“Come on, Patty. I’m not a fool. That’s never the truth. You don’t have the guts to do it straight.”
She sat up, raised the drawbridge, filled the turret with guns, and unsheathed her sword. “I’m trying to be honest, I’m trying to talk about it. You’re the one who never says a damn thing. You’re so closed off and cold.”
“Right. You’re walking out — I’m the bad guy. That’s what this is about. Getting rid of your guilt. You want to leave and be a saint. You got it. Don’t bother to even argue for it. I concede it to you.” He walked away, propelled by his anger.
“You have to win every argument,” she shouted at his back. “Even when winning it means you lose.”
“God, you’re a real phrase-maker!” he answered, talking up to the ceiling. “I don’t know what the fuck that means!”
“It means, all I felt coming in here was confused. I wanted time to think things out. The way you’re behaving does make me want to leave!”
“That’s gotta be bullshit!” he yelled, his hands out in a furious plea. “Confused about what?” he said, turning on her. He walked at her angrily. She stood up, startled, as though his movement were threatening. “What? What is there to think about?”
“Uh, us …” she stammered. “We haven’t been having a good time together.” She gained confidence. “We haven’t fucked in two months.”
“I’ve been busy!” he cried out.
“Oh, the magazine! The magazine, the magazine, the magazine. It’s your answer to everything. You’re like some terrible cliché on a soap opera. What the hell are you working so hard for? You’re thirty-one years old — you act like a fifty-year-old man!”
“All right, all right. I’ll stop working so hard. I was scared,” he pleaded, lying, though it sounded very honest, to his surprise. “I got this big job — I didn’t think I could do it.” Tears formed at his eyes.
Patty looked amazed. “Oh,” she said, touching his arm with her hand. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?” he said, laughing and sobbing at once.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, and moved into his arms, hugging him.
“I kept thinking they were going to knock on the door and tell me it had all been a mistake.” he said, elaborating on this successful theme. It sounded so authentic, so convincing. He had reached for this explanation to avoid confessing about the prostitution — not to have to reveal the tableau of him wearing a collar and licking a woman’s boots.
“It’s not a mistake,” she whispered in his ear. “You’re brilliant.”
“Thanks,” he answered shyly.
They held each other for a while. For both, it was relief to be holding and loving anyone. “Where are you going to go?” he asked, meaning really: Are you still going?
“I’m going to stay with Betty. Tony’s got to go to LA for a month.”
David eased himself out of the embrace. “Oh. Well, that’ll be good for your book.”
“That’s not why I’m doing it,” she argued, a teenager complaining she had to stay out past eleven.
“I didn’t mean anything,” he answered. “I meant, you can keep her working on it. I know that’s not why you’re doing it.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling embarrassed. “I may not do it. I don’t know.”
“I …” His voice broke. He cleared his throat. “I hope you don’t.” His chin quavered.
She looked ashamed and hugged him again.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too,” he answered.
CHAPTER 16
Tony watched them talk on Malibu beach. He stood above them on a wide deck supported by thirty-foot-high wooden stilts that looked inadequate to the task. The surf, which seemed gentle and casual as it approached the shore, broke abruptly and angrily at its finish: a horse rearing in horror at the row of two-million-dollar houses. Garth and Redburn, two of the most famous faces in America, stood in profile, elegant in their casual clothes, tranquil faces, and perfect hairdos, their words drowned by the Pacific’s noisy disgust at encountering land. The scene looked like a movie. An obvious thing to think, but fascinating nonetheless. Tony could make up the dialogue in his head — his eyes were the cameras.
“I hear the script’s going well,” Helen, Garth’s wife, said from behind him.
She was lying on a green-and-white-cushioned deck chair, wearing a black bikini on a body so spectacular that to be aroused by it was almost too passive a response. Hurling oneself on Garth and strangling him immediately, tossing diamonds at her, instantly swearing love and running off to the Crimean War — even they might be responses not commensurate with her beauty. And to make her more infuriating, she was pleasant, intelligent, modest, and kind. “We’re almost done,” Tony said.
“You sound relieved.”
“I am.”
“Has it been very hard on you? Staying here and working?”
Below, Garth gestured toward him. Redburn looked at Tony, his eyes squinting as he concentrated on the sight. The look was almost a product’s logo — the distant glance of a hero regarding the future fearlessly, or the past with brave regret. Garth dramatically held his arms out at full length and applauded Tony. Redburn smiled. Tony nodded and held his glass up in acknowledgment.
“He loves you,” Helen said. “He told me last night, he’ll miss you terribly when you go. Made me feel jealous.”
Tony turned her way, his eyes drawn (despite the constant warning lights he flashed them) to her firm full breasts, languidly arrogant in repose. He forced them up with effort, like pulling away from a magnet (it could be done, but it required steady pressure), and looked at her wonderful face. Her green eyes were bright and cheerful. “He’s been very nice to me,” Tony answered in the tone of an ancient retainer speaking of his master.
“He said he thinks you could make a great director. Says you really understand actors.”
Tony ignored the compliment. Hollywood prophesied future success only slightly less casually than it offered absolute predictions of utter failure. “It must have been hard on you to have a houseguest for two months. You’ve been very patient.”
“Aren’t we both wonderful?” she said.
Tony smiled. “I mean it.”
“You don’t really like us,” she said. Not argumentatively, accusingly, but not stating a fact, either.
“Oh, no, no,” Tony said, startled by her comment.
“Don’t feel you have to—”
“I don’t. If I’ve behaved distantly, it’s only because of my problems. He’s a great star — you are a great beauty. For someone like me — vain, greedy, childish — it’s pretty hard to take.”
This little speech was the first time he had spoken informally, intimately. She sat up — Tony’s eyes slipped their leash for a moment and looked at her crotch, barely covered, the surrounding skin of her hips and thighs unblemished, without a ripple of fat or looseness — and looked at him eagerly. “You don’t seem anything like that. You’re self-confident, you’re very at home with yourself.”
Tony giggled. He couldn’t believe she meant that about him — he felt so uncomfortable with himself, as though his ego was infested by fleas: he was scratched raw from the restless itch of its countless wounds. “You’re kidding,” he said, and giggled again.
“No,” she said. “Both of us have talked about it. We wondered if it was our life here.” She nodded at the beach and the house. “Everybody here is conscious of being judged, talked about … you seem to be sure of your value, no matter how things are going.”
“God, I wish that were true. Thank you. But all I’ve felt since I came here is envy.” Tony looked out at the dynamic duo below. “He’s got everything. Fame, money, talent, power.” Tony looked at her, letting all his lust and longing show. “And you. He even has you.”