Love and Death on Long Island (12 page)

Overtaken by swift remorse and unable to tolerate my ridiculous half-dressed state a second longer, I stood up
and adjusted my clothes. I knew now that, if ever I was to draw the poison, there was only one course left to be taken. It is, paradoxically, logic that is the mainspring of every obsession: advancing measure by measure, step by single step, not one of them skipped or leapt over, towards the psychic acrostics of madness itself, such is the path taken, usually consentingly, by the obsessive. By the repulsive charade to which I had just allowed myself to be party, I had attempted to leap over a crucial step and circumvent the logic in whose adamantine machinery I had become enmeshed. But I had also come to know what the next step must be, indeed I must have known it all along, and I stood at the window with my hands folded behind my back in a pose suggestive of some newly won mood of serenity and of a calm and deliberate acceptance of what was to be.

Eager though I was to be off, I was retained in the city by affairs both literary and practical for some ten days after my decision had been taken; during which time I bought a round-trip ‘plane ticket for New York and alerted my housekeeper to the likelihood that I would be out of London for a lengthy and, until I knew better, open-ended period. I read through what I had written of
Adagio
, placed the manuscript inside a folder and locked it away in the desk drawer that already contained my album of cuttings. Then, on a day between the middle and end of November, and without advising my agent or indeed any other person of my departure, I boarded my ‘plane at Heathrow.

If, as I have said, I was fairly widely travelled, this happened to be my very first visit to America, a continent which had never held much interest or allure for me. It was also my first extended trip anywhere for a number of years and only the second time I had flown – and it was not, all things considered, the most agreeable of experiences. I fretted at the fact alone that the aircraft's first-class section was full, its every seat occupied by dynamic young executives, as I assumed them to be, each of them – sitting in pin-striped shirt-sleeves, balancing some company report on his knees and dreamily and interminably clicking a ballpoint pen – as indistinguishable from his fellows as though all of them were Japanese. I did no more than nibble on the wretched meals the stewardesses would tirelessly set before me. Although (as one for whom the cinema had of late assumed a significance that it had never known before) I raised my eyes from time to time to contemplate the soundless posturing of the bland and blurred forms that drifted across the small cabin screen just in front of me, it was with a gesture of tetchy impatience that I motioned away the offer of a side-order of earphones. And during the slow, solitary hours spent crossing the ocean I fell prey to the worst of the traveller's anxieties. Why, I would ask myself,
why was I here
, why flying off to an unknown destination in quest of some as yet not satisfactorily formulated personal craving – one that, if it were ultimately to be satisfied, would lead to nothing else but my having got Ronnie Bostock ‘out of my system'? I knew I could not legitimately hope for more than that yet at the same time I had no wish to be cured, to be restored, to recover my self-possession. I knew equally
well that, no matter what the final outcome would be, no matter that all the odds were against the success of my mission, I would never permit myself to return empty-handed.

I had not consciously tried to sleep, but I found myself awakened, as the aircraft was already making a banked descent towards Kennedy Airport, by the sound of an amplified male voice announcing that we were flying directly over Long Island. I sleepily roused myself and peered out of the tiny cabin porthole. There, spread out beneath me, only slightly obscured from my view by drifts of cobwebby cloud that were attenuated almost to the point of transparency, there, somewhere amid that peaceful quiltwork of half-rural, half-suburban America, perhaps in one of those neatly aligned little settlements of red-roofed, white-walled houses or else, more likely, in one of the larger residences set down on its own in green parkland and from which there would come a flash of translucent blue, the blue, I had no doubt, of a swimming-pool – somewhere down there was where Ronnie lived and where I myself was fated to go. And the wear and tear on my system that this knowledge produced struggled, with the reckless exultation of my heart.

My arrival into New York passed off without incident. The airport's customs and immigration inspection turned out to be neither gruelling nor protracted, not at any rate the ordeal I had expected it to be. I immediately found a taxi ready to bear me off to my hotel; I dutifully gave myself up to admiring the city's incomparable and (it being late in the afternoon) now half-illuminated skyline;
then my coal-black cabdriver was ploughing and plunging through the vertiginous canyons of ‘downtown' Manhattan.

It was my hotel, however, located exactly halfway between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, that did not at all meet my expectations. It had been recommended to me many years before by one of my Cambridge friends – my wife and I had been planning an American tour, that had had to be cancelled when she was suddenly stricken with the illness of which she was shortly thereafter to die -and he had expatiated with some warmth on its decaying splendour and the solid old-fashioned virtues of its service. But what I was to discover when I entered the lobby could be called decayed only in reference to taste: a long, split-level foyer whose lower-level bar area was laid out in a sickly spectrum of beiges and apricots, its chairs and low tables all with arms and legs of tubular steel and speckled black cushions which looked from where I was standing like so many enormous blackcur-rent pastilles. The style, too, of my own suite I immediately recognised as being merely an extension of that of the lobby. Its apricot-and-black lavatory or ‘bathroom' in particular made me think – as I could not resist remarking to the bellboy who accompanied me, a dark-haired, prettified young man rendered all the more effeminate by having been obliged to sport a suit of hyper-virile black leather livery – of ‘a bathroom in Hell'. At this comment the young bellboy, to my amusement, could not have appeared more crestfallen than if it were he himself who had been responsible for designing the fittings. But just as suddenly he grinned again (exposing what looked to be a tiny jade earring that he had had in some manner clipped on to the upper rim of
one of his front teeth) and, as though personally to bear on his shoulders the city's reputation for smart repartee, replied, ‘Maybe, though, that's why Hell
is
Hell -because it doesn't have a bathroom.' He chuckled at his own joke, which he seemed also, thoughtfully, to be storing away in his mind for a more promising occasion.

On my putting the question to him, he informed me that the hotel had only the year before been purchased by an international consortium (here, presumably to convey the vast sums of money this consortium had had at its disposal, he slyly rubbed one thumb and forefinger together), which then had had it completely renovated. While he chattered away, I scrutinised him cynically, thinking to myself, ‘He really is an American Felix Krull,' and wondering whether his duties would necessarily cease at the bedroom door. As he turned to leave, I pressed a dollar bill into the palm of his open hand and watched him sashay along the hallway towards the lift.

That evening I strolled out into the streets of the city in search of some suitable restaurant and almost at once found myself in Times Square. I was exhausted and out of sorts, my eyes smarted as though the pupils had been scraped with sandpaper, my ears revolted at the pandae-monium of police and ambulance sirens, screeching tires and endlessly gabbling pedestrians that filled the heavy-scented night air. I was more confused than delighted by the hurry and flurry of New York, by all its noise and neon. I was assailed by nameless fears and began to suspect everyone whose path I crossed of hoping to pick my pockets.

Suddenly, before I knew what had happened, I was
waylaid by an outlandishly tall, pot-bellied black man, barefoot and shirtless, his left ear caked with congealed blood, his right ear missing and in its stead something ghastly, something without form, as obscene and grotesque and misshapen as an ear, were an ear not just an ear. He lumbered towards me, gripped me by the lapels of my overcoat and kept muttering the same demented sentence between his teeth and into my face, a sentence of which all I could make out was the reiterated, ritualised salutation: ‘Hey, man … Hey, man … Hey, man … Hey, man …' In his right hand he held a half-consumed hot dog nestling in wads of greasy paper and dripping with mustard that looked like soft diarrhoea, but it was with his left, in a to-and-fro motion, that he tugged viciously at my coat lapels, and I recoiled with a shudder from every foul blast of a breath that smelled of some unholy compound of whisky and fried onions. This lasted some minutes, until I panicked altogether, pulled myself free at last and with the sound of rumbling, mocking laughter behind me took to my heels.

By an excruciatingly roundabout route, that somehow involved my walking down much of Broadway, I managed to find my way back to the hotel. Still quite haggard and shaken, smoking cigarette after cigarette, I ordered myself some scrambled eggs in my suite and immediately afterwards went to bed.

The next morning, after sleeping myself out, I felt very much invigorated. Manhattan was cold and sparkling. A beautiful city, unquestionably – I would have to explore it one day. In the meantime, it was with a light step, with the hotel's street map in my gloved hand, that I directed my path towards Grand Central Station.
There, at a small information booth, I learned that trains for Suffolk County, the area of Long Island in which Chesterfield apparently was situated, did not depart from Grand Central at all but Penn Central, a station of which I had had no prior knowledge. But even if this small setback was to cause me a moment's frustration, the mere fact of hearing the name of Ronnie's town uttered as though it were a community like another, a community with nothing at all mythic or unattainable about it, the reality of whose existence could not have asked for vindication more unequivocal than to be reflected in something as mundane and authoritative as a railway timetable, buoyed me up immeasurably. Chesterfield existed, and Ronnie lived there; therefore Ronnie, too, existed and he could be approached like any other individual living anywhere else.

Such were my reflections as I made my way back through the station's subterranean halls out towards the sunlit exit. And it was when still underground, in one of those same marble halls, that I chanced to notice a large newsagent's shop, in which, it occurred to me, I might buy an English newspaper. I stepped in. Before I had had a chance to enquire about the possibility, my eye was attracted to one rack in particular, along which were shelved dozens, possibly even scores, of the teen magazines I had become addicted to, only a handful of which were ever sold in England at all and those at least two or three weeks after they went on sale in New York.

To have chanced upon such a treasure trove! There was an article on Ronnie in virtually all of them, and even if the purpose of my visit to America was precisely
to supercede what I hoped I would one day look back at as a pathetic and primitive stage of my love affair with the youth, I picked each one up with a trembling hand and the manic, feverish trepidation of one in a dream, excitedly examined its contents then laid it aside with the others I intended to buy.

Finally, I had in my hands what must have been the newest of all, since the publication date on its cover actually postdated that very day and month. I turned its pages to the article on Ronnie, and I had just time to register the fact that the photograph which illustrated it, and which itself was garlanded by a pair of pink ribboned hearts and two little sets of wedding bells, was of Ronnie clasping hands with an unknown young woman, and that its caption read ‘Ronnie B's Secret Engagement!!!' -when, my heart throbbing, I felt the pile of magazines sliding one by one down my overcoat on to the floor, started to gasp for breath, swayed and an instant later lost consciousness.

When I came to, I heard, as though through some sort of lead piping, the question ‘Are you okay?' Someone, who would turn out to be the newsagent himself, a burly shirt-sleeved man in late middle age, chewing on the half-smoked stump of a cigar, was assisting me to my feet. I had fainted. The newsagent was asking me if he should fetch a doctor. Out of my anxiety to play down the incident I contrived to draw myself away from him with an officious and quite unintended brusqueness. ‘I feel quite well,' I murmured, steadying myself against the shop counter. ‘Please don't trouble anyone.' ‘Well, frankly,' said the newsagent, scrutinising me, ‘to me you look terrible – but if you say you're okay, then I guess
you're okay. Have a nice day.' And he returned to his place behind the counter.

It took a few minutes for me to pull myself together. Without attending to which order they ought to be in, I hurriedly replaced on the shelves all the magazines but the one that had brought me the dreadful news. I was still trembling when I paid for it and, although I mumbled an inaudible thank you, I endeavoured not to look my puzzled Samaritan straight in the face. I walked only a few steps along the corridor outside, stopped, then, casting a nervous glance on either side of me, opened the magazine and read the article through.

That which, even as I swooned, I had half attempted to persuade myself could yet simply be mere journalistic hyperbole, a publicity stunt, an unscrupulous ruse to sell more copies than some rival publication, there it was, in black-and-white, incontrovertibly true. For nearly three months now, the very three months of my own passion for him, Ronnie had been secretly engaged to be married. His fiancée was named Audrey. She was twenty-three years old, three years older than he, a fashion model of, to my eye, nondescript physical appearance, and she and Ronnie had met in Hollywood where she was ‘filming a series of Pepsi commercials'. The ‘new and exciting movie' that had been titillatingly referred to in
Teen Dream
was – oh Ronnie, how could you! –
Hotpants College III
. Filming would start in six weeks and it was the young couple's intention to be married on Long Island then immediately afterwards fly out to California for the shoot; and Ronnie would carry his bride over the threshold of the luxurious new condominium awaiting them in the Hollywood Hills. They were young, as
they knew, very young, but Ronnie trusted sincerely that his many fans would understand, for ‘when you're as crazy in love as we are, there's really no point in hanging on.'