When the Stars Come Out (20 page)

Love.

Too damn bad it was the love of another man, which would

never do. Those four hours each week with Jimmy Beloit were

beautiful in their tenderness and intensity, and painful in their

brevity, but they were all Quinn could offer
. . .
and maybe more than he could afford.

And so, Tuesdays and Thursdays, week after week, Quinn Scott

drove across LA, leaving behind his affluent Bel-Air neighborhood

for Jimmy’s modest digs, and feeling richer, yet more troubled, for the experience.

But it was still a routine, and routines breed regularity, and regularity breeds confidence, at first, and then sloppiness. It was late November, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and some eight weeks

since they had exchanged what they’d come to refer to as The

Glance on that soundstage, before Quinn slipped up the first time.

It wasn’t
really
a slipup. He had been courting the inevitable by following the same routine for two months with no deviation, expecting everything to always progress the way it had in the past.

This time, though, the inevitability of disruption caught up to him, although he didn’t know it at the time.

It was only after he had returned home that he learned of the

slipup.

“You were in Venice today,” Kitty said, sizing him up suspiciously as he walked into the dining room, where he had expected dinner

to be waiting. There was no dinner; just Kitty Randolph sitting at the unset table, looking
. . .
not
angry
, really, but definitely per-turbed. “What were you doing there?”

His first impulse was to deny it, but if she knew his car had been there, that wouldn’t have been a good strategy. Compounding the

lie could only lead to more trouble for him.

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“I stopped to visit a friend,” he said, with an even sureness that he hoped would put an end to the conversation. Before she had a

chance to follow up he asked her, “How did you know?”

“Maria saw the car.” From somewhere behind him, Quinn could

hear Maria, their housekeeper, being noisily busy in the kitchen.

He hoped she was making dinner, because sex with Jimmy usually

left him famished.

Quinn smiled. “She’s very observant.”

Kitty didn’t smile. “Which friend?”

“I don’t think you know him.”

She held her gaze, her eyes burrowing into his head, trying to

read whatever secrets he wasn’t telling her.

“Are you having an affair?” she asked, finally.

He felt himself blush slightly. “Don’t be ridiculous, Kitty.”

“I just can’t imagine you would have a friend in Venice.”

“From my struggling actor days.” Hoping to put an end to the in-

terrogation, he added, “Maybe you know him. Jimmy Beloit?”

She thought about that. The name
did
sound vaguely familiar.

Had her husband mentioned him in passing once before?

“We ran into each other recently and he invited me over for a

drink. Poor guy. His career just hasn’t taken off.” Quinn envisioned Jimmy’s tidy, small apartment, keeping his mind away from that

bed with the crisp white sheets. “And he lives in a dump. I really feel bad for him.”

Kitty warmed slightly. Quinn
could
be lying to her, but he seemed sincere, and he certainly wasn’t setting off her natural Bullshit

Detector.

“And,” Quinn added, “I think he might be a fag.”

She furrowed her brow. “Did he say something?”

“Not directly. But I just got a few uncomfortable feelings.” He

shook his head. “Whatever. It’s his business, right? Let’s eat.”

Dinner appeared just moments after the conclusion of Kitty’s

staged confrontation, and Quinn mentally complimented her on

the way she set the scene. Through dinner, he wondered why he

had thrown out the gay angle, let alone used Jimmy’s real name. If she had demanded to meet him, it’s true that there would have

been a real person to go with the real name, but his elaborate story would have fallen apart when she either recognized Jimmy from

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133

the
Stars
set, or when she realized that the only way they could have known each other in their starving actor days was if Quinn was

hanging out with twelve-year-olds at the time.

But he didn’t think about any of it too much. The story, for all its elaboration, had worked, and Kitty was now far away from the topic of illicit affairs and well into a monologue on her favorite subject, which just happened to be the life and career of Kitty Randolph.

A few weeks later, though, Quinn made his second—and much

more damaging—slipup. And this time he could not just blame it

on bad luck, the way he had when his housekeeper happened across

his car.

On a Wednesday night in mid-December, he and Kitty had

stayed far too late at a prominent studio head’s Christmas party.

Generally well behaved in social situations, that particular night Quinn had had a bit too much to drink; not enough so that he

made an ass of himself, but enough to render him extremely tired

on the following Thursday. Still, he had a routine, so minutes after Kitty left to get her skin massaged, exfoliated, buffed, and moisturized, he climbed into his car and set off for his date with Jimmy, where the men spent their usual two hours in intimate union.

And then they both fell asleep in each other’s arms.

For three more hours.

“Shit!”

Jimmy’s eyes flickered open, only to spy Quinn scrambling fran-

tically for his clothes.

“What . . . ?” he groggily started to ask, but then saw the clock on the nightstand.

“It’s 8:00!” Jimmy had never seen Quinn lose his cool, let alone

be reduced to panic. “It’s eight-fucking-o’clock! I am
fucked
!”

“Just tell her . . .” Jimmy drew a blank.

“Tell her what?!” Quinn began buttoning his shirt. “How could

you let this happen?”

Jimmy sat up in the bed, suddenly angry at the blame. “I fell

asleep, too.”

“Goddamn it!”

She was, as he knew she would be, waiting for him when he fi-

nally arrived home.

“Who is she?”

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“Who is who?”

“Who are you seeing, Quinn? What’s her name? I want to know

her name.”

“I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Goddamn it, Quinn, I can smell the sex from here! You didn’t

even have the decency to clean yourself up!”

“Kitty, I—”

“You
what
, Quinn? You want a divorce?”

“No,” he said. “Of course not. But you’re wrong.”

“I don’t think so.”

He knew he couldn’t win. He was too rattled to think straight

and, in any event, she was more right than wrong.
Far
more. Without a word, he left the room and went to shower the hours of sex and

sleep off his body.

In the hot spray of the shower, as he soaped his body, he won-

dered if he had not done it on purpose, at least on a subconscious level. Had his suppressed longing for Jimmy led to his overindulgence at the studio honcho’s party the night before, which, in tandem

with his comfort in the dancer’s arms, led to his ill-timed nap? Had the routine gone on too long? Was it time to confess to Kitty, and move on to the next phase of his life?

He let the steamy water course over him, hoping that it would

wash away his sins.

Quinn and Kitty co-existed for the next few days. She was still

angry, but no longer talked of divorce. He was contrite without

being suspiciously
too
contrite. The subject of his late homecoming—

the homecoming that “smelled of sex”—came up a few times, and

each time he had dismissed the event as innocent, while offering

no real details to clear his name. The simple fact was that he had been caught—he had let himself be caught—and the only way he

hoped to survive the indiscretion was to maintain stony silence.

After all, he was a man, and hardly the first of his sex to stray. At some primal level, even Kitty would understand that. As long as it wasn’t repeated—the “getting caught” part, that was, not the “cheating” part—Quinn felt they could get past it. They would hardly be

unique in sharing a black moment, never quite going away but never being spoken of again.

And Quinn might have been right. But he wasn’t.

On the Tuesday of the following week came the natural out-

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growth of the previous Thursday’s indiscretion. Six minutes after

Kitty left to reinvigorate her skin, Quinn left to reinvigorate his life.

Twenty minutes later, he held Jimmy in his arms; five minutes after that, they were in the bedroom.

And seven minutes after that, the doorbell rang.

“You have a visitor,” said Quinn, as he slowly stroked Jimmy’s

erection.

Jimmy wasn’t expecting a visitor. In fact, beside food deliveries

and Quinn’s biweekly visits, he couldn’t even
remember
the last time he had been visited.

“Whoever it is,” he said, taking Quinn’s head in his hands, “will

have to come back.”

A minute later, the bell rang again. Jimmy, focused on the sensa-

tion of Quinn as he began to penetrate him, barely heard it. He

only started paying attention when a fist started banging on his

front door.

“Ah, fuck,” he said, sliding off of Quinn. “I’d better get this before someone calls the cops.”

As Quinn sank into the bed, Jimmy threw a robe over his naked

body, pulling his erection flat against his belly with the belt. Partial-dressing accomplished, he marched out into the living room and

swung open the door.

Kitty Randolph stood on the stoop.

She looked at him and gasped. And he looked at her and gasped,

then slammed the door in her face.

While Kitty screamed for him to open the door, Jimmy raced,

screaming, back to the bedroom.

“It’s her!” he yelled, pouncing on the bed. “It’s her!”

“Her?” Quinn’s eyes widened. “Kitty?”

He sat, stunned, on the bed, as Jimmy began tossing clothes at

him. From the living room they could hear her as she continued to

angrily pound on the front door, each barrage of thuds louder and

more demanding than the ones before. “You’ve got to get dressed

and get out of here!”

“How?”

“The window. Crawl out the window!”

“That won’t work.” Although panicked and stunned, Quinn still

knew that Jimmy’s only windows—beside the one in the bathroom,

which was too small to crawl through—were in clear view from the

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R o b B y r n e s

front stoop, where his wife was now standing and flailing at Jimmy’s door.

“Then we’ll hide you in a closet. Or under the bed.”

Quinn shook his head. “It won’t work. She’ll find me.”

“Well
. . .
what should we do?”

Quinn stood, gave Jimmy a short hug, took a deep breath, and

said, “I guess we’d better let her in.”

Chapter 6

You would think that revisiting my past—watching old movies

or whatever—would be the last thing an old curmudgeon like

me would want to do. You would think that I’d consider it a

painful reminder of the industry I loved and was forced to leave.

But you would be wrong.

There is pain in revisiting the past, of course, but watching

those old movies reminds me of a time when life felt fresh and

perfect. It wasn’t perfect, of course—it only became perfect

when Jimmy came along—but, at the time, it was as close to per-

fect as I thought I would ever know. And anyway, Jimmy came

from those old movies, too, and I can watch our celluloid mem-

ories over and over and over . . .

Southampton, New York, September 2005

“H
oly crap,” said Noah, when Jimmy finished his story.

“The rest was sort of anti-climactic. Well . . . once she looked

through the closets and under the bed, and figured out we weren’t

hiding another woman in the apartment. In fact, she was almost

calm when she figured out that her husband was boning another

man . . . although, come to think of it, she was a bit pissed off when she finally recognized me from the
Stars
set. But still, it wasn’t as bad as I would have expected. It was almost . . . I don’t know, a
relief
to her, or something.”

“Maybe it was,” said Noah. “If she caught Quinn with a woman,

the divorce could have been sticky and expensive. With a man,

though, she could make him go away quietly.”

Jimmy nodded. “Which he did, in his own way. The divorce was

painless, she gave him a tidy bit of money to keep his mouth shut, he signed over sole custody of Q. J., and everything would have

worked out perfectly. He might have even been able to keep work-

ing.
Except
once he had tasted the forbidden fruit, he couldn’t get enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“The attention, Noah. Quinn fell in love with the attention he

was getting from Gay Hollywood. There’s a little—well, not so little, actually—shadow community out there, and after his divorce from

Kitty was finalized and word started to seep out, he was the most in-demand man in that town.” He looked away, lost in memories that

were still fresh after thirty-six years. “You know, if Quinn really cared about women, deep down, he probably would have realized

that every female in the industry had worshipped him for years.

But he never noticed. So much for his heterosexuality, right? With the men, though, it was a different story. All of a sudden, we were invited to every gay dinner party in town . . . although when I say