Love and Death on Long Island (11 page)

There were, too, certain dormant aspects to his personality that the actor would expose through his publicity – indeed, could not help but expose. It had gradually come to my notice, for example, that among the several other young performers featured on the pages of the magazines there were some who appeared resolved to offer images of themselves rather less servile and sycophantic than his, less easily manipulated by the general house style. For one thing, their pin-ups were far less uniformly ‘wholesome' than Ronnie's. They would be shown lounging against graffiti-streaked walls and in all manner of unsavoury settings, they would connive at drawing the eye towards haunched hips and shamelessly flaunted crotches and did not always smile for the photographer. In one interview an actor not any older than Ronnie, thuggishly good-looking yet with skin so taut and angular it looked almost flayed, a young tough if ever there was, made an offhand and only sulkily repentant allusion to his struggle against alcoholism; another, a little older, spoke of his dread of contracting
Aids; a third of his now faltering career. The pervasive ideology of these publications, the unreflecting and peculiarly American cult of
mens sana in corpore sano
, was not, then, bound to remain the immovable object it had once seemed to me, not at least if their young subjects could command the strength of character to resist it; and if Ronnie was unable or unwilling to assume any role other than that of the pretty ventriloquist's doll of those in whose interest it was to control his every movement, it could only be that he himself espoused that ideology without condition or else was lacking in just that strength of character. ‘He is not very intelligent, there is not much on top,' I thought. ‘He will only say what others have advised him to say.'

I started to reflect upon the race of actors, upon what a strange vocation indeed is that of the professional actor; it was a subject that had never preoccupied me in the past. At the very least, I concluded, the actor's intelligence must conform to a merely mechanistic model – a parody of true intelligence, in short, of a type that soon becomes impossible to distinguish from pure instinct. For, when he performs, what he is really performing is sums, sums inside his head, simple mental arithmetic, calculating from one instant to the next not only the range and intensity of those facial expressions destined for public consumption but also of those more latent embodiments of selfhood of whose precise importance to the delineation of character perhaps only the actor himself will ever be fully aware. It might be no more than the way in which his arms swing at his sides as he crosses a room or the precise stance of his feet even when the spectator is intent upon his smiling face. And there,
too, when an actor smiles in a film, he must be able to call upon a whole panoply, a radiant bouquet, of smiles to select from, a file of smiles, so to speak – rueful, sly, sarcastic, ironic, sardonic, gentle, melancholic, whatever. So that the smile is made over into the portrait of a smile, the codified representation of a spontaneous initiative. And nothing could more conclusively demonstrate Ronnie's own undoubted insufficiency as a performer, yet nothing as well was more calculated to beguile his admirer, than the fact that when he smiled on the screen it was with his own unique and lovable smile, the smile I had come to know from dozens of snapshots, the only one he had. It was a document, not a representation, of a smile; one, moreover, that oftentimes seemed to me to have been eroded from within by a secret sorrow, as though the smiler were being ordered at gunpoint to ‘Smile or else!' Thus would he open up his soul to view, make public property of his beauty and charm, his humour and tenderness, and only those more at ease applauding a statue than the living individual who had posed for that statue could ever think to reject such a priceless offering as second-best to one of those silvery, glib-tongued ‘performances' which enable the actor to seek refuge in the role, to mask rather than shed light upon the recesses of his own nature. If Ronnie wore a mask, as was sometimes demanded of him, it was only the better to expose himself. For what is it, in effect, that may be regarded as the minimal, mundane but imperative condition of an actor's capacity to surprise us, to move us, to make us laugh, and so forth – whatever the desired object of his performance should happen to
be? The answer, surely, is that he not be interchangeable, that his investment in a role be such as to cause any other actor in the same role to appear an
impostor
.

Thinking along these lines, recalling how my own existence had been transformed by Ronnie, I now clearly saw that if it be the actor's ultimate destiny to interpret, to serve as an interpreter between a mediated reproduction of living forms on the one hand and the world, the ‘real' or unformalised world, on the other, if it be, simply but sublimely, his vocation to make us more alert to the latent strengths and frailties of our fellow men, then Ronnie Bostock, indifferent performer though he was, might be considered a great actor.

And again there came to my mind notions of representation, of what I had belatedly come to understand as the network of tensions underlying any cinematic representation of a human body, at once a recurrent icon of art history, a smooth, compliant, un-orificed vessel ready to be ‘poured' into a series of poses, and a living, corporeal presence and identity.

Nakedness in art, I knew, was a matter of great complexity. A human body in representation, even in a work of pornography, is never naked, is always, in accordance with the art historian's celebrated distinction, ‘nude'. Hence, because an actor performing to a film camera never ceases to present himself as being ‘in character', the nudity he proffers up to the spectator's gaze is not that of his own body but belongs by rights, as would the costume he might wear in another scene, to the character he is playing. In none of his three films, of course, had Ronnie ever let himself appear naked, had only, in one scene of
Tex-Mex
, shown himself in a pair
of low-cut sky-blue bathing-trunks. But were he ever to do so, then the self-exposure would again necessarily be of his own self, just as his smile was his own; it would, in a manner of speaking, advance
beyond representation
, it would make of his body the object not of a reproduction but of a regard. Since that nakedness had never been offered up, however, and remained a matter of pure speculation, my theory could not be tested; and, with a slight shudder, I realised that it was all there was left me, it was practically the last manifestation of Ronnie's being, whether in body or soul, that I had still to possess.

I was seated at my kitchen table, laid out for supper as usual by my housekeeper. I had not worked on my novel for some little while, nor even now, as blinking I rose once more to the surface of the external world, the world of real things and real people, did I contemplate doing so. I had been only half-consciously eating the curry which had been prepared for my supper; when I glanced down at the nearly empty plate, I discovered that the knife and fork were left untouched at its sides, that I had been picking at the meal with my fingers, stuffing it blindly into my mouth with such wholesale and indiscriminate relish that my lips still felt slobbery from stray scraps of chicken and rice and there were stains flecking the buttoned front of my grey woollen cardigan. I sensed that my face had fired up from my having eaten much too hastily, and I had an irresistible urge to blow my nose. I did so and, giving two or three luxuriantly violent snorts for good measure, recomposed my features. ‘At my age,' I said to myself, then again softly, ‘At my age!'
On the table, beside the plate that bore the smeary remains of my supper, my cuttings book lay open at a page on to which I had pasted one of Ronnie's most captivating pin-ups. The young actor was sitting backwards astride a chair, his arms resting along the slightly bevelled edge of the white formica chair-back, his shoulders curving forward to take his weight, his chin just brushing his splayed fingers. He had on a white shirt of a light, almost transparent cloth stippled with rows and rows of tiny dots, like perforations on a postage stamp, that somehow managed to appear of an even whiter whiteness than that of the shirt itself. The photograph had not perhaps been very expertly reproduced, for the two whitenesses, that of his shirt-front and that of the formica chair-back, all but dissolved into each other as I looked at them and I had to peer closely to see where one left off and the other began. It was also the imperfect quality of the reproduction, no doubt, that lent the boy's closed lips an improbably scarlet coloration, as though he were wearing lipstick. This was my own favourite photograph of Ronnie, had always been -and now, now, quite undone by the sway of my senses, I leaned over the table top, so far forward that my nose seemed on the point of grazing the page, and kissed him on his satiny paper lips. It had been a long courtship.

The following morning, a cold, sunny, reviving morning such as autumn sometimes holds in late reserve, I took a cab into Soho to one of the two newsagents' shops I had come to frequent. This was, unless there had been a shipping problem, the very day when I might expect to
find the latest issue of
Teen Dream
. Behind the counter the turbanned Indian took impassive note of my appearance in the shop. I at once found the magazine I was looking for and glanced through its pages to assure myself of its contents. Then my eye started to stray to the shelf above, a shelf on which was displayed the shop's fairly extensive supply of pornography. On the covers of most of these magazines, which were nearly but not quite out of arm's reach, half-stripped, big-bosomed women, all of them as hard of feature and coarse of limb as naked barmaids, paraded their blowsy charms with repellent coyness. At the far end of the same shelf, however, the end closest the door, were two or three publications that I had already noticed, publications with such names as
Vulcan
and
Jupiter
and
Toy Boy
, concerning the nature of whose appeal, and the precise sexual orientation of whose readership, no ambiguity was possible. I stretched my arm up and, after a moment's hesitation, pulled down
Toy Boy
. On its cover stood a young man at the foot of an oak tree, his back to the camera, his head turned to face the purchaser with a gap-toothed but not unappealing grin on his craggy working-class features; as the ends of his undone belt hung loosely at his sides and the top of his jeans was sliding ever so slightly down his buttocks, I had the impression, as I was perhaps intended to, that the lad was urinating or about to urinate up against it. With a quick, covert glance at the newsagent, whose back happened to be turned away, I took a peek inside to make absolutely sure I knew what I was getting for my money – I had become a seasoned customer of clandestine literature and had no intention of being defrauded
of my prize. A single glimpse of the inside sufficed: that which I was after was the first and indeed only thing to catch my eye on the page at which the magazine fell open in my hands.

I closed it again and prepared to take it with the other to the counter. But, even here, even now, I had not so anaesthetised myself to the opinion of the world to remain insensitive to the socio-moral niceties that the situation seemed to entail. Thus was I quite prepared to buy
Teen Dream
, prepared, too, to be seen buying a rag like
Toy Boy
, but some remaining shred of decency, of respect, respect for Ronnie, perhaps, rather than for myself, prevented me from buying the two of them together.

I replaced the more innocuous on the shelves. It was not that I was about to relinquish owning it altogether; I would purchase another copy separately, at the second newsagent's, a mere hundred yards away.

Once home, inside my study, its door locked, I read the article in
Teen Dream
that was devoted to Ronnie Bostock; read it as avidly as ever, even if, with the exception of a passing, teasing reference to ‘a new and exciting movie that may just happen – but I'll only be uncrossing my fingers to sign the contract!!!' (not one of your own, I suspect, Ronnie dear), it turned out to be yet another recapitulative chronicle of the relatively few events of note, after all, actually to have taken place in the young man's life. Then I took a small pair of scissors from a desk drawer and started to cut along the outline of Ronnie's head in one of the three photographs which accompanied the article. It was his hairline that proved
to be the greatest inconvenience, with each tuft, practically each strand, above the line of the forehead having to be snipped at with the utmost caution if I wished to produce a good likeness; equally, I was forced to take a few liberties with the jawline whose shadowy formlessness in the photograph had caused him, once it had been cropped, to appear unwantedly jowly. When I had completed it quite to my satisfaction, I performed the same operation on a second, smaller, monochromatic portrait. Then I picked them up, holding them in a gingerly way between my fingers so as not to crease them, removed
Toy Boy
from the plain brown envelope into which the newsagent had slipped it, and stepped over to the chaise-longue. Although it was not much after two o'clock in the afternoon, I drew the curtains together and switched on a small table lamp.

I extended myself on the chaise-longue, aligned my body on its right side, unfastened my belt and eased my trousers and underwear down past my knees. Trembling, as though I might at any instant call a halt to the whole loathsome, mad and degrading business, yet grimly getting on with it nevertheless, I set the pornographic magazine on the floor beneath me and started to turn its pages one by one. It had come to this. On each of these pages, filled as they were with naked male flesh (youthful but then again, I remarked, not always so very youthful flesh), filled as they were with young but not always so very young men posing salaciously in those settings that would seem to be the favoured preserve of homosexual fantasies (a beach, a swimming pool, a construction site), on each of the heads of these young men in turn, and depending on the size of the photograph or whether it
was in colour or in black-and-white, I would place, hoping thereby to have the boy usurp then plausibly assume their diverse nudities, either one of the two little transposed heads of Ronnie Bostock. At the same time, I gently then more vigorously began to masturbate, rediscovering the long dormant cadences of solitary love and longing. But it happened that either the torso I had selected would be too beefy and muscular to carry with any real conviction Ronnie's still boyishly graceful features; or it would be too hollow-chested, too hirsute, too bony, too squat, too tall, too short, even too horribly tattooed; or the photographic perspectives failed to correspond properly, the respective grains proved impossible to reconcile, the dissimilarities in contrast and definition were too great; or else the slant of Ronnie's head was so out of line with that of some young bruiser's body he looked almost as though he were being throttled. Even in the single instance where (if I half-closed my eyes) head and body were fairly reasonably matched -the photograph was of a rather exotically complexioned, heavy-lidded youth sitting naked and hunched on an incongruously chintzy sofa, his slim, hairless legs bent at the knees and gaping apart at the thighs and the toes of his two bare feet curling around the hemline of the sofa's cushions – whoever this hybrid creature was, it was manifestly not Ronnie. And it never, never would be Ronnie, I knew, as in sheer impotence and despair I hurled the filthy magazine from my sight. It would always be a fraud, a low and disgusting confidence trick that I had tried to play against myself!