Hoag:
I can’t believe you did this, Cameron.
Noyes:
Were you really surprised?
Hoag:
What, to walk into my apartment and find
your
writing table sitting here? Of course I was surprised.
Noyes:
Big Vic and I took it uptown in the back of the Olds after work yesterday. He was planning to pick your lock until we discovered that giant hole in your —
Hoag:
I can’t accept it, Cameron.
Noyes:
You said you liked it.
Hoag:
I do. But you spent hundreds of hours making it. It’s a work of art.
It’s yours
.
Noyes:
Not anymore. Besides, I can always make another. In the meantime, this old workbench will suit me fine. Your apartment is awfully dreary, coach. Why don’t you get a nicer one?
Hoag:
I tried once. It didn’t work out. Are you sure about this?
Noyes:
Positive. I want you to have it.
Hoag:
Thank you, Cameron. I’ll cherish it.
Noyes:
Don’t cherish it. Write on it.
Hoag:
I’m interviewing Skitsy tonight.
Noyes:
Maybe I should come with you.
Hoag:
I’d rather you didn’t. I’ll get more out of her if I’m alone.
Noyes:
Whatever you think is best, coach.
Hoag:
So when did your thing with her start? At Stony Creek?
Noyes:
Yes, it started then. In its own way.
(pause)
Stony Creek turned out to be the former country estate of a railroad millionaire, this huge, gothic mansion surrounded by five hundred acres of sugar maples, and dotted with a couple of dozen little cabins, one writer-in-residence to each. Dinner was a communal affair in the main hall. Breakfast and lunch were delivered to your cabin in baskets. No distractions. No TV. No radio. Nothing to do but work. Tanner headed back to New York after dinner. Skitsy stayed over for the night in the main hall. I unpacked my things, sharpened my pencils, got into bed early, anxious to get an early start the next day. I had just closed my eyes when there was a tapping at my cabin door. I opened it to discover Skitsy standing there with a flashlight and a bottle of wine. Said she couldn’t sleep in a strange place and would I invite her in for a drink. So I did. She sat down on my bed and told me how anxious she was to read my manuscript, because Tanner had told her how very talented I was. Naturally, I was thrilled. She was an important editor. We worked our way through the wine, and we talked, and before long I realized her hand was on my leg. I was at Stony Creek to work, not luck around, especially with a middle-aged woman who I wasn’t particularly attracted to. I told her so. I wasn’t tactful about it. She left in a huff. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. I didn’t like what had happened. I didn’t like being there. At dawn I packed up and hitched a ride out of there due south on I-91, all the way down through Connecticut to New Haven, then another one east on I-95 to Old Lyme. There’s a general store a few miles up Route 156 where I got provisions and some freshwater lures. Also a small marina where I rented a rowboat. I put it in Crescent Moon Pond and started rowing. I hadn’t been to the shack since Smilin’ Jack died and it became mine. The mooring was rotted out. I had to tie the boat to a tree. Kids had been using the place for beer parties. There were empties everywhere, windows busted out. There were a few sticks of furniture. A framed, mounted copperhead skin on the wall. Smilin’ Jack had found it coiled in one of his wading boots one morning. There’s no electricity or running water. Just a well out back with a hand pump. I chopped some wood and made a fire in the stove. Rigged up a makeshift rod and reel and caught myself a perch for dinner. I spent three weeks there in my little shack. Probably the three happiest weeks of my life. I worked all day. Swam for miles at dusk in the cold, clear pond. Fished. Spoke to no one. Grew a beard. When my rewrites were finished, I rowed back out and caught a train for New York. Called Tanner as soon as I got home to tell him I was done, all excited. He wouldn’t have been chillier. Told me he’d terminated my fellowship. When I asked him why, he said I’d violated it by running off without submitting a written application. He told me I was uncooperative and obviously not committed to my work, and then he hung up on me. I couldn’t believe it. Tanner wanted nothing more to do with me. I told Boyd, and he couldn’t believe it either. He said I must have done something else to warrant getting dumped. I told him about the night in the cabin with Skitsy. He looked at me like I was some kind of naive jerk. That’s when I kind of realized what Tanner meant by uncooperative. I had been expected to sleep with her. It was part of the deal. A rite of literary passage, if you will, and I’d refused to pay the toll. … I don’t know, maybe it was all of those weeks alone, but I went into a blind rage. Stormed straight downtown to her office without shaving or changing clothes. Barged fight past the reception desk, locked her door behind me, threw her down on the sofa, and fucked her. There was nothing gentle or quiet about it, and she couldn’t have loved it more. Took the rest of the day off. Dragged me up to her apartment, where we did a lot more deliciously nasty things to each other. The next day Tanner asked to see my revised manuscript. A week later Skitsy Held made an offer on it. I asked Boyd to act as my agent. I didn’t trust anyone else.
(silence)
I suppose you think less of me now.
Hoag:
What would have happened if you hadn’t slept with her?
Noyes:
I’ll never know, will I? All I know is I wasn’t going to let sex get in the way of my literary future. It just isn’t that important to me. I mean, it’s important, but it’s not sacred or precious or anything. … You give people what they want, the world opens up to you.
Hoag:
That’s your philosophy of life?
Noyes:
That’s reality. I gave Skitsy what she wanted. So what if it was sick and perverted and —
Hoag:
And is still going on?
Noyes: (pause)
How did you know that?
Hoag:
You just told me.
Noyes:
You’re awfully slippery. Would have made a damned good lawyer.
Hoag:
And my parents very proud. Actually, it’s that red lipstick Lulu found under your bed the day we met. Skitsy’s color. Hers, wasn’t it?
Noyes:
You mean you’ve known about us all along?
Hoag:
Let’s say I’ve suspected. So that’s how you know about her and Tanner’s little schemes?
Noyes:
Yes. Pillow talk. She tends to get blabby afterward.
Hoag:
Does she know yet about you and Delilah?
Noyes:
What about us?
Hoag:
Don’t kid a kidder.
Noyes:
No, I don’t think she does.
Hoag:
What would happen to their editorial relationship if she found out?
Noyes:
It wouldn’t be enhanced. Skitsy is definitely the jealous type, and vindictive as hell.
Hoag:
Delilah knows about you and her?
Noyes:
Yes.
Hoag:
She must like to play with fire.
Noyes:
She does. She believes danger heightens the intensity of the female orgasm.
Hoag:
Does it?
Noyes: (laughs)
It certainly doesn’t reduce it in her case.
Hoag:
Why don’t you break it off with Skitsy?
Noyes:
What makes you think I want to?
Hoag:
Something about the words “sick,” “perverted” …
Noyes:
I happen to be into that. The fact is I’m total scum. Don’t ever introduce me to your sister.
Hoag:
Haven’t got one.
Noyes:
Good.
Hoag:
I repeat, why are you still seeing Skitsy?
(no response)
Does she have something on you?
Noyes:
Like what?
Hoag:
You tell me. Why does she own you?
Noyes:
She doesn’t own me.
Hoag:
Bullshit. What is it? Tell me!
Noyes:
There’s nothing to tell!
Hoag:
There
is!
You’re holding out on me — I can see it in your eyes. What is it?
(no response)
Damn it, Cameron! I
won’t
collaborate on a whitewash, you hear me!
Noyes: (silence)
I hear you.
Hoag:
Then decide what you want. And let me know. Until you do, we have nothing more to say to each other.
Noyes:
But coach — !
(end tape)
T
ANNER MARSH WAS NAKED
again, this time on the canvas Charlie was working on in her studio when I came down the stairs from Cam’s study. Tanner looked frightened and vulnerable in the painting, like a turtle with his shell yanked off. He had no penis. She had given him a Bic pen there instead.
She worked intently in the late-day sun, often substituting her fingers for a brush. She had on an old, white, paint-splattered shirt, gym shorts, and clogs. There was yellow paint all over her nose from pushing her glasses up with her painted fingers.
“He’ll look terrific hanging next to you at Rat’s Nest,” I observed.
She smiled wearily. “Thanks.”
“Here.” I took out my linen handkerchief and began to wipe the paint off her nose. “I’m afraid you’re making better progress than we are.”
Charlie’s brow furrowed with concern. “Trouble?”
“The worst kind. He’s hiding something from me.”
Lulu stretched out between us. Charlie kicked off a clog and rubbed Lulu’s ears with her toes.
“Don’t take it personally,” she said. “He hides things from everyone.”
“Even you?”
“Especially me. He
is
getting it on with that redheaded bitch, isn’t he?”
I left that one alone. I wasn’t going to lie for him.
“I’m leaving him,” she announced quietly.
“Sorry to hear that. You want to be the one to tell Barbara Walters or shall I do it?”
“I’ll finish these portraits. I won’t allow this to jeopardize our project. But I’ll finish them elsewhere.”
“That’s very professional of you,” I said. “I don’t know if I’d feel the same way in your shoes. In fact, I’m sure I wouldn’t.”
“I don’t blame him,” she explained. “He can’t change the way he is. He’s just making me too crazy. I don’t like myself when I’m that crazy.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “God, what I’ve been through with him. You know one night I found him naked out there in the park, three in the morning, on his hands and knees, face bleeding, babbling incoherently, ‘Dead inside. All of us are dead inside.’ I had to drag him inside, patch him up, put him to bed. I won’t anymore. I won’t bring him home so he can go to another woman’s bed. I’m not his mother.” Her eyes searched my face. “Am I?”
“No, you’re not.”
“I just don’t know what I’ll do with myself,” she said, her eyes locking onto mine now. “Alone, I mean.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” I assured her.
With that, Lulu got up and went over to the stairs and sat with her back to us.
Charlie watched her and swallowed. “No?”
“No. I’d say you’ll be alone for about as long as you feel like it, and no longer.”
She reddened, “Are you … offering your services?”
“If I were, I’d have to go stand at the end of a long line.”
“You could get right up to the front of it if you wanted to,” she offered matter-of-factly.
I tugged at my ear. There was no idle flirting with this one. There was only the real thing. “You wouldn’t want another writer. We reserve our best qualities for our lead characters. There’s not much left over for real life.”
“Oh.” Disappointed, she pushed her glasses up her nose and got paint all over it again.
I sighed and dabbed at it again with my handkerchief. “What am I going to do with you?”
“You could hold me,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
I put my arms around her. She buried her face in my shirt and sobbed, shuddering violently. I held on to her. I liked holding on to her. When she was done, she held her face up to me, her cheeks wet. She wanted me to kiss her. I wanted me to kiss her, right on that little bud of a mouth. But I didn’t. For me, there was still the matter of Merilee. There was also Lulu glowering at me threateningly from the stairs.
“Sorry,” Charlie said, taking my handkerchief and wiping her eyes with it.
“No reason to be.”
“Could we maybe have a drink sometime? Talk?”
“I’d like that,” I replied. “I’ll even teach you how to flirt.”
“What for?” she wondered, frowning.
“For fun. Beats the hell out of dirty bathroom floors.”
She offered me my handkerchief back. It was soaked with paint.
“Keep it,” I insisted. “A gentleman always carries two.”
Downstairs, Vic was running a vacuum in the parlor. He had on a chef’s apron and his Sony Walkman, on which he was listening to Ian Carmichael read
Jeeves in the Offing
by P. G. Wodehouse. A pot of his chili bubbled on the hot plate in the kitchen.
When he saw me, he turned off the vacuum and the tape. “She got to the theater safe and sound, Hoag,” he reported, pulling a small spiral notepad out of his apron pocket. “Let’s see … had a visitor at her place from noon until two. Fellow named Ulf Johansson, former member of the Swedish Olympic bobsled team.”
“Oh?”
“Now a personal fitness instructor. A lot of the Broadway stars use him.”
“Oh.”
Vic chuckled. It wasn’t a pretty sound. “Still stuck on her, aren’t you?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” I growled.
“At two she went out to the Fairway Market on Broadway to buy nectarines and skim milk,” he droned. “Then she stopped at a newsstand for the current issue of
People
magazine. Also at the cleaners and the liquor store, where she bought two bottles of champagne. Dom Pérignon. Then she returned home. Didn’t go out again until she left for the theater.” He closed the notepad and put it away.
“Still no hostile contact from anyone?”
“None. Of course, I’m not tapping her phone. I can, if you want me to.”