Tell-All, Page 3

  Brushing aside the black rice of mouse feces—in this strange negative image of a wedding—my Miss Kathie lifts the silver picture frame and props it to stand on the shelf, leaning the frame against the tomb’s wall. Instead of a picture, the frame surrounds a mirror. Within the mirror, within the reflection of the stone walls, the cobwebs, poses Miss Kathie wearing her black hat and veil. She pinches the fingertips of one glove, pulling the glove free of her left hand. Twisting the diamond solitaire off her ring finger, she hands the six-carat, marquise-cut Harry Winston to me. Miss Kathie says, “I guess we ought to record the moment.”

  The mirror, old scratches scar and etch its surface. The glass marred by a wide array of old scores.

  I tell her, Hit your mark, please.

  “Are you absolutely certain you phoned Cary Grant?” says Miss Kathie as she steps backward and stands on a faded X, long ago marked in lipstick on the stone floor. At that precise point her movie-star face aligns perfectly with the scratches on the mirror. At that perfect angle and distance, those old scores become the wrinkles she had three, four, five dogs ago, the bags and sumps her face fell into before each was repaired with a new face-lift or an injection of sheep embryo serum. Some radical procedure administered in a secret Swiss clinic. The expensive creams and salves, the operations to pull and tighten. On the mirror linger the pits and liver spots she has erased every few months, etched there—the record of how she ought to look. Again, she lifts her veil, and her reflected cheeks and chin align with the ancient record of sags and moles and stray hairs my Miss Kathie has rightfully earned.

  The war wounds left by Paco Esposito and Romeo, every stray dog and “was-band.”

  Miss Kathie makes the face she makes when she’s not making a face, her features, her famous mouth and eyes becoming a Theda Bara negligee draped over a padded hanger in the back of the Monogram Pictures wardrobe department, wrapped in plastic in the dark. Her muscles slack and relaxed. The audience forgotten.

  And wielding the diamond, I get to work, drawing. I trace any new wrinkles, adding any new liver spots to this long-term record. Creating something more cumulative than any photograph, I document Miss Kathie’s misery before the plastic surgeons can once more wipe the slate clean. Dragging the diamond, digging into the glass, I etch her gray hairs. Updating the topography of this, her secret face. Cutting the latest worry lines across her forehead. I gouge the new crow’s-feet around her eyes, eclipsing the false smile of her public image, the diamond defacing Miss Kathie. Me mutilating her.

  After a lifetime of such abuse the mirror bows, curved, so sectioned, so cut and etched so deep, that any new pressure could collapse the glass into a shattered, jagged pile of fragments. Another duty of my job is to never press too hard. My position included mopping up Paco’s piss from around the commode, then taking the dog to a veterinarian for gelding. Every day, I was compelled to tear a page from some history book—the saga of Hiawatha, written by Arthur Miller as a screenplay for Deborah Kerr, or the Robert Fulton story, as a vehicle for Danny Kaye—to pick up yet another steaming handful of feces.

  I drag the diamond in straight lines to mimic the tears running down Miss Kathie’s face.

  The diamond shrieks against the glass. The sound of an instant migraine headache.

  The mirror of Dorian Gray.

  Then footsteps echo from offscreen. The heartbeat of a man’s leather shoes approach from down the corridor, each step louder against the stone. Van Heflin or perhaps Laurence Olivier. Randolph Scott or maybe Sid Luft.

  In the silence between one footfall and the next, between heartbeats, I place the mirror facedown on the shelf. I return the diamond ring to my Miss Kathie.

  A man’s silhouette fills the doorway to the crypt, tall and slender, his shoulders straight, outlined against the light of the corridor.

  Miss Kathie turns, one hand already reaching for the tarnished tube of lipstick. She peers at the man, saying, “Could that be you, Groucho?”

  A bouquet of flowers emerges out of the gloom, the man’s hands offering them. Pink Nancy Reagan roses and yellow lilies, a smell bright as sunlight. The man’s voice says, “I’m so sorry about your loss.…” The smooth knuckles and clear skin of a young man’s hands, the fingernails shining and polished.

  What Hedda Hopper calls a “funeral flirtation.” Louella Parsons a “graveside groom.” Walter Winchell a “casket crasher.”

  Webster Carlton Westward III steps forward. The young man from the dinner party. The name and phone number on the burned place card.

  Those eyes bright brown as summer root beer.

  I shake my head, Don’t. Don’t repeat this torture. Don’t trust another one.

  But already my Miss Kathie wipes a fresh coat of red around her mouth. Then tosses the old lipstick to rattle among the tarnished urns. Among the empty wine bottles that people call “dead soldiers.” My Miss Kathie lowers the black mesh of her veil and reaches one gloved hand toward something coated with dust, something abandoned and long forgotten among her dead loves. She lifts this ancient item, her red lips whispering, “Guten essen.” Adding, “That’s French for ‘never say never.’ ” Her violet eyes milky and vague with the drugs and brandy, Miss Kathie turns to accept the flowers, in the same gesture slipping the dusty item—her diaphragm—deep into the sagging slit of her old mink coat pocket.

  ACT I, SCENE FIVE

  Clare Boothe Luce once said the following about Katherine Kenton—“When she’s in love, nothing can make her sad; however when she’s not in love, nothing can make her happy.”

  We’re playing this next scene in the bathroom adjacent to Miss Kathie’s boudoir. As it opens, we discover my Miss Kathie seated at her dressing table, facing three mirrors angled to show her right profile, her left profile, and her full face. The bouquet of pink Nancy Reagan roses and yellow lilies delivered by Webster Carlton Westward III occupy a vase, those few flowers reflected and reflected until they could be a florist shop. An entire garden. This single bouquet, multiplied. Made infinite. Not left at the crypt to rot.

  Dangling from the bouquet, a parchment card reads: Our love is only wasted when we fail to share it with another. Please allow the world to share its limitless love with you. Some gibberish plagiarized from John Milton or Mohandas Gandhi.

  Reflected in the mirrors, my Miss Kathie pinches the slack skin that hangs below her chin. Pinching and pulling the skin, she says, “No more whiskey. And no more of those damned chocolates.”

  Chocolate poisoning, it fits all the earmarks. Shame on Miss Kathie for neglecting an entire box on her bed, where Loverboy would be bound to sniff them out. The caffeine contained in even a single bonbon more than sufficient to bring about a heart attack in a dog of that size.

  The parchment card, signed, Webb. The Westward boy, what Cholly Knickerbocker would term an “opportunistic affection.” Next to the roses on the polished top of her dressing table rests the rubber bump of Miss Kathie’s diaphragm, pink rubber flocked with dust.

  Peeling off her false eyelashes, Miss Kathie looks at me standing behind her, both of us reflected in the mirror, multiplied into a mob, the whole world peopled by just us two, and she says, “Are you certain that no one else sent their condolences?”

  I shake my head, No. No one.

  Miss Kathie peels off her auburn wig, handing it to me. She says, “Not even the senator?”

  The “was-band” before Paco. Senator Phelps Russell Warner. Again, I shake my head, No. Not Terrence Terry, the faggot dancer. Not Paco Esposito, who currently plays a hot-tempered, flamenco-dancing Latin brain surgeon on some new radio program called Guiding Light. None of the was-bands have sent a word of condolence.

  Pawing the makeup from her face with cotton balls and cold cream, Miss Kathie snaps the elastic wig cap off the crown of her head. Her movie-star hands claw the long strands of gray hair loose. She twists her head side to side, fast, so the hair fans out, hanging to the pink, padded shoulders of her satin dressing gown. Fingering a few wis
py gray strands, Miss Kathie says, “Do you think my hair will hold dye again?”

  The first symptom of what Walter Winchell calls “infant-uation” is when Miss Kathie colors her hair the bright orange of a tabby cat.

  “Optimism,” says H. L. Mencken, “is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.”

  Miss Kathie cups a hand beneath each of her breasts, lifting them until the cleavage swells at her throat. Watching herself in the angled mirrors, she says, “Why can’t that brilliant Dr. Josef Mengele in Munich do something about my old-lady hands?”

  At best, this young Westward specimen is what Lolly Parsons calls a “boy-ographer.” One of those smiling, dancing young gadabouts who insinuate themselves in the private lives of lonely, fading motion-picture stars. Professional listeners, these meticulously well-groomed walking men, they listen to confidences, indulge strong egos and weakening minds, forever cherry-picking the best anecdotes and quotes, with a manuscript always ready for publication upon the instant of the movie star’s demise. So many cozy evenings beside the fire, sipping brandy, those nights will pay off with scandalous confessions and declarations. Mr. Bright Brown Eyes, without a doubt, he’s one of those seducers ready to betray every secret, every wart and flatulence of Miss Kathie’s private life.

  This Webster specimen is obviously a would-be author, looking to write the type of intimate tell-all that Winchell calls an unauthorized “bile-ography.” The literary equivalent of a magpie, stealing the brightest and darkest moments from every celebrity he’ll meet.

  My Miss Kathie scoops a finger through a jar of Vaseline, then rubs a fat lump of the slime, smearing it across her top and bottom teeth, pushing her finger deep to coat her molars. She smiles her greasy smile and says, “Do you have a spoon?”

  In the kitchen, I tell her. We haven’t kept a spoon in her bathroom since the year when every other song on the radio was Christine, Dorothy and Phyllis McGuire singing “Don’t Take Your Love from Me.”

  Miss Kathie’s goal: to reduce until she becomes what Lolly Parsons calls nothing but “tan and bones.” What Hedda Hopper calls a “lipstick skeleton.” A “beautifully coiffed skull” as Elsa Maxwell calls Katharine Hepburn.

  The moment of Miss Kathie’s exit in search of said spoon, my fingers pry open a box of bath salts and pinch up the coarse grains. These I sprinkle between the roses, swirling the vase to dissolve the salts into the water. My fingers pluck the card from the bouquet of roses and lilies. Folding the parchment, I tear it once, twice. Folding and tearing until the sentences become only words. The words become only letters of the alphabet, which I sprinkle into the toilet bowl. As I flush the lever, the water rises in the bowl, the torn parchment spinning as the water deepens. From deep within itself, the commode regurgitates a hidden mess of paper trapped down within the toilet’s throat. Bobbing to the surface, bits of waterlogged paper, greeting cards, the tissue paper of telegrams. It all backs up within the clogged bowl.

  Within the rim of the toilet swirls a tide of affection and concern, signed by Edna Ferber, Artie Shaw, Bess Truman. The handwritten notes and cards, the telegrams reading, If there’s anything I can do … and, Please don’t hesitate to call. The torn scraps of these sentiments spin higher and higher toward the brim of disaster, preparing to overflow, to run over the lip of the white bowl and flood the pink marble floor. These affectionate words … I’ve torn them into bits, and then torn those into smaller bits, scraps. All of my covert work is about to be exposed. These, all of the condolences I’ve destroyed during the past few days.

  From the downstairs powder room, echoing up through the silence of the town house, the sounds of Miss Kathie’s gorge rises with beef Stroganoff and Queen Charlotte pears and veal Prince Orloff, heaving up from the depths of Miss Kathie, triggered by the tip of a silver spoon touching the back of her tongue, her gag reflex rejecting it all.

  “Fuck ’em,” Miss Kathie says between splashes, her movie-star voice hoarse with bile and stomach acid. “They don’t care,” she says, purging herself in great thunderous blasts.

  The infamous advice Busby Berkeley gave to Judy Garland, “If you’re still having bowel movements, you’re eating too much.”

  Upstairs, the shredded affections rise, about to spill out onto the bathroom floor. Spiraling upward toward disaster. At the last possible moment I drop to my knees on the pink marble tile. I plunge my hand into the churning mess, the cold water lapping around my elbow, then swirling about my shoulder as I burrow my hand deep into the toilet’s throat, clearing aside wet paper. Clawing, scratching a tunnel through the sodden, matted layer of endearments. The soft mass of sentiments I can’t see.

  Downstairs, Miss Kathie heaves out great mouthfuls of gâteau Pierre Rothschild. Bombe de Louise Grimaldi. Aunt Jemima syrup. Lady Baltimore cake. The wet, bubbling shouts of undigested Jimmy Dean sausage.

  The plumbing of this old town house shudders, the pipes banging and thudding to contain and channel this new burden of macerated secrets and gourmet vomit.

  A “Hollywood lifetime” later, the water in the toilet bowl begins to recede.

  The shredded scraps of love and caring, the kind regards sink from sight. Freshwater chases the final words of comfort into the sewers. Those lacy, embossed, engraved and perfumed fragments, the toilet gulps them down. The water swallows every last word of sympathy from Jeanne Crain, the florid handwriting of Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret, from John Gilbert, Linus Pauling and Christiaan Barnard. In her bathroom, the purge of names and devotion signed, Brooks Atkinson, George Arliss and Jill Esmond, the spinning flood disappearing, disappearing, the water level drops until all the names and notes are sucked down. Drowned.

  Echoing from the downstairs powder room comes the hawk and spit sound of my Miss Kathie clearing the bile taste from her mouth. Her cough and belch. A final flush of the downstairs commode, followed by the rushing spray noise of aerosol room deodorant.

  A “New York second” goes by, and I stand. One step to the sink, and I calmly begin to scrub my dripping hands, careful to pick and scrape the words sorrow and tragedy from where they’re lodged beneath each fingernail. Already, the lovely bouquet of pink roses and yellow lilies poisoned with salt water, the petals begin to wither and brown.

  ACT I, SCENE SIX

  The next sequence depicts a montage of flowers arriving at the town house. Deliverymen wearing jaunty, brimmed caps and polished shoes arrive to ring the front doorbell. Each man carries a long box of roses tied with a floppy velvet ribbon, tucked under one arm. Or a cellophane spill brimming full of roses cradled the way one would carry an infant. Each deliveryman’s opposite hand extends, ready to offer a clipboard and a pen, a receipt needing a signature. Billowing masses of white lilac. Delivery after delivery arrives. The doorbell ringing to announce yellow gladiolas and scarlet birds-of-paradise. Trembling pink branches of dogwood in full bloom. The chilled flesh of hothouse orchids. Camellias. Each new florist always stretches his neck to see past me, craning his head to see into the foyer for a glimpse of the famous Katherine Kenton.

  One frame too late, Miss Kathie’s voice calls from offscreen, “Who is it?” The moment after the deliveryman is gone.

  Me, always shouting in response, It’s the Fuller Brush man. A Jehovah’s Witness. A Girl Scout, selling cookies. The same ding-dong of the doorbell cueing the cut to another bouquet of honeysuckle or towering pink spears of flowering ginger.

  Me, shouting up the stairs to Miss Kathie, asking if she expects a gentleman caller.

  In response, Miss Kathie shouting, “No.” Shouting, less loudly, “No one in particular.”

  In the foyer and dining room and kitchen, the air swims with the scent of phantom flowers, shimmering with sweet, heavy mock orange. An invisible garden. The creamy perfume of absent gardenias. Hanging in the air is the tang of eucalyptus I carry directly to the back door. The trash cans in the alley overflow with crimson bougainvillea and sprays of sweet-smelling daphne.

  Every card signed, W
ebster Carlton Westward III.

  From an insert shot of one gift card, we cut to a close-up of another card, and another. A series of card after gift card. Then a close-up of yet another paper envelope with To Miss Katherine handwritten on one side. The shot pulls back to reveal me holding this last sealed envelope in the steam jetting from a kettle boiling atop the stove. The kitchen setting appears much the same as it did a dog’s lifetime ago, when my Miss Kathie scratched her heart into the window. One new detail, a portable television, sits atop the icebox, flashing the room with scenes from a hospital, the operating room in a surgical suite where an actor’s rubber-gloved hand grasps a surgical mask and pulls it from his own face, revealing the previous “was-band,” Paco Esposito. The seventh and most recent Mr. Katherine Kenton. His hair now grows gray at his temples. His upper lip fringed with a pepper-and-salt mustache.

  The teakettle hisses on the stove, centered above the blue spider of a gas flame. Steam rises from the spout, curling the corners of the white envelope I hold. The paper darkens with damp until the glued flap peels along one edge. Picking with a thumbnail, I lift the flap. Pinching with two fingers, I slide out the letter.

  On television, Paco leans over the operating table, dragging a scalpel through the inert body of a patient played by Stephen Boyd. Hope Lange plays the assisting physician. Suzy Parker the anesthesiologist. Fixing his gaze on the attending nurse, Natalie Wood, Paco says, “I’ve never seen anything this bad. This brain has got to come out!”

  The next channel over, a battalion of dancers dash around a soundstage, fighting the Battle of Antietam in some Frank Powell production directed by D. W. Griffith of a musical version of the Civil War. The lead for the Confederate Army, leaping and pirouetting, is featured dancer Terrence Terry. A heartbreakingly young Joan Leslie plays Tallulah Bankhead. H. B. Warner plays Jefferson Davis. Music scored by Max Steiner.

  From the alley outside the kitchen door, a man’s voice says, “Knock, knock.” The windows, fogged with the steam. The kitchen air feels humid and warm as the sauna of the Garden of Allah apartments. My hair hangs lank and plastered to my wet forehead, flat as a Louise Brooks spit curl.