When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1)

What can I say? I was in love for the only time in my life, and when, in our
initial embrace a couple of hours later I must have squeezed her too hard and
she urinated all over my sneakers, I just — I guess it was the intimacy of it —
went over the top. Indeed, before the sun came up I had invited her to live
with me and she had accepted.

“I’m so excrutiated,” she gushed. “I’m besides both sides of myself. And
yours too!”

Yes, of course I knew there was no way it could work, that it had to end
badly. But I couldn’t help entertaining the fantasy that if I drew her in
really tight before she discovered her error, we might achieve a depth of
bonding that would make my true identity (or lack of one) irrelevant.

The following morning (and amazed by the soothing effect her presence was
having on my flying roommates — who’d stopped fluttering around so much and
were making sweet cooing sounds), I was more than anxious to know everything
about her.

She hadn’t, I learned, had an easy time of it.

Her father, she said, had been a profligator of languigistics at a
presticated universalment but had quit his tender position and dissipated —
just, and poignantly, a day after Roger, then a toddler, had spoken her first
paragraph.

Even more heartbreaking, her mother, on whose insurance policy she’d been
living for the last twenty years, had tragicastically electrified herself when
she dropped a George Foreman grill into the bath she was taking — this on the
evening of the day she’d come to Roger’s first grade class to hear her recite
“Mary Kept A Smallish Lamb.”

But at this point (and apparently wrestling with her delusion — which was
something I’d never known any of my women to do and which, I thought, said
something about the quality of her character, though I’m not sure what
exactly), she began to ask some questions of her own.

“How come you don’t seem to have the majority of cash I respected?” she
said. “How come you don’t habituate in a nice place? How come you don’t have a
phone in case Steven Spielberg and Sidney Pollack are feeling communicable? How
come your closet is only fulminating with jeans? Also, how come you don’t keep
your birds in cages?”

Considering that I wasn’t used to such an interrogation — and that I was
obliged to think on my feet — I came up with something that I thought wasn’t
bad.

“Honey,” I said, “you’ve entered my life at the worst possible time and
while I know that it’s asking a lot, I can only hope you’ll find it within
yourself to bear with me. I’m afraid that I may be afflicted with what’s called
the ‘J.D. Salinger Syndrome’. It’s a condition of creative paralysis that
sometimes develops in artists who have achieved a legendary stature. Owning the
prospect of a fame that will survive their demise, they live in terror of
losing that prospect by producing work that might be inferior to what they’ve
already accomplished. Rather than risk tainting their image, they cease to
function and, in the worst cases, to even appear in public where the
possibility of a clumsy or mediocre utterance could alter and diminish the way
they’re perceived. What happens is that they effectively sacrifice the
remainder of their lives to their immortality. I may or may not overcome this
disease and I’ll understand completely if its something you want no part of.
All I can say is that I’m deliberately staying out of the public eye right now
and that I’ve cut myself off from even my closest friends and associates who,
meaning well but not understanding, would only make light of my problem and
encourage me to work. This unfortunately includes my accountant who happens to
be the only person with access to my bank accounts. As for the apartment, it’s
my hideout. It’s perfect as a hideout because no one would ever think to look
for me in such a crummy place. You’re the only one who knows about it, the only
person I’ve trusted enough to bring to it. But again, I’ll understand if this
isn’t something you want to involve yourself with because it won’t be a whole
lot of fun and I don’t know how it will end.”

And it worked. Roger said nothing, but in addition to breaking out in a
really hideous rash as I spoke, her chest swelled noticeably, almost expanding
into something like a bosom. She must have felt five feet tall to be deemed
worthy of sharing in my time of trial.

But her obvious uneasiness with the situation in which she found herself
would periodically surface. A couple of days later she wanted to know why more
people didn’t notarize me on the street.

“Really good actors,” I said, “have the ability to be anonymous when they
want to be, sometimes even invisible.”

I remember that when I said this it made her giggle.

But even putting aside the considerable tensions caused by my charade (and
the always frazzling necessity to invent places I was going to when I left the
house for the car wash every day), living with Roger was nerve-racking all by
itself — like being tuned to two radio stations at once in a room with the
light bulb loose in its socket. Periods of incessant chatter, for instance,
would suddenly be interrupted, often in mid-sentence, by a dead silence, as
though her plug had been pulled from the wall. At such times she might become
motionless as well. Although her eyes would remain open I couldn’t be sure if
she was actually conscious. In fact, on several occasions, I’d have been ready
to believe she’d expired were it not for an odd clucking sound, the origin of
which I was never able to locate, and something unattractive that she did with
the muscles around her mouth.

Still, as enormous as the problems were, the moments of bliss I experienced
in those first weeks more than compensated for them.

Spring was beginning and, celebrating its arrival, we did the things new
lovers do when spring is upon them. We went to a windswept beach where we
romped and frolicked in the sand. Locked in an embrace we rolled over and over
down a steep hill in Central Park. In the evenings I washed her hair and she
gleefully folded my penis into woodland animal shapes.

I’d have to say that, all things considered, life was pretty good.

Then it went bad.

(Contined in Part 3) https://www.abctales.com/story/robert-levin/when-pacinos-hot-im-hot-part-3