The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald (10 page)

I didn’t like this. Not one bit.

We had just ordered our drinks when Tanner Marsh, dressed in a fresh poplin suit, walked in the door with Skitsy Held.

The place suddenly got very quiet. Everyone in Elaine’s was staring at them. The evening’s news had traveled fast.

Tanner got pale when he spotted us. He and Skitsy began murmuring to each other.

“This should be interesting,” observed Todd quietly.

“Hey, should I invite them to join us?” wondered Boyd.

“No, no, let’s wait and see what they do,” exclaimed Delilah as Elaine rushed over to them.

They didn’t walk out. They allowed Elaine to seat them at a table as far from us as possible, Skitsy exchanging grim hellos with the regulars as she passed by them. Slowly, the room’s usual level of urbane chatter returned.

Elaine worked her way by our table. “No trouble tonight, Cameron,” she pleaded, shooting a nervous look over at Tanner.

Charlie put a fresh roll of film in her camera.

I expected Tanner to retaliate. He was a critic. A critic is someone accustomed to having the last word. But I didn’t expect him to retaliate in quite the way he had in mind.

When his drink came, Tanner downed it at once and struggled to his feet. Skitsy put out a hand to stop him, but the fat man shrugged it off and started toward us. Heads turned. The place got very quiet again. When he got to our table, Tanner stopped and stood over us, his eyes on Cam. He said nothing, just stood there staring at Cam, his face an utter blank. Cam stared right back up at him.

Boyd broke the silence. “Evening, Tanner. Care to join us?”

In response, Tanner pulled a gun out of his jacket pocket, pointed it at Cameron Sheffield Noyes, and fired it.

I
’M QUITE CERTAIN TANNER
would have killed his brilliant young discovery if I hadn’t taken a swipe at his gun hand a split second before he fired. As it was, the bullet just took off the tip of Cam’s left ear before it made a small, neat hole in the wall behind him.

Delilah screamed. Lots of people did. Others, Cam included, froze. Tanner just stood there dumbly, as if in shock. I pried the gun out of his hand and gave it to the bartender, who helped me hustle him out onto the sidewalk, where Tanner immediately threw up. Then he sat down on the curb and began to weep uncontrollably.

“Do you see?” demanded Skitsy Held, who had followed us outside. “Do you see what that boy does to people?”

“Yes,” I replied. “And I see what they do to him.”

“He’s a cancer,” she snarled. “He’s terrible for publishing. Awful. And so are you for having anything to do with him.”

I glanced over at the bartender, who was missing none of this, then back at Skitsy. “That’s funny, I thought you said he was still your biggest star.”

“You’re wrong,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not funny at all.”

She and the bartender stayed outside with Tanner. Inside, a gynecologist who’d just written a best-selling diet book was bandaging Cam’s ear. Elaine was calling the police and Cam was telling her not to.

“No harm, no foul,” he said with remarkable calm, seemingly not at all fazed by his narrow brush with death. “The man simply got upset. Quite understandable. Let’s just let it drop.”

So Elaine put Skitsy and Tanner in a cab, and Cam bought the house a drink, and things went back to what passes for normal around there.

“Get it on film?” I asked a somewhat wide-eyed Charlie Chu as I took my seat.

“Missed it,” Charlie replied, her voice quavering. Her glasses slid down her nose. She pushed them back up. “I guess I’m not very cool under fire.”

“Who among us is?” I asked.

“You are, coach,” Cam pointed out. “You’re a genuine man of action. You surprised me.”

“Not as much as I surprised myself,” I said.

“I still think the dude oughta be put in jail,” groused Boyd.

“Me, too,” agreed Todd.

Cam shook his head. “Forget about it,” he said firmly.

“But he tried to kill you, Cameron!” cried Delilah.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Cam said, throwing back his glass of tequila and motioning for another. “You can’t kill something that’s already dead.”

After a few more rounds at Elaine’s we headed down to Sammy’s, the boisterous Lower East Side steak house where everything comes drenched in garlic, and where things got even wiggier.

It was hot and crowded and incredibly noisy in there, even at two a.m. on a weeknight. Waiters rushed about with Fred Flintstone-sized platters of sizzling meat. Patrons took turns at the microphone singing Billy Joel songs off-key to the accompaniment of the house piano player.

We sat around a big round table laden with eggplant salad, pickles, bread, and seltzer siphons. We were one less. Todd, who had to be at work on time, had headed home. Lulu stretched out under me, grunting sourly. She hates it when I eat garlic. My own feeling is anybody who eats canned mackerel has no right to comment about somebody else’s breath.

There wasn’t much on the menu for Charlie the vegetarian, but she wasn’t exactly a woman of appetite by this point. She just picked quietly at some eggplant salad and glowered at Cam and Delilah, neither of whom seemed to care any longer that she was there, or that anyone else was. The two of them were gazing into each other’s eyes, cooing into each other’s ears, giggling, touching. Maybe it was the sight of Cam’s hand resting there upon Delilah’s. Maybe it was simply that everyone, no matter how forgiving, reaches a boiling point. Whatever, Charlie Chu turned very human when Delilah Moscowitz got up and flounced off to the ladies’ room, twitching her tail. Not that Charlie was obvious about it. She waited a moment before she dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, excused herself, and followed Delilah in there. No one thought a thing of it, including me.

All I knew is one minute everyone in Sammy’s was eating and drinking and making merry, and the next minute a horrifying scream was coming from the direction of the ladies’ room.

Cam frowned and looked inquiringly over at Boyd, who suddenly got very busy with his steak. Neither of them budged. Not even after the second scream. It was I who paid the call. At full speed. The ladies’ room door was locked. I threw my shoulder against it and immediately regretted it. Oh, the door popped open, all right, but so did something inside my shoulder.

The two of them were on the bathroom floor. Delilah was pinned flat on her back with Charlie astride her, clutching her by the throat and brandishing a big, ugly hunk of broken beer bottle before Delilah’s terrified face.

“Stay away from him, you hear?” Charlie cried. “Stay away or I’ll cut you! He’s mine!
Mine!
”

“Hey, Blue Monday,” I said softly from the doorway, rubbing my shoulder.

“Back off!” Charlie spat at me. “This is between me and her.” She turned back to Delilah, holding the glass directly against her lovely white throat now. “Say it! Say you hear me!”

“I hear you, I hear you, you crazy bitch,” gasped Delilah. “He’s all yours. Now get the hell off me, will you?”

Charlie relaxed her hold. I immediately grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and pulled her up onto her feet. She didn’t weigh much. I tossed her glass weapon in the trash.

By this time the singular object of their affections had come reeling in, jacket rumpled, ear bandaged, blue eyes glazed, a full bottle of beer in one hand, his half-eaten steak in the other. He looked down at Delilah, whose leather miniskirt was hiked up over her hips, then over at Charlie. Then he narrowed his eyes at me, not comprehending. “So what’s … I mean … ?” Before he could say more, Charlie snatched him impatiently by the arm and stormed out, dragging him along like a large, docile child.

“You’ll be sorry, you crazy bitch!” Delilah yelled after her from the floor. She lay there a moment, too drained to budge, then looked down at her state of undress and raised an eyebrow at me. “Wanna climb aboard, sailor?”

“That’s it, Red. Don’t lose your sense of humor. You okay?”

“Just fine,” she replied, giving me her hand. “It so happens I love being assaulted on filthy public-bathroom floors.”

“Look on the bright side,” I said, hoisting her to her feet. “You can get a column out of this —
sharp
advice on how to steal someone else’s man.”

“He’s not someone else’s,” she retorted, scowling.

“I could have sworn someone else thought so.”

She looked herself over in the mirror, tossed her head. “Hey, it’s not my fault she can’t see the signs.”

“Signs?”

“He’s unhappy with her. No man who is happy with someone gets as bombed as he does all of the time.”

“And you think you can make him happy?”

She turned and faced me, hands on her hips. “No offense, but what business is this of yours?”

“Everything about Cam Noyes is my business now, whether I like it or not.”

She thought that over. “You want the truth?”

“Generally.”

“If I lose Cam Noyes, she won’t have to slit my throat — I’ll slit it myself.” Delilah took a prescription bottle of tranks out of her purse and threw two of them down her throat. She had several such bottles in there. She had a small drugstore in there.

“Pills are somewhat neater,” I countered.

“Not after they get done pumping out your stomach they aren’t,” she said.

“That sounds suspiciously like the voice of experience.”

“Lets just say that this reporter doesn’t have it as totally together as her readers think she does,” Delilah confided. “And who am I to shatter their illusions.” She got her brush out of her purse and went to work on her hair, glancing at me in the mirror. “What, no smart remarks?”

“Not from me. I’ve spent too much time in too many glass houses.”

Her eyes softened. “You’re a sensitive man, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m an utterly modern kind of guy. What kind is Cam?”

“Everything I’ve ever wanted — tall, blond, handsome, brilliant, tragic, a bit dangerous. Cam Noyes is the man of this fat, insecure, manic-depressive Jewish princess’s dreams.”

“You’re not my idea of fat.”

“I used to weigh a hundred and sixty-four pounds,” she informed me. “I work out at a Nautilus club three hours every day to look like I do now. I live on popcorn and cranberry juice and a host of artificial chemicals. You also happen to be looking at somewhat less than half of my original nose. Christ, why am I telling you all of this?”

“I asked.”

She admired the curve of her throat in the mirror and swallowed.

“Charlie wouldn’t really hurt me, would she?”

“Hard telling. Personally, I wouldn’t test her, but I scare easy — all part of the modern-guy thing.”

“God, how trashy.” She started out of the bathroom, stopped, and looked around. Then she swiveled on one foot in a Tina Turner gyration and cried out, “And don’t you just love it?”

The oomph kind of went out of the evening after that. I drove the happy couple home to Gramercy Park in the Loveboat. They rode beside me on the front seat. Lulu snoozed in the back. She was still sniffling, which was not a good sign. It was late. The streets were as quiet as they ever get. Very few cars, aside from the occasional cab whisking late-nighters from one club to another. No one was out walking.

We rode in silence until Charlie said to Cam in a soft, halting voice, “I got so scared when Tanner tried to … and then when you and she … I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”

“Not going to lose me,” he assured her thickly. “Just being nice to her because Boyd asked me to. Strictly business. Not as if I’m planning to bang her or anything.”

“Honest?” she asked, wanting desperately to buy into it.

“Honest.” He put his arm around her. She cuddled into him, relieved.

“Sorry if I made you mad,” she said.

“Mad is not how you made me feel.”

“How did I … ?”

He took her hand and pressed it due south of his equator. “That’s how.”

She groaned and climbed into his lap, her arms around his neck. Her mouth found his. They did very little talking after that.

I kept my eyes on the road and my hands upon the wheel. My shoulder ached and I had the taste of garlic and self-loathing in my mouth. I wanted no part of this job. Cam Noyes was a liar and a cheat and a mess. His women were ouchboxes of exposed nerve endings. His best friend was a featured selection of the Reptile of the Month Club. And I was quickly turning into his silent accomplice. I wanted no part of it. What I wanted was out. But I knew I wouldn’t get out. Because there was something about Cam Noyes. Maybe it was the fear and vulnerability and torment I saw beneath his golden surface. Maybe it was the kinship between us — of upbringing, of art, of boy wonderdom and the burden that went with it. Maybe it was just that he knew how to make great tables. Whatever it was, I knew I wouldn’t get out. Because Cam Noyes desperately needed someone, and that someone was me.

At Eighteenth and Third, Charlie abruptly rolled off his lap and sat there glaring straight ahead, chin raised, mouth drawn tight. I glanced across her at my celebrity — he was out cold, his head back on the seat, snoring softly. All of the tequila and coke had finally caught up with him.

“Sorry,” I said to her.

“Don’t say another word about it,” she snapped.

So I didn’t.

The lights were on in the town house.

“Ah, good,” I said. “Vic has arrived from Los Angeles.”

“How did he get in?” Charlie wondered.

“He has a way with locks,” I replied as she started to rouse Cam. “Oh, don’t worry about him. Vic will take over now.”

“But —”

“Trust me.”

We found him in the kitchen unpacking a new microwave oven. A set of dishes, pots and pans, bags of provisions, were piled everywhere. Coffee was perking on a new hot plate. James Mason was reading
The Third Man
by Graham Greene on a cassette player. Vic Early, show biz bodyguard extraordinaire, was getting settled.

He was a balding, sandy-haired giant in slacks and a striped polo shirt. He stood six feet six and weighed 250 pounds, little of it fat. A couple of decades before he’d been a star offensive lineman for the UCLA Bruins. The Rams drafted him in the first round. He chose the Marines instead and went to Vietnam, where he took some shrapnel in the head. He has a plate in his skull. Sometimes it gives him trouble — he sees red. I know this because he once rearranged my face and rib cage. But he hasn’t actually killed anyone, as far as I know, and most of the time he’s extremely mild-mannered.