Money: A Suicide Note (32 page)

'Fielding,' I said, 'what are you doing to me? What? It's been twelve days. God damn it, where is that script?'

'Tomorrow morning, John. I guarantee it.'

The telephone rang, and I swore brutally — but it was the call that Fielding had been waiting for. Spunk Davis. I returned to the window as Fielding soothed and coaxed.

'Just like I figured. Shnexnayder was straight on to him. You see, Spunk hates Nub with a passion. A long story.' Fielding shrugged limply. 'Yeah, he's in. And Herrick's out.'

That's good,' I said, and meant it.

'On one condition. Get this. He wants it to be a vegetarian restaurant.'

'In the film.'

'In the film. These guys ...'

I laughed, and Fielding laughed too, his lovable, his loving laugh. As he showed me his clean back teeth (plump, kiddish, uninjured), I thought numbly, Christ, what a goodlooking guy. When I wing out to Cal for my refit, when I stroll nude into the lab with my cheque, I think I know what I'll say. I'll say, 'Lose the blueprints. Scrap those mock-ups. I'll take a Fielding. Yeah, give me a Goodney. Do me one just like him.'

——————

As I've already mentioned, 1984 and I were getting on famously. A no-frills setup, run without sentiment, snobbery or cultural favouritism, Airstrip One seemed like my kind of town. (I saw myself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police.) In addition, there was the welcome sex-interest and all those rat tortures to look forward to. Stumbling into the Ashbery late at night I saw with a jolt that the room I had hired was Room 101. Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money. But I had no time for reading the next day. I was too busy reading.

At eleven o'clock Felix woke me with four smartly-bound volumes of Good Money, a screenplay by Doris Arthur based on an original idea by John Self. I ordered six pots of coffee and did my bathroom routines simultaneously, like a one-man band. I D-noticed all calls. I settled down, with the new anglepoise lamp staring interestedly over my shoulder. Reading—it's all I ever do these days. All I ever do is sit about the place reading. But this was different. This was work. This was money '1. INT. NIGHT,' I read, and pressed on, feeling dangerously excited.

An in-form reader, an old hand at reading, I flapped through Good Money in just under two hours. Then I burst into tears, smashed a straightbacked chair, threw a full coffeepot at the door and kicked the base of the bed with such savage power that I had to run round the room with a pillow in my mouth until at last I staunched my screams. I couldn't fucking believe it... Fielding was right in a way. Good Money was a dream script, wonderfully coherent, with oodles of rhythm and twang. The dialogue was fast, funny and seductively indirect. The pacing was beautiful. You could have gone out and shot the whole thing in a month. I sat at the desk with complimentary pen and pad. I started reading again.

1 couldn't fucking believe it. Who's doing this to me? Who? First: Gary, the dad, 'Garfield' — the Lorne Guyland role. In the pre-credit sequence Lorne is glimpsed wearing dank pyjamas, carrying his clothes in a bundle as he is jeered from the marital bedroom. This is pretty well Lorne's best moment. After that it's all downhill. Although Lorne boasts constantly about his erudition, wealth and youthfulness, in reality (we find) he is illiterate, bankrupt and more or less senile. Yes, on his very last legs, is old Lorne. When he eventually blackmails the young dancer into the cot (a richly comic episode), old Lorne can't raise it. Raise it? He can't even find it. In his weepy frustration he takes a swipe at the sneering young beauty. She replies with a kick in the balls, and Lorne cracks like a broken stick. In the fight scene proper, an anoraked Lorne Guyland is given the hiding of his life, despite the fact that he surprises his sleeping co-star with a car-tool. His last, abject few lines are delivered from under a mummy-suit of plaster in an intensive-care unit. As for the son, Doug — as for Spunk Davis — well, to start with, his motive for hanging on to the mob heroin is as follows: he needs to fan the wildfire, the sparkling gorse, of his own narc habit, priced at a thousand dollars a day. A chain-smoker, a compulsive gambler, a hopeless lush and (what was Doris up to here?) a haggard handjob artist, Spunk also turns out to be a veritable guru or sorcerer of junk food, presiding over the vats in the restaurant kitchens with various lethal additives and glutinous flavourings. We are left to guess at the full extent of his sexual delinquencies, though in one haunting digression Spunk pays a 'charitable' visit to an orphanage with his mother: in a series of tight close-ups we see him doling out candy bars as he gooses and fondles the staring waifs.

Now for the ladies. If you were searching for a word to encapsulate the Caduta Massi character, then sterility would spring to your lips. The key to Caduta lay in how fantastically sterile she was. Boy, was she ever sterile! No extra kids for Caduta. No kids at all: Spunk himself (it crucially transpires) is her adopted son. Despite her husband's well-established impotence, and despite the on-screen celebration of her fifty-third birthday, Caduta kept talking about how many children she would one day bear. There were many symbolic moments in which Caduta gazed desolately at playgrounds full of laughing children or composed herself near jugs of wilted flowers. There was the visit to the orphanage. There was even a dream sequence where the fallow Caduta wandered alone in a boundless grey desert. How sterile can a woman get? Yes, you really felt for Caduta, what with this unbelievable sterility of hers. And Butch Beausoleil — the mistress, the dancer? I had expected Doris, as a fellow feminist, to honour Butch's single proviso. I had expected Butch to be spared the stock domestic chores, the dish-washing, the floor-sweeping, the bed-making. But no. So far as the Arthur screenplay was concerned, Butch could have been a representative figure called Drudgery in a commercial for labour-saving appliances. She peeled potatoes, lined dustbins, swabbed toilets. Even in the nightclub scenes Butch was forever rinsing glasses and ironing G-strings. Her chief dance routine featured a mime with mop and pail. And the other big thing about Butch? You guessed. You were there before me. A confident talker, full of ideas, Butch was none the less a person of sensationally low intelligence. A bushy-tailed, big-breasted meatball. A classic, a textbook dumb blonde: that was the big thing about Butch.

'Someone's fucking me around,' I said out loud, and felt my boil burst.

Then I was off and running again.

I moved at speed through the first-floor vestibule where a dozing flunkey stirred too late, through the antiques and gadgetry of the tall inner chamber, and right up to the double doors of the bedroom. I seized both knobs—and tugged... Fielding sat at the foot of the bed in a black dressing-gown, unstartled. Behind him, naked on the sheets, face averted, lay the hard dark body of a young boy.

Now I'm as shocked as the next guy when I get a glimpse of another's true appetites, but I was all fired up by then and I just thought, So he's a faggot too, is he? Right.

'Come here.'

'Something the matter, Slick?'

He didn't look fazed, I'll give him that. He even yawned and scratched his hair as he closed the door behind him. 'The script,' I said.

'Yeah, don't you love it?'

'It's a disaster and you know it.'

'... How so?'

'The stars, the stars! They'll never touch that shit. It's all over.'

'Forgive me, Slick,' he said, pouring coffee from the tray, 'but you're betraying your inexperience here. You want some? Take a drink. The stars are all signed up. They'll do it. Or our attorneys move in on this. You just have to assert yourself, John. You wanted the realism. God damn it, that's why I went with you.'

'That's not realism. That's — it's vandalism.'

'Don't you see what we're sitting on here, Slick? Good Money will be the only movie of the year, the decade, the era that will show the real delirium of film, the nakedness of actors, what it does to —'

'You've got the wrong guy. I can't work like this. Now I'm not fooling around. Doris goes. That bitch is in turnaround. She's sick in the head. I'll get the script I need — I'll get my man in, don't worry. Give Doris her dough and kick her down the stairs.'

Fielding paused and looked away. Here was a man who sees his deepest and most mysterious plans undermined, messed up, blundered with. He said lightly, 'Don't you think Doris should hear this?'

'Sure. Call her.'

'I'll do that.' And he called her. 'Oh, Doris?' he said.

And Doris Arthur came out of the bedroom wearing nothing but a pair of cool pants ... Now, lit up as I was, this had to be registered and absorbed — and a compelling sight it was too. She walked over to the breakfast trolley, loosely swinging her arms with the ease of a seaside nine-year-old. For she had nothing to hide, nothing, nothing. The pants, on the other hand — and these were useful pants I'm talking about, useful by fetishist standards, let alone feminist ones— the pants contained a good deal: the high trembling rump, the frontal tussock with its own curious pendency, like a plum in a handkerchief waiting to be shined and shared. I suppose (I thought), I suppose she'll get proper tits when she has children, and then the, and then the whole —

'Okay now — right. Yeah,' I said, 'stick to fiction, Doris. You fucked it. You're out. Listen,' I told Fielding, 'it's this simple. She goes or I go. It's me or your chick. Jesus, if Caduta read one word of that crap. Or Lorne!'

'They're reading it now,' he said. 'I had copies limoed over this morning. You, Caduta, Lorne, Spunk, Butch.'

'Okay,' I said. This was my move, my shot. You can do it only once and you have to mean it. 'Now there's going to be a shitstorm from all four directions. And you're going to handle it, pal, because I'm flying out tonight. And I'll tell you something else. I'm not coming back. I don't care. I'll go back to C.L. & S. and make commercials and wait for the right deal. She goes or I go. She goes. Do it, or I'm walking out of here for ever.'

Fielding sat tight in his chair. Doris drank coffee unconcernedly, holding the cup with both hands. I turned.

And I walked. Down the long room, past the sofas, the glazed tables. On either side of the far door grey circuitry simmered, key banks and function consoles, a jukeboxful of floppy disks, the many screens showing printouts and readings in squat robot type... This walk to the door, I thought — it's good. Keep going. You're on the right track. I do mean it. I'll walk through the door and I'll keep walking, all the way to England, and I'll never come back.

'Slick,' said Fielding.

——————

Now a paved park in midtown, with dampness and seepage showing between the flags, despite all the heat could do. The heat had done all it could, and failed. The building at the far end of this block-long concrete bower had a look of some austerity to it, with its strictly channelled cornerstones, but the square was anybody's, street-cultured, with blacks and buskers and birdshit, sax-players, pushers, jungle artists. By my side on the wooden bench, Martina Twain.

She had just been to some museum. Her skin shone with a museum pallor. For all the fruit and nut of her colouring, she has her moments of bloodlessness. Normally, of course, I would attribute this to the fact of my presence and proximity. But there was something else. Consulting my butch radar, I detected Ossie trouble. And I too was thinking of Selina. I had just called London, and the little bag-bantam was home for once. 'Yes,' she even said, 'no, that's good. Come back quickly'... This meeting with Martina — I had called her in full travel flurry, in full escape posture, to say goodbye, and then I thought: wait, slow down. She sounded poorly, more poorly still when I said goodbye. So this silent meeting, with no progress, only presence, and maybe some comfort too. What are friends for, after all? What are they for? I've often wondered.

And I had other spurs to silence. Moviestars, they're evidently speedy readers. When I loped into the Ashbery after lunch, a tribe of adults converged on me and about a dozen things at once seemed to happen to my face. Someone spat in it, someone slapped it, someone swore at it, someone bunched a fist at it, someone waved a writ at it. There was the tearful Thursday, escorted by a Nub-sized black man in minder livery, who introduced himself as Bruno Biggins, Lorne's bodyguard. There was old Prince Kasimir, all set to fix a dawn meeting in Central Park. There was Herrick Shnexnayder, wearing his rug sundae, representing Spunk's interests. There was a hollering ghoul of a human being called Horris Tolchok — Butch Beausoleil's attorney... In the end I just made a run for it and holed up in a bar with a telephone on my lap. But it was close to dusk now: Fielding had made the rounds of reassurance all afternoon, and things were slowly calming.

Myself, though, I wasn't calm. Early for my date with Martina, I strolled the bowels of Times Square, the low Forties, the high Thirties. In a murky cross-street I saw a black awning that my legs remembered before I did, because I gave a stagger, and limped forward with my shoulders bent, like a damaged soldier under fire. Zelda's. I came nearer. Dinner and Hostess Dancing. I peered in through the limousine glass. Tables, a hooded piano. It looked dead in there, it looked extinct, with the grey, dry light imparted by dust and full ashtrays. All the staff and clientele were in their mummies' tombs and vampire coffins, waiting on the night... I slipped into a bar across the way and turned my stool to face the forgotten awning.

'Give me a — what are they called?' I said. 'White wine and soda.'

'You sure?' said the barman. He was big, slabby, Irish, in a clean white apron, like a butcher at the start of the week, yet to begin his week of blood. In his arms, in his butcher's arms he cradled a beaked pint of scotch.

'Sure I'm sure.'

Doubtfully he put the B&F aside. 'Where's your ladyfriend?' he asked me, not amiably either — no, far from it. He's going to chuck me out, I thought, and I only just got here.

'What lady?'

'Big gingerhead. The one who had her tongue in your ear.'