Six of their seven fans were about the sort you expected to find-decent enough people, Tobin supposed, from Des Moines or Baltimore or Spokane, stocks and bond people, or retail people, or medical people-but caught up in a very silly moment, that of treating has-been Hollywood types as if they were something special, as if they were golden people not plagued by age or illness or failed relationships or poverty. And maybe that's what it was all about, anyway- maybe that's what people from Des Moines or Baltimore or Spokane wanted to believe, that out there in Hollywood was this different, better species, one safe from the sag of jowl, the loss of money, the specter of surgery. Maybe it was somehow comforting to believe in this species.
There was a couple, a husband and wife; two men who wore a few hundred pounds of gold chains around their necks; and two very young and very drunk girls who seemed to be serving as snacks for the two men with the great tonnage of gold chains.
Only one man seemed unimpressed with the three stars. He sat a bit to the left, sipping at a beer not from a long slender glass but directly from the bottle. There was a certain quiet defiance in the gesture but then there was a quiet defiance about the man, period. He wore a sedate western suit-no spangles or piping-a Stetson that sat parked on what was obviously a black toupee, and a gigantic wedding ring. He watched. He listened. He didn't smile and he didn't talk. He did only those two things. He watched. He listened. Captain Hackett and Tobin pushed past him to the three stars.
"Look," said one of the very young girls. "It's that film guy!"
"Tobin!" said her friend.
Husband poked wife and wife poked husband. "It's Tobin," whispered wife.
"The film guy," whispered husband.
Captain Hackett said to the three stars, "I wondered if we might talk with you."
"What's up?" Kevin Anderson grinned drunkenly. "Did Tobin lose his temper and throw somebody overboard?"
Tobin wanted to make an obscene gesture but decided that would only underscore Anderson's point. Tobin was tired of True Temper Tales. He had long ago quit throwing tantrums. For the most part, anyway.
"I'm afraid this is more serious than that," Captain Hackett said.
"Aw, come on," one of the chain-encumbered men said. "Todd was going to tell us which of the 'The Pendergasts' guys is a fag."
"Yeah, which one?" said his buddy.
The captain turned to the fans and said, with the expansive courtliness of one long accustomed to appeasing those he considers beneath him, "I know what an inconvenience this is-getting people like this dragged away from you. But I'll tell you what. If you'll let me have them for just ten minutes…" And here he made a gesture the pope would have envied, a sweeping kind of thing that bestowed freedom on these people. "Then if they'd like to come back and spend some more time here in the lounge, the drinks will be on me. How's that?"
"Ten minutes and no more?" asked the eager husband.
"And no more," promised the captain.
Then he indicated to the three confused-looking stars a private party room at the end of the lounge. He quietly asked a steward who had been helping the bartender to go get two other passengers.
"It's-that red-haired guy, isn't it?" one of the hairy, golden-chained men called out as the group started to the party room. "He's the fag, isn't he?”
Nothing looks lonelier than a room meant for festivity when nothing festive is going on.
The party room was long and narrow, with beautifully flocked red wallpaper, a dry bar along the west wall, a sensational view of the moon-tipped ocean, and a jukebox, Tobin noted, loaded with as diverse a play list as any forty-year-old drunk could hope for-Sam the Sham amp; The Pharaohs, Dan Fogelberg, Judy Collins, Firefall, David Bowie, Jackson Browne, Hank Williams (the real one, not the fat-ass no-talent bully boy son living off the old man's rep), Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Patti Page.
The captain, still in the grand style, saw that his guests had the drinks they chose. Tobin had a diet 7-Up.
"Something terrible happened, didn't it?" Susan Richards said. Though she invariably played the beautiful bad woman, off-camera she was often overwrought, her looks somewhat wasted on her unspoken anxieties. She sighed and sounded sorry for herself. "I thought getting out of LA was going to make me feel better. And now this."
Todd Ames slid an arm around her. "We don't know what happened yet, Susan. Maybe it's not as bad as it would seem. No sense borrowing trouble." As he spoke, he took note of his sleek, gray-haired good looks in the window.
Kevin Anderson said to the captain, "This is really bullshit."
"What is?" the captain said calmly.
"Keeping us all on edge like this."
"I'd simply prefer not to go through it twice," the captain said mildly.
"Something's really wrong," Susan said, touching her breast. "I can feel it."
Anderson stared directly at the captain and said, "Nothing more than heartburn, Susan. It's the food we eat."
The captain looked over at Tobin. He smiled apologetically at Tobin, as if the three stars were the captain's children and they were misbehaving and embarrassing both themselves and him.
Tobin had to find a bathroom. He said, "I'll be back in a minute."
The captain glanced at his watch. "I'd like you all here if you don't mind."
"Just need a bathroom."
"Oh."
"A minute."
"Fine."
Susan said, "Tobin, I thought you and I were friends. You're really going to leave this room and not tell us what's going on?"
"I can't, Susan. At sea the captain is boss."
"What a brownnose," Anderson said in his best blond TV hero way.
Tobin laughed. This was like being in sixth grade. Brownnose. Right. (His all-time favorite line was from Andre Malraux, in which an elderly Italian priest is asked if he learned anything hearing confessions for sixty years. The priest thinks for a moment and says, "Yes. There is no such thing as an adult." And fortyish Anderson had just proved the priest's point-as Tobin proved it every day, putting his own age of maturity at eighteen, tops.)
The deal was he just needed to go to the bathroom located at the east end of the lounge and get right back. It was not supposed to be a significant trip.
But as he opened the party room door from inside, he heard the sound of something heavy moving quickly away.
When he looked out, he saw the chunky man in the western suit and the Stetson hurrying back toward the bar. He remembered how intently the man had watched and listened to the celebrities holding court.
He'd been listening again, only this time by leaning against the door.
Tobin wondered more than ever who he was, and what he was doing.
The men's room reminded him of a column he'd written for his college paper in his senior year, all about why men's rooms should have rubber floors that could be easily hosed off.
Presently, the three urinals were occupied by three drunks carrying on an enthusiastic but totally meaningless conversation while paying not the slightest attention to where they aimed.
Tobin took a stall, kicked the lid up with the toe of his shoe, and acted like a very responsible citizen, aiming, and aiming to please.
He left the men's room feeling like a very responsible citizen. Perhaps he'd get a gold star in urine.
8
Tobin had learned that the news of unexpected death is generally greeted in one of two ways-angry denial ("There has to be some mistake") or instant shock, usually expressed by tears or a kind of animal keening that has nothing to do with gender, the ageless noise of grief over the fact that human beings must die.