I set off for Jefferson Hill at precisely six thirty-five, walked at a steady pace through the still fairly animated streets and made my way where the township itself started to thin out. At six fifty-five I stood on the doorstep of no. 16. I took a deep breath and rang the bell.
It was Ronnie who opened the door, Ronnie whose voice I had already heard coming from within the house – half heard, rather, against a background of crashingly loud music – calling out, ‘I’ll get it.’ He was barefoot and had on a pair of faded jeans and a plum-red V-neck sweater over a blue-and-green checked shirt. That these colours did not produce a very elegant effect together I scarcely noticed: it was as though, having waited so long for this moment, I were now standing face to face with nothing short of a myth, with at the very least some dashing, dazzling product of man’s imagination, a Romeo, a Fabrizio, a Steerforth.
Smiling winningly, a casual, open smile, the most elementary of social graces, which I nevertheless thrilled to as though it heralded a declaration of love, he extended his hand.
‘Hi. You must be Giles.’
I took Ronnie’s hand in my own, my flesh enfolded his, so long desired. Then he said, nodding his head backward in the direction of the music, ‘Are you into heavy metal?’
Weeks of poring over magazines destined for fourteen-year-olds having familiarised me with that curious expression, I would have been quite capable of parrying the question without making a fool of myself in the other’s eyes. But before I could answer, Ronnie himself, with nothing but sweet amiability in his manner, added, ‘No, I guess not.’ Then, with a sideways switch of his arm, ‘Come in, come in. I’ll turn it off.’
Everything else he said, as I accompanied him along a narrow hallway and into a bright, high-ceilinged living-room, was just as banal – ‘Honey, Giles is here’ (this to his fiancée, who was presumably in the kitchen) or ‘Let me take your coat’ or ‘Audrey, come see the flowers Giles brought you’ – but to his lover’s ear they became so many mingled harmonies. And I longed to kiss the two pearly, slightly rabbity front teeth I had come to know as well as my own.
The room, which also contained a dining table, already laid, had been done more tastefully than might have been expected, but what my eye was drawn to were those objects alone, recalled from a hundred photographs, which had become the very fetishes of my passion. A soft toy panda sitting comically at the fireside; an ornately painted guitar propped up in a corner; a silver-framed snapshot on the mantelpiece of a very long-haired Ronnie standing shoulder to shoulder with the singer Bruce Springsteen, inscribed To R. B. from the Boss; a tiny Japanese bonsai tree in a pot.
Audrey stepped in from the kitchen wiping her hands on a tea-towel, reminding me with a simper that I had agreed to take pot luck and leaving again almost at once to find a vase for the gratefully acknowledged white roses. Ronnie offered me a drink – apologising because there was nothing in the house but beer and club soda -and our first evening together got under way.
The conversation began with an exchange of those inoffensive commonplaces that characterise all tentative social communication – bland generalities about Britain and the United States, about how uninhabitable the Hamptons had become of late, especially on summer weekends when the influx of New Yorkers fleeing the humid metropolis made it next to impossible to find a parking space or a half-decent table in a restaurant – and we even heard ourselves edifying each other with brief and nuggety profundities about the weather and the likeliest effect upon it of the damage done to the ozone layer. With the unembarrassed candour that I might have expected of him, however, and that could only honour him the more in my eyes, Ronnie soon showed himself impatient to have me speak of his career; and that evening I talked to the young actor as I am certain no one had ever talked to him before nor, am I equally certain, would ever again. I proceeded to detail his performances scene by scene, almost shot by shot, as though blessed with some sort of infallible photographic memory. Ronnie, unable to contain his delight at hearing himself spoken of with such authority and expertise, his eyes aglitter, his two elbows poised on the table top, his bare, suntanned arms converging at hands tightly clasped under his chin to form the apex of a triangle that bewitched me just to look at it, ingested what I was saying not merely with his mind but with his entire body and seemed to catch his breath again and again in incredulous fascination as I complimented him on this minor piece of business or that line of dialogue that had been delivered, as I would suggest, with an unsuspected poignancy of tone and expression. And, as I spoke, Audrey would turn to him again and again with a glow of pride and satisfaction on her face that I was gratified to interpret as meaning, ‘Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you?’
Watching the spellbound youth opposite me at table, with the tiny bonsai tree on a wall-shelf behind his head, it struck me just how like that tree Ronnie himself was, a slim, exotic stem of flesh all of whose tender shoots ought to be so pampered, so lovingly nurtured, all the deadwood in him so tidily trimmed off, that he too would come to see, as his lover did, that it would be better were he never to grow up at all. I did not doubt that I had wholly captivated him, on whose features admiration was now freely commingling with a certain awe and a respect for age and experience that was perhaps something new in his life; and this was confirmed by a trivial but for me momentous incident that occurred towards the end of the evening. It happened that, while I was in full flight, Audrey had interrupted to ask whether or not I would take coffee and, to my great and secret gladness, Ronnie replied so snappishly to her that she had stalked off into the kitchen in a sulk. Nor did he follow her to ask forgiveness, merely shrugging his shoulders and raising his eyebrows at me as though to say, ‘Women!’ It’s true that, on her return to the living-room with the coffee, he now slightly shamefacedly made her sit by his side on the sofa, pecked her affectionately on the cheek and sat for a long while afterwards with his arm encircling her neck; yet such an obviously dutiful and deliberately public display of endearment did not, could not, dampen my intoxication at the involuntary fit of impatience that had preceded it.
Nothing had been said all evening of the precise nature of Ronnie’s relationship with Audrey. But, shortly before midnight, when I stood on the doorstep saying goodbye, and was on the point of proposing that we dine again but next time at my invitation, Ronnie, thanking me over and over for my words of advice and shaking my hand for the longest time, also happened to announce in that casual way he had that, because of an imminent writers’ strike, the shoot of his new film had been brought forward by several weeks and Audrey and he would be flying out to Hollywood five days hence to be married there instead of on Long Island as initially planned.
I offered the young couple my very best wishes and turned away from the house on Jefferson Hill as though entrusted with a fatal gift. As I slowly walked down towards the town, in which only a few stray house-lights still flickered in the darkness, each of them, as I fancied, separated from its closest neighbour by millions of light years, my brain seethed in uncontrollable ebullition, the richest expectations mixed with quite unbridled despair. I had set out to conquer the boy and I had conquered him, filled his puppyish mind with ambitions and aspirations such as it could never have entertained on its own, such, too, as his foolish little dormouse of a fiancée would never have been able to inspire. I could not lose him now.
Fretful with longing, I didn’t sleep at all that night, and the whole of the next day just seemed to prolong the same, almost hallucinatory state of mind. The following night, too, I battled with every species of conflicting desire, and it was only in the cold light of the second morning that I knew a quick decision was in place.
Exactly at ten o’clock I dialled the actor’s number -that number which by rights I ought not to have known. It rang seven times before it was answered, dozily, by Ronnie himself. With a thickly voiced apology, he asked to absent himself again and the telephone stayed dead for a minute or two. When he returned, he sounded fresher and more al
ert, as though he had sprinkled water into his eyes. I apologised in my turn, for having wakened him, then put it to him that he and I might meet that morning in town. Ronnie was clearly surprised, even startled, by my invitation and questioned me on its purpose. And when I insisted that he must wait until he see me for an explanation, he chided me for being so mysterious with what he charmingly called ‘an old friend’ but agreed to meet me a half-hour later. Where? I remembered that in Irving’s there were one or two rather isolated and private booths at the back that would most probably remain unoccupied until the lunch-hour rush and allow us to converse undisturbed. Ronnie fell in with the suggestion and we hung up simultaneously. Neither of us had made mention of Audrey.
He was, as I had known he would be, late – fifteen minutes late. I had selected the very furthest booth from the entrance of the diner, one that was nevertheless directly in its view. There I ordered a coffee and sat quite patiently stirring the spoon and staring out ahead of me. And even if Ronnie was late, he was the first customer to arrive after I had myself. He sauntered in from the street, turned out in his eternal blue jeans and a thin linen jacket, the collar upturned, the cuffs of the sleeves folded back over his wrists, still his unmistakable, ravishing self, in spite of a pair of dark glasses that lent him a somewhat rakehell air. He slouched down opposite me, ordered a Coke, pushed the glasses up on to his lovely head of blond hair and quizzically cocked his sun-kindled features.
Irving’s hoarse-voiced chatter was audible at the far end of the restaurant; a single customer perched on one of the barside stools was monotonously tapping a spoon against a saucer as he turned the pages of a newspaper; there could be heard, too, from beyond the half-open door to the kitchen the orgasmic crescendo of a racecourse commentary. When I started to speak, in a rush of words, I was quickly made aware that I was merely reiterating the compliments I had paid Ronnie the previous evening; so that he, if just as visibly gladdened as he had been, if smiling that same bashful smile of his, also looked a little baffled, as though he could not quite comprehend why he had so soon been called out to hear them again.
It was then that I adopted the loftiest overview imaginable, that I spoke to the unlettered boy of the Oedipus and of Oedipal themes, of that now tender, now torturing, imbroglio of love and hate, of a love near to hatred and a hatred nearly indistinguishable from love, wherein fathers and sons have eternally ensnared each other, of the related theme of the quest for law and authority, a theme that could be traced through the entire history of the world’s drama, from the prototypical and emblematic personage of Oedipus himself to that, his counterpart of a more contemporary psychology, of Hamlet. I then passed on to the theme’s resurgence in the American theatre of our own century and the pervasive influence that such a resurgence had had on the modern American cinema; and if, there, I was very much less sure of my thesis, was in truth half improvising, it thrilled me that Ronnie would nod his head and mutely spur me on, as though we two were as father and son ourselves. These, I concluded, and not the roles unworthy of him that he had hitherto been assigned, and that if they were not to become stumbling blocks must be considered as mere stepping stones, these were the roles upon which he was born to leave his mark, roles whose dominant mythology was that of the father, of the search for the father and the death of the father, narratives of a true Oedipal inspiration.
Then, tensely excited, finding that I had often to clear my throat, growing incredulous myself at what I was saying, I took a more personal and intimate tack, I insinuated – none too subtly, I fear – that the youth’s career, possibly his very life, was reaching a turning point and that he would regret it ever after were he to be tempted down the wrong path. I was mortified to hear myself all but wheedling in my endeavours to make him understand that he should not lazily fly out to Hollywood and make Hotpants College III as though there were no alternative – that an alternative did indeed exist.
It was towards the close of this speech that I first noticed Ronnie shifting uneasily in his seat and, once or twice, when my voice seemed to become painfully shrill, turning his head to make certain we were not overheard. But, only a moment later, his face would crease into a smile again, he would shrug his shoulders and with a half-humorous pout of self-deprecation seek to make light of his discomfiture; and, when he spoke, he would try to intimate that everything he had heard me say, now and three days earlier, represented little more for him than, as he put it, ‘a terrific ego trip’, to be luxuriantly savoured, to be positively lapped up, not to be taken really seriously for a second.
Yet the vulnerable young creature was, I believed, already half inside the trap I was setting for him; I could read in his eyes how he still craved to gorge on the praise and attention the inadequacies of his career had hitherto denied him; and although I could not afford to have him too alarmed, the course to which I had committed myself was irreversible and there was nothing for me now but to press home what I felt to be my advantage. Thus I reminded him that I was a writer, that, even if he had not heard of me, I was, in England, in Europe, a famous writer, esteemed, respected, paid attention to. And I vowed, I vowed that I would henceforth devote myself to his career, that I would write the kind of role and the kind of film which his gifts merited, that I was ready to subordinate everything else in my life to that end – it would be a total commitment on my part and it would demand no less total a commitment from him. ‘I realise,’ I added, and God knows what had got into me, ‘that you are bound by temporary attachments –’ and as I said these fatal words I waved my arm in vaguely the direction of Jefferson Hill.
Ronnie would not now suffer me to go on. Temporary attachments?’ he repeated in disbelief. He shook his head as though believing I was insane or else merely beneath contempt, and there began to appear on his face an expression of tight-lipped cynicism such as I had never seen in any of his photographs.
All the more desperately did I struggle to reanimate the eloquence, the glib command, which had served me well until then. I attempted to evoke, to set forth in words that he wouldn’t misunderstand, the type of relationship that had ever existed between a younger man and his elder, this elder being a writer, oftentimes a poet, by whom the youth would accept to be moulded, shaped, educated, inspired on to heights of spiritual and intellectual endeavour he could not, could never, attain by himself. In years past, I told him, there had arisen almost a tradition of such romantic friendships, and I mentioned Cocteau and Radiguet, Verlaine and Rimbaud-
My allusion to Rimbaud seeming in particular to confuse him, I don’t know why, I unguardedly hastened to explain it and made my second fatally wrong move -’Rimbaud,’ I said, ‘the French poet, who was Verlaine’s lover.’
With a swift, anxious glance over his shoulder, Ronnie drew his dark glasses back down on to his eyes, their two blind man’s sockets making his face appear rather paler than perhaps it was. He made to speak, as though disgustedly to repudiate my advances, then seemed to soften again. With a gentle, graceful flick of his wrist he took my hand in his, and for one brief, blissful instant I imagined, but no, it was only to shake it, politely and coldly – the brisk, neutral handshake of someone on the point of taking his leave.
He started to rise to his feet, thanked me for what I had said about his work and hoped that he could nevertheless continue to believe that I had been sincere. It was all over, as I knew, yet I cared for nothing but to keep him for as long as possible at my side, before my eyes, where I could simply look at his face and listen to his voice. And when, because of the width of the table and narrowness of the booth, he had to edge out sideways, I found myself madly clinging to his wrist, to his hand, holding him back and then, in a fierce whisper, forcing from myself the inevitable, irreplaceable words, hackneyed and sacred: ‘I love you!’
Standing quite erect now, Ronnie pulled my hand from his, he peeled it off, rather, finger by finger, as he might have removed one of his own gloves, he turned his jacket collar up so that it half-concealed his face and with
out addressing another word to me strode out of the restaurant.
Once more alone in the booth, I let my head sink into the palms of my cupped hands. I felt a slight viscousness on the tip of one finger and realised to my horror that a little bubble of snot had been blown out of one of my nostrils.
‘Dear God,’ I said to myself, ‘what have I done?’
*
It was late when I reached the motel, too late in any event for me to think of returning the same day to New York. I advised the proprietress, who greeted the news almost as though it were her own personal misfortune, that unforeseen circumstances obliged me to leave early next morning and paid my bill in advance. I also made a request – an uncommon one, it appeared, for such a modest establishment – for writing paper, an envelope and stamp.
Having made my luggage ready against the morning, I spent that same evening writing a long letter to Ronnie; just before midnight, I walked for the last time into the centre of town to post it. Unless the postal system were super-naturally efficient, it would not, I was sure, be delivered to the house on Jefferson Hill until after I had entirely removed myself from Chesterfield.
Later still, in my little bungalow sitting-room, illuminated only from without by the motel’s neon sign, I gave myself up to my thoughts.
Love and Death on Long Island Page 12
