What She Saw... (23 page)

10. Arnold Allen

OR “The Man in the Sheepskin Coat”

“EXCUSE ME, MISS. Excuse me. Miss. Miss. Excuse me. Miss . . .” That's how it started; that's what he said—at the end of the winter, in the middle of the crosswalk, on her way home from work. She didn't answer. She figured whoever it was probably only wanted a handout. And she was hungry, and tired, and stingy. And it was getting dark, and she was eager to kick off her shoes and put up her feet. And everyone knew you weren't supposed to talk to strangers. Just like you weren't supposed to chew gum when you played sports. Or smoke if you were on the pill. Or drink when you drove. It wasn't safe. And look how far playing it safe had gotten her—all the way to Toffler Associates, a medical-textbook supplier on East Forty-third. And tomorrow it would be something else: the NYU Dental School, the Boys Club of America,
Roofer's Monthly
magazine, the private banking division of Chase Manhattan.

Every morning Phoebe rode the subway to another glass-and-steel monolith, another high-speed elevator that led to another set of frosted-glass doors, behind which another moon-faced receptionist leafing through that morning's tabloids would avert her eyes just long enough to punch in the three-digit extension of Debbie or Barbara, Denise or Louise Ann, any one of whom would emerge from behind a simple wooden door with a simple wooden smile only to lead her back through that same wooden door—down one hall, then another, then another, past the ladies' room, the water cooler, the microwave, and the minifridge—“If you brought your lunch, you can put it in there”—to another corkboard cubicle “humanized” by another chimpanzee calendar, another petrified-wood placard proclaiming the benefits of friendship, another phalanx of Smurfs sitting atop another beige computer on which she'd be asked to compose another set of inconsequential memos for another fake-cheerful executive—if she wasn't already copying the Greenwich, Connecticut, phone book into a database, or filing color-coded purchase orders into a gargantuan black ring binder.

It was curiosity that made her glance sideways—curiosity and maybe a little of something else. Arnold Allen was attractive in a fatherly way. Not that he looked like Leonard Fine— far from it. He was a light-skinned black man in early middle age, with a slender face and glassy brown eyes floating in pools of bright white. And he was dressed in brown wide-wale corduroys, tassel loafers, and a sheepskin coat, the soiled collar of which seemed incongruous with his otherwise elegant demeanor. “Miss. I'm sorry to bother you.” He walked at her side as he spoke. “But I couldn't help noticing you on the street. And. Well. Look.” Here he laughed lightly, as if the absurdity of the situation had not escaped him. “I don't do things like this very often, but you have a rare sort of beauty.” With that, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a business card. Phoebe didn't so much take it as have it thrust into her palm.
Arnold Allen, Vice President, Atlantic Pictures, Burbank, California,
she read as she walked. Could it be true? Things like this didn't happen every day.

“Thank you,” she said, stunned and flattered and wary all in the same breath. She paused on the corner to drop the card into her bag. “I'll definitely give you a call.” With that, she turned to walk away.

“Miss! Please!” It was the urgency of Arnold Allen's supplication that made her stop in her tracks and turn back around. So the two of them were standing three feet apart, blocking the way, commuters pushing past them. She thought she'd let him finish his sentence. It seemed like the least she could do. “Please don't go yet,” he importuned. “Arnold Allen. You haven't heard of me?
Mother of the Bride, Last Day in Heaven, You're the One I
Want.
I've produced more hits than you are old.” He extended his arm. “We haven't even been properly introduced.”

Phoebe took a step forward, met his hand halfway. She didn't see the harm in that. And besides, maybe she had heard of Arnold Allen. It sounded vaguely familiar, the way most names do. “Hi,” she said, “I'm Phoebe.”

“Well, it's a pleasure to meet you,” he said, laying a second hand on top of the pile, like a visiting dignitary in the act of concluding a peace accord. “I just—I can't get over your face!” His eyes danced, his brow furled. Phoebe turned a cheek, smiled in embarrassment. “For God's sake, tell me—are you a model? A student?”

Suspicion seized her. She reasoned it away. Why would this man lie? Unless he only wanted a date. But he didn't seem like that kind of guy. He was too old, the wrong race. “I work in documentary film,” she told him. It was a lie but not an unrealistic one.

She'd been wondering lately if real life wasn't, ultimately, beyond the reaches of theoretical paradigms.

“So you already know a little about the business . . .”

“Sort of, yeah, but I should really be going,” she twittered, her discomfort level rising at the thought that already her lie was catching up with her. “I have your number. I promise I'll give you a call.”

Arnold Allen released her hand, grimaced dolefully. “I understand. Maybe . . . could I just walk with you for a few blocks?”

What did this man want from her? This man made Phoebe nervous.

Oh, but the request seemed innocuous enough. And she was concerned about offending him. She figured he probably got attitude from all kinds of white people who didn't believe a black man could hold such an important position. And she considered herself different, progressive. And besides, Kevin McFeeley had been just a stranger once, too—just a face and a voice before he became her boyfriend.

And wasn't most of life a calculated risk? Wasn't even crossing the street a kind of gamble with the gods? There were brakes that could fail, drivers who could fall asleep at the wheel. And she hated disappointing people. And she was starved for attention. And she was vain—quietly, pathologically vain. Which is to say that she felt somehow compelled to reward Arnold Allen for having identified in her a “rare sort of beauty.”

“Okay,” she found herself agreeing. “But just a few blocks. Then I really have to go.”

“No problem,” he said. “Whatever you want. That's cool with me.”

AS THEY MADE their way up Second Avenue, Arnold Allen ran down an extended list of his Hollywood credits, told her he was the brother of a famous weatherman and that he'd been raised in Brooklyn but now made his home in Beverly Hills.

“Speaking of home,” Phoebe interjected on the corner of Ninth Street. “This is where I head off.”

“Listen!” he clucked, as if a brilliant idea had suddenly come over him. “We're taping a pilot, and I just know you'd be perfect as the sexy, young schoolteacher. It's not a big part, but it's a great place to start. Would you be willing to read a few lines for me?”

“Now?” she croaked. She was worried she'd perform poorly, ruin her chances. “I mean, maybe I should practice first. I mean, I've never really acted before. I mean, not professionally or anything.”

“Don't worry about it,” he said. “You'll be fine. This'll be your practice. Then when you show up Friday, you'll know what to expect.”

Friday? Everything was happening so fast.

But, then, wasn't that just life—a series of stultifying lulls interrupted by great bursts of activity? And what if one day she would look back on this meeting with a kind of disbelief that it had all been so easy? “I mean, I guess I could do that,” she started to say. “It's just that—it's getting kind of late.”

“Hey, where do you live—do you live near here?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Great—why don't we go to your house?”

“My house?”

Arnold Allen prodded her upper arm playfully. “Hey. Listen. Don't be scared of me. I'm old enough to be your father. You're a beautiful woman, but I'm not after that. Call my secretary. Go ahead. Ask her if I'm a nice guy. Three hours difference. She'll still be there.”

“Maybe we could go to a restaurant?”

“Listen. I'd say yes, but we're going to need a little privacy, and there's not much time.” He cocked his head in the direction of uptown. “I got a dinner date in an hour, and I'm clearing out of here tomorrow morning.” He lowered his chin, narrowed his eyes. “Arnold Allen. You sure you've never heard of me?”

Maybe she had. But he was still a stranger. And having him up to her apartment—it didn't seem right, it didn't seem safe.

But she was sick of collating and faxing and filing and phoning and transcribing. And she wouldn't have minded a little extra cash for shoes. She wore the same pair of black suede platform sandals every day. The toes were worn and gray, the platforms were melting away to ground level. And the daily stress of shoplifting—she could have done without it, frankly. Someday she meant to pay back the Fifth Avenue Epicure for all those lovely premade grilled vegetable sourdough baguette sandwiches she'd sneaked into her handbag of late. In the meantime, she couldn't persuade herself to spend an entire hour's wage on a piece of bread and three zucchini rounds. She would rather have skipped lunch. She always planned to skip lunch. She always planned to revert back to her earlier starvation diet of frozen yogurt and muffin crumbs. But she always got hungry. That was the problem.

She was human, after all.

And whether or not they could actually afford it, she'd convinced herself that the three hundred dollars Leonard and Roberta shelled out every month to help cover her rent was a sacrifice they were making at the expense of their own comfort. Oh, but it wasn't so much the money; it was the failure to live up to her promise that their beneficence implied. It had been said in the Fine family since before anyone could remember that if anyone made a fortune it would be Phoebe. And it had been said with a tinge of condescension, since the expensive tastes she'd been shown to possess (beginning in high school, with her purchase of Guess overalls) were considered fundamentally incompatible with the values her parents subscribed to—values defined not by the vagaries of the stock market but by the crescendos and decrescendos of a mad genius's last symphony.

Condescension or not, however, Phoebe was determined to prove Leonard and Roberta right—and wrong. She wanted to show them just how much happiness money could buy. Later they'd whisper between themselves, “Isn't it amazing?” And “Could it be true? Could she really have made it that big, that fast?”

And she'd pretend not to hear.

And there was something about walking the streets of Manhattan when you were nobody, nowhere, nothing. Even the homeless guys mocked you: “Smile, honey—things ain't that bad.” What did you do then—smile? If you smiled, they won. If you didn't smile, they won, too. It was television's fault. It was all those glossy magazines with their preternaturally radiant cover girls. Every idiot on the street saw herself as a celebrity in the making. Was that it? Or was it rather that Phoebe Fine in particular had been reared to believe that she was special and others ordinary?

And what if she was to pass up her one big chance in life to be rich and famous? How would she ever forgive herself for something like that? Not that she necessarily aspired to be rich and famous, and she certainly didn't see herself as an actress type. She was far too self-conscious, not quite enough of an exhibitionist. But she wanted to be on TV; she wanted people to see her on TV. She wanted all the naysayers from her past to find her transmogrified into a glittering, impenetrable amalgam of pixels they had once known as flesh and blood, back when she was a mere mortal. They would be looking and she would be laughing, privately, somewhere far from the camera's lens. And that distance—that divide—would be enough poetic justice for one lifetime.

“Alright, let's go to my house.” She looked at Arnold Allen.

“Terrific,” he said. “You're a great girl. Really. I can tell.”

THEY RODE THE elevator in silence, Arnold Allen air-whistling at the ceiling, Phoebe staring at her shoes. She wasn't so much nervous as she was anxious to get the whole thing over with. She wanted the results without the effort. “This is my apartment,” she said, fitting the key in the lock and flipping on the lights. “It's actually a sublet. I have to get out once a month. That's how I can afford to live alone.”

“Not bad,” he said, circling the tiny living room. “I bet you get nice light in here.”

Gripping the sill, he leaned his head out the window, extended one leg behind him in a crude approximation of an arabesque.

“It's okay.” She found it odd that he wasn't wearing any socks. “Can I take your coat or anything?”

“Oh, that's okay—thanks.” He bounded over to the upright piano and straddled the bench. “You play?”

He ran his hands up and down the keys but not hard enough to make a sound.

“Not really,” Phoebe mumbled. “I studied the violin.”

“The violin? Great instrument. Very romantic.”

“So what should I read?”

“Oh, right.” Arnold Allen stood up. “This is the thing. I don't have the script on me, but the setup is this. You got a room full of disobedient children, okay? And you come in, you're wearing something tight and sexy, and you tell them to quiet down. And they all shut up and you start giving them a lesson. You got that?”

“So I have to improvise?”

“Exactly.” He paused. Then he said, “Hey, you got something cute to put on? It'll make the whole thing more believable. A short dress maybe? A silk top? Something like that?”

Phoebe's breath left her body. Was a change of outfit really necessary? There were always so many obstacles. And she was always so exhausted—exhausted before she'd ever exerted herself. “I mean I guess so,” she faltered, her eyes grazing the hemline of her knee-length beige skirt, her corporate skirt. How hideous it looked to her at that moment! “I mean—if you think it'll help.”