“Hey!” I said again, this time to those I couldn’t see.
I placed my ear against the wooden door. I thought I heard someone say “a warning,” and Troy’s gravelly voice reply, using the archaic phrase “moolah.” Then I heard a hand slap a face.
I started pounding on the door.
“Let us out!” I yelled, my voice cracking. I looked back down at Marthe. She was idly kicking her boot, smoking her cigarette, her husband’s sleeping head in her lap.
“What the hell is going on?” I called down to her.
She shrugged. “Troy’s business.”
“What?”
“I say, just wait,” she said, louder. “It will be over soon.”
Not soon enough. I pressed my ear again to the door and once more pounded, futilely. I perceived more muted mayhem. Troy contemptuously muttered “gat,” tough-guy for gun. Hand made contact a last time with face, this time hard. Feet walked across floor. Then the front door was opened and this time quietly closed.
My jet lag ended by dismay, I recalled that Betty Hutton had replaced Judy Garland in Annie Get Your Gun.
“Hey!”
As in a comedy routine, I was now knocking on air, as the door flew swiftly open. I stumbled into the kitchen. Its tiled floors were littered with the remains of china.
Troy, who had let me out, was walking quickly away, his back to me. I saw that he was pressing a dish towel to the side of his face. The freezer hung open. An empty ice tray was in the sink.
“Are you all right?” I called after him.
“Fit as a fiddle. Thanks for asking,” he muttered, through cloth. “No man is a failure when he has friends.”
He walked, quickly this time, to stairs leading up. The cliché from It’s a Wonderful Life hung in the air like a moldy smell.
I moved to a window of the house and pulled aside its curtain. I saw a car peeling away from the curb. It wasn’t the dinged-up Honda of my nemesis, that was for sure. It was a fancy Mercedes.
Troy, I knew now, had problems of his own.
MY PROBLEMS, THOUGH, WERE ABOUT TO BE SOLVED. THE PHONE WAS RINGING, and I answered it.
“Good news,” Dena said, out-of-breath. “I got the film.”
“What? That’s fantastic!”
“The bad news is … I can’t watch it.”
I stopped for a second, not sure what she meant. Then, carrying the cordless, I shut the door in my ground-floor guest room. “Slow down and back up.”
“I went through everything in my father’s place here, in Bar Harbor. It wasn’t easy. He seemed never to have thrown anything away. But at the bottom of one drawer seemed to be his most private things. Bank books, emergency phone numbers, porn magazines, more pictures of me.”
“Sweet.”
“And, wrapped in a plastic bag, was a videotape.”
“So. He’s had it for a while.”
“Looks that way.”
Under my door, I saw a light going on and off in the hall. Then I heard footsteps so light they could only have been Marthe’s. I lowered my voice further.
“This comes at a good time.”
“What? I can’t hear you.”
“I said, this comes at a good time. I’m pretty sure things aren’t kosher here.”
“Well, it is L.A.”
Spoken like a true trivial person, I thought; maybe there was hope for Dena yet. I realized suddenly, caught in this house of has-beens and half-perceived truths, that I missed her. I also realized something else.
“How do you know it’s Clown? Was there a label or something?”
“You mean, one that says ‘Priceless Unreleased Film’? Roy, that’s beneath you.”
Dena was taking a mean mother tone. I didn’t miss her so much now. Still, I thought my question was valid.
“The fact is, you don’t know. It could be more porn, may your father, uh, rest in peace. Why can’t you watch it?”
“I don’t know how to work the VCR. It’s an old one, anyway. His apartment’s sort of a dump, to be honest. And, sadly enough, I think it belongs to me now. I don’t know the New England real estate market well enough to—”
“Look, I don’t mean to interrupt—” I heard footsteps from the room next to mine. The wall was creaking. Was someone leaning against it, listening? “But how are we going to know for sure?”
