Festival of Deaths(77)

Out in the hall, she saw Prescott Holloway following Carmencita Boaz down the hall. Carmencita was telling him how they had to have six dozen yellow roses brought up at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning, it didn’t matter when the flower shops opened, because roses were the only thing that would calm the sex therapists down enough so they wouldn’t swear when the discussion started.

“They’re very temperamental,” Carmencita was saying. “They’re highly sensitive people. They’d have to be, given their work.”

“Right,” Prescott Holloway said.

DeAnna turned a corner and saw Lotte through the door of one of the offices. Sarah was in there, too, which made things easier. Shelley and Itzaak were nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t matter. DeAnna didn’t need them for this.

“Come on,” DeAnna said. “Let’s get moving. I want to get out of here at a reasonable hour today.”

“Most people would say three or four o’clock in the afternoon is a reasonable hour,” Lotte responded.

“Most people don’t start work at three A.M. Come on, Sarah, move your butt. And you need your pad.”

Sarah made a face, which DeAnna ignored. DeAnna had suffered through her share of shit jobs. She didn’t have much sympathy for a Wellesley girl who thought typing was beneath her. She went on down the corridor and stopped at a door with a big red dot on it. Just to be safe, she knocked. There was no answer.

“All clear,” she told Lotte and Sarah, who had come up behind her. She opened the door and stuck her head in. The room was dark. She felt around inside the door for the light switch and switched it on.

It was a compact, crowded room with one wall taken up entirely by an enormous television screen and quadraphonic speakers. Under the television screen there was a VCR unit so small, it was ludicrous, like the mouse the elephant stood on in the illustrations to the old children’s story. This was the room people came to to review the tapes they had made of their shows and decide what to keep and what to cut in them. In a minute or two, the technical man who would do the actual cutting would come along to get them started. DeAnna was in rooms like this five days a week, forty weeks a year. There was nothing about them to make her feel so nauseated.

Nauseated, however, she was. She grabbed the nearest chair and sat down in it. She put her head between her knees and felt her shoulders tremble in fluttery little spasms that reminded her of the heart palpitations you got from drinking too much coffee.

“Are you all right?” Lotte asked her.

“Jesus Christ,” DeAnna said, when she was able to talk at all. “You won’t believe what I just did to myself.”

“Maybe I should get her some water,” Sarah said, sounding as if she’d just as soon rather not.

DeAnna sat up and shook her head. The motion didn’t clear it. It did come close to giving her a headache.

“Jesus Christ,” she said again. “It was unconscious or something. It was weird. I turned on the light, and then when there was nothing here, I think I went into shock.”

“You’re not making sense,” Sarah said.

“She is making sense,” Lotte said. “Do you want to lie down, DeAnna, and leave this to me?”

“No, no, of course not. You can’t cut a tape. You’ve never done it in your life.”

“I’ve been working on this show for fifteen years of my life. And I’ve been sitting in on your cutting sessions for just as long. I would do all right, DeAnna.”

“Yes,” DeAnna said. “Yes, you probably would. But it’s okay, Lotte, it really is. I’m fine.”

“Fine,” Lotte repeated.

DeAnna laughed. “I’m getting soft, Lotte, I’m having visions. What do you say about that?”

“I say that I am having visions, too,” Lotte said. “The day has felt all wrong from the start.”

It was not, DeAnna thought, what she wanted to hear. Always before, she and Lotte bounced off each other. When one of them was depressed, the other was optimistic. When one of them was afraid, the other was fearless. It had been a good partnership that way and it had been supposed to last forever.

DeAnna hauled her tote bag onto her lap and began to go through it, pulling out papers and pens and spiral notebooks in profusion.

“To hell with this,” she said. “We’re letting ourselves get spooked. Nobody on earth can predict the future.”

“My paternal grandmother used to do a good imitation of it,” Lotte said drily.

“You only believed that because you were a child at the time.”

The entire contents of DeAnna’s tote bag were now on the seat of the chair next to the chair she was sitting in—except for the four kinds of makeup she always kept with her just in case, which didn’t count. DeAnna grabbed her favorite pen and one of the spiral notebooks and sat back, looking busy, looking important, trusting in what she always trusted in when she was scared stiff. Besides, she told herself. She didn’t have any reason to be scared stiff.