Red Cat

7

Clare’s hair was spread like a fan on her naked back, and her breathing was slow and silent. I pulled the blanket to her shoulders and pulled on my robe and went into the living room. Sleep, I knew, was impossible, and I drank a glass of water and looked out the window. The midnight streets were empty, and a sliver of moon wandered over the skyline, drained of color by the city lights and lonely as a wedding ring in a pawnshop. I refilled my water glass and picked up the scripts to Liars Club and The Nest.

Two readings later, neither play made much sense. Both Lisa, at Null Space, and Moira Neal, the former Gimlet Player, had been spot-on in their critiques. The plays were dense with family psychodrama, incoherent speechifying, and abrupt and confusing changes of time and place, and they depended heavily on a set of symbols and references so personal and hermetic as to be impenetrable.

As far as I could tell, The Nest took place on a spaceship in the distant future, and Liars Club was set in contemporary suburban Connecticut. And while it was difficult to tease a sensible narrative out of either piece, they both seemed mostly about a vain and tyrannical father, his flagrant and chronic infidelities, and the devastating effect that these had on his wife and daughters.

As self-conscious and opaque as the plays often were, they were not entirely laughable. There was real emotion in the dialogues between the cruel fathers and the daughters, and their exchanges were wrenching and sad- sometimes frightening. And, I realized on my second readings, they were frighteningly reminiscent of the telephone messages that Wren had left for David.

I was tired and my eyes slid off the pages and drifted to the window, and to the sky that was brightening over the city. My mind stumbled over scraps of Holly Cade’s life- her luckless Gimlet Players, her sister’s harsh voice and suspicious eyes, Babyface looming in her apartment doorway, the nosy, frightened man in 3-F. I put the scripts down and thought about going for a run. I put on some coffee instead.

It was ten o’clock when Clare arose, and the loft was filled with hard winter glare. She padded across the living room wearing a scowl and little else. I was at the table, drinking coffee and reading the Times, and she squinted at me with shadowed eyes.

“There more of that?” she whispered, and cocked her head at my mug.

“You want some?” She nodded and I went to the kitchen and poured her a black one.

“God bless,” she said, and she took the mug and her overnight bag into the bathroom. Thirty minutes later she returned, smelling of soap and wearing jeans and a short Norton Motorcycles T-shirt. Her hair was in a loose, shiny braid and her feet were bare. Her coffee mug was empty.

“Refill?” I asked. Clare nodded. I poured her another and she took a couple of sections of the paper and headed for the sofa. I picked up the scripts again.

I understood them less the third time through, and began to find them irritating. Having extracted what I could from the dialogue, I paid more attention to the character names. In The Nest, besides Wren and Fredrick, there was the mother, Lark, and the older sister, Robin. In Liars Club, the father was again named Fredrick- Fredrick Zero- and the daughters were Cassandra and Medea. The mother was Helen. Birds and Greeks. Was there anything to that? Buried on my shelves were some yellowed paperbacks of Aristophanes and Euripides. I hadn’t looked at them since college and wondered if they might be the keys to Holly’s work, or if, like so much else in her plays, the classical allusions had been encrypted for Holly’s eyes only. I sighed and tossed the scripts on the table.

Clare was still sprawled on the sofa, her bare feet propped on cushions. She’d read the Times and the Journal both, and now she was working her way through a thick biography of Andy Warhol that she’d produced from somewhere. She heard my sigh and looked at the scripts and at me.

“You going into show business now?” she asked. She stretched her legs and ran a small, pale foot across the top of the sofa.

“Isn’t everybody- for fifteen minutes, at least?”

“I figured you for the one holdout.”

She shut her big book and sat up and went to the window. A pair of gulls wheeled and swooped above a rooftop across the street, fighting over a scrap of something. Clare wrapped her arms across her chest and watched them.

“You buy a car yet?” she asked after a while.

“I’m still renting.”

“You want to rent one tomorrow- maybe drive someplace for the day?”

This was new. I took hold of my coffee mug. “Someplace like where?” I said slowly.

“Anywhere- I don’t care- someplace out of town. Someplace we won’t run into anybody, and we can walk around.”

I thought about it while Clare watched the gulls. “I’ve got some things to take care of, but if I can get through them today, then sure.”

Clare nodded, her back still to me. After a while, she pulled on her boots, picked up her coat, dropped a pair of dark glasses on her nose, kissed the corner of my mouth, and left.

Her perfume still hung in the air when I picked up the telephone. It was nearly one o’clock and I hadn’t heard back from Gene Werner yet, or from the other ex-Gimlets I’d left messages for. I tried Werner first, but didn’t even get the answering machine. I gave up after a dozen or so rings. I tried Kendall Fein, out in LA, with much the same result. I had better luck with Terry Greer. He still lived in the city and still acted in way-off-Broadway theater and, best of all, he was actually at home.

I put another couple of miles on my accident story and Greer was eager to talk. His voice was youthful and friendly, and though his story was nothing I hadn’t heard before- that he hadn’t kept in touch with any of the Gimlets; that, when he knew them, Holly and Gene were prickly and self-absorbed; that Holly’s plays were problematic, at best, but that she was a hell of an actress- he nonetheless turned out to be a little pot of gold. Greer had pictures.

“My girlfriend was just cleaning out that drawer last night. I was going to dump those old photos, but she put them in a box. They’re not great art or anything, just snapshots from when we all went for drinks after the last performance of Liars Club. That was the last thing we did together.”

“Snapshots are better than what I’ve got now,” I said.

“I guess so.” Greer chuckled. “Well, you can pick them up whenever- there’s usually somebody around.”

Pictures.

I called David’s cell and got his voicemail and, eventually, a call back. He was in a car, on the way to the airport and not alone. I heard a man’s voice nearby, my brother Ned’s. David listened silently while I told him about my trip to Brooklyn, my conversations with the former Gimlet Players, and Greer’s pictures. His voice was full of business and studied neutrality when he spoke.

“That all sounds reasonable,” he said. “I’m back Tuesday night; we can follow up on Wednesday.”

He hung up and I headed for the door.

Greer lived not far from me, in a beaten-up brownstone on West Twenty-second Street, off Tenth Avenue. His apartment was on the second floor and, to judge by the number of names on his mailbox, he shared it with at least three other people. Greer wasn’t in when I buzzed but, as promised, someone was. The roommate was a lanky, twentysomething guy with blond hair and a bad beard; he came to the apartment door in a Columbia sweatshirt and a cloud of reefer smoke. He gave me an envelope and a nod and he shut the door.

“Thanks,” I said to the empty hall.

I opened the envelope in the little lobby of Greer’s building. There were two photos in it. They were in color and they showed two men and three women around a scarred wooden table in a corner booth in a bar somewhere. There were beer bottles on the table, and a few empty highball glasses and a candle burning in a red hurricane lamp.

A pale woman sat at the edge of the group, on the right, looking beyond the camera and maybe beyond the walls of wherever they sat. Her hair was a heavy russet mane, swept back from an angular, icon’s face. Her nose was long and delicate above a broad, mournful mouth, and her eyes were shadowy smudges. She wore a black T-shirt that fit like paint and her breasts were round and full beneath it. One white forearm rested on the table.

Even poorly lit, she looked like Wren as David had described her to me. More arresting than I’d pictured, more frankly beautiful, but I was almost certain it was her. According to the note Terry Greer had scribbled on the back of the envelope, it was also Holly Cade.

“She’s just not that into him,” Clare said. She was sitting at my kitchen counter, sipping at a vodka tonic and looking at Terry Greer’s photographs. Late-afternoon light came through the windows and warmed the color of her hair. “He’s into her, but she could give a shit.”

I was mixing a cranberry juice and club soda and eating the cold sesame noodles Clare had brought back. “Who’s not into whom?” I asked.

“The redhead, and the guy sitting next to her.”

The guy, I knew from Greer’s note, was Gene Werner. He was dark-haired and ponytailed, clean-shaven except for a short, neat beard that covered his square chin. There was a rope braid around his wrist, a small gold ring in his left ear, and a handsome smile on his lips as he looked at Holly. I stirred my drink and swallowed some and picked up the photo.

“You think?”

“It’s in the body language,” Clare said, and she was right. Werner was turned toward Holly, one arm along the back of the booth, trying to encircle her, the other on the table, a barrier against the rest of the group. His eyes were fixed on Holly’s face and there was worry and uncertainty in his smile. Holly was leaning away from his hopeful arm, and her eyes were in another zip code.

Clare played with the lime wedge in her drink. “She must be used to the attention,” she said, “wanted or otherwise.”

“How so?”

“That whole Renaissance sex-kitten thing she’s got going- it’s hot.” I looked more closely at the photos, at Holly’s pale skin and slender fingers and wide, sad mouth. Clare had a point.

“You’re looking for her?” she said. I nodded. “What for?” I smiled and shook my head. Clare held up a hand. “Forget I asked.” She took another sip of her vodka tonic and opened her Warhol biography.

I carried my drink, the noodles, and the pictures to the table, where my laptop and notepad waited. My notes were nearly up to date: I’d covered my conversation with Greer, and the photographs, and I’d summarized all I’d learned about Holly Cade. It took a page and a half but as I reread it, I wondered if it was what David had in mind.

I want you to find this Wren, for chrissakes- to find out who she is and where she lives- to find out as much about her as she has about me.

I’d done well enough on the first two items, though I needed David’s ID to be certain; it was the third I had doubts about. Assuming Wren and Holly were one and the same, how much did I really know about her beyond her name and address? The strained family ties, the forays into writing and acting and video, and the decidedly mixed results, the striking looks and the self-absorption- what did they add up to? What had she been doing since the Gimlets had folded and her video show had gone nowhere? Who was Babyface, and who was he to her? Why was she trolling the web for a guy like David? And, having found him, what the hell did she want from him?