“Good idea. Stay outta sight,” Andy commanded, and turned back. Twenty minutes later, as they entered the compound again, Victor felt he had to bring up the subject.
“You’ve got other things to masturbate to, right? Magazines? Picture books? Movies?”
“Sure but they’re nothing like the real thing.” Andy hugged him with one arm. “Why?”
“Because—when was the last time you read a newspaper?” Did he even have a television? No, there was no antenna up ahead.
“Gave that up a while ago,” Andy said airily. “Papers too liberal and too opinionated. Television too fascistic and consumer driven. Why?”
“Well I hate to be the messenger of doom. But M*A*S*H is going off the air very soon. We may have been watching the last episode there today.”
Andy flashed him a look composed of consternation, then suspicion followed by despair, and then suspicion again that once back inside the house, Victor suggested that Andy call someone he knew and find out for sure. It had been in all the papers.
His friend was so shell-shocked by the news that Victor decided that their previous plan for dinner would be too much to expect of him. He made up a story about having to talk to the East Coast before it got too late there, and took off a few minutes after.
The sight of Andy Grant among his busily chomping goats sadly waving goodbye, facing a future without naked guys to whack off to in the woods, might have been a tragic one if it weren’t for a single detail. Unknown to Victor’s friend, all the while they were departing one of the goats was happily chewing away at Andy’s shirt bottom, hanging loose out the back of his denim jumper.
CHAPTER seventeen
“I told you before, he’s in a meeting and he can’t be bothered right now,” Sam Haddad said and made a face as though he’d eaten something left in a restaurant fridge a day too long. “That’s right. Uh-huh. Right. Well, no, he goes from one meeting to another, all day today. Uh-huh. No idea. I’d try another time.” He listened, clearly wanting to be rid of the speaker on the other end. “Try tomorrow. Sure. Natch. Of course. I’ll tell him you called.”
He hung up the phone and looked up at Victor.
“Sor-ry. She is persistent.”
“Actress looking for work?” Victor wondered.
“Worse,” Sam said. “Far worse.”
And before Victor could ask what that meant—bill collector? ex-fiancée? out of wedlock birth child?—Sam stood and ushered him into Frank Perry’s office.
Frank was in his swivel chair, not at the desk but at a low table with his fully shod feet up, and he was reading some pages that Victor recognized as what he’d dropped by yesterday.
“Vic! my man! Have a seat. I’m just about to finish this.”
“She called again,” Sam told Frank.
“I don’t see why you don’t want to patch her through.”
“Frank!”
“Okay. All right. You know best. Go now! I want to read this. Sit, Vic.”
Victor sat opposite, opened the New York Times and began doing the crossword puzzle in ink. This wasn’t as bold, impressive, or daunting a move as it might seem. Victor had been doing the Times crossword puzzle for decades, and it was only Thursday, so it wasn’t as difficult as, say, Friday’s puzzle or Saturday’s. So he moved ahead, quickly filling in spaces.
Frank put down the few pages, got up out of the chair and began pacing around the big office. He would stop to scoop up popcorn, he’d pause to look out the window—a nice view of the Hollywood Hills looking east—he would turn suddenly.
“What I don’t get is how we believe, both in the book and in this little scenario you gave me, that this woman would just call this guy from out of the blue and begin speaking to him.”
“Because it happened,” Vic said. “Happened to me, in fact.”
“Why did I never know it happened to you?”
“I thought my agent Marcie sent over all the supporting material? One would be the article I did for a men’s magazine around the time the book came out in hardcover, about female voyeurs, telling the whole back story.”
“That’s right. I read that,” Frank corrected himself.
“At least the first part of the novel happened to me. Unlike Theo, at a certain point I stopped talking to her on the phone and told her not to call again.”
“And she really didn’t call again?”
“Not while I was at home. Oh, and I also shut my blinds whenever I was home so she couldn’t look inside anymore.”
Frank wheeled around, suddenly a prosecuting attorney in the courtroom. “And you did this why?”
“Because of what happened when a college friend of mine slept over.”
“I don’t remember any college friend sleeping over.”
“You wouldn’t. It’s not in the book. Remember? Theo doesn’t stop her from calling. Theo doesn’t begin dropping his blinds to hide from Anne-Marie until almost the end.”
“Tell me what happened,“ Frank said and sat back in the swivel chair and threw his feet upon the low table again.
“Well, in short, I freaked out,” Victor said. “This friend from high school and college called suddenly saying she was back from Europe and looking for the little group we had belonged to at school. I gave her the phone numbers, but they’d all moved out of town and she was only around for a few nights. And anyway staying in the suburbs with her parents, where she was bored. We talked about some of the crazy places and crazy things we had experienced together when we were kids. She said she missed the city, so I said why not come in and have dinner, or catch a show together, and she did.”
“What do you mean? Crazy places?” Frank asked, looking very stern. “What kind of so-called ‘crazy things.’”
“Well, it began innocently enough,” Victor recalled. “Out in the suburbs, we would go bowling, then to a Chinese restaurant that had just opened. Usually she and I went there alone. While our bowling buddies went for burgers next door. Now, I was sixteen when I graduated high school, so I must have been fourteen, fifteen at this time. She was a year older but she was a bit more mature looking.” Vic illustrated with his hands arced over his chest. “So we ordered cocktails with dinner. Alcohol. Long before we were supposed to.”
“They didn’t ask for proof of age?” Frank asked.
“No. We began going there whenever we would go bowling, so we became regulars. One new waiter did ask if I was eighteen, and my friend said she was.”
“What other crazy things?” Frank asked.
“We also went up to Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow Summer Festivals with a teacher and a group from school, over summer weekends, and she and I would wander off by ourselves. Around the local town. Backstage. That kind of thing. We met John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Leonard Bernstein, a whole bunch of pianists and violinists, and of course a lot of dancers, as she was so interested in Modern Dance. We just pretended we belonged there. Or, we’d hang out in this pub in the town where they all congregated after performances, when we were supposed to be sleeping.”
“At fifteen?”
“At fifteen. Oh, and at sixteen, after our senior prom, which was held in a hotel ballroom in midtown Manhattan, we all went to a nearby restaurant. She and I ordered liquor and got a little tanked. By then it must have been two-thirty in the morning, and while the others began arguing about where to go next in the limo we’d rented, the two of us danced down Broadway, right down through the nearly empty street, pretending we were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It was like a scene out of a movie. We were all dolled up in tuxedo and gown, right? The sanitation guys stopped work to watch us from their truck. The policeman on the corner stopped twirling his baton, the guy at the newsstand stopped unpacking newspapers. And they all applauded us. So we bowed, and casually strolled back to the limo.”
“Down the middle of Broadway?” Frank was amazed.
“From 47th Street to 42nd Street. I was sixteen. She was seventee
n.” Victor laughed recalling it. “Another time, she wanted to hear the Beat Poets at the Metropole Café on the Lower East Side. Second Avenue and what? Eleventh Street? Around the corner from St. Mark’s Church. So we took a bus and subway into the city and went there, dressed in black slacks with dark turtle neck sweaters, and berets on and all. Little baby beatniks.”
“Did you hear Ginsberg?”
“We heard Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, and then Ginsberg’s boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky, began reciting a poem spontaneously as Allen sucked his dick.”
Franks’s popcorn sputtered out of his mouth.
“Onstage, about six feet away from us,” Vic added, giggling. “He called it ‘Blowjob Ode.”
“What did your friend think of that?” Frank asked.
“I guess she knew about blow jobs. I certainly did, so we remained cool, dragging on our Gitanes cigarettes, sipping Pernods, occasionally snapping our fingers, like everyone else in the room.”
“Okay! Okay! All that’s pretty crazy for sixteen-year-olds. You use words accurately. Not everyone does. I was just checking. So, years later, your friend comes to dinner, and . . . ?” Frank prodded.
“And we meet in the Café Figaro in the Village, for old times’ sake. We have dinner then wander through the Village to near where I’m living in the far West Village. We sit in Abingdon Square Park and she begins telling me about living in Paris and this bummer love triangle she’s now in. Her best friend from when they were four years old. And the woman’s husband, who my friend is passionately involved with.
“We talk till, I don’t know, one, one-thirty, and she suddenly remembers the bus from the train to her parent’s house stops at one o’clock. Can she stay at my place?
“So we walk there, and I give her a big old t-shirt as pajamas. She’ll sleep on my single bed, while I sleep on the floor on the mattress. But we’re up talking and finishing off my cheapo wine until maybe three or four. Then we go to sleep. Nothing happens—obviously. She’s passionately involved with this Guillaume or whatever his name is. And we never had a sexual friendship anyway when we were kids.
“She leaves next day, all well and good, I walk her out to the subway since I’m also going there, headed to work, myself. But when I get home later that evening, the phone caller rings—my Anna-Marie—and she begins in on me and my friend, calling her a whore, and all kinds of names. This about a very nice young woman, and about this very sweet, friendly, completely chaste night that we two had catching up, sleeping ten feet apart. At this point I realize that my caller is obsessed with me to the point that anyone who stays overnight will come under attack, and that’s when I end it.”
“Just like that?” Frank asks.
“Absolutely. She’s already acting like a psycho. I’ve got enough problems in my life. I don’t need a psycho who won’t even agree to show her face or meet me. So it’s arrivaderci, baby!”
“Unlike Theo. And your woman friend?”
“I didn’t see her nor even hear anything about her for years and years. Then I heard from mutual friends that she had moved to a Kibbutz in Israel. Sometime later on, I heard from a mutual woman friend that she married a Sabra and is raising a family there.”
“So this really happened to you?” Frank asked, now holding up the paperback of Justify My Sins.
“Up to that point, yes. You have to understand, Frank, I was already somewhat kind of pissed off when I discovered she could see me, and was watching me! Although that was mixed, too, you know, because I didn’t mind showing off for her and all. But this business with my friend, ruining a nice evening like we’d had, I guess that was my personal breaking point.”
“You never found out who she was?”
“I had my theories. Directly across my street were several single-family townhouses. She could have been a servant, a nanny or nurse, who lived in the top floor of one of them. The top floors there would be slightly higher than my fourth story walk-up, and so would provide the right angle for her to see as far into my studio as she supposedly could. Either that or she lived above and behind those townhouses in the huge twenty-story high-rise, and she might be looking out from any of dozens of windows.”
Frank asked Victor to clarify what he meant.
Instead, Victor grabbed a piece of paper and drew the parallel lines of the short Greenwich Village street. He dotted his apartment in the middle of one line. Dotted the townhouses opposite. Drew in the yards behind those buildings, and sketched the enormous apartment tower behind those fronting 12th Street.
As Frank asked more questions, Victor got another sheet of paper and began drawing the buildings in architectural elevation: the two rows facing each other, the taller apartment building behind the row of townhouses. This allowed Frank to see sight-lines between one set of windows to the others.
“This is great!” Frank said. “It’s our set. At least our basic exterior set! ‘Fade In. Act One. Scene One. Theo turns onto his street and advances toward his building. He can hear his phone ringing through an open window upstairs,’” Frank said as though reading a film script. He stood up and pressed a phone button and a few seconds later Sam Haddad came in, surprised.
“You were so right, Sam. This guy’s a genius. He just gave us the layout of our first and most needed set. Have copies made of this and send some out to . . . who’s the guy we used on Mommy Dearest?”
“Bill Malley. He’d be perfect. He does intimate well. But he’s up to his ears over at Paramount with several projects.”
“What about Joe Chevalier, who we used for Monsignor?”
“I’ll call and see if he’s busy,” Sam said and exited.
Frank was musing. “What you described? That night together? Sleeping ten feet apart? I don’t know if it could have happened to guys of my generation.”
Had Frank momentarily forgotten Victor’s sexuality?
“She was very attractive, Frank. But we were friends, remember? Also, she had spent much of the night telling me how nuts she was for this other guy.”
“No. No. You’re right. You’re right,” Frank admitted
“When I was in school I was cute,” Victor said. “No boast, point of fact. Girls were jumping on me all the time. But what I discovered in high school and college, especially through this young lady, was that sometimes a sexual relationship is the least interesting kind you can have with someone you really like.”
“Tell me,” Frank said, suddenly dispiritedly.
They went to work with the scenario, breaking it down into smaller and sometimes slightly different scenes than what Victor had laid out the previous morning.
Meanwhile, Frank paced. Meanwhile, Frank consumed a quart of unsalted, unbuttered popcorn. Meanwhile, Frank made phone calls upon suddenly remembering something or somebody.
Victor remained where he was all the time except once, when he used the washroom. In between Frank’s phone calls, he would continue to methodically fill in the spaces of his Times puzzle. It’s so odd, Victor thought, here I’m the calm one. Me! The calm one! Mark would laugh at that.
Frank had to take one phone call privately—his wife?—and so Victor went out to Sam’s office.
“He’s nuts about you,” Sam commented.
“It’s early,” Victor disparaged. “Wait till he gets to know me.”
“How’s the house you’re in?” Sam asked.
“The people next door went away while they’re having the roof replaced. The first few days weren’t bad, but now they’re putting the new one on. Bang bang! Bang bang! From 8:00 a.m. on. Bang bang. You may have to come bail me out of the Beverly Hills jail. Is there a Beverly Hills jail?”
When Victor got home, there was a message on the answering machine. It was from a very perplexed and somewhat sleepy Mark Chastain back in New York, asking what Victor’s note was all about. He didn’t really understand it, and where was Victor anyway? Victor should stop fooling around and come home. Mark left an hour by hour sch
edule of places and names and phone numbers where he could be reached for the rest of the night.
“Guess the casseroles ran out sooner than I’d planned,” Victor said, then laughed at himself, adding, “You’ve become such a hardened Hollywood bitch!”
CHAPTER eighteen
It took a while before Victor got up the nerve to call Mark. He knew he shouldn’t feel guilty, but somehow he did, as though he’d abandoned ship, when in fact he’d been the one abandoned. Speaking with Jeff, Gilbert’s b.f. and now a board-licensed psychologist, Victor had brought up his hesitation about talking with Mark and the guilt that he felt.
“Only natural,” Jeff said. “You snuck out on him.”
“Excuse me!” Victor corrected him. “He wasn’t actually there long enough for me to sneak out on. And it is my apartment, which by the way I continue to pay rent on.”
“True, true,” Jeff mused. “But those are all rational points. When you feel guilty, it’s always irrational.”
That seemed true enough. But if Jeff were on the other end of the line right now, Victor would have to admit that it was because he was feeling extra-super-guilty that he was calling Mark at all. And the reason he was feeling extra-super-guilty was because of Jared Clapham.
Clapham was a roofer: in fact, one of two roofers working on Mopsy and Danny Porter’s house next door. Bang-Bang. Bang-Bang. From 8:00 a.m. on, as he’d told Sam. How Victor and Jared had met was an intrinsic, indeed the crucial, element of the guilt Victor now felt. Victor had returned from a second visit to Andy Grant’s place in Topanga Canyon and had been so dirty, sweaty, and dust-covered from yet another drive and on-foot trek to the hallowed television shooting spot, already mostly emptied of actors and humpy cameramen, and back, that once home at Mulholland Drive, he’d taken a second shower.
Victor’s rented house was positioned high atop a ridge that ran through Los Angeles like a humped and distorted spinal chord. Given the unseasonable temperatures that had persisted all day, and with the sun still shining brilliantly, when Victor emerged into the twenty-by-ten foot patch of back garden still shaking off the shower water, he decided to plop down and obtain some rays. Unlike his previous trip, he’d not done much sun bathing since he’d arrived. He’d not gone to the beach, not even been near a pool. Now was the chance to make up for it. Somewhere on the surface of his mind was an idea that he might even get a head start on the tanning and so not burn when he began to go about it more seriously this summer.
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