Media Share 9/MEDIASHARE_09.ISO/private/rubyv19.zip/RUBY19-6

Text File | 1993-02-15 | 5KB | 89 lines

Copyright 1993(c)
                   THE DAY AUDREY HEPBURN DIED
                         By B.Z. Niditch
     I was feeling restless. I couldn't sleep for the life of me.
The artificial flowers, microwave, the fake fireplace and stuffed
bear on the rug, all made me want a foreign body or foreign tea.
     Up 'til three at "the Other Side" bar made me feel "jiggy",
as my high school teacher Miss Feeney called it. She only wore a
plum skirt the whole year until Christmas when the kids, many of
whom were Jewish or Arabic, pitched in for a poinsettia pant suit.
     The green tea percolated me. I took a couple of sour vitamin
C capsules. The radiator was bleeding; and I gagged on the
toothbrush when it touched that one wisdom tooth. Some people
shouldn't drink, especially on Monday.
     I watched the frozen snow on the broken T.V. I had no
expectations from cards, tarot or otherwise.
     At least I'll always have Audrey Hepburn. Life is a charade
with a funny face. Wait until dark, I thought.
     I looked at the mirror. No narcissi around that I could see.
I guessed I'd clean the apartment form the January rubbish. I
started to recite Baudelaire. He alone, like Mozart, has the voice
of an epiphany. Shuddering with a cold, I continued looking for a
tape of the Requiem to play as my tribute to Audrey.
     Not that she was the most glamorous - certainly not the
campiest - yet, there was something stylish and real in her acting
and in her life (the two were always co-equal). She lived through
World War II, had no parents to speak of, was without bread.
Obituaries are bitches, aren't they? I took out today's Times, cut
around her picture and put it on the bathroom wall next to Cary
Grant.
     The tea was all right but a bit gaseous. I walked downstairs
to the French cafe and had a petit pain. Oh, no, not that psychic
who always appears to me in any part of the city. Her name is
Cymbeline. At least that's what she says. Cymbeline is a
transsexual, and tells me my future lover was, in my past, a Latin
slave boy. Tell me more. Anyway, I guess the karma wasn't right.
She did not speak, but continued to write out a chart for a young
Adonis in tennis shoes. He smiled.
     "Well, I won't ask you what sign."
     "You don't know?"
     "I would guess, Adonis, it's Scorpio."
     "You're right."
     Scorpio Rising?
     I told him that I heard on the radio Audrey Hepburn just died.
Well, they continued to just go on with the reading. I munched on
the petit pain and walked out into the chalked, windy air.
     I'm past all signs and numbers; I've passed up on too many to
count.
     I had followed every one of Hepburn's movies, even tried an
imitation at a bar once.
     It's noon, and I'm dog tired. I feel wired on the bus,
lightheaded, too, and the cologne on this Harvard Business School
grad next to me is a musk that's overwhelming. These guys never
sweat. Anyway, this gentleman confirmed my thesis, but there
certainly was something distinct about him, apart from his cologne.
     After a brief intro, Rick tells me that he attended one of my
fiction readings; that his father was a former Wall Street flower
child and his mother was a ballerina in a mime troupe. I sense he
wants me to push his buttons so I will write about him. Rick tells
me he was briefly married and goes to softball games with his son,
who is part Greek. I ask him what separated the men from the boys
in Fifth Century Greece.
     "No idea."
     "A crowbar," I reply.
     At least I got him to laugh, his baby face and blue eyes
dilating a dazzled expression.
     We were getting off at the same Cambridge stop, and
impetuously I invited Rick to go to the video store and take out
the film Robin and Marian. That was the only Hepburn movie
available. A star's death travels fast. In the video store, there
was a fellow Rick insisted was Truman Capote's double, demanding
Hepburn.
     Rick and I go out for brunch. I take a melancholic salad; the
sprouts seem four feet high. It isn't breakfast at Tiffany's. I
wolf everything down, while Rick eats slowly. He smiles.
     "My mother always told me to eat alfalfa and celery sticks."
He says it is actor's valium.
     "With my family, it was milkshakes," I confess.
     I have espresso and he orders espresso yogurt, because coffee
makes him congested.
     "Do you play movie trivia?" I ask.
     "On planes," Rick says.
     I proceeded to tell him about my life as a writer and he asked
if all writers are insomniacs. I told him I sleep on a Hawaiian
waterbed, and we went back to my apartment. I could have danced all
night.
                               END