Karoo Page 4

  “Peggy, this is my son Billy. Billy, Peggy.”

  He nodded easily, smiling, gazing down at us like a streetlamp.

  Peggy seemed stunned either by the beauty of Billy’s face or by this sudden and puzzling appearance of my son. Were we all going to my place together? And what would we do when we got there? After all, the boy she saw was much closer to her in age than I was. Something bothered her. A hint of reluctance appeared in her eyes, but she was too drunk and too committed to do anything about it now. Her face assumed a blank expression of somebody awaiting further instructions.

  Out we all went, into the corridor, to the choral accompaniment of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

  The ancient, hydraulic elevator of the Dakota descended at the speed of radioactive decay. The decline and fall of Rome, it seemed to me, probably occurred faster. I had no idea how these hydraulic elevators worked, but if this elevator used water then judging by the speed it probably needed to have water evaporate to go down, and condense to go up.

  There were seven of us crammed into the small car which was paneled with dark stained wood. We were in the back. Peggy was on my right, Billy on my left. The other two couples stood in front of us. They were reassuring each other in a lighthearted way that the elevator was in fact moving.

  “How can you tell? I can’t feel anything.”

  “It’s moving.”

  We all looked up at the panel of numbers and saw number 6 light up. The McNabs lived on the seventh floor. Here, then, was conclusive proof that we had traversed one whole floor.

  “Only five to go,” a man in front of me said, and we all chuckled. Sensing a receptive audience, he added, “Who knows, maybe by the time we land, the Democrats will be back in power.”

  “I think the Democrats built this elevator,” a woman next to him said.

  We all chuckled again. And then, as so often happens after jokes, good or bad, things got silent.

  I desperately wanted a cigarette. I was fully readdicted to tobacco. In addition to this craving, I was feeling a mounting hostility toward Billy for being so goddamned blind to the situation. What should have been settled upstairs was not. I dreaded the thought of actually having to tell him when we got out into the street that he was going one way and I another. I felt victimized by his innocence. And then there was Peggy. I could see out of the corner of my right eye that she was staring up at Billy. Transfixed. If I could have found an easy, graceful way for the two of them to go home together to her apartment and let me go home alone to mine, I would have.

  It was bitter cold outside and no cabs were in sight. Two waiting limos took our foursome away. The liveried Dakota doorman left his little guardhouse and stood out in the street, looking up and down for a taxi.

  I smoked. The three of us shivered.

  The cold front, which had killed a dozen homeless in Chicago, frozen citrus crops in the South, and stranded barge traffic in the ice of the Mississippi, was now blowing through Manhattan along Seventy-second Street.

  Billy, being Billy, seemed to have no doubts that he and I were doing the gentlemanly thing and getting a cab for this Peggy in a fur coat, after which we would get one for ourselves or, if need be, walk together to my apartment. He even seemed to be shivering in a recreational way, going along with the bitter cold Peggy and I felt rather than feeling any himself.

  What the hell was I going to do with him?

  I smoked and babbled. I asked him about life at school. I gave him credit, in that macho way I sometimes assumed when I was around him, for having a lot of girlfriends at Harvard. I asked him if he had seen his old high school flame, Laurie, while in town. No, no he hadn’t. But they did talk on the phone. Did he remember, I asked him, how her mother used to bring her over to our apartment to watch me shave?

  “She’s a wonderful girl, Laurie. Wonderful. I’ll never forget that time when she …” I babbled on.

  A bright yellow cab, almost like an apparition, shot out of Central Park, and the Dakota doorman raised his mittened hands in the air and began waving. The cab stopped. The doorman opened the door. I slipped a five-dollar bill into his mitten. Peggy got in. And as I followed her inside the cab, I gestured to Billy to come along.

  In the snow-white whiteness of his face I saw his deepest dark eyes take in the momentarily puzzling situation and with computer speed come up with the wrong solution. The scarcity of cabs was such that we would drop off this Peggy in the fur coat first, and then the two of us would continue to my apartment on Eighty-sixth and Riverside Drive.

  Tripodlike, he tucked in his long limbs and sat down next to me in the cab. He shut the car door with a flourish as if, with a combination of magnanimity and innocence, he was slamming shut once and for all the book in which was recorded the history of all my past misdeeds.

  His height was all legs. Mine was all torso. Sitting next to each other, we were of equal size. I waited until the cab was in motion and said, putting my arm around his shoulder, “We’ll drop you off first.”

  My tone could not have been more loving and caring, but the trouble with language is that it sometimes has a content in addition to the tone, and the content of my words caught him totally off guard. The wind and the cold, to which he had appeared youthfully immune when we were standing outside, fell upon him in an instant. His body stiffened under my arm, I could feel him shivering.

  I told the driver Dianah’s address. He could have made a U-turn but he didn’t. We went straight across Seventy-second and then took a left on Columbus Avenue. The heater in the cab was on full blast. It was, if anything, too hot inside, but Billy couldn’t stop shivering.

  And I couldn’t stop babbling. It was a short ride, but I made it long by babbling the whole way.

  Not only did I not want to take my son home with me, I didn’t want to take the memory of his disappointment and hurt home with me either, I wanted to be free of both son and memory, if possible. I had to disarm him somehow and dilute the pain that he was feeling, so I wouldn’t have to think about it the next day. If only I were drunk, I wouldn’t have this problem.

  The Berlin Wall was going down, but I brought it up again. I resurrected the ghosts of the dead chow-SHESS-koo and interposed the executed tyrant and his wife between myself and Billy.

  What did he think, I asked him, of chow-SHESS-koo’s execution. Was it, in his opinion, the correct thing to do under the circumstances or was it an ominous precedent for the future of Romania? I argued both sides and gave him credit for being profoundly concerned about the recent developments in Eastern Europe. The credit of concern I extended to him was almost impossible for a boy like Billy to refuse, impossible for him to be selfish enough to say out loud that his own personal concerns were of such a high order that they overrode those of an entire nation. He had no choice but to identify himself with people who cared, as I was pretending to, about the larger issues in the world. I knew this. I knew my son. And so I babbled on. About the poor, unwashed orphans found living in cages like animals. About the endemic reliance of the people of Eastern Europe on paternalistic tyrants for political order. On and on.

  When the cab finally stopped in front of Dianah’s apartment building on Central Park West, my former home, I dropped Europe like a piece of junk mail.

  “It was good to see you, big guy,” I told him. I stepped out of the cab with him and, while Peggy and the driver looked on, because they were looking on, because I had an audience, I gave him a kiss on each cheek.

  “Good night, Billy. Good night.”

  “Goodbye, Dad.”

  “I’ll call you,” I shouted and waved from the cab.

  The cab made a loop and a few minutes later we were driving once again past the Dakota, as if the detour with Billy had never occurred. The driver didn’t mind if I smoked, so I smoked. I had him stop on Broadway so I could pick up a carton of cigarettes and then we went on.

  When Billy left, some part of Peggy, however small, left with him. It was as if we had dropped off some daydr
eam of hers and she was now sitting in the backseat of the cab with reality itself.

  I smoked and talked about Billy the rest of the way. I told Peggy, and spoke loudly enough so the driver could hear me as well, what a wonderful boy he was. How much I loved him. How proud I was of him. What a priceless privilege it was to be a father. The further away we got from the actual Billy, the closer I felt to him.

  There was certainly no need for me to tell Peggy and the cab driver that Billy was adopted, but one of the symptoms of my truth disease was to flaunt unsolicited truths to total strangers.

  “Adopted. Really?” Peggy’s whole face squinted at me.

  “Yes. He was just a baby when we got him.”

  “He’s so beautiful,” Peggy said. “So very, very beautiful.” And then she started crying, sobbing like a sentimental drunk in a manner much older than her years.

  “But who,” she cried, “who in the world would give away such a beautiful boy?”

  We stopped at a red light and the cab driver turned his head, as if waiting for me to answer.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  THE UNSEASONABLY COLD weather didn’t last long. It was replaced by unseasonably warm weather, and the first week of the new year, 1990, and the last decade of the twentieth century began on the note of unseasonableness.

  My friend Guido (my very last friend) and I were pausing before parting outside the Russian Tea Room, where we had had lunch. Both of us took turns commenting on the un-Januarylike January we were having.

  “It’s like spring.”

  “It’s like Indian summer.”

  “I had to turn on my air conditioner.”

  “Me too.”

  Glancing at the enormous wristwatch on his big wrist, Guido sighed.

  “I better get going,” he said. “Damn nuisance, this Maria mess.”

  “You’ll find somebody,” I reassured him.

  I waved. He waved. We parted, he heading east and I west.

  The Maria mess had to do with Guido’s cleaning woman. His former maid, Maria, had suddenly quit to return to her country of origin and he needed to find another maid to clean his apartment.

  Almost every cleaning woman of the people I knew in Manhattan was named Maria. Dianah and I had a Maria when we lived together. She stayed with Dianah when I moved out, and I got an apartment and a Maria of my own. The McNabs, George and Pat, had a Maria. The name Maria was no longer a name to me, it was a job description. I never saw my Maria after I hired her. She came to clean on Fridays, and even when I had absolutely nothing to do at my office I made sure not to be home when she came.

  Something is called for when you have another human being in your apartment. Some minimal human transaction is required, which I prefer to avoid when it’s just me and one other human being. This evasion of privacy extended even to somebody like my Maria.

  I paid her in cash, leaving the money on the dining room table under a heavy glass ashtray. When I returned in the evening, the apartment was clean and the money was gone.

  My memory of this woman, who worked for me for almost two years though I never saw her again after hiring her, was of a woman between thirty and fifty. She was dressed in black for our interview, as if she were in mourning. Short arms. Short legs. A sturdy-looking body with no discernible waist. Indian features. Her neck was tucked in the whole time we talked, as if her people had been taught by history, by the Spanish conquistadors and the Catholic church, always to keep their necks tucked in.

  My phone was ringing when I entered my office, but it stopped before I could get to it.

  2

  The telephone rings.

  I light a cigarette and pick up.

  “Hello.”

  “Mr. Karoo?”

  It’s a woman’s voice, and although I haven’t heard it in a long time, I know who it is.

  Some people specialize in remembering faces, others remember names, with me it’s the sound of the voice. Once I’ve heard somebody’s voice, I never forget it.

  “Hello, Bobbie,” I say.

  Her name is Roberta but everyone calls her Bobbie, and not just Bobbie but, for reasons unknown to me, “that Bobbie woman.”

  She works for Jay Cromwell, though her little cubicle of an office in Burbank (which I saw once) isn’t even attached to Cromwell’s office. It’s off by itself down the corridor.

  I have never actually seen her. I only know her voice, and her little throwaway laughter which brings to mind the sound of a cigarette lighter being struck.

  “It’s that time of year again,” Bobbie tells me. “I just want to make sure my Rolodex is up-to-date.”

  She rattles off my two telephone numbers, home and office, and my two addresses, home and office, and I confirm that yes, that is me all right. No, I still don’t have a fax, I tell her. Yes, I lie, I’m thinking of getting one next year.

  Shifting gears, she inquires, “Do you plan to be in town, in New York, I mean, on the twenty-second and twenty-third of February?”

  “Yes,” I tell her, “I think I will be in town on both of those days.”

  “Mr. Cromwell is planning to come to New York for the presentation of the Spirit of Freedom Award to Vaclav Havel, and he wants to know if he could see you while he’s in town. At first he didn’t think that he could attend the ceremony, but a change in his schedule …”

  She goes on, telling me what a very busy man Mr. Cromwell is and how he is really looking forward to seeing me.

  She is sure, she tells me, that Brad will be calling me soon to verify the dates and the particulars.

  “I’d rather have you verify my particulars, Bobbie,” I tell her.

  She laughs her little laughter into my ear and then, wishing me a good day, and I wishing her the same, we hang up on each other.

  3

  Perhaps it’s ironic but, despite my many diseases, my nickname in the business is Doc.

  Doc Karoo.

  I’m a small but comfortable cog in the entertainment industry. I doctor screenplays written by somebody else. I rewrite. I cut and polish. Cut the fat. Polish what’s left. I’m a professional hack with a knack that’s come to be regarded as a talent. People who live in LA and do my kind of work are called “Hollywood hacks.” The term “New York hack,” for some reason, does not exist. A hack in New York is called Doc.

  I have never written anything of my own. A long, long time ago, I tried, but after several attempts I gave up. I may be a hack, but I do know what talent is and I knew I didn’t have it. It was not a devastating realization. It was more in the nature of a verification of what I had suspected all along. I had a PhD in comparative lit, I was a Doc to begin with, but I didn’t want to teach. Thanks to some contacts I made, I segued quite painlessly into my true calling, where for the most part I rewrite screenplays written by men and women who don’t have any talent either.

  Every now and then, very rarely, of course, I’m given a screenplay to fix that doesn’t need any fixing. It’s just fine the way it is. All it really needs is to be made properly into a film. But the studio executives, or the producers, or the stars, or the directors, have other ideas. I am confronted with a moral dilemma. I am capable of having a moral dilemma because I have this mascot within me called the moral man, and the moral man within me wants to stand up for what’s right. He wants to defend the script that doesn’t need fixing from being fixed or, if nothing else, he wants to refuse to be personally involved in any way in its evisceration.

  But he does neither.

  The moral man within me feels uncomfortable and pretentious at these times. He feels, as I do, the burden of precedents we have set for ourselves. Why should we stand up now for what’s right when we remained comfortably seated on other, much more crucial occasions? In this way, the moral dilemma becomes diluted and rationalized, and I accept the assignment and the money that comes with it, enormous sums of money, knowing ahead of time that my contribution, my rewriting, my cutting and polishing, can only cause harm or r
uin to the work in question.

  These occasions, when I’m given something I admire to ruin, are fortunately very rare. In the last twenty years or so, I have eviscerated no more than half a dozen screenplays and of those only one still haunts me.

  The young man who had written the original screenplay for Cromwell showed up uninvited at the sneak preview of the film in Pittsburgh. I now remember only two things about Pittsburgh. I remember the beautiful view from my hotel suite of the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers and the painful scene that the young (he was so young) writer caused in the lobby of the theater after the film was over.

  Like some clean-shaven Jeremiah, he shrieked at us, trembling with rage. The director was a pimp. The producer, Jay Cromwell, was a fucking monster. The studio executives were castrated piranhas. I was a worthless slut. Personally, I had no quarrel with any of these terms. They seemed quite accurate to me. What hurt me was seeing how hurt he was. He wept while he tried to insult us, not realizing, because of his youth, that we could not be insulted. He was too young and he had loved what he had written all too much. He never wrote again. Perhaps it was unrelated, it’s hard to know for sure with these things, but a year or so later he committed suicide. I still remember the sound of his voice. The film, like all films produced by Cromwell, did well at the box office and my reputation as a man who can fix troublesome screenplays received yet another boost.

  Most of the time, however, I work on screenplays that are so bad I could have written them myself.

  My job for the most part involves cutting the fat and adding jokes. I’m handy at both. I get rid of subsidiary characters, dreams, and flashbacks. I cut the scenes in which our hero or heroine visits his or her mother or his or her favorite high school teacher. I get rid of aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters. I have cut entire childhood sequences from the lives of characters and have left them up there on the screen without a mother or a father or a past of any kind.

  I keep my eye on the story line, the plot, and I eliminate everyone and everything that doesn’t contribute to it. I simplify the human condition of the characters and complicate the world in which they live. I’m aware at times that this approach has been put into practice in real life, that men like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceausescu, and others have incorporated some of the techniques of fixing screenplays into their endeavors. Sometimes I think of all tyrants as being glorified hacks, rewrite men like myself.