David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

Well, good: simply to ask such questions was to work. Unless it was another way of not working.

Perhaps the thing to do was to look at something less harrowing and allow his unconscious to process some of this.

He ejected Hellfire Club, put it back in its case and looked through the rest of the new ones. Well, what about Sean in Love? If nothing else, it ought to be sensitive. Perhaps instead of films that were manifestly sordid, you wanted to look at the capital- S sensitive ones and spot the details that showed they were sordid, too. Or was that too easy? Probably.

The premise of Sean in Love was that “Sean,” a Wall Street type — there was some malarkey at the beginning about “mergers”—took an island vacation and kept falling for lifeguards, Rastas and suchlike. He would gape at them, then the image would go wavy and dissolve (harp glissando on the soundtrack) to show that what followed was fantasy. In the third such fantasy, he was in a sauna getting fucked by a Nautilus instructor — it seemed to Finn that the wooden bench must’ve been hell on his back and shoulders — when there was a cut to outside the door (through which their stagy moans could still be heard), where a third young man, in tight shorts, was reaching for the door handle. (This annoyed Finn: up to now the fantasies had been presented scrupulously from Sean’s point of view.) “Oopsy-daisy,” said the intruder — and Finn leaned forward. Cut from the fuckers’ surprised faces to the smiling face of the intruder: James, of course, of course, of course. Younger, but still James. Finn had never been fool enough to think that particular smile had been turned on no one but him. He watched the scene through to the end, with its combinations and recombinations. All very predictable.

Finn was still sitting in his study when he heard the car pull in. He’d smoked all but one of the cigarettes that should have lasted him until sometime tomorrow, and he’d tossed the pack with the last cigarette onto the floor just out of reach; that way he wouldn’t smoke it until he really needed it. Well, he would take the keys from James — who he now hoped wasn’t bringing him a present — say as little as possible and drive over to Stewart’s for a fresh pack. Maybe by the time he got back he would’ve figured out what to do next. He heard the screen door slap and James calling, “Hey, anybody home?”

He stood up and felt suddenly lightheaded. He’d been sitting there ever since … ever since. He opened the door and saw James coming through the kitchen. The living room between them, with its narrow, glossy floorboards, looked as vast as a basketball court.

“So guess what?” said James.

“Suppose you just tell me,” Finn said.

“Okay. Brace yourself.” James wasn’t picking up Finn’s mood at all. Or he was choosing not to, in order to make his own mood prevail. “You’re looking at a productive citizen.”

“A productive citizen,” Finn said.

“Well, a soon-to-be productive citizen. I’ve got a job.”

“Do you.” Finn remained standing in the doorway. James went over and sat in the burgundy armchair, draping one leg over the side and letting the foot swing.

“So aren’t you curious?”

Finn said nothing.

“I would’ve thought you’d be pleased.” James now seemed to be catching on.

Finn thought for a second. “I can understand that,” he said.

“What’s going on?” James said. His foot stopped moving. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “My dad.”

“Say again?” Then Finn remembered. “No,” he said. “No, there’s no news of your father.”

“Jesus, you scared the hell out of me. So listen, do you want to hear this or not?”

Finn stretched forth his hands as if supplicating, then let them drop. “Fire away,” he said.

“Okay, there was an ad in the paper that they were looking for an assistant manager at the Symposium. So I went down and checked it out? I thought it would just be like running the popcorn machine. But it’s actually a serious job, like book-keeping and stuff. I will have to run the ticket window, but he said I’d have some input on programming, and I’ll definitely be writing the little synopses in the schedule, and it’s just — I think it’s really going to be good.”

“You’ve taken a job,” Finn said.

“Assuming the reference I gave him checks out.” James laughed.

“Right,” Finn said.

“So anyhow, I promise that every July I’ll get them to run our Hitchcock movies again that we didn’t like. God, I’m getting sentimental in my old age.”

“Perhaps you could make it a triple feature,” said Finn. “With Sean in Love. ”

James cocked his head. “I don’t get it.”

“ Sean in Love, ” said Finn. “It’s a video I picked up in Times Square. I think it would interest you greatly.”

James took a deep breath and let it out. “Oh,” he said. “Always wondered what they ended up calling it.”

“So what do they pay for work like that?” Finn said.

“I don’t know. They paid me a hundred dollars. Which I needed very badly at the time. It was my first year in New York.”

“A hundred dollars,” said Finn. “Did you enjoy your work?”

“Did you? What do you want me to tell you? That they were holding a gun to my head like Linda Lovelace? You know, I was eighteen, and this friend of mine asked me if I wanted to be with him in this movie that—”

“Which friend was that?”

“He was supposed to be playing this exercise teacher or something. He actually was an exercise teacher. I used to go to his workout.”

“I can imagine,” said Finn.

“Maybe you ought to sit down,” James said. “You look really pale.”

Finn walked to the blue armchair — his footsteps seemed to echo, and the journey seemed to take a long time. He sat down. Sparkles swam before his eyes.

“How many of those friends of yours,” he said, wishing he had that last cigarette, “are dead?”

“How would I know?” said James. “This was one afternoon, like five years ago. Don’t you think I think about it every day? Plus all the other stupid shit I did?” He reached into his jacket pocket and tossed Finn first a book of matches, then an unopened pack of Merits. “You know, everybody’s got dead friends. Except you, right? Since you don’t have friends.”

Finn got the pack open, worked a cigarette out of it, lit it, took a first deep, wonderful drag and glanced around for an ashtray. The late afternoon sun glinted off the varnished floor. He became conscious of the faraway drone of somebody’s lawnmower; for a second there he thought of nothing at all. Then he realized he was staring at the overlapping white rings by the side of James’s chair.

“So,” he said. “I suppose this explains why you were hellbent on getting me sidetracked from my project.”

“One reason, yes,” said James.

“Why didn’t you simply tell me?”

“Because look at you. You know, I know about men who like naughty boys. And the bottom line is that they don’t like ’em to be too naughty. So.” Quick shrug. “What? Do you want me to go over and stay at my sister’s while I make other arrangements?”

Touching up just that little bit of floor, Finn thought, would be simplicity itself.

“I don’t know what I want at this point,” he said. “I want to believe that none of this really happened.”

“Oh,” said James. “Well, if that’s all. You can manage that okay, whether I’m around or not. I imagine you’ve already started.”

The year was round, a millstone turning slowly clockwise, and even on this Friday afternoon in August, Faye could feel it moving down toward Christmas. There were points on the circumference whose approach she always dreaded: Ben’s birthday and their wedding anniversary, both in June and safely past this time around; her own birthday, in January, when he was likely to call or send a card; May 21, the projected birthday of their aborted child; October 17, the day it died. They were like the songs she must never never listen to: “Devoted to You,” or “These Foolish Things” or “The Long and Winding Road.” She had been able to date the conception exactly, because it had been the only time for weeks. She had wept afterward, and Ben was put off, probably understandably; the next week he moved out, and never touched her again. When she went through her mystical thing about it, both her shrink and her sister Karen had explanations: she had gone off the pill because it was killing her (to increasingly little purpose), and having sex with him that afternoon was a fleeting self-destructive impulse. But lately she hadn’t been bothering to fight away mystical ideas. At this point, what harm could they possibly do?