Soap Opera Slaughters Read online

  The Soap Opera Slaughters

  Marvin Kaye

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  If I hadn’t paused to watch the goldfish ripping up the anarchis, I would’ve missed the precommercial teaser on the Channel 14 newscast.

  “—unidentified naked man plunges to a bloody death from the rooftop of a Manhattan TV studio. We’ll have details after—”

  It didn’t mean anything to me then, though “naked” caught my attention, just the way the copywriter planned. Certainly I had no idea the coming report was the first link in a chain involving Hilary that I would have to unweld.

  I was in a lousy mood. Loneliness is watching one comet and two fantails—Charlie, Jackie and Marty Goldfish—systematically defoliate the greenery in their ten-gallon aquarium tank at eleven o’clock at night. On a Saturday. In Philadelphia. The apartment was empty, The Old Man was busy wrecking his wheels in a midwestern demolition derby while I tried to salvage his fly-bitten detective agency, and the telephone remained silent. The latter being the chief irritant. Hilary had almost a week to call, but she didn’t not even after I squeezed an apology into the thirty seconds her recording machine allows.

  Several months earlier, I’d been employed as secretary-houseboy-copywriter for Hilary’s PR firm in her ground-floor West End Avenue apartment in Manhattan’s mid-Eighties. I got the job a few years earlier on the recommendation of one of her clients, a resort comic who owed me a few favors.

  My first impression of Hilary Quayle was mixed. Physically, I found her extremely appealing: sky-blue eyes, long graceful neck, pale blond silky hair that she used to tie severely in back, but now lets fall loosely in soft parentheses about her delicately complexioned. Though petite, she is well curved, dressing tastefully but modestly, yet the most sober business suit whispers contradictions when Hilary wears it.

  But somehow Hilary’s beauty irritates her. She reminds me a little of St. Bridget, distracted from what she thought her true self by the accident of comeliness. Like Bridget, Hilary found a way of offsetting the attribute: sarcasm of so virulent a strain that at first she seems as warm and charming as a copperhead. It took me quite a while (though it was worth the wait) to glimpse the caring, vulnerable woman behind the facade, and to recognize Hilary as one of those blithely tormented people who never really know their own beauty and try to hide their uncertainty behind a rampart of bravado and irony.

  Hilary is a frustrated detective. It stems from a tangled need to both emulate and surpass her father, himself a prominent Manhattan private investigator. He left Hilary and her mother when she was a girl, and ever since she’s tried to win Daddy’s approval—or at least, his notice. Once she offered to work for him for nothing so she could learn his business, but—equating her offer with the price—he refused with an offhand contempt that has smoldered in her ever since.

  The stumbling block to her ambition is New York’s stipulation that an applicant must work three years at existing detective agencies before being eligible for a license. She’s tried to hold down such jobs, but never managed to last long. She blames her father, thinks he pulled strings to get her fired, but I find that doubtful. I don’t think he’d go to that much trouble on her account. More likely, her mouth just rammed broadside some very unliberated male employers.

  The early days as Hilary’s assistant were strained. She fired me more than once, and I quit a few times, but little by little, a romantic bond began to grow between us, maybe not as strong as the one the dwarfs fashioned to bind the wolf, but tight enough to chafe us both. We were Mirabell and Millamant, afraid to climb down from our self-images and admit we liked each other. A case of love at first spite.

  I got the bright idea to renew my old detective’s license, a relic of upstate unemployment from one of my many abortive pasts. I thought it would be the perfect way to help Hilary achieve her dream. “All you have to do,” I told her, “is chuck PR and open up an investigative bureau with me as figurehead, you as brains. Once you earn your license as my ‘employee,’ you can assume your rightful place as agency head. What do you think?”

  “I think,” she replied acidulously, “that you want to change a symbiotic relationship to a parasitic one with myself as host body.”

  That left her open to two cracks, one sexist, one psychological I was so stung by her attitude that I used them both, and as usual she fired me. It didn’t take, though. A week later, an old friend of hers called and on a rare impulse, Hilary asked me along for a few drinks at Mr. William Shakespeare’s in the Village. It was the beginning of the sequence of events elsewhere chronicled as Bullets for Macbeth, and it ended with me and Hilary as lovers. Our honeymoon lasted until last June. I made the mistake of inviting Hilary to the annual banquet of Sons of the Desert, the international Laurel and Hardy society. I’m a member of the New York founding “tent,” which until recently was strictly stag. Hilary found out, called me a sexist and refused to speak to me for days on end. The result was The Laurel and Hardy Murders and a change of membership policy at Sons of the Desert.

  But by the time Hilary and I reconciled, my old job was filled. Not that I was out of work; while the deep freeze was on, I accepted an offer from Frank Butler, “The Old Man,” the worst excuse for a detective in the East I was sure it was a temporary situation, but then I suppose every employee thinks himself absolutely irreplaceable, so when Hilary gave my job to Harry Whelan, I was stunned. Also jealous. Harry is a part-time actor and full-time opportunist. He dated Hilary and went with her on a business trip to Washington that I’ve never felt easy about. I was sure he hadn’t gotten her out of his system. It’s difficult

  One week before the night I sat gawking at my goldfish I was on the phone with Hilary having an old argument. She assured me for the hundredth time that I’d have my old job back as soon as Harry left. She’d been telling it to me for a long time. I figured it was time for her to make a token move to prove there was still something between us. Firing Harry would be a nice gesture.

  “Has it occurred to you,” I asked her on the phone, “that dear Harry may not be pursuing his acting career quite so zealously these days?”

  “Gene, you know it’s not unusual for an actor to be unemployed for long stretches of time.”

  “Correction, milady—Harry is employed. He’s just not acting.”

  “Are you implying,” she asked in her Number Two Icicle Voice, “that my relationship with him is anything other than professional?”

  “No. Should I?”

  A brief pause. Then in too precise diction she told me she refused to discuss it further. “If you want to wallow in neurotic projection, Gene, that’s—”

  I whistled appreciatively. “Neurotic projection? An area of considerable expertise on your part, milady.”

  I had the phone away from my ear before she slammed it down.

  So I was still stuck in Philly earning peanuts from the laughable Benjamin F. Butler a/k/a The Old Man.

  But exactly one day after the long-distance spat with Hilary, my resort comic pal—the one who first recommended me to Hilary—rang me up with the news that none other than Harry Whelan just signed a one-year contract with Colson-Ames Productions to play an ongo
ing part on (of all shows) the WBS-TV daytime drama—soap opera, if you insist—“Riverday.”

  I’d often ribbed The Old Man for his addiction to “Days of Our Lives,” etc., but while he was out of town, he told me to videotape his favorite programs. That’s when I came out of the closet and got hooked on “Riverday.” It and “Ryan’s Hope” proved my downfall, partly because both are extremely well written, partly because I became enamored of an actress on “Riverday.” Her name is Lara Wells, and she bears an uncanny resemblance to Hilary Quayle. Of which, more anon.

  Well, I rejoiced, it finally happened. Harry Whelan is a working actor once more! He’d promised Hilary he’d move out once he found employment in his own field, so my old job finally was vacant and ready for me.

  Only why hadn’t she called to ask me back? I gave her the benefit of the doubt and assumed she hadn’t known about Harry’s contract when she hung up on me. I decided to sit tight and wait for her to phone with the news.

  I waited all week.

  On Friday afternoon, I swallowed my pride and called her, but got her answering machine. That tended to confirm the report. Hilary dislikes using the recorder unless there’s no way she can leave the office manned. So Harry must be gone, I thought.

  The beep sounded. I stammered a message of apology for what I’d recently said to her on the phone. It took too long but before the allotted half-minute elapsed, I managed to squeeze in a question: did she have anything to tell me?

  I could’ve saved myself the trouble. It fetched no response. She didn’t call at all that day, Friday. Or the next day, either, the Saturday of the goldfish and the news bulletin.

  I waited till evening, then my patience ditto temper ran out Around 10:30 P.M. I left another message on Hilary’s answering machine. I had no trouble whatsoever fitting it into the thirty-second time limit

  Because I had Harry on my mind, “Riverday” was already there, too. After I left my rude message, I settled down with the Philadelphia Inquirer, the edition for that Saturday, and while leafing through it saw a two-page spread with a headline at least forty-two points high.

  MEET YOUR FAVORITE SOAP OPERA STARS!

  Want to meet your favorite Soap Stars IN PERSON? Find out what they’re REALLY, REALLY LIKE? Get behind-the-camera lowdown on THEIR private lives? Here’s your chance...

  There was a lot more copy, but the gist was that six men and a like number of women—performers representing all twelve current “soaps”—would be in the flesh Sunday from one o’clock on to greet the public and answer questions at the brand-new Delaware County Shopping Mall, twenty miles southeast of downtown Philly.

  The representative for “Riverday” was Lara Wells, the Hilary Quayle lookalike I had a crush on.

  The newspaper ad reminded me I hadn’t yet viewed Friday’s “Riverday” episode. Idly wondering whether Harry was on it, I fished it out of the holder and turned on the set, but before I had a chance to flick over to playback mode, my three goldfish caught my eye. It was about ten minutes before 11 PM.

  Charlie was my first fish. A next-door neighbor bequeathed him (her?) to me. At that time he lived in a variety store fishbowl, the kind you can hold in one hand. Deciding Charlie would be lonely in there, I bought her (him?) a companion, but the newcomer lasted less than a week. It occurred to me I didn’t know all that much about goldfish care, so—dumping the dead fish and changing the water—I bought a paperback on How to Help Your Goldfish Thrive. I found out what I was doing wrong. Everything.

  Ninety dollars later, Charlie was comfortably ensconced in a ten-gallon aquarium filled with aged tap water, a filter floss/charcoal corner filter, fifteen pounds of prewashed gravel, a hose leading to the air pump that rests above on the tank’s screen cover (which also holds the 25-watt strip light), two fantails named Marty and Jackie, and a batch of anchored anarchis.

  According to the book, anarchis is a hardy plant capable of withstanding the nibbling of the average goldfish. It didn’t have a chance with my roughnecks, though. I stared at them for at least ten minutes while they tore off every single leaf from every available stalk. I wondered whether they were engaged in some kind of Pet Power protest Maybe they wanted a bigger aquarium? Different food?

  The Channel 14 teaser shook me from my reverie. I put down the VTR cartridge and waited for the commercials to end. Soon the newscaster returned and the remote film played. I saw a vaguely familiar midtown Manhattan block. An ambulance was at the curb. There were police holding back the curious.

  This afternoon at a quarter past two, a man fell from the roof of the block-long WBS-TV studios on West Fifty-third Street near Twelfth Avenue. Medical examiners say he died instantly.

  “Police refuse to comment on whether the death was accidental, suicide or the result of deliberate violence. However, Chief Inspector Lou Betterman admitted the incident looks extremely suspicious.”

  The familiar boiled-fish glower of Fat Lou Betterman, Hilary’s family friend on the force, appeared on the screen. Brushing his stubby thumb back and forth over the straggly ends of his salt/pepper mustache, Betterman spoke into the handheld microphone the remotecaster aimed at him.

  BETTERMAN (grousing)

  Look, I’m not bugged because the victim happened to be bare-[BLEEP], it’s a hot day, maybe he was sunbathing. But I want to know where the [BLEEP] his clothes are, we didn’t find ’em on the roof.

  The camera panned to the remote reporter, who said further investigation disclosed nobody had seen a man without clothes wandering the WBS halls.

  They cut to another on-the-spot interview, this time with an elderly security guard wearing glasses so thick his eyes looked three times as big as they actually must have been.

  SECURITY GUARD

  ...a hell of a lot, man, not on a Saturday, ‘cause they don’t tape “Riverday” on th’ weekend, there’s just only th’ news crew, and they’s all accounted for. That poor bastard must’ve just snuck in—

  Which amounted to a general announcement that WBS security was lax and the public might as well come right over and nose around. I felt sorry for the old man. He probably just bought himself a pink slip.

  The anchorman returned and said the body, too badly smashed to identify, was at the ME’s on First Avenue, where the usual fingerprinting, tissue samples and forensic dentistry work was under way.

  I had my fill of atrocity news. Switching to VTR mode, I inserted the tape cartridge and settled back to watch “Riverday.” It was a good episode. Lara Wells had several dramatic scenes that gave her a chance to show what fine acting she was capable of. I marveled once more at her uncanny resemblance to Hilary. They even shared a few mannerisms.

  No evidence on the program of Harry Whelan. It was a good episode.

  I dozed off before it was over. In my sleep, I rescued Lara from man-eating telephones and a horde of naked goldfish.

  Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

  IT’S BAD ENOUGH TO fall asleep feeling sorry for yourself, but it’s a hell of a lot worse waking up in the same state with a stiff neck from sleeping at an impossible angle on a hushed Sunday morning. In Philadelphia.

  The VTR, after running to the end of the reel, shut itself off, and now the glowing screen was blank. The speaker emitted a middle-register monotonous hum.

  Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

  I stood up, cramped and cranky, aching in every joint, rested but not at rest. I could hardly straighten my neck or back. My clothes were rumpled, and I felt gamy. I didn’t like myself, the world, or even my goldfish—why should I, they never bought me dinner.

  I switched off the TV, put away the tape cartridge, went into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, then stripped and let the needlepoint shower try to wash away my predawn blues.

  But half an hour later—cleaner, wide awake—I sat once more in my living room, still thoroughly depressed. Once upon a time, Sundays were reserved for reading the funnies on the floor with Dad, eating the banquet maternally labored at all day in the presence of cousin
s and grandparents, but now they were nothing more than bleak weekly reminders that I was thirtyish, still single, tormented by better yesterdays. My friends are settled, moved or dead, my family is gone, it’s gauche to buy newspapers with rotogravure if you can even find them, American restaurants don’t have tables for one...and even I was bored by the valid yet commonplace litany of my own self-pity.

  The late August sun filtered through the interstices of the oriental screening, unaccompanied by the slightest noise of traffic. Pine Street might have been an empty Kansas plain.

  After feeding the fish, throwing out the garbage, watching strangers walk past my window, I wondered what device I could discover to take the cutting edge off living through another Sunday.

  Stooping, I picked up Saturday’s newspaper where I’d left it, still spread out wide upon the living room rug, and there was the big banner headline staring up at me.

  MEET YOUR FAVORITE SOAP OPERA STARS!

  At first I told myself, Gene, you’re not going to drive twenty miles and rubberneck with the unwashed multitudes just to catch a glimpse if your dream-mistress’ eyebrow. Then I modified my machismo. I had nothing better to do, and I’d been meaning to check out the new Delaware County mall, anyway. Sure, I felt a little sheepish about the extent to which soap opera addiction had taken hold of my imagination, and yes, I fully expected to find myself in the middle of an army of closet loonies unable to separate fantasy from reality, but damn it, I argued with myself, there are supposed to be fifty-five million Americans watching daytime dramas every week, why should they be any less correct than the proverbial outnumbered Frenchmen?

  Before I left, I considered taking along my binoculars, so I could at least be reasonably sure of getting a good look at Lara Wells—just to see if she really resembled Hilary all that much. But I decided finally to leave them behind, on the unlikely chance that I might actually meet her. I wouldn’t want to give her the impression I’m just another celebrity chaser.