The Vestal Virgin Room

Author

1

I do paradiddles with my digits while Dottie skims the Post-Dispatch and sculptures wedges from her Howard Johnson hot-cakes with a fork. A side of links sits near her elbow, sopped in grease and the syrup she poured on them. Slows me down to consider eating that. My Timex says 7:00 and that's too soon for food. I like to get wired real quick when I wake up, take a dozen cups of coffee, a few unfiltered Luckies and a little speed. But Dottie comes out of sleep like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and has to stoke her furnace with a lot of carbs before she feels human.

Think I'll get a Lady Di do, she says without looking up. Inside page one, across the table, the royal couple are upended to my eye. She's real cute pregnant, anyway.

Dottie's drawing me in so I won't feel bored or left out. That's one of the reasons I adore her, that she would think to do that. But I don't mind just watching her eat and read the newspaper. When I get billowy inside about her I'm content to applaud her toenail paring, especially if she doesn't know I'm there. I like the curious way she seems enveloped in an invisible egg when she forgets she's under observation. Something there I can't touch, like a soap bubble.

Brooke Shields is against smoking.

More celebrity notes. Now we're getting personal, though. I stub out my burning Lucky and light a new one. Any news about her sister? Dottie looks up, hooked. Her sister?

"The one you read about in Cosmo. Panty Shields."

Dottie groans. God, Don!

I love to poke fun at celebrities because I'm not one and I want to be. It's terrible to envy a sixteen-year-old.

Dot cocks her head toward the window that looks out onto the parking lot. Violet light, a winter dawn, out there. But she's using the watery pane as a mirror, slipping on that Lady Di do, no doubt. She frowns. I know she's seeing her flaws. I like her hair however it happens to be, and complain when she claims she's going to change it. That's men, she always tells me. I never met a man who didn't have an overly proprietary interest in his woman's hair, to quote verbatim. I don't think she needs a Lady Di do, that's true. Her own blond hair is fine; it's parted in the middle and brushed down on both sides with a little ski-tip curl an inch or so above her shoulders. It's a simple style, glamorous enough for the spotlight, easy to care for, and that's important when you're on the road. This style evolved from a do she got when that ice skater, I forget her name, sent everybody scampering to their hairdressers. Before that, when we were in college in the sixties, she had hippie hair down to her waist.

She mugs at herself in the glass. It's her habit to keep her face in motion, to make it a moving target, but I love the way she looks. Her eyes ease from gray to green to lime, depending on the light, and she doctors the lashes and brows a bit, so with her upturned nose and her bow-shaped lips she always looks a touch cartoonish, but pretty, like a bubbly comedienne. She's wearing the Irish wool sweater I got her two Christmases ago and her breasts are full and rounded in it. She calls them peasant matron breasts, but I like them that way. (She wants pert bird breasts; they're more stylish.) Her thighs are full, strong-looking to me, but she thinks stumpy. She's always wanted six more inches than her five three—that's the influence of the fashion rags, I'd bet—but I like to see her as a healthy, corn-fed Iowa maid, broad-bottomed and strong, ready to calve a child a year.

You're beautiful, Dottie, I say, carried away.

Aw thanks, guy. She grins, goes back to her hotcakes. She doesn't eat like a bird. She's an earth-woman sort, not an angel subsisting on honeysuckle nectar and watercress sandwiches. Not too long ago she read that Cheryl Tiegs dines on lettuce leaves and hot water spiced with lemon, and she's cursed her appetite ever since. She spears a wedge of cakes with her fork and lays it easily into her mouth, dribbling a thread of golden syrup across her scarlet lip. There's nothing piggish or hurried about her eating. A kind of absent languor comes over her, as if she's inwardly humming. She makes love the same way, with a calm, bovine grace and a sense of idle dallying. Sometimes when we're driving, she'll hum and stick her arm out of her window to let the wind play through her fingers. Sometimes I see her fondling the upholstery on a chair or a couch where she's sitting.

Hey, Dottie!

She looks up from the chunk of sausage on her fork, brows going yes?

I'm happy to be here with you today.

She grins. You're just wired, she says, but I can tell she likes me this morning. Her alto, husky with phlegm, sounds sexy. One of life's pleasures is to lie in bed reading or thinking while she sings to herself in the shower. Her repertoire is richly catholic, everything from Tangerine to Natural Woman. Sometimes I think she may be practicing, but she seems to be having too much fun.

I hum Olivia Newton-John's Let's Get Physical. When she doesn't get the point, I say, Lemme hear your body talk.

All you'd hear would be a creak and groan of plumbing, says Dottie. Stomach gurgling, joints griping about being used too early.

Well, you look good today.

She grins. Thanks, fella. You're pretty cute yourself.

Back to the hotcakes. Hard to compete with them. I am feeling a little wired, but I'm usually this way early in a tour. It's part of the worry and hope of being on the road. On the leaving end there's the wonder of new places, new faces, the surge forward. The motel rooms are naughty the first few days, too. I picture Dot naked except for a bikini bottom made from two hotcakes strung together with link sausages. Getting on the road makes me horny. For Dottie, for life.

She frowns at the paper.

What is it?

She shrugs, shakes her head, can't speak of it. She passes a section of the paper over, taps a column with her nail. An unemployed construction worker in East St. Louis cigarette-burned the four-year-old son of the woman he was living with then drowned him in the bathtub because he broke a string on my guitar. When the article turns to the psychological pressures of supply-side economics, I toss it aside.

No wire hangers. The feeble joke is all I can manage. Child-abuse stories fill me with a rage and depression that can take hours to pass, and I don't want to come down. The older I am the more the stuff tucked on the back pages gets to me. I used to slide by it and get riled up about Watergate and Vietnam, but now not even James Watt raping the forests can hit me like a four-year-old tortured for breaking a guitar string. A killer in Atlanta sucks boys dry and tosses their corpses out with the garbage. Real vampires out there.

Somebody has hit the Muzak and the speaker overhead gushes out Lullaby of Broadway. Sounds like Red Norvo on vibes. It's strange to hear that in a coffee shop in Missouri. When I was sixteen working in a Safeway in Downer's Grove, Illinois, my passion for jazz collided constantly with the Muzak in the store. Back then, it was Swedish Rhapsody and Humoresque, but now I hear Muzak mangling music I once thought original, even subversive: The Boston Pops Plays Bob Dylan. Look What They Done to My Song, Ma. Now Red Norvo sounds as innocent as Paul Whiteman to me. We've got kids skinny as hall trees biting the heads off bats onstage. I hate the punkers, their self-pity, all that unearned anger. It hacks me that a handful of wimps called the Stopped-up Toilets or something gets lifted off a street corner in New Jersey and shoveled onto the stage of Saturday Night Live, and a week later teeny-boppers buy their records with Daddy's money and make them overnight millionaires. When Dot and I have worked so long, so hard. And some jerk sociologist from Slippery Rock U. will get a slot in Newsweek's My Turn to explain how the Stopped-up Toilets represent some peristalsis in the national gut we ought to take a stethoscope to. The Dead Kennedys, one group calls itself. I'm old enough to remember the live ones.

Out there. Out there the cold air is suffused with a wan and violet light; far to the east, the sun is striking the cold waters of the Atlantic. What time is it in Northern Ireland? Here, cars on the lot are glazed like doughnuts from last night's sleet. A foursome, obviously a family, emerge from a muddy, high-wheeled Chevy Suburban topped by a rack laced with skis. Off to Colorado for the holidays? The family, in jeans and new green goosedowns, encounter the ice on the lot. Suddenly, bearded Pop stretches out his arms, teetering, inching gingerly away from the vehicle. Mom's just out of arm's reach, her jacket unsnapped, the arms of a red scarf swinging as she does his balance-beam dance. Pop's looking both ways for traffic, but Bud and Sis have already discovered skating on their boot soles. Pop's mouth goes open: Hey, hey, you kids! But they're oblivious to danger. Pop reaches out to take Mom's hand, but it's hard to tell from here if he wants to steady her or needs it himself. The kids are low to the ground, though. Gleefully, Bud slides into Sis's back, and she whirls to lunge at him. Pop yells Stop it! Holding hands, arms outstretched and held high for balance, Pop and Mom look like they're about to be measured for crosses.

I'm stuffed! Dottie groans.

She slumps against the seat rest as if exhausted from running. A chunk of hotcakes large as a pie wedge stands on her platter. I shouldn't have eaten that, she says glumly. Shouldn't have ordered it.

The poor kid plays this tune when we're on the road. She doesn't carry scales when we're touring, so she usually eats whatever she wants and spends two months after we come off the road punishing herself with grapefruit and dry wheat toast.

Don't worry about it. You know there's no use in dieting when we're traveling. Enjoy.

But I didn't! I was just trying to wake up!

The Muzak says Here Comes Santa Claus. Already I'm tired of Christmas music because of all the medleys we'll play each night, but it brightens Dottie up.

So what do you want from Santa?

She's grinning again. She's an organized person, and I know good and well she has something for me tucked into her suitcase. Me, I'm not so organized. I worry about money more, too. We always buy each other gifts far more expensive than what we'd buy ourselves. Hanging near our heads are good examples of this mutual profligacy: the blue goosedown she gave me Christmas last, the London Fog I got for her. I have no idea what to buy this year, but I want something that does justice to what she means to me.

How about fame and fortune? I joke.

She takes me seriously. She reaches across the table, holds my fingers in her hands, reading my fate off my knuckles. I'll do my best, but I can't promise anything.

2

Dottie rides with half her attention to the inside scoop on Lady Di's condition and the other half to my own. She can tell I'm jittery as I drive.

Keep cool, fool.

The ice, I say. The streets are glazed. Dirty snow mounds along the curbside, the corners of yellowed newspapers jutting out of it. Coke cups lie half-buried in the gray ice like unappealing shellfish in a market big as all outdoors. This town seems to be built on stilts, and the slick streets go up and down the hills. Trees are cast in ice, branches dangling or fallen to crusted earth. I feel a treacherous slipping under the wheels of the old Dodge wagon, and it always takes me a few days to get used to the dead weight of the U-Haul trailing like a caboose. I have to corner with care so the trailer won't jolt over curbs, and I have to think ahead to park.

But I'd be lying if I said only the ice made me nervous. Dottie knows it's not just that, or the caffeine, the nicotine and the little black Molly I had for breakfast, either. Sometimes it's frustrating to be married to someone who knows you so well. Among my many flaws is the compulsion to behave badly when I'm drunk or nervous; I do what Dottie calls my Don Rickles act. When I encounter strangers at a party who seem smarter, richer or more sophisticated, and I feel out of place, I get loaded, then insult them. Usually I fool myself that getting bombed will relax me, but it merely turns me inside out. I hear talk about fine wine, I swill down beer and spend the evening figuratively farting. I even know it's happening. I remember movies from the forties and fifties where patients were magically cured by recalling a childhood trauma, but I've never had a problem go away that easy.

I get nervous even if it's just a reporter from a high-school paper, Dottie says.

She's trying to be supportive.

Hey, it's no big deal. We're talking five thousand watts. Who's going to be listening, farmers holed up for the winter?

Okay.

That means she'll say no more about it.

What bothers me is that I don't think I should be nervous, so it's hard to admit I am. Our booking agent, Leon, said that the hostess, Billie Wycoff, is the winter substitute on a farm talk program. She does recipes, Hints from Heloise, chats with show-biz folk like Dottie and me who play cocktail lounges in the chain motels. Even were it Baba Wawa and NBC I don't think I should be nervous, because in the cosmic scheme that's not important.

Still, being at the mercy of a stranger for thirty minutes of air time is making me sweat. Even though I can anticipate her questions, having heard them before, and I've got the answers down by rote, a cold trickle is dribbling down my ribs beneath my flannel shirt.

I spot KROL above the door in a row of one-story buildings with green aluminum siding just off the main drag. I'm relieved that there's parallel parking in front, so I can take two slots and not have to back the trailer when we leave.

Hope they have a bathroom, says Dottie.

This is it. My hands shaking, I open the car door, step onto the icy street, feel the rush of cold air, start to step away from the car, remember I haven't locked the door, open it again, punch down the lock, remember to push the button from the outside—ordinarily this would be second nature, but I'm rattled—slam the door to again, get a flash of alarm that I might have locked the keys inside but pat my pocket and feel the lump there.

I open the plate-glass door with gold trim and step aside for Dottie.

I'd say thanks but I know you're just flinging me into the fire first, she cracks.

Bells tied to the hydraulic door hinge tinkle, and I feel a smirk coming on. The place is so down-home that a bunch of Pier One bells tell somebody's coming in, like a Mom and Pop gift shop.

So why am I sweating? When I shrug out of my jacket, I see my pits are dark and rank with nerve-and-pill juice, and that makes me even more self-conscious. I need to pee but I'm afraid I'd come out of the bathroom with a dime-sized spot next to my fly. Maybe I'll let Dottie do the talking; she's good at seeming normal.

The receptionist's area is unlighted, a gray metal desk looming out of the dimness like a destroyer in a fog.

Anybody home? yells Dottie. And where's the bathroom, she mutters.

A door at the end of a corridor swings open, spilling light; a figure enters the darkness, flicks a switch, and an overhead fixture coughs up tubercular light.

She's one of those petite, well-tended numbers in a size four, frosted hair all careful and stiff. A green wool skirt, a matching cardigan over an ivory silk blouse, bits of gold on her ears, her neck, and a diamond big as one of my molars. She fingers back the cuff of her cardigan to peer at her Rolex. She frowns. My heart sinks. I think we're in trouble. She looks too much like Nancy Reagan—that type—to suit me.

I'm Billie Wycoff. Sounds as if we were subpoena servers chasing her for weeks and harassing her employer. You're late, so if you'll come on back—

Where are the bathrooms? asks Dottie.

Exasperation flickers across Billie's face. Go right through this door, take the second left and go down the hall, then turn right again and it's the third door, just past the closet.

Right through the door then second left and then right again?

Dottie's dancing in her skin, hungrily chomping on the route. Billie hesitates, as if that won't quite do it, but then she nods, and I can tell poor Dot will open wrong doors before she gets the right one.

Come on into the studio, Billie says over her shoulder as she strides back down the corridor, her spike heels going click chok click chok. I trail, a little irritated. We're not late. We keep our appointments, we don't trash motel rooms, and we try to give good weight when we're on on the stand or with the press, if Billie could by any stretch belong to that category. My watch says 7:45—that's fifteen minutes until show time, folks. When Billie says we're late, intuition tells me she means she's uptight and she's angry at us for her feeling anxious. I could apologize anyway, I guess, but I won't. I lag behind out of perversity. She has to wait for me at the end of the corridor, holding open a door marked Studio, giving me a tight smile.

Thank you very much, my dear, I breathe into her face as I pass, wondering if my pits trail my stench behind me.

The room is small, with carpeted walls. A bay window looks into a compartment choked with equipment, where a bald man with headphones is smoking a pipe and studying dials.

Hiya, fella! I yell at him through the glass. Don Baxter here! I give him a big wave, he waves back, smiling wryly: he thinks I'm a character maybe. Billie's brows knit with apprehension. Maybe she suspects I'm on drugs, which, in a manner of speaking, I am. My adrenaline has kicked in behind all that caffeine and jacked up the speed in my system, and I'm getting a sudden rush at the back of my neck. Billie looks skittish. She's moving about the room, opening cabinet doors, bending over, searching for something. Very genteel lady: she turns the side of her body to me when she bends down. I guess I ought to set her at ease, make small talk. But isn't she the hostess? Okay if I sit down?

Why don't you sit here? She gestures to one of two plastic scoop chairs behind a table.

I don't know, I mumble, but I do it, anyway. There's a table mike on a stand between the chairs. Billie continues to dance about the room. She's not doing much to warm me up, considering that in eight minutes by the lunar-faced clock on the wall she's going to ask me personal questions.

Mind if I smoke?

She jerks open a cabinet door, plucks out a flimsy tinfoil cup that frozen pies come in, sets it on the table. I light up. After a moment, I relent.

Hey, don't be nervous, I say. Everything's going to be okay. We're old hands.

Billie looks startled.

I'm not nervous. I'm just in a hurry. Her tight smile has a touch of playfulness, but combative. Do I seem nervous to you?

Well, I thought maybe—

I do this every day of the week during the winter, she insists.

Okay, lady, so you're not an amateur. Maybe I've misread her. Some media people don't seem alive until the machinery is turned on and they presume the same about you. I decide to smooth her feathers.

I guess you do a lot of interviews, then.

Oh my, yes. A couple a day, usually.

I guess you meet a lot of really big stars. I mean to sound sincere, but I can hear my own sarcasm. Her face tells me she's not sure if she's being made sport of.

As a matter of fact, yes. She reaches into a cabinet on the wall and extracts a stack of cards. I was just going to put these out. Here. She picks one off the top and deals it to me across the table. Don't you think it was nice of him to send that?

A Christmas card from Jackie Gleason. The signature looks rubber-stamped. Billie is giving me a steady look laced with challenge as she stands by me with her hand outstretched to take her card back. If she wore glasses, she'd be looking over the tops of them, chin on breastbone. I'm getting the picture now. Dottie and I aren't important enough to have justified her anxiety.

I had an uncle shook hands with Roosevelt one time, I say. Billie laughs politely to acknowledge the implicit self-deprecation. She opens a folder onto the table, moves to a coffee-maker, gets out Styrofoam cups. At least we'll get coffee. I look for silver linings.

Since this isn't New York we don't get too many of what you'd call household names except at the Country Dinner Playhouse Theater, Billie says. But I've had people like, well, Paul Lynde and Rita Moreno on.

This comes out sheepishly; she doesn't want to show how proud she is. It's hard to drop names without being a name-dropper. It strikes me that old Billie and I suffer from the same affliction: we've got more ego than status. But I can't seem to get unhooked from the game.

Right here? In this very chair? I drop my jaw in mock astonishment.

Billie's wry little moue says she'll let me have a little fun at her expense. She lights a Virginia Slim, shakes out the match and drops it in the tinfoil cup.

"Not