Free Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair Page B

than by rights they ought to have been in someone so fair, and threaded by single strands of real auburn, softened the high-toned purity of his unlined brow. His marbly blue eyes might have been polished they shone so. Withal, this face was not a flawless one. Since his lips, slightly pursed, were closed, the teeth were concealed. But I remarked a spot, a minute beauty-spot, no doubt, just above the corner curl of his upper Up; and another, also located on the right half of his face, nestling beneath the nostril’s soft shell. Otherwise his complexion was quite perfect, captured by the photographer in all the poignant bloom of adolescence and looking (so it struck me) to having not yet suffered the coarsening attentions of a razor blade. He was – a fact I would never have believedpossible – even more exquisite than on the cinema screen.
    I started to read, word for word, from the first line to the last, the accompanying article. It was couched in the same noisy, ejaculatory idiom that the Editor’s Message had been, but I had cast my scruples to the wind and I greedily devoured it. And how much I learned that was surprising to me. I learned, for example, that Ronnie had been born on the 8th of March, 1970, so that he was just twenty, at least three or four years older than I had once reckoned; born and brought up in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. That ‘his dad is Ronald, Sr, his mom is Lucille, kid sister Joanie and current pet a mixed-breed pooch named Strider’. That his favourite food was ‘fast food -I call it fast food ‘cos I have to fast after eating it!!’ That he preferred girls who ‘are sincere, romantic, have a sense of fun and who like me for
myself
– not just ‘cause I’m a star’. That he found making movies ‘neat’ but hated ‘all the razzmatazz – and specially all the waitin’ around you have to do!!’. And that he would kiss a girl on their first date together ‘only if she made it clear she wanted me to’. Besides his acting gifts, he was apparently ‘an accomplished jazz drummer’ whose greatest ambition was ‘to play the drums in an upcoming movie – preferably opposite Madonna!!!’ Had he ever been in love? ‘Who hasn’t?’ Pet hate? ‘Designer stubble.’ And his secret, unspoken fantasy? ‘To go to bat for the Mets.’
    I sat at the same desk where only lately I had laboured over the genesis of
Adagio
, intently reading and rereading each of the youth’s answers, interrogating them for any, not immediately tangible, clue that they mightoffer to his more latent psychology, even as the mute and unshakeable conviction was growing within me that the whole piece, questions and answers alike, could be nothing else but an outright fabrication on the part of the editor, doubtless with the passive collusion of Ronnie himself or his agent.
    Yet, no matter how questionable its provenance, this information was all I had to work upon for now and I feasted off every last crumb with a zest of appetite that few books had given me lately.
    Most significant, though, was what I learned about the lad’s professional life. It transpired that Ronnie had ‘made his showbiz debut’ advertising ‘sneakers’ on television commercials, had been cast in some ‘popular, long-running sitcom’, whatever that was, and had to date completed just three films, that which I had already seen and two others, tersely and enigmatically titled both of them:
Tex-Mex
and
Skid Marks
.
    After a moment’s hesitation, I rose from my desk and stepped into the perennially gloomy hallway and over to a small, oblong combined-table-and-umbrella-stand on which, the evening before, I had left my copy of
Time Out
. I quickly ran through its pages to the one on which were listed the films on current release. Neither of the two titles appeared on it; and, of course, I