Sacred Monster

Flashback 7

The far blue sea was full to the brim, rolling up the white sand lip of shore and receding again, flowing and ebbing, frothing white, whispering to itself while up on the silver-bleached wooden deck the pretty people in white trousers and powerful people in multicolored muumuus chattered together amid a jingling music of ice cubes. The deck served as collar for an oval swimming pool in which two bronzed young men in bikini briefs played and giggled, their fingers from time to time brushing as though inadvertently each other’s thighs. The bikinis bulged, the eyes sparkled like the sea, the pink tongues lolled in their mouths.

Beyond the pool and deck was the house, all white and glass, broadside to the sea, extending to the right beyond the deck. Through open sliding glass doors was the wide main room, at once parlor, dining area, and kitchen. In here, among the white walls, blond furniture, and large semi-erotic paintings, more people, all of them male (like those outside), chatted and drank and ate the delicate canapés. The kitchen was at the right end, and beyond it stretched a skylit hall flanked by doors — master bedroom and bath on the ocean side, guest rooms and bath on the poison ivy side — with an open door at the far end leading to a room enclosed by crowded bookshelves, with small windows grudging an ocean view and a desk against the windowless farthest wall. In this room, hunched over a small portable typewriter on the desk, sat the owner of the house, George Castleberry, trying to get some work done.

It was always the same thing every summer. Get into a social mood, invite friends, accept friends of friends because the whole world and his gay brother wants to come to Fire Island Pines, and when the house fills up discover there’s just too much work to be done, deadlines are pressing, the whole thing was just a dreadful mistake. The typewriter calls, duty calls, let the damn locusts amuse themselves, they’ll all be gone on the last ferry anyway, no sleepovers. Except, of course, for those very few, that tiny number, that infinitesimal troop of those George Castleberry actually liked. Then he could settle down with that hardy band for the true amusement of the day: dishing the day trippers.

In the meantime, work. It was so hard to concentrate; while his guests cavorted, George frowned furiously at the leaden words he had most recently typed. A slender petulant balding man of fifty-three, dressed in a green and white caftan and brown sandals, George Castleberry was among the three or four most powerful playwrights of the current American stage, and yet it seemed to him when working that every word he put on paper was meretricious and false, that he had been incredibly lucky in the matter of actors and directors and producers, that he was a fraud and a mountebank who would inevitably some day be exposed for the utter waste of everybody’s time he really was, that it was only the deplorable state of the American theater — all the really talented writers were either doing novels for the art or movies for the money — that had made it possible for him to get away with this fourth-rate toothless mumbling for as long as he had. Having to fight his way past that clawing gorgon in his mind to the typewriter every day left him not much time or patience for the sensibilities of others. Now, hearing light laughter more distinctly than the general background wash of social chitchat, he snarled, he actually ground his teeth, he turned to glare over his shoulder and down the long hall to where some pretty pansy all in white stood twinkling in amusement, just beyond the threshold into the kitchen. “Damnit!” George cried. “Close that door!”

Startled faces were turned toward him. Two or three people reached at once for the knob, bumping into one another, creating a brief Keystone Komedy before at last the door was shut and he was alone.

Still angry, George turned to the typewriter and glared at the words written there. “Now I don’t get the ventilation,” he muttered, anger shading into self-pity.

Two or three minutes of despairing concentration quite slowly elapsed. George’s fingers moved tentatively to the typewriter keys, tapped out a word, another, another, a phrase, a sentence, another.

A breeze riffled the page in the typewriter. Party chat became audible again. George, one eyebrow raised in murderous disbelief, turned about to see Harry Robelieu making his way down the hall toward this room, diffident but daring. Robelieu, a minor director of off-Broadway or out-of-town productions, was among those tolerated by but not actually welcomed by George; his brazen approach now, no matter how tremulous, was so unexpected that George said nothing, didn’t even snarl, scarcely showed his teeth as Harry traversed the hall and entered the office and said, “George, we just came over on the ferry.”

Deceptively quiet, George said, “I’m trying to work here.”

Harry, unbelievably, didn’t even acknowledge that. Some sort of excitement gleamed beneath his pale anonymous face. He said, “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“I don’t want to meet people,” George told him. “I hate people. What have people ever done for me?”

“This isn’t people,” Harry insisted, moving toward the sea-view window. “Come take a look.”

George sat where he was. Harry looked out the window, then back at George, gesturing to him to come see. George turned his head to glower at his typewriter, needing to struggle through to victory, but at the same time tempted by this distraction, intrigued despite himself by Harry’s unwonted manner. With an angry slap of the hand on the desktop, he rose and crossed toward the window, prepared to be coldly bitchy about anything at all Harry might have it in mind to show. “Yes?” he said.

“Look,” Harry said, gesturing again, stepping back from the window.

George looked, lips already curling.

All alone by himself, at the outer corner of the silver-gray deck, stood a magnificent boy of twenty-three or — four, in tight black T-shirt and white jeans. He was half turned away, one hand on hip, gazing out over the illimitable sea. Sunlight caressed the strong line of his jaw, shadowed the eyes beneath his brows.

“Marc Antony,” whispered George.

“His name’s Jack Pine,” Harry Robelieu said, smiling with mingled amusement and relief. “If you want, I’ll—”

George turned, ignoring the soft, stupid man, and crossed the room with suddenly certain strides. Down the hall he went, and diagonally through the long main room to the open glass doors. Surprised and happy voices spoke to him, mistakenly assuming he had finished his work for the day, but he brushed uncaring by their faces, glasses, smiles, babbling words, gestures of comradeship and welcome.

Outside, the sun was very bright, almost a physical presence through which he marched, around the pool and across the deck, as though he and the boy were alone on a platform on a high mountaintop somewhere, the highest mountain in the world. A breeze whipped the caftan around his legs as he strode, the giggling and splashing from the pool faded to vacuity, and George stood before the boy.

Slowly, Jack Pine’s sea-struck eyes drew in, darkened, refocused down from the far horizon. George smiled at him. The boy, uncertain, tried an answering smile, saying, “Hello?”

George took the boy’s hands in both his own. “Do you know?” he said, his voice melting, all his pain and doubt draining away, leaving him as light as air. “Do you know? I’ve just written an entire play all about you, and here we are, meeting for the very first time.”

How beautiful the ocean was that day. I’ve always been very interested in water. (Not today, though; today I have no interest in looking at that pool of mine, just over there somewhere beyond the gray slate patio. I seem to be sitting up again, bent slightly forward for balance, terry-cloth robe fallen from my knuckly knees and bunched before my crotch. I seem to be half-turned away from that charming pool of mine, my face seems to be very near the polite but businesslike and very properly clad knee of my interviewer, who gazes down past that knee of his at me with what I now perceive to be horror and shock. What on earth have I been telling him? Oh, gosh, yes, George. Old George. I chuckle.)

The chuckle goads a reaction from my friend with the pad. Repugnance half strangling his voice, he says, “You went to bed with George Castleberry?”

“Waterbed,” I say, explain, explicate further, and the memory of that oceanic encounter, full of slipperinesses and heaving and absurd near misses makes me chuckle again.

The interviewer is appalled, well and truly appalled. “But—” he says, stutters, stumbles, “but — you’re completely heterosexual! All those marriages, all those girlfriends, all those children!”

I shrug, nod, acquiesce, explain: “It was a great part.”

“A great part!”

“I wanted it,” I say. “I am an actor, that’s what I am. When I don’t work, when I can’t work, I get into all these things, all this trouble. After Miriam, after Jack Schullmann blackballed me in the theater, after the empty months of being nothing and nobody and having no idea where I was going or if I was going anywhere, I wanted it. The role of Biff Novak was the only thing in the world at that particular moment that I really and truly wanted. So I got it. And the emptiness went away.”

“You had sex with George Castleberry!” Has ever an interviewer before in history had such large, round eyes?

“Mostly,” I say, “George had sex with me.”

Those large, round eyes blink, the mouth purses. “I’m not sure how that works,” he says.

I reach up a hand, mildly surprised at how badly it’s shaking, and tug at his nearest trouser knee. “It’s easy to understand,” I say. “Take off your pants.”

Nervously, betraying his nervousness, he taps my knuckles with his pencil to make me stop tugging at him. “That’s not necessary, Mr. Pine,” he says.

I remove my hand from him. This hand is really shaking. “The necessary we do right now,” I say, watching the hand. “The incoherent takes a little longer.” Turning my head a bit, bracing myself with a palm against the cool slate so I don’t inadvertently knock myself over with the force of my projection, “Hoskins!” I shout.

“The point is,” the prissy interviewer says, viewing me with loathing, “the point is, you slept your way to the top.”

“I did not.” I frown at him in offended dignity. “I slept my way to the middle,” I correct him frostily. “I clawed my way to the top.”

“However it happened,” he says, still coldly upset with me, “you did get the part of Biff Novak, the lead, in Last Seen in Tupelo.”

This is a statement, not a question. Having nothing to answer, I once again turn my head and raise my voice: “Hoskins, dammit!”

Immediately he appears, as though dropped from an airplane. He is my butler, and by God he looks it. White-haired, stoutish without being obese, stone-faced, dressed in full fig, he is as much a symbol of my status as my Mercedes. Bowing correctly from the hips, he speaks with that proper English-butler accent of his (I love it!): “You called?”

“I bellowed, dammit,” I tell him. “That’s your line, Hoskins, as you well know.” Imitating him perfectly, a thing I’m good at, and dipping my head in pale shadow of his obeisance, I say, “You bellowed, sir?”

Imitating me perfectly, not a flicker of expression on his patrician face as he dips his head in pale shadow of true obeisance, he says, “You bellowed, sir?”

“I did.” I show Hoskins my shaking hand. For some reason, I’m not sure why, I believe him to be sympathetic behind that blank facade. “I want one of those fuzzy drink things, you know?” I say. “With the vodka and the milk and the egg and all that stuff.”

“Certainly, sir,” he says (what else would he say?), and turns to the interviewer. “Anything for you, sir?”

The interviewer seems embarrassed as well as surprised. With a fidgety laugh, he indicates his notepad and pencil. “Not on duty,” he says.

Strange thing to say.

Hoskins doesn’t think so. “Very well,” he says, and bows generally and exits.

Where am I? Something’s gone agley with this interview, this fella dislikes me now. That’s not the way it’s done; we get along with the press. Trying for a cheery smile, I say, “Very restoring, that drink thing. Gets me on my feet. Knees, anyway. Where were we?”

“Last Seen in Tupelo.” He still disapproves of me; damn his eyes.

“Right,” I say. “That play made me, of course. Biff Novak was the real start of it all.” Smiling in reminiscence, I say, “And it brought Buddy back into my life.”

“Your best friend.”

“That’s right.” I smile, seeing it as a camera shot. AN ANGLE on a theater marquee:

CAMERA PANS down from the marquee to a busy mid-town New York street, centering on Buddy Pal, standing on the sidewalk in marine uniform and close-cropped hair, duffel bag over shoulder, smiling up at the marquee.

“Buddy Pal,” I say.