Tell-All

My position is not that of a painter, a surgeon or a sculptor, but I perform all those duties. My job title: Pygmalion.

As the clock strikes seven, I’m hooking my creation into her girdle, lacing the waist cincher. Her shoulders shrug the gown over her head, and her hands smooth the skirts down each hip.

With the handle of a long rattail comb, I’m hooking and tucking her gray hair into the edges of her auburn wig when Miss Kathie says, “Hush.”

Her violet eyes jumping to the clock, she says, “Did you hear the doorbell just now?”

Still tucking away stray hairs, I shake my head, No.

When the clock strikes eight, the shoes are slipped onto her feet. The white sable draped across her shoulders. Her orchids, still chilled from the icebox, she cups them in her lap, sitting at the top of the stairs, looking down into the foyer, watching the street door. One diamond earring pushes forward, her head cocked to hear footsteps on the stoop. Maybe the muffled knock of a man’s glove on the door, or the sound of the bell.

A whiskey later, Miss Kathie goes to the boudoir mantel and her violet eyes study the letter I forged. She takes the paper and holds it, sitting again on the stairs. Another whiskey later, she returns to her boudoir to fold the letter and tear it in half. She folds the page and tears it again, tears it again, and drops the fluttering pieces into the fireplace. The flames. One of my creations destroying another. My counterfeit Medea or Lady Macbeth, burning my false declaration of love.

True love is NOT out of your reach. Saturday replaced with Friday. Tomorrow, when Webster Carlton Westward III arrives for his actual di

By a third whiskey, the orchids are worried and bruised to a pulp between Miss Kathie’s fretting hands. When I offer to bring another drink, her face shines, sliced with the wet ribbons of her tears.

Miss Kathie looks down the stairs at me, blinking to dry her eyelashes, saying, “Realistically, what would a lovely young man like Webb want with an old woman?” Smiling at the crushed orchids in her lap, she says, “How could I be such a fool?”

She is no one’s fool, I assure her. She’s A

Her eyes, in that scene, as dull and glassy as pearls or diamonds soiled with hair spray. In one hand, Miss Kathie balls the smashed flowers tight within her fist, to make a wad she drops into one empty old-fashioned glass. She hands the glass to me, the dregs of whiskey and orchids, and I hand her another filled with ice and gin. The sable coat slips from her shoulders to lie, heaped, on the stairway carpet. She’s the infant born this afternoon in her bed, the young girl who dressed, the woman who sat down to wait for her new love… Now she’s become a hag, aged a lifetime in one evening. Miss Kathie lifts a hand, looking at her wrinkled knuckles, her marquise-cut diamond ring. Twisting the diamond to make it sparkle, she says, “What say we make a record of this moment?” Drive to the crypt beneath the cathedral, she means, and cut these new wrinkles into the mirror where her sins and mistakes collect. That etched diary of her secret face.

She draws her legs in close to her body, her knees pressed to her chest. All of her wadded as tight as the ruined fistful of flowers.

Throwing back a swallow of gin, she says, “I’m such an old ni

Her heart, devastated. My plan, working to perfection.

The rim of the glass, smeared red with her lipstick, the curved rim has printed her face with red, spreading the corners of her mouth upward to make a lurid clown’s smile. Her eyeliner dribbles in a black line down from the center of each eye. Miss Kathie lifts her hand, twisting the wrist to see her watch, the awful truth circled in diamonds and pink sapphires. Here’s bad news presented in an exquisite package. From somewhere in the bowels of the town house, a clock begins to strike midnight. Past the twelfth stroke, the bell continues to thirteen, fourteen. More late than any night could possibly get. At the stroke of fifteen, my Miss Kathie looks up, her cloudy eyes confused with alcohol.

It’s impossible. The bell tolling sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, it’s the doorbell. And standing on the stoop, when I open the front door, there waits a pair of bright brown eyes behind an armful of roses and lilies.

ACT I, SCENE EIGHT

We open with a pa

This demonstrates the endless nature of my work. By the time I’ve done them all, the first awards will need dusting and polishing. Thus I move along with my soiled cotton diaper, really the most soft kind of dust cloth.

Every month another group entices Miss Kathie to grace them with her presence, rewarding her with yet another silver-plate urn or platter, engraved, Woman of the Year, to collect dust. Imagine every compliment you’ve ever received, made manifest, etched into metal or stone and filling your home. That terrible accumulating burden of your Dedication and Talent, your Contributions and Achievements, forgotten by everyone except yourself. Katherine Kenton, the Great Humanitarian.

Throughout this sequence, always from offscreen, we hear the laughter of a man and woman. Miss Kathie and some famous actor. Gregory Peck or Dan Duryea. Her ringing laugh followed by his bass guffaw. As I’m dusting awards in the library of the town house, the laughter filters downstairs from her boudoir. If I’m working in the dining room, the laughter echoes from the drawing room. Nevertheless, when I follow the sound, any new room is empty. The laughter always comes from around another corner or from behind the next door. What I find are only the awards, turning dark with tarnish. Such honors-solid, worthless lead or pig iron merely coated with a thin skin of gold. After every rubbing, more dull, worn and smutty.

In her boudoir, on the television, my Miss Kathie rides in an open horse-drawn carriage through Central Park, sitting beside Robert Stack. Behind them trails a huge looming mass of white balloons. At a crescendo of violin music, Stack rolls on top of Miss Kathie, and her fist opens, releasing the frenzied balloons to scatter and swim upward, whipping their long tails of white string.