by Paul Monette
Now all of that had changed. In part, it was knowing that Jasper was gay, so the whole of his macho stance washed off like so much makeup. Among the clones and anorexics of the new breed here in Hollywood, Jasper Cokes was suddenly more than just another cipher in the toxic sky above L.A. Still, Greg had no clear picture of him. Everyone kept insisting Jasper wasn’t quite himself. He was drugged, they said, till he floated two feet off the ground. He coasted from one anonymous fuck to the next. He wasn’t there.
But if that was so, then what was the self that he left behind to get that way? What did he used to be like before? Nobody ever said. Though all Greg had were the old haphazard snaps from Carbon Mountain, he thought perhaps he had a better idea than they. As with any dream too much told and retold, everyone else had ceased to see Jasper at all. They just saw what they made him into.
He picked up the phone and peered at the dial, trying to figure how to ring the bar. Before he had time to guess, there was a click. The barman came on the line.
“Yeah, what?”
“Send in a dozen oysters, will you?” he asked. His stomach followed up with a sudden roll, as if to beg for the lunch he’d missed and the dinner he’d spurned in the heat of pursuit. “On second thought, make it two.”
“Listen—all we got back here is Fritos.”
Greg could hear the dusky, plaintive lyric of April in Paris riding behind the barman’s voice. What now? He was not a man given to giving orders. He avoided clerks in stores with a second sight, just when they longed to help him most. He’d never used room service ever, not once in his life. He preferred to starve.
“I don’t care where you get ’em—just get ’em,” he said. “Send someone out to a restaurant. Say you got somebody sick.”
“With what?”
“The vapors.”
He could hear the barman serving beers, the bottle caps bulleting off when he brought up his church key. The ricochet made it sound as if Artie were singing in a bunker somewhere, in the midst of a pitched battle.
“Never heard of it,” said the barman after a pause.
“Disease of the heart. You get so dizzy you can’t keep anything down but oysters and good champagne. You’ll do it?”
“It’ll cost you an arm and a leg. A buck apiece, I bet.”
“Money’s no object,” Greg assured him, squinting into the mirror to see how pale the East had left him.
“Yeah, I’ll do it. But only because it’s for Artie, see?”
Greg thought that was the end of it. He’d have hung up first, but stayed to hear as much of the song as he could. Distorted and strangely hollow-eyed, it crackled through the line, faint as an Edison cylinder full of the voice of Caruso. The bottles went on being opened, and Greg assumed the barman was momentarily stuck, without a free hand to hang up. He didn’t suppose they had anything more to say. Then:
“Listen—if you’re so loaded, do me a favor. Slip him a little cash, why don’t you? He doesn’t have nothing. You want champagne with that?”
“Of course,” said Greg, dazzled at how elaborate Artie’s lies turned out to be.
“We don’t got French,” said the barman, “but I guarantee it’s good and cold.”
He made it sound like ginger ale.
The connection broke abruptly, and Greg was left to ponder the notion of having come off as stinking rich. The big tycoon who appeared by chance in the leading lady’s dressing room, lighting his fat cigars with twenty-dollar bills. The irony was compounded by the fact that Artie had six million socked away. As for being taken for a long-lost love come back for old times’ sake, Greg didn’t mind in the least. It was his kind of story, after all.
He rose from the chair and stood back to see what they saw in him. He was just beside the rack of gowns, and he picked up the end of a tawny boa and draped it across his shoulders. It made him feel vaguely threatened. He shrugged it off, not a moment too soon. The door swung in, as if someone meant to catch him in the act. In fact, it was only Artie, back as big as life.
He dragged the wig from his head and plopped it on the table. His short and sandy hair, all plastered with sweat against his scalp, looked more than ever like a football player’s. The jersey dress was soaked at the pits and belly—though not at the tits, where the falsies absorbed the heat. He made no further move to cross back over now, neither stripping out of the dress nor diving for the cold cream. The hair, it seemed, was quite enough concession to the real.
“You were saying?” Artie asked, without benefit of backtrack.
“What?”
“No—why. You were going to tell me why.”
“Look, I know you didn’t do it,” Greg began.
“Then why did you say I did? For kicks?”
“Because”—he had no notion what he meant to say till it tumbled out—“I don’t know how you stood it, frankly.”
If what he was after was a moment’s pause, he suddenly got it in spades. Artie stood still and waited to see what further twist was coming. From the neck up, he was just another man, with a thin veneer of makeup on—like a kid at Halloween. Neck down, the illusion held, especially as he stood with his hands on his hips, a shimmer of bangles at either wrist. The moment grew. The two faced off so nakedly they even seemed to blink as one. Greg began to understand that Artie might prefer to come across half and half like this—like a man at a woman’s window. As if one could have things butch and pretty both at once.
“Say on, Macduff,” said Artie dryly.
Greg took a deep breath, ready as he’d ever be: “Well,” he said, “you must have felt real fucked over, right? Like somebody stole your life right out from under you.”
“What life would you be referring to?”
“Why, the theater, of course.”
“Oh,” he exclaimed, like the light had dawned, “you mean them!” And he pointed across the room at the Lunts.
“Well, yes.”
“This is all before my time,” said Artie, walking across to stand in front of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. He smiled as if it were the play itself spread out in front of him—third-act curtain just gone up. “I used to hear all these stories,” he said, “about how it was in the thirties. The streets were paved with gold. The lilacs bloomed all over Times Square. And everything good was a hit.”
“Didn’t you want a piece of that?”
“Of course,” he said. “Who doesn’t?”
He spoke without trace of sarcasm. Turning away from the poster, he smiled a smile that seemed to mean it didn’t matter. It was all the same to him how fate was broken down. He stepped up to Greg, put a hand on his arm, and leaned over as if to tell a secret. He said: “Things haven’t turned out so bad—believe me.”
“What about Hamlet?”
“What about Hamlet?”
“Wouldn’t you like to try it?”
“Goodness,” said Artie, “aren’t we grand?”
He sat sidesaddle on the bentwood chair and turned at last to the mirror. He studied his face in a purely technical way, as if to see what needed touching up for the late show at eleven.
“What I like to do,” he said dreamily, more to himself than Greg, “is go to the market. Or the dry cleaner’s. I love it when things break down, because then I can run and get them fixed. I figure, if I keep my gear shipshape, it’ll last me all my life.”
Greg remembered something Vivien said—that Artie did everyone’s errands. It seemed, when she said it, like part of a larger put-down, as if, six million or no, he was mostly a glorified valet. His bodyguarding duties, aside from muscling through the occasional crowd, more often than not involved his going out on rainy nights to score a bottle of aspirin. It had never occurred to Greg he might enjoy it.
“Besides,” said Artie, “you never know where you’ll be when the snow starts falling. You gotta be ready.”
They were more alike than not, these two. It was just that Greg preferred to do his errands inside, as he made a circuit of his apartment. Recall
ing now his endless puttering—day in, day out—he felt the most delicious pang for the way he once got by, before all of this began.
“Carl’s dead,” he stated quietly.
“Yes, I know,” the other replied.
But of course he did. Why else was Maxim Brearley here?
The wheels had wheels, and they turned like crazy. Greg leaned a shoulder against the gowns. He knew he had reached this point by sheer deduction. Everything fit. The rightness of it all was such that he literally would have staggered if he’d had to walk away. Yet he couldn’t have told you when he’d puzzled it out in a conscious way—or what were the two and two that added up to four.
“I just remembered what I came to ask.”
“What’s that?”
“About Max,” said Greg. It was all a lie to act as if he’d known it all along. It was only now, this very minute.
“Well, what?”
“This is going to sound funny,” he said, “but—how many toes does he have?”
chapter 9
ARTIE PICKED THE THREE OF THEM UP at the Cherokee Nile, at a few minutes after seven. Sid and Edna, quite beside themselves since Monday, had on the sly alerted half the tenants. Dozens leaned out the windows as they left, to try for a glimpse of the powder-blue Rolls. The effect, thought Greg, was rather like a tenement in Naples. He ought to have known Sid and Edna couldn’t be trusted to be discreet.
He wedged himself between them on the seat and launched into a course of manners appropriate to a stately home. They nodded and gave their solemn word. They swore they wouldn’t speak unless spoken to first. But all the while, they checked out the car—running their fingers over the wood veneers and the calfskin soft as butter. As the sun set far down Sunset, filling the air with the twilight smell of jasmine, Greg could tell he was mostly talking to himself.
“And don’t ask to see the hot tub, whatever you do. In general, try to act like bored aristocrats.”
“I’ll be the Duchess of Windsor, shall I?” Edna asked, stretching her feet to the built-in footstool. “Sid, can you do a duke?”
“I can do a maharaja,” boasted Sid, by which he seemed to mean he could do them both at once.
“No, no,” insisted Greg. “Just be yourselves. What I’m trying to say is keep it down.”
“Don’t worry, Greg,” she said. “We’ll dodder around like the Ancient of Days. You can even cut up our food in little pieces if you want.”
At the end of Beverly Hills, they turned off Sunset and made their way up the pass. Greg wasn’t sure what made him so fastidious of Steepside, all of a sudden. It certainly wasn’t for Vivien’s sake, though she probably turned out dinners as finely tuned as Mozart. He knew he could talk till he turned quite blue, warning them not to act overawed, but that was a losing battle. He stood a better chance, just now at least, of turning down the volume.
They had gone about half a mile when Artie called over his shoulder to point out a half-moon rock by the side of the road—the border stone of the ancient Willis parcel.
“He had a whole square mile at one time,” Artie said.
That was all the prodding Sid and Edna needed. In a flash, they asked him twenty questions, doubling up like a pair of overeager journalists. Greg was struck dumb. They knew so much already, with their facts and figures flying, it was a wonder they had anything left to ask. Artie managed to keep up his end, but just barely. Since most of it was news to him, Greg had no choice but to sit it out and listen.
At last they left the winding boulevard and snaked their way up Willis’s hill, as far as the high wire fence that trailed away across the chaparral. With hardly a break in speed, Artie snatched up his electric eye and aimed it at the gates. They parted soundlessly and let the Rolls pass through. The silence fell in the first class lounge as the newcomers took in the reaches of Steepside. Greg, for all his cautionary pose, was happy as a kid for a moment there, to feel them on either side of him grow openmouthed and still.
They reached the gravel turnaround in front of the garages. Greg hadn’t said a single word to Artie yet—not so much as hello when he first got in. It was as if he meant to hide whatever bond there was between them. Silly of him, maybe, since Sid and Edna were already wise to what was going on, but in fact, he wasn’t the only one who was acting so discreet. They were all quite formal, in their way. They played to type, like a carful of character actors waiting out a plot.
When they came inside, they found the canyon room lit up with firelight and candles only. Vivien seemed to be making sure that the rose of dusk in the bowl of hills would not be lost upon them. Artie left them alone and wandered off to the kitchen. Sid and Edna lost no time. They slipped out onto the narrow balcony, gripped the rail, and gawked at the view. Greg slumped down in a leather sling chair and flipped the pages of a magazine devoted to endangered species.
After a moment, he heard her voice trail in from a few rooms off, giving a final order as to the imminence of dinner. Then the noise of footsteps as she came across the slate-stone floor. He turned to beckon in his fellow musketeers—only to find they’d vanished. Had they leaned out over the rail too far?
“Uh—I don’t know where they went,” he said as Vivien reached him. “I probably should have brought a leash.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Saves me having to give a tour.”
“You holding up all right?”
“Oh, sure. It’s over now.”
She’d sent the body back to Kansas City, where Carl had a younger sister. If the sister had her doubts about the details, she apparently put them to rest for the sake of the millions she fell heir to. Money didn’t talk half so much as it worked to keep things quiet.
“Max here?”
“He’s downstairs setting up,” she said, smiling over his shoulder.
A Ping-Pong of voices just behind him told him who was back. Vivien moved to greet them. They flushed with pride to be taken up like guests from out of town. They’d been up to the roof and had a tour of Jasper’s private room. They made as if to apologize, but who would have thought they’d find it open?
Open or not, Greg almost said, they didn’t have to go in. But he held his temper and left the matter of reprimand to Vivien. From the smile on her face, he knew she didn’t mind where they poked about. He wandered off into the bar and poured an amber liquid just as old as he was into a hollowed-out rock of deep-cut crystal. The room was paneled blond, the bar itself a sandstone slab pocked here and there with the print of fossil shells. Above the row of bottles along the wall, twenty feet of Chinese screen accordioned out, in an ink-brown silk overrun by storks.
He’d been in this house just twice before, and then like a common sneak thief. Tonight, like the prince and the pauper, he was due to sit at the head table. For sheer drama, it was more of a movie than any movie he’d ever thought of writing. But he dared not moon about any of that. The bar was an empty set just now. Greg turned and beat a hasty retreat, bumping into Artie as the latter came around the corner with a tray of hot hors d’oeuvres. Greg plucked up a puff of pastry, then stepped back to let Artie pass. This moment, he thought, was clearly not an accident.
“You want a drink?” asked Greg, stepping around behind the bar and reaching for the private stock.-
“No, thanks,” said Artie patiently, as he took a seat on one of the stools and spun around once. “I never drink at home.”
“I see. Has it started snowing yet?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How much?”
“Oh, it’s very hard to say,” said Artie, a trifle disapprovingly. He offered the tray of canapés again, and Greg took a chicken liver wrapped in bacon. “Three, four inches maybe,” Artie went on nonchalantly.
“That much, eh?”
Greg buried his face in a gulp of Scotch, less struck by the fact they were talking in code than he was to hear that “eh.” He sounded like he took his cues from the cutting-room floors of the forties. It was irony made him talk that way—or pe
rhaps it was only nerves. Why else would he walk out saying what he did? With a pat to Artie’s shoulder, he said: “Carry on, old boy.” Like a British officer up to his ass in restless natives.
He snatched a mushroom stuffed with crab and exited back to the canyon room.
Vivien, Sid, and Edna huddled on hassocks drawn up close to the great stone fireplace. Vivien poked the roaring logs with an iron bar. Hell, he thought as he walked across towards them, all they needed now was weenies. It was very hard to maintain his Trevor Howard steeliness in the face of so much woodsy comradeship. But he made his way down to within ten feet, which he thought was near enough to strike a balance. He stood at a long bay window and stared across the ridge. There was still no marker on Jasper’s grave, and the dark was so far advanced as to blur the fall of the slope. Yet he seemed to know precisely where it was, by a kind of instinct.
“Okay,” Edna said, cozying closer still to Viv, “but that’s just you and the masses. What’s it like to be recognized by somebody else as big as you?”
Oh, shit, he thought, they were at it already. Still, he made no move to get out of earshot.
“Well, like who?” asked Vivien curiously.
“Oh, I don’t know—Picasso or something. You’re walking down the street, and all of a sudden he pops around the corner. You’ve looked at each other in magazines for years. What happens?”
Vivien paused to think. The fire smacked its teeth in the silence. Greg could no longer see ten feet into the dark. And then she said: “I suppose we’d say hello.”
“I knew it,” said Edna fervently. “It’s like a little private club. You get to the top, and everyone’s got this secret.”
“What secret is that?”
“How would I know? I’m not famous.”
