The Fame Game (30 page)

“What do you think?” Gerry asked him.

“I think we’ve been punished,” Daddy said. “Go straight to jail and do not pass Go. What’s your name?”

“Melvin,” the chauffeur said.

“Melvin, go back to that place on Long Island where we were supposed to go in the first place. At least they hate me there.”

The chauffeur headed the limousine toward Long Island. Mad Daddy chewed up an ice cube. “Did you ever read 1984?” he asked Gerry.

“Yes, in school.”

“Well, do you remember where it said everybody has his one fear that’s his cracking point, like that guy with the rats? Remember he was in love with the girl and then Big Brother locked him in the room with the rats, which were his one big fear thing, and then he said: ‘Take away the rats and I won’t love the girl any more’?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, that’s how I am with crowds. Crowds are my rat. I don’t mind a crowd in a department store or something, but when it’s a crowd of fans, or people who recognize me, I panic.”

“But they love you,” Gerry said.

“Love me? Is that what you think?” he stared at her. “The hell they do! That love can turn to hate so fast it’d make your milk curdle. Let me tell you something. Somebody recognizes me, and then a whole bunch of people recognize me, and then the rest of the people start crowding around because they think: ‘Well, there’s something everybody’s looking at, so I’ll look too.’ Already I’m the entertainment. And they
expect
me to be the entertainment. They expect me to
give
them something … time, love, something. A piece of my coat they’ve torn off. My finger maybe they broke off. It’s not enough I gave them all that time and love on stage, behind the camera, and the time I spent planning my shows so they’d enjoy them …
that
doesn’t count. This is a piece of
me
they want. Do you know why people want autographs?”

“So they can prove they met you?”

“Wrong. They want your autograph because it’s a socially acceptable piece of interpersonal relating. You didn’t think I knew all those big words, did you? Well, I figured it out myself. What they really want to say is: ‘Speak to me, look at me, be my friend, spend time with me.’ But they can’t, because they’re strangers and I’m busy and because there are so many of them. Besides, if some stranger came up to a celebrity and said that, the celebrity would think he was a nut case. So they ask for an autograph. Lots of these autograph hounds get your autograph every time they see you. Some of them even make you give them four autographs, one after another, while you’re standing there on the street trying to get away. That’s your
time
and your
friendship
they’re getting, not your signature. They trade autographs and sell them and stuff; they don’t care about the actual autograph. They care about the minute they spoke to you and you paid attention to them. And the scary thing is, if you ignore them or run away like I just did, they stop loving you in one second and start hating you. All that love just turns to
hate
. Wow!”

“Do you hate
them?
” Gerry asked.

“No … I like them. I really like them when I’m doing my show, when they’re an audience. That’s the way I really like to communicate with them. After I finish giving them my show I haven’t anything to say to them. My show is what I want to say to them. All the other stuff is just bullshit.”

“What would have happened if you hadn’t run away from the kids just now?”

“I guess it would have been okay. I’d have been signing autographs for an hour and we wouldn’t have had any fun, and maybe they would have torn most of my clothes off or something, but they wouldn’t have screamed and chased me. But I just panicked. I can’t help it; they scare me to death. Do you know, some kid cut off my tie once? Cut it right off. A girl.
Wow!
I felt castrated. That’s why I never wear a tie any more unless I absolutely have to, in case you noticed.”

“Well, I guess fame is a great waste of ties,” Gerry said.

He laughed. “You’re funny. You’re smart too—I like talking to you. I haven’t talked to a girl for as long as I can remember.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank
you
,” Mad Daddy said. Shyly, this time, he took her hand.

She was surprised at the electricity that passed between them when they touched, and neither of them wanted to let go. Gerry was a little embarrassed. They were like two kids holding hands for the first time. He was such a funny combination of grown man and child; she wanted to reassure him and at the same time she felt that he could take care of her. They held hands all the way to Long Island, and he played with her fingers, and once he looked down at himself playing with her fingers and he actually blushed.

The landscape turned into beach and beach foliage, and there was the pink shell driveway and the darling little pink gingerbread house darling little Penny Potter had picked out all by herself, according to the society columnists, and by the time the limousine crunched to a stop Gerry thought if Mad Daddy didn’t kiss her she would die.
I’m turning into a mad nymphomaniac
, she told herself,
and I’m much too old for him. He likes only little girls
. But from the way he was looking at her she could tell that for whatever odd reason, he didn’t think she was too old for him at all.

A butler met them at the door of the gingerbread house and took their overnight bags. There was a garden in back of the house, with a swimming pool in it, overlooking the beach. The B.P.’s and their guests were grouped around the pool, drinking and sunning themselves. No one was on the beach. Penny Potter arose languidly from her flowered beach chair and introduced them around, forgetting Gerry’s name the first time, as usual. She was wearing a tiny white bikini and had a nice, if underdeveloped, body.

“Didn’t you bring bathing suits?” Penny asked.

“They’re packed,” Mad Daddy said, embarrassed.

“Well, get them, for heaven’s sake.”

Gerry and Mad Daddy went back to the house. The butler had automatically put them in the same guest bedroom.

“Housing shortage,” Gerry said, suddenly shy. “We’ll have to do something about that.”

“Do we have to stay here the whole weekend?” he said.

“Well, as long as we’re here let’s have a swim anyhow. I’m hot.”

“You can have the bathroom first,” he said. He sat on the bed. “This is kind of a nice house.”

“Yes.” She went into the bathroom and put on the new bikini and cover-up Libra had sent her. She’d been surprised and touched when the clothes arrived. Libra wasn’t much for compliments when she’d done good work, but he was always generous, and she was very fond of him. She wished Lizzie was nicer to him. She thought of her own moment of lust in the car with Mad Daddy and she wondered if she was going to turn out like Lizzie, sleeping with the clients. It would be so easy … they were so available, and they were the only people she met. It must have been too easy for Lizzie …

“Your turn,” she told Mad Daddy. He went into the bathroom to change.

The bedroom was pleasant, done in white bamboo and a profusion of Porthault flowered material, with a window that looked out on the sea. There were guest colognes and cosmetics on the dresser, like a public ladies’ room in a chic restaurant. She put on some cologne and smelled immediately that it was stale. Penny Potter’s old cast-offs. She found her own cologne in her overnight bag and splashed it on to cover the smell.

Mad Daddy came out in black-and-white-checked vinyl bathing trunks, with a towel around his neck. He looked good in a bathing suit, young and in good shape for forty, with a tan.

“Where did you get the great tan?” she asked.

“Sunlamp. Elaine bought it.”

He
did
need to be married. He wouldn’t even think to buy his own sunlamp. “What meal are we in time for?” she asked.

“Drinking.”

They went out to the pool. Everyone ignored them. There were six people, counting the B.P.’s—a middle-aged woman with a recent face lift (Gerry could tell because her face was too perfect), a young man with bleached blond hair and a magnificent tanned body, and a fifty-ish couple who seemed either married or going together. The bleached-haired boy looked at Mad Daddy with interest, then looked away when he decided Daddy was too old and too straight. He glanced at Gerry’s outfit with approval, and at her hair and make-up with disapproval. Gerry smiled at him and he immediately looked away.

The butler was at their side. “What would you care to drink?”

Gerry didn’t want anything, but she asked for a Bloody Mary and Mad Daddy asked for Scotch. The drinks were there in a moment, served from a silver tray, the glasses heavy expensive crystal.

The guests were discussing a guest list for a future party one of them was going to give. “Aren’t you going to ask Dick Devere?” the face-lift lady asked.

The middle-aged man puffed on his cigar. “We’ll wait till we see what kind of reviews his show is going to get,” he said. The others nodded understandingly. Gerry felt sick.

“Let’s shake them up and go swim in the actual ocean,” Mad Daddy whispered to her. They got up.

“Oh, you can’t take your glasses on the beach,” Peter Potter said. It was the first time he had appeared to notice them. “It cost me fifteen hundred dollars last year for glasses people lost on the beach. Those glasses came from Baccarat.”

“Vot den?” Mad Daddy said.

They put their glasses down carefully and escaped to the beach. “Crystal glasses for plastic people,” Gerry said.

“Do you realize—if my show had gotten bad reviews they wouldn’t have let us come here today?” Mad Daddy said.

Gerry realized then who the middle-aged man with the cigar was: a comedian who was known as being lovable and darling. She hadn’t recognized him without his toupee. His adoring public should only hear him now, King Snob. She and Mad Daddy walked along the white, clean, deserted beach, kicking up the cold surf. He bent down and picked up an empty beer bottle.

“Do you have a suicide note?” he asked.

“How about just: ‘Help!’”

“Let’s go pee in their pool,” he said. “Then I’ll tell Yiddish jokes.”

“This is such a beautiful place,” Gerry said. “Too bad it’s wasted on them.”

“Let’s go into town and find some black orphans,” he said. “I’ll bring them back here and tell them it’s a free picnic.”

“Shall we go drown ourselves now, or wait until after dinner?”

They ran into the cold water and splashed around. Neither of them was a very good swimmer, but the almost painfully cold water was a relief because it gave them something to think about besides the frustrations of their day and the long disastrous weekend they were sure was to come. Then they came out with relief and sat on the sand. Neither of them had remembered to bring their towels. It was probably just as well, Gerry thought, because Peter Potter would have told them the towels were from Porthault and he’d already lost fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of towels, too.

“Did you ever go to camp?” he asked.

“Yes. I hated it, though.”

“I never went. I swam in the hydrant.”

“That’s a good trick.”

“We used to steal ice and stick it in front of the electric fan. Who would ever dream I’d grow up to be a Fresh Air Fund kid?”

They sat in the sun for a while, then went back into the ocean briefly to wash off the sand, and took a long walk along the beach past other houses similar to the B.P.’s house, where similar people were drinking cocktails around similar swimming pools. A few children played on the beach, accompanied by uniformed Nannies with blankets and beach umbrellas.

“Nobody has a dog,” Mad Daddy said. “Do you notice none of those kids has a dog?”

“They do have dogs,” Gerry said, “But they can’t take them to the beach. You can lose a lot of expensive dogs that way.”

He laughed. “You’re very funny for a lady.”

They gathered shells, discarding them when they found prettier ones. Gerry washed them off carefully in the water and wrapped them in her cover-up.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll get it all wrinkled. I’ll hold them for you. We can write people’s names on them and sell them in the Village.”

They walked back then, their backs to the sun to even their tans, until the pink gingerbread house came upon them too quickly. “I love that gingerbread house,” Gerry said. “I’d love to live on the beach someday.”

“Me, too. That’s my secret dream. But not in that house. The witch is inside.”

“Somehow I keep getting the feeling
we’re
the witch.”

He took one of the shells and scratched in letters two feet high on the beach in front of the B.P.’s house:
WASPS ARE OUT.

“Stop it,” Gerry giggled. “They’ll see you.”

“Let them.”

“Maybe we should go back and try to be friendlier. Let’s really try this time.”

“I can’t—I’m too shy.”

“Well, let’s just try. Maybe they think
you’re
a snob because you’re a star.”

“They probably do, and I hate it,” Mad Daddy said. “They’re going to spend the whole weekend ignoring me just to prove they’re not impressed. Then somebody will insult me. I know it; it always happens.”

“Well, let’s
try.
”

“All right, but you’ll see.”

They went back to the pool. The six people were still lying there on their beach chairs, in the same positions, the recent-facelift lady carefully under an umbrella. Everybody stopped talking when they came over.

“Hello,” Mad Daddy said brightly.

“Did you have a nice swim?” the face-lift lady asked.

“Very nice, thank you,” Gerry said.

“Wash off that sand under the tap,” Peter Potter said. “You’ll track it on the rugs.”

Chastened, they went over to the water tap beside the bath house and washed their feet.

“This ocean is too cold for me,” the face-lift lady said. “I swim in Acapulco, and in the Bahamas, but not here—brrr.”

“Of course, you’re from California,” the comedian with the cigar said. “So you’re used to it.”

“I’m not from California,” Mad Daddy said.

“But of course you’ve been there,” the comedian’s wife or girl friend said. “You do a show, don’t you?”