Don't Make a Scene Read online

  “I know a wonderful architect,” said Hamilton Ferris, an aging Southern actor who had played the weak son of rich, domineering men in films of the fifties and sixties.

  “We should use someone who specializes in cinemas,” said Gary Masters, a high-powered attorney from a white-shoe corporate law firm. His wife, a desiccated professional Park Avenue socialite, had snubbed Daniel on every possible occasion.

  “I know a very up-and-coming team,” Jan Mattias butted in. “They're not cinema specialists, but they're, like, masters of space.”

  “Where's the money to renovate coming from?” Daniel interrupted, to stop Jan Mattias from imprinting up-and-coming thoughts on the suggestible collective mind of the Board.

  “That's a good question,” Jack Lipsky shouted from the head of the table.

  Strange that they should be on the same side of an issue.

  “First things first,” said the lovely Diane. “Let's see the building.”

  “If it's protected as a landmark, we could sell it,” Lipsky said.

  “Sell it!” Dorothy Vail shouted. “The second screen will make Bedford Street a real player in New York cinema. How could you even think of selling it?”

  “Jack isn't saying we should sell it,” Rebecca Temple said. “But if the building is a designated landmark, it may not be our choice.”

  “That's outrageous!” Miss Vail shouted.

  That doddering old bat, Daniel thought. Someone should shut her up.

  “Dorothy, keep your hat on,” Diane said. “Let's not argue about a hypothetical situation. Let's invite Estelle DeWinter to a meeting, get this donation in writing. Then we'll see what's lurking in the building, and if it's landmarked. Next item!”

  Daniel stood on line to have a word with Diane afterwards. As usual, everyone automatically organized themselves into a power hierarchy: Jan Mattias first, as the dominant male; Dorothy Vail second, up several rungs today as the source of the new acquisition; Gary Masters third, as the éminence grise. On and on, until finally Daniel Dubrovnik, has-been screenwriter, son of the blacklist, could speak to her.

  Long ago, Richard Schickel had taken the “bitterly gossiping literary gentlemen” of Hollywood to task for failing to recognize and move toward directing as the creative center of filmmaking. Well, not everyone wanted to direct, or had a feeling for the visual. What was wrong with knowing your strengths? Daniel had met people who quoted lines from his movies verbatim. One of them was Diane Kurasik. And this was before she knew who he was—she hadn't done it to impress him. Sweet Diane—she might have been the last woman in New York who didn't have a cellphone or use the word “journal” as a verb.

  When it was his turn, Daniel asked her to lunch to discuss coming to his class. She said she'd be delighted to lecture, but lunch was out of the question.

  “Nothing personal, Daniel.” She held her books and folders like a schoolgirl. “I'm being evicted. Every spare moment of my life now is spent on the search. Anything for rent in your building?”

  “I can certainly find out,” he said, and went home to do just that. If Diane moved into his building, he could see her every day. His mood improved just thinking about it.

  ESTELLE DEWINTER walked into the restaurant that Dorothy had chosen. They had been friends for more than fifty years, through two of Dorothy's marriages and three of her own. Dorothy was the godmother of Estelle's son, Seymour. And every time the woman left a message on Estelle's machine, she said “Hello, this is Miss Dorothy Vail.”

  Miss Dorothy Vail had always taken herself too seriously. She'd appeared in twenty-two also-ran costume dramas, where her angular looks, upright posture and breathy, cultured diction were suggestive of besieged royalty. Estelle and Dorothy had bonded in the ladies’ room on a double date with two other contract players over what losers the fellows were. The friendship took off when they began dating two friends. Within a year both of them were married; it was the second marriage for each of the four parties.

  When the marriages broke up, there was a cooling-off period. Then, in 1975, Estelle bumped into Dorothy in New York, and they began a weekly movie-and-burger ritual. Estelle realized that although she missed having a man in her life, she enjoyed dishing with Dorothy. These dates reminded Estelle of her early days in Hollywood and, since she was aging much better than Dorothy, she always went home feeling energized.

  The maître d’ led Estelle back to the table. Dorothy's face lit up when she saw her. Estelle smiled and waved. Old friends were important, especially lately. Not a week went by that she didn't hear that someone else had died. She was glad she'd decided to get involved with the Bedford Street Cinema, if only to see Dorothy more often.

  DIANE SPOTTED the ladies in a corner booth; they were engaged in animated conversation, although neither one was looking at the other. They were both in full makeup and costume. The dueling perfumes began to wash over her at the bar.

  “We were just talking about you,” Estelle said, with her hand out ready for a shake. She was pale, petite and quick to smile, with short gold curls and delicate features. Before Diane could sit down, Dorothy announced that she would have to leave early.

  “It's a radio play on NPR,” she crowed. “A real job!”

  Dorothy received congratulations, the waiter took their order and the talk naturally turned to the Bedford Street Cinema, specifically the Board. Estelle knew Ham Ferris from her nutritionist's office in LA.

  “I think he's a bit lost in New York, but he came here to shake up his life,” she said. A tailored navy handbag with elegant white stitching sat parked on the table beside her. It matched her navy blue pantsuit.

  “Poor boy, his tan has faded,” Dorothy said, smiling at passing men. She wore enormous mollusk earrings in mother-of-pearl and had placed an exquisite burgundy leather handbag on top of the table. Her bag also matched her suit.

  “He's a lost soul,” said Estelle. “Any pretty actor over forty is completely vulnerable.”

  “Hardly,” Dorothy said, gazing at herself in the mirror opposite, sitting up straight, turning her chin to catch her profile.

  “We both separately came to the conclusion in the late forties that actors as men were a waste of time,” Estelle told Diane as the food arrived. There was a shifting of water glasses, as neither woman took her handbag off the table. Diane suggested that the waiter take the flowers away.

  The women tucked in to their salads.

  Estelle leaned toward Diane. “I understand you're single,” she said.

  “I'd rather have needles stuck in my eyes than discuss my personal life.”

  Estelle smiled. “Let me know if that changes, I have a nephew.”

  “I'm so sorry, I don't do nephews.”

  Estelle let out a girlish cackle. “Well, I hear that Jan Mattias is quite a catch.”

  “Oh, please.” Jan Mattias always came to Bedford Street events with a starlet from an upcoming film or a woman Diane was sure was paid by the hour.

  “I heard he used to be a big druggie and party boy,” Dorothy said.

  “Nothing would surprise me about him,” Diane said.

  When the time came, Dorothy patted her lips, painted a new mouth with coral lipstick and bustled out of the booth stiffly, but with purpose.

  “Break a leg!” Estelle said. There was kissing and wrist grabbing.

  “I can't tell you how excited we all are about the new building,” Diane said as they went to the ladies’ room.

  “I think the place is going to be a real mess,” Estelle called from inside the stall. “Herb says nobody's been there since he bought it in 1982.”

  “Why did he buy it?”

  “Who knows? My husband is impulsive.” Estelle opened the door. She was smiling and buttoning up her pants.

  Diane's impending eviction was a low-level anxiety that flared into an active fear event every three days. Tenants in the building had spent the summer scrambling to find new homes; some had been priced out of Manhattan and were moving to the
outer boroughs or New Jersey. Diane had discovered a temporary solution to her housing crisis: a one-year sublet in a generic redbrick building on East Twenty-sixth Street. The apartment was an average studio with a pass-through kitchen that had been renovated in the 1980s. There was nothing special about it. But the rent was not too pricey, the view was not too obstructed, the single closet was not too tiny, the lobby was not too dingy, the street was not too noisy and the neighborhood was not too inconvenient. It was a single room for a single woman for a single year.

  Diane heard rhythmic tapping. “Estelle, is that you?”

  When Diane emerged from the stall, Estelle was tap-dancing in front of the sink.

  Gotta Dance! she sang, and performed a little combination, ending with a kick, a pose, and a wink. She sailed through the restaurant and into the revolving door. A chauffeur emerged from a black car parked directly in front of the restaurant and opened a door. They were whisked to the theater, where a contractor that Gary Masters had recommended was waiting to help them get into the building.

  “We went into a closed-up place like this not long ago in the Bronx,” said Joe Franco, peering through a crack in the boards. “Remember?”

  “Crack addicts had been holed up in there for years,” said Roy, his second-in-command. “You wouldn't believe the smell.”

  “Yikes!” said Estelle. She produced a set of keys and a yellowed piece of paper. It was a property survey dated 1927, which identified the building as a carriage house and stables, two stories tall. Roy attacked one of the boards with a claw hammer, yanking nails out one by one. The board fell inward with a crash and a puff of dust. A smell of plaster and urine rose from the opening.

  Joe handed Diane a flashlight.

  Eleanor Roosevelt said that you must do the things you fear the most.

  Joe turned the key and pushed on the door, but it didn't open. He tried again, throwing his shoulder into the door, and it opened with a bark.

  Diane gripped the flashlight with both hands. In his autobiography What's It All About? Michael Caine advised that if you're required to do something dangerous on a movie set, you should make sure the stunt is scheduled at the very beginning of the production, when your life is at its most valuable to your director and producer. If you do it on the last day, with the film in the can, they literally don't care if you live or die.

  Diane felt a pulse in her stomach; she couldn't remember the last time she'd dared herself to do anything. She reached for Estelle's hand as the men removed debris from the entrance.

  “I was in a movie, Haunted Hotel,” Estelle said, squeezing back; she was wearing gloves. “It looked abandoned on the outside, but inside, ghosts of the family were running the hotel in secret. The chorus girls were chambermaids. I had a tap solo on top of the front desk.”

  As they entered the gloom, a dark object flew across the floor.

  “Look at the size of that!” Roy exploded, and Diane dropped her flashlight. She and Estelle screamed in unison and bolted out to the street, tripping over each other on the steps. They stood panting on the sidewalk. Estelle bent over, hands on her knees. Diane leaned on the hood of a car and tried to catch her breath. Her heart was throbbing in her throat, and she was covered in sweat.

  The chauffeur rushed into frame. “Mrs. Greenblatt! Are you all right?” He disappeared for a moment and returned with two bottles of cold water. Estelle sipped delicately; Diane sucked down half a bottle.

  “It was a cat,” Joe emerged to report. “A very well-fed cat, I must say.”

  “I think I'll sit out the rest of this safari,” Estelle said. She followed her chauffeur to the car and got into the backseat. She rolled down the window and called, “I'll be here for the full story when you come back.”

  “If we come back,” Diane said.

  A damp odor saturated the space. There were four dark wooden stalls along the length of the space; apparently, horses—and later, cars—had lived here. Windows at the far end illuminated a large, dark pile, which Diane and the two men approached with caution. At one time the pile must have been a collection of tools, drop cloths, and a ladder; now it looked as if it were reverting to primeval forest.

  “Somebody never got around to that paint job,” Roy said.

  In almost ten years Diane had had no curiosity about what lay behind the boards next door. Now she tried to imagine how the space connected to her theater, and where she would put the second screen. She had never been able to visualize things that weren't there. Architecture: another profession she had no aptitude for.

  SHE RECOGNIZED a distressed-leather jacket in front of the box office: Bobby Wald was chatting up a woman, blocking the line to buy tickets for The Prisoner of Second Avenue (Melvin Frank, 1975), which she was showing as part of the “New York, NY” series. The Star of the Month was Robert De Niro, who had put antisocial behavior and Tribeca on the map. Tribeca was now too chic for Diane's budget.

  Bobby Wald had been an eleventh-grade heartthrob with black curls and a wolfish smile when Diane was a freshman. He'd led her on with significant eye contact by the lockers and had once briefly fondled her knee in the bleachers at a Montclair High School hockey game. She'd never told her friend Claire Giancarlo, who had a crush on him. Now Bobby reminded Diane of the beefy, well-dressed thirty-year-old guys without occupations in Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953). She'd bumped into him occasionally over the years; each time, he was recovering from a girlfriend and a professional setback. He'd dropped out of architecture school, and he had tried selling things over the phone. He was currently making furniture with a master carpenter. He'd lost hair, developed a paunch. Since he'd moved to Carmine Street, he'd been coming to the Bedford Street Cinema three or four times a week, routinely chatting up Cindy at the box office and Storm at the concession stand. Storm, who was twenty-one, had patiently inserted ever-larger wooden circles into her earlobes so that the original pierced holes were now the size of quarters, and you could see through them. It was a disconcerting look, but most people didn't get past the lip ornament.

  Bobby spotted Diane and came over to talk. “I saw this movie with Debbie in college. She couldn't believe Stallone played the mugger in the park! I loved that scene when Jack Lemmon rants on the terrace. My aunt lived in a building like that on Second Avenue.”

  Not everyone was a film critic. Bobby projected a loose, unstructured charm, but what worked on fourteen-year-old girls next to the lockers didn't do it for her anymore. After a few minutes she cut him off. “Glad you enjoyed it, Bobby. I have to get to work.”

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, Diane took the bus to Montclair from the Port Authority Bus Terminal and walked east in a light drizzle to the house she'd grown up in. There were grisly Halloween vignettes being played out on many lawns and porches. Ah, New Jersey, where people had time to decorate for Halloween.

  “Margie has a man for you to meet,” Connie Kurasik greeted her at the door.

  “Thanks, I'm on strike,” Diane told her mother, shaking the rain out of her hair.

  “That's a stupid thing to do when you're almost forty,” said Rachel, sliding off a stool to peck her hello.

  “Thank you,” Diane said, setting a bag of citrus fruit on the counter. “That's tactful.”

  She heard her sister's children shrieking somewhere in the house, her sister's husband sat in front of a Sunday-morning talk show on TV, a generalist in desperate search of meaning and focus.

  “You meet the wrong men because you do the wrong things,” Rachel said.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as talking to the creeps and weirdos who come to your theater! Such as dressing like a math teacher from 1978.”

  “And turning down blind dates,” her mother said.

  “Excuse me: The last four creeps and weirdos were all fix-ups.”

  “I think a strike is a good move,” her father said.

  All eyes turned toward him. Gene Kurasik was sitting with the Sunday crossword at the kitchen table. “You can use the extra time and
energy to apply to graduate school, inherently a smart idea.” Diane and her father had an ongoing argument about the movies, which he considered passive entertainment. Diane regarded the bloated celebrity memoirs of the stars that her father liked to read as passive entertainment. “And incidentally, you might meet someone there.”

  “I went to graduate school,” Diane said.

  But she hadn't finished; this hung in the air unsaid. They all looked at her.

  “You know, until you get married, there is no other subject,” her sister said.

  Rachel was a competitive person without a sport.

  “I think I found an apartment,” Diane said, to change the subject.

  Her uncle Mort arrived, with a big, elaborate fruitcake. “How's business?” he asked Diane.

  “We had a great summer. Attendance is up in every category.”

  “But don't you have a script, Diane?” he asked. “I thought you wanted to direct, produce, right? Be higher up on the food chain?”

  “In case the apartment I'm counting on falls through, I was wondering if I might stay at your place, Mort.”

  “I don't think that would be a good idea,” Mort Kurasik said.

  Her uncle spent the fall and winter in Santa Fe. His pied-à-terre in the NYU area was a ten-minute walk from the theater. Why couldn't she stay there, especially if he was going to be out of town?

  “Try the cake,” he said, and dumped an enormous piece in front of her. It plopped off her plate onto the table with a clatter. Diane left it there.

  “You'll stay with us,” her mother said. “The train is fabulous. Just forty-five minutes from Penn Station. Everybody takes it. All the young people.”

  Diane stayed seated as the table was cleared around her. She was being evicted. She was about to be homeless. Not without resources, of course—one of them being family. Her uncle was talking to her father in the kitchen. The swinging door opened as he said, “Well, I'm sorry,” and closed. It opened again as he said, “no obligation.”