Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

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.