HOW TO DESCRIBE the rest of that evening, the way in which, and the speed with which, everything changed with Cromwell’s arrival?
One moment I was who I was, sitting there with Laurie, and the next I was somebody else, standing up to embrace and be embraced by him.
The way we embraced. The way I sucked in my gut when I felt the pressure of his abdomen against mine. My realization, or his, which I perceived, that our relative heights had changed by the inch and a half I had lost.
The post-embrace position. The way he pushed me away from him to look at me at arm’s length. The way he looked at me. The way he looked me over, as if to say, and then saying: “Let me look at you, Saul. It’s been a long time. Too long, right?”
“Right,” I said.
The way I said it.
His forehead. The size of his forehead. The sheer size of it.
The young Asian girl at his side, his date, his concubine. The mirthless glow of her doll-like eyes.
I introduced Laurie as “my old, young friend.”
Cromwell shook her hand with his right and with his left he squeezed my shoulder as if my flesh were a surrogate for Laurie’s, and his gesture, that repeated kneading of my shoulder, was a masculine sign of commendation for my choice of Laurie as my companion.
He winked at me and with his left hand he drew me close to him again to whisper in my ear. “Nice, very nice, Saul. Robbing the cradle, but nice.”
The sound of his voice, the warmth of his breath, as he breathed those words down my ear. The physical sensation that he was not merely saying the words but making sure that each one of them entered the orifice of my ear without spilling.
There were three other men there. Maybe they were older men who looked good for their age, or maybe they were prematurely old Brads. They had wonderful white teeth. Maybe the teeth were theirs, maybe not. All three had little bells in their hands, as did the young women at their sides. Cromwell rattled off the introductions, but the names I heard failed to stick. I heard them all, but then, as if some memory magnet were suddenly demagnetized, the names slid off the board of my mind and fell into a common heap.
Drinks arrived. We drank, delighted with ourselves, congratulating each other on who we were and how wonderful it was to be spending an evening like this. We had to shout to be heard, but it was so much fun being who we were that we enjoyed shouting.
The three men, and to a much lesser degree the three young women with them, were familiar with my work and they all expressed a high regard for it.
A pro, Cromwell called me.
“A toast,” he said. “To one of the true pros in the entertainment industry.” He raised his glass to me and I, like a true pro, raised mine to him.
Drinking up, he glanced at Laurie over the rim of his glass and winked at me again (“Nice, very nice”) and smiled.
The way he smiled. How to describe the innuendo of that smile, lips parted, teeth showing, eyes elaborating on what the lips and teeth were doing.
The way his attendants responded to his smile with little smiles of their own. The voting that took place while we bantered at the top of our lungs in the din of that restaurant.
It was secret balloting by little smiles, but it was a secret only to Laurie. Sensing that something to do with her was happening but not knowing what it was, she kept her eyes downcast. In her confusion, she even moved her chair a fraction of an inch closer to mine, as if I were still her father figure, her guardian from harm.
All the girls at our table were young. The Asian girl, Cromwell’s girl, was younger than the other three, but Laurie was even younger than the Asian girl.
Laurie’s youth was transformed into consumer goods, which I possessed.
It was I who had her youth, not she.
My popularity at the table was soaring.
The ease with which, and the speed with which, my relationship to Laurie, so recently renewed, so recently treasured as a potential source of my salvation, the ease with which, and the speed with which, its nature was reinterpreted by the drinks before dinner plebiscite.
The vote was unanimous: I was fucking the youngest one there.
I was declared the unanimous winner of this night.
And it was all done by smiles and glances, the whole plebiscite took less time than it takes to take a few sips of wine.
Why couldn’t I, when I saw clearly what was happening, reject the results of the voting?
Cromwell’s conviction, and by his extension the unanimous conviction of his attendants and their dates, of who I was and who Laurie was and what our relationship was, the unanimity of all those convictions was much stranger than anything I possessed and I could not counter it.
I had no way of holding on to my own convictions because I had no way of holding on to anything of my own for too long.
I went along with the new drift of things. Let them think what they want to think, I thought. I’ll recapture my mood of salvation later.
The way Laurie looked, unable to understand the specifics of what was going on but sensing a smarmy plebiscite descending over her.
The way she kept looking up at me for guidance.
The way Cromwell looked at her. His zest, as it’s been called, “not just for his own life, but for the lives of others.” The size of his forehead. The Kissinger shape and size of his forehead and the frightening power of the darnned-up thoughts behind it.
Drunk is what I wanted to be, dead drunk, or dead even, but since none of those choices was available to me, I slipped into the role of a drunk, a role familiar to both Laurie and Cromwell from the days when I didn’t have to pretend. I played it for all I was worth.
Either my reputation as a legendary alcoholic rewriter had preceded me or Cromwell had made a point of acquainting his male attendants with it, because the more I drank and the drunker I pretended to be, the more I seemed to confirm their expectation.
The way I thought I was deceiving and manipulating Cromwell with my parody of myself. After all, I knew the truth, that I was cold sober, and he didn’t. The way I thought that the possession of truth gave me an advantage.
The Asian girl sitting across the table from me, next to Cromwell, was the only one keeping up with me. For every drink I ordered, so did she. Whenever she noticed that her glass was empty, she raised her arm in the air and rang her little bell at our waitress. The drunker she became, the more she laughed. When she laughed, her eyes disappeared completely and she seemed to laugh for the pleasure it gave her to be temporarily blind. I had never before seen laughter used as a blindfold.
We ordered dinner, all except Laurie. She couldn’t eat, she told me. Not even a little something? No, she shook her head. I ordered a country salad to start and lamb chops, medium rare, as my entree.
And then Cromwell explained about the bells.
He spoke to me, but he looked at Laurie while he spoke.
Prior to coming here, they had all been at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, to attend the tribute to Vaclav Havel and the celebration of democracy in Czechoslovakia. (The Asian girl roared with laughter.) As part of the program, Cromwell went on, hundreds of little bells were distributed to those in attendance, so that when Havel made his entrance into the cathedral he could be greeted by the sound of all those little bells ringing in his honor. This part of the program was called the Ringing of the Bells for Freedom.
The food arrived as ordered.
Throughout dinner, somebody at the table rang one of those little bells.
When Laurie excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, somebody rang a bell. When she came back, somebody rang a bell. When a waitress, not ours, dropped some dishes on the floor and they broke, almost everyone at our table rang their bells. It became a compulsion, and the compulsion finally resulted in a kind of crescendo.
The Asian girl became inspired. She gathered up all the bells at our table. They had little key chain clips on them, and she clipped them together into two clusters of four bells to a cluster. She looped the clusters over her earrings. One cluster of bells on the left earring, one on the right. And then she shook her head, making the bells ring. All of us except Laurie exploded with laughter and applause.
Laurie excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. I don’t know how many times she went. I lost track.
In her absence, we played a parlor game with her and my relationship to her.
Where did I find her, Cromwell wanted to know. She was delicious, he thought. She really was.
I made a big show, in Laurie’s absence, of denying all the innuendoes and insinuations. Laurie, I told them, was like a daughter to me.
The way I said what I said. The way I smiled when I said it. The incestuous connotations of my defense of our relationship. The remarks with which it was greeted. The way the Asian girl shook her head, ringing all those little bells dangling from her ears, the way she shook and shook her head, laughing with an eyeless face.
“Really, really,” I insisted. “She used to come and watch me shave when she was a little girl.”
“And I bet she still does,” somebody said.
The way we all applauded the remark and laughed. The way I laughed. The way Cromwell laughed. The way he flung back his head and laughed, so that all his teeth showed.
Laurie’s return.
The way she looked, walking back toward us, her long neck seeming not so long anymore. The way in which, and the speed with which, our laughter subsided when she sat down again next to me. The way she looked when she absorbed, as she couldn’t help absorbing, the smarmy leftovers of the conversation that had prevailed during her absence.
Her eyes. The way she didn’t know what to do with them. Where to look.
After dinner, over after-dinner drinks, another parlor game began.
Could anyone guess, Cromwell wanted to know, his Asian girlfriend’s country of origin.
We all took turns playing the game, all except Laurie.
Cromwell gave a hint. It was Southeast Asia.
Thailand?
No.
Laos?
No.
Vietnam?
Cambodia, somebody finally guessed. Yes, she was from Cambodia. We all burst into applause.
The way in which, and the ease with which, the banter turned from her country of origin to movies. Somebody wanted to know, maybe it was me, if she had seen The Killing Fields.
Later, and only when asked, Cromwell regaled us with details of the various movies he was planning to make and the various stages of development of each of the projects.
The ravenous, empty hunger he created in me for an assignment, a rewrite job on one of them. A hunger for something for which I had no need, or use, or desire, but a genuine hunger nonetheless.
As an entertaining finale to our dinner, Cromwell told the story of our last collaboration and the last time we saw each other. His reenactment of the young writer’s attack on us in the lobby of the theater in Pittsburgh. The way the writer wept and cursed and called us names. Cromwell’s interpretation of that event as comedy. The way everyone laughed and applauded his performance. The way I laughed and applauded with the rest.
The parting outside Cafe Luxembourg. The waiting limos. The way I staggered as if drunk. The way Cromwell took me aside and asked me to meet him for lunch at two at his hotel tomorrow. The way he told Laurie how much he had enjoyed her. The Cambodian girl with the bells still dangling from her earrings. The way she laughed and laughed when she caught herself staggering toward the wrong limo.
The almost balmy February night.
The seemingly endless limousine ride with Laurie, back to her apartment on the East Side.
The way she either refused or could not bring herself to look at me.
The silence between us.
My memory of our limo ride to Cafe Luxembourg. Our limo conversation. My memory of Laurie as my guardian angel. The last person on earth who could speak on my behalf. The way it all seemed so long ago. The same night, but so long ago.
The memory of that sweet seriousness of life I had seen in her face.
My growing desperation, the closer we came to her apartment, to part with her on terms that would enable me to call her again.
When the limo finally stopped outside her building, she recoiled in horror when I tried to give her a good-night kiss on her cheek.
The way she fled from me, out of the limo, as if running for her life.
The way the limo driver took notice of everything but, being a professional, made it seem he was oblivious to the whole thing.
The way I tried to chat him up.
The taste in my mouth. The way my saliva tasted like somebody else’s.
Moods, I thought, moods was all I had. Waxing moods. Waning moods.
I could not hold on to anything.
I was not, I realized, a human being anymore, and had probably not been one for some time. I was, instead, some new isotope of humanity that had not yet been isolated and identified. I was a loose electron, whose spin and charge and direction could be reversed at any moment by random forces outside myself. I was one of those stray bullets of our time.