A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix) Read online

  “I haven’t had a tree in years,” Lucia admitted. Then she smiled. “Have you ever noticed what sad creatures Christmas trees are?”

  I knew she was talking about something else, not trees, but I didn’t know how to respond.

  Lucia took her coffee cup and wandered over to the window with it. I stayed where I was and left her to her thoughts.

  After a few moments, I saw her tense as she peered down at the street.

  “Oh, look!” she exclaimed.

  “What is it?” I started to rise.

  “Oh . . . No, nothing. I thought I saw a group of children caroling.”

  “Not in this neighborhood, dear,” I said. I was preparing to make a cynical remark as to the only reason I could think of for a group of youngsters to be congregating in my neighborhood. But Lucia had turned away from the window by then, and I saw the anguish on her face.

  “Horrible, horrible!” she wailed, her face in her hands. “Damn horrible Christmas!”

  As I sat watching my distraught friend crying her eyes out, I had a sudden and anomalous memory of one of the many happy Christmas celebrations I had had with my grandmother in Minnesota. Christmas at home on the farm had had no religious overtones whatever, but it was always special—everything about it. The graceful untrimmed spruce that dwarfed the enclosed porch; the chores that had to be done whether it was Christmas or not; the enormous breakfast of pancakes and preserves and delicious sausages made by a neighbor and presented to Gram; the functional gifts—mostly clothes, and almost always winter clothes; and finally, the money Gram would always give me in a plain envelope—“to spend on any wicked thing you please,” she would say happily.

  But now, I had no choice but to turn back to the unhappy woman weeping in front of my living room window. I went to her and put my arms around her, leading her back to her seat.

  “I had to . . . identify . . . him, Alice! Can you imagine what it was like? He was so . . . so . . . his eyes, staring, wide-open like that! And that terrible hole in his head! You just don’t know what it was like!”

  I thought it best not to interrupt Lucia to say that I certainly did know. I’d had my own brushes with violent death.

  “I want to tell you something, Alice.” She was a little calmer now, taking a few sips of coffee. “It’s something . . . very private.”

  I waited.

  “About four years ago, I had—Dobrynin and I were lovers for a time.”

  My incredulity must have shown quite baldly.

  “Yes,” Lucia went on, as if addressing my disbelief. “I had an affair with him.”

  Decorous, proper Lucia—like me, a middle-aged woman—and the maniacal seducer Dobrynin? I suppose I’ve heard more preposterous confessions, but at that moment none came to mind. It seemed crazy. Like the Queen of England confiding that she’d had an affair with Fidel Castro. Or Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau revealing he’d been the longtime lover of Janis Joplin.

  Lucia Maury was and always had been a sweet person. She had come to New York from Delaware. Her family was wealthy and strait-laced in equal measure—which is to say, very much so. In fact, they were out-and-out puritans. And so, in her way, was Lucia, despite her cultural sophistication and experience. Even in what was supposed to have been her “wild” twenties, I had never seen her take a drink or smoke a cigarette. In fact I’d never seen her do so much as stay up past midnight. She was all hard work and discipline and veneration of the arts.

  And now she was telling me that she’d had an affair with a satyr. A great dancer, yes. But a wild man—especially in the sexual arena. Dobrynin’s promiscuity and inventiveness were legendary. Apparently he had delighted in providing endless grist for the tabloids and the gossip columns.

  “I loved him very much, Alice,” she whispered. “We loved each other, I mean.”

  Of course I didn’t say so, but I doubted that. Dobrynin probably loved ballet and booze and himself, I thought, and almost certainly not in that order.

  “He was not what people said he was.” Lucia was on her feet again. “Believe me, Alice. Peter was kind and beautiful. . . .” She paused and turned back toward the window before continuing. “It’s just so terrible, so sad. He could have been the greatest dancer who ever lived.”

  She reached down and grasped my hand then. “Say you’ll come with me to the funeral. Please, Alice.”

  “Of course, Lucia. If that’s what you want. But for now, why don’t you sit down and relax?”

  She shook her head. “No. I have to be going now.”

  “Then let me take you home,” I suggested.

  “No,” she said firmly. “You’ve done enough. Bless you, Alice.” And with that, she gathered her things and left.

  Chapter 3

  I stepped inside the cavernous Russian Orthodox church with Lucia, and knew immediately that we were in a strange land. There were flowers everywhere, and incense and brilliantly brocaded priestly garments. This, I could tell, would be the kind of funeral an irreverent actor friend of mine has dubbed “a smells-and-bells show.”

  The mourners were no less elegant, ornate, and magisterial. Everywhere you looked was rich black velvet, fur, flowing chiffon; pale, flawless skin, swathed in somber finery.

  In stark contrast to all this was the coffin, which was plain and closed and utterly free of ornamentation.

  Lucia and I sat in a rear pew and watched the proceedings unfold. These ballet people provided quite the spectacle. They moved noiselessly, regally up and down the aisles, as if they were on a promenade in some other century. Young and old, famous or infamous or simply unknown, they all seemed to share a stylized appearance that was almost absurd in its theatricality.

  Lucia leaned into me conspiratorially. “There’s Louis Beasley,” she whispered, nodding toward a portly man taking his seat several rows ahead of us. “And that’s Vol with him.”

  Beasley, the impresario who had “discovered” Dobrynin, had the look of a well-fed kitchen cat. He was decked out in a long beaver coat. His younger lover, Vol Teak, looked more the feral Siamese. The two had entered the church and strode up the aisle as if they were about to go out onto the balcony of their Venice hotel room to take the sun.

  “Look!” Lucia whispered again, urgently this time. “There’s Melissa!”

  I turned my head obliquely and saw ex-ballerina Melissa Taniment seating herself alongside her husband. She was still graceful, striking, with those hypnotizing hazel eyes. Dobrynin had been catapulted to fame when Melissa chose him to partner her in Giselle. Their subsequent affair had been intense, stormy, and a staple of the gossip-and-society pages.

  Then Lucia pointed out in quick succession: Betty Ann Ellenville, the ballet critic whose articles had helped create Dobrynin’s reputation; Maggie Brown, one of Dobrynin’s teachers; Dr. James Broga, the dancer’s physician, a specialist in dance-related injuries; and half a dozen others. Lucia was a veritable tour guide to the world of ballet society, but her monologue was interrupted by the first wail of the chanting priests.

  At the conclusion of the service, Louis Beasley walked briskly up to the pulpit for the eulogy. His voice was a commanding, if affected, one.

  “This!” He gestured toward the plain coffin. “This is what awaits all the young gods. Madness and death. Death and madness. Nijinsky went mad. And so, finally, did Dobrynin.” Beasley paused a minute. “Peter Dobrynin was what every dancer yearns to be. Guileless. Without affectation. Purity of line. Purity of soul.

  “But it is as La Rochefoucauld said: ‘Death and the sun cannot be looked at steadily.’ And so, when we remember Dobrynin, it will not be his horrible death, the loss of his brilliance, that we recall. No, we will remember only Dobrynin dancing.”

  Here, Beasley grasped at the ends of his long red cashmere muffler. He paced for a moment.

  From the pew
s, for the first time, came the sounds of weeping. I wanted to look around, to locate the person doing the crying, but it seemed scandalously inappropriate, so I kept my eyes on Beasley.

  “What do I remember of Peter Dobrynin? I will tell you.” And here he paused momentarily, swallowing audibly. “I remember the beginning of the coda of the Black Swan pas de deux. I remember Peter as Siegfried—his series of grand jetés. I remember that as I watched him dance I was filled with a beauty and strength and wisdom that only he could evoke.”

  Now the tears cascaded down the impresario’s cheeks and threatened to choke him. His last words were unclear. I think he said something fairly standard, like “Good-bye, dear Dobrynin. Rest well.”

  There was such a lost look in Lucia’s eyes. “I never saw him do the Black Swan pas de deux,” she confided in a whisper, sounding utterly crushed.

  Beasley’s lover was assisting him from the pulpit. The lights illuminated Vol Teak’s profile just then, and I realized he was not as young as his manner of dressing suggested.

  “Look at Melissa!” Lucia urged. “Look at her face!”

  I turned to look at the beautiful ballerina, now retired for more than five years. What I saw startled me. Her lovely face was deathly still—not a flicker of an expression on it. She might have been in a trance, or listening to something no one else could hear.

  I felt Lucia tremble beside me, sensed that she was beginning to fall apart again. I placed my hand in hers and she met my eyes and nodded once, thankfully.

  Then, what I found myself hoping would be the final procession began. First came the priests, chanting and swinging the censers. Slowly they left the church, followed by the pallbearers and the coffin, and then the mourners.

  “I don’t want to go to the cemetery. I just don’t!”

  I turned to reassure the obviously shaken Lucia, who had forgotten that we had decided beforehand not even to try to get out to the cemetery. We were by no means close relations of the deceased, so there would be no room for us in the limousines—and neither of us had a car.

  The two of us had just stepped out of the church when the person in front of me—it was the writer Betty Ann Ellenville—stopped abruptly.

  I banged into her, sending her off-balance and setting off a chain reaction of stumbling and startled cries.

  I suddenly noticed, however, that all the mourners seemed to be tripping over one another.

  “What is going on?” Lucia hissed.

  I could see that the forward motion of the coffin had ceased before it reached the street. Now everyone was crying out and pointing. There was a growing, palpable sense of danger.

  I pulled Lucia toward the door at the side of the church. We would have more room there and would be able to see the street—and locate the source of the bottleneck.

  The procession had halted on the steps because the hearse was not ready to receive the coffin.

  On the side of the hearse facing the church, someone had painted graffiti in large, blood-red letters. It must have been done while the drawn-out ceremony was in progress, with the drivers no doubt off somewhere having coffee.

  Now all the drivers were using gloves, caps, pieces of paper, anything they could find, in a frantic attempt to wipe away the words.

  The words on the car read: ANNA PAVLOVA SMITH.

  Nothing more.

  Everyone knew who Anna Pavlova was. But who on earth was Anna Pavlova Smith? Lucia didn’t know. Nor did I. Nor did anyone else in the crowd. The consensus was that the funeral had been infiltrated by one of that army of deranged celebrity-worshipers—or celebrity-bashers—who stalk events such as this one.

  The men could not remove the scrawled red letters. They gave up and loaded the hearse. Finally all the cars took off. Peter Dobrynin was to be buried in his mother’s family plot in Connecticut.

  I walked Lucia to Park Avenue and saw her into a taxi. Then I headed downtown, walking into the bright winter wind. For everyone else on the street, perhaps this was just a pleasant post-Christmas afternoon. But I felt oddly oppressed by it. The sun was out, and I was all bundled up . . . yet I felt myself slowly turning numb.

  Chapter 4

  About thirty-six hours before the dawn of the new year, Tony Basillio came rapping on my door. It was his usual mode of arrival—completely unannounced. Out-of-the-blue Basillio.

  Tony was exhibiting that brand of proprietary behavior typical of the ex-lover, but from the looks of him now was no time for me to carp: He appeared to be crazier than ever. It was apparent that his plunge back into the world of the theater—after more than a decade of being a good citizen—was taking him deeper and deeper into murky waters.

  “Well, Swede,” he announced broadly, “here I am at last. I know how madly you’ve missed me. I could tell by all those desperate, pleading letters and phone calls of yours.”

  “Don’t you chastise me, Tony. I didn’t even know where you were living the last few months.”

  He scooped into his arms the preening Bushy and collapsed along with the cat onto the sofa.

  “I could use a brandy, Swede,” he said wearily. “Or in lieu of that, you could bring me an order of rye toast with a schmeer of scallion cream cheese.”

  “I don’t have any scallion cream cheese, and you know it.”

  “Then a brandy it is, my girl.”

  He grinned as I delivered the drink.

  “You’re more beautiful than ever, Swede,” he said. “Can we make love now—right this instant?”

  I ignored the question. Bushy seized the opportunity to escape from Tony’s grasp.

  “What are you up to, Tony?” I asked, a little suspicious.

  He gave me the killer smile again, only this time he shivered, too. As usual, he was underdressed. I saw then that his distinguished, pockmarked face was red from the cold. He had grown his hair quite long, and it was all over the place. Well, I thought, at least he hadn’t succumbed to the Middle-Aged Man with Ponytail Syndrome. In fact, it was hard to believe he was a middle-aged man.

  “Swede,” he replied languorously, using that silly name for me that he alone used, “I’m up to no good—and loving it.”

  Tony stretched luxuriously.

  No, the name “Swede” had no relation whatever to the reality of my life. For while I am indeed tall and fair, I in no way look like a Swede, nor am I one.

  “I spend my time,” he was saying, “going from party to fabulous party. Attracting beautiful young actresses. And when I spot one about nineteen, just in from the provinces, with that long golden hair and that firm, ripe body and that hungry look on her face . . . why, then I just tell her who I am.

  “And of course she’s never heard of me. So I tell her that I’m such a famous designer that Olivier himself, in the old days, would never contract to appear in an American production unless he knew I was doing the sets.

  “Then I invite her up to my room to look at my . . . uh . . . sketches for the Theban Cycle sets. And then I promise to make her a star and she melts in my arms. You know the drill, Miss Nestleton.

  “So there you have it. That’s what I’ve been up to.”

  He held out his empty glass for a refill.

  “Oh, right, Tony,” I said, not taking it from his fingers. “Meanwhile, back in your real life, what are you up to?”

  “Get me another brandy first, Swede.”

  “I don’t know, Tony. The bottle’s pretty near empty.”

  “But it’s the holidays!”

  Feigning reluctance, I took the glass and refilled it.

  “The truth is, I have been to a couple of parties lately. In fact, at one of those Christmas Eve do’s your name was mentioned prominently.”

  “My name? Who by?”

  “Some producer. I don’t remember his name.”


  Against my will, “What did he say?” came out.

  Tony laughed, and took a slow sip of his brandy before proceeding. He was purposely being difficult.

  “The man said, and I quote, ‘Alice Nestleton is one of the best actresses out there today, but she’ll never be rich and famous . . . never be a star . . . never arrive at a restaurant in a limo . . . she’ll never have a summer place on Dune Road.’”

  “He forgot, ‘Never be able to hire a tailor to let out her camel-hair coat.’ Come on, Tony. You’re making this up.”

  “I’m not, Swede. I swear. I swear on your sainted grandmother’s head. The guy said there were two reasons you never made it in the past—and won’t make it in the future. First, he says, you’re too old. Though I don’t agree with that, babe. That was downright cruel. And second, says he, you’re too goddamn stubborn—‘willful,’ he called you. Willful. He said you always act like you’re some kind of theatrical pope delivering holy instructions.”

  “Ha! And what did you say?”

  “Me? Nothing. I wasn’t a part of the conversation. I was merely eavesdropping.”

  “Um-hum.” I nodded. “And you can’t remember his name.”

  “Nope. But he said you were up for one of his shows and you didn’t get it. It was something called The Interesting Mrs. Heath or something like that. He said you didn’t get it because you refused to use the proper accent. The part was an upper-class California WASP. And you told the director that California WASPs sound like Memphis hookers and you don’t do Southern accents. Or something like that.”

  “What nonsense!” I exploded. “Of course I read for that part. About seven months ago. The name of the play was The Interrogation of Mrs. Heath. ‘Interrogation,’ Tony, not ‘interesting.’ And I wasn’t ‘up’ for anything. I had the part!

  “Plus—I did not argue with the director about any phony accent. The argument was about his using an overhead movie screen for some ungodly, arty commentary during the performance. It was one of the most hideously fake modern props that ever saw the light of day—just intolerably cute. And I’d rather earn my daily bread worming foul-tempered cats for the rest of my life than deal with a fool director who doesn’t know his—”