Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

As she touched herself, she remembered the curious flush of desire that had come over her the night before when she had finally gone to bed. The images of the fighters, white and black, that had sickened her while she was in the arena, suddenly became the inspirers of desire, the magnificent, harsh bodies tumbled around her. Sex for a woman was in a demonstrable way an intrusion, a profound invasion of privacy, as was a blow given by one man to another. In the uneasy, early-morning bed, after the disturbing night, the lines crossed, blows became caresses, caresses blows, and she turned, aroused, under the covers. If Willie had come into her bed she would have welcomed him ardently. But Willie was sleeping, on his back, snoring softly from time to time.

She had gotten up and taken a pill to sleep.

During the morning, she had put it all from her mind, the shame of the night covered with the innocent mask of daylight.

She shook her head, opened a drawer full of panties and brassieres. When she thought about it, “panties” seemed a hypocritically innocuous word, falsely childish, to cover such desperate territory. Girdle was a better word, though it was from more melodious periods of language, and she didn’t wear girdles. Boylan’s teaching.

The phone rang again, persistently, but she ignored it as she dressed. She stared for a moment at the clothes hanging in the closet, then chose a simple, severe blue suit. No advertising the mission. The emergent rosy body better appreciated later for having been concealed before. She brushed her dark hair, straight and long to her shoulders, the broad, low forehead clear, serene, unwrinkled, concealing all betrayals, all doubts.

She couldn’t find a taxi so she took the Eighth Avenue subway uptown, remembering to get on the Queens train that crossed over to the East Side on Fifty-third Street. Persephone, coming from the underground in the flower-time of love.

She got out at the Fifth Avenue exit and walked in the windy autumn sunshine, her demure navy-blue figure reflected in the glitter of shop windows. She wondered how many of the other women she passed were, like her, briefly parading the avenue, drifting cunningly through Saks, diaphragms in place.

She turned east on Fifty-fifth Street, past the entrance of the St. Regis, remembered a wedding party on a summer evening, a white veil, a young lieutenant. There were only a certain number of streets in the city. One could not avoid them all. The echoes of urban geography.

She looked at her watch. Twenty to two. Five full minutes, in which to walk slowly, to arrive cool, controlled.

Colin Burke lived on Fifty-sixth between Madison and Park. Another echo. On that street there had once been a party from which she had turned away. When renting an apartment, a man could not be blamed for not picking through his future lover’s memories before putting down the first month’s rent.

She went into the familiar white vestibule, rang the bell. How many times, on how many afternoons, had she rung that bell? Twenty? Thirty? Sixty? Some day she would make the count.

The buzzer hummed at the doorlatch and she went in and took the small elevator up to the fourth floor.

He was standing at the door, in pajamas and a robe, his feet bare. They kissed briefly, no rush, no rush.

There were breakfast things on the coffee table in the big, disordered living room, and a half-finished cup of coffee, among piles of leatherette-bound scripts. He was a director in the theater and he kept theatrical hours, rarely going to bed before five in the morning.

“Can I give you a cup of coffee?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve just had lunch.”

“Ah, the orderly life,” he said. “So to be envied.” The irony was gentle.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “you can come down and feed Billy a lamb chop. Envy me later.”

Burke had never seen Billy, had never met her husband, or been to their home. She had met him at a luncheon with one of the editors of a magazine for which she did occasional pieces. The idea was that she was to do an article on him, because she had praised a play he had directed. At the luncheon she hadn’t liked him, had thought him cocky, theory ridden, too confident of himself. She hadn’t written the article, but three months later, after several scattered meetings, she had gone to bed with him, out of lust, revenge, boredom, hysteria, indifference, accident … She no longer probed her reasons.

He sipped at his coffee, standing up, watching her over the cup, his dark-gray, eyes tender under thunderous black eyebrows. He was thirty-five years old, a short man, shorter than she (Am I doomed all my life to small men?) but there was a thin intensity about his face, dark-stubbled with beard now, a strained intellectual rigor, an impression of directness and strength, that made one forget his size. In his profession he was used to ordering complex and difficult people about and the look of command was on him. He was moody and sometimes sharply spoken, even to her, tortured by failures in excellence in himself and others, easily scornful, given sometimes to disappearing without a word for weeks at a time. He was divorced and was reputed to be a ladies’ man and in the beginning, last year, she felt that he was using her for the simplest and most obvious of reasons, but now, standing across the room from him, watching the slim, barefooted, small man in the soft, navy-blue bathrobe (happy matching of afternoon colors) she was sure she loved him and that she wanted none else but him and would make great sacrifices to remain at his side for her entire life.

She was talking about Burke when she had said last night to her brother that she wanted to sleep with one man, not ten. And in fact, since the beginning of their affair she had made love with no one else but him, except for the infrequent times when Willie had come to her bed, in nostalgic moments of tenderness; unhappy, fleeting reconciliations; the almost forgotten habits of marriage.

Burke had asked if she still slept with her husband and she had told him the truth. She had also confessed that it gave her pleasure. She had no need to lie to him and he was the one man she had ever known to whom she could say anything that came to her mind. He had told her that since their first meeting he had not slept with another woman and she was sure that this was so.

“Beautiful Gretchen,” he said, taking the cup from his lips, “bounteous Gretchen, glorious G. Oh, to have you come in every morning with the breakfast tray.”

“My,” she said, “you’re in a good mood today.”

“Not really,” he said. He put down the cup and came over and they slipped their arms around each other. “I have a disastrous afternoon ahead of me. My agent called me an hour ago and I have to go to the Columbia office at two-thirty. They want me to go out West and do a movie. I called you a couple of times, but there was no answer.”

The phone had rung as she had entered the apartment, again as she had dressed. Love me tomorrow, not today, courtesy of American Tel and Tel. But tomorrow, there was no trip to the museum for Billy’s class, freeing her until five o’clock. She would have to be at the school gate at three. Passion by children’s hours.

“I heard the phone ring,” she said, moving away from him, “but I didn’t answer it.” Abstractedly, she lit a cigarette. “I thought you had a play to do this year,” she said.

“Throw away that cigarette,” Burke said. “Whenever a bad director wants to show unspoken tension between two characters, he has them lighting a cigarette.”

She laughed, stubbing it out.

“The play isn’t ready,” Burke said, “and the way the rewrite’s going it won’t be ready for another year. And everything else that I’ve been offered is junk. Don’t look so sad.”

“I’m not sad,” she said. “I’m horny and unlaid and disappointed.”

It was his turn to laugh. “The vocabulary of Gretchen,” he said. “Always to be trusted. Can’t you make it this evening?”

“Evenings’re out. You know that. That would be flaunting it. And I’m not a flaunter.” There was no telling with Willie. He might come home for dinner, whistling cheerfully, two weeks in a row. “Is it a good picture?”

“It can be.” He shrugged, rubbing the blue-black stubble of his beard. “The whore’s cry,” he said. “It can be. Frankly, I need the money.”

“You had a hit last year,” she said, knowing she shouldn’t push him, but pushing him nevertheless.

“Between Uncle Sam and the alimony, my bank is howling.” He grimaced. “Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863, but he overlooked the married men.”

Love, like almost everything else these days, was a function of the Internal Revenue Service. We embrace between tax forms. “I ought to introduce you,” she said, “to Johnny Heath and my brother. They swim like fish among the deductions.”

“Businessmen,” he said. “They know the magic. When my tax man sees my records he puts his head in his hands and weeps. No use crying over spilt money. On to Hollywood. Actually, I look forward to it. There’s no reason these days why a director shouldn’t do movies as well as plays. That old idea that there’s something holy about the theater and eternally grubby about film is just snobbism and it’s as dead as David Belasco. If you asked me who was the greatest dramatic artist alive today I’d say Federico Fellini. And there hasn’t been anything better on the stage in my time than Citizen Kane and that was pure Hollywood. Who knows—I may be the Orson Welles of the fifties.”

Burke was walking back and forth as he spoke and Gretchen could tell that he meant what he was saying, or at least most of it, and was eager to take up the new challenge in his career. “Sure, there’re whores in Hollywood, but nobody would seriously claim that Shubert Alley is a cloister. It’s true I need money and I’m not averse to the sight of the dollar, but I’m not hunting it. Yet. And I hope never. I’ve been negotiating with Columbia for more than a month now and they’re giving me an absolute free hand—the story I want, the writer I want, no supervision, the whole thing shot on location, final cut, everything, as long as I stay within the budget. And the budget’s a fair one. If it’s not as good as anything I’ve done on Broadway, the fault’ll be mine and nobody else’s. Come to the opening night. I will expect you to cheer.”

She smiled, but it was a dutiful smile. “You didn’t tell me you were so far along. More than a month …”

“I’m a secretive bastard,” he said. “And I didn’t want to say anything until it was definite.”

She lit a cigarette, to give her something to do with her hands and her face. The hell with directors’ clichés of tension. “What about me? Back here?” she asked, through smoke, knowing again she shouldn’t ask it.

“What about you?” He looked at her thoughtfully. “There are always planes.”

“In which direction?”

“In both directions.”

“How long do you think we’d last?”

“Two weeks.” He flipped his finger against a glass on the coffee table and it tinkled faintly, a small chime marking a dubious hour. “Forever.”

“If I were to come out West,” she said evenly, “with Billy, could we live with you?”

He came over to her and kissed her forehead, holding her head with his two hands. She had to bend a little for the kiss. His beard scraped minutely against her skin. “Ah, God,” he said softly, then pulled back. “I have to shave and shower and dress,” he said. “I’m late as it is.”

She watched him shave, shower and dress, then drove with him in a taxi to the office on Fifth Avenue where he had the appointment. He hadn’t answered her question, but he asked her to call him later so that he could tell her what the people at Columbia had said.

She got out of the taxi with him and spent the afternoon shopping, idly, buying a dress and a sweater, both of which she knew she would return later in the week.

At five o’clock, dressed once more in slacks, and wearing her old tweed coat, she was at the gates of Billy’s school, undiaphragmed, waiting for the class to come back from the Museum of Natural History.

III

By the end of the afternoon he was tired. There had been lawyers all morning and lawyers, he had discovered, were the most fatiguing group of people in the world. At least for him. Even the ones who were working for him. The constant struggle for advantage, the ambiguous, tricky, indigestible language, the search for loopholes, levers, profitable compromises, the unashamed pursuit of money, was abhorrent to him, even while he was profiting from it all. There was one good thing about dealing with lawyers—it reassured him a hundred times over that he had acted correctly in refusing Teddy Boylan’s offer to finance him through law school.

Then there had been the architects in the afternoon, and they had been trying, too. He was working on the plans for the center and his hotel room was littered with drawings. On Johnny Heath’s advice, he had chosen a firm of young architects who had already won some important prizes, but were still hungry. They were eager and talented, there was no doubt about that, but they had worked almost exclusively in cities and their ideas ran to glass and steel or poured cement, and Rudolph, knowing that they considered him hopelessly square, insisted upon traditional forms and traditional materials. It was not exactly his own taste, but he felt it would be the taste best appreciated by the people who would come to the center. And it certainly would be the only thing that Calderwood might approve of. “I want it to look like a street in an old New England village,” Rudolph kept saying, while the architects groaned. “White clapboard and a tower over the theater so that you can mistake it for a church. It’s a conservative rural area and we’re going to be catering to conservative people in a country atmosphere and they will spend their money more easily in an ambience that they feel happy and at home in.”

Again and again the architects had almost quit, but he had said, “Do it this way this time, boys, and the next time it’ll be more your way. This is only the first of a chain and we’ll get bolder as we go along.”

The plans they had sketched for him were still a long way from what he wanted, but as he looked at the last rough drawings they had shown him that day, he knew they would finally surrender.

His eyes ached and he wondered if he needed glasses as he made some notes on the plans. There was a bottle of whiskey on the bureau and he poured himself a drink, topping it off with water from the tap in the bathroom. He sipped at the drink as he spread the sheets of stiff paper out on the desk. He winced at the drawing of a huge sign, CALDERWOOD’S, that the architects had sketched in at the entrance to the center. It was to be outlined in flashing neon at night. In his old age, Calderwood sought renown, immortality in flickering multicolored glass tubing, and all Rudolph’s tactful intimations about keeping a single modest style for the center had fallen on deaf ears.

The telephone rang, and Rudolph looked at his watch. Tom had said he would come by at five and it was almost that now. He picked up the phone, but it wasn’t Tom. He recognized the voice of Johnny Heath’s secretary on the phone. “Mr. Jordache? Mr. Heath calling.”

He waited, annoyed, for Johnny to get on the phone. In his organization, he decided, when anybody made a call, whoever was making it would have to be ready to speak when the phone was answered. How many slightly angered clients and customers there must be each day in America, hung up on a secretary’s warning trill, how many deals lost, how many invitations refused, how many ladies who, in that short delay, had decided to say, No.

When Johnny Heath finally said, “Hello, Rudy,” Rudolph concealed his irritation.

“I have the information you asked me for,” Johnny said. “Have you got a pencil and a piece of paper?”

“Yes.”

Johnny gave him the name and address of a detective agency. “I hear they’re very dependable,” Johnny said. He didn’t inquire why Rudolph needed a private detective, although there must have been some guessing going on in his mind.

“Thanks, Johnny,” Rudolph said, after he had written down the name and address. “Thanks for your trouble.”

“It was nothing,” Johnny said. “You free for dinner tonight?”

“Sorry,” Rudolph said. He had nothing on for the evening and if Johnny’s secretary had not kept him waiting he would have said yes.

After he hung up, he felt more tired than ever and decided to postpone calling the detective agency until the next day. He was surprised that he felt tired. He didn’t remember ever feeling tired at five o’clock in the afternoon.

But he was tired now, no doubt about it. Age? He laughed. He was twenty-seven years old. He looked at his face in the mirror. No gray hairs in the even, smooth blackness. No bags under the eyes. No signs of debauchery or hidden illness in the clear, olive skin. If he had been overworking, it did not show in that youthful, contained, unwrinkled face.

Still, he was tired. He lay, fully clothed, on the bed, hoping for a few minutes of sleep before Tom arrived. But he could not sleep. His sister’s contemptuous words of the night before kept running through his mind, as they had been all day, even when he was struggling with lawyers and architects. “Do you enjoy anything?” He hadn’t defended himself, but he could have pointed out that he enjoyed working, that he enjoyed going to concerts, that he read enormously, that he went to the theater, prizefights, art galleries, that he enjoyed running in the morning, riding a motorcycle, he enjoyed, yes, seeing his mother sitting across from him at the table, unlovely, unlovable, but alive, and there, by his efforts, not in a grave, or a pauper’s hospital bed.

Gretchen was sick with the sickness of the age. Everything was based on sex. The pursuit of the sacred orgasm. She would say love, he supposed, but sex would do as a description as far as he was concerned. From what he had seen, what happiness lay there was bought at too high a price, tainting all other happiness. Having a sleazy woman clutch you at four in the morning, trying to claim you, hurling a glass at you with murderous hatred because you’d had enough of her in two hours, even though that had been the implicit bargain to begin with. Having a silly little girl taunt you in front of her friends, making you feel like some sort of frozen eunuch, then grabbing your cock disdainfully in broad daylight. If it was sex or even anything like love that had brought his mother and father together originally, they had wound up like two crazed animals in a cage in the zoo, destroying each other. Then the marriages of the second generation. Beginning with Tom. What future faced him, captured by that whining, avaricious, brainless, absurd doll of a woman? And Gretchen, herself, superior and scathing in her helpless sensuality, hating herself for the beds she fell into, adrift from a worthless and betrayed husband. Who was immersing himself in the ignominy of detectives, keyhole-peeping, lawyers, divorce—he or she?

Screw them all, he thought. Then laughed to himself. The word was ill chosen.

The telephone rang. “Your brother is in the lobby, Mr. Jordache,” the clerk said.

“Will you send him up, please?” Rudolph swung off the bed, straightened out the covers. For some reason, he didn’t want Tom to see that he had been lying down, with its implication of luxury and sloth. Hurriedly, he stuffed all the architects’ drawings into a closet. He wanted the room to look bare, without clues. He did not want to seem important, engrossed in large affairs, when his brother appeared.

There was a knock on the door and Rudolph opened it. At least he’s wearing a tie, Rudolph thought meanly, for the opinion of the clerks and bellboys in the lobby. He shook Thomas’s hand and said, “Come on in. Sit down. Want a drink? I have a bottle of Scotch, but I can ring down if you’d like something else.”

“Scotch’ll do.” Thomas sat stiffly in an armchair, his already-gnarled hands hanging down, his suit bunched up around his great shoulders.

“Water?” Rudolph said. “I can call down for soda if you …”

“Water’s fine.”

I sound like a nervous hostess, Rudolph thought, as he went into the bathroom and poured water out of the tap into Thomas’s drink.

Rudolph raised his glass. “Skoal.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. He drank thirstily.

“There were some good write-ups this morning,” Rudolph said.

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “I read the papers. Look, there’s no sense in wasting any time, Rudy.” He dug into his pocket and brought out a fat envelope. He stood up and went over to the bed and opened the envelope flap and turned it upside down. Bills showered over the bedspread.

“What the hell are you doing, Tom?” Rudolph asked. He did not deal in cash—he rarely had more than fifty dollars in his pocket—and the scattering of bills on the hotel bed was vaguely disquieting to him, illicit, like the division of loot in a gangster movie.

“They’re hundred-dollar bills.” Thomas crumpled the empty envelope and tossed it accurately into the waste-basket. “Five thousand dollars’ worth. They’re yours.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rudolph said. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“There’s your goddamn college education that I did you out of,” Thomas said. “Paying off those crooks in Ohio. I tried to give it to Pa, but he happened to be dead that day. Now it’s yours.”

“You work too hard for your money,” Rudolph said, remembering the blood of the night before, “to throw it away like this.”

“I didn’t work for this money,” Thomas said. “I got it easy—the way Pa lost his—by blackmail. A long time ago. It’s been in a vault for years, waiting. Feel free, brother. I didn’t take any punishment for it.”

“It’s a stupid gesture,” Rudolph said.

“I’m a stupid man,” Thomas said. “I make stupid gestures. Take it. Now I’m rid of you.” He turned away from the bed and finished his drink in one gulp. “I’ll be going now.”

“Wait a minute. Sit down.” Rudolph pushed at his brother’s arms, feeling, even at that hurried touch, the ferocious power in them. “I don’t need it. I’m doing great. I just made a deal that’s going to make me a rich man, I …”

“I’m happy to hear it, but it’s beside the point.” Stonily, Thomas remained standing. “I want to pay off our fucking family and this does it.”

“I won’t take it, Tom. Put it in the bank for your kid, at least.”

“I’ll take care of my kid my own way, don’t you worry about that.” Now he sounded dangerous.

“It’s not mine,” Rudolph said helplessly. “What the hell am I going to do with it?”

“Piss on it. Blow it on dames. Give it to your favorite charity,” Thomas said. “I’m not walking out of this room with it.”

“Sit down, for Christ’s sake.” This time Rudolph pushed hard at his brother, edging him toward the armchair, risking the blow that could come at any moment. “I have to talk to you.”

Rudolph refilled Thomas’s glass and his own and sat across from his brother on a straight wooden chair. The window was open a little and the city wind entered in little gusts. The bills on the bed fluttered a little, like a small, complicated animal, shuddering. Both Thomas and Rudolph sat as far away from the bed as possible, as though the first one inadvertently to touch a bill would have to claim them all.

“Listen, Tom,” Rudolph began, “we’re not kids anymore, sleeping in the same bed, getting on each other’s nerves, competing with each other, whether we knew it or not. We’re two grown men and we’re brothers.”

“Where were you for ten years, Brother, you and Princess Gretchen?” Thomas said. “Did you ever send a postcard?”

“Forgive me,” Rudolph said. “And if you talk to Gretchen, she’ll ask you to forgive her, too.”

“If I see her first,” Thomas said, “she’ll never get a chance to get close enough to me to say hello.”

“Last night, watching you fight, made us realize,” Rudolph persisted. “We’re a family, we owe each other something …”

“I owed the family five thousand bucks. There it is, on the bed. Nobody owes anybody anything.” Thomas kept his head down, his chin almost on his chest.

“Whatever you say, whatever you think about the way I behaved all this time,” Rudolph said, “I want to help you now.”

“I don’t need any help.” Thomas drank most of his whiskey.

“Yes, you do. Look, Tom,” Rudolph said, “I’m no expert, but I’ve seen enough fights to have an idea of what to expect from a fighter. You’re going to get hurt. Badly. You’re a club fighter. It’s one thing to be the champ of the neighborhood, but when you go up against trained, talented, ambitious men—and they’re going to get better each time now for you—because you’re still on the way up—you’re going to get chopped to pieces. Aside from the injuries—concussions, cuts, kidneys—”

“I only have half hearing in one ear,” Thomas volunteered, surprisingly. The professional talk had drawn him out of his shell. “For more than a year now. What the hell, I’m not a musician.”

“Aside from the injuries, Tom,” Rudolph went on, “there’s going to come the day when you’ve lost more than you’ve won, or you’re suddenly all worn out and some kid will drop you. You’ve seen it dozens of times. And that’ll be the end. You won’t get a bout. How much money will you have then? How will you earn your living then, starting all over at thirty, thirty-five, even?”

“Don’t hex me, you sonofabitch,” Thomas said.

“I’m being realistic.” Rudolph got up and filled Thomas’s glass again, to keep him in the room.

“Same old Rudy,” Thomas said mockingly. “Always with a happy, realistic word for his kid brother.” But he accepted the drink.

“I’m at the head of a large organization now,” Rudolph said, “I’m going to have a lot of jobs to fill. I could find a place in it for you, a permanent place …”

“Doing what? Driving a truck at fifty bucks a week?”

“Better than that,” Rudolph said. “You’re no fool. You could wind up as a manager of a branch or a department,” Rudolph said, wondering if he was lying. “All it takes is some common sense and a willingness to learn.”

“I have no common sense and I’m not willing to learn anything,” Thomas said. “Don’t you know that?” He stood up. “I’ve got to get going now. I have a family waiting for me.”

Rudolph shrugged, looked across at the bills fluttering gently on the bedspread. He stood up, too.

“Have it your own way,” he said. “For the time being.”

“There ain’t no time being.” Thomas moved toward the door.

“I’ll come and visit you and see your kid,” Rudolph said. “Tonight? I’ll take you and your wife to dinner tonight. What do you say to that?”

“I say balls to that.” Thomas opened the door, stood there. “Come and see me fight sometime. Bring Gretchen. I can use fans. But don’t bother to come back to the dressing room.”

“Think everything over. You know where you can reach me,” Rudolph said wearily. He was unused to failure and it exhausted him. “Anyway, you might come up to Whitby and say hello to your mother. She asks about you.”

“What does she ask—have they hung him yet?” Thomas grinned crookedly.

“She says she wants to see you at least once more before she dies.”

“Maestro,” Thomas said, “the violins, please.”

Rudolph wrote down the Whitby address and the telephone number. “Here’s where we live, in case you change your mind.”

Thomas hesitated, then took the slip of paper and jammed it carelessly into his pocket. “See you in ten years, brother,” he said. “Maybe.” He went out and closed the door behind him. The room seemed much larger without his presence.

Rudolph stared at the door. How long can hatred last? In a family, forever, he supposed. Tragedy in the House of Jordache, now a supermarket. He went over to the bed and gathered up the bills and put them carefully into an envelope and sealed it. It was too late in the afternoon to put the money in the bank. He’d have to lock it in the hotel safe overnight.

One thing was certain. He was not going to use it for himself. Tomorrow he’d invest it in Dee Cee stock in his brother’s name. The time would come, he was sure, when Thomas could use it. And it would be a lot more than five thousand dollars by then. Money did not negotiate forgiveness, but it could be depended upon, finally, to salve old wounds.

He was bone tired, but sleep was out of the question. He got out the architect’s drawings again, grandiose imaginings, paper dreams, the hopes of years, imperfectly realized. He stared at the pencil lines that would be transformed within six months into the neon of the name of Calderwood, against the northern night. He grimaced unhappily.

The phone rang. It was Willie, buoyant but sober. “Merchant Prince,” Willie said, “how would you like to come down here and have dinner with the old lady and me? We’ll go to a joint in the neighborhood.”

“I’m sorry, Willie,” Rudolph said. “I’m busy tonight. I have a date.”

“Put it in once for me, Prince,” Willie said lightly. “See you soon.”

Rudolph hung up slowly. He would not see Willie soon, at least not for dinner.

Look behind you, Willie, as you pass through doors.