He kept the phone off the hook the rest of the day, took a Valium, a shower, then went to sleep. He’d been afraid of dreams, horrible dreams, but thankfully none came.
2
When the downstairs buzzer rang three days later and the doorman said that a lady had come to visit Noel, his first thought was that it was Mirella Trent. He didn’t want to see her and was signaling back to tell Gerdes not to let her up, when he received a loud buzz and the slight electrical shock that meant Gerdes was leaning on his end of the button. The old man’s cracked voice announced, “She’s coming up.”
Noel cursed once, then looked at himself in the mirror. He was unshaven, unwashed, unkempt, wearing jeans that ought to have been laundered a week ago. He hated being seen like this. Well, maybe Mirella would be disgusted and leave. Of course, perverse as she was, she might find it a turn-on; she’d always professed a taste for workingmen. He didn’t want her, though. He still felt too much resentment toward her for what he’d discovered about himself the last time he was with her.
Suddenly it was too late to do anything about his appearance or the slovenliness of the apartment—the doorbell was buzzing.
Defiantly, he opened the door for her. “Yeah?”
“You look awful. Have you been ill?”
It was Alana, not Mirella.
Noel fell back from the door. She looked at him once more, then came in, shut the door, repeated her question, and put a cool hand up to his forehead. He brushed it away.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“You certainly don’t look fine.” She was wearing the lightest hint of patchouli today, but she smelled as fresh as a mountain cascade. He felt even slimier next to her.
“I thought you were someone else,” he said lamely. He felt completely unprepared. He looked awful, the place was a mess. She was like a rare Ming vase suddenly placed in a Chinese Laundromat five steps below street level. She didn’t fit.
She sat down in the big rocking chair, let him get her an ashtray and a soft drink, and rocked back and forth gently, alternately looking at him and outside through the tall windows, smoking a St. Moritz cigarette as though she’d been here many times before, as he foolishly reiterated that he was not ill, but had merely been upset, needed time to think, to be alone.
“It’s such a lovely day,” she said when his words had come to a dead end. “Why don’t we go out?” It was as if she hadn’t heard a word he’d said, though he knew she had. “I’ll wait while you clean up. Perhaps we’ll go for a walk in the park. Or have lunch. We never did have that lunch,” she reminded him.
All so tactful, so gratefully said, Noel couldn’t refuse her.
Fifteen minutes later he was walking with her to the parked Mercedes. Alana handed him the keys and slid into the passenger seat.
It was a glorious June day: a few high, motionless clouds, like wads of cotton, but bright sunlight reflected off the streets and glass building façades as they drove up Sixth Avenue.
At Fifty-seventh Street they stopped for a light, and Noel turned to her with a sudden, insane idea. “Let’s split somewhere. To Mexico. Just you and I. I have some money, some credit cards we can bum. We’ll live in an adobe hut. Go swimming. Make love all day. Eat tacos.”
She laughed tentatively for the first time, then broke into a laugh. “I don’t like Mexican food.”
Before he could suggest an alternative route, she said, “Why don’t we walk into the park?”
When they had locked the car, she took his arm and let him promenade her into the park, first on a broad paved path, then past the swan pond, onto a cutoff, going north, deeper into the park, without saying a word.
She seemed to know all the byways. She steered them away from the more frequented areas, until they had skirted the carousel, past the Tavern-on-the-Green, the Delacorte Theatre where Shakespeare was given at night, into a secluded little hilly area with a green-lawned dell that Noel had never seen before. They stopped there. Alana looked around, and finally sat down on a flat sheet of basalt, set like a dark gray tablet amid the grass. Loosening the kerchief she’d been wearing around her head, she shook her hair free, long, almost blue-black in this light. Noel didn’t see anyone else in the little valley.
“There,” she said with relief, and lay back on the flat rock, her hair spread out, her thin silk blouse looking as fragile as Japanese paper against her skin.
“I’d like to kiss you,” Noel said, leaning over to do it.
She held up a restraining hand. “No. I promised.”
“Promised who? Eric?”
“Of course. The first day we saw you. At the Window Wall. We agreed then. Either both of us, or neither of us.”
Alana smiled as she said it, so Noel took it for a joke. He pushed her hand aside and leaned over her again.
She sat up, eluding him. Her smile was gone.
“I said I promised, Noel.”
“You can’t mean it?”
“Of course I mean it. I would never break a promise to Eric.”
“You already did,” he protested. “You kissed me once before. Remember? In the studio?”
“That was for the photographs. It wasn’t real, Noel.”
He sulked for a minute. She lay back down again.
“Why did you bring me here, then?” he asked.
“To talk to you.”
“Why here?” He realized he was being suspicious, but didn’t care.
“Because I like it here,” she replied simply. “I hoped you would like it, too.”
That made his suspicions even more foolish.
“Why don’t you lie back and relax?” she suggested.
He hesitated, then joined her. The stone was warm against his back, smooth, soothing. Above them the clouds seemed to have vanished; the sky was a pale, ringing blue.
“All right,” he said, deliberately harsh, “talk!”
She was silent at first, and, he thought, angry, but then she quietly said, “There’s so much to say to you.”
He wouldn’t help her a bit.
“First, I want to be certain that you know how much we care for you, Noel, both Eric and I, because that is most important. These past few days we both missed you a great deal.”
“What’s the matter? Was Okku too busy cooking to spot for Eric’s weight lifting?”
“Eric loves you. You don’t do him justice.”
“Sure.”
“As I love you, Noel. No. Differently than I do. But he does.”
“All right, let’s assume I believe Eric loves me, what next?”
“He needs you, Noel. He is going through a bad time right now and he needs your help, your support.”
“He’s going through a bad time?”
She seemed surprised by the intensity of his reaction. Sitting up on one elbow, she looked at him bewildered. He wanted to play with her hair desperately, but figured that would constitute an advance.
“Yes. It is true. I would know, wouldn’t I? Eric is very upset about, well, you know, this ghastly business about poor Rondee.”
Alana believed that. Noel could tell looking into her eyes—now brown, now black, now flecked, now even bluish in the sunlight—innocent, guileless eyes. She believed Eric was upset about Randy’s death.
“All right. So he’s upset. What else?”
“Nothing else. Eric needs you by him now. He wants you near him. I know you have your differences of opinion, but try to…”
“It goes beyond differences of opinion. One reason I haven’t been to the house is because I feel more than ever that my position is a false one there.”
From her puzzled look, he instantly wondered if that hadn’t been the worst thing to say. He tried explaining it away.
“I really can’t live off him, live with him, and I can’t return Eric’s interest, or infatuation, or whatever it is. I can’t. He doesn’t attract me. He doesn’t turn me on. Just the opposite.”
“No. No. You are wrong. I have seen you together. You are
like a snake charmer and a cobra. Sometimes one is the charmer, sometimes the other. Everyone else has remarked it. It’s a strong and unusual attraction you have with Eric and you are foolish and wrong to deny it.”
“Well, I don’t see it.”
Noel wondered if Eric had ever told her about his taking the Mercedes the night of the party and the fight they’d had in the garage. Probably.
“Then you are choosing not to see it,” she declared. “The attraction exists. Now, I think that right at this moment you are merely a little confused and…”
“Is that what you told Eric to explain why I’m coming on to you?”
“Don’t make a bad joke, Noel. It is true that you are a little confused. You don’t know yourself what you are or who you want to be.”
“You win, Alana. I’m confused. Several days ago I made love to a woman and although she was completely turned on, I wasn’t. Later on that same night, I made love to several men.”
“In Le Pissoir?”
“In the back room there. That night I really let go of myself. I did things with absolute strangers I’d never thought I’d do. Things I’d scarcely heard of. I wasn’t disgusted about it. I didn’t feel it was awful or wrong. But neither was it all that gratifying. And if it weren’t for the drugs and atmosphere, I doubt that I even would have been interested. So you tell me, what is sex all about? A little pleasure, a lot of work, and for what?”
“If that’s how you feel, you must stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Sex. All of it. With men, with women. Stop for a while and don’t think about it.”
“But that’s not dealing with it.”
“Fou!” She tapped him lightly on the cheek. “You just told me you cannot deal with it. No? Sex is not so important. Do other things instead.”
In the three days of furious thinking and rethinking since he’d awakened on the sawdust-strewn floor of the back room, that particular idea had never even struck him. She repeated it again, and again he was forced to admire her clearheadedness.
“Put it aside,” she said; “there are more important matters now: yourself, me, Eric, being friends. That is very important, no? You always want to kiss me, to make love to me. Why not be my friend, first? And Eric’s friend, too. He needs friends more than ever now. And so do you, Noel.”
That last remark irritated him. He wanted to grab her and tell her she was talking bullshit, Pollyanna nonsense. But her simple solution cut through his overwhelming confusion like Alexander the Great’s sword slicing through the Gordian knot.
Alana must have been aware of what was passing through his mind; she looked down at him as though her beauty and sympathy would lead him exactly right.
“No sex for a while,” he said. “And I won’t try to kiss you.”
“You’ll feel better. Believe me.”
“Maybe.”
“You will.” She sat up and leaped off the rock. “Now! Let’s go to lunch. Then we will see Eric and tell him.”
“Tell him what?” Noel asked warily.
“That you’ll come back to the house. That we’ll all go to the Hamptons together, which he needs so badly right now. And that we’ll all be friends. Come on, lazy. Get up.”
Glancing at her as they strode arm in arm back through the park, Noel wondered how she would take the news when it finally came, as it must, of the kind of monster Eric was. He knew it would be shattering to her. His only consolation was that he would be there, a friend and potential lover. She would need and want him to be there, to help her get over the shock.
“You look better already,” she said. “You see how easy it is?”
3
Eric joined them in the sidewalk café attached to an elegant hotel on upper Fifth Avenue. He sauntered in so casually, sat down so naturally, that it was a full minute before Noel registered it as an intrusion on the lovely afternoon he’d been enjoying with Alana.
“I asked Paul-Luc to call me if you came here,” Eric explained, ordering a Zubrowka vodka on the rocks from the slightly embarrassed waiter. “I thought you might be here. This is Alana’s favorite afternoon spot.”
She kissed Eric lightly on the cheek. Noel stared for an instant, which Eric didn’t seem to mind. Then Eric said exactly what would have infuriated Noel three days ago. Now, it only seemed unnecessary:
“I know you were fond of Randy. I’m very sorry to hear about what happened to him. I can’t think of anyone who deserved it less. It was rotten. Everyone liked him.”
His words were innocuous enough, expected, given the situation. Yet they held an unexpected anger that Noel couldn’t quite understand. Could it have been a mistake, and Eric really was sorry it had happened? He had always liked Randy, Noel knew. Or was he a consummate actor? Or even worse, did Eric have some kind of psychosis that allowed him to sanction such an act and then to blot it out so thoroughly that he could be sorry later?
“I guess that’s the danger of places like Le Pissoir,” Noel replied, conventionally enough. “Anyone can be the target.”
“But why Randy?” Eric insisted. “With all the real shits around.”
“No more, please,” Alana begged.
Even an Oscar-winning performer wouldn’t go that far, Noel guessed. The psychosis theory, then.
“Just one thing more,” Eric apologized to her. Then, to Noel, “I don’t think Randy was the intended victim. I think he was mistaken in the dark for you.”
First Loomis, now Eric. It freaked him. “For me? Why me?”
Eric’s drink arrived, he sipped at it. Slowly turning the glass in his hands and avoiding Noel’s eyes, he said, “To get at me. That’s why. That’s what it’s going to be like staying with us—with Alana and me. You’ll be in constant danger. All of us will be.”
“Eric!” she pleaded. “You said you wouldn’t.”
“I have to tell him that.” He turned to Noel. “Now you know the worst.”
Noel was so twisted by the new tack Eric had taken, he almost couldn’t answer. He felt disarmed by the warning, then angry, then thrown back into confusion: the psychosis theory wasn’t working. Maybe it had been a mistake. A freak killing. Both Eric and Alana were looking at him for some kind of response, so he said:
“The police think I did it.”
“That’s what Reed said. Don’t worry, we’ll get you the best attorney if it comes to that. I doubt that it will. They have no case. By the way, what the hell were you doing in there anyway? That was the real shock to me.”
It was too long and complicated to go into, so Noel told him it was research for his book.
“Oh, Christ! I might have known. Well, you sure did a good job of it.”
“Why? Did people talk?”
“People always talk.”
“What did they say?”
“That you were stoned, hot, trashy, outrageous. Don’t worry. All that’s good for your reputation.” Suddenly his lips opened in a smile. “I’m sort of sorry I missed it. It must have been like the Virgin Mary losing her cherry at an Elks convention.”
“You bastard,” Noel said, but he laughed, too, and soon all of them were laughing at how Noel had in one night turned around his previous aloof, distant, cold reputation.
They were still laughing when Alana glanced at her watch. It was nearly six o’clock.
“I thought we’d get out of town for the next few weeks,” Eric said, suddenly sobered, “until all this blows over.”
“I’m not sure I can,” Noel admitted, “the police.”
“Dorrance fixed it. You can. How about it?” Eric asked, looking closely at Noel.
I think he was mistaken in the dark for you. “All right,” Noel said.
They paid the bill and walked out onto the street. Eric and Okku would fly out tonight: would Noel mind driving with Alana?
Noel would be delighted, he said, as Eric stopped half a block away from the sidewalk café at a flat, waist-high silver coupe parked at the curb.
“How do
you like it? I just bought it.”
It looked more like a piece of contemporary sculpture than an automobile. “What is it?” Noel asked, trying to read the stylized nameplate set into the vents of the front grille.
“A Lamborghini. Like it?”
“It looks like it belongs on the lawn of a suburban museum,” Noel said. “It’s extraordinary.”
Eric got in and the window shot down. Then he signaled for Noel to bend down for a final word.
“Drive carefully. If you have any trouble at all, there’s a loaded gun in the Benz. Inside a fake ceiling in the glove compartment. Alana knows where it is.”
Alana bent to kiss Eric. He waved, and with a single light touch of the steering wheel, pulled out of the spot and roared down Fifth Avenue.
4
“What I don’t understand is why you need a place like Le Pissoir?” Noel said.
It was their fourth day at the villa. Noel and Eric had just finished a leisurely jog up and down the mile-and-a-half-long driveway. Eric’s house was off the double lane road that ran from Springs to Amagansett. Now, they lay on rafts in the large circular pool, talking, floating under the shade of three large trees that had been left at one end of the pool when the compound was constructed. If they stood, they’d be near the only open portion of the terrace—a balcony overlooking a several-hundred-foot drop over rough rock cliffs. Northeast, there was a magnificent view of Napeaugue Bay and Gardiners Island. On clear days, standing at the railing looking due east, you could see as far as Montauk Point, and north to the Connecticut shore.
“I’m involved with both Bar Sinister and Le Pissoir because if I didn’t run them someone else would. Only I do it better,” Eric said. “There have been back-room bars since the early sixties. I’ve upgraded the whole thing. I sell liquor at uninflated prices. I have a controlled membership so there aren’t too many undesirables. I’ve made the atmosphere cleaner, sexier, more attractive, safer—yes, Noel, safer—fire exits, sprinkler systems. A dozen ways out of each place in an emergency. Check out some of the competition. Firetraps, pigsties, cleaned once a month, if at all, and staffed with insolent, gay-hating slobs.”
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