An Idol for Others (3 page)

“Spending a couple of days in California isn’t going to change anything. All that weight.” He completed what he was doing but kept a hand in his pocket as he edged around to face Walter. “Forget what I said about not seeing you–I’d love for you to come. At least, I think I will. It all depends on how things go in the next few days. Strangely enough, I think I’m going to be wildly happy.”

“How long will the trip take?”

“I allow five days. I’ve got to be there in six.”

“Fine. I’ll get there a day or so after you.” He squeezed Tom’s knee. “Call me collect any time you want.”

“I hope I’ll be able not to.” He put his hand on Walter’s. “You know, if we play our cards right, maybe we’ll end up just liking each other instead of this other thing.”

“It remains to be seen which of us is going to get out of this in one piece. I have a funny feeling it won’t be me. You’d better get going before I create a scandal.”

Their hands gripped each other again. They exchanged another long, searching look. Tom almost weakened. Wouldn’t an hour in bed be better than nothing? No. The thing that had happened between them was too extraordinary to handle in the ordinary way. Maybe Walter would come to California. They might have a fighting chance to make something of it there. He reached for the door as the doorman sprang forward again.

Walter watched him go, imprinting on his mind the way he moved, loose and easy, with a hand still in his trouser pocket. He uncrossed his legs and spread them and dropped his hands over his crotch.

“Hey, Mike,” he shouted. “Open up.” The glass wall separating them descended. “Push buttons, Mike. Open everything.”

“It’s pretty hot out, Walter.”

“Good. Let’s roast then. I want to breathe plain polluted air. Home, James.”

All the windows slid silently down as the car swung back into traffic. “He’s a hell of a fine-looking guy,” Mike said over his shoulder.

“You thought so?”

“No question about it. You don’t see many beauties like him around this dump.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” Movement created a hot breeze. Walter sat back with his eyes closed and breathed deeply. They would be together again in a week. That thought would get him through today and tomorrow and the next day. After that, it would probably get tougher, but maybe Tom would call and bridge the gap. He should have insisted on his calling. He already felt his absence as an ache of emptiness all through him.

Perhaps it had happened at last. Was he capable of falling in love? He had been emotionally dead for so long that he couldn’t believe in it. In a week a trip to California would probably seem a tiresome chore. He could write him, especially if he had something nice to say about his play, perhaps arrange for him to come back to New York later. Time settled everything, even Clara.

Who do you think you’re kidding
? he asked himself. Nothing would ever settle Clara. He had had the choice once, but had handed it over to her. He had made his real choice at the beginning when he had determined never to do anything that might blight his chances to reach the heights. Tonight’s award was the payoff; it wouldn’t have been conferred on a man with an acknowledged flaw, a flaw that wasn’t as secret as he would have liked (Mark had talked) but had never been confirmed by a public scandal.

His life was a fantasy, and Clara was trapped in it as surely as he.

His thoughts made him restless and strangely unsure of himself. He opened his eyes and ran a hand over his stomach. Flat. Looking down at himself, he wished Tom knew that he didn’t really give a damn–not any more–about show, about all the trappings that made up the public image of Walter Makin, such as his too studied and elaborately tailored pale summer suit. He was suddenly impatient of having wasted so much time on his clothes, taking care not to indulge in any flourishes that might be considered pansyish but incorporating self-designed details that made them distinctive, theatrical, but, most carefully, not effeminate. He wanted to strip down to a pair of jeans and relax–an absurd thought. He didn’t own a pair of jeans, and he hadn’t relaxed in years. He had rested, embarked on many an elaborate holiday, but not relaxed. A vision came to him of himself and Tom sprawled out beside a mountain stream somewhere in the big country between here and California, a vision of bliss. It clarified everything that had occurred in their few moments of intimacy. He had responded, was still responding to the great reservoir of repose he had sensed in Tom, his calm, serious concern for serious matters, the thrilling contact with down-to-earth reality he seemed to offer. Talk of being in love might be fanciful, but Tom was real.

Jeans and a swift mountain stream. A cliche, but compelling. Tom’s straightforward proclamation of his sexual inclinations was very contemporary, so at odds with the way Walter had been brought up that he still couldn’t quite adjust to it. His spirit seemed to stretch and soar at the thought of letting himself go. He reminded himself that he was 50 years old, but that didn’t quell his body’s response. He had once felt like a child, and then he had felt like an adult, and nothing had happened since, no sense of aging, no sharp awareness of time running short–only a sense of time wasted. Something to do with his appearance, perhaps. You’re as old as you look?

Mike took the turn into his block, and the reminder of the family gathering awaiting him, abruptly snapping all the imaginary ties with Tom, accomplished what thoughts of age had not.

When he had been allowed back into the house, he started up the stairs but hesitated and turned back for a word with Alice. “Will you call Taylor’s? Ask them to send over everything they have by Thomas Jennings. If they don’t have them in the shop, get the name of his publisher and call them. There’re two or three novels.”

“Is that who David was with? What a gorgeous man. Yummy.”

“Get yourself under control, Alice. We must concentrate on his literary gifts.”

As he mounted the stairs, he adjusted his jacket and drained his mind of all thought except how he would greet his sons–no more kisses. They were drawing back. A handshake, a pat on the shoulder–and no questions about school unless information was volunteered. Nathan and Joel, two names that had struck Clara’s fancy for reasons he couldn’t remember. An American dynasty of one generation. He sauntered into the library, the impish smile fixed on his lips, and found them in an amiable buzz of conversation. It stopped as they registered his entrance. The boys rose, demonstrating their expensive boarding-school manners. He offered him his predetermined greeting. Sixteen-year-old Joe and 18-year-old Nat, both tall and skinny, both undeniably beautiful in an unfinished sort of way, both intimidating, his progeny, to whom he owed his nomination as Father of the Year, 12 years ago.

“I’m glad your horrible headmaster let you come. Aren’t you proud of your daddy?”

“Of course they are, and don’t make fun of it,” Clara said briskly.

Walter moved on to where Clara sat and leaned over and kissed her on the top of her tinted auburn head. He was swinging into her orbit once more. Whatever she did to him eluded definition. After 30 years, it certainly wasn’t sex, although that current could still throw off sparks. Love? A strange sort of love that shriveled him and left him feeling dead. Thinking in her presence of his excitement with Tom made it seem trivial and unworthy of him. She nurtured an image of him that sustained his self-love, an image he had nearly smashed long before it was fixed in the public eye. Only half knowingly, she had stayed his hand, and their life together had been launched on his gratitude to her. Misplaced? Over the years she had been the assurance that he was what the world took him to be–rich, successful, a model father and husband.

The world was almost right on all counts; it was the slight discrepancy between the public image and his private reality that made him feel sometimes that everything had gone disastrously wrong. How had a slight discrepancy turned into such an elaborate hoax? Who was Walter? Who was Clara? Were they prisoners of a spell cast by a dreaming boy? It was probably too late to find out, but whoever he was, he wasn’t that popular banality, the victim of the Bitch Goddess Success. Walter Makin would have been an absurdity without success, at any cost. He had never had any doubt about that. Nor had Clara.

Clara looked up at him with her challenging smile. “You seem to have had a busy morning.”

“Yes. Secrets. Oh, no, they’re not. The major secret is about to be unveiled.” He exchanged a private smile with David as he went to the bar table and collected the package he had brought in earlier. “Very well, madam. A small token of esteem.” His mind balked at putting in “my.”

Clara rose as he returned to her. “Oh, dearest. A present? How divine.” She took it, tore off the paper, and opened the box. It contained a large brooch contrived of two gold-and-enamel figures, male and female, lightly draped, holding up a jeweled torch, framed in a proscenium arch surmounted by tiny masks of Comedy and Tragedy. The date,
MAY
1970, was unfurled on an enameled banner, and the whole was scattered with baroque pearls and precious stones. “Oh, Walter,” Clara gasped, her voice almost girlish with pleasure. “It’s superb. Fulco did it? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It’s a Cellini. I can’t wear it. We should mount it in a case. Boys! David! Have you ever seen anything so exquisite?”

Walter leaned to her and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “I trust the message is clear. The lady is about the wrest the torch of Enlightenment from the gentleman’s hand.”

“And bash him over the head with it if he doesn’t watch out.”

“Precisely.” He gave her a little bow, and they laughed into each other’s eyes. If there was a hint of animosity in it, it was deeply submerged and overlaid by years of mutual appreciation.

They gathered around and passed the ornament from hand to hand with appropriate exclamations of admiration. Clara could be very appealing when she was pleased, and she was more pleased now than he had seen her for a long time. She had been described so often in newspaper columns as “statuesque” that he supposed he saw her from a different angle than others.

To him, the fire of life burned so hotly in her, her vitality was so aggressively indomitable, that the epithet was inappropriate. True, she was tall. Something about the way she wore her clothes, even the simple day dress she now wore, made her seem robed in majesty. Her surface was of steely serenity. She came up close to him. Holding the extravagant brooch, she looked up at him with her big, ceaselessly probing eyes.

“You must know what this means to me,” she said in her flat no-nonsense tone. “Of course you do, or you wouldn’t have thought of it. It’s going to make tonight a little bit for me too. Thank you, dearest.” A little bit? He knew as well as she did that she had long ago earned the right to be honored as an equal partner.

“The least I could do. Wait till you hear the bits about you in my speech. They’ll make you blush like a bride.”

She laughed abruptly. “I don’t remember even faintly blushing. You did, though.”

“Quite proper, Clarry. After all, I was only a child.”

They separated and drifted about the room. Walter found himself beside David, while Clara engaged in some discussion with the boys.

“Tom’s quite a guy, don’t you think, Walter?” David asked, keeping his voice low.

“I do indeed,” Walter agreed. He spoke up so as not to sound like a party to conspiracy. “You think he’s really good, I gather.”

“Absolutely, but I’m not the only one. He made a reputation for himself with
Colson’s Dream.
”

“Yes. I missed it somehow. Oh, lord, I never read anything but scripts. It’s a bore.”

“Same here. I just happened to know him.” His teeth flashed, he tilted his head in his facetiously flirtatious way. “I’ve tried to stir up interest in him at the studio, but he’s made some tough conditions. He can afford to. A guy he lived with for years died not long ago, and now he’s rich. I think I mentioned it when I wrote.”

Walter felt the hot discomfort of having made a faux pas. He had told Tom to call collect as if he were an unknown kid. He must have found it impudent, but he had sweetly, modestly let it pass. “He said he’d fixed it with you to send me the play.”

“Yeah, I have a copy I’ll get right off to you as soon as I’m back. You’re really interested in him?”

“Of course. You brought him.”

David leered cheerfully. “Like Philip?”

“Don’t be silly. We were all children then.”

“Dear old Walter. You do puzzle me, but I suppose that’s because I’m so amoral.”

Nat broke away from Clara and slouched over to propose a game of chess with his father after lunch. The buzzer sounded three times to announce the meal.

“Come on, everybody; let’s go down,” Clara said. “I’ve had some smoked salmon flown over specially for the Grand Old Man.”

“Let’s drop that this minute before it gets to be a habit,” Walter protested. “Everybody has to be 50 sooner or later.”

Emile was waiting to serve them in a white jacket in the stately dining room. Emile and Mathilde, a working butler and a working cook? Or a couple of French character actors he had hired when he had decided to concentrate his creative energies on life rather than art? The luxuriantly planted garden outside was sun-dappled, a fountain glittered in its depths, busy little city birds flitted about in the upper branches and swooped to earth. Walter wished they could open everything and smell and hear the hot damp greenness of it. Did only he feel confined?

He joined the others in exclaiming over the smoked salmon, he joked with the boys, he exchanged movie gossip with David, he listened while Clara pointed out the unprecedented significance of the award; never before had all branches in the field of entertainment joined to honor a single individual for outstanding achievement. All the while, Walter was trying to plot Tom’s movement. He had long since checked his laundry, probably finished his lunch. He wondered how he would eat–go out to a restaurant or have a sandwich sent up? It was the sort of thing, ridiculously, that he felt he had to know. Now that Walter knew there was money, he should perhaps revise his picture of Tom’s traveling light. He might have done a lot of shopping while he was here; he might have a lot to pack. He had said he wanted to leave before the rush hour. Before 5, probably about 4. If he had meant earlier, he would have put it differently–right after lunch or something of that sort. He found that if he could think of him as being still nearby, he could pay more attention to what was being said around him.