Lucy's Launderette. Betsy Burke
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Take down these numbers. They’re emergency numbers. Not in the book. He makes an appearance, you keep him there, call the police, and we’ll have the assessment team arrive and do a follow-up.”
He gave me the numbers and I wrote them out carefully. Gratitude toward the faceless Mr. Trelawny oozed from my every pore.
He said, “Good luck. We’ll be in touch. I’m afraid I’ve gotta go. Got an emergency call on another line. Bye, Miss Madison.”
“Bye, Mr. Trelawny.”
My hand was shaking as I put the receiver down. On another occasion when my brother Dirk had decided his life wasn’t interesting enough, before California and Hawaii, he had boarded a downtown bus with a toy pistol. It had been snowing then as well and everyone was getting sick of the cold and slush. He had held the pistol to the driver’s head and ordered the poor man to take him to Cuba…where it was warm.
Dirk was a one-man raid on sanity. And he was six feet, four inches tall. So people usually took his threats seriously.
On the subject of Dirk, my mother took a classic position, the ostrich position, with her head well-buried in sand. Whereas my father pleaded the fifth amendment and arranged to be out or busy whenever his only male heir was around. As far as my mother was concerned, Dirk had nothing that a good meal, his family’s love and a few lithium cocktails couldn’t cure. She was always going on about how talented he was.
Dirk had trained as an actor at the National Theatre School. As far as I was concerned, he was still acting, but with a rotten script. He had once confessed to me, when we were both teenagers, that he would never work at a normal job, that he wouldn’t have to, because he was such a mind-boggling genius. I concur with the mind-boggling part.
I was on the lookout for the Superman costume all day but it never showed. Probably slowed down by a lump of kryptonite.
The next morning I took the bus down to the East End of the city and the Italian neighborhood. Jeremy and Connie had shared a big old Victorian house, a ruin with a vague whiff of damp rot about it. For years, the dilapidated four-story mansion had hosted big parties, biker friends and whoever happened to need a place to crash. And then Jeremy had taken that trip to the States six years before and come back with Connie. The doors that had always been open were suddenly closed. Jeremy took Connie very seriously. There were still parties, but never at the house.
After that, I always met him at one greasy spoon or another—some place where we could get cheap bacon and eggs and talk for a while. He’d intimated that Connie reminded him of someone he’d been crazy about. But there was more to it than that. There was a sense of mission. He was like a schoolteacher guiding a favorite pupil and this had never made much sense to me.
There I was on the rickety doorstep peering through the beveled glass door into the interior. Connie was the last person in the world I wanted to talk to. I always had the feeling that she was sneering behind my back, probably thinking how tough and world-wise she was and how bourgeois and artsy-fartsy I was. It was the expression on her face whenever she saw me, a blunt skepticism, and it completely unnerved me.
But Jeremy’s wish was my command. I rang the bell and waited. A few minutes passed and no one came. I lifted my hand to ring again when I saw a dark shape at the end of the corridor. It was her. She moved slowly and when she got to the door and opened it, she didn’t look pleased to see me.
To say she looked like she’d been scraped off the bottom of someone’s shoe would be putting it nicely. She had a cigarette hanging off her lower lip. Her face was puffy with a greenish tinge. Her hair was greasy and limp, and the house-coat she was wearing looked like it was hosting miniature colonies of thriving alien life.
“Hi, Connie.” The sound of my own voice made me shrink. It was too chirpy, like a cheerleader’s. Connie just nodded.
I qualified myself. “Jeremy asked me to come and see you. I have no idea why. He thought I should.”
“I guess you better come in.” The sound of her voice scared me. It was a low-pitched monotone at the best of times, which made it impossible to read her emotions, but now there was something else lurking there.
She slouched toward the living room and I followed her. The air in the house was close and fuggy and the curtains were drawn. She slumped into an armchair, narrowed her eyes at me and blew a smoke ring. “So Jeremy wanted you to see me, eh?”
“He sent me a letter. He must have sent it just before he…uh.”
“Bit the big one?”
“Yes. Did you know he was going to do what he did?”
“Not exactly. But I had a feeling it was coming. He was sick. They didn’t give him much more than a few months. He was feeling really bad.”
“Why didn’t you tell us he was sick? Why didn’t he tell us?”
“He said he didn’t want to see that look in people’s eyes. He didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for him.”
I wanted to be able to blame her. I wanted to hear that Connie had talked him into it, that she was somehow responsible, but I could see that it wasn’t the case. Still, I was mad, and when the “Jesus” came out of my mouth she was quick to answer.
She said, “You don’t like me, do you? None of your family does. You all think I’m trash.”
My mouth opened like a fish’s and then shut again. I didn’t know what to say.
She went on, “I didn’t choose Jeremy. He chose me. If he hadn’t, I’d have been dead in a ditch a long time ago, I can tell you.” She squinted at me again. There was a long silence and then her voice was so low, she was nearly whispering. “Jeremy got me off junk, you know. He got me off the street, got me out of the life I was leading. I don’t know why he picked me, why he thought I had anything special. But I can tell you, after a few months with him, I thought I was worth saving, too. Now I’m not so sure.” She started to look even greener than before. She muttered, “Oh, Christ,” shot up out of the chair and ran down the hall. I heard a groan and the sound of a toilet flushing. Connie came shuffling back down the hallway and just as it was dawning on me as to why she looked so chunky, she plopped herself back in the chair and said, “Damn him. He wouldn’t let me get rid of it and now it’s too late.”
I was early for my date at the Rain Room. Mostly because I wanted to see if Paul Bleeker was serious and had booked ahead. The Rain Room was the kind of place where you practically had to have reservations just to look inside. It was on the top floor of a very tall high-rise overlooking the harbor. It had a central courtyard full of trees and the walls were of molded glass. On the outside, rivulets and cascades flowed down the contours. It was like being under a waterfall or at the center of a rainstorm. At night it was lit with thousands of tiny white lights and the whole place glittered. The background music was watery, too. I recognized Saint-Saens’s “Aquarium.”
Sure enough, Paul Bleeker had booked a table for two. I lingered in the doorway for a minute. I had decided to go in and sit down when I saw it. Across the Rain Room, outside in the courtyard, Dirk, still dressed as Superman, stood completely still, looking important. He then took one step forward and pressed his face against the glass. Water splashed onto his head and flowed down his body but he was oblivious to it. I bolted.
As the elevator descended with me in it, I wondered what Paul Bleeker would think of the way I’d stood him up. In that moment, I didn’t care. Until my brother had been dealt with, I wanted to crawl under a rock. I hailed a cab, got in and looked over my shoulder the whole way home. No one was following me. I paid the driver with the last of my spare change, raced through my front door and double locked it once I was inside.
I went into the bedroom and took off my all-purpose little black cocktail dress. I could hear the Viking in the other room. Without knocking, she opened my door and handed me an envelope. “This for you,” she told me.
“Who left it?” I asked. There was no stamp on it. She just shook her head in linguistic bewilderment