The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald Page 6

  Noyes: I didn’t know. I hadn’t found myself yet. And I was different from the others. I had no future laid out for me — Ivy League education, seat on the Exchange, sturdy, well-bred wife who spoke in hushed, demure tones. Part of me was like Boyd — a rebel. Part of me desperately wanted to be accepted. The easiest way to become accepted was in sports. From the day I arrived at Deerfield I was the academy’s best athlete. I was made quarterback of the varsity football team when I was still a sophomore. Everyone wanted to be my friend. I was a gung ho prince among men.

  Hoag: Any resemblance to Sawyer Noyes would be strictly coincidental, of course.

  Noyes: You don’t miss much.

  Hoag: I try not to.

  Noyes: Believe me, that resemblance was short-lived. Died in the second half of the Choate game. That’s when I finally got a good look at myself. We were trailing 7-0 at halftime. Not one of my better halfs. They were a big, physical team. On me before I had a chance to throw. Coach really let me have it in the locker room. Told me I was spitting the bit. Told me I wasn’t playing like a Deerfield man. Made me feel like if I didn’t win that game, I’d be a complete failure as a human being. And I believed that. I went out there wanting to win more than anything in the world. I was in the huddle calling the first play of the second half, all pumped up, when it hit me — here I was taking the same exact path as Father. Picking right up where he left off the night he threw that rope over the cellar support beam and hanged himself. That wasn’t what I wanted. That was what I hated. I decided then and there to do something about it — I started completing passes, all right, only I completed them to the wrong men. Coach yanked me when I’d run the score up to 28-0. Screamed at me. Threw me off the team. Boyd hugged me after the game. Told me we were blood brothers. Everyone else treated me like someone with a serious psychological problem. I had, after all, repudiated everything that the school held sacred. Collingwood, my corridor master, sat me down and said to me, very sternly, “You are not a lone wolf, Noyes. You are a unit of society.” He recommended counseling. And left me alone after that. Everyone did, except for Boyd.

  Hoag: Is this when you started gravitating toward writing?

  Noyes: Not really. The only writing I remember doing was in a sophomore English class. The teacher asked us to do an autobiographical essay. So I told my story — unvarnished. The dickhead gave it back to me with a poor grade and a note across the top: “Life just isn’t this bad, Cameron.”

  Hoag: And reading habits? Who were you into?

  Noyes: Jim Carroll, Kerouac … Mmm … you. I skipped almost all of the required reading. Did very little on my own. Still don’t read much. I’m very poorly read. I’ve never read a word of Hemingway, for instance.

  Hoag: (pause) Fitzgerald?

  Noyes: Fitzgerald? No. I don’t think I’ve read anything of his either. (silence) Why are you looking at me like that?

  Hoag: I’m just a little shocked.

  Noyes: I told you — I’m not well-read.

  Hoag: I know. But you’re always mouthing off in interviews about the great writers, putting them down.

  Noyes: Oh, that. Boyd feeds me those quotes so I’ll get attention. Just a lot of publicity. You know how that goes. Actually, I think I’m better off being so ignorant. It means I haven’t been influenced by anyone who came before me. My style is mine.

  Hoag: Tell me about your summers. Where did you go? What did you do?

  Noyes: Deerfield fixed me up with a job as a lifeguard at a summer camp in the Berkshires. I think the dean had a piece of the camp. Wasn’t terrible, just dull. The only hard part was when the parents came up to pick up their kids. All of them had homes to go to. I had nowhere to go, except back to Deerfield.

  Hoag: Did you ever go back to Farmington?

  Noyes: No. Never.

  Hoag: What about girls?

  Noyes: What about them?

  Hoag: Tall, blond lifeguards tend to fare pretty well on moonlit summer nights. I wondered if there was one shy doe in particular.

  Noyes: Nobody worth talking about.

  Hoag: I’d like to be the judge of that, if you don’t mind.

  Noyes: I do mind. I told you, there was nobody worth —

  Hoag: Look, Cameron. If I ask you a question I ask it for a reason. That’s my job. Your job is to answer me. That’s how it works. Understand?

  Noyes: Okay, okay. (silence) When I was seventeen, there was this counselor named Kirsten. She was a Dana Hall girl from Brookline. Blond. Slender. Very into horses …

  Hoag: And … ?

  Noyes: Why are you so sure there’s an and? (pause) And she and I … she was my first, okay? I was hers, too. On a blanket by the lake with the Clash playing on my boom box. She loved me, and I — I loved her back.

  Hoag: I thought you didn’t go in for that.

  Noyes: That was the only time. Never again. Ever.

  Hoag: I see.

  Noyes: We were going to go to Bennington together. Get married when we were seniors. It was for real, coach. We were in love. I really felt like I belonged to somebody. And she belonged to me … And then it blew up in my face — just like everything else had in my life.

  Hoag: What happened?

  Noyes: Her mother happened. She forbid Kirsten to see me after the summer was over. She thought I was genetically unsound — no money, no living relatives, suicide in the family. I wasn’t good enough for her fucking daughter. And Kirsten … she did what she was told. I couldn’t believe it — after all we’d meant to each other. She blew me off. Just like that. (silence) I never saw her again.

  Hoag: Any idea what happened to her?

  Noyes: None. Probably became a rich perfect bitch. Married a rich perfect bastard.

  Hoag: And what happened to you?

  Noyes: Boyd was planning to go to Columbia. He was very into New York. The whole idea of New York seemed, somehow, very appealing to me, too. After that thing with Kirsten, I wanted desperately to get away from those quaint historic villages with those quaint placards out front of those quaint houses. I wanted to go someplace ugly and sweaty and real. I wanted to meet people who had ideas and dreams and passions. I wanted to disappear. Does that make any sense?

  Hoag: New York is like the Foreign Legion. People flee here for a lot of different reasons.

  Noyes: What was yours?

  Hoag: Mine? There was a job waiting for me in the family business. I didn’t want it. I wanted to sip martinis at the Algonquin with Benchley and Parker.

  Noyes: Did you?

  Hoag: No, they were good and dead by the time I got here. Martinis were damned fine though. So you and Boyd both got into Columbia?

  Noyes: Yes. We paid a couple of the Deerfield computer nerds to take the SATs for us. Mine did so well I actually got in on an academic scholarship. (laughs) I like to think that Mother would have been proud of her Cammy.

  (end tape)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PUB PARTIES USED TO be small, dreary affairs. Three or four dozen writers, editors, and agents herded into someone’s smoky, book-lined living room on West End. Wine and cheese on the dining table. Lots and lots of boring, pretentious conversation. They were never my idea of fun. Merilee used to say the only good thing about them was the chance to see so many men in the same room at the same time who looked exactly like frogs.

  Pub parties are still dreary affairs, but they’re no longer small. To celebrate the publication of Tell Delilah, Skitsy Held had rented a triple-decker cruise yacht, the Gotham Princess, for the entire evening. It was waiting there at Pier 63 festooned with Tell Delilah banners when Cam and I left his Olds in the parking lot at Twenty-third and Twelfth and made our way up the long, narrow ramp.

  Two hundred glittering celebrity guests were on deck enjoying the free champagne, the late-day sun on the Hudson, and the complimentary Tell Delilah balloons, T-shirts, hankies, and panties. It was the usual crowd of smiling, chattering celebrities who turn out at Broadway openings and museum benefits and other such ph
oto opportunities, people who had nothing in common with each other except that they were all celebrities, and no reason for being there except that the photographers were. Lensmen from the Daily News and Post, Women’s Wear Daily, and the supermarket tabloids were busily snapping shots of Sugar Ray Leonard, of Paulina Porizkova, the Polish model with the $6 million Estée Lauder contract, of John John Kennedy and Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger, of Ashford and Simpson, Jackie Mason, Bianca Jagger, Bill Blass, and Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels. Phil Esposito, the former hockey great, was there. So was City Council president Andy Stein and Ron Darling of the Mets and a former child star who had just written a scandalous book accusing Darryl Zanuck of waving his dick at her when she was nine years old. All of these people and more were there to celebrate Delilah Moscowitz’s new book.

  We lingered at the rail for a moment, Lulu sniffing hungrily at the air wafting up from the kitchens down below. Cam swaying slightly. He’d put away a great deal of José Cuervo that afternoon, and also taken a major toot in the Loveboat on the way over. He still wore his rumpled seersucker suit and torn black T-shirt, and no shoes or socks. I had on a glen-plaid suit of Irish linen and a straw trilby. I looked better than he did, but you’ll have to take my word for it.

  Skitsy Held hurried over to us almost immediately, her high heels clacking on the deck. She was a brusque, gristly little woman in her early forties with shoulder-length black hair, heavy black brows, nervous brown eyes, and the unlikeliest pair of breasts in all of publishing, if not the Empire State. They positively strained against her lavender knit dress, jutting so outrageously far forward that it was a miracle the woman didn’t topple over. Those who worked for her swore that Skitsy’s oversized mammeries would slowly deflate through the course of the year and that every winter she would disappear alone for a holiday — returning two weeks later tanned, rested, and uplifted.

  “Well, well, you made it, young Master Noyes.” She spoke in rushed, officious bursts and didn’t move her mouth when she did. “Not that I ever doubted you, of course.”

  “Hey, sure,” Cam said good-naturedly, bending forward so she could give him a maternal peck on the cheek. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  She gestured to a crew member. A moment later the ship lurched and began to pull away from the pier. She’d been waiting for us. She turned to me now and extended a small, bony claw. Her nails were painted red, as was her rather wide mouth. “And I know this gentleman.”

  “Using the term loosely,” I said, taking her hand.

  “We met at the Anne Beattie party, remember?” Her eyes darted over to Cameron, then back to me.

  “As if I could forget,” I said, trying to keep my own eyes off her breasts, and failing.

  “There seems to be a bar,” observed Cam, glancing across the deck.

  “Yes, go have fun, dear,” she said. “And please say hello to Delilah. She’s so insecure.”

  We watched him shoulder his way through the crowd, a big disheveled blond kid at a party of sleek grown-ups.

  “He can be a very bad boy,” said Skitsy, shivering slightly from the breeze that had picked up as we began to chug up the Hudson. “Be firm with him. He needs that. You see, he’s always felt this need to act out his view of the world.”

  “Which is … ?”

  “That all people, himself included, are trash.”

  A white-jacketed waiter passed by with a tray of champagne. She took a glass. We both did.

  “I’d like to talk to you about him for the book,” I said, sipping mine. “Get your side of his story.”

  She raised an eyebrow, on guard now. “The rumor I hear is it’s some kind of publishing exposé.”

  “Not really. Just his story, honesty told.”

  “Still, I’d be careful,” she warned.

  “I’m almost always careful.”

  “Publishing is a very small, very social business.”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  She eyed me over her champagne glass. “Friends look out for each other. Lend a hand. They don’t screw each other. Not without paying the consequences. Am I making myself clear?”

  I tugged at my ear. “Yes. You have something to hide.”

  Skitsy’s eyes flashed at me hotly. “I was wrong about you. You’re no gentleman.”

  “I tried to warn you.”

  “So I’m in it?” she demanded. “I’m in this book?”

  “Of course. You discovered him. He was your biggest star.”

  “He’s still my biggest star!” she snapped angrily. “And he always will be!”

  With that, Skitsky Held turned on her heel and stormed off. Well, it certainly wasn’t hard to locate her little hot-button. Actually, given that Cam had so ungratefully left her for another house, it was a wonder she still spoke to him at all. Loyalty means a lot in publishing. It’s rarely practiced anymore, but it’s still one of the two grand delusions book people cling to. The other is that they’re smarter than movie people.

  Had she been the one who slid that threat under my door? True, those footsteps on my roof had sounded as if they belonged to Andre the Giant, but the sound had been magnified by the darkness and my imagination. It could have been a woman up there with that crowbar. It could have been Skitsy.

  Boyd Samuels was out there in the middle of the crowded deck, his greetings hearty, his laughter forced. He had on a white linen jacket and had tied a red bandanna over his head, Hell’s Angel style. I saw no sign of Delilah. I did see Boyd’s burr-headed assistant, Todd Lesser, who was standing by himself at the rail, nursing a beer and ignoring the views. He wasn’t watching the sun drop over the Jersey Palisades, or the lights of the Manhattan skyline beginning to twinkle in the dusk. He had eyes only for the woman photographer who was across the deck from him snapping shots of the guests. She was a trim woman, light on her feet and graceful in an oversized men’s white oxford button-down shirt, faded jeans, and black penny loafers. Todd was gazing at her the way a guy looks at the one and only woman he wants, and whom he knows he can never have.

  I headed over to her with Lulu and said, “Blue Monday, isn’t it?”

  Charlie Chu lowered her Nikon and exclaimed, “You guys made it.” Her dimples were even nicer flesh-toned, especially since that flesh was the color of honey and the texture of silk. Her black hair was glossy and parted neatly on one side. She wore horn-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down her nose in a way I knew I could easily find adorable. Her mouth was like a rosebud. There was no lipstick on it. She wore no makeup or jewelry of any kind. She needed none. There was an alive, eager beauty to her, a freshness you seldom find in New York women.

  “How’s the tree pollen?” I asked.

  “Better, thanks,” she replied. “Hi, cutie,” she said brightly to Lulu, who glowered up at her disapprovingly. Charlie frowned. “She still doesn’t like me.”

  “She’s peeved because there’s no clam dip.”

  “There’s shad roe downstairs on the buffet tables.” Lulu promptly waddled off in that direction.

  “I waited at the house for you guys to pick me up,” Charlie said gaily. “No show. Todd was nice enough to bring me.”

  “How chivalrous of him.”

  He was still over by the railing, conversing now with Boyd. Actually, Boyd was talking and Todd was nodding.

  “Yes, he’s very sweet,” she said. “A little tongue-tied though.”

  “I’m sorry we stood you up. I only just found out about this little gathering. Standing up beautiful women isn’t my style, believe me.”

  “Oh, I know,” she assured me. “It’s Cam’s.” She spotted him now across the deck, where he was gulping tequila and conversing with Sean Landeta, the punter of the New York Giants. The glow in her eyes was unmistakable: utter adoration.

  “Getting any good shots?” I asked her.

  She pushed her glasses up her nose. “A couple. Stuff I might be able to work off of for portraits. Skitsy. Tanner … ”


  I looked around for Tanner Marsh. I didn’t see him. Possibly the illustrious critic had fallen overboard and drowned in the Hudson, untreated sewage spilling out of his mouth. There was always hope.

  “And you?” she asked. “Have you and Cam been having good talks?”

  “I believe so,” I replied. “It’s still early, of course, but so far he’s been candid and cooperative. An excellent subject.”

  She looked up at me with a quizzical expression. “I hope he doesn’t disappoint you.”

  “Not to worry. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  She cocked her head slightly to one side now. “I’ve decided you’re going to be a positive influence on him.”

  I grinned at her. “I’ve been called many things in my time, but never that.”

  She giggled. It really was a delicious giggle. Then she went off to say hello to the man she loved.

  I worked my way over to the bar and found myself next to Todd, who was getting a Wild Turkey for Boyd.

  “He invited most of these people here,” Todd volunteered. “Has me check out the gossip pages every morning to see who’s in town. If they’re hot, Boyd makes it a point to invite them out. Then he tips off the photographers.”

  “Does he have a publicist?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t need one. This sort of thing,” Todd explained, taking in the yachtful of celebrities with a wave of his hand, “is one of the things he’s best at.”

  Todd seemed much more expansive than he had before. He was, I realized, somewhat drunk.

  “And what are you best at?” I asked him.

  “Me?” The bartender returned with Boyd’s whiskey. Todd reached for it, downed it somewhat defiantly, and ordered another. “Writing is what I really want to do. I’ve had some short stories going around for a while. Just finished a novel … ” He trailed off, shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. It’s been years.”

  “Sometimes it takes years.”

  He gazed enviously over at McInerney, Ellis, and Janowitz — the Athos, Porthos, and Artemis of Lit Lite — who were yucking it up for Liz Smith. “Not for some people,” he said softly.