The Fame Game (12 page)

Franco left to begin his sketches for the Gilda Look, and Libra kept her busy with dictation and typing so there was no time to think. But on the way home that evening Gerry began to realize that what was really bugging her was more a guilty conscience than unselfish guilt. It was flattering to have someone who was not a freak or a fool take a liking to her. She hadn’t had a date in two months. Who had she met in this office? So far, freaks and fools. Who was she likely to meet? More freaks and fools? She was too old, sophisticated, shy, and proud to go to singles’ bars. She could call up some of her old romances and say: “Hey, I’m back in New York!” but they were why she had left New York in the first place. Maybe, as her mother would say, this Dick Devere had a nice friend. He probably had plenty of them.

She stopped at the grocery and bought a small barbecued chicken and a cantaloupe. There she was, picking out the smallest chicken in the store and knowing it would still be too big for one. She was too lazy even to cook for herself. At least she wasn’t at the stage where she bought one lamb chop like an old maid. A chicken was more dignified; anyone watching her would think she had someone coming to dinner, or perhaps a husband at home to feed. Still, it was depressing. The chicken felt warm through the paper bag; something nice and warm to hold, and that was depressing too. You could make yourself forget about sex and babies you didn’t have, but it was hard to forget about loneliness. Television was interesting, but there would still be plenty of television when she was ninety years old. She saw a young couple running down the street, the girl dressed up, the man waving at a cab. She hadn’t had a date in New York in years! She didn’t want to look forward to having lunch with Dick Devere on Thursday, but in spite of herself she
was
looking forward to it, because she knew as well as he did that it was a date.

Why are you being so noble? she asked herself, as if she were a stranger. You’ve gone out with
married
men, and you believed them when they said they had nothing to say to their wives. You didn’t worry about their wives then either. Sure, you were younger, and you hadn’t learned yet what it felt like to be hurt, but why are you playing so noble now? Because Silky’s black?

You’re taking all the sins of the world on yourself and the man’s only asked you to have lunch with him, she told herself. She climbed up the three flights of stairs and let herself into her brand-new, lonely apartment with her brand-new, one-set-only key. She looked around the living room. It looked so clean and bare. She would have to buy some paper flowers, and candles. She wondered if she would ever invite any man to have dinner there. Sure, being single was lonely, and dating was tough, and a new apartment didn’t feel like it belonged to her yet, or she to it. She put the chicken in her immaculate kitchen, feeling like a guest in a hotel. No wonder people had invented lunch dates and dinner dates; it was awful to eat alone. She might as well be honest with herself and look forward to her lunch date on Thursday—it was the only thing she had to look forward to all week. And she could wear her new green suit that she’d brought back from Paris, the one that did all the things green was supposed to do for green eyes. God knows, if she didn’t wear it sometime it would go out of style.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mad Daddy, formerly Moishe Fellin, was in the bathtub of his room in the Albemarle Hotel in Atlantic City, accompanied by a floating Dennison of the Deep toy, about a quart of bubble bath, and a fourteen-year-old girl named Marcie, who had come backstage to ask for his autograph the night before. Marcie was a tall, gloriously sun-tanned blond girl with slender, nymphet limbs covered with the most delicate frost of platinum hair. Right now those limbs were also covered with a froth of bubble bath, and with her long straight hair held up out of the bubbles with a barrette, a few tendrils damp and escaping, he thought she was one of the prettiest girls he had ever seen. He pushed the rubber fish toy to her and she pushed it back, giggling.

The bubble bath, being the new, patented Mad Daddy bubble bath that came in a plastic replica of the man himself, was the kind that got you clean by soaking, without soap. It also smelled good and gave heaps of suds. They had been in the tub for about forty-five minutes, while the radio in the room blared rock ‘n’ roll; frolicking and soaking and having a snowball fight with the suds. The Dennison of the Deep toy was just like a friend in there with them. Marcie had a nice giggle, and very friendly blue eyes. When he had met her the night before Mad Daddy had been very much attracted to her. It was only a matter of a few moments before he was buying her a frozen custard on the Boardwalk and taking her to see the Ripley’s Believe It or Not exhibit, and only a little more time before she invited herself quite coolly up to his room. He’d turned off the phone because he was sure Elaine would call to holler as soon as she found out he had taped today’s show too and was going to stay and have a good time.

There were two things that Daddy definitely did not want to think about at this moment: one was Elaine, who had a mean temper, and the other was his birthday next week, when he would be forty years old. He had told Marcie he was thirty-five. He told everybody that. It was an awful thing to get old, especially when you felt just as young as when you were a teen-ager. The things that made him laugh were the things that made the kids laugh, and his grown-up friends bored him. Libra, for example. Libra bored Daddy to death. Libra was always talking about girls in a dirty way, saying that if he was Daddy he’d certainly take advantage of all the little teeny-boppers who were in love with him. Libra had no soul, and no sentimentality at all.

“I think my skin’s shriveling up,” Marcie said. “Isn’t
your
skin shriveling up?”

“What a terrible thing to say!” Daddy exclaimed, and jumped up and out of the tub. He looked at his body. “I’m not shriveled up. Are you shriveled up, Marcie?”

Marcie looked down at her splendid body. She had jumped out of the tub too, and was shaking bubble bath suds on the bathmat like a frisky puppy. “No,” she said, giggling. “Everything’s here.” She scooped the Dennison of the Deep toy out of the bath. “We mustn’t let him shrivel up.”

“You can have him if you’d like,” Mad Daddy said.

“Oh, can I? Oh, he’s groovy!” Marcie hugged the rubber fish. “I’d really rather have you, Daddy. I think you’re even groovier.”

“You can’t have
me
,” he reproved mildly. “Hey, can you do this?” He had a toy that shot a pingpong ball into the air and caught it in a net. The gadget was hard to work. He played it for a while, deftly, showing off for her. Then he gave it to her to try.

“Oh, I can’t do that at
all!
” she cried, giggling.

He led her to the full-length mirror in the bedroom and made her try it, and then he showed her again, but Marcie had no sense of timing and even less manual dexterity and she missed the ball every time. Finally she got annoyed and tossed the pingpong ball at him, hitting him on the ear. He whooped happily and tossed it back at her, but she ducked. Then they ran around the room throwing everything at each other—pillows, magazines, toys, a slipper, her bra.

“Where did you get that beautiful suntan, Marcie?”

“I went to Florida between semesters. There are lots of boys in Fort Lauderdale. We had lots of fun.” She became serious for a moment. “Daddy, tell me something. Nobody knows if you’re married or not. Are you married?”

“Well, of course I’m married,” Daddy said. “I’m a grown-up. Grown-ups are always married.”

“How boring.”

“Yes, it’s very boring.”

“Do you like her? Your wife?”

“Oh, she’s a nice girl.”

“How old is she?”

“Eighty-seven,” Mad Daddy said, shoving Marcie on the bed.

She giggled and hit him with the pillow. “Is she as old as you are?”

“Do I look eighty-seven?”

“How old is she?”

“Twenty-six.”

Marcie shrugged. The subject bored her. “I’m starving,” she said.

“Me, too. I’ll send down for some breakfast.”

He called Room Service and ordered two hamburgers with chili and two Cokes. As an afterthought he told them to add some French fries and some ice cream with chocolate sauce. “That’s my very favorite breakfast,” Marcie said.

“Mine, too.”

“How come you have all these toys?” she asked.

“The people from the Toy Show sent me a lot of samples.”

“Are we going to the Toy Show?”

“Do you want to?”

“Not particularly,” she said. She wrinkled her nose. “I’d rather watch television. Your show should be on soon.”

Mad Daddy looked at his watch on the dresser. They had played the whole morning away, and some of the afternoon. His show would be on in ten minutes. He turned off the radio and went across the room and turned on the television set.

“I love your show,” Marcie said. “I watch it every day when I come home from school. I didn’t go to school today. I wonder if they’ll tell my parents.” She had called her parents the night before and told them she was sleeping over with a girl friend.

“Will you get in trouble?”

“Nah.”

She wouldn’t get in trouble, but he would, he was thinking. Elaine was going to kill him. To tell the truth, he was rather afraid of Elaine. She was so big, and when she was drunk, which was every night now, she became paranoid. She cried, and a few times she had even slapped him. But the thing that scared him the most was when she yelled. Elaine was a champion yeller. She had invented tantrums. Every time someone cursed she got a royalty. It was hard to believe Elaine had once been so sweet.

People kept changing. It wasn’t like children growing up and changing, like his children had, which was wonderful to watch. It was scary the way adults changed. They got neurotic and mean. He’d seen it with his older sister, Ruth, who had brought him up after their parents died when they were kids on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Ruth was beautiful and loving, but then when she and he were both grown-ups she became a nagging yenta housewife like all the other women in the neighborhood. Her husband, Bernie, was in the tie-pin business, and when Ruth and Bernie moved to Scarsdale there was no stopping her. She did her whole house in white wall-to-wall carpet and put plastic on top of it, and you had to take your shoes off anyway when you walked into the room. She kept introducing Mad Daddy to terrible replicas of herself, only unmarried or divorced or widowed, who she wanted him to take out. She had hated all his wives. And she and Bernie always called him Moishe. “I only had one Daddy,” Ruth would say, “and it wasn’t
you
.”

Oh, Ruth would have a fit when she found out his marriage with Elaine was in trouble. She would say “I told you so” until it came out of his ears. She only seemed to like his wives when he was well rid of them and they had married other people. Then she would look back on them with nostalgia, comparing them to the new one. He hated having dinner at Ruth’s. Her nagging gave him indigestion, and her cooking was enough to give him indigestion all by itself, even if she had kept still.

“There he is!” Marcie squealed. She pulled the sheet around herself like an Indian and sat on the floor cross-legged in front of the set. “Oh, I just love him! Isn’t he a gas?”

“That’s
me
,” Mad Daddy corrected her.

There he was, on the screen, taped from the day before yesterday. He looked very good; no one would know he was going to be forty years old next week.

“
Ssh
,” Marcie said reprovingly.

“That’s
me
,” Mad Daddy said again, beginning to feel left out, beaten by his own television image.

Marcie gave him a blank look. “Will you keep quiet? I’ll miss all the jokes.”

He went to the closet and took out his bathrobe and put it on. He didn’t want to see the show; he knew what he’d said. A show was a show, it was a job, and it was finished until the next one. He had never basked in his own glory. Sometimes he watched the show for a minute or two on the occasions when it was taped, but once he had reassured himself that he looked well his interest was finished.

Room Service arrived with their breakfast and Mad Daddy signed for it, keeping the door discreetly ajar and his body between the boy and the sight of Marcie rapt on the floor.

“Can I have your autograph?” the boy asked.

“You have it on the bill.”

“I mean for me.”

“Why don’t you keep the bill?” Daddy asked slyly, and he and the boy both laughed. He signed the piece of paper the boy held out to him.

“Hey, that’s you on TV now,” the boy said, craning his neck to see into the room. Daddy blocked his view with his body. “Hey, how does it feel, seeing yourself on television?”

“It feels like a piece of glass,” Daddy said. The boy laughed.

As soon as the boy turned away, Daddy shut and locked the door. “The food’s here,” he called to Marcie.

“
Ssh.
”

He looked at the hamburgers, feeling lonely. He opened a Coke with the opener on the bathroom wall and sipped it, looking at himself on the seventeen-inch screen and wishing the show was over. He nibbled at a French fry. He hated eating alone and he hated cold food. If she wouldn’t eat with him, he’d either have to eat alone or eat cold food, and that really depressed him. He unwrapped one of the hamburgers and put it into Marcie’s hand. She accepted it without looking at it or at him and transferred it to her mouth like a sleepwalker, her eyes never leaving the screen. She didn’t say thank you.

“Wow, I’m hungry,” he said, trying to sound cheery. She didn’t seem to hear him. “Hey! There’s a fishbone in my hamburger!” No response. He put his uneaten hamburger on top of the television set so it would keep warm and retired morosely to a corner of the messed-up bed, nursing on his bottle of Coke, and wondered if he should try to get to the Toy Show before it closed. There would be salesmen there who would sell twice as hard if they met him in person. He was getting a healthy royalty from the dolls: Dennison of the Deep, Little Angela, and Stud Mouse, and from the Mad Daddy Bubble Bath in the lifelike Mad Daddy plastic container. Libra was a good man to have on your team if you wanted to get rich. He thought about the midnight show and wondered if it would be a success. He was planning to use the same kind of material he used in the daytime. Indeed, he didn’t know how to write any other kind of a show. He hoped Libra was right and that the midnight hour would draw twice as many people as the daytime slot had. He’d be taping all the shows, with a live audience. He’d probably continue to tape in the afternoon because he was used to it. It was funny to think that he, the clown from the Lower East Side who always did impromptu skits to amuse the neighbors, was going to have all those big sponsors and become a millionaire. Libra said he
would
be a millionaire. Then he could retire to a desert island and run around without clothes all day long, drinking from coconuts, eating bananas, and swimming in the ocean whenever he felt like it. He would have a tree house, the kind he’d always wanted when he was a kid. He’d meet a beautiful girl and give her a shell he’d found, without a word, and she would accept it without a word, just a smile, and lead him by the hand into the lush jungle where they would lie down together. She would have long black hair and she wouldn’t be wearing anything either. She wouldn’t look anything like Elaine.