When the Stars Come Out (25 page)

He was pulling on a pair of jeans when Bart walked into the bed-

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room, fresh from the shower and clad only in a towel wrapped

around his waist.

“Oh, shit,” said Noah, as he collapsed backward on the mattress

with his pants pulled up only to mid-thigh. “Take me now.”

Bart rolled his eyes. “Again? Sorry, dude, but after three times

last night, it needs a rest.” The towel dropped to the floor.

“But we’re boyfriends now!” Noah playfully whined, still lying on

his back. “I think that means we’re supposed to have sex all the

time.”

Bart smiled and turned away, and Noah admired the wide shoul-

ders which tapered down to a narrow waist. He thought he had

been kidding when he asked Bart to “take me now,” but suddenly

he wasn’t quite so sure.

“I’m going to have to leave you alone with them,” Bart said, as he pulled a pair of briefs over his muscular thighs. “They have about six pages of errands for me to run. Will you be all right?”

“Not a problem. That gives me an opportunity to fine-tune this

idea with Quinn and get us both on the same page.”

Bart smiled. Noah still had no idea what he was getting himself

into.

“Good luck with that.” He glanced at his watch. “And you’d bet-

ter get moving, Rip Van Winkle. It’s closing in on noon.”

“Noon? How did that happen?”

Bart winked. “Three times, baby . . .”

When Bart was dressed and gone, Noah finally finished pulling

up his jeans, threw on a shirt and shoes, and descended the stair-

case to the kitchen, where he poured a cup of coffee. Then, press-

ing his face to the glass door, he found Quinn stationed at his usual post: the round glass table on the patio. Camille lay next to him, soaking up the sun through her blond fur.

Coffee cup in hand, Noah slid the door open and stepped out-

side.

“Good afternoon, Quinn. Nice day out here.”

Quinn didn’t answer. He took a deep breath—whether that was

a sign of exasperation or he was taking in the fresh air, Noah didn’t know—and stared into the distance, somewhere in the direction of

his rosebushes at the far edge of the property line.

The silence continued, and Noah wondered if he had, again,

lost Quinn and his cooperation.

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Until Quinn finally spoke.

“Okay.”

That was it: “Okay.”

So Noah had to ask. “Okay?”

“Yup.” Again, there was a long silence. Finally Quinn bothered

to look in Noah’s direction. “I’ll probably do it.”

“You’ll do it?!” Adrenaline coursed through Noah. “This is great,

Quinn.”

Quinn’s nostrils flared. “I said, I’d
probably
do it. Didn’t say I’d do it. There’s a difference.”

As quickly as it surged, Noah’s adrenaline rush subsided. “Of

course there is. You’ll
probably
do it.”

Quinn again turned away from Noah, his eyes wandering back

to the vicinity of the rosebushes, but he continued talking, in a

slow, deliberate voice.

“We’ll need some ground rules. You’ll need a tape recorder.”

“I’ll get one,” said Noah, remembering that his machine, the

one still bearing the voice of G. C. swallowing his words, was at his father’s apartment.

“Good. Everything I tell you will be taped. And
I’ll
keep the tapes.”

“Uh . . .” That wouldn’t do. Noah understood Quinn’s desire to

cover his ass, but he also knew he would need those tapes. “I’m

going to have to keep them, Quinn. The publisher will—”

“Then you’ll make two tapes. Which means you’ll need two tape

recorders.” Decision unilaterally decided, he moved on to his next demand. “Second, I don’t want you to use Jimmy’s name.”

“But—”

“I also don’t want you to use the names of any actors—any
per-

son
, period—unless I explicitly tell you it’s all right.”

“I don’t understand. The story of your life is more than just,

well,
you
. It’s the story of the people you’ve met and worked with through the years.”

“I’m willing to out myself, or whatever you call it. ‘Come out,’

right?”

“Right.”

“I’ll do that ‘coming out’ thing for myself, but I won’t be re-

sponsible for outing others.”

“But—”

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“If you can’t make me those promises, this isn’t going to hap-

pen.”

Noah swallowed hard and did his best to be diplomatic. “I under-

stand. But if this autobiography doesn’t have anything to say, I

don’t think we’ll find a publisher.”

“PMC will publish it,” he said firmly. “That’s what you told me.”

“I don’t think so,” Noah said, with equal firmness rooted in his

experience in the industry. “At the end of the day, this is a business decision. And from a business perspective, no one wants to buy a

biography that has nothing to say. David Carlyle is interested, but we’ll have to give him
something
.”

Quinn smiled, but it was not a smile born of good nature. It was

a smile that said, Who the hell are
you
to tell
me
how to write my autobiography?

But what he actually said was, “I’ve got plenty to say, but there’s no need to say it about other people. This is about me, son.
That
is the story.”

Behind them, the sliding glass door from the kitchen
whooshed

open, and Jimmy Beloit—dressed for the sun in a straw hat, green-

and-white striped shorts, and a loose white cotton shirt—walked

out onto the patio, delicately balancing a martini and nodding to

them as he passed.

“Don’t let me interrupt.”

“Can’t stop you,” muttered Quinn, and Jimmy smiled as he took

up residence in a chaise lounge in the far corner of the patio, facing away from Quinn and Noah. When he finally sat, after an ex-

tended period of adjusting the cushion, only his straw hat was

visible to the two men.

Returning his attention to Noah and the subject at hand, Quinn

said, “Those are the rules. Live with them, or don’t write the book.”

Noah felt something heavy in the pit of his stomach. “And if the

book is never written?”

He shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t matter, does it? My life stays exactly the same as it’s been for the last thirty-six years. I can live with that. As I recall,
you
are the one who thinks I need to do this to reclaim my life, and
I
am the one who doesn’t think it’s a great idea in the first place.”

Noah had to concede his point. Quinn Scott could bitch about

being bored, and he could bitch about being blacklisted, but he

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169

had a pretty damn good life out here in Southampton and he knew

it. When it came to penning his autobiography, he held all the

cards.

“Okay,” Noah finally said, feeling a vague sense of frustration. “I think I can work with those rules. But . . . can we try to be a bit creative with them?”

Quinn frowned. “What do you mean?”

“What if we use the names of actors who are already publicly gay.

Or dead. That wouldn’t do any harm, right? I mean, it would be

silly to protect Rock Hudson’s sexuality at this point, right? The guy has been dead for twenty years.”

Quinn thought about that. “I suppose . . .”

“And if you don’t want me to use Jimmy’s name, we can use a

pseudonym. ‘Johnny,’ or something like that.”

“Excuse me?” said the voice from the chaise, and the straw hat

bobbed. “I am
not
a Johnny.”

“Quinn asked me to protect your privacy.”

“I
told
him to protect your privacy,” Quinn asserted.

Jimmy’s profile appeared at the edge of the chaise. “Oh, in that

case . . . why not, Quinn? Why not? I gave up an acting career for you—”

“A
dancing
career.”

“Which was going to grow into an acting career.” Jimmy paused.

“I would have had an acting career
in time
. I had a plan.” He paused again. “Anyway, I gave up a
career
for you, so why shouldn’t I
totally
disappear from history? In fact, when I die—which hopefully will

be sooner rather than later, thank you very much—I hope you’ll

give me an unmarked grave. No, wait . . . take my body out to sea and dump it. Or, better yet, use it for chum. Get one last use out of me, then make sure that all evidence of my existence completely

vanishes.”

“Drama queen,” muttered Quinn. “Sixty-two years of drama.

Probably sixty-two years and nine months, because you were proba-

bly a fucking drama queen in your mother’s womb.” To Noah, he

said, “Let me think about it. Maybe.”

“I want to be in the book,” said the chaise.

“Okay. Noah, you can use that asshole’s name. Just make sure

you describe him as old, fat, and out of shape.”

“I obviously heard that.”

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“
And
bald.”

“I obviously heard that, too.”

Quinn pivoted slightly in his chair, straining to get a better view of his all-but-hidden lover. “As long as we all know you can hear me, I hope you can hear me when I tell you to put that martini down.”

“You can come take it away from me. If your hip can make it

across the patio, that is.”

“Dr. Marcus says it will kill you.”

“Screw Dr. Marcus. If you truly loved me, you’d let me enjoy my-

self while I still can, instead of forcing me to live a joyless existence for the next decade until I’m as old as you got to be, and I’m drool-ing and incontinent and convinced you’re Napoleon.”

A smile crossed Quinn’s lips. Not the malevolent smile he had

shown Noah a few minutes earlier, but a smile that showed he en-

joyed the banter. Still, he made it disappear almost as soon as it had appeared.

“All right, then,” Quinn said to the chaise. “Napoleon says you

can have one martini. One.”

“Oui, monsieur.”

Returning again to Noah, Quinn said, “Be smart. Stay single.”

He stopped, turning to shake his head one more time in Jimmy’s

direction before continuing. “Okay, let’s get back to the ground

rules, because I have two more.”

Noah sighed. “More rules?”

“My family. Rule number one: my ex-wife. Rule number two: my

son. I don’t want them involved. Obviously you’ll have to mention

Katherine, but I want her only mentioned in passing. I suppose

we’ll have to acknowledge my lack of judgment in marrying her,

but, besides that and a mention of the movies we made together, I

want nothing about her in the book.”

“That’s going to be tough,” said Noah. “I mean, she’s the reason

that people will buy this book.”

The moment those words flew out of his mouth, he regretted

them. After all that playing to Quinn’s ego, telling him that he

would become a role model, and after having been warned off

Kitty Randolph once before, Noah had set a bad hand down on the

table and revealed that it was still all about . . .

Quinn’s ex-wife.

Quinn’s
hated
ex-wife.

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171

Quinn glared at him, and there followed a long period of si-

lence broken only when he muttered, “Excuse me?”

Noah cleared his throat and stared at the slate on the patio. “Uh . . .

what I was trying to say is . . .”

“Oh, for chrissakes, Quinn,” said Jimmy, interjecting himself

again into the conversation but still not moving from his seat in the sun. “We’ve talked about this before. Who the hell is going to buy a book about you? Who even
remembers
you? Everyone who ever saw
Philly Cop
has been dead for twenty years.”

Noah caught a glimpse of Quinn out of the corner of his eye. He

was holding his position, poised to attack.

“Nobody asked for your input,” he snarled at the chaise. “This is

my
book.”

“There won’t be a book if you don’t listen to what Noah is trying

to tell you. We are nothing more than two old gay men. We are not

celebrities. You’re not Rock Hudson, all right? The only reason

anyone is going to buy your book is because you were married to

Kitty Randolph. End of story.”

Noah stole another glance and, this time, Quinn looked like he

was softening. So, to share the burden with Jimmy, he added, “Like it or not, Jimmy is right. Kitty Randolph and Q. J. Scott—your ex-wife and son—are . . .” He trailed off and thought hard about the

words he was about to use, knowing that they could doom the pro-

ject. Still, they had to be said, so Noah pushed on. “Like it or not, your ex-wife and son are the reason most people will buy this

book.”

Quinn continued to glower at the man who hoped to cowrite his

autobiography for an uncomfortably long amount of time, silence

following silence.

“I’m sorry,” Noah said, filling the void. “But that’s the truth. No offense, Quinn, but you’ve been out of the business for more than

a generation. The young people have never heard of you, and the

older crowd has forgotten.”

“But Richard Chamberlain . . . Yesterday, you were comparing

me to him. What’s different today? What happened to—?”

“Richard Chamberlain was Dr. Kildare,” said Jimmy. “You were

Philly Cop. Get the difference yet?”

Quinn ignored his husband and again asked Noah, “So what has

changed since yesterday?”

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