"I have the right to know if you are," I said, feeling myself on shaky ground.
"You know, the next time I want to make love," he mumbled into his pillow, "I'll call your assistant and set up an appointment."
"Exploitative bastard!"
Even turned away, even from in back, he was still strong enough to grab me and pull me close to his face. "Get serious, will you! Who but you would do all this shit for me?" he asked, gesturing at the edge of the bed, referring to our ritual that kept crippling incapacity at bay a few more days.
"They all would!" I said. "Thad! Any one of them!"
"You are Mr. Myxtplqztrx! Sixth-dimensional jerk!"
"All I ask is give me advance warning when you... split...."
"Idiot!" he moaned, letting me go and turning away.
"...So I don't end up looking a complete fool," I finished.
"Anything! Anything you want!" He covered his head with the pillow.
I got in bed next to him, still irritated, and in the dim light I picked up and began to read the novel I kept on the bed table.
Fifteen minutes later, he was lightly snoring and I was involved in the book, but my eyes were beginning to smear the words on the page. When I shut off the light and slid down the mattress, Matt moved next to me in the dark and we assumed our sleep position: me on my back, flat and motionless as a corpse in its coffin, he on one side facing me, one arm thrown over my midsection, one leg thrown over my lower body, effectively trapping me, his other hand lightly gripping my dick.
"Mr. Myxtplqztrx!" he murmured once in his sleep.
Four phones were ringing at once. And all of them were for me.
The Grunt fielded them one after another, writing down messages, then he looked up and pointed to the phone, held up a finger so I'd pick up line one, and picked up his own receiver. Not six feet away, at her own desk, also on the phone, Sydelle Auslander had crossed her long legs, as she was rifling through a folder while on hold. This, I thought, is my staff. God help me.
"Boss wants you!" the Grunt said. "I don't know. He didn't say," he quickly added, cutting me off at the pass.
"Sit on it, Bernard," I said casually, "and rotate! Who were the others?"
I could see him go through the messages. "No one important. No one important. And your dance buddy."
"Jeffrey? I wanted to talk to him! Did you tell him I've been trying to reach him?"
"I did. He said he's been living at the tubs. He met Mr. Wrong from— are you ready?—Cincinnati there and hasn't been home for two days."
"Is he home now?"
"He gave me three phone numbers. Aren't you going in?"
"In... a... minute!"
"Do you know what it's about?" the Grunt said.
I didn't. I thought a bit. Maybe... No, I didn't have a clue. But I did know that whenever Harte called me into his office on the afternoon that the magazine was going to bed, it was bound to be trouble—real trouble!
I hung up the receiver. Stood up. Turned toward the door to our publisher's office. And strode instead directly into the art director's studio next door.
Newell Rose was seated on the floor in fall lotus position. The darks of his overlarge pale-blue eyes were hidden somewhere deep in their sockets. Around me, the studio looked unusually spotless, even for such a complete anal-retentive type like Newell. His light board was clear, pristine, shut off. His desk was clean. Rolls of tape and wrapped bunches of rubber bands and stickums were arrayed by size and color to one side. Upon the walls around us, in precise, perfect double-page boards was the entire current issue of the magazine, all neat and clean and finished. Ready to be picked up by our printer in about an hour. Or so I hoped— against hope.
I thought, Newell knows trouble's looming. Or at least he guesses that it's on its way! Otherwise he wouldn't be so intent on centering himself like this. But I couldn't be certain.
"I'm not even dreaming of interrupting," I said. "But Harte just called me into his office. So..."
"Shit! Fuck! Piss! Nigger! Kike! Wop!" Newell chanted his mantra aloud without even moving his lips.
"...I just thought I'd warn you," I said and quickly ducked back out of his office.
If Harte wanted to see me, that meant changes would have to be made at the last minute, and any changes to be made at the last minute meant Newell would have to stick around and make them on the boards—painfully make them, since by this stage in the magazine's production, he'd already formed a complete universe of order and beauty and perfection centering around what? The finished issue, of course! Which Harte—with me as his agent—was about to suddenly, mindlessly, demonically destroy.
Back out in the oversized, big-windowed pressroom I could see the Grunt on the phone again. He spotted me, raised the receiver above his head, and shook it from side to side. In the odd if somewhat primitive semiology of Bernard Gunzenhausen's body language as my assistant at Manifest, holding the phone up in the air and shaking it like that meant crucial, meant desperate, meant one of only two persons could possibly be on the other end of the line—the President of the United States, whom the Grunt respected for his power yet personally despised, or Matt Loguidice, whom he adored unstintingly and for whose sake he would willingly die the most humiliating and painful death.
I went to an abandoned advertising person's desk with the nearest empty phone and picked up line four. It wasn't Matt. It was:
"Hi, Cuz. Hope I'm not getting you at a bad time."
"Alistair? Where are you?"
"Actually I'm at the Pines Harbor public telephone. Reason I'm calling is that something has come up and... Tom and Juerg have decided to continue on to Bar Harbor in the boat and my... the... you know, papers haven't come through yet."
"You checked the post office?"
"Again! I can't really do anything until all this is settled. I was wondering... You have a spare room. Could I possibly stay at your place out here until..."
Gevalt! Matt would have kittens if I called and asked him.
"You know, it's okay with me," I said. "But I'd have to check with the others. Luis and Patrick and..."
"Matt called them already and they agreed," Alistair amazed me by saying.
"He did?" My Matt did that for Alistair?
"I explained to him that it won't be for long," Alistair said. "Just until I get the papers and the cash draft comes through from our Parisian bank to the little Chemical office out here."
I was still astonished Matt had agreed. He was so finicky about his privacy. Unless... Could he have done it for my sake? To be good to me because he was feeling guilty about spending so much time with Thaddeus? (I knew how much time exactly; I had my acquaintances, my friends, my spies, in and around the harbor and at the Botel.) Whichever it was, I'd have to call Matt later and promise to do something extra nice for him when I flew out.... If I even managed to get out there this weekend.
"Well, if it's okay with Matt and the others...."
"He couldn't have been more gracious about it, " Alistair assured me.
"...I guess it's okay with me."
"That'll be a big help! Thanks. We'll see you tonight, right?"
"Depends upon what happens here."
"The reason I ask is that we decided to cook dinner tonight."
Matt cook? He burned boiled eggs! But Alistair surely must have learned to cook in his years as a French chateau co-owner and house-husband. I told him not to bother. Or at least to wait an hour. "I'll call Matt and tell him my plans for tonight when I know them."
"Thanks again, Cuz. You're a lifesaver."
"Sweet with a hole in my head," I responded, but he'd already hung up.
"I thought you'd want to take that call," the Grunt said. He'd quite shamelessly eavesdropped, leaning on the desk adjacent to where I'd perched.
He was just oozing questions: Who was Alistair really? What was his place, his function, his precise importance in my life?
That's one of the down sides to having a really good, a tru
ly involved, assistant: they give themselves over completely to your life. They adore whom you like. Despise and abhor whom you dislike. Go out of their way to do things you might do for some in your life if you only had the time to do them. Go out of their way to ruin and undo those you'd make trouble for if you only had the time. In short, they help you live your life a bit better, fuller, and more satisfyingly. Yet at the same time they detract from it by always being there and always letting you know that you wouldn't enjoy, say, the latest Broadway hit if they hadn't moved heaven and earth to get you the best seats in the house, or you wouldn't have gotten so spectacularly laid by that cute and terribly grateful number if they hadn't arranged the job interview for him that you'd promised unthinkingly that night, when the head of your dick was running your brain, even though you were meaning actually to follow through and somehow never managed to get around to it. For this, and for his assuming control over things, whether or not I wanted, the Grunt, like all such good assistants, had to be kept in place, even knocked down, reasonably often.
"What is wrong with your pants cuffs?" I suddenly asked the Grunt, having just noticed them and seeing an easy way to get back at him. "Is this some sort of play for sympathy so I ask Harte for another raise for you?"
He stood up and smiled his crooked smile, which was the only time the Grunt even remotely approached human standards for cuteness. He knew we'd begun to play the Game; he'd half expected it, even if he'd not known precisely how I'd introduce it this time. Before his basic submissiveness asserted itself, he said, "Frayed denim cuffs is the current style."
"In Bora Bora, perhaps! In Lvov, certainly! Or Ouagadougou!"
"What would a Pines Queen know about style!" he said, lisping saliva all over himself. He grandly spun away and waddled off to his desk, where he sat down primly and picked up the ringing phone. I could read his still-quivering-with-anger lips form the words "Hello, Beverly Hills Hotel, Front Desk!"
At her desk nearby, Sydelle pretended to be too engrossed in searching for something in her purse to notice the Grant's irritation.
I now dared enter the lion's den.
Harte was on the telephone—naturally. He saw me right away and gestured me into the office with that youthful eagerness that convinced me that I—or the magazine—was facing a real problem.
"You're right you're right you're right," Harte was saying into the phone to someone, his surprisingly deep baritone voice sounding totally insincere, at least from this end.
His pale, wildly curling caterpillar eyebrows trembled as he shook his head from side to side, mimicking something silly, the head of a jack-in-the-box perhaps.
"Tell me everything! Every single word!" Harte said, sounding even more insincere to me, but evidently not to whomever he was speaking, who began to tell him just that—everything. Harte now aped a suddenly deflated balloon and almost vanished behind his desk in his airlessness.
I took the time to look around at the office. Despite the fact that it was located not ten feet from my desk, I seldom came in here. Harte's involved approach to Manifest meant he was often at my desk or at the ad manager's desk or in Newell's inner sanctum. Even so, the place had its idiosyncrasies—some constant, others changing—by which one might gauge our publisher's mood.
Among these, "Jersey Joe," Harte's nearly life-sized stuffed panda, was the most mutable and thus more or less the most emblematic. Joe partly derived his name from the sweater he'd arrived wearing: a basic pullover in the colors of Harte's alma mater, Swarthmore. The other part of his name came from his face—surely the most pugilistic of any teddy bear, never mind panda, ever manufactured: not evil, simply aggressive. Over the years since Jersey Joe had taken up residence in the office, he'd moved from the desk to the floor to a lamp table to the wing chair. His clothing changed too: sweaters exchanged for antique rayon Hawaiian shirts (with matching Ray-Bans, natch), and then onto argyle vests, to Greek boat-neck shirts, to formal shirtffont and black bow tie—all with appropriate accessorization. Today, I couldn't help but notice, Jersey Joe was hung from a wall peg—some eight feet off the ground, by the straps of his studded black leather S/M harness. Hung facing die wall! Each of his stuffed arms and legs had been bound with leather thongs, heavily knotted, pulled up behind his back! His motorcyclist's cap had been knocked forward, shoved down over his always inscrutable button eyes! Uh-oh!
"Blithering idiot!" I heard Jersey Joe's master utter, and I spun around to see the phone already hung up. Harte picked up the receiver again and punched his assistant's line. "If you let him get through to me once more, An-Tho-Nee, I will personally feed you ground glass! Do you understand?"
Then to me he said, "What's all that on your neck?"
I looked down at myself. "I guess they're hickeys!"
Annoyance vanished, and Harte's childlike face lit up with glee. "Dirt!" he shouted. He jumped up, ran to the door, opened it a few inches, and screamed out, "Dirt! Dirt! At last! I've got dirt on Roger!"
"Calm down, Forrest." One of his many affectations was to be called by his middle name. "My lover did it."
His infantine mouth opened all the way. He slammed the office door shut and turned to me. In his preppy chinos and loafers, his pale-blue oxford shirt and school tie, Stephen Forrest Harte resembled an eleven-year-old trying to look adult. His prematurely gray hair, almost platinum in color but purposely kept long enough for Shirley Templeesque curls, didn't help change that impression. Nor did his bambino features: the pudgy cheeks, the playing marble-blue eyes, and pug nose. With all that so prominent, his sketchy mustache and five o'clock shadow virtually vanished.
"Your lover? Your lover of five years? Matthew the gorge-o?"
"The same."
"How perfectly gro-tesque!" He returned to his desk chair and sat himself down wearily. "Roger Roger Roger, when will you ever learn? To have actual, consensual, physical intercourse with one's lover of five years, even a lover as admittedly spectacular as Mr. Longudick, is barely comprehensible. To have that intercourse in such a manner that one perforce bears upon one's very person the unambiguous and ambulatory proof!... Even if one's lover is half-Italian and given to strange bursts of inappropriately spousal passion... This, in the eyes of Nature, not to mention Art, and it goes without saying all Civilized Tenets of Behavior, is gro-tes-quely unacceptable!"
"You mean you and Twining don't play 'Hide the Salami'?"
"Heaven forfend! Twining and I have a mariage blanc. It's one reason why we're invited to the best homes in East Hampton, you know."
Mmmmn, I thought, I can live very well without invitations to East Hampton, and you may eat your heart out, little fellow. "You wanted to see me?"
"I did?" Harte asked, looking like a preteener caught inspecting a condom for rips.
"The Grunt said..."
He suddenly remembered. "Oh right! It's this!" He held up a photocopy of the second spot feature article from the issue that in about nine minutes was to leave the art director's studio and go to press. My heart sank. I'd guessed it would be bad. Now I steeled myself and peered more closely at Sydelle's article, an exposé titled "Jocks in the Powder
Room," with my subline "When it comes to sex, some dykes in the sports world are real wolves!"
"What's the problem?" I asked, trying not to sound too concerned.
"Her!" He pointed to a picture of an all-too-well-known athlete. "If we're going to print that she laps cunt juice, we need proof."
"We've got proof! Two girls said..." I hunted for the place.
"Three! We need three!" he insisted.
"Oh, come on!"
"Three!"
"What is this, The Daily Planet or something?"
"Three or the dirt on her goes!"
"It's the linchpin of the entire article!" I argued.
"Three!"
"Well, then take the article out.... I don't care! You were the one who wanted her to do a feature," I said wearily.
"I still want it!"
"I'll tell her the feat
ure's gone," I said, about to leave the room.
"You're not listening, Rog. I want the feature! You get the third piece of evidence!" Harte said.
"You want Brenda Starr?" I asked. "I take size ten fuck-me pumps."
"We've got to have more than one journalist involved. In case we're sued. And it'll help that you're a male. With only a woman giving the evidence, they could say it's sour grapes or something."
"And how exactly am I supposed to get evidence between now and the time the issue goes to bed?"
"Wasn't Sydelle working up something? Some maid at the motel?"
"Fell through. She wouldn't talk without money. Up front! U.S. Post Office money order!"
"You've got to get her on the line and pressure her."
"You pressure her."
"You're the editor."
"Ex-editor! The hell with you and her out there and all the dykes in sports," I said. "Because I just quit."
"You quit every month." Harte said the obvious.
"I'm so relieved!" I ignored him, addressing Jersey Joe's back in an exaggeratedly relieved tone of voice. "Now I can spend some time with my macho lover at our lovely summer house. Instead of being treated like dirt in this hellhole."
"Please, Roger?" Harte suddenly fell on his knees and grabbed at my pants and begged with his little-boy face and voice. "Please, please, please? You know it will be great. You know everyone will be talking about the article. You know that you'll scoop 'em all."
He went on and on like that, in his usual totally bogus self-humbling act, dragging in my so-called personal pride in the magazine, throwing back at me things that I'd previously said in completely different contexts—in short, irritating and infuriating, yet also daring, me.
When his whining had reached a certain decibel level, I said, "I'll try. No promises!"
"I know you can..."
"I'd just as soon see the article out, her working for Ms., and you fucking your lover!"
Harte drew himself up to his complete five feet, three inches and said with the greatest of dignity, "Now that last was unnecessary and scurrilous!"
I was already out the office door, wishing I had a dozen daggers to toss at the cause of all this ágita.
Like People in History Page 35