“I just couldn’t see my way through to abandoning you folks,” said Gurney, lying through his teeth.
“God will reward you for this,” said Essie Hartog. “And you’ll see: We’re going to bring in a smash yet. I’ll do everything in my power to get your precious lines exactly right. And I know they love me out there.”
“Let’s not talk about that, Mother,” said Hartog, in one of the rare instances of his acknowledging their close tie. “What’s important is that Paul stayed here after the closing notice was posted. He’s going to be here and look the kids in the eyes. I want you to know, Paul, that they took it like thoroughbreds. You would have been proud of them.”
The four talked about the good times they’d had in preparing the show. And then Essie went out to do her evening performance. Standing proudly on a pair of gift stilts from the cast, she turned in the acting job of her life. Watching the pared-down Violencia, Paul Gurney realized he was seeing his once-beloved baby for the last time in his life, even though the show, by contract, had a full week to run.
A great cry of excitement could be heard when Gurney walked into the closing night party. After an argument with Norman Welles, Tippy had flown back to Holliman to be with the cast in its last days. And she had graciously consented to have the party in her suite.
Holly was one of the first to approach Gurney.
“I thought you were going to disappear and not say goodbye,” confided the wiry little dancer. “I said to myself, I’ll never forgive that guy if he does that. How come you decided to stick around?”
“Leaving’s easy,” said Gurney, looking philosophically off in the distance. “Anyone can do that. It’s the other that’s tough.”
As Holly pondered the thought, one of the female singers came over and once again, in what seemed to be a trademark greeting of hers, thrust her tongue deep into Gurney’s throat.
“You’re a major artist,” she said. “And you are ahead of your time.”
“I don’t know,” said Gurney, hoping she wasn’t getting set to deal out another sensuous kiss. “Sometimes I think I didn’t do a good enough job.”
“It was too good. That’s where you went wrong.”
The party then took on a drugged and slightly out-of-focus quality. Restraints were abandoned, with people walking about in a tilted, slow-motion gait, as though they were on the deck of a sinking liner—which in a sense, of course, they were. The male chorus boys no longer bothered to disguise their sexual preferences. They put on elaborate jewelry, changed into skirts and peasant blouses, applied makeup liberally, and broke into dance numbers from shows that had been successful. The unmistakable odor of hashish was in the air. Gurney had some expertise in this area. He had been in on raids and watched junk dicks, after a drug seizure, sit around and smoke up samples to make sure it was the real thing.
With his eyes filmed over, Ty Sabatini lay back on a bed with two female singers, openly stroking them between their legs and meeting with only halfhearted opposition. Gurney thought he saw Clement Hartog applying a great blue-black gash of lipstick. He turned away, not wanting to know about that particular tendency of the director.
A jewelry-bedecked Hobie Hancock approached Gurney and gave him a wet earlobe kiss.
“C’est la vie, Monsieur Paul. Thanks for giving my dormant career a much-needed zetz.”
Matt Tanker squatted on the floor as if he were sitting at a campfire. It was his feeling that Gurney’s concept of the show had been a mistaken one.
“I believe it should have been all about me—my narration, my voice throughout, sort of my trip; Essie singing now and then, but me, in a sense, continually drowning her out. That’s where you went astray. But I want you to know I don’t resent in the least giving up a booming medical practice. At least I got to get into myself … in addition to sleeping with just about every girl in the show … Tippy, Holly, you know the list₀. except Essie, of course, although, believe me, she was lined up and ready to go…. But don’t be misled … it was just plain old-fashioned sex … stick it in, take it out…. I did not get into their heads.”
Gurney was impressed by how quickly Tanker had gone from being a hotshot Beverly Hills chiropractor to a laid-back Marin County dropout. He didn’t even resent the former sex patroller for sleeping with all the girls in the show, although he would have preferred that Holly hadn’t made the cut. Still, Tanker’s style was so vague and free-floating that the girls probably hadn’t even noticed they’d slept with him.
Essie Hartog dragged Gurney into another room and thanked him again and again, allowing, perhaps unconsciously, one of her giant torpedoing bosoms to slip into his mouth. Gurney quite diplomatically rejected the mammary, pretending it had never been proffered. He looked for Holly, who was pinned inside a shower stall by two of the young Balinese assistant choreographers. Is that all they did, he wondered, just pin her to the walls inside shower stalls? Didn’t they ever have higher thoughts?
For the first time, Gurney behaved like a real management fellow and elbowed them aside, dragging Holly’s tricky little body outside to the hotel corridor.
“I never let them near me,” she said. “It only looks that way. It’s always been you, Mr. Gurney … Paul, if I may.”
I’ll bet, he thought. When he finally had the squirming little dancer alone in his suite, he took her out to his terrace, feeling that the lovely view would make a nice change from her own congested little quarters and possibly be exciting.
“Pop this under my nose,” she said, handing him a gelatin capsule. “It’ll send me through the roof.”
Gurney followed her instructions, taking a fast sniff himself and then waving the crushed object beneath the dancer’s nostrils. Fingers of blood pumped out of her nose in great jets; he never would have guessed they could have come from so fragile a girl. Somewhat panicked, he tried to stop the flow with a towel. What if this was it for her, and she never came to? The press would probably pick it up. And that’s all he would need—Chorus Cutie O.D.’s in Suite of Ex-Dick Librettist.
At a loss as to what to do next, he slid the dancer under the bed and sat on it. When he saw that this was a poor solution, he slid her out again and carried her back to the party. He felt a little sheepish about this, holding her as if he was on his way to the post office to return a package that had been mistakenly delivered to him. By the time they got back to the party, the blood flow had stopped.
“Hi, fellas,” she said brightly to a pair of Han Nihsu’s assistants, putting her arms around their tightly muscled East Asian shoulders.
“Hi, pussy-pants,” said one of them, as they scooped her up and took her into a bathroom.
Later, as he strolled by, Gurney saw them popping capsules freely beneath her nose while she giggled and slipped her mischievous tongue in and out of their eager little Balinese mouths.
Gurney saw all of this as a clear-cut demonstration that she was “chorus” and he was “management.” They existed in separate worlds—his clean and wholesome, hers unbearably sexy—and he might as well wash his hands of her … unless he wanted to take dancing lessons and become a high-kicking, middle-aged chorus boy. There was also the stray possibility that she really didn’t like him that much. Whatever the case, he made a vow that when he got back to the East Coast, he would not call her for dinner unless he had absolutely nothing else to do.
Much more important to him was that he had finally made it to one of the orgies—even if as a nonparticipant. As he sat in the center of the room, drugged and bleary-eyed, but somewhat happy, one of the chorus people, a fellow known for his hawklike temper, approached him.
“This,” he said, “has got to be the dullest party we’ve had since the start of rehearsals.”
Just as Gurney had suspected, the uninhibited bashes had been going on night after night without him. Oh well, he thought, at least I got to attend one of them. He felt that on a night like this it was almost against the law to end up alone. In that spirit, he looked around for
Tippy and saw that she was in close colloquy with Matt Tanker. Evidently she had decided to spend a sexually laid back night with him.
Gurney returned to his suite, sharing the elevator with one of the great-breasted sopranos. As they stopped at his floor, he said, “Oh hell, come on along with me,” and pulled her into his suite. He undressed her and sucked her great breasts in the moonlight, but decided after a few minutes that it was a hollow and pointless activity.
* * *
In the darkness of his suite, Gurney called Angela and told her the official notice had gone up and that perhaps the two of them ought to take a vacation on some island or other.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “It’s much too good a thing to happen.”
The next morning Gurney went to Hartog’s room and told the director he was really leaving this time. Hartog made a last feeble effort to keep him in Holliman.
“I’m bringing a major producer down to see the show. Kermit enjoys a good crapshoot and likes nothing better than to beat the odds. If he sees something in the show that he likes, he just might gamble and bring it in.”
“I can’t deal with it,” said Gurney. “You’re looking at a dead man.”
Gurney was far from being a corpse when he said that. In many ways, he was spilling over with suppressed energy. What he meant was that he was frustrated and lonely. Had the rascally little Holly dashed in that moment and flown at his body, for example, his outlook would have changed immediately.
Hartog paused a moment, then set him free.
“I understand, Paul. And I know where you are. I’ve never been there myself, but I do understand. And I want you to know that I’ll never forget what you did for the cast by staying an extra day. One more day would be even more useful, but I don’t want to push you.”
Gurney let the hint go by. He gave Hartog a quick hug and swept out of the room. After checking the lobby to make sure there were no cast members about—he’d had his fill of good-byes—Gurney slipped out of the hotel and took a slow, mournful drive back to New York. On the one hand, he felt awful about not staying to see the show interred once and for all. But at the same time, he found that he was light and easy behind the wheel, as though orders had arrived to remove a giant weight from his back. Before driving to his ex-wife’s house, he stopped off at midnight to call Angela, and arranged to pick her up in his car. Once he had done so, he parked on a deserted street and wanted to make love to her then and there, but she turned him down.
“Not in the car,” she said.
It was the first time she had ever rejected him, which seemed to be of importance, although he didn’t know why. And out of nowhere, she said she needed to visit her parents, who were retired prison guards, on the Jersey shore.
After dropping off Angela at her folks’ place, Gurney drove over to his ex-wife’s small ranch house, wondering if he would discover her on a chandelier with one of his old Homicide buddies. He tried to imagine what he would do—sail into the fellow and pummel him to the ground with outraged blows? Or take the high road—simply turn around disdainfully as if he had no time for trivialities?
He could hardly wait to find out which course he would take.
As it happened, Gilda Gurney was alone. They sat together and had a few brandies. Amazingly, she had completed her decorating scheme for the house, something he had been after her to do for years. When they were together, her style had been to bring each room frustratingly close to completion and then to stop cold, leaving a third of the room bare and unfurnished. Only after he left had she been able to go the distance on decorating. Was that true of their love life as well? He left that door unopened.
Gurney stayed over that night, thinking for a moment that he might slip into bed with her for old times’ sake and perhaps give her a few hugs and light squeezes. Who knows where it might lead—possibly to a fresh new marriage? But he held off and slept in the second bedroom, a bit tensely. In the morning he got a call from Mandarin, who had somehow tracked him down.
“How would you like to go to the Caribbean for a few weeks, all expenses paid, to rest up and do a little fiddling with Hey, Job!”
The call was a nice shot in the arm. It was good to know he was in demand. Gurney told Mandarin it sounded great, but that he would only go on one condition.
“What’s that?” asked Mandarin.
“That my friend Angela gets to come, too.”
“She the one with the great body?” asked Mandarin.
“That’s her, all right. She’s highly intelligent, too, and has a wonderful family background.”
“Bring her along,” said Mandarin. “She sounds like a good kid.”
Gurney thought it over and decided it was an excellent idea to go away for a rest, even though he wasn’t particularly tired. But there was no need to bring Mandarin into the picture. Added to which, he didn’t particularly feel like working on Hey, Job! It would certainly have helped to take his mind off the crumbling Violencia, but his mind was off it anyway. And he had gone a bit sour on musicals in general. He called Mandarin back and told him he had changed his mind. Then he booked a private cottage on a small Caribbean island for “Mr. Paul Gurney and Guest.”
After he and Angela had lounged in the sun for a few days, Gurney, having no idea in advance he was going to do this, began to create a long verse play, in heroic couplets, inspired by some of his experiences on Violencia. He felt it had some spirit to it, and he enjoyed seeing the pages pile up. On the days that it rained, Angela sat inside the cottage and helped Gurney, taking notes and then typing them on an old Underwood, supplied by the management. At other times, she roamed the island on a motorbike, holding on for dear life with that lovely one arm of hers.
When the work bogged down and Angela was out on the road, Gurney took strolls along the beach, making friends with a handsome, elderly British colonial type, who walked with a knotted cane and said he had once written with F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“What do you mean?” asked Gurney.
“I should think it would be perfectly clear,” said the fellow.
“We wrote together.”
Gurney, who still did not understand how two people could write together, kept after the old gentleman.
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”
“Then bugger off,” said the fellow with a certain colonial irritability. But when he himself tried to march off, he fell over in the sand and Gurney had to help him to his feet.
“Damned hip,” said the fellow. “Went to war in ’14 and it’s never been the same. Trouble is, I like to take walks, do things, but I can’t and it’s a bloody shame.”
“I think you’re very courageous.”
“Courageous my neck,” said fellow. “It’s just a bloody nuisance, that’s all.”
Gurney seemed to be saying all the wrong things to the elderly gentleman, and continued to compound his mistake.
“You’re bloody well right, sir,” he said, agreeably.
The fellow glared at him for making this remark, feeling he had exclusive rights to the “bloodies”—but somehow they became friendly all the same. He complimented Gurney on his lean, fit detective’s body and said he had not overlooked the exquisite shape of “your lovely traveling companion.”
“Yes,” said Gurney, playing down the compliment, “she’s quite a gal.”
They saw each other every day along the beach and Gurney felt confident they would be getting together for lunches once they got back to the city. He seemed to require an older man for a friend. Now, of course, Gurney could no longer count on Clement Hartog to fill that role.
He thought often of the great director, picturing him back at Holliman, still trying to get the show in shape so that he could bring it to Broadway. He saw Hartog as a kind of theatrical Ahab, standing alone astride the battered deck of the sinking show, trying to keep it afloat, all the while combing the horizon with one demoniacal eye for a sign of that great white rave review. Gurney considered going back to
help him, making another dramatic last-ditch appearance, and once again being saluted by the now tattered cast. And then he awakened in the middle of the night with a terrible fear that the show had opened on Broadway without him, and was an enormous smash, playing to packed houses. Single-handedly, battered and corpselike, with the life spilling out of him, Clement Hartog, in the greatest testimonial ever to the human spirit, had pumped life into the bleeding carcass of the dying animal of a show and miraculously turned it into a runaway hit. Or perhaps he had gotten help, and at that very moment another young, unknown librettist, who had put in only a week’s work on the show, was sitting at Sardi’s, wearing a cloak, smoking Russian cigarettes, and tossing off epigrams to network interviewers who hung on his every word.
Careful not to wake his companion, Gurney got out of bed, jumped on Angela’s motorbike, and started off across the island to look for a newspaper. The stores, of course, had long been closed; perhaps he’d known that when he started out, and just wanted to get the feeling of a windswept drive around hairpin curves in the moonlight.
But his fear was genuine. When he got back from his ride, he was unable to sleep and remained on the cottage porch until dawn. Then he knocked on the door of the testy old colonial. The fellow hobbled forward, wearing a Dickensian nightgown of rich but conservatively chosen fabric. He admitted Gurney, who apologized for the intrusion.
“I was hoping, sir, that I might look through your New York Times. You mentioned having them sent to you each day.”
The elderly fellow seemed, perhaps out of some sturdy sense of empire, to understand emergencies. He led Gurney to a stack of newspapers that were piled high on a bridge table. Holding his breath, Gurney raced through the theatrical sections of half a dozen of them until finally, with an enormous sense of relief, he came across the item he’d been hoping for.
MUSICAL SHUTS DOWN
The producers of Violencia, yielding to the generally poor out-of-town notices, have decided to close the show in Holliman after twenty-eight performances.
“Thank God,” said Gurney.
Violencia! Page 20