‘Someone’s fucking me around,’ I said out loud, and felt my boil burst.
Then I was off and running again.
I moved at speed through the first-floor vestibule where a dozing flunkey stirred too late, through the antiques and gadgetry of the tall inner chamber, and right up to the double doors of the bedroom. I seized both knobs—and tugged… Fielding sat at the foot of the bed in a black dressing-gown, unstartled. Behind him, naked on the sheets, face averted, lay the hard dark body of a young boy.
Now I’m as shocked as the next guy when I get a glimpse of another’s true appetites, but I was all fired up by then and I just thought, So he’s a faggot too, is he? Right.
‘Come here.’
‘Something the matter, Slick?’
He didn’t look fazed, I’ll give him that. He even yawned and scratched his hair as he closed the door behind him. ‘The script,’ I said.
‘Yeah, don’t you love it?’
‘It’s a disaster and you know it.’
‘… How so?’
‘The stars, the stars! They’ll never touch that shit. It’s all over.’
‘Forgive me, Slick,’ he said, pouring coffee from the tray, ‘but you’re betraying your inexperience here. You want some? Take a drink. The stars are all signed up. They’ll do it. Or our attorneys move in on this. You just have to assert yourself, John. You wanted the realism. God damn it, that’s why I went with you.’
‘That’s not realism. That’s — it’s vandalism.’
‘Don’t you see what we’re sitting on here, Slick? Good Money will be the only movie of the year, the decade, the era that will show the real delirium of film, the nakedness of actors, what it does to —’
‘You’ve got the wrong guy. I can’t work like this. Now I’m not fooling around. Doris goes. That bitch is in turnaround. She’s sick in the head. I’ll get the script I need — I’ll get my man in, don’t worry. Give Doris her dough and kick her down the stairs.’
Fielding paused and looked away. Here was a man who sees his deepest and most mysterious plans undermined, messed up, blundered with. He said lightly, ‘Don’t you think Doris should hear this?’
‘Sure. Call her.’
‘I’ll do that.’ And he called her. ‘Oh, Doris?’ he said.
And Doris Arthur came out of the bedroom wearing nothing but a pair of cool pants … Now, lit up as I was, this had to be registered and absorbed — and a compelling sight it was too. She walked over to the breakfast trolley, loosely swinging her arms with the ease of a seaside nine-year-old. For she had nothing to hide, nothing, nothing. The pants, on the other hand — and these were useful pants I’m talking about, useful by fetishist standards, let alone feminist ones— the pants contained a good deal: the high trembling rump, the frontal tussock with its own curious pendency, like a plum in a handkerchief waiting to be shined and shared. I suppose (I thought), I suppose she’ll get proper tits when she has children, and then the, and then the whole —
‘Okay now — right. Yeah,’ I said, ‘stick to fiction, Doris. You fucked it. You’re out. Listen,’ I told Fielding, ‘it’s this simple. She goes or I go. It’s me or your chick. Jesus, if Caduta read one word of that crap. Or Lorne!’
‘They’re reading it now,’ he said. ‘I had copies limoed over this morning. You, Caduta, Lorne, Spunk, Butch.’
‘Okay,’ I said. This was my move, my shot. You can do it only once and you have to mean it. ‘Now there’s going to be a shitstorm from all four directions. And you’re going to handle it, pal, because I’m flying out tonight. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m not coming back. I don’t care. I’ll go back to C.L. & S. and make commercials and wait for the right deal. She goes or I go. She goes. Do it, or I’m walking out of here for ever.’
Fielding sat tight in his chair. Doris drank coffee unconcernedly, holding the cup with both hands. I turned.
And I walked. Down the long room, past the sofas, the glazed tables. On either side of the far door grey circuitry simmered, key banks and function consoles, a jukeboxful of floppy disks, the many screens showing printouts and readings in squat robot type… This walk to the door, I thought — it’s good. Keep going. You’re on the right track. I do mean it. I’ll walk through the door and I’ll keep walking, all the way to England, and I’ll never come back.