The Merry Month of May (6 page)

And what about the director? He could not write for just any director. Harry elaborated on this for a while.

And the star? They had no real contact with a star for it, yet. And Harry could not write the star role properly unless he had some idea what star he’d be writing for. As they well knew, a Burton role was not a Steve McQueen role. They discussed this a while.

No, he just did not think he was the man for their job, Harry said finally.

They came back with all the right answers. They knew the original story was not much good, they said, but they were depending on Harry to fix that. As for his reputation, they thought such a film would enhance his reputation, not damage it. And the director and the star of course depended a great deal on whether they had a Harry Gallagher script or not. They were really ladling it on. They both looked a little puzzled somehow, as though somehow they could not quite figure out how they had got put into this position, this role. Matter of fact, they went on, they could even use a phony name, something like Enrico Galignani, say, if Harry liked that idea. Of course, the director and star would know Harry Gallagher really wrote it. After all, Harry Gallagher was a “star” writer, the kind whose work directors and stars delighted to do. Who did he have in mind, who did he think he would like, as the star and director?

There then followed a long discussion, over more Scotch and cigars, as to what director and what star would be good for it and could work together well. It was flattery of the worst order really, and I could see that Harry was quite aware of that. Finally they left with the tentative agreement that Harry would think about it a few days and let them know whether he would accept or refuse, or whether he wanted to discuss it further.

“Who the hell do they think they’re bullshitting?” Harry said the instant the door closed. He was grinning. We went back into the smoke-fouled living room.

For a moment Harry stood and looked at it. “Jesus!” he said suddenly. He slapped himself on both thighs. Then he went up on his toes, stretching himself to his full height in the dark narrow-cut suit, and spread his arms above his head. Momentarily he looked like some kind of witch’s demon. There was in it such force, such a power of long-sat-upon, painfully contained energy and exuberance, that I half expected to see sparks crackle in streams from his spatulate fingers.

“Jesus!” he said again, and threw himself down in an overstuffed armchair like a sack of old arms and legs. “I’ve been waiting for a shot like that for over a year. Ever since those Italians hit the market with their product.”

He wriggled in the chair. “I’ve been waiting longer! Five years at least. To make that kind of a Western. But nobody in America had the guts to go against the taboos and try it.” He gathered himself and got to his feet.

“Come on. Let’s go upstairs. Up to my office. We need to cool out, you and me. Over a bottle of Scotch. I feel like I’ve just gone fifteen rounds.”

He led us out. On the dimly lit exterior stairs of the building he turned back, grinning with his hatchet-face in the faint light, and said, “You have to play poker with them. It’s almost a ritual. That’s just the way it is in this business.”

He climbed on, and his voice continued, coming back over his shoulder in the pale, just barely sufficient light of the
minuterie
. “If you ever let them know that you want it, they’ll kill you. If they even get any idea at all that you’re in fact aching to do it, they’ll shit all over you all down the line. They’ll stick a knife as big as Jim Bowie’s up your ass and make you dance the hoe-down.”

The keys jingled in his jacket pocket as he withdrew them. He reached inside and snapped on the overhead light and led us in. By the time I was inside and had shut the door, he was already sitting tilted back in the big black leather swivel chair behind his antique wooden desk. “You just can’t level with them,” he said. “Anyway, I’m not sure I want to go down to Spain to work that long really. I’m not sure I want to be away from Louisa that long.”

The desk and the Louis Treize table set at right angles to it were covered with manuscript and stacks of research materials. Beside the chair stood his IBM electric on a rollered typing table. Beside that stood a tiered paper, carbon and notebook holder on rollers. I sat down on one of the two middle-height Louis Treize armchairs across from the desk.

“I’m not at all sure I want to be away from Louisa that long,” Harry said. He got up and moved toward the bar for whisky, Perrier, glasses and ice. I looked around. Again.

“Anyway, it’s already been done now, in Italy,” he said from behind the bar. “It’s not the same as if I would be doing it for the first time.” I didn’t answer.

Harry’s studio was such a massive projection of Harry’s personality that it was almost a caricature, or something made up by a screenwriter of one of Harry’s own American he-man love-story films. On one wall hung a Watney-Mann “Red Barrel” dartboard in its Watney-Mann cabinet identical to the one in any London pub; and on the floor under it stretched the authentic Watney-Mann rubber mat with its eight-foot and nine-foot marks. On another hung Harry’s collection of Western arms and cartridges, Bowie knives, Indian lances, bows and tomahawks. In a corner leaned six or seven modern shotguns, and three modern fiberglass bows, unstrung.

Harry had taken over three maids’ rooms on the top floor of the building up under the roof, back when he leased the apartment, and by knocking out portions of the walls between had made them into one studio. So he had more than four walls under his slanting ceiling; he had about seven. It had its own complete kitchenette, and its own ample bathroom. Half of one of the small rooms had been covered with a sort of raised dais a foot-and-a-half high covered in some kind of a heavy blue felt material, and on this for a bed was a made-up double mattress with a reading lamp over it, leaving plenty of space on the dais for books, ashtrays, a tray of drinks, and a chess board. A small fireplace had been built to serve both the dais area and Harry’s black chair behind the desk. It had an extremely cozy air, with its slanting ceilings and small windows, and made me think of nothing so much as a secret
pied-à-terre
place of assignation to bring a girl. Harry had the only set of keys in the household, which once in a while he would give to the one maid he allowed in to clean it. Nobody else was allowed in it. And in all the years I had known him, I had only been invited up there three or four times.

One entire long wall had been completely covered in bookshelves, about a quarter of which had locked glass windows in front of them and housed Harry’s famous pornography collection. Another shorter one had cabinets built against it, which stored all Harry’s charts and carried on its top under its special lamp all his navigational tools and his
Mixter
and
Bowditch.
Though Harry had never owned a yacht that I know of. A third wall was hung with the plaques and framed certificates and citations of his life, and other memorabilia. Harry called this his
Shit Wall.
There were things like his Life Memberships in the National Rifle Association and National Skeet Association, his citations from the Screen Writers Guild for Academy Award Nominations. There were his framed Silver Star and Bronze Star citations from the war, a certificate making him an admiral in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska some fan had sent him, some newspaper clippings, a menu signed by himself, Irwin Shaw and William Styron from the South of France, several poker hands, a framed tie from a club he had become a member of, a framed key from the Chief Purser of the old
Liberté
which would let him into First Class, framed covers of
Newsweek
or
Time
with the portraits of friends who had made it, and a framed photo of some anonymous girl’s bare behind all bent over cunningly so that nothing shocking really showed except her pubic hair peeking through under. Harry would never say who she was except that she was a famous movie star he had known.

In the other corners around not counting the shotgun corner were scattered a couple of scope-mounted hunting rifles; his skis, his poles, and his boots in their carrying rack; his Aqualung tanks and regulators; several pairs of different types of crutches and some canes; and near the bar was a folding table-like thing called an Adams Trainer Exerciser. About the only thing missing was a Ping-Pong table. But there wasn’t room for one.

“No, I’m not at all sure I want to be away from Louisa that long,” he said, coming back from the bar with a tray, and sat back down in the tall-backed black leather swivel chair.

“You could take her with you,” I said.

He looked at me with surprise. “I could, couldn’t I?”

“Install her in Madrid.”

“Except there’s nothing to do in Madrid. She’d be bored. I’d be out at the studio all the time, or out on location.”

“Shopping.”

“There’s nothing to shop for in Madrid. Maybe some of those knitted Spanish rugs is about all.”

“Museums. She’s never seen the Prado. Has she?”

“That’s true,” he said thoughtfully. He rocked himself in the black chair several times. “That’s true.”

“She’d love it,” I said.

“Maybe,” Harry mused, “maybe. Well, I sure don’t feel like going without her,” he said. Then he grinned, to make sure I knew what he meant. I think he was still feeling particularly high after his session with the two producers.

I took a drink, then left my nose in my glass and studied the ice in there. Harry and I had never really talked openly about sex—except for what was implied when he nudged me and smiled or nodded imperceptibly over some especially well-endowed girl at a party, or who would pass by us in the street. I did not particularly want it to begin now. And I certainly did not want it to start with something about Louisa.

At the desk Harry swung himself around toward the Watney-Mann dartboard and looked at it a moment. Then he swung back, and placed the soles of his black short-boots on the desk’s edge, jackknifing his long body. His eyes had become brilliant, and curiously shallow, like jewels. The leathery soles of his shoes stared me in the face, framing his head. This was grinning at me in a super-diffident way, which at the same time was oddly conceited and quite proud. I realized I was on the brink of some revelation.

Harry said from between his feet, “You see, I haven’t slept with another woman except Louisa for six years. Not since McKenna was born. Not since she was
conceived,
in fact.” He peered at me between his boots as if I were expected to react to this in some way.

I on the other hand did not know what to say to this statement, so I said nothing.

Harry shifted his position to stretch out his long legs, and crossed his ankles on a corner of the desk while he lit a cigar. He poured more straight whisky into his glass. “You may not know it, but I used to be quite a rounder. I was quite a womanizer at one time. Before McKenna. For quite a long time. All my life, in fact. You probably never guessed that.” He paused.

I still did not know what to say, so I coughed—but politely—to show my continuing interest. I had a hunch he would continue anyhow, whatever I did. I somehow knew somewhere inside myself that at this point nothing was going to stop him. I also knew, to give Harry his due, that in fact in that six years since McKenna Harry had spent several quite long periods away from home, working in Rome or in London.

With his jewelly eyes, Harry said, “I don’t think I’m inordinately attractive to women. I mean, no more than some other. So I don’t take credit. But I’ve had more cunt in my time than most fellas ever get. Twice more, probably. I’ve just about done them all. I’ve fucked the great and the near-great.” He paused and grinned diffidently at me. “You never even imagined that about me, I suppose.”

It was not quite a question, but it almost was. And I felt I was expected to answer. Since I couldn’t, I leaned forward suddenly and held out my glass, to dissipate his attention; and he poured for me, straight whisky, from the bottle on the tray among the manuscripts. I put in the Perrier myself.

Harry said, “I’ve found, in general, that most girls will put it out, and think nothing very much about giving a little bit of it away, if it’s to their interest. After all, there’s always more of it left. And girls learn that, fast. And they do like writers, especially script-writers. So I don’t take credit.”

I cleared my throat, cautiously. I felt we were fast reaching the point where I must answer with something. “I think that’s pretty damned magnanimous of you to say so, Harry,” I said; and peered again down at my ice, which was shrinking.

He waved his hand, as if shooing an irksome fly. “Anyway, Louisa came to me about it. About my other women. Well, I was flabbergasted. I had no idea that that meant anything to Louisa. Hell, I didn’t even know she was upset about it. But she was. Upset, and mad. Shi-
it
, was she mad! She wanted to divorce me. She was going to leave me. She wanted to take Hill and go back to America. To her family.

“Some sense of her own inadequacy, you see. She felt she had failed as a wife. She felt she alone wasn’t enough for me. She couldn’t satisfy me enough to keep me at home. She felt I didn’t love her. Or no longer loved her. Or, had never loved her. All that stuff, you know.

“—All of which, of course, was absolutely untrue.

“I don’t mind at all telling somebody close like you, Jack, that Louisa has always been more than adequate in the bed with me. She’s basically a real woman, which means she’s basically a masochist-type. She likes to have things done to her, instead of taking the initiative herself. Which is what a woman ought to be. Sexually, she’s always been adequate, more than adequate, for me. We’re well-matched like that.”

“That’s nice,” I murmured, then felt it wasn’t adequate. “Nice to hear, I mean.” It’s strange how things which have terrified you so in your imagination, when they actually come to pass, are digested so easily, and with such dispatch.

He only made a kind of gesture with his cigar. “How do you explain to a woman that you can love her and adore her and still want to fuck around a little on the side?—especially when it’s all right there waiting for you, practically, so to speak? All ready to fall back down on its back and open it up wide for you?