So, towards the end of dinner, as Martina stood at my side pouring out the last of the wine, I rammed my hand up her skirt and said, 'Come on, darling, you know you love it'... Relax. I didn't really. In fact I behaved doggedly well all evening. You see, I'd figured it out by then. Oh, I knew what her angle was — I knew what this Martina Twain character was after. Friendship. Friendship: no sex or duplicity or complication, no money, just frictionless human contact. Well that's no fucking use to me, is it, I thought at first. I was out of my mind with sobriety, teetotalled — I felt lightheaded, I felt downright drunk, eating dinner up here with this sicko who saw nothing in me but myself. Jesus, what kind of pervert am I dealing with now? And yet I steadied, and the talk came freely enough. It takes all sorts, I concluded with a shrug, and resigned myself to the whole deal. Besides, I had this boil on my ass.
I did try a gimmick on her, though, as I took my leave at eleven-thirty. The best women, sometimes, are the most neglected, and you never know your luck.
'Oh yeah,' I'd just said. 'Give me another book to read.'
'All right, hang on then.'
It was 1984 — by George Orwell again.
I raised a finger at her. 'No animals?'
'No. Just a few rats.'
'Any allegory?'
'Not really.'
'Say,' I said (and here was my gimmick): 'I had a swell dream about you the other night.'
Normally, with this line, in my experience you get either coy withdrawal or outright panic, depending on the dame. But Martina merely gazed at me with level curiosity and asked, 'Oh yes? What happened in it?'
'Uh — well I was sort of rescuing you from Red Indians. Except they weren't red but white, with fair hair. I was rescuing you in my car. It's a Fiasco. And then the car wouldn't start.'
'What was so swell about it all?'
'Oh, then another car showed up and I drove you away in that. To safety.'
Actually this was my first deviation from truth. I did have a dream. What happened was, the Red Indians disappeared or went off somewhere else, the Fiasco was transfigured into a kind of playboy pad, Martina shed her cotton shirt and buckskins — and I loved her up pretty good on that oval sack.
'Yes, it was a real bitch,' I said, 'my car not starting like that.'
'It was probably drunk,' said Martina, smiling as she opened her door to let me out.
The adult movie was a period piece and more thoughtfully plotted than usual, all about a black plenipotentiary (Ottoman? Carthaginian?) and the appetites of his talented wife (Juanita del Pablo), who, with the help of her chambermaid (Diana Proletaria), puts out not only for her husband but for most of his army too, as well as the odd handful of servants, slaves, eunuchs, acrobats and, finally, executioners. He catches Juanita at it in the end, and throws her into some stock footage, where the lions get her. As I shuffled down the aisle with my Orwell and my pint, and as an hysterical voice-over blurbed the coming attractions ('... starring Diana Proletaria, the Princess of Pawwun. Iss whyuld. Iss hat!'), two black dudes climbed tiredly to their feet, rubbing their eyes.
'Man, I sure could use some of the BC. I wouldn't want to go back too long.'
'Yeah. A couple of weeks, maybe.'
'Two, maybe three. I wouldn't want to go back too long. But oh man I sure could use some of that BC.'
Five minutes later I was in a gogo bar on Broadway, discussing inflation with an off-duty stripper called Cindi. If you'd asked me how I felt, I would have told you that it was a big relief—to be back in civilization again.
'I want to thank you, John,' said the telephone, 'for our date the other night.'
'Which night was that?'
'Saturday night. Or Sunday morning. Don't tell me you don't remember. We met. Kind of. You were very nice to me, John. You didn't try and kill me or anything. No, you were very dear.'
'Don't talk crap,' I said.
Frank the Phone again, giving me a hard time. Actually I was still deeply curious about Saturday night. The harder I tried to remember — or, let's be accurate, the harder I fought to keep memory away — the more convinced I became that something really bad had happened, something definitive, something life-wrecking. I think that was why I had drunk myself to pieces all through Sunday. To keep that memory away, away. But Frank the Phone I could handle. This wimp couldn't worry me.
'You find a bookmatch in your pocket?. .. Go find it again, John. I wrote a message for you inside.'
'Oh yeah? What?'
'Go find it, John. I want you to see the proof.'
I went to the wardrobe and frisked my suit. I had thrown nothing away. I never throw anything away. Here, the telltale bookmatch, valentine-pink, the colour of sweet lipstick: Zelda's — Dinner and Hostess Dancing. I snapped it open, and I got the message.
'Oh you sick bat,' I said. 'You poor idiot. Will you tell me something? Why are you doing this? Tell me again. I keep forgetting.'
'Oh it's motivation you want. You want motivation. Okay. Here. Have some motivation.'
Then he made his longest speech to date. He said to me, 'Remember, in Trenton, the school on Budd Street, the pale boy with glasses in the yard? You made him cry. It was me. Last December, Los Angeles, the hired car you were driving when you jumped that light in Coldwater Canyon? A cab crashed and you didn't stop. The cab had a passenger. It was me. 1978, New York, you were auditioning at the Walden Center, remember? The redhead, you had her strip and then passed her over, and you laughed. It was me. Yesterday you stepped over a bum in Fifth Avenue and you looked down and swore and made to kick. It was me. It was me.'
The Ashbery, Room 101, I sit with my big croc face flickering to the last veils of the late, late movie. I don't — I don't remember the pale boy with glasses crying in the playground — but no doubt there were one or two, and I was a mean kid. There always are those pale boys — I was in LA last December, and I hired a car all right. There were near things, there were skids, emergency stops, emergency sprints. There always are those near things... I did hold auditions in the Walden Center in '78, checking out some models for the big-bim role in a Bulky Bar commercial. There must have been the odd redhead among them, and I was my usual working self (I'm an altogether different proposition when I'm working—I'm not very nice at all). There always are those redheads ... I was a mean kid in 1978. I was a mean kid last year. And this.
Yesterday I was walking up golden Fifth Avenue towards the tawny gulf of the Park. The powerful stores were in full exchange, drawing people in, easing people out, superintended by the lean Manhattan totems, these idols or rock-statues that stare straight ahead in grim but careless approval of the transactions compounded in the street beneath. It was pouring money. On the pavement the monkeynut operatives and three-card trick artists, the thimble-riggers, hot-handbag dealers, contraband bandits — they all plied their small concerns. A lot of dinky women taking the goods and the air today ... there's no shortage of big tits in Manhattan. It's not a problem. Nearly everyone seems to have them over here ... Then I saw something you see pretty often over here too: a have-not, a real flat-earther, a New York nomad lying face down on the flagstones like a damp log, sideways-on to the streaming spenders in their waves and sheets and racks. As I stepped over him I looked down (the rug as stiff as bark, an ear the texture of pomegranate peel) and said, rather affably I thought, 'Get up, you lazy bastard.' I walked on — and hailed Fielding as he strolled out of a bookstore. Arm in arm we gained the Carraway and met with two more of our moneymen, Buck Specie and Sterling Dun. They were both very excited by the venture and were alike convinced that I had a big future in our industry. Then they all went off nightclubbing in the Autocrat, but I was already massive and speechless with rice wine, and so I...
Zelda's — Dinner and Hostess Dancing. Inside was the message, the hand forward-sloping, tremulous, not unlike my own. Here in the States, in my day, writing lessons began with you tipping your pad forty-five degrees to the left, in order to promote this wavy, tumbling style. 'Frankie and Johnny were lovers', sealed with a kiss, a full lip-print in sweetest pink.
All in all, I'm none too clear what this guy means by motivation.
——————
The new televisual intercom on the steel desk gave off its throttled bleep. Fielding pressed the button and waited for the picture to form. He looked mildly startled.
'Who's this?' I asked him.
'That's fine, Dorothea. Thank you. No, you just wait for our call.' Fielding sat down and said, 'Nub Forkner.'
'Good,' I said. With Spunk Davis going AWOL, with Spunk sulking and failing to return our calls, Fielding and I had decided to check out Nub Forkner as a possible reserve. I made a note of the name on my pad, for something to do.
'That's o-r-k, Slick,' said Fielding.
I glanced down at the page. 'That's what I've got.'
'... You read much, John?'
'Read what?'
'Fiction.'
'Do you?'
'Oh sure. It gives me all kinds of ideas. I like the sound and the fury,' he added enigmatically.
That's what reading does to you: you start saying things like that. 'Yeah,' I said, 'well I've been reading a novel by George Orwell. Animal Farm. Re-reading it, actually. Yeah and 1984 too.' Me and 1984 were getting along just fine.
'Animal Farm?' said Fielding. 'No kidding.'
Dorothea or whoever waved goodbye and clicked off to the far doorway buttoning up her shirt. We saw her shrink back momentarily before hurrying out into the hall. Nub Forkner ducked slowly through the entrance and paused with a sigh to re-amass his weight ... Now I was far from familiar with Nub's work. True, I had dozed and belched my way through two films in which he featured—but at thirty thousand feet, in the refugee darkness of transatlantic airplanes. The press handout on my lap confirmed that Nub had played a Pawnee vagrant in Whisky Sour and a deaf mute in last year's cackle-factory spectacular Down on the Funny Farm. Both the vagrant and the mute, I seemed to remember, were outsize psychotics given to sudden and indiscriminate violence — big mothers, primal-scream specialists. Well, as Nub creaked across the joists towards us, with oil-strike hair shawling his shoulders, throwback knuckles grazing the floor, Fielding and I were clearly meant to think there was something unshirkably elemental about him, his cave shave, primal jeans, noble-savage beerbelly. You didn't need much of an eye for nutcases to tell that Nub was a real fizzer, all set to pop. He was about six five, 300 pounds. Yes, Nub looked pretty useful.
'Hi, Nub,' said Fielding drily. 'Why not take a chair.'
Why not indeed? Nub took a chair and sent it twirling sideways end over end with a negligent whipcrack of his wrist. Next, he picked up Fielding's snazzy egg-timer (used to pace the strippers) and stomped it to the floor. He bent down and extended an arm across the desk, ready to swipe it sideways over the high-tec tabletop. He looked up quickly and I saw that his face was full of expectant ingratiation.
Fielding climbed sharply to his feet. 'Easy, Nub,' he said.
Nub frowned and straightened. 'This is a fury scene, right?' he said in a deep calm voice. 'Male rage. I'm a method actor. I got to get furious first.'
The whole thing was a farce from the start. Nub was a one-role guy, a bearded lady. He was hopeless for us. Who'd believe that Caduta Massi could have produced this room-filler? How would he contrive to lose a fight to Lorne Guyland? Could you see him in the arms of Butch Beausoleil? Forget it. Nub would just have to hang around until the next fat-whacko part came along... But we had to test him, and he had to test us. He had to come here to see if his particular brand of rogue chemicals, his particular slant or version, was good for another few bucks. I suppose we sell whatever we have. Actors are strippers: they do it all day long. Fielding gave him the usual bullshit and at last he shuddered off across the floor.
'Great,' I said. 'Back to square one.'
'Don't be so easily discouraged, Slick. You know, Nub and Spunk are both with Herrick Shnexnayder. I'm going to give Herrick a call. You fix the drinks. It's your turn.'
Fielding called Herrick Shnexnayder. He said he loved Nub's work and wanted to know what his availability looked like. Sums of money, low down in the six figures, were cautiously mentioned.
'Nub's availability looks good,' said Fielding, as he replaced the telephone and turned to the intercom.
'Yeah, I bet.'
'Ah come on, he might do for a heavy — the arm-breaker. Now will you take a look at that. Celly Unamuno. Mexican. Nineteen.
Word is she's really hot.'
'Christ,' I said, 'I hope Butch Beausoleil doesn't find out about all this.'
'Relax. Hey, what do you make of Butch? Personally.'
'Don't tell me. You've checked her out.'
'I'm too young for her, Slick. She likes mature men. It's you she goes for.'
'The big thing about Butch — well, as she says herself, you know, just because you're young and talented and beautiful doesn't mean you can't be intelligent too. The big thing about Butch is that she's not just .. .' I paused.
'You guessed, huh?'
'What?'
'She's a moron,' said Fielding. 'The big thing about Butch is her ass. Hi there, Celly. Now you just sit down and make yourself at home. John? Where are those drinks.'
Twenty minutes later, as Celly was getting dressed again (she looked like a pornographic cartoon, a comic strip, except for the eyes, which weren't even twenty yet and could hardly be expected to hide their fear or helplessness), I stood up and moved like a ghost to the white window. I held the cold steel of the cocktail-shaker, and, watching the way my shoulders worked, you might have thought that I was shaking it. But I wasn't. I was just wondering, I'm in hell somehow, and yet why is it hell? Covered by heaven, with its girls and deceptions and mad-acts, what is the meaning of this white tent? I keep looking at the sky and saying, Yeah, I'm like that, so blue, so deeply blue. How come? I've done it before and I'll do it again. There are no police to stop you doing it. I know that people are watching me, and you aren't exempt or innocent, I think, but now someone else is watching me too. Another woman. It's the damnedest thing. Martina Twain. She's in my head. How did she get in there? She's in my head, along with all the crackle and traffic. She is watching me. There is her face, right there, watching. The watcher watched, the watched watcher — and this second pathos, where I am watched by her and yet she watches me unknowingly. Does she like what she is seeing? Dah! Oh, I must fight that, I must resist it, whatever it is. I'm in no kind of shape for the love police. Money, I must put money round me, more money, soon. I must be safe.