Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

“Sold,” said Perry.

“My God,” Jane whispered under her breath, “how did he know? How do they all know? It hasn’t even been in the papers yet. The share.”

Perry grinned.

“In this town,” he said, “everyone knows.”

He took Jane’s hand beneath the table, giving it a powerful squeeze.

He wanted her to share and enjoy his newly won power, wanted the heady feeling it gave him to rub off on her as well. He felt full of love for his wonderful wife and wanted to make up to her for his recent neglect and indifference, even irritation, as his energies had flowed so fully into the show. He knew she was trying, too, to get in the spirit of things. She had worn the semi-slinky new silk dress she had bought on their abortive shopping spree, and the pair of medium heels that were as high as she would go toward the locally fashionable spikes. She had even put some gloss on her lips, and her hair was tied loosely with a pretty silk ribbon instead of the usual yarn.

“You’re beautiful,” he told her. “I mean, you’re always beautiful, but tonight you’re especially beautiful.”

“I guess I better be,” she said, “to keep up with a forty-four share.”

She smiled, letting him know it wasn’t a dig, and returned his powerful hand-squeeze under the table.

“You’re my best share of all,” he said. “Always.”

The champagne soon was bubbling in their glasses and Perry sipped, rather than gulped, savoring the taste and sensation as he also savored the events of the day, recounting them to Jane, embroidering for her amusement Archer’s “state visit,” reporting the amazing pile of messages, the requests for interviews and articles, the calls from well-wishers, new hangers-on, and old friends. She perked up especially when he told her about talking to Al Cohen, and how back at Haviland the Student Union was packed for the show.

He stopped short of mentioning Al’s idea about coming out to visit on some kind of charter flight. He didn’t want to try to explain why he didn’t really want to encourage it. She wouldn’t understand. In fact, she’d probably want Al to bring Rachel and the kids out, too, charter a whole plane for friends and faculty of Haviland, pack a few pine trees to put in the backyard, and sock in a month’s supply of Vermont maple sugar. Perry didn’t want to get into explaining how he loved all those people but wanted to keep his California experience pure, to enjoy it unadulterated by intrusions from his other life, so he just didn’t mention that part. He didn’t want to argue with Jane tonight, he wanted to make love to her.

The forty-four share had made him horny. Not “horny” in the old sense of being desperate, of feeling an almost adolescent itch and fever for sex, but rather, a deep surge of sexual energy, a strong, confident fullness of desire. He imagined himself as being like some prize bull ready to bestow his favors on the luckiest of the herd, the one that in his prime wisdom and experience, in the swollen heat of his own power, he had personally chosen as mate.

He was glad that it was Jane because she was his wife and he loved her, and he wanted, among other things, to make up for his sexual neglect of her these past months; yet, on some other, deeper level, he knew it did not matter at all that she was the precious, singular, beloved woman with whom he had shared his deepest intimacies of mind and body and soul. He did not want or need to fantasize her as any other woman, imagine her a sex goddess or movie star or elegant, expensive, professional mistress. It mattered only that she was a woman, or even more simply and basically, was woman .

Man of power. Man in command. Man whose own prick seemed to have swelled beyond itself, royal purple pulsing and perfectly rigid, rock-hard, pumping up and down, in and around, in total control, no spillage or early unwanted eruption—this was a tool programmed for performance and Perry had only to guide it, go with it. He moved and molded Jane to his wish, above and below and alongside, over and under, feeling her let go and glide with his—or its—own rhythm, and her responding to it, peaking and pouring again and later again, more fully than he’d ever felt her before, and finally, in his own sweat and juice of lust and fission, entirely by his own removed decision (for somehow he felt distant from what was happening, as if he were looking on it from outside his own body), he let himself go with her too, exploding, the two of them together, dying in one another’s arms, slumping and sliding off the bed and falling to the floor, bodies sprawled like battle victims.

Afterward, they usually touched and murmured soft made-up, spontaneous words of sweet pleasure and love, but now both were silent, staring at one another, almost like strangers. Perry went off and took a shower and returned to find Jane lying on her back in bed, her hands beneath her head, staring at the ceiling. There were tears in the corners of her eyes. Perry didn’t ask about them, or anything else. He rolled over and fell at once into a dead, dreamless sleep.

The party at the Vardemans’ Saturday night did not, after all, turn out to be one of Pru’s New England Boiled Dinners, but it was, according to guests in the know, the next best thing in terms of invitational prestige. It was one of Vaughan’s Five-Alarm Texas Chilis. Vaughan did not make the chili himself, of course, it was just from his own recipe, or rather, a recipe he had allegedly won in a high-stakes poker game with the scion of one of Texas’s wealthiest old oil wildcatting families, while raising financial backing for one of his first productions. This was back in the days before any studio in town would have been glad to bankroll anything that he wanted to do.

Vaughan’s Five-Alarm Chili was actually made by a staff of Mexican chefs schooled at Cordon Bleu in Paris, and served by a bevy of beautiful young women wearing high-heeled boots with jangling spurs, miniskirts, and halters made of red and white bandanas. One rumor was they were the actual Dallas Cowgirls, which might well have been true, since their service at such a power-packed party could have meant the discovery of any one of them for a role in a movie or television show; what aspiring young show business beauty would not have been more than happy to serve?

Perry pointed out to Jane just a few of the powerful directors he recognized—Steven, of course, Randy, and the brooding Francis. She was of course more interested in the stars, right there in the flesh, and Perry, though he tried to be cool and not betray his greenness to power, was awed himself. He tried to keep up a good front of casual, almost-about-to-yawn composure, on seeing the likes of such legendary older greats as Gregory, Jimmy, and the ageless George, as well as contemporary legends like Warren, Meryl, Harrison, and Teri.

There was another category of stars whom Perry knew not by their real names but the names of the characters they portrayed, characters who had become part of the national consciousness. They were known by anyone who had flipped the dials of the TV set on idle evenings at home or scanned the pages of People while waiting in a supermarket checkout line. Here in living color were such famous faces as J.R., Fonzie, Archie and Mindy. Perry realized they had become part of the background of the times, like reference points for personality traits, just as characters in novels had been a century ago when Simon Legree, Huck Finn, Mister Pickwick and Little Nell were familiar symbols. It was an eerie, exciting feeling to be rubbing shoulders with them, fictional characters come to life.

“Lapping it up, are we?”

The arrogant, almost sneering voice broke Perry’s pleasurable sense of being part of this real-life fantasy, and he turned to see the snide countenance of the Vees’ pet English novelist, Cyril Heathrow.