Westlake, Donald E - Novel 50 (3 page)

 
          
Oh,
how long have I been here? I'm all curled in a ball on the gray slate patio.
When did I stop talking? Slowly, with a degree of pain, I straighten out of the
fetal position, I lie straight again, on my back, legs straight, feet together,
eyes staring up at the sky. White, blue, faded, faint, far-receding sky ... Is
someone screaming?

 
          
"So
you knew
right then you were
an actor."

 
          
The
interviewer's voice brings me back, his words make me happy. "Yes!" I
say. "It
had
to be. I could feel
it like, like, like chicken soup. Well, later, like bourbon. Like nose candy,
you know what I mean?"

 
          
"It
made you strong."

 
          
"It
flowed
through me," I say,
feeling it again, the finest high there is. "It was warm, it was
beautiful. Give me a role to play, give me the costume,
give
me the lines. I don't need an audience. That's why I'm good in the flicks, see?
You got these stage actors who
need
that boost, that audience out there with that reaction right
now
, but I never did. I could play in a
closet, man, just me and the coats, in the dark. Just give me somebody to
be.”

           
“Uh-huh." The interviewer seems
to think for a minute, brooding over his notebook like someone with something
to hatch. Then he says, “So you came to
Hollywood
?"

 
          
I
don't get it. Confused, I say, “
Hollywood
?" thinking of those miserable little
houses on
Woodrow Wilson Drive
, with their miserable little swimming pools
taking up the whole back yard. Why would anybody want to—?

 
          
Then
I
do
get it. “Oh!" I say. “LA!
Here, you mean. No, my college professor sent me to some fruit he knew in
New York
, an acting teacher. My folks said they'd
give me a year,
then
I was on my own. That's the only
time, really, for any length of time, the only time Buddy and I were ever
separated."

 
          
“He
didn't go to
New York
?"

 
          
“He
went to the marines."

 
          
It
was a cold and drizzly day in Grover's Corners, the needle-thin rain pasting
trash and candy wrappers to the cement of street and sidewalk, the passing
traffic a monotonous symphony of
shashing
tires and
flwacking
windshield
wipers. Beside the big, lumpy blacktop parking lot with its few wet,
mud-streaked automobiles like minor artifacts of a preceding civilization, the
small building was incongruously bright and exuberant, with its impermeable
pale green aluminum siding and the red neon bus-company name dominating its
picture window. Posters and other signs cluttered that window with high-pitched
come-ons: ski vacations, reliable taxi services, guaranteed package delivery,
all-inclusive tours. Here in this false little building, fevered outside, grimy
within, here nevertheless there stood the magic doorway between Grover's
Corners and the world. Step through, or stay at home; no one can do both.

 
          
Inside,
Jack and Buddy, both twenty-one, stood looking out, through the runnels of
rain, waiting for their separate buses. They'd talked themselves out.
Expectation, bravado, doubt, and then apprehension had each moved in its turn
through their minds and speeches and expressions of face, leaving them now drained,
emptied, waiting for a world of new experience to refill them. The only
remaining residue of emotion was a faint embarrassment, a hint of premature
homesickness, causing an inability to speak or to stand naturally, an
unwillingness to meet each other's eyes for more than a glancing second before
the gaze of each would slide away, back to the window, the rain, the inactive
parking lot, the anonymous traffic on Main Street.

 
          
A
bus appeared, out there, beyond the nearer line of traffic, signaling hugely for
a left turn with a powerful and slowly blinking yellow light—the only vibrantly
alive point in
all that
gray outdoors. The bus's huge
windshield wipers moved vertically back and forth arrhythmically, to separate
patterns, narrow straight-standing sentries patrolling to different beats.

 
          
Jack
made a sound,
then
cleared his throat. He said,
"Yours, or mine?"

 
          
"What
dif?"

 
          
Both
stood hipshot, palms against backs, fingers jammed down into hip pockets, in
unconscious imitation of the calm insouciance of characters in westerns, but
with angular tension in their poses. More than ever, that false familial
similarity hovered over them.

 
          
A
break in the streaming traffic; the bus made the turn, massively,
arthritically, the fat driver visible in his rainy fishbowl, turning and
turning the huge flat wheel.
Chicago
,
said the sign above the windshield: Buddy's bus.

 
          
Jack's
grin was spastic; he'd wanted it to be
his
bus. "Well, Buddy," he said, "you're on."

 
          
"Here
I go," Buddy said, looking around for his single small suitcase. He saw
it, pointed at it, but didn't pick it up yet. Just beyond the window, the bus
heaved to a stop with a great hissing of air brakes. Passengers began to
disembark. Buddy grinned at Jack. "Knock 'em dead, Dad," he said.

           
"You, too, Buddy."

 
          
Buddy's
grin widened. "Well, sure," he said, and mimed spraying the interior
of the depot with a machine gun.

 
          
Ex-passengers
leaped the wet space from bus to depot doorway. Jack said, "I'll miss
you."

 
          
"We'll
both be around," Buddy said with a shrug. "Send my folks your address
when you get to
Big
Town
."

 
          
"Sure.
And I'll get yours."

 
          
Buddy
took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook out two,
gave
one to Jack. Jack brought a Zippo lighter from his
trouser pocket and started to light Buddy's cigarette, but Buddy took the
lighter out of his hand and lit both cigarettes. Then Buddy held the lighter
up, flame off. He grinned at Jack and closed his hand around the lighter,
saying, "To remember you by, huh, Dad?"

 
          
There
was just the slightest, tiniest hesitation, and then Jack became effusively
agreeable: "Oh, sure! Take it, Buddy, sure thing. What a good idea. I
should have thought of it myself."

 
          
"Fine,"
Buddy said, and pocketed the lighter, as outside the
Chicago
bus gave an irritable-sounding
honk.

 
          
"Well,"
Jack said, suddenly exuding nervousness, "I guess you're off."

 
          
"Right."
Buddy picked up his suitcase and grinned
again. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do, Dad."

 
          
Awkwardly
trying for a joke, Jack said, "Gives me plenty of leeway, huh?"

 
          
"That's
right."

 
          
The
two friends shook hands, firmly, smiling at each other. Then Buddy stepped out
the door, ignored the rain, crossed through it to the bus and boarded,
instantly disappearing, though Jack kept peering through the wet plate-glass
window, paying no attention to the young couple in their twenties near him,
kissing farewell. The young man said a quick final word to the girl, then
turned and hurried out to the bus. The girl stood beside Jack, watching, as the
young man followed Buddy up into the bus, and the bus door closed.

 
          
For
a long second nothing happened.

           
The bus groaned away, as though
movement was something alien to it. Jack stood where he was, but the girl moved
sideways along the window, paralleling the bus, until she bumped into Jack,
startling them both. “Oh!" she cried. "I'm sorry!"

 
          
The
bus moved on. Jack looked at the girl, saw she was pretty. He grinned at her.
“That's okay, I enjoyed it."

 
          
The
girl seemed drawn to him, seemed about to respond in kind, then remembered herself.
She looked past him at the receding bus, then more neutrally again at Jack,
saying, “Well. Bye."

 
          
“We
must do it again sometime," Jack told her.

 
          
No
response at all. She left the depot and hurried through the rain across the
parking lot toward one of the cars waiting there. Jack watched her until his
view was cut off by the abrupt appearance of the next bus, its bulk filling the
space in front of the window, the sign beside its door reading
new york.
Then he blinked, shook his
head as though waking up or rousing from hypnosis, and turned to find his
luggage: a round, soft bag and a soft suit-carrier. He picked them up.

 
          
One
door closed. Another opened.

 
          
He
was smiling by the time he boarded the bus.

 
          
And
now I'm cold. Why
now?
Why
cold?
It's warm here in the sun, on the
slates, on my own land, in my one life, where only the warm is permitted.

 
          
It
was cold then, that day, the bus station, the girl that crossed my scanners
just as the big ship was banking away toward the depths, cold and wet, but I
knew nothing of cold then, felt nothing that was cold in those days. Here, now,
in my estancia, I feel myself feeling cold despite the warmth here,
senor,
the
muy caliente.
(Is that right? We all
learn
servant Spanish here, Spiclish, but it can't be
trusted; it's at the level of collies barking at sheep, moving the slow and
docile creatures through the fences.)
Muy caliente.
But I'm
coldl

 
          
I
see that girl's eyes more clearly now than on the day she looked at me in the
rain, in the bus depot, when her boyfriend and my friend had gone away, and she
was about to turn and walk through the rain to her car. I could have walked
with her that day, I could have gone home with her,
I
could have lain with her on the softly crumpled sheets, our torsos hot, cool flutters
on the flesh of our arms, on the backs of our legs, the rain soft on the glass,
her eyes looking at me with trust and knowingness. We could have spent
forty-seven years in the task, just the two of us, recapturing that first
afternoon, or at least reaching for it. Isn't that what marriage is?

 
          
But
how could I? What choice did I have? I was never free to choose.

 
          
Slowly,
pulling the robe closed more tightly around my throat, I look at the gray
slates and I say, "Sometimes I wonder who I would have been, if I'd just
stayed there, you know?
In Grover's Corners.
Got a job
at the bank, got a suit,
got
married."

 
          
The
interviewer doesn't speak. The flimsy high clouds write words in an
undiscovered alphabet. I'm interviewing
myself,
I'm
doing this clod's work for him. But I don't mind, it's as easy as sleep,
it's
calm. I'm calm. I can be a very calm person.

 
          
"If
I'd lived a normal life," I say.

 
          
"But
you went to
New York
." The interviewer's voice is neutral, but I know he's interested.
Who the fuck is
he,
that he should
not be interested?

 
          
"
New York
," I say, and with the words I can see
it as it was when I first saw it; jazzy, fast,
full.
And me walking through it,
striding
through it, carrying that round
soft bag and that soft suit-carrier.
"I loved it, man," I say,
and I can hear that sound in my voice. I'm saying
love
as I never said it about any woman, and I know I'm not really
saying it about the city but about myself; who I was then, who I planned to be.
But I say it again, because this is the surface of the prism we show in the
interviews: "I loved that city, everything about it."

 
          
"And the acting class?"

 
          
"I
dropped that fruit right away. I met
people,
I got
taken on by Venashka. Do you know who Venashka was?"

 
          
"Famous acting teacher."

 
          
"Brilliant,"
I say, meaning it as a correction. He wasn't a
famous acting teacher,
Venashka, he was
brilliant.
"Brilliant mind/' I say, while the sky writes those
words in its own language
. "
Brilliant soul/' I
say.

 
          
"He
helped you."

 
          
"I
learned so
much
. Venashka was such a
dynamite person,
man,
he'd take you right out of
yourself. I learned to
be,
you know?
Not
act,
any door-to-door salesman
can act.
To
be.
And I met wonderful people in those classes."

 
          
I
smile. I'm remembering a girl named Tricia, first girl I ever actually lived
with. We were all in the class, on the floor, being dogs. Venashka moved among
us, touching a shoulder here, a head there, murmuring encouragement or
corrections. I was being a very specific puppy, searching myself for fleas
because I wanted to play with them. Venashka moved by, nodding at me, and then
I saw Tricia across the way being a hunting dog, pointing at quail. My puppy
loped over and sniffed her crotch. She broke character for just a second,
shocked, I think maybe even repulsed, and my puppy lolled his tongue and panted
at her, bright-eyed. I didn't have a tail, of course, but I wagged it, and I
think anybody looking at me would know I was wagging my tail. And Tricia got
back into character and reared around to bite me on the shoulder, and that
weekend I moved in with her.

 
          
The
interviewer walks on the garden of my reverie, all unknowing: "Were you
just taking classes then? Not acting professionally yet?"

 
          
"God, no!"
Happy memories bounce me around on the
slate like a beach ball.
"Making the rounds, trying out
for parts.
Trying to be a real
actorl
Incredible!"