He wondered frequently about the other man and decided to keep his eye on the coming senatorial campaign in the East. He wanted desperately to know who was the man who bore in his brain all of Mark Jenner’s triumphs and disappointments, all the cowardices and vanities and ambitions that made him human.
He had to know, but he postponed the search; at the moment, returning to the stage was more important.
The show was called No Roses for Larrabee. It was about an aging video star named Jack Larrabee, who skids down to obscurity and then fights his way back up. It had appeared the previous fall as a ninety-minute video show; movie rights had already been sold, but it was due for a Broadway fling first. The author was a plump kid named Harrell, who had written three previous triple-threat dramas. Harrell had half a million dollars in the bank, fifty thousand more in his mattress at his Connecticut villa, and maintained psychoanalysts on both coasts.
Casting was scheduled to start on October 20. The play had already been booked into the Odeon for a February opening, which meant a truncated pre-Broadway tour. Advance sales were piling up. It was generally assumed in the trade that the title role would be played by the man who had created it for the video version, ex-hoofer Lloyd Lane.
On October 10, Mark Jenner phoned his agent for the first time in six months. The conversation was brief. Jenner said, “I’ve been away, having some special treatments. I feel a lot better now. I want you to get me a reading for the stage version of Larrabee. Yeah, that’s right. I want the lead.”
Jenner didn’t care what strings his agent had to pull to get the reading. He wasn’t interested in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Six days later, he got a phone call from the play’s producer, J. Carlton Vincennes. Vincennes was skeptical, but he was willing to take a look, anyway. Jenner was invited to come down for a reading on the twentieth.
On the twentieth, Jenner read for the part of Jack Larrabee. There were only five other people in the room—Vincennes; Harrell, the playwright; Donovan, the director; Lloyd Lane; and an actor named Goldstone who was there to try out for the secondary lead. Jenner picked up the part cold, riffled through it for a few minutes, and started to read it as if he were giving his maiden speech on the floor of the Senate. He put the words across as if he had a pipeline into the subconscious minds of his five auditors. He did things with vowel shadings and with facial expressions that he had never dared to do before, and this was only improvisation as he went. He wasn’t just Mark Jenner, has-been, now; he was Mark Jenner plus someone else, and the combined output was overpowering.
After twenty minutes he tired and broke off the reading. He looked at the five faces. Four registered varying degrees of amazed pleasure and disbelief; the fifth belonged to Lloyd Lane. Lane was pale and sweat-beaded with the knowledge that he had just lost a leading role, and with it the hefty Hollywood contract that was sure to follow the Broadway one.
Two days later Jenner signed a run-of-the-show contract with Vincennes. A squib appeared in the theatrical columns the day after that:
Mark Jenner will be making a Broadway comeback in the J. C. Vincennes production of No Roses for Larrabee. The famed matinee idol of the seventies has been absent from the stage for nearly a year. His last local appearance was in the ill-starred Misty Isle, which saw ten performances last March. Jenner reportedly has spent the cast season recovering from a nervous breakdown.
Rehearsals were strange. Jenner had always been a good study, and so he knew his lines flat by the fourth or fifth run-through. The other actors were still shambling through their parts mechanically, muttering from their scripts, while Jenner was acting—projecting at them, putting his character across. After a while, the disparity became less noticeable. The cast came to life, responding to the vigor of Jenner’s portrayal. When they started working out in the empty theater, there were always a few dozen witnesses to the rehearsal. Backers came, and other directors, theatrical people in general, all attracted by the rumors of Jenner’s incandescent performance.
And it was incandescent. Not only because the part was so close to his own story, either; an actor playing an autobiographical role can easily slip into maudlin sogginess. For Jenner the part was both autobiographical and external. He interpreted it with his double mind, with the mind of a tired actor and with the mind of a potential senator on the way up. The two personalities crossbred; Jenner’s performance tugged at the heart. Advance sales piled up until record figures began to dance across the ledger pages.
They opened in New Haven on the tenth of February to a packed house and rave reviews. Ten days later was the Broadway opening, right on schedule; neither driving snow nor pelting rain kept the tuxedo-and-mink crowd away from the opening-night festivities. A little electric crackle of tension hung in the air in the theater. Jenner felt utterly calm. This is it, he told himself. The chips are down. The voters are going to the polls…
The curtain rose, and Jenner-as-Larrabee shuffled on stage and disgorged his first mumbled lines; he got his response and came across clearer the second time, still a bent figure with hollow cheeks and sad eyes, and the part began to take hold of him. Jack Larrabee grew before the audience’s eyes. By nine o’clock, he was as real as any flesh-and-blood person. Jenner was putting him across; the playwright’s words were turning to gold.
The first-act curtain line was a pianissimo; Jenner gave it and dropped to his knees, then listened to the drumroll of applause welling up out of the ten-dollar seats. The second-act clincher was the outcry of a baffled, doomed man, and Jenner was baffled and doomed as he wrenched the line out of him. The audience roared as the curtain cascaded down. Jenner drew the final line of the play too—a triumphal, ringing asseveration of joy and redemption that filled the big house like a trumpet call. Then the curtain was dropping, and rising again; and dropping and rising and dropping and rising, while a thunder of applause pounded at his temples; and he knew he had reached them, reached them deeply, reached them so deep they had sprung up from their own jaded weariness to acclaim him.
There was a cast party later that night, much later, in the big Broadway restaurant where such parties are traditionally given. Vincennes was there belligerently waving the reviews from the early editions. The word had gone out: Jenner was back, and Jenner was magnificent. Lloyd Lane came up to him—Jenner’s understudy, now. He looked shell-shocked. He said, “God, Mark, I watched the whole thing from the wings. I’ve never seen anything like it. You really were Larrabee out there, weren’t you?”
Looking at this man he had elbowed aside, Jenner felt a twinge of guilt, and redness rose to his cheeks. Then the other mind intervened, the ruthless mind of the nameless politician, and Jenner realized that Lane had deserved to be pushed aside. A better actor simply had supplanted him. But there were tears in the corners of Lane’s eyes.
Someone rushed up to Jenner with a gaudy magnum of champagne, and there was a pop! and then the champagne started to flow. Jenner, who had not had anything to drink for months, gratefully accepted the bubbling glass. Within, he kept icy control over himself. This was his night of triumph. He would drink, but he would not get drunk.
He drank. Vapid showgirls clawed through the circle of well-wishers around him to offer their meaningless congratulations. Flashbulbs glittered in his eyes. Men who had not spoken a civil word to him in five years pumped his hand. Within, Jenner felt a core of melancholy. Helene was not here; Walt Hollis—to whom he owned all this—was not here. Nor was his counterpart, the man whose mind he wore.
Champagne slid easily down his gullet. His smile grew broader. A bald-headed man named Feldstein clinked glasses with him and said, “You must really be relishing this night, Mark. You had it coming, all right. How does it feel to be a success again?”
Jenner grinned warmly. The champagne within him loosened the words, and they drifted easily up through his lips. “It’s wonderful. I want to thank everyone who supported me in this campaign. I want to assure them that their trust in me will be amply repaid when I reach
Washington.”
“Hah! Great sense of humor, Mark. Wotta fellow!” And the bald-headed man turned away, laughing. It was good that he turned away at that moment—for if he had continued to face Mark Jenner, he would have had to witness the look of dismay and terror that came over Jenner’s suddenly transformed, suddenly horror-stricken face.
The play was a success, of course. It became one of those plays that everybody simply had to see, and everyone saw it. It promised to run for at least two seasons, which was extraordinary for a nonmusical play.
But night after night in the hotel suite Mark Jenner had rented, he wrestled with the same problem:
Who am I?
The words that had first slipped out the night of the cast party now recurred in different forms almost every day. Phantom memories obsessed him; in his dreams, women he had never known came to reminisce with him about the misdeeds of a summer afternoon. He missed the children he had never fathered—the boy who was seven, and the girl who was four. He found himself reading the front pages of newspapers, scanning the Washington news, though always before he had turned first to the theatrical pages. He detected traces of pomposity in some of his sentences.
He knew what was happening. Walt Hollis had done the job too well; the other mind was encroaching on his own, intertwining, enmeshing, ingesting. There were blurred moments in the dark of the night when Jenner forgot his own name, and temporarily nameless, dreamed the dreams the other man should have dreamed.
And, no doubt, it was the same way with the other, whoever he was. Jenner realized bleakly that a strange compulsion bound him. He lay under a geas; he had to find his counterpart, the man who shared his mind. He had to know who he was.
He asked Hollis.
Hollis had come to him in the lavish hotel suite on the sixth day after Larrabee’s opening. The little man approached Jenner diffidently, almost as if he were upset by the magnitude of his own experiment’s success.
“I guess it worked,” Hollis said.
Jenner grinned expansively. “That it did, Holly! When I’m up there on the stage I have the strength I never knew I could have. Have you seen the play?”
“Yes. The third night. I was—impressed.”
“Damn right you were impressed,” Jenner said. “You should be, watching your Frankenstein monster in action up there. Your golem.” There was nothing bitter in Jenner’s tone; he was being genially sardonic.
But Hollis went pale. “Don’t talk about it that way.”
“True, isn’t it?”
“Don’t—don’t ever refer to yourself that way, Mark. It isn’t right.”
Jenner shrugged. Then casually, he interjected a new theme. “My alter ego—the chap you matched up with me—how’s he doing?”
“Coming along all right,” Hollis said quietly.
“Just—all right?”
“In his profession it takes time for results to become apparent. But he’s building up strength, lining up an organization. I saw him yesterday, and he said he’s very hopeful for the future.”
“For the Senate race, you mean?”
Hollis looked past Jenner’s left shoulder. “Perhaps.”
Jenner scowled. “Holly—tell me his name.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I have to know it, Holly! Please!”
“Mark, one of the terms of our agreement…”
“To hell with our agreement! Will you tell me or won’t you?”
The small man looked even smaller now. He seemed to be shivering. He rose, backed toward the door of Jenner’s suite. His hand fumbled for the opener button.
“Where are you going?” Jenner demanded.
“Away. I don’t dare let you keep asking me about him. You’re too convincing. And you mustn’t make me tell you. You mustn’t find out who he is. Not ever.”
“Holly! Come back here! Holly!”
The door slammed. Jenner stood in the middle of the room staring at it, slowly shaking his head. Hollis had bolted like a frightened hare. He was afraid of me, Jenner realized. Afraid I’d make him talk.
“All right,” Jenner said out loud, softly. “If you won’t tell me, I’ll have to find out for myself.”
It took him ten days to find out. Ten days in which he delivered eleven sterling performances in No Roses for Larrabee, ten days in which he felt the increasing encroachment of the stranger in his mind, ten days it which Mark Jenner and the stranger blurred even closer together. Or the seventh of those ten days, he received a phone call from Helene long distance. He stared at her tired face in the tiny screen and remembered how like a new-blown rose she had looked on the morning after their wedding, in Acapulco, and he listened to her strangely subdued voice.
“…visiting New York again in a few weeks. Mind if I stop up to see you, Mark? After all, we’re still legally married, you know.”
He smiled and made an empty reply. “Be glad to see you, Helene. For old times’ sake.”
“And of course I want to see the play. Can I get seats easily?”
“If you try hard enough, you can scrape up a seat in the balcony for fifty bucks,” he said. “But I’m allotted a few ducats for each show. Let me know the night, and I’ll put a couple away for you.”
“One’s enough,” she said quietly.
He grinned at her, and they made a bit of small talk, and they hung up. She was obviously angling for a reconciliation. Well, he wasn’t so sure he’d take her back. From what he’d heard, she had done a good bit of sleeping around in the past three years, and she was thirty-four now. A successful man like Mark Jenner might reasonably be expected to take a second wife, a girl in her twenties, someone more decorative than Helene was now. After all, the other had married again, and he had done it only because his first wife did not mix well with the party bigwigs—not primarily because she had been cheating on him.
Three days later, Jenner knew the identity of the nameless man in his mind.
It was not really hard to find out. Jenner hired a research consultant to do some work for him. What he wanted, Jenner explained, was a list of members of the House of Representatives who fulfilled the following qualifications: they had to be in their early forties, more than six feet tall, residents of an eastern state, married, divorced, and married again, with two children by the second wife. They had to be in their second term in the House, and had to be considered likely prospects for a higher political post in the near future. These were the facts Hollis had allowed him to retain. Jenner hoped they would be enough.
A few hours later, he had the answer he was hoping for. Only one man, of all the 475 representatives in the one hundredth Congress, fit all of the qualifications. He was Representative Clifford T. Norton, Republican, of the Fifth District of Massachusetts.
A little more research filled in some of Representative Norton’s background. His first wife had been named Betty, the second Phyllis. His children’s names were Clifford Junior and Karen. He had gone to Yale as an undergraduate, then to Harvard Law, thereby building up loyalties at both schools. He had been elected to the House in ’86 after a distinguished career as district attorney, and he had been returned by a larger plurality in the ’88 elections. His term of office expired in January of 1991. He hoped to move into the other wing of the Capitol immediately, as junior senator from Massachusetts. In recent months, according to the morgue file Jenner’s man consulted, Norton had shown sudden brilliance and persuasiveness on the House floor.
It figured. Now Norton was a politician with the mind of an actor grafted to his own. The combination couldn’t miss, Jenner thought.
Jenner felt an odd narcissistic fascination for this man with whom he was a brain-brother; he wanted anxiously to meet Norton. He wondered whether Norton had managed to uncover the identity of the actor whose tape Hollis had crossed with his own; and, Jenner wondered, if Norton did know, was he proud to share the memories of Broadway’s renascent idol?
It was the last week in March 1990. Congress was home for its
Easter recess. No doubt, Representative Norton was making ample use of his new oratorical powers among the home folks, as he began his drive toward the Senate seat. On a rainy Tuesday afternoon Jenner put through a long-distance phone call to Representative Norton at his Massachusetts office. Jenner had to give his name to a secretary before Norton would come to the phone.
Norton’s voice was deep and rich, like Jenner’s own. He did not use a visual circuit on his phone. He said, “Hello there, Jenner. I was wondering when you were going to call me.”
“You knew about me, then?”
“Of course I knew! As soon as that play opened and I read the reviews, I knew you were the one!”
They arranged a meeting for two the following afternoon, at the home of Walt Hollis in Riverdale. Hollis had once given Jenner a key, and somehow Jenner had kept it. And he knew Hollis would not be home until five that afternoon, which gave them three hours to talk.
That night, Jenner phoned the theater and let the stage manager know that he was indisposed. The stage manager pleaded, but Jenner stood on his contractual rights. That evening Lloyd Lane played the part of Jack Larrabee, to the dismay of the disgruntled and disappointed audience. Jenner spent the evening pacing through the five rooms of his suite, clenching his hands, glorying masochistically in the turmoil and hatred bubbling inside him. He counted the hours of the sleepless night. In the morning, he breakfasted late, read till noon, paced the floor till half past one, and took the undertube to Hollis’ place.
He used the key to let himself in. There was no sign of Norton. Jenner seated himself in Hollis’ neat-as-a-pin living room and waited, thinking that it was utterly beyond toleration that another man should walk the earth privy to the inmost thoughts of Mark Jenner.
To Be Continued Page 42
