WRITER AT WORK

CATCH OF THE DAY, CHAPTERS 12 - 14

2006-08-26T04:53:00.000-04:00

XII. The Shuttlecock

The tourist throngs came early and stayed. Bermuda’d and sunburned, they crammed the shops and restaurants and even the seedier bars that were normally the locals’ very own. They spent freely; there were fewer Boston people than usual and more New Yorkers. The continued hot weather and the looming recession put them in a desperately festive mood.

Or maybe it was the presence of the film colony, which had descended on the town over the Memorial Day weekend. “Port Scandal” was a big-budget soap opera, and it gave Selene Harbor the alien glamour of a couple of hundred actors, technicians, and hangers-on who were so meticulously groomed, so well dressed, so rich in their expense accounts, that they conferred on the dowdy village a little of their debonair arrogance.

The effect of money and star power was instantaneous. The fantasy of sex galore seduced nearly everyone. Bill knew it had reached destructive proportions when Claire showed up for work one morning wearing “lip rouge,” a hint of mascara and a short-sleeved dress with a crinoline petticoat. She was still sporting her Red Cross Shoes, though.

“Hey, baby. What would St. Francis of Sales think of this getup?”

She almost threw the platter of scrambled eggs at him. “Nothing wrong with trying to look nice.”

Bill rolled his eyes back into his head and whispered, “Sometimes you can look toooooo nice.”

She gave him a hateful look, tossed her head--Bill noticed that she’d been to a hairdresser in a hopeless try at taming her curly black mop, no doubt for the first time in her life, no doubt pressured into it by her bitch of a niece with those sharp eyes and a way of delivering a compliment with a blade. And the damned girl was everywhere, popping in and out of view like some platinum-blonde version of—of what? The Raven? Harvey the Rabbit? The SS?

Claire moved on to a bald man from New York. She said sweetly, “Bonjour, m’sieu, des oeufs?”

He smiled, charmed by the French and the saucy style. “Why, yes, maircee.” He added, “That’s how we always say thanks on the Upper West Side!” Polite titters from around the table. Bill gave him a cross look and thought, Patronizing dickhead. Carol, the niece, flitted past the door to the hallway when the dickhead, who confessed himself to be a public relations expert, was flapping his gums. Whenever this tiresome newcomer was spouting off or humming at top volume along the corridors, Carol was sure to materialize. I’ve got some sharp eyes too, honey.

The other guests paid no mind--they were in high spirits, awaiting the appearance of a few crew members and lower-paid actors, who had contracted to stay for eight weeks at the highest rates. They got the turret rooms. They claimed to adore the views, the old-style charm and so on.

Who said Douglas was a dope at business? He’s raking it in! He pondered, briefly, the law of supply and demand and wondered if insufficient demand wasn’t really the cause of Douglas’s credit-unworthy existence. Rooms are so scarce--he’ll raise my rates, the pathetic prick

Bill listened for Douglas. He thought he heard him speaking to a female guest on the porch.

A few members of the crew entered, laughing about their hangovers. They sat at the table and playfully fought over the coffee carafe on a trivet.

A hush fell over the table, and the tourists tried not to gawk. They had the look of people who were satisfied with the value they were receiving.

The crew reveled in the attention but made no attempt to draw others into their incoherent conversation. They were young and gloried in their supporting roles as servitors to the glamorous. One of them, a broad-shouldered man in a tight polo shirt, referred to as Dave, glanced at Bill and looked away too quickly.

Bill’s heart skipped and he looked away, too. Was that what I think it was? He looked around the table and happened to see Dave flex his thick arms and flick his glance away again.

The civilian to the right of Dave asked, “What’s your job on the crew?”

“Grip.” No explanation. Everyone was afraid to ask precisely what he gripped.

Dave grinned at everyone generally. A good-looking guy of 30 or so, in a rough-hewn sort of way, Bill thought. He had dark hair that had barely begun its recession, a round firm face and a thick neck. He looked like a man who needed to shave three times a day.

Hairy as King Kong. Hung like, too?

He caught Bill’s eye and altered the grin--more leer-like--for a split-second.

Bill flushed and got up, muttering, “Off to work. I’m late.”

Mr. Upper West Side said, “Work? In this vacation paradise? What do you do?”

“Writer.”

“Oh!” He appeared to be impressed. But Bill thought that Dave sneered slightly. Maybe he imagined it; but he had heard that, in the barbaric culture of Movieland, writers were low down in the pecking order. Even below grips, maybe. He remembered what happened to the writer in “Sunset Boulevard.”

“How interesting,” the man from New York persisted. “What do you write? Essays? Poetry? Plays?”

“Fiction. Novels and so on.”

“Really!” Dogged fascination. “Like Hemingway? Faulkner? F. Scott?”

No, like Fanny Fucking Burney.

Bill chuckled like some condescending twit. “Yes. Well. Must be off now. Scribble scribble.” Another horrific chuckle. He mugged in a parody of artistic travail, compounding his own inanity. Dave winked, smirking a bit.

Remove me from this place! Where’s a Deus ex machina when you need one?

Bill went out to the sunny porch and sat on the railing as he tried to recover his composure. Douglas poked his head around the corner and said, “Good morning, Mr. Blake.”

Bill put on his sunglasses, as if Douglas would be able to read his flirtation with Dave in his eyes. He gestured helplessly, as if trying to phrase tragic news. Diversionary tactic!

He took a folded letter out of his shirt pocket and waved that.

“What’s wrong?” Douglas used a softer, less public voice and came over to him. He sat on the railing and blocked the sun from Bill’s face. “You seem upset.” He took the letter and read:

Dear Bill,

I have “my father’s business” to discuss with you. I will be in Selene Harbor over the Independence Day holiday. “Wry Beach” is my joy and my cross. I assume that there will be room at the inn. Please be sober.

As ever your friend,

Don W.

“He enclosed a check for $200. That’s milk shake money! What’s with him anyway--there are more Jesus references in three lines than I’ve used in my entire life. These literary Jews love to throw him in your face: ‘He was one of us, and you let him down, too, you anti-Semite.’ Well, here’s another one for ‘em: ‘Father, Father, why hast thou abandoned me?’”

“Don’t be dramatic.” Douglas reread it. “Well, it doesn’t look so good, does it?”

“I don’t trust people who quote the Bible all the time.”

“You just did.”

“’All the time,’ I said.”

“You’re almost at the end of Wry Beach. You have another few chapters and then you’re done. You can finish it by the Fourth. That’s two weeks. Are there new pages to type?”

Bill moaned. “I hate this pressure. I dread his coming.”

“I can assure you that we won’t have a room for him. We’re overbooked as it is.”

“I’ll still have to deal with him, Douglas. Even if he camps out by the road. Don is at least as soft-spoken as you but infinitely more tenacious.” Bill looked at him closely. “Overbook? You?”

“Do you have the pages?”

“No, I do not.”

“You don’t think I’m tenacious?” Douglas’s green eyes clouded over.

“For Chrissakes, Douglas.” Bill got up and stalked off. “Actually, no, you’re not. Think back a bit, will you?”

He walked around the property feeling put-upon, yet lacerating himself as a shirker. Well, there’s a bit of undeniable truth. A shirker. Worthless. A shiftless shirker. Dora’s voice resounded between his ears. “Get with it, Billy. Be a man, for God’s sake, if you have the balls for the job.” Her snidely smiling face gleamed before him, as if she were the Duchess of Windsor at her husband’s funeral (“Rid of that little loser at long last!”)

He writhed around the property, loathing even his own shadow when it fell on the shingled walls of the house. He hadn’t written a word since they went to the beach. Since he went to bed with Evelyn. Since he slept--literally, slept--with Douglas. The only one who was at all happy with things as they were--with him--was Evelyn, who was probably counting the days till her next period and ready to publish the banns when she was a day late, or whatever desperate fat women who wanted a husband did in this stinking hellhole.

He felt somehow--what? Untethered? Cut off from his own deepest truest unfeigning self?

That sad sack of a Douglas had unnerved him with his on-again, off-again manner. Mostly off-again. They had slept together a good part of that night, and the man hadn’t made a move. He had gently picked Bill up when he was sure nobody was about the house, and he had deposited him in the bed of the Sarah Orne Jewett room, tidily tucked in so that Claire would see nothing scandalous when she brought his breakfast tray. All so decorous. Humiliating. As if he were a child who’d fallen asleep on his uncle’s lap.

Nothing since then.

Bill didn’t know if Evelyn had said anything, or if some snoopy neighbor had archly mentioned Evelyn’s randy little visitor. But it was clear to those with eyes to see, like Claire, that Douglas was back to his old ways: he gave nothing away, he was self-contained and discreet to an extreme degree. He conserved his meager stores of natural affability and spooned it out to the paying guests. Those guests, that is, who were paying exorbitant rates, thanks to the hot summer and the hop of Hollywood celebrity.

Now it struck him as so laughably pathetic--now it was Bill who mooned after Douglas, and who always had to know where he was and what he was doing. Now it was Bill who hardly ever left the property and looked hurt when Douglas came back from an unannounced errand or appointment. Now he was the one who knocked gently on Douglas’s door late in the night and whispered his name. And now it was Douglas who pretended he was asleep.

Or, worse, he really was asleep, callously indifferent to the suffering of the soul and body in the next room.

Or, worst of all, he did know of Bill’s duplicity and enjoyed his ashen-faced misery. Bill raged. Douglas Broadwood, public saint, private tormentor. Valmont in a moth-eaten cardigan. I could do a lot better than Douglas Broadwood!

Still, Douglas’s coldness had made it easy to go on dallying with Evelyn. She became a more active and vocal lover every time they were together. Now she was happy not to waste a lot of time going on and on about how happy she felt. And there were none of the usual follow-up hints about making it eternal and legal. Maybe it was because he made such a fuss over her voluptuous body and how it fulfilled all his fantasies, etc. Or maybe she had it all figured out and knew better than to push it.

Certainly, she seemed to be enjoying their erotic play as much as he did, if not more. He had started by coaxing her out of the missionary position and persuading her to let him engage in a practice that was supposedly the specialty of gay Paree. Now she turned out to adore oral sex, all varieties of it, giving and taking. She had a strong, delicate tongue, and she made sure they were both very clean before they went to bed. No orifice would go unexplored, unprobed, untasted.

“Where did you learn to do all this?” he asked, breathless one morning.

“Never mind. A girl has to have a few secrets.”

He supposed he had the disgraced Gary to thank for it; there were good things about having a queer husband after all. He must’ve been inventive with Brunhilde so he wouldn’t have to conduct with his baton. The image made him laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh really?” She started to get playful.

“Ow! Pick on someone your own size.”

“Tell me.” She was poised to bury his head between her Brobdingnagian tits.

“Nothing, actually. I’m pretty happy.”

He kept smiling even though he was breaking one of his own rules. He was determined not to let her get too serious.

“For as long as it lasts, huh?”

He sat up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, Bill. I realize there’s someone else.”

“Jesus Christ. Do we have to go down this road again?”

She sat up and looped her meaty arm around him. “It’s OK, Bill. I know you don’t love her.”

“Well, so relax, if she’s not in the picture--“

She gave him a noisy kiss and hoisted herself out of the little bed. “Another fucking committee meeting. I’m late.”

“What did you say?” He was shocked. The color drained from his face.

“Late for my meeting, silly.”

He laughed, “No. I meant that I’m having a corrupting effect on you!”

She went along with him. “To be honest, I talked like that long before you showed up on the scene. Sometimes,” she said wistfully, “sometimes, you know, I think we fall in love to retrieve something we lost. Feeling free, mostly. And the person we fall for--well, he or she does a good job of reminding us how it feels, that’s all.”

“That’s fairly profound.”

“Coming from a big ox like me, you mean.”

You said it, not me. All you need is the cart, the farmer, and the yoke. He got up and put on his shorts. “Evelyn, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about yourself.”

She smiled at him and kissed the top of his head. “Sweetheart, I’m not a complete idiot. No one around here is. Not even my brother.” He didn’t know what to make of what she said or the expression on her face.

“Oooh! I need some new polish on my toenails. You don’t think this frosted pink color is too young for me, do you?”

He had spent the rest of that day in a funk. They all have me figured out. I’m the punchline of their nasty little jokes!

This morning, then, he decided to go and gather some material for his book. Maybe he’d forget himself and everyone else as he observed the mechanics of filming a movie in the town square.

The crew had set up early for the day’s shooting. The square looked the way it always did, but there was an unusually large number of 20-year-old cars in the street. They were glossy and new, not the dented wrecks that the local peasants drove out of necessity. Extras and a vast number of people who exuded self-importance stood around looking peevish. A couple of the stars emerged from nowhere laughing and shaking their hair in the sun. Bill and the rest of the gawkers couldn’t get anywhere near them, of course. He watched as they ran through a scene two or three times; someone always fluffed a line.

Most often it was the fey young actor who played the fey young friend of the heroine. Here he was dressed in an Army uniform, and he gave her an awkward kiss before he went away in what would be a vintage Greyhound when they were doing a take.

“Isn’t this exciting?” an old woman in red pedal pushers said to her husband. He murmured assent, cross-eyed with boredom.

Bill turned to leave. Some material here. I’d rather watch Cobb declaim ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’ He caught the eye of a strikingly pretty, petite blonde, who was wearing a tarty Hollywood interpretation of how lower-class girls dressed in the New England sticks. She had to be playing the role of the poor but proud girl who fed her rapist-father to the pigs. They’ve got her looking like Daisy Mae for Chrissake. Her hair wasn’t anywhere near frizzy enough to be authentic. Her makeup made her look like an expensive angel slumming on earth. She had a pouty mouth and soft pink lips. Her blue eyes were 20 years older than the rest of her.

And next to her materialized Dave of the flexing arms, who pointed at him and whispered something in her ear. Next to her golden beauty Dave was huge and dark, the definition of male magnetism. H. G. Wells came to mind. Eloi and Morlock. Funny how I go for the Morlock.

She gave Bill another look, more penetrating and frankly appraising. She closed her eyes, leaned forward to show her cleavage, and made a little kissy-face expression. Dave looked at the actress, then at Bill. He raised his eyebrows in a question.

The throng applauded as if this were the performance.

Bill smiled back at Dave and the actress in what he hoped was a noncommittal way and turned to leave. He had to fight his way through the gathering crowd.

“Oooh, there’s Brenda Ballard!” Jill from the restaurant cried, and he put the face and the name together. Confidential had detailed her drug habit (“reefer queen,” “pill-poppin’ baby doll”) and her taste for weird sex, lots of it (“all nite SM orgies with jigs and chinks!”). Hinted she might be a Commie, too, for a well-rounded smear job.

Either she was fucking the Kennedys or she wouldn’t fuck any of the Kennedys.

Bill walked back to Broadwood’s in a state of mild excitation. He thought of Brenda Ballard’s lascivious eyes. He wondered what it would be like to kiss those pouty lips. And he imagined what it would be like to put his arms around Dave, kiss his rough face, release his thick dick from those very worn, very snug dungarees.

Bill sat in the garden, eyes half closed in the heat of the late-morning sun. He congratulated himself on finally not censoring his thoughts, desires. A threesome with Dave and Brenda would be something to remember till the day he died. He wanted it. He wanted them. He wanted Dave mostly, of course. Brenda was there as a garnish, the pickle slice in the beefburger.

“I can do a hell of a lot better than Douglas Broadwood.”

He opened his eyes and there was Douglas before him, caught in mid step carrying a glass of lemonade on a little silver tray.

Bill scrutinized his face but got nothing. He put out his hand and Douglas let the glass fall on the ground. The lemonade glittered in the dried-out grass.

Douglas went inside.

Bill decided to spend the day in town.

XIII. Port Scandal

No this cannot be happening I am in a nightmare maybe I have finally died and gone to my just reward.

“Brenda tries to be a person of substance. She wants to be taken seriously. She’s risen from--well, not humble circumstances--let’s say that they were distinctly middle class, very Readers Digest condensed books. She wants more--to have more and be more. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? Of course not. This is America which, putrid as it is with fear and prejudice, is a place where you can redefine yourself every two years if that’s what you really want. Invent a whole new persona. Make new friends, live in a new city, do something new to make a buck. Alexis De Tocqueville said that over a hundred years ago, and how insightful he was, don’t you agree?

“Brenda loves artists, she loves men of words. She loves men who can create a new reality with their vision, through the pain and wisdom that they’ve acquired simply by existing on this ridiculous planet. She doesn’t care about looks or a big cock, she cares about the mind, the soul. This is because she has a hunger for knowledge and wisdom.”

“Which is why Confidential—“

“Which is why, when Dave told me he’d met a writer at the inn, I had to sit down with you. He told me you were nice-looking too, but he didn’t do you justice. Maybe he was jealous--and envious.” She let that sink in a minute, looking barracudaish. “You’re handsome. And Brenda likes small men. She hates being physically in someone’s thrall. She likes being able to put up a good fight.”

“So you and Dave don’t…?”

She smiled demurely and looked down at her pink umbrella’d drink. “There are times when being roughed up has its charms.” She took a sip and laughed watchfully. “Brenda Ballard didn’t say that. Neither did I.”

“You’re nuts, honey.”

She assumed the mask of tragedy for a moment and sat watching him. “Why say that? Is what a woman wants so unacceptable to men in our society? It’s fairly common for women to like forceful lovers. With thick cocks. It’s the thickness that really matters, did you know that?”

“So does length. But I won’t belabor the point.”

“Spoken like a man with a big load. My honesty doesn’t scare you, does it?”

“You refer to yourself in the third person. That fucking scares me.”

She raised her drink in an ironical toast and said, “So say something literary and clever. Replete your sentences with obscure references. Brenda loves that.”

Replete as a verb? HELP ME. “Where’s Dave?”

“He’ll be along soon. He said he thought you might swing, you know, both ways. AC/DC. I can see that dear dumb Dave was right this time.” Her foot was riding up his leg.

They were sitting in John’s Mariner. The cheesy nautical décor seemed to be a hit with the Hollywood people. That and the pretty staff--Jill’s uniform of short shorts had inched up to reveal, in its latest incarnation, a few bleached pubic hairs. She was looking at Brenda Ballard hungrily at the moment, and she seemed about to suggest an unorthodox arrangement with the two of them.

Bill’s face was burning not for that reason, but because he dreaded being spotted by Evelyn or the Cobbs. As it was, they’d hear about this rendez-vous with Miss Third Person before next sunrise.

She grinned, nodding and cooing, “Ooooh, my boy, you have some fun ahead of you.”

Bill noted, with resignation, that she was acting again. Was always acting. He almost missed the unaffected dopeyness of Evelyn Lamb. He put her leg down.

“I’ll wait for Dave’s leg, thanks.”

“Brenda loves a challenge.”

Bill would love to run home and get shitfaced.

“Fairies and jigs are a speciality.”

He reached out and grabbed her wrist. He twisted and she winced with pain, smiling. “Bye.” He got up.

“Aren’t you paying for my drink?” She rubbed her hurt wrist, eyes glittering. “Anyway, you haven’t told me about your writing. Dave said it was a novel. Are there good female characters? Are they convincing, or simply the typical shitty projections of male vanity? Queero writers are different, though, aren’t they? They understand women better than real men. I mean than real men do. I’m sure they understand real men very well.” She caught herself. “Brenda sometimes wonders if there are any real men. She thinks every man is something of a faggot way deep down.”

“Brenda would.”

She gave him her patented pout and then laughed at it. “I wonder--are there any good parts for women if your book is adapted for pictures?”

Oh, well. As long as she wants to talk about me…

Bill sat down. Dave clapped him on the back and sat down next to him.

He put out his hand. “Hey, there…”

“Bill.”

“Bill. So. How are you two getting along? Friendly? Or is Brenda playing one of her bitchier parts tonight?” He flexed his arms and his chest. He smiled shyly at Bill. Bill was looking at the chest hairs peeping out of a round hole on Dave’s turquoise jersey.

“Bill thinks Brenda’s weird because she refers to herself in the third person. You do know what the third person means, don’t you, Dave?”

Dave rolled his eyes. “Oh, boy. Babe, how much have you had to drink?”

“Not much. I like to keep a clear head when I’m getting it from both ends at once. I’m not one to dull my own pleasure.”

Dave gave her a skeptical look and turned to Bill. “Brenda likes to shock people. She’s really a sweet girl--as sweet as she looks.” Another smile with a beseeching quality.

“She looks like a spoiled brat, actually.”

Dave glared at Brenda. “She really is not a foul-mouthed bitch. A bit of fame and a couple of stories in the scandal sheets, and--”

“Eckshally. Veddy British of you, Mr. Fruit Writer.” Brenda laughed and shifted in her seat. She was probably running her foot up to Dave’s crotch.

Dave looked at Bill seriously. “We sure have our work cut out for us, huh?”

Bill sat staring at the table. “I can’t do this. I can’t be with these people.”

“You know, we’re right here.”

“Good. Then Bill won’t be inexplicably rude when he walks the fuck out.” He stood and pulled his hand away from Dave’s warm grasp. His touch reminded him of Douglas.

* * * *

He tried one more time. One last time he knocked on Douglas’s door and gently called his name. The clocks began striking twelve. He waited till they had ceased their unsynchronized din and called him again. No answer.

That’s it, damn you. Damn you, Douglas. I’m done with this. And you.

He looked up the stairs to the third floor and saw Dave. He had stopped a few steps up and was turned to look down at Bill. There was only a dim light on, and Bill couldn’t read his expression.

Dave descended a couple of steps. “Bill,” he whispered. “She said she was sorry. She had a bad day. I didn’t know until you left. Alla Trotter tried to get her fired. She gets like that when she’s scared. Brenda does, I mean.”

Bill grunted.

“She wants to see you. She wants to make it up to you. She’s really a swell girl.” There was a note of pleading in Dave’s voice, again. Bill waved him away and went into his own room. He switched on his desk lamp and pulled out his notebook. So miserable I might as well be productively miserable. The refined specter of Don Wassermann hovered over him, as beady eyed and all-seeing as the Raven. It was a warm night, but he shivered.

The clocks were striking one when he heard a scratching sound, like a rat in the wall.

“Bill.”

“Who is it?”

“Sssh. Me.”

Bill opened the door a crack. He was looking at Douglas’s shirt front. It was wet with sweat, and he could see Douglas’s nipple through the thin madras.

His breath smelled of gin. He was far less sober than Bill. “Please.”

He opened the door. He went back to the desk and picked up his pen. “Well?”

Douglas advanced into the room with a few side-to-side steps. He stood swaying over Bill and raised, then dropped his hand. “You hurt me this morning.”

“Thinking out loud--never a smart thing to do.”

“No. Not so much that.”

“I could do a hell of a lot better than you.”

“I’m sure. It wouldn’t be hard to do.” Douglas slumped down on the couch. “I was out on the porch and saw the way--you and that burly fellow, Dave… You’re very handsome together. I felt a stab in my heart. I still do. My heart hurts when I think of you and him. Of you and anybody.”

“Am I supposed to apologize?”

Douglas was silent.

“Twice you’ve taken me to the brink and dropped me. You’ve done it for the last time, Douglas. This little flirtation is over. I’ll screw anybody I want to, male or female. I’ve been screwing your--“

Douglas raised his hand. “Why?”

Bill’s turn to be silent.

“I know why.”

“Do you?”

Douglas nodded. He started to cry.

“This must be a family trait. No wonder you’re both alone. Mopey, depressed assholes.”

Douglas got up.

“You leave this room and I won’t speak to you again. You can go back to your fantasy man in New York, the beatnik or whatever the hell he is. You can jerk off the rest of your life. Compose stupid letters you’ll never send.” Douglas looked astonished, then embarrassed. “OK, go then. I have to finish this fucking book.”

“How did you know--“

“Claire’s got a big mouth. She also worships you. And she’s more efficient at cleaning up your waste paper than you are.”

“Oh God.” Douglas began weeping again. “I’m such an old fool.”

“No fool like.”

“Don’t, please. I feel rotten enough as it is.”

“Ah, the imperturbable Douglas Broadwood shows a new side!” Bill hiccupped as an editorial comment on Douglas’s boozing.

“Keep your voice down, please,” Douglas begged.

“Douglas, I don’t think I care anymore. I don’t think we’re fooling anybody. I think everyone’s figured us out.”

“’Us’?”

“Us. Us, you big faggot. Us, here and now.” Bill tried to pull Douglas’s head down to kiss him. Douglas pushed him away.

“I’m not ready. I can’t--I can’t, Bill.”

Bill pushed him onto the sofa and jumped on him. “You’ll never be ready unless I make you ready, you chicken-hearted piece of shit.” He kissed him hard. He ripped the buttons off his shirt. Douglas put up slack resistance, and he whimpered. Bill stepped out of his gym shorts and whipped Douglas’s face with his cock. Douglas turned away and sobbed, whispering, “Not like this, Bill, please, not--“

The whimpering infuriated Bill. He grabbed Douglas’s wisps of hair and pulled his head back. “Shut up. Shut your stupid mouth. I’m sick of this damsel in distress routine. Fucking old queer! It’s bullshit bullshit bullshit.”

Douglas controlled himself. He got very still. His green eyes gave Bill their old melting look. Bill got quiet and watched him closely.

“I love you. Don’t be like this. This isn’t what love should be like. Please, Bill.”

Love. Jesus, here we go again.

Bill let him go. He stood looking outside for a minute. Then he threw his polo shirt on the floor and got into bed. “Get over here.” Douglas turned off the light and undressed. Bill felt the mattress dip wildly when he got in beside him, like when a boat’s about to capsize.

XIV. The Dialectic of Desire

Oh his little boat capsized all right and he swam and dove all night in hot green tropical waters the color of a man’s eyes, he grew gills, he breathed a new air, he held onto spars that rolled on the roiling waters, he lost his grip and he went under and he came up and then an electric eel nosed its way into him, charging him with a volley of pleasing shocks, and then he floated free again in a world of calm swells and then came more violent tempests that bruised and tumbled his small smooth body deep into this ocean of sumptuous terror, and he swam up out of it and was deposited on the wet mattress and reeking sheets of his room at 41 Armitage Road, and he lay in the long gray morning twilight dazed and spent, pleasantly fucked out, wondering if he was really was the transformed being, the Jonah of buggery, that he had most feared and almost hoped he would become.

And as he swoffed between sleep and waking he remembered that sometime in the stubbled dark of the night there was revealed to him an unknown being composed of an avid mouth that licked his face, gigantic hands that caressed and cupped and stroked, and a wave of solid flesh that crushed him from behind, and it growled out its excitation, then sang his name in a rocking swell of new lust.

And soon after the first coming but well before the second, the metrics of power, the dimensions of superiority, of the tactical advantages of height and weight and cock and the armor of language dissolved, and even taste and smell and hearing and most especially desire its holy self was burnt up in a consuming roar of skin that left only one passion in a kingdom where there was no distinction between desire and expression or between the glimmer of a want and its whole gratification.

At the end, exhausted, they looked at each other in a stuporous state of incomprehension. He broke the silence after a time, afraid he hadn’t been pleasing, that he hadn’t measured up in some important way. He asked Douglas, “Well, how was it?”

Douglas stirred and turned his head to look at him, opening his green eyes with a noontime brightness shining from them. “Oh. Oh, my dearest l–“

“Good, good,” he said quickly. “Me too.” He stretched up and kissed Douglas’s neck, licking the salty dried sweat on his skin. He sighed and rested his cheek on his clavicle.

They embraced, unwilling to let go of this special dispensation of grace, unable to heave it into the world of dripping faucets and drunks quarreling in the road. They lingered, without more words, but the night magic slipped away as they dozed off in exhaustion.

Bill slept fitfully again. Soon he was listening to the birds wake up. He fell into a disturbed reverie, where he saw Gwynne’s petulant face in a yearbook photograph, in which she wore only a string of pearls as the tops of her nipples peeped over the edge of the print, and the picture was crumpled, white creases showing through the glossy black-and-white emulsion, and it burst into flames and it blew away in a gust that stirred the sheer curtains and brought inside the grassy smell of dawn.

He woke again, a little, and felt the heat radiate from Douglas’s huge frame. He looked to his right and saw a wall like the White Cliffs of Dover, like Urizen himself, the strong back and colossal shoulders of the sleeping man. Bill nestled into him, trying to place his cock, still half hard, by his bum crack. He looped his arm around his stomach and found his lips were resting against the middle of Douglas’s back.

               The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.

            His own body felt childishly small and weak next to Douglas’s reclining vastness.  The sense of it mortified him.  It stimulated him, too, the image of them together, one tall and broad with sprawling long arms and legs, and the other compact and cock-heavy.  He tingled where Douglas had been.  Now he had an unrelenting hard-on of unprecedented sensitivity, wired directly into his blood supply, it seemed, without stopping for analysis and editing at his brain.

            He hath stuck a Pecker up a Man’s bum Hole and lo! it was good.

He moaned a little as he pressed into Douglas’s large round ass. He understood that he’d been denying himself this pleasure for far too long. And he regretted the truth that materialized like a messenger from above: his thrashing, boozed-up existence had been a drawn-out diversionary tactic to keep everyone from knowing what sort of bird he really was. Especially himself, of course.

An arm reached and turned him over. He woke as his face met the tickling hairs of Douglas’s chest.

Douglas stroked his back and neck. He whispered, “How do you feel?”

Bill shrugged. He spoke into Douglas’s nipple. “Like shit.”

“Me too.” Douglas bent down and kissed his head. “No, in all truth, I--I feel as though I--I’m happy.” It sounded as though he caught himself before saying am in love.

Say it then. What could happen? He found himself not recoiling from the idea.

The cool breeze was blowing the curtains around as if they were benevolent, mildly disoriented ghosts.

Douglas sat up and gave him an affectionate, almost proprietary smile. The timorous librarian was nowhere to be seen. With surprising boldness, Douglas reached for Bill’s cock and stroked it till it was fully erect. “Oh, my…” Douglas’s own modest tool was limp but swollen to a promising reddish thickness from its workout. With a shock Bill saw that it wasn’t circumcised like his own. Bill’s fingertips dabbled with the foreskin, and it stirred. He noticed there were bits of brown stuff dried on the skin, and he dropped it, slightly repulsed by what this signified.

He struggled bravely to master his revulsion. “Well. I guess we went all the way, didn’t we? What shall we name the baby?”

Douglas leaned back and shut his eyes, smiling his Etruscan smile. He ruffled Bill’s hair. He sighed and whispered. “I must get up.”

“It’s not even five,” he said indignantly. The spell was breaking indeed. Blunt Thursday (Wednesday?) was already tapping its foot, waiting for its scrambled eggs and toast.

“Full house. Lots more work. Day and night.” He didn’t move. After a dozy few minutes he said, “I’m sorry but…but you’ve got a very nice one.” He laughed at his own habits of apology.

Four decades of Dora’s conditioning made Bill wary of any praise, especially when it came to things sexual. He fended off his joy at Douglas’s admiration. “You say that to all your conquests.”

Douglas gave him a squinty face. “What?” He turned away with the aggrieved huffiness of someone who has been wrongly accused of something. “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way. It’s beneath you. Beneath me, I should say.”

Bill poked him in the ribs, kidding around to cover his own confusion. His emotions were still loosely bound with the cords of sleep and memory. “It’s just that you surprised me with your expertise. I didn’t expect such…mastery. But it was my first time in this area, so…” He shrugged. He grinned, waiting for a protest of “your first time, it can’t have been your first time, you have a natural talent for this kind of thing!”

Douglas merely gaped for a moment, then said, “Didn’t you ever do anything like this before? Not once--in school or something?”

“No,” he scoffed. “What do you take me for?”

Douglas raised his eyebrows skeptically. “The same thing I am.”

There was a strange complacency in this, and it irked Bill to think that Douglas might glory in being more advanced or competent than Bill himself. He said, a bit spitefully, “By that you mean a full-fledged fairy? Complete with gauzy wings and a trilling little soul?”

Douglas gave him one of his ‘Incorrigible Bill’ looks, laughing silently. “I’ve never met anyone so brutally reductive as you.”

Bill sat up and looked him in the eye. He was about to say something but stopped short. He liked the superlative of ‘most brutally reductive.’ He said, “Thank you, Douglas,” with only mild sarcasm.

Douglas smiled, looking out the window at the first bright sun of the morning. He held Bill closer. They spent a few quiet moments, gazing outside at what Bill assumed was the same spot.

“It’s strange,” Bill said in a near whisper.

“What is?”

“This is so--I don’t know.” He figured it was better to finish the thought inside himself: So fucking wrong. And so fucking good.

A robin was sitting on a branch not ten feet from the window, warbling its little aubade. Douglas regarded it intently, saying, “It’s a gift from God. Take it and be grateful you’ve experienced it some time in your life. And that you recognized it when it came your way.”

Bill almost flinched when he heard “a gift from God.” If this was from God, he had to revise his opinion of God, and maybe even do some begging of forgiveness. He looked up at Douglas, who was afire with a new glamour, a cresting, confident beauty. “Do you really believe in God?”

That didn’t come out right. I’m not actually buying any of this bullshit.

But of course he was. And he celebrated inwardly when Douglas said, “I believe in God. Yes. Now I do.”

This has to be a first. I have turned someone to God. He had a brief image of himself as St. Bill the Baptist, pushing a mob of men under water and making redemptive love to them, waggling his magically healing staff over their heads, one at a time.

Douglas held him close and kissed him with a companionate tenderness, tinged with a playful irony, which belied the months of secretive torture that he must have been going through, and which marked the decisive appearance of a new Douglas Broadwood.

Bill had been going through the same torture himself, sort of, sporadically; even in his own head the sneering pose wasn’t working. This sudden happiness had come at a cost, and the payments weren’t all made yet, not by a long shot. Indeed, there was now a kind of smugness in Douglas’s looks and actions that irritated him. He wondered what would happen if this suffocating contentment went on too long.

“Now I do have to go downstairs, my love.” Douglas disengaged himself from Bill’s slender little limbs. He put on his dirty underclothes and tiptoed to the door.

Bill gave him a forlorn wave and hummed “Now Is the Hour.”

Douglas smiled wistfully, as if he really were sailing far across the sea. He shut the door very gently behind him.

Bill closed his eyes and began to drift again, feeling languorous and deliciously achy. He wondered what it would be like to live with Douglas--to be open about their kind of relationship, to fall into pleasant patterns--pleasanter than the ones they’d already fallen into, by far…as long as the centerpiece of all remained Douglas’s devotion to his talent and comfort. He imagined Douglas coming back into the room with breakfast on a tray, which Douglas would eat in bed next to him while he picked at Douglas’s plate of toast and cantaloupe and drank a gallon of superb coffee. (He made a note to tell him about the deplorable quality of the brew he served now. He still was a paying customer, after all.)

He dozed a bit more and had tumultuous visions of Douglas following him like a St. Bernard, salivating happily as he, Bill, accepted the Pulitzer Prize, and as he made charming small talk--very small--with a soused Mamie Eisenhower at the White House. He saw them flying a BOAC jet plane here and there, pampered and plastered in first class, and all the accolades and all the prodigiously liquid occasions in every corner of the English-speaking world, with appreciative laughter after his every sally of wit, every trenchant observation about the State of Literature Today.

But his visions clouded when he thought of the return home--home being Selene Harbor, Maine, 41 Armitage Road, in the unburied dead of winter. Sunday mornings in the off-season eating jam on dry toast in silence…listening to Russell Cobb witter on about Simpole’s Damascene Conversion every fucking January…enduring the pining looks and sniffling innuendos of an ever fatter Evelyn Lamb over endless flavorless mirthless Sunday afternoon pot roasts served without wine. And especially he dreaded the Sunday night bill-paying sessions, when Douglas would take a wee cup of tea and gloom on about the sorry state of the bank account and fret over the sorry state of advance bookings for summer and the coming collapse of the heating system, which Bill thought had already happened. Oh, and of course, could Bill please go easy on the Glenlivet or buy a cheaper brand, please, DAHling.

He woke up enough to recollect that Sundays with Gwynne--and Dora--had been far worse than anything he could imagine in Selene. Tense, resentful, silent, punctuated by the verbal strafings of three people who couldn’t stand themselves, and the intrusions of that nutcase kid, who came in every three or four hours, regular as clockwork, to demand some sort of attention, which none of them could stand to give him. Certainly in those charmless days he had not had the consolations of Douglas’s ardor or the look of unalloyed love that Douglas had bestowed on him when leaving the room. Or the delight of a strong male body next to his, and the hairy physicality of it all, plus a serving of coq en cul, included on the American Plan. He had experienced nothing like this, nothing. Ever.

It occurred to him that he didn‘t know whether to be thrilled or horrified. Love, he thought--if it was that--love is such a crushing burden.

Oh, God, this was complicated, and it no longer seemed a simple force, as powerful as the tides in Fundy, which it had been all through this petered-out night. Oh course not--already he was back at his favorite activity, this recessive rummaging around in the ashcans of his personal history. We who are doomed not to escape the nightmare of history pick through our own trash.

The impulse to laugh at himself died when he thought of the advice Don, the editor he loved and feared, had given him:

“Bill, you really need to see a headshrinker. It’d help you to discover why you--who you are and, well, why you tend to foul your own nest.”

A daunting prospect, lying on a couch and delving into the past, years and years of this tedious self-deconstruction and for what, precisely?

“Shit,” he muttered. He turned over on his back and pulled down the sheet. He was sick of thinking, sick of the endless rehashing. Sick of all the scenarios of better living through progress or chemistry or red-white-and-blue manliness or whatever they were pitching this year. “Shit!”

He shut his eyes and beat off so he could sleep another hour or two. He tried to imagine Douglas kissing, handling, humping him. But the face, the hands, the body and especially the cock belonged to Dave the grip, then Father Purefoy, and climaxed with Captain Parnell. Despite all the activity of the night, he came in a couple of minutes. He shivered all over as the seminal fluid burst forth, hitting him first on the chin as he moaned and thrashed around, as if the denied passions of 25 years--as if the long line of frustrated men he’d flirted with had forced their way into the room and were demanding satisfaction at long last. Oh, yes, he wanted to give it to them, he wanted to be generous now that he’d fallen into this delicious degeneracy, he wanted to share every inch he had, and all he could imagine doing to handsome virile men, lots of men, men he didn’t know, men he’d meet tomorrow in a bar or public bathroom, men of many colors and sizes, as long as they had a mouth, a cock and an asshole.

He felt his heart rate slow. He looked down at the pearly clots of come on his belly and around his bush. He noticed there were brown flakes on his cock, too. This made him smile as he fell asleep, whispering, “Captain Bill.”

Bill got up and showered around 8 o’clock. He went downstairs bright and fresh, if a bit light-headed from the depletion of his juices, humming Elvis Presley’s joyous remake of “So Glad You’re Mine,” and went straight to the sunny kitchen. He avoided the dining room and the risk of having to deal with Dave.

He poured himself a cup of coffee and was standing at the window over the sink when Claire came in with a loaded tub of dirty dishes.

“Oh. It’s you.” Her eyes were rimmed with red and her voice shook. She brushed past him--almost through him--and he stumbled to the side, spilling a few drops of coffee on the linoleum. “You are late to begin writing. Or are you already so tired?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” He thought it a better response than Mind your own fucking business. She muttered something that sounded suspiciously like Fous-toui. He opened his mouth for a demolishing retort, but Douglas bustled in, looking haggard from work and lack of sleep, yet smiling the goofy smile of the blessed. He gave Bill a merry roll of the eyes as a hello.

Carol called in from the pantry, “Claire, please bring Mr. Weisbrod his miel de lavande.”

Claire shrugged in resignation. Douglas said to her, “The film crew needs another pot of coffee. I’ll start soaking these dishes. Don’t worry about the bacon--we’ve got plenty. I’ll put on more scrambled eggs.” He went on and on with all the tedious details of satisfying the guests’ expectations. Claire was planted in front of him, looking at the floor with a hangdog expression, quaking for want of a Pall Mall and a good cry.

It occurred to Bill that she was more angry than sad. Either way, her big honker was red.

Douglas stopped filling the sink and leaned down. He spoke tenderly. “Claire, you needn’t worry about me. Everything will be all right.” He gestured towards Bill. “He’s really a wonderful… Tout sera bien, très bien. Et rien ne changera pas pour toi.”

Carol flipped open the pantry door. “Now!”

Claire nodded, miserable, unconvinced. She went to the cabinet and rummaged for Mr. Weisbrod’s honey. She took it into him, forgetting the coffee.

Bill made a face at her back. “Well, good morning, you all happy peppy people. I hope the guests aren’t catching what ails her.”

Douglas was working at the sink. He looked outside pensively. “Claire has had a trying life. A life of trials, to be precise. This is home to her.” He smiled at Bill. “You’re shaking things up for her, too, you know.”

“Not just me,” Bill said.

Douglas acknowledged that with a rueful smile. He rinsed off a large metal serving dish. “Could you dry this, please?”

Bill moved away and sipped his coffee, attempting to seem abstracted. “She doesn’t even live here. How can it be her home?” He sounded irritated. He felt irritated--put out as much by Douglas’s indulgence as by her self-pity.

Douglas pursed his lips and reached for the tea towel hanging on the refrigerator door. He dried the serving dish himself. “Could you do the next one, Bill?” His saintly patience was wearing thin--he sounded irritated himself. “We really need to get these servers filled up again. It’s the busiest hour.”

WE? WE need to? Filling the trough is OUR problem now?

“Where the hell is Carol at this moment? Sucking off Mr. Weisbrod under the table?” With the ill grace of a teenager he took the tea towel and waited for Douglas to rinse the dish.

He’d omitted this little scenario of blessed domesticity, hadn’t he? Who would’ve believed that Douglas would move so very quickly to enlist him in his squalid inn-keeping chores? So much for his being the loyal amanuensis of a working author. This was the slyly smiling, laconic Douglas Broadwood in true form, wasn’t it?

Bill dried the next several serving pieces, aware that he was doing a sloppy job--though it was no sloppier than Douglas’s; in his haste he was washing fast and incompletely. There were bits of scrambled egg stuck to the insides--burnt-in bits of bacon--little trails of soap suds.

Douglas’s face darkened. “We have to take her feelings seriously. I have a tender regard for Claire.”

“Why don’t you rein in that obnoxious Carol then?”

He shook his head, as if pondering a deep riddle. “I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

Bill saw Claire stop at the door, holding it open a couple of inches. He spoke louder. “You mean Claire is merely useful to you? I guess she is, since you both work her to death.”

Douglas looked confused and displeased. “What’s got into you?” He went Bill and took him by the shoulders. His eyes searched his.

Bill smiled and shrugged him off. “Better not.” He nodded at Claire, who was still peeking in from the doorway.

Douglas turned around and motioned for her to come into the room. She approached them slowly, staring at the floor as if in deep thought. Douglas put his arm around the tiny, wretched woman and drew her to him. “There are all kinds of love, you see.” He said it looking at Bill, solemn and gentle.

Claire shook and pressed her face against Douglas’s shirt, which was sticking wet against his ribs. Then she turned away and dried her eyes with a tea towel, staring somewhere out the window. “J’peux pas travailler parmi les homosexuels.”

“I can’t work among a bunch of queers.” That’s what she said, isn’t it?

Bill’s face blazed red. He felt more ashamed than angry. “I’m going out.”

“Bill, wait.”

Bill was out on the porch before Douglas recovered enough to say, “You always run away when things get sticky.”

Bill put his hands to his head and said, “I do not!” And he turned and hurried down the steps to the walk.

He caught a glimpse of the sunny scene inside the dining room, where Dave was watching him with a knowing grin on his brutish, attractive mug.

* * * *

This transparent excuse sickened him, of course--no, he really wasn’t an utter fool, he was aware and conscious of his venality and self-indulgence--and he headed to the package store as soon as it opened at eleven.

He stopped short when he reached the main street that led to it. The film crew had set up there for a day’s shooting, and the route was closed to the public. The usual excited crowds behind notional barricades of rope and saw horses, the usual self-absorbed actors, the usual unattractive, snarly director and his instantly reactive minions. He scanned the scene for Dave and Brenda, but they weren’t around.

Thank Christ. I don’t want to deal with any horseshit from anyone right now.

He turned to go back around the corner and approach the liquor store from the other side.

“Hey! Watch it, honey!”

He bumped into Allie Cobb, who gave him a knowing grin. “Hello, Mr. Blake. This is quite a morning, isn’t it?”

He peered upward as if reading the clouds for omens. My shitty luck.

“Guess so.” He began walking away, but she fell in step with him and laughed in a peculiar way. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh, nothing and everything.” She scrutinized him as if counting the blackheads on his nose.

His heart was sinking. In a village of two thousand people, even the most sublime bedroom secrets had a mysterious way of becoming known and discussed in lip-smacking detail within an hour of the last toilet flush.

Allie took his arm and laughed a trifle less ominously. He imagined that they looked like a moderately unhappy couple, a handsome young husband saddled with an older, boozy frau whose only claim to privilege was a fine set of cheekbones.

“It’s a lovely morning, I think. A good day for new beginnings. A good day for true things and open hearts. Cause for merriment, and a bit of celebration. It’s never too early for that, Mr. Blake. Come to that, it’s never too late. You know the old expression: Life begins at forty.” She waited for her volley of intimations to hit home, but he wasn’t reacting. She faltered on with a watchful, “Ars longa, amor brevis or something like that.”

“Did your life begin at forty?”

Allie let go of his arm. She barked out a hollow laugh. “Don’t let’s talk about me.”

They went around the corner under a double arcade of majestic elms, away from the buzzing gawkers and the self-conscious bustle of business done in public, with all the tedious layerings of plays within plays. On the deserted little street Bill was aware that they were starting to assume a more relaxed posture, and Allie’s expression was again bland and ironic. She said, “I called Douglas early and Claire picked up the phone.” Silence. “She seemed agitated.” Silence: Bill looked straight ahead. “She told me Douglas was exhausted but quite happy. Said he had a glow about him. You know--the way a bride is reputed to look on her wedding day, or should I say, the first morning of her honeymoon.” Silence. “Mr. Blake, are you there? To what would you attribute such extraordinary behavior on his part?”

Bill watched the long boughs of the elm trees droop lower in the mounting humidity. He saw a haze building up, unusual for this hot, exceedingly dry summer. The observations she was reporting didn’t sound like anything Claire would say--she had to be interpreting liberally on the merest scraps of information. Or she’d been dishing the dirt with Carol.

They sauntered around the corner and saw the liquor store a couple of short blocks ahead on the left. Holy Apostles was far to the right, all but its front porch hidden by houses and trees.

“Mrs. Cobb, you seem to have figured everything out without my telling you a damned thing. The reason for Douglas’s joy, etc.”

“Of course,” she said. “No one acts or says anything without a highly specific reason; there is no such thing as an unmotivated action. To say so is to lack information. Or a sympathetic imagination.” She gave him one of her searching looks. “What I can’t figure out is how you feel about it. I think the happiness is one-sided. I think you’re going to hurt lots of people by the time this is done.”

“Well, then, who’s likely to limp away from me most wounded? Me?” He tried to sound sarcastic to match her unblinking irony, but he was afraid his curiosity got the better of him.

“That should be obvious. ‘You always hurt the one you love.’”

“Thanks for the profound wisdom, courtesy of the Mills Brothers.” He looked around sourly, as if he could foist her on a good-natured tourist.

“I could quote the Bible, but I’ll leave that to the professionals.”

Right on cue, Russell Cobb drove up in his perfectly maintained 1941 black Buick and tooted the horn twice. He leaned out of the window and cried, “What a gorgeous day! Did you see the film crew--and Alla Trotter! It was worth being detoured to see the great star herself!” There was no irony in his voice. He bounded out of the car and gave Bill a two-handed shake, then leaned a little to the left to kiss his wife chastely on the cheek.

“You make a lovely couple. Should I be jealous, dear?”

“Oh no, Russell. Hardly.”

He laughed, his molars showed. Bill had to look away.

“Are you two off to the package store?”

“Yes, dear. Why else would we be walking together on Elm Street?”

Russell calmed down and considered this for a moment. “Indeed.” Then he brightened and turned to Bill, who was starting to inch away from them. “Bill, I want to invite you--if my better half hasn’t already--to a little celebration at our cottage up at the lake. Oh, it’s not for several weeks yet, but we’d love to have you join us.”

Allie shot Bill a look. “Oh, yes. Do come.”

He grimaced and looked at Russell. “What’s the occasion? An AA convention?”

Russell threw back his head and guffawed. “Touché! As a matter of fact, it’s the day of my dear heart’s nativity.”

Bill went, “What?” He had an image of Allie in a creche, peering with wizened cynicism at a flock of blond, green-eyed camels and lambs.

“He means it’s my birthday,” Allie explained. “Russell, why don’t you speak English when you’re not wearing your collar?”

“Dear heart, it’s part of my charm.”

“Ah,” she said, bland irony turned way up high, “that’s what it is.”

Her husband laughed and drew her close to him. “We’ll send a proper invitation in the mail. It should be the event of the Selene summer season.” Standing together, arms about each other’s shoulders, for a second the Cobbs looked equally engaged and ironic, vital and glamorous, handsome and united against the world.

Bill made haste to break the spell of their complacency. “OK, let me get in there before you buy them out. I’m going easy on the sauce these days. Writing, you know.”

“Of course,” Allie said, amused by his non sequitur. She bent closer to her husband and tilted her cheekbones to catch the shadows exactly right, almost as if she meant to taunt Bill with her femininity in the grip of her husband’s taut virility.

He left them and bought a fifth of Scotch. He ignored them when they passed one another in the store’s entrance, as Russell called out, “Have a blessed day!”

CATCH OF THE DAY, CHAPTERS 15 - 16

2006-08-26T04:43:00.000-04:00

XV. Penetration Recollected in Tranquillity

After a week or more of long, passionate nights together, Douglas considered the commonplace once more. He wondered at the peculiar fact that one got used to happiness almost immediately, and that happiness wasn’t an emotion but an enveloping condition, an environment. And that even he, unused as he was to it, could already spot the Happy and the Unhappy in every crowd, which engendered a pitying disdain in his heart for the ones who were too--what? too stupid or too proud?--for happiness. Or maybe they were too realistic, knowing as they did the capacity for deceit in their lover, waiting for that expected revelation of cheating and lying and generally sickening cruelty.

Tonight seemed the right time to bring up the subject again, Douglas thought. Especially after the love-making (Bill would say the raw animal sex) that had just rattled their teeth and shaken half the house. And more especially because Bill had been on top, painfully hard and grappling and groaning like a gladiator who was going to fight his last battle in the morning. Douglas’s hind parts were raw; pain and pleasure of the intensest kind warred for dominance. As the minutes passed, pleasure seemed to be winning.

“Maybe,” Bill was saying, “the unhappy ones are untalented. Like not being good at ballroom dancing or drawing the human hand. If you haven’t got the talent, you haven’t got the talent,” Bill said. He was lying beside him in bed. They watched Bill’s cock soften and slide slimily down his belly like some Amazonian slug.

Douglas stroked the slug and felt its twitch between his fingers. It was surprisingly cold, considering where it had been and what it had done. “Think I have a talent for being happy, then?”

“No. Well, who knows.” Bill gave him a curious glance and closed his eyes, stretching mightily. This had the effect of making his pecker thrust outward, bigger than before. He gyrated on the sheets moaning dramatically.

“Are you happy?”

Bill raised himself on one elbow and looked up at him. “What? You can’t tell if I’m a Happy or an Unhappy? So much for your big epiphany.”

Douglas looked at the sarcastic face and knitted brows. The bitterness in the way he held his mouth. “I feel foolish. Sorry.”

“Douglas, we’re card-carrying New Englanders. Descendants of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. No, of course I’m speaking figuratively,” he said with some annoyance. “I’m not supposed to be happy. I’m supposed to be righteous and right. Since I have no talent for that either, I have to take some comfort in the fact that I can be miserably unhappy wherever I am and whatever I’m doing. Championship gloom and doom.”

“Misery loves company,” Douglas smiled. “I’m the same as you. We’re one.”

Bill gave him one of his hooded looks. “Not necessarily.”

“What do you see in me, then? What do you like about me? Why don’t I make you happy?”

Bill sighed and turned over on his stomach. “Jesus. It’s almost one thirty. Why do you want to start a colloquium on love and happiness at this hour? Do you want to make me really fucking unhappy?”

Douglas brooded. “I was asking what you saw in me.”

The light was on and shone directly at Bill’s forehead. His face took on a shy quality, which seemed to mitigate his irritation.

“First switch off the light, then I’ll tell you,” Bill said.

Douglas turned out the lamp and waited. Bill pulled himself up and licked and bit Douglas under the ear, making him whimper weakly in his pleasure. Bill pulled his hair, what there was of it, and slammed his head into the pillow. He worked Douglas’s dick between his knees and got it hard, then he slid down until it was knocking against Bill’s balls.

Douglas grabbed him and held him tight, then laid him on his back, smothering his face with wet kisses. He bit and slavered over his face. He pushed up Bill’s taut little legs and spread his ass. He felt his heart racing, and visions of wild nature--scudding clouds, frothing surf--filled his head as his body explored and tasted and pushed into the perfect man for him without Vaseline, the love of his life, yes, that and more. Adieu, Jack, and good riddance.

They both came again in a reasonable amount of time for two men in their fifth decade.

“See?” Bill whispered, out of breath and soaked with sweat when they were finished some time after two. The alarm would be ringing in no time. “There’s your answer.”

“Good night,” Douglas said softly. “Bill.”

“What?” He was already half-asleep.

“I’m happy. Right this minute.”

“That was my point.”

“I see. This is paradise enow.”

“You bet. Good night.” But he reached over and squeezed Douglas’s thigh with his hand.

Another blessed night. Night after night of utter delight.

Douglas smiled at the sudden doggerel, lying curled up on his side, eyes closed, sated, still warm with the afterglow. He liked the declarative simplicity of it. All ten nights of it.

Nothing like this, nothing since Catullus perhaps. Was Clodia really a woman?

He slept fitfully, prodded awake by chaotic dreams of alarming sensuality, with many partners, notably Russell Cobb. Douglas wasn’t shocked by this, because he’d read Freud and Jung. He entertained himself idly while he woke up by degrees, listening to the end of the small rain that had begun pattering down some time during the night.

He felt a little embarrassed by his attempt to extort an admission of happiness from Bill--that’s what it was, he believed. Why question or worry about it when you’ve had another night of godly bliss, a night of passion that was a thousand times greater than lust--an expression of love that could only flower at night, when the world closed its eyes and worried about itself for a change?

Bill stirred and farted little pop-pop-pop-pops in his sleep. Douglas covered his bare bum with a sheet and got up, partly to escape the smell and partly to start his Sunday with a less arousing image in his head. He clapped his hand over the alarm button seconds before it was due to go off. He just had time to put on some coffee and get cleaned up before the early service, which Russell held--aha! That was why he’d inserted Russell into his dream, always a rational explanation for the irrational--at 7 AM during the summer, really in deference to the long working days of his townie flock.

Douglas made a small pot of coffee on the hot plate in his study, then showered and dressed quickly. He shook Bill and whispered, “Do you want coffee?” Bill grunted and burrowed under a pillow. But his hand reached for Douglas’s crotch.

“Not before church.”

Bill raised himself up and grogged: “How long ‘not before church’?”

Douglas drank up his coffee and blew him a kiss. He left the room as Bill fell back into the profound sleep of the well fucked.

The guests were all still in their rooms, although he could hear a few of the older ones thumping about, peeing and hawking. Mr. Morton was in especially fine throat this morning.

He stopped in at the kitchen and there was Claire, bless her, taking the muffins out of the oven and frying bacon for the chafing dishes. She had started three pots of coffee on the Bunn burners, not forgetting the decaf for the overexcited New Yorkers who had such a fear of caffeine, as if it meant shooting up heroin. They gobbled up more fat-laden bacon and eggs than anyone, though. She would begin the eggs any minute.

“Off to church,” he whispered. “All right?”

“Allez-y, M’sieu, tout va bien ici.” She waved him away, hardly looking at him.

“Where’s Carol? Is she here yet?”

Claire glanced at him with pain in her eyes. “She did not leave last night.”

“Oh.” He’d really have to talk to her about that. Without appearing to be a complete hypocrite, of course. “Claire.”

“Oui?”

“Do you want to go to mass?”

She shrugged elaborately. “You ask now?”

He left as she was turning way, muttering.

I hope she won’t turn in her notice. Be discreet, be discreet.

Douglas decided to go to church anyway. Carol could take care of everything till he’d returned from church in a mere hour. He needed church and the peace and the something ineffable that it offered. All in an hour.

Douglas went down the hill as the clouds began to part and the sun poked lazily through. The pavement still was wet, and the birds seemed to have an extra bit of energy to sing the day. He made sure to step around the worms that had crawled out from between the cracks in the asphalt, but he noticed where some others--pedestrians or cars, it was hard to tell--had crushed them and made them bleed like people. The roadside air smelled of Queen Anne’s lace.

Douglas walked through the town he’d known all his life, and he felt as if he’d never seen it before or, at least, not truly. Instead of a massive set of givens, now he saw it as a place where everything was up for grabs. It seemed to be a modestly pretty little place that depended too much on carelessly well-off people to survive. He walked by this or that store front, this or that house, and he realized that the prosperity--even the survival--of this or that family was wholly dependent on the whorish pleasing of uncomprehending outsiders. The locals who were striking it rich this season--were sharply distinguished from those who couldn’t or wouldn’t kowtow to “them.” The scarcely tolerated summer people were never more clearly in the ascendant over them; Douglas detested them more than ever. He realized that their control of the town would only become more powerful and seductive over the years. Their wealth and their deluded conceptions of New England life would deform Selene Harbor and a thousand villages like it for decades to come.

The dark sanctuary smelled of damp prayer books and pew cushions that hadn’t had an airing since Teddy Roosevelt’s time. On automatic pilot, he sat in his usual spot--second row from the front, under the pulpit on the left side--and it took him a few moments to realize that Evelyn was sitting on his left and Allie Cobb had sidled in on his right. The women kneeled and said whatever conventional prayers they had been taught to whisper inside their discreet heads. They sat up and waited for the arrival of the minister as if they were waiting for a train.

It was only 6:52 or so--plenty of time for them to pester, probe and inquire until Russell began the service at 7 on the button, as he always did. The Cobb line was always on time.

“Good morning, Allie,” he murmured. Mrs. Cobb merely inclined her head, gazing almost in a trance at the pulpit.

“Evvie.”

His sister gave him a sharp look and said nothing. She closed her eyes as if she were meditating, hands folded. They sat there suspended in a timeless sort of vacuum, punctuated by dust motes floating in the sunlight, and he was grateful for the sense of solitude even as he felt a separation, a growing separation, from the people he had been closest to.

A stout young man, the acolyte, came in and lit the altar candles. Russell followed him and bowed before the cross, handsome in his priestly raiment. He turned to the congregation, which now numbered about a dozen, and raised his hands in a blessing.

Douglas thought his heart would burst. In terror he thought, I shouldn’t be here.

Russell turned back toward the altar. Douglas got up and brushed past his sister, who seemed not to notice, so intent was she on the progress of the service. Allie Cobb gave him a sharp glance, and a sharper, more skeptical one at Evelyn.

The other parishioners, the townies, also glanced curiously at him, but the few vacationers ignored him and continued chatting in whispers.

At the front of the church, Douglas heard a break in Russell’s voice. He didn’t look back. He escaped into the warm, clean air of the July morning, grateful to be outside and not imprisoned in the musty church where he had spent so many mornings praying for an end to his weakness and his loneliness. Incompatible wishes, he realized. One out of two isn’t bad.

He frowned as he walked past the package store and up the hill to his house. God give me strength.

He paused and looked down at the shriveled weeds straggling from the cracks in the sidewalk. If God has anything to do with what I’ve done.

In his fear, he decided to toss God out of the equation.

XVI. “What is this, Leopold Bloom Goes to a Clambake?”

“You know,” Don Wassermann said during a work break, “I always think of Gwynne as Nell Gwynne.” He sipped Earl Grey tea from a costly china cup. He was staying at Selene’s poshest inn. That sagging femme fatale and consort of gangsters, Alla Trotter, was on the floor above. Walter Baird, the male lead who gave Cary Grant a run for his money in the suavity department, roomed next door with his hatchet-faced wife. They had the sea view.

“Meretrix meretrixiarum,” Bill said. He was drinking strong coffee to drown a hangover.

Don rested his head on the desk and laughed himself silly. “You’re like Yeats!”

“What! How?”

“Your Latin is hilariously atrocious.”

“Excuse me. My Stygian ignorance must be a trial to you.” Bill was a little touchy. Five hours logged in today. Sixty over the past week. All that was missing was the factory whistle. Don had entered Selene Harbor with his usual brio, and they had embarked right away on what Bill called the Bataan Death March. Not so much as a celebratory drink or a visit to Bill’s part of town. The disassembling of Wry Beach began. “Anyway, I thought this was supposed to be your vacation.”

Don composed himself and sighed. “OK, Bill. Down, boy. You don’t have to get all worked up. You’re still one of my favorite charges even if you have little Latin and less Greek.”

Don’t be too sure about that one. He felt a tingle where Douglas had been yet again the night before. Part of his edginess was because he was utterly wrapped up in Douglas and their world-changing nights together. And he couldn’t tell anyone about it.

“And I am on my vacation. A paid vacation. A busman’s holiday. It’s wonderful! I get to stay in Maine for a few weeks, and I get to work with one of my most interesting writers--really!” Don smiled and pointed at the manuscript.

“You don’t miss Elaine? I do. I wish she had come with you. We always have a terrific time. Don’t you remember when we—”

Don saw through this, or must have believed he did. “OK, old chap. Ever onward.” Sudden change in voice, all business. “Chapter 8 is very problematic. There is a sudden and dramatic change in voice--what is the reason for this, to what end? Come on, Bill, faites attention. You want more than a couple of $200 advances, don’t you?”

Don went on and on, trying to coax him out of his resistance to self-critical analysis and the acceptance of Change.

He should only know, Bill thought with a trace of smugness.

Don was in the sunniest of his moods. “Now, my friend, this is some of the finest work you’ve ever done--I am so terribly confident that Wry Beach will far excel Choate’s Castle--so much more original yet grounded in a beautifully detailed historical and social setting--that by 1960 I foresee another book of at least equal prowess.”

Bill eyed him with mock joy and then realized that he meant every ill-considered word he spoke.

That was Don, though. He spoke the language of optimism, he avowed his faith in Progress. Bill thought this was idiotic but admirable, like a monastic vow of celibacy. Still this faith was probably the source of Don’s ability to apply himself without letup to ghastly, thankless tasks. Such as dealing with W. E. Blake, a voice crying in the wilderness of the back list. Such as making some sense of the mélange of beginnings and endings and stylistic detours that Wry Beach had turned into.

“What is this, Leopold Bloom Goes to a Clambake?” Don had cried in one of his few displays of exasperation.

“Well, goddamn it, you’ve been telling me for years that I gloss over my characters’ reactions and that I needed to put more on the page!”

“Not to this extent. All these italicized thought balloons--enough already!”

Bill thought, At least in Bataan some had the good fortune to die. End their pain. This will never end.

He was in pain as he confronted, repeatedly, the limitations of his genius. And he was confused. He didn’t remember writing half the stuff. It seemed odd--off--not quite what he’d had in mind. But maybe he was imagining it. Hadn’t he written most of this draft in a state of frothing ecstasy a few months ago? It felt like ages. Or like it never happened.

Bill shifted his attention to Don. He watched him with a resigned expression. Sometimes Don made him believe in the future--his future--and somehow managed to link it to the Greater Good. Don was the only person he had ever known who was consistently capable of separating his own selfish impulses from the Right Thing. And occasionally acting on it.

So despite himself, he trusted Don like no one else. Don’s zeal for righteousness had nothing to do with religion and the sobbing majesty of cantors; it had everything to do with his Code. And he did call it “the Code, capital C.” The Code appeared to be a synthesis of the less preposterous Levitical do’s-and-don’ts and the Renaissance ideals of, say, Castiglione. Don was nothing if not an ambitious Hegelian.

Bill had known Don since they labored over Choate’s Castle eight or nine years earlier. Through the disappointments of the second book and the wet and wasted years since Gwynne stormed out, Don had been one of his champions. His only one, actually. Bill trusted his taste, his opinions, his guidance.

Don Wassermann was a few years younger than he was, which both impressed and irritated Bill. Don was a rising star in his company and profession. He had come from more comfortable circumstances than his cousin Harold--Riverdale vs. Midwood--and was able to assume an urbane superiority more easily than Harold because he’d gone to Columbia vs. CCNY. Bill had gotten the clear message that Midwood wasn’t anything to brag about, and that Riverdale was.

“It’s like the difference between Everett and Brookline,” Don once explained.

Bill went, “Aha. Yah.” But he hardly knew one neighborhood from another in Manhattan, never mind the pecking order in the outer boroughs or how they correlated with Boston’s inner suburbs. The golden Harold sure as hell didn’t seem like any creature who’d crawl out of the sulfurous wasteland of Everett, Mass.

These days Don lived in a classic six on the extreme Upper West Side (“Kind of near your cathedral,” Don told him, but Bill saw Westminster Abbey in his mind’s eye), and there was enough money and cachet in his position and choice of wife for him to fall into the urban swoon. Don liked to convey the impression that his way of life was a fair approximation of old Vienna but with better plumbing, or Weimar Berlin in its dynamic Brillianz but without the icky sexual confusions.

Bill was interested in Don’s pretensions; he found them funny and touching. Their lives and priorities were so different that he called Don “the AntiBill,” which Don found funny and touching.

“I wouldn’t beat myself up if I were you,” Don would say with his typical largesse of spirit. “You’re a wonderful guy underneath that snotty exterior.” Then he’d poke Bill in the ribs, in a play of brotherly riffing, whenever he said anything that might be construed as a jab. At the same time, he liked Bill for being “the freeish spirit that I am not.” He sometimes intimated that he was always defending Bill in meetings with the owner of the firm, and with the other editors, who were bored with bad-boy novelists from the sticks.

Oddly, people often took them for brothers. Both were short, slender, dark-haired, and quite good-looking. Don’s features were rounder--he had something of a baby face and looked much younger than his age (“I don’t have that English skin, sorry”), even though his fine hair was subliming from his scalp.

Bill was happy to see less admirable similarities, too. Especially where Don’s cousin, now his own non-relative by marriage, was concerned.

Don was a full head shorter than his cousin Harold Blumberg, whose straight blond hair, blue eyes, and jut-jawed perfection outmatched the Aryan ideal. Don admired Harold in public and sang his praises, always in connection with that word of supreme power and might, “Harvard.” But he deplored him in private.

“A vainglorious mama’s boy, all appearance over substance. His early work on Defoe and Richardson was brilliant and innovatory”--pronounced innoVAYt’ry--“but, sadly, he has sold out to the ephemeral and fashionable. How can you build an academic career of gravitas on the works of Brendan Behan, for God’s sake?”

When he carried on in this way, his wife Elaine would say with exaggerated compassion, “You’re a success too, honey. You make a lot more money than Harold.” She was the daughter of Weimar émigrés: a Tufts philosophy professor who had defeated Wittgenstein in a student debate, or so he claimed, and a psychiatrist mother who had studied with and incessantly criticized Karen Horney. Elaine had a well-toned body that looked superb in tennis getups; her perky nose and ponytail by themselves painted a living portrait of Upward Mobility.

So Elaine she wasn’t easily impressed, and she maintained an ironic stance about everything to do with her husband’s pretensions. Bill sensed a kindred spirit--but she tended to keep her hostility under wraps, using her powers for good, mostly, unlike himself.

Don knew he was in the wrong with respect to Harold. Regardless of Elaine’s tender scorn, he couldn’t seem to help it, and he worried at the Question of Harold in connection with one he saw as intimately related, Who Is a Jew?

To Don the mere fact of Harold rankled; his cousin was a living slap in the face of Jewish continuity (“not to mention our endogamy!”), and he accused his cousin of adding to the suffering of his own people with his very blondness. “God knows who his relatives were sleeping with,” he muttered to Bill on more than one occasion. “He’s the archetype of the assimilated Jew--far worse, the painlessly assimilated Jew. People are amazed to discover that he is Jewish: ‘Why, I thought he was Swedish or something!’”

And, Don added, “I’ve noticed that Harold is never the one to reveal his true identity.”

“As what? Superman? Orson Welles? Donny, it gives me the creeps, how you harp on this purity of yours.”

“’You’? As in ‘you Jews’?”

“You as in you, shithead. Your racial integrity and all that. The purity of the Jewish Volk. Your logic’s pathetic. Ethnic purity was a plank in the eugenics platform, wasn’t it?”

Don goggled at him.

“Of Der Fuehrer!”

He loved to see Don do a slow burn. But he couldn’t keep a good man down.

“And now he’s got that fair colleen of a wife. And the athletic, nouveau-riche Catholic in-laws to rub in my face.”

“Thanks for reminding me of my failure, bub.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but that Harold seems to worm his way into everything.“ Don caught the double entendre a second too late and punctually blushed.

“Such as the favor of some powerful people at Harvard.”

“Exactly!” Don was grateful for the life preserver thrown at him.

“Ah the unkindest cut of all!” Bill laughed. “My, God, Donald, you have a bigger problem with him than I do. And, you will note, at least I have the good grace to admit I’m jealous of him. He’s depressingly competent. I hear he’s even good with his hands!”

Elaine barked at that little dig against Jewry. Bill nodded in ironic acknowledgment of her thanks.

“Although he can have that fair colleen. Ever notice she’s got an ass that drags on the ground?”

Don went, “No, she’s a beauty,” but he did giggle at the image.

Whenever direct attacks on Harold grew stale, there was always his cousin’s mother, Estelle. She headed up an entire branch of the family who said things like “Eat up--it’s an averah to leave food on your plate! You could wait till Shavuos for this one to make up her mind! I demand to speak to the manager! Eat it--they’ll say you ate it anyway! This hangnail--I’ve never known such pain! I’m doyingk!”

Aunt Estelle did pronounce the usual words deplorably: “doyingk” and “sing-gingk,” “Loo-ong-Guylandt” and so forth. She wore a red wig--not because she was so religious--and many bangle bracelets. She talked with her mouth full and sprayed gefilte fish on her audience.

Don was ashamed for her closeness to a certain stereotype. Once, when Bill was visiting him in New York, Don said, “I know plenty of Jews, New York Jews, who aren’t a bit like her! ‘Oy oy oy’ all over the place.”

“Is your own mother like that?” Bill asked.

“No!”

“Then who gives a shit? She’s your aunt. Tell her to amscray.”

“You,” as in you goyim, “don’t understand the pressure. She invites us to Passover seder every year! My mother makes us go there for break fast!”

“Your mother makes you? She still rules you at your age? Tell her no! For Chrissakes, Elaine, talk some sense into your husband.” Impatient with him, Bill polished off his wine and looked around for more as Don got up and fussed with the dishes on the dining-room table.

Elaine hated all this; it made Don sound like a parvenu. “Sweetie, it’s OK not be Deutsch. Romania isn’t so bad.”

“Wait.” Bill was pouring more wine and Don mouthed “seven” to Elaine. “Wassermann’s a German name, right?”

Elaine deadpanned. “Lots of Negroes have Irish names.”

“Elaine!”

Bill winked at Elaine and turned to Don. “No wonder you like Dora. She saw ‘Gentleman’s Agreement.’ She didn’t think it applied to her either.” Elaine cackled. Don trundled his load of dirty dishes into the kitchen, wearing a face of shame.

For there was more guilt, beyond the normal “self-hating Jew” stuff. Elaine once let it slip that it was thanks to Don that Harold and Gwynne had met.

Don had played Pander.

Back then he felt sorry for his struggling cousin. As he explained it to Bill, “Poor Harold is stuck in a dead-end lecturer’s position at Simmons, he hasn’t published, and his fiancée left him for a Portuguese dental student from Fall River. I hope you don’t mind, but I invited him to your family place in Angleport. He needs a change of scene. And your home town is close to John P. Marquand’s stomping grounds, isn’t it? Harold loves The Late George Apley.”

Bill made a face.

“Our ‘family place’?” Bill envisioned broad lawns and balustrades and squads of crooning darkies, like in some embarrassing movie with Bette Davis and George Brent. Don was always seeing the Blakes through the glamorizing prism of films and literature. If the likes of J. P. Marquand was literature. “Sure, bring your loser cousin.”

Don spent a weekend engaged in a war of wills with Bill over the disastrous second book, the collection of short stories that violated every one of the rules codifying the form. (“Where’s the conflict, Bill--this is no story, it’s a pile of ruminations! Where’s the denouement in this one, Bill?”--“Don’t confine me! I am not a slave to those dead conventions!”) Don didn’t pay much attention to his cousin or the rather bratty wife of his writer. He dismissed her on Dora’s recommendation, actually--he doted on the grande dame, to him a peppery old-style Yankee straight out of some regional novel. Even better, he thought she had the same sense of style as the Duchess of Windsor.

“She’s a girl of no account, Donald. She’d be washing our clothes if she hadn’t got herself knocked up by your author.” Dora dragged on her cigarette. She used a long holder, a touch that Don loved. And she always lit up with a big wooden kitchen match, swinging the thing around like a signalman on the railroad, another “colorful” touch. “I take that back. I would have fired her for incompetence and insolence. She’d have stolen, too.”

At that moment Fanny Bresnahan (“the family retainer,” in Don’s account) came bustling in with the tea tray. Ever eager to punish an overreaching member of her own tribe, she directed Dora’s eyes to the window. The scene was outside Don’s field of vision.

Dora saw Gwynne and Harold sitting on a bench in the garden under a tangled bower of vines and morning glories. There were goldfinches flitting around them. They were handsy. Coy, giggling. Gwynne gazed at him with stars in her violet eyes. Harold leaned close, on the verge of kissing her upturned lips.

Dora exchanged a bright glance with Fanny, who exited with an air of satisfaction. Dora was overjoyed to see betrayal take form. This misbegotten marriage had been effectively over for some years. This handsome Jew would give it the kibosh. “She’s got a pretty face. I’ll give her that. But she’s a drinker, so the bloom’ll be off that rose before too long. I pity the next fellow who lands that one.”

Dora had related all this to Bill in the aftermath. They had laughed over Don’s being clueless and predicted misery for Mr. Blumberg. “I feel for the poor bastard,” Bill had said. “Really, I do.”

Dora had grinned and clinked her glass with his.

So Bill smiled at his friend and tolerated his requests for minor rewriting, if not for the arduous work of re-casting, even re-imagining. He sipped coffee and went along with this or that suggested change. “Yah, you’re right. Christ, what was I thinking? OK, delete this set-piece, it’s a pimple on the ass of progress. No, she wouldn’t say that, would she? I’ll revise it tomorrow. Yes, TO-morrow. No, I did not rifle the OED for obscure sexual verbs!” And so on.

After a few more hours of this, though, even Don’s patience ran out. He threw down his pencil and rubbed his eyes, groaning. “Bill. This isn’t going well. There is something fundamentally altered in your writing.”

“Or in me?”

“I’m not sure about you. But the writing, yes.” Bill didn’t say anything. “It lacks the old--well, let’s call it the wild, cynical energy that is you, my friend.”

“There’s been a lot of turmoil for me here. A lot of changes. It’s been hard.”

Don waited for more. He looked at him with equal parts curiosity and compassion. He tried to speak in a lighter tone. “Well. What I mean, Bill my lad, is that it seems prettied up. Somehow tranquilized. With uplift.” He made a gagging motion but failed to get a rise out of him. “So unlike you. Bill, I don’t hear your accustomed voice anywhere in the last two-thirds of this book. It’s as if you’re trying to turn it into a best-seller--or--I don’t know--another editor’s--“

“I don’t know what you’re telling me.”

“Someone’s been tinkering with your work, Bill. That’s what I think. There is another consciousness at work here. I don’t believe you’ve changed all that much in a few months. My question is: Who? And why?” Don gave him a searching look. It was tinged with suspicion, a readiness to believe the worst.

But Bill had stopped listening. He looked outside rented living room with all its chintz and fake antiques. He could see the first thundercloud in weeks. It was massing over the mountain in back of town.

CATCH OF THE DAY, CHAPTERS 17 - 20

2006-08-26T04:27:00.000-04:00

XVII. Word Games

“Getting muggy.”

“Need the rain.”

“I love summer. The hotter the better.”

“You start, Russell.”

“Shouldn’t we wait for Evelyn?”

“She’s always late. We’d be waiting till next Pentecost.”

“You look tired, Douglas.”

“Been burning the candle at both ends?”

“That’s me. The rake in repose.”

“Pass me the chips.”

“Better grab ‘em before Evvie gets here.”

“That’s uncharitable of you, my dear.”

“You’ve been full of snappy retorts lately, Douglas. I think someone’s having an effect on you.”

“Really?”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with it.”

“There. My first word.”

“H-A-H-A? Oh my lord, I thought I married a brilliant man.”

“Very funny. Ha. Ha.”

“What’s that?”

“An English garden building or something.”

“Oh, yes. I believe it has a hyphen. That violates the rules. Russell has a surprising tendency to break rules.”

“You should see the rotten letters I drew! All vowels except H, and that’s rough breathing. It looks like Hawaiian over here.”

“Forfeit your turn and start over.”

“It could be all consonants.”

“Let’s pretend there are no hyphens in the word.”

“I’ll stick to what I have, poor as it may be.”

“Thank you, Isaiah. Watch me go in for the kill.”

“I didn’t realize we were into life-or-death Scrabble. We generally don’t go in for kills, lovey.”

“It’s about time we did. Played for high stakes.”

“I guess Bill’s been working hard with his editor. What’s the slave-driver like?”

“I hear he’s a very nice-looking young man. His wife’s not here, is she?”

“Play your turn, Allie.”

“You’ll love this one. P-R-I-C-K-S. Add the points for H-A-H-A-S, too.”

”Do you get credit for the whole word?”

“You know I do. Want me to keep score?”

“I blush. And we’re in the rectory too. Here’s mine. C-A-S-H.”

“Been a good season, hasn’t it?”

“Thanks be to God. This town’s been struggling for a while.”

“We’ll always look back at 1957 with longing.”

“Is the future bound to be that grim?”

“No. But golden ages never last long. Everything afterwards seems wanting. A letdown of divine proportions.”

“If we veer into theology I will go and have a drink right this instant.”

“You were the one who brought up the Suffering Servant. And it was a low blow, if I do say so.”

“No more theology!”

“My turn. C-H-E-E-R-E-D.”

“The Good News by any other name.”

“He was trying to get rid of vowels--weren’t you? What’s your word?”

“R-E-R-E-D-O-S.”

“I did marry somebody brilliant! How did you ever think of that?”

“It came as in a vision?”

“Well! Look who’s here. Hello, Evelyn, how are you?”

“You don’t look so good. Is anything wrong?”

“Should we start the game over again for Evelyn?”

“And give up reredos? No!”

“What a day!”

“That covers a great deal.”

“Sorry I’m late. The store.”

“I sent Carol over there to help you out. She’s very good.”

“That’s Claire’s niece?”

“She’s all right. Pushy.”

“Her niece from Bath. She goes to the University of Maine. She’s been helping me out at the front desk.”

“You have a front desk? Since when?”

“Calls the place an inn. I suspect she doesn’t want to teach grammar school kids all her life.”

“Who can blame her? So glad we never had children.”

“What a thing to say. Having a baby is something every woman wants. Or should.”

“Do you? Time’s running out.”

“Evelyn, it’s your turn.”

“I know. Here goes nothing. E-X-P-E-C-T.”

“Too bad you couldn’t put the X on a double-point score. Not that many points.”

“Got any chips?”

“I am alarmed by our running through the E’s.”

”Pretzels?”

“How is your Mr. Blake doing? I haven’t seen him in his usual haunts lately.”

“He is most certainly not ‘my’ Mr. Blake.”

“Russell. Your turn.”

“I wonder whose Mr. Blake he is.”

“I heard from a reliable source that she saw him leaving that little blonde starlet’s room at 4 AM. With the hunky fellow from the crew who’s staying with you, Douglas. I mean, at your inn.”

“What was Nellie Dempsey doing up that late?”

“La dee da.”

“Early. She’s 84--gets up at 3 every morning.”

“The town should shut down that aptly named Dump of hers.”

“Really? When was this?”

“Thursday morning.”

“I doubt that. He came home worn out after ten hours with his editor.”

“’Home’?”

“And never left his room all night?”

“Oh my. How dark it’s getting.”

“We need the rain.”

“A rainy Sunday afternoon. Makes you lonesome.”

“R-I-P-E.”

“We ripe and rot.”

“The Broadwoods are relentlessly upbeat today. I’m of a mind to break my rule and offer you both a drink.”

“My name hasn’t been Broadwood for about twenty years. I guess once you’re branded with that iron…”

“Break it, darling. I will anyway.”

“The past couple of weeks have been very rough.”

“Douglas?”

“I’ve been fine. What do you want me to say?”

“You look different.”

“He sounds different, too. A regular wisenheimer.”

“Me!?”

“Not so miserable and downcast.”

“As if you’re walking on sunbeams.”

“That’s why I edit his sermons.”

“It’s easy for Douglas to be happy.”

“Since when?”

“He’s content living in a dream world.”

“Your turn, dreamer.”

“C-R-A-P.”

“That’s not allowed!”

“Nasty word!”

“It’s slang.”

“Not in the rectory, what on earth do you mean by that?”

“I knew I shouldn’t come over here. None of you take anything seriously.”

“Stop it, Evvie. You’re acting like a spoiled twerp.”

“You can’t leave! It’s going to pour in a few minutes.”

“I’m going home to take a nap. I haven’t been feeling so good.”

“Don’t you want to play your turn?”

“Oh, leave me alone, all of you. You take my life and problems so lightly. You only care about your own pleasures.”

“I!?”

“Why do you to take it so personally?”

“He’s stung over losing Mr. Blake. Again I ask, ‘Whose Mr. Blake?’”

“It isn’t at all like ‘who lost China’!”

“You pervert everything you touch!”

“Please don’t go! Evelyn! What’s got into her?”

“I think she knows for sure now.”

“Evelyn, be well. God bless you!”

“Let her go. It’s about time she grew up.”

“Knows what for sure?”

“My turn again. I’ve got a good one this time, too. C-R-A-P-U-L-O-U-S. Cuts a couple of ways, doesn’t it?”

“What’s going on here?”

“Oh my God, Russell. You know very well. We’ve discussed it a hundred times. Some of it anyway.”

“That’s disturbing.”

“You know, true happiness is a form of redemption.”

“Or deception. In your moments of highest bliss, watch out.”

“Allie, darling, your cynicism depresses me.”

“And for one to be redeemed another must suffer. Funny old universe.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“There are no secrets here. Even within families. You know it better than we do. N’est-ce pas, Russell?”

“The main thing is: Are you happy?”

“I am. Yes, I am.”

XVIII. The Film about the End of the World

Douglas walked to the center of town moments after the thundershower had passed through. The air was cool. The earth was exhaling its warmth like a perfume, he smelled it in the faint steam rising from the lawns and flower beds. The six-o’clock sun shone through the loosening clouds. In the stillness after the storm the birds were singing as fresh and clear as the dawn chorus; the tourists were still indoors, eating and drinking away their boredom. Their behind-closed-doors spending was a double gift.

Right on cue, a rainbow was forming over the bay.

Walking on sunbeams? Thank you, Russell. You continue to surprise me.

He smiled as he felt the water on the road seep into the soles of his loafers. Even though the air was turning warmer, he shivered as he changed his course to sit on a bench by the harbor. Shivered from the delicious half-secret that he carried with him. Which he could summon up at any time, anywhere. For the first time.

He saw Bill’s body as he lay on top of the sheets, deeply tanned except for the lighter skin of his small bum. The rake in repose. He was snoring a little, his hair a tousled mess of nearly black on the pillowcase. He stirred and turned on his side, revealing an imposing erection for such a small man. Eyes still closed, he reached out for Douglas with his right arm and, feeling nothing but the sheets, groped around with an expression of growing concern. His eyes opened a slit, and he smiled when he saw Douglas standing by the bed, ready to lie beside him again.

Douglas’s heart gave him an extra bump. He looked away, almost afraid to smile at what was, really (wasn’t it?) a commonplace sight. Enacted, he thought, a million times a day all over the earth? But never before in my life. He wondered if he’d ever known joy before. He had believed so, but those few, furtive old stabs at joy now seemed like the difference between dreaming and knowing.

It was miraculous, of course, because here he was, at 42, tickled pink to lose his second virginity. Second, yes, because the first deflowering--correction, his “first man-to-man fuck fest,” as his blunt little author phrased it--had been so long ago and the memory of it so suppressed that it seemed less real than a thousand solo fantasies. And the tarnished senses of middle age were bound to vibrate with the joy of new stimuli. When Bill cried out and shuddered and gazed blindly at him, he knew that Bill was as drunk with delight as he was, as overwhelmed by self-discovery.

And it was true that he was taking a revolutionary delight in his own body. He appreciated it for the first time, its size and proportions, its strength and ability to dominate a handsome, nicely endowed man who was about 10 inches shorter and 90 pounds lighter. Even more, he appreciated its pleasure-taking ability, the intensity of its responses and its uncounted erogenous zones, from his left ear to his big toes, especially the right one. Bill had found them all within a few sessions, and he exploited them deftly, rousing him to orgasm too soon at the beginning of every night. Except that Bill cozened more out of him, always more, and left him sore and spent and creaking the next day.

Whereas Bill himself, small as he was, having been lain upon, fondled, bitten and fucked repeatedly--three times to Douglas’s once--jumped up and attacked with brio his breakfast, his work, his Scotch and, at night, Douglas.

“You’ve a lot of élan vital.”

“Roll over, baby, it’s my turn.”

Douglas noticed that they were consuming the Vaseline at a scandalous rate. The staff at the Rexall were bound to talk.

“So what, Douglas. Isn’t it nice to know that someone in this town is getting laid every night? And that it’s you? You don’t know how lucky you are, old pip.”

Douglas didn’t know whether to be more astonished by the changes in himself or in Bill. These days Bill was a little more discreet and amiable in public, with less of the edge he’d exhibited before. And in private he was alternately fierce and tender, intimate and impersonal. He was more fully in command of himself than previously, and his confidence intensified both his desire and his desirability. As soon as Bill closed the door behind him and advanced like Sherman, Douglas surrendered.

“In love as in war,” Bill remarked, “the physical advantage of the adversary doesn’t necessarily carry the day. Remember Thermopylae.”

“Sssh. Please keep your voice down. Someone might hear you.”

Some things didn’t, couldn’t change.

“I’m already whispering, for Chrissakes. You want me to learn sign language?”

Douglas stifled his laughter in a pillow and Bill crawled up to lick his neck and toy with the light fur on his chest, lingering on his nipples.

“Kiss me. And actually open your mouth this time.”

Douglas smiled at the memory of it. Bill was still Bill. He did love that brash little monster.

But. But, while Bill understood the ins and outs of his wants, and God knew he was given to excess as a devotee of the Pleasure Principle, he didn’t grasp the meaning of their gratified desire any better than Douglas. Was it the sign of some slightly disreputable grace that was beneath the soul’s notice? Was it a spiritual attribute, a special divine favor that ennobled and transformed? And how did it relate to the everyday blessing that was bestowed, cheap as penny candy, upon legitimately married couples?

Surely, the divine favor reading seemed overblown even if it felt right at supreme moments (during and no more than two minutes after orgasms). And the blessings bestowed on Joan and Darby seemed too dull for male pioneers opening new physical and emotional continents.

Douglas reflected that, maybe, it was a middle way. He liked to believe they were the beneficiaries of a grace that an unexpurgated edition of God offered to adults. He never spoke of it, afraid to call down the wrath of God on them, presumptuous degenerates that they were. Afraid to queer it.

Douglas sat down on the bench farthest from the line of bars and restaurants; behind was a shady slope topped by houses belonging to well-born outsiders. Pleasure craft bobbed before him. At the end of the dock a girl with long straight brown hair was bailing out a dinghy tied to a 30-foot sailing boat. Her rhythmic motion and its delicate plashing sound soothed him into a kind of unafraid reverie.

The people who knew him well had figured it out--probably before anything had actually happened. They hadn’t changed their way of treating him, they hadn’t cast him into the hell of internal exile in his own town. To his amazement, they seemed to accept it. “Douglas and Mr. Blake have a particular friendship.” When he looked at it from the outside, or tried to, it had a Transcendentalist ring to it. Very civilized, discreet in that high-minded way the gentle classes had when they chose to give one of their own a break. He hadn’t seen--not yet anyway--any fire from heaven, or heard any oracular condemnations from the guardians of morality, or felt the rising damp of the townies’ insinuations and ostracism.

But the secret part was because only he knew what it was like to feel this way. He doubted that Evelyn knew what it was like to touch and taste Bill the way he knew it. And, he suspected, Evelyn had had no experience with Bill’s tenderness and professions of real feeling. He tried to pity her in the thankless role she played, but she’d always received all the pity and concern she’d demanded. Now it was finally his turn to get what he wanted.

My God, selfishness feels good. It was invigorating and--here was the odd part--it made him feel expansive and generous. He looked with humorous benevolence on his sad case of a sister, on the quirky Cobbs, on the loyal Claire, on the coarsest of the town selectmen and the most grating of the New York visitors.

So maybe it wasn’t selfishness after all. Rather, it was a feeling that was part of a type of experience for which he had no understandable category. He’d have to reread the great accounts of love and destiny in Western literature. Starting with the volumes that filled the bookcase in his study, although he worried that there were too many homosexual writers in that grouping. He admitted the need for balance, but he wasn’t in the mood for George Meredith yet. At any rate, maybe their ideas and sentiments and polemics would mean something now, maybe they wouldn’t be part of some vast cavalcade of incomprehension, like the Koran or the Bible. And, maybe, he’d have to invent a whole new set of rules for living. In a moment’s panic he realized that his entire upbringing was on the verge of being invalidated--tossed out like gaiters and razor strops. And carriage reins. Then he thought of Jack and Allen and that other, far more reprehensible William and that whole gang of bohemian troublemakers he’d worshiped and utterly misunderstood.

So THAT’s the work they’re about.

He shook his head. He felt like a nitwit or, more precisely, a large, slow-witted child.

He looked around and sighed deeply. Although the sun had come out in all its late beauty, there were few people out. It was supper time, and even visiting sophisticates tended to fall into the habit of early eating and late drinking. The bailing girl was still at it but in an abstracted way; she was gazing out at the dark clouds east and the fading rainbow in between.

He recalled Bill, one evening after supper, sitting in the private study, where they were sipping Port, dressed in their undershorts. Bill was explaining, sort of, his duplicity:

“I went after her because she was easy. Safe. I was bored. I was scared. I was pissed at you. I never promised her anything, though. I told her I never loved anybody.”

“And it was true.”

“I guess so.”

“You told me that, too.”

“I know.”

“You told me something--the opposite last night.”

“I did? Seriously?” He tried to joke his way out of it, but, to his credit, not too forcefully. “Yah. I did.”

“You meant it in the heat of the moment.”

“Mmm. One will do that.”

“I won’t push it.”

“Give it a while, Douglas.”

“I wish I could trust it.”

Bill took umbrage. His eyes flashed with real anger, and he was beautiful to behold. “As far as it goes, you can. I don’t know how I feel. Or I feel too good. Don’t demand a detailed analysis from me now, for God’s sake.” He took a long pull on his glass and held it out for more. Douglas poured it for him. “What can I tell you that will make you believe me--so you’ll know this is real? How’s this? I feel comfortable in my own skin for the first time in my life. Thanks to you. How’s that, Douglas? Does that suffice?”

He didn’t speak for a while. He had to bite his tongue to keep from badgering Bill about old boyfriends, his secretive lapses from marital legitimacy. He hated himself for it, but he said something almost as foolish: “I’m frightened, Bill. All this terrifies me.”

“All this scares the shit out of me, too. Still.”

“Does it? Still?”

“Of course. We both have reason to be afraid.”

“Yes. This isn’t Periclean Athens.”

“It’s not even Renaissance Rome. We’ve got fucking Ike in the White House and that shifty creep from California waiting with his talons out, praying for the old man to kick the bucket. But I don’t think it’s as scary as when it was purely an idea, a ‘tendency.’” He mused for a bit, seeming to forget the drink in his hand. “Funny how reality cuts fear down to size.”

“Does it?”

“Don’t you see that?” Bill laughed. “It’s a new thought for me, too. Quite subversive. Maybe we should send a telegram to Nixon. He could get Ike to deploy anti-faggot bombers.”

This silliness irritated Douglas. Take me seriously, damn it! “I’m still frightened. This--this has the power to…”

“Cause expulsion from Eden?”

“Bill, this is my home. I’m a fixture here in Selene Harbor.”

“Don’t kid yourself. You’re as expendable as a poverty-stricken Canuck like Claire.”

That one hit home and jarred him. “If you were at home--in your hometown right now, would you still take these risks?”

“You mean finally step up and admit what I am? I don’t know. I do know that once this Rubicon’s been crossed, there’s no going back. I happened to cross it here. With you, Douglas. Here and now. There’s the scandal of particularity coming into it again.”

“Bill, I love you.”

“Have you learned nothing?”

“But sex isn’t everything.”

“It is too.”

“What do you think we--where--“

“All right, you win. Sex isn’t everything.” Bill’s hand was already cradling his balls. He kissed his belly and licked the hair around the navel. “It’s all about love.” And he went to work on Douglas’s rising member.

At that moment it occurred to Douglas that Bill had done this before, and not merely once or twice. Nobody had such unerring instincts, not even perverts, who, he imagined, had a natural gift for unnatural practices.

“What’s the matter?”

Douglas didn’t speak. Bill kept at it. Douglas shuddered and let himself and his ex post facto sense of betrayal go. “It doesn’t matter,” he murmured.

Bill whispered, “What? What did you say?”

Douglas answered with a groan.

Later, when they both were worn out, he woke up in the dark and found Bill’s hand posed gently on his chest, over his heart. Bill was looking at him and whispered, “This is good. I love being with you.”

Douglas smiled and said, “I know what you mean.” And Bill kissed him delicately on the lips.

Douglas wasn’t smiling now. Now it seemed as qualified and at-arm’s-length an expression of love as existed. And the thought that Bill was far more experienced at this than he’d let on--that he’d betrayed his wife all during their marriage…

He saw the lightning fork downward over the water. He thought he heard the thunder some seconds afterwards.

He got up from the bench. The sun angled lower. The reddish light made the town resemble a set from a film about the end of the world. He walked toward Montecalvo’s, half expecting to see Evelyn or the Cobbs, if not all of them, heading there for a long Sunday supper of wine and spaghetti. He turned the corner and saw two men who looked like Bill going into the place, one animated and speaking with good humor, the other slump-shouldered and sullen.

“Bill?”

Both men stopped and watched him approach. Bill nodded curtly and looked away. The other man’s eyes lit up and came forward holding out his hand. “Hello,” he said cheerily, “who might you be?” A look of recognition seemed to move over his face for a moment. Then he smiled and briefly, almost perfunctorily, shook Douglas’s hand.

“I’m Douglas Broadwood. Mr. Blake’s landlord. Is that the right word for it, Bill?” he asked jocosely.

Bill gave him a silencing look and said, “Douglas Broadwood, Don Wassermann.”

Don said, “It’s a pleasure, Mr. Broadwood. I hope you’re taking good care of one of my very favorite writers.”

Douglas gave Bill a curious glance. He replied in kind. “I hope we are, Mr. Wassermann. He’s a favorite with us, too.” Douglas felt like an oaf, in front of these two small, handsome men.

“He has a way about him. At times.” And Don nudged Bill, needling, affectionately eye to eye in the veiled way of little men.

Bill scowled. “Look, I’m starved. We’ve been at it since ten this morning. I didn’t even get to church,” he added, glaring at Douglas. “Did I miss anything?”

“Not really. Russell Cobb was walking on sunbeams, though.”

Bill shrugged and went inside, leaving the two of them on the threshold, where several parties came bunching out at once.

“Bill’s going to church these days?” Don asked in wonderment. “What’s going on here?”

“He was pulling your leg, actually. And mine.”

“Oh.” Don seemed let down. “So. How do you find him?”

“Excuse me?”

“In good shape?”

“He’s not drinking so much if that’s what you mean.”

“Then I wonder why his writing is so poor.”

Don had landed a verbal punch in his solar plexus. He stared. “What?”

“I worry. He’s lost the, the thrust made him special. An appealingly angry, unrefined voice. His latest work is excessively genteel. Too writerly. I hope it’s a temporary thing. We really don’t need another Updyke.” Don caught himself, gave him a wan smile of apology. “Forgive me. This isn’t right. You wouldn’t possibly know--“

“I would. I was the one who typed all his work and posted it to you.”

Don looked up at Douglas and went, “Is that right?” He pursed his lips for a second and then smiled. “Let’s eat. I’m famished myself.” He led them into the restaurant.

The place was emptying out, and Bill had got a table overlooking the lane that led to the water. Somehow he’d already managed to get his hands on a bottle of Chianti, and was pouring himself a refill. Both Don and Douglas made a clucking noise at the same time.

“So, tell me,” Douglas said gamely, “how’s the work going? A ton of rewrites? That’s pretty normal, isn’t it, Mr. Wassermann?”

“Shut up, Douglas.” Bill flashed him a look, then finished his wine and went to pour another.

“Not so fast,” Don said with his usual good humor. “Let me have some. You think I haven’t been working like a dog today?” He offered the bottle to Douglas.

“Please.”

Bill got the bottle away from Don and poured. “This is number three, Don, Douglas. In case you’re keeping track. Dinky little glasses, too, by the way.”

“I hope there won’t be too many more. We’ve a lot of work tomorrow, too, big boy.” Don grabbed his neck and shook him gently.

Douglas wondered if he knew how big a boy Bill was. He scrutinized Don for subtly betraying signs of effeminacy. He saw none and relaxed.

“I need a day off. I’m not a fucking factory hand. Like one of these poor slobs who stitches shoes in a fucking shoe shop all day long. Breathing in poisonous dyes, slicing their fucking fingers when they’re cutting leather for high heels. One little slip and you’ve got a reject and your pay gets fucking docked.”

Douglas gave him a startled look. When has he ever been anywhere near a place of work? Bill avoided his eyes.

“And even if every shoe is perfect, the fucking foreman will take the credit for himself and rob you of your bonus.”

Don wore an expression of polite bafflement, in part because he didn’t know from the New England shoe industry. He steered the conversation back to his job. “Mr. Broadgood--“

“Broadwood,” Bill corrected him.

“I’m so sorry! Mr. Broadwood, I was about to say that I hope you don’t mind if we talk a little shop at dinner.” Don smiled at him with the assumption that he would be acceded to.

Douglas nodded and murmured something agreeable, he didn’t know what.

Don went into editorial mode, again all business. “Now, Bill, I know you don’t want to hear this but--“

“You’re right about that, Donny. I’m tired and sick of thinking about that fucking book.” But the wine was having its effect, and he seemed to relax in time-lapse photography, blooming into ruddy bonhomie right in front of them. He winked at Douglas to show that he wasn’t peeved with him.

“OK,” Bill said tolerantly as he raised the glass to his lips. He said to Don, “What bug is up your ass, specifically?” He grinned at Douglas. “My editor seems to think my work has changed since I’ve been here. Imagine that.” Another wink.

Don looked from one to the other uncomfortably. He shifted his chair closer to the table and hunched over it, resting his elbows on the scarred and rather sticky wooden surface. He looked intently at Bill, smiling to cover his agitation. “Bill, I was starting to say earlier, the last three-quarters or so of the book is--well, it is so unlike you. I don’t hear your accustomed voice anywhere in the last two-thirds of this book. It’s as if you’re trying to turn it into a best-seller, or--I don’t know--another editor’s been at work. It may sound absurd but–“

“I don’t know what you’re telling me. What do you mean another editor?”

Don and Douglas got very still, surprised by the sudden tension in his voice. Bill furrowed his brow and lowered his head a little.

Douglas knew this mannerism by now. This isn’t going to be pleasant, whatever it is.

Don evidently knew it too. His manner eased a doit, became slightly more cajoling. “Bill, somewhere around chapter 6 I noticed that the syntax was changing--textual analysis was always my forte in college and graduate school. Lionel Trilling,” he began fondly, taking in Douglas as well. “He always told me--“

His heart did a strange little stammer. He looked at Don more carefully, and saw the gaze returned. “You studied with him? So did I.” Is this a good thing? Or a very bad one.

Don’s head wagged with the amazement of it. “I thought you looked familiar! When were you there?”

“Right after the war. PhD. program.”

Don covered his confusion with a jolly laugh, even though his face was registering something far from delight. “Isn’t it a small world?” He said it like a catch-phrase meant to divert from actual feelings, but Douglas didn’t understand the reference.

“I wish I could place you,” Don said. “I was there about ten years ago, too.”

Bill motioned to the waiter to take their order. “You know, I’m right here. It’s rude to exclude someone from the conversation like this.” They picked up their menus while the willowy waiter huffed over their delay. They ordered and Bill looked happy.

“Christ, I’m starved. Aren’t you? So, Donny, what’s this about the writing being different and all that? Whatever you were trying to say before the detour down Memory Lane?”

Douglas noticed that Bill was smiling, but the head was still down, the eyes still shielded by the furrowed brow.

“Ah, where was I again? Oh, yes, I was saying that the syntax changed and I felt the tone of the prose became a bit becalmed with it. No, it was more than that. The intense allusiveness--one of the hallmarks of your work--changed into something more, oh, buried or something. And the vocabulary--well, it became less earthy, less grounded in the physical world, more abstract and nebulous. Like suddenly being in a fog bank here in Maine.”

Bill narrowed his eyes and bent his head downward yet again. “Exactly where did this sea change take place in your reading, Don?”

“Chapter 6, as I told you.”

“Exactly what passage, Donald?”

Don sipped and sloshed wine around his mouth to give himself time, to assess and weigh before speaking. He gave Douglas a quick glance, as if asking for a spot of help. Finally, he swallowed with a big aaah! and smacked his lips. “Not bad for house wine.”

“Cut the shit. Where, exactly?”

“Oh, Bill, it’s been a very long day.”

“Some editor you are.”

Don colored a bit and said, “All right then, the sudden change is near the end of the chapter. That’s what was so odd about it. Here we are going along in one mode and then, all of a sudden, another style, another consciousness makes itself felt. At the very least it seems like an inept editing job.” Don was giving Bill of look of sad suspicion, almost of jealousy.

Inept editing job!

Douglas felt his heart squeeze in his chest, as if it were about to tear open the skin and send blood and muscle all over the restaurant’s red table cloths, red curtains, red lamp shades.

“The passage?” Bill persisted.

Don sighed and raised his palms in a sort of surrender. “It happens within the scene between Jimmy and Nora, when they’re celebrating the acceptance of Jimmy’s novel and they get drunk and start to make love. Then, after about five lines, boom. It’s as if we are forced to avert our gaze, and all the expectations we’ve been given for a steamy, emotionally complex scene are wiped away by a sponge--it becomes very pallid and emotionless. Tame and--small somehow. I was telling your...friend here that I was reminded of Updyke.”

“Updyke!” Bill fell back in his seat, unable to believe his ears. Too astonished to drink, too horrified to shout obscenities.

Douglas felt thirsty. He grabbed for a glass of iced water but got wine. He drank it down. This was the first passage he typed for Bill--the first that Bill had written, or perhaps rewritten, after arriving in Selene. He had been shocked by the coarseness of it, blaming Bill’s violently sexual prose on the alcohol and an overly vivid imagination fueled by frustration.

“Worse yet,” Don went on, sipping another glass of wine, beginning to slur his words, “the word play and the underlying humor were gone. I can’t understand it, Bill. What happened? Has Maine had such a strange effect on you?”

Bill had been glowering downward. He looked up now, and he caught Douglas’s eye. He smiled and slid his gaze over to Don. “Yes.”

They sat in their various states of confusion. Don, exhausted from a long day with his uncooperative author, looked from one to the other of them rather muzzily, unsure what to make of things. Bill kept a Mona Lisa smile plastered on his face, occasionally glancing around the garish dining room and prattling vacationers, as if to say--Douglas didn’t want to know or even guess.

Douglas felt short of breath and parched, and he reached for the water glass, draining it in one long swig. He is dangerous, dangerous tonight. Unpredictable.

When the waiter dropped the food on the table, Bill broke the tension by clapping his hands. “I love this wop grub!”

Don shot Douglas a wan look asking for his pardon. “I love Italian food, too. It’s the best cuisine--or should I say cucina--for everyday eating, don’t you think so, Mr. Broadwood?”

“Yes, I agree.” He didn’t agree, had never considered this before, but he was in no mood to add a gram of controversy to the scene.

Bill ate for a minute and wiped his mouth with a red napkin. Douglas almost believed that there would be foamy red blood all around his mouth, but as Bill took the napkin away, he saw a smear of oil above his chin. Bill sighed with good humor and said to Don, “I hardly know what to say. I think I still have my original manuscript around someplace. If you’ll excuse me…”

“Where are you going?”

“I remembered where I can find the original draft for you. I’ll see you tomorrow at 9 sharp, OK, Donny?”

Don nodded and went, “Sure, Bill,” but gazed at him, troubled.

Bill turned and made his way to the front of the restaurant. He bumped against the pine paneling once or twice. He went out.

Not a word. Not a look or a smile. Not one iota of acknowledgment.

Douglas felt sick to his stomach. He couldn’t eat his spaghetti and meatballs. He fiddled with a breadstick, breaking it in two. Don caught his eye, but he looked away and stacked the breadstick pieces in a kind of cross on top of the pasta.

Don turned to Douglas. He gave him a forced smile. “Bill’s a vulnerable person. More fragile and damaged than most. I love--I care for him deeply, in part because he is so different from me. I find his self-destructiveness and anger almost incomprehensible but somehow compelling. Maybe less baffling now that I’ve come here and met…”

Don regarded him coldly. “His talent is all he has to hold onto. You understood that about him, didn’t you? Take that away and, well…” Don made a fluttering bird motion and turned from Douglas. He rested his chin on his hand and seemed to be watching Bill shamble down the lane. A sigh that segued to a yawn. “There’ll be no work done tomorrow.”

Don ate while Douglas sat and watched.

“You don’t have to keep me company, you know.”

“No, I’d like to rest here a while.” Douglas forced himself to smile and adopt a conversational tone. “Running a tourist--an inn at this time of the year--well, it’s all-consuming. Nice to get away for a few hours.”

He shriveled at the thought of going home and encountering Bill’s wrath. Or finding that Bill had left.

Where would he go? Evvie’s?!

His heart thumped in his ears, and he couldn’t catch his breath. He struggled to keep a mask of slightly bored sociability. He heard Don speaking.

“Given everything that we know now, Mr. Broadgood, I think it would be wise for him to register at my hotel--L’Auberge du Capitain--until we get the book sorted out. I know you aren’t his keeper, and I’m sure you’ve done a bang-up job of helping him in his work, and even saving him from the worst of his self-indulgences. His drinking anyway.” Don gave him a sidelong glance that may have been accompanied by a sneer.

Then Don’s expression assumed a bland formality as he turned to him and said, with an almost humorous lightness, “I remember you. You were the one who was always going downtown, hanging around with that bunch of--coterie of extremists who called themselves ‘beat’. The Beats. Now yclept the Beatniks, a little shtetl humor from that Ginsberg character, I have no doubt. As I recall, you were somehow involved with that bibulous Kerouac. You had quite the crush on him--oh, yes, it was all over Columbia. Lionel used to laugh about it. Unrequited love is hard, I suppose.” Don gave him a pitiless look and switched off. Douglas was about to be dismissed.

Don looked at his watch. He said, “I do hope he finds those manuscript pages. He needs a real editor to look at them this time.” At pointed glance at him. Full of contempt and unveiled anger. “You kept them, didn’t you?”

Douglas felt his face blaze. His insides turned to water. He wasn’t a violent man, but this haughty little Mandarin was conjuring up visions of mayhem. “Of course.” He could scarcely speak, the blaze in his body had dried out his throat.

Don looked away and drummed his fingers on the table. He flagged down the waiter and ordered one coffee.

Douglas got up. He lumbered out of the place as if the nerves had been cut to all his limbs. From the doorway he saw that Don was sunk in some introspective morass, ignoring the waiter when he brought the coffee and asked with a moue if he wanted cream.

Douglas went out into the clean cool of the evening.

The sun was setting, crimson light and stiltish shadows were crawling everywhere. The film about the end of the world was coming to its conclusion: the red ball was going to balloon outward, outward, and it would first broil then crush this paltry earth and its foully unhappy inhabitants. God would have his Last Laugh; He would laugh best, relieved to be done with this collection of vermin, whom He had once intended to be in his own image. Even God would have to wonder what had gone wrong--how had He botched things so grievously? Why was happiness so rare, and once experienced, ripped away so quickly?

For an instant Douglas saw himself enthroned in the clouds like an engraving of Jehovah by the first William Blake, pondering the wickedness of humanity, then giving the nod to the sun: Go nova. Let there be too much light. That all things might be new again.

If he had any feelings left, it would have been both erotic and amusingly ironic to think of himself as a creation of William Blake, any William Blake.

He made his way up the hill to Armitage Road like a disembodied spirit, or a spiritless body. It should have been a familiar state, even a comfortable one, but it was like being sent back to hell. What had he done, or left undone, to deserve this hell on earth?

Passers-by called his name and cried out what a glorious evening it was. He ignored them. He felt ill. He never felt ill, but he did now.

Funny. I want my cardigan. So cold.

XIX. Hard Landings

He had stopped short of his house and turned around and made for Evelyn’s. It was already dark, and when he got there she still hadn’t put on any lights. He knocked at the kitchen door, as always. There was thumping and the sound of someone – no, more than one someone – dashing down the stairs. He thought he heard the front door slam, but his state of mind was such that he almost discounted this until Evelyn, out of breath, jounced into the kitchen and switched on the light over the stove. Through the six-paned window he saw her tug and smooth her dress so that it covered her slip. “Coming, Douglas!”

Couldn’t wait, could he? Bitterness warred with the sting of another betrayal. Hurt was winning over anger; he realized that it had always smothered any other emotion, no matter how warranted anger or, say, contempt actually was.

“Douglas, what are you doing here at this hour?” She looked uncomfortable and showed no hesitation in expressing her irritation.

“How did you know it was me?”

“You’re about the only one who knocks at the back door. Anyway, I saw you kind of looming in the shadows.”

“Well. Sorry. But it’s only about eight-thirty, Evvie.”

“So?”

“He was here, wasn’t he?” His voice shook. He was relieved that there wouldn’t be a confrontation after all.

She blanched. “Who?” She stepped aside to let him in and shut the door soundly.

“That faithless, gutless little – “

“Oh, stop it, Douglas!” She put her hands to her ears and burst into tears. “I can’t take this!”

“What? What can’t you take, damn it?”

“None of it! What do you think?”

Close to tears himself, he sat down heavily in a flimsy wooden chair that creaked under the sudden load. He stared at the Jackson Pollock linoleum; it was none too clean, and it reminded him that Claire’s work had been rather lackluster of late. Evelyn shuddered, composing herself. She went to the sink and poured water into the kettle.

“Smells like you fell into a vat of wine. Stomping grapes with Lucy. I’m making us some tea.”

“Coffee would sober me up.”

She lit a match to one of the gas burners and stood back from the woosh of blue flame. “Well, coffee doesn’t agree with me these days.” Her voice had a tremulous, self-righteous tone to it. It reminded him of their mother’s, and of his own much of the time.

He felt soberer already.

Evelyn threw the match in the sink and sat down at the other side of the table, which looked out into a private, tree-ringed back garden. She sniffed back the runoff of her tears and looked curiously at him. “What’s happened? You look like shit.”

“Evvie, really.” He hated it when she swore. It sounded defiant and childish coming from her, for some reason.

“Oh, forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” She softened her harsh tone with a rueful smile. “Tell me. What did he do to you? Was it with that petite bitch, Brenda Ballard? Oh, they’ve been --”

He wasn’t prepared for that one. He said quickly, “He turned on me. Sided with that pompous little editor against me. Negated all the work I did for him – accused me of betraying him. Said he was moving out.”

“Where to?” Evelyn brooded, looking out at the darkness. “Leaving Selene?”

“No such luck.” Another unwelcome thought, another shock to his nervous system. How many horrifying ideas was this stupid girl going to plant in his brain, anyway? He was regretting his announced goal of sobering up. A clear mind, an objectively assessing head was the last thing he wanted right now. “No, he’s moving in with the editor at L’Auberge. God knows what they --” He caught himself, his turn to turn white, and avoided her eye.

Evelyn aimed her derisive green eyes at him and gave a bitter laugh. Hers was the clear eye right now, and what he saw in it was the worst vision of all: that his future was going to be exactly like his past.

Then she said, “Douglas, why are you here?”

He opened his mouth, but the kettle whistled and she got up to prepare the tea. He faced her broad back. “I needed to talk to someone who understands what it’s like to…”

She said nothing. After a couple of minutes she set a mug of Lipton’s in front of him and sat down, blowing on her own tea. “Say it.” She didn’t seem at all like his deferential kid sister right now. There was a cynical look in her eye. A slight curl of the lip registered her contempt.

“Listen, Evvie, about this afternoon – I’m sorry if I –“

“Save it. You don’t have to start pretending you care now.” She sipped the tea and burnt her mouth. “Shit!”

He wondered if she’d always been this tiresome; maybe he’d been seeing her through a haze of fraternal duty and solidarity against the wretched parents they’d been cursed with. He got up. “This was a mistake. Sorry.”

She got up and reached out to him, came into his arms and rested her forehead on his shoulder. Big sobs wracked her. He stood with his arms at his side. “Put your arms around me, damn it.” Then she let loose, tears spilled out of her till his shirt was soaked. Her nose couldn’t stop running, and she had to sit down with a fistful of paper napkins to finish shedding of some of her water weight.

“Douglas.”

“What.”

He knew what was coming. The horror of it – her scandal added to the shame of what he’d been up to! He was thrown into a state of angry confusion. Before she spoke, he was ready to believe the worst and was exceedingly skeptical of her claim.

“I – I think I’m pregnant.”

It was one thing to hypothesize, another to hear the ghastly words tumble out of her mouth. “That little bastard.” He said “Bahstad.” He fell into the local speech patterns only when he was in great distress. He sagged forward and put his hands over his face. He waited for the explosion of rage against the randy little weasel, the two-timing (three-timing? four-timing?) sneaking worm. “I’ll kill him.” He was ready for it and he wanted to join in. He put his hands down and glanced at her. “He won’t be allowed to stay in town for long.”

But Evelyn was calm, wearing an odd expression, one that seemed almost sly. “Evvie? What’s wrong with you?”

She sighed and sipped her tea. “Douglas,” and a nervous laugh for punctuation, “since the movie crew came to town, people have been getting kind of wild – they’re doing whatever they feel like doing.”

This was hardly a new observation, but he felt newly flattened by Bill’s restless appetites. “Whom are you trying to exonerate? Him? Yourself?”

She grimaced at whom. “You’re not good at the real, actual world we all live in, are you? Always hiding in some fantasy world of books and, oh, what? Daydreams.” Never had daydreaming sounded so deviant. “Father knew about you. Everything about you, Douglas. You think he didn’t know, but he did, and he spoke about it to Mother. And me. He despised you for your...” She gave him a malign smile as she airily waved her hand. An alien thought was taking hold. “Evvie? Who’s the father of your putative child?”

She shrugged her big shoulders, laughing the way women do when it’s a stand-in for crying. “I really don’t know.”

“I believe you.” Despite his anger, he was touched by her impulse to protect her latest homosexual lover – although, to his mind, the big, slovenly, rather ugly Gary wasn’t as repulsive a human being as the handsome little Bill.

“Thank you.” She was being ironic and not the least grateful. She yawned. “It’s been a hard day, Douglas. Do you mind going back to your house now? I’m kind of busy.”

“Good night.” He got up and kissed her tangled mop of hair.

She didn’t move. “Good night. Don’t mention this to Bill, please.”

“Evvie, I admire your desire to shield him but –“

“No, don’t, Douglas. You’re more than enough for him to deal with.” She blew her nose very wetly into the fistful of soggy napkins. “I admit he had me going for a while. Bill, I mean. But I’m not the big dumb ox I look like. I knew about you two, and I was happy for you. Really I was. For both of you. I saw the change in him and you and – well, you shouldn’t be stupid about your pride. Anyway, it’s pretty damn late for you to be finding your pride, you know?” She looked up at him, smirking like the Greek who discovered irony.

“Or my balls? Isn’t that what you meant?” Douglas felt very wicked and worldly saying this to his own sister. He almost thought he heard his father rumbling about in the background, preparing to burst through the door with his razor strop in striking position. Thank God the old monster’s dead and cremated. It occurred to him that ghosts didn’t bother coming back if they’d be cremated. Too much work involved.

“Oh, them too,” Evelyn said breezily, waving a dimpled wrist. He began to head for the back door, but she said, curtly, “Front door, please. You’re not the yard man, are you?”

He went to the front door and watched her looking past him and out the living room windows, clearly hoping the cheating bastard would be popping back in as soon as the coast was clear. “Who do you think the father is, Evvie?”

Her sly look again. She assumed a childish pose with her head tilted to the side. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“You’re really a stupid one, aren’t you?”

He slammed the door and took his time walking home. As he walked along, musing and comfortably melancholy, he imagined the future when cold and snow and galelike drafts penetrated the house, blowing away even the memory of his touch, his kisses, his alcoholic sarcasms, his short-man overcompensations.

Douglas saw himself sitting by the kitchen stove in a rocking chair, warming himself with the oven door open, cardigan well buttoned, staring at nothing as a March storm tossed sleet at the ineffectual windows. This made him much less comfortably melancholy.

He resolved to let Evelyn take care of herself. She was almost forty, and it was time she got herself out of her own messes. Maybe next time she’ll latch onto a more suitable host. And suck the life out of him without all the petty drama. Worse than this soap opera they’re filming.

“Why, good evening!” boomed the hearty voice of Russell Cobb. “My, it’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”

Douglas started a bit. The street was dark and its houses were hidden behind high shrubs. This wasn’t a place he expected Russell to be walking on a Sunday night. “You startled me.”

Russell threw back his head and tried to get out one of his robust guffaws, but it came out wrong. Douglas cocked his head and said, “Where’s Allie? Is she…?”

“Not a bit of it, Douglas. She’s – she’s chatting on the phone. In fine condition, too, I might add.” He looked up at Douglas somewhat defiantly.

Douglas realized, suddenly, after five years, how short the minister was. He had always seemed so manly, athletic and vaguely intimidating. Now Russell seemed like a distracted little old gent. He was chagrined to think that Bill’s attitudes had infected his perceptions of good friends. Or, he reflected, friends as good as he deserved.

“Well, Russell,” he said in a more kindly fashion. “I’d better get home. You too?”

Russell stopped and looked in the other direction. Then he said, slowly, as if unwilling to change his plans, “Well, sure, I guess I’d better. It’s been quite a long day.” He tried putting his arm around Douglas’s shoulder, but the disparity in height and Douglas’s fidgety discomfort ended that attempt after a minute or two.

Douglas could only think of Bill’s touch, his neat body and large veiny hands, and of course the hard penis pushing against his nether parts. But, as he and Russell walked toward the center of town, with light from the street lamps and restaurants, he noticed the man’s taut, muscular body. And he had to admire his strong profile – not exactly handsome, but virile and attractive. Russell Cobb reminded Douglas of an uncommonly well-favored boxer dog.

Douglas began to speculate on Russell’s endowment but blotted out the thought with shameful recollection of the priest in his vestments and the cadences of the creeds and the smell of prayer books and candle wax. He saw himself, ashamed before the Eucharist, kneeling in an abject position – deserving abjectness – at the altar rail. Cast into a new awareness of his corruption as he heard the cloying strains of the boy choir in all their supposed prepubescent innocence.

He laughed softly at the image of his penitent self, tonsured and all. “But not really.”

“What? You seem to be lost in a fascinating interior monologue.” Russell was more subdued than usual.

“You know, Russell, I was. I was thinking of the difference between – between conventional –“

“Ah, here we are. Home sweet home.” Douglas thought he detected a sarcastic note, but Russell trotted up the steps to the rectory and turned around, waving and calling out “cheerio.” He lost no time getting into the house.

* * *

The days passed in a kind of sober trance. One after another, indistinguishable and at once torturous and skimmingly peaceful and productive in Don’s custody. It was a kind of house arrest, Bill knew, but he didn’t mind it too much. Don was leading him back into the raw originality of his vision, assisted by the breathless, echt scribblings in the notebooks retrieved from Douglas’s meddling – no, traducing--hands. Don handled the notebooks reverently, with only the slightest irony in his earnest face. Bill could see the light of true belief once more in his eyes, which he hadn’t seen since the first book, and Don’s belief induced him to believe too. The renascence of Wry Beach felt like a time-lapse movie sequence, where a tulip pokes a leaflet above the earth, springs up and does a heliotropic dance before it blooms, all in ten seconds.

Don had hired a professional typist, who of course did nothing to compromise the integrity of his vision, Bill’s vision, as patted and shaped by Don’s knowing touch.

Well, Bill, reflected, wasn’t Don an artist in his own right? He had listened to the whole impassioned, wheedling, cajoling, evangelistic performance that Donny made on the phone with Mr. Greenleaf. “He’s got enough material here for two novels – maybe three! They defy categorization! This bids fair to become a seriocomic sweep of New England history, ending with the ironically decadent present day in all its Republican corruption and torpor! This series of novels will make Cheever’s work look like the half-baked drivel it is! In Bill we have – finally, and I know it’s been a long wait, sir, yes, Mr. Greenleaf, I acknowledge how you’ve footed the bill for a long unrewarded time – but now, now we have the American Joyce…no, the American James! Well, really American, unlike the effete James, who went dawdling away half his career in E. F. Benson territory!” Don went on in this curiously inaccurate way for over an hour, employing more exclamation points than Bill, sober, had used in ten years. The result was that he had won a publication date for the book; a marketing budget (two fractional ads in the Times Book Review); and a $5000 advance. With this windfall, Bill opened a savings account, and he swore Don to secrecy; Dora and the indulgent Selene tradesmen must never learn of his ability to support himself.

“Bill, you’re a character,” Don laughed. This was one of the highest accolades he could have given Bill, who basked in it until Don made him tackle the supremely difficult eighth chapter once more. In this 70-page monster, Bill had the protagonist of the present day (the boozy but brilliant and spiritually honest Jim Sweet) and his wife (the beautiful but vile, materialistic Violet) engage in sex scenes that beat out anything in Henry Miller, if not the Marquis de Sade. The unhappy couple made a religion of sex and, using that as the launching pad, the chapter digressed into foul-mouthed philosophical musings on the trajectory of American history as seen through the natives of a town similar to Hawthorne’s Salem, minus that author’s coy, hoop-skirted allusions to matters of the flesh. Ah no, the sex was graphic and physically specific– very raunchy, as the New England term had it. But it was also exalted and rapturous, an expression of Higher Things, in another and not unrelated New England manner.

Partway through this clotted chapter, the character of the novel changed. From a swift, comic, deftly realized, regional comedy of manners and pretensions it metamorphosed into something that outRussianed the Russians in its sardonic, narcissistic despair. “These are very heavy matzoh balls you’re serving up, Bill. We’ll need a hell of a lot of work to ideate a lighter recipe. If not, you’ll sink the book.”

Somewhat cowed by ideate, Bill held his fire, sort of. “But I worked so hard on this, Donny! There’s a lot of great writing here!”

“But, Bill, it’s something of a farrago –“

“No, damn it. I’m not cutting this out. I’ll revise it – some--but it’s got to stay. I’ve given in to you all over the place, but not here.” Bill thumped the table to demonstrate his adamancy. Then in a non-sequitur that had Don’s mouth hanging open: “The problem with American fiction is that it’s, it’s not political enough!”

“Since when is narcissistic pornography political!”

Bill seethed. “For your information, Mr. Trend Seeker, we are living in an Age of Narcissism! Ever since Hemingway! And Norma fucking Shearer!”

Don went “ugh!” as Bill slung himself to the other end of the room, into one of the big chintz armchairs. He was out of Don’s line of sight. He looked out on the mountain with its featureless mantle of green. His gut was fluttering; something was giving way inside, and it felt like a kind of grief. Not only anger. Grief too. He composed himself and said in a cold tone, “If people think two hundred pages of fucking whale zoology is so fucking fascinating, they can put up with my fucking obsessions for a couple of pages.”

Don groaned. “When I hear the triple fuckings, I know I’m licked. So have it your way, my scribe. You’ll see my point before too long, I’m sure. You always do. Meanwhile, I remind you that, despite your tantrums, the book has been pruned down to a reasonable length and focus. It could actually sell, William. With the right promotion. If we ingratiate ourselves with the right people.”

“Like Columbia people?

Don smiled complacently. “We all could make some money for a change.”

“Shit!” He remained there, arms crossed, raging inwardly that Don had won his point so many times and even now had to act superior in the expectation that Bill would bow to his wisdom before day was done – presumably, before the thing was published and Don and the Eboracum Press were suffered critical – and let us not forget financial--humiliation for his puerile excesses. Still, he’d played ball, hadn’t he? Hadn’t Don had persuaded him to save the “fine work in the long section set in the eighteenth century” for another book? Bitterly, Bill realized that this other, embryonic book would never see the light of day if Herr Doktor Editor prevailed. And so here they were at an impasse about three-quarters of the way through a brilliant yet readable novel (“I think this can hit big, Bill, America’s had enough of bloated soap operas”) of raffish charm and verbal élan; Bill continued to dig in his heels so stubbornly that even he was puzzled by it.

Then that weird sensation of an upwelling sadness – no, a specific grief – overwhelmed him again. He tried to quash it, but the upwelling didn’t subside; it threatened to overspill his metaphorical banks. It stupefied him, because he couldn’t remember the last time he cried.

A lost life and wife, a family he’d carelessly destroyed – was that it? Homesickness for the brittle security of the ancestral manse? Was it that he missed the pampering – having his messes, literal and figurative, picked up by his female acolytes? Did he pine for the sense of privilege that had always shielded him from the callousness of the sneering world – privileges that would quickly vanish when – if – it was discovered what sort of bird he really was? He tried to imagine himself back in Angleport, lounging around the old house, expensive drinks in hand, aromatic wood fires brightening well-lit rooms crammed with beautiful things, sumptuous fabrics caressing his sleek form, etc., etc., etc?

Christ, no. No, no. Just thinking of it in those terms made him laugh out loud. Absurd!

No no no no, he mused, furiously banishing those images of blessed indolence. He stared out at the mountain as Don beavered away at the manuscript behind him and thought that none of the old comforts and security mattered in the least. He congratulated himself, because he may have actually grown up a bit since he’d come here. He felt like the same man inside, alas, but in letting some things go, he’d allowed others to take their place. And, well, shit, he had to be honest with himself. He had to admit it. He missed Douglas. He heard the Edith Piaf song in his mind’s ear, Tu es partout. He saw Douglas’s face smiling up at him from the pillow. He remembered the way he felt when Douglas grabbed his arm and pulled him down, whispering, “Don’t leave,” caressing him with infinite tenderness. And of course he’d fucked that up royally, hadn’t he, weak-willed little turd that he was. Always caving in. First to Dora, then Don. And everyone else. Screw ‘em.

It occurred to him – now, at 40 years of age, a couple of gray hairs on his head – that no one had to live his life but him. It seemed a bit like a revelation, more embarrassing than exhilarating in its anticlimactic lateness.

So Bill thought, wording it very explicitly to himself, I need to see Douglas. I need to--

He said to Don, “I have to go.” He got up and caught Don’s eye.

“No. No, Bill.” Don’s gaze was like a searchlight into his consciousness. “You don’t.”

“Now I know the way of out the dead end – the book. I get it now. I need to…” He needed to see Douglas. Needed. Because the fact was that only under Douglas’s roof had he been able to break out of his self-made bonds. Douglas had compulsively tidied his work, but the original notebooks were here, full of their raw demotic vitality or whatever bullshit Donny liked to spout. He felt desperate to go to Douglas and throw himself on his mercy, move back into the Sarah Orne Jewett room even if someone had to be turned out (he could afford to fork over Douglas’s gouging rate now), have his trays delivered and fires laid and all the rest of it. But with none of Dora’s caustic editorials, the perfect example of giving with one hand and taking with the other.

And all of it without the incessant checking up and assessing and nagging that Don subjected him to. He even stopped by Bill’s room and sniffed the air for alcohol every evening after dinner! It was insupportable! He’d never experienced such hateful control before! Such shameful lack of trust! Such smug self-control and the absolute conviction that he, Donny, had all the answers and was alone able to guide his gifted but weak scribbler to a joint success for which Don would broadcast his own decisive brilliance and persistence!

Don got up and stood in front of him, blocking the light from outside as he leaned forward and peered into his eyes. “No, Bill. Douglas is – he’s bad medicine for you, Bill.”

Bill sulked, looking past Don to the view outside. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Don played his trump. “He’s bad for your career, Bill.”

Bill almost flinched but said with arch irony, “Too bad. He’s a great lay.”

Don had his own version of the hooded, dangerous look that Bill used so effectively. Bill absorbed Don’s expression of disapproval. And his disgust.

After an uncomfortably long time, Don almost whispered. “If this or any other book is to be published, Mr. Greenleaf has demanded – demanded – one more thing of you, Bill.” He stood there giving Bill a hard look.

His guts clenched. “If he expects me to quit drinking –“

“Not that. Although I think it would be a good idea. But no. Even Mr. Greenleaf has the romantic notion that writers’ creativity is fueled by the alcohol they consume.” Don sighed. “He chided me for staying here too long. I have neglected my duties, for all that this was a working holiday. Emphasis on the working.” Don seemed lost in thought. Bill peered at him, waiting for the next shoe to drop.

He tried laughing it off. “I suppose he wants me to have a chaperone twenty-four hours a day.”

Don’s face lit up with a smile. “Exactly. You have to move to New York.”

“What?”

“We’ll find you a place on the West Side. Far from the gin mills downtown. Very far from the likes of the Beat crowd,” Don said wryly.

“But I want to stay here. In Selene Harbor. I don’t want –“

“What you want isn’t always what you need, Bill. You know I’m right about that. What’s more, old boy, it’s already in the works. My assistant is working with a friend of Elaine’s who’s a real estate broker–“

“No, Donny, what the fuck is this, anyway?” He jumped up and faced Don eye to eye. “What are you – no, who are you characters to ‘demand’ this of me? Am I your goddamned serf? Your chattel? Lincoln freed the slaves almost a hundred years ago!” He tried staring Don down but blinked first and looked away. “I’d fucking belt you if I didn’t need this book published before I’m truly and universally written off. Thanks a fucking heap, my buddy. My pal.” He pushed Don out of the way and made for the door.

“Bill, if I were you –“

Bill was churning inside, and as much as he loathed both Don and his employer right now, he did allow himself to imagine New York vignettes. Drinks in storied clubs, staying up late every night surrounded by wit and revelry, the New York party that didn’t end at 10:30, like when the last double feature ended at the Strand back home. Or when the dumps in Selene ejected their last drunk on the good side of midnight. Hell no, in New York it was just getting good around midnight, you had hours to look forward to. You could even order a meal if you wanted to, that’s how different New York was from these dull-as-ditchwater New England burgs!

And in New York he could…explore, was that the right word? --yes, explore the new territories that Douglas and he had started to open together. Away from the prying eyes and censorious mouths of small towns, of narrow-minded New England with its festering secrets. Oh, at last, he thought, at last he would be free, really free, and none of the stifling moralism of Mr. Greenleaf or the self-seeking Don Wassermann would stop him.

For once I can do what I want, unfettered. At last I can live like a human being.

No, he couldn’t, actually.

He didn’t know the city or where to hook up with anyone or what the local ground rules were. He’d be another middle-aged failure, wandering around the colossal heartless place pathetically seeking illegal and despised pleasures, pleasures that wouldn’t be pleasures at all when his sense of self was being annihilated and his stubborn attachment to his own talent lost its grip – as he lost his will.

And he had to face it: he was a hick New England boy, scared shitless even in Boston, which was a pokey little hole next to New York.

Bill stood by the door. He broke out in a sweat. “Donny, I –“

“Bill,” Don said soothingly, approaching him, “it won’t be so terrible. In fact, I think it will be the best thing that ever happened to you. It’ll get you away from Dora, at long last. You know I adore her, but, well, she’s pretty…”

He felt paralyzed. He wished he could walk out the door and be free, even if it meant spiting himself and destroying his chances as a serious writer, for once and for all.

He looked at Don, who’d put his hand on his shoulder. “You fucking win, damn you.” He shrugged him off, in too much turmoil to explode. He made an attempt to smile, giving Don one of his hood looks. “We need good reviews, Donny. Can you get them for me?

XX. Doors to Temptation

Miss Ballard was holding forth on Acting. Charming, almost clever with a glass of white wine in her exquisitely manicured little hand, she held the room in thrall. As one of the top supporting players in the cast, she was enthroned in the worn main parlor of Broadwood’s Olde Yankee Inn (new sign out front, what had possessed Douglas to come up with a name containing Olde? And for Douglas Broadwood to part with a dime on something that didn’t involve the plumbing…!), holding court with the supporting players in the life of the little town. Alla Trotter was doing likewise with the visiting magnates at L’Auberge du Capitain, glass of straight vodka in her even more exquisitely groomed little hand; like Miss Trotter, the magnates were gilded outsiders of lowly origin who’d invaded the place for the season.

This was a collection of townies, as Don muttered to Bill. The Cobbs—Russell, anyway--were paying homage to semi-stardom, as were half of the doctors and lawyers in town who hadn’t sneaked into the Trotter audience (fellow parishioners and regulars at Douglas’s Sunday dinners). Even a puffy Evelyn was sitting way over there by the bay window in rueful solitude, studying the backs of her hands. Douglas was nowhere to be seen, of course. Bill imagined him in his sanctum upstairs writing one of his idiotic, unsendable letters to Jack Kerouac, in which he’d be satirizing the whole celebrity-besotted town and all its new-money airs. “There is no true vision, there is no art anywhere in these traitorous days, my darling,” and God knows what other high-minded horseshit. I can fucking imagine the sanctimonious garbage he’d scribble, the big martyr!

“And they told me,” Don went on, “that even though I was a paying guest at that pretentious ‘auberge,’ I was not invited to remain. Can you believe that! Well, Alla Trotter is hardly a talented actress, is she? More of a mammary phenomenon, and of course she’s slept her way to the top, if top is what that precarious perch is.” He paused. “In person she looks like a sagging old tart.” He sipped his ginger ale. “Which she is. Frightening facelift and all. Those Hollywood doctors are dreadful quacks. Serves her right, the --”

Bill grinned as the townies next to them went shush and Please! He loved seeing Don lose his sang froid, which didn’t happen much. Unlike Bill, Don wasn’t used to being slighted, dangling on the B list. Or on no list at all.

Then, with something of a jolt and a sudden flush that had him sweating, way in the center of the room he saw Brenda smile at him and move her eyes back and forth between Don and himself. He shook his head No. Brenda smirked as if to say Oh, you think so?

Don caught the last part of this face language. He whispered, “You know each other?”

There was a pathetic eagerness in his manner. God help Elaine. Bill kept looking at Brenda, who was graciously fielding questions about the differences between film and stage acting from the audience, as if she’d know, and nodded. “We’ve met.”

He hadn’t had the heart – or was it the temerity? – to tell Don that the reason for his ill-tempered exhaustion some days wasn’t the amount of work or even the amount of booze he’d sucked up the night before. Sure, Don checked on him early before toddling off to his own well-regulated slumber. Then, six or seven times in the past few weeks, since leaving Douglas’s, Bill had headed for Brenda’s lodging, where she and Dave would be waiting, martini glasses in hand. What else was he going to do with his free time? Hadn’t Douglas himself said, “You have a lot of élan vital”?

When he got there, Dave always had a glass in each hand and passed one to Bill as if it were the communion chalice. Dave was always naked; Bill was surprised to discover how small his cock was. They would sit around sipping with a sort of tense deliberateness, Brenda watchful and smiling her peevish Mona Lisa smile.

The first time, Bill looked more at Brenda, stealing the odd glance at Dave’s hairy, muscular perfection, and his adorable little dick. But after a couple of these sessions, he made no show of preferring her. He allowed himself to acknowledge that Dave was the bait Brenda had set out for whatever satisfactions she was going to get; and that she really did expect Bill, Mr. Fruit Writer, to find his excitement in the dark, hairy man. Well stimulated, he was expected to finish perverse little her off at the end.

If fucking the starlet was the price he had to pay for an hour with Dave, he was willing to pay it.

By the end of the first threesome, they’d worked out their M. O. When Brenda disrobed, Dave would set down his untouched drink, advance on Bill and roughly undress him. Nowhere nearly as tall or massive as Douglas, he was still considerably taller and far stronger than Bill, and Bill learned not to fight him too much – only as much as enhanced the game. Brenda would watch with mounting excitement as Dave stood with Bill pressed against him, and poked him in profile to Brenda. She got to see Bill’s bigger cock swell and throb purply as Dave did his work.

Then, prostate well stimulated, Bill would mount Brenda. Dave moved to the top of the bed; his dick got lost in her golden hair, and he stroked both dick and hair. Dave never came. Bill struggled not to shoot his load within a minute or two of getting inside.

He was surprised that Brenda was so tight after her years of experience; he rather liked feeling that she was so petite and thoroughly invaded by his cock. She moaned a little and came. He could feel the warm wash of it, and he let it go, yowling with frustration until Dave lunged over the bed and sucked the air out of him. Dave’s lips had a calming effect, and he could have stayed hard for hours with Dave’s saliva washing into his mouth.

Once, in the middle of things, he opened his eyes and saw her pouty smirk below him. Her right hand was playing with her hair, and with Dave’s dick.

Then she asked for a cigarette and another drink. “Brenda needs a ciggie.” She reached to the night table and rattled the ice still in her glass. Dave jumped up and fetched for her. Bill labored on until he’d done what he’d been summoned to do.

It was an efficient procedure. In and out in about an hour. “Better than going to the headshrinker,” Brenda once said. “Cheaper, too. And Brenda doesn’t have to rehash her si triste childhood.” Then, as she toweled out her hair, she started talking about her career. Bill suspected was his cue to leave. He was happy to oblige.

Dave never got dressed. He stayed. He always gave Bill a smile that spoke of either a relieved gratitude or a budding love. He could never tell. But he did know better than to proposition Dave directly for their own twosome.

“I wonder if, to some degree, all emotion isn’t play-acting,” she was saying to the crowd. “I mean, think of it this way. The world is a system of conventions. You’re scripted as much as I am when I’m in a movie. We’re all expected to feel certain things and react in certain ways, in any given situation. Delight. Disapproval. Longing. Terror.” She made silent-film faces to illustrate, and everyone was content to see the artist mock her art’s conventions. “So, you see,” she said, leaning forward with a playful earnestness, “we all act to some extent. As an actress, it’s my job to be aware of it and to give it a slight twist – to play it up and, perhaps, to acknowledge the ever so slight mendacity that we all share in expressing our feelings.” There was a wink at this, and a muffled chuckle of discomfort.

“Oh, gosh!” she cried, gauging the effect of the last remark. She shook herself winsomely, as if coming out of some acting trance. She all but winked at the crowd, and she grinned as they seemed to come round to her again. “I have gone on and on. I really should be going.”

A chorus of No’s and Please don’t’s.

Brenda bowed her head in gratitude, making no attempt to get up. “Oh, the life of a movie actress isn’t as glamorous as you think. I have to get up at five for a six o’clock call.” She groaned. At this she did get up and accepted with a genuine show of delight the thanks and good nights of the people closest to her, Russell Cobb first among them. He pumped her hand as if she’d pledged a new organ to the parish. Allie Cobb stood to the side, polishing off another highball, regarding her husband with sour indulgence. Evelyn stared at them angrily; her gaze met Bill’s, and she looked away, blushing, confused.

Brenda caught Bill’s eye, too, again with a nod toward Don. He shook his head, but she stood up. In a few seconds she managed to break away from the others and came to him. “Mr. Blake, it’s nice to see you here tonight. Your old lodgings, I believe. Where is that tall landlord? He reminds me of Raymond Massey in Arsenic and Old Lace. Please introduce me to your very handsome friend.”

Snide bitch.

He wanted to slap her. Douglas was no Greek god, but he sure as hell wasn’t that creepy. He quashed his own awareness of, even dissatisfaction with, Douglas’s vast, unexceptional body and long horse face. Now he had Dave to compare, and there was really no comparison: Dave was a Greek god – a living statue of Hercules, miniature meat and all--while Douglas was a tired fuddy-duddy with a pot belly.

“Miss Ballard, it’s such a pleasure!” Don gushed. Bill saw the big eyes she was giving him, and he saw Don falling, falling off a precipice. Don wore a dazed expression in his star-struck joy. For possibly the first time in his life he looked stupid, which gave Bill a certain malicious comfort.

Don twitched, as if he were about to grab her hand. He restrained himself with difficulty.

“This is my editor, Brenda. The taskmaster I told you about,” and he laughed with a Ballardesque consciousness of everyday play-acting. “Don Wassermann. Don, Brenda.”

“Charmed!” Don beamed. “I loved you in…” He stopped dead, and they were all aware that he’d probably seen her only in Life magazine.

Brenda tossed back her head and gave a short, lusty laugh. She was doing Bette Davis in All About Eve. “Oh, I wouldn’t feel too bad, Mr. Wassermann. I surely wouldn’t expect a man of your attainments to follow the film career of someone who – well, someone like me. Ooh!” She contrived to twist her ankle and stooped swiftly to remove her shoes. Now she was able to look up at Don, laughing like a school girl caught writing her boyfriend’s name in her notebook.

“Call me Don.” He beamed down at her, elated at his elevation to taller man. “Please.” He steadied her and held her free hand, playing with her knuckles.

“Don. I know you’re an intellectual, and you probably go to foreign films. Or revivals of lefty Warners pictures. Yes?”

“Yes!”

“That’s fine. My tastes lean in that direction myself. The Bicycle Thief.”

“The Rules of the Game.”

“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

“The Blue Angel.”

“Red Dust.”

“The Black Legion.”

“Marked Woman.”

“High Sierra!” they cried together.

“Well,” both of them sighed, rapturous. Whether Brenda’s enjoyment was real or simulated, Bill couldn’t quite tell. The Ballard Method in action.

Then Brenda said to Bill, “Really, I feel as if I’ve met my soul mate.” She winked to indicate her overstatement, but she took Don’s hand and held it for a good half-minute. . “So handsome and soooo smart. Mr. Wassermann. How delightful to meet you. I hope to see you again quite soon.”

She must think people in publishing talk like this. And hadn’t he caught her doing a subtle riff on Marilyn Monroe meeting Arthur Miller for the first time? The mobile lips and the breathy, little-girl voice all of a sudden, quite different from her usual deadpan delivery.

“Please! Call me Don.”

“Don.” She did a lot with the unassuming little syllable, he had to give her points for that. Straight out of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. A minute more of this and Don would be looking like Bernini’s Teresa.

“You too, Mr. Blake. When will we be graced with your presence again?”

“Don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “So busy. Busy busy. Right, Don?”

“Oh, well…I – I don’t know if we’re,” Don had to take a breath, “all that busy! It isn’t every day one gets to enjoy the company of so charming a lady.”

Bill decided to play along with the idiocy of the moment. Assuming what he thought was a George Sanders tone, he said, “We have an early call tomorrow as well, don’t we, Donald? I’d leave by myself, but I fear the mischief that you’d do, Brenda.” Murmurous laughter all around.

Don sighed. “You happen to be right, William. But soon, Miss Ballard?”

“Brenda. Always Brenda. For you.”

To Bill’s horror and, at the same time, his gratified amusement, he saw Don become an idolater. Right there, in front of his amazed eyes. The good-humored, even-tempered, utterly responsible editor, that pillar of Morningside Heights, looked like a hop head grooving on bebop, capable of robbing and killing to get more of the drug. (I’ve been reading too many scandal sheets!)

Even so, it was plain that all the temptresses of the Bible had nothing on Brenda Ballard for promises of grace and ecstasy.

Don didn’t seem to notice his perdition, or Brenda in her of her favorite roles, Jezibel. He laughed with a ravished idiocy and left the house singing “Libiamo” in what seemed, to Bill, flawless Italian.

Bill followed him and turned to see Brenda’s triumphant smirk. She kissed him good-bye. She gave him the finger, too.

* * *

Bill knew the novelty of being the responsible one would wear off fast. And it did. All Don could talk about was Brenda, her air, her wit, her beauty, her freshness and – “But surely I’m mistaken in this!” – her suggestion of wantonness, tantalizingly mooshed in with all that flaxen-haired purity.

The day was rainy and cool, for once. All the location shooting would have been postponed, and there weren’t many interiors being shot in Selene. Brenda would be free. If Dave was free, she would find errands for him to run, such as an emergency trip all the way down to L. L. Bean for something she required, like a camp stove or a pair of moosehide slippers. Just the thing for those orgies with jigs and chinks.

“No. You’re not mistaken. She’s a whore and a sneaky, conniving little bitch. She’d sell her turds to Hearst if it would help her career.”

“Bill! That’s a harsh thing to say!” Don got up and paced about in his new frenetic manner. “I don’t think you should talk about Miss Ballard that way. What has she ever done to you?” He kept peeking at his watch. He appeared to have an appointment soon.

Bill bit his tongue. “Aren’t we supposed to be working on my book? Our book, I mean?” He didn’t know if he was happy or not about Don’s presumed cascade into adultery.

“Oh, we’re doing all right. We’ve made blazing progress. We don’t have to work like slaves each and every day.” Don stopped pacing around in his needing-a-drink way and tried smiling as if he were still in command. “Well, time is of the essence. Why don’t you tackle chapter 8 while I go for a walk. You know,” he added, as if having an epiphany, “I’ve been here weeks and weeks and have still seen very little of this town.”

“Chapter 11, actually.”

“Yes! You’re right! We’ve really made great progress, haven’t we, old boy?”

Bill grinned sourly. “Yah. Anyway, I could use some unchaperoned time to write on my own.”

Don checked the time again. He laughed, “Wonderful, my scribe! Don’t wait up for me,” and left. Bill heard him skitter down the stairs.

He sat in the chintz-rich room for a while, knocked about by a wild variety of emotions, visions, desires. It was as if all the Seven Deadly Sins – really, he thought, the Seven Basic & Necessary Emotions for Survival in This Nasty Universe – were banging on his chest at the same time, demanding action to suit each one of them. (Well, sloth was taking its usual nap.)

He seethed with righteous indignation as he imagined the self-righteous Don, in direct violation of his Code, fooling around with the meretricious Brenda.

He ached with lust as he imagined Dave, alone and cast out, lying naked in his own room back at Douglas’s. He tried to imagine what Dave was thinking and feeling, but he couldn’t quite believe that Dave was capable of thinking thoughts and feeling emotions on his own.

Maybe that was why Dave kept becoming Douglas; suddenly the thoughts and feelings came in a flood, and he realized Douglas was sweeping him away.

He struggled some but gave up and allowed Douglas to take over his imaginings. Some old helpless feeling, a kind of terrible ache in his balls, took over his senses.

The flood of emotions swirled around a center of loneliness and betrayal. He knew his own loneliness – the resentment he felt – in this separation from Douglas. The pain of his own shame as an accomplice in Douglas’s betrayal actually made him sit up ramrod straight and gasp. He was alert now, peering into the middle distance. “Douglas,” he whispered. “Douglas, I’m—“

Jesus, the full force of what he’d had--Douglas’s warm touch and fearfully hopeful green eyes—his long strong body and cradling embrace—even of the flowery scent of Camay soap and the bitter taste of Breck shampoo when he kissed and licked his neck—Oh, yes, and let’s not forget the heat of his questioning mouth, his delicate tongue.

The full force of what he’d tossed away in a fit of pique—a mean-minded, faggoty access of spite—pressed on him like a two-ton boulder named Evelyn. The “kid sister,” by the way, who’d always manipulated poor Douglas with a pretense of loving and caring about him. Hers was the closest to a reciprocated love that poor bastard had ever gotten, wasn’t it?

Bill groaned with remorse as it occurred to him that nobody had ever loved Douglas before. No one had ever returned so much as his lust, never mind anything more personal and pleasant, more sustaining. He thought, Well, sure, he never permitted it. Always afraid, always living behind his barriers. Never trusting anyone. I sympathize, but it’s so fucking sad.

Bill got up and went to his own room as soon as the self-serving nature of these thoughts began to intrude. He studied his ruddy summer face in the mirror of his bathroom. No hangovers for a while; relative sobriety showed in his face. He grimaced at himself and opened the toilet tank and, fishing out a pint of Scotch, dried it on a towel and took it into the bedroom, where there was a glass and a water jug by the bed. He mixed a finger of Scotch with half a glass of water. He sat down on the bed and sipped at it.

“Shit.” He slugged it back and poured a more customary ratio. After closing the blinds and drapes, he undressed and lay naked on the bed in the cool afternoon darkness.

Do I “love” him?

He’d allowed as much to Douglas, although he’d never, ever uttered that deadly phrase, not even in the privacy of his own brain. How many times had he said, “I’ve never loved anybody,” and said it with a bravado that now seemed like the pathetic defense that it was?

And he blamed Don for it, Don and only Don.

Fear, anger and contempt for Don warred within him. It was all Don’s fault, this sense of isolation and falsity. Finally he had begun to live authentically, hadn’t he, and Don swept into town and started playing nanny and truant officer without letup. Always preaching and attempting to set a good example, blah fucking blah. The Code. The Arts. Litrachah.

“My scribe.” What crap! Self-serving son of a bitch!

Ah, how he had always envied Don’s money, sophistication and self-assurance, his achievement of the perfect life, or something akin to it. And how he despised him now for his willingness to risk it all for a piece of Hollywood ass. And, by the way, for leaving “his scribe” alone to soldier on by himself.

He imagined the money and fame – no doubt modest but far greater than anything he’d realistically expected for himself – if he cravenly stayed the course, shut his mouth, played ball, etc., etc. All this self-interest sickened him almost as much as it drew him in like some powerful gravitational force.

As he brooded, Bill glanced at the end table next to him. On it there was a butter-colored telephone, which matched the warm glowing paint of the walls. He picked up the receiver and stared at it. Then he called the inn’s operator. “Get me Mr. Wassermann’s home number in New York City. Please.”

He had never felt so sober in his life. He felt light and joyous.

He felt mean. It felt good.

Bill saw shipwrecks and biblical plagues coming, and he thought, I don’t give a shit. Don would soon see how willing he was, still, to take risks in his writing and elsewhere.

Elaine picked up the phone and spoke in a lonely voice. “Hello? Donny, is that you, sweetheart?” She sounded as though she had been crying.