Late in the Season

by Felice Picano

  Jonathan was so startled by the line of attack, he almost laughed.

  “I think you’re jealous,” he said.

  Daniel ignored it. “Let’s get off the phone so I can start calling British Airways.”

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t come here.”

  “Why not? It’s half my house too. I paid the entire down payment, if you’ll recall.”

  “Be rational, Daniel. You’ll be fired from the film, word will get out immediately. You’ll be called irresponsible. You’ll be sued for endangering production. You’ll never get work again. Your career will be washed up, now, at the very moment when it’s finally going somewhere.”

  Calmly, “You’re right. All the more reason to make her into purée of teenager and to beat the shit out of you when I get there. ’Bye.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re acting like a Forty-second Street Puerto Rican transvestite.”

  “What are you acting like? Cary Grant? For chrissakes, Jonathan, you’re obviously completely flipped out and need help desperately. I’ll tell the producer you’ve gone bonkers. Everyone understands that.”

  Jonathan was no longer amused. “Well, do whatever you want to. Come here or stay there. I don’t care. But know this: I’m not flipped out. The solitude hasn’t gotten to me. I’m not schizoid from too much creative work. I’m quite sane, Daniel. And you’re going to have to accept this as a sane decision. And it has nothing to do with getting some kind of twisted revenge on you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I don’t think it’s that at all,” Daniel said.

  “Good. Because it isn’t. I don’t know what it is really either. But I’m developing as a composer. And I’ve got to expand, to see things in other ways, to experiment. You’re the one who always says, ‘Change or Die.’ Well, maybe that’s what’s happening to me. Maybe being gay is just a stage in one’s development, as Freud thought. Or maybe we’re capable of loving men and women equally well, equally validly. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, Dan. You can’t deny me the chance to change my life, can you? What right do you have to deny it? You’re the one who always says ‘Your first responsibility is to yourself.’ God knows, you follow that philosophy. So, that’s what I’m doing now, finding out what those responsibilities really are. What I really want. Who I really am. What my true commitments are.”

  It was a mouthful, Jonathan knew, sorry he’d gotten going on it. But after all, Daniel wanted it. It was clear he wouldn’t settle for anything less. Yet Jonathan wondered where it had all come from. He certainly hadn’t been thinking anything of the sort lately. He’d done everything possible to avoid thinking about it. Yet here it came forth, like some revivalist communicant spouting gibberish, talking in tongues. And its coming so made it seem all the more valuable now that it was said, as though unconsciously he’d been thinking this way all the while and was only now admitting it—to Daniel and to himself.

  All the more surprise then when Daniel said, “I’ll tell you who you are, Jonathan Lash. You’re my lover of the past eight years. The person I love most in this love-filled and hate-filled existence. You are a brilliant, famous, still rising composer of popular music that may come to be regarded as classical in the not too distant future. You are someone who doesn’t always know who or what precisely he wants. You are committed to music, the theater, the good life, great sex, and me—not necessarily in that order. That’s who you are,” Daniel concluded.

  “As for what you are doing with that poor teenage girl, I can even sort of understand that, odd as it is. You’re having what’s known as a midlife crisis. Male menopause is another name for it. Everyone seems to be getting it lately. It means that all of a sudden you turn around and more than half your life is lived, and there’s a great deal you haven’t done you were certain you’d get a chance to do. All those boys you haven’t slept with, all those books you haven’t read, all those movies you just kept missing, all those pieces of music you intended to write but could never find the time for, all those wonderful places around the world you wanted to go to, but somehow never bought the tickets for when you had a free week. You turn around and see the present, and it is reality, which is the most hideous bringdown when you’re creative and have wishes and whims. Reality, darling, r-e-a-l-i-t-y. Sorry, love. But that’s what it is. And it’s a drag, because you don’t think it will alter, as it probably will, so subtly you’ll be surprised, or so suddenly you’ll go into shock. So you think, ‘Man, this is it. Let me out.’ I know, Jonathan. I went through the same changes last year myself. Remember? When I came home from Toronto and began playing around with the cute but dumb thing from the West Coast? You helped me through it then—good lover that you are, and you are the best—and now I’m going to help you through yours. See you tomorrow night. And get her out of the house!”

  The phone clicked off.

  Jonathan held it, dead, for a minute. He was blown away by Daniel’s last barrage. Then he realized he still held the receiver.

  He put it carefully in its cradle. Carefully, because suddenly everything around him seemed terribly fragile and frangible. The room he sat in—the so familiar room—looked totally alien, as though some subtle shift had altered its proportions since he’d been on the telephone: nothing he could measure, but clear, there.

  His next reaction was disbelief—in the room, the house, the phone call, Daniel, himself. He even gripped the sides of the chair he sat in, as though he were in the middle of an earth tremor and the floor was about to give way.

  That lasted a minute or so, and was followed by a slow but welling rise of rage at Daniel, which became intense, flashing anger, the kind that would make him explode.

  When he calmed down a bit, he called the international operator and asked to have a call put through to Daniel’s number. He was proud of how calmly he did this, how calmly he rehearsed to himself what he would say to Daniel, as the operator disappeared to find a line for him.

  When she returned, she said he would have to wait for another line, perhaps twenty minutes.

  He tried sitting there in the chair, waiting. But the words kept going around in his head, making him angry again, which he didn’t want. So he stood up, went to the closet, found the pair of corduroy pants he’d given Stevie to wear the night of the storm, put them on, a little tight, and found a pair of sneakers and sweatshirt, put them on too, and went outside.

  The beach was wide—low tide, he supposed—farther out than he’d seen it in weeks. Dancing algae were phosphorescent on the distant surf. The beach was heavy with damp, thick sand, almost as soft as silt. As though by night it had a second, different life; not the dry, gritty, individualized granular identity of daytime sand at all. The air was chilly, as he’d thought, but somehow warmer at the edge of the surf. A thin mist hung over it, to the horizon, separating the surging blackness of it from the moving, more evenly hued flatness of the starry night. No moon. It was too early for it to have already set. It must be up there somewhere—disguised in shadow: a new moon. Moon of beginnings, of late sowing, of pruning to encourage growth. Wasn’t that how the Farmer’s Almanac characterized the late September lunation?

  Suddenly the energy damned up within him needed release. He jumped up, spread his arms and legs as far as he could, threw back his head, and yelled, letting the sound bellow out of him. Then, somewhat satisfied, he began to jog along the water’s edge.

  He ran the length of the community, thinking of nothing but how his arms and legs were moving, how the air was coming at him, how he was taking it in and exhaling it, how the sand beneath him was sometimes flat, angled down to the water, sometimes hard packed, damp, sometimes flooded by an errant wave. The breeze buffeted him, chilling every bead of perspiration that erupted on his face.

  The run worked. When he returned to the house to dial again, he was exhausted, but considerably calmer: really calm, not like before.

  Good thing too. For the international operator couldn’t connect him to Daniel, and wh
en he called Dan’s office at the BBC productions, the switchboard operator told him she’d just received a call herself from Dan saying that he was going away for a holiday, and would return in a day or two.

  Jonathan fumed at the news. What cheek!

  What was he going to do now? Sleep would probably be impossible. But losing sleep because of Daniel was intolerable. So he went into the kitchen, heated up some milk, added a jigger, then another jigger of rum to it, and slogged it down.

  Peeking into the bedroom, he saw that Stevie had fallen asleep. He hoped while they were still on the phone. Unusual for her, she wasn’t all over the bed, but flat on her back, her breathing soft and regular.

  He tried lying down in bed next to her, and trying to match the rhythm of his breathing to hers. No way. After a few minutes, all he could think of was Daniel, flying from London over this. This?

  He got dressed again and went back out into the living area. He picked up a magazine, the book he’d been reading, his composing. All to no distractive effect at all.

  Instead, he thought of an earlier phone call, this afternoon, while Stevie had been out on her errand to the post office: a call as upsetting now to Jonathan as it had been surprising and even amusing earlier.

  He’d been at the piano, working on a trio between Don Farnace, Gentile, and Fiammetta in the last act. It was a tricky piece, with three separate related melodies that melded finally in a triple fugue. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t answer the telephone if it rang. But when it did ring, he was so involved in his score he forgot that promise to himself. He immediately, impulsively picked it up, thinking it was Stevie calling to tell him the postmistress wouldn’t give her his mail or with some other complication.

  So, he’d answered the phone with alacrity, brightly said “Hel-lo,” accenting the second syllable.

  He’d been greeted by silence, then a woman’s voice that was neither Stevie nor the postmistress, asking if he were Jonathan Lash. His first thought was that it was Lady Bracknell, and he’d answered cautiously, hesitantly, “Yes. Yes it is.”

  “Good!” The voice seemed more businesslike; and now he was sure it wasn’t Paula Locke: her voice was far more nasal. “I’m calling about a mutual friend, Stephanie Locke.”

  “She isn’t here now,” he said, then quickly amended that to, “I mean, I can pass on a message to her, but she isn’t at home right now. Would you care to leave your name?”

  “I will,” his caller said, “if you promise not to say I called. I’m Rose Heywood.”

  “Oh!” he said involuntarily, possibly even with a sigh of relief. This was no enemy as Paula Locke would assuredly be, but a friend—Stevie’s friend.

  “And I really have to admit I’m pleased Stevie isn’t there,” Rose added. “I’d like to keep this chat between us, if that’s all right with you, Mr. Lash.”

  Mysterious. But why not? he thought. “Sure.”

  “Good! You are amenable. I see this is going to be less difficult than I’d feared,” Rose said. “My call concerns Stevie.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, actually Stevie and yourself. If you must know, I ordinarily detest people who go about interfering in others’ lives. But then, sometimes one has no other choice, does one?”

  “It depends.”

  “I mean, if you know the score and I know the score, but Stevie doesn’t, well, then, I feel sort of duty bound to…” She faltered.

  Jonathan tried to help her: “To let Stevie know the score too?”

  “Yes! Well, no. Not exactly. She obviously knows the score too, or I wouldn’t. But I wonder does she really know it?”

  Jonathan hadn’t an idea of what Rose was talking about. “You aren’t referring to a specific score, a musical score, are you?”

  “No. Why would I? Oh, that’s right, isn’t it? You’re a composer. What an unfortunate choice of a word then. What I mean, Mr. Lash, is that…well, you’ve got to let Stevie go before she begins to get serious about you. Playing around, even flirting is fine, and I can understand your interest in Stevie. But you’ve got to end it all before something happens. Before she manages to trip you into the sack or something awful like that.”

  Jonathan paused. He really did find Rose delightful, no matter how interfering she was. He loved the way she said things, and used her last sentence back at her. “She already has tripped me into the sack.”

  “Oh, dear! I’m too late!” Rose said.

  “Don’t worry. Stevie uses the rhythm method of contraception. She’ll be all right,” he reassured her.

  “It’s not that, Mr. Lash. Stevie is confused right now. She’s terribly impressionable, terribly imaginative.”

  “So am I,” he said. “That’s why we’re…” He tried a few words, and ended up, “in the sack together.”

  A gloomy, “Right! I see!” from Rose. “That’s what I inferred. But you must tell me, your intentions are honorable, aren’t they?”

  It was so old-fashioned he had to laugh. “I have no intentions.”

  “Toward Stevie?”

  “Or if I do, that’s for Stevie and me to discuss.”

  A pause. “I am interfering? I am out of place?” Rose asked, chastened.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Well, I’m sorry about that. But I do care for her. And I don’t want to see her hurt.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “And well, knowing what I do about you—after all, she had to tell someone, poor dear; every woman absolutely requires a confidante in these matters. But I want you to know I don’t at all condone it.”

  “Did Stevie ask you to?”

  “Well, not exactly. I mean, in a way.”

  “Look, Miss Heywood, I appreciate your concern. But we aren’t really getting anywhere, and I’m working right now.’’

  “I’m sorry about that,” Rose said in a smaller voice. Then, more forcefully, “But I couldn’t know about you two and just let it pass. She is young, and she is vulnerable, especially vulnerable right now. I suppose none of us wants to see the young go through difficulties the way we had to. Even though we know they must anyway.”

  “Stevie can take care of herself,” Jonathan said. “I’ll attest to that. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

  “You won’t tell her I called, will you?”

  “No.”

  “All right. I’ll let you go back to work. But tell me something, is it true that you’re thirty-six years old?”

  Jonathan was surprised by that question. “Yes.”

  “You sound a great deal younger,” she concluded. “Good-bye.”

  Jonathan had put the receiver back in its cradle, had returned to the complicated trio and fugue, and had gotten back to work immediately, the odd phone call instantly banished from his thoughts.

  Only to arise again later, during dinner with Stevie, by candlelight on the back deck; a dinner perfect but for the memory of the call, which cast a slight pall over it.

  Now, Jonathan realized he’d been reacting to Rose Heywood’s phone call and its unsubtle pressures, as well as to Dan when he’d called just now from London.

  What were his intentions toward Stevie? Was this just a summer affair, a post–Labor Day sexfest? What intentions had he ever held toward her? Did he expect her to return to school, to see her only on weekends and holidays? Would he ask her to not return to school, to set up an apartment with him? To marry him? Could all that happen now, so late in his life? Of course it could, it had happened to others. And it wasn’t too late. Dan himself was the baby of seven other siblings, he’d been sired when his father was over forty years old, his mother almost forty. Could Jonathan too begin a new life, and if so, what would that life be like with a wife? There would be children, of course; he couldn’t see Stevie married without children. Schools, colleges, health care, the inexorable move to a larger apartment, even to a house, possibly out of Manhattan, for the kids’ sake. There would be no longer a shared income—or at least if there were, it was unlikely
that it would be as large as his and Dan’s. Then too, he and Dan had over the years supported each other at different times: before Little Rock was a hit, when Dan was between jobs; in the doldrums last summer, before the BBC series came through. And they’d achieved a good financial balance since then. Married to Stevie, there would be new financial pressures on Jonathan. Lady and the Falcon would have to be a hit, a huge hit, one that gave birth to productions in London, Los Angeles; road shows, a movie sale. And the next show too, and the one after that…

  I’ll get no sleep tonight, he thought. That’s some recompense to you, Dan, for your own sleepless night over me. If you really did have one. Which I only half believe anyway.

  It would be just like Dan to lie about that. Idiot. And that ridiculous business about change of life. It really did sound as though they were all just housewives sitting around the laundry room, talking about their skin rashes and hemorrhoid conditions. Not to mention that incredible snow job about how he was coming to save him. What movie had Daniel seen to inspire that? Probably some screwball comedy from the thirties, where after this-ing and that-ing for three reels, the hero—say Jimmy Stewart—comes to his senses, and returns home to the girl who almost got away. Idiot! Dan’s entire life seemed to derive from movies or shows. Hadn’t Janet, his ex-wife, once confessed to Jonathan, “I didn’t mind playing Margo Channing to his Max, but I did mind playing Robert Stack to his Marilyn Monroe in Niagara!” That summed it up. Poor Janet! What she’d had to put up with: and how few shared references she had to go by, in dealing with Dan. It must have been like living with the television tuned in to the Late Show all the time. Not that Dan had settled down much with Jonathan. Hardly. The time they got a black cleaning boy, and when the boy broke a lovely vase and began to apologize to Dan, what had Dan said? Of course he’d begun his Butterfly McQueen imitation: “I don’t know nothin’ about birthin’ babies, Miss Scarlett!” he’d cried in the boy’s face. Jonathan had a moment then when he was certain Dan was going to be the victim of a race riot in his very own living room. But no! Dan, ever lucky. The boy had laughed, laughed uproariously. After that, he and Dan did Amos ‘n’ Andy routines whenever Jonathan was about. Idiot! Who did Dan think he was? His entire life was one scene after another—if not real, then certainly manufactured—one great moment after another: comic, tragic, pathetic, reflective—and often some indescribable mixture of them. What was he planning this time? Some mad rescue from across the sea? Some Guns of Navarone scenario, with Jonathan as the victim, the treasure, the secret document all rolled into one to be spirited away by SST to London? Or was Dan really simply bored over there, in need of a companion: someone to listen to his jibes, to remark on his accents, his witticisms at the expense of the place and the natives; someone to play straight man to him, to be the living audience to his living theater? Really, that’s what it came down to: Dan didn’t need a lover, he needed an audience!