The Fame Game (13 page)

He thought about Elaine. Elaine had
grown
after he married her. Not more mature, just taller. And she had turned into a bossy woman. Who had known she was going to grow and fill out? Nobody told him sixteen-year-old girls grew any more. She was two inches taller than he was. And she thought just because she was married to a TV personality she had to acquire culture. She had started studying French. That wasn’t so bad, except she talked French all the time when they were out and she was trying to impress people. The last straw, the day he knew their marriage was finished, was the day Elaine insisted on talking to the goddam Puerto Rican waiter in French.

After that everything she did drove him crazy. She bought all those five- and six-hundred-dollar dresses when she knew he couldn’t afford them. She put the kid into a French kindergarten. Then she started hanging around with Lizzie Libra, who was old enough to be Elaine’s mother, and who was a big whore besides. He ought to know: he’d gone to bed with Lizzie Libra once when he’d had a fight with Elaine at a big, rotten, drunken party. Lizzie wasn’t his type, but she was so little and dressed like a kid, and for a moment, feeling unloved and mad as hell, he’d imagined she was a little girl. Lizzie had always been after him. She’d batted those horrible false eyelashes at him and made double entendres—even he knew that word. He hated false eyelashes on older women. It made them look even older. But Lizzie had taken him by the hand and led him into one of the bedrooms at the party, after Elaine had stormed out drunk, and Lizzie had locked the door. “You’ve always been my idol,” she had said to him. She didn’t say it sexily, as if she was coming on or anything, but wistfully. He had felt sorry for her. She had this kind of hunger about her, like a woman who never gets any love. He’d felt sorry for her. Poor little Lizzie. She had seemed very sexy at the time. Her blond hair was hanging down loose and she was wearing a little pink dress. She had taken off her glasses and looked at him with those big, hungry, myopic eyes. “You’re the greatest thing since sliced bread,” she said. So he’d done it with her, there on somebody’s bed, and afterwards he had felt so guilty and scared to come back to the big, rotten, drunken party where her husband and all his and Elaine’s friends were that he couldn’t even look at Lizzie, much less talk to her.

She’d been happy as a lark. She was absolutely bubbling, like seltzer. He’d never seen a woman so happy just because of a little fling. Maybe it was him? He didn’t think he was so much, just an ordinary guy. She hadn’t even come. How strange she was! He was scared to death afterwards that she would say something to Elaine, because of how close they were, but evidently Lizzie never had, because Elaine was the most jealous woman in the world and she had never said a word to him about Lizzie, even as a prospect.

The doorbell rang again. He glanced at Marcie, still enthralled in front of the set, and realized with relief that the show was almost over. He went to the door.

It was the bellboy. “Telegram, sir.”

Mad Daddy signed for the telegram and got some money off the dresser for a tip, first shutting the door in the bellboy’s face. The bellboy was delighted to get a dollar tip and did not seem to know who he was, which was a relief.

Safe in the room again he grinned when he saw Marcie turn off the television set. She ran over to him and sat on his lap, putting her cheek against his. “Oh, you are the grooviest!” she breathed.

“Let’s see what this telegram says,” Mad Daddy said, pretending to be unimpressed with her now that she had ignored him for so long. He opened it.

“
Your Kew Gardens Fan Club wishes you the greatest success ever at your benefit in Atlantic City
” the telegram read. “
We love you. Michelle, Donna, and Barrie.
”

“They know everything,” he said.

“I’m so glad I live right here,” said Marcie. “Or else I never would have met you.”

“Do you want your hamburger now?”

“Oh, yes!” she said, all excited.

“Well, it’s hanging out of your hand.”

She looked at it. “It’s all cold and greasy.”

“Your own fault. Here, you can have half of mine.”

He shared the warm one with her that had been waiting for them on top of the warm television set. They munched and gobbled and stuffed themselves, smearing the chili inside the hamburger roll and washing the whole mess down with Cokes. The ice cream, which he’d stupidly put on top of the TV set in the same bag, was all melted, so they mixed it up with Coke in the water glasses from the bathroom and made sodas.

“I love to cook,” Mad Daddy said.

“Yeah? Can you cook?”

“Just stuff like this. Ice-cream sodas.”

She giggled. “Oh, you are silly! I really love you.”

“Well, I love you, too,” Mad Daddy said solemnly.

“Do you really?” She looked ashamed. “You know, I didn’t tell you, but I have a boyfriend, Howie, who I go steady with.”

“That’s okay—I have a wife who I go steady with.”

“Howie wouldn’t mind,” Marcie said. “You’re not like cheating. You’re not a person … you’re a … a phenomenon!”

“Well, you’d better not tell him anyway,” Mad Daddy said.

“I won’t tell him if you won’t tell
her
.”

“Oh, no, I most solemnly promise I won’t tell
her
.”

“Will I ever see you again?”

“Let’s not talk about that,” he said. “We have a whole evening ahead of us.”

“When do you have to go back?”

“I should go back tonight.”

“Can’t you stay longer?”

“I have to do my show.”

“If I save up my money and come to New York to see your show during spring vacation, will you speak to me?”

“Of course,” Mad Daddy said, kissing her on top of her cornsilk head, “I’ll always speak to you. But you’ll have to cool it. You know, pretend you’re just a fan.”

“Oh sure, I know,” she said calmly.

Panic gripped him. He hoped she would act as cool as she was acting now. He hoped even more that she would forget all about him by the time spring vacation came. He didn’t need any more trouble with Elaine than he already had, not to mention with the police for molesting a fourteen-year-old girl who was really older than he was, but how could you convince them of that?

“Are you sure you’re only fourteen?” he asked.

“Wanna see my identification card?”

“No, I believe you.”

“Did you ever go out with a fourteen-year-old girl before?”

“No,” he lied solemnly. “Never.”

“How come you like me then?”

“Because you’re so beautiful.”

“You think I’m beautiful?”

“I think you’re the most beautiful girl I ever saw.”

“Wow,” Marcie breathed. “Wow …”

He put the music on again and took off his bathrobe. Marcie unwound herself from her sheet. “Wow,” Mad Daddy breathed, closing his eyes to kiss her, then opening them again because she really was so beautiful he wanted to see her. “Wow …”

CHAPTER FIVE

As it turned out, two interesting things happened to Gerry that Thursday: she had lunch with Dick Devere and she received an engraved invitation to the party the B.P.’s were giving for Franco two weeks hence.

The day of her lunch was one of those false spring days New York sometimes has in March, just to keep the inhabitants going until real spring rescues them from their eternal bouts with flu and slush. She recklessly left her coat at the office so the whole world could see her new green suit, and Dick Devere was charming. He reeled off the names of what she already knew from reading about them were three of the seven best restaurants in New York, and she let him make the choice because she’d never been to any of them. At the one he took her to they saw two Kennedy ladies and a movie star, several socialites, and of course Penny Potter, Mrs. B.P., who was lunching with her mother. Although Gerry had never met the client, she nodded at Penny Potter, who gave her a totally nonplused look back and a fake smile just in case she was somebody after all. The girl was smaller than she looked in her photographs, and terribly young.

“Are you going to her party?” Dick asked.

“Yes. I just got the invitation this morning. I guess Mr. Libra forced her into it.” She didn’t want him to think she traveled with the jet set.

“I’m going too,” he said. “If you have no one to escort you, I’d be glad to take you there.”

“That would be great.” At least she’d know somebody.

He ordered knowledgeably, in perfect French, and Gerry was glad her French was as good as his. The restaurant intimidated her. She was relieved that she was wearing the green suit, and that even though it came from an unknown boutique it was at least an original. The food was marvelous and so was the wine he chose, and he surprised her by making her laugh almost all through the lunch with amusing stories about people he had worked with on his shows. He evidently had a keen eye for satire, and she thought that if he hadn’t turned out to be a director he could probably have been a writer.

After lunch he said, “I want to do something extremely corny because it’s a nice day.” He had his car parked near the restaurant; an unshowy little yellow Mustang convertible, and he took the top down and drove her to the East Village, where he seemed to know a great many people—shopkeepers, old ladies leaning out of windows, whom he waved at, hippies lounging on benches in the sun, whom he said hello to. Everybody seemed to like him. “This is my second home,” he told her.

He took her into an antique store, where he had a long chummy talk with the proprietor, priced several things he did not buy, and picked out a string of green glass beads which he bought and hung around Gerry’s neck.

“Love beads,” Dick said. “So you’ll be lucky and loved.”

She fingered the beads. She was touched. They were the nicest sixty-cent present anyone had bought her in her whole life. She liked the way Dick seemed to fit in anywhere, and the way people accepted him whether he was in an intimidating restaurant or on Avenue A. He really wasn’t as bad looking as she had thought the first time she saw him. A man didn’t have to be pretty, or even handsome, if he was bright and had charm. And Dick Devere certainly was bright and had charm.

She realized in panic that it was a quarter to four. Libra would kill her. Dick drove her back to the office and shook her hand.

“It was a pleasure,” he said, “and I’ll see you the night of the party, if not before. Give me your home phone number and address.” She did, and he wrote them down in a small leather-bound note pad, using a gold ballpoint pen. He seemed very neat. She wished she knew how to analyze handwriting. His was tiny and impeccable. Did that mean he was repressed—or just that he had a small notebook?

That evening when she got home from the office a florist’s boy delivered a dozen roses with a card saying: ‘Thanks again. Dick.’

It was the same tiny handwriting. She put the roses into her one and only vase, pleased and flattered. He didn’t have to do a thing like that, but wasn’t it marvelous to get flowers from a man, even if he was a client! Somehow she knew there was nothing businesslike about sending those flowers.

She phoned him the next day from the office while Libra was at the gym working off his vitamin shot from Ingrid the Lady Barber, and thanked him.

“I hope they didn’t clash with your apartment,” he said.

“What could clash with an empty apartment?”

“If you’re looking for furniture, I know some very good, cheap antique stores I can take you to. I also know a very cheap, good carpenter who builds things—shelves and shutters and stuff. He’s an artist. I can turn you on to him if you’d like.”

She wrote down the name of the carpenter and made a date to go looking for antiques with Dick on Saturday afternoon. Then she looked at the schedule of where all the clients were, thinking she would invite Silky to lunch tomorrow, and she discovered Silky and the Satins were doing a club date out of town. The news didn’t please her. Now she still didn’t know where Dick and Silky stood.

On Saturday they went to several cheap antique shops, where Gerry bought a metal headboard that had formerly been a gate, two glass bottles that had formerly held opium and marijuana, according to the labels, and a miniature chest to use as an end table, which Dick told her was what they used to sell furniture instead of blueprints in the old days. It was an exact replica of what the chest would be when the customer ordered it full-sized. He told her the carpenter would install the headboard, and didn’t offer to come up and install it himself, so she realized he would never allow himself to be categorized as Good Old Helpful Dick, which in a funny way pleased her. The store said they would deliver that evening, so Dick took her to a dark bar for a three-hour lunch and then drove her home.

“Would you like to come up for a drink?” she asked.

He looked at his watch. “I have to go to a dinner party. I’m in great demand because I’m single and have a blue suit.” He smiled and patted her on the head. “I’ll call you.”

She couldn’t figure him out, but he was nice. He was very cool. She went up to her apartment, glad that the day had been spent so pleasantly, and thinking that a Saturday-afternoon date was as good as a Saturday-night date because at least you didn’t have to be depressed that you didn’t see a soul all weekend.

There were great plans in the office for the B.P.’s party the following week. Lizzie and Elaine were both going to wear new Franco creations, fortunately not the Gilda Look, which was still on the drawing board, and Nelson was going to do everybody’s hair, even Gerry’s. The day of the party Gerry went to Nelson’s salon on her lunch hour and he trimmed off an inch of her hair and set it in ninety-three pigtails so she looked like a cross between Topsy and Medusa. If Libra hadn’t been picking up the bill she would have cried right there. She thanked him profusely, rushed back to the office, and in the lobby Ladies’ Room—which she had been using faithfully since Libra’s rebuff that first day, although he never seemed to notice it—Gerry brushed out all the pigtails until her hair was normal-looking again, if a little crimped. At least it was shiny, and Nelson gave a very good blunt cut. She hoped the crimps from the pigtails would all straighten out by that night; maybe sitting in a steamy hot bath would help.