(Zeus and Alcmene)

I was impatient. I had wanted this day ever since I began writing publicly twenty years before, for only the writing would give me my excuse. As it turned out, it was one of those uncommonly slow days where you look at the clock and can it be? It is only 6:03, then 7:17. Then 7:40. It was a day when every hour feels like another day, as Walter Mosley wrote in one of his books. I had been preparing myself since five, bathing, curling, anointing, doing all the intimate things to look as good as I could and cover up my lack of sleep.

I was meeting him at the Sherry-Netherland hotel at eleven. I was told he was not an early riser. This I knew because I had made a study of him and the myth he commonly presented. I also had written his name into almost every piece of journalism I published—just in passing, a quote here, a movie reference there, and I was told he knew this.

I was of course early and had to walk around the block twice, feeling my hair deflate and whip around with every step in the sharp cold winds. It was either that or lurk in the small lobby, which I eventually had to do. I told the desk clerk who I was, and he called up and I watched the hand on the bronze elevator clock descend many times—the elevator disgorging disappointments, one after the other.

I had positioned myself by a pillar, notepad in hand, angled to look as thin as possible with a small display of the legs Terry Southern once had said were the best since Marlene Dietrich.

The elevator door opened and there he was—big, big and looming with the chest thrust out and that worn knowing face that some writer had described as “the living embodiment of a dangerous city at night with all it contains.”

I sighed at the sight of him crossing the lobby ridiculously like a jungle cat creeping up on its prey. He wore a gray suit, but with each slow step he was wearing a trench coat belted tight, his cowboy gear, a military uniform, a fedora and a loosely draped suit with a gun somewhere easy to reach. Then he was truly in front of me.

“Present,” he said in the voice I had heard coming at me from screens since I was fourteen. I am a child of television and was too young for his movies at theaters. Various heads turned to the sound.

Just then a PR man I knew entered the lobby from Fifth Avenue and went right over to us and, for a moment, after greeting me, seemed unsure if we were together.

“You know Sharon?” he said.

“Every chance I get,” said he.

We laughed then with a certain relief. The PR man, as I had been promised, was not for us, after all. He was there for other business. The long black car at the door was for us.

People were waiting for him on the sidewalk. He signed for three of them. Of course, like every movie star, he knew he was being observed, and that, from the moment he left his suite, he was to fulfill the expectations suggested by his name, his outlaw face, his role in the long Conroy story.

“Here’s our train,” he said getting in and eying the bar supplies. “Are you looking at my chin?”

In fact, I was noticing that he missed a spot while shaving and there was a bit of hair in the famous cleft. Also he was not wearing socks. He was sitting very close in the big car.

“Driver, take us to Arizona, slowly.”

I arranged my legs carefully as he turned on the seat and gave me a look I had seen before.

He was used to being wanted. I came as no surprise.

“As Liberace used to say, time for a ‘drinkie doodle.’ Do you even know who Liberace is?” He was already pouring a glass with four fingers, as the crime writers say, of vodka.

“Seen your movies, sir and that TV thing. Glad to be taking you to Philadelphia today Mr Conroy,” said the driver.

“Thanks, Clyde. You sure that’s where we’re going?”

Were it anyone else I would have raised an objecting eyebrow to his use of “Clyde” for a black man, but I knew just who I was with and what I wanted to do with the secret I held and intended to keep. I knew his poses and acts, too, which might give me some small advantage. I still thought of every story as a contest.

“Tell about you,” he said leaning in very close with his large face turned to mine.

“Women like me are trained to forget,” I said and tried to look like the line was both original and something I might merit.

“Is that from one of my pictures?”

“It’s Greta Garbo when she played Mata Hari. I’ve been waiting to use it.”

“Have a drink.” He took the note pad and pen from my hand and put them down on the floor of the car and moved even closer. I watched the pen roll away.

We hadn’t even gotten to the Holland Tunnel and I was already overwhelmed and breathless.“ Shipwrecked before I got aboard,” as Seneca said.

“Chagrin Valley, that’s where I’m from and where we’re goin,’ right, Dad?” he told the driver.

He took a drink that was deep and long and unfulfilling. It seemed rude not to join him, and I scanned the bar for something that would not allow him to make fun of my choice. I knew he could be mean. I watched the pen rolling to and fro on the carpet of the car.

“You’re very little, have you always been so little or is it just for me?” Without pause and without seeming to move he lifted me up—neither of us had gotten around to seatbelts—and put me on his lap. The driver braked and I watched my pen roll way forward under the front seat.

“Pour me another, and pour one of these dangerous waters for yourself. Don’t squirm.”

This scene had not appeared in my fantasies about the day, and I had a disturbing flashback to the innocent games of Ride-a-Cock-Horse of my childhood. I was still worried about the notebook and the pen because I had trained myself to write everything down. I was one of the rare journalists with no recall at all, and often enough I could not read my handwriting.

‘Philadelphia or a week in Arizona, it’s your choice.  Clyde here can take us. Can’t you?”

“Fred, sir. I have my instructions, Mr. Conroy. I am to take you to the studio and bring you back to the hotel as soon as you are done and drive the young lady home.”

I leaned way forward to the bar and fell on the floor of the car. He was roaring then and my skirt was up on my fancy underwear in a style not at all Philadelphia.

I fixed his vodka and poured a small one for myself with ice.

“Too cold for ice. It’s a three dog night.”

“I never knew what that meant.”

“Honey, it’s a night so cold that you need three dogs in the bed with you, which won’t be our problem tonight.” He worked his sleepy eyes on me and entered one of his moments of stillness which filled the screen whenever he acted. It was the absence that had swelled him into a presence.

I groped for the pad on the floor. I had three other pens but I was thinking there goes my story, there goes my fifteen thousand dollars, which is what I was being paid in those days of flush magazines. I did not care.

The sulphur smells of New Jersey had entered the car as we drank. I had resumed my seat and retrieved my notepad which he was eying.

He was going to reloop some of the dialogue on his seventy-fifth movie, dialogue he would scan at a glance for he had a photographic memory. His powers were phenomenal, and one by one his directors came to see and appreciate them within the context of his bad, but never unprofessional, behavior.

“There’s a man in Japan who named every one of his five children after me. Imagine that. Jeff Conroy San this, Jeff Conroy San and that—even the girls. They must all hate me.”

He began to tell me anecdotes I had read before in various magazines, and I realized he had memorized them as a script. I would never get behind the curtain. Still, I pretended to write everything down since he was bothering to entertain me. I could see he was weary of the act and it would have been a kindness if I shut him off

“I’m sure you think I am going to ask you about your poems or the play you wrote long ago or the songs. I’m not—that was then and this is now, Mr. Conroy.”

I had resumed my seat after my fall and he looked over at me with his first sign of  interest beyond the carnal. He didn’t need me to tell who he was, everyone knew who he was.

On screen, they had always placed him with big women, women who came up to his eyes or chin, and when the combinations worked they were summoned back for another picture. All of them had left the screen by now. His wife had stayed through it all, and I knew she always would. A love that begins at thirteen and is fulfilled is hard to break. I knew about the sons, too.

The day that began so slowly had speeded up now. He raised the partition, opened the windows and took a joint the size of a cigar from his pocket.

“It’s good gage.”

I said I had never seen one that big and he said that line comes later in the script. This was a man who knew how to smoke. It was movie star smoking. It filled the car with a sweetness I had not smelled in years and I felt it right away. The bad air of New Jersey was quickly replaced with a haze through which the famous features loomed.

I was afraid the grass might loosen my tongue and I might even tell the secret that burdened me.

I expected we both would fall out of the car in Philadelphia.

We went to eat at a steak restaurant where, even after 2 pm, he caused a commotion with the owner coming from his office and the chef peeping round in his bloodstained apron and various businessmen and a few older women torn between politeness and real excitement with that desire for contact of any sort that fame plus admiration causes.

My girl-reporter notebook stayed out on the table to explain my presence and maybe, if possible, add to his importance.

Another two doubles for him and a steak and spinach sunk in butter. He fed me his potatoes one by one, dangled and limp with blood on the ends, but I could not eat. The water glasses stayed pristine.

He had ordered for the driver, who was standing by the door with his takeout bag. For me the cold day had turned hot. I was flushed and lost—shipwrecked in the currents of his talk in the back of which the secret I was holding kept bobbing.

 

“What are my lyrics?” he said to the men at the studio.

He dubbed his lines as the image of him saying those lines played on the screen. I could see that the film that led me to this story was going to be just another film and not that last push to overdue recognition. His real performance was taking place now for me and my story.

I had been on many movie sets and somehow enjoyed this much more, everything heightened by the vodka and leftover effects of the fumes from the car. He would look over at me every once in a while as he said his lines.

After two hours, he looked the way he always looked—like a man ready for a nap or a long night someplace else. One of those big handsome women would be on the next pillow looking tousled and well pleased and he would be ready to leave. He would always be ready to leave.

I thought of another bed in another country, one that had looked like a crime scene with my blood streaking the sheets.

Conroy ambled and rambled his way to the car with his “traveler” cup and I followed. Fred kept the heat going in the car and had aired out the back, enough so that the warmth perched on top of the remaining reek of the morning.  Where was I going with this? Where indeed? There was more drinking as the sun, not anxious to surrender to the evening, crept across a mauve sky.

Slumped against each other like old buddies, we fell asleep on the drive back to the city which was alive and twinkling with excitement as it always is on cold winter nights.

By now we were chatting like friends and the notebook stayed open and illegibly scribbled on my lap. He gave it a look that might have been worried.

“She’ll be down in a little while,” he announced to Fred and handed him five hundreds folded lengthwise. As he peeled them off, I saw that all his bills were hundreds in the way that most people carry twenties from an ATM.

We were silent in the elevator, me shivering inside my thin coat, him looking at the floor.

His suite was not empty.

There was Mrs. Conroy, mature, elegant and distant, and, even though it was late, some little boys running around the tables of room service to fling themselves at his leg. Grampa Conroy. And then the son, Bill Conroy, who was the one of his three sons that happened to have his build and his face. Bill Conroy was an actor too, minor, part of the background, part of the ensemble cast of a hippie movie made in a country of llamas and mountains. In this country the morning beverage was coca tea. In the evening, it was Pisco Sours and cocaine.

“My son, Bill,” Jeff Conroy said. “Sharon’s from…” and he named my magazine.

Bill Conroy looked at me as though he had never seen me before.

“It’s pretty late, Jeff,” Mrs. Conroy said in my direction. I backed to the door and waved to the room, the whole enterprise resting on the tough guy “here between trains.” His words, not mine.

When the movie flopped, the long Conroy story I wrote, never ran. I got permission to send it to him but I never did.

Zeus appeared to the mortal Alcmene in the guise of her husband: “and, to prolong his pleasure, made the night three times its usual length.” —Classical Myths in English Literature, Dan S. Norton and Peter Rushton.

 

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