Love and Death on Long Island (13 page)

I closed the magazine. I felt a sickening taste on the lid of my mouth, the taste of emptiness, the sterile taste of nothing at all. Salty tears sprang into my eyes. ‘Only six weeks!' I muttered to myself in a febrile voice as I strode along the corridor. ‘Six weeks – there's no time to be lost!'

One or two of those passers-by whose paths I crossed would turn to glance at this strange individual in their midst; not many, though, for New Yorkers have grown accustomed to seeing strangers talk to themselves in public places.

Almost as though the self-injunction that there was no time to be lost must take immediate effect, I hastened out of Grand Central Station. For a long moment, I stood staring at the meshed, lattice-like grid of the city's numbered streets and avenues on the map I had taken with me from my hotel; then frantically dashed off in what I trusted was the direction of Madison Square Garden (the same Madison Square Garden where Ronnie had once attended a Michael Jackson concert), deep in whose nether regions, assuming I had not misread the map, Penn Central should be found.

So it turned out; trains were relatively frequent, and the very next one was due to leave nearly at once. I purchased a return ticket and set off for Chesterfield.

A little over two hours later I stepped down from the train to find myself-precisely nowhere. The station was certainly that of Chesterfield, yet, outside and around it,
apart from a highway, a lonely, seemingly unattended garage and, to the west, its cold aluminium glitter turning silverish in the early afternoon sun, what might have been a modestly sized power station, there appeared not a sign of human commerce or habitation. The railway station, too, was quite deserted save for myself – for I was alone among the train's passengers to have alighted at Chesterfield – and an elderly black hunchback who was sweeping it out. From him I learned that the town itself was ‘jest a way ‘long the highway there'; and that although, yes, it was well within walking distance, ‘no one ever do walk'.

The walk into Chesterfield took me forty minutes. To begin with, and for a long time, the landscape remained as characterless as that by which I had been greeted on my arrival. Then, very gradually, came the first feelers of the community ahead: a graveyard sloping gracelessly down towards the highway, every tombstone in it white and new, as though the townspeople had only just started to die; a quite unpicturesque lumber mill with an Alsatian dog asleep among the shavings; the first of the town's private residences, of which only the driveway was visible and a gatepost in the form of an ornate, cod-mediaeval parchment. And suddenly, almost as I was about to give up hope of ever arriving there, the township of Chesterfield, Ronnie's town, reared up to meet me.

In England it might not have been judged a town at all. The ‘city center', as the locals were rather grandly given to calling its municipal and commercial area, was intersected by but two sets of parallel boulevards traversing each other at right angles in the manner of a game of noughts-and-crosses; when each of these reached the
edge of the town proper, it would continue on up into the rolling forested uplands within whose snug, soft dale the community lay, and it was there that most of its residents had built their homes. Chesterfield, in short, was a tolerably charming specimen of affluent American suburbia, not too arch, not too daintified, its restaurants and shops (there was even a lone gun store, as I remarked, forefronted by an eye-catchingly symmetrical, evidently window-dressed display of rifles and revolvers) encased in a pleasant reddish-brown brick, its trio of banks flanked by their own trim shrubbery like miniature mansions, its exclusively residential streets, along which I roamed after having explored the centre of the town itself, bordered by neat and mostly unostentatious clapboard houses with freshly painted white picket fences and perhaps a child's tricycle parked outside the front door. A certain faint tanginess in the air and the distant screech of a gull helped to remind me that I was indeed on an island of sorts, but there was not a hint of the fey and raffish romanticism of that Long Island of Fitzgeraldian myth.

On this first day, although I rejoiced in the sensation that everywhere I walked Ronnie must have walked before me, that now at last we were, in an expression he himself had employed in one of his interviews,
sharing the same space
, and although (preposterously, as I acknowledge) I was already bracing myself, keeping myself on wellnigh constant alert, for the miracle of a chance encounter, my overriding concern was to find a place where I might stay on and plan my strategy.

Towards the latter part of the afternoon, realising that I had not eaten all day, I ordered a cheeseburger in a
small, clean, noisy diner whose wooden booths with their studded leather upholstery lent it a vaguely nineteen-twentyish air. Its proprietor and chef was one Irving Buckmuller, and his sole error of taste and judgment -for the cheeseburger itself, to my knowledge the first I had ever eaten in my life, turned out to be quite delicious – was the name he had inflicted on his establishment:
Chez d'Irv
.

Irving himself, fat and slovenly, with a great football of a head that was exactly the same shape as his torso, would regularly emerge from his kitchen wiping huge pancake hands on a filthy, once-white apron and wafting into the restaurant along with him a billow of stale lukewarm steam. With a kind of foul-mouthed joviality he would make his round of the booths, leaning right over his customers' shoulders and enquiring in a gravelly voice, that sounded as though his vocal chords had been removed, whether everything was to their satisfaction. He seemed to take an especial interest in me, as he would have done, no doubt, in any new and unfamiliar patron; and, ignoring his waitress's strident appeals for ‘one eggs over easy' and ‘two blue-plate specials, hold the relish', settled himself down on the seat opposite my own, told me of how he had been based in Aldershot during the Second World War and asked if I had ever come across his ‘best British buddy' of those days, a certain Ben Sutcliffe. I was longing in my turn to ask Irving if he was acquainted with Ronnie Bostock, was suddenly, absurdly, panic-stricken lest my motive be made immediately apparent and confined myself to an anodyne query about local hotels. There was only one, I learned, a ‘motel court' on the outskirts of the town, and when I
had finally succeeded in disengaging myself from the chef's bearlike conviviality I made my way there. It was a matter of a few minutes to reserve myself a modest semi-detached bungalow and pay the fawning proprietress for a week's lodging in advance. I returned to New York by the next train, passed a second night in my hotel (a night full of churning dreams in which I would drift back and forth between scenes of great violence -violence whose precise source remained for me wholly unlocatable – and a sense of physical and spiritual well-being of a sweetness so indescribable, so all-encompassing, as to defy comparison with any of my life's moments of intensest rapture) and checked out early the next morning. Then I returned to Chesterfield.

It would be tedious to narrate in any detail or with any respect for their chronology my movements during the next ten days or so. I had made the trip to Long Island with, as I imagined, a ‘plan', only to have it dawn on me, once there, that I had no plan, as that word is understood, only an impromptu and unreasoned resolve to confront Ronnie face to face. But how was I to go about it? My first instinct was quite simply to consult the telephone directory which I found (alongside an ancient Gideon Bible that had, as its bookmark, a tattered, comically dated pornographic postcard) in the top drawer of the bedside desk in my motel room. There was, needless to say, no Ronnie Bostock listed for Chesterfield – no Bostock at all, in fact, appeared to live in Suffolk County. In itself that initial and not exactly unforeseeable drawback offered scant cause for alarm:
terrified of being laid seige to by his more rapacious fans, Ronnie would certainly have asked to be assigned an ex-directory number. Yet it had the effect of clouding my brain with fresh anxieties. What, I said to myself, what if the boy, as would be all too likely, were at this very moment in Hollywood discussing his new project, or what, instead, if he were merely holidaying somewhere – in England, perhaps, in
London!
– or what if it were simply not true that he lived in Chesterfield, what if all those cretinous magazines had been conspiring from the very start to throw his admirers off the scent, what then? I sweated in horror at the notion, not that I might have come so far for nothing, but that I might eventually have to return, and then live on, live on as before, without ever having known Ronnie, and I determined that it would not be so.

As a means of learning his address, I briefly and vainly flirted with the possibility of bribing the town's only postman, whose route would sometimes cross my own, the two of us being alike and unique in our obligation, albeit for different reasons, to prowl the streets of Chesterfield at all hours of the day. It was now just under a week away from December, and there had come since my arrival days of heavy rainfall and even sleet when I would nevertheless feel compelled to leave the motel in the morning and spend every daylit hour in the pursuit of my prey. Thus would I walk along one of the streets in the town until I arrived at its first set of traffic lights; at these take a left or right turning and continue until this second street be traversed in its turn by a third; when I would alter direction yet again and now walk right to the circumference of the township itself. This
was what I thought of as the inner circuit, in the course of which I would very thoroughly cover the shopping area, peer in at the frosted, already Christmassy windows of coffee shops, wander as though aimlessly along the aisles of supermarkets, find myself purchasing some useless and valueless geegaw in a haberdasher's store whose over-decorated windows would not permit me to ascertain from outside exactly who might be within. But there was also the outer circuit, when I would saunter up the quiet residential streets sloping calmly into the surrounding uplands, streets that were usually quite deserted save for a group of children playing baseball on a front lawn or a lone angler bearing on his shoulder all his insectlike tackle. Here, patiently, from one house to the next, I looked out for some clue or other bearing upon the householder's identity, a clue that was all the harder to detect in that I had absolutely no conception of what it might amount to.

An ever-constant dread was that I would become conspicuous, that the honest townspeople of Chesterfield would come to notice and set to wondering about the alien, solitary figure who appeared to have no legitimate business in the town other than that of merely walking, to and fro, day in and day out, among its inhabitants. But although I strove to pass unnoticed, to efface myself in the bustle, it happened that, except at one particular hour late in the forenoons of weekdays and again during the whole of the afternoons of the two weekend days, there was very seldom to be seen milling along the pavements of the shopping streets the sort of harassed and yet high-spirited family crowd by which an English equivalent of Chesterfield would have been enlivened on
an almost daily basis. And I felt sure that the presence of the lone, brooding foreigner that I must have appeared – the heavy, stolid grey of whose overcoat, moreover, stood out against the bright, childishly primary colours of the windcheaters and anoraks sported by most of the locals and by which the contented and uncomplaining race of Americans succeed in disowning winter's very existence – had already begun to attract inquisitive comment.

I lunched every day in Irving's diner, where my cool, non-committal reserve about the purpose of my visit to Chesterfield had finally stanched my host's amiable garrulity; no more than a gruffly discreet ‘G'afternoon' would we exchange whenever Irv made one of his steam-enhaloed irruptions into the dining area. And, by the late afternoon when hope had had to be abandoned for that day, or else even earlier did I feel too tired and discouraged to prolong the operation, I would retire into my little bungalow and on most evenings watch television.

It was there, in front of the desultorily flickering screen in my sitting-room, that an idea came to me, an idea so simple it could not conceivably be so, but so audacious it just might. I burrowed into my suitcase, in the depths of which, underneath unpacked linen, I had stowed away the magazine bearing news of Ronnie's impending marriage. I opened it at the page in question and let my eyes skim through the article until at last they saw what they were looking for: the surname of Ronnie's fiancée. Then I turned to the telephone directory on my bedside table, sought the letter L and ran my finger down a column until I found, afforded almost hallucinatory
prominence by the ridge of my now slightly grubby and unmanicured fingernail, the entry:
Lynn, Audrey, 16 Jefferson Hill, Ches
.

I paced up and down the little room, triumphant in possession of a clue at last and feeling as though, having secured this one piece of information, I had crossed a second Atlantic. But if I could scarcely contain my delight at the fact that the young woman's telephone number had all the time been listed in the Suffolk County directory and that the telephone itself was within easy reach of my arm, I did not dial the number; another, very much more effective, course lay open to me.

Next morning I made directly for Jefferson Hill. As I vaguely recalled from my perambulations, it was one of those residential streets outlying the town centre. Each of the houses along it being spacious in itself and enclosed on every side by its own rambling grounds, no. 16, which I could remember already having passed more than once, was located some little distance into the countryside. It was not one of the larger of the houses, but its saffron-yellow clapboard walls and the roofed-over porch that ran the length of its façade made it appear old and nostalgic and cottagey. There were blinds down on its two front windows. As I slowly, selfconsciously, passed in front of it that first time, I observed that there was, on its right side, just visible to a passer-by, a small and overgrown trellised garden -without question the same one in which Ronnie had once been so memorably photographed! Then, too, on the left side, I sighted an open garage, its mechanically operated door tilting half-upwards and outwards; and, parked
within, a glossy powder-blue sports car, a Porsche. What caused my heart on sight of it to beat even faster was not just the implication that someone, evidently, was at home. In my photograph album, I could not quite recall where, there was a snapshot of a beaming Ronnie framed in the window of just such a motor car; the snapshot was in colour and the car – the car was powder-blue.
It was Ronnie's car
. Shaking with excitement, I made a swift mental note of the first three letters of its registration number, enough, I believed, for my immediate purpose.