The Fame Game (4 page)

“Come in, Ingrid,” Libra called happily. His expression had changed completely the moment he saw her: he looked like a small boy greeting his beloved governess who is bringing toys.

“How are you, my dear Sam?” Ingrid asked in a slight accent.

“Ready for you,” Libra said. “This is my new assistant, Gerry Thompson—Ingrid the Lady Barber, my doctor.”

Gerry shook hands with the woman. Doctor or barber? It was sometimes difficult to keep track of what Libra was talking about—but on the other hand, before this morning she would never have believed there was such a person as Nelson the Society Hairdresser either.

“I am not a barber,” Ingrid said, reading Gerry’s bewildered look. “I give scalp massage, body massage, and, of course, vitamin injections.”

“They’re fantastic,” Libra said. “Completely fantastic. I can be exhausted, ready to drop, and Ingrid fills me up with B-12 and Ingrid-only-knows-what-else, and in five minutes I’m a new man. I can go for two days without sleep or food on one of Ingrid’s shots.”

Ingrid took off her black mink coat and handed it to Gerry. She was wearing an immaculate white nurse’s uniform under the coat. “Now I wash my hands,” she said. “And you come in the bedroom, please, Sam. Excuse us, please.”

The two of them went into the bedroom and closed the door while Gerry hung up the coat and poured herself another cup of coffee. She was beginning to feel starved. The telephone had stopped ringing, and she realized it was the sacred lunch hour. Libra had said nothing about
her
lunch hour—perhaps she should just ask him. The coffee had grown cold. Having signed the bill she knew the breakfast snack for the visitors had cost thirty-one dollars, and she also knew instinctively that none of the nervous, keyed-up people who came into the suite would touch it, and it would all go back in an hour or two, wasted. She wrapped up four of the Danish pastries in a clean napkin and put them into her tote bag. She couldn’t stand to waste food, and besides, she was poor today.

Libra and Ingrid came back into the living room. It was miraculous: Libra was bouncing with energy already. Gerry wondered if it was psychological.

“Coffee, Ingrid?” he asked.

“You always ask me for coffee, and I always tell you no,” Ingrid said disapprovingly. “Coffee has acid.”

“Well, it’s just a figure of speech,” he said. “To be polite. Would you like a glass of water?”

“Water I would like,” Ingrid said. She poured herself a glass of ice water and drank it down in one long draught. “Look at that cake,” she said with distaste. “Who eats that cake? Cake is nothing but starch and artificial preservatives.”

“You run your store and I’ll run mine,” Libra said.

“I eat all the time yogurt,” Ingrid said to Gerry. “When I was pregnant last year I ate four cups of yogurt every day. Do you know, my son was born with two teeth and all his hair?”

“My,” Gerry said.

“You should see him; a big monster! He walks already.” She patted her flat stomach. “Do you know I have four children?”

“Guess how old she is,” Libra said.

“Thirty-five?” Gerry said kindly.

“Forty-five!” Libra crowed. “Look at her! I’m going to make you a movie star, Ingrid.”

“It is not necessary ever to have the menopause,” Ingrid said irrelevantly. “With the new hormones women can function normally until they’re eighty.” She turned to Gerry. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-six,” Gerry said.

“You should be taking hormones already. After twenty-five one should start on hormones. Do you take hormones?”

“No.”

“Do you take birth-control pills?”

Gerry looked at Libra, embarrassed. She wished everybody in this office would stop treating her like an object.

“Tell her, for heaven’s sake,” Libra said, annoyed. “Don’t be so coy—she’s a doctor.”

Gerry nodded yes.

“Well, that’s good,” Ingrid said. “The Pill has hormones in it. But that’s not enough after twenty-five. I can give you some hormone shots if you’d like.”

“No thank you,” Gerry said.

“You don’t know what’s good for you,” Ingrid said. She snapped her doctor’s bag shut with a disapproving look on her face. “I come back tomorrow for your massage, Sam. What time is good for you?”

“Eight in the morning,” Libra said.

“Very good. How do you feel now?”

“Fantastic. You’re a genius, Ingrid.”

He bounced to the closet, took out Ingrid’s coat, and helped her into it. Then he walked her to the door with his arm around her and kissed her on the cheek. She was as tall as he was.

“Very nice to have met you,” Gerry said politely.

“Good luck with your job,” Ingrid said, and left.

Libra looked at his wristwatch. “I’m going to the gym,” he said. “You can go to lunch if you want, or call Room Service and have it sent up here.”

“I’d like to go out, if that’s all right.”

“That’s all right with me, I’ll save money.”

“Thank you, anyway. And speaking of money, do you think I could have my first week’s salary in advance? I’m kind of broke.”

He went immediately to the desk and wrote out a check. He tore the check out of the checkbook carefully, as if he was having a little trouble functioning. He inhaled deeply and patted his chest with both hands. He really did look like an ape. “Got to work off that excess energy,” he said cheerfully. He handed her the check. “I’ll be back at three.”

When he had gone Gerry looked at the check. It was for four hundred dollars: two weeks’ salary in advance. She could hardly believe it. He really wasn’t so bad—he was generous with money, he wanted to help her learn the job, he was a little peculiar, but after all, he had a right to be peculiar if he wanted to be. She called down to the operator to hold the calls, took the extra key for the suite, and rushed downstairs to find the nearest branch of her bank.

She deposited the check, withdrew fifty dollars for spending money, stopped for a hamburger and a glass of skimmed milk, and took a taxi to her new apartment. The painters were there, and the smell of new paint was intoxicating. She found a hardware store a block away and bought a supply of light bulbs. Her new apartment! It was going to be beautiful! On the way back she made a mental note of the liquor store, the grocery, and the cleaners. The neighborhood was so clean and quiet. No hippies standing around; only a few old people walking dogs. Everyone else was at work, or if they were young mothers they had taken their children to the park. She had a pang of regret, wondering what it would be like to be married to someone she loved, taking their own beautiful baby to the park. She wondered if anybody would ever marry her. At college she had thought that she would be very brave and wait until she was an ancient twenty-four before she settled down. But twenty-four had come and gone, and she had found no one she wanted to settle down with, or if she had wanted him, he was too happy being single—or married to someone he claimed he couldn’t stand—to give it all up. Maybe Libra was right and nobody got married any more. She thought of her married friends: Were they really as happy as they claimed to be? Did the husbands play around already? Did the couples take as much delight in making love, still, or was it only Saturday night, get drunk and get laid because you can sleep late tomorrow? Were the wives bored staying home alone all day? She knew she would be bored; she would have to keep her job, or one like it with easier hours. What had happened to the few guys she had thought she really loved? Were they lonely, tired of dating new, exciting girls every night, tired of telling the same life stories to impress the new stranger, tired of the game to make the girl love them but not
too much?
How wonderful it would be to love someone too much, and to know he felt the same way … that had to exist somewhere. She felt it really had to. Maybe when she was fifty, if no one wanted her, she could settle for less than love, but right now the thought horrified her.
Well
, she thought, remembering her favorite heroine, Scarlett O’Hara,
I’ll think about it tomorrow
.

She came back to the office at three o’clock. Libra was already there, wearing a fresh, clean navy-blue silk suit and a reddish silk tie that clashed with his maroon hair. His hair was damp again as if he had just washed it. After the comparatively fresh air of the streets outside the suite blasted her with its hothouse smell, but she guessed she would eventually get used to it. Libra turned on the television set.

“You’re just in time to watch the Mad Daddy Show,” he said. “Sit right down in front there and pay attention.”

The show opened with Mad Daddy, who was an innocuous-looking fellow, a little square and out of step in a Beethoven sweatshirt and tight chino pants, vacuuming the rug of what was supposed to be his apartment. He was followed and heckled by Dennison of the Deep, an enormous fish which evidently had a man inside its rubber body. Dennison of the Deep kept getting water on the rug which Mad Daddy was trying to vacuum. Mad Daddy told the fish to get back in his bowl but the fish refused. It said that it was going to hold a protest demonstration at the Museum of Natural History because it had auditioned for a Western television series and had been turned down. There was proof, Dennison of the Deep said, that there had been fish in the old West, but the discriminatory policies of the television authorities refused to cast a fish as a hero in a Western.

Mad Daddy agreed seriously. He seemed a pleasant enough fellow, but although he had a humorous, innocent face and what appeared to be quite a sexy body, Gerry couldn’t understand the secret of his charm. And she wished the fish wouldn’t yell so loud. It had probably gotten rejected for the Western just on the quality of its voice. She realized then that in the first five minutes the show had already achieved suspension of disbelief, which was quite something.

A little girl entered, named Little Angela. She was actually a hand puppet. Mad Daddy was not a ventriloquist; an actress did the voice. Little Angela looked about five years old, but she had the aggravating logic of a teen-ager. She kept heckling Mad Daddy and he kept trying to defend himself. She told him the way he was dressed was ridiculous for an old man, and he answered that he thought he looked pretty nifty. She told him nobody said ‘nifty’ any more, the word was ‘groovy.’ Then she hit him on the head with her giant lollipop.

Dennison of the Deep exited to begin organizing his protest demonstration. Another hand puppet entered, named Stud Mouse. He was a mouse in a turtleneck sweater and a bow tie, who averred that he was a great success with the ladies and proceeded to recount a story of his latest amorous exploit and then told several very corny dirty jokes. Stud Mouse tried to kiss Little Angela, and Mad Daddy tried to defend her. Little Angela told Mad Daddy to mind his own business. There was a lot of yelling and screaming and running around, and finally Little Angela hit both of them on the head with her lollipop and ran out of the apartment.

Stud Mouse tried to explain to Mad Daddy how to be a success with the ladies, but Mad Daddy said he was always a failure because he was so shy. Dennison of the Deep returned to tell a long story about his protest demonstration, as if it had already happened: how enthusiastic the demonstrators had been, what their signs said, what they wore, and how the cops had broken up the demonstration with their clubs. He went back into his fishbowl (offscreen) to sulk.

Stud Mouse sang a very silly song, off key. He and Mad Daddy exchanged some more corny jokes. Mad Daddy brought out some ridiculous props to enable Dennison of the Deep to disguise himself for the next protest demonstration in case he was arrested. The two of them tried to cajole Dennison of the Deep out of his bowl and finally succeeded. Dennison decided to start another protest demonstration the next day, and the hour was over.

Gerry thought the show was idiotic: a combination of old-fashioned burlesque and modern satire, but she was surprised that the time had gone by so quickly, and in a way she had become rather fond of Mad Daddy, who was a gentle, well-meaning nebbish with the secret soul of a hippie. He was a sort of grown-up flower child without the flowers. The show itself was not much, but he had charisma. She could see why the kids liked it. There was fantasy, harmless violence, and above all a childlike quality about the living toys and the way Mad Daddy accepted them as if they were real people with rights like anyone else. She supposed teenagers, especially the young ones, identified with them: Dennison of the Deep, who was a socially conscious, put-down member of a minority; Little Angela, who was a nymphet pretending to be more sophisticated than she really was; and Stud Mouse, who was a braggart and a liar who knew no one really believed his wild stories but wanted everyone to pretend they did.

“What do you think?” Libra asked.

“I hated it at first but he finally got to me,” Gerry said. “I like it. I especially like him. Who writes the show?”

“He does, every word. Mostly he doesn’t write it, he just improvises. He writes a sort of script, but then he generally doesn’t use it.”

“It’s funny, but I think he’s sexy,” Gerry said.

“Everybody does,” said Libra. “Everybody loves a loser—he’s modern man. I think the show is going to go very big in its new slot at midnight.”

“There were some kids in the hall this morning. A fan club, I guess.”

“I could run that guy for president,” Libra said. “The only reason he wouldn’t win is that his fans aren’t old enough to vote.”

“I think I’d vote for Dennison of the Deep,” Gerry said, smiling.

The rest of the day went quickly; a normal publicity day with correspondence and press releases, things Gerry was used to handling by now. Libra wrote all his own press releases, the jokes for the columns, the earnest letters saying how exciting something ordinary was. But she much preferred it to her motion-picture publicity work because at least this man had a wild imagination. When Libra made up a joke or a clever line, it was worth printing. She had grown used to typing up “witticisms” that embarrassed her by their stupidity, but she laughed at the ones Libra invented. She knew he was watching her and that he was pleased at her approval.