“I must stop. I don’t want to hurt nobody.”
Randall said, “I could just give you whatever amount of money you need to ensure that if you are going to use drugs you buy from the most reputable dealers in these drugs, that you get the safest drugs, and that you always use the cleanest needles, and in that way, you take the fewest risks. Because if money is going to enable you to feel comfortable, then I need to help, because I am the man who loves you.”
After consideration, Randall added, “We can go through this together.”
Raoul wept for a while and when he again met Randall Tork’s eyes, it was with a kind of gratitude that Tork was not used to seeing, even from the wine publicists who had dodged the exploding ordnance of his malice. Randall could tell that Raoul was high even at the moment of confession, because he knew the look. The look of the simulation of self-knowledge by one who is able in deceit. He knew Raoul was high and he suspected it would get worse, that there was no ending ahead but a bad ending. This bad ending might contain the assault of his own person, the robbery thereof. Still, he had come this far, and for the moment there was no course but to trust further and to attempt to lead Raoul to the light of nobility, especially as this light was indicated in the tradition of the production of wine. He urged Raoul to come to tastings with him, and Raoul attempted to comply on a few occasions. But for each boondoggle that featured Raoul’s guest appearance, there were days when he was gone, and, for all Randall knew, he was out on the street, playing the
putain
for an extra twenty or thirty clams. Randall Tork tried to make sure that the boy never left without cash, and he always snuck a half-dozen condoms into his pocket when Raoul’s blue jeans came out of the wash.
As Halloween rolled around, Randall Tork began to get an even more desperate notion. That he would like to
marry
Raoul. Marry him? He could not marry Raoul, for so many reasons, chief among them that Raoul Rodriguez was Catholic, and in the Roman Catholic Church there was no such thing as the love between men. The blood of Christ congealed at the very notion. And there was also the law of the land, the nauseating Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited two men from meeting in the nuptial bower to celebrate their love. Formidable problems, indeed, and yet Randall Tork, the greatest living wine writer, did not accept that anyone could tell him what he might do. He would marry Raoul, and they would promenade down the steps of some church, sparklers sparkling everywhere around them. He would utter his vows to the boy and he would know the joy the vows brought down on their utterers.
Was it delusional? He’d known Raoul three months. Three delicious months during which he had never once shrunk from holding the boy’s head when he upchucked, nor from cleaning up after his bouts of diarrhea. He cherished every joke and every moment of kindness; he loved every landscape that had Raoul in it. He was occasionally struck by the notion that Raoul would not live out the whole of his term. For example, Randall Tork should have been finishing a big article for a big glossy magazine about the Afghani vineyards that were springing up in place of the once plentiful fields of opium poppies. But he could not finish the article because he was too busy thinking about getting married. Where might they conduct the ceremony? Should they travel to some faraway country that recognized their type of union? Would Raoul be able to fly without having to give himself an injection? Which designer should they select for the creation of their wedding suits? And, most important, what would be the wine? In the past few weeks, Randall Tork had been vacillating between two different choices: the 1945 Mouton Rothschild, with its light amber edges, and the 1959 Lafite Rothschild, memorable for, dare he say it, the black truffle overtones. He found himself curiously irresolute, as if the idea that he might now be married had begun to affect somehow his professional credentials in the matter of this selection. Scandal!
Into these interesting times, as if dropped from the air, a movie star projected himself. Randall had met the movie star at a wine tasting at a Sonoma vineyard, Lonely Lake, owned by a certain film producer. Randall Tork felt that the wines of Lonely Lake were beneath contempt, as were all but a few American wines, but he had made an exception and graced this tasting with his presence for the simple reason that Lonely Lake had the best wine
label
he had ever seen. It hadn’t escaped Randall’s notice that some of the California vineyards had brought to the design of their labels the expertise and sublimity that their wine making lacked. The pen-and-ink elegance and the almost Victorian calligraphy of the Lonely Lake label appealed to Randall, as did the invocation in its title of that most romantic of emotions. What did Randall know better than wine? Just the one thing. Loneliness. The idea that a purveyor of popular pabulum like the producer who owned this vineyard would willingly invoke that most perfect word,
loneliness,
in the pursuit of a drinkable simulation of a Malbec, it was enough to roust him from Raoul and his house.
Randall Tork recalls that he was talking to a thoroughly moronic author of mystery novels, whose visage looked as though it had been face-lifted by a drunken home renovator, and she was boasting about how her next novel was going to be about a wine writer, when all at once there was a commotion in the room, and the movie star and his wife made their entrance. Of course, Randall Tork is not the sort to be surprised by stardom. He has seen stardom come and go. He has seen great chefs laid low by pedophilia and vainglory, and he has seen vineyards that were red-hot in one vintage produce nothing but detergent for a decade. He has seen it all. Still, Randall Tork admired a fine entrance. When the movie star and his wife entered the party, the general astonishment of the wine tasters was a fine thing to behold. The wine tasters laid aside their gossip about the movie producer and his wines long enough to take note of the white minidress that the wife was wearing and the ensemble that the movie star himself sported, a pair of torn blue jeans, a silk T-shirt, a blazer from Armani, and cowboy boots.
Randall Tork was introduced to the movie star as the world’s greatest living wine writer, and neither he nor the movie star disputed this characterization. There were two giants in the room now, and this was one of those moments when those destined to greatness must sniff around each other’s behinds to settle the question of whether or not to attack.
What impressed Randall about the movie star immediately was that the movie star ignored everyone for the rest of the afternoon and devoted himself exclusively to Tork. This indicated, on the part of the movie star, a developed palate. He believed that the movie star showed promise. And the movie star, unlike many straight men of reputation, was not at all uncomfortable around a man of Randall Tork’s persuasions. On the contrary, the movie star seemed to enjoy talking to a wine writer no matter
qu’il fait la drague.
It was only when they had been talking for some fifteen or twenty minutes that the movie star admitted that he actually did collect a little bit, under the tutelage of his father-in-law, who really knew about these things, and it happened that in this context, the wine-collecting context, the movie star had indeed read some of Randall Tork’s reviews.
“You’re a madman, and I can’t get enough of it. I don’t care about the wines. I only care about the way the language tumbles out.”
“Of course you do.”
“You’re like Proust.”
“Proust is like
me.
I’d never change the boys’ names to girls’ names.”
“He—?”
“I was not pampered as a child. I made myself up in a fever dream. It was not a taxing project. Now Randall Tork rules the world.”
Of course, the movie star had many demands upon his attention. Eventually, the vineyard owner, that briny lump of tissue, pried the movie star loose from his colloquy with Randall, and Randall recognized that this was inevitable, if boring. But before the movie star moved on to dally with the vacuous, diaper-clad elderly of Sonoma County, he leaned in to Randall and said, “Give me your card. We’ll get together.”
And Randall’s card is rather special. It’s from Smythson of Bond Street, the London office, special ordered, and it is on heavy stock with gilt edges, printed in Edwardian script from a hand-engraved copperplate:
RANDALL TORK. IN THE CONSIDERATION OF FINE VINTAGES.
E-mail address below. During the events described, Randall delivered the card with the ennui that appropriately suggested that the movie star could never have been luckier than just now. Indeed, the movie star smiled, before disappearing into the throngs.
This personage, Randall later admitted to his consort, Raoul, was called Thaddeus Griffin.
“Single Bullet Theory
?”
“The very one.”
“Was he a handsome man?”
“Exceedingly handsome, his handsomeness chiefly located in his tonsorial effects. He is a man with perfect hair, hair whose disarrangement is among the most calculated statements of beauty I have seen in many years.”
“You going to make room in your bed?” said Raoul mischievously.
“Fool,” Randall said. “I’m promised to you. You are my appointment and my disappointment. Moreover, this is a man who loves his wife. I can sense these things.”
Evidently the movie star managed such feats as producing from thin air the unlisted and fervently guarded telephone number of Randall Tork, because suddenly, out of the blue, in the middle of the crisis of Raoul’s addictive relapses, the movie star called not too long after the tiresome general election. He said he had something he wanted to discuss with Randall Tork and could he come out to Sonoma, just after the Thanksgiving holiday, to meet with him. There was no description of what was to be discussed. And yet Randall Tork, the greatest living wine writer, was not above a little adolescent excitement. An excitement that he elected not to display, lest his passions bring about one of the inexplicable torrents of Latin rage in Raoul.
Today is the day. Having completed six column inches of negligible interest and having fretted briefly over whether his powers are on the wane, Randall Tork has washed behind his ears, and he has brushed his teeth again, and he has set out a lovely Château Lafite from a year before he was born on a silver platter, alongside which are two glasses from Tiffany’s, and he has gone out into the living room, where Raoul is sobbing over a talk show about a woman who cannot accept her daughter’s navel ring, and he has hugged this dear boy, and he has asked if Raoul would make sure not to ask the movie star anything about his movies or his upcoming projects, because these people, he tells Raoul, do not like to have to talk about how they live. It would be better if he would just continue watching the program until Randall gives him the secret signal, and then he can go ahead and talk.
“You trying to hide me away from your famous boyfriend!”
“Raoul! Absolutely not!”
“You saying that I’m not good enough?” It’s just what he was afraid of. The outrage gathers momentum, like a chain reaction, beginning as a peevish jocularity and moving through bitter resentment into full-scale meltdown.
“I am saying no such thing! I’m saying that we do not yet know what the movie star
wants,
and in the absence of information, we should wait and see what it is that he wants, and that requires the stealthy strategy of a feline —”
“You calling me —”
“I’m not calling you anything except my dear sweet boy who has made my life tolerable. I’m just explaining —”
“I can go out on the street and wait for you there, if that’s what you want. I come into your house like this, you ought to treat me with
respect.
Because I have things I can do. I can go away!”
“Raoul! Please don’t do this! Not now. I am your cheering section and your federal agency. I love you no matter what. Please just understand —”
In fact, Raoul has taken a bad turn in recent days. Raoul has stopped looking rosy in the way he was, even though Randall is making sure that he takes what he’s supposed to take, and he has stopped expressing the joy he was previously expressing. Raoul has mostly lain around on the couch, complaining about a program called
American Spy,
which bothers him because he thinks the participants are unpleasant. Perhaps it will be this way until spring training, when his pastime can again lighten his heart. Whatever the cause, Randall Tork does not have liberty to ponder it, because the doorbell is ringing—because it is twelve noon sharp on the Monday after Thanksgiving, the appointed day and time—and now the movie star has come to call, here at the little house on stilts.
The movie star is graceful and full of humility as he stoops and crosses the threshold. The movie star hands over his scarf and his leather jacket, and he smiles at Randall and compliments him on the house, on its elimination of inessential furnishings, the concealment of all books, the warm light that suffuses the premises with genteel hospitality. All things, it should go without saying, that Randall Tork has premeditated in the presentation of his modest bunker. If the movie star notices the lump on the couch, he doesn’t say anything about it, and neither does Randall. At the kitchen table, after the wine is poured from the decanter and after the movie star performs a neophyte’s swirling and sniffing, the conversation at last begins.
“Let me know what you think,” Randall says. “Grape juice. Just a trifle. I have a couple of other things I want you to try.”
“Excellent.”
The movie star gives the wine pause, a pause that the movie star apparently thinks he must observe, before getting onto the subject he has genuinely come here to address.
“Listen, Randall—it’s okay if I call you Randall, right? I didn’t really come here to discuss wine, which I’m sure is kind of an unusual thing to say under the circumstances. Since that’s what you’re known for. I really admire what you do as a writer, and that’s why I’m here. It’s like I said the last time we saw each other. I think I said then that I didn’t think you were
just
a wine writer, any more than Hemingway was just a writer about bullfights. I think you’re one of the great contemporary writers, I really do, and believe it or not, I do read. Once you get locked into doing what I do, you’re sort of stuck there. There are lots of compensations, sure, but there are lots of costs, too. For example, no one believes I got a good education at a good college. No one believes that I love to read and that I admire the great storytellers, you know? It’s true. I even write.