“So how is old Thorvin these days?” Barry asked me politely.
“Not well, in my opinion.”
“Perhaps,” he suggested, “it was someone he ate.”
Barry Feingold was in his early sixties, second-generation New York real estate money. His father, Herschel, built those awful brick apartment towers in Queens that are clustered practically on top of the Long Island Expressway, the ones you pass on your way to the airport and wonder how anyone could possibly live there. As far as I knew, Barry had never actually held a real job. During the Koch years, he had served as the Mayor’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. Before that he’d been on some board or another at Lincoln Center. Lately, he’d been backing experimental theater, which is a graceful way of saying he was sleeping late most mornings. Not that Barry wasn’t a self-made man. He most decidedly was. He’d made himself into what the British theater people call a laddy boy. Barry was trim and tanned, with a cultivated air of wry detachment and just a hint of the dissolute scamp. He had lovingly coiffed silver hair and a proud, aquiline nose and not a trace of sagging skin. Not under his eyes. Not under his chin. Not nowhere. We’re talking multiple tucks. I think he was also wearing a girdle. Either that or he didn’t exhale once while I was there. He had on a red velvet smoking jacket, white silk shirt, an ascot, gray flannels and black suede lounging pumps with little gold foxes braided on them. It was not an easy outfit to pull off, especially for someone who grew up in Douglaston, Queens. But Barry worked at it, and Barry Feingold was good at his work.
“That’s a deliciously lugubrious little dog you have,” he observed cheerily.
“Do you want her?”
Lulu jumped right up and let out a wounded yowl of protest.
Barry frowned—or tried to. Definitely multiple tucks. “Why, are you giving her up?”
“I may have to. We’re having some sibling problems. She’s not adjusting.” This was me taking a stab at tough love. “I’m hoping she’ll shape up, but if she doesn’t …”
Lulu glowered at me, not buying one bit of it, then curled back up with a snide little grunt. This was her saying: You couldn’t make it without me if you tried, butthead.
Marco came clomping in from the kitchen with our martinis. Marco Paolo, the former Mark Paul Humberstone of Grand Island, Nebraska, was a boy toy of the grade-A prime beef variety—six-feet-four and heavily muscled and still not yet thirty. Before Marco caused a stir in the fashion world with his Hasidic leisure ensembles he had been a bouncer at a downtown after-hours club, Mrs. Norman Maine, where he achieved modest renown for putting one of Madonna’s entourage in the hospital with a ruptured spleen. It had taken all of Barry’s considerable pull to smooth that one over. Marco had spiky hair, orange, and a two-day growth of beard, black. There was a diamond stud in his left earlobe. He wore a flowing black linen shirt, awning-stripe bombachas and no shoes or socks. He seemed edgy, as if he was about to either get violent or break into tears. He was also flushed and rather sweaty. When he handed me my glass his fingers were scalding to the touch.
“I was admiring your suit,” he said to me, his voice unexpectedly hushed and demure. He reeked of that new vanilla scent everyone was wearing. Smelled very much like a bakery.
I thanked him and he sat and the three of us drank and talked about my suit, which I’d had made for me in London at Strickland’s. And then my brogans, which were also made for me in London, by Maxwell’s.
“I’ve just ordered my first pair of customized orthopedics from T. O. Dey on East Thirty-eighth Street,” Marco informed me, mopping at his brow with a red bandanna. “They’re costing me six hundred and fifty dollars, but I can’t believe I ever lived without them. They’re dope. So well made, and just for me. Everyone’s getting their shoes made there now—Sly, Cher, Liza …”
“That’s everyone, all right,” I agreed pleasantly.
Yes, it was all very pleasant. Me, I can drink martinis and talk about clothes, especially my own clothes, for hours.
But Barry’s glass was empty. “Make us another round, would you, dear?” he said, holding it out to Marco.
Marco got to his feet and started back to the kitchen, moving rather unsteadily. The big guy crashed right into a pair of those non-mobile plaster partygoers, knocking them flat and sending himself sprawling. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he said quickly, scrabbling back to his feet. “Don’t fuss.”
“Poor bastard’s running a fever,” Barry clucked as we watched him stagger from the room. “I just know it.”
“Is it something serious?”
There was a narrow wooden box of small cigars on the table next to him. Barry removed one and lit it. “Do you mean, is it AIDS?” he asked, arching his brow at me. Or trying to. “He won’t go to the doctor to find out. Too afraid. He’s HIV positive, you see.” He puffed on the cigar, watching the smoke rise toward the chandelier. “We both are.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Barry.”
“Ruth doesn’t know, by the way,” he said airily. “In fact, no one in the family knows.”
“Why tell me?”
“Just felt like it, I guess. Maybe I’ve had too much to drink. We started with wine at lunch and haven’t stopped since. Have you noticed how no one drinks in the afternoon anymore? I do believe there’s a clear connection between the decline of Western civilization and the death of the two-martini lunch. What do you think?”
“I think no one has any fun anymore. Which, I suppose, is another way of saying you may be on to something.”
“It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,” said Barry, drawing on his cigar. “A certain peace of mind comes with knowing it can all end just like that. I spend a lot of my time thinking about what I haven’t done. Do you know I’ve never been to Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon?” He paused, in case I wanted to toss anything in. I didn’t. “What I’ve come to realize is that there’s no sense getting upset about anything. Just enjoy what and who you have.”
“You don’t have Clethra,” I pointed out.
“I never did,” he countered. “Thor’s her dad.”
“She says you are.”
“Of course she does. It suits her to say that. Otherwise, she’d be doing something terribly dirty, wouldn’t she?”
“I rather thought that was the whole idea.”
“I am her biological father,” Barry conceded. “But he’s the one who’s been there for her through the years—bandaged her scraped knees, wiped away the tears.” He let out a mirthless chuckle. “Awfully strange, the two of them ending up playing hasta la grab ass together.”
“Does it upset you?”
“I don’t condemn them for it, if that’s what you mean. I don’t feel I have a right to. I don’t feel anyone does.”
“That sounds suspiciously like the voice of experience.”
“Oh, it is, Hoagy. It most assuredly is.”
“Ruth told me you’ve been a big help through all of this.”
“I’ve tried. Ruthie and I were good together, early on. I just wasn’t being me, that’s all. It wasn’t easy for her, when I came out. People made fun of her, laughed at her. But she was nothing but supportive. She understood. So now it’s my turn. Whatever she needs. Hell, it’s the least I can do.”
There was a crash in the kitchen—glass shattering.
“I’m okay, damn it!” Marco cried out angrily. “I’m okay!”
Barry’s face fell. Or tried to. “His apparel line is in the toilet, too. Loans up to his ears. The Hasidic look came and went. As a fashion statement, I mean. And I know exactly what you’re going to say next …”
“How can you when I don’t?”
“If he’s flat broke what’s he doing spending six hundred-some bucks on a stupid pair of shoes, right?”
“Not at all. In the world we live in, appearances are everything.”
Barry eyed me approvingly. “You’re very perceptive.”
“I’m a thin entering wedge, all right. Getting back to Marc
o …”
“I’d much rather talk about your thin entering wedge,” he joked.
“Down, boy.”
“I may have to sell my country house to bail him out,” he confessed wistfully. “I’ll miss it terribly. It’s so quiet out there you can hear a cliché drop. And we tool around the back roads in this dear little old bug-eyed Sprite. I suppose that’ll have to go, too.”
“What year is it?” I asked, tugging at my ear.
“A ’59. Are you interested?”
“Does it have any rust?”
“Don’t we all?”
That one I let him have.
“My money is in a trust, you see,” Barry continued. “Can’t be touched without being okayed by a committee of bean counters. Bailing out Marco’s line would not be their idea of sound investment strategy. And even if it were, I’m quite certain they’d demand a blood test of him. Anyone who’s backing fashion these days does. And that would be the end of that.”
“I’m sorry to hear you say all of this, Barry. It gives you a motive.”
He stared at me. “A motive for what?”
“Peddling this tape of Clethra. Lots of money involved.”
“But I didn’t,” he insisted, reddening. “I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. The girl’s my own flesh and blood. I’d never do something like that to her.”
“You wouldn’t be doing it to her. You’d be doing it to him.”
“Thor?”
I nodded. “This is bound to throw even more public sympathy toward Ruth. Hard for people to root for a man who makes videos of his teenaged lover taking her clothes off. It’s unseemly.”
“Maybe so,” he admitted. “But how would I even get hold of that tape?”
“You tell me.”
He turned chilly on me. “I don’t think I like what you’re insinuating, Hoagy.”
“Okay, if you didn’t do it, then how about Marco?”
Barry shook his head. “All butt, no brain. Dumb as a salt cod, that one. Actually, I was thinking it was Thor who did it.”
Marco returned with our martinis. “Thor who did what?” he demanded.
“Nothing, dear,” Barry said hurriedly, reaching for his glass.
“Goddamned caveman is what he is,” Marco spat angrily. “He saw a piece of meat and he took it!”
“Marco, sit down and drink your—”
“Like one of those animals who rub up against schoolgirls on the subway and come in their trousers!” Marco thundered, clenching and unclenching his big fists. He was shaking with rage. “Someone ought to cut the old bastard’s schlong off for what he did to Clethra. And to poor Barry, too. Hurting him this way. Barry doesn’t deserve this, especially …” Marco trailed off; his features darkened.
“Especially now?” I put in.
He shot a look at Barry. “You told him?”
Barry gave him a mild shrug in reply.
Marco breathed in and out several times rapidly, his eyes wild. Man looked like he was about to explode. Then he let out a wounded sob and went running off to the bedroom, knocking over several more partygoers en route. He slammed the door behind him. The whole apartment shook.
Barry sipped his martini, totally unfazed.
I got to my feet. So did Lulu. “Thank you for your time, Barry,” I said.
Barry frowned, or tried to. “But you’ve not touched your drink, Hoagy.”
“You drink it. For some strange reason, I’m not thirsty anymore.”
I walked up Riverside to my old apartment, the drafty fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street I’d had since before I met Merilee. And still kept as an office. It had little or nothing in the way of heat, and hadn’t been painted since the seventies. Or cleaned, for that matter. Something of a dump, if you want to know the truth. But the apartment on Central Park West was ours. The farm was hers. This place was mine. What can I tell you—it’s a guy thing.
Lulu made right for the fridge. There wasn’t much in there besides her jar of anchovies and a half loaf of pumpernickel with a bull’s-eye of blue mold growing on it. I threw her an anchovy. Then I called home.
“How’s my little girl?” I asked when she picked up.
“Fine, darling,” she answered wearily. In the background I could hear small splashing noises.
“And how’s the midget?”
“A holy terror. We’re having a bath. And when I say we, I mean we … No, sweetness, please don’t kick! Mercy, I’ve gotten soap in my eyes six times already. I should start wearing goggles.”
From the floor next to me Lulu started whimpering. She always knows when it’s her mommy on the phone. Don’t ask me how.
“I’ve been thinking, Merilee. We haven’t had an evening out alone in quite some time.”
“We’ve never had an evening out alone. That was all a dream.”
“We’ll dress to kill. Something black and low-cut and slinky.”
“Sounds perfect for you, darling. But what shall I wear?”
“We’ll eat caviar, we’ll drink champagne, we’ll paint the town until we drop. Tracy can stay with Pam for the night. What do you think?”
“I think you’ve just saved my life. But what of Thor and the bovine girl?”
“Oh, him. I would have words with him, if he’s available.”
“They’re out in the chapel, darling.” She lowered her voice. “It’s the afternoon, you know.”
“It’s important, I’m sorry to say.”
“I’ll have Dwayne fetch them out a cordless phone. Hang on … Oh, darling?
“Yes, Merilee?”
“You’re not too terrible.”
“You’re not too terrible yourself.”
Thor got on in a few moments. “How’s the big city, boy?” he boomed, all hale and hearty.
“I take it you haven’t heard the latest news.”
“Which news is that?”
I told him. And he hadn’t known about it. Or at least he gave a very good imitation of not having known about it.
“I would never do such a thing, Hoagy,” he protested, his voice turning thin and strangely high-pitched. “Clethra’s body is a sacred temple. I would never, ever defile it in such a way.”
“You didn’t sell the tape?”
“I don’t even own a video camera,” he insisted. “You must believe me, boy. You must.” He sounded genuinely shaken. And old. He sounded old.
“Thor, would you mind putting Clethra on?”
I heard heated words between the two of them. Couldn’t make out what they were. Then she got on.
“I don’t know anything,” she whined right off, like a kid who’d just been caught with a couple of joints in her sock drawer.
“Clethra, you know who filmed you taking your clothes off, don’t you?”
“Duh … yeah.”
“Well, then we have to have a talk about it.”
“But—”
“When I get back.”
“But—”
“Just you and me.”
“Oh, okay,” she said glumly. “But I don’t know much.”
“That much I already figured out.”
I hung up and went digging in the bedroom closet. The old metal strongbox was up on the top shelf, back behind the shoeboxes full of tax returns and canceled checks, the files full of old contracts, the bound galleys and manuscripts and other paper entrails of my so-called adult life. I got the strongbox down and set it on my desk, staring at it a moment. Then I opened it.
It was all in there. The journals, the notebooks, the photographs. All just as I’d left them. Hadn’t looked at them in, what was it, ten years? Longer? But leafing through them took me right back. Back to Amsterdam and Istanbul and Lisbon and Barcelona. Back to Cadaques, where I tended bar for my keep and fell in love eight times every night. Back to Port Vendres, where I went out with the fleet before dawn. Back to London: “This is a city of smells—diesel fuel, stale ale, cigar smoke and the rancid odor of forgotten ambitions and failed dreams.”
Whoa, heavy, man … To the Isle of Skye: “The light is different here. Perhaps it is the clouds. Or perhaps it is history itself. The world is so much older here.” Step aside, Bill Faulkner … I glanced through the snapshots—a Portuguese girl whose name I didn’t remember but whose breasts I did. A gang of six kids I stayed with in Truro, helping them fix up a thatched cottage that had no heat or running water … I flipped through my sketchbooks—not that I was ever going to be an artist. This was an exercise Thor had taught us. First you looked at something, then you tried to draw it with your eyes closed. It was a way of strengthening your powers of observation. Opening up your mind, or expanding it, or … it was supposed to do something to your mind.
It was Thor who’d urged me to take the year off before I started my career. The world, he assured me, would still be there when I got back. Father had a much different plan for me. He expected me to come take my place at the old brass factory on the banks of the Housatonic River, the one that had been in the family since 1823. But I wanted to see the world first. And I did. And Thor was right. It was the greatest year of my life. And Thor was wrong. My world wasn’t there when I got back. The factory failed. Not that I could have saved it. No one could have. But you couldn’t tell Father that. He’d never forgiven me for deserting him. And I’d never forgiven him for not understanding me. Nothing had changed between us to this day. I still thought he was a rigid, close-minded, sanctimonious prig. He still thought I was a juvenile, irresponsible hedonist. He had never even read my two novels.
And now it was too late. Now he never would.
I sat there, sifting through my artifacts of the road and feeling the old wanderlust. Maybe Yucatan this time. Sleeping on the beach. Living on grilled fish and iced cerveza. New sights. New sounds. New voices, other than the ones already up inside my head. Maybe Thor was right once again. Maybe it was what the novel needed.
The Man Who Cancelled Himself Page 48
