An Idol for Others (42 page)

“Come, darling. Come,” she cried. “I want to feel you come in me.” She continued to cry out disjointedly, praising his cock and the things it was doing to her.

The room exploded into violence.

Mark was torn from her. Walter towered over them. She felt momentarily bereft, and then she began to laugh. Mark tried to scramble up but was flung to the floor. She heard him cry out, “Let me tell you,” but Walter was on him. His arms were flailing, and he was shouting obscenities. She saw his fists smashing into Mark’s face and body. Mark staggered up under the blows and made a dash for the door. Walter was ahead of him. He seized the hanger on which his clothes were neatly hung and flung it into the other room. He found his shoes and socks and hurled them after it. He was back at the bed in a bound. He dropped down on it and began to beat her and curse her. She rolled onto her stomach and covered her head with her arms, laughing and sobbing.

He continued to beat her until his hands hurt. He spit on her and tore himself away from her and rushed to the living room. Mark’s back was turned. He was shoving his shirt into his trousers. Walter leaped at him and struck him hard across the side of the head. Mark staggered and pulled himself up and faced him. Walter saw his fists lifting and braced himself to parry them and met eyes filled with love and torment. His guard faltered, and then he was on the floor with a chair on top of him. Mark stood over him, tears streaming down his face.

His voice was choked and breathless. “Even if you’re not queer, I hope you get rid of her,” he blurted. “I’ll be waiting at home if you want me.” He picked up his jacket and tie and walked to the door. His body slumped against it as he opened it, and then he was gone.

Walter pushed the chair from him and pulled himself up. The silence was numbing. He dragged himself to a chair and fell into it and put his head in his hands. He waited for his heart to stop pounding and for the total chaos within him to sort itself out. The slowing of his heart restored him to what he assumed was normal. He felt wonderfully dead. He had beaten his love into submission. He could feel his fists pounding into the worshiped body, releasing hatred to murder love. Now that it was done, it was clear that that was the way he had wanted it, the way it had to be. Mark had been right: They couldn’t be lovers and work together without sooner or later giving people ideas. He thought of the speculative glances the night they had dined at Le Pavillon, and out of the depths of his deadened spirit crawled the horror he had always felt of having his secret laid bare.

He would never see him again. Would he be able to see Clara again? He hoped he had killed her but doubted that he had been so lucky. He felt nothing. His mind was dead.

He dropped his hands and sat back in the chair for a long time, staring at nothing while the numbing silence gave way to the everyday sounds of the street. He heard another sound and lifted dead eyes to see Clara enter, wearing a dressing gown. She was a stranger, perhaps an enemy. He noticed that the room was getting dark and rose heavily and went to the switch and snapped on the main lights. He looked at her, expecting her to be bruised and bloodied. Her mouth looked slightly puffy, but otherwise she was all right.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” she said coolly. “Are you mourning the end of an idyll?”

He made a conscious effort to concentrate on her. “I’m warning you, Clara. You better be very careful what you say–or I’ll kill you. And I’m not speaking figuratively. I mean exactly what I say. I probably ought to kill you.”

She crossed the room, her carriage regal, and stood in front of the fireplace. “Because I had a man you’ve had dozens of times?”

He lifted his hands in front of him and looked at them. The knuckles were swollen. He dropped them. “You wanted me to find you with him. Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know I’d get here in time?”

“I found out when your meeting was ending. I knew you’d go to him as usual. You found his note.”

He felt a dull admiration for her ingenuity and persistence. “I see. I suppose you tricked him into some sort of confession.”

“I didn’t have to. I told him what I knew. He denied it for as long as he reasonably could. He was very loyal.”

“Then he went mad with desire and tore your clothes off. You’re talking shit, but I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of trying to find out what really happened. I don’t care. Amazingly enough, now that I’ve had time to calm down, I don’t care that you dragged him into bed with you. That should worry you, Clara.”

“Should it?”

“Yes, goddamn it!” he roared. “I cared about it being him. I don’t care what you were doing. I don’t care how you managed it. He should’ve told you to go fuck yourself instead of doing it for you.”

“Charming.”

“You haven’t left much room for charm, Clara. Oh, Christ.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and took a few paces back and forth in front of her. He stopped and looked at her and spoke quietly. “Mark and I were friends. What does it matter if we loved each other’s bodies? It can happen and last a little while, and that’s the end of it. When are you going to let up, Clara?”

“Never.” She blazed with challenge, her shoulders back, chin up. “I’m your wife. I married a man. If you’re a faggot, get out of here and go be one. I’ll get a divorce. Daddy’s always thought that’s the way it’ll end up.”

“Daddy. One reason I’m still here is that I’d hate to prove him right. What’s bloody Daddy got to do with it?”

“Thanks to you, I’m a pauper, that’s what What’re you going to do about that?”

“Christ I’m getting out of here.” He headed for the door.

“Where’re you going?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“If you go to him, I’ll–”

He swung back to her with his devilish smile. “Well, well, well. For once you’re not feeling so sure of yourself, are you, Clara? Perhaps it’s not too late for you to learn a lesson. Let’s make it stick.” He made a rush at a draped table laden with a collection of porcelain figures and swept his arm across it. Sound was deadened by the carpet. He kicked the table over and heard a gratifying crunching sound as more porcelain was smashed. He sprang at another table and overturned it with his hands. A crystal lamp went and a few pieces of Etruscan pottery. He picked up silver and lacquer and porphyry boxes and flung them at pictures on the wall. Glass shattered, paper ripped, canvas dented. He continued around the room, gutting rare books, hurling carved marble candlesticks against the wall, splintering painted silk fans in his hands. He sprang to the tall windows and yanked at draperies and brought heavy rods and bits of the wall crashing down around him. He ripped delicate fabric to shreds. He charged the mantelpiece in front of which Clara was standing, toppling two more lamps as he went. She retreated hastily. He seized the Empire clock that had been measuring out his life to empty infinity. He lifted it over his head and sent it catapulting into the hearth. Time stopped with a magnificent crash. He would gladly have it stop forever. He paused, breathing heavily, and surveyed the shambles around him.

“I hope you’re satisfied,” Clara said imperturbably at his side.

He whirled to her. “Almost, you fucking slut. You’re a pauper, aren’t you? Naked went they into the night, or something.” He sprang at her and seized her dressing gown and tore it from her. She went for his face with her nails. He grabbed her arms and dragged her across the room toward the door. She struggled and made herself a dead weight and shouted curses at him. He heard the word “faggot” and hit her hard across the face with the back of his hand. He caught her from falling and grappled with her naked body while he got the door open. He put his hands on her back and shoved. She careened across the hall and bounced against the banisters and fell to her hands and knees. He stepped back inside and slammed the door on her. He slumped against the wall, his chest heaving, waiting to recover his breath.

In a moment he heard her tapping at the door and softly calling to him. A memory came to him of one of the first evenings they had spent together. He remembered thinking how satisfying it would be to see her groveling now, but the sweetness was gone. Let her stay where she was. There wasn’t much traffic in the hall. They had only a few neighbors above them. The chance of scandal was slight.

He laughed at the thought of Clara Washburn scratching naked at his door. Laughter swelled up in him. He howled and shook with laughter and rolled against the wall until laughter turned to tears and he was sobbing uncontrollably. He doubled over and tore at his hair. He dropped to his knees and pounded the floor with his fists until the paroxysm passed. He pulled himself to his feet unsteadily and leaped against the wall for support and wiped his face with a handkerchief. He had to get away. He smoothed his hair with his hands and straightened his clothes and pulled open the door.

She was curled up on the floor against the jamb in a fetal position to hide herself. A man’s jacket had been dropped over her shoulders. There had been traffic after all. He stepped over her and ran to the head of the stairs and hurtled down them.

In the street he continued to move fast for fear his feet would betray him. He felt far less dead. He feared a return to the living. He dropped down a few blocks toward Washington Square and went into the first bar he came to where he could hope not to meet anybody he knew. Two quick double whiskies deadened him again. He started on a third and thought of the future and found an astonishing idea lodged in his mind. He wanted money. He couldn’t see how money would have changed what he’d been through, but he felt sure that it would have. Money would have given him the freedom to act promptly as the occasion demanded. Money would have given him some choice. Money paid for trips to Europe and big apartments and privacy. He finished off the third drink and ordered a fourth. He wanted money. He had counted on Clara’s. He would damn well make his own.

Having followed his thoughts that far, he found that others formed in lucid succession. He’d resign from Theatre Today. He’d call David and tell him to get him the best contract any Hollywood director ever had. The thought of getting out of New York lifted a great weight from him. He had no place to live now. He had taken care of that He didn’t see how he could ever go back to the office. Too many memories. Two weeks of enchantment and passion and joy. Never again. He ordered another drink.

Let Clara run the fucking theater. Let her have all the men she wanted to manipulate and destroy. How had she managed it? What had he done to make it happen? He didn’t know how to handle love, if that was what it had been. He had no time for it. It was too confining and diverted all his creative energies away from the things he knew how to do. He didn’t need it. He needed money to lead the kind of life he had always dreamed of. He would replace all the trinkets he had smashed with things of real value and surround himself with beauty. Let Clara follow him if that was to be his fate. She was all he had, all he was ever likely to have–best to make the most of her. There was no substance in relationships outside the recognized ones. They were too intense, too precarious, too dependent on the shifting sands of physical passion.

He drank some more until he was confident that there was no chance of a face, a body, a name materializing in his mind. He ate something somewhere. He went to another bar–or perhaps it was the same one–and had several more drinks. Long stretches of time slipped away from him, leaving him standing in the same place without knowing what he had been doing. The drinks began to play tricks on him. He was getting maudlin. He found himself weeping for no reason and impatiently dashed the tears away. There was a room nearby. Nothing important. He would like to see it maybe just once more, give him a chance to explain. He was sure there was an explanation. “Let me tell you,” he had begged in an agonized voice before he had begun to beat him. With his erection just beginning to subside. Shit! Goddamn fucking shit!

He found himself outside, going somewhere. He couldn’t remember where. He stopped in front of a door and had to focus carefully before he recognized it. He went into the drab little entry and fumbled with his keys. Was there someone here he wanted to see? No. Only a painful memory to be wiped away by time. Weaving slightly and with uncertain fingers, he removed two keys from the ring and stood with them in his hand. He couldn’t see very well. Tears seemed to be rolling down his cheeks again. He lurched toward the letter boxes and put a finger painstakingly on a name and dropped the keys through the slot.

He hugged the wall as he stumbled slowly around a corner and headed toward home.

Hollywood was a new life, a one-dimensional life of work; and Walter found it fascinating until he decided that he had nothing more to learn. At the beginning he had everything to learn and a great deal to teach Hollywood.

David had outdone himself. He browbeat his studio into offering Walter complete independence, with final approval of script and cast and the right to cut and edit his own work. The pay was princely, and he discovered what it felt like to be rich. He liked it.

He didn’t like the atmosphere of big business in which he was obliged to work. It took him the better part of his first year to teach the men who ran the studio that he intended to operate nearly as possible to the way he had operated as director of Theatre Today and as principal partner in Makin-Fiedler Productions before that. He had to invoke every clause in his contract that guaranteed independence before he could finish his first film to his satisfaction. It apparently hadn’t occurred to the studio heads that anybody would take the document literally. David, assigned to Walter as producer, knew studio politics and had his own position to consider, but he backed Walter to the best of his ability.

Aside from David, Walter was on his own in a way he had never been before in his professional life. The studio isolated him from Clara. She was no longer there to spare him tiresome details, help him reach decisions, cow opposition with her commanding or forbidding style. He hadn’t insisted on her coming with him. He had discussed the possibility of her staying in New York and producing on her own. Now she was restricted to the life of a housewife, and he wasn’t greatly perturbed by her evident restlessness and frustration. They both had made sacrifices to stay together. Slowly the pain of his unacknowledged loss faded, and eventually he began to feel sorry for her.