Bill Ackerson and his Bunny hopped quickly from the scene of the crime, but a group of us went out for drinks together afterward, the usual thing, actors hanging out together, coming down off the nervous high of performance. After a while everybody forgot I used to be the television hotshot and we all just talked together. It was very pleasant, and the next time I looked at my watch it was five minutes to twelve.
I hadn’t thought about Ross Ferguson the entire time.
8
When I was a teenager, it was a big thing on the weekends to take the train into the city and wander around either Times Square or Greenwich Village. This great big exciting place, New York City, the center of the known universe, was practically our next-door neighbor, full of electricity and promise. We didn’t know what the hell to do with it then, but at least we could enter into it and wander around and stare at it and pretend we were cool.
That wasn’t so very long ago, but nevertheless things have changed a lot. New York somehow seems to have less promise than it did, or the promise is somehow now tainted with expectations of defeat. The electricity is still there, but with a stronger current of danger. Times Square has degenerated into some sort of subhuman pit, and all over the city there’s less of a sense that rich and poor are breathing the same air. The drawbridges are up; the self-made millionaires aren’t from Akron and Kansas City anymore, they’re from Oman and Kuwait.
One of the few parts of the city that hasn’t changed — or at least hasn’t become unrecognizable — is Greenwich Village. That’s why I live there, and why I feel comfortable walking in it late at night, and why it was so difficult to walk faster even though I was going to be late for my meeting with Ross Ferguson, who I could see from half a block away, pacing the buckled old slate sidewalk in front of my house.
I don’t know where Ross Ferguson came from originally, but by now he couldn’t be anything but what he is: a successful Hollywood writer. In his early fifties, with thick steel-wool hair that’s all pepper and salt, he has a year-round dark orangy-brown tan, and in his native habitat he tends to wear silk shirts open to the waist — curly gray hair-clumps on his bronzed chest — and heavy necklaces of gold chain, and designer sunglasses on top of his head. He’s been writing for more than twenty years out on the Coast, a few movies but mostly television, owns a piece of a couple of successful series, and lives up in the hilly part of Beverly Hills with a succession of wives and girlfriends. Actually, I think it’s just girlfriends these days, his accountant having told him he can’t afford any more wives; that is, ex-wives.
I know I’ve made him sound terrible, and in many ways Ross is terrible, but the odd thing is, he’s also a very talented guy and fine craftsman. He was one of the three or four most prolific writers for PACKARD, and his scripts always gave us interesting things to do and think about, characters with more complexity than absolutely necessary and story lines that took unexpected but not unbelievable twists and turns. When I first sat down to try my hand at a PACKARD script, Ross was one of the three people I showed it to, and he was wonderfully generous and forthcoming in his response. If life hadn’t made him a rich bronzed Hollywood writer, he probably would have been a hell of a teacher, and possibly a better and happier human being, though I realize it’s stupid to make that kind of judgment about another person. Anyway, whoever he might have been, a fine writer and a fine teacher and a rotten apple is who he is, and who I was now approaching along the sidewalk on West Tenth at not quite ten minutes past midnight. “Jesus, Sam! I thought something happened to you!” His expression was so tense, so worried, that I felt immediately guilty at being late. “I’m sorry, Ross,” I said, “I really am. You know how actors get after an opening.”
“More self-absorbed than ever,” he commented, reverting to his usual self. “Hard to believe, I know.”
“Well, I’m here now,” I pointed out, guilt all gone. “Come on in.”
The only lights burning inside the house were on the staircase, which meant Robinson had gone to bed, disapproving my late hours, no doubt. Ross and I came in and shut the door and I hit various light switches, saying, “You want something to drink?”
“Yes,” he said simply. “I have a story to tell you, Sam, and then a tape to play, and they’ll both need a drink.”
“A tape?”
“Wait’ll you see it.” His eyes looked hollow, haunted, an expression I’d never seen on him before.
“I’m looking forward. Name your poison.”
“Brandy.”
“Fine. We’ll go up to the office, in that case; the brandy and the VCR are both there.”
“It’s U-Matic,” he said as we went up the stairs.
U-Matic? That’s the professional level of tape, similar to the Betamax system but with a tape twice as wide. I’ve never seen that much difference in quality, but that’s what the networks and the producers all use. My secret opinion is that the professionals use a different tape system because if they used the same system as the amateurs, how would they know they were professionals?
Anyway, I have players for all three systems, so that was no problem. Up one flight, we went into my office — the night-time view, across quiet West Tenth, is of low skyline and lit windows — and I opened the liquor cabinet while Ross shucked out of his topcoat.
Away from his native habitat Ross’s clothing style became a little uncertain. His tan topcoat was good quality, suggesting someplace like Brooks Brothers. His dark gray suit, fitting a little badly in the shoulders and seat, made him look older, and as though on his way to the funeral of a business acquaintance. The black tasseled loafers softened this image a bit, not much, while the pink shirt and the flowered tie were just crazy.
My office is a fairly large room, divided into two areas. Toward the front is a double-sided antique desk with green leather insert top; depending on my mood or what’s going on, I can sit facing the room or the street. The chairs on both sides of the desk are identical; oak, with green leather seats and backs.
The rear half of the room contains more casual seating; a low short sofa, upholstered in soft cotton with an autumn design of branches and berries and fallen leaves, facing a pair of low overstuffed swivel chairs in a light brown. The back wall, opposite the windows, contains, in addition to a door to my bedroom, cream-colored shelves filled with books, VCRs, and stereo equipment.
Armed with brandies, we sat facing each other, me on the sofa and Ross nervously moving in little arcs back and forth in one of the swivel chairs. I said, “Cheers,” and we sipped our Remy, and I said, “What brings you east, Ross?”
“You,” he said. “I had nowhere else I could turn, and your service said you were in New York, so here I came.”
I put my snifter down on the oak coffee table between us. “You came all this way just to see me? No other reason? What’s going on?”
He had taken a small paper bag from his topcoat pocket when we’d first come upstairs, which he now fidgeted with in his lap. From the shape I would have said it contained a U-Matic tape. Now he patted it and said, “First I’ll tell you the story, then I’ll show you this.”
“Fine.”
“Do you remember Delia West?”
I didn’t. “Remind me.”
“I went with her awhile, a year or two ago. She’s the one who threatened a breach of promise suit. Can you imagine? In this day and age, a breach of promise? That’s after her own lawyer laughed her out of his office when she tried palimony.”
“I’m sorry, Ross, I don’t remember this one,” I said. “And she does sound like somebody I wouldn’t forget.”