by Steve Tesich
I clung to this comparision as if my salvation depended on it. And just to show Leila and myself that I was no longer worried about anything, I started talking about Spain in general, about that strange drowsiness, that tourist disease I had while we were there.
“I don’t know what it was, I still don’t, to tell you the truth, but I just couldn’t wake up to save my life. I remember I kept drinking those double-double espressos until I thought I would …”
The telephone rang. Or rather, all the telephones in our suite rang. The two in the bedroom. The one in the master bathroom. The one in the dining room. The three in the huge living room where we were sitting.
It took me several seconds to mobilize myself into action. The ringing of the telephones had silenced me and I felt such relief not to be babbling that I almost didn’t want to answer the phone and have to start talking again.
But of course I picked it up and, in a voice suddenly hoarse from all my talking, I said, “Hello?”
It was Billy.
“Billy,” I said. “God damn it, Billy, I’ve been …”
I managed to shut up and let him talk. I felt the sound of his living voice commuting the sentence of catastrophe my worried mind had passed on him. I started crying.
Leila stood up and gestured that she was going to bed. She let her hand slide over my shoulder as she went. It was a loving thing to do, letting her hand slide over my shoulder like that, but it touched some nerve and caused an involuntary shudder.
6
The phone call was brief, rushed, and matter-of-fact. Billy was calling from downstairs. He had just arrived. He had driven down here from Boston. Driven? Yes, he had borrowed a friend’s car. He felt like driving. He had a little car trouble on the way, something about a rotor cap, and he called to tell me he’d be late. He was sorry about having me worry. He said he was very sorry. He sounded more tired than sorry, which was understandable, just as it was understandable that he felt like going straight to bed. But I couldn’t let him do that. I couldn’t wait until morning to see him. I had to see him tonight. Now. And I told him as much. He said he would stop by for a minute. He said he was very tired.
“Of course you are,” I told him.
Our meeting in my suite was almost as short and rushed as our telephone conversation.
When I opened the door and saw him, I was rendered speechless, and for somebody in my condition to become at a loss for words required a potent image.
Which is what Billy presented.
His lovely long black hair was gone. Completely gone. In its place was hair so closely cropped that I saw more scalp than hair.
A two-day growth of beard on his face.
Glazed, bloodshot eyes.
He wore a long military-style overcoat full of buttons. The coat was too narrow for his wide shoulders and its sleeves were too short for his long arms.
He looked more like somebody named Boris than Billy, an asylum-seeking defector from a Bulgarian basketball team.
I hugged him. Whoever it was he was portraying, whatever image he was projecting, he was still my boy, my Billy, and so I hugged him. Or as much of him as I could manage to hug through that barricade of an overcoat. He let himself be hugged in much the same way that a skinhead lets himself be frisked by the cops.
He didn’t want to come inside. He was too tired. Just came to say hello.
I thought I detected a scent of alcohol on his breath when he spoke.
So we stood in the doorway and talked briefly in that unnatural way that people have when talking in doorways.
His eyes looked over my head as if examining my suite.
We went over the car business again.
He had borrowed his friend’s car because he needed to take a long drive by himself.
“To clear my head.”
“From what?”
“Things.”
“What kind of things?”
“All kinds.”
When I asked him about his haircut, he shrugged.
“I got carried away. I don’t know.”
Towering above me physically, he had something in his attitude as well that wanted to tower above me.
When I asked him if his room was all right, he snorted. He grunted when I inquired if he had had dinner, as if food and lodging were middle-class values he had jettisoned long ago.
There was this put-on punkish disdain for me and my questions and concerns. He seemed eager to offend, dying to displease, his whole facade clamoring for attention, yet when the attention was given, it was greeted with the studied indifference of a surly lout possessing the taunting virility of youth. Any minute, I expected him to turn his head and spit a huge gob of spit on the carpet in the hallway.
His image was neither new nor original for a Harvard sophomore, but it was new for Billy. Unexpected. But because it was Billy (my boy), I found the affectation of it neither hostile nor troubling. There was something sweet about it, which I was eager to understand at my leisure. Only his exhaustion seemed genuine. He looked spent. Like a lone survivor of some legendary binge.
“I gotta get some sleep,” he said by way of good night.
“Of course you do. Off with you, then. Go. Go sleep. I’ll see you in the morning, OK? Good night, Billy.”
For a brief fraction of a second, our eyes met as he turned to go and I saw Billy, my Billy, the old Billy I knew so well, peering out at me from that cumbersome suit of armor that was his new image.
7
I wasn’t sleepy, tired, or hungry, even though the last thing I had eaten was a light snack on the plane. Adrenaline flowed through me.
No sooner did I shut the door to my suite following Billy’s departure than a door opened in my mind, leading to an immediate and complete understanding of Billy’s motives for looking and behaving the way he did.
It was all so obvious.
A clear-cut case.
An archetypal textbook case, in fact.
He had not been able to rebel against me, his father, when it was the proper time for such rebellion to occur, because I, his father, had not been there in any real sense for him to rebel against. The only rebellion open to him was hatred of me, an option he tried but found (thank God) unacceptable.
And so a bubble formed within his psyche, full of tantrums untried and rebellions unexplored, a bubble of adolescent behavior.
The immature boy became a mature young man on the outside, but the trapped bubble of immaturity remained on the inside.
Liberated, as he now was at last, by the certainty of my unconditional love for him and confident that I was there to stay in his life, Billy was finally free to burst that bubble within him.
Finally, finally, he was free to reject me, to rebel against me, to see me as somebody to be supplanted instead of needed and respected. He was free to do this because he knew that no matter what he did, I would love him and continue loving him.
It was, in my opinion, a very healthy and necessary thing that he was doing. Better that he should do it now than when he was my age.
How fitting it was, then, that Billy should revert to childish behavior the night before I reunited him with his mother, who, as a child, had given him away.
I was dazzled by my ability to understand everything so well and so completely and yet so effortlessly. Understanding flowed forth from me like music from Mozart.
I stretched out on the couch, wiggling my toes in delight. I contemplated getting up and going to bed, but the couch I was lying on felt perfect. Gradually, as if in conscious and discrete increments, I fell asleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1
THE TELEPHONE RINGS.
I pick up, still half asleep.
“Hello,” I say, in a voice alien even to myself.
It’s Cromwell at the other end.
His voice, unlike mine, is showered and shaved and full of bristling vitality.
What, what’s this, he wants to know, don’t tell him (I haven’t told him anything) that
I’m still asleep. At this hour! Ha, ha, ha, he laughs, like reveille in a boot camp. Still in bed at this hour!
“No,” I defend myself as best I can. “No, no, no, I’m not.”
I clear my throat and feel around for cigarettes I can’t seem to find.
“Breakfast. It’s breakfast time. I’m downstairs waiting for you. You got my message, didn’t you? So c’mon, put on some clothes and get your ass down here, you profligate bastard. Ha, ha, ha.”
He hangs up laughing.
I check the time. It’s nine forty-five.
It doesn’t matter that I’m late for a breakfast appointment I neither made nor accepted.
I start rushing around. I had fallen asleep on the couch in my clothes, so I’m fully dressed, but I can’t find my left shoe or any of my cigarettes. My rushing is tinged with futility. No matter how much I rush, it’s too late to be on time. I can’t make up for lost time.
First, I find my cigarettes and then my left shoe, and then, smoking, I rush to the master bathroom.
Leila is not there, but I have no time to wonder why not, or where she might be.
There is no time to shower or shave, but I have to brush my teeth.
Toothbrush in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other, I brush away, foaming toothpaste from the corners of my mouth.
There’s a burning sensation in my penis, but there’s no time to relax and play with the probability that I might have to pee. I’m at an age when physiological signals sent out by my body cannot be trusted anymore. My prostate gland is a source of ongoing disinformation. So I don’t really know if I have to pee or not. I only know that I have no time to find out for sure.
I rush out of the suite and rush down the long corridor toward the elevators. En route, I have time to wonder where Leila is, but no time to come up with a likely explanation for her disappearance.
“She’s probably just …”
I rush on.
2
The restaurant in the hotel lobby is large and almost filled to capacity. The tablecloths are white, the waiters dignified and well dressed, the atmosphere formal. The scent of food, bacon and maple syrup, leaves me in a quandary. Am I ravenous or stuffed? There is no way to arrive at an answer.
I look around for Cromwell and I don’t have to look long or hard.
There he is.
He is talking. His huge head is talking to somebody at the table with him. He is turned on. The power is on. He is smiling, laughing, reaching across the table with his hand to make a point.
Before I’m even halfway there, Cromwell senses my approach. His head, not the rest of him, just his head, much like a giant console TV with a swivel base, turns in my direction. He sees me. He takes me in. He incorporates me.
He waves and smiles.
I smile and wave back.
3
There were three of us at the table, Cromwell, myself, and Cromwell’s new concubine.
His new concubine was a young black man.
A very young and very slim and very beautiful black man. He was light-skinned, more light brown than black, but Cromwell was determined that the blackness not be lost on me. Nor on the young man himself. Throughout breakfast, he used superfluous phrases to keep the issue of that young man’s blackness alive.
“As my young black friend here will tell you …”
“Although he’s young, my black friend has lived a lot more than …”
“ … my young black friend …”
The repetition became oppressive.
The young man’s most striking feature was his eyes. They were as enormous as the eyes of Byzantine saints and so dark blue as to seem purple.
Despite his youth, he had thinning hair. His reserved semi-Afro was receding at the temples.
He wore a knowing expression on his face, like a sign that read that he was so well-informed and so wise to the ways of the world that nobody could put one over on him.
He was sure that he was way ahead of the game he was playing with Cromwell.
Whatever his name was, and it wasn’t Brad, it went out of my head as soon as I heard it. As far as I was concerned, his name was Brad.
4
“Doc!” Cromwell stands up to greet me. “Goddammit, Doc, it’s good to see you, even though you look like a human hangover, you old sinner.”
We embrace.
“Sit down, sit down,” he tells me, “you look like you’re having a helluva time standing up.” He laughs and slaps my back. “You really hung one on last night, didn’t you?”
“What can I say?” I say and shrug, my shoulders demonstrating how lightly I bear the reputation that precedes me.
“What did I tell you?” Cromwell tells Brad. “Didn’t I tell you he’d come down here with a hangover?”
He flatters both of us in one sentence. He flatters me that he had taken time out of his busy schedule to discuss me in my absence, and he flatters his young black friend by reminding him that he had discussed intimate details of my life with him.
It is a masterly demonstration of a master host. He flatters us both effortlessly and then rolls on.
“I just can’t get over you,” he tells me, and then he tells Brad, “He’s indestructible. He’s been this way ever since I’ve known him. The man’s a legend …”
A waiter comes. Cromwell orders a fruit plate with plain yogurt and unbuttered toast, Brad a blue-cheese omelette.
I’m still in a quandary about what to have, but Cromwell comes to my rescue.
“I don’t think our friend here is having anything to eat.” He smiles at the waiter. “Unless I’m mistaken, he’ll have a Bloody Mary to start,” Cromwell says and turns to me for confirmation.
I nod once, as if the state of my hangover is such that to nod twice is out of the question.
5
It is relaxing, playing the image Cromwell has given me to play.
I had forgotten the mindless comfort of being an image instead of a human being.
It’s not a lack of willpower that makes me go along with the charade of playing the image I’ve been given to play.
There are benefits.
I need a break from being.
Everyone, I think, needs an occasional break from being.
Even though I neither was drunk last night nor am hungover this morning, the image of a hack with a hangover is so comfortable that by assuming it I experience the peace that comes from finding a temporary respite from all the meaning crowding into my life.
From Leila and Billy, who mean so much to me.
From all the understanding I’ve had to do in the last few months.
I drink my Bloody Mary and smoke my cigarette and give myself over to Doc. He has fixed and streamlined so many screenplays and characters, transplanted so many spines into characters’ lives and caused so many happy ending to occur that I want the same treatment for myself. Fix me up, Doc. And if you have to hack away, then hack away at me, but fix me up, Doc.
We talk on.
Our talk is talk-show talk.
There’s a rhythm to the talking, an ancient rhythm, and there’s a rhythm as well to the laughter. It’s all very mellifluous and polyphonic, an acoustic massage for the mind. There is no content as such, but the tone is so pleasing that it becomes the content.
We’re neither so loud that we offend the people at the tables around us nor so inconspicuous that we lack an audience.
We attract the proper amount and the proper kind of attention.
Our group image is enhanced by the fact that we’re two white men and one black man (practically a boy) sharing the same table. It speaks well for us. It makes us feel and allows us to be perceived as goodwill ambassadors of some kind, of racial harmony if nothing else. And if the young black man at our table is Cromwell’s concubine, that is not apparent in the image we project.
We’re celebrating something at our table, life perhaps, or perhaps the fact that we’re all in the entertainment business, the unifying religion of our tim
e.
6
Here I am having breakfast with Cromwell and his young black friend because I was asked to be here and I came. I rushed to come, but there is neither rhyme nor reason for my presence except to be a witness of Cromwell’s fucking of his young black friend.
In order to justify my presence, the topic of tonight’s sneak preview comes up every now and then. Cromwell initiates the topic and he terminates it as he pleases.
He tells me that all the signs point to our having a big hit on our hands.
“Knock on wood.” He smiles and raps the table with his knuckles.
The word of mouth on the movie is to die for. His friends and even his enemies in LA are calling him up and wondering when they can see it.
The ad campaign, built around the copy line “Love, the All-American Pastime,” is going great. He had the copy line market-tested and it tested out even better than the title of the movie.
A sleeper, he’s certain of it. An art movie with mass appeal.
As if as an afterthought, he turns to Brad and tells him that the credit for the copy line belongs to me.
I protest. It was just something I said, I say. I had no idea it was a copy line until Cromwell said it was.
Young black Brad watches us with his big blue Byzantine eyes which bring to mind the portraits of Christian saints.
Our banter, the way we so easily and generously give each other credit, the way Cromwell pats my shoulder, the way I respond, it all has the charming markings of a long and close friendship. A professional relationship, but a personal relationship as well. It is an appealing image we project, of two talented men fond of each other, and the black Brad, I can tell, feels good to be sitting there, being a part of this camaraderie. It is lost on him, of course, that I detest (loathe, hate, abominate) Cromwell, but why shouldn’t it be lost on him when, for all practical purposes, it is lost on me?
But the focus of Cromwell’s enormous forehead and the dammed-up power behind it is not on me. I’m there as a diversion for the real business of this working breakfast, I’m nothing more than an observer who can be counted on to watch Cromwell fuck Brad in public. For a man like Cromwell to fuck somebody in private where only he and the victim are aware of the transaction would be a waste of time. Why even bother fucking somebody if there are no witnesses?