Stages (19 page)

“Agents. Speak of the devil. Is it true what I’ve heard about Jacobs? That he reminds you of an earthworm on a wet sidewalk?”

“I’m starting next week with William Morris,” Nat replied. “
In the mail room.
Does that answer the question?”

“Jacobs is looking for an assistant, huh?” David was rolling his empty Scotch glass between the palms of his hands.

“Yeah, but
who
?”

“Do you have his number?”

Nat removed his glasses and looked at David. “Yes, but…” he said in his stupefaction.

“Can I have it?” David said. He wanted to cry, but he only added, “I need a job.”

He called Donald Jacobs the next morning, and Donald Jacobs invited him to lunch.

An extract of cynicism might have given that event the same flavor that Jacobs provided. He arrived at the restaurant ten minutes late. Nobody waved when he walked in. Nobody nodded. And this was Ma Maison. David thought he saw several diners lowering their heads into their shoulders, though. He reasoned that
Don’t touch me
is better than no recognition at all.

Donny Jacobs was around fifty, balding and paunchy.

David rose to greet him.

“David Whitman?” Jacobs asked as if this were a moot point.

“Yes,” David replied. “How are you, Mr. Jacobs?”

“Fine, fine,” said Jacobs as the maître d’ held his chair like a shovel. “You?”

“Good, thanks,” David replied.

“Yeah,” Jacobs said to the proffered menu. “Gimme a vodka martini. Dry. Up. Olives.”

“What’ll you have?” he asked David.

“A vodka and tonic, please,” David said. He noticed that Jacobs had a facial tic; the third time he saw it he had to will himself not to wink back. As they began to talk, Jacobs absentmindedly scratched a patch of psoriasis on the back of his left hand. Tiny flecks of dead skin dotted the tablecloth after a while; when the soup came, the waiter offered David some fresh grated Parmesan cheese, and he said, a little too quickly, “No, thanks.”

After his third martini, Jacobs suddenly waxed philosophical and said to David, “What do you see yourself doing out here eventually?”

“I really don’t know,” David replied. “I came here wanting to act but—”

“Acting, agenting,” Jacobs interrupted. “It all comes down to the same thing—
hustling.
Which is what you gotta do. What everybody does.”

David was watching his eyes, which were as active as flies caught between a window and a screen. They seemed, finally, to settle on a starlet across the room. Her cleavage was like the bare bottom of a big baby.

“All my life I’ve had to hustle,” Jacobs reflected. “But I’ve had some fun along the way too. Christ, I’ve swung every way there is to swing….”

David presumed that his prospective employer was now talking about benefits.

While he was on dessert Jacobs confided that he had a house in Brentwood and another one in Malibu and four cars, all from sixty-two clients.

Barely avoiding a sympathetic twitch, David looked Donny Jacobs squarely in the eye. “I’ve got a crappy apartment and a V-W. Other than those two things, all I’ve got is ambition. But it’s
practical
ambition.”

“Then maybe I can use you,” Jacobs replied, then quickly added, “One thing, though.”

“I’m listening,” said David.

“Your desk will be next to Karen’s. She’s my other assistant. I lived with her for a while. She’s from Texas, wanted to be an opera singer. We don’t live together now, but we still…occasionally. Anyhow, the thing about her is…she keeps a vodka bottle in her desk drawer. So it’ll be you, Karen, and Mr. Smirnoff.”

“I think I can handle that,” David said.

“What it involves, mostly, is your picking up the phone when she’s there, but she’s not there, you know?”

“I understand,” David said.

“You don’t have to understand,” Jacobs replied. “Just pick up the phone. That’s what this business is all about. But you’ll learn that fast enough.”

David drank off the last of his second vodka and tonic. A filament of lime got stuck between his teeth, and he dug it out quickly with a fingernail, thinking that it might be a piece of skin.

35

The huge stuccoed house was at the end of a long driveway that began at majestic iron gates. These gates opened electrically and silently, although their twelve-foot height and their heraldic flourishes could easily have called up in a visitor’s mind the sound of trumpets blaring. The driveway beyond the gates was of crushed marble. During the summer months, the marble chips were raked into swirls every morning by gardeners, who would then attend to the topiary shrubbery, and to the flowers, which grew as if they had been arranged in vases.

The great house overlooked Long Island Sound. Its French doors opened to a brick terrace with a swimming pool. At one end of the terrace was a cabana that looked like a frilly tent, with streamers flying from its peaks. The tent was wooden and the streamers were painted copper; it was a pleasure pavilion that suggested here pleasure was permanently installed.

On a brilliant morning in late April the husband and wife who had commissioned the fairy-tale cabana were finishing their coffee in the shade of its awning. A telephone under an umbrella rang, and a maid in a pink uniform answered it. She spoke cheerfully for half a minute to the person who was
calling, and then she handed the receiver to her mistress, mouthing a name.

“Jason?” said the lady of the house. Her white silk crepe Valentino blouse was only a little less exquisite than her voice. Sure of the voice on the other end, she said, “How are you, darling? And
where
are you?”

As she listened, the woman stroked her exquisitely streaked hair, with impeccably manicured, cameo-pink fingernails.

“Oh, you’re traveling
with
someone,” the woman said. She listened and her expression grew more intent. She replaced her coffee cup in its saucer with a clack. “Well, this certainly comes as a surprise,” she said. “But it’s a
wonderful
surprise—if you really feel the way you say you do.”

The telephone conversation continued in this vein for another ten minutes. After the woman hung up, she looked at her husband and said, “Jack, he thinks he’s found the girl he wants to marry.”

The husband did not reply. With his left hand he reached haltingly for his eyeglasses, which were slightly askew.

Late that morning, the woman, wearing tennis whites, walked onto the clay court that had been built the year before. From a landing halfway up the house’s grand staircase, two maids were watching her. One smirked knowingly at the other.

A bright red Porsche 911, its tires crunching the marble driveway, turned around in front of the eight-car garage and came to a stop. A young man got out of the car. He went straight to the guest house, which was a few feet from the tennis court. The guest house’s Dutch door was open. Inside, on a bed nearly buried in lacy pillows, was the woman in white, who was contemplating a tennis ball the color of a crab apple.

“Ready?” asked the young man.

“Mm,” said the woman, and went out to the court.

For an hour the tennis pro worked on the woman’s backhand. He noticed that she was stiff today, and clumsy. He
tried to relax her, letting his fingers linger as he adjusted the racket in her hand.

“What’s the prob, Andrea?” he said finally. “What is it with you, anyway? You’re unbelievably uptight.”

“I don’t know. Nothing,” Andrea replied.

“Is it Jack?”

“No, Robbie, it isn’t Jack. He’s the same. The same as he’s been. He doesn’t change. The world does. Life does. But Jack doesn’t.”

“If it isn’t Jack, what is it, then?”

“Jason called today. I think he’s going to get married.”

“Hey, how about that? Good for him.”

“I think we’ve worked on my backhand about enough for one day.” Andrea sounded bone weary.

“Want me to work on your back, then?” Robbie asked.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Andrea replied.

He followed her into the guest house, whistling, and twirling his tennis racket like a billy club. His father had been a policeman in Bridgeport, and was retired now, and often sat in front of his TV set with a beer, muttering at the tennis tournaments on “Wide World of Sports” and curling his lip up at the society game that had turned his son into a playboy bum.

An ocean away from the guest house by the tennis court, in a hotel room in Vienna, Jason was saying to Lauren, “Well, what do you think? I think we should just go ahead and do it.”

Lauren was pale with thinking.

“I don’t
know,
” she said. “I’m just not
sure.
”

“Not sure of what?”

“It’s not that I don’t love you, Jason. I do. It’s…it’s that I have to know. I
have
to.”

“Know what?”

“Know what’s wrong with you. It’s been driving me crazy. Ever since you brought it up. And you never want to talk about it. Jason, I don’t care what it is, or how bad it might be for you—us eventually. I’ll take care of you, whatever happens. But you can’t keep me in the dark like this. I don’t even know…how much time we might have together…or how little.”

“Who knows?” said Jason with a tentative smile. “We might have a year. We might have sixty or seventy years. You can never be sure with this—”

“This
what,
for God’s sake?” Tears were in Lauren’s eyes.

“With this life,” Jason said to her as he poured a bottle of beer into the antique stein he’d bought the day before. Lauren blinked at the Bavarian villagers cavorting around the mug.

“Huh?” she said stupidly.

“I told you I haven’t got very much time, Lauren. That was what I said, wasn’t it? Well, you haven’t either. Nobody has. Life is short. That’s why you shouldn’t miss a minute of it, ever.”

“What…what are you saying?”

“I think I’d enjoy being married to you. I think that would really
maximize
…my few brief moments in time.”

“Are…are you trying to tell me that
you’re not really sick
?”

“Whatever made you think I was sick?”

“
You.
You did, you asshole. You
lied
to me.”

“No, I didn’t. I said I didn’t have very much time. Not only was that the truth, it was my philosophy of life. When I told you I didn’t have much time, you’d just finished telling me that you couldn’t run off with me because you had your
acting career
to think about. I thought that was bullshit, so rather than argue with you, I told you I didn’t have that much time. And I meant it.”

Lauren flew at him and beat on his chest with her fists. He held his arm out so the beer wouldn’t spill.

“You
rat,
you dirty stinking
rat,
you,” she wailed.

“I didn’t
lie,
”
Jason said, amused, apparently, by the pummeling he was receiving. “I admit that maybe I
acted
a little. Tell me, was I any good?”

“You
monster,
” Lauren screamed. “You had me believing that you were
dying.
How
could
you?”

“If
I
was that convincing, then maybe
acting
isn’t such a big deal.”

“What do you know? You don’t know anything. Ooh, I hate you. I
hate
you.”

“Bull
shit
,” said Jason. Setting his stein on the dresser, he took hold of Lauren’s flailing arms and pulled her down onto the bed. She shut her eyes and clenched her teeth. Then she felt his lips pressing against hers. She jerked her head away. He covered her ear with his mouth.

“No,”
she hissed, even as she felt herself giving way, yielding helplessly to
“Yes.”

Andrea, on the other side of the Atlantic, groaned as Robbie entered her from behind, pushing her clitoris up to what felt like the rafters of her sanity. On the brass rail of the bed’s headboard hung Robbie’s jockstrap. Andrea gaped at it in her ecstasy; the pouch still looked full. Before he’d taken it off, she’d held it in her hand and said, “Fair enough, isn’t it? My court, your balls.”

Now she prayed to him, “Ohh, do it,
do
it.” She had decided a couple of years ago that desire was the only religion with a ready paradise.

The maid who had served Mr. and Mrs. Case their coffee took Jack upstairs in the elevator. When she had him settled in the master bedroom, by the window wall that overlooked the sound, she asked him if he was comfortable and if he wanted anything else. He raised his left hand and let it drop again to show her that he was perfectly happy. His right arm was in a plastic sling that looked like a rain gutter, and he was wearing a brace on his right leg. His Sulka bathrobe did not quite conceal it.