Teddy sipped his drink thoughtfully. “So Guy is dead,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I can hardly believe it.”
“Me neither.”
“And what did you mean; Madeleine doesn’t know who she is?”
“She just lost it all,” I said. “Right in the middle of the third act. We heard the shot and she was sobbing in my arms and she kept repeating her line over and over. We had to get her offstage and then I gave her my handkerchief and she asked me if we’d ever met.”
“What was the line?”
“What?”
“What was the line she was repeating?”
“What?” I took another drink, washing back the impatience I felt at this question. “I’m not as bad as you think.”
“That was the line?”
“Yes,” I said. “That was the line. I’m not as bad as you think. Why is that important?”
“Where is she now?”
“Peter took her home.”
“Peter?”
“Smythe. The director. He said she doesn’t know who she is. He called a psychiatrist who said she might snap out of it. She went to sleep.”
“This is awful,” Teddy said.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I agreed.
“No,” Teddy said. “I’m sure you don’t.”
“For one thing, the understudy has a completely different interpretation of Elena. It’s all vanity and irritation. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it’s just completely different. I’ll have to start from scratch.”
Teddy was quiet, rotating his glass on the coaster, drying the moisture from the bottom before he lifted it for another cautious sip. His eyes rested upon me with a distant, friendly
curiosity, such as one might show for a child who has charmingly botched a recitation.
“I know that sounds incredibly callous,” I admitted.
“Well,” Teddy said, “it is
one
of the things you’ll have to worry about.”
I
slept poorly and arrived at Peter’s apartment fifteen minutes early. He came to the door in his robe and slippers, his eyes bleary, his mop of hair sticking out in all directions. “Come in, come in,” he said. “What a night. I didn’t get back from the hospital until four.”
“What hospital?” I said, looking about the gloomy living room. Why was it so dark?
“Bellevue,” Peter said. He shuffled to the window and pulled the curtain cord, vaporizing the gloom. “God it’s bright out there.”
Bellevue. My legs went rubbery and I sank onto a handy hassock. “Oh no,” I said.
“We didn’t have any choice. She woke up screaming and we couldn’t calm her down. She wanted to get out of the apartment, didn’t know who we were, said someone had stolen a baby, at least I think that’s what she said. Mary called Dr. Hershey and he said to call 911 and meet him at Bellevue. So that’s what we did.”
“Did she calm down?”
“They gave her a shot. Then she was just moaning.”
I stood up, making for the door. “I’ve got to see her.”
“They won’t let you see her,” Peter said. “Sit down, have a cup of coffee.”
“What will they do to her?”
“It’s a hospital. They’ll take care of her. You can call Hershey later. She’s his patient now. She needs help, psychiatric help. Hershey said she was in a fugue state.”
I sat back down again. So Guy was right, I thought. Madeleine was fragile. I hadn’t believed it because she was so ambitious and talented and beautiful and sexy, but he knew it, probably from the start, which is why his suicide is so completely inexcusable. He knew what it would do to her; he even made sure she would bear a crippling weight of guilt. He’d kept her up all night, berating her, threatening to kill himself if she left him, and then he sat in the dressing room listening to the play on the intercom, waiting for that moment when her lips met mine, and then he pulled the trigger. When she heard the shot she knew exactly what it was. In the annals of suicide has there ever been a more ignoble performance? If there was any justice and if there was a hell, I thought, Guy was surely in it. I would not waste a moment’s pity on him.
Peter brought me a mug of coffee. “Do you want milk?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Black is good.”
“Are you sure you can do the matinee? We can get the understudy if we call him now.”
“No,” I said. “I can do it.”
———
T
he matinee was a shambles. We were running on nerves, parroting our lines like politicians, all save the understudy, who was in the unenviable position of benefiting from another actor’s misfortune. She’d decided to throw herself at the role with a passion that was at odds with the character she was playing. She shivered and fidgeted, had starts and fits. The audience, composed of blockheads with hearing aids, thought she was terrific.
After the show I headed uptown to the offices of Dr. Seymour Hershey, a dour, bespectacled individual with heavy dark lips like two prunes folded under his big nose. He greeted me indifferently, even disappearing behind the desk to pick up a pencil while I inquired about Madeleine’s prognosis.
Amnesia, he explained, is a rare condition, usually brought on by an injury, such as a blow to the head. In such cases the effects were sometimes reversible, though not, as so often happens in fiction and film, as the result of a second blow. In Madeleine’s case the loss of memory was the result of a psychic trauma. “Typically,” he said, “these patients were sexually abused as children. Do you know anything about her childhood?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “She didn’t like her mother.”
“Well,” he said, psychiatrically, “she would have buried that too.”
“She’s an actress,” I said. “There’s nothing buried in there. She has complete access to her emotions. That’s what actors do.”
“Pretending to have emotions you don’t feel doesn’t open the portals of the unconscious,” he said.
“We’re not pretending. That’s the point,” I countered.
He probed his chin with his thumb, scanning his desk for something of interest. “Actually in my experience, actors are extremely unstable personalities,” he said.
“Will she get her memory back?” I asked.
“If she wants to,” he said. “But her memory loss is the least of her problems.”
“Will she get well?”
“If she wants to,” he repeated maddeningly.
“So your deep professional wisdom is that Madeleine wants to be extremely unstable.”
He ran his eyes over me critically, like an antique dealer inspecting a table, checking for cracks in the veneer. “Not consciously, of course,” he said.
“Can she come home?”
“Oh no. Not now. She needs to be clinically evaluated. There are medications that may help. I can recommend a mental health facility that should be able to take her.”
“An asylum?”
“We don’t actually call them that anymore.”
“Where is it?”
“In Westchester. It has an excellent reputation. It’s called Benthaven.”
I sputtered. “Benthaven?”
He removed his glasses and rubbed the lenses with a square of red cloth he kept on the desk for just that purpose. Absolutely humorless, I thought. My poor Madeleine. “Once we get her stabilized I can have her transferred there,” he said.
“Can I see her before she goes?”
“Oh, yes. You can see her. It might be helpful; I don’t think it can hurt. You should bring her some food. She’s refusing to eat anything they offer her at the hospital.”
“Why does she do that?”
He gave me another long, magnified look, opening and closing his prune lips a few times like a fish trying to catch a wafer of food in an aquarium. “Why do you think she would do that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Then what makes you think I would know?”
“You’re her doctor.”
“And you’re her what? Her friend? More than that?”
I had to think this over. Whatever I was, I knew I was committed to getting Madeleine out from under the thumb of Dr. Seymour Hershey.
“I’m the one who knows what she likes to eat,” I said.
I
n the days that followed, Teddy and I began the process of freeing Madeleine from the mental health authorities. Hershey was having a picnic because Madeleine wasn’t capable of making decisions and we couldn’t find anyone related to her who was. I knew her father had died when she was in high school and Teddy’s investigations revealed that her mother too had died of cancer the previous year. Madeleine was a widow and an orphan.
By the time I got to see her, she was “stabilized,” but she hadn’t, as hoped, snapped out of it. She wasn’t hysterical or frightened, she was unfailingly polite, but she didn’t recognize either Teddy or me, nor did she understand why she was in a
hospital. Mostly she was hungry, but, as Hershey had told me, she wouldn’t touch anything that didn’t come from outside. Teddy and I took turns bringing meals from nearby restaurants. One night, as I was opening another white carton of her favorite Chinese takeout, she confided, “If you eat the food they make here, you can never leave.”
“So it’s not that you don’t like it,” I said, handing her the box.
She stabbed a water chestnut with the plastic fork. “I’m sure it’s perfectly nice,” she said in her new affectless voice.
“They make it nice,” I suggested, “to tempt you to eat it.”
She sent me a conspiratorial glance over the carton. There was just the flicker of a smile at the corners of her mouth as she lifted a long noodle above the edge. “Exactly,” she said.
She’s still in there, I thought. I just have to find a way to get her back.
T
eddy helped me with the other problem that (I can’t resist the pun) gravely needed clearing up, which was the earthly remains of Guy Margate. He too was without traceable relations. “We can’t just leave him to the city to dispose of,” Teddy said. “Should we buy a plot somewhere?”
“I want him cremated,” I said.
“Should we scatter his ashes?”
“No,” I said. “I want him cremated and in an urn and buried. I want him put to rest.”
Teddy, puzzled by my vehemence, acquiesced. “I can arrange that,” he said.
Getting Guy out of the morgue and into a grave proved a complicated and expensive process. Teddy took on the funerary arrangements and, with the help of Detective DiBanco, I navigated the murky legal channels. In the process I had to sign a document that made me responsible for Guy’s interment, an obligation that gave me a full moment’s pause.
“Do you want to see him?” the detective inquired.
“No,” I said, scribbling my name on the dotted line.
“We’ll release his stuff to you. The backpack has keys in it; must be to his apartment. We’ll keep the gun.”
“Yes, do. Please,” I said.
“We checked him out from his license. He didn’t have a record.”
“That’s comforting.”
“You know where he lives, right?”
“Lower East Side,” I said. “But I don’t know where exactly.”
He took up a pen and jotted down the address on a yellow pad. “You actors are an odd bunch,” he said. He ripped off the sheet and held it out to me.
“In what way?” I asked. I had the sense that he was about to make some deep and revelatory observation, so I gave him my full attention.
“You know, like a bunch of children. Always in the fantasyland, always waiting for a break, playing make-believe. Your friend was wearing a fake mustache. You’d think if you was going to kill yourself you’d take off the costume.”
So the mustache wasn’t real.
“It’s a calling,” I said to DiBanco.
“Yeah, right. Like I was called to be a detective.”
“Weren’t you?”
“No, I wanted to play baseball. But I had to be realistic. That’s the difference.”
I
took Guy’s bag back to my apartment, dropped it on my kitchen table, and made myself a cup of coffee, postponing this final encounter with all things Guy. It had seemed bulky when he had it on his lap, but in fact there wasn’t much in it. A shabby wallet with his license, a bookstore ID, one credit card, and thirty dollars in cash, one of those collapsible leather coin purses containing sixty-seven cents in change, a leather key ring with five keys. A travel toothbrush and a travel-size tube of Colgate toothpaste. A comb. A wool muffler. A pair of wool socks and an unopened box of white Jockey briefs. A blank notebook and a pen. A copy of the
Playbill
for
Uncle Vanya
. A paperback sci-fi novel,
God Emperor of Dune
. I flipped through the
Playbill
. My name on the cast list had been scratched out with a red marker; my listing in the Who’s Who box was entirely blotted out in red.
The sun streamed through my kitchen window as I drank my coffee, considering the last hours of Guy’s unhappy, unlucky life. According to Madeleine they had been fighting all night, even on the subway. At some point, either before or during that argument, he’d packed this backpack. What was he planning? The underwear and toothbrush suggested he intended to be away, at least overnight. The gun must have been in the bag already. Did Madeleine know he had it? Was that why, when she heard the shot, she knew what it was? The
mustache, I thought, why the mustache? Did he plan to murder me and then take my place onstage after the intermission? What a bizarre idea, but not impracticable.
I put everything but the keys back in the bag and stowed it in my closet. Someone had to clear out the apartment and let the landlord know his tenants wouldn’t be returning. I dug the address Detective DiBanco had written for me from my coat pocket, took up the keys, and went out into the street. Maybe there would be some clue—a diary, perhaps—that would clear up the mystery of Guy’s intentions toward me.
The East Village is still a gritty territory where the opportunities to enjoy a tattoo session are limitless, but it was worse then. An evening stroll required making a choice between dodging the rats on the street or the dope peddlers on the sidewalk. These denizens weren’t much in evidence in daylight, but the occasional syringe or strung-out, babbling addict lolling curbside provided helpful reminders for those who might be duped by the run-down gentility of the buildings. One had to circumvent the black steel doors flung open like bat’s wings over steps descending vertiginously into the gloom of various basements, a vast underworld of violence and criminality.