Wooooooo!
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The door was jumping off its hinges. There was yelling outside and I knew instantly that it was Richard. I stood with my fingers on the handle for a few seconds without turning it just to agitate him.
“Jeanie! It’s Rich, babe, open up!”
I played dumb.
“Who is it?”
“Richard! You know who it is just open the door already.”
“Fine.”
I opened it slowly. Richard was twitching more than usual. He was either really mad or really excited. It was hard to tell with him.
“I’ve got a new one,” he said with strained casualty. “Well, most of it, anyway. I want to get started soon. I need to see if it works before I finish it.”
He studied me with sunken eyes as I lazily tightened the silk ribbon that secured my robe. His hair was black like oil with the same smell and consistency. The stubble on his chin was well aged; five days of five o’clock shadow all piled on top of itself. He twitched again and scratched his shaggy face.
“Well,” I said, “What is it about?”
He hesitated a moment before answering, “I haven’t decided yet.”
“What? If you’re just here to mess with me you can leave.” I gestured toward the door.
“No no no! Look, the rest of the cast has already agreed, but I want you,” -He waved his arms at me like I was the grand prize on a game show- “I want you to play the lead role.”
“Wow, Rich, that sure is special and all but I don’t really think I want to be lead actress in a play without a plot.”
Richard looked frantic.
“No, it’s got a plot. I just meant, you know, it doesn’t have a meaning yet. It’s not about anything. It has a great plot.”
"Okay, fine, I’ll take a look at it,” I sighed. “Do you have a script for me or what?”
“Well, no.”
“Oh my god, Richard. If you’re high right now I swear I’m going to-”
“I’m clean! Listen, no one has the script yet. Come to the Farbank tonight at eight. Everybody’s gonna be there and I’ll hand out the scripts then, alright?”
“This better be the best goddamn play you’ve ever written.”
His smile made me a little uneasy.
The Farbank Theater was about as rundown as a building could be without collapsing. Behind its crumbling façade there were at least a hundred fire hazards, the biggest of which being the dusty old wooden seats. They were so old and dirty that when too many audience members sat down at once, the whole theater was swallowed in a haze of dust. Not that it mattered. The lighting was already poor and the acoustics were equally terrible. But for some strange reason, people still went there. The antique building created the perfect atmosphere for Richard’s dreary plays, and tickets always sold fast. He struggled for years before finding the Farbank. When he found it he fell in love. It was there that what was then his most unpopular play became an overnight success. Since then he had written three more to critical acclaim. This new one would make five total if he ever completed it.
I slipped through the unlocked stage door into the dark hallway. In the dim light at the end I could see the backs of two people, a man and a woman. I recognized them immediately because, along with myself, the three of us together were Richard’s favorites. We had been in all of his plays since the very beginning. When Richard rose to fame, so did we.
The man was named Alan. He was a tall blond with a booming voice that overpowered the muffled theater. Richard and I had known Alan since high school. He had been both quarterback of the football team and head of the school drama club until one drunken night when he got a cheerleader pregnant. After that everything went downhill fast for Alan. He ended up dropping out to get a full-time job only to find out two months later that the baby was a miscarriage. Left with neither a diploma nor a child, no plans and seemingly no future, he teamed up with Richard and I and we began our struggling career in entertainment.
The woman was Richard’s longtime on-and-off girlfriend, Laura. She had an addict’s physique, desperately thin with yellow, blotchy skin. Her wispy auburn hair fell at waist-length around her bony frame. On might have assumed that she was only a part of Richard’s plays because they were dating, but this was far from the truth. In reality she was a very talented actress, capable of performing roles in which I would have likely failed miserably. They met in a time when Richard was known to skulk in the back of the room at various city acting classes, scouting for talent. Like the Farbank, Laura suited Richard perfectly, and they fell in love.
As I came closer to the light, Richard spotted me.
“Ah, our lead actress has arrived!”
Alan and Laura turned to see me. Laura looked mildly contemptuous. I noticed a handful of other people in the room, a few regulars, who would undoubtedly be playing the ancillary characters.
“Do we get our scripts now, Rich?” Alan asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Richard, grinning. “But I’m not giving you a chance to read it first. We’re gonna jump right into this. Jeanie, you’re up first, take the stage.”
I walked apprehensively to the center of the creaky stage. Richard tossed me a bundle of crumpled papers.
“The characters aren’t named?” I asked. “It just says ‘Jeanie.’”
“I told you it wasn’t finished. For now you’ll be ‘Jeanie’ and Alan will be ‘Alan.’ Can you handle that?” he said dryly.
“Whatever,” I said. I looked at the paper again.
I stood anxiously inside a grubby phone booth. My breath had begun to fog up the glass walls. Rocking back and forth on my heels, I mumbled rhythmically into the receiver.
“Pick up, pick up, pick up…”
Someone answered.
“I need to talk to Alan,” I pleaded. He came to the phone and I said, “Alan, I need you to meet me at the park. Don’t ask, just get here as fast as you can. Bring something to dig with.”
My voice broke at the last word as I stopped reading. I stared at Richard, who motioned impatiently for me to continue. This story was sickeningly familiar to me. I silently contemplated Richard’s sanity.
I slid out of the booth and paced back and forth on the sidewalk. My forehead glistened with sweat. My hands shook a little. Alan appeared with a gardening trowel sticking out of his back pocket.
“What’s going on?” he asked me.
“Look, um… I’ll show you.”
I led him to a place in the park that was relatively thick with trees and brush. There was a middle-aged looking man lying on the ground in a position that looked too uncomfortable for a conscious person.
Alan turned paper-white.
“He’s…”
I nodded.
“What did…? What are…? You’re just going to bury him?” His eyebrows nearly met at the middle as he pointed to the shallow hole that I had already started in the soil. “This is ridiculous.”
“Why else would I want you to bring something to dig? I tried with my hands but I couldn’t get very far.” I held up my dirt-stained hands, dripping blood from three missing fingernails.
“You can’t just leave him at a park, it’s crazy!” he said incredulously. “Listen, I’ll pull my car around and we’ll figure something out.”
I had reached breaking point, and I could feel my face turning dark red.
“Richard, we need to talk,” I said. Then, seeing curious looks from everyone around me, I added, “We’ll be right back. It’s nothing serious.”
I doubted my acting skills just then.
I took Richard to the costume room, figuring that all the cloth would absorb enough sound to make it impossible to eavesdrop on us. When he had closed the door, I pushed him up against the wall and put my face obnoxiously close to his.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked in a whisper.
“Look,” he said, “I can see why you might be upset, but this story is just what I need! What’s better than a good murder story? Especially when the killer gets away…”
“You’ve lost your mind. You’ve lost your fucking mind. If you write about this, we’ll get CAUGHT. Do you understand?” I shook him. “Do you?”
“This is fiction, Jeanie. Nobody knows.”
“It’s real, Richard. Do I have to remind you exactly how real it is?”
I grabbed his arm and led him to the back of the costume room, where another, smaller room was hidden behind a rack of old Shakespearean attire. The second room was supposed to be a sort of women’s changing room, but our lack of modestly had made the room obsolete.
“It’s real, I get it. I get it.”
He was carefully keeping the bench in the corner out of his line of sight. It was made of wood, grayish in color, but maybe that was just from all the dust. Originally it was one of those hollow benches that were used for storage, but the hinges had been removed and the top was nailed shut. If anyone ever tried to move that bench, felt how heavy it was, wondered why… Maybe pried it open to have a peek inside… Hopefully Richard and I would be long dead by then.
“I want you to look at it. Go ahead, look. You know what’s inside there. It’s about twelve bags of rock salt and, oh yeah, a dead body. The salt-mummified corpse of a man who’s still considered ‘missing.’ In the same fucking theater that you want to tell a fucking story about it in!”
“You know, I never asked you why you did it. I don’t even know who this guy is.”
“It doesn’t matter! You can’t finish this play. It’s not just me who’ll take the blame. Do you realize you’re an accomplice to murder?”
He exhaled slowly. As he stood there, thinking, it was as though I could see the clockwork of his mind. He was working out something intricate, I could tell. Without speaking, he left the room to rejoin the others. I followed.
Richard clapped his hands once and said to his cast, “Alright, everybody, I think tonight was a good start. We’ll resume, same place, same time, Friday. That’s two days, so rest up and get ready. That’s when the real work begins.”
My heart dropped like an anchor. I fixed my eyes on Richard as everyone else began to clear out. He saw my look of horror and told Laura, who was waiting for him, to wait outside.
When she was gone, I said, “You’re not serious. You can’t do this. This isn’t going to end well for anyone. It’s insane.”
“You worry too much, Jeanie. Listen, I’ll come by your place later and we’ll talk. I think you’ll see it my way.”
He brushed my shoulder with his hand as he left. I stood for a while without moving. He was coming to my apartment to convince me. I wondered how I might be able to do some convincing of my own.
Again there was a knock at my door, and for the second time that day I let Richard into my apartment. He walked in calmly and sat down on the couch, but his demeanor was quickly broken when he saw the two lines of cocaine that had been cut on the coffee table. I sat down beside him.
“Want some?” I offered. It gave me so much pleasure to see him struggle with the dilemma. I knew he would give in.
“N-no,” he stammered, “I’m trying to cut back a little.”
“Fine, more for me,” I said and leaned forward toward the coke.
“A little wouldn’t hurt, I guess,” he said.
As he went for the line, I snatched up a coffee mug from the table and swung it at the back of his head, knocking his forehead into the tabletop. I had expected this alone to be sufficient in knocking him out, but he made to get up. This time I punched him at the place between his neck and his skull, and he was still. It took effort to lift him; even though he was sickly underweight, I greatly lacked in muscle mass.
I dragged him to my bedroom closet where there was a wooden chair waiting for him. There was also a roll of duct tape. Once I had secured him satisfactorily to the chair, I made sure he wasn’t too hurt. His nose was bleeding, and for a while I was afraid he would drown in his own blood. I figured he would be fine as long as he sat upright. It was my last intention to kill him. No, I wanted Richard alive. In spite of all of this, I still considered him my friend. I just wanted to stop him from writing this detrimental play.
I sat, watching him for two hours. My fears of his accidental death were extinguished when he groggily regained consciousness. He struggled within his duct tape cocoon.
“What? Where am I?” he sputtered. “Jeanie, help me!”
His cry for help struck a nerve in me. I flinched, but persevered.
“It’s me who needs the help, Richard. You can’t finish your play. It would get me in trouble. It would get you in a lot of trouble, too, Rich. Do you see what I’m getting at here?”
He seemed to understand what was going on now.
“You can’t scare me out of writing it.”
“Alright, we’ll see how you feel about that in a few hours. I took the tape and wrapped it several times around his mouth, good and tight. He was breathing through his nose now, so I was sure it wouldn’t hurt him. I shut and locked the closet door, got in bed, and went to sleep.
There was knocking at the door, not the closet door, but the front one, and it couldn’t have been Richard. I ran to it, but then stood behind it silently and thought out my next move. It felt like a bad dream.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“It’s Laura,” said the person on the other side.
I let her in. I wondered whether or not I should just snap her skinny body in half and hide her under the couch.
“It’s Rich,” she said softly. “He never came home. I know he went here earlier, so I wanted to know if he was still around. Is he?”
“No. Sorry, Laura. Rich left hours ago. I have no idea where he could have gone.”
Laura was a good actress, but could she catch a bad one in the act?
“You’re sure?” she said slowly, tilting her head. Then she added, "You acted weird tonight, and after you talked to Rich, he told everybody to go home. He wouldn't tell me why."
"Oh, well that's kind of embarrassing."
"What?"
"I haven't been very reliable lately, been spacing out a lot. I think I'm becoming a burnout or something. I wanted Richard to know that his lead actress might end up in rehab before opening night."
She glanced at the cocaine scattered all over my coffee table.
"Well, I'm sure you'll pull it together."
"Need any help looking for Rich?"
“No, he does this sometimes. Probably out getting high. He said he was clean, but I had doubts about that.”
“I know he'll turn up.. G'night, Laura.”
“Later.”
She left. Her visit was enough to ruin my confidence. It all became very clear, very real to me.
I ran to the closet and opened it to find Richard still wide awake in his cocoon. I peeled the tape unceremoniously from his lips. As I unwrapped the rest of his body, I said, “Please don’t tell anyone about this. Please. Say a deal went wrong or something. A crackhead beat you up. Say anything, just don’t tell them I did this to you. I’m sorry Richard, I’m so sorry.”
He looked sympathetic. I would have been less afraid if he was angry or shouting. This was purely unsettling.
When he had finished rubbing his mouth, he said, “I understand. You were scared, I get that. Believe me, I get that now. I’m not writing the play. But on one condition.”
“What is it?”
“Tell me why you did it. The murder, I mean.”
“So, if I tell you why I killed him, I’m off the hook? No play, and none of this ever happened. That’s it?”
He nodded. I knew I would never have another chance at a deal this good, so I told him everything.
I was sitting alone on a park bench, my hands folded in my lap. It was evening, a Saturday, and anyone with a social life was miles away. The place was empty, save for me and him. He approached me slowly. I could hear his timid feet crunching the grass behind me. When he reached the bench, I looked up.
His face was more creased than I had ever seen it before. He was sickly and pale, and his hair had only a few patches of black in streaked through the more prominent gray. Though he was only in his late forties, he looked much, much older. I remember, I thought he looked as though he could drop dead at any moment.
“You showed up,” he said quietly with something like admiration in his voice.
“I don’t like letting people down,” I said.
He sat beside me and said, “I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time. It took me so long just to find you. Honestly, I’m surprised you agreed to meet me.”
Ted was the closest thing to a father that I ever had, but that was not saying much. He dated my mom for five years, from the time I was seven until I was twelve. The day he ran out on us was the happiest day of my life. Ted was the standard, textbook, piece-of-shit abusive kind of man that too many women end up with these days. He was a mean drunk, but some of his biggest achievements in violence happened sober, when he had his full wits about him. I once saw him wrap a phone cord around my mom’s neck and throw her into a glass china cabinet. We had a hell of a time explaining that one to the nurse at the emergency room. My mom was my first acting teacher.
“Why did you want to see me?” My voice was bored, monotone. “To apologize?”
“That’s exactly why.” His eyes looked watery, but that could have been the evening sunlight.
“Well, save it. Saying sorry won’t take back what you did to us. It happened. Get over it. I did.”
The vein on his forehead jumped.
“At least have the common decency to accept my apology.”
I stood up.
“No, not after all the shit you put us through.”
“You said you were over it.” He stood up, too.
“That doesn’t mean you deserve forgiveness. I saw you beat Mom more times than I can even remember. And you smacked me around a lot, too. I was just a kid, Ted.”
He still had the marks from my eleven-year-old teeth on his right hand.
“You were a smartass little kid.”
“And that gave you the right to hit me?”
I had chosen to meet him in a pubic place so there would be witnesses, in case he tried to get a few punches in for old time’s sake, but there was nobody around to help me. I said, “Whatever, this was a bad idea,” and tried to walk away. He followed me.
I walked faster, he walked faster.
I started to run, he started to run.
At some point he dove for me, grabbing my calves, and I fell hard. He was on top of me and he was hitting my stomach.
Nice apology, Ted.
Even in blind rage, he still had enough sense to avoid hitting my face. Those were the kind of bruise that could only be hidden with a lie.
Something in my pocket kept poking me. It was a nail file and then it was in my hand. And then it was in Ted’s neck. And then it was in the grass and so was Ted, only he was bleeding and jerking around. Then he was quiet.
After that my memory was blank, but Richard already knew it well enough.
“That’s when you called me?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Wow. Wow, I never even dreamed it was your dad.
“Step-dad. Sort of.”
He was thinking again, the clockwork of his brain whirring away.
“Well,” he said, “I made a promise and I’m gonna keep it. I’m not writing the play. We’ll all just take a break for a while, you know, take a vacation. It’ll give me time to write something that doesn’t get me bound and gagged in a closet.”
“That never happened,” I reminded him.
He smiled. There was a pink band around his face from the tape. He had a dried blood mustache.
“Right. Never happened. See you around, Jeanie.”
Six weeks later, the marquee above the entrance to the Farbank made me do a double take. Richard had written a new play without me. He had written a script, assembled a cast, and sold tickets without a word to me. The play was already being performed. I didn’t like the name.
In faded plastic letters, it said, “PATRICIDE.”
Recognizing me, the usher let me in without a ticket. I stood in the back and watched as the heavy maroon curtains lurched aside. They revealed Laura, sitting alone on a prop that I had not seen before on that stage. It was a park bench.
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Nonfiction
The door was jumping off its hinges. There was yelling outside and I knew instantly that it was Richard. I stood with my fingers on the handle for a few seconds without turning it just to agitate him.
“Jeanie! It’s Rich, babe, open up!”
I played dumb.
“Who is it?”
“Richard! You know who it is just open the door already.”
“Fine.”
I opened it slowly. Richard was twitching more than usual. He was either really mad or really excited. It was hard to tell with him.
“I’ve got a new one,” he said with strained casualty. “Well, most of it, anyway. I want to get started soon. I need to see if it works before I finish it.”
He studied me with sunken eyes as I lazily tightened the silk ribbon that secured my robe. His hair was black like oil with the same smell and consistency. The stubble on his chin was well aged; five days of five o’clock shadow all piled on top of itself. He twitched again and scratched his shaggy face.
“Well,” I said, “What is it about?”
He hesitated a moment before answering, “I haven’t decided yet.”
“What? If you’re just here to mess with me you can leave.” I gestured toward the door.
“No no no! Look, the rest of the cast has already agreed, but I want you,” -He waved his arms at me like I was the grand prize on a game show- “I want you to play the lead role.”
“Wow, Rich, that sure is special and all but I don’t really think I want to be lead actress in a play without a plot.”
Richard looked frantic.
“No, it’s got a plot. I just meant, you know, it doesn’t have a meaning yet. It’s not about anything. It has a great plot.”
"Okay, fine, I’ll take a look at it,” I sighed. “Do you have a script for me or what?”
“Well, no.”
“Oh my god, Richard. If you’re high right now I swear I’m going to-”
“I’m clean! Listen, no one has the script yet. Come to the Farbank tonight at eight. Everybody’s gonna be there and I’ll hand out the scripts then, alright?”
“This better be the best goddamn play you’ve ever written.”
His smile made me a little uneasy.
~*~
The Farbank Theater was about as rundown as a building could be without collapsing. Behind its crumbling façade there were at least a hundred fire hazards, the biggest of which being the dusty old wooden seats. They were so old and dirty that when too many audience members sat down at once, the whole theater was swallowed in a haze of dust. Not that it mattered. The lighting was already poor and the acoustics were equally terrible. But for some strange reason, people still went there. The antique building created the perfect atmosphere for Richard’s dreary plays, and tickets always sold fast. He struggled for years before finding the Farbank. When he found it he fell in love. It was there that what was then his most unpopular play became an overnight success. Since then he had written three more to critical acclaim. This new one would make five total if he ever completed it.
I slipped through the unlocked stage door into the dark hallway. In the dim light at the end I could see the backs of two people, a man and a woman. I recognized them immediately because, along with myself, the three of us together were Richard’s favorites. We had been in all of his plays since the very beginning. When Richard rose to fame, so did we.
The man was named Alan. He was a tall blond with a booming voice that overpowered the muffled theater. Richard and I had known Alan since high school. He had been both quarterback of the football team and head of the school drama club until one drunken night when he got a cheerleader pregnant. After that everything went downhill fast for Alan. He ended up dropping out to get a full-time job only to find out two months later that the baby was a miscarriage. Left with neither a diploma nor a child, no plans and seemingly no future, he teamed up with Richard and I and we began our struggling career in entertainment.
The woman was Richard’s longtime on-and-off girlfriend, Laura. She had an addict’s physique, desperately thin with yellow, blotchy skin. Her wispy auburn hair fell at waist-length around her bony frame. On might have assumed that she was only a part of Richard’s plays because they were dating, but this was far from the truth. In reality she was a very talented actress, capable of performing roles in which I would have likely failed miserably. They met in a time when Richard was known to skulk in the back of the room at various city acting classes, scouting for talent. Like the Farbank, Laura suited Richard perfectly, and they fell in love.
As I came closer to the light, Richard spotted me.
“Ah, our lead actress has arrived!”
Alan and Laura turned to see me. Laura looked mildly contemptuous. I noticed a handful of other people in the room, a few regulars, who would undoubtedly be playing the ancillary characters.
“Do we get our scripts now, Rich?” Alan asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Richard, grinning. “But I’m not giving you a chance to read it first. We’re gonna jump right into this. Jeanie, you’re up first, take the stage.”
I walked apprehensively to the center of the creaky stage. Richard tossed me a bundle of crumpled papers.
“The characters aren’t named?” I asked. “It just says ‘Jeanie.’”
“I told you it wasn’t finished. For now you’ll be ‘Jeanie’ and Alan will be ‘Alan.’ Can you handle that?” he said dryly.
“Whatever,” I said. I looked at the paper again.
I stood anxiously inside a grubby phone booth. My breath had begun to fog up the glass walls. Rocking back and forth on my heels, I mumbled rhythmically into the receiver.
“Pick up, pick up, pick up…”
Someone answered.
“I need to talk to Alan,” I pleaded. He came to the phone and I said, “Alan, I need you to meet me at the park. Don’t ask, just get here as fast as you can. Bring something to dig with.”
My voice broke at the last word as I stopped reading. I stared at Richard, who motioned impatiently for me to continue. This story was sickeningly familiar to me. I silently contemplated Richard’s sanity.
I slid out of the booth and paced back and forth on the sidewalk. My forehead glistened with sweat. My hands shook a little. Alan appeared with a gardening trowel sticking out of his back pocket.
“What’s going on?” he asked me.
“Look, um… I’ll show you.”
I led him to a place in the park that was relatively thick with trees and brush. There was a middle-aged looking man lying on the ground in a position that looked too uncomfortable for a conscious person.
Alan turned paper-white.
“He’s…”
I nodded.
“What did…? What are…? You’re just going to bury him?” His eyebrows nearly met at the middle as he pointed to the shallow hole that I had already started in the soil. “This is ridiculous.”
“Why else would I want you to bring something to dig? I tried with my hands but I couldn’t get very far.” I held up my dirt-stained hands, dripping blood from three missing fingernails.
“You can’t just leave him at a park, it’s crazy!” he said incredulously. “Listen, I’ll pull my car around and we’ll figure something out.”
I had reached breaking point, and I could feel my face turning dark red.
“Richard, we need to talk,” I said. Then, seeing curious looks from everyone around me, I added, “We’ll be right back. It’s nothing serious.”
I doubted my acting skills just then.
I took Richard to the costume room, figuring that all the cloth would absorb enough sound to make it impossible to eavesdrop on us. When he had closed the door, I pushed him up against the wall and put my face obnoxiously close to his.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked in a whisper.
“Look,” he said, “I can see why you might be upset, but this story is just what I need! What’s better than a good murder story? Especially when the killer gets away…”
“You’ve lost your mind. You’ve lost your fucking mind. If you write about this, we’ll get CAUGHT. Do you understand?” I shook him. “Do you?”
“This is fiction, Jeanie. Nobody knows.”
“It’s real, Richard. Do I have to remind you exactly how real it is?”
I grabbed his arm and led him to the back of the costume room, where another, smaller room was hidden behind a rack of old Shakespearean attire. The second room was supposed to be a sort of women’s changing room, but our lack of modestly had made the room obsolete.
“It’s real, I get it. I get it.”
He was carefully keeping the bench in the corner out of his line of sight. It was made of wood, grayish in color, but maybe that was just from all the dust. Originally it was one of those hollow benches that were used for storage, but the hinges had been removed and the top was nailed shut. If anyone ever tried to move that bench, felt how heavy it was, wondered why… Maybe pried it open to have a peek inside… Hopefully Richard and I would be long dead by then.
“I want you to look at it. Go ahead, look. You know what’s inside there. It’s about twelve bags of rock salt and, oh yeah, a dead body. The salt-mummified corpse of a man who’s still considered ‘missing.’ In the same fucking theater that you want to tell a fucking story about it in!”
“You know, I never asked you why you did it. I don’t even know who this guy is.”
“It doesn’t matter! You can’t finish this play. It’s not just me who’ll take the blame. Do you realize you’re an accomplice to murder?”
He exhaled slowly. As he stood there, thinking, it was as though I could see the clockwork of his mind. He was working out something intricate, I could tell. Without speaking, he left the room to rejoin the others. I followed.
Richard clapped his hands once and said to his cast, “Alright, everybody, I think tonight was a good start. We’ll resume, same place, same time, Friday. That’s two days, so rest up and get ready. That’s when the real work begins.”
My heart dropped like an anchor. I fixed my eyes on Richard as everyone else began to clear out. He saw my look of horror and told Laura, who was waiting for him, to wait outside.
When she was gone, I said, “You’re not serious. You can’t do this. This isn’t going to end well for anyone. It’s insane.”
“You worry too much, Jeanie. Listen, I’ll come by your place later and we’ll talk. I think you’ll see it my way.”
He brushed my shoulder with his hand as he left. I stood for a while without moving. He was coming to my apartment to convince me. I wondered how I might be able to do some convincing of my own.
~*~
Again there was a knock at my door, and for the second time that day I let Richard into my apartment. He walked in calmly and sat down on the couch, but his demeanor was quickly broken when he saw the two lines of cocaine that had been cut on the coffee table. I sat down beside him.
“Want some?” I offered. It gave me so much pleasure to see him struggle with the dilemma. I knew he would give in.
“N-no,” he stammered, “I’m trying to cut back a little.”
“Fine, more for me,” I said and leaned forward toward the coke.
“A little wouldn’t hurt, I guess,” he said.
As he went for the line, I snatched up a coffee mug from the table and swung it at the back of his head, knocking his forehead into the tabletop. I had expected this alone to be sufficient in knocking him out, but he made to get up. This time I punched him at the place between his neck and his skull, and he was still. It took effort to lift him; even though he was sickly underweight, I greatly lacked in muscle mass.
I dragged him to my bedroom closet where there was a wooden chair waiting for him. There was also a roll of duct tape. Once I had secured him satisfactorily to the chair, I made sure he wasn’t too hurt. His nose was bleeding, and for a while I was afraid he would drown in his own blood. I figured he would be fine as long as he sat upright. It was my last intention to kill him. No, I wanted Richard alive. In spite of all of this, I still considered him my friend. I just wanted to stop him from writing this detrimental play.
I sat, watching him for two hours. My fears of his accidental death were extinguished when he groggily regained consciousness. He struggled within his duct tape cocoon.
“What? Where am I?” he sputtered. “Jeanie, help me!”
His cry for help struck a nerve in me. I flinched, but persevered.
“It’s me who needs the help, Richard. You can’t finish your play. It would get me in trouble. It would get you in a lot of trouble, too, Rich. Do you see what I’m getting at here?”
He seemed to understand what was going on now.
“You can’t scare me out of writing it.”
“Alright, we’ll see how you feel about that in a few hours. I took the tape and wrapped it several times around his mouth, good and tight. He was breathing through his nose now, so I was sure it wouldn’t hurt him. I shut and locked the closet door, got in bed, and went to sleep.
~*~
There was knocking at the door, not the closet door, but the front one, and it couldn’t have been Richard. I ran to it, but then stood behind it silently and thought out my next move. It felt like a bad dream.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“It’s Laura,” said the person on the other side.
I let her in. I wondered whether or not I should just snap her skinny body in half and hide her under the couch.
“It’s Rich,” she said softly. “He never came home. I know he went here earlier, so I wanted to know if he was still around. Is he?”
“No. Sorry, Laura. Rich left hours ago. I have no idea where he could have gone.”
Laura was a good actress, but could she catch a bad one in the act?
“You’re sure?” she said slowly, tilting her head. Then she added, "You acted weird tonight, and after you talked to Rich, he told everybody to go home. He wouldn't tell me why."
"Oh, well that's kind of embarrassing."
"What?"
"I haven't been very reliable lately, been spacing out a lot. I think I'm becoming a burnout or something. I wanted Richard to know that his lead actress might end up in rehab before opening night."
She glanced at the cocaine scattered all over my coffee table.
"Well, I'm sure you'll pull it together."
"Need any help looking for Rich?"
“No, he does this sometimes. Probably out getting high. He said he was clean, but I had doubts about that.”
“I know he'll turn up.. G'night, Laura.”
“Later.”
She left. Her visit was enough to ruin my confidence. It all became very clear, very real to me.
I ran to the closet and opened it to find Richard still wide awake in his cocoon. I peeled the tape unceremoniously from his lips. As I unwrapped the rest of his body, I said, “Please don’t tell anyone about this. Please. Say a deal went wrong or something. A crackhead beat you up. Say anything, just don’t tell them I did this to you. I’m sorry Richard, I’m so sorry.”
He looked sympathetic. I would have been less afraid if he was angry or shouting. This was purely unsettling.
When he had finished rubbing his mouth, he said, “I understand. You were scared, I get that. Believe me, I get that now. I’m not writing the play. But on one condition.”
“What is it?”
“Tell me why you did it. The murder, I mean.”
“So, if I tell you why I killed him, I’m off the hook? No play, and none of this ever happened. That’s it?”
He nodded. I knew I would never have another chance at a deal this good, so I told him everything.
I was sitting alone on a park bench, my hands folded in my lap. It was evening, a Saturday, and anyone with a social life was miles away. The place was empty, save for me and him. He approached me slowly. I could hear his timid feet crunching the grass behind me. When he reached the bench, I looked up.
His face was more creased than I had ever seen it before. He was sickly and pale, and his hair had only a few patches of black in streaked through the more prominent gray. Though he was only in his late forties, he looked much, much older. I remember, I thought he looked as though he could drop dead at any moment.
“You showed up,” he said quietly with something like admiration in his voice.
“I don’t like letting people down,” I said.
He sat beside me and said, “I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time. It took me so long just to find you. Honestly, I’m surprised you agreed to meet me.”
Ted was the closest thing to a father that I ever had, but that was not saying much. He dated my mom for five years, from the time I was seven until I was twelve. The day he ran out on us was the happiest day of my life. Ted was the standard, textbook, piece-of-shit abusive kind of man that too many women end up with these days. He was a mean drunk, but some of his biggest achievements in violence happened sober, when he had his full wits about him. I once saw him wrap a phone cord around my mom’s neck and throw her into a glass china cabinet. We had a hell of a time explaining that one to the nurse at the emergency room. My mom was my first acting teacher.
“Why did you want to see me?” My voice was bored, monotone. “To apologize?”
“That’s exactly why.” His eyes looked watery, but that could have been the evening sunlight.
“Well, save it. Saying sorry won’t take back what you did to us. It happened. Get over it. I did.”
The vein on his forehead jumped.
“At least have the common decency to accept my apology.”
I stood up.
“No, not after all the shit you put us through.”
“You said you were over it.” He stood up, too.
“That doesn’t mean you deserve forgiveness. I saw you beat Mom more times than I can even remember. And you smacked me around a lot, too. I was just a kid, Ted.”
He still had the marks from my eleven-year-old teeth on his right hand.
“You were a smartass little kid.”
“And that gave you the right to hit me?”
I had chosen to meet him in a pubic place so there would be witnesses, in case he tried to get a few punches in for old time’s sake, but there was nobody around to help me. I said, “Whatever, this was a bad idea,” and tried to walk away. He followed me.
I walked faster, he walked faster.
I started to run, he started to run.
At some point he dove for me, grabbing my calves, and I fell hard. He was on top of me and he was hitting my stomach.
Nice apology, Ted.
Even in blind rage, he still had enough sense to avoid hitting my face. Those were the kind of bruise that could only be hidden with a lie.
Something in my pocket kept poking me. It was a nail file and then it was in my hand. And then it was in Ted’s neck. And then it was in the grass and so was Ted, only he was bleeding and jerking around. Then he was quiet.
After that my memory was blank, but Richard already knew it well enough.
“That’s when you called me?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Wow. Wow, I never even dreamed it was your dad.
“Step-dad. Sort of.”
He was thinking again, the clockwork of his brain whirring away.
“Well,” he said, “I made a promise and I’m gonna keep it. I’m not writing the play. We’ll all just take a break for a while, you know, take a vacation. It’ll give me time to write something that doesn’t get me bound and gagged in a closet.”
“That never happened,” I reminded him.
He smiled. There was a pink band around his face from the tape. He had a dried blood mustache.
“Right. Never happened. See you around, Jeanie.”
~*~
Six weeks later, the marquee above the entrance to the Farbank made me do a double take. Richard had written a new play without me. He had written a script, assembled a cast, and sold tickets without a word to me. The play was already being performed. I didn’t like the name.
In faded plastic letters, it said, “PATRICIDE.”
Recognizing me, the usher let me in without a ticket. I stood in the back and watched as the heavy maroon curtains lurched aside. They revealed Laura, sitting alone on a prop that I had not seen before on that stage. It was a park bench.