Both stars were sober people, drinking nothing but water, not even Perrier and orange juice, and painstakingly trim.
The slim leverage I had over them was that I had known Torlucci since the days when he made commercials in Melbourne. I had even played small parts in his two earliest films, one of which was based on a novel of mine.
Given that everyone expected Australians to be crass, I had my crass line: I’d known Mark when he was unhappily married for the second time.
Torlucci’s reply: That’s all right you bastard, I’ve known you since Maureen and I were lovers.
The male star told us, When I met Mark Torlucci for the first time, I went back to our apartment and said to my wife, Torlucci is the most vulgar man I have ever met. Four days later, I went home and said, Torlucci is the most brilliant man I’ve ever met.
He appealed to Jacko.
—Why do you guys send mixed signals like this?
Jacko had the most pleasant way of not yielding, when he chose not to yield.
—Wouldn’t you say though, old mate, that you blokes send mixed signals too. Mean to say, we talk uncivilized and we’ve got some secret class. A lot of you, yourself excepted of course, talk civilized, but … well, Jesus Christ, you don’t need me to finish the sentence. An example. On the campuses of the universities you’ve got all this political correctness, calling women and blacks and Hispanics by their right names. All very well and good. But in the big world of the corporations and the government, the graduates of the universities treat women and blacks and Mexicans like turds eh. And on the street, mate, on the street … women are just cannon fodder.
Jacko and I exchanged glances, mine a warning in part. For a second a kind of pungency, a sort of smoky vacancy, flavoured the Torlucci living room. I remembered the picture of the Sondquist girl offered in the hands of muscular Bob.
It was interesting, too, to ask why Jacko had spoken out like this. It might have been nationalism of a kind. It might have been a case of Jacko getting a few blows in on a movie star, though it didn’t sound like that. It sounded in fact a little like that rare Emptor beast: a surge of authentic outrage.
The film star politely agreed with Jacko on the question of American hypocrisy. There was nothing there which he could disagree with. He had made many liberal films about America’s sins.
Amongst the other guests was a small, bouncy woman in a black cocktail dress who came from the same west-Russian gene pool as Rachel Torlucci. For that reason, I suspected at first that she was Rachel’s relative. It turned out that she was the wife of the tall, slim Southerner across the room, the man who spoke with that easy lilt foreigners love and Yankees despise. There was a sort of Thespian polish to this man, and I thought he must be an actor. He was as tidily made as that. It had been established that his name was Dart, short for D’Artagnan he told me, his father having been an Alexander Dumas reader.
Lucy Emptor and my wife and I got talking to him, and Lucy asked him with a James Ruse High sort of smile, copious and utterly lacking in malice, if he was in the film business.
He said he wasn’t, not directly. He was in politics.
Lucy Emptor said, Politics eh. What sort of politics, Dart?
—I’m Governor of Tennessee, said Dart. That’s how I met Mark Torlucci. You remember his film before last. It was shot in Tennessee. We’ve got this State Film Commission down there. We’re a number one location: farmland, forest, plains, mountains. We can even mock up a passable ocean some place like Douglas Lake.
The divine Lucy said, Astounding!
I forget which one of us asked him whether his wife was in politics too.
—Oh no, he said. My wife is conductor of the Knoxville Symphony. We’re in good shape with the symphony. Recruiting from all over the nation. Throwing out a challenge to the Scottsdale Symphony. You know? From Arizona.
He held his hands out in front of him making – with a very handsome half-smile – a disclaimer.
—Now I didn’t appoint her. She was appointed by my predecessor in office. It’s on the record. But I was always a patron of the symphony. That little woman right there has a very adventurous repertoire. I’d argue she’s extended the tastes of audiences in the state of Tennessee by a factor of two or three. The conductor before her tried to cosset folks with the Barcarole and Ravel’s Bolero and Gilbert and Sullivan and even rock and roll and country music. But you can’t beat Nashville with a symphony no matter how you try. You shouldn’t try in the first place. Amy there does audiences the great honour of taking them seriously, and giving them the serious article.
Gradually everyone in the room was learning, as we had, that the mannerly Dart was the Democratic Governor of Tennessee. They were aided in their efforts by Torlucci’s jovial cry, Have you met my governor yet? I would have guessed that Jacko was by now a party to that open secret.
Towards eleven o’clock my wife and Lucy wanted to go home. Jacko asked Lucy if he could stay on. As an act of submission, it somehow rang untrue and made people who heard it laugh. Lucy herself, my wife, even me.
—Okay, Jacko, said Lucy, with her apparently limitless good will. Let me stamp your leave pass eh.
By the time Jacko and I saw them off in a cab and came back upstairs, there were not many guests left. Dart the governor and Amy the conductor were still there. Amy stood in the kitchen talking with Rachel Torlucci and her mother and sisters. From across the living room, I saw Jacko sit down on the sofa beside Dart, slap him familiarly on the leg and say, Okay, Dart, you old bugger. What do you do for a crust eh?
—A crust?
—Line of work, explained Jacko.
—No, said Dart with a quiet smile, not totally lacking in intent. I’d rather hear first what you do, Jack … Jacko?
Jacko explained that he was a television journalist with Vixen Six, you know, Sutherland’s crowd. I was struck with both the humility and pretensions of respectability which were attached to that description. Television journalist. Video trespasser might have been more accurate.
Dart asked subtly, And do you work sometimes with a program called Live Wire?
—Yeah. I do a bit of work for Live Wire. But listen, I’m bored with that shit. You look to me like a feller who’s got a real life. Tell me what you do, Dart mate!
—I thought you knew already, Jacko. I’m Governor of Tennessee.
—Gee eh, said Jacko in echo of Lucy Emptor.
But then, as if he was short-sighted and needed to focus better on Dart, he pushed himself back dramatically into the corner of the sofa.
—Oh, Jesus, you’re not that governor, are you?
Dart said, smiling still, Exactly right, Jacko. I’m that governor.
I saw now that Jacko was utterly shaken. He was beyond artifice, beyond the normal cunning of his trade.
—Oh mate, what can I say?
—You might remember, Jacko, said Dart, seeming even to enjoy himself, you might remember the day last fall you talked your way past our guards and we eye-balled each other in the lobby of the gubernatorial mansion. You might remember that.
—Oh shit mate, I remember.
Dart said, It sort of stuck in my memory too, Jacko.
—Oh Jesus, mate, what can I say? I can plead professional duty eh, or I can come clean and confess to you it was my idea to hit the mansion.
—That doesn’t surprise me for some reason, Dart murmured.
—All right, fair play! Can I do something to make up? I mean, totally without malice, mate. Totally without malice! Can I do something eh?
Naturally I did not know what any of this meant, but I noticed that Dart’s wife, Amy, in the middle of her conversation with Torlucci’s wife, had been distracted by Jacko’s histrionics in the living room. She came stamping into the living room to enquire. She leaned forward to look closely at Jacko, and recognition swept thunderously across her face.
—Jesus, she asked her husband. Why didn’t I recognize him?
Dart still twinkled with irony rath
er than ill will, but his wife the conductor looked murderous.
—I think we should go now, Dart, she told her husband.
—Just let me finish causing discomfort to Mr Emptor here, honey, said the governor.
—Oh Jesus, mate! Jacko kept saying, raising his hands to his face. Like a literary critic, he had thought till now that he could live on free of any riposte from a victim. His concept of a victim had always been something more akin to Sunny Sondquist than to Dart the governor.
The conductor said, I’ll wait for you in the kitchen, Dart.
She pounded out on brisk, firm legs.
Jacko rocked and threw his arms wide.
—Dart, he said, let me assure you of something! That first wife of yours did herself a disservice coming on Live Wire. I mean, Live Wire’s mad as a meat axe to start with, and if mad people go on it, it’s all compounded eh. I mean, electorally, she did you a big favour. And then in one sense, you’re fair game, aren’t you? We only follow the trail of blood, old son! But we don’t actually put the knife in.
I was still trying to follow the argument. I could see that in the kitchen, Rachel and Mark Torlucci were listening avidly to a pell-mell explanation from Amy the conductor about why Jacko was an offence to her. Torlucci had his lips parted and was shaking his head, half-amused, half-unbelieving.
In the living room, Jacko repeated his earlier offer.
—Dart, mate, I’d be willing to go down there to Nashville at any time and make an upbeat story about your administration.
Dart said equably, I think you’ve made enough stories, Jacko.
Still attempting to discern what all this meant – Jacko’s discomfiture, Dart’s whimsy, his smile degenerating, however, into a grimace at the corners of the mouth, and Amy’s fury – I looked first at Jacko as he flailed contritely, skewered by Dart’s urbanity, and then at the wife in the kitchen further informing my friends the Torluccis. This wife was surely not the same wife Jacko was speaking of to Dart. I was relieved for the sake of my long love of Torlucci to see that indeed he was making polite efforts not to laugh. Rachel Torlucci, however, seemed as grim as Amy. Whatever Jacko had done clearly shocked women more drastically than men.
—Sure, Jacko was saying, I behaved like a circus, but that’s the medium, Dart. Because television is a circus, and it’s only bloody hypocrites who dress it up as if it’s Moses receiving the bloody tablets eh. I mean, honest to God, you would have let into your office by appointment video jockeys who had more ill will against you than I had. I just wanted to ask you what you thought of what your mad missus’d said? Sure, I did it in the style of our bloody awful show. But they’re all pretty bloody awful shows, Dart mate, all those bloody stick-up-the-arse commentators who are clowns but don’t know it.
—I didn’t realize, said the Governor of Tennessee, that your approach to the medium was as philosophic as this, Jacko.
And he winked across the room at me.
Watching the impact of that wink on the party in the kitchen, I was aware that Mrs Dart had seen it and – not knowing what a savagely wry gesture it had been – decided that her husband was letting the dreadful Jacko go free. On the minute heels of her fashionable shoes, she came pounding into the living room again. Though a coffee table laden with half-empty plates of food stood between him and Dart’s wife, Jacko flinched.
—I’ve been trying to think, the governor’s wife announced, of an act of reprisal vulgar enough to match you, your program, and all that immoral television Basil Sutherland has brought into our lives. If I could I would organize a group of Tennessee ex-cons, even bigger and flabbier than you, to sodomize you. Except it would be bad for my husband’s political reputation. As it is, I am reduced to slapstick. I’m sure you understand slapstick. It’s the art form which followed Impressionism.
From the table she lifted a two-thirds full jug of orange juice. All the film people, except Mark’s agent and the lead actors, had drunk of this orange juice very slowly, cautious of its power to fatten them. She made as if to hurl it by the handle, but then thought of the Torluccis’ upholstery. So she reached across the coffee table and directed all the fluid fairly accurately over Jacko’s chest and lap.
She placed the jug back on the table and murmured, Ape.
Turning back towards the kitchen, she called over her shoulder, I’d like to go whenever you’re ready, Dart.
She kissed Rachel and Torlucci. Torlucci was leaning on the refrigerator, beating the enamel in hilarity. When the governor’s wife and then Rachel looked at him, he tried to restrain himself. Rachel had a level, compelling gaze. I could hear the conductor apologizing formally to Rachel and to Mark Torlucci. And then she disappeared down the hall and into a bedroom, searching for her coat.
Jacko had stood up. He flapped his hands, dripping orange juice, and spluttered as if he had been swimming. But he showed no anger.
—Oh mate, he said in a chastened voice. Oh mate!
He seemed to be offering an acknowledgement of the justice of what had been done to him. Like a bystander and witness to an act of God, the barely amused governor fraternally handed Jacko wads of tissues and paper serviettes. I also took a wad of paper serviettes from my end of the table and presented them to Jacko. But he only had eyes for those offered by Dart. Such was the transaction between them.
Torlucci wandered in with a spacious grin on his yokel face. He said to Jacko, I’d offer you some clothes, mate, but I don’t think they’d fit you.
—Look, I know, Jacko told him.
Jacko was still in the mode of level acknowledgement.
At last Torlucci was overcome by great shivers and then a throaty gurgle of honestly declared laughter. It tended towards the baritone.
—Christ, when you beat your way into the governor’s mansion, you didn’t know one day you’d have to face Amy!
I was still there, watching Jacko now become contrite towards Torlucci, saying he was sorry he had destroyed the birthday party. Torlucci, of course, told him that the opposite was true: he had saved it from oblivion, set it in the memory against all the other soon forgotten parties, the ones that blurred.
With a last courtly smile and a shrug, Dart excused himself now and went to get his overcoat. Amy could be heard in the corridor offering to send someone round to see that the sofa wasn’t stained. Rachel Torlucci gave one little bark of laughter and told her not to be ridiculous.
We thought they were gone then, but Dart reappeared once, sticking his head round the doorway into the kitchen and living room.
—Jacko, he breathed in his Secesh lilt, I was wondering if you wanted my business card?
Jacko put his head back and he and Torlucci bellowed with hilarity.
—Go to buggery, Dart. And listen. Keep your bloody door locked from now on!
—How can I, Jacko? asked Dart. I’m a servant of the people.
Sporting Rachel Torlucci, who did not talk much but who attended to things, including the thing of keeping Torlucci himself under control, loaned Jacko a bathrobe and dried out his orange-juice-stained shirt and pants in the communal laundry up the corridor. Jacko was fully restored by these kindnesses.
—Christ Rachel, he yelled after her up the hallway, you’d be just about the only Jewish sheila who ever put quarters in that drier eh. Hope it bloody takes them from you.
He meant, of course, that generally Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans came in to do the laundry of the apartment dwellers. Having paid his price to society, he was now entitled to be impudent again.
So he drank some wine and flapped the inadequate bathrobe across his thighs.
—Because, he’d told the Torlucci women, I’d hate you to be affronted by a sight of the old Aussie pork sword.
—I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it, murmured Rachel. It’s nothing to write home about.
In the cab we shared on the way home, Jacko, warm in his stained, dried clothes, told me what had happened in Tennessee to make Dart so socially lethal and Amy so furious. A year before,
towards the end of the governor’s first term in office, his former wife began to campaign for the Republican candidate, claiming that Dart was a homosexual. Jacko had been sent down by Durkin and Live Wire to interview her.
—Mad as a cut snake, said Jacko. She would have caused him real harm if she hadn’t been so rabid, but she overdid it. She made remarks about the size of his old feller, and said that if he couldn’t put a smile on a woman’s face how could he put one on Tennessee’s? She was so over the top, even the Republican candidate disowned her in the end.
This wife’s attack caused Dart to go public about Amy. You couldn’t work out America any more – Amy was Jewish and a New Yorker, but they really loved her in Knoxville.
After Jacko interviewed the furious first wife, the idea of gatecrashing the governor’s mansion occurred to him. Somehow Jacko and Dannie and Clayton, but above all – you could bet – Jacko, had talked their way in through the guards on the gate, and were in the foyer when Dart had emerged and asked at the yell what was happening. Jacko and the others had been seen off the premises by armed guards, and so on. Lots of Next time get an appointment! and You’re lucky you’re not locked up! from the mansion officials. Repartee from Dannie: I thought the First Amendment still applied, even in Tennessee.
All shame expiated through the little penance of the orange juice, Jacko jack-knifed with laughter about it all the way home and wanted me to go on drinking with him in the Odeon in honour of the fact that it had become a story about itself. Jacko, to whom legend was more important than history. This had to be said of Jacko: unlike that oafish bumper sticker which said He with the most toys wins the game, Jacko believed in He who made the most myths goes to heaven.
I begged off the proposed session in the Odeon.
—Not even for a glass of orange juice?
It was curious that all the men who had women waiting for them did prefer to drink with other men once the right glands had begun to secrete a fable by which we could sail and fight together. We’d all been mates that night. Torlucci had been a prime mate, and Jacko was very pleased with him. And in a way, Dart, with his gracious, whimsical revenge, had been a mate. It was Amy who’d fallen into the classic woman posture and been sparked by the masculine languor of the party into throwing the orange juice.