The set designer couldn’t have done anything more perfect, more glittering for the opening-night party. Staircases curved gracefully to a long balcony where a small combo played Gershwin and Vernon Duke and Sondheim—and, sporadically, the score from Scoundrels All! The chandeliers hung like gigantic tiaras on ropes of diamonds. Candles glowed everywhere, mesmerizing, casting a roseate glow. There was caviar, cold poached salmon in a green sauce, sliced roast beef and chicken, cold pasta alla putanesca, the platters arranged on vast buffets, with sleek waiters and waitresses moving among the guests, deftly avoiding the sudden sweeping gestures of excitement, hauling silver trays the size of hubcaps. I had to smile at the spectacle. Beside me, through the doors to the awninged terrace, the rain bounced like a billion triphammers and hung in gauzy sheets above the quiet fountain in the garden, on the flagstones, beneath the heavy drooping trees.
The rooms were full of a strange mixture of friends, people I’d seen mainly on television and in the newspapers, some not quite identifiable faces from long ago that sent distant bells pealing, and strangers. The actors and actresses from the show mingled happily, soaking up praise. The backers were drinking determinedly, speaking softly, shrugging, waiting tensely for the first television critics to pass judgment.
Harvard friends of Harry’s, gathered painstakingly together for the occasion, tried to act as if they’d all seen each other yesterday, and some of them probably had, in Wall Street and in Park Avenue law offices. Across the long room I noticed the Harvard professor who had been something of a gray eminence in the days when Harry was rounding up the Ruffians and giving them their identity. But I had forgotten his name, of course. Then I saw that he was talking to the large, heavyset man in the linen jacket whom I’d caught staring at me in the street outside the theater. Once again, as if there was something magnetizing us, I saw him turn slowly to look at me over the crowd between. Again he smiled at me, then turned back to the professor.
Who was he? I bit a thumbnail and something came back to me. He’d been at the theater the day I went to see Harry. He’d watched me walking up the aisle … Why did he keep smiling at me, as if he knew something I didn’t? Was he supercilious or one of the friendlies? Or was I suspicious of anyone and everyone in the wake of Jack wanting to kill me and Harry betraying Sally and Peter Venables betraying me and Jack … and then those damn yellow roses? But, no, those must be Venables’ peace offering. Or had Sally been right? Maybe they were Jack’s apology. And where had he gone after the show? Why hadn’t he spoken to me before if he’d spent the evening sitting behind me—behind us, Mike and me, which was maybe the answer to that particular question.
God, I was fed up with all the irritating, abrasive little questions! I exchanged my empty glass for a full one as a silver tray floated past.
On the terrace, beneath the awning, the heat engulfed me, but I welcomed the scent of the flowers in the heavy planters and the wet earth and the sound of the steady rain. It rattled on the awning, dripped from the fringe. And I heard a voice behind me.
“Well, Belinda, you look beautiful and sad all by yourself out here.” His voice was soft and deep, somehow reassuring, but I didn’t know who he was. “But I could be wrong about the sad part.” The big rumpled man in the linen jacket. He still wore the bemused smile. And his eyes caught mine again, didn’t skitter away like other people’s.
“I’m sure you could,” I said, “but probably not this time.” I frowned at his widening smile. “But I didn’t need you to tell me.”
“Well, try to find it in your heart to forgive me.” He leaned against the railing with his back to the rain. “I’m a professional observer, a constant fault and … well, I’d hate to get off on the wrong foot with you after all these years.”
“Look, you seem to know me and I guess I’m just not making the right connections. I don’t mean to be rude …” I shook my head, gave a little beseeching look. His hair was receding, it was brushed back in wings over his ears, curled over his collar. His foulard tie had managed to skew off to one side. His French-blue shirt had a collar point that had struck off on its own. Something was bulging in one of his jacket pockets. All the other men wore formal first-night clothes.
“Maybe it’ll come to you. Someone from the past.”
“Don’t be a jerk, okay?”
He laughed at me. “Welles,” he said. “Hacker Welles.”
I felt myself blushing with embarrassment. “Hacker! Oh, my God, what a fool—you wrote the show! Oh, Hack, really—”
“It’s good to see you, Belinda.”
“Oh, I feel like such an idiot! Please forgive me, but it has been an awfully long time, hasn’t it? If you knew me, you’d know that while I habitually can’t place the face and I can never, ever remember the name … I’m babbling. Shut up, Belinda!”
“Listen, I was the least memorable of the Ruffians. And I’ve been on the West Coast for a long time. And I’ve changed. Used to be a lot more hair and rather less of me. Not much for a girl like you to remember.”
“Well … Hacker Welles.” I kept thinking about his blue eyes, how watchful they were. His face was broad, candid, open. He seemed so supremely at ease, observing me from behind the barricade of his writing. “I feel funny, as if you’ve spent a lot of time looking inside me, seeing how the machinery works …”
He laughed again at that.
“It’s the play, of course, seeing how you portrayed me—”
“I don’t really know much about you. Your type, maybe, but not you. Of all the characters, you were the hardest to write. So I was stuck with the way I perceived you way back then. And you were pretty elusive, Belinda.”
“Elusive? Hardly.”
“Even now, I can’t tell if you’re honest and ingenuous, or if you’re playing some kind of game with me. That’s what I had to deal with when I was writing the blond—but listen, I don’t mean to get into all this. I saw you the other day at the theater and then tonight. I hate these nervous-breakdown parties but I hoped I might see you here. So what’s going on with you and Jack? Harry says there are some problems—”
“As usual, Harry’s right, but I really don’t want to talk about that. What did you mean, ‘elusive’?”
“I used to watch you. I took a long time to make up my mind about you. I guess maybe I never did.” He grinned as if we were sharing a secret of the past together. “For three years, while you were hardly aware I even existed, I watched you and your boyfriends, my two buddies. Were you just a gorgeous airhead Wasp who never gave away any feelings—”
“Good God!”
“Or did that kind of sad expression and that level stare, that sort of somber face, hide something wonderful and sensitive … which might lead to your appreciating one such as me? Well, boyish fantasies being what they are …” He shrugged, eyes twinkling. As if the thought were so amusing and irrelevant now that we were adults that it was laughable.
“Are you sure we’re talking about me?”
“I never did get up the nerve to find out what you were really like. I heard about you from Harry and then Jack, and then, just like the play, we all sort of danced off into real life, where I suppose most of us got our asses handed to us.”
I felt myself relaxing for the first time in days, weeks. He was so burly, slouching, rumpled, and the talk flowed so easily for both of us. I kept prodding him with questions and listened while he told me about the writing of the play and how Harry had urged him to develop it as a musical, take a shot at writing some lyrics. I listened as he told me how he’d set about working his way through the forests of memory in search of a story, something that would make a plot. “That’s the problem with adapting something from life. The stories never hang together. Anyway, I did the best I could.” He shrugged as if he weren’t at all sure he gave a damn what anyone else thought. “Now that you’ve heard all my excuses, give me your reaction to the show—the unvarnished truth, so long as you adhere to Joseph Conrad’s dictum.”
“Which is?”
“He was eager to entertain all criticism so long as it was unqualified praise. What did you think, Belinda?”
I waited a long time, looking at the rain, the slick flowers in their pots. “It made me sad. That’s why I was out here by myself when you found me.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Well, it makes me sad, too, I guess.”
I plunged onward. “And it made me nervous, seeing our past reinterpreted that way. I don’t suppose people actually look at their lives quite that analytically.”
“But you didn’t take offense?”
“Oh, no …” I felt myself blushing again. “I thought it was wonderful.”
“You didn’t think you were portrayed too coldly?”
“I hadn’t thought … No, I must not have. She was a bit of a bitch, I suppose. Maybe that’s what made me nervous.”
“Think how I got to feeling, having to spend a year going back, living those days all over again.” He was looking into my eyes as if they were the vaults of those days, where the secrets were locked away. “There we were in the sixties, up to our necks in our own privileged innocence, somehow managing to ignore Vietnam and assassinations and civil rights. Where were we, our little group, when everybody else was off marching and demonstrating and burning draft cards and bras? You know what I did? I made my own protest. I burned my library card. And I lived it all again and I kept asking myself, why were we so bloody insulated? Did we simply not want to be serious people? Were we just too wrapped up in ourselves?”
“And what did you decide?”
“I never really did. But somehow we all managed to trivialize one of the great and tragic eras of our history. We were masters of self-indulgence. We were all, in our own ways, unindicted co-conspirators. An idea whose time had not quite come but was lurking just ahead, around the next bend. We were all guilty parties, Belinda, we just never got caught.”
I was surprised by the sorrow in his blue eyes, which had been so light and impish and confident only moments before.
“Or did we?” I asked.
Eventually, after another glass of champagne, he thanked me for the use of my life in his play. “I’m going to miss you, Belinda.” He shook my hand.
He drifted away and later I saw him with a pretty girl from the show who came and took him away from some group, claiming him with an air of propriety. I wondered what the girl was to him, was he sleeping with her? She looked to be twenty-one or twenty-two.
Alone again, not wanting to go back inside to join the party, I tried to put him out of my mind. Odd, I hadn’t remembered him at once, but the fact was—like Peter Venables—he seemed a virtually new and unknown person to me. How had I ever gotten so disconnected from people I’d once known?
There had been something about Hacker Welles tonight. Maybe his air of unconcern, his confidence at such a tense moment waiting for the reviews—something about him both attracted me and vaguely frightened me. He acted as if he had once seen something so bad that it had bleached away fear of anything like an opening night.
And he had been watching me. Long ago as well as now. Thinking about me, every day for a long time. He’d miss me, he said. I was mindlessly pleased by that, but there was also something out of kilter, too, if I could just pin it down.
Did he still find me an airhead?
Did he know I painted?
But then, I wouldn’t be seeing him again, so why should I care what he thought of me?
The fact was, however, that I did.
Chapter Thirteen
THE MUSIC CASCADED LIKE TINSEL from the balcony, sprinkling the irresistible high spirits that come to life when things seem to have gone so well. But there was also the continuing cutting edge of forced hilarity, people dancing in the shadow of the sword. In this case, the critics. All we could do was wait.
I was staring across the room at the remarkably vibrant blond girl with Hacker Welles. She had been me in the show. What had Welles called her in the play? Jill? Yes, Jill. The girl was, of course, an actress, not a college girl wrapped up in her own tiny, out-of-proportion world as I had been. I marveled at how much further along life’s road this young actress had come than I at the same age. I almost introduced myself to her when I glimpsed her standing alone for a moment. Hello, I’m the original of the character you played tonight. … No, it was hopeless, I’d sound like a moron. I just couldn’t get into the idea and the spirit of the party.
“Belinda, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe we’ve met since Harry and Sally’s wedding. Sag Harbor, all those yellow-and-white-striped tents, a windy day … I’m Tony Chalmers.” He was short and round, but his hair, going a bit gray, was still worn in a frizzy halo—an Afro, people had called it then, back in the archaeological era known as the sixties. He’d been a tutor or a young instructor and Harry had latched on to him, made him a pal, declared him faculty adviser to the Ruffians and an honorary member.
“I believe you’re right,” I said, remembering how he’d always been a calming, thoughtful presence when the Ruffians had thrown a party in Harry and Jack’s room on the top floor of Eliot House, overlooking Memorial Drive. “It’s been far too long—”
“Well, college connections sometimes fade pretty quickly. Though not Harry’s, God knows. He got me back into the old Ruffian lore.” Chalmers puffed at a short, chipped black briar. “Asked me—told me, is more like it—to give Welles a hand, memory work. It was an interesting experience, sifting through the sands of time, trying to fit the bits back together. How did you like Hacker’s handiwork?”
I told him I’d loved it, adding that it had made me feel my age, and a little sad.
He nodded. “Bound to have that effect, I suppose.” He sucked on the pipe, tamped a finger into the bowl. “Nostalgia. It’s funny, when Harry brought up the idea of a show based on the Ruffians, I had my doubts. I always had a funny feeling about the club …”
“Really? It seemed so innocent.”
He squinted at me as if wondering how much he dared confide in me. Men at their little secrets, making rules for their little games.
“No, no, I guess there wasn’t anything out of line.” He puffed again. He’d taken on some professorial habits which made him seem older, but he couldn’t have been fifty yet. “Sometimes, though, men and boys, they can get too close, share too many confidences and trust each other too much … sounds contradictory, I know, that’s what a club like Harry’s is supposed to do. But when you have a bunch of guys so close, you’re also running a real risk—there might be a misunderstanding, a difference of opinion—and pow! You’ve got a problem. These were bright, volatile guys. I was always afraid the top might just come blowing off one day …” He bobbed his head, scowled, shrugged, and burst into a wide grin. “But, lo, I need not have worried. Nothing violent, nothing nasty, and it’s a sweet, happy little show … sigh of relief, standing bravos.”
As I listened to him run through some Ruffian reminiscences, I remembered what Jack had once told me about Chalmers. “He’s the only man in the world,” Jack had said, “who knows more about the Ruffians than we do ourselves. He knows more, you see, because we all went to him with problems we couldn’t take to each other. A professional people collector, old Tony.”
Finally the professor ran down, drifted away in a cloud of pungent smoke, leaving me alone. Thank God, he hadn’t asked me about Jack. Perhaps he already knew how things had turned out.
Suddenly I wanted more than anything else to be alone. I found a bottle of champagne, half-full, grabbed it, and went off down the hall toward the study. The door was ajar, and I closed it behind me. A breeze moved the draperies, the rain drummed outside. In a corner a small television glowed with a baseball game, the sound turned down. The furniture was heavy leather, a large desk, stacks of bound playscripts, a couple of framed theatrical posters on the wall, a green-shaded student’s lamp.
I sank like a stone onto the island of a couch, resting my chin on my arm across the back, watc
hing the ballplayers in white dashing against the dark green of real grass in some ballpark somewhere. It was all so clear-cut. You hit the ball, you ran, you were safe or out, you scored or you didn’t, you won or you lost. Jack had once told me that baseball was the only game in which you scored when the ball was somewhere else. Jack loved baseball and hated tennis. “What kind of game is that?” he would say contemptuously. “You get penalized if you hit the ball too far—ridiculous!”
I was crying again, watching as the batter swung and drove the ball high into the night sky, up past the light standards, then the tiny comet of white, plummeting downward, the crowd on its feet, mouths open, all in silence, the outfielder leaping at the fence as the comet disappeared beyond his reach …
Tears on my cheeks, like a befuddled child, I watched the mute crowd screaming. With no sound, they might have been painted by Munch, an army of pain and despair beating their palms, crying out in the night, mouths caverns of agony. … I knew it was a ballgame, I could see it, but the lurking afterimage was one of agony, as if the awful reality clung like a beast to the back of illusion.
The door opened and there was Sally through the blur of tear-stuck lashes. She took a tissue from a box in the desk and handed it to me. “Come on, dry off. No reason to cry, you don’t have a penny in this show.” I giggled helplessly, felt the tears gush again, like a nosebleed that wouldn’t quite give up. Sally knelt on the couch beside me, softly patting my shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s all going to be all right … now, what’s the matter, tell Sal …”
Guilty Parties Page 7
