“Tobin, please, I—”
“You owe it to me.”
She said nothing. She looked at her beautiful hands and then at her beautiful face in the mirror again. “I’ve started thinking about reincarnation a lot lately.”
“Last year it was transcendental meditation.”
“I think studying reincarnation has been more helpful for me.”
“Good.”
“You don’t need to be sarcastic. Just because you don’t believe in anything.”
“I believe in lovers telling each other the truth.”
“Tobin—”
“I knew something was wrong when you wanted to take a ‘break.’ But now that I don’t get phone calls—”
“Now isn’t the time.”
“To tell me the truth?”
“It’s very complicated.”
“Your favorite word.”
“What?”
“Whenever you don’t want to be honest about something, you say it’s complicated.”
“This conversation isn’t a lot of fun. I think I’d better be leaving.”
“It shouldn’t be fun, Jane. It should be truthful.”
She glanced down at her hands again. “A lot of people were starting to find out about us, Tobin. It was getting messy. You being his partner and all.”
“You could always have left him. We could always have moved in together.”
She sighed. “But that’s what I mean, Tobin. It’s — more complicated than that. I’m sorry.”
The phone rang. It was the director. “You can drift out anytime you want,” he said.
“All right,” Tobin said. He hung up.
“I want to see you again,” Tobin said to Jane. “I want to sit down across a good table at a good restaurant and talk. I want you to tell me everything. Everything. Then at least I won’t have to wonder what happened. I’ll know what happened.”
She leaned over and kissed him. “I know it hasn’t been much fun for you lately. And I’m sorry.”
He pulled her to him and kissed her as he’d been wanting to kiss her for months. He was almost dizzy with the grinding need of his kiss. It was beyond sexual need. It was — he didn’t know what else to call it, though he’d called so many things this — love.
Then she pulled gently away from him. “You’d better get ready for the show.”
“I want to talk to you. Tomorrow.”
“All right. Call me.”
“I’m serious about this.”
“Fine,” she said. “Fine. You’re serious about this. Fine.”
He tried not to notice that, as she was leaving, she was trembling.
3
6:58 P.M.
Peeps was the only movie-review TV show with a live audience. During the final segment of the show, the audience got to tell the two critics what they thought of their criticism. Sometimes the result resembled a brawl.
One unkind critic had called it “Bowling for Movies,” but he was probably just jealous because he didn’t get to sit in one of the two chairs arranged in a kind of confrontational position and argue not only with his partner but with an audience filled with film students from various schools in and around New York. If there is a group more insular and arrogant than film students, it is still in the experimental stage and has not been mass-released yet.
Tonight’s crowd seemed more aggressive than usual. Frank Emory felt it was a good idea to send one of the show’s stars out before the taping to establish an “emotional link,” as he liked to call it, with the audience.
Which is what Tobin was trying to do now.
“I’d like you to know that we’re going to start including more foreign films, the way you’ve asked,” he told the two hundred young people.
“Yeah, your idea of a foreign film is Rambo Goes to Japan.” Somebody laughed from the audience. Then the entire audience — no surprise here — laughed.
“No, I mean we’re going to cover Fellini’s new movie, and even do a tribute to Fritz Lang.”
“He’s dead!”
“So is Orson Welles,” Tobin said. “So what?”
“Why don’t you cover what’s really happening today?”
“What would that be?” Tobin asked.
“Music videos.”
“Right. There’s a big audience for criticism of music videos.” Here he put on a snide voice. “Which Nazi uniform do you like — the red one or the black one?”
“Fuck yourself! You’re an old man!”
With that, they began chanting, “You’re an old man!” and stamping their feet and doing catcalls with chilling perfection.
Tobin had to go right on pretending to be put out but he knew it was what gave the show its edge and, consequently, its audience. Peeps was kind of a pseudo-intellectual version of mud-wrestling, and for the past four years people had been eating it up.
Tobin raised his hands high and bowed, as if supplicating himself to the loonies in the audience, then ran offstage like a lounge singer after his last number.
Backstage he ran right into Richard Dunphy.
Several people around them stopped doing what they were doing and began watching intently.
It was the virtual equivalent of two top guns in the Old West facing off in the middle of Main Street.
Here stood five-five (he used to add “and a half,” but that got too embarrassing) Tobin and there stood six-foot-two Richard Dunphy.
Neither spoke a word.
They just looked at each other.
Dunphy said finally, “Hello, Tobin.”
“Hi.”
“I suppose you remember last night.” Dunphy’s face shook with what seemed equal parts of anger and fear. “You weren’t that drunk.” Dunphy was going slightly fleshy but he still had a face that appealed to women in a bookish way. The horn-rimmed glasses and the tweed jackets with the leather patches and the absent-minded air helped. Dunphy always gave the impression he was thinking of something that would have startled Plutarch. Even when he was reviewing a teenage slasher movie.
“No, I wasn’t that drunk.”
They fell into their silences again.
More people came. Stood close by. Watched.
Dunphy said, “You owe me an apology. I hope you know that.”
“You know what I say to that?”
“What?”
“Fuck yourself.”
And with that, Tobin stomped back to his dressing room.
4
7:02 P.M.
“There you are,” Michael Dailey said as Tobin put his hands on the doorknob of the upstairs dressing room.
He recognized Dailey’s voice instantly. Tobin turned to face the man the way you might turn to face a firing squad.
Michael Dailey had made a minor art form out of lounge lizardry. With his slicked-down dark hair, his pencil-line mustache, his heavily lidded eyes, his full ironic mouth, he resembled a gigolo from a thirties movie. He was at least fifty years old. Tonight he wore a narrow-collared black jacket, a brilliantly white shirt, and a red bow tie. It was to his credit that he didn’t look silly. Indeed, he looked quite seriously decadent. He was Richard Dunphy’s agent.
Dailey extended a hand that Tobin shook reluctantly. “Isn’t it time you two made up?”
“No,” Tobin said and turned back to opening the door.
“He’s a better friend of yours than you might think,” Dailey said. “You really hurt his feelings.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“I saw Jane leaving your dressing room,” Dailey said. “1 should have expected she’d run straight to you.”
The back of Tobin’s neck felt tingly. Did Dailey know about the affair he’d been having with Jane Dunphy?
Dailey said, “She should have come to Joan, if anybody. Joan could have helped her and not made the situation worse by stirring up your feelings about Richard again.” Joan was Dailey’s wife, a former runway model, blond, pale, inexorably of the night. Mrs. Dracula.