I said I was sure he would be flattered but I would run up and ask him anyway, and I jumped at the chance to “try out” with Travis that excruciatingly poignant scene that would leave millions of moviegoers fumbling for their hankies or Kleenex.
It was easy for Travis and me to hold our separate copies of the “script,” in the form of the just-off-the-press paperback editions of Georgie Boy, which Bantam would soon leave in special display boxes in every supermarket, drugstore, and bookstore in America.
Travis threw his heart into the climactic scene and seemed to be speaking his lines more than reading them, and even his Bodarks accent seemed to vanish. The tears that he and I shed were genuine. I was seized and wracked by an emotion of much greater power than anything I had actually experienced with Dzhordzha: Art is, after all, more real than life.
And the emotional intensity of such art is greater than the most profound sexual pleasure. I would rather have done that with Travis than any of the Jacuzzi acrobatics we actually had done. But I knew that I could never do it again. So perhaps there was another truth: Great art happens only once.
The moment came for Georgie to reach out and hold Princess for the last time. He, Travis-who-had-become-Georgie, had dropped his copy of the paperback and didn’t need it, and he gave me an indescribable look of longing—of having searched so hard to find me and, having found me, of being about to lose me forevermore.
And then his sweet freckled face and his haunted eyes were transformed by an expression of fear that wasn’t in the script at all. Or, I realized, it was not craven fear so much as astonishment, discovery.
I realized that Georgie was no longer looking at Princess but at something beyond her. And I couldn’t resist turning to see what it was. It was not Bolshakov but Trevor Kola, standing at the top of the stairs that led to my aerie.
He had obviously been there for a while. His arms were folded over one another and he was leaning against the wall in a posture of relaxation and contemplation, and he wore the trace of a smile, as if he’d been listening to the whole scene.
Almost automatically he said, but in a gentle voice, “Cut. Print. Perfect.” And he walked up to us, gave me a hug and a kiss on my cheek, and then shook hands with Travis and threw an arm over his shoulders and said to him, “Kid, that was almost on the button. But this is a full shot and we need to see you do something with your body, like maybe shiver a little more, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Travis Coe said.
And then Kola said to me, “How do you manage to keep him forever twelve?”
III
Kola and Gladys had become steadily and inexorably aware, he confessed, that I was Kelian. But he would never, he swore, reveal my secret to anyone. He apologized profusely for any incivilities or rudenesses he may have committed while he was still under the impression that I was “only Kelian’s bimbo.” He would not even tell Jay, when he saw her again next month, that I was actually not only Princess but also Kelian. It was a secret that only he and Gladys would know, and I could be sure that Gladys would never breathe a word of it to anyone, either.
Kola told me a little story about his “old friend” the director John Huston: how, when they were getting ready to begin shooting The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Huston went down to Mexico looking for the author, B. Traven, but could find only a mysterious recluse who called himself Hal Croves and pretended to be a “go-between” for Traven. Like Kola had done with me, Huston had spent several days in Croves’s company, discussing the script and planning the film, before convincing himself that Croves actually was Traven. But to the day of his death, Huston always insisted that Croves was not Traven. He insisted this to the press and Traven’s biographers and anyone else, except a few of Huston’s closest friends…including Kola.
“So,” Kola said to me, “Huston hired Croves to be a technical consultant during the shooting of the picture and kept his identity as Traven a secret during production. I’m prepared to make it worth your while to come out to the coast, Kat.”
I had thought about it even before Kola made the offer, and I had already reached my decision: “Thank you, but I have much work to do here.”
“Your next book?” Kola asked, and when I nodded he requested, “Give me an option on it.”
“It’s a collection of short stories,” I said. “You couldn’t film it.”
“Wanna bet?” he said…And indeed, two years later Trevor Kola made the famous and wonderful box-office hit out of an expansion of one of my stories, All Hid, All Hid (also starring Travis Coe).
For now, there was the problem of how Kola could, as he put it, “wrest” Travis away from me. In the presence of the wide-eyed, open-mouthed boy, Kola explained that he had already arranged with several talent agencies to conduct a major search next month for the boy actor to play Georgie, and Kola was obligated to have a look at two dozen twelve-and thirteen-year-old finalists for the part, but if I could “spare” Travis for a few days, Kola would fly him out to the coast and give him an equal chance to compete with the other kids, most of whom, of course, had several years of professional training in acting.
“He’s raw,” Kola said of Travis in the boy’s presence. “He doesn’t know his ass from his elbow about the profession, and we’ll have the devil’s own time cleaning up his diction. But he’s a natural. He looks like Georgie. He thinks like Georgie. I believe the kid thinks he is Georgie, don’t you, kid?”
“Yes, sir,” Travis said again, which seemed to be the only words he knew to speak in the presence of Kola.
Kola’s final request, before I took him and Gladys back to the airport, was to “see some real hillbillies.” Travis, Kola said, was a “juvenile hick” but not a “real hillbilly.” I tried to explain to Kola that the stereotyped image of rustic mountaineers had disappeared from the American scene forty years earlier, but I agreed to take them in Silvia, he and Gladys in the backseat and Travis sitting up front, out to the wilds of Stick Around country. Travis was willing to point out the cabin where he had grown up, the sight of which brought a tear to Gladys’s eye and even a lump to Kola’s throat, but Travis did not want to tarry. The old sheepdog I’d seen on my previous visit bestirred himself at the sight or scent of Travis, and Travis reached a hand through the car’s window to pat the dog and say “Howdy, ole Prince,” but then he said to me, “Let’s git on out of here,” just as Aunt Fannie emerged from the cabin to see what I was doing back at her place, and he turned his head so she couldn’t see his face. Whatever guilt he felt for not stopping to say hello to the woman who’d raised him (“Now, she did kind of look like a hillbilly,” Kola observed) was no greater than my own guilt for not pausing to introduce these people to Sharon, or Lara Burns, or Day and Diana Whittacker, some of whom may have recognized Silvia and wondered why I was not stopping. The only place I did visit, giving Silvia a workout on the mountainside, was the grave of Daniel Lyam Montross. Kola read the headstone and asked, “What’s your connection with him?”
I didn’t know how else to explain it than to say, “He was my mentor and lover.”
Kola glanced again at the headstone. “But it says he died in 1953. You weren’t even born then.”
“I was born when he died, in fact,” I said. And then I echoed a remark of Kola’s: “But I keep him forever twelve, as a kind of phantom fiancé.”
Travis rode with us to the Fateville airport and said good-bye to Kola, who promised to stay in touch by phone and arrange Travis’s flight to the coast the following month. “Work on your voice,” were Kola’s last words to Travis.
Then I took Travis shopping in the best places in Fateville, to find a new wardrobe and luggage for his upcoming journey to Hollywood.
The boy was in a trance for days, trying without luck to imagine the adventure that awaited him and finding himself unable to stop thinking and talking about it. He couldn’t function as my houseboy any longer. Strange to relate, Morris refused to have anything further to do with Travis. Morris would not even e
at food that Travis opened and served for him. So I had to resume feeding Morris myself, as well as handling all the other chores that Travis neglected. The only thing Travis was still good for, I discovered, was our sexual sport in the Jacuzzi and in bed.
Did he truly understand that he was going to abandon me? Did he realize that I would feel a greater loss when he left for Hollywood than I had when he left to live with Lurline?
Yes, he did. One day, the week before he was scheduled to fly out of the Bodarks, he was gone all day, without explanation, and when he returned in the late afternoon he had another twelve-year-old boy with him.
IV
Although I was touched at his solicitude and consideration, I was shocked at his frank realism bordering on cynicism. The other boy stood bashfully with his hands in his pockets, his face openmouthed, gawking at my apartment. When I drew Travis into another room to protest, he whispered urgently, “But he aint never done it afore!” as if that somehow would make the boy more appealing to me.
“‘He hasn’t ever done it before,’” I corrected him, mindful of Kola’s concern for his diction.
“What I said. I don’t think he even knows how to play with hisself. You’ll have to learn him how.”
“Travis,” I said. “Oh, Travis.” In spite of myself, I was becoming fascinated by the idea. The other boy was not unattractive; he was simply far behind Travis in handsomeness and charm. “Where did you find him?”
“Huh?” Travis said. “Never mind where I found him. This town is full of ’em. Do you want him or not?”
“If I took him,” I pointed out, “don’t you understand what that would make you? A pimp!”
“What’s a pimp?” he asked.
“A panderer!” I said.
“What’s a panderer?” he asked.
“A procurer!” I said. “I don’t suppose your vast reading has ever exposed you to the concept? It’s a person who obtains another person to offer to a third party for sexual intrigues or prostitution.” I remembered that Bolshakov had an obsession with prostitutes and spent most of his spare time simply watching them on the street, a form of silent pimping.
“What’s wrong with that?” he wanted to know.
I wondered how to explain. If he didn’t instantly grasp the corrupt, mercenary exploitation of pandering, his innocence was greater than I’d given him credit for. With some sarcasm, I asked, “Do you plan to watch?”
“Naw, not unless you want me to,” he said.
The other boy, whose name was Billy, had supper with us, during which most of the talk concerned Travis’s rather boastful account of how he was going to be flying to Hollywood soon. Billy did not want any wine; that is, he had never had any before and was “afraid to start,” although Travis assured him it was “real good stuff and will loosen ye up.” After supper, Travis took the remainder of the bottle of wine and retreated to his quarters, which I had recently furnished with a large-screen color television, at his request, so he could observe and imitate “real actors.”
When Travis was gone, I asked the boy, “Do your parents know where you are?”
“No,” he said in his tiny soft voice, “but they don’t care. I just told Mom I was staying over at a friend’s.”
“What did Travis tell you was the reason for bringing you here?”
“He said you wanted me to get in your swimming pool with you without any clothes on.”
“It’s just a large tub, not a swimming pool,” I said. “But would you like to do that?”
“Sounds like fun,” he said.
Billy proved to be even more of a water sprite than Travis had been. Not as skinny as Travis, but still with a thoroughly undeveloped body, a body waiting to be shown all the pleasures of which the flesh is capable, Billy became a merman to my mermaid, a nixie to my nix, a Gandharva to my Apsaras, a Limnaiad to my Naiad, a kelpie to my undine. We spent so much time in my oversized Jacuzzi that the skin of our fingertips puckered. And he was truly a virgin. For me, that was as if I were the novelist who, after some minor works, suddenly thinks of a totally original story, a story that nobody has ever heard before, a story that will seize and entertain and edify anyone who reads it.
A week later Billy rode with us to the Fateville airport to send Travis off to Hollywood, and the two boys exchanged parting words:
“You lucky dog,” Billy said to Travis.
“Naw, you’re the real lucky one,” Travis said. “Now you’ve got her all to yourself.”
“See you in the moom pitchers,” Billy said.
“You shore will,” Travis said.
The next time we saw Travis, Billy and I sitting together in the Razorback Cinema in Fateville; Travis’s wide-eyed, innocent face was with Jesslyn Fry’s in a shifting rack focus of the teaser beneath the credit AND INTRODUCING TRAVIS COE.
Billy’s education had progressed by that time, so that he knew better than the character of Georgie what Princess was doing to herself.
24
I
Morris at eighteen is arthritic and slow, and the vet tells me I ought not expect him to live much longer, but I have come to anticipate that he may survive me. He still roams the hotel, still makes himself freely available to guests—as if he has begun to take seriously the title of General Manager bestowed upon him. Our actual, human general manager is the fourth or fifth—I’ve lost count—we’ve had since I’ve been here, and the ownership of the Halfmoon has changed hands thrice during the nine years of my tenure. The current owner, an outfit called Historic Hotels, seeking to enhance business, is having tonight a much-advertised séance for our resident quartet of ghosts and is shamelessly capitalizing upon the success a few years ago of my off-Broadway play Hotel Mezzaluna, in which those ghosts converse and interact among themselves: a Swedish carpenter who died in the construction of the hotel, a college girl who jumped from a balcony when it was Mezzaluna College in the 1920s, a woman cancer patient from the days in the 1930s when it was the quack Dr. Baker’s Mezzaluna Hospital, and the mysterious “frockcoated gentleman” whose murder provides the play’s plot. Dear Trevor tried so desperately to convert Hotel Mezzaluna to the screen, the fourth of my works to be filmed by him and to star Travis (who at twenty-one played—badly, I thought—the ghost Sigbjorn, the Swedish carpenter); Trev was hampered by the essential staginess and lack of action in the play, as well as by competition with other recent and better spook movies, most notably Ghost and Dead Again. Trev was also stymied by the refusal of the Halfmoon’s then-management to let him actually shoot the film here, and he was required to use a hotel in Eureka, California, that bore no resemblance to the Halfmoon. I am told the film is still available on videotape, but I would just as soon not have its mangled apings of the stage play continuing to circulate and helping draw a sell-out audience for tonight’s séance, which I’ve agreed to attend only as a favor to Jackie Randel, the Halfmoon’s current sales manager, a native Bodarks lady to whom I’m indebted for several kindnesses. I have a feeling that I may even enjoy myself, having never attended a séance before and having little expectation that “Veronica,” the imported British medium, will actually contact the four ghosts, not one of whom has ever manifested itself (herself, himself) to me during my many years here. But how can a dignified, proper séance be conducted in a crowded ballroom—or rather, dining room, the Crystal Room itself—with an audience of several hundred curious but skeptical snoops, many of whom, I suspect, will be here not to see the ghosts but to see the unmasked V. Kelian in his newly revealed identity as an aging but still-glamorous Svanetian princess?
When I appeared a few months ago on the cover of Vanity Fair with those words, V. KELIAN EXPOSED, it was almost as if one of my lives had already ended. At the time I began writing these memoirs, at Wölfflin’s urging, I had no idea that I would find myself in the position, as I am now, of having to skim over eight years of my life that I had intended to cover in detail, and it is no consolation that Nabokov himself in the prototype, Speak, Memory, skims ov
er more years than that and commences his last chapter with that atypically clumsy sentence “They are passing, posthaste, posthaste, the gliding years—,” although it is from him rather than from Ingraham that I slip into the comfort of this present tense. Indeed, the passing years, those not covered by this chronicle, seem illusory or illusive in the engrams of my recollection, mostly happy though they were, confirming my belief that truly memorable experiences are always unpleasant ones: I can recall that far-distant time in Pittsburgh with much greater clarity than I could tell my attentive reader just what happened to me this past winter.
It is April again, and as I approach my fortieth birthday I find myself actually anticipating the pure poshlost of tonight’s séance because it may divert me for one evening from my essential loneliness, a condition the general human nature of which I have explored so thoroughly in my recent fictions, last year’s best-selling novel Original Flavor and my in-press novel to appear next month, Earthstar (which has taken its title from the strange and lonely mushroom Geastrum), as well as the moderately popular nonfiction book Dawn of the Osage, in which I essayed to speculate upon the essential loneliness of the aboriginal inhabitants of these Bodarks. Tomorrow afternoon I’m going to grant an interview, rather belatedly it seems, to Paris Review for their continuing series “The Art of Fiction,” and I’ve already told their Barbara Phillips that I’d much rather talk not about my writing habits and such as that but about the condition of loneliness, which, more than lust and self-doubt, is the essential state for successful writing. If the publication of Louder, Engram! brings to the Halfmoon a passel of persons seeking to ameliorate my condition, they shall be disappointed not simply because I prefer to cultivate my loneliness but because, as I am about to reveal, I will not be here when this book appears.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 34
