Yearn, p.7
Yearn, page 7
Startled by this new vein of skepticism, D’Arcy leapt to his feet. “I swear, Crosby, I would never have endangered both your reputation and mine!” Appalled, he stepped toward the door. The publisher patted his arm reassuringly, then led him back into the room. “In which case we will pick up the glove with relish. You must take up his challenge; you must attend the debate and defeat him with great wit! It will be a triumph of publicity. Why, Dingle, draw up the leaflet immediately! We shall emphasize youthful innovation over old prejudice. . . . Of course, naturally you will be required to produce the secret journal and verify your sources.”
“Naturally,” the young biographer replied, and if there was any doubt behind his veneer of brazen confidence he did not let it show.
The next morning, D’Arcy was woken by Henries clutching the morning papers—the headlines all screamed CHOLERA!. The newspapers warned local residents to stay clear of Golden Square and the infected borough of Soho. “Sir, I strongly suggest that you adjourn to your father’s estate or at least stay indoors for the duration of this pestilence. I am convinced this would be your father’s wish, young D’Arcy,” the butler counseled.
“I cannot. I am to attend a public debate tomorrow, Henries, and my reputation will be in ruins if I should miss it,” D’Arcy replied. In fact despite the cholera outbreak, he was determined to visit Golden Square himself in order to see Harry, the chimney sweep, to ask him if he would consider giving a verbal confirmation of his discovery of the secret journal at the very same debate. Fortunately for Henries, D’Arcy kept this decision to himself, and it was only after both the old butler and his wife had retired to their own quarters that the biographer ventured out onto the streets of the West End.
• • •
D’Arcy stood at the curb of Regent Street, now the great divide between the diseased and the unaffected, and looked down Beak Street. Behind him stretched the affluent, disease-free borough of Mayfair, where fashionably clad shoppers and pedestrians still thronged the pavement, whereas before him there was a distinct lack of humanity. He lifted a handkerchief that he had drenched in an herbal concoction he’d purchased that was meant to ward off the toxic miasma blamed for spreading the noxious disease. After a silent prayer to Thoth, Zeus, and any other deity he thought would be sympathetic, he hesitantly crossed Regent Street.
D’Arcy plunged into the narrow and dingy Beak Street. Normally a hive of colorful commerce and frenetic activity, this evening it was strangely desolate. Most of the businesses and shops were boarded up as many, fearing contamination, had fled to other parts of London or relatives in the countryside. The only business still open appeared to be the Lion’s brewery on Broad Street. An old woman scuttled past, her gaze held steadily downward, as if to look at him would be to invite the contagion. It was a disturbing and eerie sensation. Increasingly anxious, he made his way down to Golden Square.
A good half of the tall houses had their blinds pulled down, while many had black cloth displayed in their windows, an indication that there had been a death or deaths in that particular building. Fearing the worst, D’Arcy walked down to number ten, Harry the sweep’s lodgings.
He stood outside staring up, not daring to enter. Black cloth hung in the windows of the first two floors, but he couldn’t see the top window of Harry’s family’s lodgings. The small girl he’d encountered before on those very same steps months earlier, when he was a very different man, was still sitting there, seemingly impervious to the grim atmosphere, engrossed in a game of marbles. She looked up at him. “Who are you after?”
“Harry the sweep.”
She held out her hand, the nails broken and filthy. Pushing down a wave of nausea that swept through him, D’Arcy, careful not to touch her, dropped a penny into her palm.
“Harry the sweep, top floor?” she asked in a voice flat with lack of emotion.
D’Arcy nodded, his handkerchief pressed against his nose and mouth; he dared not breathe in.
“Gone. Sunday morning, carried off by the cholera. His mum and a sister followed. I got her hoop,” she finished with a certain pragmatic triumph.
Shocked, D’Arcy stumbled, then ran back to the safety of Mayfair.
• • •
Once returned to the sanctuary of his own study, D’Arcy stood nonplussed for a moment—it was hard to believe such youth and beauty could be wiped out so indiscriminately. Harry’s presence now lingered before him, imprinted on both his memory and body. He could still taste his sweat, could still cast his mind back to that night the young sweep possessed him with such audacity. They had been linked by sex and magic, but also by discovery. But most disastrously of all, now that his only witness was dead, what chance did D’Arcy have to prove the legitimacy of his research, other than by his own word? His dilemma was interrupted by a tentative knock at the door. It was Henries informing him that he had an unexpected visitor—a Mr. Horace Tuttle—who insisted that he see him immediately.
• • •
“This is an unexpected pleasure.”
The two men stood in the grand reception room of the mansion, facing each other warily. D’Arcy, fearing he would lose control of his own temper, kept his clenched hands thrust into his trouser pockets, while he noticed that Tuttle had not bothered to remove his coat.
“You are a master of disingenuousness, young Hammer, a trait I will not pretend to admire,” Tuttle, abandoning any semblance of etiquette, observed. It was a reply that sent a surge of fury through the young biographer, who immediately went to open the door, indicating that his rival should leave.
“Oh, I don’t think you shall be so eager to see me leave, once you have heard me out,” Tuttle protested, not moving an inch.
“You have three minutes to interest me, but I suggest you save your argument for our great debate tomorrow, sir.” D’Arcy stayed by the open door, gripping the handle. Smiling, Tuttle threw down his cane and strolled into the center of the room.
“Three minutes, eh?” To D’Arcy’s intense annoyance, Tuttle produced a small gold case and lit up a cigar. “Well, I promise it will be a devastating three minutes.” He exhaled a plume of cigar smoke with an air of smug triumph. “D’Arcy, it was I who hired Harry Jones, the chimney sweep. A wonderful thespian for a working man, do you not agree, and so easy on the eye. . . .” Tuttle watched D’Arcy with the callousness of the hunter studying his prey as it dies in the trap. Shocked, the young biographer let the door handle slip from his grasp and the door swung shut with a bang.
“What do you mean, sir?” Ashen-faced, he turned to face his nemesis.
“I mean, Hammer, that the so-called secret journal of Sir Joseph Banks, the ritual to Atanua, was all fabricated by myself and planted as bait. Biography, young man, is a war—a war that you have proven yourself to be unfit to engage in. And if you don’t expose yourself as having fictionalized Banks’s memoir, I shall do it myself. You are ruined.”
“But it cannot be a fake!”
“I tell you, after studying Banks’s handwriting, and his phraseology, I wrote it myself.”
“But the ritual works!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Anyhow, how could you possibly know that?”
“Because, Tuttle, I executed it myself, with the assistance of three other people—poor Harry and two ladies of the night, one of whom is a regular amour of mine. . . .”
Behind him the door clicked open, but D’Arcy was too impassioned to notice that a third party had entered the room. Instead he stepped closer to Horace Tuttle.
“I duplicated every movement of the orgy. I caught the sun in the cup and summoned up the goddess. I tell you the ritual works!”
“D’Arcy, how could you!” Clementine’s voice rang clearly through the room. D’Arcy swung about and faced his estranged fiancée for the first time in months. He felt nothing but revulsion. “How could you betray me like that?” the young woman continued, her voice thick with outrage. “Why, you are nothing but a disgusting libertine.”
“You have no right to take the moral high ground with me, Clementine, and if you both care to sit down for a moment I shall explain why.”
Both Horace and his niece reluctantly sat, and, for the first time, D’Arcy noticed the familial resemblance between them.
“Mr. Tuttle, you are lying, sir. I suggest you did not fabricate the ritual.”
“You’re right; I copied it out of an old grimoires, an old magic book I found in my collection. I merely changed the nature of the artifacts, but what of it? It was all nonsense anyway,” Tuttle barked back, flushing with indignation.
“I thought that must have been the case, because you see, my dear man, when I was possessed, when I was empowered with the magic ability promised from that ritual, whose eyes do you suppose I could see through?” An expression of horror slowly began to creep across Tuttle’s face as he started to comprehend. Savoring the moment, D’Arcy continued. “Your own, sir, and what I saw both appalled and disgusted me.” Now he noticed that Clementine had paled and the hand that held her parasol was visibly trembling. Determined to sink the dagger in, he did not falter for a moment.
“Uncle and niece making vile, unnatural love. And so my original instinct was confirmed, that you, Clementine, had betrayed me and smuggled my manuscript to your lover—”
“You have no proof!” she screamed, abandoning all semblance of decorum.
“That night you both spoke of your first encounter only two years ago. I can tell you the place, day, even the name of the hotel at the time—”
“Enough!” Clementine shrieked, now holding her hands over her ears.
“What do you want?” Tuttle’s voice was now little more than a broken whisper.
“A deal, Tuttle—a devil’s pact, if you like. You withdraw your accusation and publicly endorse my biography tomorrow and in return I shall never expose either yourself or Clementine. That way my literary success is assured, and you will never see the inside of Newgate. Do I have a deal?”
“You have a deal.”
And that, my dear reader, is the end of my little moral fable. Tuttle, of course, never recovered, and as for Mr. D’Arcy Hammer, well, that chapter isn’t quite closed. Of course, you’d never read a tale of such moral depravity in one of my books.
FLIGHT
It was one of those long-haul flights, the overnight L.A.–London route, when the plane chases the sun north across the globe in a streak of perpetual dawn. Cocooned in the pastel-colored luxury of the first-class cabin sat one entrepreneur, a minor Saudi prince and his wife, two American executives being flown by their company for a day with investors in London, a Chinese businesswoman, and one film star: male, Australian, and instantly recognizable.
Jerome Thomas, famous for his raven locks and piercing blue-gray eyes as well as huge donations to the starving orphans of Ecuador (all tax deductible, but that doesn’t make it any less commendable), was London based and on first-name terms with British Airways special services. Dressed in black jeans (Versace), a white shirt (Tom Ford), and purple loafers (Paul Smith) in true antipodean style, he affected a friendly casualness that belied an obsessive appreciation of anything luxurious, exclusive, and elitist.
At thirty-nine, the film star was at that point when he could either fade into obscurity along with his looks or move out from the romantic hero roles that he’d built his early career on into more three-dimensional dramatic roles. Luckily for Jerome, his latest film, Loser, had been an international success and had landed him an Oscar. A psychological drama that had required serious acting and physical transformation, it was about a middle-aged American businessman who finds himself suddenly divorced, unemployed, and without custody of his children. Then one day, homeless and sleeping under a bridge, the hero discovers a wild beehive and eventually finds spiritual meaning, new love, and redemption by becoming an urban beekeeper. Much to both Jerome’s and his agent’s amazement, the film had become a runaway hit and the film star had safely made the transition from romantic hero to serious actor.
Jerome Thomas was still eerily beautiful to look at, a fact that he had struggled with all his life, a situation made even more poignant by the fact that the actor was also unusually intelligent, with a capacity for empathy that he sometimes found paralyzing. Celebrity for him had been a curiously painful process, a little like a slow-growing disease he’d only become aware of around the release of his fourth film. He had begun his career as an intense young actor, in the business not for fame but to lose the real and very awkward self-consciousness that can haunt the very beautiful. Jerome had been desperate to be taken seriously. At NIDA, the prestigious Australian drama school where he’d trained, Jerome was set on a stage career in London, preferably as a Shakespearean actor. Then, a couple of American producers had run auditions for a romantic comedy starring Meryl Streep, about a young male escort who falls in love with his much older female businesswoman client. Jerome hadn’t even intended to go to the audition, but ended up accompanying his roommate, who was almost speechless with nerves and needed serious moral support. As fate would have it, Toby Gladwell, the young Australian director attached to the movie, cast him on the spot. The film went on to make millions but Jerome Thomas was typecast. To his deep but secret vexation he’d wanted to be taken seriously, and somehow, in the passionate pursuit of that objective, he had ended up hugely successful in unserious but very commercial projects. It was a paradox that Jerome had now escaped.
And so it was with a sense of sublime achievement rarely experienced by the extremely ambitious that Jerome had settled down in his favorite seat in first class, 1K, in the very nose of the jet with his customary two portholes. Here he could, without stretching his neck, gaze down on the carpet of lights that was Los Angeles as the plane swung to the left and then backed momentarily toward the city before heading northeast toward Canada and beyond.
He’d been in L.A. for a week meeting with “his people” and several directors to decide on the next film project, the script of which was now tucked securely in the magazine pocket in front of him. He’d also caught up with a lover there, a young make-up artist he’d seduced on the set of his last movie, a twenty-two-year-old from Kansas whose endearing lack of irony laced with naive optimism had reminded him of himself when he’d first landed in L.A. fifteen years ago. But on this latest visit Jerome had found himself increasingly vexed by her awe of him, and, yet again, he’d ended up feeling as if the dialogue she thought she was having with him was nothing but transference on her behalf, a discourse with some idealized version of him she’d created from various roles he had played. Jerome’s true self was lost in celluloid, in that mirror of who his lover thought he was. It was a frighteningly familiar experience that always seemed to hijack his relationships, one that inevitably left him feeling disingenuous, guilty, and inadequate, as if he himself was somehow responsible for his lovers’ projections.
It was when he began to notice that his young girlfriend had started to spout lines he’d used in movies without even realizing it that he’d finished the affair, appalled. Since then an aphorism one of his drama tutors had always used—“Wear the truth like a skin”—had begun to run through his head like a pop tune he couldn’t get rid of. This sense of shifting identities was beginning to drive him crazy. Suddenly deeply aware that he’d actually started to lose his Australian accent, even to dress in the manner of some of his more famous roles, he’d become terrified he was losing his own “truth.”
In reaction he’d secretly started to address himself by his childhood pet name, Rom, and had taken to scribbling notes to himself as a desperate way of staying emotionally anchored. He’d made sure that no one else knew the pet name. This was an identity that belonged to him, not to any lover, not his agent, and certainly not his adoring fans. It was his personal totem, the anchor that held him together psychologically, but still he was finding it hard to be himself with an intimate.
Jerome longed to argue, to fight, to have a disagreement with someone who didn’t know or care about who he was or how she imagined he would behave. He longed to be with someone who’d never seen a Jerome Thomas film, someone who didn’t know him. Maybe then he would be able to get a measure of his true power—power as a basic human being and not some nebulous idol that millions of people had projected their fantasies upon.
This secret longing of his had blossomed into an obsession. Jerome desperately needed to know whether he could still attract someone with who he really was behind the facade of fame. Early that day, driving back from his agent at William Morris’s office at Mid-Wilshire toward LAX, he made a pledge to himself. Before he was forty he would seduce someone who didn’t know who he was at all. It was a pledge he took seriously, especially as his birthday was the next day.
The actor’s gaze encircled the cabin. The entrepreneur, a jovial-looking man in his midfifties, had ostentatiously ignored Jerome, even when he’d almost bumped into him hanging up his leather jacket in the wardrobe tucked behind the pilot’s cabin. Such a reaction usually meant the other person had recognized the film star immediately and was shamming indifference—again, a scenario Jerome encountered over and over again, and one that at times had made him feel strangely isolated.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the Saudi prince and his wife, sitting in the center aisle, side by side. Now that the plane was safely in the sky, they had finished reciting the Koran. The prince was studying a portfolio and his wife was engrossed in flicking through the deluxe in-flight shopping magazine. Jerome, applying the character research skills he’d learned both at college and over the years, furtively examined the minutiae of the man—the way his shirt was immaculately laundered and ironed, the fastidiousness with which he kept pulling his cuffs over his wrists, indicating he was both controlling and nervous, characteristics, Jerome concluded, that were further underpinned by the bitten nails, chewed down to the skin, and a patch of eczema on the side of the prince’s face. Despite his vast wealth and influence, the prince obviously had hidden anxieties.
