“What’s going on here?”
“Dig’s a sellout.”
“You can’t believe in anything these days.”
Another couple left. And another. Satisfied now, Dig, clutching his microphone, came round his desk to confront his rebellious followers. “Mortimer Griffin,” he began, breaking off as he was seized by a paroxysm of laughter. “The major here –” Dig clutched his stomach, helpless. “The captain –” Tears rolled down his cheeks. “Mortimer Griffin is a – a – a – a
hero!”
In the control room, the director and his crew sat bolt upright. “Hero” had not been said on British television for years. Would they be cut off?
“He’s a fucking …
hero”
Dig said, wiping his face. Pandemonium.
“You can never count old Dig out.”
“Good old Dig.”
“Imagine,” a man said, slapping his cheek. “A hero.”
“Poor dumb bastard.”
As Mortimer, followed by the camera, slunk offstage, nobody laughed. Nobody scoffed. He was not ridiculed. Swingers, after all, were not without pity.
32
“w
ELL, LOOK WHO’S HERE. MR. CHICKENSHIT HIMSELF
. Diana,” he hollered, beginning to flex his hands, “bring out the gloves.”
“No gloves, damn it. I’ve got to talk to you, Hy. It’s about Oriole – the Star Maker – I’m in serious danger.”
“That’s not what I hear. I hear you’re the new editor-in-chief. That means I’m looking for a new job, Dr. Himmler.”
“Please hear me out, Hy, you’re just about my last hope.”
Briefly, Hy’s belligerent manner faltered. He considered Mortimer with something like his former regard. “Shoot,” he said.
Mortimer, relieved, was just about to begin his story when a bald, pear-shaped man, sucking an enormous cigar, stepped out of the living room. He walked toward Mortimer, his soft ringed hand outstretched.
“My father,” Hy said in a failing voice. “Paw, Mortimer Griffin. A friend of mine. Once.”
“Put it there, Morty. You’ve known my Hymie for years, haven’t you? Well, maybe you can tell me what’s wrong with him?”
“But Hy’s a splendid chap. Just the sort you can count on in a moment of need.”
“And always walking around with that expression like somebody was going to take a scissors like this,” Mr. Rosen said, demonstrating with two extended fingers, “and snip his bleeding cock off.”
“Hy’s been my best friend for years and years.”
“Listen, I’m not saying my Hymie’s a shmuck. I only wish I had his head for the market.”
“Hy?”
“When he was younger and playing only for fun he picked winners nine out of ten. Hymie knows his onions. He’s got a good Jewish head on his shoulders.”
“The capacity to judge the market has nothing to do with one’s racial origins.”
“You got kiddies of your own, Morty, or are you a nit with a social conscience like Hymie here?”
“I’ve told my father a hundred times that world conditions being what they are, it would be madness to bring a child into –”
“World conditions, my arse. You want to make Diana happy or you want she should end up like Cousin Sadie with twitches and headaches for no reason and the insides, God forbid, being scraped out twice a –”
“Somebody ought to tell you the facts about strontium 90.”
“Think of the pleasure it would give me to have a grandchild. A Bar Mitzvah boy.”
“Even if we had a child there’d be no Bar Mitzvah. I’ve told you a hundred times, Paw, Diana and I are atheists.”
“Facts of life. Your Diana can be an atheist. Your friend Morty can be an atheist. You can only be a bloody Jewish atheist.”
“We will not burden any child of ours with outmoded tribal customs. That’s final, Paw.”
“Education, that’s what’s giving him such a pain in the
kishkes
. Here’s a goy, we’ll ask him. Isn’t it true that your kind has more respect for a Jew who is a Jew? Take Rothschild, for instance. He would never buy or sell on the Sabbath. Or take me. On Yom Kippur I fast. I go to
shul.”
“You drive there and that’s against the law.”
“I’m not a fanatic, you know.”
“You go to the synagogue to discuss business. Not to worship.”
“There’s something wrong with talking business?” Mr. Rosen asked Mortimer.
“He doesn’t know. He’s condescending to you, Paw.”
“Listen,” Mr. Rosen said, seizing Mortimer by the lapels, “I like you. You’re highly intelligent, I can see. Wednesday I’m taking Hy and Diana to dinner. You’re his friend and he never gives me a chance to meet any. You come too. There’ll be plenty to drink. The best.”
“My father never invites a Gentile out without first assuring him there will be plenty to drink. A ghetto compulsion.”
“You don’t drink?”
“Of course I do.”
“See?”
“And I’d be glad to come.”
“You don’t have to prove anything to me, you bastard.”
“But, Hy, I –”
“And I won’t have you patronizing my father. He thinks you’re colorful, Paw. A character.”
“No kidding,” Mr. Rosen said, beaming.
“You’re
ashamed of him.”
Hy started to say something, stopped, and grabbed his coat. “I’m going out for a breath of air,” he said.
“Hy, wait! I need you.”
He slammed the door.
“Hy!”
“He’s a sensitive boy,” Mr. Rosen said. “Don’t you think?”
33
P
OLLY COULDN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT DOCUMENT HE
was working on so secretively. Typing it over and over again. Or why he drank so much and double-locked the doors. Neither could she understand why he pretended to be ill, avoiding Oriole House. Everybody knew he was going to take over from Tomasso. You’d think he’d be proud.
“Men,” she said, ruffling his hair.
“What?”
“Don’t hate me,” she whispered.
“But I adore you,” he said.
“I’m pregnant.”
“That’s bloody impossible! One, I’ve only been staying here for a few nights and two, let’s face it, Polly, we’ve never actually –”
“No, you won’t hate me. If I know you, you beautiful idiot, tomorrow you’ll be handing out cigars everywhere. You’ll be off to Harrod’s to buy him the biggest panda going … and you’ll be putting him down for Eton.” Polly chuckled lovingly. “By the time you get done with it, I will have had nothing to do with it at all.”
“But, God damn it, Polly –”
“Oh, how I love you when you’re angry.”
As soon as she had gone to sleep, Mortimer poured himself a drink and went off to the kitchen in search of ice cubes. Once more, he was struck by the screenplays stacked here, there, and everywhere. No: it couldn’t be. And yet … Mortimer reached for the first screenplay. He sat by the kitchen table all night, consuming one screenplay after another, understanding coming to him at last.
The following evening Mortimer led Polly across the river to a decrepit, sleazy street. Unmistakably a back street.
“I feel like a murderer,” she said, sobbing.
“It can’t be helped, darling.”
“Don’t come any farther with me.”
“As you wish.” He handed her a thick envelope. “You go to No. 83 and ask for Dr. O’Hara. You hand him this.”
Mortimer watched her, his eyes tracking, as she continued alone down the endless street, slowly, slowly, running her gloved hand along a wrought-iron fence, just as she had done as a child.…
Concentrating on holding the glove in a tight shot, as it were, Mortimer detected the contaminating grit of experience rubbing off on its pure, bored, overrich whiteness. Finally, he concentrated on Polly starting up the steps to No. 83.
Ordering another in the pub, thinking it over, Mortimer regretted that it wasn’t autumn. Possibly, she had missed the falling leaves. Oh, well, can’t have everything, and he took his time returning to the flat on Beaufort Street, allowing her time to change and adjust mentally for the next scene, the obligatory dissolve to the bedroom.
As he had anticipated, she said, “I feel dirty.”
As was expected of him, he replied, “Yes, I know,” but emptily.
Oh, how he adored Polly, creature of a generation, but living with her was, nevertheless, a mixed pleasure. If, for instance, she looked up a complicated meal in
Larousse
, he had to reconcile himself to a hasty sandwich secretly consumed in the toilet, for she was bound to cut from pondering the sauce to serving coffee and brandy, just as she
dissolved from his cupping a breast to the gratifying pillow talk that followed the most satisfying lovemaking.
One sun-filled but rather wintry afternoon, she insisted that he take her to Richmond Park, where they ate a picnic lunch.
“You look absolutely ravishing,” he said.
“When we are old,” she said, “I want you to always remember me like this, the sun catching fire in my hair …”
“The look in your eyes,” he continued for her, “ten fathoms deep.”
Reaching for her hand, he pulled her to him. Then, for he was in a considerate mood, just as he reached for the top button of her dress, he spun her around, so that she could cut away, so to speak, over his shoulder … to the stags locking horns in the distance.
Living in sin, Polly called it, but the affair, such as it was, had only been consummated on the wide screen of her imagination, which, alas, suited him – suited him too damn well, considering his condition.
Mortimer’s happiness was blunted by an overriding anxiety. As things stood, Polly accepted him as the consummate lover. But week by week the movies were leaving less to the imagination, the love scenes were becoming more explicit, and so surely it was only a question of time before Ziggy’s artistic dream came true and it would be possible to show fucking on the screen. Then, what? Then she would come to realize he wasn’t up to the big scene, and she would look elsewhere for a man, a real man, to track in on her.
“I’m your mistress,” she said, dancing across the room, “and I don’t care if the whole world knows.”
“You can shout it from the rooftops,” he replied, looking up from his typing.
If Polly didn’t do precisely that, she did at least let everybody know that she was living with Mortimer, the most demanding and masterful of lovers, and naturally this especially delighted him. Oh, to be the envy of Oriole, of all publishing in fact, for there wasn’t an editor under sixty who hadn’t had a go at Polly Morgan, but only Griffin
had won her favors. Such as they were, he added to himself in dark or drunken moments.
“Typedy-type-type,” Polly said. “What ever are you working at?”
“An indictment, if you must know,” Mortimer said, rising, as he folded papers into two separate long brown envelopes.
Polly watched him get into his coat. “Don’t tell me you’re actually going into Oriole this morning.”
“No. I’ve got business elsewhere. See you later, darling.”
Across the street, the Rover waited, the two black-suited men inside. I should get these papers to Joyce first. Or Hy, he thought. But, on impulse, Mortimer walked right up to the Rover. “Okay,” he said, “let’s get it over with. Take me to
it.”
34
“H
ELLO THERE. GREETINGS.”
The Star Maker sat up in bed, knitting, a patch over the right eye. The bassinet Mortimer had last seen at the studio stood under the window in the Star Maker’s suite at the Clinic.
“Star Maker,” Mortimer demanded, “why are you still having me followed?”
“Sit down, my boy. Pour yourself a drink.”
Mortimer eagerly sloshed brandy into a glass. “Why are you here?” he asked.
The Star Maker blushed, actually blushed.
“I will be operating out of here for at least nine months to come.”
“Nine?”
The Star Maker chortled, swollen breasts shaking. “But it can’t show yet,” the Star Maker said, flushed with pleasure.
“What can’t show yet?”
“That I’m pregers.”
“Pregnant? You?”
“Well, let’s not put the cart before the horse. However, I can reveal this much. I’m very, very overdue this month.”
“Overdue!”
“Mn. Join me in a cigar?”
Mortimer, his hands shaking, lit a cigar for himself and one for the Star Maker. The Star Maker inhaled deeply and set the knitting aside.
“Star Maker, may I ask you a personal question?”
“Shoot, dear.”
“Are you a man or a woman?”
“But don’t you know? Haven’t you guessed? I,” the Star Maker said, “am a modern medical miracle.”
Mortimer hastily poured himself another brandy.
“There are many sexes,” the Star Maker said, “and gradients on the Kinsey scale, categories within categories. Hetero, homo, Lesbian, the mundane variants, are all familiar to you, I’m sure. But there are the more complicated genders. There are the transvestites and, above all, the transsexuals. Tiresias changed himself into a woman because he felt that the woman’s kicks during intercourse were ten to the man’s one, and, damn it, he had the odds very nearly right. The East Indian King, Mahabharata, transformed himself for the same hedonistic reasons. Nero … well he’s still a dodgy case, but history abounds with more recent examples. The Chevalier d’Éon, for instance, lived forty-nine years as a man and thirty-four as a woman. L’Abbé d’Entragues had a shot at feminine facial beauty by submitting to frequent facial bleedings. A certain Mlle. Jenny Savalette de Lange died at Versailles in 1858 and was found out to be a man. More recently there was the sensational case of Christine Jorgensen, born a man, transformed into a woman by a with-it Scandinavian doctor. The true transsexual, Mortimer, is a man born into a woman’s body or vice versa. The most unhappy of God’s creatures until he or she is operated on.
“I first became fascinated by these unfortunates some fifty years ago, when transsexual surgery was still in the Kitty Hawk stage. And then, maybe ten years ago, I learned of the genius of Casablanca, Dr. Georges Burou, who has been of such help to
TS
’s of both sexes … though, characteristically, I’m afraid, the Russians are miles ahead of us in penis making –”
“In
what
making?”