The Talisman

“Goodbye, Mr Sloat”, I’ll get you fired so fast you’ll think you were beheaded.’ So the hillbilly watched him inspect his car, knowing that if Sloat found any imperfections in the car’s finish he would bring down the axe, afraid even to come close enough to utter the ritual goodbye. Sometimes from the window that overlooked the parking lot Sloat had seen the attendant furiously wiping some flaw, bird dropping or splash of mud, off the BMW’s hood. And that’s management, buddy.
    When he pulled out of the lot he checked the rearview mirror and saw on the hillbilly’s face an expression very like the last one Phil Sawyer had worn in the final seconds of his life, out in the middle of nowhere in Utah. He smiled all the way to the freeway on-ramp.
    Philip Sawyer had underestimated Morgan Sloat from the time of their first meeting, when they were freshmen at Yale. It could have been, Sloat reflected, that he had been easy to underestimate – a pudgy eighteen-year-old from Akron, graceless, overweighted with anxieties and ambitions, out of Ohio for the first time in his life. Listening to his classmates talk easily about New York, about ‘21’ and the Stork Club, about seeing Brubeck at Basin Street and Erroll Garner at the Vanguard, he’d sweated to hide his ignorance. ‘I really like the downtown part,’ he’d thrown in, as casually as he could. Palms wet, cramped by curled-in fingers. (Mornings, Sloat often found his palms tattooed with dented bruises left by his fingernails.) ‘What downtown part, Morgan?’ Tom Woodbine had asked him. The others cackled. ‘You know, Broadway and the Village. Around there.’ More cackles, harsher. He had been unattractive and badly dressed; his wardrobe consisted of two suits, both charcoal-gray and both apparently made for a man with a scarecrow’s shoulders. He had begun losing his hair in high school, and pink scalp showed through his short, flattened-down haircuts.
    No, no beauty had Sloat been, and that had been part of it. The others made him feel like a clenched fist: those morning bruises were shadowy little photographs of his soul. The others, all interested in the theater like himself and Sawyer, possessed good profiles, flat stomachs, easy careless manners. Sprawled across the lounge chairs of their suite in Davenport while Sloat, in a haze of perspiration, stood that he might not wrinkle his suit pants and thereby get a few more days’ wear out of them, they sometimes resembled a gathering of young gods – cashmere sweaters draped over their shoulders like the golden fleece. They were on their way to becoming actors, playwrights, songwriters. Sloat had seen himself as a director: entangling them all in a net of complications and designs which only he could unwind.
    Sawyer and Tom Woodbine, both of whom seemed unimaginably rich to Sloat, were roommates. Woodbine had only a lukewarm interest in theater and hung around their undergraduate drama workshop because Phil did. Another gilded private-school boy, Thomas Woodbine differed from the others because of his absolute seriousness and straightforwardness. He intended to become a lawyer, and already seemed to have the probity and impartiality of a judge. (In fact, most of Woodbine’s acquaintances imagined that he would wind up on the Supreme Court, much to the embarrassment of the boy himself.) Woodbine was without ambition in Sloat’s terms, being interested far more in living rightly than in living well. Of course he had everything, and what he by some accident lacked other people were quick to give him: how could he, so spoiled by nature and friendships, be ambitious? Sloat almost unconsciously detested Woodbine, and could not bring himself to call him ‘Tommy’.
    Sloat directed two plays during his four years at Yale: No Exit , which the student paper called ‘a furious confusion’, and Volpone . This was described as ‘churning, cynical, sinister, and almost unbelievably messy’. Sloat was held responsible for most of these qualities. Perhaps he was not a director after all – his vision too intense and crowded. His ambitions did not lessen, they merely shifted. If he was not eventually to be behind the camera, he could be behind the people in front of it. Phil Sawyer had also begun to think this way – Phil had never been certain where his love of theater might take him, and thought he might have a talent for representing actors and writers. ‘Let’s go to Los Angeles and start an