Perception, Mystery, and Beauty
David and the Lion’s Den, chapter 16
“About time!” Richard growled after he ripped his Carla persona away with his wig.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me!?” I gasped.
“Why? How didn’t you ever notice?”
Richard’s question shocked me. I think he meant for it to. Of course I should have known who Carla was all along. With my painter’s eye — my sense of shape and perspective — I should have seen through the makeup and wig immediately.
Jill and Hilda were obviously not surprised. So, why was I? I thought about that as I collapsed into my chair and picked up my coffee.
“So, what else haven’t you noticed?” Richard prodded.
His bristly crewcut contrasted so weirdly with cherry lipstick and fluttery false eyelashes that his image almost swam in front of me. I didn’t manage a very thoughtful question. “Huh?”
“Look, if you were so wrapped in yoursel… in your work, that you couldn’t see who I was, then what else have you missed?”
“Missed?”
“Come on, kid. Think! Whoever killed those people had to be close to you, right?”
I nodded, warily.
Jill looked me in the eyes. “Didn’t they all die of like severe food poisoning?”
Richard agreed. “That’s what the papers are saying.”
“And that doesn’t even begin to make sense,” I complained. “I don’t get it at all.”
“Whether it makes sense or not,” Richard continued as he picked up his whip and turned it over carefully, “everyone who died had to eat something toxic. And since nobody but your models got sick …”
“Something in the lunches we delivered,” I shrugged. “It had to be, but it can’t be.”
“We know this already,” Jill pointed out.
“What we don’t know are the details,” Richard frowned. “How did it work, David? Where did you pick the meals up, and who had access to them — other than you and Howie?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I’ve been over this a million times. Howie always had them in the van already when he picked me up. I just helped deliver. Hilda? You’d know better than me.”
She looked up from her coffee, wrinkles contorted in puzzlement. “Ja, but what I know is not helping. Ist no sense.”
“Just go over it with us, anyway,” Richard instructed. “And, David, listen carefully. There has to be something we’re all missing.”
So, she laid out the details — A kitchen rented from the Westbeth Community Center. Food donated from restaurants, supermarkets, and government surplus agencies. Volunteer cooks and packagers showing up every morning just after dawn. Howie and plenty of other drivers backing into loading docks under a rusted rail line near the Hudson. Boxes slung in hand over hand.
Richard asked her the key question. “But how do you know which box goes to which apartment? What’s the paperwork like for that?”
Hilda shrugged. “Maybe one day we can be so careful. But now there is no giving exact food to exact patient. No, is too difficult for us. Each box is like every other.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Howie always had a crumpled up carbon copy he got at the docks. It had the number of meals on it and a list of names and addresses. That’s all! I think he had to turn it in the next morning.”
Hilda agreed. “Exact. I am receiving all forms for bookkeeping. Ja.”
Richard summed it up. “So, nobody in the kitchen could know which delivery guy was getting which box, let alone who would ultimately eat it.”
I sighed. No wonder the papers thought we were guilty. “So now what?” I asked the table at large. “This isn’t helping unless you guys want to testify for the prosecution.”
“We’re missing something, obviously,” Richard mused. “Don’t get discouraged.”
We sat in silence for a while, nobody having any idea what to say. I was about to give in to despair again.
It was Jill who got the big idea. “Write it all down!” she suggested.
“Huh?”
“Pick a handful of days you remember really well, and write the stories. Put down every little detail, like it was a book.”
“OK,” I started, doubt weighing down my words. “But what’s the point? We already know nobody could have …”
“No, she’s right,” Richard broke in excitedly. “Listen — obviously something happened that we’re all missing. It’s probably right under our noses.”
“I guess,” I hesitated.
“Look, just start getting it written down, then as you do, we’ll get back together and go over it with you. Find the missing link. Something!”
I had strong doubts, but Jill and Hilda were so enthused that I went along.
“And don’t forget you’re a painter!” Jill added. “Write it like you’re filling in a canvas. Paint it. Make it real.”
She and I went shopping a couple hours later, grabbed the subway up to 23rd and 8th, to the old Five and Dime on the corner with its school supplies, lunch counter, and elderly ladies slowly counting out coupons. If I was going to do this writing thing, I wanted the right supplies.
Plus, I wanted a 99-cent patty melt. I was finally hungry. Now that I had a plan, something was stirring in me. Maybe it wouldn’t lead anywhere, but it felt good to be moving forward — under my own steam.
Jill and I perched on ripped vinyl seats and talked while we ate cheap beef patties and sipped milkshakes. She laughed at me around bites. “You honestly had no idea Richard was Carla?”
I shrugged and chewed. I needed to ask her something that had been eating at me. “Do you really think I’m self centered? That’s what Carla, I mean Richard, seemed to be saying.”
I saw a shadow flit across her face. “No, tell me the truth,” I insisted. “You look like you’re getting ready to lie.”
She spit out a dry bark of a laugh. “Ha! Isn’t everybody self centered in a way? But you? I dunno know, man, check it out. You just read my face like a book. Nobody that perceptive can be totally self absorbed.”
I blinked and took a pull of my shake to give myself time to think. What did she mean by totally?
“Take me,” she continued. “I was raised in this huge Italian/Polish family. Between us brothers and sisters and cousins and whatever, the house was packed with a dozen kids most of the time. I was never alone, but I never had any one-on-one attention either.
“Yeah?” I’d heard some of this before. Couldn’t figure out where she was going with it.
“So, now I guess I kind of look for attention and privacy both,” she went on. “Why do you think I struggle along with only one roommate? I’m sick of living in a zoo.”
“And the attention part?”
“I wanna be close to people, but they have to mean something to me. Like you and Howie.”
I blushed and dropped my eyes, though not on purpose.
She noticed. “See, that’s how we’re different. You expect people to be kind to you and pay attention to you. You grew up the center of attention. You soak up affection like a stone takes in the sun’s rays. It’s nature.”
“Hm,” I mumbled, stirring my shake and smelling chocolate. “I’m not sure how to take that, exactly.”
She looked me up and down carefully. “Why don’t you ever date anybody?” Her voice was clipped and careful.
“Huh? I do! What are you talking about?”
“I don’t mean like hooking up with somebody at a club, man. I’m talking about a real relationship. Seeing somebody regularly. Don’t you ever think about falling in love?”
“So what, if I don’t have a boyfriend, then I’m self centered?”
“I’m not saying that at all. Just wondering. You’re 24 years old and as far as I know, you’ve never been really interested in anybody. What’s up with that?”
“What, you think it’s easy? It’s not like I could in high school. College was slightly better, but still … You ever been to Kansas? Gay guys don’t exactly grow on trees there, ya know.”
I didn’t like where the conversation was going, so I turned it back on Jill. “What about you? How come you dump so many guys? What’s up with that?”
She flipped her hair at me and rattled off a response that sounded so canned she might as well have just pressed play on her Walkman. “Hey, I’m picky, OK?”
“Oh, really? If you’re so picky, why not pick better to start with? God, Jill, some of those guys …” I was thinking of that Ivy League jock from the Limelight. They went out for about two weeks before she stomped in from a date cursing him and his “chauvinist bullshit.” No surprise to me. I knew he was a jerk about six seconds after I met him.
Jill stirred her shake and looked away. “It’s not like I’m such a catch, myself.” She shrugged and waved her hand down her front dismissively. “Look at me.”
I gave her a once over and let my jaw drop open. “Girl, stop!”
I took in her typical look, sexy and a little intimidating — black leather jacket with lots of zippers, tight vintage jeans, plain tee shirt, hair clipped back simply. With her glowing skin, she barely needed makeup, hardly ever wore any. “Get outta here. You look fabulous, as usual. Total Village chic. I wish I knew how to dress as well as you.”
“East Village, maybe,” she allowed. “But you know what I mean. I don’t really have looks, I’m not pretty. I know that. It’s OK.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“I wish! Just look at my nose. And my chin! You don’t have to pretend. I know what I look like.”
“Oh, please, girl. You’re beautiful. You don’t know that?” I saw her eyes glaze over, so I hurried on, raising my voice a notch. “Guys come into Cucina all the damn time and ask for your table special. You have to notice people checking you out in the street, right? So, what’s your deal? You don’t think you rate better than some of the clowns you go out with?”
“You’re not so hard on the eyes, yourself, cutie. So what’s your problem?”
“Oh, no you don’t,” I laughed. “You’re not changing the subject that easy. This is about you, not me.”
“Any time you wanna turn on some that good ole self-absorption thing, bub,” she teased. “I thought we were talking about you. Remember?”
“Oops.” I laughed and pretended to cough.
She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Thanks, sweetie. Feel free to call me beautiful anytime you want. Just don’t expect me to believe it.”
I started to object, but she pressed a finger up against my lips. “Finish eating. I gotta get ready for my next shift.” She picked up her shake and loudly suctioned up the dregs. “And now that we’ve established how you aren’t a completely self-centered jerk?
“You’ve got work to do.”
You just read chapter 16 of a character-driven mystery set in Greenwich Village during the worst of the HIV Plague Years. David, Jill, Hilda, Richard, and Howie — and Raphael — are walking a path that leads to intense friendship and love, to the creation of gorgeous but wrenching art, and to the unraveling of a series of horrific events that nobody sees, not even as they happen. Because sometimes what you’re looking at isn’t what you see.