Tell-All

auburn wig, handing it to me. She says, “Not even the senator?”
    The “was-band” before Paco. Senator Phelps Russell Warner . Again, I shake my head, No. Not Terrence Terry , the faggot dancer. Not Paco Esposito , who currently plays a hot-tempered, flamenco-dancing Latin brain surgeon on some new radio program called
Guiding Light
. None of the was-bands have sent a word of condolence.
    Pawing the makeup from her face with cotton balls and cold cream, Miss Kathie snaps the elastic wig cap off the crown of her head. Her movie-star hands claw the long strands of gray hair loose. She twists her head side to side,fast, so the hair fans out, hanging to the pink, padded shoulders of her satin dressing gown. Fingering a few wispy gray strands, Miss Kathie says, “Do you think my hair will hold dye again?”
    The first symptom of what Walter Winchell calls “infant-uation” is when Miss Kathie colors her hair the bright orange of a tabby cat.
    “Optimism,” says H. L. Mencken, “is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.”
    Miss Kathie cups a hand beneath each of her breasts, lifting them until the cleavage swells at her throat. Watching herself in the angled mirrors, she says, “Why can’t that brilliant Dr. Josef Mengele in Munich do something about my old-lady
hands?”
    At best, this young Westward specimen is what Lolly Parsons calls a “boy-ographer.” One of those smiling, dancing young gadabouts who insinuate themselves in the private lives of lonely, fading motion-picture stars. Professional listeners, these meticulously well-groomed walking men, they listen to confidences, indulge strong egos and weakening minds, forever cherry-picking the best anecdotes and quotes, with a manuscript always ready for publication upon the instant of the movie star’s demise. So many cozy evenings beside the fire, sipping brandy, those nights will pay off with scandalous confessions and declarations. Mr. Bright Brown Eyes, without a doubt, he’s one of those seducers ready to betray every secret, every wart and flatulence of Miss Kathie’s private life.
    This Webster specimen is obviously a would-be author, looking to write the type of intimate tell-all that Winchell calls an unauthorized “bile-ography.” The literary equivalentof a magpie, stealing the brightest and darkest moments from every celebrity he’ll meet.
    My Miss Kathie scoops a finger through a jar of Vaseline , then rubs a fat lump of the slime, smearing it across her top and bottom teeth, pushing her finger deep to coat her molars. She smiles her greasy smile and says, “Do you have a spoon?”
    In the kitchen, I tell her. We haven’t kept a spoon in her bathroom since the year when every other song on the radio was Christine, Dorothy and Phyllis McGuire singing “Don’t Take Your Love from Me.”
    Miss Kathie’s goal: to reduce until she becomes what Lolly Parsons calls nothing but “tan and bones.” What Hedda Hopper calls a “lipstick skeleton.” A “beautifully coiffed skull” as Elsa Maxwell calls Katharine Hepburn .
    The moment of Miss Kathie’s exit in search of said spoon, my fingers pry open a box of bath salts and pinch up the coarse grains. These I sprinkle between the roses, swirling the vase to dissolve the salts into the water. My fingers pluck the card from the bouquet of roses and lilies. Folding the parchment, I tear it once, twice. Folding and tearing until the sentences become only words. The words become only letters of the alphabet, which I sprinkle into the toilet bowl. As I flush the lever, the water rises in the bowl, the torn parchment spinning as the water deepens. From deep within itself, the commode regurgitates a hidden mess of paper trapped down within the toilet’s throat. Bobbing to the surface, bits of waterlogged paper, greeting cards, the tissue paper of telegrams. It all backs up within the clogged bowl.
    Within the rim of the toilet swirls a tide of affection and concern, signed by Edna Ferber, Artie Shaw, Bess Truman .The handwritten notes and cards, the telegrams reading,
If there’s anything I can do
… and,
Please don’t hesitate to call
. The torn scraps of these sentiments spin higher and higher toward the brim of disaster, preparing to overflow, to run over the lip of the white bowl and flood the pink marble floor. These affectionate words … I’ve torn them into bits, and then torn those into smaller bits, scraps. All of my covert work is about to be exposed. These, all of the