“What the hell’s biting you?” Johnny demanded.
“Keep your voice down, dammit! If you start chewing Matt out tonight about the triple, getting him all shook up when he’s got this show to do tomorrow, I am personally going to beat the living shit out of you! Can’t you see what you’re doing to him?”
“But, Tommy, what the hell are we going to do? You know as well as I do, he’s never going to be right until he gets it back again. Look, I’m not trying to hurt him. You’re acting like I was his enemy or something. You’re not the only one in the world wants to see him acting like himself again!”
“I shouldn’t have said it just that way. Maybe what he needs is somebody to take over, and give him hell, the way Papa Tony used to do. All I’m saying is, tonight, with this thing hanging over him, lay off, okay?”
“I’ll lay off him till this thing is wrapped up. But I’m not going to keep on handling him with kid gloves indefinitely, and the sooner you get that through your head, the better for all of us. Understand?”
“Hey, you two, we’re waiting,” Stella called.
Johnny, tilting up his eyebrows, said, “What’s the rush? You got a train to catch or something?” and slid into the booth beside Stella. Tommy, taking his accustomed place beside Mario, welcomed consciously, for the first time, the family arrangement that had allowed him to do this without comment.
There’s just two things you can’t admit to being, in this business. And the other’s a Communist.
What the hell is happening to me? I’m acting like I want to hire a hall and let everybody know I’m queer!
Stella said impatiently, “Tommy, the waitress is waiting for your order. You asleep or something?” Quickly he roused himself, glanced at the menu, and ordered the first thing his eyes fell on.
Later Johnny said, “I know a place a few miles away where they play good jazz. Want to go down and listen to them a while? Nothing else to do in this town, I guess.”
The music was good and they stayed out very late. It was noon the next day when they woke. Mario was in the shower when the phone rang, and Tommy reached to answer it.
“Is this Mr. Gardner’s room, please?”
“Who’s calling?” Tommy asked.
“This is Susan Gardner,” said a husky female voice, “Cleo Fortunati gave me this number.”
Oh, Christ, Tommy thought, whatever I do now, it’s going to be wrong. And if I don’t do anything, that’s going to be wrong, too.
“He’s not here right now, Sue-Lynn,” he said, using the old name. “Can I have him call you back?”
“As usual, huh?” The woman’s voice sharpened. “Yes, you tell him I’ve still got some unfinished business with him, and if he knows what’s good for him he better come and get it settled, hear? I’ve been trying to get in touch for weeks now, and if he won’t talk to me, he’s going to find himself saying it to a process server. You got all that? Who is this, anyhow?”
Tommy hesitated, wondering if Sue-Lynn had heard the ancient scandal. He was unwilling to find out. “This is his brother. Look, you do know he’s got a show to do tonight?” Maybe he should call Mario out of the shower and leave it at that; the thought of what Mario would say if he knew Tommy was taking it on himself to protect him, made him flinch. “Can I have him call you after the show, Sue-Lynn?”
Her voice was irritable, grudging. “Say, what the hell goes on? Has he been sick or something?”
“You could say that.” Tommy hesitated, seeking for words which would neither compromise Mario nor antagonize the woman at the other end of the line. “If you have any generosity or any goodwill at all toward him, Sue-Lynn, wait till he’s got this show off his mind. You’re a flyer, you know what it’s like with something like this coming up.”
“I guess it could wait one more day. But you have him call me tomorrow, or he’ll find out what kind of trouble I can make when I really try.”
The sound of the shower had ceased. Tommy said hastily, “Where should he call you?”
“He knows where I am,” she said spitefully, “and you can tell him I’m still in the book, and it’s no good pretending he doesn’t know how to get in touch with me.” She hung up, and Tommy slowly replaced the receiver as Mario, in his shorts, came from the bathroom.
“Who was that on the phone, Tommy?”
“Wrong number,” he lied, unhesitating. Mario looked calm, but Tommy knew how quickly that could give way to depression or an almost hysterical restlessness. “We better go out and get some breakfast,” he suggested. “We aren’t likely to feel much like eating before the show tonight.”
“Breakfast!” Mario glanced at his wristwatch and chuckled. “Some time for breakfast!”
He ate enormously—as always on a day when he had a late show and his later meals would be sketchy—but Tommy felt as slack, stale, and weary as an untwisted rope. Remembering an insight that had come to him the day before—As a flyer, I’m not in their class, not at all—he was troubled, restless, wondering why he was here at all. Had his childish hero worship of Mario led him back to work for which, as an adult, he was in no way fitted? Had it been a mistake to come back, an emotional decision born of the excitement of meeting Mario again? He looked at Mario, relaxed and shabby in his old ballet-school sweater, the graying hair shading his thin face at the temples. The face of one dearly loved, but essentially a stranger.
“You’re awfully quiet, Tom,” Mario said, pouring more coffee from the insulated pot the waitress had left on the table. “Look, don’t worry about tonight—it’s going to be great. I know how you’re feeling; it’s like it used to be on the first day of the season, when I was a kid. Every year, on the first of May, when we opened, I used to wish I was back in the ballet school. I still do, only now I know it’s just one of those things I have to go through on the first day of the season, wondering why I’m here at all. Relax. Here, you take those last couple of sausages.” He dumped them on Tommy’s plate. “It’s going to be a long day.”
Looking up to meet Mario’s smiling eyes, Tommy suddenly knew Mario was right. They had a show to do in a few hours. This was not the time to wonder about whether he ought to be doing it.
“Yeah,” he said, picking up his coffee cup and draining it, “we got about six hours to kill. No sense hanging around here, letting it get on our nerves. Let’s go out and hunt up a good movie or something.”
~o0o~
Before the show, television makeup men and specialists prepared every detail of costume and makeup for the cameras. As they waited for their cues, Tommy felt with distaste the pancake makeup on his face and wrinkled his nose at the sickish smell of whatever they had put on his hair to hold it in place. They waited, watching on the television monitor screen behind the enormous panels of equipment the TV crews had moved in. There were four images from different cameras: one on the stage, where the famous Hollywood actor who was to host tonight’s special was warming up the audience; one on the audience itself, which would later be turned on the flying rig for long shots; another lens mounted very near the flying pedestal; and the fourth focused on the empty, swinging catcher’s trapeze. At a central monitor a technician, preoccupied and silent, was mixing the images for broadcasting on the main screen.
Tommy wondered what all the complicated equipment was for. Johnny was watching as if he knew what was going on. He probably did.
The actor was telling some joke which sent the audience into ripples of laughter. In one of the side-screen images Tommy saw the actor, a handsome graying man who slightly resembled Jim Fortunati.
“And now we take you, live, to the winter quarters of the Starr Circus in California, and to your host tonight, Barry Cass.”
Watching on the TV monitor, Tommy saw behind Barry Cass’s head the first of the trick-photography sequences they had filmed, now going out on the television broadcast all over the country: a swinging trapeze, Johnny’s upside-down form blurred by distance, unreal and dreamlike, moving back and forth with hypnotic rhythm
. Unconsciously, Tommy felt his own shoulders flexing, his calves tightening as if around the padded supports of the catcher’s trapeze. In the background he saw the flyer, swinging higher and higher in perfect matching rhythms with the catcher. He had never before seen himself flying, and was not until afterward aware that he saw himself now. His whole awareness was focused on Johnny in the catch trap; his body was motionless before the screen, but there was the tiny subliminal tensing of the appropriate muscles, the motionless straining in inward identification as the locked linked swing of two bodies perfectly merged . . . .
His world. Where he belonged.
He felt Stella’s hand slide into his and squeezed it with hard tenderness. Just beyond her he saw Johnny in profile, tense and apprehensive, so different from the arrow-straight locked perfection of the catcher on the television screen. I love him, too. I never realized it. Sometimes I don’t even like him much, but he’s my brother, too, and I love him . . . .
“Santellis, please. Mr. Gardner. Thirty seconds.”
And Mario was just behind him, where he had been for so many years. Tommy did not look at him or touch him, but he was aware of his breathing, the warmth of his body. Barry Cass was saying, “And now John Gardner presents . . . the Flying Santellis!”
Lights in his eyes. A heavy spatter of applause like rain on a trailer roof years ago. Lights at the foot of the flying rig, lights everywhere, a center ring with an audience of millions. Stella was just ahead of him on the ladder. Tommy felt as if he were watching himself take the resin bag between his hands, losing track of time . . . . Was it now, or was it years ago? Then Mario was beside him, stepping off the ladder with the old careless flourish. At the far end, lights glinted on Johnny’s bright hair.
“Okay, Lucky, you’re first. Wait for my call.”
Stella’s hands as she passed it to him, hard and steady, not trembling now, rocklike with concentration. Grasp the bar, out in the long swooping dive, tension in shoulder muscles as he swung up and over the bar, backswing, playing with it, diving, the long tumbling sense of free flight. Johnny’s wrists gripping and meshing with his. The long breathless backswing, the excitement of fingers closing on the bar again when he was braced for the long drop and fall . . . feet slamming on the platform. Stella like an arrow, flying, swooping.
Mario. Mario flying, his body melting into the flowing perfect line. Tommy, feeling his own shoulder muscles straining in identification, hardly knew for a moment whether Mario had meshed into Johnny’s hands or his own. Perfect merging, perfect flight, Mario and Stella soaring past one another like birds.
And yet, for all the dream images, his attention was harshly focused as never before. Stella’s body was smooth and hard and impersonal against his own, and yet he felt an awareness of her so enormous that it was almost a sexual ache. Mario’s eyes, meeting his for a moment. Mario, flying. The precise, endless, timeless rhythm of flying . . . .
Then it was over, and they were diving into the net one by one, posing for rehearsed bows. Tommy came back to ordinary consciousness cold and shivering, knowing that on the monitor screens the prephotographed trick shots were going on and on, endless, perfect . . . but for them it was over. Cleo Fortunati came up and spoke to him, and he managed to answer her civilly, not knowing what she had said. Mario was beside him, their hands meeting for an instant. Johnny, looking pale, almost nauseated, was answering questions and accepting congratulations, his face deathly white. Stella, too, looked pale, and small, but still taller than Cleo Fortunati, who came up and hugged her, saying things that made Stella glow like a praised child.
Bart Reeder came into sharp focus, smiling at Tommy with a friendly, correct handshake and formal compliments meant for the ears of outsiders. Then he whispered, “Tell you tomorrow what I really thought about it!” with a quick, secret, shared grin. Mario and Bart shook hands, and newspaper reporters took their picture together. Even that could not take the elated grin from Mario’s face. Nothing wrong with Mario now. This is where he belongs. Where we belong.
Back in the dressing room, he scrubbed off the pancake makeup, feeling the residual stiffness on his skin. A reception was being held for the television people, the circus people, and the people from the movie studio. Tommy was getting into the neat dark suit he had bought just for this event, the first one he had ever owned, when Mario thrust out his wrist, sticky with tape. An old memory tried to surface as Tommy pulled off the tape, then wrapped gauze and adhesive around the raw, chafed wrists.
“What the hell is this reception all about, anyhow?” he asked.
Mario shrugged. “God knows. Publicity for Johnny, maybe. Or maybe for the Parrish film. What the hell, does it matter? It’s a free drink.”
At the reception Cleo came up to Mario and asked, almost hurt, “Why wasn’t Lucia here? I really wanted to see her.”
“She sent you her love, Cleo. But she had already promised to take Tessa to the sunrise Easter Mass.”
Cleo looked pretty, unfamiliar in her low-cut evening gown. Her mouth tilted in a gentle, amused smile.
“I should have expected that of Lu. She won’t come down here for anything. But after what she did for me when I was hurt, it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“What did she do, Cleo?” Mario asked.
“All the years, since she had her fall and left the circus, she would never come down and see me. I thought she hated me. I had resented her so; people were always comparing us. Nobody ever noticed me—it was always ‘in the great tradition of Lucia Santelli.’ And I felt like a shadow, an imitation, whatever I did, and then when she fell, I thought she hated me because I was still flying and she couldn’t . . . .”
Tommy listened with dismay and a strange, growing insight. This woman was the greatest star of the circus, perhaps the greatest woman star in the history of flying. Yet she had felt inferior, outclassed. Always in Lucia’s shadow, as Mario felt that nothing he did could ever equal what Barney Parrish had done. Had Barney Parrish, too, cherished some inferiority, some inward shadow, some feeling that he could never equal an ideal within himself? Did it happen to everyone?
“I was paralyzed, I couldn’t move. And then when I woke up, Lucia was beside my bed. She wouldn’t drive down to Anaheim to see me, but she flew to Boston to be with me in the hospital. Matt, she stayed with me every minute. I didn’t want to live. I thought if I was finished flying, I might as well give up and die. Lucia kept reminding me that they hadn’t expected her to live, either. She bullied me, she fed me, she washed me, she stayed with me at night when the nurses didn’t have time. I don’t think I’d be here now, if it hadn’t been for Lu.”
Mario looked stunned. “Lucia? Lucia did that?”
“Matt, she mothered me. She kept me alive, I think. And the day they said I’d walk again, she came and told me I didn’t need her anymore. She kissed me good-bye, and she went back to California. And I haven’t seen her since, and I don’t expect I will.”
None of us understands Lucia, Tommy thought. None of us ever will.
The reception was drawing to a close, the reporters drifting away, exhaustion settling in steady lines down over Stella’s taut face. In Jim Fortunati’s car, Tommy felt heavy and sleepy. When Stella’s head collapsed on his shoulder, he held her tenderly, filled with love for her, too.
After a few last good-nights, he was alone with Mario in the room they shared. He looked up, and suddenly it was the old Mario again, the one he had known as a child. The way he used to be. Speechless, he turned to Mario and put his arms around him. There was nothing he could say. Mario’s arms closed around him, but he didn’t speak, either, for a long time. They didn’t need to. After some time Mario let him go, but his hand lingered a minute on his shoulder.
“What in the hell . . .”
Tommy’s hand went up, touching what Mario had touched. It was the St. Michael’s medal, the one Mario had given him years ago, the day of his first real taste of flying.
Mario said, in a whisper, “Good God, hav
e you worn that all these years?”
Tommy had not the faintest memory of transferring it—automatically, as he had done all these years—from one shirt to another. He said, “Yeah. I forgot I had it. Whaddya know about that?”
Tommy went into the shower, feeling the hot rain on his head and body, remembering somewhere outside himself the last time he had been in a motel with Mario. And as if past and present had come together and merged, Mario was there, wedged into the shower beside him, silent, close, the past very much with them both, but they could not speak of that time. They soaped one another, still not speaking; Tommy knew that if he said a word he would begin to cry like the child he had been that night years ago. They toweled each other dry, still without a word, still in that absolute awareness. Mario put out the light, and Tommy pulled him down on the nearer of the beds.
He was still almost reliving that night, so many years ago. Then it had been a despairing frenzy, a desperate need for reassurance in the face of his own cruelly new self-knowledge. Now it was reaffirmation, coming together in the full knowledge of what they had always been to one another. He was not a child now, clinging to an older boy in a confused mixture of hero worship, adoration, and sexual wakening. Now, confident and aware, knowing precisely what they both wanted, he pulled Mario into his arms. Something lost between them since they had met again as men, something he feared had gone forever, was there again.
We belong together. We’re not kids now. We’re men, and we know what we are and what we want. But out of the excitement of watching Mario tonight there was a touch of the old wonder and awe. He said, “I love you, Matt,” but he knew the words were a shorthand for something more than love, more than sexuality, more than the need which drew them together. Again there came the quick image of the meshing grip, interlocked, soaring, there, perfect, together . . . entwined, sensual, their bodies meeting as they met perfectly in midair. Flight dreams. Which are sex dreams . . . In a split second of memory, words he had forgotten came back to him, and he whispered, “We have only one heartbeat.” He wasn’t sure Mario could hear. But it didn’t matter. He knew.
The Catch Trap Page 66
