Which was too weird, but Jessie recognized that she was just as weird. They each needed to prove something, didn’t they?
“May I introduce myself?” said Henry. “Is that acceptable?”
Jessie noticed Frank standing by. She had brought him, but why? Did she need him here as her conscience?
Then she saw Caleb across the room, framed in the double doors to the terrace. He stood beside a fat neo-punk waiter, looking a bit like a waiter himself in his white dress shirt and Elvis Costello glasses. She could not get used to those glasses or his little soul beard. They still looked like a disguise.
He saw her. He saw them. He stepped inside. He stepped down into the slightly sunken living room, looking at her, looking at the two men with her. No, three. She kept forgetting about Frank, but Caleb wouldn’t care about Frank.
“Happy birthday!” she sang when Caleb stood in front of her. She gave him a kiss on the cheek. It came out sloppier, wetter than intended. “Sorry we’re late. But better late than never, huh?”
64
Caleb stared at the three faces. Or no, four faces, but Frank Earp was not part of this equation. Frank stood back, frowning, waiting, looking chilly. The others—Jessie and Toby and the famous Henry Lewse—were all grinning at Caleb like a pack of shit-eating dogs.
“You must be Caleb Doyle,” declared Lewse.
He held out his hand, and Caleb took it without thinking. The hand felt dryer and tougher than Caleb expected.
“So good to meet you at last,” said Lewse. “When I’ve heard so much about you.”
Which could not help sounding loaded when he stood between Caleb’s sister and Caleb’s ex-boyfriend. What had they told him? Not that it mattered. The man was only an actor. Caleb had known too many actors. With no role to play tonight, no character, Lewse was an absence, but an oddly precise absence, his long face suggesting a footprint in the sand.
“Hello, Caleb,” said Frank. “Happy birthday.”
“Thanks, Frank. Good to see you.” He suspected Frank disliked him, although he wasn’t sure why. But Caleb respected Frank. Frank wanted nothing from Caleb.
“Caleb? Caleb?” said Toby. “Happy birthday, right?”
“Yeah. Hi, Toby. So glad you could make it. And that you brought your new friend.”
Toby grinned and nodded, oblivious to sarcasm. “Henry saw our play tonight. He thinks it’s good. Don’t you, Henry?”
“Quite good. We were all delighted by how good it is.” Lewse spoke in round, plummy, flirtatious tones, still smiling, never dreaming that his host might despise him.
“It is good,” said Jessie. “Really. You got to see it, Caleb.”
“Anyone want something to drink?” said Frank. “I sure do.” And he left without waiting to hear from the others.
Toby continued to gaze at Caleb, all big-eyed and expectant, like a giant puppy hoping to be petted. He wanted Caleb to be jealous. He was so transparent that it was laughable. So why wasn’t Caleb laughing? He’d known Toby and Lewse were coming. He had assumed he wouldn’t feel a thing. But he couldn’t look at Toby now for fear he’d picture him running his tongue over that public English face.
Lewse was watching Caleb with a mild, thoughtful, curious expression. Did he really expect Caleb to be friendly?
Jessie looked pained and apologetic—as well she should. Caleb was furious with her for shoving this pair at him.
He ignored the men and faced Jessie. “You’ll never guess who came tonight. Not in a million years,” he said. “Mom.”
Her head jerked as if the building had hit a bump. “Our mom?”
“Uh-huh. Don’t you ever check your voice mail?”
“You’re kidding. She came into the city for your party?”
“Yeap. But she wanted to see you too.”
“She went home already?”
“Oh no. She’s still here.”
“Oh my God. Where?” Jessie wildly looked around.
“Your mom’s here?” said Toby. “Neat. I’ve never met her.”
The intrusive sound of that slightly froggy voice angered Caleb beyond reason. He turned to Toby and Lewse.
“You two must be hungry. There’s food out on the terrace. Why don’t you go help yourselves.”
“No, I’m fine,” said Toby. “I’ll get something later.”
“Toby.” Caleb kept his temper, but just barely. “Please. Could you and Mr. Lewse allow me and my sister to finish our talk in private? It’s a family matter.”
Toby stared and winced, squinting as if Caleb had just said something vicious.
“Come along, Toby,” said Henry. “Let’s go put on the feed bag.”
“Right,” said Toby. “I’m coming.” His temper raised his voice. “Because I’m hungry. Real hungry. And I’m not gonna be hungry another minute just so other people might think I care about them more than I care about my stomach.”
He wheeled around and stomped away.
“Ah, youth,” said Henry. He nodded good-bye and followed.
Caleb watched him go. He was still angry but was free to express it now, and it all fell on his sister. “Jesus, Jessie. You had to bring your whole damn entourage tonight?”
“My what? Oh no. Only Henry and Toby.” She nervously looked around, as if other unwanted bodies may have followed her. “Is Mom really here? Or did you make that up?”
“No, she’s here. She lay down to take a nap in my bedroom. She was asleep.”
“But she’s so phobic about the city. I wonder why she came?”
“Out of love for me,” he said with a perfect deadpan. “And for you too,” he admitted. “She said she couldn’t go home until you got here. Because you’d be all pissed and out of shape.”
“I wouldn’t be pissed. A little miffed, maybe.” She chewed on the idea a moment. “She didn’t really say that?”
“Why don’t you go ask her? We can go wake her up.”
“That’s okay. Let’s let sleeping moms lie.”
A few minutes ago, Caleb had felt criminally alone at his own birthday party. Now Jessie was here, and he felt less alone, not wrapped in love but tangled up in meaningful aggravation.
“So that’s the great Henry Lewse,” he said.
“What? Oh right.” She stopped fretting about Mom. “But see? He’s not such a bad guy.”
“I guess. For somebody who’s fucking my ex-boyfriend.”
She made a little pout, looking surprised by the idea, then decided not to play dumb. “But I thought you were finished with Toby. You having second thoughts?”
“Not at all. Especially when he shows up with your boss, hoping to make me jealous.”
“Yeah, I was picking up those signals too. But if he can have Henry Lewse, an actor, why would he still want you, a writer?” She smiled. It was a joke, sort of.
“And now he’s going to be a movie star,” said Caleb. “Greville.”
“You don’t need to sneer. Have you read the novel?”
“No. Have you?”
“No. But I read the script. Yesterday.”
“And?”
She was smiling again. Her smile broke apart in a laugh. “It’s a Lolita rip-off. Only this time Lolita is legal—eighteen—and she and her mother team up and kill Humbert Humbert. So it’s a feel-good Lolita. Where mothers can bond with their daughters.”
Caleb laughed with her. No matter how angry he might be with Jessie, he respected her intelligence and enjoyed her humor. So why couldn’t she get her shit together?
“Are they really fucking?” he suddenly said.
“What?”
The question had broken into his brain and he had to ask it. “Or does Toby just want me to think they’re fucking?”
“I—uh—er—um—” Jessie was thrown, not by the question but by the look on his face, the tone of his voice.
“Tell me! That’s why you brought them here!” he charged. “You want to put me in my place! Let me know my life is as big a mess as yours! You must kn
ow if they’re fucking or not!”
“Caleb.” She held her ground, she did not flee. She lowered her head but looked straight at him. “Yeah, I think they’re fucking,” she said calmly. “But it’s got nothing to do with us.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”
But he knew exactly where it came from: his sister loved him, but her unconscious hated him. For various sibling reasons. And his own unconscious understood that and had struck out at her. He understood her unconscious better than he understood his own. Maybe. Yet what does one do with such knowledge? Now was hardly the time to exhume old grudges and built-in sib antipathies.
“Want some cake?” he asked.
65
So that’s Caleb Doyle, thought Henry as he followed Toby out to the terrace. Not quite what he’d expected. He was scrawnier, less American, more bookwormy than Henry had imagined—but he was a playwright. Nevertheless, there was something appealing about him, a mysterious familiarity, although that may simply have been the fact that Henry saw the man’s sister every day. He’d been circling Doyle for the past week, ever since he brought him to orgasm over the telephone. And now they finally met. But there had been no spark, no electric recognition. They had gazed upon each other with as little mutual sympathy as a dog and a cat stranded on an ice floe.
“Damn him,” said Toby. “Did you see the way he looked at me? Like I wasn’t even there. And then he told me to beat it. Get lost.”
“And how did you hope he would look?”
“Like he was sorry, like he still loved me.”
“Like he was jealous, you mean. Which was why you wanted me here.” Henry spoke matter-of-factly, without resentment.
They were standing beside a table loaded with food, neither of them taking a thing. Toby suddenly turned and walked away.
Henry hesitated, then followed. Toby stomped past knots of people, head down, shoulders hunched. He disappeared around a corner. Henry found him facing a stucco wall. He wondered if he were going to bang his head against it. But no, Toby planted a foot on a rung of ladder there and hoisted himself upward.
“Where are you going?” Henry grabbed the boy’s belt.
Toby looked over his shoulder. “Up on the roof. To escape this stupid party.”
“May I come along?”
Toby produced a dull sigh. “I guess.”
Henry followed the heavy hams in khaki as they flexed and swung their way up the ladder. There was a roof above the roof, a tar-paper flatness over the terrace, somewhat shabby but startlingly dark as soon as you stepped back from the edge.
“This is my spot,” said Toby. “From when I stayed here and needed to be alone.” He crawled around the darkness and sat down.
Henry remained standing. The people below were too deep in the gargle of conversation to look up and see him. The terrace suggested the crowded rampart of a castle, a Ludwiggy thing perched on an improbable aerie in a ravine of taller buildings. The windowed mountains stood all around, most of the windows dark—it was after midnight—but a few flickered with telly lights. The ravine narrowed in front of the castle, closing over a pitch-dark garden, then opened wide again on a bright, noisy valley: a street corner full of tiny pedestrians. VILLAGE CIGARS, announced a big red sign. Over the sign were two billboards, one of them that jaunty ad for Tom and Gerry.
“This party,” sneered Toby. “These people. Do you see any real artists down there? No. Just a bunch of jerks on the make.”
“My boy,” said Henry patiently. “We’re all on the make. It’s as natural as breathing. Frivolous to get righteous about it.”
But Toby didn’t hear. He was talking about something else anyway. “He won’t come see our show. He looked right through me. Like I meant nothing to him.”
Henry carefully folded his legs together and sat down beside Toby. They were not sitting on tar paper but on fibrous plastic mats, like floor mats from a car. “Yes, I imagine how that must hurt,” said Henry, still playing Mr. Nice Guy. “But at least you have me.”
He was surprised that he could enjoy being used by this young, self-centered romantic. He supposed he was in love with Toby, but it was an oddly platonic, amused kind of love. The boy was nice to look at. Henry didn’t need to touch him. Or no. That wasn’t entirely true. But looking was sweet as his eyes adjusted to the light.
“Why can’t he love me anymore? He did once. I’m sure of it. But gay men are like that. Shallow. They can love for only so long. He couldn’t even feel jealous. It’s too deep an emotion for him.”
Henry was losing patience with Toby’s single-mindedness. Here was the boy, sitting on a roof with a man who was not just a major Shakespearean, or so the critics said, but soon to be a major movie star. And all he could talk about was that scrawny-arsed playwright down below.
“Here’s an idea,” Henry proposed. “Do you know what’d make our friend truly jealous tonight?”
Toby thought a moment. Then he snorted and shook his head. “Forget it. And you don’t really want to make him jealous. You just want us to have sex.”
“You are so wise, Toby. So perceptive.”
“I thought we were just going to be friends.”
“Nothing could be friendlier.”
“You just want to use me.”
“As you’ve been using me. Not that I mind,” he quickly added. “I’m amused. Even flattered. But I must confess”—he decided to say it all—“that I do find the spectacle of you getting up on your moral high horse extraordinary. I’ve been fair to you. I’ve always treated you as an equal. But it’s been a one-way street. I mean, take the other night. I did everything I could for you, obeyed every request, touching you here, there, pumping away until I was blue in the face. But did you do anything for me? Not a damn thing!” But that wasn’t the point, that was not what he needed to address here. “Oh but we love the young,” he explained. “They have energy, beauty, hope. They are all future tense. All light and air. But your sense of entitlement, Toby, your apparent belief that your youth and good looks put you above a successful veteran of the theater is beginning to annoy me.”
“What are you saying, Henry? You’re pissed because I didn’t—reciprocate the other night?” He couldn’t even name it.
“No! It’s not about blow jobs. It’s more than blow jobs. It’s what a blow job represents.”
Toby was silent for a moment. “I can be selfish,” he confessed. “I’m sorry, Henry. But that proves how much I love him, doesn’t it? That it can make me mean to other people.”
Henry irritably crossed his arms together, so he wouldn’t slap him. “It’s not that you’re mean. I’d just like to be appreciated more.”
“All right. I’ll make it up to you. Why don’t you lie back?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I want to appreciate you, Henry. I want to reciprocate.”
Before Henry could argue, before he could explain that he was not just talking about sex, Toby leaned forward on all fours and kissed him on the mouth.
It was a warm, slow, friendly kiss. It was a wonderful kiss, like a first kiss, no hands but lots of tongue, like when you’re fifteen and you start snogging backstage with your best friend, the Artful Dodger, not knowing how far a kiss can go, where it will take you.
Toby broke off the kiss. “Yes? Okay? Please.” He was unzipping Henry’s zipper. “It’ll make me feel better.” He brought a plump prick out into the night air. “Lie down. Make yourself comfortable.”
Henry leaned back with his head toward the ladder. He could clearly hear the party below. He’d have to twist his neck around if he heard someone climbing the ladder. He propped himself on his elbows to watch Toby.
It did not look like an act of love. It looked more like penance. Henry was not fully aroused. And Toby was not very good. He did it timidly, as if it were unclean, keeping his mouth wide open. There were occasional ticklish snorts into Henry’s fly. But it didn’t have to be good sex. It was onl
y symbolic sex.
Henry remembered the windows all around, where people may or may not be looking down on them. Not a very flattering picture of a beloved Broadway star, he thought.
66
When Jessie came out to the terrace, she found Frank standing at the table under the beach umbrella, loading a plate with wedges of cheese, ham, and melon.
“I just realized,” he said, “I haven’t eaten all day.”
“Me neither.” But she had no appetite. Just looking at the picked-over rainbow of food was enough to fill her.
“Your brother didn’t seem very happy to see us.”
“Who knows what the fuck Caleb wants anymore?”
Frank gave her a forlorn, miffed, knowing look. “What did you hope to prove by bringing everyone down here?”
“I wasn’t out to prove anything. I just wanted to have fun. I thought it’d be fun. Can’t anybody have fun anymore? The rest of you people are so damned serious.”
“Uh, Jessica?” It was Kenneth Prager. “Have you seen Mr. Lewse? He told me to meet him out here to finish the interview.”
Jessie peered through the French doors, then up and down the terrace, looking for Henry, but also for her brother. Not that Caleb would be freaked to find Prager here. He’d probably find that funny. And if he didn’t, screw him.
“Sorry, Kenneth. Don’t know. Did you check the john?”
“I was just there myself.” He sounded indignant that she hadn’t kept track of his whereabouts. “I’ll check inside again,” he said with a grave sigh. “And then I’m going home.”
Frank watched him depart. “It wasn’t just fun,” he told Jessie. “You brought us here to make a big ruckus and get attention.”
“That’s a good one,” she said. “A real ripsnorter. Caleb says I did it to put him in his place. To prove his life is as shitty as mine.”
“But you have a good life. Both of you have good lives. Although that won’t mean much coming from me, the loser.”
“You’re never going to let me forget I said that, will you?”
“No. Because it hurts each time I remember it. But especially now when you’re working for a big winner.”
Lives of the Circus Animals Page 31