Stages (42 page)

“I don’t think Miss Marsh had in mind such a long-term investment,” said Herbert Levitt as he stuck his Cross pen into the holder in his attaché case. It looked to David like a little leather cartridge belt, full of pens loaded for bear. His underarms felt all mucked up with perspiration, but he kept on talking fast, trying to convince this accountant who’d suddenly come out of left field that everything was kosher.

“I’m personally convinced that this film will pay back everyone who’s involved with it ten times over,” David said. “I guarantee it.”

“Miss Marsh doesn’t expect guarantees,” Herbert said. “Only a reasonable assurance that her money is being put to the proper uses. I assume you know, Mr. Whitman, that real estate transfers are a matter of public record?”

“Of course,” said David. He was getting as impatient as he was nervous.

“I skipped lunch yesterday,” Herbert said, “and took a little trip downtown. I came across something I thought you might find interesting.” He handed David a couple of Xeroxes.

“What’s this?”

“A property in Malibu, that your production company used for a few weeks of shooting several months ago. I thought you might like to see who currently holds title to that property.”

Herbert sat back in his chair expectantly, his hands curled over the top of his attaché case. David shook his head at the papers that had been set in front of him. He didn’t seem to understand what he was reading. “You’re acquainted with those two individuals, I believe,” Herbert said after what he thought was a decent interval.

“I know one better than the other,” David said. “The guy, he’s just a…a production assistant.”

“A well-compensated one, it would seem,” Herbert replied.

“You don’t understand how these things work, Mr. Levitt,” David said. “This is a business where people expect…little perks.”

“Like the check-cashing service Mr. Begelman ran on the side?” Herbert inquired.

David wiped his face with his hand.

“Look, ah, all I can tell you right now is…I’m going to look into this,” David said. “My feeling is that the house was bought to be rented to the production company, for tax purposes. You understand, I’m sure.”

“I understand…taxes,” said Herbert.

“Look, Mr. Levitt,” David replied. “Just give me a couple of days. And I’ll get back to you, on every point you’ve brought up. I give you my solemn word on that. Okay?”

“Before noon on Thursday?”

“No problem.”

“Well, then, Mr. Whitman, I’ll look forward to hearing from you.” Herbert Levitt rose deliberately from his chair and extended his hand to David.

“Sorry to have to trouble you this way,” he said at the door, “but Miss Marsh always includes in her investments of this type a provision for review. I’m sure you noticed it when you signed on the dotted line.”

“No, I didn’t,” David said. “It was twenty-five thousand, I didn’t look that closely.”

“The coat and the ear clips, plus tax,” Herbert said. “And something left over for lunch, at Ma Maison. Which is your production company’s commissary, I believe. Good day, Mr. Whitman.”

“Good day,” David said.

As soon as the door closed behind Levitt, he sat down. He had to. He was trembling uncontrollably, and his legs felt as though they were going to buckle under him. All he could think was that he had to get home. He had to see her. He couldn’t believe this of her, he couldn’t. If he only saw her, he thought, it would all go away. He would wake up the same as he was before, with a struggle on his hands but
alive,
not dead inside, not betrayed like this, not unloved, not
nothing.

Somehow he made it out to the parking lot. David tried to concentrate on the road in front of him; he was afraid that if he thought of anything else he’d have an accident. He realized—swerving—that he’d left the coke in his office. What if he needed more? What if…what if
what?
If it was all true, what difference did anything make? His life would be over anyway.

David almost hit the back wall of the garage. Her Thunderbird was there, its top down. He’d almost hoped that she wouldn’t be home. But then there would have been the intolerable waiting. He opened the door to the kitchen trying to call her name, but nothing came out.

“Dave, that you?” he heard.

He couldn’t answer.

She came into the kitchen. She looked at him. Her face altered. In that instant David knew what she had done, and what she was.

“The jig’s up, huh?” she said.

David’s eyes filled with tears.

Rebecca turned and ran. She slammed the door to their room, locked it, and pushed a heavy chair against it. Grabbing a suitcase from her closet, she yanked open a drawer she’d had prepared against this very outcome and emptied its contents into the bag—jewelry, safe-deposit-box keys, cash. Then she grabbed a half dozen of her most expensive dresses and jammed them into the bag too. Her furs were in storage, but she had all the receipts.

“So long, sucker,” Rebecca said to the door. Then she climbed out the casement window, scurried across the lawn, wetting herself in the sprinkler, and jumped into her car.

The garage’s side door opened, and she saw David standing there. In his hand was the gold .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver he’d bought for her at Bijan—to protect herself when he wasn’t there, should the alarm ever go off.

She twisted the key and the Thunderbird’s motor came to life. She saw David point the gun at his own face. He fired, and he fell. Rebecca screeched out of the garage.

David was on the floor of the garage. Rebecca paused. She watched him struggle to his knees. He stared at her, his face blackened, his cheek bleeding.

“I filled it with blanks six months ago,” she shouted to him. “April fool, asshole.” David let out a terrible howl. He crawled toward her, his arms extended helplessly. She pushed the button on the visor to close the garage door and roared off.

David collapsed on his back. The garage door was rumbling downward. He moved his head to one side. If he hadn’t, the door would have closed on his neck.

David stared at the overhead light. In two minutes, it went off automatically. He half thought that the cops would come. They didn’t, though. Whoever had heard the shot must have assumed that it was a backfire.

That would be a logical assumption. Then, in the dark, with nothing but that single logical assumption in his head, David Whitman slowly pulled himself up onto his feet.

Rebecca drove straight to Malibu. She found Johnny at the house when she arrived. He was sitting on the deck, looking through an address book.

“I thought you weren’t coming out till tomorrow,” he said.

“That’s what I thought too,” Rebecca replied. She put the suitcase on a glass-topped table, opened it, and emptied its contents out onto the deck. Rings, bracelets, wads of cash, and some sterling silver spilled at Johnny’s feet.

“Not a bad haul, huh?” Rebecca said. “But this is it, I’m afraid. The sonofabitch
knows
.”

“There goes your career,” Johnny said.

“That’s okay,” said Rebecca. “I really want to
direct
.”

“Directing’s my department,” Johnny replied. “But there’s no reason you can’t go back to what you used to do.”

The smile left Rebecca’s face.

“What?” she said.

“You know Davidson? The guy who likes to dress up like an Indian. The one the girls call Tonto. I was talking to him on the phone the other day. He remembers you. He told me he’d like to see you again.”

“You gotta be kidding.”

“You know the rules, Becky. Everybody has to carry their own weight. You want to be with me, you got to
work
.”

Rebecca lunged at the money on the deck. Johnny grabbed her by the hair, and pulled her head back, and slapped her across the face, hard. She could feel his warm breath on her skin.

“I hate you,” she said.

“I told you you should’ve gotten married,” he said.

71

Less than a year after the disease had been given a name—AIDS—Mike had lost three friends to it. Now Eric was sick too. When he’d heard the news from someone who had known them both from Fire Island, all Mike had been able to say was, “I’m not surprised.” Later, he’d called Art, who lived in Eric’s building. Art had told him that Eric was horribly depressed.

“He has nightmares,” Art had said. “He doesn’t know whether he’s going to stay here or not. He’s lost weight and he’s weak. He has trouble climbing the stairs.”

That evening Mike had been horribly depressed himself. He’d called Art as a step toward seeing Eric—they’d been close, once upon a time—but then Art had said that Eric didn’t want to see anybody. Mike thought that he would probably go anyway. Nobody really wanted to be alone with something like this. Or did they?

Hearing someone in the hall, Mike glanced at the door. In the semidarkness of his apartment, the thin band of neon light that glowed underneath the door looked almost like day, like morning the way it used to arrive at the edges of the dark green shade that had been at the window of his boyhood bedroom. Mike wondered how Eric could be sleeping at all, except when he passed out from sheer exhaustion. When the future holds nothing for you, you withdraw. People might come to visit you, but they could never see you the way they used to. Still alive, but doomed, you have already been removed from the room. You must wait, sit waiting in terrible pain, in a world outside the world where time no longer has any meaning.

Mike got up and walked over to the picture window that looked out onto a brick wall and a spindly tree that was always reaching for the light that only came from overhead, like one of the weeds that grow beneath your feet under gratings in the sidewalk. Rust was already percolating through the paint over the steel window frame, and the apartment had been freshly painted just a year ago. How quickly everything had gone gray.

The Village was turning into a ghost town. The party truly was over. The confetti left on the sidewalk had turned mushy and colorless in the slow, dirty rain.

We had ten good years,
Mike thought. Ten years to see and do everything, to be not just out of the closet but uncaged, wild, and completely free. As if anyone ever is. Life will always be confined by death; Mike was acutely aware of that now. You were gay second, and human first. Somehow they’d gotten the order of existence mixed up. In an ecstasy of the flesh they’d forgotten what flesh is always heir to. There was always a new connection, it seemed. Now they feared to connect. Now, there was simply no cure.

In the long afternoons of depression Mike would sometimes wish that they could have it all back again, the world they—and he—had loved, however callously, that world of eyes, hundreds of them, watching, anticipating, looking back, looking over your shoulder to see if there was anyone better. It had been a flowering of the night, perfumed and exotic, lush, gorgeous, unrestrained. And all of it had withered on the vine.

Soon Mike heard that Eric, who had been in and out of St. Vincent’s, was back there again, maybe for the last time. He resolved to see him, no matter what. It was something he had to do, perhaps because it was all he could do.

Mike was not prepared for what he saw in the hospital. Eric no longer looked like Eric. His face was swollen, covered with lumps that made him look as if water were boiling under his skin, and he’d shrunken to the point where his body made Mike think of one of those broken umbrellas you see around the city in a wind driven rain.

“Hi, how’re you doin’?” Mike asked. He heard himself speaking the words, and cringed to realize that he sounded like somebody talking in a funeral home. Eric’s eyes looked at him through slits.

“Not very well,” he said.

“How long are you in for?” Mike asked.

“They don’t seem to know,” Eric said dully. “At this point, I don’t really care. I’m tired…of all this. Very tired. I can’t take much more of it.”

“You could go into remission,” Mike said. “That happens. You could be out and around. And they
are
working on it. You never know.”

With difficulty, Eric shook his head. “I know,” he said. “I’ve had enough. I don’t want to feel like this anymore, that’s all. I’d rather not feel anything. In the beginning, I was so scared I… But not now. I had some good times. But they’re over. I don’t have anything to look forward to at this point…except relief. Rest. That’s all I want. To rest. In peace.”

Mike thought of his grandmother, dying in the hospital, in her nineties, her eyes closed to anyone in the room, her lips saying, “Please take me, God.
Take me.
”
He thought of someone he’d once slept with, who, worn out by sex, had said, “Do with me…what you will.” Were the dead free of this longing…to connect? Or did they fulfill it somehow, somewhere beyond the stars, in a place where the constantly expanding universe opens out the human spirit too? There was nothing Mike could say of this to Eric, so he said, “Is there anything you want, anything I can get you?”

“Could I have a drink of water?” Eric replied.

Mike picked up the glass with the bent plastic straw in it and held it for his friend. He watched his throat working to swallow. For the first time, he truly understood what his mother had meant when she said of someone who had died, “It’s a blessing.”