Secret Language by Monica Wood

Author:Monica Wood [Wood, Monica]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-49065-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

V

SECRET LANGUAGE

ONE

Garrett has not done well. His waiting room is small and stale, its one window looking down on the wintry rubble of Times Square. Behind a flimsy desk sits a secretary, a girl barely out of high school, with heavily made-up eyes. She has the aspiring look of an out-of-work actor and is reading an unbound script. Her head moves oddly, as if she is walking the stage in her head.

Photographs jam each wall. Many of them are old, including one—the largest, almost poster-sized—of the cast of Silver Moon. Isadora gets up to inspect it. She is quiet, obviously disappointed by Garrett’s poor quarters. Connie wanders to a different wall, sorry to have brought Isadora here, to have presumed she had anything to give her.

She scans the photographs, dozens of obscure faces—musicians, actors, comedians, dance troupes, rock bands: a parade of hope and frustration in which she recognizes no one but her parents. In one photograph Billy and Delle stand side by side, dressed as a count and countess. Connie recalls the costumes but not the show, though she thinks she might remember a choking heat, a vapid audience, a bitter, ongoing argument. In another photograph they are posed in evening clothes, flanked by Garrett and some cast members in front of the Barrymore. The marquee reads Smythe and Smythe. Their smiles are huge and gluttonous, for this is their first Broadway show.

She blinks at this photograph and, as if they have just appeared, finds two tiny girls hovering like dust motes at the fringes of the small crowd. They stand close to each other, but nothing touches except the frilly hems of their white dresses.

A shadow appears behind the milky glass window of Garrett’s office door. As it swings open, the letters on the window, GARRETT REESE, MANAGEMENT/PROMOTION/PUBLIC RELATIONS, appear backwards behind him. The secretary doesn’t flinch from her reading; in the twenty minutes Connie has waited, the phone hasn’t rung once.

“I’ll be goddamned,” he says, putting his hand out. “Connie Spaulding.”

His smile strikes Connie as unnervingly forgiving, as if she has come here for restitution. His face, mostly unchanged, triggers a clutter of eavesdropped memories: screaming phone calls, accusations back and forth, threats and counterthreats and ultimatums. She’d had some foolish notion of cashing in on his nostalgia, but realizes too late that there is nothing to collect.

“This is Isadora,” she says.

Isadora offers her hand, a little stiffly, Connie thinks. She looks like a person aware of wasting time.

Garrett looks from one to the other. “Amazing.” He shakes his head, chuckling softly. “Amazing. Come on in.” To the girl at the desk he says, “Hold my calls.”

He ushers them into his office, a roomier, more cheerful space with two windows and a smaller explosion of photographs on each wall. He sits down and teeters back on his chair. His hair is almost gone, but otherwise he is not much changed. His clothes are casual, but expensive and pressed, and he moves like a man who knows what he’s doing.

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