Like People in History (47 page)

Among these, "Jersey Joe," Harte's nearly life-sized stuffed panda, was the most mutable and thus more or less the most emblematic. Joe partly derived his name from the sweater he'd arrived wearing: a basic pullover in the colors of Harte's alma mater, Swarthmore. The other part of his name came from his face—surely the most pugilistic of any teddy bear, never mind panda, ever manufactured: not evil, simply aggressive. Over the years since Jersey Joe had taken up residence in the office, he'd moved from the desk to the floor to a lamp table to the wing chair. His clothing changed too: sweaters exchanged for antique rayon Hawaiian shirts (with matching Ray-Bans, natch), and then onto argyle vests, to Greek boat-neck shirts, to formal shirtffont and black bow tie—all with appropriate accessorization. Today, I couldn't help but notice, Jersey Joe was hung from a wall peg—some eight feet off the ground, by the straps of his studded black leather S/M harness. Hung facing die wall! Each of his stuffed arms and legs had been bound with leather thongs, heavily knotted, pulled up behind his back! His motorcyclist's cap had been knocked forward, shoved down over his always inscrutable button eyes! Uh-oh!

"Blithering idiot!" I heard Jersey Joe's master utter, and I spun around to see the phone already hung up. Harte picked up the receiver again and punched his assistant's line. "If you let him get through to me once more, An-Tho-Nee, I will personally feed you ground glass! Do you understand?"

Then to me he said, "What's all that on your neck?"

I looked down at myself. "I guess they're hickeys!"

Annoyance vanished, and Harte's childlike face lit up with glee. "Dirt!" he shouted. He jumped up, ran to the door, opened it a few inches, and screamed out, "Dirt! Dirt! At last! I've got dirt on Roger!"

"Calm down, Forrest." One of his many affectations was to be called by his middle name. "My lover did it."

His infantine mouth opened all the way. He slammed the office door shut and turned to me. In his preppy chinos and loafers, his pale-blue oxford shirt and school tie, Stephen Forrest Harte resembled an eleven-year-old trying to look adult. His prematurely gray hair, almost platinum in color but purposely kept long enough for Shirley Templeesque curls, didn't help change that impression. Nor did his bambino features: the pudgy cheeks, the playing marble-blue eyes, and pug nose. With all that so prominent, his sketchy mustache and five o'clock shadow virtually vanished.

"Your lover? Your lover of five years? Matthew the gorge-o?"

"The same."

"How perfectly gro-tesque!" He returned to his desk chair and sat himself down wearily. "Roger Roger Roger, when will you ever learn? To have actual, consensual, physical intercourse with one's lover of five years, even a lover as admittedly spectacular as Mr. Longudick, is barely comprehensible. To have that intercourse in such a manner that one perforce bears upon one's very person the unambiguous and ambulatory proof!... Even if one's lover
is
half-Italian
and
given to strange bursts of inappropriately spousal passion... This, in the eyes of Nature, not to mention Art, and it goes without saying all Civilized Tenets of Behavior, is gro-tes-quely unacceptable!"

"You mean you and Twining don't play 'Hide the Salami'?"

"Heaven forfend! Twining and I have a
mariage blanc.
It's one reason why we're invited to the best homes in East Hampton, you know."

Mmmmn, I thought, I can live very well without invitations to East Hampton, and you may eat your heart out, little fellow. "You wanted to see me?"

"I did?" Harte asked, looking like a preteener caught inspecting a condom for rips.

"The Grunt said..."

He suddenly remembered. "Oh right! It's this!" He held up a photocopy of the second spot feature article from the issue that in about nine minutes was to leave the art director's studio and go to press. My heart sank. I'd guessed it would be bad. Now I steeled myself and peered more closely at Sydelle's article, an exposé titled "Jocks in the Powder

Room," with my subline "When it comes to sex, some dykes in the sports world are real wolves!"

"What's the problem?" I asked, trying not to sound too concerned.

"Her!" He pointed to a picture of an all-too-well-known athlete. "If we're going to print that she laps cunt juice, we need proof."

"We've got proof! Two girls said..." I hunted for the place.

"Three! We need three!" he insisted.

"Oh, come on!"

"Three!"

"What is this,
The Daily Planet
or something?"

"Three or the dirt on her goes!"

"It's the linchpin of the entire article!" I argued.

"Three!"

"Well, then take the article out.... I don't care! You were the one who wanted her to do a feature," I said wearily.

"I still want it!"

"I'll tell her the feature's gone," I said, about to leave the room.

"You're not listening, Rog. I
want
the feature!
You
get the third piece of evidence!" Harte said.

"You want Brenda Starr?" I asked. "I take size ten fuck-me pumps."

"We've got to have more than one journalist involved. In case we're sued. And it'll help that you're a male. With only a woman giving the evidence, they could say it's sour grapes or something."

"And how exactly am I supposed to get evidence between now and the time the issue goes to bed?"

"Wasn't Sydelle working up something? Some maid at the motel?"

"Fell through. She wouldn't talk without money. Up front! U.S. Post Office money order!"

"You've got to get her on the line and pressure her."

"You
pressure her."

"You're the editor."

"Ex-editor! The hell with you and her out there and all the dykes in sports," I said. "Because I just quit."

"You quit every month." Harte said the obvious.

"I'm so relieved!" I ignored him, addressing Jersey Joe's back in an exaggeratedly relieved tone of voice. "Now I can spend some time with my macho lover at our lovely summer house. Instead of being treated like dirt in this hellhole."

"Please, Roger?" Harte suddenly fell on his knees and grabbed at my pants and begged with his little-boy face and voice. "Please, please, please? You know it will be great. You know everyone will be talking about the article. You know that you'll scoop 'em all."

He went on and on like that, in his usual totally bogus self-humbling act, dragging in my so-called personal pride in the magazine, throwing back at me things that I'd previously said in completely different contexts—in short, irritating and infuriating, yet also daring, me.

When his whining had reached a certain decibel level, I said, "I'll try. No promises!"

"I know you can..."

"I'd just as soon see the article out, her working for
Ms.,
and you fucking your lover!"

Harte drew himself up to his complete five feet, three inches and said with the greatest of dignity, "Now
that
last was unnecessary
and
scurrilous!"

I was already out the office door, wishing I had a dozen daggers to toss at the cause of all this
ágita.

"Bernard! Mizz Auslander!" I called them to my desk. "Newell! Betty Jean! Nurses of all sizes and shapes! Help! Disaster looms!"

Only the first two that I'd called actually arrived at my desk. I held out the offending paragraph, but before I could get out a word, the Grunt said, "He wants a third attribution, right?" He turned to Sydelle. "I said you'd never get away with two!" he added, having long ago mastered the art of making someone feel like shit.

For her part, Sydelle looked one part nauseated, one part secretly pleased she'd managed to make trouble for me, and one part actually frightened. I found myself torn between wanting to comfort her and wanting to pitch her out the window and watch her land directly atop her chic Mako slantcut.

"Mizz Auslander! Get the motel maid on the phone," I instructed. "Bernard! Once she's reached her, you take over!"

"What are you going to do?" Sydelle asked.

"Soften her up! Bernard, you know what to do! Promise her anything. David Bowie's genitalia on toast points if you have to. Then, scare her. Not too much. Do Mr. Sinister. When she's ready, transfer her to me. I'll be waiting."

"Wait a minute. I don't understand...," Sydelle began.

The Grunt had scurried to his desk. He was hunched over the phone, a great hairy spider, cracking his knuckles and chuckling to himself with glee.

Sydelle's eyes began to widen. "What are you...?"

"Mizz Auslander!
Ne
say a word
pas!
Just dial!"

It took fifteen minutes for Sydelle to reach the hapless motel maid, ten minutes more for the Grunt to turn her into trembling aspic, another fifteen minutes for me to take down a statement while two other people in the office—including Harte,
lui-même
—listened in.

Two hours later, when the new piece had been typeset and laid into the article, and Newell Rose's artistic ego had been stroked and Harte's publisher's ego caressed, and the printer's messenger had left the room with the corrected boards, I looked into Harte's office and said, "If you're smart, you won't expect me in on Monday."

And slammed his door before he could explode.

"They're holding the last seaplane of the evening for you," the Grunt told me as he handed over my weekend bag. "There's a cab waiting downstairs."

"Bernard, you're an angel," I said, folding my Dunhill sport jacket over my arm as I turned and rushed to the door. "When I return," I shouted behind myself, "I'll give you anything you want. Anything!"

"The head of Sydelle Auslander," he shouted, following me out into the hallway, where I'd just pressed the elevator button. "In a Peck & Peck hat box!" he remembered to add, as my car arrived and I stepped in.

"Hello? Anyone home?"

I dropped the weekend bag onto the floor, unrolled my pants cuffs, which hadn't gotten wet, and aimed myself toward the kitchen, looking for something to drink and munch on and smoke.

The seaplane trip had been madness. The company pilots were obviously hired only after they'd completely failed any mental exam designed: they ran the gamut from the merely irresponsible to the totally schizophrenic. Today's sky jock had thought it amusing to "dive-bomb" any staidly flying smaller aircraft within visual range. We three passenger's had given up trying to convince him to cease these antics after he'd responded to our first try by declaring, "My wife left me this morning and took my only son!
I
have no reason to live!" So we three quietly shared a handful of Valium 10s, thinking that, at the least, fewer bones would break in the crash if we weren't Quite-So-Tense!

Despite my calls, no one answered: I had the house to myself. I located, put together, and sipped a gin and tonic, found a lengthy roach of Matt's best Michoacán grass in an ashtray and lighted up, stripped to my briefs, and stepped out onto the little deck on the side off the kitchen.

As a house, Withering Heights wasn't much: an early sixties cottage on stilts with a living room, dining room, kitchen, and master bedroom suite. Sometime later, another wing with two more bedrooms and bath had been added on the other side of the living room. This separation made it almost perfect for two "married" couples like ourselves to rent together. Even so, the rooms weren't large, nor were they well laid out, nor were they even particularly attractive. The walls were thin, storage space was barely adequate, kitchen and bathroom fixtures nothing to write home about, and those touches of "individuality" that had existed originally—artwork, throw pillows, curtains—were in such ghastly taste that after one exchanged look of horror, we instantly consigned them to a chest under the house uttering a collective sigh of relief.

On the other hand, the location was perfection. The three-quarter wraparound deck provided a front view of the ocean, with intervening houses giving what the rental agent called "foreground definition." No matter, we saw enough of the ocean, and heard it clearly, constantly. The much wider side deck was hidden from neighbors, and from the boardwalk, behind fast-growing, unruly beach plum; away from the wind, it was ideal for sunning and eating. The narrow strip of back deck facing north was the real prize: it lofted so high above its surroundings that we had a truly spectacular 180-degree view—the entire community all the way east to the harbor, all the way west beyond the Burma Road.

Included was a vast seascape of the Great South Bay, from the little beach at the end of our walk scarcely big enough to launch a few skiffs from, but six miles deep on the horizon to where Sayville glimmered during the day and glittered yellow and white at night.

Back there, facing what promised to be a divinely multitonal sunset, I sat, nine-tenths naked, the crack of my ass athwart a railing some fifty feet above a sheer drop down to sand and a wind-twisted pine, puffing a joint and sipping my gin, wondering where the hell everyone was.

A thumping sounded along Sky Walk: two people had just turned off the main walkway, Fire Island Boulevard, and had begun climbing the hill toward our house, though I couldn't from this angle make out who. Matt's steps were familiar to me, naturally: I'd often lain in bed editing copy or reading and listened to his approach. No. Not him. This must be...

"Carajo!
Just what I needed today! A nail in my foot!"

...Luis and Patrick! Out of their hands, two brown bags full of grocery shopping dropped onto Sky Walk, while Luis hopped around swearing and Patrick dashed in, tall and tan and distraught. "I need the first aid kit!"

"Fuck that!" Luis shouted. "Get a hammer!"

I found the tool, and Patrick dropped the first aid kit on the outdoor table and mimicked someone about to tear out his hair by the roots. Luis proceeded to hammer the nail so deep into the wood one couldn't see it.

"The foot, Thor!" I said when he hobbled onto the deck. And when he'd lifted it onto the chair, I added, "What a baby! That's not bad. I'll fix it in a jiff."