Ghostwright Page 3

  “You’re right,” said Asquith. “I’m hard to find.”

  There was a silence around Asquith’s words, like the pale gleam of dish around a cut of veal. It was a matter of careful articulation, that theatrical precision, each word the plunge and parry of a fencer. But it was something else, too, a sense that the words sprang from a psyche unlike that of a normal human being. Asquith’s words had to be translated out of another sort of mind into drab, common human speech. Asquith used words with a certain arrogance, even contempt: this is the way I must sound to be understood.

  “I won’t bother asking you where you were,” joked Speke. By now he was convinced. Asquith was back.

  He had, several years ago, hired two different detective agencies to find Asquith. These were not storefront operations. These were the kind banks hire, and movie companies curious about the habits of their stars. They had tracked him into four different emergency rooms, but Asquith had always just checked out, just hours before. One detective, a woman who worked for the most expensive—and greedy—attorneys in San Francisco, had told Speke bluntly, “He’s either dead or dying, and even if you found him he’d be brain damaged. He was so drunk in Philadelphia at one point he stopped breathing. People like this aren’t built to last.”

  Why wasn’t Asquith talking? But of course, thought Speke, warming, Asquith had always worn silence, like an extra layer of clothing, an aura woven of deliberateness, of his own will. He was silent as a violinist might be, poised to play. He was reading Speke’s temperament, his mood, his mental health.

  Speke stood, nearly dropping the phone in a surge of enthusiasm. With every passing moment he was more amazed. “Where have you been? Jesus—all this time. I paid people incredible amounts of money to find you. You completely disappeared years ago.”

  He found himself carrying the conversation, and delighted to be able to talk to someone he had known so well. “Do you remember that woman I was seeing in Atherton? Her husband hired a detective who trailed us all over and ended up with nothing but a blurred telephoto picture of her with her arm around some male figure on Ocean Avenue in Carmel.” He stopped himself. He was gushing, chattering—Asquith had always brought that out in him, and made him overeager to both impress Asquith and join with him in laughter against the world. He steadied himself, and said, with feeling, “It’s wonderful to hear from you.”

  “Is it?” That reedy, superior voice caused just the slightest shadow to fall over Speke’s soul.

  “Of course it is,” he responded, laughing perhaps just a bit too loudly.

  “You sound,” said Asquith thoughtfully, “happy.”

  Of course I’m happy, Speke nearly said. Why shouldn’t I be happy? People are meant to be happy.

  But there was something chilly about the way Asquith said this that silenced him for a moment. Asquith sounded healthy enough. They were both only thirty-nine, but Asquith had been the one to drink at dawn after a night of tequila in that bar in Cozumel, watching the tropical sun bloat over the horizon. Well, they had both tipped a few, but Asquith had lived on the stuff, swilling mezcal and chewing up the little worm. Asquith had been the one to discover how little sleep the human body required with a little help from amphetamines, and how blue the sky was if you ate peyote like Corn Nuts. And accident prone—three cars totaled in one year, unloaded guns blasting, one of them blowing off the back of the dresser one drunken pre-dawn.

  Speke had been the good-looking one, the one who took in mauled cats and gave cash to impoverished strangers. Asquith was the one who was good at hiding, keeping to himself, drifting away from the party. His great skill had been in falling silent and communicating in his silence what he thought of all the gabbling, guffawing people around him. Asquith had never been likable in any traditional way. He had been keen, quick, and full of ideas, and that was all that mattered to Speke.

  “I thought,” said Asquith, his voice cutting the silence, “that I would come and see you.”

  There was a thrill in Speke’s limbs. The framed manuscripts on the wall seemed to gleam. He had begun to believe that the past was vanished, the old faces bleached to nothing by time. He should have trusted life, fate, or whatever tides shaped life. To see Asquith again would be more than the reawakening of a friendship. It would be to rejoin a part of himself, a part he had mislaid and thought beyond recovery.

  “I thought I would pay you a visit and discuss a little business,” said Asquith.

  And then, in the midst of his pleasure, Speke began to feel the smallest touch of doubt, as subtle as the trace of blood on the yolk of an egg. There was the telephone, here was the sound of Asquith’s breath, his actual breath, in Speke’s ear. What, he wondered, could possibly be wrong?

  “Tomorrow,” said Asquith.

  Speke felt painfully apologetic. “Tomorrow is a mess. It’s a disaster area. Any day but tomorrow.”

  What had made him call after all this time? Surely Asquith never read People magazine, and certainly he hadn’t run across the spread in GQ. One of the talk shows, perhaps, or the Oscar nomination, but that had been months ago. There had been so much media coverage lately that it was impossible to pin down what might have jogged the attention of this voice from the past. Surely, Speke told himself, he simply wants to congratulate me on Stripsearch—first the Tony award-winner and now the movie. Or maybe on Flash, still breaking records after two years simultaneously in New York and London.

  “Tomorrow will be fine,” repeated Asquith, and Speke could imagine his smile.

  Tomorrow was a crowded day, the appointment book a mess of scribbled names and times. But he could make room for Asquith. The dry voice was deliberate and cunning. Speke knew the ways of his old friend. Asquith wanted him to feel anxiety. He was doing this on purpose.

  But Speke’s faith in himself, in good fortune, in life itself, was, for the moment, unshakable. It would be delightful to see Asquith. Tomorrow, though, was going to be a problem. Tomorrow was the day the biographer was coming, the man who could cap his already astounding career. You couldn’t buy the sort of publicity Bell could give, and the man had decided on his own, without any prompting from anyone, to make Speke the subject of his next book. Not even forty, and he would be immortalized!

  He had promised Dr. Murchison, the head of the film department at Stanford, that he would do Christopher Bell a favor. What a delightful favor—to let a well-known biographer pen your life. But Bell was in trouble, Speke had been told, suffering from what Murchison had hinted was both a penchant for gambling away his mortgage and buying cocaine off the street. Speke had to help Bell—he admired the man, and couldn’t disappoint him. The truth was, Speke needed very little encouragement to let the biographer begin his research.

  What was Asquith like these days? There was the usual sort of qualm: how do I look? How will he look? What if his taste in everything has changed and we have nothing to talk about?

  Speke prided himself on being open-minded, flexible. He was not the hotheaded Speke of years past. He was calmer, now, successful. A man of good bearing, fine taste in all things. There was no doubt: he was famous, and wealthy. He had worked hard to reach this pinnacle. He had been the most impetuous, anxious man in the world, notorious for his nerves and alcoholic blackouts. But no more. He still relished life, but now he was strong as well as energetic. He was a new man.

  His plays moved people. It brought them to their feet, applauding. He got letters saying that his songs had stirred people from depression, from angst—had made people want to live. He was Hamilton Speke, a man who had helped give life to the world, and he was happy to hear from his old friend, his old partner.

  “I know how to find you,” said Asquith.

  “Early, then,” Speke heard himself say, with a voice that sounded steady enough, although Asquith would detect that rasp, that tremor, and even now he was chuckling again.

  Speke was surprised to feel a chill. He was surprised to feel an ugly thought: what an irritating little laugh that was.
I thought you would have wrapped your motorcycle around a tree, he nearly said. I thought you would have blown out your aorta on diet pills.

  Speke himself had not always been as healthy as he was now. Once he’d awakened on Kauai completely naked but for one brand new hiking boot. He had huddled in the warm rain waiting for the night to come again, nursing aching thirst, shuddering with hangover, surrounded by feral chickens.

  And then there were the nightmares, the terrible dreams that had plagued his nights as a young man.

  He was pleased at the prospect of seeing Asquith, but he was also cautious. He could sense something stirring, something cold and heavy, something from the past. He tried to deny this uneasiness, but it was there.

  Asquith waited, letting the silence grow.

  But I am being polite, Speke reassured himself. Didn’t he sound polite? He should be recording this conversation, so he could replay it and be reassured that he sounded polite. It was important that he not sound like the heavy-handed prick he used to be, before therapy and a little travel had made a wiser man out of him. Before Maria.

  Twice he had paid five-figure dental bills to men who had irritated him at parties. After a little bourbon, it could be admitted, and each time over politics. Speke believed in Saving the Whales, and if a tree was spiked now and then, that was fine with him. In his view, any person who did anything to harm a wild animal should be punished. Severely. But he kept his temper these days. The new Speke was in top physical condition, had contacts and capped teeth, and was in love with a more peaceful version of life.

  Still, Asquith was the only man in the world who really understood him, knew what he loved, and what he feared. Asquith knew his taste in women, in wine, in music. Asquith knew him as no one else in the world could.

  “I know the way,” said Asquith. There was a spin to his voice when he added, “I saw your house on television.”

  And then he was gone. There was only the electronic silence of the telephone, and the other, inner silence that resulted from a turmoil of feeling.

  Speke made a fist, and stared at it.

  Asquith wasn’t coming here to see an old friend. He wasn’t coming to have a beer or two and talk over old times.

  Asquith wanted something.

  5

  He was awake and it was still dark.

  He had just had the nightmare, the old dream he had hoped was buried forever.

  This is just perfect, he thought. The one night he really needed to have a good sleep. It was almost enough to make him wish for the old Seconal and tequila nightcaps he used to gulp. Today was going to be impossible. Asquith was coming. Bell was coming. And Scamp was coming—he had nearly forgotten that. They were coming to shoot footage for a television special.

  He sat up, sweating.

  Maria was beside him in the darkness, still asleep, but she, too, stirred. She whispered without waking, and he could not hear what she was saying. She tossed, and spoke again. She was warning someone, or begging him. He made out a single word: no.

  Then he could hear a phrase, a sub-vocalized prayer. “Don’t hurt me.”

  Christ—who would want to hurt such a lovely woman? He knew so little about this bride of a few months. Who had caused her to suffer in the past? Whoever it was, he would like to kill him. He himself needed Maria as he needed oxygen.

  His own boyhood had been so ordinary. So sunlit and logical, the newspaper route and the howling, spitting mating of cats under the bedroom window. A loving but distant father, a smart and secretive brother: a childhood. But hadn’t people been kind, really? The neighbors had always said good morning, out spraying dog dirt and leathered toad skins down their concrete driveways. His childhood had been safe and full of common mysteries, the run-over cat, the Kentucky Blue Wonders lifting the white, bare bean husk into the sun at the head of each sprout, a helmet, a trophy.

  One very frightening thing had happened: a man had died on the front lawn. He had been watering his lawn when he turned blue, impossible, perfect blue, and collapsed. Hamilton, five years old and on his way from the bus stop, had watched as the Cadillac ambulance sirened its way up the street. The sheets of the stretcher had been so white in the sunlight, so crisp and neat. Even as a grown man Speke had suffered nightmares of this blue man turning his head to look right at him, and then slowly, jerkily, trying to get up to walk toward where he stood.

  The effort was what always ended the nightmare. The blue man never actually climbed to his feet. It seemed that Speke’s sense of what was real and what was impossible counseled even his dream life, an invisible editor. One of his therapists had been charmed by the phrase “reality principle,” and had praised him for knowing exactly what was real. “That’s rare,” the therapist had beamed, “in imaginative people like yourself.” Asquith had always kidded him about the “blue man dreams,” and confessed that he himself never dreamed at all.

  The memory of the dream was vivid, but it had that quicksilver quality that made it something impossible to cup and hold in the consciousness. He remembered the gleaming brass nozzle clearly, one of those nozzles that adjusted to make a fine aura of spray or a tight, hard lance of water. The dream had a sour quality, a cast of light that made him wince.

  He did not want to move.

  No, don’t get up yet, he told himself. Stay here with Maria, staring into the almost perfect dark. At least you can hear her breathing—that’s some solace.

  Why of all the days under the sun was Asquith coming today?

  It was as though the man had thought: what day would be the worst day for me to slither from my grave? And somehow, using some sense of timing only such madmen must have, Asquith had chosen the very worst day, and had managed to deceive him to the point that Speke had not talked him into a day a week from now, or a distant city a month away.

  He rested his hand on her hip. Her slip of a figure delighted him. He would do anything to protect her, and keep secure her faith in him.

  Some day he would tell her the secret pet name he had for her. It was a silly name, but it was the way he thought of her: my Little White Mouse. Embarrassing—a man of letters should be able to come up with something better than that, and so he had kept it secret.

  Her brunette pubic hair contrasted with her skin to make it appear nearly spectral. The thought of her now did not arouse him so much as make him want to lie beside her like this forever. Why was he lying here, thinking of her as someone who was long-departed? But she did have that sense of belonging not so much to another world as to no world at all, a creature separated from daily events. It was easy to imagine Maria as though he could see her only in his memory, as though she were long absent.

  He crept from the bed carefully, so he would not disturb her sleep. He would look like a smashed bag of garbage when the cameras rolled. Scamp would bring that makeup whiz, though, and Bell would see bags under his eyes as a sign that he was a rumpled genius.

  Besides, he had always wondered what sort of older man he would make. Would he be one of the baggy, bulky ones? Or would he grow gaunt and skeletal, one of those old guys who are all ear and chin? Today, maybe, he would start to find out.

  He stared at the decanter of scotch, but made no move. In the old days he had always started his day off with a taste, red wine and bread, like an Elizabethan.

  He had longed to have a biographer some day, someone to whom he could tell the story of his life. There was so much to tell, and so much to embellish. He wanted someone good, someone who could etch it into history.

  Such a man was coming at last. He paced, disturbed by the approach of the man who would transform him from a playwriting celebrity, his face beside the Fritos and M&Ms at Safeway, into a modern day—but here he faltered.

  A modern day what? Oscar Wilde? Not with my flat wit. A modern day Doctor Johnson? Hardly, sir, I haven’t the tongue for it. Maybe he could emulate John Huston, all snarl and charm, or dig up the boxing gloves and do a knockoff of Hemingway and Mailer. He had to pretend to be som
ething, or somebody. By himself, without an act, what was he?

  Christ, where were the beta blockers that quack doled out to him in the days when he had been Speke the wreck? He yanked the desk drawer and pawed through match books from Zurich, Milan, from every place on earth, and he hadn’t smoked for months.

  The years before Maria had been tough. At least some of the details were hard to remember. Those years had left a smear of images: both phones ringing at once, him battling to refuse deletions in First Cut.

  Both the song that gave the album its name and the album itself had been in “desperate need of a remix.” Remix, he had said, and die. That refusal had been brilliant, since “First Cut Reprise” and “Big Bucks” both subsequently starburst at number one. His brother had even found it in an alley in Moscow, in what he had called “a really putrid-sounding bootleg.” Still, his brother had grudgingly admitted, this was market penetration.

  He had been known as a professional but a very ill-tempered man on the phone. Who wouldn’t be grumpy, talking to people who never identified themselves and who all sounded alike? “Ham, listen, we got just a little problem with the broken bottles in the second act. The union says someone’s gonna get hurt—I mean real glass. They have these sugar bottles—” All the while him thinking, puzzling, seething, and finally asking in what he thought was the mildest voice in the entire world, a voice right out of the Mother Teresa Finishing School, with the other phone bleating in his ear, “Please tell me who is this please.” But it came out with a roar, not meek and mild at all and there was a long and very embarrassing conversation in which it turned out that between the pleases Speke had used the f-word to the most important human being on the East Coast. Although they did, in the end, use real empty Smirnoff bottles. The play was still running in eight major cities. People did get cut. The audiences loved it.