The Boys in the Mail Room: A Novel

by Iris Rainer Dart

  The show went well. Mickey could pick out the giggles of his creative dramatic students, and when he came out to take his bow at the end of the show, the children let out with a cheer that was so filled with adoration the rest of the audience turned to see where the voices came from.

  The dressing room was filled with friends and fans. This was always Mickey's favorite part of the evening. Everyone coming in to tell him how great he'd been. The feeling was so terrific; it lasted nearly until the next week when they came in again. Ruth Levitz, Jackie's wife, gave Mickey a special hug.

  "Jackie told me what you did. You're an angel."

  Then the children came in. With Betty Day. Mickey made a face of mock surprise. They all giggled. Mickey ran over and hugged them all in one big hug. Lucy Hill wasn't there. But the others jumped all over him.

  "Mickey, we saw you on television and real at the same time," Dawn said.

  "She means on the monitors."

  "Yeah."

  "Can I sit in your chair?"

  "If I be an actor when I get big, how do I get a job here?" little Adam asked.

  Mickey grinned. All the grown-ups waited for his answer. "With great difficulty," he said.

  Lots of laughter.

  After the children had explored every corner of the dressing room, Betty Day ushered them out and the others left one by one, and Mickey took his makeup off and he looked at himself in the dressing-room mirror. There was a knock at the door.

  "Yeah?"

  "Costumes, Mr. Ashman," a girl's voice said.

  "I'm decent," he answered, still looking at himself in the mirror.

  The young costume girl, Mary, had long straight California blond hair and a turned-up nose and braless bouncing breasts. She was shy with Mickey, even though he'd seen her flirting and laughing with the grips and propmen.

  "Just want your dirty clothes," she said, not looking at him.

  "You pervert," he joked. "I'll bet you want to take them home and sniff them till you get high."

  She giggled.

  "Mary," he said. "You're pretty."

  "Thanks, Mr. Ashman." She was blushing.

  "Want to come home with me?" he asked, looking at her hopefully. "I may be a big star, but I'm humble in bed." He smiled boyishly. She was really pretty. It would be good with her. His life had been so busy there hadn't been time for women in ages. But this cute little blond would change all that and—

  "I can't," she said. "My boy friend's waiting for me."

  She shrugged apologetically and walked out the door carrying the dirty laundry. Mickey sat silently in his makeup chair. After a while he got up and picked up his plastic duffel bag. It still had the piece of masking tape on it that he'd removed from his trailer dressing room on I Give It Six Months. He looked in the mirror one more time.

  "Well, kid," he said to himself, "it's pretty lonely at the top. Ain't it?"

  Then he smiled. He was lonely. But he wouldn't trade what he had. Not for anything.

  TO THE TOP

  forty-three

  Barry recovered slowly. When the doctors finally agreed he was ready to leave the hospital, Beau, who had been there every day, with toys and flowers and food from his favorite restaurants, arrived excitedly to pick him up. She was very early and she came in a limousine she'd hired for the occasion. She'd been up since six that day, singing in the shower, dressing, putting on makeup. Looking like the perfect Beau Daniels. The television Beau Daniels. She almost never looked like that anymore. But Barry was coming home. Her delicious Barry. Her love.

  One of the nurses helped Barry into a wheelchair. He was so frail now that Beau could have lifted him herself. But she didn't. She watched instead. The bandaged head, the tiny face with the scraggly beard. He looked like a—She stopped herself from thinking it. But the thought kept coming back. He was so small and loose. He looked like a ventriloquist's dummy.

  And then Beau and the nurse were in the elevator standing behind the wheelchair and the silent Barry. And there was no sound but the elevator's hissing. And then the door opened and they were on some strange cement level of the hospital. It was a back exit. A way to get out of the building and avoid the paparazzi who were hovering around the front of the hospital, waiting. For Barry and Beau. Beau Daniels who only made one TV special a year now because she didn't want to do anything that would take her away from Barry for even a few hours. Now she and the nurse pushed the wheelchair down the cement corridor. It was endless. Later Beau would have nightmares about that corridor. Her footsteps, the nurse's footsteps, the creaking of the chair. And Barry's silence. His very obvious silence.

  At home Beau tucked Barry into bed. The room was filled with flowers and balloons from friends and well-wishers. People Beau had told happily, earlier that week, "My man's coming home." Barry didn't notice the balloons or the flowers. For days he hardly spoke. And when he did it was always about death. Harley's death, Eugene's death, his own death. Still deep in the shock of what might have been. Small caskets. For Eugene and Harley. They only needed small caskets. And for him. Only need two pallbearers. He'd overheard someone make that joke at Harley's funeral. A joke? A fucking joke? At Harley's funeral. It's a good thing he didn't see who it was who made it. Fuckers. Death. Meningitis. He hardly ever even looked at Beau, who told him funny stories, and who lay next to him, singing to him softly, with the ocean beating against the beach as her accompaniment. Mostly she sang love songs. And when Barry fell asleep, she would tiptoe down the stairs and curl up on the living-room sofa and read until she fell asleep there, so she wouldn't disturb him.

  Weeks went by when the only voice Beau heard was her own, or the delivery boys from Jurgenson's who brought the groceries, or the doctor she called to report Barry's progress.

  "He can't stay in bed, Beau," the doctor told her. "He has to be up and active."

  "Fuck that," Barry said when Beau told him what the doctor said.

  "So that's what your voice sounds like. I recognize it," she said. "Now get your candy ass out of bed."

  Barry continued to look at the ceiling.

  "I could have died," he said.

  "But you didn't."

  "But I could have."

  "Yes. You could have. Is that why you're acting like you already did?"

  "Easy for you to be glib," he said angrily.

  "I'm not glib, you motherfucker. I was there for all of it."

  "Not where I was."

  "If I could have been I would have traded."

  "Bullshit."

  "I swear to God, you ungrateful bastard. I would have." Barry looked at her.

  "Beau . . ." He reached out his arm. He looked so helpless. She went to him and held him. She was very careful now when she touched him. Gentle.

  "Please. Barry. Walk with me on the beach."

  "No."

  "Please. Just today. Then if you don't like it, tomorrow we can play Esther Blodgett and Norman Maine."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Judy Garland and James Mason. In the second version of A Star is Born. You see, I'm her, so I stay up at the house and sing and make breakfast, thinking you're going for a starting-a-new-life morning swim—because you're him. Then you walk out into the ocean. And you keep walking to Japan. Get it?"

  Barry was laughing. He remembered the movie now.

  "Oh, but you have to leave your robe on the beach as a memento," she said. "Do you have a white robe?" He was laughing. She ran to the closet.

  "Let's see. Red robe. Black robe. Green robe. No white. You creep. What are you trying to do? Ruin the picture?"

  Barry was laughing hard now.

  "Don't try and make up," Beau said with a mock pout. "You've ruined my whole fantasy."

  Barry turned slowly, put his feet on the floor and stood. He was pale and the size-small blue cotton pajamas hung around his slight body.

  "I'll go put on a sweater and we'll be Streisand and Redford in The Way We Were instead," she said.

  They walked on the beach
every day, and most of the time, for the first two weeks, it felt to Beau as if she was holding him up. But soon he was a little stronger. Beau was making him eat, and he had a doctor's appointment and was told he was progressing nicely, and one day he called in to Beau, who was taking a shower, and said he wanted to take a walk alone.

  "You're not wearing a white robe, are you?" she shouted back to him.

  He laughed. He loved her. They hadn't made love in six months.

  Dr. Lutz sat cross-legged in the chair. Barry remembered now how Beau had described Lutz as looking like Humpty Dumpty. Perfect description. Barry and Beau sat across from Lutz on a leather sofa. They were holding hands.

  "He doesn't fuck me enough," Beau said to Lutz.

  There was a long pause. Lutz looked at Barry.

  "Barry," he said. "Fuck her more." Then back to Beau. "What else?"

  Beau laughed. "That's all."

  Everyone was quiet again. Lutz looked as if he might fall asleep.

  "I can't," Barry said, breaking the silence.

  Both Beau and Lutz looked at him.

  "I love her, but I can't."

  "Is it because you love her that you can't?"

  "What?"

  "Many people are unwilling to connect sexuality with feeling, Barry," Lutz said.

  "That's not it," Barry said.

  "Then what is it?" Lutz asked.

  Barry was getting tense.

  "I don't know."

  Beau was no longer holding Barry's hand. She was picking at a place in the arm of the leather sofa where the leather was ripped. She was making the tiny tear a little bigger, and bigger still.

  "Maybe it's just that I'm a fag," Barry said.

  No one knew how to respond. Fat Lutz pursed his lips. Beau kept picking at the leather. Then Lutz spoke.

  "Maybe," he said.

  "That's crazy," Beau said, but her voice was choked with emotion. "We had great fucking until you got sick. Great. Why are you doing this to yourself? And to me?"

  Barry didn't have an answer.

  "Do you love me?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  "Do you want to be with me? Live with me?"

  Silence.

  "Barry?"

  "Beau, I'm a homosexual. I love you but I don't think I can—I don't know."

  Beau was crying. "But we talked about it. In the beginning. And it's been so good for so long. Why now? Why are you telling me this now?"

  "Maybe it has something to do with my having been so close to death," he said. "But I started feeling as if my lying to you was like lying to my mother, pretending to be straight when I wasn't."

  "I knew you weren't straight. I always knew the truth about you."

  "But what you didn't know was that sometimes when I was fucking you, I was picturing Harley or Andy May, or some twelve-year-old little groupie boy who—"

  "So what?" Beau said. "I thought about Benny plenty of times when I was with you, because Benny got me hot. Even though I hated his guts. Does that matter?" She turned to Lutz.

  "Not to me," Lutz said.

  Beau was getting angry. "Lutz, you asshole. You know what I mean. Isn't it just important that everybody comes? And not why, or how?"

  Lutz laughed. "Well, I wouldn't have quite put it that way," he said.

  "Don't leave me," Beau said to Barry.

  "I won't."

  But still there was no sex, and Beau tried. She wore her most provocative clothes, she wore no clothes, she bought books of erotic art and kept them by the bed. And the more she tried, the more difficult it became. And the more tension there was between them. And the less Barry spoke. And the more she loved him. So when she woke up that morning and he was gone, she ran right to the garage, because she already knew that he hadn't just gone for a walk on the beach, and when the Corniche wasn't there she came inside and pulled the telephone out on the deck with her, and kept her hand on the receiver, praying that Barry would call from wherever he had gone, to tell her he was all right. She didn't hear from him for three weeks.

  "Beau."

  "Please tell me you were kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Please," she said. She hadn't left the house.

  "Beau," he said gently. "I can't come back."

  "Where are you?"

  "I'm in New York."

  "I'll come there. I'll leave in one hour. I'll be there by tonight."

  "No."

  "Don't tell me no, you bastard."

  "Beau, I miss you and I love you, but no."

  The limousine driver thought the little guy with the beard was crazy. Every day for the last ten days, the same thing. Pick him up at the Sherry Netherland and drive him to Brooklyn, park the car on the same street, and then sit there. All day. While the little guy looked out the window of the car at this one particular building. It was so frigging dull. And sometimes if the driver had to take a piss, he'd say to the little guy, "See ya in a little while," and he'd go to take a piss and get a newspaper too, so he wouldn't die of boredom. Today, just when the driver was getting back to the car from a walk around the block he took to stretch his legs, he saw the little guy get out of the car and walk across the street toward the front of that place he'd been watching, where a woman was getting out of a taxi.

  This was like some kind of detective movie, for Christ's sake.

  "Aunt Eleanor."

  The woman was startled. She turned her head nervously and looked at the bearded young man. Then she looked more closely.

  "Barry?"

  "Yes."

  There was a moment when it looked as if she might turn and run, but instead she moved toward him and embraced him, and the smell of her perfume was first familiar and then overwhelming because it brought back all of his past, and he fought back tears.

  "Make my mother see me," he said.

  "What do you mean?" Eleanor asked.

  "I called her once, a few years ago, and I begged her to let me come over and be with her, and talk to her. I asked her if I could take her to dinner or the theater and she said no. She was busy. I've never spoken to her since."

  "She never told me that," Eleanor said. "In fact, when Mashe died, she said at the funeral, 'It's too bad Barelah isn't here, but I don't know how to reach him.' "

  She said that. Mashe died. She said that.

  "I didn't know about Uncle Mashe."

  "Two years already. A massive coronary. I'm dating."

  "Of course you are," Barry said. "You're a very attractive woman, Aunt Eleanor."

  "That's your limousine?" the aunt asked.

  "I rented it."

  "Why?"

  "So I could sit outside here and wait for her to come out."

  "She won't be coming out," Eleanor said. "She had a cerebral hemorrhage a few months ago. She's totally paralyzed. Your father sits and reads to her all day. No one knows if she understands or not. She could stay like this forever, or die. I come over a few days a week. I pay my respects. I'm dating."

  "You told me."

  "You want to come in there with me?" she asked, nodding toward the door.

  Barry didn't know what to say.

  "At least you know she won't call you names," Eleanor laughed. A kind of hysterical laugh. Black humor. Like the joke about two pallbearers.

  "No," Barry said, and turned and walked across the street toward the limousine.

  "Barry," Eleanor shouted after him, "I was kidding what I said about her not being able to call you names."

  He turned and stood in the middle of the street looking back at his aunt.

  "Maybe she wouldn't have," Eleanor said.

  Maybe she wouldn't have.

  "Please, Barelah, go inside with me," Eleanor said, reaching out her hand for him to come and take.

  The limousine driver had been watching the little guy in the mirror. Starting across the street, then stopping right in the middle of the goddamned street and starting to talk again, and then going back across the street and disappearing with that woman, inside the place he
'd been staring at for days.

  All the way up the three flights behind Eleanor, Barry was nervous. Now they were at the front door. Barry was sweating as he looked at it. Remembering.

  "Aunt Eleanor—I—"

  Eleanor produced a key from her purse and turned it in the door. Nothing had changed. The same grandfather clock and umbrella stand in the tiny foyer. The same musty smell. Barry was shocked at himself for feeling so nervous. He was Barry Golden, he told himself. A self-made multimillionaire, a major force in the music business, the lover of exotic Beau Daniels. Beau. He missed her. But it couldn't work with her. And the agony of trying to make it work every day had been worse than the pain of feeling her absence. Maybe. The living room looked the way Barry remembered it before the days when the racks of Eldor seconds lined the room.

  "Hiya Jeanie," Eleanor shouted.

  "Good mornin'," came a voice from the kitchen.

  A fat black woman in a white nurse's uniform.

  "How's she doing?" Eleanor asked the woman.

  "Same."

  "Jeanie's a good nurse," Eleanor said. "The day nurse."

  Nurses. Day nurses? That must mean there were night nurses too. Who was paying for it all?

  Aunt Eleanor tapped lightly on the door to Barry's parents' room.

  "Yes?" His father's voice.

  "I have a surprise for you," Aunt Eleanor said, opening the door.

  Barry saw his mother now. Her eyes were closed but the lids were not shut tight. And they fluttered.

  And there were tubes moving liquids in and out.

  Intravenous. Catheter.

  A wave of nausea swept over him. But before he could run away, he caught a glimpse of his father. So small and old. Wrinkled. And bent. It was frightening.

  "Is it Barelah?" His father was squinting. "I'll get my glasses."

  "It's Barelah," Eleanor said.

  "No."

  "Yeah, Dad," Barry managed to say.

  The two of them. His mother with intravenous and his father looking like an old troll. No. It was a nightmare. He had never imagined a homecoming like this. And he had imagined a homecoming many times.

  "With a beard, yet," his father said, coming toward him. Toward him.

  Barry extended his hand. His father took it. The old man's hand was bony and small and weak.