I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (22 page)

“Maybe he’s Alexander the Great come back.”

“Alexander was short.”

“But great!”

“Barry says half the Pines has been ringing Wayne Calder’s house and no one answers.”

“Wayne Calder?”

“The boy he took home.”

“Just remember,” said Paul. “I’m the one he smiled at.”

Roger came in.

“You missed everything!”

“‘The players cannot keep counsel,’” Roger replied. “‘They’ll tell all.’”

“The
most
incredible man—”

“To die!”

“Wearing nothing but—”

“And whispered as if—”

“Stop.” Roger peered into the oven. “Oh good, lasagna.” He grinned at them. “I happen to know the case.”

“Who is he?” They crowded, sat near, posed, twirled. The fun of the Pines!

“Who he is is not clear.” Roger poured himself a drink. “But it is told that Wayne Calder wept for happiness as he was being stripped.”

“No!”

“Name your source!”

“And, in a dear moment, they tell, Wayne murmured, ‘If an officer finds us, we’ll be put in the brig for life.’”

“Scream!”

“No!”

“More!”

“The question is,” said Franklin, “is Wayne Calder beautiful or just sexy?”

“He misses being handsome,” said Albert, “but the body is truly historic.”

“Here’s what I want to know,” Paul put in. “What did the mystery man whisper to Wayne before they left?”

Roger said, “He whispered, ‘I want to lay you on your back and deep-pump you full of joy.’”

Silence.

“The tactless majesty of the beautiful,” Roger called it. “They speak their own language.”

The conversation eventually passed to other matters, less weighty, such as true love, taxes, and who else might be invited to take up the outstanding share in the summer rent. Roger excused himself for a walk. While the others were clearing the table, a chestnut-haired Viking in jeans and a leather vest appeared at the door.

“Hi. Is Roger Ryder around?”

“No,” said Paul. “But I am.”

“Roger went for a walk,” said Albert. “He’ll be back any minute. Would you like to wait for him?”

“No, thanks. Just tell him I was here, okay?”

Albert’s mouth had opened and Paul was hugging himself. Franklin coughed.

“What … name … should we give?”

The Viking treated them to a lovely laugh. “Describe me.”

“Did you see that?” said Albert in a stage whisper as the footsteps died down the walk.

“Do you suppose he’s in the same house as the tea man?” asked Franklin.

Paul sank into the sofa in a daze. “I’d wear a leather vest, only I catch cold so easily.”

“Does a laugh like that get born with you?” Franklin wondered. “Or do you have to practice it?”

“This,” Albert swore, “is going to be an arresting summer.”

The Viking thought so, too. He raced down to the beach and danced in the darkness, his arms beating salutes in the air. Throwing off his clothes, he dove into the ocean where the moon gloated and swam like a champion. It’s so easy! So incredibly easy! No doubts, no mistakes, no waste! A no-fault existence! We speak our own language!

He raced the wet sand like those crazy runners; so easy. Tomorrow, he’d give them a beach parade to set legend, then tea again … maybe something in a rough punk this time, with stupid eyes, the kind who dance as if their stomach were a snake.

Cresting the stairs, he paused, his upper back shivering in the cool night, and he spoke his own language. “All you have to be,” Roger Ryder said aloud, gravely and slowly, as if promising to take good advice, “is terminally beautiful.”

*   *   *

The soap interview was a breeze, but what wasn’t, now? For an hour or two, Roger stood at a crossroads: should he show up in one of his new “modes,” as he called them, or in the form that matched his professional track record, résumé photographs, and appearances in Madame Podyelka’s acting class? The modes, he had noticed, effortlessly won; the old Roger had had to fight for everything. But perhaps a separation of parts was not a bad idea; perhaps looks belonged to romance and talent belonged to acting. Pretty-boy roles were boring, anyway; they seldom led to anything but your total replacement two years later by the next pretty boy. This soap was unreasonably loaded with beauties as it was; two had been written out in the last three weeks. Roger decided to go as a character: as Roger Ryder.

They liked him. They liked his walk, his hair, his bluntness, his watchband. They liked his self-confidence, one of his best acts, always. They asked him where he had been hiding, and he laughed because the night before he had been hiding in the mode of a simian wrestler who dazzled a jaded veteran of Sheridan Square with his dangerous thighs, his unexpectedly shy recollections of life in the ring, and his mastery of the spanking arts.

They asked him why he had laughed, and Roger said, “Well, I’d say it doesn’t feel like hiding. On the contrary, it’s a rare chance to validate your feelings.”

What is? they asked him.

“Acting is,” he said.

They brought in an official to meet him and had him read. They told him to try one longish speech as if he were wildly in love with the woman he was addressing, a second time as if he hated her, a third time as if she were his dying mother. Then they took the script from him and asked him to play it from memory, because television is tempo, tempo, and the halt are left behind.

He won; and again he was thinking, It’s so easy—before he remembered that this one he had done by himself.

We’ll call your agent, they told him, and, you know, it’ll go through channels, and like, keep your weekdays free starting June 5, and no, there’s no script yet, so come in early and you’ll have the morning to get used to it.

No language has words for how an actor feels when he gets a hot job without half trying and work starts in a week and this part can take him
anywhere.
For starters, world history begins to seem trivial in comparison with your future, and your feet get bigger. No, they do!

“You look happy, young fellow.”

“You!”

“I knew you’d have good fortune.”

They had met near Columbus Circle, minutes after. “You didn’t…” Roger began. “You can’t arrange this, can you?”

“I like my boys well placed,” said the gang leader. “Depression clouds the mind. Euphoria clears it. The Norse thought the essential quality in a hero was luck. I like the Norse. Good lines.”

“‘My wit’s diseas’d.’”

“Ah, but you don’t lack advancement, that’s the important thing. Where will you go tonight? What will you be?”

Roger wondered about that every evening, as he prepared before a full-length mirror behind the bathroom door. He was a Mr. Wizard of the vanity lab, learning by doing. He would experiment with shapes of nose, depths of navel, formats of chest hair. Marvellous how the flesh instantaneously responded to the will; the imagination is quicker than the eye. But when you’re already in the topmost class, what sets you apart from the others such—what’s 101 percent? A really slick haircut? Roger fleetingly played with innocuous yet arresting flaws—scars, a mole, wild eyes, a limp. Maybe a cane?

What will you be? he wondered again two nights after the soap interview, in the apartment of an old Village avatar, a king of the leather scene in the early Stonewall years and nostalgically resonant even in semi-ruin. Roger, a busty buckaroo, had taken particular care with his face that night, molding till he had something truly shattering. The old leather king very nearly shook his head in disbelief as they traded stares in front of Clyde’s.

“I can’t decide,” he told Roger, “if it’s the eyes or the mouth.”

“It’s both.”

Two blocks away, in the tiny studio that had played host to uncountable young princes, Roger saw how raptly one obeys the command of attraction, what concentration lies in the borrowing of beauty. “As you open my pants like a burglar,” the leather man breathed, and “I have no choice, as you lead me by the ass to the bed, to get me all set, to ream my ass out for me whether I’m willing or not.” Captions to pictures Roger had never seen. “I know what it is, man,” the leather man said as Roger laid him down. “You like to see some big stud throwing his rod as you stretch him out, huh? Big, fuckable stud, big dude, to give you what he has. Is that it? Tell me about it. Tell me what you’re going to do.”

Why should I? Roger thought. You’re doing fine all by yourself.

“You make me so hot,” the man went on. “And you know it. You’re gonna go ahead with it. Yeah, you don’t care. Like some guy I met once, this trucker, this big hot dude. Jesus, he was tough.” Roger tried to shut him up with some mouth-to-mouth, but he talked right on through. “Oh yeah, romance me. It’s so nice. So nice it hurts. So this big dude tells me he knows this guy who makes porn movies and maybe he should audition me. Yeah. So I said I don’t know about that stuff, man, and he says, Just come here so I can loosen you up.…” Roger stroked the man’s thighs as he eased in and at last the man was silent, except, just before he came, when he whispered, “Oh, you are so damn what,” which is a somewhat notable thing to have said. And no sooner were they disencumbered than the man more or less threw Roger out.

“I couldn’t live up to that, man,” the old king told him when Roger asked him to lunch the next day. “I mean, I have my good days, but … hell…” He looked at the wall, at nothing, faded squares where once hung nude photographs of an achingly beautiful man, this man. He laughed ironically, to please himself. “It’s both.”

Amiably donning his Stetson, Roger said, “Are you saying you didn’t enjoy that?”

“No. I’m saying you didn’t.”

*   *   *

What will you be? Lose the cowboy, Roger warned himself. It’s too hot for that clothing, anyway. I’ll be contemporary, loose. No more mercy fucks for old-timers. Let’s try some California-style kids, sheer looks and no complications. Three nights later, in the mode of a preppy football hero, Roger picked up a boy hovering near the garage of an office tower. Roger had seen him there before, whistling at women with his co-workers in the garage and setting the pace for the lunchtime stroll. Straights yield to beauty just as gays do, working-class straights especially, because they don’t know how to behave around women who aren’t their mothers. Instead, they court men.

This boy told his pals that Roger was a cousin and ambled up to him as if a motor were humming in his mid-quarters. The cheek, Roger thought. The cocky lack of cover dodges. That’s what they’re like; confidence turns them reckless. And their pals will look away and change the subject. His pals did. Everybody spoils them.

It took a long time to land the boy; they like to be persuaded in code. On the way to Roger’s, they paused at a sidewalk fruit stand and the boy coolly palmed an apple while the proprietor was helping a fastidious business wimp collect a ripe banana. What did he save, fifty cents?

Roger cursed himself for caring. He tried to think of the boy’s callous devilry as showmanship. The boy chomped on his booty as they walked, mouthing out “Like, man” and “Yeah, like” as if they were basic punctuation. He undressed like a peep show come unsprung, giggling and posing. Roger fucked him savagely, to avenge the stolen apple. The boy got mad and shoved Roger off him, so Roger grabbed him by the hair and bounced him off the walls. He was mad, too, it appears.

The boy cursed Roger as he dressed. He kept saying “Fucking crazy, man,” and finally Roger grabbed the boy and his clothes and threw them all into the hall. The boy had to snatch the bannister to keep from flying downstairs.

“‘Don’t know m’own strenth,’” said Roger, in Bullwinkle’s voice. You never know what you’ll be.

*   *   *

Some actors see life as fun and work as terror, but Roger viewed acting as relaxation. If you’re well cast and you know your lines and your public is with you, what else should it be? For the first few days in soap, his part consisted of showing up in General City, embracing about thirty-five relations in law and flesh, befriending twenty men, coming on to twenty women, and, at fadeouts, looking enigmatically menacing. Anyone could play it. But the first mail was good, and being recognized in D’Agostino’s by appallingly delighted housewives of both sexes amused Roger. He admired the speed with which the whole thing moved, from “story lag” (the time between script composition and public airing) to “set time” (the taping). Once, they told him, their second biggest male sweetheart was written, taped, and presented dying in a hit-and-run automobile accident, all in four days.

Everyone should live this fast, Roger exulted, stretched out on the couch as he answered his housemates’ daydreaming questions about the sudden rash of devastating strangers in the Pines. Sometimes he claimed intimate connection to well-sourced dish; at other times he chuckled when they challenged him. All the questions were, What are they like? Yet everyone thinks he knows what they’re like. They speak their own language, converse in the instructive pictorial of bodily parts. To note face, shoulders, hands, is to know what they’re like—everyone
thinks.

How amazing, Roger thought, to know.

One thing he could tell about them: they are never shy. By the time they’re seventeen or so even the dullest of them has noticed the interest he excites in others, in the way women show their feelings a little for him, and the way men try to cover theirs. Nice-looking people can be shy, but spectacular people have had it too easy to hold back.

There was a nice-looking fellow at Roger’s soap; no one, ever, was shyer. He had virtually grown up on the program, playing someone’s child through from early adolescence into young manhood. Roger’s character was intricately and repeatedly related to his, yet thus far they had met only in the green room during breaks. His name was Roger, too, yielding a dozen nervous-actor jokes and breaking the ice for them.

“Sometimes I think it’s safer to play the sidekick parts,” the boy told Roger. “I’ve seen hot shots here today and … you know? But look at me. Twelve years of steady work. And I don’t have to do anything. What else could I do, anyway? I never had … an ambition. I do what I’m told and I collect my check.”