A Night at the Operation (3 page)

 

 

 

 

“SHARON
is missing,” Gregory repeated.

His oval face was drawn and sallow, even for him. “I mean, nobody’s seen her since yesterday afternoon,” Gregory said. “She didn’t come home last night. She’s not answering her cell phone or the phone at the house.”

“If she has caller ID, that could just be a sign that she doesn’t want to talk to
you
,” I suggested. “You want me to call her for you?” I picked up the desk phone. The office at Comedy Tonight isn’t exactly what you’d call state-of-the-art, but we do have a telephone.

“I don’t need you to call her; she’s missing,” Gregory lamented. So I put the phone down. That had just been a ploy to annoy him, anyway. “We have to call the police.”

I avoided the “what’s this
we
stuff, Kemo Sabe” line and said instead, “She hasn’t been missing twenty-four hours yet, and she’s a grown woman. We don’t know that she’s even
missing
at all. The police won’t get involved. Go put people to sleep for a while and see if you hear from Sharon tonight.” Gregory is an anesthesiologist.

“You don’t understand,” he sniffed. “I should have expected this from you.”

I went back to my game, trying to knock off virtual bricks with a virtual ball and paddle. “It’s truly amazing that you didn’t,” I said as Gregory slunk out of the office.

Once he was out of sight, I reached for the phone and pressed Sharon’s button on speed dial. The phone rang a number of times, and I got transferred to her voice mail. That wasn’t unusual, if she was working, but my guess was that Gregory would have checked with Betty at the practice first.

“This is Dr. Sharon Simon-Freed.” I took some pleasure, I admit, in the fact that Sharon had added my name, and not Gregory’s, to her own. She kept it that way, even after we divorced, and even when she was married to Gregory. Not that I’m petty. “I’m not available right now. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you.”

I waited for the beep, and said, “Hi, it’s me.” The stupidest statement a person can make. Does anyone ever leave a message that says, “Hi, it’s someone else”? “Gregory thinks you’re missing. Give me a call and let me know you’re not.” I hung up.

It was an hour and a half before we’d open the theatre for the evening. My staff was just starting to trickle in. Anthony Pagliarulo, the projectionist, was already upstairs in the booth, doing whatever magic it is that he does to keep our ancient projection equipment running. I don’t question Anthony’s mechanical brilliance—I just quiver at the very thought that one day he’ll graduate from college and leave me alone with the man-eating monster in my projection booth.

No need to worry about that now, however. Anthony was still an undergraduate at Rutgers, majoring in film. He’d actually made a movie of his own, a remarkably gory Western called
Killin’ Time
, which had come dangerously close to being distributed by a real company only a few months earlier. Luckily, someone at the studio had actually watched the movie first, and had therefore passed on it, and now Anthony was back in my projection booth, tending to the dinosaur.

I had a favor to ask of him, though, so I went upstairs to the refurbished balcony (which was much sturdier than when it had been originally furbished) and knocked on the projection booth door. I own the place, but one time I had entered without knocking and had almost put a permanent dent in the back of Anthony’s head with the door. It’s not a large projection room.

“Come in,” he said, so I did.

Anthony was threading up the first feature for the night, a personal favorite of mine. (We run the classic first and the contemporary comedy second.) Preston Sturges’s
Sullivan’s Travels
is a masterpiece about a director who discovers that making people laugh is at least as important as making a Statement. It’s only after he goes through hell that Joel Mc-Crae (playing John L. “Sully” Sullivan) realizes comedy is the thing that can get us through our most difficult moments. The title of his intended “important” project,
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
became the title of a Coen Brothers film starring . . . But, I digress.

“Can you do me a favor?” I asked Anthony. I handed him a VHS videocassette I had brought up from the office. “Take this back to your editing suite at school and transfer it to DVD for me, would you?”

He took the cassette from my hand and examined it as if it were a relic from King Tut’s tomb, which is silly. Everybody knows the Boy King was into Beta. “Can’t you do it at home?” Anthony wasn’t trying to shirk the job; he was curious about why I’d asked.

“I could, but the picture quality would suffer on my cheap home machine,” I told him. “You can get a better transfer.”

Anthony nodded, and put the cassette in his backpack, which was lying on the floor. “What is it?” he asked as an afterthought.

“The video from my wedding,” I told him.

His head swiveled. You’d have thought I’d told him it was a film of my recent sex-change surgery. “Really?”

“Yeah. Our wedding anniversary is coming up next week, and I thought I’d give it to Sharon as a gift. So, on second thought, make two copies, okay?”

Anthony was staring at the spot directly between my eyes, seemingly trying to decipher the strange dialect I was speaking. “You know you’re divorced, right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“But you still give your ex-wife a present on your anniversary?” Anthony and his girlfriend Carla were so far from thinking about marriage that considering life after divorce was beyond his comprehension. He thinks every divorce is like the ones in movies like
War of the Roses
, ending in acrimony and, usually, violence.

“Yes, Anthony, I do,” I told him. “Sharon and I try to keep up a civil relationship, and one of the things we do is continue to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Besides, I know the only copy she has is on VHS, and I’m willing to bet she’d like something that won’t deteriorate over time.” Symbolic, no?

Okay, so maybe sentimental anniversary gifts that feature our wedding vows go past the concept of “civil,” but we still have feelings for each other. And besides, a woman who pays you alimony every month deserves at least a token, doesn’t she?

He didn’t answer, but shook his head and went back to threading the projector with a grin on his face that spoke volumes about his crazy boss.

I
was that boss, so I exercised my authority and went back to playing MacBrickout. It’s a dangerous little game, seemingly simple, that will grab you in its tentacles and steal your time away. And it always gives you just enough hope to make you think it’s worth trying to win again. In many ways, MacBrickout is like my ex-wife Sharon.

Whiling away my remaining life force with the game took another twenty minutes or so, until Sophie Beringer, the snack bar attendant/ticket taker, and Jonathan Goodwin, the usher/ swing man, entered the theatre, mooning at each other, as had become their habit. They were high school students, they were dating, and it was close to unbearable how happy they were.

I left them alone. Unbridled joy is something I have a hard time with: I always want to bridle it with a dose of reality. Sophie actually mussed Jonathan’s hair as they walked by the door to my office, which led me to wonder if she’d been replaced with an android that only
looked
like Sophie. Before they started dating, Sophie was about as bubbly as Coca-Cola that’s been left open. For a week.

Jonathan, for his part, had undergone something of a metamorphosis once Sophie smiled upon him. He started actually looking me in the eye when I spoke to him, began wearing shoes that covered his toes (he had previously favored sandals that gave a view of his feet that I believe helped keep Comedy Tonight’s crowds smaller than they should have been), and although he continued to wear T-shirts with images from great comedies (today’s was a simple moustache-and-eyebrows caricature bearing the phrase “Just tell ’em Groucho sent you”), they were now clean, frequently changed, and mostly the right size for Jonathan’s tall, skinny body.

I ignored this flagrant happiness and turned back to the task at hand. Before I realized the time had gone by, another thirty minutes of my life had been eaten up by MacBrickout. I looked up at the clock and frowned. Okay, now it
was
strange that Sharon hadn’t called back yet, if only to mock Gregory for worrying that she hadn’t called back.

The scene from the day before was starting to seem ominous. It wasn’t like Sharon to yell at anyone (she never even raised her voice at me during our divorce), particularly Betty, for whom she has a great deal of affection. Whomever the patient was whose case was worrying her must have been very special.

I was suddenly glad Sharon was not my doctor, or I’d have to include myself on the list of possible doomed people.

Maybe I should walk over to her office. Sharon’s medical practice was only four blocks away, and I had a little time before we really had to be ready to open the theatre. I stood up and walked out the office door, but didn’t make it any farther than the edge of the lobby.

Sophie’s parents, Ilsa and Ron Beringer, burst—there is no other word for it—through the front doors of Comedy Tonight, both with the wild-eyed demeanor of Moe Howard after Curly hit him over the head with a bowling ball. Ilsa clutched in her hand what appeared to be an e-mail printout.

“Sophie!” she screamed. “Where are you, Sophie?” Sophie was perhaps fifteen feet away, at the snack bar, in direct view of her mother. Jonathan should have had the good sense to look alarmed, but the fact is, he doesn’t really live on the same planet as the rest of us, and he simply kept studying Sophie with a serene grin on his face. Jonathan was still amazed that she ever went out on a date with him in the first place.

Sophie’s face took on the expression of every teenage girl who hears her mother’s voice: she immediately looked annoyed, and turned toward Ilsa as if her mother were an especially persistent type of mosquito.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. No, demanded.

“They
came
!” Ilsa cried, thrusting the paper toward her daughter with a vehemence normally reserved for reprieves from the governor.

“
What
came?” Sophie intoned.

“Your SAT scores,” Ron said. Ilsa pivoted and stared at him. Her husband appeared amazed that he had gotten a word in edgewise. But his pride in himself was matched by Ilsa’s expression of fury. “You got . . .”

He stopped once he saw Ilsa’s expression. Clearly, he was not supposed to be the one to tell his daughter about her test scores. This was reserved for her mother. But Sophie took perhaps a quarter of a second to go from completely impassive to laser-focused. She snatched the e-mail printout from her mother’s hand before Ilsa could get so much as a number out of her mouth.

“What were you doing reading my e-mail?” Sophie growled.

“They sent it to us, too . . .” Ron answered, but his voice trailed off, and he went back to being a paper cut-out of a man, his usual role.

I felt like I was intruding on what for a normal family would be a private moment, but I was too far from the door to go back into the office again without drawing attention to myself. Besides, I wanted to find out about Sophie’s SAT scores, too. She’d never even mentioned the test before she took it, so I had (as usual, mistakenly) assumed she wasn’t especially concerned.

“Twenty-two sixty!” Sophie crowed. “I got a twenty-two sixty!” I was immediately confused, because when I took the SATs, the best you could do was sixteen hundred. Sophie must be
really
smart. She showed the page to Jonathan, who earnestly tried to interpret the numbers, but Sophie yanked the paper out of his hand again before he had a chance. She reached over and kissed him on the cheek, and Jonathan, as usual, smiled a dopey smile and hugged her. If I hadn’t actually heard him speak on occasion, I’d have believed he was a tall, gangly puppy dog that had learned to stand on its back legs.

“Isn’t that
amazing
?” Her mother beamed. “I always knew you were a
genius
.”

“A genius,” Ron Beringer echoed. But nobody seemed to hear him or the sound he appeared to make. The fool on the hill.

“Do you realize what this
means
?” Sophie asked Jonathan, completely ignoring her parents. “I actually have a chance at the Ivies. I could take a shot at Harvard. Yale. Brown.”

Jonathan’s brow furrowed. “Does this mean you’re moving away?” he asked.

“Oh, Jonathan.” Sophie’s hand went to her boyfriend’s cheek. “You knew I was going away to school next year.”

“Well, yeah,” he admitted. “But I figured you’d go to Rutgers.
Everybody
goes to Rutgers.”

Rutgers University is not quite walking distance from Midland Heights, New Jersey, and many of its students rent apartments here and especially in Highland Park, which is just to the south. Anthony, for example, goes to Rutgers, and lives in New Brunswick, like I do.

“Well, I have a chance to do better,” Sophie said, her voice a little sad. “I should go for that, shouldn’t I?”

“Of
course
you should.” Ilsa, not to be denied, butted in. She insinuated herself between Sophie and Jonathan, effectively turning her back on the poor kid. “Come along home now, Sophie, and we’ll start planning. You have a lot of work to do.” She tried to take Sophie’s elbow, but her daughter simply shook her arm free and glared at Ilsa.

“What do you mean, ‘come along home’?” Sophie asked. “I have work tonight.”

“You’re not going to keep working
here
,” Ilsa scoffed, looking around the lobby the way she might at a not-very-high-class house of prostitution (I guessed). “We’ll pay you for your time so you’ll have spending money, but from now on you have to concentrate on getting into the best college you can.”

Ron, perhaps reeling from the “we’ll pay for your time” part of that speech, stood with his jaw dropped. Jonathan, horrified, took a step back and almost squashed the box of Milk Duds that Sophie had placed on the stool behind him. I winced. I have a soft spot for Milk Duds; they saved my life once. It’s a long story.