He is Randall Tork, the greatest wine writer in history. He is the writer of innumerable wine articles and wine books, and the author of an eponymously named franchise of annual wine-collecting guides, the Randall Tork Guide for Discerning Collectors. He is popularizer of such terms as barnyard and gymnasium when used in the description of fine wines. He is the man who made the Battenkill vineyard what it is. He created its reputation; no one else did it, though many stake their claim. He’s the one who destroyed a popular sommelier at one of the French restaurants by spreading the rumor that this so-called professional had no sense of smell. He did it with glee. He cares nothing about his subjects, the vintners, not about their feelings, not about their multimillion-dollar investments. They are the enemies of true invention.
What he despises: the delusions of wine connoisseurs, how they actually believe that they can taste all those faint traces, tobacco and chocolate and toasted almond, how they defer to whatever costs the most and is most prized by the heirs and heiresses who haven’t spent a sober afternoon in forty-five years. The look in the eyes of wine collectors at the word Bordeaux makes Randall Tork want to drive forks into these eyes, and when he encounters these people at wine tastings, he invariably selects the “best” wine at random and then argues for the perfection of the vintage, saying that the rest of the region tastes as though it has formaldehyde in it, and he then adheres to the result unswervingly.
He wrote the column that is whispered about by every informed collector, the remarks in which he compared the entire run of 1997 California chardonnays to the actress Elke Murnaugh. Who could forget?
These wines are flabby in the way the cellulite bulges from the too-tight pouches of her nulliparous behind, they are fruity like the desserts that are favored by the disadvantaged children that Murnaugh and her never-to-be-mentioned partner take into their house so that she can be photographed leering, like a wine taster, surrounded by her brood, on the covers of celebrity weeklies. These chardonnays have the mouthfeel of neglected vaginas begging to be brought beseechingly out of retirement, musty, undeodorized, and sentimental. They have the aftertaste of excessive reuse of Lysol spray in the bovine bathrooms of salacious celebrities who are otherwise lax about germs, and they are garish like appalling Broadway productions, the casts of which are full of malnourished thespians who would do anything for a plug from her flatulent fabulousness. Have I neglected to mention the overused dance belts of Broadway dancers, ossified with eons of sweat and antifungals? These wines have hints of these exquisite tastes. And the so-called wine drinkers who favor these chardonnays are, like Murnaugh herself, pustular pretenders to the great tradition of wine producing who would never save a bottle of anything, who would drink a capful of cheap perfume and call it French wine, if only they have been told by some online sewing circle of hacks that they should do so. Let these Murnaugh urine specimens be drunk by the aforementioned imbeciles and then praised to the stars. Persons who use words like zippy, zingy, and fun should be lined up and shot, and perhaps their moldering remains will bring a more satisfying fermentation process to the creation of a wine than we find in this repellent grape.
The fact that he once had to sit behind Elke at a certain performance of a certain Broadway spectacular did not enter into the review, of course, and how dare the suggestion be made. Randall Tork is the greatest writer in wine history, and his contempt for the edifice of wine consumption is owing to the fact that he cares about the truth. Indeed, at forty-nine years of age, and completely repulsive in the matter of his physical demeanor, being rather short, rather fat, and rather covered with acne scars, and having large muttonchop sideburns, and eyes too close together, and given to wearing a beret because of hair that is thinning on the top, there is nothing else for him to care about but wines.
His parents, who separated in his earliest childhood, found him unlovable and his feminine primping and mincing worthy of contempt, and they abused him mercilessly, and may they rot in hell. He had no friends as a child, and in the instances where people were moved to pity by his circumstances, he spit on these people, reviled them, and felt good about it after the fact.
Today’s august task is to work the term “festering boil” into a review of a Moselle, and to compare the owners of a restaurant in Marin County that once failed to honor his reservation to Vichy collaborators, after which he will return again to one of his favorite leitmotifs, the “gentle crushing of the fruit.” The foot crushing the grape in the bathtub is where wine began, in an intimacy, in a humanness. What enology has lost, and there is always something lost, is this very humanness, the slave in the bathtub crushing the grape at the behest of his cruel master. There should be slaves, of course, and there should be masters, and there should be a calm, serene attitude about the fermentation process: Keep the room cool, require absolute cleanliness, make certain that the man who is monitoring temperatures is a man who knows to check every hour. Don’t forget about elevage, the interval between fermentation and bottling; it is an art that has been handed down through the oral tradition. Randall can talk about these things. He can talk about triage and malic acidity and cap management, and the role in this era of the great French families, the way père et fils have conspired generation after generation to do this one perfect thing, and how this has not happened in the appalling United States of Baptist wine swillers because what have we here? In this country? We have the kind of tradition in which a fawning twenty-three-year-old wine writer comes to call at your vineyard, though he is unable to recognize appropriate tannins and wouldn’t care if the wineglass was filled with antifreeze.
Thus, Randall begins to compose:
Is that what you want for your vineyard? Do you want to have an expensive meal with a twenty-three-year-old with genital herpes, so that when you attempt to bed him in order to ensure the fine review of your pestilential product he infects you with his suppurating sores? Is that what you want? Maybe if you calved off his finger warts and mixed them in it would improve your beverage.
The language is closing in on what he needs. Truth is a condition of language, and when the outrage is pure, then the review is accurate.
What about the piece he fashioned entirely of similes? Reviewing the wines of Paraguay? Magnificent, really.
What are these wines like? They are like the teenage sacrifices of the Aztec peoples at the moment that these sacrifices wet themselves; like the smoked banana peels of banana republics; like the scorched smell of freebasing at the coca-producing factories of the Colombian cartels; like the acidified pages of the tomes of the Magic Realists; like the revolutionistas, unwashed and unfed; like the Disappeared after a good six months in their unmarked graves; like the punctured rectums of the fervent Catholic altar boys on their way to another round in the confessional with the good Father; like the smoking sky over the scorched rain forest; like the rainwater running down the gutter of an Indian village with no plumbing; like the throbbing bosoms of the sun-ripened, thong-wearing transvestites of the humid slums; like the discarded thatch of a continent’s worth of Brazilian bikini waxes; like the cannibalism of the interior tribes; like the moldy grooves of another box full of warped tropicalia LPs; like the nectar of slug-infested mangos; like the ear-splitting cry of the toucan and like its gaudy, excessively colorful exterior and its thinly constructed beak; like the bomb shelters of the hidden Latin American Nazis; like the still throbbing organs of their victims; and like the soiled loincloths of the victims of cannibalism at the moment of their demise.
Yes, he is the greatest, and no one can take the mantle from him, and yet there is the one thing missing, namely a personal life of any kind. There were some married men, in his later teens, the sort of men who liked much younger boys, no matter the appearance of these boys. He has been with some of these men, and he loved these men, and he learned a lot from them, including something about wine. But many years have since elapsed with nothing to show for them but the occasional tawdry sally with a vigneron or a sommelier. These never did satisfy, especially when he tried to get them to tie him up properly.
In the wake of this realization, there was no choice, really, but to take the search for love out into the world. And that was how he, Randall Tork, the greatest wine writer in history, came to conduct wine tastings at the hospices and in the chronic-care wards of the Bay Area. To be Randall Tork, stripped of his reputation and his franchise, in a hospital ward, with a couple of bottles of swill and a box of digestives, filling plastic cups for men and women who had cast off all but the last few pounds of their body weight, this was actually a rather moving experience for him. He got the okay from les médicines: a glass or two would not unduly affect the tripartite cocktail of chemicals routinely prescribed for his étudiants. He began spinning out his tales of wine excellence, how the grace to make a good wine did not take just root stock and ample sunshine, it took five hundred years of perfection and the beneficence of the gods, and he spoke of the kinds of political stability (monarchy being especially good) that made this perfection possible and of the secret languages that needed to be handed down, and in telling these stories, he found that he suddenly had a greater purpose. He found that he could feel great affection for the HIV afflicted, even when they made uninformed evaluations of the wines. He looked forward to getting out of the house.
It was in this context that Randall met a certain handsome gentleman. Raoul was not exactly who Randall Tork was imagining when he went to speak in the wards of the damned. Many of the men in the hospices at least dimly recognized the importance of wine, perhaps as part of their dining lives. Some of them even had strong opinions on the subject. They would occasionally take issue with him, and there was vigorous back-and-forth. Raoul was not one of these men, and Randall was of the opinion that Raoul had never even tasted wine before he had his first plastic cupful on the ward. He knew so little of wine that he had no idea that the stuff in the chalice at church on Sundays was reputed to be the same beverage that Randall Tork was now handing out. Raoul, it seemed, was mostly interested in professional baseball, the argot of which he pronounced in a charming Hispanic way.
Whippet thin, with short curly black hair, Raoul also sported one brown eye and one that was sort of greenish, a combination so lovely that Randall Tork felt a need to compose lines on the subject. It turned out, of course, that the vehicle for these lines was a review of a New Zealand white that everyone said was so vivacious, full-bodied, like an Oakland hooker, with the fruit of her cheap douche and the overtones of a Sumatran boar barbecued on a spit. Yet still this wine reminds me of the multicolored eyes of a beautiful man who once offered to take me to see the legends of local baseball frolic on their fields. Always Barry Bonds this, Barry Bonds that, Barry Bonds is a Greek god, he will live into eternity. This was Raoul’s sweet song, along with the fact that his surname, he said, proved that he was related to someone called A-Rod. Raoul was full of strong opinions about baseball, as befitted a young man, and seemed to come to the wine tastings with the cross-purpose of perseverating on America’s pastime.
Raoul said he was straight, which is what they all say, especially those men of the Catholic countries to our south, notwithstanding that they have all been around the block, pledging their eternal love to their boyhood friends before going and knocking up some she-vixen because they are too prideful to use a condom. Raoul said to Randall at the first tasting, “I am not a fruity wine like these others here,” and then he giggled as if he had never said anything so amusing in his life, which was perhaps true. Maybe he was straight, because who knew about these things? The libido is as mysterious as soil and sunlight and precipitation and the vine.
One fact was incontrovertible, however, and that was that Raoul had been an intravenous drug user during many years. He had lived on the streets for some of these years. It was likely that Raoul had been a male prostitute, perhaps in the Tenderloin. And this dark history of Raoul was, for Randall Tork, especially thrilling.
Accordingly, Randall visited this particular ward more often. Other locations of the needy began to get fewer lectures, less exacting attention. And then abruptly Randall Tork was visiting Raoul on a nonprofessional basis because Raoul was very sick and very thin, with a lingering pneumonia, and some days he could get out of bed, and some days not. Raoul was never less than enchanting, in his consumptive ghostliness, and he was always gallant when Randall Tork came around. The question was why. Why would a former male prostitute and IV drug user who claimed to be straight, whose main interest was Barry Bonds, get excited about the attentions of a stumpy, middle-aged wine writer with muttonchops and a beret, who sat around all day trying to decide whether to repaint his living room while checking the prices of his stock portfolio?
There was no reason on earth why Raoul should care for the attentions of Randall Tork, and thus the reasons must have been abstract and perfect, and Randall Tork, the greatest wine writer in history, did, of course, attempt to divine the nature of these abstractions while considering the force and meaning of the Castello di Ostuni, 1999 Chianti Classico (fifty-five dollars a bottle):
Why should this be the top Chianti from Ostuni, a region not widely noted for its fine wines? Why should this estate, which has been in the family since 1580, suddenly produce a wine that I love, after a run of the worst, most undrinkable table swill of my considerable experience? To answer these questions, reader, there is no choice but to speak of sweet love generally. When in love do you not see depth where once depth was unapparent, and when in love do you not see elegance where once elegance feared to tread, and when in love do you not see complexity where hitherto all was simplistic, and is not a condition of willingness and openness to novelty the most succulent of trances? Does not love eventually work its magic on even the unworthy? Yes, complexity is love’s highest aim, and in the case of a wine, its symbol is in the full-bodied nature of the vintage, and by full-bodied I mean the kaleidoscope of liminalities in one sweet goblet. Hold it up to the light, hold up the beloved wine to the light and see how when your love is decanted his blood is deep and red like history. Now drink of its bouquet, the bouquet of this sweet Chianti, its bouquet of musk and lilies and warm semen, and now you are ready to see the precarious balance in the taste of your love, citrus, honeydew, and birch, and now and only now are you ready to sip, oh yes; here are the fierce tannins, which ask for your courage and which call after you, reminding you of the responsibility of this sweet instant; now let the echo of that taste linger, bringing with it a sweet waiting. It is yours to delight in love and to remember that love and wine call you to the same reverence, to take and delight and remember and describe and teach and succumb to the sweet wrestling, the longing for what will soon be gone, for a bottle of wine must end, like the greatest love story told.
He threw caution to the wind and read the column aloud to Raoul. And though Randall wasn’t sure that Raoul would really understand all of it, the critic nonetheless performed his love poem, acting out his Keatsian excesses with stylized sibilances and exclamations. If Randall Tork could not answer why Raoul should favor him with attentions, perhaps it didn’t matter any longer, because the column proved that Raoul brought out the best in him. He even took Raoul out to a Mexican restaurant in the Mission, and he actually drank beer with Raoul, which he previously would never have been caught doing with anyone, and he laughed uproariously at Raoul’s tales of the street, of the camaraderies of the street. He didn’t care if the louts and toughs of the authentic Mexican restaurant used that horrible Spanish slang word to describe the two of them. Then he took Raoul back to the hospice, giving the taxi driver very exacting directions, which if not followed to the letter elicited torrents of abuse, because he now cared about the vintage known as Raoul and, notwithstanding the haste of the decision, he wanted to know if Raoul would come and live with him in Marin County, in his little house on stilts.
Of course, it occurred to Randall Tork that Raoul might be lying about various things. It occurred to Randall Tork that he was taking in a felon with a past full of shadows, but he was willing to do what needed to be done, which was to administer the tripartite cocktail when it needed to be administered, and to cook healthful soups from scratch, and to laugh when laughing was possible, and to give constant updates on baseball scores, and even to watch televised baseball if that was what was needed, to help the patient dress, to bestow kisses on the patient, and when Raoul began improving a little bit, when he seemed to rally such that he was even talking about getting a job, perhaps at a discount-beverage center, then Randall Tork knew that in addition to being the greatest wine writer in history, he was also a person whose love was curative. How to tell Raoul this, that he had never ever before been such a person, that his principal motivator had always been the urge to despoil? Now he wanted only to despoil the vineyard owners of Sonoma and Napa Valley, no one else. Passersby seemed more benevolent than ever.
There was the wrinkle: that Raoul would never make love with him. Would not, at any rate, have an orgasm with him. Raoul said that his spunk, which was the word he used, was toxic, and that it was not fair to subject Randall Tork to it, when the truth was that the very poison of Raoul’s little frogmen was what made them more ambrosial and heavenly. Randall would have delighted to eat them, as a testament to his sacrifices, since there was no apparent link between this practice and viral transmission. But no, when it came to these moments, Randall had to beg of his Hispanic lover, and this was proof that there were always further depths of humility for Randall to know, if he would know love.
The amounts of money that began to go missing were mainly inconsequential, because Randall Tork did not leave a lot of cash around the premises. He hated cash, in fact, and dealt almost exclusively in debit and credit cards. He was an inveterate saver, and most of his fortune, which was not much, considering the reach of his annual paperback and his Web site ratings, was tied up in mutual funds that had nosedived, along with everyone else’s, earlier in the year. Yet he was frugal and thrifty. When two hundred dollars disappeared from his wallet just after these monies were extracted from a cash machine, he didn’t fail to notice. Nor did he, however, immediately confront Raoul. He waited to see what would happen. Would the two hundred dollars be converted immediately into a speedball or whatever the term was? Six weeks later, there was another precipitous disappearance of cash. Randall asked himself what the saints would do. Would the saints thank the heavens that Raoul was feeling frisky enough to go in search of drugs? Would the saints forgive and forget?
One afternoon about dusk, in early October, which is after all a perfect time for a shocking revelation, Raoul, weeping, put his hand on the knee of his patron and said that he was again putting the needle in his arm. It was not what he wanted to do, he said, lapsing into the Spanglish patois that was so divine, “The thing calls to me, and I cannot refuse.”
Randall listened to the circles of Raoul’s reasoning, and his disgust was with himself, more so than with the rampant lies that peppered the confession. Because he had not yet sacrificed enough, as anyone could see. Holding the emaciated head of his lover in his lap, he said, “How can I help?”
“I must stop. I don’t want to hurt nobody.”
Randall said, “I could just give you whatever amount of money you need to ensure that if you are going to use drugs you buy from the most reputable dealers in these drugs, that you get the safest drugs, and that you always use the cleanest needles, and in that way, you take the fewest risks. Because if money is going to enable you to feel comfortable, then I need to help, because I am the man who loves you.”
After consideration, Randall added, “We can go through this together.”
Raoul wept for a while and when he again met Randall Tork’s eyes, it was with a kind of gratitude that Tork was not used to seeing, even from the wine publicists who had dodged the exploding ordnance of his malice. Randall could tell that Raoul was high even at the moment of confession, because he knew the look. The look of the simulation of self-knowledge by one who is able in deceit. He knew Raoul was high and he suspected it would get worse, that there was no ending ahead but a bad ending. This bad ending might contain the assault of his own person, the robbery thereof. Still, he had come this far, and for the moment there was no course but to trust further and to attempt to lead Raoul to the light of nobility, especially as this light was indicated in the tradition of the production of wine. He urged Raoul to come to tastings with him, and Raoul attempted to comply on a few occasions. But for each boondoggle that featured Raoul’s guest appearance, there were days when he was gone, and, for all Randall knew, he was out on the street, playing the putain for an extra twenty or thirty clams. Randall Tork tried to make sure that the boy never left without cash, and he always snuck a half-dozen condoms into his pocket when Raoul’s blue jeans came out of the wash.
As Halloween rolled around, Randall Tork began to get an even more desperate notion. That he would like to marry Raoul. Marry him? He could not marry Raoul, for so many reasons, chief among them that Raoul Rodriguez was Catholic, and in the Roman Catholic Church there was no such thing as the love between men. The blood of Christ congealed at the very notion. And there was also the law of the land, the nauseating Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited two men from meeting in the nuptial bower to celebrate their love. Formidable problems, indeed, and yet Randall Tork, the greatest living wine writer, did not accept that anyone could tell him what he might do. He would marry Raoul, and they would promenade down the steps of some church, sparklers sparkling everywhere around them. He would utter his vows to the boy and he would know the joy the vows brought down on their utterers.
Was it delusional? He’d known Raoul three months. Three delicious months during which he had never once shrunk from holding the boy’s head when he upchucked, nor from cleaning up after his bouts of diarrhea. He cherished every joke and every moment of kindness; he loved every landscape that had Raoul in it. He was occasionally struck by the notion that Raoul would not live out the whole of his term. For example, Randall Tork should have been finishing a big article for a big glossy magazine about the Afghani vineyards that were springing up in place of the once plentiful fields of opium poppies. But he could not finish the article because he was too busy thinking about getting married. Where might they conduct the ceremony? Should they travel to some faraway country that recognized their type of union? Would Raoul be able to fly without having to give himself an injection? Which designer should they select for the creation of their wedding suits? And, most important, what would be the wine? In the past few weeks, Randall Tork had been vacillating between two different choices: the 1945 Mouton Rothschild, with its light amber edges, and the 1959 Lafite Rothschild, memorable for, dare he say it, the black truffle overtones. He found himself curiously irresolute, as if the idea that he might now be married had begun to affect somehow his professional credentials in the matter of this selection. Scandal!
Into these interesting times, as if dropped from the air, a movie star projected himself. Randall had met the movie star at a wine tasting at a Sonoma vineyard, Lonely Lake, owned by a certain film producer. Randall Tork felt that the wines of Lonely Lake were beneath contempt, as were all but a few American wines, but he had made an exception and graced this tasting with his presence for the simple reason that Lonely Lake had the best wine label he had ever seen. It hadn’t escaped Randall’s notice that some of the California vineyards had brought to the design of their labels the expertise and sublimity that their wine making lacked. The pen-and-ink elegance and the almost Victorian calligraphy of the Lonely Lake label appealed to Randall, as did the invocation in its title of that most romantic of emotions. What did Randall know better than wine? Just the one thing. Loneliness. The idea that a purveyor of popular pabulum like the producer who owned this vineyard would willingly invoke that most perfect word, loneliness, in the pursuit of a drinkable simulation of a Malbec, it was enough to roust him from Raoul and his house.
Randall Tork recalls that he was talking to a thoroughly moronic author of mystery novels, whose visage looked as though it had been face-lifted by a drunken home renovator, and she was boasting about how her next novel was going to be about a wine writer, when all at once there was a commotion in the room, and the movie star and his wife made their entrance. Of course, Randall Tork is not the sort to be surprised by stardom. He has seen stardom come and go. He has seen great chefs laid low by pedophilia and vainglory, and he has seen vineyards that were red-hot in one vintage produce nothing but detergent for a decade. He has seen it all. Still, Randall Tork admired a fine entrance. When the movie star and his wife entered the party, the general astonishment of the wine tasters was a fine thing to behold. The wine tasters laid aside their gossip about the movie producer and his wines long enough to take note of the white minidress that the wife was wearing and the ensemble that the movie star himself sported, a pair of torn blue jeans, a silk T-shirt, a blazer from Armani, and cowboy boots.
Randall Tork was introduced to the movie star as the world’s greatest living wine writer, and neither he nor the movie star disputed this characterization. There were two giants in the room now, and this was one of those moments when those destined to greatness must sniff around each other’s behinds to settle the question of whether or not to attack.
What impressed Randall about the movie star immediately was that the movie star ignored everyone for the rest of the afternoon and devoted himself exclusively to Tork. This indicated, on the part of the movie star, a developed palate. He believed that the movie star showed promise. And the movie star, unlike many straight men of reputation, was not at all uncomfortable around a man of Randall Tork’s persuasions. On the contrary, the movie star seemed to enjoy talking to a wine writer no matter qu’il fait la drague. It was only when they had been talking for some fifteen or twenty minutes that the movie star admitted that he actually did collect a little bit, under the tutelage of his father-in-law, who really knew about these things, and it happened that in this context, the wine-collecting context, the movie star had indeed read some of Randall Tork’s reviews.
“You’re a madman, and I can’t get enough of it. I don’t care about the wines. I only care about the way the language tumbles out.”
“Of course you do.”
“You’re like Proust.”
“Proust is like me. I’d never change the boys’ names to girls’ names.”
“He—?”
“I was not pampered as a child. I made myself up in a fever dream. It was not a taxing project. Now Randall Tork rules the world.”
Of course, the movie star had many demands upon his attention. Eventually, the vineyard owner, that briny lump of tissue, pried the movie star loose from his colloquy with Randall, and Randall recognized that this was inevitable, if boring. But before the movie star moved on to dally with the vacuous, diaper-clad elderly of Sonoma County, he leaned in to Randall and said, “Give me your card. We’ll get together.”
And Randall’s card is rather special. It’s from Smythson of Bond Street, the London office, special ordered, and it is on heavy stock with gilt edges, printed in Edwardian script from a hand-engraved copperplate: RANDALL TORK. IN THE CONSIDERATION OF FINE VINTAGES. E-mail address below. During the events described, Randall delivered the card with the ennui that appropriately suggested that the movie star could never have been luckier than just now. Indeed, the movie star smiled, before disappearing into the throngs.
This personage, Randall later admitted to his consort, Raoul, was called Thaddeus Griffin.
“Single Bullet Theory?”
“The very one.”
“Was he a handsome man?”
“Exceedingly handsome, his handsomeness chiefly located in his tonsorial effects. He is a man with perfect hair, hair whose disarrangement is among the most calculated statements of beauty I have seen in many years.”
“You going to make room in your bed?” said Raoul mischievously.
“Fool,” Randall said. “I’m promised to you. You are my appointment and my disappointment. Moreover, this is a man who loves his wife. I can sense these things.”
Evidently the movie star managed such feats as producing from thin air the unlisted and fervently guarded telephone number of Randall Tork, because suddenly, out of the blue, in the middle of the crisis of Raoul’s addictive relapses, the movie star called not too long after the tiresome general election. He said he had something he wanted to discuss with Randall Tork and could he come out to Sonoma, just after the Thanksgiving holiday, to meet with him. There was no description of what was to be discussed. And yet Randall Tork, the greatest living wine writer, was not above a little adolescent excitement. An excitement that he elected not to display, lest his passions bring about one of the inexplicable torrents of Latin rage in Raoul.
Today is the day. Having completed six column inches of negligible interest and having fretted briefly over whether his powers are on the wane, Randall Tork has washed behind his ears, and he has brushed his teeth again, and he has set out a lovely Château Lafite from a year before he was born on a silver platter, alongside which are two glasses from Tiffany’s, and he has gone out into the living room, where Raoul is sobbing over a talk show about a woman who cannot accept her daughter’s navel ring, and he has hugged this dear boy, and he has asked if Raoul would make sure not to ask the movie star anything about his movies or his upcoming projects, because these people, he tells Raoul, do not like to have to talk about how they live. It would be better if he would just continue watching the program until Randall gives him the secret signal, and then he can go ahead and talk.
“You trying to hide me away from your famous boyfriend!”
“Raoul! Absolutely not!”
“You saying that I’m not good enough?” It’s just what he was afraid of. The outrage gathers momentum, like a chain reaction, beginning as a peevish jocularity and moving through bitter resentment into full-scale meltdown.
“I am saying no such thing! I’m saying that we do not yet know what the movie star wants, and in the absence of information, we should wait and see what it is that he wants, and that requires the stealthy strategy of a feline —”
“You calling me —”
“I’m not calling you anything except my dear sweet boy who has made my life tolerable. I’m just explaining —”
“I can go out on the street and wait for you there, if that’s what you want. I come into your house like this, you ought to treat me with respect. Because I have things I can do. I can go away!”
“Raoul! Please don’t do this! Not now. I am your cheering section and your federal agency. I love you no matter what. Please just understand —”
In fact, Raoul has taken a bad turn in recent days. Raoul has stopped looking rosy in the way he was, even though Randall is making sure that he takes what he’s supposed to take, and he has stopped expressing the joy he was previously expressing. Raoul has mostly lain around on the couch, complaining about a program called American Spy, which bothers him because he thinks the participants are unpleasant. Perhaps it will be this way until spring training, when his pastime can again lighten his heart. Whatever the cause, Randall Tork does not have liberty to ponder it, because the doorbell is ringing—because it is twelve noon sharp on the Monday after Thanksgiving, the appointed day and time—and now the movie star has come to call, here at the little house on stilts.
The movie star is graceful and full of humility as he stoops and crosses the threshold. The movie star hands over his scarf and his leather jacket, and he smiles at Randall and compliments him on the house, on its elimination of inessential furnishings, the concealment of all books, the warm light that suffuses the premises with genteel hospitality. All things, it should go without saying, that Randall Tork has premeditated in the presentation of his modest bunker. If the movie star notices the lump on the couch, he doesn’t say anything about it, and neither does Randall. At the kitchen table, after the wine is poured from the decanter and after the movie star performs a neophyte’s swirling and sniffing, the conversation at last begins.
“Let me know what you think,” Randall says. “Grape juice. Just a trifle. I have a couple of other things I want you to try.”
“Excellent.”
The movie star gives the wine pause, a pause that the movie star apparently thinks he must observe, before getting onto the subject he has genuinely come here to address.
“Listen, Randall—it’s okay if I call you Randall, right? I didn’t really come here to discuss wine, which I’m sure is kind of an unusual thing to say under the circumstances. Since that’s what you’re known for. I really admire what you do as a writer, and that’s why I’m here. It’s like I said the last time we saw each other. I think I said then that I didn’t think you were just a wine writer, any more than Hemingway was just a writer about bullfights. I think you’re one of the great contemporary writers, I really do, and believe it or not, I do read. Once you get locked into doing what I do, you’re sort of stuck there. There are lots of compensations, sure, but there are lots of costs, too. For example, no one believes I got a good education at a good college. No one believes that I love to read and that I admire the great storytellers, you know? It’s true. I even write.
“I wouldn’t exactly call what I do writing; it’s more like blocking out big chunks of story. You know. I try to develop scripts and stuff. That’s what I’ve tried to do for the last few years, in New York. And recently I’ve had a little good news. That’s really why I’m here. I’ve finally got something set up, or just about set up, something that has the potential to be a really big project, you know, the kind of thing that has major-studio involvement, major money on the table. A blockbuster.”
“Is this a —”
“Not a motion picture, actually. It’s a . . . well, it’s sort of a television thing, really. It’s a . . . miniseries.”
“A what?”
“Just listen for a second. It’s not every day that I have a conversation like this, Randall. Let me tell you a little bit about what’s really going on. Let me tell you a little bit what it’s like. My name has been in the papers lately, and not in good circumstances. The kind of coverage that you don’t exactly want to get. And that sort of coverage has not exactly endeared me to my family, if you see what I mean. I’m about to go film a movie in the desert, Randall, a movie called The Tempest of Sahara, which has to be one of the dumbest scripts I’ve ever read. And when I’m through filming there, in three months, and I come back to the wreckage of my married life, I don’t exactly know what I’ll find. The production company that I helped found is at death’s door, money problems, embezzlement; I have every bit of bad luck you could think of.
“Still, I had this idea about a month ago, for a miniseries. About diviners. Diviners, Randall, you know, the guys with the, with the —”
“Forked sticks.”
“And this prompted me to read a little bit about the arid places of the world, Randall. It started out as a joke. The whole story started out as a joke. I guess I can come clean, Randall, because you seem like a guy who could, who has been . . . I feel like you’ll understand, and the thing is, the story started as a joke to impress someone, Randall. It was spun out on a cocktail napkin in a bar. But then I started reading about the deserts, about the American West, and about the struggle for water, which, you know, is a struggle as old as man. There’s always been this class of magicians, Randall, and they’re, like, they’re the priest class in the desert, they get to wear the best outfits, these ones who know where the water is; I started to see that there was always something magical happening in the desert, there was this awesome deprivation and savagery going on, and then on the other hand, there were these little moments of grace, from generation to generation, whenever the diviners were on the scene, and that’s when I got the idea for this series. Once I started writing I couldn’t stop. The words were just pouring out, Randall, I never had an experience like this before, I’m not . . . I’m probably not really an artist. I’m not a guy who lies awake at night with bits of inspiration floating through my head. But once I got the idea to start writing this story, Randall, I couldn’t think of anything else. It was like I was the desert, like I was the parched landscape, and the rainfall, the storm was breaking over me, for no reason other than I was in a bad patch and I was being given this chance to make something out of it.”
The movie star’s earnestness is commanding enough that Randall Tork can hardly look away. He refills the wineglasses. The movie star drinks his down as though it really were grape juice. Randall, who normally tastes the stuff and spits it out, feels somehow compelled to keep up, as the movie star begins to spin out his deluxe plot summary. Can anything on earth truly be duller than a movie or book digested by some brainless hunk of protoplasm who didn’t read carefully in the first place? Randall would rather die than listen to plot summary. But that was before he got pitched by a movie star. Now, as the movie star tells him that the story begins at the dawn of time and moves up through the Dark Ages, into the Crusades, he’s thoroughly charmed. The movie star could give the plot summary of the new post-deregulation phone book, and Randall would think it rather adorable. This is how the colloquy goes, until something really special happens.
What is the thing that happens? The thing that happens is that the movie star begins to tell Randall Tork about the discovery of Las Vegas. What was Las Vegas? Las Vegas was nothing; it didn’t exist. Nothing existed, for the Spanish, on the road to Los Angeles, except a dozen days or more in the open sun with just the brackish water that the wayfarers managed to carry with them along the way. Many were lost, as the movie star tells it, many were lost, and that’s without bothering to mention the assaults of the natives, who came from out of limitless nothingness where no one should have lived, to surround each and every band of Spaniards, stealing their women and scalping their men. Sometime in the early nineteenth century a young Spanish adventurer, Rafael Rivera, on a journey across this very desert, decided that the natives had to be coming from somewhere, from some verdancy out there in the wasteland. There had to be water; there had to be waving fields. There was no other explanation. And Rafael Rivera set out across the desert with courageous confederates. No one expected anything of him, only that they would later find his shiny skeleton, picked clean. But what did Rafael find? He found an oasis, and he named it for its waving fields, Las Vegas. It cut the trip to Los Angeles in half because it was no longer necessary to go around.
A beautiful little story, of course, and as part of the larger narrative, it would necessarily include a dowser as one of the courageous confederates. But what piques the interest of Randall Tork, of course, is the role of Rafael. In general, the rest of the story is a little silly. Who cares if there were other, older explorers along for the ride? Who is going to play Rafael Rivera in this miniseries? It seems completely natural to him that Raoul, his intended, his plighted troth, would be perfect for the part, since he is already Hispanic, and he is beautiful to behold, and the gravity of his illness would look entirely appropriate out in the merciless desert. So overwhelming is the idea of trying to cast Raoul in the role of Rafael that he doesn’t at first pay attention to what comes next.
“The thing is, Randall, you know and I know that the world hates a guy with two ambitions. The world wants me to do the one thing, and that’s fire off blanks from an automatic weapon. Especially with all the trouble I’ve gotten myself into recently. Everywhere I go lately, there’s a guy with a beer gut and a telephoto lens waiting for me to pick my nose. I had to change cars twice and duck into a men’s room just to get here without anyone following me. And so it’s just not for me to try to be the writer on this script, even though I’m really proud of what I’ve come up with. I don’t want to go through the whole process of coming up with a pseudonym or any of that nonsense. I want someone to flesh out the story for me, Randall; I want someone to be the writer for me. I want someone who really has something, who really has the gift, who really has the inspiration that maybe I have had this week but that I’ll probably never have again. I want someone who has the real vision to do this for me, to be the name on the poster for The Diviners. You could work on the script with me if you want, Randall, it’s really up to you. You’d get a cut on the whole project and a credit that you can use to your advantage later on if you want. You’ve got a name and a reputation, a great reputation among the people who could really help to finance a project like this, and you’re a natural, so why wouldn’t you write a script?”
Why wouldn’t he, indeed? Is he not Randall Tork, the greatest wine writer in history? And has he not always, in the back of his mind, known that one day he would turn his abilities toward something that served as a more likely platform for world domination? His editor has often told him he has a novel in him, for example, and if not a novel, why not a thirteen-episode miniseries, with a three-hour pilot, that goes from the dawn of man up to Las Vegas? He is a natural, really, as long as one point can be negotiated. And that point is Raoul.
“Well,” Randall says. “This is all so sudden. All so very sudden. But I must say, Thaddeus—if it’s okay that I call you Thaddeus—I’m touched and honored. I really am. Because there must have been any number of writers, experts in other fields, whom you must have considered—although I’m obviously more qualified than all of them. Still, I’m honored. Touched and honored. Obviously, I’ll need to think about it for a few days, and would it be possible to take a gander at some pages from your script? I think that might be the way to proceed, just so that I can see to what I might be signing my name? It’s really a very provocative proposal you bring, and I will give it my utmost consideration.”
Then Randall says, “Oh, and by the way, there’s someone I want you to meet.”
If his husband-to-be, Raoul, is going to secure the role of Rafael, it would be best if the movie star could meet him first. He certainly hopes that Raoul can hold his tongue and not say any of those incredibly impulsive things he says sometimes, because here it is, the movie star’s proposal, delivered in a passionate and intensive forty-five-minute tête-à-tête over a Château Lafite, and could anything be so wonderful and so sudden as this proposal? Nothing could. He just wants Raoul to share in the outrageous wonderfulness of it, and after the shoot they will perhaps wed, in a large ceremony in Sedona, because it wouldn’t be all that far from Las Vegas, and so perhaps they could get married in that spectacular Frank Lloyd Wright chapel up in the rocks, and perhaps the movie star would agree to be the best man for the both of them. Randall rinses the crystal out and then he points at the living room. Thaddeus tarries in the doorway. Beyond, the television screen murmurs hopelessly.
“Raoul, honey?” Randall says. Though he never employs cheap endearments. “Raoul, honey? Are you awake?”