Gay Place (57 page)

“Arthur — you all right?”

“Well, they are running hell out of me. They won’t give me any rest, and now I’m out here in no man’s land trying to —

“Arthur, you are a pretty tough customer — one of the toughest. Do you want to come up here tomorrow. Is that it?”

“I can’t come tomorrow. I want to come before you do this terrible thing that I heard this morning you are getting ready to do.”

“I’m not going to do anything to you, Arthur.”

“Well somebody’s after me — haven’t I been square with your bunch?”

“You’ve been more than square, Arthur. What is it you want?”

“I want you to get a sixty-day extension. That’ll give me time to —”

“Extension on what?”

“You know what. Hell and goddam — if you do this terrible thing —”

“What can you do in sixty days?”

“I don’t know. But we can reason together. You do this thing now and you’ll have a mess on your hands. You’ll defeat me, and the kind of fellow taking my place will have promised everything short of civil war to get in. I’ve been what you bastards up there call
moderate.
They’ll be calling me a Communist down here if you do this thing. You’ll crucify me, beat me, and there’ll be nothing moderate about whoever happens to be the next Governor.”

“I didn’t even know you were running for re-election.”

“Well somebody up there does — you can bet your sweet life on that. First I heard of this was sprung on me this morning, just before I was leaving for this no man’s land —”

“Where the hell are you, anyway?”

“Never mind about that. They called me and told me what you people were about to do in the courts. I didn’t know any action was even being contemplated. My God it would kill me. You realize that?

“Yes, but —”

“You know what my position is. I want to cooperate in any way I can. I want to abide by the law. But you get somebody stirring up the people and I’ll have a riot on my hands. And then pretty soon you won’t have me here to smooth things over. For example — there are a bunch of segregationists down in —”

“Wait a minute, Governor …”

“There are these segregationists and they’re bringing in this bird from — Well you know who he is. It’s been in all the papers. He’s making a speech tomorrow night, and they’ve got these special buses taking members of the Legislature down —”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me ask you a question or two. I don’t know whether I can get this postponed. It’ll take some work, I can tell you —”

“I appreciate that …”

“I don’t know if I can. If I do, I don’t want any credit for it, and if I don’t, I don’t want any credit for it.”

“Neither do I. I’m not talkin’ to anyone. My staff doesn’t even know about it …”

“There are a lot of things I can’t do. And messing around with the courts is one of them.”

“I know that. But this was instigated by your people. Who they are I don’t know. But you can take the pressure off. Sixty days is all I ask. Somebody up here’s trying to defeat me.”

“The way you say it, I belong to a giant conspiracy.”

“No, no. The wicked fleeth when no man pursueth. I’m ready, willing and able to do the right thing — in sixty days. I need a stay of execution.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“You’re a good man. God bless you.”

“Well you’re all right yourself. I’ll call you.”

“When?”

“I don’t know — when it’s settled.”

“Call me at the Capitol. My office will know where I am.”

“All right.”

“All right.”

A
RTHUR FENSTEMAKER SAT QUIETLY
for a few minutes after he had broken the connection. He stared round the room, not seeing any of it, thinking of the conversation, going back over it sentence by sentence, reassembling the phrases in his mind. He thought casually of having a drink brought to him. He smoked a cigarette, one of the five he had rationed himself for the day. The other telephone, the pink one, made a buzzing sound. He picked up the receiver.

“Governor?” Vicki’s voice came to him, twinkling and insistent; the emotions it aroused in him were unsettling. He wanted to keep his mind on his business.

“Yes, Miss Vicki?”

“Would you like another drink?”

“Well now you must be reading my mind. I —”

“Or would you like to take a walk over the hill with us and watch that scene?”

“Perhaps I should — just to see how this business is done. I’m a little frightened about what I’ve committed myself to.”

“Nothing to be frightened about. Come along and you’ll see how simple it all is.”

He agreed to meet the others outside. It was now midafternoon but the sun was still nearly directly overhead; the reflections came at them from every direction. They did not have far to go to reach the set, which was hardly any set at all. One of the wooden oil derricks had been hoisted off the railroad flatcar and placed near a fence that was only a few hundred feet long. A dirt road paralleled the fence and several hundred yards up the road the Dusenberg was parked. Vicki was driven to the Dusenberg in a jeep; the others stayed behind and watched the cameramen and technicians going over the scene with Shavers. One of the men stood in the middle of the road, paying out a tape measure to a camera boom. Others stood around under the wooden derrick, looking up dubiously at its insides.

Then the area in front of the cameras was cleared except for a single person, a stand-in for Greg Calhoun someone explained to them, who climbed halfway up the derrick and straddled one of the cross timbers. The boom camera moved up and around like a cobra’s head, and Shavers climbed on top for a moment to satisfy himself about something; no one was quite sure what.

They could hear the rumble of the Dusenberg, idling down the road, and then someone signaled Vicki to proceed. The old automobile moved ahead, and the cameras swung with the approach. It was rather an anticlimax for the visitors. Vicki approached in the Dusenberg; then the fellow hanging on to the derrick waved at her and the Dusenberg stopped and Vicki waved back and rested her arms along the open window of the car, her chin on her arms. They ran through the scene again, and once again, shifting the cameras occasionally, and Vicki had returned up the road for still another attempt when the Governor, Mrs. Fenstemaker, Hoot Gibson, Sarah and Jay gave up in exhaustion and headed back to the row of trailer houses.

The Governor and his wife went directly to their “suite.” Hoot Gibson wandered on across to the mess tent. Jay and Sarah stood and talked for a few moments outside one of the trailers. It all seemed very formal and painfully remote. There had been little real communication between them since the week before when Arthur Fenstemaker had arranged the trip in exchange for a personal appearance by Vicki at his party. They talked idiotically outside the trailer house.

“It’s hot,” she said to him.

“Yes.”

“Is my nose blistered?”

“Yes. Is mine?”

“You look like a lobster.”

“We’d better go inside.”

“I — They don’t seem to have cared whether we share the same trailer.”

“I can find another if you like.”

“No, it’s not — I just — Oh come on, let’s get inside.”

The arrangement was similar to the quarters shared by Vicki and the Director. They examined the furnishings in both rooms. “Which do you want?” Jay asked pointlessly. The rooms were nearly identical.

“This one’s fine. I want to shower …”

“I’ll get the bags,” Jay said.

They stood looking at each other uncomfortably, like ancient players on a grade school stage, lines long forgotten, prompters vanished from the world, as the ceaseless, shifting desert wind gnawed at the trailer walls.

He had wanted to kiss her then, but turned instead and went to get the bags. They had not touched each other since the week before when Arthur Fenstemaker brought the business with Vicki out in the open. He remembered the look Sarah had given him when he agreed to help the Governor get his “movie queen wife” to come to the party — a look reserved for some alcoholic husband about to come down off the wagon for a first drink …

He remembered the newsstand, later that day. He had slipped into the narrow stall out of the afternoon sunlight, pushing past piles of outdated papers and rows of withered fruit laid out in thin wooden boxes. He paused before a display of pocket fiction, thumbing through several selections, before moving to the magazine rack. His fingers moved over the magazine covers, eyes searching for the familiar face and platinum hair. Twice he was fooled by comely imitations (they simply did not interest him) and once he came across an old copy of
The Vicki McGown Story
that he had purchased two months before and destroyed almost immediately.

He took the magazine down from the shelf. There was a half partition toward the end of the stall, and from beyond that came the “thwack” and “thwack-thwack” of a domino game.

He examined the cover photograph. They had done something with her faintly irregular front teeth — he could not tell what — and there was the inevitable stretch of bosom cleavage; otherwise, except for the white hair that never seemed to photograph the same color twice, scarcely any change was discernible in the months since he had begun averting his eyes from such things. Across the top of the cover the editors exulted: “Six New Intimate Portraits of Vicki McGown!”

He found the section with the color photographs. They had Vicki lying in what appeared to be a field of clover in exquisite disarray, and the expression on her face ranged in stages of arousement, from bemused interest to vague pleasure to the teeth-grinding ecstasy of orgasm. On the facing page there was a full-length nude of her, laid out in the grass in deep, untroubled sleep.

It meant nothing to him now, he told himself, although there had been a time when the caterwauling memories of her pursued him everywhere he wandered, when it had been impossible not to think or talk about her or react to the mention of her name. That had been in the early days when she had become a “personality” with no visible means of support. She had been a phenomenon, all right, a household word before she ever made a picture.

So many photographs … There had been so many. The first had been the “Miss Rocket-Launcher” thing while he was still stationed in Japan, and there had been a maddening succession of others, but the one that really got her career underway was after he had returned, when he was living in San Francisco and seeing the little girl, Victoria Anne, on weekends. Vicki had called him from Los Angeles one Friday.

“How would you like to keep Victoria Anne for several days?” she asked.

“I could arrange it. Why?”

“I’ve got a free ride to Cannes for the Film Festival. It’s a tremendous opportunity.”

“Cannes! Good heavens, Vic, that’s —”

The several days stretched into several weeks, and Jay, unable to hold down his new job in the interim, had sat in the silent heat of the furnished room with the little girl, teaching her the new words (Eyes …
Ice
… Nose …
Noss
… Mouth …
Mouse
) until the predictable photographs preceded Vicki’s return, pictures of Vic stripped down to the bottom half of a two-piece suit, standing calf-deep in the surf in the arms of an aging, out-of-fashion male star. An unretouched version of it appeared the next week in a news magazine, and it had done both their careers some good. There were a succession of substantial character parts awaiting the older fellow; for Vicki it was her long-awaited “discovery.”

But he did not really mind about the pictures; he had begun vaguely to enjoy them. It was the image he had of Vicki in his mind that nagged and badgered his emotions. There was the scene set in his head at college, the evening they announced their secret marriage to the others, with the celebration that followed and Vicki tight on champagne, swinging on the arm of his roommate, the two of them standing together in some dim corridor of his brain, the roommate kissing her lightly on the lips and Vicki laughing and unconcerned, dizzy with the wine, returning the kiss with more meaning than he thought possible. There were the other episodes in the months that followed, and always Vicki unable to fathom his objections, mentally or morally incapable of grasping the distinctions, until he began to feel slightly limited and priggish himself, like an old woman crabbing after her husband’s muddy shoes.

There was the episode with the Kruegers. They had been to a dinner party that had begun to disintegrate like so many of the others, the guests drunk on rum and dinner never being served. He had seen Vicki leaving with Ben Krueger, and out of self-defense or possibly a last, thundering avowal of his manhood, he had begun to flirt with Evelyn Kreuger. The others left sometime afterwards and the two of them remained in the darkened house, Jay and Evelyn Krueger, and whatever it was they sought from each other was realized in one of the front bedrooms.

When the door came open they lay terrified together, unable to move or reason or crawl out of their perspiring bodies, agonized by the searing patch of flesh where their hips touched. But then there was only the darkness and presently the sound of Vicki’s muffled laughter.

“They’ve all gone.”

“Without us? They couldn’t have gone without —”

“Well, it’s twelve-thirty. It’s —”

“I wonder where Jay-Jay went?”

“With the others probably … Will I see you tomorrow?”

“Oh yes, yes, I —”

“God you’re great …”

“I’m worried about Jay-Jay.”

“You shouldn’t be. Why bother about Jay? Jay doesn’t possess you. How can any person possess any other? How can you possess a nymph?”

“It’s not that. I just wonder where he went.”

“I’ll take you home. Come on …”

There was the sound of the door being pulled shut and then the enormous silence of the house, with Evelyn next to him sobbing in her pillow.

It had come to them suddenly, and with finality, that there was nothing to be done, nothing to savor, no moral bludgeon, even, with which to flail the other lovers. They had been denied something, furthermore, something terribly important, whatever it was that at least could have made the moment seem significant for themselves. There was nothing for them — no hope or want or simian grace; they were left defenseless by an awful knowledge, while Vicki and Ben were carried along in the animal heat of renewal and discovery.