Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [77]
It took her a second to get his meaning. She pressed the magazine to her bosom and peeked down, reacquainting herself with its front cover. There was the tabloid-size photograph of Burton Else, the movie star, sashed with the diagonal caption: TOTALLY HET.
“You find it hard to believe?” she said.
“I guess not.”
“You’re surprised? Disappointed?”
“Nah,” said Cleve. Which wasn’t true. He was scandalized. “I saw his new one just last night,” he went on. That was true enough: Cleve and Orv, at the movies, with their popcorn and their Perriers. And up on the screen—Burton Else, your regular join-the-dots romantic lead. The usual kind of thing. Burton taking his young feature star Cyril Baudrillard to a disco opening. Burton and Cyril attending a yard sale, and encountering Burton’s ex. Burton cradling Cyril’s sweat-soaked nudity in the marmalade glow of the log fire, after that fight about the flower catalogs. “There he was up there,” said Cleve, “doing his dreamboat routine.”
“They say he has to be helped into his trailer after he does those love scenes. They give him a back rub and he does his breathing exercises and he’s usually okay.”
Cleve laughed. “You’re kidding. But he seems so …”
“What?”
“You know. So …”
“What?”
“I don’t know. So …”
“Hey there.”
Immediately Cleve sat to attention. The young woman was being joined by her young man. By her lover; this was instantly clear. Of course you saw it all the time these days (downtown, anyway), straights kissing in public, on the lips and everything—open mouthed, even with tongues, like a demonstration. Cleve was only thirty-eight, but in his lifetime people used to go to fucking jail for doing that. Or for doing what that portended. The young woman had her head tipped back. The young man was leaning over the side of her chair. Her face was small and round and candid, not pale, but evenly freckled—the freckles like asperities on the skin of a new potato. (Cleve found that he thought about food, or about cooking, almost as often as he thought about Grainge.) As for the young guy—dark, compact, tight-jawed, plump-lipped—and yet, in Cleve’s estimation, somehow totally un-Hot. Uh-oh: more kissing. And more whispering. He listened. It wasn’t intimacies they were exchanging. More like duty-roster stuff. Whose turn it was to do what.
In fact Cleve was grateful for the diversion. It gave him a chance to contemplate the visage of Burton Else—the shamed visage of Burton Else, which smiled joshingly on, over and above the block capitals that sliced his chest in two. At the bottom of the page it said: BURTON ELSE ACTOR. ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE. ROARING STRAIGHT. Cleve really was scandalized. The thing being … he’d been told more than once that he resembled Else. And been pretty pleased to hear it. As the young woman whispered to her young man, her fingertips steadying his cheek, Cleve felt marginalized, and outnumbered. The young woman; the young man; and now Burton. Suddenly he saw himself from the outside. Cleve: his cropped and kitteny black hair, his heavy dark glasses, his halter straps, his gold popper holder, his rectangular mustache, his fishnet tank top. In accordance with the latest Look, he resembled a half-dressed policeman getting ready for night shift. Burton Else was clean-shaven, for some reason. Or was that a tell?
He was about to return to his book and his Sumatra Lingtong when the young woman said, “I was talking to …”
“Cleve,” said Cleve.
“Cressida,” said Cressida. “And this is John.”
John nodded humorlessly at Cleve, who nodded back.
“We were talking,” said Cressida, “about the outing of Burton Else.”
“And how did Cleve feel about that?”
“Cleve didn’t yet say.”
And Cleve thought: eek. He leaned sideways and shrugged loosely. One