Death Is a Lonely Business Read online

  “I wait for phone calls, myself,” I said. “Anything’s better than that!”

  “You actually understand.” He stared at me with eyes that burned the clothes off my body.

  I nodded.

  “Come visit me sometime.” He nodded at the faraway Carousel Apartments where the calliope groaned and lamented over something vaguely resembling “Beautiful Ohio.” “I’ll tell you about Iris Tree, Sir Beerbohm Tree’s daughter, who used to live in those apartments, the half-sister of Carol Reed, the British director. Aldous Huxley sometimes drops up, you might see him.”

  He saw my head jerk at that and knew I was on the hook.

  “You like to meet Huxley? Well, behave yourself’—he caressed the words—“and you just might.”

  I was filled with an inexpressible and insufferable need that I had to force myself to repress. Huxley was a madness in my life, a terrible hunger. I longed to be that bright, that witty, that toweringly supreme. To think, I might meet him.

  “Come visit.” Hopwood’s hand had crept to his coat pocket. “And I will introduce you to the young man I love best in all the world.”

  I forced myself to glance away, as I had often glanced off from something Crumley or Constance Rattigan said.

  “Well, well,” murmured John Wilkes Hopwood, his Germanic mouth curling with delight, “the young man is embarrassed. It’s not what you think. Look! No, stare.”

  He held out a crumpled glossy photograph. I tried to take it but he held it gripped firmly, his thumb placed over the head of the person in the photo.

  The rest, sticking out from under the thumb, was the most beautiful body of a young man I had ever seen in my life.

  It reminded me of photos I had once seen of the statue of Antinous, the lover of Hadrian, in the lobby of the Vatican Museum. It reminded me of the boy David. It reminded me of a thousand young men’s bodies wrestling up and down the beach from my childhood to here, sunburned and mindless, wildly happy without true joy. A thousand summers were compacted down into this one single photograph, as John Wilkes Hopwood held it with his thumb hiding the face to protect it from revelations.

  “Isn’t it the single most incredible body in the history of the world?” It was a proclamation.

  “And it’s mine, all mine. Mine to have and hold,” he said. “No, no, don’t flinch. Here.”

  He took his thumb off the face of the incredibly lovely young man.

  And the face of the old hawk, the ancient German warrior, the African tank general appeared.

  “My God,” I said. “It’s you.”

  “Me,” said John Wilkes Hopwood.

  And threw his head back with that merciless grin that flashed sabers and promised steel. He laughed silently, in honor of the old days, before films talked.

  “It is I, rather,” he said.

  I took off my glasses, cleaned them, and looked closer.

  “No. No fake. No trick photography.”

  It was like those contest picture puzzles they used to print in newspapers when I was a boy. The faces of presidents, cut in three sections and mixed. Here Lincoln’s chin, there Washington’s nose, and above, Roosevelt’s eyes. Mixed and remixed with thirty other presidents you had to recut and repaste to win a fast ten bucks.

  But here a young man’s Greek-statue body was fused to the neck, head, and face of a hawk-eagle-vulture ascending into villainy, madness, or both.

  Triumph of the Will was in John Wilkes Hopwood’s eyes as he stared over my shoulder, as if he had never seen this damned beauty before.

  “You think it’s a trick, eh?”

  “No.” But I stole a look at his woolen suit, his fresh clean shirt, his neatly tied old-school tie, his vest, his cufflinks, his bright belt buckle, the silver bike clips around his ankles.

  I thought of Cal the barber and Scott Joplin’s missing head.

  John Wilkes Hopwood stroked his vest and legs with rust-freckled fingers.

  “Yes”—he laughed—“it’s covered up! So you’ll never know unless you come visit, will you? Whether the old half-gone-to-seed Richard has-been really is the keeper of the Summer Boy flame, eh? How can it be that a miracle of youngness is mated with an old sea-wolf? Why does Apollo lie down with—”

  “Caligula?” I blurted, and froze.

  But Hopwood didn’t mind. He laughed and nodded as he touched my elbow.

  “Caligula—yes!—will now speak, while lovely Apollo hides and waits! Will power is the answer. Will power. Health foods, yes, are the center of actors’ lives! We must keep our bodies as well as our spirits up! No white bread, no Nestlé’s Crunch bars—”

  I flinched, and felt the last of the bars melting in my pockets.

  “No pies, cakes, no hard liquor, not even too much sex. In bed nights by ten. Up early, a run along the beach, two hours in the gym every day, every day of your life, all your friends gym instructors, and two hours of bicycling a day. Every day for thirty years. Thirty years! At the end of which time you stroll by God’s guillotine! He chops off your crazed old eagle’s head and plants it on a sunburned, forever golden, young man’s body! What a price I have paid, but worth it. Beauty is mine. Sublime incest. Narcissus par excellence. I need no one else.”

  “I believe that,” I said.

  “Your honesty will be your death.”

  He put his photo, like a flower, in his pocket.

  “You still don’t believe.”

  “Let me see that again.”

  He handed it to me.

  I stared. And as I stared, the surf rolled on the dark shore just last night.

  From the surf, a naked man suddenly appeared.

  I winced and blinked.

  Was this the body, this the man who had come out of the sea to frighten me when Constance Rattigan’s back was turned?

  I wanted to know. I could only say, “Do you know Constance Rattigan?”

  He stiffened. “Why do you ask?”

  “I saw her name at Shrank’s outside, typed. I thought maybe you were ships that passed in the night.”

  Or bodies? Him coming out of the surf at three a.m. some night soon, as she plunged in?

  His Teutonic mouth shaped itself to merely haughty.

  “Our film Crossed Sabers was the smash of 1926 across America. Our affair made headlines that summer. I was the greatest love of her life.”

  “Were you—” I started to say. Were you the one, I thought, and not the director who drowned himself, who cut her hamstrings with your sword, so she couldn’t walk for a year?

  But then, last night, I hadn’t really had a chance to look for the scars. And the way Constance ran, it was all lies told a hundred years back.

  “You should go see A. L. Shrank, a concerned man, pure Zen, all wise,” he said, climbing back on his bike. “How so? He told me to give you these.”

  He took from his other pocket a handful of candy wrappers, twelve of them, neatly paperclipped together, mostly Clark, Crunch, and Power House. Things I had mindlessly strewn in the beach winds and someone had picked up.

  “He knows all about you,” said Mad Otto of Bavaria, and laughed with the soundtrack off.

  I took the candy wrappers shamefacedly, and felt the extra ten pounds sag around my middle as I held these flags of defeat.

  “Visit me,” he said. “Come ride the carousel. Come see if innocent boy David is truly married to old evil Caligula, eh?”

  And he biked away, a tweed suit under a tweed hat, smiling and looking only ahead.

  I walked back to A. L. Shrank’s melancholy museum and squinted through the dusty window.

  There was a toppling stack of bright orange, lemon, chocolate-brown candy wrappers filed on a small table near the sunken sofa.

  Those can’t all be mine, I thought.

  They are, I thought. I’m plump. But then—he’s nuts.

  I went to find ice cream.

  “Crumley?”

  “I thought my name was Offisa Pup.”

  “I think I’ve got a
line on the murderer himself!”

  There was a long ocean silence while the policeman put down the phone, tore his hair, and picked the phone up again.

  “John Wilkes Hopwood,” I said.

  “You forget,” said the police lieutenant, “there have been no murders yet. Only suspicions and possibilities. There’s a thing called a courtroom and another thing called proof. No proof, no case, and they throw you out on your butt so fast you’re stopped up for weeks!”

  “You ever seen John Wilkes Hopwood with his clothes off?” I asked.

  “That did it.”

  Offisa Pup hung up on me.

  It was raining when I came out of the both.

  Almost immediately the telephone rang as if knowing I was there. I snatched at it and for some reason yelled, “Peg!”

  But there was only a sound of rain, and soft breathing, miles away.

  I won’t ever answer this phone again, I thought.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” I yelled. “Come get me, you bastard.”

  I hung up.

  My God, I thought, what if he heard and came over to visit?

  Idiot, I thought.

  And the phone rang for a last time.

  I had to answer, maybe to apologize to that breathing far away and tell it to ignore my insolence.

  I lifted the receiver.

  And heard a sad lady five miles off somewhere in Los Angeles.

  Fannie.

  And she was crying.

  “Fannie, my God, is that you?”

  “Yes, oh, yes, Lord God in heaven,” she wheezed, she gasped, she floundered. “Coming upstairs almost killed me. Haven’t climbed stairs since 1935. Where have you been? The roof’s caved in. Life’s over. Everybody’s dead. Why didn’t you tell me? Oh, God, God, this is terrible. Can you come over? Jimmy. Sam. Pietro.” She did the litany and the pressure of my guilt crushed me against the side of the phone booth. “Pietro, Jimmy, Sam. Why did you lie?”

  “I didn’t lie, I just shut up!” I said.

  “And now Henry!” she cried.

  “Henry! My God. He isn’t—”

  “Fell downstairs.”

  “Alive? Alive?” I yelled.

  “In his room, yes, thank God. Wouldn’t go to the hospital. I heard him fall, ran out. That’s when I found out what you didn’t say. Henry lying there, swearing, naming names. Jimmy. Sam. Pietro. Oh, why did you bring death here?”

  “I didn’t, Fannie.”

  “Come prove it. I’ve got three mayonnaise jars full of quarters. Take a cab, send the driver up, I’ll pay him out of the jars! And when you get here, how will I know when you knock at the door it’ll be you?”

  “How do you know it’s me, even now, Fannie, on the phone?”

  “I don’t know,” she wailed. “Isn’t that awful? I don’t know.”

  “Los Angeles,” I said to the taxi driver, ten minutes later. “Three mayonnaise jars’ worth.”

  “Hello, Constance? I’m in a phone booth across from Fannie’s. We’ve got to get her out of here. Can you come? She’s really scared now.”

  “For good reasons?”

  I stared across at the tenement and judged how many thousand shadows were crammed in it, top to bottom.

  “This time for sure.”

  “Get over there. Stand guard. I’ll be there in half an hour. I won’t come up. You argue her down, damn it, and we’ll get her away. Jump.”

  The way Constance slammed down the phone shot me out of the booth and almost got me run down by a car racing across the street.

  The way I knocked on her door, she believed it was me. She threw the door wide and I saw what was almost a crazed elephant, eyes wild, hair in disarray, acting as if a rifle had just shot her through her head.

  I launched her back into her chair and threw the icebox wide, trying to decide whether mayonnaise or wine would help. Wine.

  “Get that in you,” I commanded, and suddenly realized my cab driver was in the door behind me, having followed me upstairs, thinking I was a deadbeat and trying to escape.

  I grabbed and handed him one mayonnaise jar full of quarters.

  “That enough?” I said.

  He did a quick estimate, like someone guessing jelly beans in a vat in a store window, sucked his teeth, and ran off with the coins rattling.

  Fannie was busy emptying the wine glass. I refilled it and sat down to wait. At last she said, “Someone’s been outside my door every night now for two nights. They come and go, go and come, not like ever before, they stop, they breathe out and in, my God, what are they doing outside an old collapsed ruin of an opera singer fat lady’s door at midnight, it can’t be rape, can it, they don’t rape 380-pound sopranos, do they?”

  And here she began to laugh so long and so hard I couldn’t tell if it was hysteria or an amazed and self-surprising humor. I had to beat her on the back to stop the laughs and change the color in her face and give her more wine.

  “Oh, my, my, my,” she gasped. “It’s good to laugh. Thank God, you’re here. You’ll protect me, won’t you? I’m sorry I said what I said. You didn’t bring that dreadful thing with you and leave it outside my door. It’s just the hound of the Baskervilles, hungry, come in on his own to scare Fannie.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Jimmy and Pietro and Sam, Fannie,” I said, and gulped my wine. “I just didn’t want to read obits to you, all at once. Look here. Constance Rattigan will be downstairs in a few minutes. She wants you to come stay a few days and—”

  “More secrets,” cried Fannie, eyes wide. “Since when have you known her? And, anyway, it’s no use. This is my home. If I left here, I’d waste away, just die. I have my recordings.”

  “We’ll take them with.”

  “My books.”

  “I’ll carry them down.”

  “My mayonnaise, she wouldn’t have the right brand.”

  “I’ll buy it.”

  “She wouldn’t have room.”

  “Even for you, Fannie, yes.”

  “And then what about my new calico cat …?”

  And so it went until I heard the limousine shrug in against the curb below.

  “So that’s it, is it, Fannie?”

  “I feel fine, now, now that you’re here. Just tell Mrs. Gutierrez to come up and stay a while after you leave,” said Fannie cheerily.

  “Where does all this false optimism come from, when an hour ago you were doomed?”

  “Dear boy, Fannie’s fine. That dreadful beast isn’t coming back, I just know, and anyway, anyway—”

  With a terrible sense of timing, the entire tenement shifted in its sleep.

  The door to Fannie’s room whispered on its hinges.

  As if shot a final time, Fannie sat up and almost gagged on her terror.

  I was across the room in an instant and threw the door wide, to stare out into the long valley of the hall, a mile in this direction, a mile in that; endless dark tunnels filled with jet streams of night.

  I listened and heard the plaster crack in the ceiling, the doors itch in their frames. Somewhere, a toilet muttered incessantly to itself, an old, cold, white porcelain vault in the night.

  There was no one in the hall, of course.

  Whoever had been there, if he ever was, had shut a door quickly, or run toward the front or out the back. Where the night came in in an invisible flood, a long winding river of wind, bringing with it memories of things eaten and things discarded, things desired, things no longer wanted.

  I wanted to shriek at the empty halls, the things I had wanted to shout along the night shore outside Constance Rattigan’s Arabian fort. Go. Let be. We may look as if we deserve to, but we don’t want to die.

  What I shouted to emptiness was, “All right, you kids. Get back in your rooms. Go on, now. Git! That’s it. So. There.”

  I waited for the nonexistent kids to retreat to their nonexistent rooms and turned back in to lean against the door and shut it with a fake smile.

  It worked. Or Fannie
pretended it did.

  “You’d make a good father.” She beamed.

  “No, I’d be like all fathers, out of mind and out of patience. Those kids should have been doped with beer and slugged into their cots hours ago. Feeling better, Fannie?”

  “Better,” she sighed, and shut her eyes.

  I went and circled her with my arms, like Lindbergh going around the earth and the crowds yelling.

  “It will work itself out,” she said. “You go now. Everything’s all right. Like you said, those kids have gone to bed.”

  The kids? I almost said, but stopped myself. Oh, yes, the kids.

  “So Fannie’s safe, and you go home. Poor baby. Tell Constance thanks but no thanks, and she can come visit, yes? Mrs. Gutierrez has promised to come up and stay tonight, on that bed I haven’t used in thirty years, can you imagine? I can’t sleep on my back, I can’t breathe, well, Mrs. Gutierrez is coming up, and you were so kind to come visit, dear child. I see now how kind you are, you only want to save me the sadness of our friends downstairs.”

  “That’s true, Fannie.”

  “There’s nothing unusual about their passing on, is there?”

  “No, Fannie,” I lied, “only foolishness and failed beauty and sadness.”

  “God,” she said, “you talk like Butterfly’s lieutenant.”

  “That’s why the guys at school beat me up.”

  I went to the door. Fannie took a deep breath and at last said, “If anything does happen to me. Not that it will. But if it does, look in the icebox.”

  “Look where?”

  “Icebox,” said Fannie, enigmatically. “Don’t.”

  But I had jerked the icebox open already. I stared in at the light. I saw lots of jams, sauces, jellies, and mayonnaise. I shut the door after a long moment.

  “You shouldn’t have looked,” protested Fannie.

  “I don’t want to wait, I’ve got to know.”

  “Now, I won’t tell you,” she said, indignantly. “You shouldn’t have peeked. I’m just willing to admit maybe it’s my fault it came into the house.”

  “It, Fannie? It, it!”

  “All the bad things I thought you dragged in on your shoes. But maybe Fannie was responsible. Maybe I’m guilty. Maybe I called that thing off the streets.”