“I’m kinda the caretaker here,” he said softly.
“Well, Jeeves, I’m Cassandra.”
Something below his thick and turbulent skin radiated outward, a kind of profound yet gentle sadness. He spoke in a low raspy voice. “Are you okay, Cassie?” I nodded yes. “You can stay the night, but you have to leave early.”
“Why, do you turn into a handsome prince?”
“No, but the lord of the manor returns. Okay?”
“Sure, thanks.”
“Y’hungry? Anything I can get for you?”
“I wouldn’t mind another Scotch.”
He went to the far side of the room, took out a glass, and only poured a drink for me, neat. He held the glass in one hand and a twenty-five-year-old Scotch bottle in the other. As he hobbled over to me, seesawing his body up and down, I was reminded of a sort of sexy, virile Elephant Man. Though he had been mangled by nature’s barbaric sense of humor, I sensed a very thoughtful and delicate spirit locked within.
Despite my initial reaction, I quickly found his distorted face truly alluring. Usually pain is deep and hidden, but here it was right on the surface. It was as though each twisted little contour was a tiny sad face of its own—a trapped audience in that fleshy arena. Narcissistically, all I could think was that he looked how I felt, cracked up yet held together by a modicum of wit and dignity.
“I know I shouldn’t say this,” he began, plunking down next to me, “but you might be the prettiest girl to ever grace this old room.” When I smiled, he added, “And I’m probably the ugliest thing that ever set foot in here.”
“Probably,” I kidded. He laughed.
“Just for the record, I didn’t always look this way. Truth be told, I was once a young prince.”
“What happened?”
“I went through about a dozen windshields and just kept a-goin’.” Pointing to a picture frame on an end table, he added, “That’s what I resembled before.”
A handsome younger face with the same eyes and hair greeted me. “Hello, sexy.”
“In a way I’m glad to have left him behind.”
“Why’s that?”
“When you’re young, you’re handsome and horny, so you screw through everything in sight. No one is ever good enough. After so much empty sex, you’re kind of ruined for any one girl. Then you reach middle age and guess what, you’re lonely anyway and now you always will be.”
“Yeah,” I replied facetiously, “who wants to be young and sexy?”
“You think I’m kidding, but sex appeal is a curse. If you got it, hallelujah. But I’m telling you, everything comes with a price.”
“That sounds a bit like how I feel about my family,” I said as he leaned forward to re-Scotch me. “I was grateful to be adopted, but I spent most of my life wondering if the orphanage in Panmunjom really would’ve been that bad.”
“So you’re a reporter?”
“A reporter without a story.” I decided not to mention the dumb Scrubbs case. “I mean, I just got into this big fight with my mother in Mesopotamia. I was heading back up to New York when I got a call that my apartment building in Manhattan has just been condemned. Then a cop pulled me over and I heard on his radio that there was a homicide here.”
“Oh, down the hill.”
“Yeah, but there’s no story.” A headache in my frontal lobe started clawing toward a migraine.
“There’s always a story, just rarely the one you’re looking for.”
“Not for me, I’m cursed plain and simple,” I said.
“Wanna hear cursed? I got drunk one day, slammed into a retaining wall going a hundred miles an hour, died on the operating table, was brought back, ended up losing my family, got a botched face-lift, and …” He let out an exasperated sigh. “It gets worse from there.”
“I’ll raise your lost family and wall collision with a stillborn child, a failed marriage, and a kamikazeed career.” Focusing on his face, I saw tears in his big beautiful eyes. This painfully twisted and brutally damaged man was crying for me!
I leaned in to give him a comforting hug. No one ever wins at misery poker.
A desperate consolation, as if we both believed we were the last two people alive, started snowballing into something much more. His large strong hands, which were holding my throbbing skull, proceeded down along my tense neck and knotted shoulders. He had no idea of the waves of ecstasy he was releasing. It felt so utterly soothing that after just minute my headache lifted away. A few more minutes, as his hands climbed down the tiny ladder of my back, and I just melted into vapor.
I didn’t even know when his large fingers breached the borders of zippers and elastic bands. I found myself swooning under his unstoppable flow. Strangely, his grotesqueness unhinged all self-consciousness. As clothes came off and our affections manifested themselves physically, our combined sense of grief made for a desperate variety of love. Though his handicaps limited certain motion, hip thrustings, finger probings, and tongue twirling were not among them. Indeed, the man was bottomless well of energy. Soon, in this bizarro world, I found that each ejaculation only seemed to energize him further.
Afterward, lying in that wonderful healing bed, he asked me more about my woebegone past: How could any husband leave someone as beautiful as me? Couldn’t I rebuild my shattered career? Why did I need to drink so much?
Maybe it was the booze, but I couldn’t recall feeling quite so wonderful in a long while, and though these tender topics were something I usually recoiled from, he steadily lured me out, compelling me to tell him more messy details about myself:
After journalism school and landing a great job for the
Daily News
, I hit the pavement, writing solid, simple features, working up a street beat, slowly positioning myself to get ever better assignments. After ten years of writing, still in my thirties, I networked with other reporters in the city. When I was offered the editorship of the City desk, I gladly grabbed it. And that was my first mistake. I loved writing and hated office politics. Yet my type-A personality was simply not programmed to retreat. I kept pushing myself at a job I wasn’t particularly good at. That’s when I started washing pills down with the morning coffee. Then doing shots to unwind at night.
During my last few years at the
News
, I made the novice’s mistake of having a fling with a senior editor, Paul, who had been covering for all my little fuck-ups. Unlike me, he was one of those people who grew stronger under adversity. His star seemed to be rising as mine fell. This always made me wonder if it was really love or just pity he had for me.
In the course of our very first date, he voiced his desire to have a family, but for the remainder of our thirties we kept running on our little hamster wheels, sixty hours a week, barely taking vacations, burning up our fertile years in the grind of our jobs. As one of the new breed of sensitive men, he respected my career.
When I turned thirty-eight, we finally married and soon afterward he was offered an opportunity as an assistant producer for a syndicated television news show. Less than a year later he was snatched up by a nearby Fox-affiliated news show where he quickly rose to executive producer.
Around then, I found myself screwing up twice as much and taking triple the blame for it. Slowly little duties were reassigned. The bigger problem was the fact that the sun was setting on the newspaper industry: people’s increasing dependency on the Internet—BlackBerries, iPhones, and laptops—was steadily killing it. Old dailies were folding one after another all over the country. Operating costs were being reduced to a trickle. It was all just a matter of time.
Late one night, on the eve of turning forty, I woke up in the little hours with an acute bout of morning sickness. That’s when I realized, hallelujah, I was pregnant! I had the best face-saving excuse to quit my job and start working freelance gigs with a morsel of my dignity still intact. And Paul couldn’t be happier. His wish had been fulfilled. He was making more than enough to support his new family.
Unbeknownst to me, my pregnancy became the first part of a two-year descent into maternity hell. That pregnancy went to full-term, but the little girl, who we were going to name Jeane, was stillborn. Over the next year I had two miscarriages. The next time I got pregnant, the amniocentesis revealed that the fetus had Down syndrome. That’s when Paul and I had the first major battle of our marriage. He wanted to keep the child.
“You never see a sad kid with Down’s,” he argued.
I simply didn’t think I had the strength to raise a baby with that kind of adversity.
We argued about it right up until the legal deadline, before I finally got the abortion. After a series of painful blood tests, my gynecologist explained that it appeared I was incapable of ever getting pregnant again. We went to a fertility clinic and kept trying, but nothing stuck. We talked about a third-world adoption, but as a charity import myself, I found myself shuddering at the thought of it. When Paul wasn’t taking a business trip, he was working late. Eventually I heard the rumor that he was having an affair with an intern and felt too pathetic to blame him. We had taken on way too much water. Tensions built up to such a point that simply a strange glance would set off a shock-and-awe of explosive fights.
“Kids are always where things get tricky,” Jeeves consoled.
Our conversation lapsed into silence. Like two panicky swimmers, we hugged each other until we drowned into sleep.
E
arly the next morning, still intoxicated, Big Jeeves gently woke me with a soft kiss on my rosy cheek. He informed me that the lord of the manor was about to arrive. I had to scat or he’d lose his job.
“The only problem is,” I explained catatonically, “I can’t move.”
He made me a cup of coffee (which I was too drunk to even hold), helped me dress, then led me to my car and drove me to a nearby motel. The Inn & Out was several miles down the main road. Walking me to the front office, he said, “Spend the day here and sleep it off. It’s cheap and the rooms are so cold, even the bed bugs don’t stay.”
I thanked him for the sympathetic ear and the great internal workout. He handed me my car keys. Before he left I asked him if he knew anything about Missy Scrubbs or her family. He shrugged and just started walking into the woods like some old bear.
I knocked on the motel door for a while until an older woman, the desk clerk, opened up. She introduced herself as Rose. I handed over my credit card and she assigned me a rathole at the farthest end of the old building.
The room was an undocumented catalog of fungi and mildew, but I was too tired to care. Flipping on the light, I saw that it was also covered with dust. I kicked off my shoes, jumped in the mossy bed, and fell right to sleep.
That afternoon, waking with a slight hangover, I swallowed some aspirin without water, then staggered into the tiny bathroom and under the icy shower, which was covered with cobwebs. I gulped down about a gallon of water and collapsed back in bed. I told myself that except for the few bruises and near rape, temporarily losing my condemned New York apartment was not an altogether bad thing. I couldn’t afford the past two months of back rent, let alone any of the future costs. And the owners couldn’t start eviction proceedings while their building was condemned. Perhaps in the time that it took them to repair the building I could return to Memphis and dig up some more details about Scrubbs, enough to cobble together a few crappy articles and work off my debt. Either way, it destroyed the option of racing back to New York and just hiding under my overpriced shell.
When the earth slowly stopped spinning, I located my cell phone and turned it on. Among the new messages were three from my editor Jericho Riggs. First: had I come across anything juicy? Any good photos, like of Scrubbs burying his pregnant wife? Then, “Where are you?” and finally, “Where the fuck did you vanish off to?” The next message was from good old Gustavo, who groggily asked if I had called him last night. He was just waking up from a terrible hangover himself.
“I did call you last night,” I said, upon ringing him back.
“I suppose I mentioned Earl.” His poor nephew, the war casualty.
“Yeah, and you said the war in Iraq was our fault.”
“I tried to be a good uncle, but the last time I saw him, he asked me why I never had a girlfriend.”
“I remember.” Gustavo had told me how he’d come out of the closet only to have his nephew verbally assault him until he was forced to leave his sister Clementina’s house. Gus had intended to just let his nephew calm down, but that was nearly a year ago, and in the interim Earl had joined the army and their growing list of KIAs.
“So where are you anyway?” he asked, eager to move on. “I just learned from the
National Enquirer
guy that the Monster of Memphis will be back in two days.”
“I had a terrible fight with the Madame of Mesopotamia. And I was about to drive back to New York.”
“Don’t be silly. I got a lead.” He lowered his voice as if he were surrounded by other reporters. “I’ve located a great connection—a plumber with a big leak.”
Gustavo was nice enough, but he was also lonely. His tips and leads were always in doubt. He once introduced me to some garage mechanic who claimed to have sex photos of Tom Cruise in some youthful gay tryst. Gustavo assured me that the guy always delivered the goods. After doling five hundred bucks out of my own pocket, I was given what amounted to a page from a high school yearbook, specifically on Greco-Roman wrestling matches. Any kid on that page could’ve been the handsome Scientologist.
“I’m just not in great shape now,” I explained. Dumpster diving through the trashy lives of contemptible celebrities, bribing their maids and servants for whatever crap they might’ve overheard, following them to gyms, clothing stores, and airports, going through their garbage cans in the early-morning hours, renting hotel rooms across from them and camouflaging the zoom lens—it was all too much.
“As one of the walking wounded myself,” Gustavo sympathized, “I know what it’s like to just want to stop forever. Death looks better every day. But until then, what choice have we, my dear?”
I thanked him and hung up. Like me, Gustavo had gone to the Ivy League, then graduated from a top journalism school and became a promising reporter for a prestigious city paper. Eventually he was appointed a features editor. Unlike me he did a fabulous job—until he discovered that one of his sparking young protégés had fabricated details on a big serial piece.