Set This House on Fire by William Styron Page A

was my bitterness, had I not at that instant run into Mason Flagg. He was standing at the archway; he had seen it all, and appeared to be beside himself with joy. In a sport shirt baroque with silver flowers, a white ski cap raked sideways across his skull, he was hooting with laughter; as I approached him his laughter slackened to a silent, convulsed chuckle and one shoulder went up briefly in that high-strung twitch I had forgotten, but which I might have recognized him by, at any angle and from any distance, whether in Sambuco or Paris or Peru.
    “Old Petesy,” he said, giggling, pumping my hand, “let’s flap off on a wild one to Goochville.”
    It was a private reference to our days in prep school. I remembered that it had always been his custom—whenever we met after a long time—to greet me in some such fashion and I generally answered in kind, with schoolboy bravura, though never without feeling slightly asinine.
    “Man, let’s really flap one,” I responded briskly. “Who was that guy running off at me out there, Mason? He burnt me up—”
    “Some assistant director. Rappaport, I think his name is. Don’t let him worry you. He gives everybody a pain. I think Alonzo should give you a job, Petesy boy. You were terrific out there.”
    “Well, I’m sorry,” I began, “if I messed up their scene. I’ve had a terrible day. I was coming down the highway outside Pompei and I ran smack into—”
    “Petesy, you look great!” he broke in. “I’m certainly glad you could come. How long has it been? Three years? Four? I don’t think you’ve changed a bit. A little fatter in the cheeks, maybe, less haunted in aspect—and I should say more self-gratified around the glands. How’s all this Italian twat you’ve been getting, Petesy? I’ve heard that a man hasn’t even begun to savor life, until he’s had one of these native girls moaning mamma mia to him in the sack. Petesy, you look absolutely in top condition!”
    “Thanks, Mason,” I said, without enthusiasm.
    I must have queered the movie-making for the day, for around the cameras there was a tired air of dismantling, and the towns-people, flocking past the ropes, had once again taken possession of their lovely square.
    “Don’t let it bother you,” Mason reassured me, as we walked toward a cafe across the piazza. “They’re running this outfit like a carnival. For Christ sake, that scene you just got yourself into wasn’t even written until three hours ago. It’s the damndest production you ever saw. Writers dropping like flies.”
    “How long are they going to be here?” I asked, with a twinge of expectation. Through his family Mason had always been in contact with the movie world, but although I had known him off and on since boyhood my acquaintance with the celebrities of that world had been more distant than I might have wished. I had an awe of those people almost teen-age in its dazzlement, and the hope now of some actual fellowship—no matter how fugitive—colored my imagination with a sudden iridescent allure. “Are they going to be here very long?”
    “There’s that little jerk Rappaport,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Don’t worry about him. You know what his first name is? Guess.”
    “I couldn’t guess, Mason.”
    “Van Rensselaer. They call him Rense. Jesus sake.” He twitched his shoulder up jerkily, as if he were trying to throw it out of joint. In the center of the square we made our way through a jabbering crowd of movie extras, from which two handsome Italian girls in skimpy black sunsuits detached themselves, slithering across our path with a great deal of pelvic animation. Mason took my arm. “Now just look at that,” he said. “Petesy, there’s more twat up on this mountaintop than a wise man could possibly handle. Just look at that stuff. I’d get a double-indemnity clause in my insurance policy before I’d play humpty-dump with something like that all night. Godalmighty,” he sighed,