After Gregory

by Austin Wright

  All round. To be a real star, you have to branch out. Movies, TV, the stage. I can’t be the Virgin Miranda all my life, nobody can. I want to say I’m really grateful for this opportunity. I have Mr. Rome to thank and Mrs. Delaware, and you.

  But as you say, your true fans will be disappointed.

  Her face was ravaged by anxiety, which was the secular side of her televised ecstasy. If they love me, won’t they follow me into my new career?

  If they love you for yourself. But what about the lame and sick who depend on you?

  I can’t help them now, she said.

  Aren’t there people whose faith depends on you, bolstered by your miracles.

  Miracles?

  Your cures. Don’t you cure people?

  She frowned. Don’t make fun of me. I’ve lost it. I haven’t had it in months. I need other ways to fulfill myself. I need to act, sing, dance, get outside of myself. I need to express. Put myself forward in a disciplined shape. That’s why I want to be a star. That will give me the feeling back.

  At her apartment you remembered your duties. Would she like to go to the Lido this afternoon? Too cold, she said. Come in and stay awhile. Get to know you, if you’re going to be my host. The apartment was small with a plainly furnished sitting room in the back. You met Aunt Rosie and the poodle.

  More coffee. Miranda Landis in a sofa facing you, bare legs pulled under her, sitting as if you were a gentleman caller two generations ago.

  This was the moment when according to Jack Rome and Jane Delaware you should begin seducing. You resisted, not that Miranda repelled you but the time was wrong, or the mood, or something. You were face to face with the question of difference between Trace and Gregory, if there was to be any difference. Gregory now would be full of moral resistance, guilt and shame, but would probably grab the lustful opportunity anyway and feel bad while doing it, since she was there and doubtless willing. Trace, liberated with no reason to be moral, was free to do what he liked, have her and improve his place in the world, yet here he was, surly and opposed for no good reason except to prove he was Trace and was in fact free to do what he liked.

  She said, Why isn’t your wife going to be in the house when we get back? (What?) They told me you and I will have your house to ourselves. She noticed your look. It isn’t true?

  Well God damn.

  What’s the matter?

  Nobody told me.

  You’re angry. I’ve made you angry.

  Someone was angry, heating Stephen Trace, creating him out of flame. A spiteful idea occurred to you. You checked it in case you ought to think it over. But already you were saying what might rule out reconsideration: Miranda, do you know what they want me to do?

  Now you didn’t know whether it was spite or just the natural thing to say.

  What do who want you to do? Jack Rome, Jane Delaware. She said, They’ve been very kind to me. Is there a catch?

  If this was so important, you’d better stall awhile.

  You’d better tell me.

  Too late anyway and maybe it was just natural. Having committed yourself by accident, you were compelled to follow through: They want me to take your virginity away.

  Without my knowledge?

  No, not that. (You were listening to what you had just said.)

  I mean, without my consent?

  Not rape, seduce. I’m supposed to persuade you.

  She looked puzzled. Why?

  I suppose to confirm you’re no longer the Virgin Miranda.

  I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. What am I supposed to say? Isn’t it enough to announce I am no longer the Virgin Miranda? I told you, I plan to go public.

  I imagine you’d prefer your own choice of ravisher.

  What if I’m already not the Virgin Miranda?

  Well I suppose you could tell them that. You really don’t need me for that purpose at all. (So much for that, Jack.) She was looking at you, you with no idea what she was thinking or how close to disaster you might be.

  They also want me to interview a New York reporter who is going to do a profile of you. I’m to give him a blow by blow account of how I took your virginity away. (It took your breath away, what you heard yourself saying, though you still did not know if it was courage.)

  She stared.

  They also want me to persuade you to pose for pictures in the nude. (Or idiocy?)

  She still stared.

  Not only that. They want to take pictures of you and me together. Do you know what they mean by that?

  Her voice was faint: No.

  Not family pictures. You and me, nude together. You and me doing it.

  Doing what?

  It, Miranda. (What Jack Rome could do to you, the various forms of ruin. And if he couldn’t, was it worth anything?)

  Consider the inside of the human skull, where everything is concealed except such crude signals as escape through gestures and looks and whatever deliberately chosen words issue in sequence, slow, temporal, one after another. Her eyes were dead, refusing to reveal war or peace.

  In a pale voice, Why do they want all that? Do they expect me to agree?

  I’m supposed to persuade you.

  How are you supposed to do that? What arguments are you supposed to use?

  No arguments. I’m supposed to overwhelm you with the force of my charm, what the hell, I don’t know.

  There must be advantages they expect me to see. If you don’t know what they are, you’re not a very good salesman.

  Maybe I forgot.

  Actually I knew about the interview. They want to do a profile. This will help when I go public. I just didn’t know about the virginity part of it. I suppose their thinking is, if I’m to give up the Virgin Miranda, they want personal testimony. I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?

  Whatever you say, Miranda, whatever you say.

  As for the pictures. I suppose that’s my fault. I sent them a picture of myself as a token of good faith.

  Why did you do that?

  Lots of famous women got a push from posing in the nude. It didn’t do their careers any harm. Back home it would be shocking, but in the outside world it’s another matter.

  The Virgin Miranda nude in Playboy or Penthouse? That would change the Miranda image pretty quick.

  Do you think it’s a bad idea?

  Don’t you? You didn’t say it, though. Having told her the worst, Stephen Trace withdrew from judgment. It depends on how you feel about it.

  You were in an argument failing for lack of resistance. A meaningless display of moral energy. The resistance you’d expect from her background was not there, which left your outrage flapping in hollow space. She was coming out of her insulated world into a world she knew nothing about. She had created her idea of this world out of two things: television images and a sure realization it was different from the world she knew. She had no way to estimate how much or little that difference was.

  You couldn’t refrain from this: It might be a shock to those lame and sick people who rely on you to bolster their faith.

  They don’t read those magazines.

  They’ll hear about them.

  She looked like crying, but pulled herself together. Well then, so I shouldn’t allow nude pictures?

  I’m not your adviser.

  All right, I’ll draw the line. And I wouldn’t do the sex pictures in any case. I don’t see any point in them.

  Good idea.

  As for my virginity, well, I really don’t need you for that. Why do they want it to be you? Do I have to name somebody?

  I guess they wanted me for the interview, but we’ve ruled that out—

  We’ve ruled the virginity part out. There will be a profile, I’m counting on that.

  So I see no need for you to name anybody.

  If I named the person—no, I can’t do that. It would serve him right. But then he’d only deny it, and nobody’d believe me.

  Who is this person you’re talking about?

&nbs
p; Forget it. Are they going to be mad at me?

  I doubt it. They might be mad at me. (You wondered, was Stephen Trace enough of a person to take pride in this?)

  I don’t want to get you into trouble. But I really don’t think I need do any of those things they want.

  You know why they want them, of course.

  Yes. Mr. Rome wants to stick it to Daddy.

  You don’t mind?

  I picked Mr. Rome on purpose. I thought he’d be glad to help me.

  You want him to stick it to Daddy?

  Henceforth I’m going to be what I am. Do you think God will be mad at me?

  I can’t speak for God. I’m trying to figure out what life was like growing up with your father.

  It was all right. Only now I want a show of my own.

  A show. You thought, a byproduct of her bizarre upbringing was that she grew up without judgment. Meanwhile she was looking you over. She said, If you really do want to seduce me—

  No.

  Well that’s okay. We couldn’t do it today anyway. I’ve got the curse.

  What?

  Don’t you know what the curse is?

  The curse? Oh yes, the curse.

  I’ll be all right Thursday. If you want to do it then.

  No, but thank you very much.

  THIRTY TWO

  Your trajectory from the river, an eastward parabola. Its apogee, the Grand Canal of Venice. You shared a gondola with Miranda Landis, feeling great because Stephen Trace had ignored Rome and Delaware and acted on his own (though he had not told them). Alarmed too by the price he might have to pay, yet this added to the exhilaration, was necessary to it in fact. A feeling you pretended Peter Gregory never knew, reclaiming the hope in your original jump. Then everything crashed.

  You were entertaining Miranda, a proper escort, with an understanding as to what that did not mean. Reclining in the gondola close to the black licking water, with another gondola coming up in a hurry, the gondolier shouting across the gap. An Italian exchange between the two gondoliers, the one calling Signor Trace are you Signor Trace? He have message, signor, the other said.

  Waves in the Grand Canal as the gondolas almost crashed, motorboats and a vaporetto full of passengers intercepting the landing, with the Rialto Bridge in sight and a pink and white palace with striped poles above slimy green bastions, and at the landing Helen Copzik waving frantically.

  Something’s wrong, she said. Janie wants us at the hotel. You hurried after her with Miranda clinging to your hand through the narrow streets between the old buildings, avoiding dog turds. Over canal bridges, under arches, beyond the great square back to the hotel, wondering what.

  In the garden café beside the hotel, Jane Delaware sat with a newspaper. Miranda was alarmed about being seen in public with Jane Delaware. Delaware looking grim shoved the paper at Stephen, the International Herald Tribune, the item on the left:

  JACK ROME FEARED DEAD

  AS PLANE DIVES IN SEA

  Hard to read, the odd juxtaposition of familiar words, Jack Rome’s fear of death or his fear of what the dead would do as the plane in twisted tenses dived into the sea. With Jane Delaware waiting for you to react, you had an uncomfortable feeling you had already heard this news and had not paid attention.

  You grasped its meaning at once: ruin, the end. Death of Jack Rome, death of Stephen Trace, it was impossible for Trace to outlive Rome. You did not know you were grasping this—I formulate it in writing months later—but you felt it as a rumble in the earth that would grow stronger until it shook you apart, while your superficial mind relished the dazzle of shock.

  The dazzle, if the news meant Jack Rome was dead, a sensation. A surge of joy, checked by the qualifying word FEARED, which meant Jack Rome was not really dead, in which case he must be alive except for Jane Delaware looking like a catastrophe.

  Miranda Landis wanted to know: What does this mean?

  Delaware: I saw this in the paper. No one told me.

  Miranda repeat: What does it mean?

  I wouldn’t worry if someone had told me. But no one told me. So I called them. I called David.

  What does it mean?

  It means he’s dead.

  What does that mean?

  Good question.

  You were irritated by others invading your privacy. Thinking, it was not you who had considered Jack immortal but Jack himself, and it would be good for him to learn mortality like the rest of us. Loss too, magnificent and irreplaceable, you could enjoy the splendor of that. Would you grieve? Not yet. This was more like a newsbreak, a great public figure dies. With disappointment that Jack’s death had made pointless whatever moral victory Stephen Trace had achieved in dealing with Miranda. (Unless of course by dying he had saved that victory from the test and preserved it in pristine uselessness.) All this was superficial, though, against the unsettling question of what would happen to the structure of Stephen Trace now that Rome was gone.

  Miranda: What happens now? What happens to me?

  I’m going home, Delaware said. You can do what you like.

  I can’t do what I like. I’m going with you.

  Go get ready then. Peremptory Jane sent Miranda Landis back to her apartment, Stephen Trace to the travel agent, Helen Copzik to the hotel room, while she made calls. Flight for four to New York tomorrow morning. Later you sat with her again in the café.

  She had the facts. How Jack Rome took off alone yesterday in his light plane from an airport in Westchester. Destination unknown, clearance to Hyannis but instead he headed south, over Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, Coney Island, out to sea. There as observed by a police helicopter and watchers on the chilly beach the plane wobbled its wings a couple of times, nosed down, and dived into the ocean. Impact hard, petrifying the sea, causing the orange wing to snap in a silver veil. Search followed, small craft. Wreckage in fragments, no body. How did it happen? The newspaper hinted suicide, but that’s impossible.

  With time to pass, Jane Delaware, griefless but grim, no sparks now, created her private obituary for Jack. No one knew him, she certainly didn’t. Sifting the legends which he created, she tried without success to see some real history. She saw the classic model, a city boy, the city reportedly New York. Stern father who ran a news store. Strong mother, goading ambition. Boy smart and aggressive, Boy Scout, doing street corner rackets at an early age, only he wasn’t Jack Rome, he was What’s his name, some different name which he had abandoned. This biography has no authority, Delaware said. Hearsay, rumor, all the rumors.

  Jane Delaware’s only history was what her imagination could guess from the anecdotal remains. The stern father with the newsshop was likely a bookmaker. The Boy Scout by another name was probably sent to jail—for he knew about jail, she had heard him rail against the human practice of ganging up on other members of the species not necessarily inferior to themselves, to put in cages like an animal.

  What was the trouble he had to wipe out with another name? Mail order college degrees. Ticket scalping. Handicapped services. Stereo speakers, fine equipment cheap. Service contracts with no service. You guess too.

  In Jane Delaware’s obituary, Jack Rome got out of jail, vowed not to repeat his mistake, vowed also in the usual way to make his first million in so many short years. Took a name pretentious enough to suit his destiny. Started by selling school supplies. Yes, school supplies. Let the great universe of Rome Enterprises grow out of kid stuff, pads of paper, pencils and rulers, teachers’ gradebooks. Next thing you know there’s copying machines and computers. Then entertainment and communications and finally (no need to guess this) a company consisting of money, nothing but money, selling it, buying it, renting it out. His talent was to nurse and feed the money tree and utilize cleverly your average human being’s need to take shelter under it. People worked for him for the love of it. Like any dictator he made people’s lives depend on him with love. Everyone in Rome adored Rome, Delaware said.

  You without grief were thinking—the dee
p tremors a little stronger—how exposed Stephen Trace might be without Rome to back him up. A savage world with bears. Yet you didn’t want a resurrection. No body had been found, what if he parachuted out? If he wasn’t on the plane at all. He would turn up in his office, call the papers and say Jack Rome here, your story is garbage. Let’s have no Lazarus back from the dead. So what does this news really mean to you? Nothing at all, your money and your house belong to you. Liberation, how the world changes, new things always happening.

  You were secretly annoyed with Jane Delaware. She was keeping something from you. Preoccupied, and despite her anecdotes you felt you had lost her.

  So it was cut short the glorious trip and fly home. To Whitfield, Sharon, Jollop, Heckel. It didn’t seem right, traveling with Jane Delaware had dislodged you. Your fine house seemed as far and cold in the past as all your other houses. All the way to the airport Miranda fidgeted nervously. The big Spanish hat and dark glasses. She said, I’m taking a chance going with you. Privately Delaware told you about another telephone call. Jack was murdered, she said. Sabotage.

  How do they know?

  Wreckage in the sea.

  At the gate where the passengers boarded, an old woman in shabby black coat, her knotted white hair coming loose over her collar, wept. Old peasant crying son or daughter to America. You couldn’t see who she was waving to, well dressed and happy down the fluorescent tube with you to the plane.

  You flew all the long afternoon in the bright sun, hours and hours of unchanging day, quiet now, changed. Miranda and you, Delaware and Copzik across the aisle. Jane Delaware, rapt in problems, nothing to say. When you were settled in the plane you told Miranda Delaware’s theory that Rome was murdered. She put her hand to her mouth, shocked. God’s Police, she said.

  What makes you think so?

  God’s Police. They found out about me and this is what they did. You thought it unlikely. No, it’s God’s Police. If not them, it’s an Act of God, but I know it’s God’s Police. It’s what they do. Oh my Lord.

  She squeezed your hand so hard it hurt, her fingernails. Then clasped hers together like prayer. You have to hide me in your house. If they’re not waiting for us at the airport, can we go right to your house, please? Then the question she couldn’t hold back: If Mr. Rome is dead, what will happen to me?