I noticed two things right away when I awoke shortly before dawn. Old Saxophone Joe wasn’t crowing and a warm drizzle was falling. According to the radio weatherman the forecast now called for a 70 percent chance of “severe” thunderstorms and “dangerously” high winds by that evening. Not exactly a good omen for the gala benefit performance of Private Lives in the roof-challenged Sherbourne Playhouse.
I hadn’t slept well at all. Too much on my mind, none of it good. Plus Lulu simply wouldn’t stop whimpering about Joe. She was sad, and trust me when I tell you that there’s nothing sadder than a sad basset hound.
I put the coffee on, hungering to get the Ramones on my turntable, crank the volume up to eleven, and dive headfirst back into my novel. But I couldn’t focus. Not after the insanity of yesterday and what was sure to be even more insanity today. That unwanted intruder known as Real Life, the bane of every novelist’s existence, had taken charge. I would get zero work done today on The Sweet Season of Madness, and I knew it.
So I got busy packing a garment bag instead. My tux. Starched pleated white shirt. Bow tie. Studs and cuff links. Black patent leather shoes. If you live long enough, and I sincerely hope that you do, you’ll discover that there are very, very few people who can carry off wearing a tux with effortless grace. There’s Fred Astaire. There’s Marlene Dietrich. There’s me. I wasn’t sure if anyone else would be wearing one tonight, but I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity. When I’d finished packing I showered, shaved and dressed in the featherweight glen plaid worsted wool suit, a lavender shirt, powder blue knit tie, white bucks and fedora. I readied the guest cottage for the coming storm by closing and latching all of the windows and locking the door. I went in the house and collected Lulu’s bowls, some canned food and her anchovy jar. Stowed them in the antique doctor’s bag that I use as her travel kit and stashed it in the Woody with my garment bag. Then I closed and latched all of the windows in the house and stowed the deck furniture in the barn. The chickens could take care of themselves. Their wire coop had a little door into the barn that they could use when they needed to.
I took one last look around, suddenly realizing that in the event of a power outage, which happened frequently in Lyme when it got stormy, that the venison leg in the mudroom freezer chest might thaw and drown my manuscript. Seized by sheer panic at the mere thought of it, I moved the pages from the freezer to the bread box in the kitchen.
Then I locked the house, got in the Woody with Lulu and moved on out, easing down the long, bumpy driveway until I hit Joshua Town Road. After a half mile or so I pulled in at Mr. MacGowan’s weathered farmhouse, where he was sitting on his covered porch in a pair of overalls puffing on his pipe and reading that morning’s New London Day. Angus MacGowan was a barrel-chested widower in his seventies whose family had been farming in Lyme since the 1600s. He was an abrupt, cranky Yankee but incredibly kind once he decided someone was okay. And Merilee was definitely his idea of okay. He was her go-to expert when it came to anything that had to do with livestock. The man knew pretty much everything there was to know. Not that he worked very hard at farming anymore. In fact, farming had never actually been his sole means of support. He’d taught math at the high school for forty years.
“Morning, Hoagy,” he called out cheerfully. Lulu waddled straight to him for a pat on the head. “Get you a cup of coffee?”
“I’ve got to be running, thanks.”
He peered at me, one eye squinted shut. “Yet you look to me like a fella with trouble on his mind.”
“Old Saxophone Joe passed away last night.”
“Sorry to hear that. Did he take sick?”
“He got attacked.”
Mr. MacGowan nodded knowingly. “Fox, most likely.”
“I wondered if you might have an extra rooster I could buy off of you.”
“Afraid not,” he said, rustling the pages of his newspaper.
“Okay. Just thought I’d ask.”
“Let me rephrase that. I have an extra rooster I can let you have but I won’t accept money for it.”
I smiled at him. “Thank you, Mr. MacGowan.”
“Actually, you’ll be doing me a favor. I’ve got me a pair that tussle day and night. Be good to get one of them out of here. You being a city fella, I should warn you it’s not easy to bring a new rooster into a coop. Those hens can get awful nasty. You’ll need a take-charge type. Me, I’d say Quasimodo’s the man for the job. Want me to bring him by later and introduce him to the girls?”
“I’m afraid I’ll be gone all day. We both will.”
“Not to worry. I’ll take care of it. Happy to.” He peered at me again. “You’ve still got more on your mind.”
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything about this to Merilee. Unless she asks, that is. She may notice that Quasimodo doesn’t look or sound like Old Saxophone Joe. Then again, she may not.”
“You’d rather she didn’t know he got himself eaten, is that it? Say no more. I understand.”
“Thanks, Mr. MacGowan. You’re a good neighbor.”
“You folks had yourselves a busy night last night, didn’t you? Cars coming and going.”
“Busier than we like. Did you happen to see them?”
“Nope, just heard ’em. I was in bed reading my new Tom Clancy. Now he can tell a story. One of ’em drove by here around ten o’clock in a real beater that needs a new muffler. Hung around for a half hour or so before it took off. Then you came home in the Woody. I’d recognize the purr of that engine in my sleep. Then another car came along not long after you. Newer engine.” He fanned himself with his newspaper. “Feel that tropical air moving up from the Gulf of Mexico? Heck, you can practically smell it. Going to pour tonight. Count on it.” He fanned himself some more before he said, “I’ll see to Quasimodo. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
“Thank you, Mr. MacGowan. We won’t be home tonight until very late. And we’re not expecting any company.”
“Say no more. I hear anybody heading up your way—like, say, somebody who needs a new muffler—I’ll call the resident trooper.” He studied me curiously. “Merilee got herself one of those celebrity stalkers or something?”
“Or something.”
THE SHERBOURNE INN, the yellow, three-story Victorian mansion that anchored the town green, was famous for its English-style rose garden. A full-time staff of gardeners kept everything pruned and tidy. The boxwood hedges were so neatly squared off they looked as if they’d been razor cut. Not a weed was to be found anywhere. It was all just a bit too twee for me. I prefer controlled chaos. But most people seemed to love the inn’s garden. Some of them even chose to get married there.
The mansion’s hardwood-paneled first floor had been converted into a formal dining room and an informal taproom where they had Guinness on draft and cooked up a not terrible bacon cheeseburger. There was a screened-in wraparound terrace overlooking the rose garden where breakfast was served.
Marty Miller was seated out there at a table by himself poring over his marked-up copy of Private Lives. He had on a different colored polo shirt than yesterday’s but he still gave off that same pungent scent of curried mutton. And he was still wearing flip-flops, sad to say. His bare feet smelled like Camembert that had been left out in the sun for too long. He was unshaven and what little he had in the way of blond hair was uncombed. Hadn’t changed the bandage that Glenda had put on his soft, pudgy hand yesterday. It looked dirty, crusty and a bit revolting, actually. On the table before him was a plate of corned beef hash topped with four poached eggs. Also a side order of sausages.
“Glad you stopped by, Hoagy,” he said, brightening as he glanced up at me. “I hate to eat alone.”
“Is that why you ordered enough food for two?”
“No, that’s because I’m a P-I-G pig. Millie, will you please get over here, you gorgeous creature?”
Our young, fresh-faced waitress bustled over in her gingham uniform to fill my coffee cup. She was a sturdily built milkmaid type with apple cheeks and bright blue eyes who was clearly awed by the presence of such a big movie star.
“Get my friend whatever he wants and put it on my tab,” Marty said, winking at me. “The playhouse is paying for it.”
I ordered the corned beef hash with two poached eggs. “And a small plate of smoked salmon for my friend, please.” Meaning Lulu, who’d started to curl up under our table until she got a whiff of Marty’s feet and relocated herself over by the screen door to the garden.
“Sure thing,” Millie said, bustling off.
“I hear they are talking deluge tonight,” Marty said to me as he went to work on his breakfast. He ate pretty much as you’d expect—by lowering his head to the plate and shoveling the food in like a snowplow. “Something tells me we’ll be up there onstage clutching umbrellas. Meanwhile, our full house of heavy hitters will be sitting there in fancy dress getting totally drenched. Coward would be chortling his head off. Too bad the old boy’s not around to see it.”
“Marty, I was wondering if we could talk about your days at Yale. You and Dini, Dini and R. J. Romero . . .”
He tensed ever so slightly. “Why do you want to dredge up that old shit?”
“I truly don’t. It’s surfaced on its own.”
“I see . . .” He shoved half of a sausage into his mouth, chewing on it. “Actually, I lied. I don’t see. That’s what is known as a space holder. Something to say when you have nothing to say. It’s, um, not a very pleasant story, Hoagy. You’d better sit down.”
“I am sitting down.”
“Son of a bitch, you are.”
Millie brought me my breakfast, topped off my coffee and delivered a small plate of smoked salmon to Lulu, beaming at her. Lulu dove in gratefully.
“Where would you like me to start?” Marty asked with a complete absence of enthusiasm.
I went to work on my hash, which tasted even better than it looked. “How about with Dini and R.J.?”
He shrugged his soft, pudgy shoulders. “They paired off right away. And broke up just as fast. The bastard tore her heart out.”
“How did he manage to do that?”
“Stole some jewelry from her. Her grandmother’s cameo brooch, to be exact, which was of great sentimental value. Worth a pretty penny, too. Naturally, he swore he knew nothing about it. But she knew he took it. The guy was a compulsive gambler. Owed lots of people money. People who were even more unsavory than he was. Anyway, when she pressured him about it he slapped her right across the face, the no-good bastard.”
“I take it you weren’t a fan.”
“He was scum. A small-time hood who was laboring under the delusion that he was going to be the next Bobby De Niro. I confronted him about it. I said, ‘See here, Romero, did you strike Dini Hawes?’ I was very chivalrous in those days. Watched one too many Errol Flynn movies. In response he produced a five-inch folding knife from his back pocket, held the blade against my throat and said, ‘Back off, Porky, or I’ll cut you.’ Then he told me what a stupid ‘twat’ Dini was. That’s what he called her. A ‘twat.’ That sweet, beautiful girl, her heart filled with so much goodness and love . . .” Marty’s face reddened. “I was crazy about her, as you may have surmised. How could I not be? I was a chubby oaf from West Islip. Never a good student. Never good at sports. Never good at anything. Mostly, I was just filled with a burning desire to be someone else.”
“A born actor, in other words.”
“Exactly. And, to me, Dini was such an exotically fascinating creature. She wore these weird antique dresses and petticoats that had belonged to her grandmother. I swear, she was like someone straight out of Tennessee Williams. But she was also so supportive and kind. Kept telling me how talented I was. Dini believed in me when I barely believed in myself. I was incredibly insecure. Didn’t belong to any of the cliques. And I sure as hell didn’t look like Robert Redford. I finally worked up the nerve to pursue her after she and R.J. broke up, and we ended up moving in together.”
“What did she see in him?”
“In R.J.? Danger. Edge. He was a bad boy. All nice girls love bad boys.”
“Was he talented?”
“Yes, but with an asterisk. He could only play one character—himself. He wouldn’t shed his own skin and try to tackle, say, Shakespeare. He didn’t know how. Didn’t understand the words and wasn’t interested in learning what they meant. Good actors are smart. Good actors are inquisitive. R.J. was a poseur—the kind who other actors can see right through. The teachers at Yale tried to push him, but he didn’t want to put in the work. Just wanted to show up. Acting is a lot more than just showing up. It’s digging into each and every word the playwright has written and trying to figure out how to bring those words to life in ways that are unexpected, revealing and, above all, emotionally honest.” Marty stuffed another hunk of sausage in his mouth. “That digging, that journey, doesn’t necessarily take you to a happy place. In fact, the destination can be so painful it eats you alive. But that’s the job.”
“And you do it damned well.”
Marty lowered his eyes uncomfortably. “That’s nice of you to say.”
“I saw your Willy Loman. I was so blown away I could barely get out of my seat. No one’s ever played him so human.”
“Lee Cobb’s the template. He played Willy angry. No huge fucking surprise there. Lee Cobb played everybody angry. If they’d cast him as Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey he would have been yelling at his imaginary six-foot rabbit. When they revived Salesman in ’84 with Dustin he played Willy as a befuddled nebbish, which I didn’t . . .” Marty trailed off, gazing out at the rose garden as he searched for the words. “I never saw Willy that way. I saw him as a man like my pop.”
“What does your dad do?”
“Did. He’s gone.” He turned back to me, a pained look on his face. “He sold cars for a Chevy dealer in Huntington. He was always under pressure from the sales manager to meet his quota, earn his bonuses. But if a customer didn’t think he could afford to buy a certain car Pop wouldn’t try to talk him into it. He was a decent human being, which made him a lousy salesman. He knew it, too, and hated it about himself. The man was consumed by self-loathing. One evening, after everyone had left, he went in the service department and hooked up a hose to the tailpipe of a car that was in having some work done. The sales manager found him dead in the front seat after my mom called him three times to say Pop hadn’t come home. He always came home. I was thirteen when he died. She raised me on her own after that.”
“You were born to play Willy, weren’t you?”
Marty peered at me suspiciously. “Why do I suddenly feel like we’re working on my memoir?”
“Sorry. Second-occupational hazard.”
He let out a booming laugh that came all of the way up from his diaphragm just in case I’d forgotten he was a stage-trained actor, which I hadn’t. “Maybe so. I sure wasn’t born to play Elyot in Private Lives, but I’m having a hell of a lot of fun. How can you not have fun with Noël Coward? My God, his command of the language, his insights into people. And I’ll let you in on a little secret. Merilee Nash can direct. She knows how to get across what she wants, but she also knows how to listen. I can see her doing more of this in the future.”
“She’d like to. She’s afraid she won’t be able to get good roles in another few years, being of the female persuasion. She’s always telling me that a leading man is allowed to be fifty but a leading lady isn’t.”
“She’s not wrong. I will say this, he was one handsome son of a bitch.”
“Are we talking about R.J.?”
Marty nodded. “You took one look at him and you knew that Hollywood would be calling. He used to complain that the teachers at Yale never gave him a fair shake because they resented him for his looks. It was a respect thing. He thought they didn’t treat him with respect.”
“Was he right?”
Marty puffed out his cheeks. “He was and he wasn’t. They definitely resented performers who didn’t ‘need’ the program. The ones who were headed right to the top simply because they won the lottery at birth. But a ton of the blame fell on him. He wouldn’t learn his lines. Figured they’d just let him improvise, like he was James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. We were doing Euripides, for crissakes.” Marty sat back and lit a Lucky Strike, dragging on it deeply. “Plus he had these sleazeball friends who’d stop by to watch us rehearse. Street corner punks from his old neighborhood who thought they were at a party. Campus security had to be called a couple of times.”
“Have you seen R.J. since those days?”
“Haven’t seen him in, God, it must be twelve years. I was in a Mamet play at Circle in the Square. He came in to read for a small part. Hadn’t prepared for it and was stoned off of his ass. When they asked him to leave, he told Mamet—the David Mamet—that he was a fake tough guy who was full of shit. A couple of stagehands threw him out.”
“Sure you haven’t seen him recently? Like, say, hanging around here?”
Marty’s eyes widened with surprise. “The playhouse, you mean? No way. Or I should say not that I know of. I’m not positive I’d recognize him now. He partied plenty hard.”
I finished my breakfast, wiping my mouth with my napkin. “He and Merilee were hot and heavy for a while, too, I understand. Any idea why they broke up?”
“Because he was no good, like I said.”
“Was there a major blowup?”
“You mean did he smack her around like Dini? Not that I’m aware of. The bad boy infatuation wore off, that’s all. She got fed up with him and moved on.”
So she’d given it to me straight. Her classmates didn’t know the truth about the night that R.J. “borrowed” his cousin Richie’s Porsche. She hadn’t told a soul. Unless, that is, Marty was sitting right there across the table lying to me, which was certainly a possibility. Actors lie for a living.
“You want to know what I think?” He pulled on his cigarette, his eyes narrowing. “I think that for women like Dini and Merilee—sensitive, caring women who have good hearts—R. J. Romero is a phase they go through. It’s like that phase in high school when guys like you and me think we’re going to become normal, well-adjusted members of society, remember?”
“Sure do. I thought I was going to be a lawyer. Possibly even a Supreme Court justice. I even started wearing permanent press Sansabelt slacks to school.”
Over by the screen door, Lulu raised her head and coughed, which is what she does because she doesn’t know how to laugh.
“But I quickly returned to my senses and the genuine, crazy me took over again,” I assured Marty.
“Did you burn the slacks?”
“Tried to, but they were flame retardant.”
Marty let out a laugh. “Me, I decided I was destined for a career on Wall Street. Bought myself a pair of Florsheim cordovan wing tip shoes.”
“Did you ever wear them?”
“Twice. They made me feel like Bozo the Clown. I stuck them in the back of my closet and there went a promising career in high finance. To this day, I still don’t understand what an arbitrageur does.”
“Trust me, you’re better off not knowing.”
Our waitress returned to fetch Lulu’s thoroughly cleaned plate and to ask us if she could get us anything else. Marty treated her to a big smile and said we were just fine, thanks. Off she went, wiggling her generous hips provocatively.
“How long were you and Dini together?”
Marty’s face fell. “She ended it after a semester,” he said, stubbing out his Lucky in a Sherbourne Inn ashtray. “Told me we weren’t a good match. She was right, of course. Wackiness aside, she was a traditional small-town southern girl who needed a calm, emotionally grounded adult male—not some wild man like me who’s racked by demons. Still, it surprised me when she and Greg started getting it on.”
“Were you and Greg friends?”
“We got along okay. He was a nice guy. Still is. We were just real different, that’s all. He was quiet and conservative. Grew up working in his dad’s sporting goods store in Tacoma. Liked to hunt and fish. Dini was so bohemian and eccentric that I couldn’t imagine that Greg was her type. But he was exactly her type. And they’ve been happy together ever since, so far as I can tell.”
“You still have a soft spot for her, don’t you?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Only to me. I happen to lug around a great big torch myself.”
“Merilee? I don’t blame you. She’s the McCoy, as my pop used to say.”
“She told me that R.J. considered Greg a total stiff.”
“R.J. was dead wrong about him. Greg Farber can carry an entire fifty-million-dollar film on his back. Very few actors are capable of doing that. R.J. just resented him because Greg knew how to get along with people. He was respectful and considerate. He was also a professional, by which I mean he was willing to learn his lines and work hard. R.J. wasn’t.”
The waitress returned with our check. Marty signed it with a flourish, winking at her. She blushed as she went back inside, her hips continuing to wiggle.
He glanced at his watch. “We’ve got a full dress rehearsal at noon. Costumes, sets, lighting, the works. Merilee wants to make absolutely sure we’ve got our wardrobe and set changes down cold so we don’t inflict forty-minute intermissions on our audience.”
“And do you have them down cold?”
“Hell no. We’re still flying blind. Chances are that one of us will tumble headfirst over Amanda’s sofa in the middle of a scene. That’s part of the thrill of attending a one-shot performance like this as far as the audience is concerned. Did you hear that Jackie O’s coming? Word is she saw Tallulah Bankhead perform here when she was a kid.” Marty glanced at his watch again. “That’ll take us up to midafternoon. I’ll probably come back here for a nap before showtime. Could use a bit of diversion, too.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “Do you think Millie’s too young for me?”
“That all depends. Who’s Millie?”
“Our waitress.”
“I think she’s still in high school, Marty.”
“Does that mean no?”