He was in a taxi at the curb, the window rolled down with the rain falling between them. “Get in this cab right now!” he ordered.
He slid over to make room for her and the cab moved along. “I’d have bet on seeing Eva Gabor on Forty-Second Street before you. Are you crying?”
“No. Yes. Oh, Bobby!”
Sue explained: She had been in the city for two months, sleeping on Rebecca’s couch. Her savings were running out. No agents would give her the time of day. She saw a man pissing in the street. She was crying now, in particular, because the only movies that told the truth about New York City were about needle parks and taxi drivers on killing sprees. Bob Roy laughed out loud! “You’ve been in Noo Yawk for two months and haven’t called me? Naughty, Sue. Naughty, naughty.”
“I didn’t have your number.”
“What were you doing in Slime Square?”
“Going to the library.”
“To check out the latest Nancy Drew mystery? I’d have guessed you’d read them all by now.”
“They have typewriters. I need to create a new résumé.”
“Titmouse,” Bob said. “Start with a new you first. How about a cup of tea or hot Postum? Whatever soothed Baby Sue growing up in Indian Country.”
The taxi took them to Bob’s apartment downtown—to a terrible neighborhood where all the buildings were six-story tenements and the sidewalks were lined with beaten-up trash cans. He gave the driver six dollars and asked for no change. She followed him out into the rain, up the stoop, through the heavy main door, then four flights up a narrow, zigzagging stairway to apartment 4D. He needed keys for three different locks on the door.
From the dingy, dimly lit hallway, the walls more dirty gray than the original green, the floor a maze of broken and mismatched tiles, Sue stepped into a haven that smelled of candles and lemon-scented dish soap, a cabinet of curiosities, one of which was the bathtub smack dab in the middle of the small kitchen. Bob Roy’s railroad flat was four tight, connected rooms, each stuffed with koombies, knickknacks, doodads, furniture pieces of any style, shelves, books, photos in frames, trophies bought from flea markets, old records, small lamps, and calendars from decades before. “I know,” he said. “It looks like I sell magic potions in here, like I’m an animated badger from a Disney cartoon.” He lit a burner on the stove with a huge kitchen match, then filled a shiny, Olde English–style kettle with water from the tap. As he prepared cups on a tray he said, “Tea in minutes, titmouse. Make a home for yourself.”
The room off the kitchen was really a hallway, a narrow passage through treasures and castoffs. The sitting room featured three large chairs of different eras, one a La-Z-Boy, each covered with a colorful throw of some kind. A circular coffee table, nearly too large for the square space, was covered with stacks of books, a cigar box full of sharpened pencils, a vase with an artificial orchid, and two assembled toy bugs from the Cootie game, posed like they were either fighting or mating. The rain was still coming down hard outside, but window curtains that could have come from an antebellum mansion muffled the roar of the storm. The last room in the railroad flat was Bob’s bedroom, most of it taken up by a four-poster bed.
“I can never move out of this place, it would take me years to pack,” Bob called from the kitchen, only eight feet away. “Turn on the radio, would you?”
“If I can find it,” Sue said and heard his laugh in response. She had to focus out so much clutter, like she was in a Lost and Found Forgotten by Time, until she saw it. The radio was a blond-wood-paneled box as big as an ice chest, with circular knobs like thick poker chips and four lines of numbers for different frequencies. She turned the ON/OFF VOLUME until its satisfying kock was so loud Bob heard it from the kitchen.
“The tubes have to warm up,” he said.
“Does this get shortwave from the Soviet Union?”
“How’d you know?”
“My grandma had a radio like this.”
“So did mine! In fact, that’s it.”
Bob came in with a tray on which were two cups, a pitcher of milk, a sugar bowl with a painted honeybee on the lid, and a plate stacked with Oreo cookies. “Feel free to take off your coat, unless you like being damp.” Orchestral music came from the radio just as the teakettle sounded its harmonic toot.
Sweet tea with milk, three Oreos, and Bob Roy’s snug and cozy flat helped Sue breathe deeply for the first time in months. She let out a sigh as big as a cresting wave and leaned back into a chair so soft it put the z in cozy.
“Okay,” Bob said. “Tell me everything.”
She opened up about, well, everything, cued by Bob’s sympathy. He uttered his support at every story, every anecdote: New York was the only place for Sue to be! Shelley and her “yeah, okay” attitude were to be expected from such a see-you-next-Tuesday! The subway was survivable as long as you never made eye contact with anyone. You found an apartment by reading the Rental classifieds in the Times and The Village Voice, but you had to get them early, at seven in the morning, and then you had to hightail it to the apartments with a bag of donuts because the super would always open up for a pretty girl who shared her donuts. From there, they moved back in time, reminiscing about the summer seasons in Arizona, comparing the backstage gossip to that from the front office, the love affairs gone horrible, and how Sue thought Monty Hall was a solid professional. Bob spilled his tea, laughing.
“Have you had any lunch?”
“No. I was going to treat myself to a slice of pizza pie.” At half a dollar per wedge, pizza had become Sue’s standby meal at midday.
“Let me go out for deli. You strip out of that uniform of yours and take a hot bath. I’ll leave you a robe I stole from a spa in the desert, then we’ll eat like middle class Jews.”
In the kitchen, he removed a large butcher board that covered the bathtub. Why a tub was in the kitchen had something to do with the original plumbing of the old building. He turned on the water, so hot plumes of steam hazed the security-gated window, and laid the robe across a chair. A delicate wicker basket held scented soap, shampoo, conditioner, an organic sponge, and a pitcher to fill with water and rinse with.
“I’ll take my time. You soak.” Bob locked two of the front door locks behind him.
After the weak, abbreviated showers uptown, Sue relished the feel of hot water on her skin and the pouring of water over her head. It was funny, taking a bath in a kitchen like this, but she was alone, the bath was like the hot tub on the Gliebe family patio, and Sue scrubbed, rinsed, and soaked her way to being truly, wonderfully clean. She was still soaking when the front door locks were opened and Bob returned carrying a large bag of deli.
“Still naked, I see.” Bob didn’t bother averting his eyes, and Sue didn’t mind. If “backstage was no place for modesty,” as they said in the Theater, Bob Roy’s kitchen was no place for blushing.
Sue’s now pale limbs were swimming in the man-size terry-cloth robe as she sat at the coffee table, running a comb through her damp hair. Bob set down some half sandwiches, small cartons of soup, coleslaw, pickle wedges, and cans of what was called seltzer and, over lunch, they talked about movies and plays. Bob said he could get her free tickets to the lousy shows on Broadway and cheap seats for the hits, so there would be no more evenings in New York with nothing to do but be unpopular on Rebecca’s couch. He’d call around to his friends for tips on agents who could arrange a meeting or two, no promises beyond that. He knew a few rehearsal pianists who would help with her audition numbers, with sheet music, transposed for her key. “Okay, titmouse,” Bob said, clapping rye crumbs from his fingers. “Let me see this résumé of yours.”