Long Shot

by Paul Monette

  She plopped the mail in the basket, stood up heavily, and headed after Sid. Clearly, she saw no need to draw it out any further. She’d already raised the specter of collusion, after all. “You think they’ll put you on the payroll?” she had asked, only moments before the call came through. The turn of events spoke volumes, all its own. Besides, he ought to know by now that what she said was the tip of the iceberg—especially when she was mad. She liked to savor being right. Words didn’t always do it justice.

  “Hey!” demanded Greg. She turned halfway as she passed inside. She poised mid-step to hear him out, but the forward motion never stopped. She was on her way, no matter what he said. “What’s with you two? You trying to say she did it herself?”

  “Vivien?” Edna asked, incredulous as he. “From what I hear, she don’t do a goddam thing herself. What do you think she’s got flunkies for?”

  And she floated on through to the living room—leaving him more or less out in the cold, though the temperature hovered near eighty. If he’d followed them in just then, he’d have found them getting right to work. Industrious, cheerful, bustling about the dining room like Santa’s elves, they would ground themselves in the only way they knew—by going into detail. “Getting on with it,” as Sid would say. There were countless things to be put in their place. Debts to pay and parcels to send. A part of Greg longed to go inside and get lost in the stars like they did. He counted, day to day, on that feel for the concrete act. He’d learned it as much from them as anyone.

  But not now. He stuck to his mood and went to the rail. He fell into his old position of repose—leaning over, staring down into the tops of trees. He saw he could no longer argue that events had shut them out of the case. They were in, all right. Sid and Edna, of course, didn’t really believe it was Vivien Cokes behind it all. Some other brand of fear—abandonment by him, no doubt—had made them snipe at her. They would all get along like a house afire once they were introduced. They shared a common habit, after all, of saying what they pleased. And they seemed, all three, to labor under the same gross misapprehension—that they understood Greg Cannon better than he did himself.

  It wasn’t a mood that had a name. It was simply his. He was hobbled and bruised and throbbing, but he wouldn’t give in to any of that. What he wished to be right now was an aimless man. He measured the shades of green in the gardens far below. He watched for rifts in the smog. He had no inclination to convince anyone of anything. The man in jail who’d wrapped him around like a coat, like a Saint Bernard in a blizzard, had fled irretrievably into the past. As far from here and now as Harry Dawes.

  It must have been jail that brought this on. However it was, the rest would have to come to him. He had no desire to meet halfway. As to Vivien Cokes, he didn’t care what she meant to do with all that money. Nor why she went to Bermuda, either. What was on his mind was something quite specific: If she was going to read the book, then he didn’t have to. Hard to say why it mattered, but the very fact that it did was why they didn’t understand him half so well as they thought. It was doubtless all bound up with his perversity.

  He followed the sway of the tall old palms that burst like so many fireworks just below his terrace. Whatever it was, he thought with a lilt of vagary, was not in any book. Till the day before, he’d been afraid to leave his own apartment. He couldn’t travel half a mile from home without a sense of doom. But now he knew there were others besides himself, and it made him want to wander all around. From wood to wood. From notion to notion. He had no use for Walden, having been there now for two whole years. He would go instead where the spirit took him. Out of this world, if the right thing came along.

  They all holed up for the weekend, trying to change the subject. Edna spent the lion’s share of Friday just going over the Crawford file. The Crawford fans had to be handled carefully, since they had a way of asking for an autograph that made it seem like what they needed was a good caning. Sid did his stable of dancers, personalizing madly. “Hello to the boys back home,” he scrawled across a glossy, sending Ann Miller’s best regards. And Greg sat under a visor, off to himself, doing the names of the dead on faded bits of paper. Bogart and Monty Clift, to be precise.

  When they’d done a whole day of it, going from this one to that one, they grouped together at five on Saturday afternoon—amply supplied with highballs. They stuffed the envelopes, licked the flaps, and stuck the stamps, in a kind of crude assembly line. They turned the local news up loud, and now and then, when an item was aired about Jasper Cokes, they found themselves turning strangely quiet. The portents were queer, all over the place. A story went out that the western branch of Jasper’s fans had just convened in Reno, where various amateur mystics planned to raise his ghost for a last goodbye. Women with child stepped up to say that Jasper was the father. People still swore they’d seen him alive—as recently as this afternoon, in eight different states and several foreign capitals. So far there was no suggestion that he’d risen from the dead.

  They processed it all in a flash, and saw how far ahead they were. Sid jiggered another round of Seven Crown. Greg fizzed the glasses with ginger ale. Edna laid out a bed of Wheat Thins, slathering each with half an inch of avocado dip. They worked on into the evening, till all their reserves were lowered and talk between them was loose again. Perhaps the instinct to compromise was stronger than their egos.

  By the time Sid and Edna left, to go see Shane at the Tiffany, they both averred to be satisfied that Greg knew what he was doing. He’d secured a route direct to the widow, hadn’t he? Just to get past the loonies and dime-store seers was something. They buttered him up outrageously. By Monday afternoon, they were sure, he’d have pried her deepest secrets out of her. Then they patted his arm approvingly and went off sloppy drunk to hail the bus at Highland.

  He made no move to disabuse them. Maybe he’d be in the mood, come Monday, to do just what they said. For now, he sat on the arm of the sofa and played the channels with his portable eye. He kept flicking back to How to Marry a Millionaire, but only turned the volume up when Marilyn was on. He tried to remember just how far Thoreau had gotten to by page 106. Though he hadn’t noticed the book was gone, the whole night through in the county jail, one thing stuck with him still. The curmudgeonly loner at Walden Pond had just described a season of visits from a dark-eyed Canadian woodcutter. A real hot number, he sounded like. In any case, Greg was convinced there was much more to it than Henry Thoreau was owning up to.

  Everyone he met was wasting time. Men with one idea, he called them—“like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling.” All but the woodcutter, chopping away and stacking it up, four by four by eight. He was favored as being at one with the woods. More so, it almost seemed, than the writer himself, with his endless record of phenomena. Thoreau had found a man who was larger in his consciousness than what he said or understood. Regrettably, they never got to bed. Greg would have known, he read so close between the lines.

  Professors and sellers of books would not have been amused. Greg didn’t care. He had nothing he felt like saying about this book he refused to finish. Grudgingly, he did admit that Thoreau was a hell of a writer. He wrote out his days at the pond as if there could never be time enough to get it right. The hardest thing about writing, Greg had always thought, was having no excuse. When you couldn’t do it, you blamed it on your income and your celibacy, or else it was the heat, the downstairs neighbor, or the phone. Yet Greg had toughed out days when the outside world did not intrude for an instant. Still he stared at his sea-green Hermes, looking as if he expected a scrap of teletype to rattle out onto the page. A career with a built-in gun at one’s head. It got so a man could hardly think without thinking he would fail. Thoreau, he saw, had worked his way beyond all that.

  By the time the Sunday paper arrived, the scope of Jasper’s holdings had begun to be accounted. Wanted!, his last year’s picture, grossed a hundred and twenty million, of which Jasper’s cut was twelve cents on the dollar, starting at dollar on
e. His up-front fees had always been common knowledge, part of the hype that went with his deals. He made a couple of pictures a year, and they paid him a million six, a million eight, for two months’ work, maybe three. After Wanted!, where his salary worked out to a flat two million for an eleven-day shoot, he suddenly had a new handle: the man who earned a million bucks a week.

  But even so, no one was quite prepared for the fortune he was piling up in points. Well over a hundred million dollars in just eight years. With figures big as this, the verdict of the press was clear: A man this rich has forfeited the right to kill himself. Or at least he ought to have signed it all away to worthy causes. It would have been better, moneywise, to drop it in stacks from the wing of a plane. Anything not to surrender seventy-five per cent of it to Vivien, who already had too damn much for her own good.

  The widow came in for harder knocks than Jasper. What kind of a wife was she to him that he had to go the route of sucking cock? The midnight press ran pictures of her meant to show she was good for nothing. Sunning topless on the deck of an oilman’s yacht. At a supper club with a married man who had to be more than her lawyer. In a word, this woman was fallen. An exclusive interview, splashed across the vilest of the tabloids, quoted a shadowy source to the effect that Jasper thought Vivien turned him queer.

  “I have nothing to say,” said Vivien Cokes. And they printed it as if it were a signed confession.

  It’s none of their fucking business, Greg thought glumly, tying his tie in the mirror Monday morning. It was the second time he’d worn a tie in a week—in a year and a half, for that matter—and he didn’t think it boded well at all. He would have preferred to go dressed down. But Sid and Edna, while he wasn’t looking, sewed up the rips in his seams and pressed his charcoal suit back into shape. He didn’t have the heart to leave it hanging in the closet. As for the tie, the long end came out shorter than the short, and he had to start all over.

  He fumed at the generalized presumption that Jasper’s being gay was the source of all his fuck-ups. He decided he ought to ask Vivien to change the public image before the plaster set. Why not go with the Romeo mood of the suicide note? Jasper had braved, as long as he could, the corner the world had painted him in. The tragic isolation of the lovers was the story with beginning, middle, and end. Greg could have written it in his sleep. It wasn’t true, of course, but for now it would serve to cut the Satanic edge, at least till they found out something more. Greg had always run the other way when gay people fought for their rights—so much did he shrink from siding with groups. But now he was pissed at all this innuendo. He knotted his tie like a noose, till it looked as if he’d used it to strangle a sudden assailant.

  He stood on the curb in the noonday sun, ducking back into the lobby three or four times to mop his brow. When the powder-blue Rolls glided up, he had just hung his jacket on the fire-alarm post. He was waving his arms like a bellows to dry the sweat in the pits of his shirt. Artie braked on a dime. He stared straight ahead through the windshield, waiting for Greg to pull himself together. At last Greg reached for the front-door handle. And just as suddenly froze. From high above him, he heard a noise of whistles and hoots.

  Oh, no, he thought with a claustrophobic shiver, cupping a shady hand above his eyes and looking skyward. Sid and Edna were leaning perilously over his railing. They pointed and called, but he couldn’t hear. It sounded like they were warning him of a bomb. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, sure it would wait till he came home later. Then the breezes seemed to shift, and he heard them loud and clear.

  “In the back,” they were shouting. “Ride in the back!”

  “Go to hell!” he hollered up at them. He thumbed the handle pointedly, and the front door opened without a sound. He climbed in next to Artie and settled back, one hand pinching the putty-colored leather of the seat. The Mozart was so loud he felt like he was trapped in the belly of a cello. But he absolutely refused to be overawed. He searched the panel of gauges till he spotted the proper knob. He cut the volume to a whisper.

  “It’s pretty silly, isn’t it?” said Greg. He tried to sound like a regular guy. “The last time we met, you got me arrested.”

  “You’re lucky,” Artie countered, without a trace of apology. “Most everyone she meets is a fool and a liar. She don’t usually bother, if you know what I mean.”

  “Ah, well,” he retorted vaguely as they sped away up Highland. He leaned back into the seat to regroup. Did they have to dispense with small talk quite so fast? He liked a bit more foreplay, somehow. “Tell me,” he said, “have things sort of quieted down at the house?”

  “I guess so,” Artie said. “People don’t bother us much.” They were going about eighty. In a moment, the Rolls would connect with Route 101 and rocket them through to the other side of the mountains. “She told me you wanted to talk about Jasper. What do you want to know?”

  It was all in the nature of a dare, Greg thought. Rooted in sex, like everything else. They had known it Thursday evening in the hills, when the course of things had put them face to face. They were both gay, and they both knew it. Vivien probably had her own reasons for asking Artie to open up, to do with the fact that Greg was Harry’s lover. There were things he had a right to understand. It was obvious too that Artie had some use for the occasion—some kind of confrontation to enact.

  “You were lovers?”

  “Used to be,” Artie said. “For a couple of months. We were kids.”

  “In college, you mean,” Greg added, nodding. What’s-its-name. The place where the three of them met, all snowbound in the mountains of Vermont. They had formed a little corporation, for the purpose of building a movie star. Greg had heard the yarn of Jasper Cokes a hundred times. There was no need to start so far back. “Couple months,” Greg said. “That’s a long time. And nobody ever made a move to get it on again?”

  “You mean, was I still in love with him?”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Not really,” Artie replied. “Not at all, at the very end.”

  He smiled at the road ahead in a funny way, as if a private joke were about to pass. They crested the mountain, and Greg saw the white-smoke mist of the Valley. Then, like an afterthought, Artie went on—as if candor were one thing, the truth quite another. “You have no idea,” he said, “how perfect he was when he was twenty.”

  A bodyguard, thought Greg, had all the opportunities. The very man you stationed in the hallway by your bathroom—so Norman Bates couldn’t get you in the shower. It sounded to Greg as if Artie put a lot of stock in an old one-liner, to the effect that a man had to sell his soul to see his name in lights. Was it enough to make a long-lost lover slit your wrists, on the grounds that you’re dead inside?

  “Did he ever make it with Carl?” Greg asked. He was talking half to himself. Trying in his mind to see the whole trio—far far back, when they first met up.

  “Of course not,” Artie scoffed. “Carl was Jasper’s straight man. Carl doesn’t make it with anyone.” And though clearly not a man who made witty remarks, he said the rest with an acid laugh that bubbled up in every line. “Actually, I don’t either. There’s this one part of Steepside we call ‘the cloister.’ Celibates only.”

  Imagine: The bodyguard turns and goes for the throat of the man he’s meant to protect. Now, there was a paranoid’s nightmare. It would be, Greg thought, a spur of the moment thing. Just double the dose of Quaaludes, and powder them up in the evening’s Mai Tais. Then, when the two men are lolling at the edge of sleep, their heads on the rim of the redwood tub, you come lumbering through the garden, a single-edge blade in one hand. Hardly believing you’re doing it, even as you cut.

  “With me, it’s because I don’t try,” continued Artie. “The other guy’s gotta come to me. I don’t know how to ask.”

  And Greg thought: Wait a minute.

  The Rolls swung off on the exit ramp. For the whole long curve, nothing was said. Greg gripped the handle beside him and hugged the door close. T
hough Artie had only made the mildest pass, the centrifugal motion seemed to push the moment to a pitch. They were going so fast, he thought he’d fall over, right into Artie’s lap. Or the Rolls would jump the divider and hurtle into a truck. He shut his eyes, waiting to go up in flames.

  It would have been the perfect way for a moralist to go—one’s virtue all intact, in the death seat of a Rolls. But Greg didn’t get to die of it just yet. They reached the end of the ramp and came to a stop at the boulevard light, quite without incident. After all, it had only been a moment. A third party listening in on every word—say Vivien Cokes—would not have detected a shred of innuendo, or not the kind that dragged a man to bed. Perhaps it hadn’t happened.

  “And what about Vivien?” Greg said into the silence. “Does she get as much as they say?”

  “Ask her,” said Artie snappishly. “It’s none of your goddam business, if you want to know what I think.”

  So there. It had just happened. Artie wanted to fuck, and Greg had turned him down. It had all been done without a word. And they were already into the phase of trying to live it down. Greg cast about for excuses, wondering if he should make a case that he was too stricken with grief to get it up. It wasn’t so at all. It was just that Artie was not his type—had the same color hair, for Christ’s sake.

  At the studio gate, the guard waved them on without making them stop. They rode in past the black tower of executive offices—like a great computer dense with circuitry, or a Xerox machine half a block long. Then on down a row of buff-colored stages. Greg didn’t want to count the times he’d moved the earth to get this far, whereupon he was usually shuffled through and out the other side. He refused to act like a tourist. Refused, after all this time, to be cowed and peasant-grateful.

  Just behind the commissary, they came up against a wall of men—the crew of a starship heading in for lunch, with a gang of armored aliens in tow. As Artie slowed the Rolls, the group from outer space divided down the middle to let it through. Some in helmets, some in masks with saucer eyes, they turned to look at what brand of star was riding by. When they saw it was only Greg, they seemed to draw back like stars themselves. As if they couldn’t bear to see a nobody acting big-shot.