There was a buzzing behind my eyes, tremors coming from somewhere deep inside me like a psychic earthquake. I didn’t feel myself speaking but I heard the words coming from my lips.
“I’d kill you, Jack.” I wasn’t even aware of how I’d joined the third-rate melodrama. “They’d have to pull me off your corpse if you touched these canvases. …”
I watched him turn pale. He finally looked away.
“Whoever writes your stuff,” he said, “should be shot.”
I sat quietly in one of the big white wicker chairs, listening to the clanking freight elevator descend. I looked at the wheel-of-fortune, afraid to ask it what I should do. Then the heat of the night hit me like a sixteen-ton weight and I realized what we’d just said to each other and I began to cry. I hated myself, not Jack. I felt my composure cracking like an eggshell.
And now Harry was telling me he was worried about dear old Jack.
The truth was, so was I.
Chapter Five
WE WENT BACK SUCH A long way, the four of us. Our lives had intertwined so elaborately because Harry and I had gotten together first. It was one of those slightly uncomfortable facts that we’d all dealt with and got past, but Sally’s bringing it up the day we went to the Stanley Spencer show had taken me by surprise. It wasn’t something we’d ever talked about at any length, at least not since undergraduate days at Mount Holyoke. And now Sally said Harry was in love with another woman, and Jack and I had threatened to kill each other, and Harry was worried about Jack. Harry and Jack. Theirs looked like the relationship that would endure. The pals. The Ruffians. …
I lay still in the darkness that night, the pillow warm and damp in the heat, the faint breeze of the old fan turning this way and that. But I couldn’t get to sleep. My mind was racing, trying to freeze the turmoil and alarm I suddenly felt all around me. Childless, parents long dead, the people and the connections I’d counted on for so many years—those with Sally and Harry and Jack—looked like they were shattering, splintering. Even with Sally I no longer felt as open as I once had. I was afraid to tell her everything for fear of what she would think of me. …
At Mount Holyoke I had casually dated a few Harvard men. Then there had been Harry, who looked at life like a master repairman, fixing and tinkering to make it fit his idea of how it should work, never making a loud noise. Harry always said he was a graduate of the Perry Como School of Calm. I had never known anyone who had approached life with such an eye for an angle. He had been terribly grown-up in my eyes and he had been the first man I’d slept with. At a motel not far from Stockbridge. He was very sweet about it. I had been so nervous I couldn’t relax for him. He had gently persevered and at last we’d managed it.
Almost immediately I had perversely begun wondering if he were the genuine article. But I had gone on with him, sleeping with him once in a while when he’d engaged a room at the Parker House and I couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing him. Why he put up with such a tense, frightened sex partner I never understood, but I was at an age when I was flattered on the one hand and delighted by my sexual power over him on the other.
And then he’d introduced me in passing to his fellow Ruffian, Jack Stuart. Jack had seemed so much richer in character, free of Harry’s poses and his search for angles, full of his own meaning compared to Harry, who was fun but a bit of a confidence trickster. Jack was. Harry seemed to be. I fell in love. Very hard. And it was nothing like being with Harry. I’d never imagined anything like it. I was sure of that.
Only two men in my life and now I was almost forty. Having slept with two men, Ruffians both.
It meant nothing to me that others thought Jack was handsome. He needn’t have been. He had presence, charisma, and that was just fine. It meant nothing to me that he played football. He didn’t make a big deal out of it. He went to practice, he played on Saturday, and when he carried the ball I hoped those great hulking oafs didn’t fall on him and break him. If anything impressed me beyond his own fiery enthusiasm, it was his writing. I loved to read what he wrote. I was delighted in the widespread assumption that he was destined to be the Class Novelist.
After graduation I went to live in New York. Sally went to Europe for a year. Harry and Jack roomed together, also in New York, and I saw them both constantly, as well as Mike Pierce, another Ruffian. Jack’s novel was published, film rights were sold, we found the loft, got married, and Sally came back from Europe. She took up the love affair with Harry that had pretty well filled her last two years at college—and we went antiquing and found the wheel-of-fortune. A few weeks later Harry and Sally got married, too, out at her parents’ estate at Sag Harbor.
I worked at Pierce and Jacoby, the publishers, Mike’s family firm, as a graphic artist in the art department. My painting was something I worked on when I had the time, almost as if I were embarrassed about it. After all, it was Jack who was destined to be the star of the marriage. My role was to bring in a regular check to keep the ship afloat while he labored mightily to bring forth his second novel.
If I had been more familiar with American literary history I’d have been less surprised, I suppose, at the turn Jack’s young manhood took. He was one of those bright young fellows, praised much in college, who flared like a comet and then disappeared in the darkness as if he’d never been at all. Two years out of Harvard the blush and the cheering that followed the publication of his first novel faded away. The rest, as they say, was silence. I watched while his hopes came to grief; I was helpless to prevent it from happening.
Call it writer’s block or the mysterious loss of the perceptions that had made him such an acute observer of the collegiate comedy which had been the basis of that one novel. Or call it his discovery of the unnerving fact that he had nothing more to say. Whatever he’d had, he’d lost it. He kept writing, but his second and then his third manuscript was rejected by one house after another. And he began to sour.
He took a job at Time as a writer/researcher, then went to J. Walter Thompson as a copywriter, and when his attitude cost him that job, he was bailed out by an old Harvardian and given a job at the Greer School across the Hudson in Jersey’s green, rolling countryside. I tried to help him see the bright side, but merely became one of the enemy in his eyes. Handsome still in a tight, compact way, he was finally showing some age in the lines etched into his face like a road map of disillusionment with life and himself. Perhaps if he’d been a better writer, more truly deranged rather than just fed up with things, he’d have carried his role in literary history right on through to the bullet that would leave the little gray cells all over the loft wall. Instead, he began commuting to the Greer School, which he viewed as a more symbolic form of suicide but, in his darker moments at least, nonetheless final.
I saw him at forty, facing his own set of unavoidable realities and limitations as best he could, but his pride hadn’t gone into hiding along with his writing ability. No, his pride grew in inverse proportion to the esteem in which he and, as it happened, the world at large held his writing. He was too proud to simply adjust, too proud to wait and cultivate the second coming of his talent, too proud to share his vulnerability and fear with me. He remained intelligent and quick-witted, but his festering disappointment and cynicism had destroyed his enthusiasm, disfigured him, and warped me.
As chairman of the English department at Greer he saw his job as a comparatively low-paid dead end, the only dividend being a certain slight prestige among his colleagues. Even they, he was convinced, saw him as a failed novelist, a rookie of the year who was sent down his second season and never came back. Up ahead, beckoning to him with the bony, crooked finger of the Grim Reaper, was a dotage as a particularly disagreeable Mr. Chips.
Infected by the jealousy of his materially successful friends, most frustratingly by that of his oldest pal, Harry, he was haunted by the past, tormented by the memory of the good years we’d all had, when he had been somebody, somebody with a nice clean shot at all the glittering prizes, who’d ha
d them in his sights and let them flutter away and now believed he’d come to nothing—a one-novel writer.
Chapter Six
BY THE TIME I GOT to the theater the next day I’d worried myself sick about whatever condition Jack might be in. I’d called him during the morning just to chat and get a feel for his state of mind, but there’d been no answer. Sally was out as well, so I’d been left to stew in the old familiar juices: the heat was unabated and the sun so bright it turned Times Square into an exhaust-filled, boiling inferno with jackhammers racketing like machine-gun fire no matter where you looked. The bums tottering along in front of the porno movies looked even more disconsolate than usual. Construction dust filled the air. A dump truck was blocking Forty-fifth so I got off at the corner of Broadway and picked my way along the board sidewalk until I got to the stage door. The marquee was up, the logo of Scoundrels All! looking fresh and hopeful, a lot the way we’d all looked once upon a time. The doorman had my name and pointed me toward the backstage clutter.
I could hear the sound of the rehearsal, a piano and a man and woman singing, stopping and starting. When I asked for Harry Granger they said he was out front. I found him sitting in the back row of the orchestra, his long legs bent up against the chair back in front of him, his chin resting on his knees. The theater was dim, like a foggy cave after the brilliance of the sunshine. A few lights glowed glumly in the lobby behind the orchestra. The director called out something to the actors. A large, bulky man sitting next to the director looked up as I made my way up the aisle, watching me. He looked vaguely familiar, but I was thinking about Harry and Jack and I swept on past, went into the row where Harry stared at the stage. He looked straight ahead, said, “Hi, Belle,” and reached out to push the seat down next to him.
“So, you haven’t committed suicide,” I said.
“Not quite. There’s still hope.” He frowned and rubbed his eyes. He was a tall lanky man with sand hair, a slightly beaky nose, and pale blue eyes, as if his genes had set out to make him a redhead and not quite finished the job. An intense and interesting-looking man. He was wearing a fresh gray sweatshirt and chino pants. The gold of his wedding ring and a ten-thousand-dollar Piaget wrist-watch caught my eye as he clasped his hands on his knees. Sally believed in giving world-class presents.
“How did it go last night?”
He deepened his frown. “It’s not there yet, you know? We’ve got all the pieces but we’re tinkering with the structure today.” He shrugged. “We’re kidding ourselves, probably. Anything we do now probably won’t make a damn bit of difference, but at least we’re staying busy instead of running around looking for bathrooms to throw up in.” He looked over at me. “You must be getting a little tense yourself.” He leaned over impulsively and pecked my forehead. “We’re both gonna be big hits. Bank on it.”
“I’m a little tense, to put it mildly. Doing the same thing, tinkering, trying to stay busy.”
“I hated to take you away from your work,” he said, stifling a nervous yawn, “and I didn’t mean to worry you but I really had a scare the other night. With old Jack. I debated telling you or not, then I figured, who the hell else could I tell? Thing is, I got a look at this place he’s living … We’re talking spooky, Belle. Jack’s not in such good shape, I’m afraid. Christ, I gotta stand up or I’ll be paralyzed. Walk around the house, okay?”
He seemed unable to tear himself away from the building in which the fate of the show would be decided so soon. We stood in the back of the house, I asked him to spill it, and he nodded. He kept walking, working his way up and up the stairs. He handed me an apple from a brown sack. I shook my head, he shrugged and began munching.
“Thing is, I had dinner with Jack. Stopped by to pick him up, first time he’s let me see his place. Christ, Belle, I didn’t know what the hell to say …”He shook his head and ran his fingers through the long sandy hair. The apple was very crisp and each bite sounded like a gunshot.
“Well, do say something, Harry. The suspense is getting a little thick up here.” We’d climbed the last flight of stairs to the second balcony and the stage seemed very small and far away and not very important. He plopped down in a seat and hung his legs over the top of those in front of him.
“He loves you, of course. As expected. But he’s in pretty rocky shape. Misses you, says he doesn’t know how to live without you.” He looked at me expectantly, chewing.
“I’d say old Jack is more resilient than you Ruffians seem to think.”
“I’m not so sure, Belle. Seriously. You get older, you lose some of the bounce. No one knows better than old jocks like Jack. Time is tougher for them to handle. Takes more away from them, and Jack’s lost quite a lot, hasn’t he?”
“I’m sorry I’m not more sympathetic,” I said. “But I have my own experiences with Jack to go by.”
“Oh, sure, I know it hasn’t been a picnic lately—”
“‘Picnic’ is a bit of an understatement. In any case, he’s not at death’s door—he just needs some time to pull his socks up …”
“Funny you should say that.”
“What?”
“Death’s door.”
“I don’t understand, Harry—”
“Well, seeing that apartment of his—you haven’t seen it?”
“I’m not on Jack’s guest list at the moment.”
“Well, if you make the list, skip the viewing. I saw the place and I got to thinking about death. The apartment is a shrine, Belle. Really. A shrine.”
Down on the stage the couple had begun singing again, but I couldn’t make out the words. They began to tap-dance very slowly, almost in a trance. “What are you talking about? A shrine to what?”
“You. Obviously. A shrine to DiMaggio wouldn’t have been worth dragging you up here, right? No, he’s got endless, countless pictures of you, he must have looted all the scrapbooks, all the desk drawers full of forgotten snapshots. I’m telling you, Belle, the whole damn thing—all the past—is stuck up on the walls of this grungy little apartment. It’s spooky as hell. Like you’re already dead.” He dropped the apple core into his sack, cracked his knuckles for punctuation, and my mind took one of those swerves, heard Jack telling me he’d sometimes like to kill me. “I don’t mean to worry you—”
I laughed. “Hard to tell, my dear—you could just stop—”
“Ah, well, I’m not quite done. Just for a note of the surreal, mind you, there’s that goddamn shotgun his dad gave him leaning against the wall over in the corner. I saw that thing and all I could think of was blood dripping down a wall. I don’t know who he’s gonna kill with it—Mike Pierce, maybe, he says he saw you two having a drink somewhere a couple of weeks ago. He delivered himself of the opinion that you and Mike are sleeping together and he didn’t seem too happy at the thought.”
“Good Lord!”
“I take it you’re not sleeping with Mike?”
“Are you asking for Jack?”
“Who else?”
“Don’t be insufferable, Harry. You’re treading very close—”
“Sorry if I hit a nerve.”
“Dammit! Of course I’m not sleeping with Mike! How could I be, I’m busy sleeping with the New York Jets, according to Jack.”
Harry laughed and defused my irritation. “Well, I’ll tell him not to shoot Mike, then. The thing is …” He paused and stood up, jammed his hands down into his pockets.
“Go on, Harry.”
“Well, if it’s not Mike he shoots, what if it’s you? For wanting him to get out and for allowing other men into your life. I don’t know, call me a dickhead, but I’ve been thinking about it—”
“Harry, for God’s sake!”
“Or,” he pressed on insistently, “more likely he’ll use the damn thing on himself for not being able to control his own life and make it turn out the way he wanted. It’s funny, the way people foreshadow things. We all used to wonder who would be the first Ruffian to go, and how would we deal with that. Well, ever sinc
e I saw that apartment I’ve had the feeling that whoever it is, Jack’s going to be responsible.”
We were going downstairs and my legs were weak and I was damned if I’d let Harry see how upset I was. How the devil could he say these things to me, anyway? I might have jumped from the balcony in sheer fright.
“And what precisely do you suggest we do about this situation?” I tried to keep my voice from shaking.
“Think about it, I suppose. Once I get this show open, I’ll try to take him in hand. In the meantime, be careful, he’s not all that stable.” He looked at me. “You’re pale. Look, I probably overstated all this—it’s just an impression I got. But I had to tell you.”
“Have you mentioned it to Sal?”
“No, actually. Things have been a little harried at home.” He chuckled weakly. “Show opening. My having done something, God knows what, to get on Sal’s wrong side—well, there I’m afraid I’m understating. She’s pissed about something, one of her paranoid states. I’m not making light—I’m worried. Between her and Jack, it is not the best week of my life.” We reached the downstairs lobby. The sun glared from the street. “And then, Peter’s coming from London. Staying with us.” He sighed.
“Peter?”
“Venables, Belle. Peter Venables. You must remember Peter. A Ruffian returning for the show. He’s coming from London, you know.” He looked at me quizzically.
“It’ll come back to me, I’m sure.”
“Well, when you see him, don’t give him that dumb, empty look. He was one of us and you know him perfectly well.”
Guilty Parties Page 3
