Donald Westlake - Sacred Monster

She opened the door, fixing her face into the false smile to be presented to the author of the play, but it was Buddy who entered instead, in his uniform and carrying his duffel bag over his shoulder, saying happily to Marcia, “Well, look at you, will you.”

“My mistake,” Marcia said. “The rough trade is here.”

Easy and amused with her, Buddy said, “Don’t be misled, doll. I can be very gentle.”

“Buddy!” Jack cried. “You’re here!”

“Sure I am,” Buddy said. “How you doin’, Dad?”

Jack embraced his friend, holding tight. Buddy returned the embrace but looked over Jack’s shoulder to grin at Marcia, who watched with some uncertainty, not exactly sure what was going on here.

It was Buddy who ended the clinch at last, saying, “Let me breathe, Dad.”

“Oh, sure, Buddy, sure!” Turning to Marcia, grinning in delight, holding Buddy’s elbow, Jack said, “Marcia, this is my oldest friend in the whole world, Buddy Pal. We grew up together.”

“That’s nice,” Marcia said.

“Buddy,” Jack said, pride and pleasure in his every atom, “this is Marcia Callahan, my co-star in the show.”

“I recognized her from the pictures out front,” Buddy said. Grinning at Marcia, looking her up and down, he said, “In person, you don’t have too much on top, do you?”

“On top of what?” Marcia asked him.

They’d left the dressing room door open, and now George Castleberry appeared in the doorway, melting face in a loving smile at first, but then becoming immediately irritable as he looked around the room. “Well,” he said. “A crowd.”

“I’m just going, George,” Marcia said.

But George’s mood had changed again; he gazed with amused pleasure on Buddy in his marine uniform, saying, “Be still, my heart. Is that real? ”

“Sure is,” Buddy told him. “Just got out of the marines two days ago. Don’t have my civvies yet.”

“Well, never change, that’s my advice,” George told him.

Turning to Jack, Buddy said, “In fact, Dad, that’s why I came by. If you could tide me over...”

“Oh, sure, Buddy,” Jack said, his smile suddenly nervous, uneasy. “How much do you need?”

“A hundred or so.”

“No problem, Buddy,” Jack said. Taking his wallet from his hip pocket, his movements and expressions awkward and clumsy, he made introductions while counting money into Buddy’s waiting palm: “George Castleberry, our playwright, I’d like you to meet my old friend Buddy Pal.”

Dryly, Marcia said, “They grew each other up together.”

“Doll, it’s you for me,” Buddy told her. Linking his arm with hers, he said, “Would you like to see my old war wound?”

Amused by him, intrigued by him, she permitted him to lead her from the room, saying as she went, “I don’t know. Would I?”

George closed the door after them, then turned to Jack with arms outstretched. “Dear boy,” he said.

Jack performed a boyish smile. “Hi, George.”

A knock sounded at the door, and a voice called, “Five minutes to curtain. Five minutes to curtain.”

Jack took George’s hands, held them in his, a movement that seemed to suggest togetherness but which nevertheless subtly kept George at a little distance. “I’m sorry, George,” Jack said. “It’s too late.”

Petulant, George said, “Traffic was terrible . I hate this city, I really do.”

Jack did truly like his benefactor, and his sympathy showed through his nervousness and reluctance. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I have to go.”

“Later,” George told him. “I’ll see you here later. After the performance.”

His smile wan, Jack said, “After the performance, the performance.”

George leaned forward to kiss Jack’s cheek. Jack awkwardly patted the older man’s back, then moved gracefully around him and left the room, closing the door behind himself.

George roved the tiny room, wringing his hands, a series of agonized expressions on his face, small moaning sounds rising from his throat. At last he flung himself into the chair in front of the dressing table and stared desperately at his own reflection. “You fool, you,” he cried, and put his head down onto his folded arms and wept.

How it all comes back to me now, those wonderful days of first success, when I was still young and naive and hopeful and caring . I had such genius in those days! I could do anything. And with Buddy again at my side... Buddy would always save me, protect me, keep me from harm. He’d been doing it from the beginning. (We don’t — we never — talk about that.)

I sit smiling at the patio, under God’s sun (the high clouds have cleared away, but I’m not even afraid of that anymore), and I bask in my memories of those glorious days, until I notice the interviewer frowning at me again. Now what’s his problem? “Something wrong?” I ask.

He says, “Wait a minute. That last part. Where George Castleberry looked at himself in the mirror and said, ‘You fool, you,’ and put his head down on his folded arms and wept.”

I nod, agreeing. “A lovely scene, isn’t it? Touching, dramatic, full of pathos and understanding and deep revelation.”

“But,” he says, “you didn’t see that part. That happened after you left the room.”

“One knows these things,” I say, and Hoskins rolls into view like a giant passenger ship, possibly the QEII , bearing a tall, shimmering glass on a silver tray. “Ah, Hoskins,” I say.

“Your fuzzy drink, sir.”

“Thank you, Hoskins.”

Hoskins recedes, like one of those literary ghosts — Scrooge’s father, Hamlet’s Christmas — and I raise the shimmering glass. “To Marcia Callahan,” I say.

“Your first wife, I believe,” the interviewer says. They love to show how they’ve researched you, how they’ve studied up on you, how they’ve done their homework . There are times when I hate being other people’s homework.

I taste the shimmer in the glass, and it is like all the finest things of our planet gathered together into one foamy tube. The clean chill of Antarctica, the breezy pure sweetness of the Caribbean, the tang of giant cities everywhere. Oh, my goodness me!

“Marcia Callahan,” I say, and pause to lick ambrosia from my upper lip. “I guess you could call it love-hate at first sight. We never had any illusions about each other, Marcia and me, but maybe that was why we were so drawn together. We were naked for each other. I was certainly naked for her .”

I smile, thinking back, reliving again our most famous scene from the play: Marcia, in various shawls and laces, sits on a park bench. I, in T-shirt and jeans and heavy workboots, roam the stage, circling her, ranting and raging. She replies in soft but compelling counterpoint, fighting back with tattered dignity. And night after night, alone in the forwardmost box to stage left, his marine uniform replaced by a gleaming new tux I’d bought him, Buddy Pal sat and watched. In my pacing of the stage, flinging my arms about, roaring, letting it all out, I would sometimes look up and see him there, a faint smile on his face as he watched Marcia. And from time to time, in her self-defense, Marcia would look bravely up past me at that box high on the theater’s side wall, where Buddy sat concealed from the rest of the audience by plush drapes. I sigh and smile, and the shimmery glass trembles in my trembling hand.

“After Buddy got out of the marines,” I say, “the three of us were inseparable. It was like old times, but even better. We were going to be together forever.”

“But you weren’t,” the interviewer says.

“The show closed. They made a movie out of it, and they hired Marcia to what they call re-create the role. But they didn’t want me.”