"Have I made myself understood?"
"Utterly."
The secretary intruded. "Mr. Wallace calling. Very urgent. I think he's smashed."
"We are not interested in your opinions, Butch. Just put the gentleman on the line." Presently she lifted a receiver, one of several on her desk. "Miss Self here. How are you, sir? I thought you were in Rome. Well, I read it in the Times. That you were in Rome and had had an audience with the pope. Oh, I'm sure you're right: quel camp! Yes, I hear you perfectly. I see. I see." She scribbled on a note pad, and I could read what she wrote because one of my gifts is to read upside down: Wallace Suite 713 HotelPlaza. "I'm sorry, but Gumbo isn't with us anymore. These black boys, they're so unreliable. However, we'll have someone there shortly. Not at all. Thank you."
Then she looked at me for quite a long time. "Mr. Wallace is a highly valued client." Once more a prolonged stare. "Wallace isn't his name, of course. We use pseudonyms for all our clients. Employees as well. Your name is Jones. We'll call you Smith."
She tore off the sheet of note pad, rolled it into a pellet, and tossed it at me. "I think you can handle this. It's not really a… physical situation. It's more a… nursing problem."
I rang Mr. Wallace on one of those sleazy gold housephones in the Plaza lobby. A dog answered—there was the sound of a crashing receiver, followed by a hounds-of-hell barking. "Heh heh, that's just mah dawg," a corn-pone voice explained. "Every time the phone rings, he grabs it. You the fellow from the service? Well, skedaddle on up here."
When the client opened the door, his dog bolted into the corridor and hurled himself at me like a New York Giants fullback. It was a black and brindle English bulldog-two feet high, maybe three feet wide; he had to weigh a hundred pounds, and the force of his attack hurricaned me against the wall. I hollered pretty good; the owner laughed-. "Don't be scared. Old Bill, he's just affectionate." I'll say. The horny bastard was riding my leg like a doped stallion. "Bill, you cut that out," Bill's master commanded in a voice jingling with gin-sluffed giggles. "I mean it, Bill. Quit that." At last he attached a leash to the sex fiend's collar and hauled him off me, saying: "Poor Bill. I've just been in no condition to walk him. Not for two days. That's one reason I called the service. The first thing I want you to do is to take Bill over to the park."
Bill behaved until we reached the park.
En route, I considered Mr. Wallace: a chunky, paunchy booze-puffed runt with a play mustache glued above laconic lips. Time had interred his looks, for he used to be reasonably presentable; nevertheless, I had recognized him immediately, even though I'd seen him only once before, and that some ten years earlier. But I remembered that former glimpse of him distinctly, for at that time he was the most acclaimed American playwright, and in my opinion the best; also, the curious mise-en-scène contributed to my memory: it was after midnight in Paris in the bar of the Boeuf-sur-le-Toit, where he was sitting at a pink-clothed table with three men, two of them expensive tarts, Corsican pirates in British flannel, and the third none other than Sumner Welles—fans of Confidential will remember the patrician Mr. Welles, former Undersecretary of State, great and good friend of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It made rather a tableau, one especially vivant, when His Excellency, pickled as brandied peaches, began nibbling those Corsican ears.
Autumn strollers eased along the park's evening paths. A Nipponese couple paused to spend affection on Bill; in a way they went out of their minds, tugging his twisted tail, hugging him—I could understand it because Bill, with his indented face and Quasimodo legs, his intricately contorted physique, was an object as appealing to an Oriental sense of the aesthetic as bonsai trees and dwarf deer and goldfish bred to weigh five pounds. However, I myself am not Oriental, and when Bill, after luring me onto the grass and under a tree, suddenly again sexually attacked me, I was not appreciative.
Being no match for so determined a rapist, it was expedient just to lie back on the grass and let him have his way-even encourage him: That's it, baby. Give it to me good. Get your rocks off." We had an audience—human faces bobbed in the distance beyond my frolicking lover's bulging passion-doped eyes. Some woman harshly said: "You filthy degenerate! Stop abusing that animal! Why doesn't anybody call a policeman?" Another woman said: "Albert, I want to go back to Utica. Tonight." With slobbering gasps, Bill crossed his chest.
My drenched Robert Hall trousers were not Bill's only offense against me ere the eve was o'er. When I returned him to the Plaza and entered the foyer of the suite, I stepped into a big pile of wet shit, Bill's shit, and skidded and fell flat on my face—into a second pile of shit. All I said to Mr. Wallace was: "Do you mind if I take a shower?" He said: "I always insist on that."
However, as Miss Self had suggested, Mr. Wallace, like Denny Fouts, was more conversationalist than sensualist. "You're a good kid," he advised me. "Oh, I know you're no kid. I'm not that drunk. I can see you got mileage on you. But never mind, you're a good kid; it's in your eyes. Wounded eyes. Injured and insulted. Read Dostoevski? Well, I guess that's not your racket. But you're one of his people. Insulted and injured. Me too; that's why I feel safe with you." He rolled his eyes around the lamplit bedroom like an espionage agent; the room looked as if a Kansas twister had just gone through—messy laundry everywhere, dog shit all over the place, and drying puddles of dog piss marking the rugs. Bill was asleep at the foot of the bed, his snores exuding postcoital melancholy. At least he allowed his master and his master's guest to share the bed a bit, the guest naked but the master fully dressed, down to black shoes and a vest with pencils in the pocket and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. In one hand Mr. Wallace gripped a toothpaste glass brimming with undiluted Scotch and in the other a cigar that kept accumulating trembling lengths of ash. Occasionally he reached to stroke me, and once the hot ash singed my navel; I thought it was on purpose, but decided perhaps not.
"As safe as a hunted man can feel. A man with murderers on his trail. I'm liable to die very suddenly. And if I do, it won't be a natural death. They'll try to make it look like heart failure. Or an accident. But promise me you won't believe that. Promise me you'll write a letter to the Times and tell them it was murder."
With drunks and madmen, always be logical. "But if you think you're in danger, why don't you call the cops?"
He said: "I'm no squealer"; then he added: "I'm a dying man, anyway. Dying of cancer."
"What kind of cancer is it?"
"Blood. Throat. Lungs. Tongue. Stomach. Brain. Asshole." Alcoholics really despise the taste of alcohol; he shivered as he bolted half the Scotch in his glass. "It all started seven years ago when the critics turned on me. Every writer has his tricks, and sooner or later the critics catch them. That's all right; they love you as long as they've got you identified. My mistake was I got sick of my old tricks and learned some new ones. Critics won't put up with that; they hate versatility-they don't like to see a writer grow or change in any way. So that's when the cancer came. When the critics started saying the old tricks were 'the stuff of pure poetic power' and the new tricks were 'shabby pretensions.' Six failures in a row, four on Broadway and two off. They're killing me out of envy and ignorance. And without shame or remorse. What do they care that cancer's eating my brain!" Then, quite complacently, he said: "You don't believe me, do you?"
"I can't believe in seven years of galloping cancer. That's impossible."
"I'm a dying man. But you don't believe it. You don't believe I have cancer at all. You think it's all a problem for the shrinker." No, what I thought was: here's a dumpy little guy with a dramatic mind who, like one of his own adrift heroines, seeks attention and sympathy by serving up half-believed lies to total Strangers. Strangers because he has no friends, and he has no friends because the only people he pities are his own characters and himself—everyone else is an audience. "But for your information, I've been to a shrink. I spent sixty bucks an hour five days a week for two years. All the bastard did was interfere in my personal affairs."