Love and Death on Long Island (8 page)

I did not turn to page 36. Instead, I calmly closed the magazine, glanced along the rows and rows of publications, selected a motoring journal with an enormous red sports car, sleek and streamlined to a degree, practically thrusting its way off the cover, and in some embarrassment – an embarrassment no longer my own but that, not, I fancy, unskilfully assumed for the occasion, of a family man commissioned by his adolescent daughter to buy her reading matter of which he has more than once had cause to express the mildest and most affectionate form of disapproval – I handed my two purchases over to a disarmingly apathetic shop assistant and paid for them.

In the street I wound my copy of
Teen Dream
into so tight a cylinder that no passer-by could have identified it and disposed of the motoring journal by dropping it into a litter bin very handily located just opposite the newsagent's shop. Then, with a spring in my step, I hurried back up to my Hampstead home.

*

I stood in front of the looking-glass over the mantelpiece in my study.
Teen Dream
was lying, still unopened, unperused, on top of my thick sheaf of notes for
Adagio
. For a long, long time I stood thus, examining my reflection. Finally, my motionless features creased into a gentle, recalcitrant smile; the ice was broken; the reflection smiled back. ‘If,' I said to myself, ‘if I affect a certain style, if I strike a certain pose, it's because I find it almost impossible to look at myself in the glass, even for the purpose of baring my soul, without at the same time straightening the knot of my tie.' And then (but solely because it did happen to be crooked) I straightened the knot of my tie.

Flushed and fertile with expectation, the expectation of at last grafting an objective reality on to a being who had not, not until now, not until this very instant, been any less spectral than the scrunched-up gargoyles' faces that had haunted me in my sleep (and, oddly, haunted me no more), I turned to the magazine I had just bought. With a trembling hand I opened it at page 36. The first thing to catch my eye was the ‘pin-up' on the page opposite. Ronnie (I.was on a first-name footing with him now) was shown in profile, rather
à la
Karsh, except that he had turned his head unsmilingly towards the camera, his chin resting in a somewhat stilted manner on the knuckles of his left hand, the thumb tucked lightly underneath as though ‘chucking' it. He wore an unexpectedly bespoke-tailorish sort of white shirt with narrow, vertical blue-grey stripes; it would appear to have been just unpacked from its box on the evidence of an immaculate crease that my eye followed along the upper arm to the elbow and on to the generous cuff
which, because of the overly stiff and starchy press, did not embrace as it might have the boy's slender, hairless wrist; and around the rakishly unbuttoned collar, its two wide flaps even more rakishly upturned on the neck, hung a loosely knotted grey woollen tie. There was something about the shirt, the open collar and the woollen tie that conjured up the conventional image of the English public schoolboy. Something, too, about the pose, half in profile as it was, as though the model were bending over a chair, which made me think, hard as I struggled to expel a thought so squalid, of just such a schoolboy compelled by his fellows to receive a caning on his bared buttocks.

His hair was longer, and seemed blonder, than in the film. It tumbled in underneath the turn-up of his collar at the nape of his neck with the odd, randomly uncombed tuft poking out over the top. His eyebrows, of a much darker shade than his hair, darker than by rights they ought to have been in someone so fair, and threaded by single strands of real auburn, softened the high-toned purity of his unlined brow. His marbly blue eyes might have been polished they shone so. Withal, this face was not a flawless one. Since his lips, slightly pursed, were closed, the teeth were concealed. But I remarked a spot, a minute beauty-spot, no doubt, just above the corner curl of his upper Up; and another, also located on the right half of his face, nestling beneath the nostril's soft shell. Otherwise his complexion was quite perfect, captured by the photographer in all the poignant bloom of adolescence and looking (so it struck me) to having not yet suffered the coarsening attentions of a razor blade. He was – a fact I would never have believed
possible – even more exquisite than on the cinema screen.

I started to read, word for word, from the first line to the last, the accompanying article. It was couched in the same noisy, ejaculatory idiom that the Editor's Message had been, but I had cast my scruples to the wind and I greedily devoured it. And how much I learned that was surprising to me. I learned, for example, that Ronnie had been born on the 8th of March, 1970, so that he was just twenty, at least three or four years older than I had once reckoned; born and brought up in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. That ‘his dad is Ronald, Sr, his mom is Lucille, kid sister Joanie and current pet a mixed-breed pooch named Strider'. That his favourite food was ‘fast food -I call it fast food ‘cos I have to fast after eating it!!' That he preferred girls who ‘are sincere, romantic, have a sense of fun and who like me for
myself
– not just ‘cause I'm a star'. That he found making movies ‘neat' but hated ‘all the razzmatazz – and specially all the waitin' around you have to do!!'. And that he would kiss a girl on their first date together ‘only if she made it clear she wanted me to'. Besides his acting gifts, he was apparently ‘an accomplished jazz drummer' whose greatest ambition was ‘to play the drums in an upcoming movie – preferably opposite Madonna!!!' Had he ever been in love? ‘Who hasn't?' Pet hate? ‘Designer stubble.' And his secret, unspoken fantasy? ‘To go to bat for the Mets.'

I sat at the same desk where only lately I had laboured over the genesis of
Adagio
, intently reading and rereading each of the youth's answers, interrogating them for any, not immediately tangible, clue that they might
offer to his more latent psychology, even as the mute and unshakeable conviction was growing within me that the whole piece, questions and answers alike, could be nothing else but an outright fabrication on the part of the editor, doubtless with the passive collusion of Ronnie himself or his agent.

Yet, no matter how questionable its provenance, this information was all I had to work upon for now and I feasted off every last crumb with a zest of appetite that few books had given me lately.

Most significant, though, was what I learned about the lad's professional life. It transpired that Ronnie had ‘made his showbiz debut' advertising ‘sneakers' on television commercials, had been cast in some ‘popular, long-running sitcom', whatever that was, and had to date completed just three films, that which I had already seen and two others, tersely and enigmatically titled both of them:
Tex-Mex
and
Skid Marks
.

After a moment's hesitation, I rose from my desk and stepped into the perennially gloomy hallway and over to a small, oblong combined-table-and-umbrella-stand on which, the evening before, I had left my copy of
Time Out
. I quickly ran through its pages to the one on which were listed the films on current release. Neither of the two titles appeared on it; and, of course, I was not to know how long ago the films had been made or whether in fact they were still in circulation. For the moment, there was nothing for me to do but return to my study and continue perusing that inexpressibly foolish but precious text. And when I had finished, when I felt I had extracted from it all it had to give me, I unlocked a
desk drawer and placed the copy of
Teen Dream
inside it, face downwards.

What differentiates a true obsessive from the mere addict, the alcoholic or the unrequited lover, whose monomania will eventually seep into every vacant pocket of his existence, until it comes not merely to coincide with that existence but actually to expand at such a rate, to such a monstrous dimension, that it ends by encompassing, overwhelming, it, making the existence just a part of the mania as once that mania had been just a part of the existence – what, I say, differentiates a
true
obsessive is that although, as was true of me now, he does not seek and would vigorously reject a remedy for his mania, he yet contrives to contain the hold it has upon him within an organically determined perimeter, where it may all the more deliciously suppurate. And this brings in its train a sense of exacerbated self-mastery, an almost intoxicating sensation of power over both the obsession itself and the outer world: the first because, so far contained, it must come to seem for ever containable; the second because the world will remain always unaware of its influence over him, so seamlessly decorous, so impenetrably respectable, even bourgeois, becomes the façade he erects between it and himself.

In the weeks that followed, my obsession with the young actor grew apace, demanding more and more of my time and my energies. Yet, by indulging it to the fullest, I was also alleviating it. My novel, now so radically transformed it bore only a titular relation to the original project, flowed as fluently from my pen as
though the complete narrative had somehow been miniaturised in advance and injected into the nib and it were merely a matter of posing the pen over the paper, teasing each word, like a droplet of ink, off its tip and having it spill on to the blank page. Effortlessly, and at an earlier stage in the process than had ever been the case with me, I passed from annotation to composition, manoeuvred with ease, word upon word, sentence upon sentence, the labyrinth of my fiction. If it was writing itself, of all the successive stages attendant on the production of a novel, which had always been the least painful and laborious for me, I had never in the past known such a state of jubilation and grace.

I worked exclusively in the morning, however, my afternoons being reserved for Ronnie. Having learned, having all but memorised, those ‘20 Facts' about the actor, I wanted now to learn everything I could. And on making enquiries at the shop where I had bought
Teen Dream
, as to where I might find other American magazines – I was careful to leave their precise category discreetly unspecified – I was informed of a newsagent's in Soho that was, I was told, frequented by half the city's émigré population.

Off I sped, then, to this cosmopolitan emporium, where one actually
did
have the impression of all the world's languages being spoken – in print, at least. Thousands, literally thousands, of publications, ceiling-high and classified by nationality, were racked along three of the shop's four walls. And the American section, so comprehensive that it alone seemed to take up practically a whole wall, was further subdivided according to the specialised interest to which each type of magazine
catered:
News, News Analysis. Sports, Fashion, People
and, usefully arrayed on adjacent racks,
Movies
and
Teens
.

For the cinema section alone it would scarcely have been worth leaving Hampstead. There was just one magazine (whose name,
Video
, the classicist that I was could not help for a split second reading as an elementary but in the context unexpectedly literate allusion to the Latin, before it dawned on me that it must refer to the current fad for videotape recorders) that contained anything at all about Ronnie Bostock: a small, ill-reproduced colour photograph from
Tex-Mex
in which, his hair dishevelled, his jeans grubby and torn, his face a livid mask of terror beneath a balefully luminous moon, he was being dragged feet first under a barbed-wire fence by a pair of Mexican-looking youths, both of them, as I noted, swarthily handsome brutes.

Already clutching that magazine, I started to flick through those under
Teens
. And, there, I simply could not credit my good luck! There were five of them, and they would have been in every respect indistinguishable one from the other had it not been for their names, all of them artless permutations on the words
teen, beat, dream
and
young
. Extraordinarily, not one of them was without its gushing tribute to the actor – rather, it seemed extraordinary to me, since I had not yet understood that, although Ronnie's career in films could still be considered no more than promising, and even then only just, the quality of his physical ‘puppiness' had already made him an icon and idol of clammy prepubes-cent fantasising. The tributes, too, would prove to be virtually indistinguishable, except for the half-dozen
monochrome and occasionally rather fuzzy snapshots that made up their illustrations. Here was Ronnie, boyishly resplendent in a snow-white junior-sized dinner jacket stepping out of a ‘stretch' limousine for an evening on the town. There, curled up on a sofa in his ‘den' and hugging adoringly to his breast a large and very hairy dog of, to my untutored eye, indefinite breed, presumably Strider. Here, in a stylish, loose-fitting track suit jogging along a high coastal road with, in the distance, dewily out of focus, a white steamship crossing a sound. And there, in quite the most endearing of all the photographs, taken against a featureless and flatly lit studio backdrop, Ronnie contracting his whole body into a curve and hurtling upwards in a flying leap, almost as though he were juggling his own limbs in the air, with such an immoderate release of pent-up energy that his teeshirt was starting to edge up over his belly and expose the belly-button – a pose, however painstakingly imagined in advance, however often rehearsed with the photographer, than which nothing could have struck one as more joyously spontaneous and life-loving.

At the colour pin-up portraits I cast only a perfunctory glance. Like a schoolboy who resists opening the latest issue of a favourite comic-book until such time as the stage has meticulously been set for it to procure him the most acute of pleasures, I was determined that only in the intimacy and tranquillity of my study would I bring to them the intense and detailed scrutiny they deserved. This time, though, as I realised, glancing furtively at the shop counter and the bearded Indian or Pakistani gentleman who was standing motionless behind it and following my movements with an expression of benign
expectancy, as though he were anticipating a good sale, I could no longer, with five almost identical ‘teen' magazines to be bought and paid for, plausibly cast myself in the role of indulgent parent to a teenage girl. Even knowing as I did that my motive in buying these magazines was of absolutely no interest to anyone save myself, some such role would nevertheless be required if I were to pay for them, be handed my change and depart from the shop without suffering any unduly protracted agony of embarrassment. So it was that I laid them down on the counter and opened my wallet – they turned out to be rather costlier than I had mentally bargained for, and I started slightly on seeing the sum that was rung up on the cash register – while assuming, in an ineffably subtle manner, the air of some social theorist, some professional analyst of mass culture, obliged by the very special nature of his research to buy in such otherwise preposterous bulk. And whether or not the Indian newsagent, for whose sole benefit the charade had been played out, was appreciative of the performance – his unfailingly, inscrutably dulcet monotone betrayed no trace whatsoever of irony – it had served its purpose as far as I myself was concerned.