Basically, I’m self-employed. I make documentary films. There isn’t a lot of money in it. Most of my films are co-produced by the PBS affiliate in San Francisco, now and then by WGBH Boston or the BBC. It’s good work, it’s what I want to do. The tough part is selling the product. Like most arts-related industry, selling the product really means selling myself. My image, that is. Now and then my soul; I have a daughter to feed.
I had spent the day filming promotional spots for PBS affiliates. You know the sort of thing, “If you enjoyed this presentation of ‘Aged and Alone,’ and want to see more quality programming like it, then the most important gift you may give your family this holiday season is a membership in Wichita’s only viewer-sponsored television station, WKRN.” Or Duluth’s, or Honolulu’s.
Someone with more zeroes in his contract than I have thought I should look network-slick for fund-raising, so a wardrobe/makeup person had been brought in to give me a commercial veneer. I didn’t mind at first. It was like the old days when I used to anchor the evening news. But every time the camera stopped, this makeup person, Stella, pulled out her sponges and brushes and patched my face.
We had started before five that morning. By one, when my producer, Errol, came back from a liquid lunch, my coating of matte-finish goo was pretty thick, and I bore little resemblance to the portrait that sits on my mother’s baby grand.
Errol’s own cheeks glowed like Max Factor crimson number six. He gave me a boozy leer when he said: “Aleda Weston surfaced today.”
“So?” If I could have moved my lips I would have said more. But my face was clenched in Stella’s hand while she painted over break-through freckles and under-eye shadows that I thought gave my face character.
“After twenty-two years, Aleda picks today to come out of hiding.” His eyes had a morbid sparkle. “Something’s up, Maggie. Something very interesting.”
“Can I quote you?” I asked, released from Stella’s clutch at last. “I want to quote you…”
“I want to hear what your sister, Emily, has to say. And your father.”
“My father has quit talking,” I said.
“Don’t let me down, Maggie. We can do a beautiful, exclusive piece on this.”
The gleam in Errol’s eye reminded me of a funeral director I once interviewed. Ever since Abbie Hoffman’s suicide, Errol has been hot for stories about the heroes of the old New Left, their demise, their parole, their transformation into middle age, their occasional reappearance after years in hiding. He finds them poignant.
“The time is right,” he said, trying to hold my eyes with his. “It’s the twentieth day of December, Maggie. Think about it.”
For an hour before this conversation, I had been trying to figure out a way to persuade Errol that he should let me leave the studio before we had taped the spots for Cincinnati, Seattle, and Tupelo, Mississippi. I hadn’t told him yet that Emily had called me while he was out drinking his lunch.
“It’s mandatory, Maggot,” she had said. “Meet me at my apartment at four.”
She must have forgotten to tell me about the rain.
Errol was watching Stella daub white makeup in my chin cleft. She said, “Little collagen injection would fill that right in.”
“I’ve thought, Errol,” I announced, hoping that I oozed conviction when in my heart I was lying. “Get me on the first available flight to L.A. I’ll see what I can talk Emily into.”
He had bought it, both the promise and the ticket. So there I was, standing on Emily’s stoop the second time, waiting for a break in the downpour.
The rain sluiced down in straight, vertical sheets that flooded the streets and poured down the eaves and made the votive candles sputter.
I was nudging the candles toward a drier area when a woman swathed in a heavy black shawl dashed in beside me. She wore crude, peasant sandals, and her sodden skirt clung to bare legs. She shivered. I assumed that she had only stopped for temporary shelter, until she reached into the folds of her clothes and brought out a candle of her own. When she struck a match over the wick, I saw her face clearly: she was no more Chinese than the blond decal Virgins flickering in the candlelight.
She could have walked up from one of the Latino neighbor-hoods around Downtown. But why? To leave a candle in this doorway?
“The candles are pretty,” I said, but she gave me a no comprendo shrug. She dropped the lighted candle into a small baby food jar and set it down among the others. I tried to speak with her, but she was finished with her business before I got past hace frio. She said a quick Hail Mary and headed back out into the night.
I watched her go, thinking that maybe she was on some sort of pilgrimage and this stoop represented one of the stations of the cross or something. Whatever she was doing, she shouldn’t have been out: It was late, the weather was extreme, the neighborhood was none too good and the woman was very pregnant. I thought she should be home in bed, and hoped she had a bed to go home to. Emily would have known exactly what to say and do.
I tugged up the collar of my coat and followed the woman into the rain. Before I gave up on Emily and went in search of a bed of my own, I thought of one more place to look, though I dreaded it. Emily was on staff at French Hospital, three blocks down Hill Street from her apartment.
She didn’t do rounds, she wasn’t that sort of doctor. Instead, she checked on things she had growing in the laboratory, staph and strep and various other agents of modern plague. The hospital itself was okay, a small, neighborhood place. But Emily’s little corner of its labs was the stuff of nightmares.
I walked in an ankle-deep stream of frigid runoff, shivering in my wet clothes. Every doorway I passed had a night tenant huddled under plastic drapings. Seeing them only made me feel colder. When I saw the lights of an open bakery on the opposite side of Hill Street, I dodged the splash of a pair of cars and crossed to it. A sign in the window promised fresh coffee.
A tiny man in starched white baker’s coveralls and cap stood in the open door, watching impassively as I leapt over the runoff in the gutter.
“Is your coffee still hot?” I shook out a shoeful of water beside his threshold.
The baker nodded and backed into his shop. I hesitated before following him. I didn’t want to soil his immaculate floor, but the lights inside and the smell of fresh-baked something overcame any fastidiousness on my part.
By the time I had my shoes back on, the baker had filled a Styrofoam coffee cup and was fitting it with a lid.
“You go,” he said, pushing the cup toward me.
I didn’t want to go. It was warm inside and I couldn’t drink the coffee out in the rain. There were some round tables by the front window. My intention was to sit down for a few minutes and get warm. If Emily came past on her way home, I would see her. But when I started to shrug out of my coat, the baker snapped open a white paper bag and put the coffee inside it.
“You go,” he repeated.
“I go,” I sighed, rummaging in my pocket for money. I thought he must be ready to close.
“You go.” He pointed toward the door and waited for me. “Whatever you say,” I conceded. My coat was cold when I shoved my arms back into the sleeves. I picked up the bag and dropped a couple of sodden, crumpled dollars onto the counter. He brushed the money back toward me. “You no pay.”
“I insist.”
“You no pay.” He folded his arms as if offended. “You go.”
I was stung. I thought I might have committed some cultural gaffe and didn’t argue further. I stuffed the bills back into my pocket, grabbed the white bag and went to the door.