I should see a psychiatrist, he thought without enthusiasm. He’d rather see the redhead. Or at least know more about her … it. To that end he was furious with himself for not having written or remembered the telephone number that had appeared at the end of the commercial.
He looked at the cable-television guide to see whether what he had seen had a title and was a regular show. It was called HotSpots and seemed to be on almost every night of the week, its time varying from midnight to one in the morning. I’ll watch it tomorrow night, he thought, and write down the phone number.
But this decision seemed insane moments later. What was he going to do? Call that number and make an appointment? Waltz to some address — God knows in what kind of neighborhood — and let that woman chain his hands and feet … It was insane. Yet a part of him didn’t believe she existed, that a real person would answer the phone. He wanted to call, if for nothing else than to confirm that all of it, from the images on the screen to his erotic response, was simply a mist of a tired imagination, briefly clouding his sound, clear mind. A harmless fog, easy to forget, and sure to evaporate under the heat of investigation.
The farewell at the airport had been agony. Sadder and more hopeless than any good-bye Tony had ever spoken before. His affair with Lois, born of vanity, sustained by sexual appetite, had become, on this trip, painful and tragic. He wondered, closing his eyelids, hot from fatigue, and feeling the cool air from overhead his seat in first class, whether he had ever really been in love before. Didn’t the anguish of holding Lois in his arms — feeling her tears on his neck, this empty depression in his spirit that made the colors, tastes, and sounds of the world dull, metallic, and tinny — didn’t that represent true longing, and therefore true love?
He was always glad to leave Betty. But, of course, he knew he would be coming back. It wasn’t a fair comparison. This was the first time in his life that he had been prevented from seeing as much as he liked of a woman he loved.
And was he now? Couldn’t he go home and tell Betty their marriage was over? Get on the next plane back and return to the delighted, wise, and adoring embrace of Lois? After all, he didn’t require dispensation from the Church, there were no children who would be scarred forever, his parents certainly wouldn’t be in a position to disapprove. In fact, no one would give it a second thought. Other than Betty, of course.
What a monstrous betrayal of her! She was faithful, endured all his moods, had been solicitous of his work and ambitions — no more trouble to him than a faithful dog. God, where did all this contempt for her come from? There had been no inkling of it until he slept with another woman. Was it merely a way of justifying himself? Belittling what he had and had had with Betty to lessen his guilt?
He was seated next to an executive who made the coast-to-coast trips often. Tony had had a brief conversation with him after takeoff, ending it (pleading fatigue) when the man began to brag about the number of women he had slept with on his trips. The executive, while claiming how great his emotionally nomadic life was, how it had helped maintain his marriage, was downing drink after drink, his language deteriorating along with his motor skills. Tony worried that that man’s first indiscretion had seemed to him as romantic and grand as Tony’s now did and that one day Tony would be slurring his words at some young man, talking of pussy and happy marriages.
He wanted to avoid cliché in his life as desperately as he wanted to avoid it in his plays. The screenwriter who breaks up the marriage of his youth as he makes it in Hollywood seemed to Tony too obvious a dramatic choice. Besides, he wasn’t making it, he had flopped. He had a chance to redeem himself with the set of revisions (which would really end up being a complete rewrite, given Garth’s and Foxx’s objections), and he now felt that how well he met this challenge would determine the course of his career for years to come, perhaps for the rest of his life. For the great artist, life should be an unbroken series of success; anything else, he thought, implied mediocrity. At thirty, Shakespeare had written Hamlet, Tennessee Williams had Streetcar making Brando’s reputation (he too was under thirty), Arthur Miller had earned the right to compete with presidents of the United States to screw Marilyn Monroe because of Death of a Salesman, Stoppard had Rosencrantz and Guildenstern running on Broadway. Mamet had already been hailed for American Buffalo—there simply wasn’t much of a tradition in the theater for undiscovered genius. After all, in the end, it was still show business, which made the phrase “undiscovered genius” oxymoronic. Nobody went around looking for unproduced plays of fifty years ago, there are no art dealers finding genius in the manuscripts of obscure writers of the last century, no academics demanding productions of unknown nineteenth-century playwrights. The famous of today may not be the famous of tomorrow in the theater, but the unknown were sure to remain rotting in the ground.
And he was rotting. Inside, strapped into a seat on a plastic bullet speeding through the air, maggots eating at his confidence, his energy, his will to continue. Five years ago, no woman, no love, no emotion would have distracted him from concentrating on his work. Every time he closed his eyes, Lois was on his body, kissing his penis, holding him in her tight desperate embrace. She listened to his every word, weighed each anxiety as though it were gold, studied his moods, picked him up at the airport on arrival, and drove him there on departure, a precious package of happiness for her that she protected with the fierce will of a mother. She loved him, apparently without any restraint, irony, or condescension. She loved him hopelessly, knowing she would be hurt, expecting to be discarded, exposing her heart to the sword of betrayal. He could run her through, cut her aorta in half, splatter the floor with her gushing blood, and still her eyes would look at him with unblinking adoration.
He was despicable. It was terrible being on the plane alone, unable to escape from this conclusion. He had two women who loved him and he was betraying them both without a single legitimate complaint against either one.
The trip took too long. He squirmed in his seat, the boredom relieved only by occasional premonitions that their plane was about to explode. Over and over an image of his charred body, still strapped into the red-white-and-blue design of the seat, perhaps clutching his wineglass, projected onto his mind a horrible internal slide show. He tried to sleep during the movie, but he would start awake the moment his body relaxed, convinced they were abruptly falling out of the sky. Finally he gave up trying, asking the stewardess for coffee, and stared forward at the low plastic ceiling. He wondered if he could make a play out of his observations of the behind-the-scenes actions on his mother’s sitcom. He tried to imagine it onstage, how he could get their inner lives out during scenes of them at work, but he decided it would be false and melodramatic. Besides, he could think of three plays running off-Broadway that used Hollywood as a setting. Then there were all those musicals that were really about show business. Playwrights had nothing to write about but their attempts to make money in tinseltown, and now he was becoming one of them. He remembered making this point about those three off-Broadway plays last year when they were in the works. He had bitterly ripped them apart at every social occasion, usually to everyone’s approval, accusing the authors of having no subject other than their own greed. And now he was one of them.