All the rest was swept into the trash bag, a major job and an important step in making a fresh start. There was another audition tomorrow, and her lucky blue suit had come through the day unscathed.
A good omen.
The X on the discarded blouse was now covered with rotted garbage, solidified milk, bottle caps, candy wrappers and deli containers. Stella never saw the folded note in the garment’s small breast pocket; it was lost in the clutter of her life. And so she never read the words, I can touch you any time I want.
CHAPTER 10
The early morning temperature was eighty-two degrees, and the East Villagers were already showing some wear as they moved down First Avenue in the rush-hour traffic of wheels and feet.
The tour guide stood at the front of the bus beside the driver. Microphone in hand, she pointed out the more colorful examples of New Yorkers in the wild. However, most of the Finnish tourists were fixated upon one specimen; though this man was clad in the common uniform of T-shirt and jeans, he stood out from all the rest. His torso and head appeared to be made of one rigid piece of wood, and his hands swung by his sides to the beat of a metronome – tick, tick, tick. He carried a gray canvas bag, but its weight never hampered the synchronous movement of both arms, and every step was of equal length and speed, never slowing to avoid other people on the sidewalk, never deviating from a straight line.
For the past hour of gridlock, the bus passengers had been bored out of their minds. Their translator had taken sick this morning, and the American tour guide had not yet grasped that they neither spoke nor understood English, except for the word tourist and a few helpful obscenities. Now they crowded together on one side of the vehicle, their sense of expectation heightened as they watched the strange man moving down the sidewalk.
Something was about to happen.
The traffic was beginning to move again, and the bus kept pace with the wooden man, following him as he turned a corner and marched down a side street. Most of the other pedestrians moved out of his way, but two smaller people collided with him. Their bodies yielded to the impact – his did not. Crossing Avenue B in advance of the bus, the man kicked a dog, but not in anger. The spaniel was simply in the way of his foot. The animal’s owner yelled at him, and he passed this woman by, blind to her raised fist and every living thing in his path.
He pivoted neatly to march in front of the bus, and the driver slammed on the brakes. The riders smiled in unison. Finally, something of interest – a near-death experience.
The Finns moved to the windows on the other side of the bus, and every pair of eyes followed the man’s progress to the opposite sidewalk, where he took a baseball cap from his gray bag and pulled it low to shield his face. Then he reached into his pocket for the giant I-Love-New-York button and pinned it to his T-shirt. He moved through a crowd of people, pushing them out of his way without raising a hand, walking into their bodies, never seeing or hearing them, and they fell off to the side with angry shouts and obscene gestures.
The Finnish tourists heard a loud bang, and some of them ducked, for they had seen entirely too many movies about New York and its heavily armed residents.
The man stopped, and so did the bus. It knelt down on one blown-out tire as the driver muttered a word for defecation and frustration. The tour guide cautioned her disembarking passengers not to wander off before the replacement bus arrived. Even if the Finns had understood what she was saying, her warning would have been unnecessary, for they had no intention of going anywhere.
They formed an audience on the sidewalk, and, behind the safety of their sunglasses, they watched the wooden man. He stood near the door of an apartment house. A fence of bars protected a tiny courtyard and a bed of daisies gamely growing in the heat. The man moved closer to the iron gate. He opened his canvas bag and pulled out a camera, then stared at his wristwatch.
The Finns understood that he was also waiting for something to happen. They waited with him, watching him between the bodies of pedestrians marching toward the subway. Except for the large souvenir button on his T-shirt, many of the commuters were dressed in the same casual clothes, but the wooden man could not quite blend in with real life.
He glanced at his watch again, and the tourists nodded to one another. It would not be long now.
The man turned his entire body to face the door in the courtyard fence, and twenty pairs of Finnish eyes were looking over his shoulder.
Beyond the iron bars, a red door flew open. A slender blonde crossed the small courtyard with a fast click of white high heels. Her blouse was also white, and the pale blue skirt matched the garment slung over her arm. The young woman opened the iron gate and hurried to the curb, one hand raking through her long hair, combing it on the run. She lifted a waving arm to fish a cab from the stream of traffic.
The Finns stared at this attractive woman, wondering if they should recognize her from television or the cinema. They wanted her to be an actress, for they had not seen one celebrity in the past two days.
After donning sunglasses, the man moved toward the pretty blonde as a tight group of pedestrians passed between them. The sun glinted off a piece of metal when the man lurched forward through the press of bodies and collided with the young woman.
She yelled, ‘Damn tourist!’ And the twenty Finns were startled, but took no offense.
The man pointed his camera at her. Some reflex made the woman toss her hair and pose for him with a smile. A cab stopped, the blonde stepped in and rode off, never noticing what the wooden man had done to her.
The show was over. The man moved on. And the Finnish tourists looked the other way. In the best tradition of New York City, they had elected not to get involved.
The cab was trapped in midtown traffic, and Stella Small’s anxiety was climbing with every dime on the meter. She banged on the bulletproof glass that separated her from the driver. Of course, he would not turn around. What was the point? He spoke no English, and Stella knew that when she yelled, ‘There won’t be any ransom! I’m dead broke!’
The turbanned cabby nodded to assure her that they would be moving soon. He was very polite, more proof that he was not a native New Yorker.
She looked down at her watch for the third time in as many minutes, and she was still late.
‘Okay, you win!’ She waved money so the man could see it in his rearview mirror. After paying him, she stepped out of the cab two blocks from the hotel. Her pale blue blazer was carefully folded over one arm to protect it from soot and the droppings of low-flying pigeons.
She was swept up in the crowd of pedestrians and moving along the sidewalk at a fast clip. Two women walking toward her were actually slowing down, completely misunderstanding the concept of rush hour. And now they were breaking the prime law of survival in New York City, going beyond dangerous eye contact to overt staring. Stella wondered if they had recognized her from a recent walk-on part in a television soap opera.
Dream on, babe.
An old man stopped to gawk at her, and Stella smiled for him.
Yes, it’s me, the famous actress with no speaking roles.
She was attracting hard looks from everyone she passed. A middle-aged couple stopped to point at her, their mouths working in silence, obviously starstruck. The daytime soaps must be more popular than she had supposed.
Don’t you people have regular jobs?
The actress pushed through the hotel door and walked into an icy wall of machine-made air. Near the entrance, a bored young man never even glanced her way. He plucked a sheet of paper from his stack and waved it in her general direction. A woman near the closed doors to the ballroom was calling out the names that began with R. Stella Small sighed – saved by her rank in the alphabet.