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By Root 639 0

been for at least a week or two now... Over a fanatically carnivorous lunch in an Argentinian joint on Eighty-Second Street my friend Fielding had been very reassuring on the whole Lorne— Caduta question. All the conflicts, he explained, would melt away the minute we had a screenplay in our hands. Moviestars invariably fucked you around like this until there was a script to defer to. Then they forgot about characterization and obsessed themselves exclusively with tilings like line-count, screen-time and close-up allocation. Doris Arthur was back in the States, typing away at her rented cottage in Long Island. I fondly imagined little Doris among her busy lizzies and lazy susans, in racoon hat and frontier dungarees, working the pump, fixing the roof, with half-a-dozen nails and a couple of briar pipes in her syrupy mouth. The first draft, Fielding promised, was only three weeks away.

'Where are we going? What's with all this walking?'

'It's a sunny Sunday, John. We're sightseeing. Tell me. How did Doris strike you? Physically, I mean,' he added, with such soft, sweet-tooth hooding of the eyes that my stride faltered and I said, 'You've been there, huh? Oh boy. What's she like?'

'Listen. You tell me about Caduta's tits and I'll tell you everything there is to know about Doris in the sack. Is it a deal?'

'Well they're big all right and low too but what they mainly are is very deep and heavy. They rest on the ribcage of course and span out a bit lower down but they're still very solid and they —'

'I get the picture, Slick. We can't use them. I thought she might have had them fixed. She likes them motherly. No use to us. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, We don't want some cant,i-levered old bimbo. We want someone real. But filmstars aren't real, John. It isn't in them. You'll see.'

'Right. Doris. Do it.'

'I'm afraid I misled you. I know all there is to know, which is nothing. Doris is gay, Slick.'

I stumbled to a halt and snapped my fingers through the air. 'So that was it. Jesus, I knew it was something like that. That bitch...'

'You made a play?'

'Well sure. Didn't you?'

'No, I knew all along. It was clear from the stories.'

'What stories? Tell me them at least.'

'The short stories, John. The Ironic High Style, remember?'

'Oh them.'

But here I saw the way the streets were going, how they darkened despite the sun, the juicy air, the innocence of the covering blue. Three blocks back there were canopied doorways, wealth-guards in livery and vistas of brownstone. Now the lanes were earless, lawless. We skirted the spreading sponge of split mattresses and jaw-busted suitcases facedown in the gutter, saw the dark excluded profiles behind windows and chicken wire — this was no-money country, coldwater, walkup. And so sudden, the breakdown, the feelable absence of all agreement, of all consensus — except for that money-hate or anger you get when cities wedge their rich and poor as close as two faces of a knife ... I marked the poverty and the poverty marked me. And I also sensed — perversely, unnecessarily, waste-fully — how gay Fielding and I must look, him in his sneakers and strontium rompers and flyaway hair, me with my butch suit, thin jekylls and proud-rounded shoes. Even the hardened faggots of Manhattan (I fancied) were gazing down at us with concern from their lofts and condos and thinking — we're pretty brazen, God knows, but these guys, they'll queer the whole pitch.

'Hey nigger brother!'

Ninety-Eighth Street. I turned my head. Two black guys with a big dog cocked on its leash.

'Fuck this shit, man. I think my dog go bite one of them white dudes.'

'Fielding,' I said tightly. 'Is this smart? Let's get the car. This is fucking pangerland.'

'Walk on, Slick, with your head high. Nothing's happening.'

He was wrong. Fielding was wrong. Something was happening, for sure. When you've brawled around for as long as I have your senses get to know the kind of fix that you can't just walk through or away from. You get to know when you have to give satisfaction. Less than a block ahead the scatterings