Tell-All

husband to film legend Katherine Kenton … ”
    I copy the original letter perfectly, only instead of
Saturday
I mimic the handwriting, that same slant and angle, to write
Friday
. Folding this new letter in half, tucking it back into the original envelope with
Miss Katherine
written on the back, licking the glue strip, my tongue tastes the mouth of this Webster specimen. The lingering flavor of Maxwell House coffee . The scent of thin Tiparillo cigars and bay rum cologne. The chemistry of Webb Westward’s saliva. The recipe for his kisses.
    Terrence Terry sets the bag of candied almonds on thekitchen table. Still eating one, he watches the television. He asks, “Where’s that awful little mutt she picked up … what? Eight years ago?”
    He’s an actor now, I say, nodding at the television set. And it was ten years ago.
    “No,” says the Terrence specimen, “I meant the Pekingese.”
    I shrug, flip the dead bolt, slip the chain and open the door. I tell him the dog’s still around. Probably upstairs napping. I say to leave the almonds, and I’ll be certain that Miss Kathie gets them. Standing with the door open, I say good-bye.
    On the television, Paco pretends to kiss Vilma Bánky . The senator on the evening news kisses babies and shakes hands. On another channel, Terrence Terry catches a bullet fired from a Union musket and dies at the Siege of Atlanta . We’re all merely ghosts who continue to linger in Miss Kathie’s world. Phantoms like the scent of honeysuckle or almonds. Like vanishing steam. The front doorbell rings again.
    Taking the candy, I slip the forged love letter into the paper bag, where Miss Kathie will find it when she arrives home this afternoon, thoroughly shocked and shaved and ravenous.

ACT I, SCENE SEVEN
    In the establishing shot, a taxicab stops in the street outside Miss Kathie’s town house. Sunshine filters through the leaves of trees. Birds sing. The shot moves in, closer and closer, to frame an upstairs window, Miss Kathie’s boudoir, where the drapes are drawn tight against the afternoon glare.
    Inside the bedroom, we cut to a close-up shot of an alarm clock. Pull back to reveal the clock is balanced atop the stack of screenplays beside Miss Kathie’s bed. On the clock, the larger hand sits at twelve, the smaller at three. Miss Kathie’s eyes flutter open to the reflection of herself staring down, those same violet eyes, from the mirrors within her bed canopy. One languid movie star hand flaps and flops, stretching until her fingers find the water glass balanced beside the clock. Her fingers find the Nembutal and bring the capsule back to her lips. Miss Kathie’s eyelashes flutter closed. Once more, the hand hangs limp off the side of her bed.
    The forged version of the love letter, the copy I traced, sits in the middle of her mantelpiece, featured center stage among the lesser invitations and wedding photos. Among the polished awards and trophies. The original date, Saturday, revised to Friday, tonight. Here’s the setup for a romantic evening that won’t happen. No, Webster Carlton Westward III will not arrive at eight this evening, and Katherine Kenton will sit alone and fully dressed, coiffed, as abandoned as Miss Havisham in the novel by Charles Dickens .
    Cut to a shot of the same taxicab as it pulls to the curb in front of a dry cleaner’s. The back car door swings opens, and my foot steps out. I ask the cabdriver to double-park while I collect Miss Kathie’s white sable from the refrigerated storage vault. The white fur folded over my arm, it feels impossibly soft but heavy, the pelts slippery and shifting within the thin layer of dry cleaner plastic. The sable glows with cold, swollen with cold in contrast to the warm daylight and the blistering, cracked-vinyl seat of the cab.
    At our next stop, the dressmaker’s, the cab stops for me to pick up the gown my Miss Kathie had altered. After that, we stop at the florist’s to buy the corsage of orchids that Miss Kathie’s nervous hands will fondle and finger tonight, as eight o’clock comes and goes and her brown-eyed young beau doesn’t ring the doorbell. Before the clock strikes eight-thirty, Miss Kathie will ask me to pour her a drink. By the stroke of nine, she’ll swallow a Valium . By ten o’clock, these orchids will be shredded. By then, my Miss Kathie will be drunken, despondent, but safe.
    Our perspective cuts back and forth between the bedside alarm clock and the roving taxi meter. Dollars