‘Lorne,’ I said. ‘Lorne! Lorne? Oh Lorne?’
‘Rubies, diamonds, emeralds, pearls, and an amethyst worth one-and-a-half million dollars.’
‘Lorne.’
‘Speak your mind, John.’
‘Lorne. If Gary’s so rich, who cares if he’s got a couple of million dollars’ worth of heroin in the kitchen?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘It cuts down on the drama, no? Think a minute. Think a second. If Gary is rich, then so is Doug. Of course they give the heroin back. No problem. No film.’
‘Bullshit! Garfield wants to give the heroin back. But the other guy, Doug you call him, he wants to keep it. Why?’
‘Yeah, why.’
‘Jealousy, John, jealousy. He’s jealous of Garfield.’
For twenty minutes Lorne talked about jealousy, how powerful and widespread it was, and how a man like Garfield (I think he even said Sir Garfield at some point) was especially likely to promote such a feeling in one as low, as weak, as vile as Doug—Garfield, with his connoisseurship, helicopter pad, erudition, Barbadian hideaway, and all the rest. This took another twenty minutes.
‘Plus,’ said Lorne, ‘he’s jealous of what I do for Butch.’
‘Why? He can’t be that jealous if he’s fucking her too.’
‘I’m glad you raised that. You know, John, I don’t think — and I never have thought — that it’s dramatically convincing that he should, that he should fuck her too, John.’
I stared heavily at him.
‘It makes no sense. It just doesn’t add up.’ Lorne laughed. ‘If Butch is fucking Garfield, how could she risk that happiness, that fulfilment, John, on a young punk like …’ He shook his head. ‘Okay.
Over that we can argue. But my scenario still holds. The way I see it, Butch has never had an orgasm before she meets this wonderful guy, who shows her a world she’s only dreamed of, a world of Othello jets and Caribbean mansions, a world of…’
I stared on. Time passed. Abruptly Lorne halted in mid-sentence, in mid-spangle, and said, ‘I think it’s time we talked about the death scene, John.’
‘… What death scene?’
‘Why, Lord Garfield’s,’ said Lorne Guyland. ‘This is how it happens. The mob guys, they’re torturing me, naked as I am. I fought like crazy but there were fifteen of the bastards. They want the heroin — they also want my cultural treasures from all over the world. But I tell them nothing. Now. As these cocksuckers torture me, Butch and Caduta are forced to watch. Maybe they’re nude too. I’m not sure. John, you might think about, about that. And these two women, as they see me, suffering, silent, naked, this guy who’s given them everything and who’s the greatest fuck they ever had in their goddam lives — these women, these simple, nude women, they forget their rivalry and weep in each other’s arms. Credits.’
‘Lorne,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to run.’
In fact it was another hour before Thursday let me out. The script conference ended with Lorne shrugging his robe to the floor and asking me, with tears in his eyes, ‘Is this the body of an old man?’ I said nothing. The answer to Lorne’s question, incidentally, was yes. I just flourished an arm and clattered down the stairs.
Thursday gave a tight smile as she opened the door. ‘Is he nude?’ she asked coldly.
‘Yeah he’s nude.’
‘Oh boy,’ said Thursday.
Why do they happen to me, these numb, flushed, unanswerable, these pornographic things? Well, I guess if you’re a pornographic person, then pornographic things happen to you.
I slanted west through the pretty East Side, with its decorative dustbins, the paunchy awnings of the low-slung stores, the smell of dark hot trash, and dined blind with Fielding Goodney and Doris Arthur in a loud and airless media restaurant just five blocks from bubbling Harlem. Doris’s script was being gimmicked by the typists. I kissed her hand. I called for champagne. I demanded to see the rough. Teasingly they said I’d have to wait-see. There was a lot of teasing going on, I suspected. I was too smudged with booze and travel to be sure. Lorne had given me lots of nonagenarian whiskey. I’ll say that for Lorne. With additional champagne we drank to Dot’s dream script. The place was full of filmstars, more filmstars. Why do I hang out with filmstars? I don’t even like filmstars. Jesus, the transparency of actors. The professionals, though, are seldom dangerous. It’s the actors of real life you want to watch — yeah, and the actresses. I developed a bad case of hiccups, more like a series of jabbing uppercuts to the chin. One of these blows actually ricked my neck and I had to lie on the floor beneath the table until it was okay to come up again. The angle of the lamp cord on the bar made me think I saw a hearing-aid cable extending from Fielding’s ear. My knee brushed Doris’s, once, twice, and I thought how wonderful it was when two young people started falling in love. I kept banging my way to and from the can, where they had incredible pictures of nude chicks from magazines all over the wall. I found a woman talking unhappily into a telephone and tried to cheer her up and went on trying even after her boyfriend or husband appeared from somewhere. I disliked his tone. He hurt my feelings. We had an altercation that soon resolved itself with me lying face-down in a damp bed of cardboard boxes at the foot of a hidden staircase. This was bad luck on the lady, who was obviously dead keen. Refreshed, I said hi to a few filmstars, briefly joining them at their tables with a selection of apposite one-liners. Invited into a back room, I shot the breeze with a married couple who said they ran the place. She was obviously a madame of some kind, not that this bothered me too much. She denied it. As Fielding led me back to our table I made a powerfully worded verbal pass at a salacious waitress, who appeared to be all for it but then came down with some deep sorrow in the kitchen, and when I burst through the double-doors to console her two men in sweat-grey T-shirts assured me there was nothing I could do for the poor child. I signed an autograph. Doris looked cute in her sleeping-bag outfit. Under the mussed hair and mace clothes she was just a big-eyed honey, a sack-addict and dick-follower, same as all the rest. She denied it too. You know, I really don’t like her. I hollered for fortified wines and drank quarts of tongue-frazzling black coffee. Doris cuddled me on the way to the door but she must have let go for an instant (perhaps I goosed her too eagerly) because I went off on a run that would have taken me all the way downtown—further, to the Village, to Martina Twain — if the dessert trolley hadn’t been there to check my sprint. The whole restaurant cheered me on as I fought my way out into the night.