But I Wouldn't Want to Die There by Pickard

Author:Pickard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 1993-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

ONE-HALF HOUR LATER, I WAS RIDING IN ANOTHER CAB down a street in Greenwich Village when I realized I had nobody to eat dinner with that night. It was a funny thing to think, since I’d just had lunch in Brooklyn. I certainly wasn’t hungry for food at the moment, but hungry for company, yes, for somebody (normal) to talk all this over with. Carol. I wanted to talk it all over with Carol. I gazed out the window at all the faces of all those people I would never know, and I wished with all my heart that I might catch a glimpse of her in the crowd.

“So, hey,” the cabbie said, “you want to go out tonight?”

I stared at the back of his head. Was I so transparently lonely?

He reached for a card stuck in his visor and handed it back to me. “So, you do, you and the mister, you call me, okay? I’ll get you where you want to go. Out to eat. Theater. You name it, I drive it. Anytime. Weeks. Weekends. Don’t matter. Here’s that theater you wanted. You need a receipt?”

I got out, thinking: Last night I didn’t mind being alone, I’d enjoyed coping on my own in the big city. Making my way. Savoring the solitude. Some of it. But now, after spending so much time with strangers—strange strangers, at that—the prospect of dining alone again filled me with a sense of dread. It buffaloed me, this unexpected loneliness. I thought I was used to being alone, what with being single for so long, Geof working late so often, and me off on my own so much. Apparently, I was less well adjusted to it than I knew, or else the very fact of being surrounded by so many faces I didn’t know exaggerated my feeling of being apart. There was another word for what I was feeling, but I preferred not to use it: homesick.

The Upstage Theater didn’t look like much.

There wasn’t even a marquee, just posters tacked up on either side of a box office that looked more like an open-air newsstand. King Leer, the hand-drawn posters announced, and I laughed. Oh, Lord, if that was an example of the efficiency of this amateur theater group, it was no wonder that Carol had delayed their last payment.

I tried both front doors and found them locked.

Knocking and then pounding produced no response.

Down an alley, I found a side entrance; it even said Stage Door in hand lettering. But it, too, was locked, and still nobody responded to my pounding. Hell’s bells. All the way down here, and no way in. Hadn’t Damon Calendar told me that morning, on the phone, that they’d be rehearsing all day?

“I thought you were desperate for the money,” I muttered to the locked door. I gave it an ill-tempered kick with the toe of my right shoe, but that didn’t help, it only scuffed the leather. I decided to try to phone the theater from one of the businesses next door.

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