“Cordelia is a bit of a stretch,” said Albert to me thoughtfully.
“Oh, queen! I had no idea you knew King Lear.”
“I didn’t come from Cuba on a raft, girlfriend. And who said anything about the end?”
For a while, Albert valiantly abstained from drink, cigarettes and drugs. But one thing he never had was willpower. So it was not much of a surprise, three months later, to find him perched on the end of a couch at some party in a penthouse on the bay, holding forth with a joint in one hand and a vodka in the other.
“Just weekends, queen!” he said. “And don’t even go there.”
So I didn’t.
A couple of days later he offered to take me to the airport. He looked drawn and grey in the car. “I’m a bit worried, Albert,” I ventured. “I heard you were doing coke again. If you are, that would be really mad.”
“I would never do that. Are you crazy? You think I have a death wish?”
“Maybe,” I replied evenly.
“Who told you?” he snapped.
“You know me. I never reveal my sources.”
“It was Myrtha, wasn’t it? Anyway, it’s not true.”
Of course it was, and one day soon after, Albert fitted the last piece of the jigsaw in its place with a small bump. In the afternoon he began to feel cold. He got into bed and turned a ghostly white. He couldn’t feel his arms, then his legs. His body was shutting down. Old Theobaldo was distraught. They called the ambulance, but he died in his father’s arms before it arrived.
Theobaldo died a month later. They had all gone within a year. But Miami is like that. The tide turns and whole worlds have been swept away.
I often wonder what happened to the bell handle that lay by Albert’s bed. It was such an odd thing to have taken out of Cuba, as he was being spirited away all those years ago; that his last glance should have ended on that, the discreet symbol of slavery. Did he turn it one last time before tearing it out of the wall after its tinkling ring echoed through the deserted house? Perhaps the servants had already left to join the revolution, who knows . . . All the hands that grasped it are dead. But strangely, Albert lives on and the little bell rings in my head all over South Beach, whenever I look up and find myself at one of his numerous front doors; just an echo, because Albert too has gone to join the revolution.
In the summer of 2001, Mo was bitten by a mosquito in St. Moritz. We all noticed him walking squiggly as we came back from lunch through the beautiful run-down garden of the old Hotel Kurhaus where I had holidayed with my friend Rifat Ozbek for the last five summers. While everyone else headed for Ibiza, Rifat, Mo and I took to the hills. Every year, we vowed never to return, yet somehow we always did. Normally it rained and the clouds curled into your bedroom window, but there was a heatwave that summer. Day after day, the sun beat down and the mountain air smelt sweet and crisp, of grass and pine and cows; and we all said it felt like the end of the world. In the afternoons, a man played an upright piano under a giant fir tree and all the old ladies from the hotel sat in the shade, chatting. One had just celebrated her 102nd birthday. It was the last summer. The hotel was a hangover from bygone days and was closing down. It had been bought by a swanky chain, and none of the families who came there—the grandparents escaping the summer heat of Italy, accompanied by grim, dutiful grandchildren—would be coming again. The piano sounded jangly in the vastness of the Engadine valley, playing show tunes from the distant past, and Mo collapsed beside it. Soon he was surrounded by caring octogenarians, and we all laughed later, imagining them from Mo’s point of view, peering down, ankles overflowing out of shoes, legs knobbly with varicose veins, and sensible panties beneath the fluttering print skirts.
Later the vet told us he had developed a crashing type of anaemia so Jay took him back to New York, where he was put on steroids that made him as fat as a pig. I followed a week later. Soon it was getting harder for him to walk so we bought an old-fashioned pram. He and Jay could be spotted walking up Fifth Avenue to 28th Street, so that Mo could have his acupuncture from Doctor Zang.
One beautiful September morning, Mo and I were on the corner of Varrick and 7th Avenue when my cellphone rang and Jay said, “Look at the World Trade Center!” Looking up is one of the great sensations in New York. There is mayhem all around you, but up there is silence and space and the tips of the high towers commune with the heavens like eyelashes brushing against a lover’s cheek, and in that glance from the street to the skyscraper lies the whole American Dream.
There was a hole in the North Tower like a tear. Were they making a movie? Then there was a bang like Concorde breaking the speed of sound. You felt it slightly in your body and your ears popped. The second plane crashed into the South Tower. The barrel-shaped dog stood on four tiny legs, his head suddenly alert through all the new folds of extra flesh, and we watched in speechless wonder as glass and metal began to fall from the towers in glittering shards that caught the sun. They were like two fireworks about to go off. People stood in the streets, looking up. Cars stopped and passengers got out. Some people still scurried about their day until somebody nudged them, and they too looked up and froze. I never saw so many vacant faces. The wailing was for later. For now it was like the end of the world in a movie when the spaceships hover over Manhattan. Hollywood had out-tricked us, and at first it wasn’t possible to take it all in. Everything one saw that day was lifted from a movie. Every cop. Every scream. Every plummeting body. And of course, the ultimate special effect: the two towers consuming themselves and crashing to the ground. We’d seen it all before in countless movies, and movies were all we had left in that September of 2001. They were real. Actual life was swept under the carpet and ignored. One half expected to see Bruce Willis appearing out of the rubble holding the movie’s unconscious babe in his arms. Then someone would shout “Cut” and we could move on.
So it took a while for the reality to kick in. But it did, in waves that nearly knocked one over with the terrible impact. Then the screaming began. It was only later, when that hard angry city turned for once into a fountain of compassion, that one was foolish enough to believe that the day’s events could be the kernel for a quantum leap towards world peace. Anyone would help you that day. Absolutely anyone. It wasn’t just a disco song, a Motown myth. Love was finally in the air. Maybe we could stop in its name. But the powers that be wanted to go on with the movie version, and the rest is history.
Mo had seen it all. He had witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the coup in Moscow and the end of communism, and now the destruction of the World Trade Center. He had visibly had enough of life. Soon he and Jay rented a car and took to the Dixie trail one last time: destination, Miami.
I returned there from a trip to Europe and Jay met me at the airport. “Things aren’t very good with Mo,” he said.
When I got back to Sea Crest, Mo could hardly get up to say hello. The steroids had caused a reaction in his coat, and huge, crusty lumps had erupted through his fur. His breathing was short, his forehead had grown into a permanent frown, and his eyes had all but disappeared inside the rolls of flesh, though they were still lively and darted back and forth. He panted a lot, his great pink tongue lolling onto the tiles, but nothing much else moved. He lay on the porch in the breeze, his nose occasionally sniffing, slightly suspicious of all the attention. Dogs are amazing examples in sickness. They are at ease in the process of letting go. In the evening, Michael, Jay and I sat watching him, and Cathy, the lady who owned Midnight, the old dog buried under the palm tree, came by with some bone-shaped biscuits she had made. We sat there chatting quietly, drinking beers, stroking Mo, but keeping our distance—a sick animal likes its space. We laughed, remembering how Mo had always cold-shouldered Midnight, and Cathy wiped a little tear from her eye. Nobody said what each of us knew and at about ten o’clock everyone left. Jay was staying with Luisa next door and was leaving for New York the next morning. I wanted everyone out of the way. The next step was for Mo and me alone.
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sp; I lay all night next to him on the porch, listening to his pathetic breaths and the rustle of the lopsided palm tree in the yard, remembering out loud all the things we had done together. He listened carefully, considerately. Occasionally I would say something and he would sigh loudly. Then his little eyes would swivel towards me guiltily.
Once he had got lost in South Beach, and Albert had driven around all night in his car trying to find him. I came home distraught at about three in the morning, only to find Mo asleep on his back on my bed and the door shut. To this day I have no idea how he got back home, but we all laughed afterwards about Albert’s valiant attempt to find him. “See, queen, I finally came through!” he’d said, and the phrase stuck. It was official. Albert could come through.
Finally I started to weep, but Mo lifted his head and looked at me disapprovingly. Then he went to sleep. The sky turned mauve, then white, and the sun came up. We had a sweet Cuban taxi driver, José, who used to take us up to the vet on 118th Street on the bay. I called him, and Mo and I took the last walk down the alley between Sea Crest and Villa Luisa. I think he knew he was never coming back because as we eventually got to the street, he stopped and wouldn’t move forward. He turned round as if he was waiting for someone, sniffed a bit, looked towards Villa Luisa and then towards South Point, and afterwards up to me, as if to say, “Let’s go.” We hauled him into the back of the cab.
On the journey he sat in the back seat, slumped against the door with his head leaning on the window. One ear blew valiantly in the wind and he looked out calmly as we crossed over the causeway and into the city.
And so our relationship began and ended in a taxi. I had collected him in a Parisian cab eleven years ago one misty February morning. He had squealed and whined as we pulled away from the kennels that day and lay sulking on the floor of the taxi. Now all these years later we were back in another cab on another journey into the unknown.
At the vet’s, my heart pumped fast. I took him into the surgery and the vet, a gentle man of about sixty, confirmed what I already knew, and swiftly the arrangements were made. The male nurse picked Mo up to take him into the next room to be fitted with a drip. That was the only moment I regret, because as he was being carried away, Mo looked at me with sheer terror in his eyes. It was my mother and me on the first day of school all over again. (“I’ll say goodbye now, and we’ll go while you’re having your drip fitted.”)
They came back a few minutes later and Mo had a needle attached to his leg. The nurse put him on the table. The vet told me to hold him close. I was about to ask a few questions, stall the procedure for a couple of minutes at least, but they had been through this thousands of times, and the two men moved in a swift ballet. One arm reached out to another. A syringe was passed from hand to hand. “Hold his head.” The vet nodded at the nurse. The solution was in. Mo looked at me. I held him tight in my arms. He grunted into a last snore, and the tension of life went out of his body. The vet checked his heart with a stethoscope. And that was it.
“We’ll leave you alone for a bit,” he said and left the room.
Mo’s coat seemed to have changed colour already. A little bit of his pink tongue was sticking out of his mouth. He was still frowning, but he was gone. It’s a strange and extraordinary thing, life with an animal. When one comes into your life, it is so young, so full of energy, and you are old by comparison. You take the role of the father. But between then and his death there is a turning of the tables. Soon you become brothers. As he gets older, you become younger, so that by the end he is a grandfather and you are a thoughtless child. In denial of his great age, you force him to do things, to keep going, and he looks at you with the eyes of an elder, sitting in the shade of the village oak. “Come on, Mo!” you say, and he sighs and lumbers to his tired paws. He’s your grandfather but he still obeys instructions.
Mo had seen me through a dangerous time. Without him I should have disappeared into the Parisian night. He got me up in the mornings. He gave me something else to think about apart from myself. And in him I found the ideal companion. Now he was letting me go. The next step was to be mine alone.
Outside in the sunshine José was waiting. He didn’t say anything. I got into the cab and we drove back to South Beach. There were some hairs on the seat where Mo had been.
CHAPTER 44
Talk to Me and Then Move In and Out Real Slow
It was a freezing winter in Montreal. It was 2002. I was making A Different Loyalty with Sharon Stone. Destined, unfortunately, for a première on a shelf at Blockbuster, it was the last falling star from the firework explosion that happens to an acting career when a Hollywood triumph is scored. I had been offered the part in the wake of My Best Friend’s Wedding and my agent, Nick Styne, kept his petite pink nail-bitten fingers on it as it rode the rapids through various incarnations over a three-year period. Finally the film was being made, not in Moscow, London or Beirut, where it was set, but in Montreal, where there’s a tax break that was imperative to our constantly shrinking budget. This budget loaded the cards against us from the start, and the Blockbuster première was written between the lines of all the initial contracts. But at a certain point, show business is a game of chance, cowboy country; you must grab the reins, hurl your lasso at the passing cash cow and hope for the best. (Or as Philip Prowse loved to say, “Faint heart never fucked a pig.”)
So there we were in Montreal: Sharon was the leading lady, and Marek Kanievska, who had directed me in Another Country sixteen years earlier, had come back from a new career in windsurfing to direct the movie, madder than ever before. I had crossed paths with Sharon on numerous occasions, but she was always wrapped up in the protective arms of her attentive husband Phil Bronstein. We kissed and chatted, raised our eyebrows (in the days when one still could) as her husband seethed beside her, and we each kept moving. The first time was on the stairs at the Hôtel du Cap in the South of France. She was radiant in a jewelled dress; he looked like a sexy pug from a downtown gym in the seventies.
Many of the girls from the old school end up at some point with a bruiser. Initially they love the feeling of protection and exclusivity. The intense power they have achieved at the studio has left them completely isolated, hard as nails and yet vulnerable as twigs, deliciously snappable. They cry out to be wrapped in love and taken home. The man in question is usually decent, simple and well hung. His emotional plumbing is straightforward (for the time being) and he responds to this intense stellar fragility by erecting an electric fence around his goddess that they both adore, and for a time life is one long, first-act love montage. He feels ten feet tall. She feels cosy and petite. Sex is a constantly exploding volcano. But at a certain point the novelty wears off. She feels trapped behind the fence. Her girlfriends are vetoed; she can’t bat an eyelid at a passing waiter, and she must flirt to keep her engine tuned. So suddenly, one day, without warning, the wind changes and her hard side comes out. He has never seen it before, although he has been warned. But nothing prepares him for the star’s first big “turn.” It is an earth-shattering hurricane and he reacts as only a wounded macho can. The electric fence is hastily built up into a high-security jail, at which point the whole universe usually comes crashing down around them both.
Soon Phil was eaten by a dragon and Sharon had a stroke. By the time A Different Loyalty came along, the marriage was over. But for the time being, we winked at each other across crowded rooms and hugged in the corridors of power. Our moment would come. Then one night at the Golden Globes, she told me she was making the sequel to Basic Instinct and had suggested to David Cronenberg (the director then attached to the project) that I should play the male lead. I went to meet him the next day, feeling pretty excited because he was a director I really admired. We got along well and he left the lunch to call MGM, the studio making the picture, to inform them that he had found his actor. At which point all hell broke loose. The head of the studio told my horrified agent during a conference call that to all intents and purposes a homosexual wa
s a pervert in the eyes of America and the world would never accept me in the role and therefore MGM would never hire me. My team was horrified on my behalf and went briefly into battle; and in further conversations, the studio enlarged its argument and even exhumed some dismal turncoat fag from the marketing department who whined in agreement at everything that was said. There was no budging them. More phone calls; cries of “unacceptable” bounced from LA into outer space and back to wherever I was; and it was about to turn into a nasty scrap. The agencies love drama. Up to a point. After a week of swearing allegiance to the client on lines one, two and three, during the relative calm of the weekend they weighed up the pros and cons for themselves. The agency is also a performer and must consider its career. Obviously MGM versus Rupert was a no-brainer and so by Monday morning the whole saga had blown over without a trace. And I do mean without a trace, because when I called people to get their side of the story (researching for this book) no one could remember the incident at all. So much for friendship; as thin and durable as the cardboard walls of the film set. When the movie ends, the friendship is struck. The company is the only connection that really counts in the handling business.
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 40