Evan Hunter - Romance

“Why haven’t you applied for a pension?” she asked.

“I don’t want a pension.”

“You want to stay on the force, is that it?”

“I’m a good cop,” he said flatly. “Getting shot don’t make inc no less a good cop.”

“But you can quit with a pension anytime you want…”

“I don’t want to quit.”

“You don’t have to invent imaginary chest pains to keep you off the street…”

“They’re not imaginary!”

“You’re entitled to the pension…”

“I don’t want the…”

“You can claim…”

“I want back on the street!”

“… federal disability incur…”

“I wasn’t afraid to go back! ”

“But if you didn’t want to risk it again, nobody would blame…”

“They already blame me!” he said. “They think I got shot because I wasn’t doing the job right. I must’ve been doing something wrong or I wouldn’ta got shot in the first place, you understand? To them, I’m some kinda failure. They don’t even want to be around me, man, they’re afraid they’re liable’a get shot if they’re even around me. I take that disability pension…”

He stopped, shook his head.

“I’m a good cop,” he said again.

“You go another eight months with chest pains nobody can find, you’ll be looking at an Article Four…”

“Yeah, but if I quit …”

“Yeah?”

“If I grab the pension and run…”

“Yeah?”

“They’ll say the nigguh’s got no balls.”

“Neither have I,” Sharyn said.

They stood looking at each other. The phone rang, startling them both. She picked up the receiver.

“Chief Cooke,” she said.

“Sharyn? It’s me.”

Bert Kling?

Now what the hell?

“Just a second,” she said, and covered the mouthpiece. “Promise me you’ll make that appointment,” she said.

“Give me the fuckin card,” he said, and snatched it from her hand.

The rehearsal had resumed at five P.M. that Monday and it was now a little past six. All four actors in the leading roles had been on the stage together for the past hour in three of the play’s most difficult scenes. Tempers were beginning to fray.

Freddie Corbin had named his four major characters the Actress, the Understudy, the Detective, and the Director. Michelle found this pretentious, but then again she found the whole damn play pretentious. The other four actors in it played about ten thousand people, half of them black, half of them white, none of them with speaking roles, all of them intended to convey “a sense of time and place,” as Freddie himself had written in one of his interminably long stage directions.

The two male extras played detectives, thieves, doormen, restaurant patrons, ushers, librarians, cabdrivers, waiters, politicians, hot dog vendors, salesmen, newspaper reporters and television journalists. The two female extras played prostitutes, police officers, telephone operators, secretaries, waitresses, cashiers, saleswomen, token takers, newspaper reporters and television journalists. All four, male or female, were also responsible for quickly moving furniture and props during the brief blackouts between scenes.

There were two acts in the play and forty-seven scenes. The sets for each scene were “suggestive rather than literal,” as Freddie had also written in one of his stage directions. A table and two chairs, for example, represented a restaurant. A bench and a section of railing represented the boardwalk in Atlantic City, where the Actress wins the Miss America beauty pageant that is the true start of her career.

The scene they were rehearsing this afternoon was the one in which someone stabs…

“Do we ever find out for sure who stabbed her?” Michelle called to the sixth row, where she knew their esteemed director was sitting with Marvin Morgenstern, the show’s producer, affectionately called either “Mr. Morningstar” after the Herman Wouk character, or else “Mr. Money-bags” after his occupation. Michelle had shaded her eyes with one hand and was peering past the lights into the darkness. She felt this was a key question. How the hell was an actress supposed to portray a stabbing victim if she didn’t know who the hell had stabbed her?

“That’s not germane to the scene,” Kendall called from somewhere in the dark, she wished she could see where, she’d go out there and stab him .

“It’s germane to me, Ash,” she called, whatever the hell germane meant, still shading her eyes, still seeing nothing but the glare of the lights and the blackened theater beyond.

“Can we just get on with the scene?” he said. “We’ll go over who done what to whom when we do notes.”

“Excuse me, Ash,” she said, “but the scene happens to be what I’m talking about. And the whom who gets the what done to her happens to be meem. I come out of the restaurant and I’m walking toward the bus stop, and this person steps out of the shadows…”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Meesh, let’s just do the fucking thing, okay?”

Mark Riganti, the actor playing the Detective. Tall and lean and dark-haired and wearing jeans, sneakers, and a purple Ralph Lauren sweater.

“We’ve been doing the fucking thing,” Michelle said, “over and over again , and I still don’t know who it is that steps out of the shadows and stabs me.”

“That’s not important,” Andrea said.

Andrea Packer, the All About Eve twit who was playing the Understudy. Andrea was nineteen years old, with long blond hair, dark brown eyes and a lean, coltish figure. In real life, she had a waspish tongue and a cool manner that perfectly suited the character of the Understudy; sometimes, Michelle felt she wasn’t acting at all. Her rehearsal outfit this afternoon consisted of a short blue wraparound skirt over black leotard and tights.

Michelle hated her guts.

“Maybe it’s not important to you, “ she said, “but then again you’re not the one getting stabbed. I’m the one getting stabbed by this unidentifiable person who steps out of the shadows wearing a long black coat and a black hat pulled down over his or her head, who is really Jerry…”

“Hi,” Jerry said, popping his head out from behind the teaser, where he’d been waiting for his cue.

“… who was the waiter with the mustache in the scene just before this one. I don’t think it’s the waiter with the mustache who’s stabbing me, is it? Because then it becomes just plain ridiculous. And it can’t be the Detective who’s stabbing me because he’s the one who leads me back to finding myself again and all that. So it’s got to be either the Understudy or the Director because they’re the only other important characters in the play, so which one is it? Is it Andrea or is it Coop, I just want to know who it is.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s me,” Cooper Haynes said apologetically. He was forty-three years old, a dignified-looking gentleman who’d done years and years of soap opera — daytime serial, as it was known in the trade — usually playing one or another sympathetic doctor. In Romance, he was playing the Director. Actually, he was much nicer than any director Michelle had ever met in her life, even the ones who didn’t try to get in her pants. “I haven’t been playing the part as if I’m the one who stabs her,” he said, and shaded his eyes and looked out into the darkness. “Ash, if I am the stabber, I think I should know it, don’t you? It would change my entire approach.”