Good old Susie the bear is a fairy tale, all by herself.
When she answered her telephone at 1 A.M. she was like a boxer springing off the ropes.
“Dumb-fuck! Creep-of-the-night! Pervert! Do you know what time it is?” Susie the bear roared.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Jesus God,” Susie said. “I was expecting an obscene call.” When I told her about Chipper Dove, she decided it was an obscene call. “I don’t think Franny’s going to be happy that you told him where she lives,” Susie said. “I think she wrote all those letters so she wouldn’t ever hear from him again.”
Susie lived in a simply terrible place in Greenwich Village. Franny liked going down there to see her, and Frank occasionally dropped in—when he was in the vicinity (there was a very Frank-like bar around the corner from where Susie lived)—but Lilly and I hated the Village. Susie came uptown to see us.
In the Village, Susie could be a bear when she wanted to be; there were people down there who looked worse than bears. But when Susie came uptown, she had to look normal; they wouldn’t have let her in the Stanhope, as a bear, and on Central Park South some policeman would have shot her—thinking her an escapee from the Central Park Zoo. New York was not Vienna, and although Susie was trying to break herself of the bear habit, she could revert to bearishness in the Village and nobody would even notice. She lived with two other women in a place that had only a toilet and a cold-water sink; Susie came uptown to bathe—preferring Lilly’s suite at the Stanhope to the opulent bathroom at Frank’s place at 222 Central Park South; I think Susie liked the potential danger of the upward-flushing toilets.
She was trying to be an actress in those days. The two women she shared the terrible apartment with were both members of something called the West Village Workshop. It was an actors” workshop; it was a place that trained street clowns. Frank said of it that if the King of Mice had still been alive, he could have gotten tenure at the West Village Workshop. But I thought that if there’d been such a thing as the West Village Workshop in Vienna, maybe the King of Mice would still be alive. There ought to be someplace where you can study street dancing, animal imitations, pantomime, unicycling, scream therapy, and acts of degradation that are only acts. Susie said the West Village Workshop was basically teaching her how to be as confident as a bear without the bear suit. It was a slow process, she admitted, and in the meantime—hedging her bets—she’d had the bear suit refashioned by an animal costume expert in the Village.
“You ought to see the suit now,” Susie was always telling me. “I mean, if you think I looked like a real bear before, man … you haven’t seen the whole story!”
“It is rather remarkable,” Frank had told me. “There’s even a wet look about the mouth, and the eyes are uncanny. And the fangs,” Frank said—always an admirer of costumes and uniforms, Frank would say, “The fangs are great.”
“But we all want Susie to get over being a bear,” Franny said.
“We want the bear in her to emerge,” Lilly would say, and we’d all grunt and make other disgusting sounds together.
But when I told Susie that Franny and I had saved each other from each other—only to meet up again with Chipper Dove—Susie was all business; Susie was that ever-essential friend, the one who’ll be a bear for you when the going gets rough.
“You at Frank’s?” Susie asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Hang in there, kid,” Susie said. “I’ll be right up. Warn the doorman.”
“Should I warn him about a bear or about you, Susie?” I asked her.
“One day, honey,” Susie said, “the real me is going to surprise you.” One day, it was true, Susie would surprise me. But before Susie got up to 222 Central Park South, Lilly called me on one of Frank’s six phones.
“What’s wrong?” I said. It was nearly two in the morning.
“Chipper Dove,” Lilly whispered, in a frightened little voice. “He called here! He asked for Franny!” That son of a bitch! I thought. He’d call up a girl he’d raped when she was sleeping! He must have wanted to be sure that Franny really did live at the Stanhope. So now he knew.
“What did Franny say to him?” I asked Lilly.
“Franny wouldn’t talk to him,” Lilly said. “Franny couldn’t talk to him,” Lilly said. “I mean, she couldn’t get her mouth to work—no words came out,” Lilly said. “I told him Franny was out and he said he’d call again. You better come over here,” Lilly said. “Franny is afraid,” Lilly whispered. “I’ve never seen Franny afraid,” Lilly added. “She won’t even go back to bed, she just keeps looking out the window. I think she thinks he’s going to rape her again,” Lilly whispered.
I went to Frank’s room and woke him up. He sat bolt upright in bed, throwing back the covers and flinging the dressmaker’s dummy away from him. “Dove,” was all I had whispered to him. “Chipper Dove,” was all I had to say, and Frank woke up as if he were still banging the cymbals. We left a message for Father in the tape recorder next to his bed. We just said we were at the Stanhope.
Father was pretty good on the telephone; he counted the holes. Even so, Father still got a lot of wrong numbers, and they made him so cross that he invariably shouted to the persons on the receiving end of his calls—as if the wrong numbers had been their fault. “Jesus God!” he would holler. “You’re the wrong number!” Thus, in this small way, did my father and his Louisville Slugger terrorize a portion of New York.
Frank and I met Susie at the door of 222 Central Park South. We had to run up to Columbus Circle to find a cab. Susie was not wearing the bear suit. She was wearing old pants and a sweater over a sweater over a sweater.
“Of course she’s afraid,” Susie told Frank and me as we sped uptown. “But she’s got to deal with it. Fear is one of the first phases, my dears. If she can get over the fucking fear, then she gets to the anger. And once she’s angry,” Susie said, “then she’s home free. Just look at me,” she declared, and Frank and I looked at her and didn’t say anything. We were over our heads, and we knew it.
Franny was sitting wrapped in a blanket, her chair drawn up to the heat register; she peered out the window. The Metropolitan Museum stood in the pre-Christmas cold like a castle abandoned by its king and queen—so abandoned it looked cursed; even the peasants were staying away.
“How can I even go out?” Franny whispered to me. “He could be anywhere out there,” she said. “I don’t dare go out,” she repeated.
“Franny, Franny,” I said, “he won’t touch you again.”
“Don’t tell her things,” Susie said to me. “That’s not the way. Don’t tell—ask her things. Ask her what she wants to do?”
“What do you want to do, Franny?” Lilly asked her.
“We’ll do anything you want us to do, Franny,” Frank said.
“Think about what you want to have happen,” Susie the bear said to Franny.
Franny shivered, her teeth chattered. It was stifling in the suite, but Franny was bone-cold.
“I want to kill him,” Franny said, softly.
“Don’t say anything,” Susie the bear whispered in my ear. There was nothing I could say, anyway. We sat in the room with Franny looking out the window for about an hour. Susie gave her a back rub to try to warm her up. Franny wanted to whisper something to me, so I bent down to her. “Are you still sore?” she whispered. She wore a little smile and I smiled back at her and nodded. “Me too,” she said, and smiled; but she looked right back out the window again, and she said, “I wish he were dead.” In a little while she repeated, “I simply can’t go out, I can take all my meals here—but one of you will have to be here, all the time.” We assured her we would be. “Kill him,” she repeated, just as it was getting light above the park. “He could be anywhere out there,” she said, watching the light grow. “The bastard!” she screamed, suddenly. “I want to kill him!”