence. Maisie was still addicted to Rice Krispies, so we pretended to sweat the snap, crackle, and pop that was magnified to a Dolbyesque SNAP CRACKLE POP by the evil weed with which my niece had corrupted us right there in the cineplex parking lot. In truth, Rick and Lisa would have slept through a Luftwaffe attack on Willimantic.

  Maisie was driving to New York for the weekend, so I rode down with her, then rode the train back to South Station in the season’s first snow. This was a light tumbling friendly snow that made me nostalgic and sleepy, as did the train itself, ratcheting past the docks and boatyards of Westerly, past the shallow weeds and windowless back walls along the stem. I saw myself at 11, playing pond hockey after school, roaming the creek bank with my buddies, watching Maverick with Lisa on Sunday nights.

  Nostalgia made me miss Lisa even though I had just left her house and had barely talked to her while I was there. The old days were just in the air that week, whenever we did manage to connect, plus I suppose I was really missing Mom, and the happy drift of childhood, which both Mom and Lisa were such a big part of. You have no purpose when you’re a kid, you just don’t know it. Or maybe everything is filled with purpose but it comes to the same thing: it’s not a problem.

  Back in Canterbury, I had no purpose and it was a problem. The visceral panic of that long night did not return, but the desperation resurfaced right away. Hiding from it, I went to bed early and slept late. I took to reading both newspapers with my coffee for no better reason than to delay the moment the day gets going, for what did the day consist of? Not a lot. A lot of nada.

  Lisa had a circle of friends who didn’t work. The three of them organized their lives around such errands as getting their toenails elaborately decorated, and their dry cleaning dried and cleaned. Throw in the grocery store, something called “the gym,” and Oprah, and their days were really packed. But how could they be so sure their fucking toenails mattered, when I was pretty sure nothing did?

  Not surprisingly, the upshot was that they did their toenails and I did nothing. Which millions of people do all day, they just do it with the TV on, which lends disguise to the moments going by. My moments went undisguised. Not that anyone was watching; it was only myself I wasn’t fooling.

  And to be honest, I hardly recognized myself. I had no handle on my “life” any more. I had not forgotten Lucy or the article she was putting together. Our article. It would be appearing soon, it was going to change things for the better. How, though? That was the part I could never remember.

  I was slightly spooked about Lucy. She was a definite point of light, a candle lantern in the storm, but she could also be a danger. I did not want to obsess again over a telephone that would ring, at best, once in 23 days. Did not want to dwell on our lovely last meeting, for fear the panic might come back. Nor did I wish to hunt for her Skylark near the Cheltenham campus or by Clapper’s new digs, though that much I did in the name of exercise.

  By the time Lucy called, I had almost stopped myself from hoping she would, had at times forgotten that she might, and was absurdly uplifted when she did. In her presence, even in the presence of her voice, the panic had no standing. Would I mind sitting through one more Q & A at The Brinded Cow? It would be her treat this time, on her Baskin Reader expense account, she joked, as though my slowed response time indicated hesitancy.

  Far from minding, or hesitating, I found myself organizing my life around it, like Lisa’s galpals. I got my first professional haircut in forever, with one of Mom’s rubrics (“Always be presentable”) sounding in my conscience. I composed a bouquet of fancy dried flowers (“Always treat her like a lady”) and took my blue shirt to be dried and cleaned.

  Along with the shirt, I took Big Al’s balmacaan, a wool topcoat he bought in London before the War, before he and Mom had met. I never did ask him what the hell he was doing in London in 1938. Certainly he never offered to tell.

  In those days, a parent’s life was far from being the open book it is today. There is nothing Alex doesn’t know about Barney and Chloe, they have lived in his plain sight. I have heard Barney laying out the financial details of his law firm, what they take in, what his pension will be. Probably they keep him up to date on their sex life. It’s not that unusual, Barn tells me, and yet Big Al’s financial package was as mysterious to me and Lisa as the floor of the Zeider Zee. And we both knew for a certainty that sex was something they could only have experienced twice.

  Anyhow, it’s a classy coat, always gets rave reviews, and it got one from Lucy Young. We had barely said hello outside the broad latticed window of The Brinded Cow when she grabbed me by the lapels and growled, “I love that coat. I want that coat.” As I say, this was one journalist who could surprise you.

  “If I were a Russian poet, I’d rip it off my back and give it to you.”

  “Too bad. But it really is a cool coat.”

  “I’m sure yours is warmer,” I said, consolingly, as we went inside and shed these coats.

  Lucy wore one of those bulky white Irish sweaters, with a long brown wool skirt. Very nice. Hoping to pass for human, I countered with the crisply laundered shirt and youthful short hair. Outwardly, I realized as we bantered with the waitress, we probably were passing for a couple. I liked the feeling a
nd celebrated by vacuuming down a pint of Guinness the way a Nascar fan disposes of a Coors Lite.

  “How’s the play coming along?” she asked, as I lifted my mug of stout. I very nearly blurted out “What play?” but the foam in my mustache saved me. With time to recover, I remembered to pretend there was a play. Then I ran with it.

  “You’re part of it, you know,” I told her.

  “I do hope not.”

  “Your article, I mean. It will be a next act, a scene, maybe even a turning point. Just think how many times the Fourth Estate has altered the course of history.”

  “Oh dear. If that’s what you are thinking, you’ll be disappointed by the questions I wanted to ask. They are not exactly of earth-shattering importance.”

  “Just as long as they’re easy,” I said, lightening it up, as our waitress arrived with a second round. This one favored hieroglyphics over ornaments. She had a vine inscribed around her neck, a sunflower on the upper swell of her left breast, a yellow rose in the caudal sweet spot, a snake round her ankle, and much more I do not doubt.

  Had Nina been sitting where Lucy now sat, she would have been wearing her suffering-fools-gladly expression as I tabulated tattoos. She would have said You’re staring, I would have said I’m doing research, she would have said That’s what I was afraid of.…

  What Lucy said was “Drugs.” (I waited.) “I forgot to ask about cocaine. Is that an easy one, or not?”

  “Are you a narc, or not?” I laughed. “How do I know there aren’t six beefy FBI agents listening out in the truck right now?”

  “Take a chance. Live dangerously.”

  “What the hell,” I said, and told her a few coke stories. No names, just the comedy of misbegotten outcomes. Like most 80’s coke stories, they were all about how excessively excessive it all was, how wonderfully wasted, how fucking stupid. “Unfortunately for our article, no one famous ever overdosed.”

  “I just wondered how it fit in.”

  “Nicely. It fit in nicely for a while. Then not at all, with the later crowd—Ed, Liz, the B’s. Clapper never touched it, nor did I.”

  “Really never?” she coaxed, tilting her head at me.

  “If someone said otherwise—”

  “No.”

  “So there you are. Next question.”

  “And the last, I’m almost positive. Who is, or was, Bud The Most Gross?”

  Bud, man. That sick dude had not crossed my mind in centuries. Bud was a real blast from the past. “Who brought him up?”

  “Jan Edelman.”

  “You talked to Jan.”

  “Sure.”

  “Then you’ve already heard the story.”

  “No, just the teaser—that you would have moved to Hollywood back in ’84 if Bud The Most Gross hadn’t screwed you. She insisted that you are the one to tell it.”

  “I used to be. Somehow that story was only funny while it was still painful. And it takes way too long to tell.”

  “Short version?”

  “Short version is two Hollywood grosseros came calling. Buzz The Gross, and Bud The Most Gross. We buy proppity. They wanted to know if they could buy A Cup of Kindness.”

  “And make a film of it.”

  “A film, yes. You had to see these guys to believe them. Think self-parody as performance art, and you’ll be on the right track.”

  “So did they buy your proppity?”

  “They screwed me, remember? They drew up a 27-page contract with all kinds of perks, and they threw me a little option money. Hollywood money, man, we put it right to work. Threw a huge party when the check cleared. Hired a band, caterers—there was even a bit of your cocaine, as I recall. High times and misdemeanors.”

  “Drinking, drugging, fucking.…”

  “All that good stuff, as they say nowadays. It was a damned fine party—we had both floors, remember. Two hundred people jammed in, and all of them campaigning for a part in the movie.”

  “Don’t tell me Bud gave you casting control.”

  “People assume. Roger Shanahan was on his knees, begging to be made official mask-maker for the production.”

  “I did read the play, Mr. Noseworthy, but you’ll have to remind me—?”

  “None. No masks. But there was some of that cocaine around, plus as far as Roger is concerned all of life should be performed in masks.”

  “His masks are truly remarkable.”

  “They are. And Bud The Most Gross should have been required to wear one out in public. But needless to say, they bailed. Nobody was cast, no film was made. The party of the second part did not sign their own contract.”

  “Did they say why?”

  “Not really. I figure they had someone actually read the play.”

  “Ah.”

  Though my account was painless enough (as befits such ancient history) Lucy’s eyes went so soft I thought she might be crying. She looked like a gal whose fella had met with disappointment and who was moved to cure him with her sweet love. Which made it seem the right moment to present her with my bright sprig of flowers.

  “By the way,” I said. “Merry Christmas, Lucy.”

  She blushed as she accepted them. “I wondered what was in that bag. Thank you so much.”

  “No big deal. I saw them on my way over.”

  “They are very lovely. And Merry Christmas to you too, even if I haven’t got a present.”

  Something vestigial in me, long unused, had begun to shape a proposition, or suggest a next occasion on the far side of her Q’s and my A’s. Call it a date. If Lucy (more appealing now by a total of 60% since our initial encounter?) was open to it, then so was I.

  “But then I haven’t begun to even think about Christmas shopping,” she was saying. “There can’t be anyone in the whole world as hard to shop for as William. My boyfriend?”

  Bang, you’re dead. Despite the question mark implied by her moderngirl inflection, I perceived that Lucy was not asking me if William was her boyfriend, she was telling me. She had lobbed this “William” thing at me like a grenade, a purpose pitch, to back me off the plate.

  “He spends a fortune on me,” she rattled on, “and I just have no clue how to respond. Basically, he has too much money. Anything he wants or needs, he buys.”

  “Get him a rug,” I muttered, pretty much at random, and Lucy went Yes! as if I’d just hired her to take over Maureen Dowd’s column at the Times. A rug was it, a rug was what he had never thought to buy himself, rugs were the answer for all those barenaked maple floors at “the loft.” I wondered if she would leave my flowers under the table, where she had stashed them, or discard them in the gutter on her way back to William.

  As we settled up Dutch (she stuck with the expense account joke, I went with the one about male pride) and started down Carver Street, William was set squarely between us. I did take her arm as we maneuvered around a mound of slush; twice we bumped shoulders; we were bouncing back, regaining our comfort level. A half mile in the crisp air was the right restorative after the raucous overheated pub.

  “You won’t forget to send the new play, will you?” she said, probably to firm up the comfort. “I don’t want to wait until it hits Broadway.”

  “You sure don’t,” I laughed, then realized how little I had laughed in recent memory. “It’s not scheduled to open there until the 12th of Never.”

  I was feeling that closeness again, something that cannot be contrived or faked: it is or it isn’t. I could hardly show her the “new play” but why couldn’t I send her an old play—send her Strawberry Wives and say it was new? Tell her I had changed the title so we didn’t overlap. (And then propose we overlap for real.…)

  But William was still with us. She may well have invented him, a pure device: if so, it was a good one. I pictured William in his own overcoat, newly bespoke, commanding a view of the waterfront from the glistening varnished floors of his princely condominium as we approached my cramped inland quarters with its repellent view of Tech Hell.

  We
approached it because Lucy had parked her car on Thalia, right around the corner from Blaisdell. She had walked to Sycamore Square, as I had. Hmmm, I thought … and even moreso when we reached her car and kept going. She was walking me home.

  Hmmm, I thought, she can’t really like this William so much. My Baskin muckraker and that business-school fop? No way. Not a match. And after she has read Strawberry Wives? No contest.

  Lucy preceded me up the fire escape offhandedly, as if we were the quotidian couple we appeared to be—the couple who would unlock the door and go inside. Who would put on some music and make some love. No big deal: Stan and Lucy.

  Instead, of course, she paused on the landing and turned to admire the nocturnal version of the view she had characterized as “not much” but could never seem to look away from. Then she turned toward me, and stood so close that I was inhaling the sweetness of her cloudy breath.

  “What will you do, Stanley?” she said. “Have you figured it out?”

  “Hey, I thought you already asked your last question,” I said, though I understood exactly what she meant: would I stay and fight or give up and go. We both understood that no more artists would ever come to the Bozarts. But what did it mean that she had just called me by my first name for the first time? Up until now, I had been a Mr. Noseworthy to her.

  “Seriously. Where would you go?”

  Where could I go was again the real question; what could I do. I don’t think it lay behind her question, but it lay behind the answer I could not summon that there seemed to be no place for me in this debased new culture. No place in a nation I was sure hit rock bottom when it twice elected a TV pitchman president, yet in truth had hit rock bottom 12 years earlier when it twice elected a crook and yet again 12 years later when it twice elected a man spectacularly unfit for any job at all. George W. Bush? Hell, why not just elect Goofy, or Donald Duck?

  Of course Barney insists that none of this shit matters, that none of it ever changes, that what makes it possible to “go on” is one special person who understands you and cares for you. Whenever I start ranting about all the problems of the wider world, he counsels refuge in what he calls “the narrower world.” Treat yourself to a nice breakfast, get away to the country with your special person, take a long walk in the woods. “I guarantee you will feel much better about everything,” says my friend.