One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

  “Take a number,’’ I shouted in the general direction of the mike in the far wall. “Tell him I’ll call back in five minutes.’’ And I swam underwater for a while, to keep from having to answer questions or make decisions.

  Actually, it was eleven minutes later when I called Ross back—he was staying at the Hotel Pierre—I having in the meantime finished my laps, taken a quick shower, put on my blue terry robe, and come upstairs to the bedroom floor. There used to be an elevator in this four-story building—five if you count the basement— but I had it taken out during the conversion, much to Robinson’s dismay.

  Ross sounded his usual self—which is to say, a bit pompous, attitudinizing, self-centered—but according to his dialogue he was desperate. “I’m desperate, Sam. I have to see you at once. I can be there in twenty minutes.’’

  “But I can’t,’’ I told him. “Sorry, Ross.’’

  “Sam, I’m not kidding you, this is urgent ”

  I was in the bedroom, and my calendar was next door in my office, so I said, “Hold it a second, Ross, don’t go away,’’ put him on hold, went through into the office with its view over Tenth Street—the bedroom gets the garden and the interesting building-backs and the occasional shots of sunlight—and I sat at my desk, picked up the phone there, and said, looking at my calendar, “I’m free all day tomorrow. You want lunch?”

  “Sam, please,” he said, and this time I could hear an edge of something different in his voice. Tension? Fear? “I can’t spend another night like this.”

  “Christ, Ross.” I shook my head, though he wouldn’t be able to see it. “The thing is, Brett’s opening in a play tonight.”

  “Brett Burgess?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And noblesse oblige, huh?” Which was more like the Ross I was used to; unnecessarily nasty even while asking a favor.

  “Ross,” I said, “he’s one of my oldest friends. He taught me what little I know about acting, just as you taught me what little I know about writing.”

  “Well, I’m in more trouble than he is. It’s barely six o’clock; what time’s the curtain?”

  I sighed. “We’re having dinner before,” I said. “I promised. Look, Ross, if it’s really that bad—”

  “It’s worse, Sam. Am I somebody who goes around crying wolf?”

  “No, you’re not,” I had to admit.

  “Okay,” he said, and yelled, “Wolf!”

  “All right, all right, there’s a real wolf. I tell you what, after the show, I could probably get away, uh . . . how about midnight? Will you still be up?”

  “I won’t sleep at all tonight, Sam,” he said.

  7

  Brett Burgess is about my age, not quite as tall as me, a bit broader in the shoulders and the jaw. We met soon after I went out to L.A., he being another young hopeful in that first agent’s stable. (He gave Brett his name, too, just as he gave me “Sam Holt.’’ I have no idea who Brett was originally.) Brett and I auditioned for the same or similar parts, we worked together just once as World War II German soldiers in a miniseries, and Brett moved over to a different agent very shortly after I made my own switch.

  The difference between us is Brett never got a series.

  The other difference is Brett is an actor, always has been, has never had any other goal in life. In the early days he was very generous with his knowledge and experience, and I wasn’t overstating by much when I’d told Ross that Brett had taught me whatever I know about acting. Brett has never looked down on me for being just a slob who drifted into his profession and right away grabbed the brass ring, but if anybody had the right to take that attitude toward me, it would certainly be Brett.

  That’s why Ross’s noblesse oblige crack had stung, as he’d known it would. I always feel a little guilty toward Brett and at the same time—silly though it may sound—a little envious. It’s true I made the money, got the fame, had what in anybody’s lexicon has to be called success, but Brett is working. He’s a working actor, he gets movie roles, TV roles, small parts in big plays and big parts in small plays, he’s constantly stretching his muscles and practicing his craft, while what am I doing? Stitching back and forth in my lap pool.

  Brett was opening that night in an off-Broadway theater near Sheridan Square, in an imported (and translated) Brazilian play called The Two Colonels. He was the second lead, the bad colonel. Our dinner date was for six-thirty at Vitto Impero, an easy walk over to the West Village. Anita Imperato, who has run Vitto Impero ever since she threw her gambling-man husband out seven years ago, had agreed to become a customer in her own joint for tonight and join us at our feast. “Don’t talk about the play,’’ she said as we all took our places at the round corner table in the back, where a bottle of Pinot Grigio and a big bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water already awaited us. “I’ll want to see it for myself.”

  “You coming tonight?” Brett asked her as I opened the San Pellegrino and filled our water glasses.

  “No, let’s see what the critics say.” Before anybody could respond to this flat-out contradiction, she signaled for Marcie the waitress and told us, “Angelo says the red snapper is terrific tonight.”

  Brett said, “What’s tonight’s pasta?”

  Briskly shaking her head, Anita said, “Something with strawberries.”

  “In that case,” Brett told the waiting Marcie, poised with her pad and pencil, “I’ll have the tortellini.” Brett believes in a carbohydrate charge before high-tension experiences like an opening night.

  I had the red snapper, since that was what Angelo the chef liked at the moment, and Anita had a carpaccio appetizer and a salad, nothing more. She’s a tall and slender woman, Anita, almost bony, and I think she keeps her shape because she’s around food too much, and feels contempt for it. She’s very good-looking, but doesn’t care about that, and therefore doesn’t dress or make herself up to enhance her looks, and so it’s easy not to notice. Her face is a long oval, with features that are somehow both strong and delicate; a small but sharp nose, large acute brown eyes, and long very black hair falling in thick waves around her head.

  Anita and I have had a thing together off and on over the years, but she refuses to take it seriously, so it’s never developed into much. In the first place, she thinks it’s ridiculous for the owner of a small-time Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village to be hooked up with a TV celebrity, and in the second place, she’s one year older than I am, which is an absurd thing to care about, but she does. Also, she knows I have a girlfriend named Bly Quinn out on the Coast, though they’ve never met. “I’ll just be your New York girl,” Anita says with that crooked grin I like so much. “I’ll just be here to see you don’t lose your East Coast edge.” And she gives me a kidney punch with her hard little sharp-knuckled fist.

  Since Anita had started the meal by banning discussion of the play—a smart and thoughtful move on her part, I later realized—we talked instead about other things. Brett had changed New York agents again, The Two Colonels being the first fruit of the change, so we discussed that. Brett’s girlfriend, Maria, who would join us at the theater and I would sit with during the show, was thinking of taking a job with a travel magazine, which would put her out of the country a lot—she was a photographer, had been taking pictures of food for Gourmet the last three years and was tiring of it—and this prospect of a constantly departing Maria was making Brett think about proposing marriage, so we worried that bone for a while, until Anita said, “Brett, is it your idea if she marries you, she’ll give up her job?”

  “Well—that job, I guess.” He grinned. “She could still work, believe me, particularly if she wants to go on eating.”

  Anita shook her head. “Marry her to keep her home,” she said. “No wonder I hate men.”

  “If that’s the only reason I want to marry her,” Brett said, “forget it.” He has a nice easy self-deprecating grin and he leans his head forward a bit from his big shoulders, like a very amiable bear. Most of the time he�
�s cast as a heavy—like the bad colonel in tonight’s play—but twice I’ve seen him do commercials that brought out that other side of him, and I wish he could get to use it more. In one of the commercials he was teaching a boy how to put a lure on a fishing line, and in the other he was a friendly truck driver explaining motor oil to a kid in a jalopy.

  Maybe one of the reasons Brett hasn’t made it is that he’s too nice to be a major heavy and too bull-like to be a major hero. Too bad, if true.

  Anyway, I had walked over to Abingdon Square for dinner, and now Brett and I walked back east to the theater, where Maria was waiting for us out on the sidewalk. Brett kissed her and grinned at me, we both suggested he break his leg, and he went away to his dressing room while Maria and I had coffee in a place nearby. I told Maria, a skinny bubbly bouncy blackhaired girl, that I’d heard about this new job possibility with the travel magazine, and she talked about it, but not with what seemed like particular enthusiasm. After a while I began to get the idea she had only considered the job as a ploy to get Brett to quit stalling around and propose. I wondered what Anita would make of that.

  A few other people I knew were at the opening, including Bill Ackerson, Dr. William Ackerson, my East Coast doctor and Brett’s, a show-biz buff who keeps the Hollywood Reporter and both Varietys in his waiting room. He always dates one or another of his young and beautiful patients; tonight’s was a smiling blond singer apparently named Bunny. Assembling, we all milled about a bit—at that point, you never know if you’re at a wedding or a wake—and then we went in to see the show.

  The Two Colonels was intellectual-dumb, so concerned with its meaning and its political symbols that it pretty well left out character entirely and twisted its plot around to look like a wrought-iron fence. Afterward, we told Brett how terrific the play was and how wonderful he was in it—he actually had invested his role with more individuality and interest than had been written into it—and congratulated the rest of the cast and the director.

  Bill Ackerson and his Bunny hopped quickly from the scene of the crime, but a group of us went out for drinks together afterward, the usual thing, actors hanging out together, coming down off the nervous high of performance. After a while everybody forgot I used to be the television hotshot and we all just talked together. It was very pleasant, and the next time I looked at my watch it was five minutes to twelve.

  I hadn’t thought about Ross Ferguson the entire time.

  8

  When I was a teenager, it was a big thing on the weekends to take the train into the city and wander around either Times Square or Greenwich Village. This great big exciting place, New York City, the center of the known universe, was practically our next-door neighbor, full of electricity and promise. We didn’t know what the hell to do with it then, but at least we could enter into it and wander around and stare at it and pretend we were cool.

  That wasn’t so very long ago, but nevertheless things have changed a lot. New York somehow seems to have less promise than it did, or the promise is somehow now tainted with expectations of defeat. The electricity is still there, but with a stronger current of danger. Times Square has degenerated into some sort of subhuman pit, and all over the city there’s less of a sense that rich and poor are breathing the same air. The drawbridges are up;

  the self-made millionaires aren’t from Akron and Kansas City anymore, they’re from Oman and Kuwait.

  One of the few parts of the city that hasn’t changed—or at least hasn’t become unrecognizable—is Greenwich Village. That’s why I live there, and why I feel comfortable walking in it late at night, and why it was so difficult to walk faster even though I was going to be late for my meeting with Ross Ferguson, who I could see from half a block away, pacing the buckled old slate sidewalk in front of my house.

  I don’t know where Ross Ferguson came from originally, but by now he couldn’t be anything but what he is: a successful Hollywood writer. In his early fifties, with thick steel-wool hair that’s all pepper and salt, he has a year-round dark orangy-brown tan, and in his native habitat he tends to wear silk shirts open to the waist—curly gray hair-clumps on his bronzed chest— and heavy necklaces of gold chain, and designer sunglasses on top of his head. He’s been writing for more than twenty years out on the Coast, a few movies but mostly television, owns a piece of a couple of successful series, and lives up in the hilly part of Beverly Hills with a succession of wives and girlfriends. Actually, I think it’s just girlfriends these days, his accountant having told him he can’t afford any more wives; that is, ex-wives.

  I know I’ve made him sound terrible, and in many ways Ross is terrible, but the odd thing is, he’s also a very talented guy and fine craftsman. He was one of the three or four most prolific writers for PACKARD, and his scripts always gave us interesting things to do and think about, characters with more complexity than absolutely necessary and story lines that took unexpected but not unbelievable twists and turns. When I first sat down to try my hand at a PACKARD script, Ross was one of the three people I showed it to, and he was wonderfully generous and forthcoming in his response. If life hadn’t made him a rich bronzed Hollywood writer, he probably would have been a hell of a teacher, and possibly a better and happier human being, though I realize it’s stupid to make that kind of judgment about another person. Anyway, whoever he might have been, a fine writer and a fine teacher and a rotten apple is who he is, and who I was now approaching along the sidewalk on West Tenth at not quite ten minutes past midnight. “Jesus, Sam! I thought something happened to you!’’ His expression was so tense, so worried, that I felt immediately guilty at being late. “I’m sorry, Ross,’’ I said, “I really am. You know how actors get after an opening.’’

  “More self-absorbed than ever,’’ he commented, reverting to his usual self. “Hard to believe, I know.’’ “Well, I’m here now,’’ I pointed out, guilt all gone. “Come on in.’’

  The only lights burning inside the house were on the staircase, which meant Robinson had gone to bed, disapproving my late hours, no doubt. Ross and I came in and shut the door and I hit various light switches, saying, “You want something to drink?’’

  “Yes,’’ he said simply. “I have a story to tell you, Sam, and then a tape to play, and they’ll both need a drink.’’

  “A tape?’’

  “Wait’ll you see it.’’ His eyes looked hollow, haunted, an expression I’d never seen on him before.

  “I’m looking forward. Name your poison.’’

  “Brandy.’’

  “Fine. We’ll go up to the office, in that case; the brandy and the VCR are both there.’’

  “It’s U-Matic,’’ he said as we went up the stairs.

  U-Matic? That’s the professional level of tape, similar to the Betamax system but with a tape twice as wide. I’ve never seen that much difference in quality, but that’s what the networks and the producers all use. My secret opinion is that the professionals use a different tape system because if they used the same system as the amateurs, how would they know they were professionals?

  Anyway, I have players for all three systems, so that was no problem. Up one flight, we went into my office— the night-time view, across quiet West Tenth, is of low skyline and lit windows—and I opened the liquor cabinet while Ross shucked out of his topcoat.

  Away from his native habitat Ross’s clothing style became a little uncertain. His tan topcoat was good quality, suggesting someplace like Brooks Brothers. His dark gray suit, fitting a little badly in the shoulders and seat, made him look older, and as though on his way to the funeral of a business acquaintance. The black tasseled loafers softened this image a bit, not much, while the pink shirt and the flowered tie were just crazy.

  My office is a fairly large room, divided into two areas. Toward the front is a double-sided antique desk with green leather insert top; depending on my mood or what’s going on, I can sit facing the room or the street. The chairs on both sides of the desk are identical; oak, with green leather se
ats and backs.

  The rear half of the room contains more casual seating; a low short sofa, upholstered in soft cotton with an autumn design of branches and berries and fallen leaves, facing a pair of low overstuffed swivel chairs in a light brown. The back wall, opposite the windows, contains, in addition to a door to my bedroom, cream-colored shelves filled with books, VCRs, and stereo equipment.

  Armed with brandies, we sat facing each other, me on the sofa and Ross nervously moving in little arcs back and forth in one of the swivel chairs. I said, “Cheers,” and we sipped our Remy, and I said, “What brings you east, Ross?”

  “You,” he said. “I had nowhere else I could turn, and your service said you were in New York, so here I came.”

  I put my snifter down on the oak coffee table between us. “You came all this way just to see me? No other reason? What’s going on?”

  He had taken a small paper bag from his topcoat pocket when we’d first come upstairs, which he now fidgeted with in his lap. From the shape I would have said it contained a U-Matic tape. Now he patted it and said, “First I’ll tell you the story, then I’ll show you this.”

  “Fine.”

  “Do you remember Delia West?”

  I didn’t. “Remind me.”

  “I went with her awhile, a year or two ago. She’s the one who threatened a breach of promise suit. Can you imagine? In this day and age, a breach of promise? That’s after her own lawyer laughed her out of his office when she tried palimony.”

  “I’m sorry, Ross, I don’t remember this one,’’ I said. “And she does sound like somebody I wouldn’t forget.”

  “A killer,” he said, and then looked startled. “Jesus,” he said. “Language is coming up and hitting me in the face.”

  “Delia West,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah. She was married to a stuntman; he did some stuff on PACKARD in the early days. She split, divorced him, went to live with a lady psychiatrist for a while, then switched back to men, then maybe a year and a half ago she took up with me. We hung out for, I don’t know, three four months. She never actually did live in the house, you know, I’m not that stupid, so that was what went wrong with the palimony.”