Three Balconies (24 page)

In such situations, when confronted with someone of unprepossessing stature, but strong convictions, he generally backed off.

I had no reason to doubt his courage, but on reflection I can't think of a time when he actually came out on top in one of his many brawls. Which leads to the melancholy conclusion that actually
winning
fights was not on his agenda.

For an embarrassing number of years, and no doubt to the detriment of the magisterial plays I had planned to write, I was completely preoccupied with sex – hot, immediate, relentless, boundary-breaking, personal and anonymous, long-and-shortterm, rough and gentle. I don't recall this being in a spirit of conquest, but I can't prove that it wasn't. More likely, it was designed to make up for some long period of deprivation in this area. I know it was a journey of some kind, through exquisite and for me unexplored terrain. Nor did I experience the hollow feeling that many insist must accompany such activity. It worked out nicely, and I got out, so to speak, when I was ahead.

Despite his unsettling last words – “There's nothing you can do for me” – my father left me some money, enough to buy but not furnish a small apartment in a midtown high-rise, which became a base for me. My territory, as it were, was a three-block area contiguous to my building. I focused on women who worked in the bank
and the optometrist's shop on the ground floor – and in an upscale boutique I could see from my bedroom window. The advantages I had were that I was available and totally committed to the enterprise. Striving to avoid the mistake of my marriage, I generally chose situations in which I felt I had a slight advantage. Women who were attractive but not overly so. Women from the boroughs who had just discovered books and theatre. Others who were new arrivals from foreign countries. It's fair to say that I preyed on women, but also to point out that often as not I discovered that I was being preyed upon. This was particularly true of a disastrous affair I had with a woman from Ecuador. I thought I had ingeniously picked her up at a delicatessen – only to learn that she had researched my work at the library, was familiar with my brief entry in
Who's Who
– and had been sitting at the same table for several weeks in the hope that I would drop by.

Beau seemed to enjoy women, but was less relentless in his pursuit of them. His affairs had a rueful caste to them. When I think of him in this context he is sitting in the gloom of the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel at some defeated hour of the day, seeking comfort from a sturdy co-worker in tweeds. But there were more spirited times for him and I envied him several of the women he knew – a furiously attractive slip of an actress with an underbite and straw-colored hair who followed him about the city, trailing furs and money – and a dark-haired fashion model with a pornographic face who disappeared with him on a motorcycle one night and was never seen again.

He showed up at my door one afternoon with a huge Swedish woman in tow who spoke no English; with a finger to his lips, he cautioned me to be quiet, as if I were about to shout out something disruptive. Unnecessarily, she did cartwheels to be enticing, then undressed and lay back on the bed to receive us. We threw off our clothes swiftly and comedically. Unused to sharing women, I had trouble getting an erection. Beau, too, had his difficulties, the woman was unhelpful, and the two of us labored fruitlessly throughout the afternoon. At one point, in a tangle of flesh, he
whispered: “Put it in my mouth.” Lapsing idiotically into an English accent, I said: “I don't think so, old boy.” It's important here to catch accurately the spirit of his offer, which was that of a soldier on a battlefield, offering to help out a wounded comrade. Or so I felt at the time. Glumly, we proceeded on our barren path . . . and then later, as we dressed forlornly in the darkness, Beau rescued the occasion with a single statement: “That woman can
never
claim she didn't get her pussy sucked.”

There were the two houses, the cars, the school tuition, and for many years and through some sleight of hand, Beau managed to keep this precarious vessel afloat. He lasted an average of two years at his jobs; from the moment he was hired, it was as if he would set about to have himself fired – by slipping off to Morocco or Spain on trips that were only vaguely related to his work. In one case, while he was working at a supposedly full-time job, he signed on for a role as a pimp in a daytime soap opera. When the patience of his employer ran out, he would, within a short period, find work elsewhere. His abilities were not unique, however; attractive young men came along who could do very little with just as much facility. He ran through jobs in music, publishing, advertising. I'd always thought it surprising that he didn't drift off to Hollywood, where men whose talents were even more amorphous had been known to flourish.

The opportunities petered out eventually – he had developed a reputation – and I began to feel some pressure from him to do something about it, almost as if he were my responsibility. I loaned – or gave – him money, which was annoying but easy enough. And I manufactured some work by paying him to translate French plays, which he did with some skill. But obviously, I was not one of the rich and powerful men to whom he had always been able to attach himself. This not only disappointed but irritated him. It was a relief to me when Sergei Volkov came into his life.

He was a huge man in both size and vision who had built a fortune in real estate in the Far West. He had also written an opera that was performed in Seattle and a sprawling novel of the
Ukraine that had more merit than the criticisms let on. Feeling hemmed in, socially and artistically, he had moved to Manhattan to establish himself as a figure in East Coast culture. With his unfailing antennae, Beau had managed to meet him and to get us invited to a party Volkov was giving in celebration of his acquisition of a major art gallery in Soho.

It wasn't that we did much once we were there, but I have a picture of us not so much entering as sweeping into Volkov's lavish downtown penthouse, and of our flamboyant arrival catching the eye of the industrialist. Halfway along in the festivities, in a swirl of vodka and caviar, Volkov made a slighting comment about a play I had written. (“It has no center. . . .”) When I took offense, a cry went up from his stunning wife who produced a pair of Tsarist sabres, handing one to each of us and encouraging us to use them. When a circle of guests formed around us, the host and I began to lunge at one another with the priceless weapons. The mood was playful – we both had a sense of theatre – but there was the chance of a dangerous escalation. Wondering how to disengage myself gracefully, I looked at Beau for some help – he knew Volkov, I didn't – but characteristically, his eyes were elsewhere. I eventually managed to withdraw and to leave the party alone and without apparent injury. When I last saw Beau, he was chatting with the Volkovs. As I prepared for bed, I noticed a perfect ring of bite marks on my shoulders. Thinking back, I recalled that Volkov had sunk his teeth into me at the door in what I thought of at the time as a show of Slavic camaraderie. To be on the safe side, I had myself treated with a tetanus shot at the emergency room of Lenox Hill Hospital, which was inconveniencing. But there was comfort in knowing that the weight of responsibility I felt for Beau had passed to another.

 

With Beau more or less accounted for, I continued along on a pleasant and purposeless path, contriving to have Hollywood pick up the bills for my wastrel life. Somewhere along the line, the notion took root in this country that Hollywood corrupts writers. My
career is living proof that the reverse is true. I found more gentlemen in Hollywood than I did in theatre and publishing, and the West Coast variety of scoundrel had at least some size and panache. It's unlikely that I would have written
Anna Karenina
if I had stayed away from Warner Brothers.

My slender responsibilities as a film person enabled me to continue living in Manhattan. A rough goal was to stumble into a commercial success or two, dissolve and show up as an aging roué, entertaining the local shopgirls on the patio of a villa in the South of France. David Niven, had the poor man lived, would have been perfect for the role. And then one Sunday night, a time I generally reserve for sober introspection, I attended a worthy but numbingly boring documentary on the disadvantaged of Guatemala and met Helen. Warm green eyes, a wink and a chuckle and there, with no sense of loss whatever, went the South of France. She gave up her apartment, moved into mine and we divided our time between the city and a cottage we bought together on Morris Island. Part of her enormous appeal was that she was not writing a screenplay.

 

I saw Beau from time to time, clearing people out of Volkov's path at various restaurants and functions. He waved at me once as if he were a national politician and I was someone he vaguely recalled as having supported him at the grass roots level. Volkov had given him an office, several secretaries and a handsome budget to develop books and films related to Beau's favorite themes. I sensed trouble ahead when he called to tell me the ones he had chosen. I had once worked for a shrewd publisher who kept a list posted on his office wall of editorial subjects that were never to be presented to him since he considered them to be commercially ruinous. Beau had selected three of them. Months later, handsomely embossed but unsold volumes dealing with bullfighting and the I.R.A began to pile up in Volkov's warehouse. Not too long afterward, McMartin told me he had attended the screening of a Volkov/ LeVyne film that dealt with log-rolling in the State of Washington. (“It did not go well.”)

McMartin and I joined Beau one night at
Wally and Joseph's
Restaurant on West Forty-Ninth Street. He was in a despondent mood and reported that he and Volkov had parted company.

“I should have stuck with you, Cliff,” he said, as if the Russian and I had waged a furious struggle for his services.

For most of the evening, he carried on a dark conversation with himself, breaking out of it now and then to rattle off the names of writers whose careers he felt were on the wane.

“To think,” he said, at a later point, “that this could have happened to the great Beau LeVyne. . . .”

In an aside to me, McMartin asked, with genuine curiosity: “Why is it the
great
Beau LeVyne?”

In the men's room, as Beau and I washed up, he carried on about Volkov's treachery and broken promises. When I started for the door, he stepped in front of me, sealing us off for the moment in a fluorescent capsule of tile and concrete. I had seen the look of hatred on his face before, but it had never been directed at me.

“You're in my way, Beau,” I said, with forced equanimity.

After a moment or two in which the air was murderous, he said “Sorry,” as if he had accidentally sipped my drink. Then he stepped aside.

 

He entered into a dark phase after the Volkov experience. I learned from McMartin that he had begun to collect debts for a shylock whose specialization was lending money to writers and artists who were down on their luck. This, of course, assured him of a large and steady clientele. McMartin, an unlikely gambler, considering his slim earnings as a critic, had fallen behind in some payments and Beau had been assigned his case for collection. After a single visit to the critic proved unproductive, Beau made threatening calls to McMartin's mother in a nursing home. When I mentioned this to Beau at some later point, he shook his head in awe – and admiration.

“Cliff, you've completely missed the point. It was McMartin who called
my
mother in a nursing home.”

Beau disappeared for awhile, during which time I received a card from him in Tangiers, saying he had been doing some research in the area. Soon afterward, he dropped round to our apartment to meet Helen and left after a short visit. I found a rectangular-shaped gift package on the dining room table, which I took to be a record album. It turned out to be a block of hashish, so exquisitely chiseled it might have passed for a work of art. I'm not a stranger to drugs, but as it happened, he had not picked one of my favorites. Still, it seemed a pity to waste it. I tried to make a gift of it to a street friend of mine whose permanent headquarters is an alleyway in the East Nineties.

“That's all very fine,” said Spofford, after listening to me sing the praises of the exotic substance, “but I sure could use a little blow.”

 

Helen and I began to spend most of our time on Morris Island, losing track not only of Beau but of the city as well. McMartin told me Beau had been seen around town with a man in a camouflage suit who literally threw money in every direction, fondled women indiscriminately and tossed balls of cocaine to the fish in the open tank of a Chinese restaurant on Mott Street. Soon afterward, I saw an item in the newspaper saying that Beau and his companion had been arrested and indicted on two counts of running guns and selling cocaine.

Literary friends gathered round after he had been released on bail. I was invited to a party that had been given to boost his spirits. He seemed peaceful and resigned as if some troublesome burden he carried had finally been removed. And he appeared mildly to enjoy the celebrity that had been conferred upon him. He regaled the group with stories of his incarceration at the Manhattan correctional facility, the intolerable food, the nights sleeping on the floor alongside AIDS victims. Listening to him, you would have thought he had gotten himself arrested and was off to prison on behalf of the literary community – so that he could report back on what it was like.

“My God,” McMartin said to him, “you're the only one here who's actually
done
something.”

 

The arrest seemed to draw him closer to Heidi. They joined us at the beach for dinner at our cottage. Beau was solicitous to his wife and she appeared to welcome his new concern for her. They seemed the very model of a civilized '80s couple. I envisioned future dinners for the four of us around the fire. Late in the evening, he took me aside and showed me a treatment he had written for a proposed film to be called “Bills.” I glanced at it and saw that it began with a former athlete and Ivy League star disgustedly throwing his mail up in the air and saying, “Bills, bills, bills.”