Johnny St. Clair awoke early one afternoon to realize he had become a raisin. He had stumbled into the bathroom, cold checkered Italian marble flown in from Milan (God he wished he could have that printed on each tile – Milan Milan Milan – what a beautiful sounding word, it made him feel like Marcello Mastroianni, I should buy new sunglasses), to perform his daily applications and ablutions of scrubs, lotions, and concealers. The face gazing back at him from the bulb-haloed vanity mirror froze him in his silk slippers. Deep frown lines, purple bulbous bags under his eyes, a cartoonish orange complexion, wrinkles sprouting like malignant cysts wherever he happened to rest his gaze. Hieroglyphics carved into the hide of a sickly, flaccid animal was the image that invaded his mind’s eye. Call Dr. Tietelbaum. Immediately. He ran a thin finger over a particularly deep and dramatic crevice, curving elliptically around his left eye. The eyes are still ice blue. At least something persists. Johnny St. Clair shivered. The urge for the doctor pressed upon him, and he could think of nothing else.
He stopped in front of the framed poster for The Lustful Young on his way to the phone, staring at it, knees locked back and arms limp, for longer than he would have liked to. That young man had…what’s the word…vitality. Virility. He woke up each morning with his hair perfectly tussled, cock loose and rustling, threw on whatever was nearest and never thought about it again. Yet he knew how he wanted others to see him. The ecstasy when he saw that first gangly teenager at the Golden Valley mall wearing the white snakeskin belt he had donned – from his own wardrobe, lest we forget – in Season 3, Episode 15 (“The Second Coming”), in which Chase Hartford had his torrid but tasteful one night affair with Maria Van Nuys, was nearly indescribable. That boy represented Johnny St. Clair as others idolized him. It was as if he had stumbled upon a statue not of himself, but of his best self; Johnny St. Clair as unattainable attitude, incorporeal substance.
Eventually (how long had he been standing there? Ten minutes? Jesus, Twenty?) he continued down the hallway to the phone and answering machine. A few weeks ago his nephew had told him, pity in his prepubescent voice, that nobody uses answering machines anymore. The little prick. He traced the most worrisome wrinkle again. One new message. His agent Bernie wanted to meet him for lunch. The usual, Don Luc. Place to be seen.
***
Don Luc was blazingly white, as always, though today the monochrome seemed more aggressive; maybe because it was a bright day, full of unobstructed vacant sunlight. White chairs, white walls, white silverware, white paintings, white waiters in all white uniforms. Bernie fit the color scheme. White paints and a billowing white shirt, through which a few frayed grey chest hairs protruded. His face, in contrast, radiated a subcutaneous crimson; he had been golfing, snuck in nine holes before his business obligations. Bernie beckoned Johnny over, Perrier lightly in hand.
“Johnny, Johnny, over here. Glowing as always you son-of-a-bitch you. Sit, order, drink, be merry. Today’s a good day.”
Bernie was an old-school agent; an inveterate bullshitter. Johnny St. Clair ordered a house salad. No egg. Dressing on the side.
“You watchin’ your figure, sweetheart? C’mon, I’m buying,” but Johnny was persistent. He shuddered at his reflection in the elegantly slender spoon, racked into an eternal yawn.
“So, here’s the thing. You listening,” Bernie sprung half from his seat, his unbridled and undirected energy most closely resembling a golden retriever with a bouncing ball, “You sitting down? This morning I get a call from this young buck producer over at Hot Sweaty Young Things, you know that teen soap? Big audience. You got nieces, I’m sure that’s all they gab about, probably call it HST…Y…YT…whatever its fucking acronym is. So anyway, this young guy knows you, big fan of yours, in all likelihood a little fruity, if you want my off the record prediction, but anyway he wants you for a guest arc on Hot Sweaty…whatever. Very meaty role. Steady work. Only thing is, you know, you’d be playing sort of a villain figure. Stingy industrialist grandfather of one of the characters. But the against-type thing is a real good play, at this stage. Now I know what you’re gonna say…”
Johnny St. Clair cast his eyes around the room, gliding swiftly over mirrors. The young, or rather just the younger enclosed him. They sat and talked and would occasionally catch an oblique sight of themselves in a mirror, and not shy away but purse their lips, slit their eyes, casually tussle their hair, and proceed. He resisted the urge to grab his jowls and stretch them like putty, either till his skin stretched taut or snapped altogether. His downbeat, masochistic reverie paused for a moment on an older woman sitting by herself in a secluded corner of the room. She returned his gaze unflinchingly, and…did she wink? Johnny had left his glasses at home. He wasn’t listening to Bernie. He couldn’t think about work.
“…But, I mean, Fonda did it in Once Upon a Time in the West and look how that turned out, big big…”
A tapping on Johnny St. Clair’s shoulder. Bernie paused mid-sentence, his hands mid-gesticulation. It was the woman: late 40s, but already with the squat, round-bottomed figure of a woman twenty years her senior. Her face, however, had a plastic sheen; it seemed to reflect the woozy sunlight like a mirror. The skin was tough and taught against her cheekbones, her ocular cavities, the edges of her mouth; hardly a crease in the skin to be found, and Johnny looked. A woman of means, if she could afford all that. Divorcée. Pity, all that work. He could tell she was beautiful in her youth; the faint ruins of a classical bone structure could be made out within the new dimensions, surgeon-sculpted. Her smile wavered from force of feeling; star struck, an interior emanation overflowing through her pores. He could almost hear her quiver. Her hands rested on the back of Johnny’s chair.
“Chase Hartford? Is that you?”
Bernie piped in, preceded by an assuring nod to Johnny. “Excuse me, honey, if you would not bother Mr. St. Clair-"
Johnny waved him off. “Yes. And your name is, miss?”
She giggled.
“Clara. Clara Collins. I just wanted to tell you how terribly exciting I found you, Chase. That white snakeskin belt, my Lord, I still dream of it. But I couldn’t approve of the way you treated poor Maria.”
Johnny smiled, folding the wrinkles upon themselves. His teeth, nearing the tail end of a bleaching cycle, receded subdued in his mouth.
“Maria was a wonderful girl, Miss Collins. We shared a wonderful night.”
Clara tittered, expanding in confidence, and breathing harder.
“Oh, but you should have seen how broken up she was the next morning. She almost swallowed a bottle of pills. You evoked such…feeling, ecstasy in her. You gave her the world, only to snatch it away.”
Bernie sat back in his seat, confused and mute. He took quick sips of his Perrier. Johnny St. Clair brushed his hair back with a deft twist of the neck, displaying prominent veins.
“I can’t say Maria was unique in that state. She was certainly a fine young lady, but you have to understand, Miss Collins, that I prefer a more mature, sorry, more experienced woman. Maria Van Nuys was the exception, rather than the rule.”
An amoeba-shaped redness had begun to spread from the cavern of Clara’s cleavage, over her curdled and dimpled skin, approaching the collarbones only obliquely suggested. “Oh, Chase!”
She brought her right hand to her neck, lightly fingering the red spot. “Oh, my, my, my. This is all too much. What a young man you are, Chase Hartford. You could make a woman very happy, if one could ever tame you.”
Johnny St. Clair took Clara’s hand with a speed that made her gasp. He brought it slowly to his lips, wrapping them around her flesh-ensconced middle knuckle.
“It was wonderful getting to know you, Miss Collins.”
***
Dr. Teitelbaum’s office was decorated like a therapist’s; muted earth colors, thin carpeting, a long couch, and a pristine box of tissues on the doctor’s desk.
“What’ll it be today, Mr. St. Clair? The works? Collagen, chemical peel, we can schedule a neck lift for this Tuesday, if you’d like. You’ll have to wait another month for the Botox. Minimum 3 months between treatments. But we can do the rest today and pencil you in for the outpatients immediately.”
Johnny St. Clair left Dr. Teitelbaum’s office, a little stiff from the injections and rotating his jaw to return the feeling to his face. He put on his sunglasses. He caught a glimpse of himself in a store window. A group of teenagers came trundling past, four across, taking up the whole sidewalk, lost in their conversation. Johnny St. Clair took off his glasses, approached the shop window to get a better look at himself. He flipped his hair back, pursed his lips. He was deliriously happy.