Music For Chameleons Page 15

  MARY (surveying the scene from the opened front door of Miss Shaw’s two-room apartment): Nothing much to do here. A little dusting. She takes good care of it herself. Look at all those books. Ceiling to floor, nothing but library.

  (Except for the burdened bookshelves, the apartment was attractively spare, Scandinavianly white and gleaming. There was one antique: an old roll-top desk with a typewriter on it; a sheet of paper was rolled into the machine; and I glanced at what was written on it:

  “Zsa Zsa Gabor is

  305 years old

  I know

  Because I counted

  Her Rings”

  And triple-spaced below that, was typed:

  “Sylvia Plath, I hate you

  And your damn daddy.

  I’m glad, do you hear,

  Glad you stuck your head

  In a gas-hot oven!”

  TC: Is Miss Shaw a poet?

  MARY: She’s always writing something. I don’t know what it is. Stuff I see, sounds like she’s on dope to me. Come here, I want to show you something.

  (She leads me into the bathroom, a surprisingly large and sparkling chamber. She opens a cabinet door and points at an object on a shelf: a pink plastic vibrator molded in the shape of an average-sized penis.)

  Know what that is?

  TC: Don’t you?

  MARY: I’m the one asking.

  TC: It’s a dildo vibrator.

  MARY: I know what a vibrator is. But I never saw one like that. It says “Made in Japan.”

  TC: Ah, Well. The Oriental mind.

  MARY: Heathens. She’s sure got some lovely perfumes. If you like perfume. Me, I only put a little vanilla behind my ears.

  (Now Mary began to work, mopping the waxed carpetless floors, flicking the bookshelves with a feather duster; and while she worked she kept her roach-box open and her roach-holder filled. I don’t know how much “heaviness” she had to lift, but the aroma alone was lofting me.)

  MARY: You sure you don’t want to try a couple of tokes? You’re missing something.

  TC: You twisted my arm.

  (Man and boy, I’ve dragged some powerful grass, never enough to have acquired a habit, but enough to judge quality and know the difference between ordinary Mexican weed and luxurious contraband like Thai-sticks and the supreme Maui-Wowee. But after smoking the whole of one of Mary’s roaches, and while halfway through another, I felt as though seized by a delicious demon, embraced by a mad marvelous merriment: the demon tickled my toes, scratched my itchy head, kissed me hotly with his red sugary lips, shoved his fiery tongue down my throat. Everything sparkled; my eyes were like zoom lenses; I could read the titles of books on the highest shelves: The Neurotic Personality of Our Time by Karen Horney; Eimi by e.e. cummings; Four Quartets; The Collected Poems of Robert Frost.)

  TC: I despise Robert Frost. He was an evil, selfish bastard.

  MARY: Now, if we’re going to curse—

  TC: Him with his halo of shaggy hair. An egomaniacal double-crossing sadist. He wrecked his whole family. Some of them. Mary, have you ever discussed this with your confessor?

  MARY: Father McHale? Discussed what?

  TC: The precious nectar we’re so divinely devouring, my adorable chickadee. Have you informed Father McHale of this delectable enterprise?

  MARY: What he don’t know won’t hurt him. Here, have a Life Saver. Peppermint. It makes that stuff taste better.

  (Odd, she didn’t seem high, not a bit. I’d just passed Venus, and Jupiter, jolly old Jupiter, beckoned beyond in the lilac star-dazzled planetary distance. Mary marched over to the telephone and dialed a number; she let it ring a long while before hanging up.)

  MARY: Not home. That’s one thing to be grateful for. Mr. and Mrs. Berkowitz. If they’d been home, I couldn’t have took you over there. On account of they’re these real stuffy Jewish people. And you know how stuffy they are!

  TC: Jewish people? Gosh, yes. Very stuffy. They all ought to be in the Museum of Natural History. All of them.

  MARY: I’ve been thinking about giving Mrs. Berkowitz notice. The trouble is, Mr. Berkowitz, he was in garments, he’s retired, and the two of them are always home. Underfoot. Unless they drive up to Greenwich, where they got some property. That’s where they must have gone today. Another reason I’d like to quit them. They’ve got an old parrot—makes a mess everywhere. And stupid! All that dumb parrot can say is two things: “Holy cow!” and “Oy vey!” Every time you walk in the house it starts shouting “Oy vey!” Gets on my nerves something terrible. How about it? Let’s toke another roach and blow this joint.

  (The rain had returned and the wind increased, a mixture that made the air look like a shattering mirror. The Berkowitzes lived on Park Avenue in the upper Eighties, and I suggested we take a taxi, but Mary said no, what kind of sissy was I, we can walk it, so I realized that despite appearances, she, too, was traveling stellar paths. We walked along slowly, as though it were a warm tranquil day with turquoise skies, and the hard slippery streets ribbons of pearl-colored Caribbean beach. Park Avenue is not my favorite boulevard; it is rich with lack of charm; if Mrs. Lasker were to plant it with tulips all the way from Grand Central to Spanish Harlem, it would be of no avail. Still, there are certain buildings that prompt memories. We passed a building where Willa Cather, the American woman writer I’ve most admired, lived the last years of her life with her companion, Edith Lewis; I often sat in front of their fireplace and drank Bristol Cream and observed the firelight enflame the pale prairie-blue of Miss Cather’s serene genius-eyes. At Eighty-fourth Street I recognized an apartment house where I had once attended a small black-tie dinner given by Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, then so young and insouciant. But despite the agreeable efforts of our hosts, the evening was not as enlightening as I had anticipated, because after the ladies had been dismissed and the men left in the dining room to savor their cordials and Havana cigars, one of the guests, a rather slope-chinned dressmaker named Oleg Cassini, overwhelmed the conversation with a travelogue account of Las Vegas and the myriad showgirls he’d recently auditioned there: their measurements, erotic accomplishments, financial requirements—a recital that hypnotized its auditors, none of whom was more chucklingly attentive than the future President.

  When we reach Eighty-seventh Street, I point out a window on the fourth floor at 1060 Park Avenue, and inform Mary: “My mother lived there. That was her bedroom. She was beautiful and very intelligent, but she didn’t want to live. She had many reasons—at least she thought she did. But in the end it was just her husband, my stepfather. He was a self-made man, fairly successful—she worshipped him, and he really was a nice guy, but he gambled, got into trouble and embezzled a lot of money, and lost his business and was headed for Sing Sing.”

  Mary shakes her head: “Just like my boy. Same as him.”

  We’re both standing staring at the window, the downpour drenching us. “So one night she got all dressed up and gave a dinner party; everybody said she looked lovely. But after the party, before she went to bed, she took thirty Seconals and she never woke up.”

  Mary is angry; she strides rapidly away through the rain: “She had no right to do that. I don’t hold with that. It’s against my beliefs.”)

  SQUAWKING PARROT: Holy cow!

  MARY: Hear that? What did I tell you?

  PARROT: Oy vey! Oy vey!

  (The parrot, a surrealist collage of green and yellow and orange moulting feathers, is esconced on a mahogany perch in the relentlessly formal parlor of Mr. and Mrs. Berkowitz, a room suggesting that it had been entirely made of mahogany: the parquet floors, the wall paneling, and the furniture, all of it costly reproductions of grandiose period-piece furniture—though God knows what period, perhaps early Grand Concourse. Straight-back chairs; settees that would have tested the endurance of a posture professor. Mulberry velvet draperies swathed the windows, which were incongruously covered with mustard-brown venetian blinds. Above a carved mahogany mantelpiece a mahogany-framed portrait o
f a jowly, sallow-skinned Mr. Berkowitz depicted him as a country squire outfitted for a fox hunt: scarlet coat, silk cravat, a bugle tucked under one arm, a riding crop under the other. I don’t know what the remainder of this rambling abode looked like, for I never saw any of it except the kitchen.)

  MARY: What’s so funny? What you laughing at?

  TC: Nothing. It’s just this Peruvian tobacco, my cherub. I take it Mr. Berkowitz is an equestrian?

  PARROT: Oy vey! Oy vey!

  MARY: Shut up! Before I wring your damn neck.

  TC: Now, if we’re going to curse … (Mary mumbles; crosses herself) Does the critter have a name?

  MARY: Uh-huh. Try and guess.

  TC: Polly.

  MARY (truly surprised): How’d you know that?

  TC: So she’s a female.

  MARY: That’s a girl’s name, so she must be a girl. Whatever she is, she’s a bitch. Just look at all that crap on the floor. All for me to clean it up.

  TC: Language, language.

  POLLY: Holy cow!

  MARY: My nerves. Maybe we better have a little lift. (Out comes the tin box, the roaches, the roach-holder, matches) And let’s see what we can locate in the kitchen. I’m feeling real munchie.

  (The interior of the Berkowitz refrigerator is a glutton’s fantasy, a cornucopia of fattening goodies. Small wonder the master of the house has such jowls. “Oh yes,” confirms Mary, “they’re both hogs. Her stomach. She looks like she’s about to drop the Dionne quintuplets. And all his suits are tailor-made: nothing store-bought could fit him. Hmm, yummy, I sure do feel munchie. Those coconut cupcakes look desirable. And that mocha cake, I wouldn’t mind a hunk of that. We could dump some ice cream on it.” Huge soup bowls are found, and Mary masses them with cupcakes and mocha cake and fist-sized scoops of pistachio ice cream. We return to the parlor with this banquet and fall upon it like abused orphans. There’s nothing like grass to grow an appetite. After finishing off the first helping, and fueling ourselves with more roaches, Mary refills the bowls with even heftier portions.)

  MARY: How you feel?

  TC: I feel good.

  MARY: How good?

  TC: Real good.

  MARY: Tell me exactly how you feel.

  TC: I’m in Australia.

  MARY: Ever been to Austria?

  TC: Not Austria. Australia. No, but that’s where I am now. And everybody always said what a dull place it is. Shows what they know! Greatest surfing in the world. I’m out in the ocean on a surfboard riding a wave high as a, as a—

  MARY: High as you. Ha-ha.

  TC: It’s made of melting emeralds. The wave. The sun is hot on my back, and the spray is salting my face, and there are hungry sharks all around me. Blue Water, White Death. Wasn’t that a terrific movie? Hungry white man-eaters everywhere, but they don’t worry me—frankly, I don’t give a fuck …

  MARY (eyes wide with fear): Watch for the sharks! They got killer teeth. You’ll be crippled for life. You’ll be begging on street corners.

  TC: Music!

  MARY: Music! That’s the ticket.

  (She weaves like a groggy wrestler toward a gargoyle object that had heretofore happily escaped my attention: a mahogany console combining television, phonograph, and a radio. She fiddles with the radio until she finds a station booming music with a Latin beat.

  Her hips maneuver, her fingers snap, she is elegant yet smoothly abandoned, as if recalling a sensuous youthful night, and dancing with a phantom partner some remembered choreography. And it is magic, how her now-ageless body responds to the drums and guitars, contours itself to the subtlest rhythm: she is in a trance, the state of grace saints supposedly achieve when experiencing visions. And I am hearing the music, too; it is speeding through me like amphetamine—each note ringing with the separate clarity of cathedral chimings on a silent winter Sunday. I move toward her, and into her arms, and we match each other step for step, laughing, undulating, and even when the music is interrupted by an announcer speaking Spanish as rapid as the rattle of castanets, we continue dancing, for the guitars are locked in our heads now, as we are locked in our laughter, our embrace: louder and louder, so loud that we are unaware of a key clicking, a door opening and shutting. But the parrot hears it.)

  POLLY: Holy cow!

  WOMAN’S VOICE: What is this? What’s happening here?

  POLLY: Oy vey! Oy vey!

  MARY: Why, hello there, Mrs. Berkowitz. Mr. Berkowitz. How ya doin’?

  (And there they are, hovering in view like the Mickey and Minnie Mouse balloons in a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Not that there’s anything mousey about this twosome. Their infuriated eyes, hers hot behind harlequin spectacles with sequined frames, absorb the scene: our naughty ice-cream mustaches, the pungent roach smoke polluting the premises. Mr. Berkowitz stalks over and stops the radio.)

  MRS. BERKOWITZ: Who is this man?

  MARY: I din’t think you was home.

  MRS. BERKOWITZ: Obviously. I asked you: Who is this man?

  MARY: He’s just a friend of mine. Helping me out. I got so much work today.

  MR. BERKOWITZ: You’re drunk, woman.

  MARY (deceptively sweet): How’s that you say?

  MRS. BERKOWITZ: He said you’re drunk. I’m shocked. Truly.

  MARY: Since we’re speaking truly, what I have truly to say to you is: today is my last day of playing nigger around here—I’m giving you notice.

  MRS. BERKOWITZ: You are giving me notice?

  MR. BERKOWITZ: Get out of here! Before we call the police.

  (Without ado, we gather our belongings. Mary waves at the parrot: “So long, Polly. You’re okay. You’re good girl. I was only kidding.” And at the front door, where her former employers have sternly stationed themselves, she announces: “Just for the record, I’ve never touched a drop in my life.”

  Downstairs, the rain is still going. We trudge along Park Avenue, then cut across to Lexington.)

  MARY: Didn’t I tell you they were stuffy.

  TC: Belong in a museum.

  (But most of our buoyancy has departed; the power of the Peruvian foliage recedes, a letdown has set in, my surfboard is sinking, and any sharks sighted now would scare the piss out of me.)

  MARY: I still got Mrs. Kronkite to do. But she’s nice; she’ll forgive me if I don’t come till tomorrow. Maybe I’ll head on home.

  TC: Let me catch you a cab.

  MARY: I hate to give them my business. Those taxi people don’t like coloreds. Even when they’re colored themselves. No, I can get the subway down here at Lex and Eighty-sixth.

  (Mary lives in a rent-controlled apartment near Yankee Stadium; she says it was cramped when she had a family living with her, but now that she’s by herself, it seems immense and dangerous: “I’ve got three locks on every door, and all the windows nailed down. I’d buy me a police dog if it didn’t mean leaving him by himself so much. I know what it is to be alone, and I wouldn’t wish it on a dog.”)

  TC: Please, Mary, let me treat you to a taxi.

  MARY: The subway’s a lot quicker. But there’s someplace I want to stop. It’s just down here a ways.

  (The place is a narrow church pinched between broad buildings on a side street. Inside, there are two brief rows of pews, and a small altar with a plaster figure of a crucified Jesus suspended above it. An odor of incense and candle wax dominates the gloom. At the altar a woman is lighting a candle, its light fluttering like the sleep of a fitful spirit; otherwise, we are the only supplicants present. We kneel together in the last pew, and from the satchel Mary produces a pair of rosary beads—“I always carry a couple extra”—one for herself, the other for me, though I don’t know quite how to handle it, never having used one before. Mary’s lips move whisperingly.)

  MARY: Dear Lord, in your mercy. Please, Lord, help Mr. Trask to stop boozing and get his job back. Please, Lord, don’t leave Miss Shaw a bookworm and an old maid; she ought to bring your children into this world. And, Lord, I beg you to remember my sons and daugh
ter and my grandchildren, each and every one. And please don’t let Mr. Smith’s family send him to that retirement home; he don’t want to go, he cries all the time …

  (Her list of names is more numerous than the beads on her rosary, and her requests in their behalf have the earnest shine of the altar’s candle-flame. She pauses to glance at me.)

  MARY: Are you praying?

  TC: Yes.

  MARY: I can’t hear you.

  TC: I’m praying for you, Mary. I want you to live forever.

  MARY: Don’t pray for me. I’m already saved. (She takes my hand and holds it) Pray for your mother. Pray for all those souls lost out there in the dark. Pedro. Pedro.

  II

  Hello, Stranger

  TIME: DECEMBER 1977.

  Place: A New York restaurant, The Four Seasons.

  The man who had invited me to lunch, George Claxton, had suggested we meet at noon, and made no excuse for setting such an early hour. I soon discovered the reason, however; in the year or more since I had last seen him, George Claxton, heretofore a man moderately abstemious, had become a two-fisted drinker. As soon as we were seated he ordered a double Wild Turkey (“Just straight, please; no ice”), and within fifteen minutes requested an encore.