Westlake, Donald E - Novel 50 Read Free Page A

director said, “You'll have to carry him, you know."
                 “Oh,
he'll be fine," Jack said.
                 “Uh-huh.
I wish I could have you play both parts,'' the director said.
     

4
                 Oh,
how long have I been here? I'm all curled in a ball on the gray slate patio.
When did I stop talking? Slowly, with a degree of pain, I straighten out of the
fetal position, I lie straight again, on my back, legs straight, feet together,
eyes staring up at the sky. White, blue, faded, faint, far-receding sky ... Is
someone screaming?
                 "So
you knew right then you were an actor."
                 The
interviewer's voice brings me back, his words make me happy. "Yes!" I
say. "It had to be. I could feel
it like, like, like chicken soup. Well, later, like bourbon. Like nose candy,
you know what I mean?"
                 "It
made you strong."
                 "It flowed through me," I say,
feeling it again, the finest high there is. "It was warm, it was
beautiful. Give me a role to play, give me the costume, give me the lines. I don't need an audience. That's why I'm good in the flicks, see?
You got these stage actors who need that boost, that audience out there with that reaction right now , but I never did. I could play in a
closet, man, just me and the coats, in the dark. Just give me somebody to be.”
                “Uh-huh." The interviewer seems
to think for a minute, brooding over his notebook like someone with something
to hatch. Then he says, “So you came to Hollywood ?"
                 I
don't get it. Confused, I say, “ Hollywood ?" thinking of those miserable little
houses on Woodrow Wilson Drive , with their miserable little swimming pools
taking up the whole back yard. Why would anybody want to—?
                 Then
I do get it. “Oh!" I say. “LA!
Here, you mean. No, my college professor sent me to some fruit he knew in New York , an acting teacher. My folks said they'd
give me a year, then I was on my own. That's the only
time, really, for any length of time, the only time Buddy and I were ever
separated."
                 “He
didn't go to New York ?"
                 “He
went to the marines."

           FLASHBACK 3
     
     
                 It
was a cold and drizzly day in Grover's Corners, the needle-thin rain pasting
trash and candy wrappers to the cement of street and sidewalk, the passing
traffic a monotonous symphony of shashing tires and flwacking windshield
wipers. Beside the big, lumpy blacktop parking lot with its few wet,
mud-streaked automobiles like minor artifacts of a preceding civilization, the
small building was incongruously bright and exuberant, with its impermeable
pale green aluminum siding and the red neon bus-company name dominating its
picture window. Posters and other signs cluttered that window with high-pitched
come-ons: ski vacations, reliable taxi services, guaranteed package delivery,
all-inclusive tours. Here in this false little building, fevered outside, grimy
within, here nevertheless there stood the magic doorway between Grover's
Corners and the world. Step through, or stay at home; no one can do both.
                 Inside,
Jack and Buddy, both twenty-one, stood looking out, through the runnels of
rain, waiting for their separate buses. They'd talked themselves out.
Expectation, bravado, doubt, and then apprehension had each moved in its turn
through their minds and speeches and expressions of face, leaving them now drained,
emptied, waiting for a world of new experience to refill them. The only
remaining residue of emotion was a faint embarrassment, a hint of premature
homesickness, causing an inability to speak or to stand naturally, an
unwillingness to meet each other's eyes for more than a glancing second before
the gaze of each would slide away, back to the window, the rain, the inactive
parking lot, the