Chill of Night

27

Adelaide Starr sat in the back of the cab and watched First Avenue glide past on either side. She felt strong. She felt limber. She felt beautiful.

She felt ready.

Adelaide was all those things. Only five-foot one, she had a compact, muscular body, with legs and neck disproportionately long so that she appeared much taller when there was no one near her for comparison. She had a tumble of ginger colored hair, green eyes, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and a carved, determined chin. Up close or from the last row in the theater, she was eye candy. Not to mention she could sing. Not the way she could dance, with a winning combination of pertness and elegance, but when it came to a show tune she could sing it and sell it and that’s what was important.

So it was a cinch that sooner or later she was bound to make it out of the chorus line and into a larger, more demanding role that required voice as well as dance. Why not today? This morning? She was twenty-nine, talented and beautiful, so why not this morning?

“I’ve sure as hell paid my dues,” she said out loud.

“Pardon, ma’am?” the cab driver asked, meeting her gaze in the rearview mirror and almost running up the back of the cab ahead. He was a swarthy man wearing a skillfully wound blue turban but had no discernible accent.

“Talking to myself.” Adelaide smiled at the man in the mirror and watched the change in his dark eyes, a kind of melting. Yeah, she was feeling confident. She’d been told in confidence by another dancer already in the show that she had the inside track for the second lead in the developing Off-Broadway musical comedy Peel the Onion.

She’d just sat back in the seat and was looking out again at the sun-drenched morning when she felt rather than heard the vibration of her phone in her purse snugged up against her right hip. Careful not to break a nail, she adroitly plucked the phone from her purse, flipped it open and said hello.

“It’s Barry, Ad.”

Her manager, Barry Baxter. She knew by his tone that this wasn’t going to be good. Shouldn’t have answered the phone. “Shoot, Barry.” She didn’t like the tone of her own voice. The cabbie caught something in it, too. His eyes were wary in the mirror.

“It’s not that serious, Ad. They don’t use real bullets.”

“Sometimes they do, Barry.”

“You sitting down?”

“I better be. I’m in a cab, on the way to the theater for the audition.”

“I’m afraid you can save the fare. I just got a call from Gerald. The role’s been filled.”

“How the hell did that happen?” She saw the cabby’s eyes narrow.

“Some friend of the producer, actress out of Chicago name of Tiffany Taft. She’s in some Off-Off-Broadway thing now that’s about to fold. She blew them away, Gerald said, and she’d already played the part in local repertory theater. She did ten minutes onstage and that was that. Everybody wanted her.”

“Screw Chicago, Barry. And screw Tiffany whatever.”

“Yeah. Well.” When she didn’t say anything, he said, “I’m sorry, Ad. It looked like gold. They lie to you sometimes in this business, you ever notice?”

Adelaide took a deep breath. “I’ve noticed. Everybody’s a shit but you, love. I’ll get over it, Barry.” If I don’t get fat, or pull a hamstring, or my skin doesn’t go all pale and crinkly, like what happened to Erin McCain, another redhead who was now out of the business. God, I’m twenty-nine!

“I know you will, Ad. Faster than me, probably. This is a lousy deal. I thought you had a real shot at it.”

“So’d I.”

“It’s not that good a play.”

“It’s great, Barry.”

“It would have been with you in it. Now I’m not so sure. I seriously doubt this Tiffany bitch can do cute like you can, and that’s what the part calls for-cute with a big voice and a big kick. That’s you, Ad.”

Adelaide smiled. Seemed to cheer up the cabbie. “A few minutes ago I felt cute enough to gag,” she said. “Now I’m semi-suicidal. Damned business can give you whiplash.” At twenty-nine, how much longer can I do cute? “I think I’m gonna drown my sorrows in a latte.”

“Too early for anything else.”

“Signing off. If I do weaken and shoot myself, I’ll leave you all my stuff.” She snapped the phone closed and slid it back in her purse. “Pull over there,” she said to the eyes in the mirror. “By that Starbucks.” She pointed across the street.

The cab veered to the curb near the intersection. “Whatever you want, ma’am.”

I wish. As she withdrew her hand from her purse, her knuckles brushed paper, the morning’s meager mail she’d hurriedly grabbed from her box in the lobby when she left the building. She’d stuffed it unexamined into her purse and stepped outside in time to hail an unoccupied cab immediately, thinking it must be her lucky day.

Instead of withdrawing the mail, she reached back into her purse for her wallet to pay cab fare.

Adelaide hadn’t been serious about drinking a latte, but when she climbed out of the cab, it seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t as if she had anyplace else to go. With her purse slung by its strap over her shoulder, carrying her duffel bag with her dance equipment on the same side of her body, she strode with a graceful leftward list across the street toward Starbucks. The light flashed the signal not to walk, but the way Adelaide walked, traffic turning off Fifty-fourth Street onto First Avenue stopped for her.

The morning breakfast crowd had mostly cleared out of the place. She ordered a large latte and carried it to a booth, picking up a crookedly folded Daily News on the way. Sometimes when she was low she could lose herself in the news, in accounts of other people’s misfortunes. What Adelaide absolutely and without exception refused to do was to feel sorry for herself. She’d always taken pride in her ability to get back on her feet after a knockdown, ready to fight on. Take the right attitude, be in your own private play, and good things tended to happen. Reality could conform. Besides, Barry might be right about Onion being a box office bomb.

Within half an hour she’d finished the paper-what parts she wanted to read, anyway-and was in a somewhat more tolerable mood. She sat for a while watching people hurry past outside the window. It seemed everyone had someplace they had to be. Everyone but Adelaide.

God! Stop it! Like there won’t be other plays Off-Broadway. Off-Off-Broadway.

On goddamned Broadway!

Damned straight! There’s always a demand for cute. Irrepressibly cute. And I can be a tsunami of cute.

She decided to read some more about the Justice Killer. That would cheer her up.

Then she remembered the mail in her purse. She got it out and spread it on the table like a hand of cards. Three envelopes. The first was an obvious advertisement for life insurance. The second was a chain letter from a college friend she hadn’t talked to in six years, urging her to send copies of the letter to five people she knew and she could avoid contracting an infectious disease and in fact enjoy a run of good luck. Others who’d ignored the instruction to keep the chain growing had met terrible fates. A few had died. Adelaide read the enclosed letter. It explained how you could be healthier, happier, and live longer if you had sex in the presence of certain aromatic candles that were for sale. Not that you had to purchase any of the candles; sending along the letter to five friends was all that was really required of you. Yeah, sure.

Adelaide set the chain letter aside with the insurance ad to be dropped in the trash receptacle on the way out. Then she opened the third envelope, using a plastic knife, as she’d painfully bent back a fuchsia fingernail while opening the chain letter.

Holy bejibbers!

A jury summons.