Love and Death on Long Island (16 page)

Then, tensely excited, finding that I had often to clear my throat, growing incredulous myself at what I was saying, I took a more personal and intimate tack, I insinuated – none too subtly, I fear – that the youth's career, possibly his very life, was reaching a turning point and that he would regret it ever after were he to be
tempted down the wrong path. I was mortified to hear myself all but wheedling in my endeavours to make him understand that he should not lazily fly out to Hollywood and make
Hotpants College III
as though there were no alternative – that an alternative did indeed exist.

It was towards the close of this speech that I first noticed Ronnie shifting uneasily in his seat and, once or twice, when my voice seemed to become painfully shrill, turning his head to make certain we were not overheard. But, only a moment later, his face would crease into a smile again, he would shrug his shoulders and with a half-humorous pout of self-deprecation seek to make light of his discomfiture; and, when he spoke, he would try to intimate that everything he had heard me say, now and three days earlier, represented little more for him than, as he put it, ‘a terrific ego trip', to be luxuriantly savoured, to be positively lapped up, not to be taken really seriously for a second.

Yet the vulnerable young creature was, I believed, already half inside the trap I was setting for him; I could read in his eyes how he still craved to gorge on the praise and attention the inadequacies of his career had hitherto denied him; and although I could not afford to have him too alarmed, the course to which I had committed myself was irreversible and there was nothing for me now but to press home what I felt to be my advantage. Thus I reminded him that I was a writer, that, even if he had not heard of me, I was, in England, in Europe, a famous writer, esteemed, respected, paid attention to. And I vowed, I vowed that I would henceforth devote myself to his career, that I would write the kind of role and the kind of film which his gifts merited, that I was ready to
subordinate everything else in my life to that end – it would be a total commitment on my part and it would demand no less total a commitment from him. ‘I realise,' I added, and God knows what had got into me, ‘that you are bound by temporary attachments –' and as I said these fatal words I waved my arm in vaguely the direction of Jefferson Hill.

Ronnie would not now suffer me to go on. Temporary attachments?' he repeated in disbelief. He shook his head as though believing I was insane or else merely beneath contempt, and there began to appear on his face an expression of tight-lipped cynicism such as I had never seen in any of his photographs.

All the more desperately did I struggle to reanimate the eloquence, the glib command, which had served me well until then. I attempted to evoke, to set forth in words that he wouldn't misunderstand, the type of relationship that had ever existed between a younger man and his elder, this elder being a writer, oftentimes a poet, by whom the youth would accept to be moulded, shaped, educated, inspired on to heights of spiritual and intellectual endeavour he could not, could never, attain by himself. In years past, I told him, there had arisen almost a tradition of such romantic friendships, and I mentioned Cocteau and Radiguet, Verlaine and Rimbaud-

My allusion to Rimbaud seeming in particular to confuse him, I don't know why, I unguardedly hastened to explain it and made my second fatally wrong move -'Rimbaud,' I said, ‘the French poet, who was Verlaine's lover.'

With a swift, anxious glance over his shoulder, Ronnie drew his dark glasses back down on to his eyes, their
two blind man's sockets making his face appear rather paler than perhaps it was. He made to speak, as though disgustedly to repudiate my advances, then seemed to soften again. With a gentle, graceful flick of his wrist he took my hand in his, and for one brief, blissful instant I imagined, but no, it was only to shake it, politely and coldly – the brisk, neutral handshake of someone on the point of taking his leave.

He started to rise to his feet, thanked me for what I had said about his work and hoped that he could nevertheless continue to believe that I had been sincere. It was all over, as I knew, yet I cared for nothing but to keep him for as long as possible at my side, before my eyes, where I could simply look at his face and listen to his voice. And when, because of the width of the table and narrowness of the booth, he had to edge out sideways, I found myself madly clinging to his wrist, to his hand, holding him back and then, in a fierce whisper, forcing from myself the inevitable, irreplaceable words, hackneyed and sacred: ‘I love you!'

Standing quite erect now, Ronnie pulled my hand from his, he peeled it off, rather, finger by finger, as he might have removed one of his own gloves, he turned his jacket collar up so that it half-concealed his face and without addressing another word to me strode out of the restaurant.

Once more alone in the booth, I let my head sink into the palms of my cupped hands. I felt a slight viscousness on the tip of one finger and realised to my horror that a little bubble of snot had been blown out of one of my nostrils.

‘Dear God,' I said to myself, ‘what have I done?'

*

It was late when I reached the motel, too late in any event for me to think of returning the same day to New York. I advised the proprietress, who greeted the news almost as though it were her own personal misfortune, that unforeseen circumstances obliged me to leave early next morning and paid my bill in advance. I also made a request – an uncommon one, it appeared, for such a modest establishment – for writing paper, an envelope and stamp.

Having made my luggage ready against the morning, I spent that same evening writing a long letter to Ronnie; just before midnight, I walked for the last time into the centre of town to post it. Unless the postal system were super-naturally efficient, it would not, I was sure, be delivered to the house on Jefferson Hill until after I had entirely removed myself from Chesterfield.

Later still, in my little bungalow sitting-room, illuminated only from without by the motel's neon sign, I gave myself up to my thoughts.

I thought of how my lover would receive the letter; how abnormally solemn he would become when he read it; how, too, he would certainly decide to keep its nature and contents from his fiancée, doubtless the first secret kept from her in a union that would know many others; and how, at the last, he would briefly toy with the idea of destroying it. But if I knew him, and no one on earth knew Ronnie Bostock better than I, he would not destroy it. Rather – in a fuller and more mature understanding of what had happened to him and equally of what might have happened to him, in the slow dawning on him that his career and his life, boding so far from brilliantly either of them, might have taken a very different course
had he but been capable of opening his heart to another whose own life he would soon see to have been transformed and perhaps even cut off in its prime for love for him – he would return to it often, read it again and again over the years, then no longer have to read what he would have come to know by heart but cherish it against the insentient world as a source of pride both possessive and possessed. And because he would not destroy it, it would end by utterly destroying him.