Three Balconies

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  McMartin and I joined Beau one night at Wally and Joseph’s Restaurant on West Forty-Ninth Street. He was in a despondent mood and reported that he and Volkov had parted company.

  “I should have stuck with you, Cliff,” he said, as if the Russian and I had waged a furious struggle for his services.

  For most of the evening, he carried on a dark conversation with himself, breaking out of it now and then to rattle off the names of writers whose careers he felt were on the wane.

  “To think,” he said, at a later point, “that this could have happened to the great Beau LeVyne. . . .”

  In an aside to me, McMartin asked, with genuine curiosity: “Why is it the great Beau LeVyne?”

  In the men’s room, as Beau and I washed up, he carried on about Volkov’s treachery and broken promises. When I started for the door, he stepped in front of me, sealing us off for the moment in a fluorescent capsule of tile and concrete. I had seen the look of hatred on his face before, but it had never been directed at me.

  “You’re in my way, Beau,” I said, with forced equanimity.

  After a moment or two in which the air was murderous, he said “Sorry,” as if he had accidentally sipped my drink. Then he stepped aside.

  He entered into a dark phase after the Volkov experience. I learned from McMartin that he had begun to collect debts for a shylock whose specialization was lending money to writers and artists who were down on their luck. This, of course, assured him of a large and steady clientele. McMartin, an unlikely gambler, considering his slim earnings as a critic, had fallen behind in some payments and Beau had been assigned his case for collection. After a single visit to the critic proved unproductive, Beau made threatening calls to McMartin’s mother in a nursing home. When I mentioned this to Beau at some later point, he shook his head in awe – and admiration.

  “Cliff, you’ve completely missed the point. It was McMartin who called my mother in a nursing home.”

  Beau disappeared for awhile, during which time I received a card from him in Tangiers, saying he had been doing some research in the area. Soon afterward, he dropped round to our apartment to meet Helen and left after a short visit. I found a rectangular-shaped gift package on the dining room table, which I took to be a record album. It turned out to be a block of hashish, so exquisitely chiseled it might have passed for a work of art. I’m not a stranger to drugs, but as it happened, he had not picked one of my favorites. Still, it seemed a pity to waste it. I tried to make a gift of it to a street friend of mine whose permanent headquarters is an alleyway in the East Nineties.

  “That’s all very fine,” said Spofford, after listening to me sing the praises of the exotic substance, “but I sure could use a little blow.”

  Helen and I began to spend most of our time on Morris Island, losing track not only of Beau but of the city as well. McMartin told me Beau had been seen around town with a man in a camouflage suit who literally threw money in every direction, fondled women indiscriminately and tossed balls of cocaine to the fish in the open tank of a Chinese restaurant on Mott Street. Soon afterward, I saw an item in the newspaper saying that Beau and his companion had been arrested and indicted on two counts of running guns and selling cocaine.

  Literary friends gathered round after he had been released on bail. I was invited to a party that had been given to boost his spirits. He seemed peaceful and resigned as if some troublesome burden he carried had finally been removed. And he appeared mildly to enjoy the celebrity that had been conferred upon him. He regaled the group with stories of his incarceration at the Manhattan correctional facility, the intolerable food, the nights sleeping on the floor alongside AIDS victims. Listening to him, you would have thought he had gotten himself arrested and was off to prison on behalf of the literary community – so that he could report back on what it was like.

  “My God,” McMartin said to him, “you’re the only one here who’s actually done something.”

  The arrest seemed to draw him closer to Heidi. They joined us at the beach for dinner at our cottage. Beau was solicitous to his wife and she appeared to welcome his new concern for her. They seemed the very model of a civilized ’80s couple. I envisioned future dinners for the four of us around the fire. Late in the evening, he took me aside and showed me a treatment he had written for a proposed film to be called “Bills.” I glanced at it and saw that it began with a former athlete and Ivy League star disgustedly throwing his mail up in the air and saying, “Bills, bills, bills.”

  In the next scene, he is in Tangiers, flagging down from the hills a truck carrying a ton of hashish and a shipment of weapons. I suggested that the character and his motivation might be fleshed out a bit, but he disagreed and asked me to help him sell it to a studio. I made an attempt to do this, but without conviction or success.

  Later, when I remarked to Helen on Beau’s new closeness to his wife, her response was succinct.

  “That woman hates that man.”

  Heidi filed for divorce the following week. Soon afterward, I received a call from Beau that seemed to be coming from a phone booth on the street.

  “I have a little cupcake in the car,” he said, “and I need some ‘lady.’”

  He whispered the last word, which of course was a code name for cocaine, one that was already out of vogue. I had taken the second of two scotches I allot myself during the televised seven o’clock news. Had I started on a third, I might have given him the number of an actor I know who supplements his modest income by doing voice-overs and selling small amounts of cocaine. As it was, I said it had been years since I’d had any interest in drugs.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “You’re better off,” he said glumly and hung up.

  It hardly needs to be pointed out that he had been asked to cast around for dealers in exchange for a reduction of his sentence. I like to think not, but with the reality of a long prison sentence staring me in the face, I might have done the same.

  McMartin reported that Beau was wearing a wire, but that I was not to be concerned.

  “When it’s functioning, he’s going to wink broadly to alert unsuspecting friends.”

  It’s easy to conclude that normal life ends once you’ve agreed to be rigged up that way, that it’s a kind of castration and that only impotence can follow. I don’t feel that applied in Beau’s case. I can see him making a small adjustment in his private rudderless code and turning it into a feat of daring, along with gun-running and shooting the rapids, one that would earn him the awed respect of his new friends in law enforcement.

  I could imagine him saying with boyish delight: “They couldn’t get over it, Cliff. They’d never seen anyone go into the places I’ve gone with that wire. You have no idea of the people I have on tape.”

  I stayed away from Beau while his trial was pending since I felt I knew the way his mind worked. I sensed that he resented my freedom and felt it was unfair somehow that I had not been arrested with him.

  “He carries a gun now,” McMartin told me.

  I could picture a scenario in which Beau would create an incident, and the two of us would end up being slaughtered side by side. He was found guilty and given a three-year sentence which seemed harsh for a first offense. There was a feeling that the expensive corporate suits he wore, the Princeton background and the letters of support that came in from luminaries had somehow worked against him.

  I corresponded with Beau when he was in prison. His letters were great sheaf-like affairs in which he dwelled on familiar prison themes – the human spirit was indomitable . . . mere walls could not contain an individual . . . wasn’t life itself a prison? Genet was quoted liberally. Apart from sections thrown over to Heidi’s treachery, the letters seemed to be written for posterity rather than to me. And I had a sense that copies were being mailed off to others. I kept my replies short and sweet, attempting to cheer him up with items about mutual friends who had fallen low. What could I say to him? Chin up? This too shall pass? It was awful,
if inevitable that he had ended up in jail and that’s all there was to it. Only McMartin, with his great heart, made the long railroad journey to visit him. He reported only that Beau looked fit, and complained that he was not receiving enough magazines.

  The years slipped by for me if not for Beau. I did some serviceable scripts in Hollywood. A lame effort became a hit. Helen gave birth to Derrick and it occurred to me that Beau would be envious since he had always wanted a son. After his release from prison, a party was given in his honor in which he doled out prison stories. McMartin said he was saving the best for a planned memoir. Beau then slipped off to Morris Island. I put off seeing him, not knowing what he would be like after his incarceration. I had been reading a novel by Naguib Mahfouz in which the main character eerily leaves prison and sets about to kill his wife and best friend. But it seemed cowardly to keep ducking my old friend. McMartin, with two infants of his own, had had him over for dinner without incident.

  I finally agreed to meet Beau at a steak restaurant which is located on a bluff within walking distance of his beach house. It is a big and draughty place that does a brisk business during the summer months and then tails off predictably in the off-season. We had met there before and enjoyed having it virtually to ourselves in December and January. When he entered the restaurant I saw that any fears I had of him were groundless. He wore a denim jacket and seemed compact and strong, but he had aged dramatically. His eyes were watery and subdued as if he had undergone a religious conversion. Obviously, he had left something behind in prison. The net effect was heart-breaking.

  As was his habit, he ordered his steak raw, not rare, the only one I’d ever known to do so. Adhering to a tradition of ours, I asked for the Steak à la Stone (sliced beef on a bed of soft onions and peppers) a dish that had first been prepared for me by Heidi. In the past, whenever I placed this order at a restaurant, Beau would call out to the waiter: “The way Heidi LeVyne makes it” and I would laugh, which delighted him since he was unsure of himself as a wit. But on this occasion, he let the waiter go without comment. He said little about prison life. His only friends had been the black inmates. He had lost an inch in height. We talked a bit about past adventures and the women we had known, but the reminiscences were stiff and had no real flavor to them.

  As near as I could piece it together, he spent his days at the beach working out in the morning and doing spiritless jobs around the house; at night he fought for sleep. He seemed unable to come to grips with the reality that Heidi (who had left him) and his two daughters (fully grown and married) and his dog (dead for several years) had not all been waiting for him at the house upon his release from prison. On this subject, he was delusionary.

  “If I had Helen,” he said, halfway along in the evening, “it would have all been different.”

  The comment was unusual in that he hadn’t seemed to notice my wife. This is not easy to say, but Helen is a plain-looking woman. It surprised me that the qualities I found appealing in her – the twinkle and the strength and the loyalty – were apparent to others. It occurred to me when he made the remark – and not without some shitty satisfaction – that over the years our positions had become reversed. When we first met, he was shored up by his family and I felt I had very little. Now, unforgivably, I had Helen and Derrick and he was the one without hope. As far as he was concerned it all came down to that and he may have been right.

  I saw him for dinner from time to time in the months that followed. After one such meeting, we visited a local pub, making a modest stab, I would suppose, to recapture one of our nights on the town. Quickly, I struck up a conversation with an attractive doctor who lived in Manhattan and was spending a quiet week on the island. While not entirely ruling her out as a candidate for myself, I tried to steer her around to Beau, who was available. She knew nothing of the stay in prison, but obviously saw something in him that I did not. Gathering up her things, she left quickly.

  Despite the sad content of the evenings, they were pleasing to me; unlike Helen, who had fallen in with a group of young mothers, I had not made any friends on the island.

  “Such is the state of my life that the only one I look forward to having dinner with is Beau LeVyne.”

  I said this to McMartin, expecting him to laugh, but he had become a moral rock and only stared at me judgmentally.

  Beau called one morning and said he had a present for me.

  “Can we have dinner tonight so I can give it to you?”

  It was short notice, and I had other plans, but I picked up some urgency in his voice, and I agreed to meet him. Then, too, I have a weakness for presents and was curious to see what he had picked out for me. He limped noticeably when he came into the restaurant; I asked him what was wrong. He said that he had developed a chronic hip injury in prison and had been advised to undergo surgery. It was an option he waved off as being pointless. He had learned that he was about to lose the beach house in the divorce settlement – which would leave him without a place to live and he had taken this badly. I had been having some trouble of my own at home and saw this situation as an opportunity. He was a relatively young man – just turned fifty.

  “Why not just pick up stakes,” I said, “start over in a new place – Paris or Portugal . . . or Hong Kong.”

  There was the parole limitation, but why couldn’t he just disappear and create a new identity? There were friends, myself included, who would give him money to do so. I felt that if I could do such a thing, why not Beau? But whatever I said disappeared into blank eyes and a head that suddenly seemed made of straw.

  Toward the end of our dinner, he brought out the present. It was an embossed T-shirt given to cast members of a play I’d written many years before. They had formed a Broadway Show League softball team. I had turned up for the game only to find Beau, playing my position at third base. I didn’t understand what he was doing there – he had no connection with the show – but he had the facility of doing that, simply showing up in similar situations. As a result, I’d had to spend the afternoon at second base, off-balance, able to field the ball but clumsy in making the throw to first base. I was annoyed at the time and wondered why he had done that. I had written the play, why couldn’t I play my position? But that, of course, was the point. I had the play, I didn’t need the position.

  I thanked Beau for the shirt, which I suspected hadn’t been laundered, and hugged him in the parking lot, continuing – and for some reason with mounting alarm – to suggest faraway places for him to go, ones without extradition treaties. When I had run out of ideas, he got behind the wheel of his battered Alfa Romeo sports car and drove off. A waitress, who was finishing her shift, watched him drive off.

  She said: “That’s the loveliest car I’ve ever seen.”

  McMartin called several weeks later to say that Beau had committed suicide; to do so, he had rigged up a smothering contraption in his basement.

  “It’s something he learned in prison,” said McMartin.

  I can’t say that I was shocked, but I was surprised. No matter what the signs, you don’t expect someone in decent health to leave the party when it’s in full swing. But of course for Beau there had never been a party.

  There was a small ceremony in a nondescript church on Morris Island. A few, but not many of his literary friends attended. The church was filled for the most part with young local couples. Beau had worked with them as an athletic coach in the community, leaving one to wonder why he wouldn’t have done more of that instead of attaching himself to celebrated writers.

  McMartin was the only speaker. An authority on deconstructionist criticism and a man who had interpreted the most arcane of literary works, he struggled with his remarks and finally threw up his hands.

  “I did not understand Beau LeVyne.”

  When the ceremony had ended, McMartin and I watched the pretty girls as they left the church. I tried to lighten the atmosphere.

  “Is it bad form,” I asked, “to cruise a friend’s wake?”

&
nbsp; He gave me one of his gray looks and I decided never again to tell him any jokes.

  A few of us trooped off to the island pub. When we had ordered drinks, a bearded public relations man I’d never thought of as being insightful said, with regard to Beau’s literary friendships: “He tasted the lion’s heart and thought he would become the lion.”

  The supermarket boy who had replaced me in the infamous volleyball game was there.

  “It took a lot of balls to do what Mr. LeVyne did,” he said.

  Taking the party line, I said it took more courage not to do what he did – but I knew what he meant.

  An instantly unpleasant man who had gone to school with Beau joined us and said that Beau had registered at Princeton as Benny Levine.

  “His father was a racing tout at Aqueduct.”

  And then the man left, as if his sole purpose in being there was to make this announcement. I thought he might have something to say about the perfect little story Beau had published – but the writing of it was to remain a mystery.

  The bartender, who looked like a boy but turned out to be a girl, said that Beau had been to the pub on a few occasions.

  “What was your impression of him?” McMartin asked.

  “He was very nice,” she said, and then added what to me was the saddest note of all. “He asked me to go to a movie.”

  Could any of us have saved him? (And I’m aware here that I’ve conveniently made us into a group.) He gave off enough signals; yet none of us responded. What would it have required? Moving in with him? Holding his hand? Staying with him until he got to another place? In that arrangement he might have continued on indefinitely. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that he would have done this much for any one of us. If nothing else, it would have given him an activity. But he had time on his hands; we were occupied and turned away. Was it that he had outlived his usefulness? That he was glum and played out and had lost his entertainment value?