Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair Page A

second reading as an elementary but in the context unexpectedly literate allusion to the Latin, before it dawned on me that it must refer to the current fad for videotape recorders) that contained anything at all about Ronnie Bostock: a small, ill-reproduced colour photograph from
Tex-Mex
in which, his hair dishevelled, his jeans grubby and torn, his face a livid mask of terror beneath a balefully luminous moon, he was being dragged feet first under a barbed-wire fence by a pair of Mexican-looking youths, both of them, as I noted, swarthily handsome brutes.
    Already clutching that magazine, I started to flick through those under
Teens
. And, there, I simply could not credit my good luck! There were five of them, and they would have been in every respect indistinguishable one from the other had it not been for their names, all of them artless permutations on the words
teen, beat, dream
and
young
. Extraordinarily, not one of them was without its gushing tribute to the actor – rather, it seemed extraordinary to me, since I had not yet understood that, although Ronnie’s career in films could still be considered no more than promising, and even then only just, the quality of his physical ‘puppiness’ had already made him an icon and idol of clammy prepubes-cent fantasising. The tributes, too, would prove to be virtually indistinguishable, except for the half-dozenmonochrome and occasionally rather fuzzy snapshots that made up their illustrations. Here was Ronnie, boyishly resplendent in a snow-white junior-sized dinner jacket stepping out of a ‘stretch’ limousine for an evening on the town. There, curled up on a sofa in his ‘den’ and hugging adoringly to his breast a large and very hairy dog of, to my untutored eye, indefinite breed, presumably Strider. Here, in a stylish, loose-fitting track suit jogging along a high coastal road with, in the distance, dewily out of focus, a white steamship crossing a sound. And there, in quite the most endearing of all the photographs, taken against a featureless and flatly lit studio backdrop, Ronnie contracting his whole body into a curve and hurtling upwards in a flying leap, almost as though he were juggling his own limbs in the air, with such an immoderate release of pent-up energy that his teeshirt was starting to edge up over his belly and expose the belly-button – a pose, however painstakingly imagined in advance, however often rehearsed with the photographer, than which nothing could have struck one as more joyously spontaneous and life-loving.
    At the colour pin-up portraits I cast only a perfunctory glance. Like a schoolboy who resists opening the latest issue of a favourite comic-book until such time as the stage has meticulously been set for it to procure him the most acute of pleasures, I was determined that only in the intimacy and tranquillity of my study would I bring to them the intense and detailed scrutiny they deserved. This time, though, as I realised, glancing furtively at the shop counter and the bearded Indian or Pakistani gentleman who was standing motionless behind it and following my movements with an expression of benignexpectancy, as though he were anticipating a good sale, I could no longer, with five almost identical ‘teen’ magazines to be bought and paid for, plausibly cast myself in the role of indulgent parent to a teenage girl. Even knowing as I did that my motive in buying these magazines was of absolutely no interest to anyone save myself, some such role would nevertheless be required if I were to pay for them, be handed my change and depart from the shop without suffering any unduly protracted agony of embarrassment. So it was that I laid them down on the counter and opened my wallet – they turned out to be rather costlier than I had mentally bargained for, and I started slightly on seeing the sum that was rung up on the cash register – while assuming, in an ineffably subtle manner, the air of