Love and Death on Long Island Read online

  I knew at once from Rafferty’s fulsome tone of voice that no resentment lingered at the odiously condescending style in which he had been treated, fear of which had weighed upon me rather more than would ordinarily have been the case. Even so, plainly under no illusion that a call from such a source had been prompted by anything other than a request for some personal favour on my part, it was he who made the first move by politely enquiring how he might be of service to me.

  I thought of my absurd and exotic mission, the query I was about to put into words, and was instantly struck down with stage fright. My teeth seemed to have got in the way of my tongue, the tongue itself to have lain down on the job. I started to stammer, to correct myself in mid-sentence, to preface myself and preface the prefaces. What further caused me to panic was the fact that before every phrase that, as I hoped, would once and for all explain the matter there always appeared to be at least one other phrase that would have to take precedence, so that my speech soon became a proliferation of niggling, clustering subordinate clauses, each one of them crowned by the next, and that by still another, and so on, interminably.

  I was (I finally got around to saying) researching a novel, yes, after all these years, a new work of fiction, and I wondered how, for in this area I was a complete ignoramus, how or rather where one could find out what else a young film actor – or, indeed, actress – had done.

  ‘What else?’ Rafferty said after a long pause. ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow.’

  ‘What else – what films, what other films,’ the words tumbled out helter-skelter. ‘I mean to say,’ I continued, ‘films other than that in which one might have seen him.’

  ‘Is it a real actor we’re talking about?’

  Possibly it was that I suspected a cynically insinuating inference behind Rafferty’s question or possibly merely that, even from experience as yet so partial and limited, I had already come to acquire a lover’s cunning and guile; whichever, I contrived to parry the other’s suggestion of personal entanglement as nimbly as an old hand at the game. Alive to the juvenile thrills of subterfuge, I patiently explained that the protagonist of my novel was a film actor and that I myself had no idea where I would be able to find such clues as I might need to this kind of actor’s film bibliography, so to speak.

  ‘His filmography, do you mean?’

  I thought I could detect, along the unbearably hissing telephone line, if not a low laugh, then an audible smile.

  Nevertheless, just a moment after, my interlocutor was giving me the information I needed as though it were the most normal request in the world, listing reference works, books and magazines, from which such facts could be routinely obtained. And, having scribbled their names in a notepad that sat, until now virtually unused, beside the telephone, I abruptly wound up the conversation without even attempting to make the par-odically vague overture towards a future meeting that tends to be the classic coda of such encounters.

  For now that I had embarked unblushing on this adventure, I was becoming impatient to see its next phase through. The time for gnomic and unfruitful ruminations, for any coy and faint-hearted sidling about the object of my desire, was past; the time to take action, to assert my liberty, had arrived. I got up at once from my desk, slipped on my overcoat and stepped into the street.

  God, usually of the Realist School, does on occasion dabble in the abstract. The morning sky was dappled all over with tiny puffy cloudlets, clean and white and arrayed above my head in a disposition of such foursquare regularity it might almost have been made by a waffle machine; yet there was also an undercurrent of closeness to the air, as stifling as a heavy scent, that made me perspire under my coat. I walked so briskly that in a matter of just five or six minutes I had arrived at the newsagent’s shop I was seeking.

  Once inside it, however, I was dismayed by what at first seemed to me the hopelessness of the expedition. Not that the newsagent did not stock film magazines. On the contrary, there were shelvesful of them, mostly of a populist, gossip-mongering variety but with two or three containing learned (to all appearances, learned) articles on Russian, Spanish and Japanese film-makers of whom, naturally, I had never heard. I pulled them, one after the other, down from their shelves, rifled through them more and more cursorily and replaced them any old how.

  But fortune, as would often be the case, was on my side. For as I prepared to leave empty-handed, I noticed a little further off, in another section of the shelving altogether, where not much more than its spine was exposed, an American magazine (a miniature dollar sign was just visible in the top left-hand corner), on whose cover, or that fragment of it accessible to the eye, was a photograph, of no more than postage-stamp dimension, a photograph of Ronnie Bostock.

  Stealthily, lest someone, who could only be a fellow browser, were to observe what I was about (very afraid I was of appearing ridiculous), I eased the magazine off the shelf. It was called Teen Dream and Ronnie Bostock’s photograph was just one, and among the less prominently displayed, of several portrait photographs on its front cover. These, superimposed on a constellation of gaudily coloured stars, all of different sizes, all radiating out from the centre, were (so I surmised) of the popular young film actors of the day, actors with such names as Kirk and Shane and Ralph and Jordan and even, unless I had somehow misread the meaning, River. Under each of them, moreover, was a caption bristling with exclamation marks and no doubt intended to entice the casual reader into the magazine. ‘Why Kirk Says “I’ll Never Make An R-Rated Movie”!!!’ and ‘Ralph’s Storybook Romance!!!’ and ‘Could You Be The Girl Jordan Will Fall For???’ And, under Ronnie’s photograph, to which my eyes immediately darted, ‘20 Facts Ya Didn’t Know About Him!!’. As someone who did not know any facts at all about him as yet, I confess I felt a certain onset of excitement, galled as I was at the same time by the one already manifest fact that my own favourite had had to make do with only two instead of the regulation three exclamation marks.

  I opened the magazine. Its first page was devoted to a Message from the Editor, evidently a regular monthly feature. ‘Hi, there!’ this began. ‘Summer’s ended (a-a-a-a-aw!) but the fall’s here (yay!) and the time is right’n’ripe for some cozy fireside r’n’r – which means rest’n’relaxation or rock’n’roll, dependin’ on your mood!! All your favorites have been in a great mood since we last got together – and I’ve been in touch – I mean personal touch – with each’n’every one!!! Well now, just for starters – ‘My eyes glazed over. Were I to have to read one more word of such twaddle, I felt, I could not be accountable for my sanity. I turned the page. There, among the table of contents, was what I was looking for: ‘Ronnie Bostock: 20 Facts We Bet You Didn’t Know About Him. Page 36’; and there, as well, in a separate, boxed-in little column listing the magazine’s gallery of pin-ups, alongside Kirk and Shane, Ralph, Jordan and River, his name appeared again.

  I did not turn to page 36. Instead, I calmly closed the magazine, glanced along the rows and rows of publications, selected a motoring journal with an enormous red sports car, sleek and streamlined to a degree, practically thrusting its way off the cover, and in some embarrassment – an embarrassment no longer my own but that, not, I fancy, unskilfully assumed for the occasion, of a family man commissioned by his adolescent daughter to buy her reading matter of which he has more than once had cause to express the mildest and most affectionate form of disapproval – I handed my two purchases over to a disarmingly apathetic shop assistant and paid for them.

  In the street I wound my copy of Teen Dream into so tight a cylinder that no passer-by could have identified it and disposed of the motoring journal by dropping it into a litter bin very handily located just opposite the newsagent’s shop. Then, with a spring in my step, I hurried back up to my Hampstead home.

  *

  I stood in front of the looking-glass over the mantelpiece in my study. Teen Dream was lying, still unopened, unperused, on top of my thick sheaf of notes for Adagio. For a long, long time I stood thus, exa
mining my reflection. Finally, my motionless features creased into a gentle, recalcitrant smile; the ice was broken; the reflection smiled back. ‘If,’ I said to myself, ‘if I affect a certain style, if I strike a certain pose, it’s because I find it almost impossible to look at myself in the glass, even for the purpose of baring my soul, without at the same time straightening the knot of my tie.’ And then (but solely because it did happen to be crooked) I straightened the knot of my tie.

  Flushed and fertile with expectation, the expectation of at last grafting an objective reality on to a being who had not, not until now, not until this very instant, been any less spectral than the scrunched-up gargoyles’ faces that had haunted me in my sleep (and, oddly, haunted me no more), I turned to the magazine I had just bought. With a trembling hand I opened it at page 36. The first thing to catch my eye was the ‘pin-up’ on the page opposite. Ronnie (I.was on a first-name footing with him now) was shown in profile, rather à la Karsh, except that he had turned his head unsmilingly towards the camera, his chin resting in a somewhat stilted manner on the knuckles of his left hand, the thumb tucked lightly underneath as though ‘chucking’ it. He wore an unexpectedly bespoke-tailorish sort of white shirt with narrow, vertical blue-grey stripes; it would appear to have been just unpacked from its box on the evidence of an immaculate crease that my eye followed along the upper arm to the elbow and on to the generous cuff which, because of the overly stiff and starchy press, did not embrace as it might have the boy’s slender, hairless wrist; and around the rakishly unbuttoned collar, its two wide flaps even more rakishly upturned on the neck, hung a loosely knotted grey woollen tie. There was something about the shirt, the open collar and the woollen tie that conjured up the conventional image of the English public schoolboy. Something, too, about the pose, half in profile as it was, as though the model were bending over a chair, which made me think, hard as I struggled to expel a thought so squalid, of just such a schoolboy compelled by his fellows to receive a caning on his bared buttocks.

  His hair was longer, and seemed blonder, than in the film. It tumbled in underneath the turn-up of his collar at the nape of his neck with the odd, randomly uncombed tuft poking out over the top. His eyebrows, of a much darker shade than his hair, darker than by rights they ought to have been in someone so fair, and threaded by single strands of real auburn, softened the high-toned purity of his unlined brow. His marbly blue eyes might have been polished they shone so. Withal, this face was not a flawless one. Since his lips, slightly pursed, were closed, the teeth were concealed. But I remarked a spot, a minute beauty-spot, no doubt, just above the corner curl of his upper Up; and another, also located on the right half of his face, nestling beneath the nostril’s soft shell. Otherwise his complexion was quite perfect, captured by the photographer in all the poignant bloom of adolescence and looking (so it struck me) to having not yet suffered the coarsening attentions of a razor blade. He was – a fact I would never have believed possible – even more exquisite than on the cinema screen.

  I started to read, word for word, from the first line to the last, the accompanying article. It was couched in the same noisy, ejaculatory idiom that the Editor’s Message had been, but I had cast my scruples to the wind and I greedily devoured it. And how much I learned that was surprising to me. I learned, for example, that Ronnie had been born on the 8th of March, 1970, so that he was just twenty, at least three or four years older than I had once reckoned; born and brought up in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. That ‘his dad is Ronald, Sr, his mom is Lucille, kid sister Joanie and current pet a mixed-breed pooch named Strider’. That his favourite food was ‘fast food -I call it fast food ‘cos I have to fast after eating it!!’ That he preferred girls who ‘are sincere, romantic, have a sense of fun and who like me for myself – not just ‘cause I’m a star’. That he found making movies ‘neat’ but hated ‘all the razzmatazz – and specially all the waitin’ around you have to do!!’. And that he would kiss a girl on their first date together ‘only if she made it clear she wanted me to’. Besides his acting gifts, he was apparently ‘an accomplished jazz drummer’ whose greatest ambition was ‘to play the drums in an upcoming movie – preferably opposite Madonna!!!’ Had he ever been in love? ‘Who hasn’t?’ Pet hate? ‘Designer stubble.’ And his secret, unspoken fantasy? ‘To go to bat for the Mets.’

  I sat at the same desk where only lately I had laboured over the genesis of Adagio, intently reading and rereading each of the youth’s answers, interrogating them for any, not immediately tangible, clue that they might offer to his more latent psychology, even as the mute and unshakeable conviction was growing within me that the whole piece, questions and answers alike, could be nothing else but an outright fabrication on the part of the editor, doubtless with the passive collusion of Ronnie himself or his agent.

  Yet, no matter how questionable its provenance, this information was all I had to work upon for now and I feasted off every last crumb with a zest of appetite that few books had given me lately.

  Most significant, though, was what I learned about the lad’s professional life. It transpired that Ronnie had ‘made his showbiz debut’ advertising ‘sneakers’ on television commercials, had been cast in some ‘popular, long-running sitcom’, whatever that was, and had to date completed just three films, that which I had already seen and two others, tersely and enigmatically titled both of them: Tex-Mex and Skid Marks.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I rose from my desk and stepped into the perennially gloomy hallway and over to a small, oblong combined-table-and-umbrella-stand on which, the evening before, I had left my copy of Time Out. I quickly ran through its pages to the one on which were listed the films on current release. Neither of the two titles appeared on it; and, of course, I was not to know how long ago the films had been made or whether in fact they were still in circulation. For the moment, there was nothing for me to do but return to my study and continue perusing that inexpressibly foolish but precious text. And when I had finished, when I felt I had extracted from it all it had to give me, I unlocked a desk drawer and placed the copy of Teen Dream inside it, face downwards.

  What differentiates a true obsessive from the mere addict, the alcoholic or the unrequited lover, whose monomania will eventually seep into every vacant pocket of his existence, until it comes not merely to coincide with that existence but actually to expand at such a rate, to such a monstrous dimension, that it ends by encompassing, overwhelming, it, making the existence just a part of the mania as once that mania had been just a part of the existence – what, I say, differentiates a true obsessive is that although, as was true of me now, he does not seek and would vigorously reject a remedy for his mania, he yet contrives to contain the hold it has upon him within an organically determined perimeter, where it may all the more deliciously suppurate. And this brings in its train a sense of exacerbated self-mastery, an almost intoxicating sensation of power over both the obsession itself and the outer world: the first because, so far contained, it must come to seem for ever containable; the second because the world will remain always unaware of its influence over him, so seamlessly decorous, so impenetrably respectable, even bourgeois, becomes the façade he erects between it and himself.

  In the weeks that followed, my obsession with the young actor grew apace, demanding more and more of my time and my energies. Yet, by indulging it to the fullest, I was also alleviating it. My novel, now so radically transformed it bore only a titular relation to the original project, flowed as fluently from my pen as though the complete narrative had somehow been miniaturised in advance and injected into the nib and it were merely a matter of posing the pen over the paper, teasing each word, like a droplet of ink, off its tip and having it spill on to the blank page. Effortlessly, and at an earlier stage in the process than had ever been the case with me, I passed from annotation to composition, manoeuvred with ease, word upon word, sentence upon sentence, the labyrinth of my fiction. If it was writing itself, of all the successive stages at
tendant on the production of a novel, which had always been the least painful and laborious for me, I had never in the past known such a state of jubilation and grace.

  I worked exclusively in the morning, however, my afternoons being reserved for Ronnie. Having learned, having all but memorised, those ‘20 Facts’ about the actor, I wanted now to learn everything I could. And on making enquiries at the shop where I had bought Teen Dream, as to where I might find other American magazines – I was careful to leave their precise category discreetly unspecified – I was informed of a newsagent’s in Soho that was, I was told, frequented by half the city’s émigré population.

  Off I sped, then, to this cosmopolitan emporium, where one actually did have the impression of all the world’s languages being spoken – in print, at least. Thousands, literally thousands, of publications, ceiling-high and classified by nationality, were racked along three of the shop’s four walls. And the American section, so comprehensive that it alone seemed to take up practically a whole wall, was further subdivided according to the specialised interest to which each type of magazine catered: News, News Analysis. Sports, Fashion, People and, usefully arrayed on adjacent racks, Movies and Teens.

  For the cinema section alone it would scarcely have been worth leaving Hampstead. There was just one magazine (whose name, Video, the classicist that I was could not help for a split second reading as an elementary but in the context unexpectedly literate allusion to the Latin, before it dawned on me that it must refer to the current fad for videotape recorders) that contained anything at all about Ronnie Bostock: a small, ill-reproduced colour photograph from Tex-Mex in which, his hair dishevelled, his jeans grubby and torn, his face a livid mask of terror beneath a balefully luminous moon, he was being dragged feet first under a barbed-wire fence by a pair of Mexican-looking youths, both of them, as I noted, swarthily handsome brutes.