I don’t suppose—
And by your reckoning does Lucille know Mr. Krug’s thoughts before he does himself ?
I shouldn’t imagine—
Well I do, Mr. Frank. I know Mr. Krug’s thoughts before Mr. Krug has thought to think them. You were expected for lunch and now an unpleasant situation that should have taken an hour to resolve is going to take two. Mr. Krug is upstairs and presently indisposed so you will have to see Mr. Cherry. If you are lucky you will find Mr. Cherry in Mr. Cherry’s office. If you are unlucky – well, if you are unlucky, you might think about clearing out your office and going home, Mr. Frank. Not that either Mr. Krug or Mr. Cherry has said anything to me, mind you, but I am not at present thinking good thoughts about you, Mr. Frank, not good thoughts at all.
The beaded chain that held the spectacles around her neck when they were not perched on the end of her nose swayed as she spoke so that the green and red rhinestones sparkled.
Now turn around, Mr. Frank.
I hesitated.
Only a masochist would make me say a thing twice, Mr. Frank.
I pivoted, sliding across the carpet but walking at an angle to her desk because the idea of Anita Tinges at my back was more frightening than the risk of falling flat on my face.
Now walk, Mr. Frank. One light little loafer in front of the other, and don’t come back without an appointment, but frankly, Mr. Frank, given the thoughts I’m thinking about you, I don’t imagine there will be any further appointments, ever again…frankly.
Porter’s secretary Susie Cott was on the phone when I reached her desk at the other side of the building. Her eyes were focused on the front page of the Los Angeles Times and for half a minute she showed no sign of having seen me.
Of course I wanted to speak to him, but there was never anyone like that at Bryn Mawr… Well it isn’t something one jokes about, Donna. You can’t walk all over people on your way up, I mean how would you like it if someone flattened your head to get another rung up? It’s simply not cricket… No, not the insect. It’s an English expression I learned from Mr. Grant… Something to do with not being square.
I cleared my throat and Susie flinched.
Don’t scoot, Donna, I have to work, she said into her headset. You’re not in the appointments for this afternoon, Mr. Frank. You were supposed to have lunch with Mr. Cherry and Mr. Krug upstairs but he, that is Mr. Cherry, said you didn’t show.
Lucille told me—
Susie shook her head as if she pitied me.
Don’t you know Lucille has a death wish for every writer on the lot? She thinks it’s your fault she never gets to act. I told her it’s the cameramen if it’s anyone, or the directors, but she said if writers wrote parts she could play then she’d be a star.
Maybe I should write a movie about a two-faced secretary.
Susie narrowed her eyes to dark green slits.
Porter had recently had his office redecorated, creating a sitting area that resembled a family room with a porthole television, coffee table, and bar cart, a separate business area with a long conference table, a formal lounge section whose purpose eluded me, and the space around his desk itself, which constituted a region all its own. The whole room was the size of a small bungalow and could have housed a family of four. Whoever did the decorating had a taste for rosewood tables and low davenports upholstered in biscuit linen. From a record player in one corner a trumpet wailed cool blue notes and one wall of the office was filled by a single canvas splotched with black ellipses against a white field.
Porter was sitting on one of the low couches near the front of the room with his back to the door. He pointed at the painting as I walked in.
Just got that. Supposed to be a requiem to the Spanish Republic. Looks like a bunch of big black testicles to me but it lowers my blood pressure to stare at the thing. I suppose some would say it’s subversive. Communist art. Porter turned to me and winked. The gesture seemed to mute the trumpet and draw a line between us. I liked the painting and the music and the furnishings but could think of nothing witty to say because I felt I had arrived unprepared for a fight. Scotch rocks or vodka neat, Frank? You’ll need one or the other.
Nothing hard for me.
Porter pressed the intercom on the end table, asked Susie to bring us coffee, and then we waited, blasted by the trumpet. There was a humming noise beneath the top notes but I could not tell if it was coming from the record or Porter’s throat. Since his arrival at the studio a year earlier our relationship had cooled, as if he believed he could not be openly friendly with a man who was supposed to answer to him, or perhaps he felt just as pained by our shared past as I did.
I must have told you that he and I were friends in college. We pledged the same fraternity at Cornell and lived in a rambling mansion overlooking a waterfall that froze nearly solid in winter. Our friendship had been cemented in the aftermath of a fire that destroyed the fraternity house, forcing the remaining members into temporary accommodation where Porter and I shared a room one semester. When I say that our friendship was cemented, I mean that I had long assumed this was the case, however much the fire itself was a traumatic memory. Every time I saw Porter the feeling of standing on the wet lawn in the dark and realizing with horror that someone was missing came over me, so that I could smell the burning house and feel the coldness in my feet and the heat on my face. His friendship at the time had helped me survive the aftermath of that loss, but working together at the studio and finding him so remote where he had always been warm in the past renewed the pain. Perhaps I never told you about this, Myles, or only shared what little I could bear to recount. By that afternoon, I had all but convinced myself that given the chance one of the most important friendships in my life might yet be reconstituted and the old Porter who had kept me company on long walks in Ithaca’s gorges would return to kill off whoever this bogus stand-in might be.
On further thought, I suspect I never spoke to you about the history Porter and I shared because I was concerned that it would make you doubt your place in my heart. It should not have done, and I ought to have trusted I could convince you this was the case. This is another matter for which I must ask your forgiveness.
I’m sorry about earlier, Porter, I think Lucille—
Porter signaled me to be quiet as Susie brought in the coffee on a tray, placed it on the table between the two couches, and closed the door behind her.
She spies for Krug, Porter whispered. He poured the coffee, adding milk and sugar to his own, and leaned close to me. What neither of them know is that Anita spies for me, and I spy for the gentlemen in New York.
Not very honest.
One can’t afford to be. But for the next hour you and I are going to make an exception to that rule. Let’s put aside the recent distemper of our exchanges.
You mean to say this isn’t about She Turned Away? It was a disingenuous question. I knew our meeting had nothing to do with the film.
Nick Charles has it in hand. The project will be fine.
But it’s John’s picture.
Marsh likes to think so.
Help me, Porter, I’m lost.
As I said, I’ll be honest with you, and you will be honest with me, because we are old friends, and the times are exceptional.
A bell rang somewhere, but it was not the clock in the corridor. The fight had started and I tried to find my feet.
Round 1
Porter picked up a fat file from the davenport and dropped it on the coffee table, rattling my cup in its saucer.
The studio decided a while ago to undertake investigations of those among its employees about whom there might be some suspicion of political or moral irregularities. I am sorry to put it so baldly. This was instituted before my arrival, and while I might cavil about the subterfuge involved, believing it always better to approach the suspected individual directly and ask for an explanation, I can understand Krug’s rationale. I know you think of me as a brother and I once thought of you likewise without gi
ving it a second thought.
Past tense, I note.
I think of you now as a member of a larger family, like a cousin who has strayed. You cannot deny that you betrayed me, Desmond. You were never honest about yourself.
Through all the years of our acquaintance I had never heard Porter’s voice sound as it did then, his words flashing and cutting like steel through the music.
You’ve always known my politics, Porter. When we were students I’m pretty sure they were your politics as well. I hoped they might still be.
I am not speaking of politics, at least not yet. I am speaking of moral irregularities. Sexual betrayals.
Although you and I had taken people like John Marsh and a very few others into our confidence, I thought that we had managed to keep the truth of our lives sufficiently secret that this kind of confrontation might never occur, and yet I also always lived in the expectation of it happening one day, the result of a slip on our part, or some gossip’s suspicion about my visits to your house under the guise of my friendship with Helen. It had not occurred to me that the studio itself might investigate those it suspected, or that such investigations would prove as intrusive as they did. Faced with such exposure, my heart thrashed between panic and relief, because having the secret out in the open between Porter and me was almost as welcome as it was terrifying.
You think Helen and I are having an affair, I said, resorting to the lie on which we had all agreed as our first line of defense. But it isn’t true, Porter. I guess you don’t believe in friendship anymore, is that it?
Porter scowled. I said this was a unique situation, Desmond, and you and I were going to be honest with each other. You know exactly what I’m referring to and it has nothing to do with women. His voice jumped, fighting the trumpet. It has nothing to do with Helen or any other woman because you’ve been tricked into believing you have no interest in women. I think you’ve been lying your whole life about the very nature of your most intimate moral character, about the way you have been warped and inverted.
How quickly I crumbled in the face of truth. I made no further effort to deny what I was, perhaps because the sense of relief quickly outweighed any terror I might have been feeling.
What did you expect me to do, Porter? Say to you, wringing my hands and sniveling, I want to confess I’m a homosexual, but I hope you’ll still be my brother and roommate?
I had never used that word to describe myself before, and immediately it felt too restrictive, signifying in my mind a class of characters with whom I have always struggled to identify. I could not confine my body to the poses of a flouncing pansy, nor put myself in the clothes of a tart or varlet or queen, and whatever alternatives might exist were resistant to summons, as if they, like me, did not wish to answer the call of that spurious nineteenthcentury epithet. I have penchants and predilections and desires, but those attractions and impulses, those orientations, do not make me someone, not in my own mind at any rate, even if they do in the eyes of others. I remain, to myself, always a subject, doing and acting, never an object, a thing, an example of a certain type. With few exceptions, perhaps that is why I avoided the secretive scene I could have chosen to frequent in those years, as I assume you also avoided it Myles. I wanted the freedom of not belonging to any group, even one that might have embraced me.
If I had spoken honestly to you, Porter, I continued, it would have been the end of my social life, if not the end of my actual life. If I had confided in you, you would have told all the brothers and the dean and I would have been hounded from the university. I might have killed myself if someone else didn’t kill me first. How dare you demand that I should have been honest when you would have turned such honesty against me?
Despite the air conditioning, sweat bangled Porter’s neck. You were trying to convert me, Desmond, I am certain of that. And you were not the first.
Nonsense. I never thought anything of the kind. You honestly believe I wanted more than friendship from you?
Isn’t that what your type always wants?
Not for a minute! And what do you mean I wasn’t the first?
You know who. I’m talking about Noah Roy. Before he died, he tried to get friendly with me.
Noah Roy.
Do you recognize the name, Myles? Even if I never spoke of him, and I am now convinced I probably did not, it should still be familiar to you. I had used it in my novels and scripts over and over so that there was always a character called Noah, often a Roy, sometimes just the initials N.R., and when it was too painful to use the whole name, parts of it, or even its variants, I resorted to describing the boy to whom it belonged, so that throughout my works there is often a young man with a shy lean face, or deep blue eyes, or a bearing that suggests a cadet expelled from the military for some dubious offense, who carries his shame like a poppy in the buttonhole. Porter saying his name that afternoon, however, awoke in my memory a more precise pattern of associations.
At Cornell Porter and I were in the same class, Noah a year behind us. He had pledged when we were already brothers. At some point I became conscious that Noah looked at me differently, and I knew on several mornings that I had dreamt of Noah in ways I did not dream about women. He was not the first boy I had found attractive, but he was the first I allowed myself to fantasize about, to imagine what I wanted to do with him, what I wanted him to do to me. We began playing tennis together, and although Noah was a superior athlete, naturally long and quick with an elegant forearm that returned a ball with easy power, I could not help feeling in those games a union approaching consummation. One weekend, when the rest of the brothers were away on a social exchange, I was in bed with a cold and Noah, who had remained in Ithaca for a tennis competition, stayed. I woke in the night, coughing and sneezing, and after a quarter hour of blowing my nose I heard the boards above my room creak, and then the murmur of Noah’s feet tiptoeing down the stairs and along the hall. My door opened and Noah came in, sat on the bed, and put a cool hand against my brow. You’ll get sick, I warned him. No matter, he said, leaving his hand where it was, what can I do? I knew he meant not only What can I do to help you? but also I cannot help what I feel, so what can I do?
It was the first time either of us had kissed another boy, and then Noah slipped into my bed. We didn’t know what to do, no one had ever told us, so at first we just held each other, a little shocked by the way our bodies reacted, then fell asleep and woke again in the night, discovering that kissing was not like it was in movies, two closed mouths pressed together, but that it was possible to open the other person’s mouth with one’s own, that kissing was warm and wet and awkward, that teeth were always a part of it, that there were edges and sharpness to negotiate, but once the problems were known an arena of play opened where a game of repetition and experiment and variation became possible and pleasurable, that the game could continue until both of us were breathless and exhausted by it, and then rally and start again, so our exertion was both hunger and its satisfaction. There would be few times when we did not fear discovery, but as summer arrived we made plans to stay at the cottage on Lake George that my parents were abandoning that year in favor of Cape Cod. There was only a caretaker, a defrocked Jesuit who got drunk every night and went to bed early, leaving us alone in the drawing room overlooking the water with nothing to distract us but a collection of records and the walk-in bar. Each night we locked the door to the drawing room in case the caretaker should wake, turned off the lights, and wrestled around on the carpets, playing like children, except that the play, by degrees, turned into the most serious game of my life. We taught each other what to do, how to stimulate and soothe and subdue, and until meeting you, Myles, that summer was the most harmonious time of my life. In the autumn, we returned to tennis and had to be content with moments stolen in our rooms, knowing every time we kissed or touched, the few occasions that we chanced anything more intimate, risked discovery that would ruin us.
As I looked at Porter, I could see Noah’s face as it had been be
fore his death, pale and freckled, laughing and bright with promise, and then I remembered the boy’s blackened skin after his body was removed from the ruins of the house. On the lawn overlooking the gorge, Porter and I identified him. It was only after Noah’s death that the two of us became close. Sitting there in Porter’s office all those years later was the first time I had heard anyone accuse Noah of being what he was. Why formulate it as an accusation, as if the designation itself were a crime? Because the label signified a certain catalogue of activities that were, in fact, against the law, I have to remind myself, perhaps also remind you. The only legal homosexual was an inactive one. If you and I had been caught in 1950 we could have been sentenced to twenty years in prison, placed on California’s then newly created registry of sex offenders, and risked sterilization by the state lest we, in our nonbreeding way, accidentally reproduce and make more men like us. Moral eugenics and nothing less. When Governor Warren signed the bill in January that year, there were few voices of protest. A social worker by the name of Mrs. Darryl Holmes – bless the dear lady – wrote to the Los Angeles Times calling the laws against sodomy what they were: medieval hysteria, no better than what the Nazis had been doing only a few years earlier. Kinsey had the right idea where sex was concerned, wrote Mrs. Holmes, and yet politicians and lawmakers refused to listen to the good doctor because they were all too ashamed to admit he might be right.
Porter was grimacing.
I can’t speak for Noah, I said. As for myself, Porter, I sensed you and I were not the same.
This was not the truth. Quite the opposite. I always suspected Porter secretly might be like you and me and Noah and so many others besides, whether or not he had a wife.
Men like me are not, despite what you might have heard, only interested in having sex, I said. We like friendship – ordinary nonsexual friendship – as much as you do.
You call it friendship. I call it mendacity.
I have always been as honest as I could, Porter. You never asked me whether I loved women or if I intended to get married. I thought there was a chance you understood, that you intuited the truth about me and chose not to speak of it. I thought when you married and chose someone else as your best man it was because you had concluded I was not the person you wanted standing next to you at the altar as you took your vows. It saddened me but I also understood why that might be the case.
Night for Day Page 24