“It’s interesting for a change, but I don’t think I’d like it all the time. The noise hurts my ears, and really there’s nothing to see. I’m not surprised Suzy is fussing. Johnny says someday people will hop on a plane the way we used to travel around by train with the show. But I don’t think so. I think people would rather see the country. We’re going all the way to Texas and not seeing anything at all, except clouds!”
“Well,” said Tommy, “as I remember from driving across it a few times, there’s not much to see anyhow, except tumbleweeds and cactus. And sky.”
“But you have the fun of driving,” Stella said shyly, “and in a good car you can drive fast. They have a lot of good roads, and there’s not much traffic. When I had the MG, I really used to enjoy it.”
“Me too.” It occurred to him that Stella would have enjoyed the rally he had driven with Bart. “How come you got rid of the MG, Stella? I liked it a lot better than that Cadillac you and Johnny have.”
“We had to sell it when I went to the hospital that time,” she said, “and when we could afford a car again, Johnny wanted one that looked more impressive. Television producers, and people like that, they sort of judge you by what kind of car you drive.”
“An MG is impressive,” Tommy said, but she shook her head.
“Impressive in the wrong way. More—oh, luxurious, sort of conventional.”
“I see,” Tommy said. “Matt and I are kind of arguing about that, too. With the money we get out of this movie thing, he wants a car that’s easy to drive, and with his bad wrist he needs one. So he wants an automatic shift, and I told him I wouldn’t have an automatic shift if they gave it to me wrapped up in a Lincoln Continental. I like to drive a car. So I’m thinking of trading my Chrysler in on something for him that he can drive, and picking up an MG or a secondhand Fiat.”
“If you do, will you let me drive it sometimes?”
“Sure,” he said, laughing. “You let me drive yours, didn’t you?”
She laughed back at him. “I wasn’t hardly old enough to drive then. My license said I was nineteen, but I was nowhere near that old! I guess you and I are pretty near the same age, only back then I wouldn’t have admitted it.”
So, he thought, she had conceived and lost Johnny’s child, and married Johnny, before she was fifteen years old. Somehow that seemed very sad to him.
She put her head back and closed her eyes. He had not noticed that she had begun to let her hair grow. She was wearing only a little makeup, her pale lips painted, her blonde eyebrows darkened carefully with pencil. After a time she got up to go to the ladies’ room; he rose to let her edge past him. A sudden lurch of the plane jolted them both and they fell together into the seat. Tommy steadied her impersonally, his arms around her.
He had done this a thousand times on the flying rig, but now, with Stella warm and breathing and scented in his arms, it was suddenly not impersonal at all. Her face was against his cheek, the whole length of her slight body in his arms, and a dozen images of Stella jolted through his mind. Stella bending beside him as she showed him the controls of the MG, Stella wet and laughing from the rain, Stella lying in his arms in her childish fuzzy bathrobe, Stella pale and shaken, holding him for comfort when Papa Tony died . . . Stella, Stella, Stella . . . Carefully, betraying nothing, he let her go.
Stella. The other alien child in the bewildering Santelli family, the frightened little girl he had held and comforted when Papa Tony shouted at her. He remembered the feel of her small grubby hand, with its bitten nails, in his own . . . . He had always been so aware of her.
He shook his head slightly, settling in his seat again. He shut his eyes and tried to rationalize what was happening to him. It was not unusual to find himself briefly, casually aroused by women. Vague memories of other women spun briefly in his mind, all the way back to the childish scuffling at the drive-in movie with Little Ann. That had certainly been sexual, perhaps the first conscious sexual awareness he had known from any woman, but there had been tenderness, too, surely. Only she was a kid, like me, and I always thought of Stel as an older woman.
And there had been women in the Army. But none of them had meant anything. What had he said to Mario? It didn’t mean a damn thing. Just getting my rocks off. It might have meant more than that with Little Ann. It would certainly have meant more than that with Stella.
She came back. He noticed that she had carefully made up her face. He settled her courteously in the window seat, bracing himself so that he would not accidentally touch her again.
She knew. How did she know? Do women always know?
But in the old, abrupt, childish way, she had withdrawn again into silence. She shut her eyes and put her head against the seat back, and Tommy shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep, too. But his mind was running around and around like a squirrel in its cage.
The women didn’t mean anything. Getting my rocks off, proving to myself that I could make it with women, that I didn’t have to be queer unless I wanted to. Only I wanted to. He had long since made up his mind about that. He was homosexual, irrevocably so, and had decided that no woman would ever mean anything to him again. Only, now, all the agonizing upheaval was with him again.
Oh, God, if it had only been Stella, how different it could all have been! He had never been aroused, had never allowed himself to be aroused, by a woman who could mean this much to him, a woman he could love . . . no, a woman he loved. He loved Stella. He now could admit to himself that he had loved her from the first moment he had held her, a sobbing child in a faded gym suit, in the Santelli practice room. He had never had a woman he cared about; he had carefully avoided any woman he could not despise and reject afterward.
Would I have wanted it to be different? Mario was not just a lover. Mario was his friend, his partner; their entire lives were bound together by a tie far deeper than the sexual sharing which, though important, was secondary to the deeper bond. Flying was his life, and flying, somehow, on the deepest level of all, was his love for Mario. Yet he was aching and tortured with the knowledge that he might have found someone like Stella. Or Stella herself . . .
She’s not happy with Johnny. She never was. I don’t think I ever saw her really look happy until the day Mario handed over Suzy to her. Maybe I could have made her happy. Anyhow, I wouldn’t have screwed up her whole life the way Johnny did.
For a moment he felt a surge of hatred for Johnny, so great that he could hardly contain it. But then he was aware of something else.
I love Stel. I think I always did. But of all the women in the world, she’s the only one I ever gave a damn about, and the only one I really can’t have. She’s my brother’s wife.
He was a Santelli. Even legally, now, that contract he had signed had made him one, but he had been one all along. He had reaffirmed that bond when he found Mario and brought him home. And Johnny was his brother, and Stella was his brother’s wife, and it was just as simple as that.
Just as simple as that, and that isn’t simple at all.
He faced the knowledge, new and old and irrevocable, that he loved Stella, that he had always loved her and would love her as long as they both lived, and that he would never have her. He was a man, not a greedy kid.
He and Mario belonged together; they had made themselves into something greater than the sum of their two parts. No woman could possibly have given either of them that. Flyer and catcher, linked by a thousand bonds of habit, shared work, failure, and success.
We’re the two halves of one thing. They had been hardly more than boys when they exchanged that pledge and sealed it with everything they had to give one another—their hearts, their bodies, their minds. Mario was the very center of his heart. At the edge of sleep, he thought, All I am that is good, I am so because he made me so. His honor is mine, and I bear it undimmed like a torch . . . . Lover and youth would rather suffer death than act dishonorably in one another’s sight . . . .
And suddenly he jarred awake again. Angelo, he thought, An
gelo wouldn’t think this was half bad, my getting shook up over Stella. He might even have some goddamn notion that it would make me normal or something. All he could think about was to get Johnny and Stel married, even after they screwed up each other’s lives that way. It came out all right, but Angelo didn’t know it would—he just wanted to get everything all straight again. Nice and normal.
He’d probably be sympathetic as hell if he knew I was in love with Stel.
But that’s not what honorable behavior is all about . . . .
He loved Stella. And she was his brother’s wife, and the face of honor demanded that she should never know or be troubled by his new knowledge. Suddenly he was not sleepy at all. Through his half-closed eyelids, he watched Stella, her hair shining in the sun, sleeping.
He was filled with tenderness for her. He loved her, but he would never disturb her by telling her so. He would never touch her, never have her; someday he would forget that he had known this hour when all of him, body and mind and heart, cried out for her and wept for what could never be. He wanted her to be happy, he wanted her to be peaceful and content, he wanted to touch her on the flying rig and know that her body would be the same steady, controlled partner it had always been, with no guilty awareness to make either of them self-conscious. It would take time. But for now he was torn, crying inside, wanting her, convulsed with rebellion.
It could all have been so different . . . .
He had to touch her somehow. Just this once. After a moment he reached out and slipped his hand into hers.
Sleeping, she tightened her small hard fingers on his, and with a small, soft, trusting noise, she shifted her weight so that her head rested on his shoulder. He sat holding her like that, aching with the weight of his love, and feeling tears burning inside him. And yet with the whole weight of what he was, he knew that this too would pass, the pain and the rebellion, and that nothing would be left but the love, nothing left except to be what they were, Santellis, brother and sister, each bound elsewhere by honor and commitment which could never be lessened. Someday the pain would lessen; for now he could only endure the ache of loneliness and waiting.
Wouldn’t you know, if I was going to fall in love with a woman, I’d fall in love with damn near the only woman in the world I couldn’t have? And a small, wry, honest voice, deeper than his pain, remarked coldly something he would never remember or admit again even to himself: If I really wanted to fall in love with a woman, wouldn’t I have fallen in love with somebody who wasn’t the only one I couldn’t honorably have?
But none of them were Stella, he argued in rebellion, and again, for the last time, the small voice remarked through the pain, Nevertheless . . . But it did not lessen the pain. Not at all.
~o0o~
The fierce dryness of the Dallas air reminded Tommy of his years with Lambeth. Stella took Suzy to the hotel’s coffee shop for an early supper before tucking her in, and Johnny came through the connecting door into the room Tommy shared with Mario.
He sat down on one of the twin beds. “Look, Matt, it’s great that you managed to get a screen credit for the Santellis. But there’s something you said about it that worries me. Do you have that contract with you, Matt?”
“It’s in my suitcase.”
“Mind if I have a look at it? I wish you’d asked me to check it over before you signed it,” Johnny said. “It isn’t that I don’t trust Jim Fortunati. But I’ve been around in that business—”
“Look, I read it before I signed it,” Mario said edgily.
“All the fine print, huh? I never knew anybody read all the fine print except a contract lawyer. And me. I learned it when I couldn’t afford a lawyer, back when I was just a kid on my own, bumming around. After I got skinned a time or two, I learned to read all the legal double-talk, down to the last word.” He was already flipping through the long typed sheets Mario had reluctantly handed over. “Yeah, here it is . . . ‘a repertory of performance as specified by the technical advisor, to include the triple back somersault with double pirouette return, the back and forward double som—’ where’s he get all this stuff? Mason wouldn’t know a double somersault from a double bed! Probably picked it up from Jim Fortunati. Oh-oh, here it is. I was afraid of that.” He read aloud:
“‘To include doubling of falls and missed trick sequences as stipulated by the script.’ Did you read that goddamn script, Matt?”
“Are you nuts?” Mario asked. “Stuntmen don’t get to read scripts! I read through the list of tricks they wanted me to do, and since they started with the triple, I figured they couldn’t get any harder than that. I figured I’d have to double a few falls, but what the hell, Jock, I learned the triple without using the mechanic—I took so many falls I could almost come down without a net and come up without breaking my neck. I’m awfully good at falling, kid.”
Remembering Mario’s fear of stunt work, Tommy frowned, troubled. But Johnny slammed his hand against the end of the bed.
“The longer I know you, Matt, the more I get the idea you shouldn’t be allowed out without a keeper! That was how Simon Barry got hurt—doing that missed trick sequence in the first make of the Parrish movie! Did your friend Reeder even bother to warn you what the script calls for you to do in that missed trick sequence?”
Mario shook his head, and Johnny scowled and said, “Some friend! Oh, hell, I guess he thinks if you can do a triple you can probably do anything.”
Mario demanded with growing apprehension, “Just what is that trick you’re scared of, anyway?”
“The script specifies,” Johnny said, “or did—and if it’s Parrish’s life story, still does—that you have to go for a triple, miss it, go to the net, hit the edge of the spreaders, and bounce out on the floor.”
He spoke with a slow, angry deliberation, and the color drained from Mario’s face. But it was Tommy who said, “Nobody alive could do that!”
“Right,” Johnny said. “I tried to help them figure out a way to fake it. I’m still hashing it over in my mind from time to time, but no luck. If you’d taken me along to look over the contract, I would have had them put in that you don’t do that one unless they can figure out a way to fake it without anybody getting hurt! Their script writer could damn well make his point some other way.”
“I guess that’s why we needed you to manage the act, Johnny,” Mario said tonelessly. “I just don’t think that way. I trusted Jim Fortunati.”
“I still do,” Tommy said. “He isn’t going to let you get killed on any movie where he’s the technical advisor.” He was shocked and dismayed. Mario had found the courage to commit himself to do the stunt work for this movie, despite a lifetime fear—and now he discovered that he had been maneuvered into signing a contract to do sequences which had crippled another aerialist!
Mario said, “Lay off, Johnny. The stuntmen’s union is going to have something to say about that. If it looks like we can’t handle it, we yell for a union rep. We’ve got the right to have a union man right there on the set all the time, to make sure all the safety regulations are taken care of.”
“You do that,” Johnny said. “You yell for a union man, and you keep right on yelling until they listen. It’s better to break your contract than to break your neck!”
He went back to his own room, and Mario sat holding the contract, looking pale and frightened. Finally Tommy asked, “Is this the trick where Parrish got crippled up, Matt?”
Mario went on staring at the floor. “No. It’s what convinced him he was lucky. Look, you know how the triple was done the first time?”
“I heard it was done by accident. I never knew whether that was true, or something some publicity man cooked up.”
“Oh, it’s true, all right. Gerard Might did it by accident—it was years before I was born, but Papa Tony knew him—and was so surprised he lived through it that he said he’d used up his lifetime’s share of luck, and quit the circus and never went up on the rigging again. That was back when they were still calling the trip
le the salto mortale—you know what that means?”
“Leap of death,” Tommy said, remembering that Papa Tony had called it, for Mario, the leap of fate.
“Well, this is what convinced Parrish that he was lucky. Cleo told me the story when I was a kid. The first time he really managed to get the three turns, he missed the catcher, hit the spreaders, bounced on the floor, and came up with nothing worse than a broken thumb. So he figured he was lucky, lucky enough to go for it and put it in his act regular—” Mario’s voice trailed off. “I always thought I was lucky, too. Maybe I ought to find out, once and for all.”
“Matt, you quit talking that way, damn it!”
“No, Tom, I’m serious. If Parrish could do it by accident and live through it, I ought to be able to figure out a way to do it on purpose. Not fake it, just do it. All I have to do is figure out how he managed to live through it, and do that.”
“How the hell are you going to do that?” Tommy demanded, in a rage. “Hold a séance with a medium and call up his ghost and ask him?”
But Mario did not rise to the bait. “No, of course not. I just have to take all I’ve learned about falling, and put it all together.”
“That’s impossible,” Tommy said, and Mario finally raised his head and smiled at him, a slow, strange smile that made Tommy’s blood run cold.
“I got the word on that from Barney himself,” he said. “Or didn’t you realize, haven’t you figured out that was him, that time, the little lame guy wanted to see me do a triple? He was right, Tom. Nothing’s impossible. Not while there are damn fools like us, with open minds about breaking our necks.”
“Matt, you are absolutely, completely, out-of-your-mind, fucking crazy!” Tommy exploded at him.
“Of course I am,” Mario said matter-of-factly, still with that strange smile. “You’ve got to be a little crazy to do a triple, anyhow. Lucky, kid, don’t you know I killed Barney Parrish, just like I pulled the trigger on him myself? I worshipped him when I was a kid. And I killed him.”
The Catch Trap Page 76