Out on the Cutting Edge (Matthew Scudder #7)

"I don't know."

"What's this? Very Good Friends. Not a bad title, and where did they do it? At the Cherry Lane? I wonder why I never heard of it. Oh, it was a staged reading, it only had one performance. Not a bad title, Very Good Friends, a little suggestive but hardly naughty. Oh, Gerald Cameron wrote it. He's quite good. I wonder how she happened to be in this."

"Is it unusual?"

"Well, sort of. You wouldn't have open auditions for this sort of thing, I wouldn't think. You see, the playwright very likely wanted to get a sense of how his work would play, so he or the designated director got hold of some suitable actors and had them walk through it onstage, possibly in front of prospective backers, possibly not. Some staged readings these days are fairly elaborate, with extensive rehearsals and a fair amount of movement onstage. In others the actors just sit in chairs as if they were doing a radio play. And who directed this? Oh, we're in luck."

"Someone you know?"

"Indeed," he said. He looked up a number, picked up a phone and dialed it. He said, "David Quantrill, please. David? Aaron Stallworth. How are you? Oh, really? Yes, well I heard about that." He covered the mouthpiece and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. "David, guess what I've got in my hand. No, on second thought don't bother. It's a playbill for a staged reading of Very Good Friends. Did that ever get past the staged reading stage, as it were? I see. Yes, I see. I hadn't heard. Oh, that's too bad." His face clouded, and he listened in silence for a moment. Then he said, "David, why I'm calling is there's a fellow with me now who's trying to find one of the actors from the reading. Her name's Paula Hoeldtke and it says here that she read Marcy. Yes. Can you tell me how you happened to use her? I see. Well, look, do you suppose my friend could come and have a word with you? He'll have some questions to ask. It seems our Paula has vanished from the face of the earth and her parents are predictably frantic. Would that be all right? Good, I'll send him right over. No, I don't think so. Shall I ask him? Oh, I see. Thank you, David."

He put the phone down, pressed the tips of two fingers against the center of his forehead, as if trying to suppress a headache. With his eyes lowered he said, "The play hasn't been performed because Gerald Cameron wanted to revise it after the reading, and he hasn't been able to do so because he's been ill." He looked at me. "Very ill."

"I see."

"Everyone's dying. Have you noticed? I'm sorry, I don't mean to do this. David lives in Chelsea, let me write down the address for you. I assumed you'd rather ask him questions yourself than have me try to function as an intermediary. He wanted to know if you were gay. I told him I didn't think so."

"I'm not."

"I suppose he only asked out of habit. After all, what difference could it make? Nobody does anything anymore. And it's not as though you have to ask who's gay and who isn't. All you have to do is wait a few years and see who's still alive." He looked at me. "Have you been reading about the seals?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You know," he said. "The seals." He pressed his elbows against his ribs, clapped his hands together like flippers, and tilted his head to mime a seal balancing a ball on its nose. "In the North Sea, and all along the European coastline. The seals are dying and nobody knows why. Oh, they've isolated a virus, but it's been around for ages, it's the one that causes distemper in dogs, and it's not as though some rott-weiler's been racing around biting seals. The best guess seems to be that it's pollution. The North Sea is badly polluted, and they think this has weakened the immune systems of the seals, leaving them with no defense against whatever virus comes along. Do you know what I think?"

"What?"

"The earth has AIDS. We're all whirling merrily through the void on a dying planet, and gay people are just doing their usual number, being shamelessly trendy as always. Right out in front on the cutting edge of death."

David Quantrill had a loft on the ninth floor of a converted industrial building on West Twenty-second Street. It consisted of one enormous high-ceilinged room, the wide board floor painted a glossy white, the walls matte black and sparsely hung with vivid abstract oils. The furniture was white wicker, and there wasn't a great deal of it.

Quantrill was in his forties, pudgy and mostly bald. What hair remained he wore long, curling over his collar. He fussed with a briar pipe and tried to remember something about Paula Hoeldtke.

"You have to remember that it was almost a year ago," he said, "and I never laid eyes or ears on her before or since. Now how did she wind up in Friends? Somebody knew her, but who?"

It took him a few minutes to prod the memory loose. He had cast another actress as Marcy, a woman named Virginia Sutcliffe. "Then Ginny called me, very last minute, to say she'd just gotten a call to do two weeks in Seesaw in some goddam place. Baltimore? It doesn't matter. Anyway, much as she loved me, et cetera, et cetera. She said there was a girl in a class with her who she swore was just right for Marcy. I said I'd see her, and she came down and read for me, and she was all right." He picked up the photograph. "She's pretty, isn't she, but there's nothing genuinely arresting about her face. Or her stage presence, but she was adequate, and I didn't have the time to chase around the kingdom with a glass slipper, searching for Cinderella. I knew I wouldn't be using her in the actual production. I'd cast Ginny for that, if she turned out to have the right chemistry with the rest of the cast, and assuming I'd forgiven her by then for deserting me and traipsing off to Baltimore."

I asked how I could reach Ginny. He had a number for her, and when it didn't answer he called her service and learned that she was in Los Angeles. He called her agent, got a number for her in California, and called it. He chatted with her for a moment or two, then put me on.

"I barely remember Paula," she said. "I knew her from class, and I just had the thought that she'd be right for Marcy. She has this awkward, tentative quality. Do you know Paula?" I said I didn't. "And you probably don't know the play, so you wouldn't know what the hell I'm talking about. I never saw her after that, so I didn't even know David had used her."

"You were in an acting class with her?"

"That's right. And I didn't really know her. It was an improv workshop led by Kelly Greer, two hours every Thursday afternoon in a second-floor studio on upper Broadway. She did a scene, two people waiting for a bus, that I thought was pretty good."

"Was she close to anyone in the class? Did she have a boyfriend?"

"I really don't know any of that. I can't remember ever having an actual conversation with her."

"Did you see her after you got back from Baltimore?"

" Baltimore?"

"I thought you went there for two weeks to be in a play, and that was why you couldn't do the reading."

"Oh, Seesaw," she said. "That wasn't two weeks in Baltimore, it was a week in Louisville and a week in Memphis. At least I got to see Graceland. After that I went home to Michigan for Christmas, and when I got back to New York I fell into three weeks of work in a soap, which was a godsend, but it took care of my Thursday afternoons. By the time I was free again there was an opening in one of Ed Kovens's classes, and I'd been wanting to study with him for a long time, and I decided I'd rather do that than more improv work. So I never did see Paula again. Is she in some kind of trouble?"

"It's possible. You said her teacher was Kelly Greer?"

"That's right. Kelly's number's in my Rolodex, which is on my desk in New York, so that's no help to you. But I'm sure it's in the book. Kelly Greer, G-R-E-E-R."

"I'm sure I'll be able to find him."

"Her. I'd be surprised if Paula's still studying with her. You don't usually stay in the same improv workshop forever, it's usually a few months and out, but maybe Kelly will be able to tell you something. I hope Paula's all right."

"So do I."

"I can picture her now, groping her way through that scene. She seemed- what's the word I want? Vulnerable."

Kelly Greer was an energetic little gnome of a woman. She had a mop of gray curls and enormous brown eyes. I found her in the book and reached her at her apartment. Instead of inviting me up she arranged to meet me in a dairy restaurant on Broadway in the low Eighties.

We sat at a table in front. I had a bagel and coffee. She ate an order of kasha varnishkes and drank two tall glasses of buttermilk.

She remembered Paula.

"She wasn't going anyplace," she said. "I think she knew it, which put her ahead of most of them."

"She wasn't any good?"

"She was all right. Most of them are all right. Oh, some of them are hopeless, but most of the ones who get this far have a certain amount of ability. They're not bad. They may even be good, they may even be fine. That's not good enough."

"What else do you need?"

"You need to be terrific. We like to think it's a matter of getting the right breaks, or being generally lucky. Or knowing the right people, or sleeping with the right people. But that's not really what does it. The people who succeed are superb. It's not enough to have some talent. You have to be positively bursting with it. You have to light up the stage or the screen or the tube. You have to glow."

"And Paula didn't."

"No, and I think she knew it, or at least half knew it, and what's more I don't think it broke her heart. That's another thing, besides the talent you have to have the desire. You have to want it desperately, and I don't think she did." She thought for a moment. "She wanted something, though."

"What?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure she knew. Money? Fame? That's what draws a lot of them, especially on the West Coast. They think acting's a way to get rich. It's about the least likely way I can think of."

"Is that what Paula wanted? Money and fame?"

"Or glamour. Or excitement, adventure. Really, how well did I know her? She started coming to my classes last fall and she kept coming around for five months or so. And she wasn't religious about it. Sometimes she didn't show up. That's common enough, they have work or an audition or something that comes up."

"When did she quit?"

"She never quit formally, she just ceased to appear. I looked it up. Her last class was in February."

She had names and phone numbers for a dozen men and women who had studied with her at the same time as Paula. She couldn't remember if Paula had had a boyfriend, or if anyone had ever picked her up after class. She didn't know if Paula had been especially friendly with any of her classmates. I copied down all the names and numbers except for Virginia Sutcliffe, to whom I'd already spoken.

"Ginny Sutcliffe said Paula did an improvisational scene at a bus stop," I said.

"Did she? I use that situation a lot. I can't honestly say I recall how Paula did with it."

"According to Ginny, she had an awkward, tentative quality."

She smiled, but there was no joy in it. " 'An awkward, tentative quality,' " she said. "No kidding. Every year a thousand ingenues descend upon New York, awkward and tentative as all hell, hoping their coltish exuberance will melt the heart of a nation. Sometimes I want to go down to Port Authority and meet the buses and tell them all to go home."