The Great and Secret Show

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 ’til the ground around them shook. –

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

– ’Til 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 (#ulink_43a94bee-cdf6-556c-a27c-778929281e6a)

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 over-stressed. 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 later.’

‘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 behaviour 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 round 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 birdsong. The only noises he could hear were internal: the labourings 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-turn 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 mid-air.

Ghosts, he half-thought; these are ghosts. I’m spying on the past, being re-run 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 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. Dared 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.