Three Balconies (23 page)

We gathered the next morning for breakfast and then went off to our final responsibility which was to speak informally to students in the class to which we had been assigned. Beau disappeared down one of the corridors and I still have no idea of where he went. He had no assignment. Did he visit a class all the same? If so, who did he say he was and what did he talk about? Or did he pretend to visit some phantom class and continue to pace the corridors? What had he told his employer to explain his mid-week absence? What was his reason for making the trip, which all seemed so unnecessary and sad?

Beau owned a cottage on what I think of as a dark and cruel stretch of beach at the northern tip of Morris Island. Built of rough stone, it seemed more of a lair than a home. He went about and virtually lived in a loincloth made of black lycra that was ill-suited to his thick body. Mike Tyson, the heavyweight fighter who was built along similar lines, was later to popularize the style. Each morning,
at dawn, Beau would invade the ocean and swim out for miles. I rented a cottage nearby. Although I was much too respectful of the strong undertow to join him – frightened actually – I did watch Beau several times. Predictably, he was a powerful swimmer. But it was as if he swam not so much for pleasure as to match his strength against the tide. He did much the same with Danny, the Labrador Retriever I brought along for company during the summer months. One morning, Beau came over for a visit and got down on a mat to wrestle with the animal. Playful at first, he began to mock the dog's mere eighty pounds of weight and to get the animal in a chokehold and to apply pressure. I had to talk Beau down quietly – I was always having to talk him down – and he gradually released his grip. But what if he had strangled my dog?

Though never quite content, he was as close to that state as he ever came during the summer months at the beach. He could feel that whatever race he was in had stalled – whatever phantom competitors he imagined had no doubt withdrawn for a few months, enabling him to do the same. Unshaven, charred by the sun, he holed up for most of the day, reading and rereading the novels of Ernest Hemingway until he had virtually memorized them, and generally attending to his family. From time to time, he would be seen in his loincloth, walking through a nearby gay community, in the style of a Western gunslinger invading a frontier town.

Each weekend, I took part in a fierce and often bloody volleyball game presided over by Beau and a Newport financier who made it clear that he disliked me. I'm a decent enough player, but I have an underhand serve and I tend to slap at the ball rather than lock my fingers and cradle it in the Olympic style that was coming into vogue at the time. It may be that the Newport man's feeling about me had only to do with my playing style although I doubt it. Our group was made up of stockbrokers, advertising executives, physicians and a celebrated actor who flung his tiny frame into the game and insisted that no special privileges be awarded his celebrity. There was an informal league along the beach, but our chief opponents were a houseful of hippies who
played the game cheerfully and were unbegrudging about their almost automatic loss to us each weekend. They showed interest in the players' wives who came to watch the games, and as the summers rolled along, began romantically to pick them off one by one, luring the wives back to their commune. In some cases, the liaisons became permanent, with the result that the beach soon became denuded of stockbroker wives. An exception was Heidi, who received visits from a private school headmaster on days when Beau was away in Manhattan. Beau was aware of the man and dismissed him.

“I don't understand what she sees in that ridiculous faggot.”

As marriages disintegrated, the games became vicious, with angry commodities men flying up in the air to spike the ball down on the heads of hippies who had broken up their families. One casualty was a plastic surgeon who broke three fingers on his operating hand and for six months was unable to correct noses.

Toward the end of one season, we were matched against a local industrial team for championship of the beach. With a crowd looking on, I took up my usual position and was asked by the Newport man to step aside.

“We're trying something else,” he said, signaling to a boy who worked in the local supermarket to take my place.

I looked over at Beau who chuckled and pawed at the sand as if the affront was some minor inconvenience and could we please get on with the game. Humiliated, I watched from the sidelines and never played again. I said nothing to Beau, of course, since the vocabulary of our friendship did not have language for the expression of hurt feelings. Did he enjoy my pain? He had professed to care about me and would embarrass me in front of others by suddenly declaring: “I can't begin to tell you how much I love Cliff.”

You can say that it was a meaningless game and that it certainly wasn't going to be reported in
Sports Illustrated
and that I should have been casual about the experience. Nonetheless, it stung.

I asked Margaret about Beau. She was a psychiatrist I was dating who was much older than me which had its own erotic appeal.

“He has a character flaw, darling,” she said. “You won't find it in the textbooks.”

She doled out such insights sparingly, roughly one each time we met, which fueled our brief affair and may have kept it going. I wondered how many she kept in reserve. Our brief affair ended when she insisted that we see each other three times a week – as if I were a patient. But she had wondered at the time why I kept up my friendship with Beau.

“It seems so unsatisfying.”

I had no answer at the time. But I must have known, instinctively, that despite his bravado, the amatory and athletic achievements, both real and imagined, I could always count on Beau – no matter what my state – to be in worse shape than I was. I was not alone on this. Many of us took that strength from him. None of us realized the toll it was to take on him.

It will come as no surprise that we enjoyed going to the fights together. Beau arranged for our ringside tickets; I paid for them as I did for our dinners and nights on the town. I don't know if I had more money than he did, but he had the family and after my wife left me I had no interest in money. I spent whatever I earned in theatrical royalties as soon as I received it, almost as if it were an annoyance. We saw Roberto Duran, unknown then and sleek as a panther, defeat the lightweight champion Ken Buchanan and spit on him in the process. We watched Jose Torres literally paralyze Willie Pastrano with a single body blow, the latter never having been knocked down before.

My father was dying slowly from a blood disease, but he could still get around and on occasion, we took him along. My mother had died some years back and he lived alone in the apartment they had shared for many years in Stanford, Connecticut. I lacked the will and strength to have him come and live with me in one of the flats in Manhattan I rented every few years. Then, too, such an arrangement would have interfered with my rigid schedule of
getting my work out of the way and trying to seduce as many women as possible – taking advantage of the glorious license that had been issued to one and all in the '70s:
Carry on to Your Heart's Content
.

I suppose the Fight Nights and an occasional dinner were a means of atoning for failing to care for my father in his last days. Beau told me that
his
father was a retired engineer who had spent many years abroad building dams. Mr. LeVyne joined us for one of the Fight Nights at Madison Square Garden. He was a small round-shouldered man who wore a fedora and a tan windbreaker and did not seem to fit the swashbuckling resume supplied by his son. Beau and his sister had been raised in a small flat on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. I kept wondering how Mr. LeVyne had been able to find the resources to send his children to Wellesley and Princeton. The two older men, both soft-spoken and roughly the same age, got along well. The Hispanic fighters were first coming into prominence at the time, and the new fans, from a more demonstrative culture, were more raucous than the usual mild-mannered Garden crowd. When a decision went against a Panamanian favorite, a hail of beer bottles rained down on us from the balcony. Using a bench as an overhead shield, both Beau and I led our respective fathers to safety.

We saw the first of the memorable Ali-Frazier fights. In the dressing room, Frazier, a man I had written about for a magazine, shook hands with my father and congratulated him on the iron grip, forged in New England textile mills, that this small courtly man was to maintain until he died. Afterward, we joined some boxing regulars at
Toots Shors
nearby. A promoter asked if I was satisfied with the complimentary tickets he had been giving to me and Beau.

“They were just fine,” I said.

The news that the tickets were “comps” and that Beau had kept the money I'd given him to buy them was hardly devastating. I wasn't exactly out of pocket, since I thought all along I'd been paying for the tickets – but it was unsettling, one of the
many little jolts in our friendship that I was to experience at regular intervals.

I have the uneasy feeling that I've been portraying myself as a monument of good behavior. It may be impossible to dig out from this posture, but I like to think that my transgressions – failing to care for a dying parent; suddenly, almost viciously shutting the door on an affair that no longer interested me – had more sweep to them than those of Beau.

Nor was I was an injured victim. No doubt, I upset my friend Beau as often as he did me. A cruel blow to him must have been my very existence – an unspoken but subtle (and smug?) reminder that as rudderless as my life had become I had at least some career achievement and he had none.

My circle of heroes shrinks as I get older, but I continue to be in sophomoric awe of outstanding writers and athletes, the latter posing a particular problem for me. What does one say to Pelé? Or Jerry Rice? What conversational opener is appropriate upon meeting Dominguin? Beau had no such inhibitions. On our nightly tours of the city's clubs and restaurants, he would disappear and then pop up at a table nearby, having an easy, bantering exchange with Reggie Jackson or Earl Monroe or whichever legend happened to be in the city. Somehow he would confer upon himself a status equal to theirs. After all, weren't he and Jim Brown, at bottom, both jocks, a pair of football greats out on the town? I believe he truly felt that he would have surpassed Brown in the record books were it not for the mysterious injury that cut short his athletic career at Princeton. And somehow, his relaxed style with them brought great heroes down to human proportions. At one of the small parties he gave at his immaculately-kept book-lined house in Brooklyn Heights, I met Kyle Rote who had always seemed Herculean on the football field. It came as a surprise that he was mortal after all, a man no taller than I am.

Beau read a great deal and for some unfathomable reason was on the mailing lists of publishers who sent him review copies of their latest novels. Whenever a notable first work of fiction
appeared, Beau would somehow wind up with the author in tow, squiring the novelist about the city. He was on friendly if not intimate terms with established writers as well. Capote, Jones, Shaw, Algren, Mailer. Such men may have been Gods to me, but not to Beau who saw that they were plagued with indigestion, had to worry about money and divorce, and feared death. He was aware, as I was not, that the writing of
Lolita
did not encase Vladimir Nabokov permanently in a state of celestial bliss.

What did they see in him ? That he had charm was undeniable, although my friend Margaret – in one of her carefully parceled out insights – suggested that I examine this trait carefully. Do we really want to be charmed? By a charmer? In the company of distinguished writers he was neither self-consciously brash nor overly solicitous but would simply penetrate their celebrity without fear.

He didn't drink very much or smoke and the very smell of marijuana turned him sullen and listless. But there were times when the proximity of these substances got through to him and he would behave badly. One such night, at a restaurant, he challenged Bill Russell to a test of strength. He had to be held by the great NBA star at arms length – kicking in the air – until he calmed down. On another occasion he flexed in front of “Crazy Joe” Gallo, prompting the fabled mobster to get up from his dinner party and ask the restaurant proprietor ominously: “What do you want done with him?”

It was inevitable that he would match himself against the legendary “Pinhead,” a bearded giant twice Beau's size, who had knocked out ranking heavyweights in saloons and was acknowledged to be the East Side's top bar fighter. McMartin stood by, puffing on his pipe, as the two wheeled round and round on a dark side street, Pinhead slamming Beau to the ground, picking him up to congratulate him (“You've got a lot of guts, kid”) then flinging him against a tenement wall.

In his pinstriped suits and corporate ties, he was always fighting someone and he was gracious in defeat. One night he showed up late at
Elaine's
and cheerfully announced that he had just been
knocked cold by the brother of a jewel thief in
K.C. Li's Restaurant
in the West Village. He would drop out of sight on occasion, then show up with fresh cuts and swollen cheekbones, alluding to a score he had had to settle in central Harlem.

One night, at a restaurant on Bleecker Street, a bedraggled poet came in from the street and sat down at our table. He recognized McMartin, had read a piece of his on Baudelaire and wanted to discuss it. When Beau asked him to leave, he refused.

“Now look,” said Beau, puffing himself up. “Don't make me repeat myself.”

The poet ignored him and decided to stay for dinner. The air went out of Beau who picked at his food morosely and said: “If there's anything I can't
stand
, it's someone who's above fighting.”