“Mama’s gonna murder you,” Mark chortled. “Said you wasn’t supposed to fight.”
“Wasn’t fighting,” Tom said.
“I saw you! You picked on Mickey Swenson, and he knocked you down and made your face all bloody!”
“You wouldn’t tell mama that, would you?” Tom asked in a low voice. “If she asked you what happened to me, I mean.”
Mark blinked. “If she asked, I’d have to tell.”
“No,” Tom said. His still-pudgy hands gripped Mark’s shoulders painfully. “We’re gonna go inside. I’m gonna tell mama I tripped on a stone and fell down.”
“But you were fighting! With Mickey Swenson.”
“We don’t have to tell mama that. We can tell her something else—make up a story.”
“But…”
“All you have to do is say I fell down, that I wasn’t fighting with anybody. And I’ll give you a nickel. Okay?”
Mark looked puzzled. How could he tell mama something that was not true? It seemed easy enough. All he had to do was move his mouth and the sounds would come out. It seemed important to Tom. Already Mark was beginning to believe that Tom had really fallen, that there had been no fight.
They trooped into the house, the dirty little boy and the dirty littler one. Mrs. Jenner appeared, looming high over both of them, her hands upraised at the sight of her eldest son’s battered face.
“Tom! What happened!”
Before Tom could reply, Mark said gravely, “Tom tripped on a stone. He fell down and hurt himself.”
“Oh! You poor dear—does it hurt?”
As Mrs. Jenner trooped Tom off to the bathroom for repairs, Mark Jenner, four years old, experienced a curious warm sensation of pride. He had told his first conscious lie. He had spoken something that was not the truth, had done it deliberately with the hope of a reward. He did not know it then, but his career as an actor had begun auspiciously.
Spring, 1966. Mark Jenner was seventeen, a junior at Noah Webster High School, Massilon, Ohio. He was six feet one and weighed 152 pounds. He was carrying the schoolbooks of Joanne Lauritszon, sixteen years eight months old. The Mark Jenner of 1989 saw her for what she was: a raw, newly fledged female with a padded chest and a shrill voice. The Mark Jenner of 1966 saw her as Aphrodite.
It took all his skill to work the conversation to the subject of the forthcoming junior prom. It took all his courage to invite the girl who walked at his side.
It took all his strength to endure her as she said, “But I’ve got a prom date already, Mark. I’m going with Nat Hospers.”
“Oh—yes, of course. Sorry. I should have figured it out myself.”
And he handed her back her books and ran stumbling away, cursing himself for his awkwardness, cursing Hospers for his car and his football-player muscles and his aplomb with girls. Mark had saved up for months for the prom; he had vowed he would die of grief if Joanne refused him. Somehow, he did not die.
Autumn, 1976. Hollywood. Mark Jenner was twenty-seven, rugged-looking and tanned, drawing three thousand dollars a week during the filming of Lovely to Look At. He sat at the best table in Hollywood’s most exclusive nightclub, and opposite him, resplendent in her ermine wrap, sat the queen of filmland, Helene Bryan, lovely, moist-lipped, high-bosomed, that month blazoned on the covers of a hundred magazines in near nudity. She was twenty. She had been a coltish ten-year-old, interested only in dolls and frills, the year Mark Jenner had first thought he had fallen in love. Now he had fallen in love with her, with this $250,000-a-year goddess of sexuality.
An earlier Mark Jenner might have drawn back timidly from such a radiant beauty, but the Mark Jenner of 1976 was afraid of no one, of nothing. He smiled at the blonde girl in the ermine wrap.
He said, “Helene, will you marry me?”
“Of course, darling! Of course!”
Spring, 1987. Mark Jenner was thirty-eight. Three Days in Marrakesh had played nine days on Broadway. The night that closing notices went up, Mark Jenner pub-crawled until 3 a.m. The sour taste of cheap tap beer was in his mouth as he staggered home, feeling the ache in his feet and the soreness in his soul. He had not even bothered to remove the gray makeup from his hair. With it, he looked sixty years old, and right now he felt sixty, not thirty-eight. He wondered if Helene would be asleep.
Helene was not asleep; Helene was up, and packing. She wore a simple cotton dress and no makeup at all, and for once she looked her thirty-one years, instead of seeming to be in her late teens or very early twenties. She had the suitcase nearly full. Jenner had been expecting this for a long time, and now that it had come he was hardly surprised. He was too numb to react emotionally. He dropped heavily on the bed and watched her pack.
“The show closed tonight,” he said.
“I know. Holly phoned and told me all about it, at midnight.”
“I’m sorry I came home late. I stopped to condole with a few friends.”
The brisk packing motions continued unabated. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Helene…”
“I’m just taking this one suitcase, Mark. I’ll wire you my new address when I’m in Los Angeles, and you can ship the rest of my things out to me.”
“Divorce?”
“Separation. I can’t watch you this way any more, Mark.”
He smiled. “No. It isn’t fun to watch a man fall apart, I guess. Goodbye, Helene.”
He was too drained of energy to care to make a scene. She finished packing, locked the suitcase, and went into the study to make a phone call. Then she left, without saying good-bye. Jenner sat smiling stupidly for a while after the door slammed, slowly getting used to the fact that it was all over at last. He rose, went to the sideboard, poured himself a highball glass of gin. He gulped it. He cried.
Late winter, 1989. Mark Jenner was forty years old. He sat in a special chair in Walt Hollis’ apartment while lights played on his tranquil face…
It was three months and many miles of mylar tape before Hollis was satisfied. Jenner had gone through a two-hour session each morning, reminiscing with unhesitating frankness. It had not been like the analysis at all; the analysis had not been successful because he had lied to the analyst frequently and well, digging up bits of old parts and offering them as his personal experiences, out of perverse and no doubt psychotic motivations.
This was different. He was drugged; he spewed forth his genuine past, and when the session was over he had no recollection of what he had said. Hollis never told him. Sometimes Jenner would ask, as he drowned his grogginess in a postsession cup of coffee, but Hollis would never reply.
From ten to twelve every day, Jenner recorded. From one to three, Hollis cloistered himself in the little room and edited the tapes. From three to six every day, Jenner was banished from the house while his counterpart in the project occupied the little room. Jenner never got so much as a glimpse of the other.
When the three months had elapsed, when Jenner had finally surrendered as much of his past life as he could yield, when Hollis had edited the formless stream of consciousness into a continuous, consecutive, and intelligible pattern, the time came to enter the second stage of the process.
Now there were new drugs, new patterns of light, new responses. Jenner did not speak; he listened. His subconscious lay open, receptive, absorbing all that reached it and locking it in for permanent possession.
And slowly, the personality of a man formed in Jenner’s mind, embedding itself deep in layers of consciousness previously private, inextricably meshing itself with the web of memories that was Mark Jenner.