The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald (7 page)

Hoag:
His name?

Noyes:
Why?

Hoag:
Just being thorough.

Noyes:
Seymour. Peter Seymour. When the dust settled, it turned out father was in terrible debt. I had to sell off the Knott manse and all of the antiques in it to pay off his creditors. I was left with a small trust — just enough to pay for my education — and Uncle Jack’s shack. Otherwise I was a penniless orphan the day when I was shoved out into the cold, cruel world at age fourteen.

(end tape)

(Tape #2 with Cameron Noyes recorded May 7 at the Blue Mill. Wears same suit as day before with torn black T-shirt, no shoes or socks. Is bleary-eyed, but punctual.)

Noyes:
I ran into a friend at Live Bait last night who thought he’d seen you on a squash court at the Racquet Club yesterday, though he couldn’t swear to it — he said you looked a lot older than your book-jacket photo.

Hoag:
Tell him, whoever he is, that he’s an asshole.

Noyes:
It was you.

Hoag:
Getting killed by a senior vice president of Kidder Peabody.

Noyes:
I don’t get it, coach. “Why are you still hanging out at that gentleman’s dinosaur pit? I thought you hated those people, like I do.

Hoag:
I told you I was complex.

Noyes:
But how can you write the way you do and still … I don’t understand you.

Hoag:
You don’t have to. I’m the one who has to understand you. I meant to ask you yesterday, do you have any old photographs of your family? Pictures of you as a child? Charlie will want to sort through them for illustration purposes.

Noyes:
Not a one. I threw everything out a long time ago.

Hoag:
So tell me about the cold, cruel world.

Noyes:
The lawyer, Seymour, decided that a boarding school made the most sense, so he sent me off to the Deerfield Academy. Deerfield became my home for the next four years, and the people there my family. Deerfield is where I came of age, though I don’t give the school much credit for that. I hated the place on sight. It’s in a small village in the middle of the cornfields in western Massachusetts. Deerfield Village is like Farmington, only more so. More quaint. More into itself and its past. The whole place is a living fucking colonial museum.

Hoag:
I take it you don’t go in for preservation.

Noyes:
I go in for destruction. On the surface, the academy was a decent enough place. Lovely campus. Superior library and laboratories and athletic facilities, second-largest planetarium in all of New England … But it was, for all intents and purposes, a minimum-security prison. Instead of cells we were assigned dorm rooms. Instead of prison blues we wore blue blazers and ties. We were told where to go, what to do, when to eat. Curfew was at ten. No drinking. No cars. No girls. Two proctors per corridor to keep an eye on you, and a corridor master to be your buddy. Mine was a prized dickhead named Darcy Collingwood, a middle-aged bachelor who taught algebra and wore Hush Puppies and ate Wheaties with diet raspberry soda on it. He smiled a lot. I didn’t. I was used to coming and going as I pleased. Plus they really laid on that whole Eastern-elite prep-school mindset — the old-boy tradition of hearty good comradeship and spirited athletic competition. Sports do make the boy into a man. They also tire him out so he won’t think about how horny he is and how there’s nobody around to fuck except for the other boys. Deerfield just went coed this past year — actually joined the twentieth century. But when I was there, the nearest wool was three miles away at Stoneleigh-Burnham, and only then for purposes of organized activities like dances. It was a prison. I wanted no part of it. I would have fled, too, if it hadn’t been for Boyd. As freshmen we were placed across the hall from each other in Plunkett, the oldest and ricketiest of the dormitories. I’d never met anyone like Boyd. He seemed conventional enough on the surface. Suburban middle-class background. But even then he was a visionary scam artist. Within weeks his room had become a working laboratory in the art of free enterprise. He bought and sold tests and term papers. Recruited smart kids to take the SATs for other kids at a fee, with an incentive program based on how far over 1400 they scored. When he turned sixteen, Boyd brought his car up from home and paid a local farmer to let him keep it in his barn. After curfew, he’d slip out his window, pedal his bike to the farm, drive over to Greenfield, and stock up on booze, using a forged drivers license. Then he’d bring it back and peddle it to the boys. Sold them forged driver’s licenses at fifty dollars a pop, too, so they’d be able to buy it themselves on weekend leaves. He had a whole setup in his room — camera, printer, laminating machine. Probably stole all the equipment from the school. He was very resourceful.

Hoag:
You sound rather proud.

Noyes:
I am. Boyd and I have always shared the same vision of this world, which is that everyone in it lies, cheats, and steals to get what they want. Every single one of us. I accept that. What I don’t accept is people who won’t admit this about themselves. They, to me, are the liars. All that really matters to anyone is not getting caught, and Boyd never did, though one time the shit did hit the fan in a big way. A kid he sold a license to went a little
off
one night. Stole a car from the village, got a bottle, got wasted, slammed the car into a busload of kids near Springfield. Killed two of them, as well as himself. A major scandal on campus. State police said if they ever found out who sold the kid that forged license, they’d nail his ass but good. So Boyd got out of that line and into grass, hash, coke, ludes. He was the campus pharmacist our junior and senior years. Used his weekend leaves to buy quantities in Boston and Hartford. Once he even smuggled a bunch of hash back from the Bahamas when he was on vacation there over Christmas with his parents. He must have made five hundred dollars a week dealing, and he never got caught. Too smart for them. … I was fascinated by Boyd from the beginning. In awe of him, really. It was Boyd who got me through Deerfield, both in terms of slipping me test papers and in terms of my head. We spent a lot of hours together getting wasted and talking about life. Boyd wanted to become a rock promoter. He sort of ran things over at WDAJ, the campus radio station, until he used the word
Fuck
on the air and the dean of students wouldn’t let him near the place again.

Hoag:
And you? What did you want?

Noyes:
I didn’t know. I hadn’t found myself yet. And I was different from the others. I had no future laid out for me — Ivy League education, seat on the Exchange, sturdy, well-bred wife who spoke in hushed, demure tones. Part of me was like Boyd — a rebel. Part of me desperately wanted to be accepted. The easiest way to become accepted was in sports. From the day I arrived at Deerfield I was the academy’s best athlete. I was made quarterback of the varsity football team when I was still a sophomore. Everyone wanted to be my friend. I was a gung ho prince among men.

Hoag:
Any resemblance to Sawyer Noyes would be strictly coincidental, of course.

Noyes:
You don’t miss much.

Hoag:
I try not to.

Noyes:
Believe me, that resemblance was short-lived. Died in the second half of the Choate game. That’s when I finally got a good look at myself. We were trailing 7-0 at halftime. Not one of my better halfs. They were a big, physical team. On me before I had a chance to throw. Coach really let me have it in the locker room. Told me I was
spitting the bit
. Told me I wasn’t playing like a
Deerfield
man. Made me feel like if I didn’t win that game, I’d be a complete failure as a human being. And I
believed
that. I went out there wanting to win more than anything in the world. I was in the huddle calling the first play of the second half, all pumped up, when it hit me — here I was taking the same exact path as Father. Picking right up where he left off the night he threw that rope over the cellar support beam and hanged himself. That wasn’t what I wanted. That was what I
hated
. I decided then and there to do something about it — I started completing passes, all right, only I completed them to the wrong men. Coach yanked me when I’d run the score up to 28-0. Screamed at me. Threw me off the team. Boyd hugged me after the game. Told me we were blood brothers. Everyone else treated me like someone with a serious psychological problem. I had, after all, repudiated everything that the school held sacred. Collingwood, my corridor master, sat me down and said to me, very sternly, “You are not a lone wolf, Noyes. You are a unit of society.” He recommended counseling. And left me alone after that. Everyone did, except for Boyd.

Hoag:
Is this when you started gravitating toward writing?

Noyes:
Not really. The only writing I remember doing was in a sophomore English class. The teacher asked us to do an autobiographical essay. So I told my story — unvarnished. The dickhead gave it back to me with a poor grade and a note across the top: “Life just isn’t this bad, Cameron.”

Hoag:
And reading habits? Who were you into?

Noyes:
Jim Carroll, Kerouac … Mmm … you. I skipped almost all of the required reading. Did very little on my own. Still don’t read much. I’m very poorly read. I’ve never read a word of Hemingway, for instance.

Hoag: (pause)
Fitzgerald?

Noyes:
Fitzgerald? No. I don’t think I’ve read anything of his either.
(silence)
Why are you looking at me like that?

Hoag:
I’m just a little shocked.

Noyes:
I told you — I’m not well-read.

Hoag:
I know. But you’re always mouthing off in interviews about the great writers, putting them down.

Noyes:
Oh, that. Boyd feeds me those quotes so I’ll get attention. Just a lot of publicity. You know how that goes. Actually, I think I’m better off being so ignorant. It means I haven’t been influenced by anyone who came before me. My style is
mine
.

Hoag:
Tell me about your summers. Where did you go? What did you do?

Noyes:
Deerfield fixed me up with a job as a lifeguard at a summer camp in the Berkshires. I think the dean had a piece of the camp. Wasn’t terrible, just dull. The only hard part was when the parents came up to pick up their kids. All of them had homes to go to. I had nowhere to go, except back to Deerfield.

Hoag:
Did you ever go back to Farmington?

Noyes:
No. Never.

Hoag:
What about girls?

Noyes:
What about them?

Hoag:
Tall, blond lifeguards tend to fare pretty well on moonlit summer nights. I wondered if there was one shy doe in particular.

Noyes:
Nobody worth talking about.

Hoag:
I’d like to be the judge of that, if you don’t mind.

Noyes:
I
do
mind. I told you, there was nobody worth —

Hoag:
Look, Cameron. If I ask you a question I ask it for a reason. That’s my job. Your job is to answer me. That’s how it works. Understand?

Noyes:
Okay, okay.
(silence)
When I was seventeen, there was this counselor named Kirsten. She was a Dana Hall girl from Brookline. Blond. Slender. Very into horses …

Hoag:
And … ?

Noyes:
Why are you so sure there’s an and?
(pause)
And she and I … she was my first, okay? I was hers, too. On a blanket by the lake with the Clash playing on my boom box. She loved me, and I — I loved her back.

Hoag:
I thought you didn’t go in for that.

Noyes:
That was the only time. Never again. Ever.

Hoag:
I see.

Noyes:
We were going to go to Bennington together. Get married when we were seniors. It was for real, coach. We were in love. I really felt like I belonged to somebody. And she belonged to me … And then it blew up in my face — just like everything else had in my life.

Hoag:
What happened?

Noyes:
Her mother happened. She forbid Kirsten to see me after the summer was over. She thought I was genetically unsound — no money, no living relatives, suicide in the family. I wasn’t good enough for her fucking daughter. And Kirsten … she did what she was told. I couldn’t believe it — after all we’d meant to each other. She blew me off. Just like that.
(silence)
I never saw her again.

Hoag:
Any idea what happened to her?

Noyes:
None. Probably became a rich perfect bitch. Married a rich perfect bastard.

Hoag:
And what happened to you?

Noyes:
Boyd was planning to go to Columbia. He was very into New York. The whole idea of New York seemed, somehow, very appealing to me, too. After that thing with Kirsten, I wanted desperately to get away from those quaint historic villages with those quaint placards out front of those quaint houses. I wanted to go someplace ugly and sweaty and
real
. I wanted to meet people who had ideas and dreams and passions. I wanted to disappear. Does that make any sense?

Hoag:
New York is like the Foreign Legion. People flee here for a lot of different reasons.

Noyes:
What was yours?

Hoag:
Mine? There was a job waiting for me in the family business. I didn’t want it. I wanted to sip martinis at the Algonquin with Benchley and Parker.

Noyes:
Did you?

Hoag:
No, they were good and dead by the time I got here. Martinis were damned fine though. So you and Boyd both got into Columbia?

Noyes:
Yes. We paid a couple of the Deerfield computer nerds to take the SATs for us. Mine did so well I actually got in on an academic scholarship.
(laughs)
I like to think that Mother would have been proud of her Cammy.

(end tape)

P
UB PARTIES USED TO
be small, dreary affairs. Three or four dozen writers, editors, and agents herded into someone’s smoky, book-lined living room on West End. Wine and cheese on the dining table. Lots and lots of boring, pretentious conversation. They were never my idea of fun. Merilee used to say the only good thing about them was the chance to see so many men in the same room at the same time who looked exactly like frogs.