Three Balconies

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  “It’s drivel, Cliff,” he said. “You can’t possibly agree with him.”

  It was as if he had to have one firm position of his own – or perhaps he thought of writing as a higher calling than I did.

  Despite his generally pliable style, or possibly because of it, I was a little afraid of him.

  One night, he called to invite me to a cast party on Eastern Long Island in celebration of the completion of Lilith, a film to which he had some mysterious connection. I decided to ask along Jane Sandler, a young schoolteacher I had met at a pottery class of all places. (I was out of control, flailing around idiotically for something to do.) She had taught me how to make love slowly and exquisitely – and probably how to make love at all. She had soft brown eyes, a comforting voice – and I’m afraid I lack the ingenuity to describe her without making reference to her breasts, which were magnificent. Years later, at the steak house on Morris Island where we met frequently, Beau would look off in the distance, lower his voice reverentially and say; “I still cannot believe Jane Sandler’s tits.”

  I picked her up in the sports car I had bought with the first royalties from my play – and probably as a consolation prize for losing my wife. Beau joined us and then there we were, speeding along in the cool and promising air of Eastern Long Island. We had little difficulty in being admitted to the set where Beau introduced us to various of the principals. Jane slipped into the background and I found myself dancing with Jean Seberg. I had seen her in “Breathless” and, along with half the country, had fallen in love with her . . . or at least her performance. It was difficult for me to actually see her – she was all fairness and shimmer and international fame; if someone had told me that I would once be holding this apparition in my arms, I would have considered the notion absurd.

  “You’re Jean Seberg,” I said, in my one attempt at speech. “And I’m dancing with you.”

  When the music stopped, I released her, or rather broke away in relief. I was not to see her again until years later when she knocked on my door at midnight in the Beverly Hills Hotel and asked me to buy a sewing machine for the wife of a black radical living in Watts. As a spur, she produced a check from Sammy Davis, Jr., whose room was further down the hall – and who had already purchased one.

  In the brief time we had been separated, Beau had developed a mysterious grievance against Warren Beatty. With clenched fists and a tight jaw, he led me to the star’s trailer.

  “Come on out, Warren,” he shouted, pounding on the door. “I know you’re in there.”

  When there was no response, he put his shoulder against the door and tried to ram it down. I had seen that done by detectives in movies and always had an urge to try it. We took turns for awhile, the door finally collapsing on my watch, so to speak. The fact that it happened this way did not upset Beau so much as intrigue him.

  “Cliff is stronger than I am,” he would say, when introducing me to new friends; then he would look off as if consulting some distant source of knowledge, and add: “But I’m tougher.”

  A pretty young actress in a petticoat stood cowering in the corner of the trailer, holding one hand to her cheek, and with the other shielding herself with a dressing gown – yet another pose I had seen in films, possibly dating back to the silents. Crew members appeared and suddenly bodies were flying, with Beau and me standing literally back-to-back, punching out at flesh and furniture. It was completely impersonal and tremendously exhilarating – something else I’d always longed to do. Never once did it occur to me that I or someone else might end up blinded or otherwise maimed for life. Police sirens sounded in the distance. When I pulled myself out of the rubble, I was miraculously intact, and anxious to have another try at it. It was as if I’d survived a wild ride in an amusement park. I felt a slight tug of reality when the police actually arrived. The fact that they were state troopers, with their no-nonsense reputation – was unnerving. A set designer, holding a limp arm, pointed us out as the instigators. Then Beau, in a fine moment, brushed himself off and with a disbelieving shake of his head, said to one of the troopers, “I cannot believe you can go through four years as a Marine and then have something like this happen.”

  The trooper nodded sympathetically. Before I knew it, we had scooped up Jane and were back in the car, racing along the highway, reviewing the adventure, embroidering it – all of which was as much fun as the episode itself. Then, as we neared the city, and the whiskey began to wear off, I realized that I was having a private celebration. Though they sat beside me, Jane and Beau were in a world of their own, speaking intensely as if they had just met on a first date. Where did she live? What books did she like? The Stranger? Beau loved The Stranger. Could they meet for drinks the following night? She didn’t see why not. This time I was the one who could not believe what was happening. Beau and I took turns doing things that the other couldn’t believe. I said nothing, as if I was impervious to it all. To comment would have shown that I lacked sophistication, which was unthinkable. But didn’t he know what I was going through, how torn up I was at the time? He had his wife and daughters, I had only Jane – and yet here he was, casually taking her away from me. What was going through Jane’s mind, for that matter, although it didn’t occur to me at the time that she had any part in it.

  I dropped them off at separate addresses and began to feel shabby about the evening. The set designer, who became prominent, never forgave me. Whenever we met, he would take on a grim look and go into a defensive crouch, as if preparing to fend off an attack. I tried to dismiss the Lilith episode as hijinks – maybe Beau was a fighter . . . I certainly wasn’t . . . but the set designer wasn’t having any.

  “Oh, sure,” he would say to his wife. “Cliff holds ‘em and Beau hits ‘em.”

  As it turned out, Beau didn’t quite have his wife, Heidi, after all. I met them together at a book party some months later, one of the many gatherings to which he had easy and unquestioned access. I was no longer seeing Jane. Our sad little romance, more of a convalescence for me actually, continued with a series of desperate little hand-holding encounters at Irish bars in midtown, and then petered out entirely. I had asked her about her date with Beau. She would say only that they had taken a long walk and that he had behaved like a gentleman. This disappointed me since I’d been expecting, and possibly hoping for something that had more bite to it. And I sensed that she was not telling me the entire story.

  Beau sat alone at the party in an almost visible black cloud. The effect was off-putting. One of the guests was a critic named McMartin who had known Beau for several years. I learned from him that Beau’s sister had committed suicide.

  “She leapt from a boat in Caracas to which she’d fled to join her married lover.”

  Though barely out of Wellesley, according to McMartin, she had been married twice and lived for a time in Pakistan. Through some curious inversion of logic, I found this troubled and frantic background to be romantic. The good schools, the fact that she was Beau’s sister, the impulsive behavior – I was convinced that had we met I would have been in love with her.

  Though Beau said little, he was stretched out elaborately on a divan in the center of the room. There was something flamboyant about his grief. This shifted the focus of the party away from the short story writer whose work was being celebrated and who began to flounce about in irritation.

  “Forgive me,” he said to McMartin, with a nod in Beau’s direction, “but who exactly is this person?”

  From time to time, guests, myself included, would wander over to Beau, pat him sympathetically on the shoulder and otherwise try to console him. A major novelist sat beside him and told him in a whisper of a loss that he himself had suffered in Paris, all of which failed to penetrate the gloom. McMartin said to me: “He’s been carrying on like this in public for weeks.”

  I introduced myself to Heidi who stood apart from Beau at the party. She was a slender raven-haired woman with exquisite skin and patrician features whose flesh was cold to the touch.
As I was later to learn, she had been a Homecoming Queen at the University of Missouri, majored in political science and then veered off to become a curator at the Indian Museum. She now spoke with an English accent that was convincing. The two had met at a resort in Barbados and must have made a striking couple. They still did, though they had little to do with one another at the party. Though we hadn’t met before, she said I had been pointed out to her at the theatre one night.

  “I was struck by the care and concern you showed for your wife, Cliff.”

  Evidently I’d been held up in the LeVyne household as an example of good domestic behavior. A lot of good it did me, I thought.

  As the party proceeded, Beau, from time to time, would call out to his wife: “Hey, cunt, let’s go home,” a remark the other guests chose not to hear and which Heidi threw off with a nervous chuckle. Despite this display, which went beyond rudeness, I continued to be envious of anyone whose family was intact. Was there a lesson in this, I wondered. Treat a wife with civility and lose her. Call her a cunt in public and she’s yours forever.

  Heidi left without him. Later on, I joined Beau and a small group in a funereal walk back to his brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. One member of our group was a film animator who listened to Beau’s mournful lament and then cut him off sharply.

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” he said. “You’re behaving like an idiot.”

  He was a thin, hollow-chested man who wore thick glasses and whose animated characters were as pathetic-looking as he was. I wondered what I could do to keep Beau from attacking him. Indeed, Beau rose up murderously and narrowed his eyes in a look I was to see many times again. But then he withdrew cheerfully, invited us all up for a drink and was never heard to mention his loss again.

  Beau turned up next at a literary symposium that was held at a university in South Carolina; there wasn’t a clue as to what he was doing there and why he was invited or if he had indeed been invited at all. Writers in various disciplines had been given $l000 each by a foundation to show up for several days and to discuss The Novelist as Journalist or The Journalist as Novelist – or some other uncompelling topic. We were also expected to be available to the students. I flew down with McMartin. We were joined at a kick-off luncheon by Isaac Bashevis Singer who was the last to arrive and who had come by bus. After the first course had been served, the great novelist leaned across to me – I thought to impart some bit of philosophical wisdom.

  “Do you mind, Mr. Adams,” he said, “trading me your vegetables for my meat?”

  A poet who had been in and out of institutions stood up and accused the group at large of being unsympathetic to the Palestinians. After he had pulled himself together, a novelist, with a shelf of lugubrious works to her credit, emphasized her seriousness of purpose to all who would listen.

  “I’m not funny,” she said, with a sharp glance in my direction.

  “Neither is Cliff,” said Beau, rallying to my defense.

  The editor of a distinguished literary quarterly got up from the table, stretched wearily and said: “I can see this is another town in which I’m not going to get laid.”

  Beau did not participate in the main discussion – held in an auditorium – but walked about in some vague supervisory way, instructing sound technicians. Once again no one thought to question his function. We were all a bit strident on stage. I remember insisting, idiotically, that as a writer I needed to be situated at all times in the center of the action – whatever that meant. McMartin made an impassioned plea that he be allowed to work.

  “I say to you one and all, my friends, let me write,” he cried out to a puzzled audience which must have wondered, as I did, what was stopping him.

  The atmosphere lightened up a bit toward evening when the poet’s wife arrived to cart him off to a rest home, the strain of the events having proved too much for his fragile spirit. At a local restaurant, the novelist said she had seen a recent play of mine.

  “It was an improvement over your earlier one.”

  She held forth for a bit on the low standard of American fiction after which the great Mr. Singer took me aside and said: “Tell me, Mr. Adams, why does she wear such little skirts?”

  A group of locals became abusive, hollering out catcalls in our direction. Taking courage from the presence of Beau, who sat beside him, the quarterly editor proposed that we fight them, a suggestion that received little support from the group.

  “Do they know about my arms?” Beau asked, with a look in the direction of the offending group. Actually, his arms were of modest size, the great strength coming up from his trunk. The locals quieted down, and it’s possible the sight of his brooding and menacing figure had much to do with it.

  After dinner, Beau and the novelist went for a walk on the campus. Several hours later, he returned, in an exasperated state, to the dormitory in which we were housed.

  “I have never met anyone that horny in my life,” he said, collapsing into a chair.

  “Did you fuck her?” asked the quarterly editor cheerfully.

  “Did I fuck her,” Beau repeated with derision.

  “Well, did you?” the editor persisted.

  “Cliff,” Beau appealed to me, “Can you believe he asked me that?”

  The question went unanswered, Beau not deigning to answer it specifically.

  We gathered the next morning for breakfast and then went off to our final responsibility which was to speak informally to students in the class to which we had been assigned. Beau disappeared down one of the corridors and I still have no idea of where he went. He had no assignment. Did he visit a class all the same? If so, who did he say he was and what did he talk about? Or did he pretend to visit some phantom class and continue to pace the corridors? What had he told his employer to explain his mid-week absence? What was his reason for making the trip, which all seemed so unnecessary and sad?

  Beau owned a cottage on what I think of as a dark and cruel stretch of beach at the northern tip of Morris Island. Built of rough stone, it seemed more of a lair than a home. He went about and virtually lived in a loincloth made of black lycra that was ill-suited to his thick body. Mike Tyson, the heavyweight fighter who was built along similar lines, was later to popularize the style. Each morning, at dawn, Beau would invade the ocean and swim out for miles. I rented a cottage nearby. Although I was much too respectful of the strong undertow to join him – frightened actually – I did watch Beau several times. Predictably, he was a powerful swimmer. But it was as if he swam not so much for pleasure as to match his strength against the tide. He did much the same with Danny, the Labrador Retriever I brought along for company during the summer months. One morning, Beau came over for a visit and got down on a mat to wrestle with the animal. Playful at first, he began to mock the dog’s mere eighty pounds of weight and to get the animal in a chokehold and to apply pressure. I had to talk Beau down quietly – I was always having to talk him down – and he gradually released his grip. But what if he had strangled my dog?

  Though never quite content, he was as close to that state as he ever came during the summer months at the beach. He could feel that whatever race he was in had stalled – whatever phantom competitors he imagined had no doubt withdrawn for a few months, enabling him to do the same. Unshaven, charred by the sun, he holed up for most of the day, reading and rereading the novels of Ernest Hemingway until he had virtually memorized them, and generally attending to his family. From time to time, he would be seen in his loincloth, walking through a nearby gay community, in the style of a Western gunslinger invading a frontier town.

  Each weekend, I took part in a fierce and often bloody volleyball game presided over by Beau and a Newport financier who made it clear that he disliked me. I’m a decent enough player, but I have an underhand serve and I tend to slap at the ball rather than lock my fingers and cradle it in the Olympic style that was coming into vogue at the time. It may be that the Newport man’s feeling about me had only to do with my playing style although I
doubt it. Our group was made up of stockbrokers, advertising executives, physicians and a celebrated actor who flung his tiny frame into the game and insisted that no special privileges be awarded his celebrity. There was an informal league along the beach, but our chief opponents were a houseful of hippies who played the game cheerfully and were unbegrudging about their almost automatic loss to us each weekend. They showed interest in the players’ wives who came to watch the games, and as the summers rolled along, began romantically to pick them off one by one, luring the wives back to their commune. In some cases, the liaisons became permanent, with the result that the beach soon became denuded of stockbroker wives. An exception was Heidi, who received visits from a private school headmaster on days when Beau was away in Manhattan. Beau was aware of the man and dismissed him.

  “I don’t understand what she sees in that ridiculous faggot.”

  As marriages disintegrated, the games became vicious, with angry commodities men flying up in the air to spike the ball down on the heads of hippies who had broken up their families. One casualty was a plastic surgeon who broke three fingers on his operating hand and for six months was unable to correct noses.

  Toward the end of one season, we were matched against a local industrial team for championship of the beach. With a crowd looking on, I took up my usual position and was asked by the Newport man to step aside.

  “We’re trying something else,” he said, signaling to a boy who worked in the local supermarket to take my place.

  I looked over at Beau who chuckled and pawed at the sand as if the affront was some minor inconvenience and could we please get on with the game. Humiliated, I watched from the sidelines and never played again. I said nothing to Beau, of course, since the vocabulary of our friendship did not have language for the expression of hurt feelings. Did he enjoy my pain? He had professed to care about me and would embarrass me in front of others by suddenly declaring: “I can’t begin to tell you how much I love Cliff.”