“Of course I can say!” she exclaimed. “I walked there! I can’t remember why I walked there, but I must have walked there, because there I was!”
And in the street did you see someone walk away?
Funny thing: that was precisely the question the other men asked her too.
Janus, you two-faced god, where are you?
Osako to the cleaning woman, the cleaning woman to a stranger in the street.
Only he wasn’t a stranger, because this was planned, this was something Janus had arranged, and the stranger was…
Monsieur Petrain, who lives at number 49, and there’s only one question I really want to ask here, one question that will crack this case wide open:
“Monsieur Petrain. His arse. Would you describe it as ‘tight’?”
Chapter 61
I remember Will, my gofer from the days of Marilyn Monroe, Aurangzeb and champagne.
I did not wear his body long, for he and I had a deal, and at the termination of our contract I shook him by the hand, and he was unafraid of my touch, and I said, “Good luck to you, Will.”
He grinned and squeezed my palm and replied, “Likewise. Likewise.”
Thirty-two years later I was sitting in Melissa Belvin in a diner off Columbus when a man entered. He was chubby without being fat, portly without being uncomfortable, and he ordered strong black coffee, a Danish pastry and a copy of the New York Post.
I watched him flick through political scandals, corruption, reports on dictators and economics, straight to the back. There he started earnestly on the sports pages, scouring each line of every article like a holy text.
After a while I walked over to him, swinging myself on to the high stool by the bar at his side.
His eyes flickered up to me from the paper and, perceiving no threat, returned to his reading. Others might have stopped to stare, for in my yellow dress and fair hair I was beautiful even by the rules of the time.
“How are the Dodgers doing?” I asked.
He glanced up again, re-evaluating then dismissing. “OK. But they can sure do better.”
“Tough season?”
“It’s always a tough season for the Dodgers. It’s how they make success feel sweet.”
That should have been that, but I said, “And how are you, William?”
His eyes focused fast, now trying to read the face that moments before he’d disregarded. “I’m not William. You’re thinking of someone else.”
“Then who are you?”
“I think you have me mistaken—”
“How’s your memory?”
Silence, and now his eyes moved though his body was still, sweeping me top to bottom. “Jesus,” he breathed. “Jesus! Look at you! Who the fuck are you?”
“I am Melissa.”
“And how the fuck have you been, Melissa?”
“Well, thank you. Moving around a bit. You?”
“Good. Good! Fucking good! You still agenting? Is this–” he leaned back abruptly “–is this work?”
“I’m not in that line of business any more.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“It became… difficult. I’m just a stranger, for now.”
He stared, his mouth making the slow circular movements of a mind that wants to speak and can find no words. Then, having no wittier exclamations, he threw his hands into the air and exclaimed, “Fuck! You wanna get a drink?”
He was older, a well-lived age, a life that had progressed more slowly than the speed of years which had passed it by. In a bar off Broadway he regaled me with the life and times of Harold Peake–a new name for a new man.
“So then I got into sport, I mean, like, bought into it, you know, as an investor. And I’ve got this house now–you have to come see it–out in New Jersey, and my partner–you’ve gotta meet my partner, he’s just great, he’s such a great guy–and we’ve got a garden, and I mow the lawn on Sundays, can you believe it? I mow the lawn! It’s like, Jesus, from where you first met me to where I am today, it’s like unbelievable.”
That sounds great, I said. That sounds really nice.
His silence was the sudden sharp closing-off of a man afraid he has talked too much. “So ‘Melissa’,” he mumbled, “you must have been up to stuff. You must have seen some things. Tell me, what’ve you been, who’ve you been?”
“Nothing much to tell. I’ve been living quietly.”
“Come on, come on! You’re… you know… why would you live anything other than… you know!”
“As I said. Things have been quiet.”
“You gotta come see the house. You gotta meet Joe.”
“That would be… nice.”
“Where you living at the moment?”
“A hotel on Columbus, near 84th.”
“That’s swell, but bet you don’t get to mow the lawn?”
You guess correctly. I do not mow the lawn.
“Then come have dinner! Sunday? You can do Sunday, right? I mean, you’re not jetting out of town?”
Sunday would be lovely. Give me the address.
The house was a mansion in New Jersey, a testimony to revival colonial pride all in white. The partner, Joe, was a man of gleaming teeth and impossible tan. The food was rich and served with guacamole on the side. The lawn was very mown.
“And where did you two meet?” Joe asked, kissing me on both cheeks.
“LA,” explained Will. “Melissa was a runner at Paramount.”
“That’s wonderful–just wonderful! And are you still in the movies, Melissa? Did you know my boy in his wilder days? You look so young–what is your secret?”
Creams, I replied. I make my own creams.
The house was full of photos. Even the toilet boasted a framed portrait of the happy hugging couple. Shelves were lined with memorabilia. A plaster model of the Eiffel Tower, which changed colour with the temperature. A memorial mug from Santa Monica, a teddy-bear shark won at a fair in Vermont, the hat Joe had given back to Will the first time they met, when a gust of wind blew it off his head and into the arms of him who would be his lover. The painting of Rhode Island they’d bought together, to hang on the bare wall of their first apartment. They showed me every object, told me every story.
This is lovely, I said.
How lucky you must feel.
God! Joe replied. It’s been such a ride, you know, like, such a ride.
At 5.45 p.m. Joe pulled out of the drive in a fat 4x4 to go to church, and I stayed behind, drinking port and eating cheese with Will in the back garden.
“You’ve built yourself a wonderful life here,” I said as the leaves swayed on the beech tree and a child screamed in a neighbour’s garden. “You must be proud.”
Silence from Will, and I glanced over at him to see his hand white around the circumference of his glass, eyes turned into the setting sun.
“Proud. I guess so. I’ve done the things you’re meant to do. Get a job, get a house, get a husband. I go to the dentist, clean the floors, plant the garden, have dinner with friends. Yeah, I’m proud. I’ve lived the American dream. I owe you that. But… I’m not so sure, any more, that the American dream is a thing to take pride in. You see the kids come back from Vietnam; you live through Watergate, watch the Russians point missiles at you which you just point straight back, and you think… yeah, I’ve got the perfect life. But it’s someone else’s idea of perfection. Someone told me to be proud, and I did it, and I’m proud, but the pride I got… I’m not so sure it’s mine.”
“What would you rather do?”
“Fuck,” he groaned. “Fuck, what kind of question is that? How the fuck do I know what I’d rather do, I haven’t done it. I’ve begged. I’ve been down on the street on my fucking knees and begged, and I know I don’t want to do that. I know that this life is better–so much better it doesn’t even seem like the same me living it. I know what I have is great because everyone tells me so, but how do I know? How do I know that what I do is better than being a surgeon, hands covered in beating blood? Or a soldier, a politician, an actor, a teacher, a preacher. How the fuck do I know that my better is anything more than the great big fat lie we tell ourselves to justify the slow fat nothing of our days. There isn’t enough time in a life to find out if the other guy’s better is better than yours, cos you’d have to lose everything you have to find out for yourself. In the old days our fathers dreamed of bringing liberty and prosperity to the whole of the human race, of building a perfect society, and somehow that became a dream of a bigger car and a bigger front window and our neighbours making apple pie, apple fucking pie. And we bought into it, the whole fucking country, we bought into it, and we’re proud because our lawns are neat and our houses are warm in winter and cool in summer and–fuck!” He slammed his glass down, port slopping in bloody streaks over the side. “We’re happy because we’re too fucking scared, too fucking lazy to think of anything better to be.”