How Long Has This Been Going On (38 page)

She was young and untried, but she had
it.
Why? The understanding of character came from her exposure to, her observation of, the Twins; her sense of structure from the ordered upbringing of small-town life; her sensuality from dreams of what Chris might be.

"I'll see you tomorrow at eight," she tells her actors. "And, remember, everyone's off book!"

Rehearsals break up quickly, because the lives of university students are replete and everyone's always eager for the next thing. But Ty dawdles, sitting at a table, chin on hand, gazing at Chris.

"What?" she says, amused.

"Just wondering, boss."

Chris is packing.

"Don't you want to know what I'm wondering?"

Chris considers her answer—flip? bemused? direct?

"Tell me," she says. Direct.

"I'm wondering what you would be like the next morning."

Be cool, Chris. "Aren't all women the same the next morning?" she says. "Radiant and thankful?"

"Well, yes, the first time," Ty concedes, getting up and coming toward her, half smiling, maybe stalking her. "But later..."

"What are you like, the next morning?"

"Guess."

"Sinister, my dear. Playful, maybe. Or lazy, yawning. These pictures of you."

"I couldn't be all those things at once, now," he said.

"You're actor enough to play a lot more than that at once," Chris replied, taking up her things.

"Feel like a bite of something?"

"Sure."

They started out together. "I feel like a bite of you, actually," said Ty.

Chris laughed and said, "You're exceeding the speed limit." Flip.

"It's because I'm older than the guys you're used to. High-school boys and college men. I'm twenty-six."

"You're kidding."

He shook his head. "I didn't jump right into grad school after college. That would be, like, homework for the rest of your life. Kind of bummed around for a while first. So there are a couple of lost years in my resume, and that's a nice feeling. Odd feeling. Nicely odd."

Thinking, Go ahead and stare at his smile, that's what it's there for, Chris said, "You really are a sharp actor. Most of the drama club is justmore of the Senior Play kind of thing from high school. As soon as they graduate, they'll be out of the theatre. But you—"

"Well, that's the drama club.
School
of Drama's a different thing. We're the real actors."

"You
are, anyway."

They turned into the dinky little coffee shop on Greene Street and settled into a booth.

"Whoa," said Ty, opening his jacket and pulling off his scarf. "Winter." He gestured at the waitress for coffee, adding, "And cheeseburgers extraordinaire." Grinning at Chris, he said, "Who'd look at a menu in a place like this?" A bit of consultation, and he called out, "That's one medium rare but not too red and one very, very, very well done."

"One rare, one well," the waitress told the cook.

"Dig New
York,"
said Ty. "Where you can't get what you need. Except the perfect haircut."

"Where are you from?" Chris asked.

"Washington State. Tacoma."

"That's far."

"From
here,
maybe. To itself, it's close, real close."

"Tell me, sexy, are you naturally out of control?" Chris asked. "Or are you just playing it?" Bemused.

"Like how?"

"Oh... the bobbing head and the undress-me eyes and so on. Is that shtick or is that you?"

"It's always me."

The waitress brought the coffee.

"We could be real nice friends," Ty went on. "I'd love to get to know you, Chris."

"Can a man and a woman really be friends? Like two men?"

"Aw, men can't be friends. No possibility." He leaned forward. "One guy lets another guy into his confidence, and suddenly it's a boxing match. They'd kill each other."

"Why?"

Ty shrugged. "Jealousy? Insecurity? Poetry?"

They laughed.

"Well, I knew two men," said Chris. "Boys, really. Friends. And they did end up fighting. But for years and years it was..."

"Almost a love affair?"

She nodded.

"Yeah, I've seen that. Were they gay?"

And do you know that Chris had never heard the word before in this context? Stunned, she figured it out at once, and considered it as well. It was a bizarre choice of word, yet appropriate, because it was short and meaningless, beyond the windy, academic noise of "homosexual," a quiet little word that you never heard any more.
Gay.
Luke was gay. And Tom...

"No, yeah, that happens," Ty went on. "More than you'd think."

"How do you know about this?"

"My friends tell me the truth." Ty laughed. "The gay ones, anyway. Because they know we're hunting different fields. No competition." He lit a cigarette. "Or maybe the gay guys are more easygoing or something. No boxing matches." He laughed again. "No, I don't want to be friends with women. Friends is, like, lend me five till Tuesday. Woman and man is..." His free hand mimed a rocket taking off. "Something special."

"Those two boys I knew were special."

"Yeah, just not to me."

Ty had four no-fail smiles—toothy little lost boy, game young man with hidden pain, playful but dangerous-when-wet Eagle Scout, and guy utterly engaged by the woman he's with right now. Moreover, Ty had an infallible instinct for using the right smile at the right time. He crossed the game young man with the guy utterly engaged and brushed Chris's hand several times.

"Oh, Ty, come on," she said, very in charge in her director's voice.

And Ty was thinking, She'll fall easy.

Johnna did not fall easy; she was one of Ty's toughest cases. But then Johnna was very self-protected, because, for all her power and note as a major editor in a major house, she had had little education and was fiercely aware that all her colleagues and authors knew more than she did. The only child of tremendously wealthy philistines, she had leaped to prominence at Macmillan in the early 1960s by fostering three authors of fiction who each cracked the
Times
best-seller list by their second or third book. Then a publisher with Heavy Lit Prestige made Johnna an offer, and she brought her three authors to her new house, where she discovered Elaine.

It was a neat little bio, triumphant and apparently effortless. Johnna had Made It, but she worried the knowledge as a puppy tears into a slipper that stubbornly refuses to come apart. I'm brilliant, she thought—but am I
desirable?

So of course she told Ty, "I could clobber you," when he finally showed up at her apartment at something like 11:10 that night.

"I'm an actor, darlin'," he told her, smoothing his way into the apartment as she resentfully backed up. He kicked the door closed behind him, still advancing upon her and not entirely smiling. "Actors rehearse, you know."

She was going to melt right down as soon as he reached for her, of course. You knew that and she knew that. She's right about him: He's a two-faced make-out artist. But he's got something that many women cannot resist: confidence. It reminds them of their fathers: for, to a young girl, her father's salient quality is the ease with which he uses her—picks her up, asks and tells her about things of no importance to anyone but her, tucks her into bed. Very young daughters are perhaps the only women that a man—however slippery his sense of command—can feel absolute mastery over.

So Ty can enchant Johnna as her father could, wholly and easily. He especially loves women who have misgivings about giving themselves to him, and he doesn't care why. In Johnna's case, it is because she knows that she is rocking her precarious self-esteem by letting him take her for granted. Ty prefers a woman who fears him physically, fears the humiliating erotic abandon he's going to inspire in her. The younger girls are good for this, despite their bravado; this cornfed Chris kid will work out real nice that way. It's why Ty calls them "darlin'," you know: He finds it wondrous that there is this entire race of people that he can accommodate as naturally as if they were two cuts of jigsaw, and with pleasure unbounded. Ty loves women of many ages, shapes, and coloring; but he has a weakness for smallish and perfectly rounded breasts, long, long,
long
white calves, and terror.

"You tell me one thing," Johnna begins, gently trying to break Ty's hold. "Am I the only—"

Ty quiets her with kisses. He says, "Let me coax you, now. You know I love to coax you." Drawing her into the bedroom. "Give you the slow treatment, deep and tender, and that is so coaxy."

"Ty—"

"Shh." He held a finger to his lips, against the playful but dangerous Eagle Scout smile. Could he get away with this if he weren't young, slim, and handsome? Of course. Women are taken in not by his looks but by his characterization. He is beautiful to them because he concentrates on them, intent and knowledgeable as he is. He
understands
them: and how many other men have bothered to?

* * *

Bart Stokes's directions for the porn shoot led Frank to a loft in the wilds of SoHo, and Bart himself opened the door. The place was one great room without subdivisions, the bedroom furniture in one corner, the kitchen along a wall
here
and the couch and other leisure pieces grouped around a rag
there.
A skylight let in a hefty share of winter sun, which an assistant was trying to concentrate with the use of great white umbrellas, and the photographer, checking the camera, looked up as Bart brought Frank over.

"Great," said the photographer, as they were introduced. "We got us a King Clone."

"King what?" said Frank, taking off his jacket.

"Perfect. Jeans, cowboy flannel shirt, the boots... I could have ordered you from a catalogue."

"What's he saying?" Frank asked Bart.

Bart shrugged. "Some term he uses. A leather-and-western guy with dark hair and a mustache is a clone." He asked the photographer, "Right?" Back to Frank, as the photographer nodded: "Because there are so many of us."

"A
clone?
"

"A copy," said the photographer. "A double."

"Well, that's wrong, because I'm one of a kind."

"So Bart assures me," said the photographer, openly admiring Frank.

Phil Neil came out of the bathroom. "Hey, Frank." "Phil."

"It's funny seeing everyone shake hands," said Bart, "when we're all going to be fucking in three minutes. Take a look at your costume, Frank." Crossing to some clothes laid out on a couch: "It's the real thing here."

"So am I," said Frank, following him. Under his breath, he muttered, "Say, what's this
done
bit, okay?"

"Search me where it comes from. But you do hear it here and there." Handing Frank the cop costume. "And it does sort of describe the look of Village guys, stalking around lean and mean." Frank started stripping. "I mean, it's kind of funny when a cab pulls up in front of the Eagle and out steps a cowboy.... You're going to be some stuff in those duds, chum."

"So it's just us three in the whole movie, or is there—"

"Yeah, there's a neighbor and a painter. They're coming in tomorrow."

"We're all fixed up with the lights," the photographer called out. "Why don't you all get into costume, and I'll describe the first scene? That's the plumber and the man in the suit. Ready on the set!"

"Real Hollywood," Frank observed sarcastically, and Bart began changing into workingman's attire.

As Bart had warned Frank, it was a silent, a movie so primitive that all it needed was visuals. The day's shoot comprised the film's opening segments: Working alone in an apartment, a plumber accidentally gets his clothes sopping wet, takes them off, and masturbates in a full-length mirror; enter then the tenant, a fancy-dan professional whom the plumber artlessly seduces; whereupon a cop comes in because of a complaint about excessive noise.

"Wait a minute," said Frank. "
What
excessive noise? Those guys have been fucking, not holding a rumba contest."

"The scenario is a little shaky by the standards of Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps," said the photographer, airily. "But this is a fantasy, after all. A dream."

"Your costumes are real enough," said Frank.

"Yes, to strengthen the dream. The clothes tell us who has the power. The man in the suit has the least power, because he's the most civilized. So the plumber has his way with him, and then the cop..." Here the photographer faltered, but his three actors were standing there listening to him, their faces blank, taking it in. The photographer went on, "You see, it's a dreamworld populated exclusively by very hot and very available men. It obeys its own rules."

It was an odd grouping: the fat, sweatered photographer and his lighting man, nondescript in jeans and turtleneck, the two of them encircled by the implausibly handsome plumber, fussing with the zippers on his many pockets; and the shirtless cop, his pants resting unfastened on his hips; and the dazzling man in the suit, readjusting his tie before pulling on his jacket: as if fantasy were edging around reality, trying to hem it in.

Frank was saying, "I just think it should make sense."

"Hey, Frank," said Bart, "this isn't
Bonnie and Clyde.
It's a sex flick. Think Forty-second and Eighth."

"Yeah, but it's this... this kind of knightly thing we could do," said Frank. "All those guys out there who want to see what it's like when really hot guys get together, right? We can give them something to be a part of, in a way. It isn't just a sex flick. It's like the ancient Greek tales, where they—"

"Frank," said Bart, "it's a movie."

"Anyway," humphed the photographer, "the cop comes in, and of course he's straight, but the other two lure him into a threesome, so first—"

"What do you mean,
of course
he's straight?" cried Frank. "You don't think there are gay cops?"

"Thousands, and I'm sure you've had them all," said the photographer dryly. "But the straight cop who is nevertheless available is a favorite imaginary figure."