Dorothy on the Rocks (7 page)

“Arrf!” Mr. Ed says, spotting a squirrel next to the sycamore tree behind us. He leaps off the bench and barks like he's possessed. It's hard having an extended conversation with Ed because he is so easily distracted.

“Let's go,” I say, pulling at the leash, and he has no choice but to obey. I like that in a companion. We walk around the Great Lawn. At the north end I stop and look south at the skyline. The view is magnificent from here. On a summer weekend it is almost impossible to make it past this part of God's green acre without a couple of tourists asking you to take a picture of them framed by the vista. Mr. Ed spots a Great Dane and tugs at the leash, anxious for a sniff.

On the way back to the apartment my dog companion confesses a rather intense infatuation he had with a very inappropriate Irish setter, or at least that's what I think he says.

He snarls at a poodle as we turn down Columbus Avenue, causing her to yelp and hide behind her owner's legs. He “arfs” with satisfaction and then we ease into a stroll for the rest of the walk home.

I give Mr. Ed some doggie treats and wish him a good evening. He's asleep on the rug by the time I turn out the light. When I get home, my message machine is blinking.

It's Dee-Honey, wanting to set up dates with me for the summer. “So glad you're available, honey,” her voice on the machine says.

It's already nine o'clock so I decide to call her tomorrow. I light a much-needed cigarette and get a beer out of the fridge and turn on the radio to the Yankees game. It's the bottom of the seventh inning. They're playing Baltimore and winning, which is not a surprise. I sit in the dark sipping my beer and listening. Derek Jeter hits a home run and the fans yell and the Yankees go ahead four to nothing.

I try to concentrate on the action and not on the fact that I haven't heard from my charming young prince of a fellow who now has a set of my keys and a place at the table of my life. I pick up the phone to make sure it's working. It is.

“Goodie,” I say out loud, “are you there? The Yankees are winning. Derek just hit a home run. Remember how you and Joe and I watched the games that summer?” The words catch in my throat. “Goodie, are you there?” I turn down the radio and hold my breath and listen for the flapping of little wings, but there is nothing except the sound of my Big Ben desk clock ticking off the seconds.

The next morning I wake up with a start and realize I have fallen asleep on the sofa with the radio on, and now it is seven a.m. and Curtis and Kuby are bantering away about Al Sharpton's latest bid for notoriety. My head is pounding. I take two aspirin and decide to go for a run and start my life over—no more cigarettes, beer, scotch, sugar, younger men, and no more imaginary fairy godmothers. I have a singing gig to prepare for. The thought of it takes my breath away. I light a cigarette and remind myself I have six weeks. Plenty of time.

I splash water on my face and try to get my hair to go in one direction. I make a cup of coffee, smoke another cigarette, then I feed Bixby and leave my apartment. It's not even eight o'clock yet. Amazing! I stop in front of my building and start to stretch out my legs.

Across the street, on the stoop of one of the beautifully-renovated-single-family-million-dollar-plus brownstones, sits a slightly balding, slightly overweight fellow smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper. This guy spends a lot of time sitting on his front
stoop smoking. Obviously he's not allowed to practice his bad habit indoors. He sips his coffee and takes a drag off his cigarette. I'm sure his coffee is not the discount blend I drink but rather a robust, full-bodied import. I feel poverty stricken for a moment and jealous of this man's big brownstone with the chandelier on the first floor and the flagstone patio in back, but then I think, so what? Maybe he does drink a better brand of coffee than I do, and lives in better digs, but nobody is telling me where I can or can't smoke—except the city of New York, but that's beside the point. So there, Mr. Big Bucks! It's horrible, the mean thoughts I construct to bolster my ego so I can get through the day.

I groan as my right hamstring relaxes into the stretch. Big Bucks looks up momentarily from his paper and nods almost imperceptibly. I nod even more imperceptibly and continue stretching. The sky is crystal clear and there is no humidity. A perfect day. I set off at a slow trot and head for the park. I'm more of a runner/walker than a pure runner. My knees have never been the same since I hyperextended the ligaments in a free-fall smash into a fence skiing about fifteen years ago. I stop at the red light on Central Park West and turn on my Walkman, which is clipped to my shorts. Cyndi Lauper fills my ears. “Girls just want to have fun,” I sing along with Cyndi as I run/walk down to the boat pond near East Seventy-second Street, and then under the Trefoil Arch heading toward Bethesda Fountain. Adorning the top of the fountain is a bronze angel with extended wings and a long skirt that billows around her legs.

She is the
Angel of the Waters
, commemorating the opening in 1842 of the Croton Aqueduct, which purified the city's water supply. In the Gospel of John, an angel was said to have troubled
the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem and thereby bestowed healing power on its waters. I stop in front of the fountain and catch my breath. I am comforted in the Angel's presence, knowing she is walking this earth, troubling the waters and healing the afflicted. I dip my hands in the fountain, splash the water on my face, and smile up at her. “Let out the bad air and let in the good air,” I think as I continue my run/walk up through the Ramble and past Belvedere Castle.

Mr. Big Bucks is not on his stoop when I return. He's no doubt down on Wall Street making gobs of money in that rarified world of high-stakes Monopoly, and good for him, because right now I feel rich too. My body is working in spite of the abuse I heap on it. My skin is clear, my hair still has some natural sheen, and my teeth are all my own. Life is good. Indeed, the waters of Bethesda have worked magic and I don't, at least for the moment, need to find fault with the rest of the world so I can feel better about myself, and that is definitely some kind of miracle.

I open the door to my apartment and find Jack sitting on the sofa reading the paper. I let out a startled yelp. He smiles at me. “Hey, baby, I brought some sticky buns.” He gestures to a Hot & Crusty bag on the coffee table. “I would have made some coffee, but I couldn't find the filters.”

I sit down and try to calm my heart, which is thumping in my chest like the percussion section of a John Philip Sousa marching band.

“Are you okay?” Jack asks.

“Sure, sure,” I say, still short of breath. “I'm just not used to walking into my apartment and finding someone here
and it caught me by surprise and at first I thought I was going to have a heart attack but I guess not so we won't have to call 911.” I take a deep breath.

“Sorry,” Jack says.

“It's fine, but I do think I need to sit here quietly for a few minutes and try to slow my heart rate down before it goes into arrhythmia which it has done a few times like when I was on a roller coaster in Sandusky, Ohio, and that's how it feels right now which believe me is scary . . .” I finish with the last bit of oxygen left in my lungs.

“Gosh,” Jack says contritely. “I didn't mean to upset you. I thought I'd drop by this morning and have breakfast with you. I'm looking at an apartment in the neighborhood.”

He walks over and starts to rub my shoulders. “I know Swedish massage,” Jack purrs. “Why don't you lie down on the bed and I can help you to relieve some of that anxiety. It'll feel great.” Damn. He is going to get to me again. I'm a sucker for any form of body contact.

“Do you have any oil? Baby oil or something?” Jack asks, heading for the bathroom. Damn and double damn. I am especially a sucker for body contact involving oil.

“Take your clothes off,” he says as he enters with a bottle of discount you-know-what.

“Maybe I should jump in the shower,” I suggest, suddenly feeling self-conscious about the run/walk sweat I worked up in the summer heat.

“We'll do that later. You smell great,” he says straddling me and pulling his shirt over his head. “This is going to be really good, Mags. Trust me. All right. Now close your eyes and breathe. I'll do all the work,” Jack coos.

Oh I do like it when someone coos, and I like it especially when someone else does all the work. I moan a little, hum softly, and try to relax.

When I was about five years old, my mother and I tried an experiment we read about in
Highlights
children's magazine. I don't remember the exact directions or all the ingredients, but basically you combined food coloring with salt and other everyday substances, and in a few minutes the raw ingredients were transformed into beautiful crystal sculptures. Jack's alchemy is beginning to transform my raw everyday ingredients into some new configuration, a warmer, softer substance. Or am I just more “me” in the presence of “him”? Or is the mix of exercise endorphins and gentle massage causing me to hallucinate? Whatever it is, it is good. It certainly feels good as I lie on my bow-tie-print quilt with a strong young man straddling my body massaging away the tensions of the world. The massage turns into sex and then into a shower and then into a day. Jack leaves to look at apartments, and I decide it is time to plan my show at Don't Tell Mama. It's time to call Thomas Garrick, the accompanist I like from
Eleanor Roosevelt: The Musical!
He had mentioned that he liked my voice, thought I had a sort of Barbra Streisand quality. So there, it's true, flattery will get you something, maybe not everything, but definitely something.

“Hello, Thomas. It's Maggie Barlow remember me? Aka Barbra Streisand?” I announce into his answering machine. “Anyway, I have a club date in a few weeks and I was wondering if you'd be available to play it. I have all the charts. So it would be a few rehearsals and then two dates the end of next month. The twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth. Give me a call. Thanks.”

I open my cupboard.
The
cupboard. The cupboard that stands
against the wall in my living room and contains all the “this and that” of my life. This program, that review, this tax return, that playbill, this broken tambourine, that photo album, this sewing kit, and now I look for those charts. Those charts that Goodie had done for me. My music. Our music. We were both eclectic in our taste and had fun putting together odd medleys combining rock and Broadway or blues and standards. Goodie and I worked together on every arrangement so that it sat just right in my voice and expressed just what we wanted. It took a lot of work. We argued, laughed, cried.

I remember standing at the window of his studio one afternoon looking out at the rooftops of West Fifty-fourth Street. “You've helped me to fall in love with music,” I said.

Until then music had been a means to an end for me—a way to get noticed, to get a boyfriend, to get a job, to get attention. But Goodie changed that. He made me see that the music wasn't about me. The music was about the music. The second or third session I had with him, after spending half an hour belting out tunes and trying to impress him with my power and my range, he told me to listen while he sat and carefully played the melody line from one of the songs I had been blasting through. He played it slowly, one note at a time, and then he added chords and a harmony and the music began to swell and I heard it.

“That's the song,” he said when he finished. “Your voice is just another instrument that serves it. You have to be part of the music and not try to upstage it.”

I'd spent most of my life trying to upstage whatever seemed threatening to me. I laughed too loud, drank too much, stayed out too late, all in an attempt to keep “feelings” at bay. Like the pioneers traveling west in wagon trains, I lit bonfires to keep the
scary things away from my campgrounds. I didn't like feelings, or maybe more to the point, I didn't know what to do with them. I learned to sing from my mother who sang hymns at the kitchen sink. I can still hear her singing “The Old Rugged Cross” as she carefully dried the cups and plates and knives and forks and put them neatly away. The music seemed to put her in a different place, a place that had nothing to do with two kids and a dog and a mortgage and a Pontiac station wagon, and all the feelings she couldn't deal with—a place where she could be happy with no thought of us and our scrapes and bruises. So I also learned to let the music take me away from my feelings. I wrapped my talent in a flurry of style and attitude and pizzazz and not much else. Until I met Goodie.

I stand looking at the scraps of my life that are wedged into the five wide shelves of my grandmother's cherry wood cupboard. An old eight-by-ten photo lands on the floor as I rummage through the piles of
things:
a coffee tin of miscellaneous buttons, a back-gammon set, a Norman Rockwell one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle unopened (who has the time?), a flashlight without batteries, three yellow legal pads still in the cellophane, a Xeroxed script of
Little Red Riding Hood,
sides from an under-five on
All My Children,
a half-empty bag of rubber bands. Toward the back on the third shelf I locate the accordion file marked
Goodie/Charts
. I pull it out, place it in my lap, and untie the string that holds it closed.

Goodie wrote his charts by hand, music calligraphy, beautiful to look at, on ivory medium-stock composing sheets. He wrote in pencil, soft no. 1 lead, sharpened to a fine point in the Panasonic electric pencil sharpener that sat to the left of his piano. Sometimes I stood beside him and consulted. We discussed ideas for the arrangements
and agreed on the key and tempo, but really I just watched. I'm a voyeur in that way. I love watching people do things they do well. I love watching painters paint and potters pot and ballplayers play ball. And I loved watching Goodie write music.