The Fame Game (48 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

They kept staying with her: Libra, Lizzie, Silky, Vincent … Vincent followed her like a dog. They were afraid she might kill herself. She wasn’t going to kill herself—that was the farthest thing from her mind, for what good would another death do? But she had to be alone to think. Silky’s doctor (not Ingrid) gave her pills; tranquillizers for the daytime and sleeping pills for the nights. She preferred drinking, and while Vincent watched her, playing upbeat records and trying to think of something to say, Gerry methodically and pleasurelessly drank down a half bottle of straight Scotch every night, finished the last of her third pack of cigarettes for the day, and took her pill. She was docile, like an inmate. Why did they treat her like an inmate? It was that kid who was the inmate, the teen-ager Barrie something, who had been caught two days after the … after it happened (what had taken them so long?) and was away now in some institution, it said in the newspapers, under psychiatric care.

Elaine had come back for the funeral, dressed in black with a huge picture hat like that strange woman who put flowers on Valentino’s grave every year, and Elaine had cried and carried on as if the loss was hers. Gerry had sat there, numb, drugged, drunk, looking calm and stolid for the world to see. There were his sister and brother-in-law. Funny to see his family for the first time that way … She wanted to tear the box open but that wouldn’t bring him back.

The public had fed on him and finally killed him. It was so ironic that he, the sweetest of men, had died saying something unthinkingly hurtful that was so entirely unlike him. Ironic too that someone they had never heard of should appear from nowhere and change all their lives. If that was what being a public idol meant, then Gerry wanted no part of it any more. No more sickness, no more sick love for strangers she had helped create, no more animals living vicariously off people they could never understand. She hated her job, she hated New York, and she had to get away.

She would go to a desert island, one of those islands she and Mad Daddy had dreamed of. She would stay alone, and pretend she was with him, until time made it easier to live by herself without the fantasy. She had to tell Libra she was leaving; it was only fair. Two days after the funeral she packed and told Vincent she was going home to her parents. She picked a deserted island from an ad in a magazine and made a plane reservation by phone. Then she went to the office to say good-bye to Libra and lie a little.

“Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t.” She saw pain in his eyes and it was strange because she had never thought he cared about anybody. “Don’t go to your parents. Stay here and work. Work is the best cure. We’re moving to our new offices soon. Look, see how nice the building is? You can see it from the window. You’ll have your own office. You can decorate it any way you want to and I’ll pay for it. You don’t have to work at all while you’re decorating it. Keeping busy is the only cure, believe me.”

“I’m going,” she said. “I just wanted to say good-bye and thank you for everything you’ve done for me.”

“Don’t.”

“Well, good-bye,” she said.

“Look,” he said, “if you have to go, I have this nice little house at Malibu where Lizzie and I used to spend weekends when we lived in California. It’s open, and there’s a live-in housekeeper. You might as well use it since it’s going to waste anyway. It’s all alone on the beach, the neighbors won’t bother you. I’ll get you the plane ticket. Go there for a couple of weeks and lie on the beach in the sun. It’s nice in California this time of year. You need a vacation anyway, you’ve been here a year.”

A year? Was it a year? Just a little over a year since she’d come to New York, and so many things had happened. Time got condensed in this business. She thought about the house. It would be nicer than a hotel, nobody to bother her. Besides, she didn’t have much money saved, and even on a deserted island it wouldn’t last long.

“Stay in the house as long as you like,” Libra said. “There’s a phone, you can keep in touch.”

“No, thank you anyway,” she said. “You’ll call me every day about business, and I’m quitting. I can’t stay in your house free and not talk to you about business. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Fair? What’s fair? Shut up.” Libra reached for the phone. “You can leave tonight. Go home and pack.”

“I am packed.”

“Then you’ll leave this afternoon. I’ll send you to the airport in my limousine with Lizzie for company. You take a cab from the airport and there’s a car at the house with the keys in it. The housekeeper shops, so you won’t starve. There are books and records at the house, a color TV set, and a small projection room with a whole library of films.”

“Just a simple little bungalow?” Gerry said, smiling in spite of herself.

Vincent came along to the airport with her and Lizzie. He had let his eyebrows grow in and was wearing his hair combed like a boy. Without make-up, in a turtleneck sweater and jeans, he looked like a very pretty faggot, but not like a girl any more. Lizzie almost didn’t recognize him. When Vincent carried her bags to the baggage scale, Lizzie said to Gerry: “Has he ever done it with a girl?”

“Oh, no.”

“Hmmm,” Lizzie said, looking at Vincent’s broad shoulders from the back, and smacked her lips.

They kissed her good-bye and Lizzie cried. “I’ll take care of the apartment,” Vincent promised. “Do you have your pills?”

“Yes.” She also had a bottle of Scotch in her airline bag. “Take care of
yourself
, and lift your weights every day. Don’t forget to go to the gym and swim every morning. Write to me; don’t phone, it costs too much.”

“I love you,” Vincent murmured, and tears spilled out of his eyes. They all knew she was never coming back, even though she hadn’t said anything. Gerry kissed him again.

“There’s a whole wine cellar,” Lizzie said. “Under the sink in the bar. Feel free.”

“Thank you. Good-bye. Good-bye.”

Buckled into her seat in the first-class cabin of the plane, Gerry realized it was the first time she had been alone since it happened. She wondered if the plane would crash. She really didn’t care, except it would be a shame for all the other people. They wanted to go on. She didn’t care one way or the other; she just
would
go on because that was what you did, that was all. She drank the free Scotches they gave her, and the free wine and champagne, washed down with a tranquillizer (one every four hours, the label said) and she fell asleep. When she woke up she was in California with a hangover.

The house was lovely and small, set high on the dunes above Malibu Beach, with a little garden in front that was sunny all day long, and its own private strip of beach. There were houses on either side, but nobody bothered her. The housekeeper, evidently briefed by Libra, kept to herself, requesting only a list of the week’s menus, which Gerry forgot to give her, so the housekeeper planned and cooked all the meals at her own discretion and did the shopping before Gerry woke up in the morning. Gerry chose Libra’s bedroom for herself because it looked out at the sea. It had a king-sized bed with blue sheets, and the colors of the room were blue and green, like the sea, with a vase of fresh flowers from the garden in a crystal vase on the dresser. In the mornings when she woke, the housekeeper brought her breakfast on a tray, and afterwards Gerry would take the morning papers, also brought by the housekeeper, and read them on the front porch in the sun. She lay in the sun for hours, with a bottle of wine by her side, stupefied with the heat and the quiet and the excellent wine (Libra always had the best of taste) and wrote crazy poems in her head. At first the poems were full of violence and hate.

There was a wood-paneled den (the one with the color TV) with a typewriter and paper in it, so she began to write her poems. They were terrible, but they made her feel better. She wrote every afternoon, half drunk, then took a nap, showered, and ate dinner in front of the television set. She watched anything. The housekeeper showed her how to operate the projection machine for the films, but at first Gerry was too numb to bother. But finally, out of curiosity and boredom, she began to show films for herself, all the good ones she had missed during the years she was away in Europe. She kept Scotch and ice by her side, and sometimes if she liked a film she showed it over three or four nights in a row. There was something strangely satisfying about seeing the same characters up there on the screen, doing the same predictable things. It was like having people in the house with her. She found a Zak Maynard film among the collection and was surprised that her professional curiosity was still with her. She showed it twice. He wasn’t such a bad actor after all. She wondered if Silky would be good in the film version of
Mavis!

Silky wrote to her occasionally, although she was a terrible letter writer and could never think of anything to say. She wrote whatever news there was in New York, but Gerry was more interested in hearing from Silky than in the news, which seemed far away and unreal. Silky’s husband, Bobby, had been a hit in his first solo dance appearance on the TV special, and was going to do a summer replacement series as lead dancer, with billing. Some variety show. Silky was thrilled.

Vincent wrote too, almost every day. His news was entirely different: it was as if he and Silky inhabited different planets. He couldn’t care less what went on in New York or show business.

“Marcia the Sex Change had to go to the hospital because her silicone started to slip,” he wrote. “When she got there they made her take off her wig with the hundred and fifty falls, and she’s all bald underneath, just an old bald man. They didn’t know whether to put her in the ward with the women or the men. She said she had to go with the women because she had it lopped off. So there she was, with all those women, an old bald man, six feet four, with sliding tits. What a
mess!
”

Vincent was afraid to go to the bars with his new look, for fear the queens would laugh at him, so his whole life was spent on the telephone keeping up with his world. He lifted his weights, had gained fifteen pounds, grown another inch, and was becoming quite a good swimmer. “Guess what?” he wrote. “I met this really nice boy at the gym. He’s straight. He says he hates nelly fruits and drag queens. He likes me. I didn’t tell him I used to be Bonnie Parker. He would have died. He took me out twice this week, to straight restaurants for dinner, and nobody laughed or stared at us or anything. I’m letting my hair grow long like a hippie, and I’m growing a moustache. It’s funny how when I didn’t want a moustache it came in too fast, but now that I want one it’s coming in too slow. A
girl
flirted with me at the supermarket this morning! Poor sick freak!”

Girls were beginning to look at him. Wow! Girls would look at anything, Gerry decided, but she was still pleased. Maybe Vincent had a movie career ahead of him after all, maybe even in another year. Teen-agers liked effeminate-looking boys, they weren’t such a threat.

She noticed (on Libra’s doctor’s scale in the bathroom) that she was gaining weight from drinking so much, so she cut down to a few drinks a day and told the housekeeper not to cook anything rich. It was pleasant to be cared for, waited on, coddled. She wrote a postcard to her parents, telling them she was taking a vacation in Malibu (they never
had
known about her and Mad Daddy because she was keeping the news from them until after his divorce). She wrote brief letters to Silky and Vincent and Libra and Lizzie. She wrote more poems, not so angry now, sadder and more fanciful. They were just as terrible as her angry ones, but she kept them all because the growing pile of papers made her feel she was doing something besides vegetate.

She read a few magazines because they were piling up, and finally she began to read some of Libra’s books. She liked history the best because she didn’t have to relate it to anything in her life. It was another world. Libra had put reruns of all Mad Daddy’s old shows on television, so she stopped watching TV early and began to get more sleep. The pills were wonderful. She tried not to think too much. The pills made her so stoned before she fell asleep that one night she wandered into the den and turned on Mad Daddy’s midnight show. It made her hysterical and she took a bottle of Scotch and a glass and went wandering off along the beach by herself, drinking and sobbing, until she was lost.

She found herself in front of a house where a party was going on. People were running around the beach and in and out of the lighted house. A man saw her.

“Hey,” he said. “Come join the party.”

“Why not?”

She looked terrible: no make-up (she never wore any here) and all teary and red-eyed, wearing her nightgown, but she went in anyway. Everyone seemed young and tanned and pretty. They were wearing far-out clothes, and nobody seemed to notice or care that she was wearing a nightgown. They thought it was just a hippie dress. She got some ice for the Scotch she had brought, found some cigarettes, and sat on the couch, trying to focus her eyes. Some men spoke to her and she smiled, trying not to act too stoned. There was loud music, and people were dancing. Someone asked her to dance and she refused, afraid she would get sick. She got up to find more ice and suddenly there was Dick Devere, on his way from another room, looking very tan and happy.

“Gerry!” He smiled with delight. “I didn’t know you were in California. How long have you been here?”

“A little over five weeks, I think.”

He put his arm around her. Was this Dick, whom she’d once loved? She hardly knew. “How are you, Gerry?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “I’m so happy. Everything is going so well for me. My film is going to be wonderful. I’ve been investing in the stock market, and I’ve made a bundle of money. I have a stock for you to buy, it’s great …”

She drew away from him. He didn’t know anything about what had happened to her, and if he did he wouldn’t care. He went on babbling about his stock and how rich he was going to be. “I’ve bought a house in the Hills, and I have a Japanese houseboy,” he went on. “I’ve always wanted a Japanese houseboy. I’m so happy. This is
my year!
”