Justify My Sins

by Felice Picano

  He managed to keep away from the film star as much as possible and he only vaguely listened to Elmore and Esteban going on at excruciating length about their trip to “gorgeously tropical” North Western Australia. It seemed that they took some pride in being a long-term if famously tempestuous couple. Even after having downed a tall vodka tonic, it took Victor a long time to wake up enough and figure out that Esteban was actually the younger and the more beloved of the two. Victor was constantly amazed in meeting new couples which of the two would end up being the prettier and thus supposedly the more sexually active one, over whom the other boyfriend suffered untold personal anxieties and burning agonies of jealousy. He was constantly being put in mind of what Thomas Mann had written in Joseph and His Brothers, “Who is to say who can be loved; and who cannot?” Not Victor, for sure.

  After a longish time and several cocktails each, Victor realized that they were suddenly all in motion, from which he assumed they were headed out to dinner. He joined Elmore and Esteban in their aged posh dove-gray Bentley drop-head coupe, sitting up front while Esteban rolled a joint in the back seat. Andy and Carol had already departed.

  Elmore drove, sitting ramrod-straight and reminding Victor even more of Portia the dog, especially when she was “begging” for bacon-bits. Esteban meanwhile nosed around the right front window in the guise of handing Victor the grass and began whispering low-voiced, quite filthy propositions into Victor’s ear. He was unheard by his lover, who, while staring straight ahead as he drove, was expatiating unbidden upon the subtle differences between the Bentley convertible, coupe, and drop-head coupe models of this peculiar vintage, all the while inhaling the weed whenever it came his way like a drug-starved addict.

  “It’s not just the rimming you’ll dig,” Esteban was now going into some detail, himself low and close into Victor’s other ear, “but especially, you know, that long muscle between the scrotum and the ass. Let me tell you, I like to lunch on that baby until you’re ready to . . .”

  Victor was happy to flee those two once they’d arrived at the over-awninged swirled-adobe-façade restaurant, a series of gray cubes stuffed between two fat stands of Fan-Palms. Luckily, they’d left the car windows open, otherwise the parking valet would have been stoned in a trice.

  Inside, Antonio’s (or whatever it was called) looked as though it had last been decorated by a Sinatra henchman circa 1956: heavy on the burgundy velvet, gold-scrolled woodwork, sharp-enough-to-cut-your-lips white linen, and sheepskin menus the same size and color-coding as an illuminated Twelfth Century missal.

  “I’m treating you,” Andy said, placing Victor next to the actress as he took the head of the table.

  Carol was smoking what looked like unfiltered Benson & Hedges yet again. Even when she wasn’t, smoke seemed to drift out of her lower lip as she ate or spoke. Halfway through dinner, after having utterly ignored him, she uttered sotto-voce to him, “You’re queer, natch,” in her smoke and liquor-cracked voice.

  “As a three dollar bill,” he confirmed.

  “But you like to party, right?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Got a tux?”

  “Matter of fact, I do.”

  He was wondering where all this was headed. After a while, she said, “I’m part of this group of over the hill actresses who party heavy around the Oscars. We call ourselves ‘The Brassy Old Dames.’ And we get dolled up and usually watch the ceremony over a good catered meal in one of our houses, then go out to the parties. Since we’re all Academy members, we’re invited everywhere. Miramax. Disney. Sony. Even Morton’s.”

  “Me and my tux enter into this idyllic picture how, exactly?”

  “We need guys to drive us to the parties. We especially need more or less presentable escorts in tuxedos. You’ve got enough looks to tickle one of those old vaginas. We feed you, you drive us and escort us. So? You in?”

  “With an invitation as gracious as that, how could I possibly refuse?”

  She burst into a torrent of J&B-laced laughter that ended in a coughing fit, requiring half a glass of water and another unmixed drink.

  His Mozzarella in Carrozze appeared and Victor lit into it with gusto. Carol ate sparingly. Carol spoke sparingly. Always to the point, not a word more; as a rule, answering someone’s question. She offered little herself and often carefully watched the others interact. Instead, she smoked, drank, and picked clean her trout meuniere with the precision of a brain surgeon—explaining her not-bad figure, given her age.

  During the rest of the dinner, Victor was treated to the unexpected spectacle of his old pal Andy Grant being dapper, sophisticated, witty, and knowledgeable about oddly urbane topics such as the best vintage year of a Pomeroy, or the sad, complicated history of Julie Wilson’s piano accompanists, or the travels of the 18th Century doyenne, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and exactly how to order perilous Fugu—blowfish to you—within the borders of Japan.

  Not only was Andy now one hundred and eighty degrees away from the back-to-the-earth Topanga Canyonette Hippie he’d been in the 1980’s—the guy who knew more about Klinger’s TV haberdashery than any one else on the planet—he was also—was it geometrically possible?—equally a hundred and eighty degrees away from the dirty-old-man young gay sleazoid he’d been in the 1970’s. In fact—in fact!—Victor recalled a High-Fag dinner at someone’s manse in Bel-Air filled with men who had been their age now, back around then. He recalled Andy’s disgust at their interests and their talk and how after dropping not very subtle hints about what a-holes he thought they all were, he had ended up doing something outrageous, one step from defecating on the carpets, and so they were forced to leave, never of course to return. Driving off, Andy had then blathered at some length about what loser-jerk-phony-queers the older guys had all been. Possibly true, but he would fit right into that Haut-French decor and pretension today.

  As they were getting up to leave the Italianesque dive, Victor going in Andy’s car, Carol with the others, she edged Victor against a wall. “It’s coming up in April. I’ll get your number from Baldy.” Meaning Andy.

  “Nice meeting you, too,” he said.

  “Little . . . prick!” She laughed at his insolence. Then repeated, “I will call you.”

  “I will answer!” he dared back.

  Later that evening when they were alone again at the house having a nightcap with their feet dangling in the still sun-heated pool, Andy, in a suspiciously mellow mood, said, “You made quite the conquest tonight.”

  “I did? With which? Cassius or Portia?”

  “Carol, of course. That’s the most in a decade any of us has heard her speak to someone she’s just met.”

  “She’s just after my body,” Victor joshed.

  “Of course she’s after your body. She’s hornier than a fag half her age. But she’ll settle for far less than that. You know, you could do worse. Knowing her, I mean. She’s been everywhere. She’s seen everything. And she’s done everyone!”

  Victor checked his boyhood friend’s profile, which looked youthfully noble in this oh-so-ambivalent desert night light, fuzzed over as it was by the pool’s underwater lamps. He remembered how startlingly handsome and how utterly desirable to Victor and almost everyone they knew Andy Grant had been, aged thirteen or so: the young Poseidon of the suburbs. Andy turned an inch, and the memory or illusion was gone.

  “Are you saying I should take Carol up on her offer?”

  “I certainly would! But then, she’s never asked me. Or El. Or Es, for that matter.”

  The pool lights went out, and all of a sudden, in the northern edge of the moonless, starry sky, Victor noticed a long bright streak covering a third of the area, just a hand’s height above the mountains.

  “Is that . . . ? Can that be . . . ? No! It can’t be!”

  “The Comet Kohoutek,” Andy assured him. “On its return journey from around the sun.”

  No wonder it had been hailing in Hollywood.

&n
bsp; “It’s so big! So far away. But huge. No wonder it scared the shit out of ancient people!”

  “It boded the fall of kings,” Andy said, musingly. “And queens.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-four

  ”Please don’t tell me we’re going back to see Sandy the Lameoid?” Victor begged.

  Dmitrios had just pulled off Barham Drive and onto the back lot of Warner Brother’s immense parking lot.

  “No, this is someone new. Gil Dittersdorf. He works for—” He named someone vaguely familiar to Victor. “I met him last week at a pool party atop the Mondrian. He’s a huge reader and I’m sure you guys will get along just great.”

  Again they found a parking spot within sight of the wooden shacks. Again the interior office was under-decorated and wallpapered with theater cards. But this at least held real furniture, albeit it was done in aluminum and glass. Unlike the other hut, this one was warm. Perhaps too warm, which might have explained the overabundant botanical life: the Boston ferns and fishtail palms sitting, hanging and all but falling out of their giant ceramic pots around the rooms seemed amazingly healthy. In the outer office, they drooped into your eyes and their branches all but nudged you while you were seated.

  The producer himself was on the phone in his office with hiss door enough ajar that Victor could make out that he faced away, and was tossing a smaller than regulation-sized basketball into the far corner hoop.

  Gil was tall with far too much badly cut yellow hair. He was also effusive.

  “Hi, you guys! Glad you could make it. C’mon into my den of antiquity. Har-de-har. Watch out for the books. They’re every-where.”

  Indeed they were. Hundreds of them stacked in piles on the floor rising shakily to maybe four or five feet and partly blocking out the omnipresent wall art. They were all about, stacked edge to edge as high as his desk, as though defending it from outsiders. Victor and Dmitrios found themselves having to be careful crossing their legs, otherwise five volumes would come crashing down. And of course, books were all over the desk, standing, leaning, flat down, and crossed like building blocks.

  “Didya ever read this?” Gil thrust a copy of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin at them. “Terrific read, but the French got the rights in like two days after its European publication.”

  On one wall were maybe a half dozen photos of Gil’s favorite authors, the classic book cover photos you always saw of Truman Capote (gamine), Eudora Welty (ugly), John Steinbeck (nautical), William Faulkner (sober), and Henry James (snooty). Center of them all was his idol of idols, author Tom Wolfe, pictured in 1978, and it was clear that for better or worse, Gil patterned himself totally after it, sartorially speaking.

  This might not have been too distracting were it not that Gil had gained substantial girth in the intervening decade. His pale-pink button-down shirt bulged inappropriately. Its buttons, where present, hung on literally by a thread, while the candy-striped seersucker trousers were by now too short and worn quite below any hint of a waist. The jacket fit not at all and had been decoratively abandoned, flung over a chair-back. The once brilliant, now food- and drink-stained silver-foil tie was pinned down to various areas of shirt-like material by who knew what combination of perspiration and ketchup. But Gil’s face was clean and bright and his oversized tortoise shell glasses, while patched over the bridge of his nose by what looked like four or five Band-Aids, were polished, allowing his merry brown eyes to glow intelligently as he managed to spout the names and titles of virtually every book he must have read in his life, attempting to make Victor feel at home as a fellow litterateur.

  “Gunter Grass’s Cat and Mouse? As great as his Tin Drum, in my humble opinion. But German TV snatched it before we could. And here’s Baalshevis Singer’s Shosha. Could have been as great a film as Sophie’s Choice. But he’s dead and the estate threw up so many obstacles it might as well have not been for sale. J.G. Ballard’s Terminal Beach. You know the collection? I was all ready to send an option agreement, when Crash came out of Canada. I loved it, but it was felt to be far too harsh, and a box office dud, so no deal. Iain Banks Wasp Factory! Tell me it’s not a movie? By the time I’d read it, BBC had an option sewn up.”

  On and on, Gil recited the list of books that he’d almost bought, never quite been able to buy, just missed buying through a “fixed-in-advance phone auction,” or that he’d gotten to a day too late. Not to mention those that were mired in contractual restraints, or that a bit of research had revealed to possess unclear copyrights, or that had far too many ownership problems. And so on and so forth.

  From Alan Ginsberg’s Howl to Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of the Genji to Beatrix Potter’s Peter Cottontail, Gil Dittersdorf had tried to obtain the rights; only to be thwarted at the last minute by a nefarious conspiracy of International Law, executor’s whims, Warner Brothers’ front office shenanigans, authorial paranoia, agenting idiocy, and just plain bad stars. It was an unparalleled tale of woe.

  When he was done with the tragic litany, Dmitrios said: “Never Can Say Goodbye has no problems. Victor Regina, right here before you, is the owner and sole copyright holder, and he’s ready to deal.”

  To which Gil Dittersdorf, that devoted reader and long-suffering, much-frustrated option-obtainer, replied, “Guys, we’re always looking for fine material, but I gotta tell you I’ve just recently been put on a strict diet by you know who,” gesturing to where they heard another thunk of a basketball onto the floor, “of only the tackiest of genre-stuff: horror-Sci-Fi, action thrillers, and mystery/courtroom dramas.”

  Needless to say, his candor, his correct pronunciation of Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski’s name, and his much-advertised though never proven love of reading earned Gil the largest and wordiest packet of stuff they’d brought along with the book itself, which Victor was talked into autographing, and which they later on in the car driving away agreed he might actually use as more than a doorstop, all the while explaining to the next person to walk into the office how this masterpiece, too, had somehow or other “gotten away.”

  “You call this ‘cocktails’!” Victor asked. “The Palm is hardly a Normandie Avenue hangout.”

  “So? I can’t buy you a nice dinner? Anyway, you’re just a little too thin and a little too toned for what I really know to be your age. I intend to change that.”

  Their drinks arrived: two very fat-glassed Martinis. The middle-aged man in a so-crisp-it-hurt white shirt and black tie with black leatherette apron attempted to place black, embossed menus the size of the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey on the table.

  Joel Edison waved them off as though they bore the anthrax virus.

  “We already know what we want!”

  “We do?” Victor asked.

  The waiter had already snatched up the menus and was giving a hundred and two percent of his attention to the agent. Edison was clearly a valued diner here. Victor could have set his hair on fire and it wouldn’t have done any good, attention-wise.

  “The Prime Ribs the way I like, Reggie. The lower set. Medium rare. Baked potato with the works. Creamed spinach. Caesar Salad to begin. Dutch Apple Pie with Cheddar and Decaf coffee to end.”

  Reg wrote and vanished.

  “That sound okay?” Joel asked.

  “Heaven,” Victor admitted.

  “What’ll we toast?” Joel hoisted his chalice. “Survival? No we’ve done more than survive.”

  “Any toast we make is sure to be premature. And sure to be undone soon enough. Instead, let’s toast the twenty-seven year old male beauty of Mr. Don Wright, my next door neighbor, whom I refer to as Mr. Totally Gorgeous Fitness Trainer.”

  “To Don Wright.” They sipped. “So tell me about Demetrius.”

  “My so-called manager, Dmitrios? You make him sound like a spoiled gladiator in a toga and sandal epic.”

  “He isn’t?”

  “He’s all business as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Rightly so,” Joel admitted. “What did you thin
k of Vlacheslav?”

  “He reminded me of who was it before, Boris? Vid dee distingveshed acksent? You always take on these Russian immigrant types who are a half step away from either ballet school or a life of crime. It’s clearly the so-far untapped but brimming-over altruism at work that your life requires. It’s the Social Worker in you coming out.”

  Joel laughed. “That’s certainly one way of putting it. Other people would say you’re out of your mind. That I’m bad through and through.”

  “Ahhhh!” Victor admitted. “But they haven’t known you as long as I have.”

  “True . . . So, you’re really trying to break back into The Biz?”

  “Meetings, meetings, meetings! One more ghastly than the other. But there I am, ever fresh, the perpetual New Kid in Town. That’s me.” Victor said brightly. “Truth is, I’m a little bored. I’ve got a hit book out here and in England and The Commonwealth. It’s being translated into French and German and I expect it’ll do well there too. I’ve got the next one already written and already in the pipeline. It’s equally good, but kind of intellectual in comparison, so it’ll get great notices and sell about a fifth of this one. And right now, I’ve got nothing else to do.” He twiddled his thumbs to illustrate. “Besides which, I’m not the only one who thinks that Never Can Say Goodbye has a shot.”

  “As a six-hour movie with a cast of four thousand?”

  “You skimmed it?” Victor was surprised. “No. Wait. You got a reader’s report on it! I’m touched.”

  “I read the whole damn book. I read most of your books, Victor. I kind of have to. To keep my chips in, in this town. And it’s terrific. Truth is, I caught the kids in the mailroom weeping over the ending, so I confiscated it. But seriously, Victor? We have to film the Student Siege of Columbia University? The first Gay Pride Parade? The ’91 March on Washington? Even I choked on the dollar signs. I don’t choke that easily.”