Outside, the sun was very bright, almost a physical presence through which he marched, around the pool and across the deck, as though he and the boy were alone on a platform on a high mountaintop somewhere, the highest mountain in the world. A breeze whipped the caftan around his legs as he strode, the giggling and splashing from the pool faded to vacuity, and George stood before the boy.
Slowly, Jack Pine’s sea-struck eyes drew in, darkened, refocused down from the far horizon. George smiled at him. The boy, uncertain, tried an answering smile, saying, “Hello?”
George took the boy’s hands in both his own. “Do you know?” he said, his voice melting, all his pain and doubt draining away, leaving him as light as air. “Do you know? I’ve just written an entire play all about you, and here we are, meeting for the very first time.”
How beautiful the ocean was that day. I’ve always been very interested in water. (Not today, though; today I have no interest in looking at that pool of mine, just over there somewhere beyond the gray slate patio. I seem to be sitting up again, bent slightly forward for balance, terry-cloth robe fallen from my knuckly knees and bunched before my crotch. I seem to be half-turned away from that charming pool of mine, my face seems to be very near the polite but businesslike and very properly clad knee of my interviewer, who gazes down past that knee of his at me with what I now perceive to be horror and shock. What on earth have I been telling him? Oh, gosh, yes, George. Old George. I chuckle.)
The chuckle goads a reaction from my friend with the pad. Repugnance half strangling his voice, he says, “You went to bed with George Castleberry?”
“Waterbed,” I say, explain, explicate further, and the memory of that oceanic encounter, full of slipperinesses and heaving and absurd near misses makes me chuckle again.
The interviewer is appalled, well and truly appalled. “But—” he says, stutters, stumbles, “but — you’re completely heterosexual! All those marriages, all those girlfriends, all those children!”
I shrug, nod, acquiesce, explain: “It was a great part.”
“A great part!”
“I wanted it,” I say. “I am an actor, that’s what I am. When I don’t work, when I can’t work, I get into all these things, all this trouble. After Miriam, after Jack Schullmann blackballed me in the theater, after the empty months of being nothing and nobody and having no idea where I was going or if I was going anywhere, I wanted it. The role of Biff Novak was the only thing in the world at that particular moment that I really and truly wanted. So I got it. And the emptiness went away.”
“You had sex with George Castleberry!” Has ever an interviewer before in history had such large, round eyes?
“Mostly,” I say, “George had sex with me.”
Those large, round eyes blink, the mouth purses. “I’m not sure how that works,” he says.
I reach up a hand, mildly surprised at how badly it’s shaking, and tug at his nearest trouser knee. “It’s easy to understand,” I say. “Take off your pants.”
Nervously, betraying his nervousness, he taps my knuckles with his pencil to make me stop tugging at him. “That’s not necessary, Mr. Pine,” he says.
I remove my hand from him. This hand is really shaking. “The necessary we do right now,” I say, watching the hand. “The incoherent takes a little longer.” Turning my head a bit, bracing myself with a palm against the cool slate so I don’t inadvertently knock myself over with the force of my projection, “Hoskins!” I shout.
“The point is,” the prissy interviewer says, viewing me with loathing, “the point is, you slept your way to the top.”
“I did not.” I frown at him in offended dignity. “I slept my way to the middle,” I correct him frostily. “I clawed my way to the top.”
“However it happened,” he says, still coldly upset with me, “you did get the part of Biff Novak, the lead, in Last Seen in Tupelo.”
This is a statement, not a question. Having nothing to answer, I once again turn my head and raise my voice: “Hoskins, dammit!”
Immediately he appears, as though dropped from an airplane. He is my butler, and by God he looks it. White-haired, stoutish without being obese, stone-faced, dressed in full fig, he is as much a symbol of my status as my Mercedes. Bowing correctly from the hips, he speaks with that proper English-butler accent of his (I love it!): “You called?”
“I bellowed, dammit,” I tell him. “That’s your line, Hoskins, as you well know.” Imitating him perfectly, a thing I’m good at, and dipping my head in pale shadow of his obeisance, I say, “You bellowed, sir?”
Imitating me perfectly, not a flicker of expression on his patrician face as he dips his head in pale shadow of true obeisance, he says, “You bellowed, sir?”
“I did.” I show Hoskins my shaking hand. For some reason, I’m not sure why, I believe him to be sympathetic behind that blank facade. “I want one of those fuzzy drink things, you know?” I say. “With the vodka and the milk and the egg and all that stuff.”
“Certainly, sir,” he says (what else would he say?), and turns to the interviewer. “Anything for you, sir?”
The interviewer seems embarrassed as well as surprised. With a fidgety laugh, he indicates his notepad and pencil. “Not on duty,” he says.
Strange thing to say.
Hoskins doesn’t think so. “Very well,” he says, and bows generally and exits.
Where am I? Something’s gone agley with this interview, this fella dislikes me now. That’s not the way it’s done; we get along with the press. Trying for a cheery smile, I say, “Very restoring, that drink thing. Gets me on my feet. Knees, anyway. Where were we?”
“Last Seen in Tupelo.” He still disapproves of me; damn his eyes.
“Right,” I say. “That play made me, of course. Biff Novak was the real start of it all.” Smiling in reminiscence, I say, “And it brought Buddy back into my life.”
“Your best friend.”
“That’s right.” I smile, seeing it as a camera shot. AN ANGLE on a theater marquee:
CAMERA PANS down from the marquee to a busy mid-town New York street, centering on Buddy Pal, standing on the sidewalk in marine uniform and close-cropped hair, duffel bag over shoulder, smiling up at the marquee.
“Buddy Pal,” I say.
Flashback 8
The dressing room was windowless and small but elegantly and expensively appointed. The style might have been just a bit too masculine, protesting just that shade too much in its elkhorn ashtray and brown leather sofa with discreet brass nailheads around its bottom and the Remington reproduction (cavalry charge) on the wall. When the makeup lights flanking the mirrored dressing table were off, as now, the indirect lighting made the room softly mellow and cozy, like some underwater grotto where Captain Nemo might relax, the rich browns and creams a pleasant relief from that infernal eternal blue.