Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair Page B

some social theorist, some professional analyst of mass culture, obliged by the very special nature of his research to buy in such otherwise preposterous bulk. And whether or not the Indian newsagent, for whose sole benefit the charade had been played out, was appreciative of the performance – his unfailingly, inscrutably dulcet monotone betrayed no trace whatsoever of irony – it had served its purpose as far as I myself was concerned.
    These magazines rewarded thoughtful study. Not caring, however, to keep around the house what constituted for me so much dead matter – which is to say, everything in them that did not pertain to Ronnie – I spent the earlier part of the evening clipping out articles and photographs and pasting them into a cuttings album I had once purchased but never used. Then, much later than usual, I went on my daily stroll around the Heath. This once, thrillingly, the stroll would have an objectiveother than its statutory one of soothing my nerves. Instead of aimlessly circling that stretch of the Heath that remained more or less in sight of my own house, I headed directly for the part of it which was furthest from home, a wilder and more densely overrun area than I generally frequented, traversed by the long and purplish shadows of the enveloping dusk. Feeling after a while that I need walk no further, that I had at last cleared the magnetic field, so to speak, of my own house and those of my neighbours, I peered about in the gloom for a litter bin; found one which had been rigged up to the trunk of a solitary beech a few yards away and which was already overbrimming with assorted lager cans, potato crisp packets, used prophylactics and the wrap-perless, picked-clean remains of someone’s fried chicken; and, first making certain I was not observed, stuffed the magazines one by one into the disgusting mulch. Then, a shiver running through me, I strode back homewards.
    Since Ronnie was just out of his teens, even if crucially older than I had assumed him to be (but ages, I had come to understand, had to be judged by criteria different from those in force in my own young days since ‘age’ itself seemed meanwhile to have been rejuvenated), the so-called ‘biographical’ material that the magazines traded in tended to be of a deliriously self-duplicating and self-perpetuating type. It was merely the rubric that changed. In the first it was ‘20 Facts We Bet You Didn’t Know About Ronnie’; in another, ‘Ronnie – The Hottest Rumors Whispered in Tinseltown’; in another, ‘His Dreaminess, R.B.’ (which had for me an incongruouslyFirbankian ring to it); and if, in a fourth, the form adopted was that of a straightforward interview, just the sort of interview, indeed, that I myself had been willing to submit to only a few weeks before, its subject uncannily assumed the same exclamatory tone of voice as the (uniformly feminine) gossip-mongers when writing about him. Time and again (for this initial investment of mine was to be only the modest foundation stone for a collection of what I might term Bostockiana or even Ronniana that would be the envy of many an adolescent girl) I would read of Ronald Sr’s prosperous real estate business; of Ronnie’s own secretly entertained hope (a secret divulged in at least three of the magazines without any of them heeding the paradox of calling it so) that he might one day be cast in a movie as the son of his favourite actor, one Jack Nicholson; of his idea of the ‘perfect date’ (’a Mets game followed by a candlelit supper in an intimate and romantic French restaurant’); of his sentiments towards his ‘legion’ of fans (’tho I mean to graduate soon to more serious parts, I won’t ever forget that they made me what I am today’); and of his attitude to R-rated movies (’Yes, I guess I’d do a nude scene, but only if it was tasteful and essential to the