he: A Novel(36)

He and Babe are co-conspirators. They know each other’s secrets, and keep them. So he will fuck Alyce Ardell, and Babe will remain silent, just as Babe will later fuck a divorcée named Viola Morse, and he will remain silent in turn.

And why is he fucking Alyce Ardell when he is a father, and a star, and the husband to a beautiful wife, and the owner of a St Bernard dog named Lady?

This he cannot say.

By 1929, Babe is trapped in a nightmare. Myrtle is an alcoholic, and clever with it, although only when it comes to her addiction. Babe is convinced that every hour of every day could be spent scouring their home for bottles of liquor, and still Myrtle would devise a way to conceal one more.

Sometimes, Babe tells him, I think she hides them inside her. I’d have to call a gynecologist to find them.

Babe is frightened of Myrtle because her rages are boundless, but Babe is also strangely protective of her. As Myrtle spirals down, they become less like husband and wife and more like father and daughter. When they make love – when Myrtle is sober enough, although she is never sober – Babe sometimes feels guilty of an act of violation, and yet Babe cannot leave Myrtle because Babe loves her, and she needs him; and the worse she grows, the greater that need, and thus the greater the love. So Babe finds comfort in distance and gambling (there is not a casino doorman in Agua Caliente who does not greet Babe by name); in golf and in football; in hunting and in work.

But Myrtle is devouring Babe.

Babe’s bouts of melancholy grow deeper, and his outbursts of choler more frequent. Babe breaks the arm of the actor Tyler Brooke with a pool cue – or so Tyler Brooke claims – because Tyler Brooke calls Babe a son of a bitch. Money is paid to make Tyler Brooke go away, and as a result Hal Roach cuts Tyler Brooke adrift. And then, because fate likes a joke, Tyler Brooke marries a woman named Myrtle, and Tyler Brooke is still married to her when Tyler Brooke kills himself by ingesting carbon monoxide.

Myrtle – Babe’s Myrtle – sues for divorce. She and Babe reconcile.

Myrtle is committed to a sanitarium. Myrtle escapes.

On and on, over and over.

Babe is trying to save one marriage while his partner is sabotaging another.

And the Audience laughs and laughs.





79


At the Oceana Apartments, he reads the newspaper and drinks his tea. Even after all these years in the United States, he retains a fondness for British habits and British food: tea, treacle pudding, Brussels sprouts, liver with bacon and onions, ginger beer, Black & White whisky.

He is still A.J.’s son.

He is killing time. His mail for today has been answered. The television people have scheduled one of his pictures for later in the afternoon. There is no logic or order to the transmissions. Old follows older, silent follows sound. Sometimes it seems that his past has been cut into pieces and tossed in the air, let the fragments fall where they may.

In the quiet of his apartment, he hums an old music hall tune.

My old man said ‘Foller the van,

And don’t dilly dally on the way …’

Lois, his daughter, liked hearing him sing that song, although he was never a great singer. Babe was different. Babe would sing to pass the time on set. Babe would sing for the joy of singing. Babe would sing ‘Shine On, Harvest Moon’ with Lois on his knee, over and over, and never tire of it, and never tire of her.

He thinks it is a shame that Babe did not have children of his own.

Another lyric intrudes, distracting him, but he cannot place it, not at first.

I love you so

I love you so

Oh I love my darling Daddy.

He tries to put a melody to this, but he cannot. It must be another music hall song. The lyrics have a certain rhythm, although he could be erring by forcing them into an inapposite form, but they also boast that sickly taint of sentimentality familiar to him from a hundred dusty stages, the singers working to lift the final line to the gods, straining against the molasses glut of mawkishness that threatens, in the hands of the wrong performer, to reduce it to the stuff of mockery.

I love you so

I love you so

Oh I love my darling Daddy.

He sets aside the newspaper, snagged on a spicule of memory.

A card left in Babe’s dressing room. Babe is using the card as a bookmark, the book lying face down, its boards reflected in the mirror. It might have been a study of politics, but he cannot be sure.

When was it: 1928, 1929? He cannot be sure of this either.

But he remembers that the card is handwritten, and the script Myrtle’s. He does not intend to read (he wants to believe), merely glance, but this glance takes in everything before he can look away.

Even now, at the Oceana Apartments, he is ashamed of his actions.

He tells himself that his curiosity is born out of concern for Babe, but if it is, then this concern is tainted by prurience. Despite what Babe has shared with him of his life with Myrtle, and what he has learned from others of Babe’s troubles, he is privy to very little that goes on behind the walls of Babe’s home. He and Babe rarely socialize together outside working hours. They do their socializing on set. They speak regularly on the telephone, but their conversations mostly revolve around scripts and gags.

Perhaps, though, they do not have to speak. Perhaps it is enough to be in each other’s company.

He knows this to be true, because he was there at the end for Babe’s slow dying.