Westlake, Donald E - Novel 50 (5 page)

 
          
There
are things I shall not tell this interviewer. Wild torsos could not drag them
out of me, though they're invited to try.

 
          
On
the other hand—is it the other hand, or another part of the same hand? A
different finger?—on the other finger, then, there are things I shall not even
tell
myself.
In fact, so clever am I,
perched atop this other finger, that I shall not even tell myself what the
things are that I shall not tell myself. And to think people say drugs affect
the brain; not
my
brain, Pops.

 
          
Between
the things I shall not tell myself and the things I shall not tell the
interviewer are those incidents, those memories that can still cause pain but
not to an unbearable degree. Such as, to take the example that slots neatly
into its chronological space at this juncture, the funeral of Miriam. Facing
the patient silent interviewer with my blandest and most untroubled smile, I
relive that troubled time.

 
          
A
lot of people blamed me for what happened to Miriam, but my doctors said it
wasn't my fault. She'd already had two minor strokes, which she hadn't told
anybody (including me) about, and it could have happened at any time. And, as
far as I was concerned, Miriam had checked out just exactly the way she would
have wanted, coming and going at the same glorious moment. But you couldn't
explain that to a lot of thin-lipped nieces and nephews.

 
          
Miriam
had found me an agent—her own, of course, Jack Schullmann—and Jack phoned to
say if I went to the funeral he’d drop me as a client and do his best to blackball
me in the theater. He was an important man in that bitchy world, but I told him
to go fuck himself. If he and the rest of them wanted to take away everything
that Miriam had given
me, that
was all right, too.
Bury me with her like an Egyptian servant, I didn't care.

 
          
So
I did go to the funeral, and a hard-eyed usher made me sit in the back row. No
one spoke to me or acknowledged my presence in any way, but that was the first
time my picture ran in the
National
Enquirer.
Is that funny, or what?

 
          
Jack
Schullmann was as good as his word; after Miriam's funeral, when I finally came
out again, I too was dead.
But
really
dead.
I made the rounds the same as ever, hit the
auditions, sent my resume to every other agent in town (none of them wanted me,
not then), but nothing happened, and in truth my heart just wasn't in it. But
then one night . . .

 
          
But
this is something I can report aloud, a spot where I can bring the interviewer
aboard again, give him a little whadayacallit—
frisson.
That's it. Got a
frisson
for you, pal. “After Miriam’s death," I begin, but then I cloud over
briefly, and when my internal sky once more is clear the interviewer is still
there, politely waiting, pen poised, eyebrows lifted in respectful attention.
“Yes,” I say.
“After . . . that, I was lost for a while.
I didn't know where to go, what to do, who I should try to be. I still had my
friends from the classes and all that, we still all hung out together, went to
parties, but I felt distant, not really a part of the scene. I knew that no
matter how it might look from outside, I didn't care for anybody else, and nobody
else cared for me. And without the acting, without
using
myself, with nobody to be but me, I was empty, I was nothing.
I guess that's about as alone as I ever got."

 
          
The
interviewer nods, viewing me with faint (possibly professional) sympathy.
"How long did that go on?" he asks. "That sense of . . .
separateness?"

 
          
"Separateness?"
I laugh, hurting my throat.
“That’s
permanent," I say.
"But the trouble after Miriam died?
Almost a year, all
in all.
Until the following summer, when one night at a party I ran into
Harry Robelieu, the director of the play where I'd met Miriam, and he asked me
what I was doing that weekend, was I free or what, there was somebody he wanted
me to meet. So I told him I was free, and God knows that was true, and that was
how I first went to Fire Island Pines and met George Castleberry."

 
          
The
far blue sea was full to the brim, rolling up the white sand lip of shore and
receding again, flowing and ebbing, frothing white, whispering to itself while
up on the silver-bleached wooden deck the pretty people in white trousers and
powerful people in multicolored muumuus chattered together amid a jingling
music of ice cubes. The deck served as collar for an oval swimming pool in
which two bronzed young men in bikini briefs played and giggled, their fingers
from time to time brushing as though inadvertently each others thighs. The
bikinis
bulged,
the eyes sparkled like the sea, the
pink tongues lolled in their mouths.

 
          
Beyond
the pool and deck was the house, all white and glass, broadside to the sea,
extending to the right beyond the deck. Through open sliding glass doors
was
the wide main room, at once parlor, dining area, and
kitchen. In here, among the white walls, blond furniture, and large semierotic
paintings, more people, all of them male (like those outside), chatted and
drank and ate the delicate canapes. The kitchen was at the right end, and
beyond it stretched a skylit hall flanked by doors—master bedroom and bath on
the ocean side, guest rooms and bath on the poison ivy side—with an open door
at the far end leading to a room enclosed by crowded bookshelves, with small
windows grudging an ocean view and a desk against the windowless farthest wall.
In this room, hunched over a small portable typewriter on the
desk, sat the owner of the house, George Castleberry, trying to get some work
done.

 
          
It
was always the same thing every summer. Get into a social mood, invite friends,
accept friends of friends because the whole world and his gay brother wants to
come to Fire Island Pines, and when the house fills up discover there's just
too much work to be done, deadlines are pressing, the whole thing was just a
dreadful mistake. The typewriter calls, duty calls, let the damn locusts amuse
themselves, they'll all be gone on the last ferry anyway,
no
sleepovers.
Except, of course, for those very
few, that tiny number, that infinitesimal troop of those George Castleberry
actually
liked.
Then he could
settle down with that hardy band for the true amusement of the day: dishing the
day trippers.

 
          
In
the meantime, work. It was so hard to
concentrate
;
while his guests cavorted, George frowned furiously at the leaden words he had
most recently typed. A slender petulant balding man of fifty-three, dressed in
a green and white caftan and brown sandals, George Castleberry was among the
three or four most powerful playwrights of the current American stage, and yet
it seemed to him when working that every word he put on paper was meretricious
and false, that he had been incredibly lucky in the matter of actors and
directors and producers, that he was a fraud and a mountebank who would
inevitably some day be exposed for the utter waste of everybody's time he really
was, that it was only the deplorable state of the American theater—all the
really
talented
writers were either
doing novels for the art or movies for the money—that had made it possible for
him to get away with this fourth-rate toothless mumbling for as long as he had.
Having to fight his way past
that
clawing gorgon in his mind to the typewriter every day left him not much time
or patience for the sensibilities of others. Now, hearing light laughter more
distinctly than the general background wash of social chitchat, he snarled, he
actually
ground his teeth,
he turned
to glare over his shoulder and down the long hall to where some pretty pansy
all in white stood twinkling in amusement, just beyond the threshold into the
kitchen.
“Damnit!"
George cried. “Close that door
!
¹
'

 
          
Startled
faces were turned toward him. Two or three people reached at once for the knob,
bumping into one another, creating a brief Keystone Komedy before at last the
door was shut and he was alone.

 
          
Still
angry, George turned to the typewriter and glared at the words written there.
“Now I don't get the ventilation," he muttered, anger shading into
self-pity.

 
          
Two
or three minutes of despairing concentration quite slowly elapsed. George's
fingers moved tentatively to the typewriter keys, tapped out a word, another,
another, a phrase, a sentence, another.

 
          
A
breeze riffled the page in the typewriter. Party chat became audible again.
George, one eyebrow raised in murderous disbelief, turned about to see Harry
Robelieu making his way down the hall toward this room, diffident but daring.
Robelieu, a minor director of off-Broadway or out-of-town productions, was
among those tolerated by but not actually welcomed by George; his brazen
approach now, no matter how tremulous, was so unexpected that George said
nothing, didn't even snarl, scarcely showed his teeth as Harry traversed the
hall and entered the office and said, “George, we just came over on the
ferry."

 
          
Deceptively
quiet, George said, “I'm
trying
to
work
here."

 
          
Harry,
unbelievably, didn't even acknowledge that. Some sort of excitement gleamed
beneath his pale anonymous face. He said, “There's someone I want you to
meet."

 
          
“I
don't want to meet people," George told him. “I hate people. What have
people ever done for me?"

           
“This isn't people,” Harry insisted,
moving toward the sea-view window. “Come take a look.''

 
          
George
sat where he was. Harry looked out the window, then back at George, gesturing
to him to come see. George turned his head to glower at his typewriter, needing
to struggle through to victory, but at the same time tempted by this
distraction, intrigued despite himself by Harry's unwonted manner. With an
angry slap of the hand on the desktop, he rose and crossed toward the window,
prepared to be coldly bitchy about anything at all Harry might have it in mind
to show. “Yes?" he said.

 
          
“Look,"
Harry said, gesturing again, stepping back from the window.

 
          
George
looked, lips already curling.

 
          
All
alone by himself, at the outer corner of the silver- gray deck, stood a magnificent
boy of twenty-three or -four, in tight black T-shirt and white jeans. He was
half turned away, one hand on hip, gazing out over the illimitable sea.
Sunlight caressed the strong line of his jaw, shadowed the eyes beneath his
brows.

 
          
“Marc
Antony,'' whispered George.

 
          
“His
name's Jack Pine,'' Harry Robelieu said, smiling with mingled amusement and
relief. “If you want, I'll—''

 
          
George
turned, ignoring the soft, stupid man, and crossed the room with suddenly
certain strides. Down the hall he went, and diagonally through the long main
room to the open glass doors. Surprised and happy voices spoke to him,
mistakenly assuming he had finished his work for the day, but he brushed
uncaring by their faces, glasses, smiles, babbling words, gestures of comradeship
and welcome.

 
          
Outside,
the sun was very bright, almost a physical presence through which he marched,
around the pool and across the deck, as though he and the boy were alone on a
platform on a high mountaintop somewhere, the highest mountain in the world. A
breeze whipped the caftan around his legs as he strode, the giggling and
splashing from the pool faded to vacuity, and George stood before the boy.

           
Slowly, Jack Pine's sea-struck eyes
drew in, darkened,
refocused
down from the far
horizon. George smiled at him. The boy, uncertain, tried an answering smile,
saying, "Hello?"

 
          
George
took the boy's hands
in both his own
. "Do you
know?" he
said,
his voice melting, all his pain
and doubt draining away, leaving him as light as air. "Do you know? I've
just written an entire play all about you, and here we are, meeting for the
very first time."