Perfect Freedom (76 page)

When he met Scot he discovered what he was waiting for. He was waiting for love, for a grand passion with its discipline of dedication and self-sacrifice. Everything about him was wrong for Scot. She hated his background, his flashy celebrity, the triviality of his work. She was tough-minded and realistic and against her coolly rational better judgment, she fell helplessly in love with him. He didn't leave Pam for her for the simple reason that Pam had already gone. Luck left him free to give himself to the joy and heartbreak of the most crucial experience of his life.

Beginning to be able to talk to Luisa, rather than simply enjoy their childlike sex play, brought it all back to him more painfully than he wanted. The agony of the last weeks had locked him into himself in a way that blocked self-examination. He had been paralyzed, an inert tangle of incommunicable suffering. His faltering but increasing ability to explain himself to Luisa made things flow in him again.

When Luisa asked if she could keep a couple of chickens, he leaped at the small challenge. He set to work constructing housing for them with bamboo and rushes, determined to prove that he wasn't completely helpless. She watched his efforts with a good deal of astonishment and dismay. She didn't want to become a nuisance by asking him to do chores.

“It's only for chickens,” she pointed out.

“Yes, but if chickens not happy, they no make eggs,” Lance said in his erratic new tongue.

“Perhaps in North America,” she conceded, “but here they lay eggs anyway.”

“Yes, but more happy, more eggs,” Lance insisted and Luisa didn't argue because he gave her the impression that he was enjoying himself. He was so pleased with his success at binding bamboo into mats that he built a palisade of bamboo around the outhouse to give it a tropical look. He started digging up a plot for vegetables.

“There is no use doing that,” Luisa told him, convinced that this was something no one could enjoy, not even an unpredictable foreigner.

“Why not?”

“Because you can't make any money farming here.”

“I have no hope for money.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“Because—” It took him a moment to select his words whenever he tried to express an idea. “It is good the ground make things.”

“But if you want vegetables, why not hire somebody to work for you? There are men here who will work for very little.”

“No, no. It is good to put things in the ground yourself and then they grow. It is good to eat things that you put in the ground with your hands. It is an idea.”

“It's a difficult idea to understand—to work if it isn't necessary.”

“But it is good work. You will see.” He was surprised at such a sophisticated attitude toward work but supposed that it was due to his inability to express himself adequately. If there was anything good here it was that his day was regulated by the rising and setting of the sun, that he could work with his hands plunged into the earth or wander around almost naked under a huge straw hat, exposing his body to the sun and air.

Working with his hands was a revelation. He had discovered that he liked to make things, build things. He hadn't felt so close to finding an identity since the opening night of his show. Then, it hadn't lasted for more than a few minutes. It was when the curtain fell on the final scene and rose again to thunderous applause that he had believed that he finally knew who he was.

As he stepped forward to take his bow, press photographers crowded down to the orchestra pit and the theater exploded with flashbulbs. The pictures would show him standing alone, tall, blond, a faint, incredulous smile on his lips, his eyes shining with a dedicated light. A thousand voices proclaimed their approbation. The tremendous moment had been recorded for history.

The next day as he looked at the pictures, doubts had already begun to undermine his proud confidence. The captions told the same old story: it mattered very much what his name was. The news wasn't that the theater had acquired a bright new talent but that a Vanderholden had done something unexpected. He should have changed his name. He had wanted to be listed as Lance Holden in the program but nobody had paid any attention to him.

Lance Holden would have had a marvelous time. Life burst like a rocket into such an array of dazzling particles—interviews, lunch parties, cocktail parties, supper parties, radio appearances, stunts arranged by the press agent to keep his picture constantly before the public eye—that for a long time he was able to dodge the fact that he had achieved very little that wouldn't have been his by birth—a grand apartment, servants, celebrity, entrée to the city's most glamorous social life.

The working part, the part he was paid for, became pure drudgery within weeks. He liked having to report for work daily at the same place and hour, and he liked payday, because all that proved that he was a working man like everybody else, but when he found himself on stage repeating words and gestures that had ceased to have any meaning for him, he was depressed by the monotony of it.

To keep boredom at bay, he reminded himself of the difficult months that had preceded his success, but he soon found himself looking back on the period with fond nostalgia. The break with his mother, the initial, essential break, had abruptly and thrillingly changed all the rules of life. He had neither sought it nor expected it, but she had announced that she would no longer consider him her son if he persisted in becoming an actor. From one day to the next, he found himself literally in the street, with a bride and no idea how to turn his improbable fantasy into reality. It took more than saying you were going to be an actor to become one.

Overnight, the world became a fascinating novelty shop. There was the novelty of replacing the elaborate establishment his mother had been setting up for him with a cheap place of his own. There was the novelty of learning how much things cost and that some shops were cheaper than the ones he had always heard of. There was the enormous novelty of discovering that there were places where he could pawn or sell his valuable possessions. Over Pam's tearful protests, he began to get rid of their superfluous wedding presents, including a car and his own jewelry.

Through people he had spent a few months with in summer theater, he met other struggling actors and writers and assorted artists, including Phil Boetz, a struggling writer who was fascinated by Lance as a case study. There was the novelty of making friends with people who talked about their mothers' cooking and their fathers' Saturday-night binges and their own experiences of farm or slum life.

No one knew how to achieve the ambitions they were all struggling for, least of all the actors. It was apparently a question of being in the right office at the right moment when somebody might be casting a part that you looked right for. They all eked out a living with haphazard jobs, but Lance's attempts at finding even the most menial work came to nothing. As soon as people found out who he was, they laughed at him, thinking it was some sort of joke.

When Pam announced that she was pregnant, the struggle took on ominous overtones. They still had things they could sell but babies seemed to be expensive. The thought of throwing himself on his mother's mercy fanned his ambition to white heat, but it was difficult to entirely exclude the possibility from his mind.

After a grim Christmas, the theater district was buzzing with gossip about Bernard Hoffman's new production. The star, Geraldine Fleet, had been signed but the male lead called for a special type—a boy on the threshold of manhood with poetic good looks who could project enough intelligence to be convincing as a writer of budding genius. There was a dream sequence, so they said, in which he appeared almost naked and performed some sort of dance, so a presentable body was essential too. Word was out that unknowns were being considered. It was going to be one of the first big postwar productions so everybody wanted to be in it.

Lance was prepared to lay siege to Bernard Hoffman's office but when he gave his name to a receptionist he was ushered past a horde of waiting youths into a large office where people were sitting around a desk. He recognized two of them as Hoffman himself and Geraldine Fleet. He was to learn eventually that the others were the director, the producer, and a production manager of some sort. He noticed glances being exchanged as his name was mentioned and passed around the desk. He was asked to read from a script. He was told to stand and walk around the room. Additional glances were exchanged before Bernard Hoffman uttered one of his historic pronouncements: “You're it.”

His engagement was treated like a press event, complete with photographers. He got a taste of the future when his picture appeared on the front page of all the tabloids the next day. He hoped somebody would have the courage to show them to his mother. He got another taste of the future after the first few days of rehearsal when Bernard Hoffman drew him aside for some professional advice.

“How are you faring with our Geraldine?” he asked. He was a heavily built man with striking Semitic features and had adopted an expensive East-Coast executive style. He was unlike anybody Lance had known and he was proud that the playwright seemed to like him.

“Miss Fleet? We get along fine, as far as I know.”

“Ah yes,
Miss
Fleet. I'm sure you're going to have a most beneficial effect on our manners.” Lance blushed and resolved to call her Gerry at the first opportunity. “Miss Fleet is inclined to get a bit overexcited in the presence of handsome young men. I must say, for the son of railroad barons and real-estate tycoons, you're quite a dish. I don't know how that old battle-ax, your esteemed mother, managed to produce you.”

Lance threw his head back and let out a whoop of laughter, more scandalized than he wanted to admit. He had never heard his mother spoken of with disrespect. She was, after all, a distinguished leader of the social and cultural community. She would consider this slick Broadway playwright beneath her notice.

Hoffman waved a jeweled hand. “We mustn't lose the thread in hilarity and mirth. Gerry can make your position in our little production quite untenable. She's already hinted that all your best scenes should be cut. I would suggest a warmer personal approach to her. Have you thought of fucking her? I understand it's rather like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel but you appear to be a sturdy lad.”

Lance covered his shock and embarrassment with laughter. “Are you serious? Do you think she'd let me?”

“Why don't you ask her and find out?”

He thought of Pam and tried to quell his scruples. Gerry simplified matters by showing him her remarkably well preserved breasts in her dressing room while he was attempting a tentative approach that evening. It would have been rude not to display some appreciation of them. He showed her his erect cock. The Pandora's box of his carefully disciplined sexuality had been opened.

It was the following summer when Lance's restlessness prompted his sexual rebellion. The show became a tiresome interruption to more pleasurable pursuits. In the fall a fat Hollywood offer gave him something new to think about. The usual post-New Year slump came around and the show finally faltered: word spread that it wouldn't make it through another summer. Lance was elated. He would be free at last to work and learn his craft if he managed to stay out of two-year runs. He turned down the Hollywood offer. New York was home, the theater the only challenge he knew. Friends confirmed his decision about Hollywood; success could bring money but no sense of achievement for an actor. He was offered a starring job in summer stock and Bernie told him he would undoubtedly be free to take it.

Pam's second baby was due just before the summer season started. Lance proposed drastic retrenchment. Out with the cook, out with the maid, out with Nanny as soon as Pam was well enough to take care of two babies. When they returned from the summer theater, they would move into a small apartment.

Pam received these proposals with stricken outrage. What about all the Hollywood money? Any real actor with a career to consider would have leaped at the offer. She wasn't going to slave in the kitchen just because of his whims. She wasn't going to raise a family in pointless poverty.

It was a real blowup of a sort that nothing in Lance's background had taught him to deal with. Civilized people didn't shout at each other. He went out to cool off and thought of all the money he planned to save. If the show ran for three more months, he could put away enough of his salary to see them through six or eight months of unemployment. When he went home after his performance, Pam and the baby were gone.

With the help of the servants the next morning, Lance got a fairly clear picture of what had happened. Pam had made a pretext of her condition to ask his mother for asylum. Mrs. Vanderholden had swooped down on the apartment and carried her off with Angela, to the impregnable fortress on Fifth Avenue. When he called, Pam wouldn't speak to him. His mother would, but he hung up. What was the point? If she wanted to resume relations, she knew where to find him.

The point was, Pam had left home. She had only to come back where she belonged for them to carry the row to some conclusion. If she thought her departure would make him change his mind about the Hollywood offer, she was mistaken. He hadn't surrendered to his mother's ultimatum. He had no intention of surrendering to Pam's. He couldn't pretend that she was indispensable to his life. He couldn't quite remember why he'd married her although they usually had pleasant times together and were too busy to be seriously dissatisfied with each other. Little Angela delighted him when Nanny allowed him to play with her and he was looking forward to the new child. He was used to being married but habits were easy to change. He knew that Pam hadn't intended to end their marriage but understood how easily she could get trapped in something she didn't know how to handle. Heaven knew what plots his mother was hatching, all with a view to bringing her rebellious son to heel. It was funny when he thought how powerless she was; she had used up all her ammunition in the first round.