He had lived in terror of the moguls who forced his father to talk and barred his mother from work because she did not. Tony trembled in bed at night, warm piss spreading beneath him, not for fear of a ghostly bogeyman, but of Senator McCarthy’s huge face — a face Tony knew only in black and white — with his dulled, contemptuous killer eyes. McCarthy was dead, his mother’s television series was in the top ten week after week, and now Gloria Fowler was offering him a script for one of America’s box-office stars.
“If you’re interested in proceeding,” Gloria was saying while Tony squirmed, “we’ll fly you out. You’ll meet with Bill and Jim Foxx, and then with the studio people.”
“But there’s no guarantee at this point, right? I mean, if I don’t wow them with my ideas—”
Gloria leaned forward, her elegant, bony hand gently touching his arm. Her eyes blinked slowly with knowledge. “They’ll hire you,” she said in a low voice. “They’ve all read your work. And, more important, they’ve read your reviews. Everybody knows, no matter what else is said, that good movies can only be made if the scripts are good. They’ve gone the hack Hollywood route. Nobody out there knows about the real world anymore, and this script needs a writer who has ideas, convictions, and cares more about the work than the money and glamour.” She leaned back and smiled. “They need a human being to write this one.”
Tony was thoroughly drunk when he got home. His mouth tasted of metal, his food felt undigested, and his mind went over Gloria’s promises and statements slowly, like a straight line he couldn’t keep his wobbly feet on. He splashed cold water on his face and stared at his bloodshot eyes. Gloria had told him she wanted to represent him. That alone would have been a break for a writer his age. Gloria said she believed she could help get his plays to Broadway if he worked in the movie business. She cited many examples of productions that were backed by movie money, and said, with a broad look, “They protect their own, you know. Write Bill Garth’s script. It will get made, the studio will love you, and buy your next play, and put it on Broadway.” Gloria laughed. “A year and a half from now you’ll have a Tony and an Oscar. You can use them for andirons.”
Tony had laughed at her. She had laughed back. They had traded looks of superiority. “You don’t care about awards and money,” she went on to say. “I know that. But I know you care about mounting a real production of your next play — and Tinseltown can do it for you.”
The last year Tony lived in California he was five years old. He had no ambitions other than wishing he were Superman or an airplane pilot. He liked movies, but they were commonplace. Everyone he knew had a screening room in the den: they were adult work, and they caused adults to have boring conversations at dinner. But the bogeyman had been in town, his mother had had a breakdown and disappeared from his life. When she returned, the boring conversations became shrill with rage and terror. His parents would begin their rumbling after he went to bed. Their voices, dark and terrible, would wake him. He’d creep out, carefully placing his feet to avoid floorboards that might give his presence away, and eavesdrop on their fights.
“I couldn’t betray people!” his mother screamed one night.
Tony heard nothing for a long time, and then his father’s deep voice said, “You wouldn’t have been lying. They were communists. And they still are.”
His mother screamed instantly: “Then so am I.”
Tony hated his mother. She was ugly like that. Why did she get so upset? He knew she was right — he felt it — but why did she have to be so loud and silly? That’s what made his father angry, Tony felt, nothing else, just her ugliness.
That was his father’s last night with them. A few months later, his mother took him to New York, where he had lived the rest of his life, except for summers in California, or other parts of the world, when he visited his father. By his ninth birthday, Tony didn’t want to be Superman. And he hated movies. By then, he would stay up late, worrying over why his mother was out so late again, and read plays. Soon, he spoke the parts aloud, and found himself crying, or dueling, or making love. He understood nothing of the plays, and yet he understood everything. He was still a baby, but he had become as old as humanity’s literature. He had never loved, or died, or ruled a kingdom: but at night, while buses belched beneath the window, he was a king, a lover, and he died a hundred terrible and wonderful deaths.
Theater grabbed his life by the elbow, slowing its hurried pace, and replayed its exquisite arguments and loves. Plays glued his shattered loyalties together, and let him weep, not only for his brilliant and brave mother but also for his scared and weak father.
Routine knowledge told him differently, but his heart couldn’t dispel the lesson of his boyhood: movies destroy.
Patty noticed him, but it was too late. At the head of the BMT subway stairs, standing in a pool of his own urine, was a bum, laughing at her. His head moved jerkily from side to side as if he were dancing, only his feet were still, like a drunk jack-in-the-box.
Patty tried to hurry past him, but the steps were steep, and she half-stumbled, preventing a fall by righting herself with an outstretched hand, placed, unfortunately, at the border of the bum’s piss. Horror shot through her so palpably that her nerves were stung, and she screamed.
“What the fuck?” the bum mumbled, his eyes big and wounded and wondering, like a child’s.
Before she could think, Patty was off the stairs and bouncing between hustling midtowners on their lunch break. I escaped, she thought, but that did not relieve her desire to scream or cry or beg someone — anyone — on this busy corner to hug her and take her away from this mad city and her hopeless life.
She had trouble finding the restaurant. The sun glistened on the storefronts across the avenue. The lettering on the signs wavered and shimmered, as if beguiling her to misread them. She squinted while she walked, peering across the midtown traffic. She bumped into people and worried each time that her purse was gone or that a pickpocketing genius had unlatched it and removed her wallet without her knowledge. She walked past the restaurant because she was so concerned with the opposite side of the street, and ended up in a phone booth getting the address from Information. (Even that was a struggle: at first the operator claimed she wasn’t supposed to give out addresses; she relented when Patty explained it was only a restaurant, not a residence.) Thus, when Patty finally appeared at Betty Winters’ table, she was twenty minutes late.
“I’m sorry,” Patty said breathlessly.
“I’m crocked. I’ve had two glasses of wine,” Betty said with a tipsy smile. “What happened?”
“I can’t find anything … I don’t know where I am or who I am.” Patty waved her arm distractedly. Her frizzy and wild hair flounced with the movement. The whole picture made Betty laugh. “I mean it,” Patty said in the nearest she could come to an angry tone with another woman, namely petulance.