“It isn’t as if he’s exactly stable, either.”
“He does sound a little nuts, doesn’t he?”
“A little?”
“I guess I will call them. If he doesn’t quit.”
“What makes you think he’ll quit?”
“Well... I have this idea.”
“Yeah?”
Rickie Diaz has been cleared with the night-shift doorman and when he asks for Kate Duggan after the Wednesday night show, he is immediately allowed entrance to the theater and told where her dressing room is. He stands looking somewhat embarrassed and awed as she introduces him to the other kids, all in various stages of feline undress, using his full proud Puerto Rican name, Ricardo Alvaredo Diaz, as she learned it yesterday while outlining her brilliant plan to him. Rickie has now seen the show from a house seat provided and paid for by Kate, from which sixth-row-center vantage point he alternately watched the prowling cats on stage and checked the house for any male who seemed too interested in the particular cat in the white costume. As they come out of the Seventh Avenue stage door at ten-fifty that Wednesday night, hand in hand and trying to look very lovey-dovey, Kate scans the men waiting on the sidewalk for the performers to come out. Most of them are holding autograph books. One of them is carrying a flash camera.
Rickie is wearing jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt detailed with an embroidered parrot in red, yellow, orange, and green, a gift from his uncle in Mayagüez, he tells her later. Kate has asked him to look casual tonight because she herself is wearing what she customarily wears to and from the theater in the summertime, just jeans and a T-shirt, sometimes with a sweater if it’s cool, which this summer shows no sign of becoming. So she’s pleased that Rickie looks not like a theatergoer but like someone who might just possibly be her big, tattooed, longhaired, bulging-muscled boyfriend, which is just what he’s supposed to look like. To reinforce this notion, she reaches up to touch his cheek the moment they step out onto the sidewalk, kisses him quickly, says, “I’m starved, honey,” and loops her arm through his as they begin walking uptown.
She hopes they are being followed.
She hopes he is watching.
The idea is to have him think she’s truly involved with this powerful-looking stud. Get him to believe this is not some defenseless little girl dancing her heart out on the stage of the Winter Garden, but is instead a grown woman clever enough to have chosen Arnold Schwarzenegger as her boyfriend. So watch your fuckin onions, my one true lord and master. Hang up your expensive stationery or Arnie here will break you into tiny little pieces.
The choice for a crowded delicatessen where he will be able to see them holding hands across their hot pastrami sandwiches and ostentatiously billing and cooing is the Carnegie on Fifty-fifth and Seventh or the Stage between Fifty-third and — fourth. They choose the Carnegie because it allows a slightly longer walk from the theater, with him in close pursuit, they hope. Neither of them appears particularly nervous or suspicious or watchful as they wander hand in hand up Seventh Avenue. The idea is to make this seem entirely natural and unplanned, something that happens all the time, no matter who’s watching them. This isn’t a show here, this is two people madly in love with each other and one of them happens to be six feet two inches tall and by the way tips the scales at two-twenty, get the message?
Rickie turns out to be a pretty good actor, leaning over the table toward her and taking both her hands in his while they’re waiting for their orders to come, talking earnestly — and somewhat touchingly — of his early youth in a South Bronx barrio where he spent most of his time trying to avoid recruitment by a gang called Los Hermanos Locos, “which means ‘The Crazy Brothers,’ I guess you know.” Steadfastly refusing their admonitions, exhortations, and eventual daily beatings designed to encourage and persuade, he took up bodybuilding as a means of self-defense, hoping to cope effectively with these jackasses unless one day they decided to shoot him, which they didn’t do after he’d gained fifty pounds of muscle and busted a few heads and they lost interest. He tells her all this with a proud look on his fiercely handsome Conquistador face with its high cheekbones and aristocratic nose, tossing his ponytail in utter disdain. Kate is thinking This is someone who can really break someone in half if he so chooses.
The Indian tattoo, he tells her, has nothing at all to do with his Latino heritage — “My family doesn’t go back to any Indian tribe or anything, though there used to be some tribes in Puerto Rico,” rolling the name of the island on his tongue, Pware-toe Ree-coe — the tattoo was just something he decided to have done one night when he was a little drunk.
“The feathers in the headband ripple when I flex,” he tells her, “I’ll show you later,” which means, she realizes with something of a start, that he later plans to take off the long-sleeved shirt and flex his biceps for her, let the feathers ripple for her, a performance above and beyond the call of duty. But she does nothing at the moment to correct his mistaken assumption, satisfied that whoever may be watching in this noisy, crowded place should be utterly convinced that they are indeed girl-and-boy. She allows herself a few discreet glances around the room, green eyes sidling from patron to patron, idly seeking the pale thin man with the dark brooding eyes, but she sees no one who even vaguely fits that description.
They have ordered not the pastrami but the hot roast beef sandwiches instead, served with creamy mounds of mashed potatoes and brown gravy and a bucket of sour pickles and cream soda the likes of which she hasn’t tasted since the time some boy, she forgets who, took her to Coney Island shortly after she joined the cast of Cats the first time around. The show has been such an integral part of her life that what’s happening with this lunatic seems almost ironic. The idea that he saw her in the show, knew how to get to her because of the show, knew where to send the flowers and the notes, knew when she’d be coming out of the theater after each performance, knew that all he had to do was follow her to find out where she lived, all of this is very frightening, hey, no kidding?
But it’s also somewhat eerie, you know? As if everything was somehow preordained. Everything that happened to her before she got into Cats was leading up to the actual moment she first stepped on the stage of the Winter Garden as part of the two-boy, two-girl, so-called “Cats Chorus.” But more than that, she now has the creepy feeling that everything since then has been leading up to now, this very instant, sitting here in a restaurant with a handsome twenty-year-old Puerto Rican who’s here to protect her because her lover — who hasn’t called her in more than a week — is up there in Massachusetts making love to his goddamn wife.
The idea galls.
She eats voraciously, as she does after each performance, her hands obligingly freed by her make-believe lover who is telling her about his ambition to own his own fitness studio one day. Working in the bicycle shop is just one of three jobs he has, how about that! He also drives a limo part-time for a company in Queens, and he works weekends in the produce department at Gristede’s. Meanwhile, he’s going to NYU at night to study business administration so he’ll know what he’s doing when he opens his own place after he’s saved enough money to do it. “Start with a small studio uptown someplace, expand to a whole chain of them, I have big ideas, Kate. Lots of the guys in Los Hermanos are either dead or in jail now, can you imagine what I could’ve turned into if I let them talk me into mugging people, or selling dope or whatever the hell?” Listening to him, Kate is secretly hoping the lunatic out there will actually make his move so Rickie can stomp him into the pavement and end his career. In fact, she’s beginning to wonder if maybe they shouldn’t walk home after they get out of here, but it’s a long way to Tipperary and also to Ninety-first and First. So when at last they’ve finished their coffee and Rickie has paid the bill...