William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

“Sorry, Gordon,” I said. “But it was better that he done your specs. He’s mean, is Trevor, and he’s my boyfriend.”

Gordon nodded without saying anything and pushed his glasses into his pocket. I helped him up and straightened out his jacket. There didn’t seem to be much to say. Trevor must have seen us at the stall and followed.

“I’d better go,” I said. Trev would be waiting, I knew. I picked up Arthur and began to walk off.

“Tracy,” I heard Gordon wheeze. “Just a moment.”

I went back to him. He did look quite different without his glasses — sort of ordinary, not so intelligent.

“Next year,” he said. “Will you be back next year?”

I was astonished. “I don’t know,” I said. “Why?”

“I thought …” he began to say. Then: “It’s just that I shall be here.” Then he gave a grim little laugh. “In fact I shall probably die here.”

That made me feel all sorry for him — he had no excitement in his life apart from me — and so I decided not to tell him about Felaine la Strade and the Ecole de Dance. Better to let him dream a bit. He might be here still, but there was no way you’d catch me as bat-girl again next year, no chance. I’d be in London, the big smoke, a dancer or something.

But I reached out and patted Gordon’s arm. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Me and Arthur’ll be back. We’ll have tea again. See you next year.” Then I turned away and walked back up the alley to where I knew Trev would be waiting. Just before I turned the corner I looked back, and there was Gordon, standing there — he hadn’t moved an inch — staring at me, just staring at me like the first time he had come into the booth. It still gave me the shivers. He was quite a nice guy, was Gordon. It was a pity really — yes, the whole thing was a pity.

10 August 1973

It was sometime in the hot freedom of July that I introduced Cherylle to Lamar. I think it was at my delayed welcoming party that AOD were throwing. Cherylle was an out of work actress who rented the apartment below mine with two other girls. Quite spontaneously I had decided to invite one of them along — I had as yet made no friends since arriving here from England and felt I needed an ally of sorts at this gathering of off-duty American executives and their brittle, frosted wives. Cherylle was the only girl at home when I knocked on the apartment door. Such are the tricks time plays. She is marrying Lamar tomorrow.

Cherylle: tall, bony, a shock of wild blond hair. Twenty-five years old? Typically Californian flawless skin. I find her an oddly attractive girl without really being able to say why — a product of the curious vectors of a face: the arc of an eyebrow, the prominence of a cheekbone. There is a simmering feral gleam in her gaze, a sense of coiled, ticking energy within her which only truly strikes you on a third or fourth meeting.

Lamar, however, claims he spotted it instantly and it was this he found irresistibly attractive. I should say that Lamar has since become my closest friend out here on the Coast. Looking back through my diary I see I first described him as “a characteristically butch American businessman. Late thirties, handsome, tanned and stocky. Tough as a hill. Self-confidence surrounds him like a force field. The youngest vice-president in the company, responsible for sales and marketing. They say AOD will be his before the decade’s out.” Now that I know him I would say that this is only partially true. Lamar still exudes this brash ease but it’s something of a façade. He is no typical VP; he works hard at his job because that is all his background and education have trained him to do. He has his idiosyncrasies and I find him both stimulating and sad.

For example, the fact that I write — albeit commercially — for a living has prompted him to attack the cultural lacunae in his life with the same vigour he applies to chase after contracts. He sees me as some sort of intellectual guru, a source to be tapped and exploited. Quite early on in our friendship he suggested we read through Shakespeare together “because they say he’s the best.” To feed this new enthusiasm I gave him reading lists and drew up programmes for his educational self-improvement. He proved to be a sensitive and intelligent student, surprisingly perceptive. He would question me so endlessly I felt exhausted, victim of some nightmare seminar, dizzy from the rapacity with which he plundered my brain.

His friendship with Cherylle did not affect the growth of our own. Indeed the three of us often went out together. And as the two of them became swiftly more infatuated, my presence paradoxically seemed all the more essential. I became the talisman of their affair, as if they needed the constant reassuring presence of the catalyst that had started the reaction off.

I have, however, tried to talk to Lamar about the wisdom of this wedding — gently councilled delay. Cherylle is an incandescent but mercurial character, wayward and, I suspect, deeply uncertain of herself. But Lamar will not listen. He is in love, he insists, wholly in love for the first time in his life.

11 August 1973

The wedding. Lamar and Cherylle get riotously drunk. At the civic hall Cherylle arrived in thigh-length suede boots, jeans and a bright-yellow windcheater. She dresses in a bizarre series of fashions — sometimes glaring lack of taste, sometimes shining with demure chicness. Hardly the wife for a rising vice-president, I would have thought, but Lamar seems to accept her extravagances with a wide-eyed, ingenuous thrill.

Now I know her better I take Cherylle’s lurid anthology of styles to be evidence of a chronic insecurity in her personality. She teeters on the brink of moods with the practised equilibrium of the perennially schizoid. Lamar, somehow, responds to this. His marriage to Cherylle is the one publicly irrational event in his entirely ordered life. He told me once he understood her perfectly, could predict her moves and responses with a Pavlovian confidence. He underestimates Cherylle, I think, and I am a little concerned. He has never displayed such verve and elation, but this is no Platonic union of opposites. Lamar’s efficient diurnal parade has broken up to join Cherylle’s Mardi Gras — and it likes the headlong pace.

14 August 1973

Working steadily for the last two days in the beach house. Windless, lustrous weather. Postcard from Lamar and Cherylle honeymooning in Mexico. Lamar’s neat printed script overlaid at the foot of the card by some illegible felt-tip scrawl from Cherylle. Lamar says I would “love the art.” Is he being ironic? I suspect it’s a sop to our abandoned educational sessions — maybe he’s feeling guilty. They didn’t stand much chance against the potent lure of Cherylle’s callow, hard-edged embrace.

18 August 1973

Lamar and Cherylle returned this morning, tanned and restless, deeply bored by Mexico. They stayed for lunch. Their evident intoxication with each other is off-putting, to say the least. Lamar was unshaven and in a T-shirt. There were bags under his eyes. I’ve never seen him like this.

Their self-absorption has its curious aspects too. Judging from the hints Lamar dropped about their days in Mexico, it seems that it only functions non-destructively when observed by a third party. He alluded to uncouth nights of violent, manic rows and equally violent and manic reconciliations. He calls it “kamikaze love” and describes it as a mixture of “laughter and pistol shots”—which is quite good for Lamar. He claims he finds it entirely invigorating.

I suspect I am to be enrolled as resident third party: token voyeur of their lambent encounters. I’m not sure I welcome the role; I sense this self-destruct mechanism poised inside Cherylle and it makes me uncomfortable. For example, she was quiet and affectionate all afternoon; then she swam worryingly far out to sea. “Trying for Catalina Island” was all she said when she returned exhausted. They left about eight in the evening heading for some dim bar on the Strip.