The Insiders

"It's over, Syl. Find another gigolo, another stud, huh?"

"Do you honestly believe that's all it was, Brant? Do you?"

She had stopped screaming at him, her voice suddenly quiet, ragged-sounding.

"What was it, then? Was I looking for a mother, you for a son? Well, maybe that was it—maybe that's all it was. I wanted a mother, and you— What was it you wanted, Syl? Someone young and untiring to fuck you? Ah, who knows, who cares? Sorry, Syl, but I've still got a lot to learn, and you have already taught me everything you know."

He was standing in the doorway of his apartment; he hadn't let her come in, and the door opened wider behind him, the girl of the moment looking out sulkily. Sylvia knew her—she was the young French starlet who'd had the ingenue lead in her last picture.

"Cherie! It's cold in bed alone."

Something in

Sylvia's face, in her sudden stillness, made him reach his hand out to her almost instinctively. Had he really needed to be so cruel? Why had he felt like lashing out at her?

"Syl.. ."

"It—it's all right, Brant. I'm sorry. It really is okay now, I mean—I think I understand. I won't bother you again, I promise."

She turned, went running down the steps, her heels clattering. Why did she always wear such ridiculously high heels? He started halfheartedly to go after her, but the girl clutched at him from behind, her greedy fingers spread over his crotch. Shrugging, he went back inside with her. She was still new, very young and wild and experienced—he hadn't yet got over craving her body.

Inside, the air conditioning hummed softly as they twisted and turned in bed. The thick, soundproof walls shut them up in a cocoon of their own breathing and broken sounds and words.

Outside, in the sunlight, Sylvia died without a sound under the wheels of a taxi that came careening around a corner just as she reached the street, still running. She died very quickly, and an ambulance shrieked up soon after that and took her broken body away. Brant knew nothing about it until the next day.

Some weeks later, when the nightmares he had started having had become worse and more frightening in spite of all the excesses he had pushed his body into, Brant Newcomb went back "home." He was only twenty. He felt as if he had done everything; there had to be something new to experience, some way to stop thinking.

He joined the Air Force because he enjoyed the challenge of flying, was promptly commissioned an officer, and went into flight training to learn to fly fighters. He volunteered for Vietnam as soon as he could, and spent two years there flying fast jets at the time when the conflict was at its height. Then, still not having succeeded in killing himself in spite of all the chances he took and the extra missions he volunteered for, he came back to the States and resigned his commission—his tour of duty over, a free man again. Free of the monotony that was military life when he was not actually flying, he was determined this time to be freed of his nightmares and his ever-present demons as well. He went into analysis.

"You loved her. Why are you afraid to admit it?"

"Why in hell do you keep insisting upon that? I thought a psychiatrist isn't supposed to put words in a patient's mouth. No, I didn't love her. Christ, I've never loved anyone! But she was the first—naturally, that made it different."

"But that's not all that made it different, is it? She was your aunt, your mother's sister. You risked the church's excommunication for her. And she was the only woman, the only thing you ever really cared about, wasn't she? Why are you ashamed to admit to me now what you have already admitted under hypnosis? Because she was older than you? Or is it because of some deeply suppressed moral code, perhaps? Because it was incest?"

"J'accuse! That's what you sound like, do you know that? Ah, come on, man! Incest, shit! Syl was only my aunt, for Christ's sake! So at the beginning I suppose I made a kind of mother figure out of her, but later—no, incest never entered into it, I never gave it a thought. She was a woman. Great in the sack, but too damned possessive. And that's all."

"Is it? What about all the years before—before you saw her as a woman. The visits, the cards, the little gifts. You were a small boy then, and you loved her. Wasn't she the only person who really cared about you? And even afterward, wasn't that still soF'

"Goddammit, are you trying to say— Ah, yes, that is what you're saying. That Syl loved me for myself. To everyone else it's the money and the fact that I'm known as a cocksman, a stud."

"Yes, that's right. Is there anything else to you besides that? Do you ever give a woman, or any other person for that matter, any part of your real self? Sylvia was the only one to whom you gave of yourself, wasn't she? I think that with the others you only take...."

"You're smart, you know that? That's why I pay you too damned much money and keep coming back. But no—what is the real self? Has it ever occurred to you that I might not be real at all?'

"Very dramatic, Brant. But let's go back to Sylvia."

"Oh, damn Sylvia! Damn her, damn her! Goddam her for dying!"

"Ah!"

Seeing an analyst hadn't cured Brant of Sylvia's ghost, but he had learned at least to accept what had happened, and above all, to accept himself as he was. No regrets, no more self-torment for Brant Newcomb. When something started to bug him, he had learned to bring it out into the open and think about it objectively. He had even learned to think about Sylvia without too much pain, too much guilt. Poor, damned, darling Syl! Did she know, wherever she was now, that by dying she'd made him forever hers?

And then, from Sylvia, Brant's thoughts veered unwillingly back to Eve Mason, and the present. She had hair that felt like Syl's, and something else about her— perhaps her pathetic, foolish, useless defiance—that nagged at his mind. She had made him want to put her down, to defeat her and degrade her, to show the stupid bitch that after all she wasn't really different from Francie. It continued to irk him that he hadn't succeeded. And he wasn't used to regretting anything he did, either, except for Syl

Brant lay awake thinking a long time before he was ready to sleep, and then he fell asleep peacefully and quickly, his mind emptied of thought, decisions made.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE