The Great and Secret Show

"What am I, a dating service? I didn't ask."

  "Go ask."

  "You ask. He wants another Coke."

  "Thanks. Will you look after my table?"

  "Just call me Cupid."

  Jo-Beth had managed to keep her mind on her job and her eyes off the boy for half an hour: enough was enough. She poured a Coke, and took it out. To her horror, the table was empty. She almost dropped the glass; the sight of the empty chair made her feel physically sick. Then, out of the corner of her eye, the sight of him emerging from the restroom, and returning to the table. He saw her, and smiled. She crossed to the table, ignoring two calls for service en route. She already knew the question she was going to ask first: it had been on her mind from the start. But he was there with the same enquiry before her.

  "Do we know each other?"

  And of course she knew the answer.

  "No," she said.

  "Only when you . . . you . . . you . . ." He was stumbling over the word, the muscles in his jaw working like he was chewing gum. ". . . You . . ." he kept saying, ". . . you . . ."

  "I thought the same," she said, hoping her finishing his thought wouldn't offend. It seemed not to. He gave a smile, his face relaxing.

  "It's strange," she said. "You're not from the Grove, are you?"

  "No. Chicago."

  "That's a ways to come."

  "I was born here, though."

  "You were?"

  "My name's Howard Katz. Howie."

  "I'm Jo-Beth . . ."

  "What time do you finish here?"

  "Around eleven. It's good you came in tonight. I'm only here Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. If you'd come in tomorrow you would have missed me."

  "We'd have found each other," he said, and the certainty in his statement made her want to cry.

  "I have to go back to work," she told him.

  "I'll wait," he replied.

  * * *

  At eleven-ten they stepped out of Butrick's together. The night was warm. Not a pleasant, breezy warmth, but humid.

  "Why did you come to the Grove?" she asked him as they walked to her car. "To meet you." She laughed. "Why not?" he said.

  "All right. So why did you leave in the first place?"

  "My mother moved us to Chicago when I was only a few weeks old. She never really spoke much about the ol' home town. When she did it was like she was talking about hell. I suppose I wanted to see for myself. Maybe understand her and me a bit better."

  "Is she still in Chicago?"

  "She's dead. Died two years ago."

  "That's sad. What about your father?"

  "I don't have one. Well . . . I mean . . . is . . . is—" He started to stumble, fought it, and won. "I never knew him," he said.

  "This gets weirder."

  "Why?"

  "It's the same for me. I don't know who my father is either."

  "Doesn't matter much, does it?"

  "It used to. Less now. I've got a twin, see? Tommy-Ray. He's always been there for me. You must meet Tommy You'll love him. Everybody does."

  "And you. I bet every . . . every . . . everybody loves you too."

  "Meaning?"

  "You're beautiful. I'm going to be competing with half the guys in Ventura County, right?"

  "Nope."

  "Don't believe you."

  "Oh they look. But they don't touch."

  "Me included?"

  She stopped walking. "I don't know you, Howie. At least, I do and I don't. Like when I saw you in the Steak House, I recognized you from somewhere. Except that I've never been to Chicago and you've not been in the Grove since—" She suddenly frowned. "How old are you?" she said.

  "Eighteen last April."

  Her frown deepened.

  "What?" he said.

  "Me too."

  "Huh?"

  "Eighteen last April. The fourteenth."

  "I'm on the second."

  "This is getting very strange, don't you think? Me thinking I knew you. You thinking the same."

  "It makes you uneasy."

  "Am I that obvious?"

  "Yes. I never saw . . . saw . . . I never saw a face so . . . transparent. Makes me want to kiss it."

  In the rock, the spirits writhed. Every word of seduction they'd heard had been a twisting of the blade. But they were powerless to prevent the exchange. All they could do was sit in their children's heads and listen.

  "Kiss me," she said.

  They shuddered.

  Howie put his hand on her face.

  —They shuddered till the ground around them shook.—

  She took a half step towards him and put her smiling lips on his.

  —Till cracks opened up in the concrete that eighteen years before had sealed them up. Enough! they screamed in their children's ears, enough! Enough!

  "Did you feel something?" he said.

  She laughed. "Yes," she said. "I think the earth moved."

  III

  ____________ i ____________

  THE girls went down to the water twice.

  The second time was the morning after the night on which Howard Ralph Katz met Jo-Beth McGuire. A bright morning, the muggy air of the evening before blown away on a wind that promised cool gusts to mellow the heat of the afternoon.

  Buddy Vance had slept alone again, up in that bed he'd had built for three. Three in a bed—he'd said (and unfortunately been quoted saying)—was hog-heaven. Two was marriage; and hell. He'd had enough of that to be certain it didn't suit him but it would have made a morning as fine as this finer still to have known there was a woman waiting at the end of it, even if she was a wife. His affair with Ellen had proved too perverse to last; he would have to dismiss her from his employ very soon. Meanwhile his empty bed made this new early morning regime a little easier. With nothing to seduce him back to the mattress it wasn't so difficult to put on his jogging gear and take the road down the Hill.

  Buddy was fifty-four. Jogging made him feel twice that. But too many of his contemporaries had died on him of late, his sometime agent Stanley Goldhammer being the most recent departure, and they'd all died of the same excesses that he was still thoroughly addicted to. The cigars, the booze, the dope. Of all his vices women were the healthiest, but even they were a pleasure to be taken in moderation these days. He couldn't make love through the night the way he'd been able to in his thirties. On a few traumatic occasions recently he hadn't been able to perform at all. It had been that failure which had sent him to his doctor, demanding a panacea, whatever the price.

  "There isn't one," Tharp had said. He'd been treating Buddy since the TV years, when The Buddy Vance Show had topped the ratings every week, and a joke he told at eight at night would be on the lips of every American the following morning. Tharp knew the man once billed as the funniest man in the world inside out.

  "You're doing your body harm, Buddy, every damn day. And you say you don't want to die. You still want to be playing Vegas at a hundred."

  "Right."

  "On present progress, I give you another ten years. That's if you're lucky. You're overweight, you're overstressed. I've seen healthier corpses."

  "I do the gags, Lou."

  "Yeah, and I fill in the death certificates. So start taking care of yourself, for Christ's sake, or you're going to go the way Stanley went."

  "You think I don't think about that?"

  "I know you do, Bud. I know."

  Tharp stood up and walked round to Buddy's side of the desk. On the wall were signed photographs of the stars whom he'd advised and treated. So many great names. Most of them dead; too many of them prematurely. Fame had its price.

  "I'm glad you're coming to your senses. If you're really serious about this . . ."

  "I'm here aren't I? How much more fucking serious do I have to get? You know how I hate talking about this shit. I never did a death gag in my life, Lou. You know that? Not once. Anything else. Anything. But not that!"

  "It's got to be faced sooner or later."

  "I'll take la
ter."

  "OK, so I'll have a health plan drawn up for you. Diet; exercise; the works. But I'm telling you now, Buddy, it won't make pleasant reading!"

  "I heard somewhere: laughter makes you live longer."

  "Show me where it says comedians live forever, I'll show you a tomb with a quip on it."

  "Yeah. So when do I begin?"

  "Start today. Throw out the malts and the nose-candy, and try using that pool of yours once in a while."

  "It needs cleaning."

  "So get it cleaned."

  That was the easy part. Buddy had Ellen call the Pool Service as soon as he got home and they sent somebody up the following day. The health plan, as Tharp had warned, was a tougher call, but whenever his will faltered he thought of the way he looked in the mirror some mornings, and the fact that his dick was only visible if he held his gut in so hard it ached. When vanity failed he thought of death, but only as a last resort.

  He'd always been an early riser, so getting up for a morning run wasn't a great chore. The sidewalks were empty, and often—as today—he'd make his way down the Hill and through the East Grove to the woods, where the ground didn't bruise the soles the same way the concrete did, and his panting was set to birdsong. On such days the run was strictly a one-way journey; he'd have Jose Luis bring the limo down the Hill and meet him when he emerged from the woods, the car stocked with towels and iced tea. Then they'd head back up to Coney Eye, as he'd dubbed the estate, the easy way: on wheels. Health was one thing; masochism, at least in public, quite another.

  The run had other benefits besides firming up his belly. He had an hour or so alone to get to grips with anything that was troubling him. Today, inevitably, his thoughts were of Rochelle. The divorce settlement would be finalized this week, and his sixth marriage would be history. It would be the second shortest of the six. His forty-two days with Shashi had been the fastest, ending with a shot that had come so close to blowing off his balls his sweat ran cold whenever he thought of it. Not that he'd spent more than a month with Rochelle in the year they'd been married. After the honeymoon, and its little surprises, she'd taken herself back to Fort Worth to calculate her alimony. It had been a mismatch from the beginning. He should have realized that, the first time she failed to laugh at his routine, which was, coincidentally, the first time she heard his routine. But of all his wives, including Elizabeth, she was the most physically alluring. Stone-faced she'd been, but the sculptor had genius.

  He was thinking of her face as he came off the sidewalk and hit the woods. Maybe he should call her; ask her to come back to Coney for one final try. He'd done it before, with Diane, and they'd had the best two months of their years together, before the old resentments had set in afresh. But that had been Diane, this was Rochelle. It was useless attempting to project behavior patterns from one woman to the next. They were all so gloriously different. Men were a dull bunch by comparison: dowdy and mono-minded. Next time around he wanted to be born a lesbian.

  Off in the distance, he heard laughter; the unmistakable giggling of young girls. A strange sound to hear so early in the morning. He stopped running and listened for it again, but the air was suddenly empty of all other sounds, even bird-song. The only noises he could hear were internal: the laborings of his system. Had he imagined the laughter? It was perfectly possible, his thoughts being as full of women as they were. But as he prepared to about-face and leave the thicket to its songlessness, the giggling came again, and with it an odd, almost hallucinatory, change in the scene around him. The sound seemed to animate the entire wood. It brought movement to the leaves, it brightened the sunlight. More than that: it changed the very direction of the sun. In the silence, the light had been pallid, its source still low in the east. On the cue of laughter it became noon-day bright, pouring down on the upturned faces of the leaves.

  Buddy neither believed nor disbelieved his eyes: he simply stood before the experience as before feminine beauty, mesmerized. Only when the third round of laughter began did he grasp its direction, and start off at a run towards it, the light still vacillating.

  A few yards on he saw a movement ahead of him through the trees. Bare skin. A girl stripping off her underwear. Beyond her was another girl, this one blonde, and strikingly attractive, beginning to do the same. He knew instinctively they weren't quite real, but he still advanced cautiously, for fear of startling them. Could illusions be startled? He didn't want to risk it; not with such pretty sights to see. The blonde girl was the last one undressed. There were three others, he counted, already wading out into a lake that flickered on the rim of solidity. Its ripples threw light up on to the blonde's face—Arleen, they named her, as they shouted back to the shore. Advancing from tree to tree, he got to within ten feet of the lake's edge. Arleen was in up to her thighs now. Though she bent to cup water in her hands and splash it on her body it was virtually invisible. The girls who were in deeper than she, and swimming, seemed to be floating in midair.

  Ghosts, he half-thought; these are ghosts. I'm spying on the past, being rerun in front of me. The thought propelled him from hiding. If his assumption was correct then they might vanish at any moment and he wanted to drink their glory down in gulps before they did.

  There was no trace of the clothes they'd shed in the grass where he stood, nor any sign—when one or the other of them glanced back towards the shore—that they saw him there.

  "Don't go too far," one of the quartet yelled to her companion. The advice was ignored. The girl was moving further from the shore, her legs spreading and closing, spreading and closing as she swam. Not since the first wet dreams of his adolescence could he remember an experience as erotic as this, watching these creatures suspended in the gleaming air, their lower bodies subtly blurred by the element that bore them up, but not so much he could not enjoy their every detail.

  "Warm!" yelled the adventurer, who was treading water a good distance from him, "it's warm out here."

  "Are you kidding?"

  "Come and feel!"

  Her words inspired further ambition in Buddy. He'd seen so much. Dare he now touch? If they couldn't see him— and they plainly couldn't—where was the harm in getting so close he could run his fingertips along their spines?

  The water made no sound as he stepped into the lake; nor did he feel so much as a touch against his ankles and shins as he waded deeper. It buoyed Arleen up well enough however. She was floating on the lake's surface, her hair spread around her head, her gentle strokes taking her further from him. He hurried in pursuit, the water no brake upon him, halving the distance between himself and the girl in seconds. His arms were extended, his eyes fixed upon the pinkness of her labia as she kicked away from him.

  The adventurer had begun to shout something, but he ignored her agitation. To touch Arleen was all he could think about. To put his hand upon her and she not protest, but go on swimming, while he had his way. In his haste his foot snagged on something. Arms still reaching for the girl he fell, face down. The jolt brought him to his senses enough to interpret the shouts from the deeper water. They were no longer cries of pleasure, but of alarm. He raised his head from the ground. The two furthest swimmers were struggling in midair, turning their faces up to the sky.

  "Oh my Lord," he said.

  They were drowning. Ghosts, he'd called them moments ago, not really thinking about what that name implied. Here was the sickening truth. The swimming party had come to grief in these phantom waters. He'd been ogling the dead.

  Revolted with himself, he wanted to retreat, but a perverse obligation to this tragedy kept him watching.

  All four of them were caught up in the same turmoil now, thrashing in the air, their faces darkening as they fought for breath. How was it possible? They looked to be drowning in four or five feet of water. Had some current taken hold of them? It seemed unlikely, in water so shallow and so apparently placid.

  "Help them . . ." he found himself saying. "Why doesn't somebody help them?"

  As though he might len
d aid himself he started towards them. Arleen was closest to him. All the beauty had gone from her face. It was contorted by desperation and terror. Suddenly her wide eyes seemed to see something in the water beneath her feet. Her struggling ceased, and a look of utter surrender took its place. She was giving up life.

  "Don't," Buddy murmured, reaching for her as if his arms might lift her up out of the past and carry her back to life. At the very moment his flesh met that of the girl, he knew this was fatal business for them both. He was too late in his regrets, however. The ground beneath them trembled. He looked down. There was only a thin cover of earth there, he saw, sustaining a meager crop of grass. Beneath the earth, gray rock; or was it concrete? Yes! Concrete! A hole in the ground had been plugged here, but the seal was fracturing in front of him, cracks widening in the concrete.

  He looked back towards the edge of the lake, and solid ground, but a rift had already opened between him and safety, a slab of concrete sliding into it a yard from his toes. Icy air rose from underground.

  He looked back towards the swimmers, but the mirage was receding. As it went he caught the same look on all the four faces, eyes rolled up so they showed solid white, mouths open to drink death down. They hadn't perished in shallow water, he now understood. This had been a pit when they'd come swimming here, and it had claimed them as it was now claiming him: them with water, him with wraiths.

  He started to howl for help, as the violence in the ground mounted, the concrete grinding itself to dust between his feet. Perhaps some other early-morning jogger would hear him, and come to his aid. But quickly; it had to be quickly.

  Who was he kidding? And he, a kidder. Nobody was going to come. He was going to die. For fuck's sake, he was going to die.

  The rift between him and good ground had widened considerably, but leaping it was his only hope for salvation. He had to be fast, before the concrete beneath him slid into the pit, taking him with it. It was now or never.

  He jumped. It was a good jump too. Another few inches and he'd have made it to safety. But a few were everything. He snatched at the air, short of his target, and fell.

  One moment the sun was still shining on the top of his head. The next, darkness, icy darkness, and he was plummeting through it with cobs of concrete hurtling past him on the same downward journey. He heard them crack against the face of the rock as they went; then realized it was he who was making the noise. It was the breaking of his bones and back he could hear as he fell. And fell and fell.