The Fame Game (25 page)

When they finished dinner Dick took them to his apartment. It was comfortably cool and he made them after-dinner drinks. Gerry wondered what was going to happen next. If Bonnie stayed, then she and Bonnie would both have to go … if Bonnie left it might look awkward. What had gotten into Dick anyway? It wasn’t necessary to make love every time you went out with your lover, but Dick had established the precedent that they did, and now she felt a little rejected. There were records playing, Dick was talking, and they seemed dug in for a good long stay. She looked at Bonnie: Bonnie was looking infatuated. She looked at Dick: he was looking as inscrutable as he always did. She wondered how she was looking: nervous? Insecure? Ungracious? It wasn’t that she
wanted
to go to bed with him tonight—well, she
did
, because it had been two days and with Dick she thought about it all the time when she had hardly ever thought about it before she met him. She certainly did want to go to bed with him, right now, and instead she had to settle for a nice domestic evening at home with friends.

She got up and went into the bathroom. Damn him anyway, so neat, so sure of himself, all the expensive colognes lined up on the marble shelf above the sink, all his things, no room in his life for anyone else. Look at his damn bathrobe on the hook on the back of the door, always white terry cloth, always freshly laundered. He must have a dozen of them. Look at his damned aquarium on the window sill, all lit up, bubbling away. If he didn’t have that he’d have room for all of a wife’s cosmetics. No wonder he didn’t want anyone in his life; it would just be too damn crowded.

Guppies
, she thought, looking at Dick’s aquarium, and in spite of herself she laughed.

She came out of the bathroom to find that Dick was alone. He was fixing another drink, looking annoyed.

“Where’s Bonnie?”

“She split.”

“What do you mean—just left without saying good-bye?”

He shrugged. “Just left. She said: ‘Good night—good-bye’ gaily and ran out.”

“Was she angry?”

“Why should she be angry? She was just being kind.”

“What do you mean,
‘kind’?
”

“She obviously felt in the way.”

“Well, I didn’t make her feel in the way,” Gerry said.

“You must have. I didn’t.”

“Maybe she had a date,” Gerry said. “She always goes out late.”

“Would you like another drink?”

“No, thanks. I think I’d better go.”

“Oh?”

“Thank you for dinner.”

“You’re welcome. Don’t get mugged.” He turned away.

Bastard
, she thought. She went to the door. Then she stopped.
Double super bastard
. “Come on, Dick. What is it?”

He looked at her innocently, with a trace of annoyance on his face. “You were obnoxious all night,” he said. “Didn’t you notice it?”

“No. I was too busy noticing how obnoxious you were being.”

“Me? I thought I was more than gracious to your fruity friend.”

“You were lovely. But why are you so angry now because she left?”

“It broke up the evening,” he said.

Gerry looked at her watch. “I wasn’t planning to stay up all night. I have to work tomorrow and so do you.”

“I don’t know … I just thought it might be interesting to see what would happen.”

“Like what?”

He glanced at her, then away. “Just like … anything.”

“Like
what
, Dick?” But she knew. And suddenly she hated him.

“Do you and Bonnie make it together?”

“Of course not!”

“Just wondered. She loves you.”

“
He
loves me, and I love
him
, but he’s a fruit and he doesn’t have anything to do with girls—he’s scared to death of them. And I am not a reformer of homosexuals, thank you.”

“I never had a boy,” he mused thoughtfully.

“Well, if you want Bonnie, you know the number,” Gerry said, hating him furiously, and at the same time feeling the pain of losing him as if she had been struck in the stomach with a fist.

“After all,” he said, “people can’t go on doing the same things forever.”

“Are you bored with me?”

“Of course not. Are you bored with me?”

“Not yet,” she said maliciously.

“I would never make it with a boy alone,” he said. “But the three of us … it would be different. Bonnie looks exactly like a girl.”

And undressed he looks just like a boy
, she thought, but she said nothing and looked carefully at Dick, trying to find him ugly, trying to remember what he looked like the first time she saw him before she stopped looking at him objectively and started to fall in love with him. She hated him but she couldn’t bring herself to go.

“I was just kidding,” he said. “I wanted to see what you’d say.”

“I guess in the world you live in you do scenes,” she said. “In the world I live in they don’t.”

“I’m not going to talk about it any more,” he said. “Forget it.”

“If I don’t talk about it I won’t be able to forget it.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Oh, Dick, why can’t you be like other people? Have real feelings …”

“I do have real feelings,” he said. “I love you.”

It was the first time he’d said it. She had waited so long for him to say it, imagined it, dreamed of it, and now that he was saying it it didn’t mean a thing.

“If Bonnie had stayed tonight, and we’d balled, I would have married you both,” he said seriously.

“She and I can wear matching bride’s dresses at the wedding,” Gerry said. She wanted to cry, or throw up, or leave, but she just stood there.

“Go to bed,” he said tiredly. He went into the bedroom.

She hated him and she loved him. She knew she should leave, and she was quite sure that if she did leave he would send her flowers in the morning and apologize. But she knew that the flowers and the apology wouldn’t mean a thing, just as nothing gallant Dick had ever done had meant anything. If she left it wouldn’t matter, and if she stayed it wouldn’t matter. She went into the bedroom where Dick was already undressed and lying in bed under the covers. Without a word she took her clothes off and got into bed, far away from him. He turned out the light.

In moments of stress she’d always been able to find refuge in sleep, and she was asleep in less than two minutes. When she woke up it was morning. Dick was in the bathroom shaving. She didn’t speak to him.

When he was finished in the bathroom she went in and washed. She didn’t bother to put on any make-up. When she came out he was dressed. She dressed quickly without looking at him.

“Hurry up,” he said. “We’ll share a cab.”

She wondered if she would ever see him again. She felt numb.

“I don’t want to spoil your relationship with Bonnie,” he said. “I know you have a good friendship going. That’s very important. I don’t want to come between you.”

That’s exactly what you want to do
, Gerry thought, but she knew this was no moment for dirty jokes. “Don’t worry,” she said.

“We’ll have dinner tomorrow night,” he said.

“All three of us?”

“It doesn’t matter. Whatever you want.”

“Just the two of us.”

“Fine.”

She got out of the cab first, he was going on. He didn’t kiss her good-bye. She knew she had to start getting over him, but she was still too numb to think. Libra had been right. He
was
Dick Devoid. Devoid of feelings. She had thought she had no feelings, but Dick could outdo her any time in the numbness department. He was really dead. She wondered what had happened to him in his life to hurt him so much that he was so dead now. Had there ever been a time in his life when he was young and idealistic and full of love? Wasn’t everybody, sometime? She knew something had clicked in her head and made her stop loving him, just like that. The old self-protective instinct. But at the same time she knew she couldn’t just turn it off. She wondered when everything she was feeling and couldn’t admit would come rushing in on her. She hoped she wouldn’t have hysterics in the office.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Bakrte Grover, fourteen, President of the Kew Gardens Mad Daddy Fan Club, found many interesting and important things to do during her summer vacation. For one thing, she finally had time to get her Mad Daddy scrapbook up to date. She had three of them, all bursting. She’d been in love with him ever since the first time she’d ever seen him on television.

He was sex to her. He was the kind of boy (even though she knew he was a man) she had imagined the older girls went out with, the kind of boy they made out with. The idea of actually making out with a real boy made her almost physically sick. She was too shy and too young. She knew there would be time for boys when she got older. She dreamed of it sometimes, imagining the boy to be just like Mad Daddy, and it was a delirious thought. Meanwhile, he was her true love. She had photos of him pasted all over the door to her room, more photos in little ten-cent-store frames on her dresser, and more pinned to the bulletin board on her bedroom wall. Before she went to bed at night she kissed each and every photo on the lips, sending him little mental messages of love and lust.

He had never answered the letter she had slipped under the door at the Plaza Hotel. She figured someone had thrown it out before he saw it. How could he be so near and yet so far? She never missed his program and she felt just as if he was talking to her. She’d gone by the television theater sometimes and seen the mobs of kids standing on the sidewalk waiting for him to appear. She knew they waited there for hours and he never showed up. He probably sneaked out a back door somewhere. He wasn’t in the phone book or she would have stood outside his apartment house. It never occurred to her that he might be listed in the Manhattan phone book as someone other than Mad Daddy.

Although she was small for her age and despaired of ever having a bust or anything resembling a normal shape, Barrie considered herself a normal teen-ager in every way. She had two boring, normal parents who were easy to deceive, and a boring, normal older brother named Rusty who went steady with a girl who wanted to be a model. She had two divine best friends, Donna and Michelle, who cared about Mad Daddy as much as she did … or used to, anyway. Lately they hadn’t been paying as much attention to the fan club as they should. Both of them had discovered boys.

Before, they’d had marvelous sleep-over dates where the three of them washed and set their hair and discussed Mad Daddy endlessly, but more and more lately the discussion had centered around boys in school, which girls made out with who, which girls were actually taking birth-control pills, whether you should do it with a boy you loved, whether you could steal your mother’s pills and get away with it. Donna and Michelle were a year older than Barrie, fifteen, because she was bright and had skipped second grade. They both had big busts and had been using Tampax for years. They were both still virgins, as of course was Barrie. But they had done a lot of other things. Donna was in love, with a boy she’d met at temple named Herb, and Michelle had met a boy at church named Johnny, whom she was going steady with just to have status although she didn’t like him very much. Johnny’s main claim to fame was that he looked just like Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate
. Barrie was an atheist and went neither to church nor temple. She knew Donna and Michelle were atheists too, or at least agnostics, because they had discussed it, but they went to worship because that was the place you met more boys.

Formerly, on Saturday mornings, the three girls would go to wherever they thought they might find Mad Daddy, usually the Plaza or the studio, or if he was doing a personal appearance they would hang around there, and they would wait for him, knowing that even though they probably wouldn’t see him the fact of their presence was an act of love. But now on Saturday mornings Donna was busy with her Temple Youth Group and that Herb, and Michelle was sleeping late and fixing herself up for her Saturday-night date with Johnny. Barrie found herself spending more and more time alone.

Donna and Michelle kept trying to fix her up with blind dates, but Barrie accepted a date only in cases of
extremis
—which was a dance or a party where you couldn’t go alone. A boy in her class had asked her out once, but she had told him she was busy. She didn’t want to go out with boys yet. There would be lots of time for that later. Secretly she was sure that once she started to date boys she would be trapped into going steady like the other kids did, and then she would be trapped into making out, and the next thing she knew she’d be a child bride—
ugh!
The thought of getting married made her physically sick.

She’d been kissed a couple of times at parties, by her blind dates, and it gave her a strange feeling of revulsion and desire. The stronger the desire was, the stronger the revulsion was.
I’m just a little kid
, she kept telling herself.
I’m only fourteen. I don’t have to do that stuff yet. Plenty of time for that when I grow up
.

Her mother was terrified that her brother Rusty was making out with his steady girl friend, Tammi, and that the girl would get pregnant. That’s all parents thought about: pregnant, pregnant, pregnant. Barrie knew that sometimes when she was out of the house her mother went through her bureau drawers, because Barrie always kept everything in its special place and sometimes her things looked gone through. Looking for what? A sign that she wasn’t a virgin? A sign that she was going to be pregnant, pregnant, pregnant? A bottle of birth-control pills, or whatever they came in? A box of Tampax instead of the Kotex her mother had ordered her to use? Her hymen lying there, discarded at last? It made her so furious that her mother looked through her things that once she had bought a little mousetrap and put it under her underwear, and another time she’d collected a whole lot of disgusting worms in Central Park and put them all squirmy into an aspirin bottle made of dark-green glass, with the label washed off, so her mother would have to open it and pour the worms out into her hand.

“Why do you keep worms in your dresser drawer?” her mother asked that night.