by Susan Isaacs
“Maybe I should have made a cold buffet. Pâtés, chicken, ham. A barbecue isn’t right…it’s too self-consciously simple.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Maybe we should call St. Lambert’s and have them send up—”
“This is perfect. Besides, what are we going to do with the twenty buckets of coleslaw and those huge things of mustard?”
“I hope it will be okay.”
“It will be wonderful. When have you ever served a bad meal?”
“How about the first year we were married?”
“I forgot about that. I hate to say it, but it was pretty awful. You made some strange salads.”
“I cringe every time I think of it.”
“Everything had marshmallows in it.”
“Not everything,” Jane said. “Not my Velveeta paprika egg froth. Remember that? True culinary excellence. Even you couldn’t fake your way through that one. Remember? Your mouth got all puckered up and your face was absolutely ashen. You couldn’t swallow it.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re sorry? I’m sorry. A year of torture. You bore up nobly.” She pulled back from him and picked up the knife. “If I don’t get going, fifty people won’t have a choice of what to put on their pie à la mode. They’ll think I’m only capable of vanilla, and I can’t afford to have my reputation sullied. Could you get the cream? It’s in quart containers in the fridge.”
“Jane.”
“What?” She stabbed the block of chocolate.
From beside the refrigerator, he lifted a quart of cream in a toast. “Happy anniversary.” She smiled at him. “Here’s to ten more and ten more after that.”
“Only thirty?”
“And another ten and another and…”
“I’m only here to advise you,” Murray King said. He exhaled a cloud of moist breath onto the lenses of his glasses, then polished them with his tie. He held the glasses up to the light of the gooseneck floor lamp beside his chair. The lamp was the only new object he’d bought for his office in the years he’d made hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars as Nicholas’s agent. He was obviously proud of it, giving demonstrations of how the neck of the lamp could be bent down for reading, up to bounce light off the ceiling, and no doubt he believed that was sufficient redecoration. He’d demanded of Nicholas, Doesn’t it give the place a whole new look? It’s very modern.
“That’s what I want, Murray. Advice.”
Nicholas scratched the mustache he had grown for his new film. It was supposed to make him look rakish. Jane said it made him look like the portrait of a Confederate general. “You should be hanging in the courthouse in Biloxi, Mississippi,” she’d remarked.
“My advice to you is this. You’re two people. You’re Nicholas Cobleigh the actor and Nicholas Cobleigh the movie star. The first one can do comedy. He can be a villain, a pervert, a nebbish. He can go wherever your talent takes you. Okay? Agreed? But the movie star is variations on one theme: the cold prick who inside has a warm heart but you have to break through the ice to get there, and the only ones who can break through the ice are a good pal or a kid or a girl. Preferably a girl, so you get more chances to take your shirt off. You know that as well as I do.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Listen to me. It’s true. You want to do FDR before he got polio, a real deep complex psychohistory where in the end you see his heart’s a bigger block of ice than his outside, you do it on the stage.”
“It could be a tour de force, Murray.”
“On stage, Nicky. On film, unless he winds up rolling off into the sunset in a wheelchair with Eleanor on his lap because he finally realizes he’s crazy for her, it’s going to be Snore City. You want to do it as a play, wonderful, I’m with you a hundred and one percent. Take six, eight months off. A year off. Stay home. It’ll do all of you good.”
“I can’t afford to.”
“Who are you talking to, some schmegegge who’s never seen one of your contracts? Come on, Nicky.”
“I can’t afford a year without a film. I’m thirty-one years old. It’s not going to last forever.”
“What? You think you’ll look like Dorian Gray’s picture when you’re forty?”
“No, but I can’t afford to lose my momentum.”
“Nicky, you’ve got the world by the balls. You can do whatever you want. Write your own ticket.”
“I can’t do a play. Do you have any idea how complicated it would be? Just security alone. And every critic would be gunning for me.”
“You’re gunning for yourself. Hey, where are you going?”
Nicholas stood. “I’m writing my own ticket to the men’s room. Can I have the key?”
Murray’s building wasn’t seedy, but, as he’d conceded, it was not the place to look for Fortune’s Five Hundred. The corridor to the men’s room was tiled with small hexagons of black and white, like somebody’s bathroom, while the men’s room itself, recently remodeled, had the cheery primary colors of a pediatrician’s waiting room. Only the white urinal gave it away. The toilet booth, which was occupied, was bright red. The walls were yellow.
Nicholas unzipped his fly. The door of the men’s room opened and, from the mirror to his right, he saw a man entering, a small, weak-faced, middle-aged man in a cheap suit, the sort who pushes papers in someone else’s office. Nicholas started to urinate. The man stood off to his left and reached for his zipper tab. Nicholas noticed the man’s cuffs ended at his ankle, leaving a couple of inches of white ribbed cotton socks showing.
“Oh, God!” The man gasped. “I know who you are!” Suddenly he was right beside Nicholas, staring up at his profile. Nicholas turned away abruptly; a spray of his urine hit the wall beside him. The man bent forward, sticking his face between Nicholas’s face and the urinal. “Nicholas Cobleigh!” He breathed his lunch into Nicholas’s face. The man in the booth began shuffling, picking up his pants, opening the lock. “When I tell my wife—” the man continued. Nicholas stepped back too quickly. Urine splashed on his and the man’s shoes. The man didn’t notice. “Can you beat this!” he went on. Nicholas managed to aim the rest into the urinal. Hurriedly, he tucked himself back in and zipped his fly. “Oh, Nick!” the man called. Nicholas was out fast, nearly colliding with the second man, who came rushing from the booth to see him. “Nick!” the first one cried. “That false mustache didn’t fool me!”
Murray took a bottle of scotch from a shelf and poured some into a coffee mug. “Here, Nicky, take a belt.” He put the mug between Nicholas’s hands. “Come on. Down the hatch.” Nicholas took a sip, closed his eyes, and shuddered. He’d always hated scotch. Then he took another sip. “Listen, Nicky, I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I’ll have a bathroom put in for you.”
“Murray, it’s all right.” He finished the scotch, took the bottle from Murray’s desk, and poured another three fingers. “I don’t know why this should get to me more than anything else.”
“Are you kidding? You were brought up in a classy situation, Nicky. Everybody was a gentleman.”
“No, they weren’t.”
“But I bet you they acted like it. They have a sense of limits, not like this farshtinkener bastard. A guy taking a leak is a sacred thing.”
“Come on, Murray.” Nicholas started to laugh.
“I mean it. At least with theater fans, they go up to you and what’s the worst they can say? Your Julius Caesar left me cold, or Gee, you look older in real life. Big deal. You live. Here, with this movie thing…Nicky, listen, I wasn’t born yesterday, but every goddamn cockroach in the country comes crawling out for you. It kills me.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Stop talking Protestant. Of course it’s bad. It’s terrible, such craziness.”
In the room outside Murray’s office, a secretary hired solely to work on Nicholas’s affairs sat behind piles of fan mail. Nicholas no longer read any of it.
Dear
Cobleigh Shitass,
When your not looking I’m gonna get you and lock you up in the basement and shove turds down your throat and kill you SLOW. I can’t wait to hear you choke you stinking shit you….
There is another, I know,
Who fills your night with
Eager lips and fingertips.
Another who sleeps beside you
In pale, silent dawn streaked by passion’s red.
And I, wakening to solitary gray…
Dear Nicholas,
Let me tell you what gets my pussy wet. I bet it will get you hot too! What I want is you to tie me up to a bed. Real tight so the ropes cut into my wrists until they bleed and I scream please don’t, but you just laugh and smack my face till its all black and blue and swollen. Then you go out and come back with a red hot branding iron with NC on it, and I…
What disturbed Nicholas most was that many of the letters were signed and had return addresses. Somewhere, there were people impatient to hear from him.
Exactly one month after her father’s thirty-second birthday, on August 2, 1972, Victoria Cobleigh had her tenth birthday. Although Nicholas had tried, he had another three weeks of shooting in Yugoslavia and could not get back to Connecticut in time for her party.
“Let me look at you,” Jane said to Victoria.
“I look okay.” The girl was built like her grandmother Winifred: tall, lean, sinewy. Unlike Winifred, however, whose essential expression was a bemused half smile, Victoria’s was somber and concentrated, as though she had been assigned to write a report on a book a year above her reading level.
Victoria wore tennis shorts and a sleeveless shirt that emphasized her gangly limbs. Her room, furnished to her taste, was as spare as she was. A faded needlepoint rug lay before the unadorned maple tester bed. A white popcorn spread matched the white-painted walls, and a white crocheted runner covered the top of her plain maple chest of drawers. Her tennis and lacrosse trophies were so densely packed they nearly hid the runner.
Standing beside the stark Victoria, Jane, in a flowered peasant dress, looked puffy and soft, like an overdecorated cake. She smoothed her daughter’s hair. “Stop it!” the girl said. “I brushed it.”
“Vicky—”
“They’ll be here any second.” She marched to a large closet. It was fitted with special compartments and filled with sporting goods: hockey and lacrosse sticks, baseball bats and mitts, ice skates. She grabbed one of her three tennis racquets.
“Mrs. Platt can get the door, Vicky. I just want to—”
“Mom, come on.”
“I just want to go over the plans.”
“Why are you making such a big fuss? First we’ll play tennis, then we’ll swim, then we’ll have dinner, then we’ll see a movie in the screening room, then we’ll tell ghost stories, and then we’ll go to sleep. And please don’t come in while we’re eating and ask if everything’s okay like you did last year.”
“I have no intention of embarrassing you in front of your friends, but considering the time and effort I—”
“Who asked for this? I didn’t want another stupid slumber party! I told you a million times!”
“And I told you if your attitude doesn’t change there won’t be any party.”
Victoria slammed her racquet against the bedpost. It made an ugly cracking sound. “I don’t care! Go ahead. Go downstairs. Tell them you’ve called it off and I don’t even want the presents. All I wanted was to take over Winkie’s and have all the kids—”
“That’s not the kind of party Daddy and I had in mind.”
“It’s just because you wouldn’t come.”
“Vicky!”
“You wouldn’t!”
“Vicky, I would if I could. You know that.”
“It’s so awful. We’re the only kids in any of the car pools who have to be driven by a chauffeur. We have a chauffeur, and they have mothers. And if Daddy’s on location we might as well be orphans. You didn’t come to the Thanksgiving play, you didn’t come to Track and Field Day.”
“But we had all the children come here! We hired a bus and we brought them all and we had the band and the big tent. You know, a lot of people would think that you’re spoiled—”
“A lot of people would think that you’re crazy!”
“Vicky, I’m warning you!”
The girl’s fair skin was such an angry red it obscured her pale brows, making her look odd, sinister. “You won’t even go outside any more! You won’t even try! Don’t you think we know? You wouldn’t even walk down to the courts to watch Liz’s lesson. It’s a two-minute walk and you won’t even try! I saw! Daddy came back to the house and you wouldn’t even go with him. He was holding your hand and—”
“I want you out of this room right now.”
“You sent Mrs. Platt outside to grill the hot dogs last night. You won’t even go out the back door any more, for God’s sake. Not out the back door. What are you afraid of? There’s nothing wrong with you! Everybody says—”
“Get out, Vicky!”
“Why didn’t you let me go to Yugoslavia to be with Daddy? I could have gone there and had fun instead of having to tell all my friends, ‘Oh, my mother has hay fever so she can’t come down to the pond to watch us swim and that’s why we had to have a lifeguard.’ Don’t you think they know it’s a lie? I hate it! I could have been with Daddy!”
“Ten-year-old girls don’t pick up and go to Yugoslavia for their birthdays.”
“They do too if their father’s a famous star and he wants them. He wanted me and Liz to come, and you said no because you were afraid he’d make you come with us. Murray would have taken us, or Uncle Ed, and you could just stay here reading eight million books. Why do I have to be stuck here in stupid Connecticut in this stupid house for my tenth birthday with you?”
For this picture, he’d gotten everything he wanted, and it had been so easy. They’d balked at making his brother Edward associate producer—he’s only twenty-three fucking years old! they’d screamed—so Murray had begun shoveling papers back into his briefcase and they’d agreed to it. They’d also agreed to his cinematographer and wardrobe assistant, the former the man who had photographed him so brilliantly in Urban Affairs, the latter a kid he’d met doing Wyoming who was a first-rate tennis player. When he repeated Jane’s criticism, that his character—a world-weary playboy who in the course of the film realizes he is in love with his glamorous wife—was so controlled he seemed more pathological than intriguing, they’d sent the director and the writer up to Connecticut and then had agreed that Nicholas could direct his next film. They’d hired his bodyguard-driver, Ernie, and paid Nicholas for his services at a rate greater than Ernie’s annual salary.
They’d rented a villa for him. It overlooked the Adriatic and had a tennis court; every morning at dawn Ernie would drive to the local hotel, pick up the kid, and he and Nicholas could get in two sets before six thirty. They’d outfitted one of the rooms with his trapeze and rings, so he could work out late every afternoon with a full view of the sea. At night he flipped a switch and light flooded the private beach below. A few times a week Edward and the girl he was seeing, the powder girl, would come over and the three of them would swim and have a picnic on the sand, in bathing suits and sweatshirts, served on china by a Serbian butler who sounded as if he’d trained with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
What burned him, what really burned him, was that it was August. Summer. Jane and the girls could have spent the summer with him. He tried to understand. He knew how miserable it made her. Once they’d been reading in bed, and all of a sudden she turned to him and said, with such profound sadness in her voice, “Why can’t I be like everybody else? Why can’t I go to a bookstore?” You can, he’d said, but it had come to nothing. He’d even gotten the name of a psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist told him he would not come to the house. Jane would have to come to his office for treatment. She has to be willing to take the first step, the psychiatrist said. She wasn’t willing
. Please, she’d beg him, whenever he suggested she try, please don’t make me.
She was fine at home. Your wife is some charmer! Nick, where have you been keeping her? She was superb. Gracious hostess. Delightful conversationalist. Informed. Witty. Well-read, naturally. Reporters loved her. “Warm.” “Real.” “The rarest of rare creatures: the contented spouse of a star.”
“‘Nicholas is the elegant taper. Jane is the soft, sure flame that casts a warm glow.’ They paid her for writing that,” Jane commented, looking up from the magazine article she was reading to him. “Someone gave that woman money to write that sentence.”
He’d pleaded with her to come. It will be just a seven-hour flight. We can use the studio’s corporate jet. Please. You can take a pill and knock yourself out, and when you wake up you’ll be there. I’m sorry, she said over and over. I’m sorry.
How many sets of tennis could he play? How many murders in English vicarages could he read about? How many evenings could he spend with Edward and his nineteen-year-old girl friend?
Everything had been done to make him happy. Their shameless eagerness to please him occasionally made him want to say, “I know. I’m being unreasonable.” And they would have said, “Hey, Nick, you should have five thou a week spending money. Who wants to get caught short in Yugoslavia? Right?”
They’d fixed up his trailer the way he’d told them he wanted it done. The first time he entered it he was stunned; it looked very much like his grandfather Samuel’s study. Each day there were copies of the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal on the table. They’d even filled the bookshelves with leatherbound copies of British who-dunits and histories of World War II; he did not know how they discovered his taste in books. It was a spartan room, except for the bed they brought in. It was too big for the space and had an ugly padded leather headboard. He hadn’t used it until the last few days, when he’d finally succumbed to inertia.