by Steve Tesich
“Mmm.” Cromwell savors the breakfast he’s eating.
He forks little pieces of fresh fruit from his fresh fruit plate and dips them into his plain yogurt bowl and then pops them into his mouth.
“Mmm.”
The zest with which he eats his food makes me doubt my hatred for this man. Makes me doubt my right to hate him. It seems un-American to hate somebody who loves what he’s doing, who relishes who he is.
I have no idea what kind of hard-on Cromwell has for the Brad at our table, nor what part of Brad’s life he wants to fuck. All I know, because I know Cromwell, because I have been repeatedly fucked by him, is that he wants to fuck that black boy, fuck something in him, or fuck something out of him, and he wants me to see him doing it over breakfast.
He has a zest for the life of that black boy.
The boy’s a wunderkind of sorts.
Self-educated. He quit school as soon as he could. Went to work in one little theater after another. Started reading scripts for a large non-profit theater where he became a dramaturg. Cromwell met him at the opening of a play in that theater and took, in Cromwell’s words, an instant shine to him.
“I could tell right away …”
“As soon as we started talking, I knew that …”
“There was no doubt in my mind that he …”
And so on.
All this happened very recently, a little over a week ago. Cromwell asked him to lunch. They had lunch. Then Cromwell asked him to come to Pittsburgh with him to see a sneak preview of Prairie Schooner: So here Brad is in Pittsburgh, having breakfast with us.
Is it the artist in Brad that Cromwell wants to fuck? Or perhaps he wants to fuck the artist out of him. (Cromwell has a hard-on for arts and artists of all kinds). Or perhaps Brad’s offense is that he has no need of Cromwell. Cromwell has a real hard-on for those who have no need of him.
“I need somebody like him in my office,” Cromwell tells me, so that his young black friend can sit there and absorb the delight of being discussed. “I really do. I need the input of youth. Especially black youth. It’s so easy to become insular and cut off, living the white life I live, and I feel a sense of responsibility to represent not just the mainstream white-bread culture but the black experience as well in the films I make. But you know this, Saul. I’ve told you this a hundred times …”
(This is the first I’ve heard of it, but I nod.)
“But I know nothing about movies,” the black Brad-in-the making says. “I don’t even like movies. I don’t.”
“Who can blame you for not liking the junk that’s out there? If you liked it, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking. And as for knowing nothing about movies, you know more than you think you do. You want to know who knows a lot about movies? All those film-school grads with their MFAs, that’s who. They know all about them. I have one of them working for me now and it’s a disaster. They haven’t got the heart or the gut instinct I need. But you do. That play you produced …”
“I didn’t really produce it. All I did was …”
“Oh, c’mon now. Let’s not play games. You produced it and you know you did. It was your play.”
“It was a play, not a movie. I really know nothing about movies,” he says, but with not quite the same conviction as before. “I’m a theater animal, is what I am.”
“If there’s anything our culture needs, it’s an infusion of that animal spirit, that raw vitality that you possess, not as an attribute but as an essence of who you are. That essence is the essence of art, be it film or theater or radio plays or rap or opera.” The power and authority with which Cromwell speaks roll out of him as easily as the acceptance speech of a political leader elected by a landslide. He creates the impression that he knows the greatness in you that you are too timid to acknowledge.
Having been fucked by Cromwell in much the same manner, I now watch fascinated. It is as if I am being fucked again.
Fucked by having to observe this.
I should intercede, I think to myself.
And on it goes.
Cromwell no longer refers to me, looks at me, or acknowledges my presence at the table. He knows I’m there. He knows I’m observing it all. That’s all he needs from me now. The little boost of energy that only an audience can give you.
Cromwell bites off little precise pieces of his unbuttered toast and shamelessly butters up Brad. He butters him up in such a blatant way that it can’t escape Brad’s attention.
And therefore Brad, knowing that he’s being buttered up, wears a knowing expression on his face, as if that will make him immune to Cromwell’s onslaught.
As if he could see through Cromwell with those beautiful purple Byzantine eyes.
Cromwell loves it when you see through him.
“What you have,” Cromwell tells him, “is something so rare that …
“It’s not just that you’re talented,” he tells him, “it’s that you’re also …
“You could be the first black man in the movie business to …”
He offers him image after image. And image after image, Brad refuses with a shrug or a smile or an amused knowing expression on his face.
But each refusal gives Cromwell an insight into the image that’s needed to entomb his young black friend.
“Look,” Cromwell tells him, and the tone of his voice suggests that he understands and accepts ahead of time Brad’s refusal.
“Look,” he says, “you’ve done just fine without me and I’ve done just fine without you, and I wager to say that we’ll both continue to do just fine without each other. But that’s not the point. I understand your reluctance. You, young man, were meant to be a young black warrior. I’m not telling you anything that you don’t know a hundred times better than I do, nor am I about to lie and tell you that to be a young black warrior in the movie business will be easy. Because it won’t. Our country, our society, the whole white corporate structure of the entertainment industry is on automatic pilot to crush they young black warrior whenever and wherever he appears. And so I have to admit that a part of me, the rational part of me, would urge you to stay away from it for your own good. But there’s another, deeper part of me that knows that when young black warriors stop appearing in our society …”
I can see the change in Brad.
Detect some internal reappraising.
This image of himself as a young black warrior appeals to him. Those words have struck a chord.
The image, like some parasite, attaches itself to him as if to a host organism.
Cromwell, with a single glance of his upraised eyes, takes in his new black Brad who, he can see, is now there for the taking.
CHAPTER NINE
1
CROMWELL AND BRAD are going to take a drive around Pittsburgh. Cromwell likes Pittsburgh. “It’s a very interesting city,” he says. “Far more interesting than people think.”
He invites me to come along.
I can’t, I beg off. My son’s here.
We part in the lobby.
“See you at the movies tonight, Doc.”
“I’ll be there,” I tell him, and extend a hand to Brad. “Nice to’ve met you.”
He tells me that it was nice to’ve met me too.
They go one way and I go the other.
It’s Billy I spot first. I become aware of him in the corner of my eye before I actually see him. His height. His newly cropped hair. Something has made me turn my head.
Had I not seen him, I would not have seen Leila, but now I see them both. There against the far wall. Both of them standing. Billy in profile, leaning against the wall, Leila full out, leaning against the wall too. Between them is a small table with a house phone, white, on top of it.
The lobby is enormous and very busy at this time of day. People checking in, checking out. Scattered throughout the lobby are little islands of furniture, little living rooms almost, with sofas, chairs, end tables, lamps, and rugs of their own.
I move through the crow
d toward one of those little living room areas in the lobby. I sit down in an easy chair, it even swivels like the one in my living room in New York, and, lighting a cigarette, I begin to observe Leila and Billy at my leisure.
Billy is talking. Leila is listening. Billy’s left hand is rubbing the top of his head as he talks.
Although there is something undeniably surreptitious about what I’m doing, my motives for doing it are innocent, pure family-man motives.
It’s not often (strange as it may seem) that we get a chance to observe freely those we love.
It feels like ages since I’ve seen them.
Being with them is not the same as looking at them, as I’m doing now. You can’t just look at people when you’re with them. They say something. You say something. Your presence alters their behavior and your own as well. You see very little of the people you love when you’re with them.
Or so it seems to me, sitting there, luxuriating in this opportunity to watch them, for once, to my heart’s content.
I love them so.
I love the way they’re talking to each other. I have no idea what they’re saying, but there’s a vitality and an urgency in their conversation that’s apparent even at a distance.
Billy keeps rubbing the top of his head.
Leila is talking now.
He wants to interrupt, but doesn’t.
Then she stops talking.
Both are silent for a while.
Then Billy says something. He seems to be asking her a question. She looks down at her shoes.
I either notice or imagine that I see a physical resemblance between them. The slightly swaybacked curve of their spines. With their heads bowed, as both their heads are now, they look like two graceful question marks.
Mother and son.
I sit there smoking, envisioning the happy ending to this day.
They stand in silence and then, without another word being spoken, Billy picks up the white phone. There is only one person he could be calling in the hotel. And that’s me.
I’m sorry to give up my comfortable observation post, but it’s time to go.
I head toward them.
Billy is leaning against the wall with the receiver to his ear and Leila is looking down at her shoes when I arrive.
“There you are,” I say.
I’ve spoken too loudly and the sudden sound of my voice, and my sudden appearance, startles Leila. She is literally shaken. Billy spins around.
“Dad, I was just …”
All three of us start speaking at the same time and all three of us seem to be saying the same thing.
Then we laugh. Or I do. Or they do. There’s laughter among us.
Explanations follow laughter. We all seem to have some explaining to do and we’re all eager to state our case. Leila, still a little shaken, is explaining how she woke up starved and saw me asleep on the couch and didn’t want to wake me but she just had to have something to eat. So she went down to have breakfast and who should she run into in the lobby but Billy, who …
Billy takes it from there and starts explaining how he too woke up starved, but as starved as he was, he just didn’t like the look of the hotel restaurant. Instead, he decided to take a drive around town to look for a less pretentious place to eat, but just as he was heading out of the hotel, he saw Leila stumbling out of the elevator and …
“I was not stumbling,” Leila protests.
We all laugh for some reason.
Then Billy and Leila take turns telling the rest of the story. How they drove around Pittsburgh looking for just the right place. How a lot of places were still closed. How cool and autumnal the air was. How they finally found this diner not far from the river. A real blue-collar kind of place, with a jukebox and a lot of trucks parked in the parking lot.
They shower me with details about the diner.
When my turn comes to explain, I tell them what I did with my time and with whom. I leave out the essentials of what occurred over my breakfast table. Instead, I repeat what Cromwell told me: how the word on the movie is that it is to die for. How we might have a big hit on our hands. How this day will mark the end of Leila’s anonymity.
They both seem overly attentive while I talk. I’m not saying much, babbling away, but they’re hanging on every word I say, nodding, responding.
We all seem overly excited about something.
It all seems slightly artificial, but it’s hard to tell. Perhaps it’s genuine.
I either detect or think that I detect the scent of alcohol on Billy’s breath. It’s hard to know for sure, because I myself have been drinking.
We seem to be standing too close together as we talk. Billy’s hands look enormous suddenly. They’re the same hands he always had, of course, but now, for some reason, they seem to be massive. Maybe he’s using them more. Big unruly hands, like the wings of a creature he can’t quite control.
He’s wearing a beat-up old fleece-lined athletic jacket and he keeps pulling up the zipper and then pulling it down and he doesn’t seem aware that he’s doing this.
I miss the distance I had while observing them without being with them.
I feel both crowded and, God knows why, lonely at the same time.
And I feel overwhelmed by the need to process, evaluate, and interpret the data I detect in their eyes, in the sound of their voices, the language of their bodies.
The way Leila keeps looking down at her shoes.
The way she looks up and then down again.
The way she seems ready to leave, to rush off somewhere, and the way she just manages to keep herself in place.
Billy looks as rebellious as he did last night (a skinhead, a Liverpool hooligan, an East European mafioso), but he no longer behaves according to his rebellious image. He seems confused, pathetic. As if he doesn’t have a clue how to behave around me, what pose to strike.
I see a multiplicity of Billys in his eyes and I feel besieged.
I’ve done my part. I went through a rather exhausting process of understanding him and his rebellious image last night. The least he can do is stick to it for a while.
I feel incapable, not unwilling but incapable, of any new understanding at the moment, and I resent being called upon to provide it.
At the moment, I lack the resources to handle any deviations from what I consider to be their current characters.
I feel out of breath. Mentally out of breath.
As if caught in a vortex, or held together by gravity, we remain standing there, too close to one another for comfort.
In desperation almost, I suggest we do something.
“It looks like such a nice day,” I shout, having not had a single glimpse myself of the kind of day it is. “Why don’t we do something?”
Billy stammers and then speaks.
“I was just … I mean, just before you showed up … that’s what I was calling you about. We were thinking of going for a drive to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House. It’s supposed to be not far from here and I’ve always …”
He starts explaining himself again, apologizing almost, telling me how he’s become interested in architecture at college and how Frank Lloyd Wright is one of his …
I can’t tell if I’m being invited to come along with them or not, but I assume that I am and I accept.
“That’s a great idea,” I tell him. “I’ve always wanted to see the Fallingwater House. Let me just shower, shave, and change my clothes and we’ll be out of here. Won’t take me more than fifteen minutes. Twenty, tops.”
I thought they would wait for me in the lobby while I got ready, but instead all three of us get on the elevator and ride up together. Billy keeps zipping and unzipping the zipper on his jacket until I’m almost ready to slap his hand.
2
Standing in the shower, I bend my head as if in prayer.
I enjoy the sensation of hot water falling on my shoulders and the sight of steam rising, enveloping me.
There is not ti
me to take a long shower because Billy and Leila are waiting for me in the living room. I picture them standing there.
It’s puzzling. I’m taking a shower in private, but there’s no private person within me. There’s only the outer man taking a shower, playing some public persona.
I can’t tell if it’s just the mood I’m in or if it’s a new malady.
I dry off, using many towels. I put on clean clothes.
3
I had left them standing and now found them sitting.
I never thought of either of them as massive before, but they seem massive to me now, as massive and as immobile and as burdened with some oppressive meaning as the two marble figures of Michelangelo atop the tomb of Giuliano de Medici.
No more meaning, please, I felt like screaming. Enough! I’m not a young man anymore.
They were sitting on the same long couch, Leila at one end and Billy at the other. Directly opposite the couch was an easy chair.
The chair faced them and seemed exactly equidistant from both Billy and Leila.
That chair was meant for me.
I was meant to sit in that chair (there was even a clean ashtray on the end table in front of it) and serve as a receptacle for whatever was oppressing them.
Everything pointed in this direction. The look in their eyes. The silence in the room. The triangular seating arrangement.
Our agenda to go sightseeing had been changed while I was in the shower.
I neither knew nor cared to know the details of the new agenda because I was not in a position to do anything about it. I was, for the time being, a completely one-dimensional creature trying to do his superficial best for both of them. There was no inner man within me. No one was on duty inside to handle this emergency.
Tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow, I would be able to deal with it. But not now.
To bog down now, to sit in that chair and listen to them disgorge themselves of whatever was oppressing them, was beyond my psychological resources. And I couldn’t allow them to jeopardize the happy ending I had in store for them. I had to save them from themselves, to keep them from spoiling the glorious surprise that awaited them tonight.