Love and Death on Long Island

by Gilbert Adair

  And again there came to my mind notions of representation, of what I had belatedly come to understand as the network of tensions underlying any cinematic representation of a human body, at once a recurrent icon of art history, a smooth, compliant, un-orificed vessel ready to be ‘poured’ into a series of poses, and a living, corporeal presence and identity.

  Nakedness in art, I knew, was a matter of great complexity. A human body in representation, even in a work of pornography, is never naked, is always, in accordance with the art historian’s celebrated distinction, ‘nude’. Hence, because an actor performing to a film camera never ceases to present himself as being ‘in character’, the nudity he proffers up to the spectator’s gaze is not that of his own body but belongs by rights, as would the costume he might wear in another scene, to the character he is playing. In none of his three films, of course, had Ronnie ever let himself appear naked, had only, in one scene of Tex-Mex, shown himself in a pair of low-cut sky-blue bathing-trunks. But were he ever to do so, then the self-exposure would again necessarily be of his own self, just as his smile was his own; it would, in a manner of speaking, advance beyond representation, it would make of his body the object not of a reproduction but of a regard. Since that nakedness had never been offered up, however, and remained a matter of pure speculation, my theory could not be tested; and, with a slight shudder, I realised that it was all there was left me, it was practically the last manifestation of Ronnie’s being, whether in body or soul, that I had still to possess.

  I was seated at my kitchen table, laid out for supper as usual by my housekeeper. I had not worked on my novel for some little while, nor even now, as blinking I rose once more to the surface of the external world, the world of real things and real people, did I contemplate doing so. I had been only half-consciously eating the curry which had been prepared for my supper; when I glanced down at the nearly empty plate, I discovered that the knife and fork were left untouched at its sides, that I had been picking at the meal with my fingers, stuffing it blindly into my mouth with such wholesale and indiscriminate relish that my lips still felt slobbery from stray scraps of chicken and rice and there were stains flecking the buttoned front of my grey woollen cardigan. I sensed that my face had fired up from my having eaten much too hastily, and I had an irresistible urge to blow my nose. I did so and, giving two or three luxuriantly violent snorts for good measure, recomposed my features. ‘At my age,’ I said to myself, then again softly, ‘At my age!’ On the table, beside the plate that bore the smeary remains of my supper, my cuttings book lay open at a page on to which I had pasted one of Ronnie’s most captivating pin-ups. The young actor was sitting backwards astride a chair, his arms resting along the slightly bevelled edge of the white formica chair-back, his shoulders curving forward to take his weight, his chin just brushing his splayed fingers. He had on a white shirt of a light, almost transparent cloth stippled with rows and rows of tiny dots, like perforations on a postage stamp, that somehow managed to appear of an even whiter whiteness than that of the shirt itself. The photograph had not perhaps been very expertly reproduced, for the two whitenesses, that of his shirt-front and that of the formica chair-back, all but dissolved into each other as I looked at them and I had to peer closely to see where one left off and the other began. It was also the imperfect quality of the reproduction, no doubt, that lent the boy’s closed lips an improbably scarlet coloration, as though he were wearing lipstick. This was my own favourite photograph of Ronnie, had always been -and now, now, quite undone by the sway of my senses, I leaned over the table top, so far forward that my nose seemed on the point of grazing the page, and kissed him on his satiny paper lips. It had been a long courtship.

  The following morning, a cold, sunny, reviving morning such as autumn sometimes holds in late reserve, I took a cab into Soho to one of the two newsagents’ shops I had come to frequent. This was, unless there had been a shipping problem, the very day when I might expect to find the latest issue of Teen Dream. Behind the counter the turbanned Indian took impassive note of my appearance in the shop. I at once found the magazine I was looking for and glanced through its pages to assure myself of its contents. Then my eye started to stray to the shelf above, a shelf on which was displayed the shop’s fairly extensive supply of pornography. On the covers of most of these magazines, which were nearly but not quite out of arm’s reach, half-stripped, big-bosomed women, all of them as hard of feature and coarse of limb as naked barmaids, paraded their blowsy charms with repellent coyness. At the far end of the same shelf, however, the end closest the door, were two or three publications that I had already noticed, publications with such names as Vulcan and Jupiter and Toy Boy, concerning the nature of whose appeal, and the precise sexual orientation of whose readership, no ambiguity was possible. I stretched my arm up and, after a moment’s hesitation, pulled down Toy Boy. On its cover stood a young man at the foot of an oak tree, his back to the camera, his head turned to face the purchaser with a gap-toothed but not unappealing grin on his craggy working-class features; as the ends of his undone belt hung loosely at his sides and the top of his jeans was sliding ever so slightly down his buttocks, I had the impression, as I was perhaps intended to, that the lad was urinating or about to urinate up against it. With a quick, covert glance at the newsagent, whose back happened to be turned away, I took a peek inside to make absolutely sure I knew what I was getting for my money – I had become a seasoned customer of clandestine literature and had no intention of being defrauded of my prize. A single glimpse of the inside sufficed: that which I was after was the first and indeed only thing to catch my eye on the page at which the magazine fell open in my hands.

  I closed it again and prepared to take it with the other to the counter. But, even here, even now, I had not so anaesthetised myself to the opinion of the world to remain insensitive to the socio-moral niceties that the situation seemed to entail. Thus was I quite prepared to buy Teen Dream, prepared, too, to be seen buying a rag like Toy Boy, but some remaining shred of decency, of respect, respect for Ronnie, perhaps, rather than for myself, prevented me from buying the two of them together.

  I replaced the more innocuous on the shelves. It was not that I was about to relinquish owning it altogether; I would purchase another copy separately, at the second newsagent’s, a mere hundred yards away.

  Once home, inside my study, its door locked, I read the article in Teen Dream that was devoted to Ronnie Bostock; read it as avidly as ever, even if, with the exception of a passing, teasing reference to ‘a new and exciting movie that may just happen – but I’ll only be uncrossing my fingers to sign the contract!!!’ (not one of your own, I suspect, Ronnie dear), it turned out to be yet another recapitulative chronicle of the relatively few events of note, after all, actually to have taken place in the young man’s life. Then I took a small pair of scissors from a desk drawer and started to cut along the outline of Ronnie’s head in one of the three photographs which accompanied the article. It was his hairline that proved to be the greatest inconvenience, with each tuft, practically each strand, above the line of the forehead having to be snipped at with the utmost caution if I wished to produce a good likeness; equally, I was forced to take a few liberties with the jawline whose shadowy formlessness in the photograph had caused him, once it had been cropped, to appear unwantedly jowly. When I had completed it quite to my satisfaction, I performed the same operation on a second, smaller, monochromatic portrait. Then I picked them up, holding them in a gingerly way between my fingers so as not to crease them, removed Toy Boy from the plain brown envelope into which the newsagent had slipped it, and stepped over to the chaise-longue. Although it was not much after two o’clock in the afternoon, I drew the curtains together and switched on a small table lamp.

  I extended myself on the chaise-longue, aligned my body on its right side, unfastened my belt and eased my trousers and underwear down past my knees. Trembling, as though I might at any instant call a halt to the whole loathsome, mad and degrading busi
ness, yet grimly getting on with it nevertheless, I set the pornographic magazine on the floor beneath me and started to turn its pages one by one. It had come to this. On each of these pages, filled as they were with naked male flesh (youthful but then again, I remarked, not always so very youthful flesh), filled as they were with young but not always so very young men posing salaciously in those settings that would seem to be the favoured preserve of homosexual fantasies (a beach, a swimming pool, a construction site), on each of the heads of these young men in turn, and depending on the size of the photograph or whether it was in colour or in black-and-white, I would place, hoping thereby to have the boy usurp then plausibly assume their diverse nudities, either one of the two little transposed heads of Ronnie Bostock. At the same time, I gently then more vigorously began to masturbate, rediscovering the long dormant cadences of solitary love and longing. But it happened that either the torso I had selected would be too beefy and muscular to carry with any real conviction Ronnie’s still boyishly graceful features; or it would be too hollow-chested, too hirsute, too bony, too squat, too tall, too short, even too horribly tattooed; or the photographic perspectives failed to correspond properly, the respective grains proved impossible to reconcile, the dissimilarities in contrast and definition were too great; or else the slant of Ronnie’s head was so out of line with that of some young bruiser’s body he looked almost as though he were being throttled. Even in the single instance where (if I half-closed my eyes) head and body were fairly reasonably matched -the photograph was of a rather exotically complexioned, heavy-lidded youth sitting naked and hunched on an incongruously chintzy sofa, his slim, hairless legs bent at the knees and gaping apart at the thighs and the toes of his two bare feet curling around the hemline of the sofa’s cushions – whoever this hybrid creature was, it was manifestly not Ronnie. And it never, never would be Ronnie, I knew, as in sheer impotence and despair I hurled the filthy magazine from my sight. It would always be a fraud, a low and disgusting confidence trick that I had tried to play against myself!

  Overtaken by swift remorse and unable to tolerate my ridiculous half-dressed state a second longer, I stood up and adjusted my clothes. I knew now that, if ever I was to draw the poison, there was only one course left to be taken. It is, paradoxically, logic that is the mainspring of every obsession: advancing measure by measure, step by single step, not one of them skipped or leapt over, towards the psychic acrostics of madness itself, such is the path taken, usually consentingly, by the obsessive. By the repulsive charade to which I had just allowed myself to be party, I had attempted to leap over a crucial step and circumvent the logic in whose adamantine machinery I had become enmeshed. But I had also come to know what the next step must be, indeed I must have known it all along, and I stood at the window with my hands folded behind my back in a pose suggestive of some newly won mood of serenity and of a calm and deliberate acceptance of what was to be.

  Eager though I was to be off, I was retained in the city by affairs both literary and practical for some ten days after my decision had been taken; during which time I bought a round-trip ‘plane ticket for New York and alerted my housekeeper to the likelihood that I would be out of London for a lengthy and, until I knew better, open-ended period. I read through what I had written of Adagio, placed the manuscript inside a folder and locked it away in the desk drawer that already contained my album of cuttings. Then, on a day between the middle and end of November, and without advising my agent or indeed any other person of my departure, I boarded my ‘plane at Heathrow.

  If, as I have said, I was fairly widely travelled, this happened to be my very first visit to America, a continent which had never held much interest or allure for me. It was also my first extended trip anywhere for a number of years and only the second time I had flown – and it was not, all things considered, the most agreeable of experiences. I fretted at the fact alone that the aircraft’s first-class section was full, its every seat occupied by dynamic young executives, as I assumed them to be, each of them – sitting in pin-striped shirt-sleeves, balancing some company report on his knees and dreamily and interminably clicking a ballpoint pen – as indistinguishable from his fellows as though all of them were Japanese. I did no more than nibble on the wretched meals the stewardesses would tirelessly set before me. Although (as one for whom the cinema had of late assumed a significance that it had never known before) I raised my eyes from time to time to contemplate the soundless posturing of the bland and blurred forms that drifted across the small cabin screen just in front of me, it was with a gesture of tetchy impatience that I motioned away the offer of a side-order of earphones. And during the slow, solitary hours spent crossing the ocean I fell prey to the worst of the traveller’s anxieties. Why, I would ask myself, why was I here, why flying off to an unknown destination in quest of some as yet not satisfactorily formulated personal craving – one that, if it were ultimately to be satisfied, would lead to nothing else but my having got Ronnie Bostock ‘out of my system’? I knew I could not legitimately hope for more than that yet at the same time I had no wish to be cured, to be restored, to recover my self-possession. I knew equally well that, no matter what the final outcome would be, no matter that all the odds were against the success of my mission, I would never permit myself to return empty-handed.

  I had not consciously tried to sleep, but I found myself awakened, as the aircraft was already making a banked descent towards Kennedy Airport, by the sound of an amplified male voice announcing that we were flying directly over Long Island. I sleepily roused myself and peered out of the tiny cabin porthole. There, spread out beneath me, only slightly obscured from my view by drifts of cobwebby cloud that were attenuated almost to the point of transparency, there, somewhere amid that peaceful quiltwork of half-rural, half-suburban America, perhaps in one of those neatly aligned little settlements of red-roofed, white-walled houses or else, more likely, in one of the larger residences set down on its own in green parkland and from which there would come a flash of translucent blue, the blue, I had no doubt, of a swimming-pool – somewhere down there was where Ronnie lived and where I myself was fated to go. And the wear and tear on my system that this knowledge produced struggled, with the reckless exultation of my heart.

  My arrival into New York passed off without incident. The airport’s customs and immigration inspection turned out to be neither gruelling nor protracted, not at any rate the ordeal I had expected it to be. I immediately found a taxi ready to bear me off to my hotel; I dutifully gave myself up to admiring the city’s incomparable and (it being late in the afternoon) now half-illuminated skyline; then my coal-black cabdriver was ploughing and plunging through the vertiginous canyons of ‘downtown’ Manhattan.

  It was my hotel, however, located exactly halfway between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, that did not at all meet my expectations. It had been recommended to me many years before by one of my Cambridge friends – my wife and I had been planning an American tour, that had had to be cancelled when she was suddenly stricken with the illness of which she was shortly thereafter to die -and he had expatiated with some warmth on its decaying splendour and the solid old-fashioned virtues of its service. But what I was to discover when I entered the lobby could be called decayed only in reference to taste: a long, split-level foyer whose lower-level bar area was laid out in a sickly spectrum of beiges and apricots, its chairs and low tables all with arms and legs of tubular steel and speckled black cushions which looked from where I was standing like so many enormous blackcur-rent pastilles. The style, too, of my own suite I immediately recognised as being merely an extension of that of the lobby. Its apricot-and-black lavatory or ‘bathroom’ in particular made me think – as I could not resist remarking to the bellboy who accompanied me, a dark-haired, prettified young man rendered all the more effeminate by having been obliged to sport a suit of hyper-virile black leather livery – of ‘a bathroom in Hell’. At this comment the young bellboy, to my amusement, could not have appeared more crestfallen than if it wer
e he himself who had been responsible for designing the fittings. But just as suddenly he grinned again (exposing what looked to be a tiny jade earring that he had had in some manner clipped on to the upper rim of one of his front teeth) and, as though personally to bear on his shoulders the city’s reputation for smart repartee, replied, ‘Maybe, though, that’s why Hell is Hell -because it doesn’t have a bathroom.’ He chuckled at his own joke, which he seemed also, thoughtfully, to be storing away in his mind for a more promising occasion.

  On my putting the question to him, he informed me that the hotel had only the year before been purchased by an international consortium (here, presumably to convey the vast sums of money this consortium had had at its disposal, he slyly rubbed one thumb and forefinger together), which then had had it completely renovated. While he chattered away, I scrutinised him cynically, thinking to myself, ‘He really is an American Felix Krull,’ and wondering whether his duties would necessarily cease at the bedroom door. As he turned to leave, I pressed a dollar bill into the palm of his open hand and watched him sashay along the hallway towards the lift.

  That evening I strolled out into the streets of the city in search of some suitable restaurant and almost at once found myself in Times Square. I was exhausted and out of sorts, my eyes smarted as though the pupils had been scraped with sandpaper, my ears revolted at the pandae-monium of police and ambulance sirens, screeching tires and endlessly gabbling pedestrians that filled the heavy-scented night air. I was more confused than delighted by the hurry and flurry of New York, by all its noise and neon. I was assailed by nameless fears and began to suspect everyone whose path I crossed of hoping to pick my pockets.

  Suddenly, before I knew what had happened, I was waylaid by an outlandishly tall, pot-bellied black man, barefoot and shirtless, his left ear caked with congealed blood, his right ear missing and in its stead something ghastly, something without form, as obscene and grotesque and misshapen as an ear, were an ear not just an ear. He lumbered towards me, gripped me by the lapels of my overcoat and kept muttering the same demented sentence between his teeth and into my face, a sentence of which all I could make out was the reiterated, ritualised salutation: ‘Hey, man … Hey, man … Hey, man … Hey, man …’ In his right hand he held a half-consumed hot dog nestling in wads of greasy paper and dripping with mustard that looked like soft diarrhoea, but it was with his left, in a to-and-fro motion, that he tugged viciously at my coat lapels, and I recoiled with a shudder from every foul blast of a breath that smelled of some unholy compound of whisky and fried onions. This lasted some minutes, until I panicked altogether, pulled myself free at last and with the sound of rumbling, mocking laughter behind me took to my heels.