The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald Page 5

  “I am. There’s no reason for you to be alarmed, but they may … well, try to get at me through you.”

  “You mean you think a loon might go after me.” She stated it matter-of-factly.

  “I’m afraid it’s possible.”

  “Not to worry,” she said bravely. “I’m used to them. Come with the territory, I’m afraid.”

  “Still, I think you should be careful.”

  “I promised myself a long time ago I won’t let them spook me. If I do, I’ll become one of them myself.”

  “Promise me you’ll be careful,” I insisted.

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “Promise me and mean it.”

  “I’ll be fine, Hoagy. I have a great big fierce doorman.”

  “Call me if you need me. It’s probably nothing, but call, okay?”

  “I shall. And thank you for the warning. It was very civilized of you.”

  We were both silent for a moment now.

  “Do you ever miss us, Hoagy?” she asked, her voice softer.

  I swallowed. “Only most of the time. You?”

  “I miss us right now. When I’ve just crawled home from the theater, from all of the lights and the applause, all the energy, to this dark, still apartment. It’s so quiet here. Hoagy?”

  “Yes, Merilee?”

  “You broke my heart, Hoagy.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  (TAPE #1 WITH CAMERON Noyes recorded May 6 at the Blue Mill restaurant on Commerce St. off Hudson. Arrives punctually. Seems eager, clear-eyed. Wears blue-and-white seersucker suit.)

  Noyes: The decor here is bizarre, coach. Don’t they know what decade this is?

  Hoag: This happens to be one of my favorite restaurants.

  Noyes: Is that why you made me promise not to tell any of my friends about it?

  Hoag: Precisely.

  Noyes: Food’s not bad. I take it you get off on simple.

  Hoag: It doesn’t get any better than simple.

  Noyes: Think so?

  Hoag: You know that cherry writing table you have in your study? Its beauty is in its simplicity. But it’s a deceptive simplicity. Thousands of hours of work went into it — by a craftsman who knew what he was doing and didn’t take any shortcuts.

  Noyes: (silence) I made that table.

  Hoag: You made it?

  Noyes: You sound surprised.

  Hoag: No, I’m impressed. You’re very gifted with wood. You know, I wondered about your hands. They aren’t a writer’s hands.

  Noyes: Maybe I’m more of a furniture maker than I am a writer. It’s the only time I feel totally at peace.

  Hoag: So that’s your shop next to Charlie’s studio?

  Noyes: Yes. I make her frames for her. Am I? Better at that?

  Hoag: I don’t have to tell you you’re brilliant. You know that. (pause) But I think you’re at a crossroads now. You can come back down to earth, work hard, get even better. Or you can fizzle out. Become one of those people who are simply famous for being famous, like George Plimpton or Dick Cavett.

  Noyes: All I did was put some words down on paper. I have no idea why people responded the way they did. I … I have no idea how to repeat it. And I sure as hell don’t understand where it came from.

  Hoag: That’s why we’re here — to find out where it came from. By the way, who knows about us?

  Noyes: Everyone in town, I imagine. Boyd believes in getting the word out. I told him last night about our new idea, and he loves it. I knew he would. Why do you ask?

  Hoag: Just curious. Tell me about growing up. Were you an only child?

  Noyes: Yes. I grew up in a typical family — no one loved anyone. I was born and raised in Farmington, Connecticut, one of those quaint, historic New England villages the tourists from Fresno go so apeshit over. I come from Mayflower stock on mother’s side, the Knotts. There are Knotts buried all over the state. Her great-grandfather, Samuel Knott, was a chief justice of the state of Connecticut. He helped slaves get away during the Civil War, when Farmington was a junction of the underground railroad. Her grandfather and father were clergymen. The family manse passed down through several generations. Mother grew up in it, as did I. It’s a white, center-chimney colonial smack-dab in the middle of the historic district on High Street. The little plaque out front says it was built in 1790. Fireplaces and family heirlooms in every room. Like growing up in a museum, really. … Mother was a beautiful woman.

  Hoag: She’s dead?

  Noyes: They’re both dead. My parents died within a week of each other when I was fourteen. … She was a tall, fine-boned blonde. An only child. Jane Abbott. Knott was her maiden name. She studied at Miss Porter’s School, of course, being that it was right around the corner. And a family tradition.

  Hoag: So did Merilee.

  Noyes: Did she? Mother could have become an actress herself. She was that beautiful. But she was much too devoted to her own special brand of pretense. The Mayflower Society. The Daughters of the American Revolution. The local historical society. Horse and flower shows. She lived in a permanent state of artificial grace. She insisted upon proper speech and dress. Proper manners at the dinner table at all times. If I pushed my food too close to the edge of my plate, she’d sweetly say, “Danger zone, Cammy. Danger zone.” I never saw mother perspire. And I never could imagine her taking a shit. Still, I shouldn’t be unkind. Mother believed in me. Loved me. Father never did. He always treated me like a stray someone had brought into the house. I often did outrageous things just to get his attention. I remember once, when I was perhaps five, he promised to buy me a penknife. I’ve always been fond of knives. He forgot. So to remind him I got a nail and ran it over the length of his Mercedes. He had to repaint the entire car.

  Hoag: Did you get the penknife?

  Noyes: No, but I got his attention. (laughs) He was of beef-baron stock. His great-great-grandfather built one of the big Chicago slaughterhouses in the mid-1800s. A multimillionaire who used to go on those expeditions out onto the plains to hunt buffalo. That bowie knife I have on my writing table belonged to him. Father’s grandfather married into the Main Line and settled in Philadelphia. Father was named for him — Sawyer Noyes. He and mother met when she was at Wellesley and he at Yale. He was quarterback of the football team, a handsome, fearless campus hero. Father was the sort of man for whom college was the pinnacle of his life. Everything afterward was a gradual process of slipping away into ordinariness and disappointment. Once in a great while he and I would toss a football around in the yard. One time he caught the ball and stared at it, and continued to stare at it, and then he just laid it down softly on the grass and walked inside. He was an unhappy man. Had some family money left in a trust, but not much. He used his looks and mother’s connections to sell real estate. Played a lot of golf at the country club. Drank, of course. So did his older brother, Jack … Smilin’ Jack Noyes was father’s idol. Had been a race car driver and flyer in his youth. By the time I came along he was little more than a sot and a bore — twice divorced and without a proper job. Hung out a lot at the Essex Yacht Club. Uncle Jack always had yachts of one kind or another. But he was nice to me, since he had no children of his own. Once, when the two of us were out on the Sound, he told me that it was vital for a man to have a place of his own — a hideaway where he could think and be himself and that when he died he intended to leave me his. It was a tiny fishing shack on Crescent Moon Pond in Old Lyme. Very remote. Had to row across the pond to reach it. He said no one else in the family knew of it, and that I wasn’t to tell father, that it was our secret. (pause) I still have the damned place. It’s little more than a tree house, really, and falling down at that. Town won’t let me rebuild, because it’s on state forest land. But I’ve kept it. And like Uncle Jack, I’ve told hardly anyone about it.

  Hoag: So he’s dead, too?

  Noyes: Yes. (pause) Yes, he’s dead, too.

  Hoag: Something?

  Noyes: (long silence) No, nothing.

  Hoag: Wha
t sort of boy were you?

  Noyes: Restless. Dissatisfied. I was a head-banger. Instead of sucking my thumb I’d bang the back of my head against my crib, sort of like a woodpecker in reverse.

  Hoag: How old were you when you stopped?

  Noyes: Who stopped? (laughs) I wasn’t allowed the usual pacifier, television. Mother wouldn’t have one in the house. It had, after all, been invented after the nineteenth century. So I spent a lot of time out in father’s workshop in the carriage barn. That’s where I learned how to work with wood. Also how to smoke cigarettes and wank off. Smilin’ Jack was right — every man needs his hideaway. I went to the town elementary and middle schools. I had as many friends as I wanted. I was large for my age, and could do sports well. I spent six weeks every summer at a boys’ camp in the Adirondacks, learning about canoeing and shooting and taking cold showers at dawn. The rest of the summer I’d play golf at the country club, sail, cherry-bomb the neighbors’ mailboxes. The usual mischief. Mine was an idyllic New England boyhood, really. Safe. Sheltered. Secure. And I felt utterly suffocated by it. It was so narrow and confining. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone was well-bred and rich and white. All of them were hiding from the real word, hiding behind their fucking antiques and good manners and garden parties. You know what I mean, don’t you?

  Hoag: Quite well. I grew up in a town much like that. And fled as soon as I was old enough to.

  Noyes: I know you did. I was thirteen when I read your book. Our Family Enterprise really influenced me. Made me feel like I wasn’t crazy for hating the place. Gave me the courage to cut totally loose from it the way you had. Of course, it didn’t hurt that it all kind of blew up in my face, too.

  Hoag: How so?

  Noyes: (silence) I suppose I’ll have to deal with this, won’t I?

  Hoag: Deal with what? (silence) Come on, Cameron. Don’t hold back on me.

  Noyes: Mother … Mother was killed in a private plane crash in the White Mountains when I was fourteen. She and one other person, the pilot. My uncle Jack. They’d run off together, Mother and Smilin’ Jack. She was a cheat, you see. She’d been banging Uncle Jack for years.

  Hoag: Had your father known?

  Noyes: Apparently not. The letter she’d left behind for him destroyed him. He brought all of her things down from the bedroom, laid them out in the dining room, and sat down at the table with a deck of cards. Sat there and played game after game of solitaire, surrounded by her things. Sat there for days. Didn’t sleep or eat or speak. I’d ask him a question and he wouldn’t even hear me. A week after the funeral I came down for breakfast and he was gone. I … I found him in the cellar. He’d hanged himself. I just stood there staring at him. Couldn’t decide whether to cut him down first or to call the police. I stood there for a long time. Finally I cut him down. He was much heavier than I thought he’d be.

  Hoag: Did he leave a note?

  Noyes: Yes. It said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, son.” Christ, I still haven’t figured out what he meant by that — what was the right way to take it? (pause) It wasn’t easy, losing both of them that way. I’d lived so much for their approval. Or disapproval. Now that they weren’t around I found myself in total wonder at what the point of anything was. Especially with father’s suicide — to be told by your own parent that life is not worth living … I suppose the main thing it did, besides leave me totally alone, was make me realize there is no such thing as security or trust or happiness in this world. There’s only chaos. And myth. I guess I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to tell people that, whether they want to be told or not.

  Hoag: That’s an excellent insight into your work. Keep it up. You had no other relatives?

  Noyes: None. No aunts or uncles. No living grandparents. The local family lawyer was appointed executor of the estate, as well as my legal guardian.

  Hoag: His name?

  Noyes: Why?

  Hoag: Just being thorough.

  Noyes: Seymour. Peter Seymour. When the dust settled, it turned out father was in terrible debt. I had to sell off the Knott manse and all of the antiques in it to pay off his creditors. I was left with a small trust — just enough to pay for my education — and Uncle Jack’s shack. Otherwise I was a penniless orphan the day when I was shoved out into the cold, cruel world at age fourteen.

  (end tape)

  (Tape #2 with Cameron Noyes recorded May 7 at the Blue Mill. Wears same suit as day before with torn black T-shirt, no shoes or socks. Is bleary-eyed, but punctual.)

  Noyes: I ran into a friend at Live Bait last night who thought he’d seen you on a squash court at the Racquet Club yesterday, though he couldn’t swear to it — he said you looked a lot older than your book-jacket photo.

  Hoag: Tell him, whoever he is, that he’s an asshole.

  Noyes: It was you.

  Hoag: Getting killed by a senior vice president of Kidder Peabody.

  Noyes: I don’t get it, coach. “Why are you still hanging out at that gentleman’s dinosaur pit? I thought you hated those people, like I do.

  Hoag: I told you I was complex.

  Noyes: But how can you write the way you do and still … I don’t understand you.

  Hoag: You don’t have to. I’m the one who has to understand you. I meant to ask you yesterday, do you have any old photographs of your family? Pictures of you as a child? Charlie will want to sort through them for illustration purposes.

  Noyes: Not a one. I threw everything out a long time ago.

  Hoag: So tell me about the cold, cruel world.

  Noyes: The lawyer, Seymour, decided that a boarding school made the most sense, so he sent me off to the Deerfield Academy. Deerfield became my home for the next four years, and the people there my family. Deerfield is where I came of age, though I don’t give the school much credit for that. I hated the place on sight. It’s in a small village in the middle of the cornfields in western Massachusetts. Deerfield Village is like Farmington, only more so. More quaint. More into itself and its past. The whole place is a living fucking colonial museum.

  Hoag: I take it you don’t go in for preservation.

  Noyes: I go in for destruction. On the surface, the academy was a decent enough place. Lovely campus. Superior library and laboratories and athletic facilities, second-largest planetarium in all of New England … But it was, for all intents and purposes, a minimum-security prison. Instead of cells we were assigned dorm rooms. Instead of prison blues we wore blue blazers and ties. We were told where to go, what to do, when to eat. Curfew was at ten. No drinking. No cars. No girls. Two proctors per corridor to keep an eye on you, and a corridor master to be your buddy. Mine was a prized dickhead named Darcy Collingwood, a middle-aged bachelor who taught algebra and wore Hush Puppies and ate Wheaties with diet raspberry soda on it. He smiled a lot. I didn’t. I was used to coming and going as I pleased. Plus they really laid on that whole Eastern-elite prep-school mindset — the old-boy tradition of hearty good comradeship and spirited athletic competition. Sports do make the boy into a man. They also tire him out so he won’t think about how horny he is and how there’s nobody around to fuck except for the other boys. Deerfield just went coed this past year — actually joined the twentieth century. But when I was there, the nearest wool was three miles away at Stoneleigh-Burnham, and only then for purposes of organized activities like dances. It was a prison. I wanted no part of it. I would have fled, too, if it hadn’t been for Boyd. As freshmen we were placed across the hall from each other in Plunkett, the oldest and ricketiest of the dormitories. I’d never met anyone like Boyd. He seemed conventional enough on the surface. Suburban middle-class background. But even then he was a visionary scam artist. Within weeks his room had become a working laboratory in the art of free enterprise. He bought and sold tests and term papers. Recruited smart kids to take the SATs for other kids at a fee, with an incentive program based on how far over 1400 they scored. When he turned sixteen, Boyd brought his car up from home and paid a local farmer to let him keep it in his barn
. After curfew, he’d slip out his window, pedal his bike to the farm, drive over to Greenfield, and stock up on booze, using a forged drivers license. Then he’d bring it back and peddle it to the boys. Sold them forged driver’s licenses at fifty dollars a pop, too, so they’d be able to buy it themselves on weekend leaves. He had a whole setup in his room — camera, printer, laminating machine. Probably stole all the equipment from the school. He was very resourceful.

  Hoag: You sound rather proud.

  Noyes: I am. Boyd and I have always shared the same vision of this world, which is that everyone in it lies, cheats, and steals to get what they want. Every single one of us. I accept that. What I don’t accept is people who won’t admit this about themselves. They, to me, are the liars. All that really matters to anyone is not getting caught, and Boyd never did, though one time the shit did hit the fan in a big way. A kid he sold a license to went a little off one night. Stole a car from the village, got a bottle, got wasted, slammed the car into a busload of kids near Springfield. Killed two of them, as well as himself. A major scandal on campus. State police said if they ever found out who sold the kid that forged license, they’d nail his ass but good. So Boyd got out of that line and into grass, hash, coke, ludes. He was the campus pharmacist our junior and senior years. Used his weekend leaves to buy quantities in Boston and Hartford. Once he even smuggled a bunch of hash back from the Bahamas when he was on vacation there over Christmas with his parents. He must have made five hundred dollars a week dealing, and he never got caught. Too smart for them. … I was fascinated by Boyd from the beginning. In awe of him, really. It was Boyd who got me through Deerfield, both in terms of slipping me test papers and in terms of my head. We spent a lot of hours together getting wasted and talking about life. Boyd wanted to become a rock promoter. He sort of ran things over at WDAJ, the campus radio station, until he used the word Fuck on the air and the dean of students wouldn’t let him near the place again.

  Hoag: And you? What did you want?