Jilly Legendre looked over his shoulder at us all. “Swan’s just pussy-whipped,” he said.
“I wish she’d smother him,” Bo said. “Plot her twat over his nose and smother him.”
“Oh, you’re all so hard on Swan,” Lulu said. “Hard, hard, hard.”
Page, meanwhile, was breathing into my ear. “No wonder it always works,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Fucking you,” she said. “I always wanted to fuck my Uncle Farjeon. Why don’t we go?”
I was a good mind to take her up. I lacked the ego to make a splash at such a table, but in fact all the real egos seemed flat, for some reason. Only Owen Oarson was really enjoying himself, and that was solely because of Jill. Bo and Lulu and Jilly seemed to be stuck in an obligatory occasion, for which they had no real taste. Probably they were all sick of one another. Only Bo seemed to have any real energy, and it wasn’t radiating outward. Bo was working at his thoughts. He had suddenly noticed an antipasto and was nibbling a carrot like a savage rabbit.
Jilly got up and came around the table and kissed Jill. “My darling, I salute you,” he said. “Très beau, très clair, très fidèle.” Then he went and installed himself by Antonella Pisa. Jill looked embarrassed, and turned back to her conversation.
Try as I might, I couldn’t overhear what she was saying to that big slob. His face was long and rectangular, like a shoe box.
Page kept breathing, near my ear. The scene at the table, which had never really engaged my full attention, began to fade from it altogether, as in a dissolve. I was a little concerned about Jill, but after all, she was thirty-seven years old. She knew how to take care of the Owen Oarsons of the world—and if she didn’t, it was time she learned. If she would only have met my eye for a moment, I would have felt better—we had always maintained our sense of one another through frequent eye contact, but for the moment she was too engrossed to give me a real look. Something—Owen Oarson, or Elaine’s, or the whole evening—had jammed our system of mutual awareness, and it seemed to me I might as well leave.
Anyway, it was hard to imagine a more detached group of people than sat around that table—detached not only from one another but from what any ordinary person would describe as reality. Yet many of them had been ordinary persons once. Bo had run a paper route in Little Rock, Jill had grown up normal in Santa Maria, and Lulu had emerged from a ministerial household in Wisconsin. Preston and Page had gone to the right schools, and Anna to junior high in a Phoenix suburb before she ran away to Hollywood. Jilly was the only one whose life had been abnormal from birth, and he was getting more normal all the time. Of course the reason for the flatness might just be that I hadn’t drunk enough. Liquor is like a fine lens to me. The right amount of it always sharpens my focus.
“I think I’ll split,” I said to Anna, as Page got up to go to the ladies’ room.
“I’d go with you, but my feet hurt,” Anna said.
I got up and tapped Jill on the shoulder. She looked up, startled.
“See you at the Sherry,” I said. “I’m bushed. Too many museums.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “I guess I’ll stay and talk some more.”
On my way out I passed the table full of writers. They were still pouring down drinks. Suddenly I felt emboldened and decided to put my invisibility to the test.
“Aren’t you Wagner Baxter?” I asked Wagner Baxter. The girl who had been licking his ear was asleep in his lap. The writers all looked up, surprised to hear a voice come out of the air. Wagner Baxter had a head the shape of a light bulb—shaved, of course. His head had been shaved even before Yul Brynner’s, much less Telly Savalas’. His cheeks looked like a mule had amused himself for a few years by kicking gravel at them.
“Of course,” Wagner Baxter said, looking down at the girl asleep in his lap. He seemed surprised that she was asleep. Probably she was supposed to be giving him a blow job.
“I knew your uncle, Boswell Baxter,” I said.
Wagner Baxter took this news calmly.
“Do you butcher novels, like he did?” he asked.
All the writers opened their mouths at that, but they didn’t laugh. They just opened their mouths. Maybe they were breathing germs at me. Their mouths stayed open, as if the difficult births Anna had ascribed to them had affected the hinges of their jaws. Perhaps they wouldn’t be able to close their mouths until Wagner Baxter made another remark.
“Only literary horsemeat, like your stuff,” I said.
I expected immediate attack, and was sort of half-hoping for it. Getting beat up might have made life seem a little more real. But the writers reacted in a strange way. They stood up instantly, as if my rejoinder had been the signal they had been waiting for.
“Uncle Boswell was a Hollywood fink!” Wagner Baxter said as he went past me. The rest of them grabbed their fur-lined Levis and goose-down windbreakers, kicked at the table once or twice, and then trooped out, glowering at the Hollywood party as they went. Wagner Baxter had managed to shake the girl in his lap into a semblance of wakefulness, and was dragging her after him.
“Hey, Wagner, don’t be rough!” she said, sleepily, trying to get the hair out of her eyes.
I followed them out into the other room. They were all clustered around Elaine, struggling into their jackets even as they raised loud complaints. Elaine suffered it all with matriarchal calm. Since nobody had punched me in the nose yet, I walked up to Wagner and put in another two cents’ worth.
“Your Uncle Boswell was an honest craftsman,” I said. “I feel obliged to defend him.”
It was a counterfeit two cents, actually. Boswell Baxter had been one of the worst snobs in Hollywood. For years he wouldn’t speak to anyone but Ronald Colman. At least he didn’t wear a green fatigue jacket, though.
Wagner Baxter ignored me, but turned to glare at Elaine. “I hate your mayonnaise!” he said vehemently, and left, abandoning the girl with long hair, who soon began to cry. Elaine took her over and deposited her like a lost kitten at a table full of convivial Broadway types.
I found Page by the ladies’ room, idly picking lint off her sweater. Despite being rich, she always seemed to wear tacky sweaters that picked up lint.
“Any sign of your husband?” I asked.
“I didn’t look,” she said. “Was I supposed to look for Preston?”
The confusion around us seemed to be increasing. More and more people were crowding in, and even the skillful waiters were beginning to find themselves boxed behind tables. There were signs of exasperation everywhere. One of the most dramatic occurred just to our left: a little short man with a spike beard surprised everybody by picking up a lady twice his size and flinging her onto a neighboring table.
“Lie in your swill, you cunt!” he yelled, and rushed out. The lady calmly climbed off the table and began to pick linguine out of her hair.
“I don’t think we’ll be missed,” I said. “Do you have a coat?”
“Oh, yeah, my fur,” Page said. She slipped through the crowd like it wasn’t there and emerged with a silver mink. She shrugged it on like it might have cost a nickel, and we went out into the icy wind, only to find that we were blocked from the taxis by a wall of black limos.
“We can take Preston’s,” she said. “I’m sure one of them’s his.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “Let’s take Abe’s.” I had spotted Folsom walking back and forth in front of a limo like a dog in a run. I grabbed Page by her deeply furred arm and strode right over.
“Open the door,” I said to Folsom, hoping he would respond on reflex. The sight of a tuxedo and a woman in furs is like a Pavlovian stimulus to a gofer. Before Folsom realized it was us, we were sitting in the warm limo.
“Say,” he said, sticking his head in. It had dawned on him that neither of us was Abe.
“Don’t talk,” I said. “Just tell the driver to get us to the Algonquin quick. Mrs. Sibley has a coccyx. Of course Mr. Mondschiem w
anted to help.”
“Aw,” Folsom said, deeply confused.
“Oh, god, my coccyx,” Page said in her huskiest tones.
Folsom couldn’t muster his resistance fast enough. He glanced longingly at the restaurant, and then got in and slowly shut the door. The driver, an impassive fellow of Mediterranean origin, eased away. Folsom looked at the restaurant again, this time with a touch of despair. He realized that the die was cast. Maybe he would be back before Abe emerged, and maybe he wouldn’t.
“Think how it would be to fuck in a limo,” Page whispered, against my neck. For a girl who was completely careless about what she ate, she had remarkably sweet breath. At the moment it was flavored slightly with marijuana.
“Listen, don’t get a thing about cars,” I said. “I’m no acrobat.”
Page didn’t answer. Her eyes were bright. Under the streetlights they shone like her fur. The fur added its smell to the smell of Page. It was a contradictory smell, suggestive of great cold—the cold where the minks lived—and also great warmth. Page partook a little of the same contradictoriness; her lips were always cool in a kiss, but the rest of her was warm as a stove.
I looked down at her again and the eyes that had shone with excitement a few blocks before were closed. She was asleep, a state she passed into more easily than most babies. A little grass, a little sex, a little wine—a little of almost anything would put Page to sleep.
Probably she was the happiest person in the limo, unless the Sicilian driver was concealing euphoria beneath his olive exterior. Folsom certainly wasn’t concealing euphoria; panic maybe, but not euphoria. He lowered the glass between the seats and looked at Page.
“Is she dead?” he asked hopefully. In his view a death would legitimize the undertaking.
“I suspect it’s a coma,” I said.
I was not quite clear as to why I had asked for the Algonquin. The name had sprung to my tongue unbidden, like the situation. Before I could order my thoughts—something I have not really managed to do in sixty-three years—we were there. Page walked in, but she could not be said to be awake. The gentleman at the desk very civilly made a room available, and Page, propped against me, snored faintly as I signed the register.
Instead of a key, I was given a strange little card, which fit in a slot in our door. The room it let us into seemed to be the shape of a slice of pie, but I was not inclined to quibble. I managed to slip Page’s fur off as she pitched in a heap onto the bed. Since I wasn’t drunk and I wasn’t sleepy, I decided to let her nap a bit while I removed myself to the lobby, to weigh alternatives, as it were.
The lobby was just the sort of place I had once imagined I would spend my life in, as soon as I got famous. A smattering of after-theater people were sipping green liqueurs and weighing the merits of plays. The lobby was so comfortable that several brandies went by before I remembered that I was supposed to be weighing alternatives, even as my companions were weighing merits.
On about the fourth brandy, the focus that had been missing from the evening finally materialized, and it occurred to me that I didn’t really need to weigh alternatives. It seemed to me that, in my tux, I was the perfect person to sit in the Algonquin lobby and drink brandy. I was, after all, from the world of entertainment. Except for the green liqueurs, everything was as I had expected it to be, long ago, in my fantasies: a gracious lobby, nice paneling, comfortable chairs, and a few well-preserved night owls like myself either sitting alone and contemplating life, or else conversing vivaciously about art and life. For once I felt appropriate. Even in my vast wardrobe of checked suits, vests, scarves, sport coats, slacks, and socks I would have looked appropriate in the Algonquin lobby. Perhaps I could take the rest of my savings and rent a corner there, for my declining years.
The only thing of mine that wouldn’t have looked very appropriate in the Algonquin lobby was the very best thing—old Claudia. She had looked right at home in her spotted loincloth, sitting around the jungle sets with a few leopards and some fake vines and a couple of stunt men to yak with. With no vines to swing on and no stunt men to amuse her, she might have gotten too restless. She wouldn’t have been content, as I was, to sit in a corner in evening clothes, smoothly consuming brandy.
I guess Claudia and I had belonged where we lived, in the Hollywood Hills. I couldn’t quite squeeze her into my fantasy of old age in the Algonquin lobby.
Then, as often happened when I remembered Claudia, I remembered Stravinsky too, and Vera, his large, calm wife. I had to wipe my eyes on my French cuff. The Stravinskys had lived not far from where I live, and I had sometimes seen them taking walks. I loved seeing that bony, irritable little man, in his baggy khakis. He was always stopping on curbs to glare myopically at the racketing, rocketing skateboarders, who often narrowly missed smacking right into him. If one had smacked into him, I had the feeling Stravinsky would have bitten him, as a ferret bites a rat. Vera, majestic as a galleon, sailed right on. The composer’s hand was always reaching for hers, and always found hers, after a search. That was my dream of love in old age, I guess.
Like a lot of mediocre artisans, I was corny about the great. My work was only a harmless kind of garbage. There was no chance that I could ever have done anything much better, and perhaps because of that I revered the great ones and would through all my days. I even had dreams of the Stravinskys—dreams of them flying over Hollywood, firebirds of the sunset, a quarrelsome jay and a great calm owl—at least as romantic as my dreams of Claudia. When she showed up in a dream she was usually over at Columbia, in one of those big hangars they used to have, a fake vine clasped between her athletic thighs, practicing her swinging.
My little lapse into reverie was interrupted by a waiter, who informed me that I could have one more brandy. I took him up on it, and then made my way a bit unsteadily back to the pie-shaped room. It was exhaustion, not drink, that made me unsteady. Being in New York was as tiring as walking around with weights on the legs. It was obvious, even after one day, that living there required training. Making it through a month in New York would be the equivalent, for a person of my age and disposition, of competing in the decathlon, in the Olympics of city life. In earlier years, the event could have been interesting, but I knew that for me it had come a little late.
11
PAGE, OF COURSE, WAS STILL IN A HEAP. AS I GOT OUT OF my tuxedo it occurred to me that getting back into it in the morning was going to seem pretty silly. If I had been a man of good sense I would have gone back to the Sherry, kept the peace with Jill—assuming she was around to keep peace with—and had some nice checked clothes to step into in the morning. It wouldn’t matter much to Page. She would just wake up, shrug on her silver mink, and be back in her life in two minutes.
Instead of pursuing that sensible course, I began to try and undress Page, so she wouldn’t be so wrinkled when she woke up. It was no easy task. While I was struggling with her tacky sweater she suddenly sat up and shucked it. For a moment it looked as if she might be going to rise to consciousness. She stretched out her arms, lifting her young breasts, but then fell back and resumed her warm slumber.
Despite the weight of New York, which seemed to have settled on my shoulders and calves, I only slept a few hours. I woke with Page cuddled against me, warm as coals and snoring faintly. There was a window near my head. I parted the curtain, to see how the smog was, and found myself staring at a grimy brick wall, perhaps six feet away. There was no sign of California, and I remembered that I was on the wrong side of the continent.
In order to restore my sense of reality, I watched some television. The set was ingeniously tucked away in a bureau drawer. The Today show was almost over before Page showed any signs of life.
“Are you watching the Today show?” she said with disbelief, sitting up and pushing back her abundant if somewhat frizzy hair.
“That’s disgusting,” she added. I made no defense, even though I knew that in her vocabulary disgusting was the opposite of perfect.
Without f
urther comment, she stretched out on top of me—not for sexual purposes, as I momentarily supposed, but because she evidently preferred me to the mattress. She was soon asleep again, her hair between me and the television set. I accepted that, and for half an hour listened to television and watched Page’s hair. Then she woke up and began to sneeze.
“It’s your mustache,” she said. “I’m allergic to it.”
“You’re not allergic to it,” I said. “You just shouldn’t go to sleep with your nose in it.”
“I don’t agree,” she said, looking at me as if I had made a totally stupid remark. Then she got out of bed and went to the bathroom. When she emerged she yawned, bent over her pile of clothes, extracted panty hose, and yawned again.
“What are we in, a hotel?” she asked vaguely. The minute I saw the curls on her little pubis disappearing from view I began to feel sexy; but when I put out a hand Page looked at me as if I were a person with very curious ideas about life.
“It’s too late to fuck,” she said, with a touch of petulance. “I was supposed to go back to Long Island last night. Preston’s mother is giving a brunch.
“I bet the limo’s not still around,” she said when she was dressed. “You better give me some money. This means a taxi.”
I gave her fifty dollars and she put on the silver mink and fell back on top of me. Her petulance had vanished and she looked wide-eyed and solemn, as children look when they haven’t really had their nap out.
“I could come back in the afternoon, if you want to hang around,” she said.
“Just name an hour,” I said.
She named 3 P.M. and arrived at 4:45. At the Sherry, where I went to leave my tux, I found a note from Jill:
All right, I’m busy all day. Do something new—why would a museum be so bad? I knew this would happen.
JILL
p.s. I wanted to thank you for my sapphire, but you weren’t here.
At the sight of the note—a perfectly normal Jill note—I felt a quiet paranoia growing in me. Perhaps Jill and I weren’t going to talk any more, or know one another any more. We had started across a glacier and a crevasse had opened between us. This had happened years before, but it had only been a hairline crevasse, about the width of a small brook, and we had been jumping back and forth across it for years, confident (indeed, overconfident) of our ability to leap crevasses, and outwit the glacier. But a crevasse that is only the width of a brook one day can be the width of Fifth Avenue the next, and the width of the Grand Canyon in a week or two. Soon we might only see one another as specks in the distance.
Somebody's Darling Page 11
