The Comedy is Finished

Liz would raise the subject in public, and particularly in that aggressive way.

The introduction of sex in that manner and these circumstances left Joyce embarrassed and uneasy. She didn’t want Larry to feel obligated to make the same offer to her; she had no illusion that he might actually want to have sex with her. Casting about for a new topic, glancing over at the TV screen, she said, “Larry?”

“Yes?”

“Did that look like me?”

“Not a bit,” Larry said. He sounded surprised at the question. “To tell the truth, I thought they did those things better.”

“It must have looked something like me.”

“I’ll tell you want it looked like,” Larry said, coming over and sitting at the other end of the sofa. “It looked like a category of person which includes you, but it didn’t look like you. It looked like someone who might be you for two seconds from a block away, but then you’d say, ‘Oh, no, that doesn’t look like Joyce at all.’ ”

“It’s not that I’m being vain.” Joyce was always afraid people would think her too feminine. “It was just that she looked—dead.”

“It wasn’t accurate,” Larry told her. “I promise.”

She offered him a quick grateful smile. “Thank you.” Then, looking at his earnest face, all the doubts she tried to keep buried came rushing into her mind, and she cried, “Larry, is it really going to work? Will it all come out somewhere?”

“Of course.” He was surprised, and it showed. “We’ve had victories,” he said. “We’ll have more.”

“Yes,” she said, concealing her doubts.

But he leaned closer, saying, “Do you mean you fight without believing in the inevitability of success? Don’t you know, historically, we must win?”

“Yes, of course. It just seems so long sometimes.” Then she smiled at him, knowing he needed the reassurance more than she did. “And I seem so short. Goodnight, Larry.” She patted his knee, and got to her feet.

“Good night, Joyce.”

“Don’t bother about Davis tonight,” she told him.

“No, that was just to protect him from Mark. He’s all right down there, he’ll keep until morning.”

7

“My brain is happy to be here,” Koo Davis says, “but my feet wanna be in Tennessee.” That’s a line from Saturday Evening Ghost, one of a series of comic spook movies Koo made in the early forties. Portraits with moving eyes, chairs whose arms suddenly reach up and grab at the person seated there, wall panels that open so a black-gloved hand can emerge clutching a knife; and Koo Davis moving brash and unknowing through it all. It was a genre then, everybody did the same gags: the candle that slid along a tabletop, the stuffed gorilla on wheels whose finger was caught (unknown to him) in the back of the hero’s belt so he’d be tiptoeing through the spooky house with this gorilla rolling along behind him, the hero pretending to be one of the figures in a wax museum. The audiences didn’t seem to care how often they saw those gags, and a recurring bit in Koo’s movies was the point where he would suddenly notice all those weird things around him, and become terrified. Koo’s bit of going from oblivious self-assurance to gibbering terror was one of his most famous routines, so much so that Bosley Crowther wrote in a review, “No one can make panic as hilarious as Koo Davis.”

I’m scared, Koo thinks, but he doesn’t say it aloud; it ain’t that hilarious. Remembering how often he simulated fear in all those movies, and later on television, he’s surprised at how different the real thing is. Of course, like everyone else he’s known brief moments of fear in his life—mostly on those USO tours—but what he’s feeling now is steady, growing, ongoing. He’s afraid of these people, he’s afraid of what will happen, he’s afraid of his own helplessness, and he’s afraid of his fear.

“Why would anybody be afraid of getting killed?” he asks. That’s a line from Your Genial Ghost, and it was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but in fact death is not at all what Koo fears now. His imagination crawls instead with images of pain, images of humiliation. He’s afraid they’ll hurt him in some awful way, and he’s afraid he won’t be brave in front of them. He’d hate to live the rest of his life remembering himself groveling on the floor in front of these bastards.

What if they do something to his throat or his mouth, so he can’t talk? What if they blind him or scar him in some awful way? What if they cut him—he’s always been afraid of knives, sharp things.

“We’ve got nothing to fear but fear itself—and that big guy over there with the sword.” The Zombie Goes to College. He keeps trying to reassure himself—they haven’t done anything to him yet, have they? They haven’t even threatened very much. But Koo remembers the look on that one guy’s face, the bearded son of a bitch who showed him the gun way back at the beginning. He’s probably also the one who hit him when the sack was over his head. And he doesn’t talk, he just stands there and glares at Koo like he’d prefer Koo’s head on a platter, with an apple in his mouth.

If only they wanted money. He’d been afraid earlier that they’d ask too much, but now he believes he could somehow have raised any amount they wanted. Ask for money, you bastards, and I’ll find it, one way or the other I’ll buy my way out of here. “Will you take a post-dated check?” Anything; ask for something I’ve got, ask for something that makes some kind of goddamn sense.

Ten political prisoners. The Feds won’t do it, Koo is convinced they won’t do it, and why the hell should they? Koo has no illusions about his “friendships” with generals and senators; one of the perks of being a general or a senator is to hang around with famous show biz people, and one of the perks of being a famous show biz celebrity is to hang around with generals and senators. “They come out ahead on that deal,” Koo says, but he doesn’t really mean it. He’s always enjoyed the company of VIPs, playing golf with them, going on hunting weekends, cruising on their yachts, visiting at their ranches, and he knows damn well they’ve enjoyed him just as much, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to release ten weirdos and crazies in return for one Koo Davis.

They won’t do it. No negotiation with terrorists, that’s been the official position for years, and Koo has always agreed with it, and even where he is now he still agrees, because if you give in to these bastards it just encourages more of them.

Well, what encouraged this bunch?

Shit; Koo doesn’t want to sit around thinking about it. He just wants to go home, back to his life, back to being what he’s good at. He’s no good at sitting here in the semi-dark, wondering what’s going to happen next. “My mother didn’t raise me to be a hostage.”

What will they do when the Feds say no? They won’t quit, not right away. They’ll try to pressure the Feds to change their minds, won’t they? And how will they do that? Koo knows how, but doesn’t want to know, he doesn’t want to think about it. He wants this over with, and he doesn’t see any good way for it to end. If this is reality encroaching on his happy private world, he doesn’t think much of it.

He also wishes to hell he had his pills. He’s not what you could call addicted to sleeping pills, but he does more often than not take one or two little capsules before going to bed. Sleeping pills, prescription, from his doctor; in addition to all the other pills he takes every day. He doesn’t know what the rest of them are for, and he doesn’t want to know. He’s simply made it clear to his doctors that he’s too busy to get sick, he can’t keep coming down with a lot of sniffles and aches, he’s got schedules, appointments, deadlines, he’s booked two full years into the future. So they give him these pills, and he takes one red-and-green every morning, and two whites after every meal, and a black-and-yellow every Wednesday and Saturday, and—

Well, he’s got a lot of pills, except they’re all back at the Triple S studio, in his dressing room, packed away in the brown leather carrying case made to his specifications by Hermes. And even somebody who never took sleeping pills would find it hard to doze off in Koo’s present position. Koo is awake, wide awake. He doesn’t know what time it is, but it must have been hours since the last light faded in the swimming pool water. He ought to sleep, if only to keep his strength up for whatever is ahead, but he just can’t. When he turns off the lights, the fears swarm worse than ever in his mind, like worms, each carrying another horror. The lights are on a dimmer, so now he has them at their lowest setting, and he’s lying on the long built-in