The Last Manly Man (20 page)

“I lost two parts this month to the same asshole. Stash Tumley. Pumped-up pretty boy. Casting director didn't think I was good-looking enough.…”

“You're great-looking,” I said.

“Hollywood doesn't think so.… It's not just Hollywood. The part last week was for a Boston chamber of commerce commercial, a national ad. The casting director was such a dick.… What am I going to do?”

Damn, he was getting
real
on me now. Okay, I hadn't been lying either when I told him about the fistfighting thugs and the bonobos, but he didn't know that. I put a little effort into it at least, making my voice sound like I was lying. But no, he wanted to talk and be truthful and ruin everything.

So I reached over, brushed my lips softly against his face and put my hand on his crotch, and I could tell he appreciated that, but he didn't stop talking. Man, had I moved into some parallel universe where men I wanted to have sex with only wanted to talk to me?

“Maybe I should just go back to Canada and get a job in my family's salmon cannery, like my brother.”

“You're from Canada? Really?”

“Really. I wasn't lying about that.”

“You don't have an accent.”

“I lost it so I could work as an actor in the U.S.”

“Your family has a salmon cannery. Really? You weren't lying about that?”

“No, I wasn't lying about the cannery. The family has several canneries and some real estate.”

“Harry the hairy pet salmon?”

“True.”

“Your late stepfather being an encyclopedia salesman who bought a cannery, then another …”

“It's true,” he admitted. “I only started lying because you thought I was lying and I was trying to play along. Oh Jesus, I am such a loser, just like my late stepfather always said. I'm going to spend my life in salmon. And I'm probably lucky to be able to do that.…”

“You're not a loser,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“I … I just know,” I said.

Well, hot, primal sex was definitely out now. At this point, it was looking more and more like sympathy sex. I had to get that ball rolling, too, take the initiative as they say. His mind was elsewhere, mine was elsewhere. The sex had all the fire and passion of a sneeze. When it was over, he had another drink and went completely silent and sullen.

Now, if this guy was my boyfriend, I'd make a little effort to get to the bottom of it, draw him out, cheer him up. But he had broken the rules. We were liars, in this for the fun and games, and he'd spoiled it by telling the truth and being all depressing and real. He was forcing me to feel for him and worry about him when I had, oh, one or two other things to worry about and surely didn't need any more emotional complexity right now.

“Want to hear a good joke?” I asked, and then couldn't think of one. My beeper went off. It was Jason, and the message said simply, “Beep me. Hat important.”

“Thanks anyway,” Gus said. “Can you stay the night?”

“I really wish I could,” I said. “I'm sorry. I have a lot to do tonight, and I have to be up early tomorrow.…”

“Who beeped you?”

“This loony animal rights activist who is working with me on the case of the missing bonobos,” I said.

“You know, you can stop lying now,” he said. His voice had turned suddenly cold. “You can talk to me like a real human being.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “We'll try that, next time I see you. I gotta go make a call. Keep the faith, okay? Try to have a laugh tonight or something. It's always darkest before the dawn.…”

And so forth. How I wanted to be a goddamned ray of sunshine, but I just couldn't pull it off tonight.

For some reason, I felt really guilty about Gus, not just because I'd deserted him in a time of need, but like I was cheating on my Irish boyfriend, Mike, which was silly. We were both free people and Mike had certainly hinted he wanted to be even freer, of me at least. After all, Mike was traveling with a circus full of sultry East European women in sequin bodysuits and surely not thinking of me at the moment.

Yet I felt bad because I was sure that, despite everything, if Mike knew about me and Gus, it would hurt his feelings. Mike got jealous sometimes, but I was not allowed to. I mean, I remember picking up my laundry from the wash-dry-fold place on Avenue C, and the guys there were really friendly with me. Mike got miffed. Afterward I said, “They're just being nice.”

“Yeah, because you let them wash your panties,” he said, and was in a lousy mood all day after that.

But I was not allowed to get upset when, e.g., I read in the rumor file six months ago that former ANN cameraman Michael O'Reilly had been chased naked through the streets of Moscow by a hysterical lover. Let me rephrase that. I was allowed to be upset that poor Mike had been subjected to such humiliation by some psycho woman. I was not allowed to be angry with him, even though this came not long after he had discussed monogamy.

My guilt about seeing Gus had never lasted too long before. I always rebelled against it. When it was just sex, it seemed okay. But now that Gus had opened up, now that there was intimacy involved, I felt kind of shitty about it, about Mike's obliviousness, about leaving Gus instead of spending the night.

What a shit I was. Why wasn't I more nurturing and all that, the way women are supposed to be? I felt for him, a lot, and I felt guilty for leaving but I had problems of my own, you know? Missing bonobos, dead scientists, thugs, not to mention a major series I was supposed to be writing now so I could start editing on Monday. I needed his problems too? He was supposed to use me sexually, and here he was, trying to establish intimacy. The reason this fling worked was because of a simple understanding: No intimacy! Gus had wanted it that way. I guess I did too, if only to keep me from falling in love with him, which would have been oh so easy, and oh so dangerous because he was, after all, an actor, and younger than me, and out of town most of the time.

In an alcove near the Plaza gift shops, I found a bank of pay phones and beeped Jason, sending the message, “Going home now. Why is hat important?”

Before I left the hotel, I bought the tabloid newspapers at the gift shop, as I hadn't had time to read them that day. They hadn't yet heard the rest of the story about Luc Bondir, Frenchie, you know, being officially dead for fifteen years, having faked his own death by killing someone else in a drug lab explosion.

When I got home, there was a message from Mike on my answering machine. Veronkya had successfully made her no-net leap and it was a huge triumph. And the Harben hat was winging its way toward me.

I beeped Jason again with the message: “Hat here tomorrow.”

A few minutes later, he beeped back: “In meeting. Talk to you tomorrow.”

One of the tapes I'd brought home earlier was of the DeWitt interview and before I went to bed I watched it, hoping to pick up a clue. Friend of bonobos, my ass. Alana DeWitt had no feeling for anyone other than herself and her women followers who thought exactly like her. The rest of us were meaningless to her except in that she could use us.

“Women compromise themselves, their ‘selves,' constantly to get along with men. We should have been running the world long before now,” Alana DeWitt said in the interview, and cited a study that showed a correlation between high estrogen and high IQ in women. She read a quote from Elizabeth Gould Davis—“Maleness remains a recessive genetic trait like color blindness and hemophilia, with which it is linked. The suspicion that maleness is abnormal and the Y chromosome is an accidental mutation boding no good for the race is strongly supported by the … discovery by geneticists that congenital killers and criminals are possessed of not one but two Y chromosomes, bearing a double dose, as it were, of genetically undesirable maleness.”

No doubt about it—something wasn't right with Alana DeWitt. But the tapes were inconclusive. They proved she was a man hater who looked forward to the elimination of men and that's all. If there were other answers there, I was oblivious. Didn't have enough information to pick up on them.

The thugs, though, were men, as were the man in the hat, Hufnagel, and Luc Bondir, the dead Frenchman, and DeWitt had a stated policy of hiring only women. Of course, she might secretly bend that rule for her own nefarious purposes. And then kill them when she was done with them. I could see it in her personality.

“Men are rapidly becoming unnecessary, and not a minute too soon in my view. The Man of the Future will be extinct,” DeWitt said on tape, and paused to take a sip of water and let some of the color drain from her face. “The best of them have limited control over themselves sexually, the worst commit the rapes, make the wars, commit the vast majority of crimes and murders.”

“You're not suggesting we should take active steps to get rid of men?” I had said to her at the time.

Her face reddened again.

“Of course not!” she said, and breathed deeply a few times to calm herself down.

I was not convinced.

“Ultimately, men will be extinct,” she said. She anticipated the obvious question, how will we reproduce without men, by adding, “We'll reproduce through sperm banks, cloning. One day scientists might be able to splice genetic material from two women together and create a whole new female human being.”

And the advantages of this?

“There are so many advantages. No more wars. No more rapes. Women would have higher self-esteem. No longer would women be subject to body fascists, to the brutality or condescension of the patriarchy,” she said.

Later in the interview, she quoted the cartoonist Nicole Hollander, “What would the world be like without men? A lot of fat, happy women and no war.”

I listened to her tell the joke about the estrogen bomb again. According to Charlotte the escort, Adam was some drug that made women happy. What was its effect on men?

Speaking of the news media, NY 1 had picked up the story the European wires had been running for the last couple of days, that Luc Bondir, the John Doe found in Coney Island, had been listed as dead for fifteen years in his native France. He was a biochemist, it reported, and authorities were now trying to figure out what he had been doing in this country. All the news jackals would be barking after this one by the morning. How long before they all trooped to Erin's Coffee House or tracked down Charlotte the escort? Jason and Blue had promised to plant some false info to mislead them, but I had no idea what they planned to do.

Fuck. What was I doing? I owed the sponsors, the network, and my staff, a Man of the Future series, and I was spending most of my time running around with animal rights nuts trying to find some bonobo chimps. Sure, there might be a big story in it, but it was risky, and we might never find them.

If I hadn't stopped for that man, Hufnagel, the night of my meeting with Benny Winter, I'd be free of the Econuts and the chimps. I'd be working on my series instead of trying to help save the planet. Why did I ever stop for that man in the hat, I thought? Why? Because of the “dead people in the doorways,” who will forever haunt me. Back in the early 1990s, I took a friend's seven-year-old daughter around New York City—
Secret Garden
matinee, high tea at the Pierre Hotel, long walk downtown—from the glittering facades of Fifth Avenue to the charming bohemianism of Greenwich Village. Afterward, her parents asked her how she enjoyed her first visit to Gotham. “It was nice,” she said. “Except for the dead people in the doorways.” What she was referring to were the many mud-colored homeless people, passed out on steps and stoops, which I, and most New Yorkers, had become inured to and didn't even see. She thought they were dead, and that vivid image would always be with her, that New York was a fairy-tale city littered with corpses. Ever since then, I've had a harder time walking away from someone genuinely in need, often to my own detriment.

When will I learn, I thought, as I began to type up a script for the first part of the series. I worked until 3:00
A.M.
on it. I had to be up at 7:00.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Monday morning I was hit over the head with a cold sock of mundane reality. Mondays always began with the weekly unit heads meeting, chaired by ANN president George Dunbar, who has never liked me. Only a doctor's slip could get you out of the meeting. Being on good behavior, I got to the meeting early, which gave Dunbar time to tell me he was “watching me” in this suspicious, pseudo-principalesque tone he always takes.

“There's no point having an Investigative Reports Unit and a Special Reports Unit,” he said to me, as if he was personally offended that the unit was still alive, as if I was keeping it going just to thwart him and maliciously suck money out of the network. “You may have Jack Jackson fooled, for now,” he said. “But you and I know better, don't we?”

Good one. Try to activate my human fear of being a fraud, the least of my fears at the moment. But even if I was a fraud, so what? Half the guys in that room were bigger frauds than I was. At worst, my promotion was a kind of feminist victory. As Bella Abzug said, we'll have equality when a female schlemiel can get promoted as easily as a male schlemiel.

That's my kind of feminism.

“Thanks for your concern,” I said to him. “If you'll excuse me, I have to get back to work. As you always say, time is money.”

Before I went to the morning interview, I asked Litigious Liz to get me DeWitt's conference schedule for the next week, “discreetly,” and I called Mike out in San Francisco, waking him up.

“I'm glad you called, Girl,” he said. “Are you ready to talk?…”

“Mike, is that hat going to arrive today?”

“Uh, yeah. I think so.”

“Do you have a tracking number?”

“Yeah, hold on,” he said. “Okay, here it is.”

After I wrote it down, he said, “Can we talk for a moment?”