Shane and Carmen: The Novelization Ch. 04

No less than four real estate agents called, offering their services. Shane referred them to McFadden's office. The pool maintenance company called, as did the guy who cut the grass and managed the landscaping. On instructions from McFadden, they were told to continue all their regular services, as usual, and they would be paid by the estate until such time as the house was sold or otherwise disposed of, and a new owner took over. Three caterers called; Carol took down their phone numbers.

Saperstein had advised them that since the family was coming, they had to go to a fabric store and get a bolt of black cloth, and to cover all the mirrors in Harvey's house, now a house of mourning, with the cloth, in accordance with Jewish custom. Harvey's religious relatives would be upset if this wasn't done.

In the afternoon Carol made them a pot of tea and made Shane come sit down and drink a cup.

"I ... um ... uh ... thank you for being here," Shane began, "I never could have handled all this by myself."

"Yes, you probably could have, if it had been necessary. One of the things we learn in life is that we can all do more than we think we can, in a crisis. But you're welcome. I'm not here just for you, though; I'm here for Harvey, too. He was a dear, dear friend, and I would have been here for him even if you weren't."

"You were his shrink when Jack died?"

"Yes."

"Can you tell me what happened?"

"We're not supposed to talk about our patients, especially to other patients. But under the circumstances, I can tell you a few things. What did you want to know?"

"I guess just what happened. With Harvey, I mean. I know about Jack."

"Did Harvey tell you about how Jack died?"

"Yes."

Carol sipped her tea and thought for a while.

"Well, to put it in layman's terms, Harvey was a mess. He had a great deal of guilt. We Jews are really good at guilt anyway, and Harvey was going for the gold medal. He felt he'd been neglecting Jack, which he had. He felt he spent a lot of time on his career, always traveling, and not enough on his relationship. Which was also true. They'd been together ten, twelve years, something like that, and after a while many relationships, straight or gay, start to get stale. Communication stops. You take each other for granted. Sometimes love dies, or it goes into hibernation. New people come along, there are distractions."

"So that was one thing. Another was the question of exactly what Jack had done, or not done, and Harvey's reaction to it. We'll probably never know what really happened at Jack's school, whether Jack really did anything to that student or not. The only two people who really know are Jack and the kid, and the kid wouldn't recant. And then a few weeks after Jack committed suicide the kid took off and disappeared, ran away, and nobody's seen him since. So we're left with two ambiguous behaviors that can be interpreted any way you want. The kid is very problematic. Seems he was a troubled kid to begin with, a very real behavior problem. And spoiled, with rich, powerful parents. So did he run away because of guilt, because he told a lie that resulted in an innocent man's suicide? Let's just speculate that the kid was gay, trying somehow to come out of the closet, and he's the one who made the move on Jack, not the other way around. And Jack responded appropriately, and rejected the advance. So now the kid has outed himself, and has been rejected on top of it. Out of anger, he turns everything around, accuses Jack partly to reinforce the notion he's heterosexual, not homosexual -- and then when Jack's life and career are ruined and Jack commits suicide, the kid is totally messed up, and runs away from it all. As a scenario, it works. But take it the other way. Jack's relationship with Harvey has gone cold. Jack is angry, resentful, hurt. Maybe some of it is even his fault, although Harvey thinks he owns it all himself. And here's Jack counseling this troubled kid who's coming out of the closet, and one day one thing leads to another ... . Just one moment of weakness on Jack's part, one inappropriate touch. And this is where we come back to Harvey, because Harvey felt tremendous guilt because he didn't fully believe Jack. He told me he never said anything to Jack, but that he sometimes wondered himself if Jack did anything. And so when Jack commits suicide, Harvey wonders if his doubts, his lack of one-hundred-percent support, had anything to do with it. And we can never answer that unless and until we know if Jack was truly guilty, and we never will know that. The only good part about any of it was that Harvey realized pretty quickly what a terrible mental mess he was in, with no apparent way out, and came to me for help. Because, you see, there were some weeks there where Harvey was ready to take off his own clothes and swim out into the ocean after Jack."

"Wow," Shane said softly.

"Yeah."

"Did you know Jack? Do you think he did it?"

"Yes, I knew him fairly well. Did he do it? I have no idea. I've been in this business nearly forty years. All I know is that anybody can do anything, anybody is capable of just about anything. Most especially are they capable of small, momentary slips of judgment and behavior, especially if they are under stress. The problem is, sometimes these small, momentary lapses have tremendously large consequences, and sometimes they manage to stay small and momentary. One way or another, Jack and Harvey caught the bad breaks."

Carol got up and reheated their tea in the microwave.

"You liked living here with Harvey," Carol said when she sat back down.

Shane blew on her tea to cool it, and nodded. "It's like ... something I never had in my whole life," she said. "I don't mean the pool and the hot tub, the big fancy house, the luxury, it was ... I don't know ... the ... the ... "

"Having a home. Having another person in your life. In this case, a substitute for the father you never had. Safety. Security. Even some ... affection, if that's not too strong a word. Respect. I hope I don't have to tell you this, but Harvey liked you, a lot. As a person. He was quite proud of you. I think maybe the word 'love' might even be appropriate, in the father-daughter way."

"I was his project," Shane said.

"Yes, that's true, at first. That's how it started. Harvey had this idea of saving a person to make up for the person he felt he'd lost. But over time it turned into something a lot more than that."

"Did you guys talk about me?"

"Oh, sure. Not in a professional sense. But just as friends. You became my patient almost right away, so I was somewhat limited in the things I could tell him, due to patient confidentiality. Barbara Cranshaw had quite an interest in the pair of you, too. And since she was both your doctor as well as Harvey's doctor, she had just as many patient confidentiality issues as I did. So here were the three of us, all old, old friends, who were basically prevented from discussing the one thing we all had in common, which was you and your welfare. But it was also apparent that you seemed to be thriving here, and to a large degree so was Harvey, so after a while we weren't concerned anymore. You see, you were just as good for Harvey as he was good for you. You gave him his life back. You guys needed each other, him just as much as you."

Shane sipped her tea. "He taught me so much," she said. "Stuff I'd never have learned in a million years."

"Like what?"

Shane shrugged. "Manners, sort of. Not the simple stuff, saying please and thank you. More like how to eat in a fancy restaurant. How to order from a menu, not be intimidated. I mean, what did I know about how to go into a four-star restaurant and order the haricot verts. The difference between a Reuben and a hot pastrami on rye. Lox and bagels. I am such a fucking expert on lox you wouldn't believe it. Novi lox. Scandanavian, gravlax. Wet brining. Dry brining, which is Scottish lox. Cold smoking. Salmon. Smoked salmon. Types of cream cheeses. Which bagels are good and which are not. Capers. You know what capers are, right? How would some kid out of a hippie slum in East Jesus, Texas, ever get to eat capers? How to order wine. I'm not even twenty-one, and I know about white wines and red wines and blush wines, and what goes with what, and when to forget about the rules and just drink whichever wine I want. Beers. The difference between beers, lagers, ales, stouts. Which beers are good and which ones are tiger piss. And music. My god. You know what he did? About the second week I started living here Harvey came up with this house rule. Every night he was home, while one or both of us was cooking dinner and eating, he'd put on a piece of music. It would be just one single piece, or maybe one entire album, but that was the rule, just one thing at a time. And he'd play it, and the rule was we wouldn't talk about it the first time, we'd just listen to it all the way through. And then he'd play it again, and this time we could talk. And he'd tell me who wrote it, and why it was important, and all this kind of stuff. The names of the various instruments I was hearing. The four kinds of instruments in the violin family, violin, viola, cello, also called a violoncello, and the double bass. The difference between an English horn and a French horn, or a bassoon and an oboe."

"The very first night, he put on Clair de Lune, by Debussy. The next night it was Bolero, by Debussy's friend Ravel. And then after we played it and talked about, he gets out a DVD of a movie called 10, starring Dudley Moore and Bo Derek. And we watch it, and there's Boleroright in the middle of it. It was so cool! And then we listened to Night on Bald Mountain, Appalachian Spring, The Planets, Sabre Dance. One night he puts on The Sorcerer's Apprentice. And when it's over he puts in this old VHS, and it's this Disney cartoon starring Mickey Mouse, and Mickey is the sorcerer's apprentice, and there's all these magic broomsticks multiplying and going crazy. Then we listen to Peter and the Wolf, and then we watch the cartoon of that. Then the other songs from Fantasia. We must have watched cartoons with classical music for nearly two weeks. It was amazing. Peer Gynt Suite. Then we did what Harvey called the heavies. Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Liszt, Chopin. The 1812 Overture, where they fire off the cannons at the end? Boom! Who would have thought cannons were musical instruments? But they were. How cool is that? When we listened to some Mozart we watched that movie Amadeus. How many street twinks on Santa Monica Boulevard know who Salieri was? I can tell you from experience, when I was turning tricks on the street Salieri just never came up in conversation."

"So anyway, we listened to a lot of classical stuff. Then he starts on Broadway musicals. Oklahoma, South Pacific, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, that's the one about Harvey and me, Pygmalion and Galatea. A Little Night Music, Cabaret, The Music Man, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, The Fantastiks. And after we listen to the cast albums we watch the movie versions. Remember the time you were telling me about Man of LaMancha? I asked him about it, and the next night that's what we listened to, and he told me all about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and Dulcinea. We go through a lot of that stuff and next thing you know we're listening one night to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Then it's Joni Mitchell's Court and Sparkand Miles of Aislesalbums. Carol King's Tapestry. Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylanand Blood on the Tracksand Desire. Pete Seeger. Arlo Guthrie. Woody Guthrie. Peter, Paul and Mary. Springsteen. Etta James. Willie Nelson. Patsy Cline. Chuck Berry. The Beach Boys' Pet Soundsalbum. The Eagles. Next thing I know, we're listening to Billie Holiday. Then Django Reinhardt. Ella Fitzgerald. Sinatra. Billie Strayhorn. Jack Teagarden. Louis Armstrong. Woody Herman, Glenn Miller, Eddie Duchin, Benny Goodman. And we watched the movies, The Eddie Duchin Story, with Tyrone Power? The Glenn Miller Story, Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson. The Benny Goodman Storywith Steve Allen. One night I come home from a bad day at school, and Harvey's in the kitchen making chimichangas, and pushes a button on the remote to the sound system and next thing you know I'm listening to Spike Jones. Great after a bad day. The next night you know what it is? Both versions of Just a Gigolo, first the David Lee Roth, which I already heard, everybody my age knows that version, and then the original with Louis Prima and Keely Smith, whom I never heard of. And you know who's version I like best?"

Carol laughed. "Louie and Keely."

"Right. And then he puts on a video of Sonny and Cher, and I look at Cher, and Harvey says, 'Okay, who is Cher modeling herself on?' and I say, 'She's doing Keely Smith!' I mean, Cher has this deadpan stare and everything. And Sonny is sort of doing Louie Prima. It was wonderful."

"What an education," Carol said, "and you were being taught music at the foot of a master."

"Yeah, he was teaching me all this stuff, that's true. But, like, it was more than that, too. It might have started out him teaching the dumb girl, but it changed into something else. Harvey wasn't just teaching me about all kinds of music. He was taking this trip through his record collection just as much for himself as me. He enjoyed it. After he got started, I was just sort of along for the ride. He wasn't just teaching me about music, he was teaching me about himself. He was telling me who he was." Shane looked up from her thoughts. "Does that make any sense?"

Carol's mouth hung open.

"What?"

"Shane, sometimes you just knock my socks off."

***

At quarter to five the doorbell rang, and Carol went to get it. She returned to the kitchen leading Harvey's brother, Marvin Platinsky, and Marvin's wife Rebecca, and their two teenage boys, a pair of surly, pimple-faced rich kids who took an instant dislike to Shane, and she to them. Introductions were made, condolences exchanged, and both Shane and Carol were working on building dislikes for Marvin and Rebecca when Bernie McFadden arrived in the nick of time. He'd called for a 5 p.m. team status update, and he'd brought with him his young associate, Mattie Shepherd, an attractive, reserved blond in her late twenties, who was wearing the classic woman killer lawyer pants suit. Shane instantly recognized Shepherd's cold, appraising, hired-gun eyes, and was instantly glad they were on the same team. She decided that the eyes were the only difference between Shepherd and McFadden; he'd been in the business long enough to keep the killer eyes shielded. It was something Shepherd would just have to learn how to do. The two arrivals began what McFadden later called "the Battle for Harvey's Soul."

Within minutes, another Platinsky brother, Harold, and a sister, Leah, had arrived after dropping off their father at their hotel, the Beverly Wilshire. Also arriving were Vicki Saperstein and Dr. Cranshaw. Two minutes later the Platinsky lawyers arrived, two of them from New York who had traveled out with the family, and one they'd met at LAX by arrangement, so they'd have local California standing. McFadden quickly took the lead as host, making it clear that he was the man in charge here. He showed the family into the large, comfortable living room and suggested they make themselves all at home there, and consider it their headquarters while they were in L.A. McFadden and his team, he said, would hang out in the kitchen. He made this sound like a generous concession, a yielding of the high ground, and the Platinsky squad bought it eagerly. When McFadden came back into the kitchen with his group assembled around the kitchen table, he was smiling, and winked at Shane. Shane looked across at Mattie, who whispered to her, "The kitchen is where the work gets done. We have access to the phone, the food, the drinks, and the patio and pool. All they have are Harvey's big-screen TV and his record collection." Shane nodded, smiling.

Shane and Carol brewed coffee, took people's coats, got people bottles of water and glasses of ice, showed them down the hall to the bathroom to freshen up, whatever the guests wanted and needed. They both noticed members of the Platinsky clan beginning to wander around the house, studying Harvey's books and artwork, his music stand where he practiced, his violin, his mementos, his photographs. Shane realized they were not only taking in a financial appraisal about what the estate was worth, but they were also learning about a man about whom they knew virtually nothing.

McFadden, Shepherd, Saperstein and Dr. Cranshaw spent a lot of time in the living room, chatting with their company, while Shane and Carol worked busily in the kitchen, ferrying in plates and trays of hors d'oeuvres. The mood was relaxed and expansive, which was all part of McFadden's plan. By custom, religious Jews are not allowed to drink alcohol before a funeral, so no one took any wine or cocktails. And by prior arrangement, McFadden had made sure all the coffee, tea and soda being offered was decaffeinated. By 7:30 the company was growing sleepy, aided by their jet lag and the extra three-hour time difference on the East Coast. By 8 p.m. they were gone.

"Well, Round One is over," McFadden said.

"Who won?" Carol asked.

"We did," Shepherd said. "And they best part is, I don't think they know it."

"How so?" Carol asked.

"We established control of the house, and control of the agenda. We were friendly and accommodating. We've got control of Harvey, so far anyway, and it'll be their job to take him away from us, not the other way around."

***

It took three days for the Los Angeles coroner's office to get around to Harvey's autopsy, because it was a routine case and no foul play was suspected; therefore it had to wait for the various and sundry murders and other cases that demanded priority attention. McFadden had connections and could have pulled some strings, but he didn't bother. Instead, he and Saperstein used the time to work on the family.

Late the next morning Marvin, Harold and Leah brought their father to the house in a caravan of limos and rented cars containing the lawyers and the rest of the entourage. The father's name was Solomon Platinsky. He was elderly and frail, but he was also alert and nobody's fool. He wore a black business suit, and in keeping with custom, he had torn the coat's collar all the way down to his heart, a large, obvious rend. His children all had tears and rends in their clothes, of about four to five inches in length.

Mr. Platinsky wanted his youngest son buried "properly" in a Jewish funeral service, which he seemed to think could only be accomplished east of the Hudson River.

Saperstein went to work. "With all due respect, Mr. Platinsky," she said, "this is Los Angeles, this is Hollywood. There are more Jews here than in Tel Aviv. You know this. You don't think we know Jewish law out here? You don't think we know how to bury Jews in this town? Believe me, we do."

She gave Mr. Platinsky chapter and verse about Jews in Hollywood, went over all the temples and synagogues, all the cemeteries, all the delicatessens. Who had the best blintzes. The works. Saperstein could see the sons and the daughter were sold, and the old man was coming around. Why schlep a body back to New York? It's not like they cared much about Harvey the homosexual violinist. And the expense? Forget it. They'd work on the old man. Bury Harvey out west, say goodbye, go home.

Next, Saperstein worked on what McFadden called "The Legend of Harvey Platt." Without coming anywhere near the fact that Harvey had been estranged from his family for years, Saperstein told them who Harvey was as a musician, and how important and respected he had been in the California classical music community. When she was done, Harvey was second only to Itzhak Perlman, and possibly had surpassed Jascha Heifitz. She told them he belonged in the legendary Forest Lawn cemetery alongside the other great celebrities -- all of them Jews -- in California. There was a very nice mausoleum where the urn containing Harvey's ashes could rest.