How Long Has This Been Going On (13 page)

Derek took a sip of his drink. "I don't believe I think anything of the name. Who is it?"

"Me, when I crash out of Thriller Jill's and hit the circuit."

"What circuit?"

"There are other cities besides L.A., you know," said the Kid, holding the green silk against himself and studying the effect in the mirror. "There are other clubs besides Thriller Jill's. I'm thinking of taking this play on the road."

Derek dropped his head and covered his eyes.

"Well," said the Kid, "I can't wait around for you to break me into the movies, can I?"

"I
can't,
Johnny, you must know that." Derek went over to the Kid—crossed to him, really, as an actor moves across a stage, with Timing and Profile and an Air. "Certain agents do get away with that, but for an actor to bring his boy friend into his career... It starts people talking."

Laying the dress down and not looking at Derek, the Kid said, "I thought you were going to help me. That was the whole point of this, wasn't it?"

"Money. Advice. Introductions. I
am
helping you."

The Kid looked at Derek sadly. "Yes, you really are, in your way. But it's possibly not a way I can all that terribly much use."

"A fine young American Y.M.C.A. lad in these ridiculous getups! It's disheartening. And that risible patter, Johnny!"

"What should I do?" said the Kid, smoothing out the beaded silk. "Tell Truman jokes like Jo-Jo?"

"But the very look of you is smooth, simple, smiling—"

"Derek.
That fantasy of yours about clean-limbed, cocky little Penrods is
so
off the track! I went to high school with them, remember, in the very recent past, and they were basically a bunch of dirty stupid cunts. These are the guys who grow up to beat their wives and kids and put on bellies, and if they can get a prostitute to nag their wiener into a semi-boner, they strut home as if they'd just fucked their way through a harem."

"Johnny—"

"So stop talking about the Y as if it were some sort of paradise."

"Oh, it's forbidden paradise. If I got caught there—"

"They caught Robert Taylor there two months ago and it never made the papers, did it?"

"They buy the
big
stars out of trouble. Not the also-rans, like me."

The Kid, trying a cameo here and there against the black sheath, said, "I thought you were doing okay."

"I was," said Derek, lighting a cigarette, crossing his legs, and looking debonair. "I was doing brilliantly, for someone with looks, style, and no talent whatsoever. It appears that it finally caught up with me."

The Kid turned to him. "All of a sudden?"

"No." Puff. "For a while now. Rather a long while, actually. The last grosses are not good, and the wait outside Mr. Weber's office has grown from ten to fifty-five minutes, and they're loaning me out on the next one, to Paramount."

"Well, that's not—"

"For a western."

"Paramount makes westerns? Like, Tonto's wearing a tuxedo?"

But when the Kid smiled at Derek, the actor looked genuinely upset,
this
close to breaking down.

"I'm sorry, Derek. I figured you were just... floating along."

"Nobody floats along in this business, as I'm sorry to say you will soon learn." Puff. Derek the wise. "Those who try to float soon crash down my so very young friend. Float? One doesn't float." Puff. "One
surges.
One roars and lies and manipulates, and I've never been good at that sort of behavior. It's probably my one good quality.
So."
Sniff. "I'm not really taking root here, you see, and they... quite possibly... won't renew my contract."

The Kid looked at him for a bit. "Does this mean... no more chauffeur?"

Derek laughed and stubbed out the cigarette and held his arms open. "Beamish boy, come and cheer me. Sexlessly. Patiently. Lovingly. Faithfully." Holding the Kid and sighing, Derek said, "I really would help you if I could. I don't have the power. I can't help myself, in point of fact. I'm in debt to my temples and I don't know what comes next in this career."

The Kid was set with another chauffeur joke, but Derek quickly said, "Don't jest with my life, Johnny, please."

"Won't jest."

"They screened a rough cut of
Broadway Lullaby
last week. And they're saying, Don't worry. The inserts. The color prints. The publicity. Well,
lullaby
is right, because ten minutes into it, everyone's asleep. The projectionist's asleep, the page is asleep, the security guards at the front gates are asleep. It's Sleeping Beauty's castle. One wave of my fairy wand and an entire kingdom is bored into coma."

The Kid was looking at him.

"What?" Derek asked him, lighting up again. "With the disapproving face?"

"You shouldn't use the word 'fairy,' Derek."

"You use it."

"For fun. You use it for anger. But what do you think?" the Kid asked, modeling the turban. "For Bombasta? Can you believe I paid ten bucks for the whole outfit?"

Now it's Derek with the disapproving face. "You will never break into the movies if you go on stage in those things."

"In those
clothes."

"In those
dresses."

"Dresses. Yes. I
will
go, Derek. On stage. In those. Dresses."

Derek shook his head. "Oh, there are rules, Johnny."

"Rules," says the Kid, "are what I humiliate."

"They're going to get you. You think they'll let you—"

"Derek, my man, you already sound like your Paramount western.
Who're
going to get me?"

Annoyed, Derek stabbed out the cigarette and started pacing.

"Who's going to get you?" he echoed. "You have to ask?"

"It's not against the law for a performer to—"

"It's against
nature!"

"Derek, nature isn't clothes. It's acorns and blue jays and rainbows. Nature is just there. Clothes are an invention. And who are you to judge me by my clothes? Some would say that it's against nature for a romantic movie hero to be played by a man who blows little boys."

"Not little boys. Young
men.
Fine, handsome, young... You make it sound disgusting."

"I make it sound great. You think it sounds disgusting. That's because you've been playing by their rules." "Their?"

"The joes." The Kid in the beaded silk, the material hugging his skin; the Kid in the mirror, posing, turning; the Kid humiliating the rules.

"Johnny, you'll... you'll pay for this, I'm warning you. It's the wrong... emphasis...."

The Kid says, right into the mirror, as if the words could bounce off the glass, "Probably." He gets into the shoes, tries the bag. "What do you think—hanging off the shoulder? Swing it by the chain?"

Derek is horrified but somewhat in awe. "You're ahead of your age, Johnny."

"No, I'm right on time. The age is behind me."

Dear Elaine,

Tonight, at last, you told Jeff about Lois, and that you were leaving him. He took it convivially. Perhaps it suits his own plans. Ray Milland couldn't have played the scene more sleekly, though I admit I goaded him a bit, just to see.

"She's tougher than you," I told him. "Lois."

"I was never tough enough, I know," he said. "I was half-tough."

"You were patient, hopeful, my bright young man."

"Really? I wanted you to revere me."

"And I did, you idol."

"Can't you
ever
be serious?"

No, I'm lying. He beat me. At the suggestion that he could be replaced—by a woman, at that, though I must say he was angry rather than shocked—he turned upon me the terror of an imperfect man defied. He brutalized me; I let him. I uttered no cry. I wanted our parting to be conclusive, irredeemable.

No, wait. He was neither calm nor furious, simply perplexed. But he has been away a great deal on those business trips, and I am a neglected wife. I have my yens. I am not stable, not a machine, not an employee. I am a disappointed partner.

That is when Elaine's husband walked in. Suitcase, cigarette, weary, half smiling; and Elaine looking up at him from her notebook, gently putting down the fountain pen.

"Jeff," she said.

Putting down his suitcase and shaking his head.

"I'll never get used to that," he told her.

"Jeff," she murmured lovingly.

"It's not my
name,

"Oh, Rex, darling."

"Rex was last year, remember? And Charlie was the—no, it was Giacomo the year before, Charlie before that, Tony somewhere in there—"

"Jeff!" Elaine rose as if delighted. "Jeff, what
is
your name?"

"It's so dumb when you act silly, Elaine. You've got a steel-trap brain and X-ray eyes, so drop the bull doody, please."

Elaine stood there, smiling. "Waiting for the name," she said.

"Elaine, you
know
the—"

"Yes, but to hear you say it, my love."

He sighed, stabbing out the cigarette. "Elaine..."

"Just to appreciate the force of your baritone," Elaine went on, "wrapping itself around the gravity of your personality."

He nodded and went into the bedroom. She followed him.

"You're tired," she said.

"Yes."

"You're not willing to fight with me," she said.

"That's right."

"You're Keith," she said.

"Yes, Elaine, finally. I am Keith, your husband, and you are toying with me, and you... you want to sack me, is that it?"

"More or less."

"I've been expecting it." Keith unpacking. "Marriages don't smash like windows, do they? They..."

"Melt!" Elaine cried. "Like icicles in May."

"Thanks. Yes. They melt. Finally, one or the other says, You're fired, I want a divorce."

"Or simply," Elaine offered, "I quit."

Keith nodded.

"Some guy?" he said.

"No. Some time. Some time between high school and now. Some realization. Some I don't know thing, because you have been the kind of husband my mother was hoping I'd have. A just husband—like a judge, I suppose. Granted, a long-distance husband, too. But it's not as if I missed you. Some emptiness in what we are together. It's possibly a trite notion, but you deserve someone better... well,
other
than a wife who gets whimsical and irreverent when her marriage melts, instead of turning passionate and terribly betrayed by it all."

"Well, I don't blame you, Elaine, and I hope you don't blame me."

"Yet you might at least stop sorting out your socks while I steal out of your life."

"How do you want to do it?" he asked. "Legally, I mean."

"Actually, I'm planning to go lesbian, so technically speaking I don't even need a divorce."

He smiled wanly as he closed the sock drawer. "You and your ridiculous jokes, Elaine."

Lois said, Who needs movers? She could truck Elaine into Lois's place without any help. But Elaine said Lois had enough to do, and this exchange took place in Thriller Jill's with Larken at their table, and Larken said, As long as he's out of work, why can't he and his boy friend do it, and Lois and Elaine, simultaneously to the nth, said, "What boy friend?" So Larken did three minutes on Frank and how he's still on the jam side but we're working on that, and Elaine said, "I want to date him," a joke Lois didn't enjoy.

She also had mixed feelings about Elaine's new job, as secretary to an attorney. Lois didn't like lawyers. "But wary Lois doesn't like almost everyone," Elaine explained. "Anyway, it's mostly writing letters, and I'm a whiz at that."

"Why don't you write stories and sell them to the magazines?" Lois challenged her. "That'd be a job to be proud of."

"Stories?" Elaine asked.

"Well, you're always making things up, anyway, aren't you?"

"Stories," Elaine repeated, thinking about it.

Now, Larken felt great, because everything was going to work out for him, even if he had gotten fired again.

And Lois felt great, because Elaine's decision to domesticate their relationship looked to be the most interesting thing to happen to Lois in many years. Yeah, it has its drawbacks. They get rain in heaven, as Lois's mother used to say. Well, that's fine, says Lois. Let's try heaven for a while.

And Elaine felt great, because, for the longest time, she had been wanting something desperately without knowing its name. Now she knew.

And Johnny the Kid felt great, because when he walked on stage in the black sheath as Bombasta, the whole place gasped and stared at him like children awed by an incendiary disciplinarian.

So he turns to Jo-Jo, who is just making his exit, grabs his arm, and says, "Hold it, fullback. Have you heard tell of the nun and the blind man?"

"Come to think of it, Bombasta," Jo-Jo replied, playing along, "I haven't heard of the nun and—"

"The
nun,"
Bombasta begins, "is in the
bath!
So. Well. Comes a knock at the door. 'Who's there?' she cries. Guy yells, 'Blind man!'

"Nun thinks, I'm ever so proud of my endowment. Here at last is my chance to show it off
without committing a sin!
Then. So. She calls out, 'Come in!' The blind man enters. Do you know what he says"—turning to Jo-Jo and eyeing him from top to toe—"you cabaret cavalier?"

"No, Bombasta. What does the blind man say?"

"He says, 'Nice tits, lady. Now, where do I hang the blinds?'"

Desmond had his hands over his eyes and Lois was muttering, "Fancy stuff." But Larken thought to himself that the Kid was right.
This
is what it should have been, right the way along! This was gay comedy. And, help!, did he look sharp in those clothes. He didn't mince or swish. He didn't imitate women. He played it like a tough but feminine man—like some of the dames who starred in musicals. It took itself entirely for granted, yet it was turning the familiar inside out, saying, What you find familiar has always been strange. You just never noticed because everyone's so busy playing roles.

"What a masquerade!" Larken called it, later, telling Frank. Of course, Frank thought the whole thing repulsive, but out of respect for Larken he just grunted.