I Meet Pamela on the Floor and Angelo in the Hospital

Showfolk & Stories

Part II – Amendments to My Constitution

I meet Pamela on the floor and Angelo in the hospital.

Of course, Jenny had been right. A suicide play for Christmas was an unmitigated disaster. The second night played to an audience of nine. Fortunately, my two one-acts, which I’d finished for a February run, did well. To quote the Port Wagner News, “This year’s Merling winner, Arthur Hopewell, has performed the miracle of bringing Spring early to The Green Door. His two one-act plays, Motherboard and Museum Pieces, make you laugh through your tears. It looks like Isle End – and Long Island’s entire East End – has our own homegrown Neil Simon at last!”

Similar reviews were excerpted in the four-inch ads that Ray Olds placed in every Long Island and New York City newspaper. I was interviewed on a cable channel and then on the New York NBC station. My interviewer told New York City, New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut that he’d driven up from his place in Montauk to see my plays. He looked straight into the camera and said, “You gotta see ‘em, folks. If you like internal time travel, nocturnal psychics, or kid computer wizards, and even if you don’t, these plays are for you! For everyone! Bring the whole family!”

They did.

It was nothing like a dream. It was February, a couple of days before Valentine’s Day. Angelo was transferred to a Catholic hospital in western Long Island. Lowell appeared daily on his soap opera. Jenny DePinna moved in with me. When Pamela phoned, saying she wanted to discuss the revised play schedule, I said I’d meet her in her office at The Green Door.

“No, come to my house,” she said. “I’ve got a cold.”

I left Jenny in the apartment with Hank, Liz, and Dennis, Angelo’s understudy who had become a full-time replacement. He looked like a model and lacked Angelo’s edginess, but he was well-cast for his part in Hotel Universe in production. The first departure from Pamela’s “Dead Sea Scrolls,” as Jenny called them, was the Philip Barry revival, and Jenny had been pacing around, before, during, and after Pamela’s phone call, trying out one of the speeches in the play:

“But can’t you accept it, somehow? Can’t you take life whole—all of it—for what it is, and be glad of it? I hate that,” Jenny complained, moving beside Dennis. “I can’t even say those words.”

Liz offered encouragement and advice, and Jenny soldiered on, Dennis reading with her.

“Three days before I came,” Dennis read, “she walked out under a tree – at the end of a very sweet lane we knew, and stood there and shot herself.”

“Another friggen’ suicide,” Jenny moaned, sinking into the couch and pulling her long red sweater over her head like a turtle.

“C’mon, Jen,” Liz said, “it’s not as bad at that.”

“What do you think?” Jenny asked me.

I’d found my jacket and was concentrating on the zipper. “What?” I said. “I’ve got to get out of here and see Pamela.”

“Oh, really?” Jenny drawled, rudely imitating me. “You were so busy whispering and hunching over the phone, we just couldn’t imagine who-all it could be-all.”

“Later,” I said, exiting.

“Tell her we all know that art should hurt,” Jenny called, sans Southern accent, “but it shouldn’t—“

I didn’t get to hear Jenny’s completed aesthetic as I took the stairs in a loud jump that probably flattened some cakes in the Ellis bakery.

Pamela answered the door, calling from the kitchen, “It’s unlocked!”

I took in the scene quickly as if scanning stage directions. She was costumed in a granny nightgown, a woolen bathrobe knotted at her waist. She wore no makeup and hadn’t brushed her hair. Goofy slippers over white socks. Pungent Vicks Vaporub. The house was dark except for the chandelier over the dining room table stacked with published scripts, books, and manuscripts. A fire snapped in the fireplace. The stereo was playing her favorite Beethoven thunder. Pamela set a big porcelain coffee pot decorated with birds on the table.

“I’m drinking Irish coffee. Want some?” she said, sitting down and pouring out an aromatic black cup.

I went into the kitchen and found orange juice in the refrigerator, poured myself a glass, and returned to the dining room.

“They’re having loads of fun with Hotel Universe,” I said.

“DePinna doesn’t like anything I do,” Pamela said. “Why don’t you sit down?”

I obeyed.

“I need your help, Arthur. If it hadn’t been for your plays, even I wouldn’t have kept me on as Artistic Director. But I honestly thought those other plays healed where they hurt.” She stopped, laid down her cup, and put her forehead into her palm.

“You have fever?” I asked.

She looked up. “I don’t know.”

“You look flushed.”

“I’ve made a mess of things.”

“The plays you chose...maybe they were just too didactic.”

“You think the Barry revival is, too?”

“No, I think they’ll play pretty well. Most of them get almost happy by the end.”

“What should I do?”

She reminded me of Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon, appealing and insincere.
“Take a break,” I said. “You’ve got a cold, and everything looks worse on the downside of a cold.”

Pamela took a long swallow of whiskeyed coffee and shook her head. “It’s not the cold.”

She rose from the table, still in character, and walked into the living room. I followed automatically. She sat in front of the fire in a big red chair. She looked up at me. Her nightgown was now two buttons open.

“Sit down here,” she said, directing me to the chair’s ottoman. “I want to tell you my play schedule,” Pamela said. “I want your opinion...”

She recited a list of plays that would have depressed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

“...and finally, before your Within Hearing for Labor Day, two Shepards, True West and Fool for Love.”

“Fool for Love,” I repeated as I admired the valley of her throat. “It’s great, but there’s a real sunbeam, don’tcha think?”

Pamela pressed her lips together. I realized she wasn’t wearing her green contacts, and her eyes were pale gray. The loss of color made them look old. She looked down.

“I am aware that I made everyone depressed,” Pamela said.

“Not everyone,” I said. “But an unremitting diet of even the greatest tragedy or irony makes an audience feel like it requires pharmaceutical intervention.”

“Those are terrific plays I just named. Are they not?”

“Pamela, chere.”

“You don’t like anything,” she said.

“I do like anything. The New York Times Magazine article with us all of on the cover standing in front of The Green Door said I did. Pamela, the audience isn’t going to see any difference between the Fall diet of death and depression and the Spring menu of depression and death. Every one of the plays you’ve chosen is about death or at best is by a playwright who died freakishly young.”

“Who died?”

“Richardson fell off a mountain. Taylor died two months after Good opened. Larry Shue died last year.”

“What about The Foreigner? Shue’s play is comedy.” She paused. “All right, then, I won’t do any of them.”

“Do The Foreigner. Christ. Delete the sets for End of the World. For one-acts, do Graceland and Hit and Run. I mean, what’s more American than Elvis and baseball?”

“Make the audience feel good,” she said.

“It’s not a crime to feel good sometimes.”

“Except it’s a lie—“

“Oh, please—“

“No!” she said, her eyes filling with tears and spilling over. “You are so critical!” She wiped her tears with her sleeve.

“Pamela, no one believes in irony anymore except adolescents. It’s just one long whine. It’s claustrophobic.”

“That’s how life makes me feel.”

All her tears returned. I got up to get her a tissue. After I gave it to her, I took her sad face in my hands and kissed her. I didn’t care about the Vicks or the hair or the old gray eyes. Pretty soon, she was kissing me back. We had moved to the floor in front of the fire, hot on my back. I put my arms around her and slipped my hand into the curve of her neck. After more kissing, she took off her robe. I got my sweater off and unbuttoned my shirt. We went back to kissing and petting like teenagers. Banging teeth and clumsily moving hands. After a long time, she whispered, “Do you want to go upstairs?”

I’d been ready since I first met her, but something in her voice made me ask, “Do you?”

She pressed her forehead against my bare chest. She whispered twice before I could understand, “Not this time. Don’t be angry,” she said more audibly. “It doesn’t feel right.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I pushed my hand into her nightgown.

“No! Stop!”

I let go. It was like when Wasley belted me. I stormed to the dining room in search of the Irish coffee. I drank down a cup in one swallow; it was loaded with whiskey. I heard Pamela change the compact disk on the stereo to something Mozart, very artsy. When I returned to the living room, every light was on. She was back into the bathrobe, all buttoned-up, big slippers back on.

“Where’s my jacket?” I said.

“These days,” Pamela said, “you just don’t know about things.”

She led me to where she had hung my jacket in the hall closet by the stairs.

I put it on. “Things?” I said.

"Well, you and God knows who, and you and Jenny, and Jenny and God knows who."

I nodded. “Nice.”

“Well, what do you do?” Pamela said.

I opened the front door. “You ask,” I said, and left.

I drove west to visit Angelo. The hospital was in a town about thirty-five miles east of New York City, near Angelo’s family who lived in a town called Valley Stream. The hospital stood right off the highway. It was a sprawling, orange brick group of two and three-story buildings. I walked through a small lobby past a waterless fountain in whose center stood a man-sized white marble statue of Jesus with His arms outspread out, as on the cross. Here, however, He was not suffering but fully clothed, neatly bearded, open to embrace. Doctors and nurses and nuns moved through the halls. I passed a funereal priest carrying the purple-ribboned tray of last rites. We exchanged a sad glance

“ Father,” I acknowledged.

“Bless you, my son,” he replied.

Angelo’s bed was on the window side of a sunny room for four, warm as a greenhouse; it looked over a rooftop. You couldn’t tell how cold it was outside. On the windowsill were a few green plants, some wilting daffodils, and so many Get Well cards that they were knocking each other over. On a small bulletin board beside the window were small photos of his family and crayoned drawings from nieces and nephews. Angelo elbowed his way to a sitting position when he saw me come in. He was attached to IV, looked sallow, but smiled broadly.

“Well, look who the ef’s here!” he said too loudly

I quickly looked over my shoulder to see there was a nun in the opposite corner of the room, tending another patient. Angelo laughed, held his iv-d arm steady, and coughed.

“You sound better than at Thanksgiving,” I said.

“Where’s my effing Valentine candy?

“I didn’t know what you were allowed to eat. What kind do you want? The store in the lobby is filled with hearts and flowers. I’ll go get you one of everything.”

Angelo waved his free hand at me. He wore a plastic hospital bracelet. “Only kidding,” he said. “I’m expecting real visitors later. You see Lowell yesterday?”

He pointed up at a TV in the middle of the room’s ceiling, aimed at his bed. “I get to watch every soap every day.”

“I haven’t been following it.”

“Well, Lowell’s character’s in big trouble. They know he worked with the Nazis.”

“The last time I watched, he was still in the romance with the redhead.”

“Isn’t she just a bitch? She chews onions before their scenes.”

“How d’you know?”

“He calls me, every other night.”

The curtain was drawn between the bed beside his. Angelo mouthed, “He here?” and I said no.

“Poor SOB. They’re not even giving him chemo. Just painkillers. His wife doesn’t come to visit him anymore. A really nice nun sits with him every night. Sister Catherine. I call her Cathy which she gets a big kick out of. The other two guys just sleep, but they’re getting better. Or worse so slowly it doesn’t make a diff. They’re old. Welcome to my world.”

I sat down on a bright orange plastic chair. “So,” I said, “you hear about the cosmic arcs or what?”

Angelo leaned back and found his plastic water cup on the side table. I got up and filled it from a plastic pitcher.

“Effing cosmic arks. What d’ya know. Who're they for, astronaut Noahs?”

“Ar-c-s, not ar-k-s. Some Stanford University guys found these arcs, the biggest things in the universe so far. Hundreds of trillions of miles long— ” I gestured.

“Hundreds of trillions – how long would it take in a Buick?”

“I don’t know. They start adding zeroes, and my eyes go like cartoon characters’.”

Angelo stared blankly off into space as if taking direction.

“They’re bigger than the Milky Way,” I added.

“The arcs?”

“Yeah. And they’re blue.”

“Arthur. Tell you the truth, to me the Milky Way is an effing candy bar. How’s your play?”

“Progressing.”

“And Hotpants?”

“Jenny?”

“No, genius, effing Liz Prager.”

“Jenny’s great. She just did a commercial in Montauk, freezing her behind off pretending it’s summer.”

“She’s got the behind for it. Drove through the Hamptons, did she?”

“Guess so.”

Angelo looked at a small travel clock on the nightstand. “I’m expecting my visitor from, y’know, East Hampton.”

“I don’t know much.”

“Y’know, I looked into the effing faith healer you told me about.”

I looked at his thin legs under a white thermal blanket.

“But you said all that stuff is—“

“Fertilizer, right. But I figure, what the – I’ll shock Sister Cathy out of her habit. Give her something to exorcise."

“What about the faith healer?”

“She called me back. Actually called me back from New Jersey. An effing nice old lady. She said she couldn’t make the trip because her arthritis was too bad. I told her, try some buffered aspirin. She thanked me. She sent me a card, even. It’s the one over there,” Angelo pointed, “with the halo of red hearts around a dog’s head.”

I saw it on the windowsill among the others.

Angelo asked, “Did you ever see anyone die, Arthur?”

An orderly entered the room, a young black man in a white uniform, pushing a bucket with a wringer and a mop. He swabbed the floor and emptied the plastic bag-lined waste baskets as Angelo and I talked.

“Yes, I have,” I said.

"I saw an auto wreck once," he said. "This old guy was stopped at a red light, and a truck behind him lost its brakes, and the truck just sort of folded up his car, like an effing accordion. I saw it in my rearview mirror when I was driving past. Happened so fast, the sound hit me after.”

“I got beat up in France once.”

“And in the USA.”

I touched the back of my head. “Yeah.”

“So what do you know about dying, you know about effing trillion mile arcs?”

“You dying?”

Angelo looked at his slowly dripping IV. “No, I’m doing an effing episode of St. Elsewhere in here.” He shut his eyes, and his cheeks sank, and he sighed. "I get tired fast."

The orderly looked me in the eye and shook his head. I winced at the cliché. A college-age kid stood in the doorway and said hi. Angelo heard his voice.

“Peter,” he called. “East Hampton,” Angelo introduced.

“Southampton College,” Peter said, accustomed to Angelo’s joke.

Peter was nineteen or twenty, like a younger, healthier brother of Angelo’s except for Peter’s thick curly hair. He wore a red cable sweater and jeans. His color was high; he looked sweaty. Peter looked uneasily between me and Angelo. I stood, ready to leave.

“Roomie, meet Roomie,” Angelo said. “Relax, Peter, we got no secrets. Not big ones, at least.”

“I guess I know more about you than vice verse,” Peter said, shaking hands.

“What’s the word, then?” Angelo said.

“Negative,” Peter said.

“Most beautiful word in the language,” Angelo said, closing his eyes and smiling. “Sister Cathy comes through!”

Peter went around the curtained side of the bed by the IV pole. “You look better,” he said.

Angelo opened his eyes. “Arthur knows all about the latest scientific discoveries,” he said, “tell Peter about a trillion arcs.”