Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 32 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

The phone was ringing when she opened the door to her room. The call was from California, but it wasn’t Colin. It was the head of the studio and he was calling to say that Colin had been killed in an automobile accident at one o’clock that day. He had been dead all afternoon and she hadn’t known it.

She thanked the man on the phone calmly for his muted words of sympathy and hung up and for a long while sat alone in the hotel room without turning on the light.

Chapter 2

1960

The bell rang for the last round of the sparring session and Schultzy called, “See if you can crowd him more, Tommy.” The boxer Quayles was going to meet in five days was a crowder and Thomas was supposed to imitate his style. But, Quayles was a hard man to crowd, a dancer and jabber, quick and slippery on his feet and with fast hands. He never hurt anybody much, but he had come a long way with his cleverness. The bout was going to be nationally televised and Quayles was getting twenty thousand dollars for his end. Thomas, on the supporting card, was going to get six hundred. It would have been less if Schultzy, who handled both fighters, at least for the record, hadn’t held out for the money with the promoters. There was Mafia money behind the fight and those boys didn’t go in for charity.

The training ring was set up in a theater and the people who came to watch the sessions sat in the orchestra seats in their fancy Las Vegas shirts and canary-yellow pants. Thomas felt more like an actor than a fighter up there on the stage.

He shuffled toward Quayles, who had a mean flat face and dead-cold pale eyes under the leather headguard. When Quayles sparred with Thomas, there was always a little derisive smile on his lips, as though it was absurd for Thomas to be in the same ring with him. He made a point of never talking to Thomas, not as much as a good morning, even though they were both in the same stable. The only satisfaction Thomas got out of Quayles was that he was screwing Quayles’s wife and one day he was going to let Quayles know it.

Quayles danced in and out, tapping Thomas sharply, slipping Thomas’s hooks easily, showing off for the crowd, letting Thomas swing at him in a corner and just bobbing his head, untouched, as the crowd yelled.

Sparring partners were not supposed to damage maineventers, but this was the last round of the training schedule and Thomas attacked doggedly, ignoring punishment, to get just one good one in, sit the bastard down on the seat of his fancy pants. Quayles realized what Thomas was trying to do and the smile on his face became loftier than ever as he flicked away, danced in and out, picked off punches in mid-air. He wasn’t even sweating at the end of the round and there wasn’t a mark on his body, although Thomas had been hacking away trying to reach him there, for a solid two minutes.

When the bell rang, Quayles said, “You ought to pay me for a boxing lesson, you bum.”

“I hope you get killed Friday, you cheap ham,” Thomas said, then climbed down and went into the showers, while Quayles did some rope skipping and calisthenics and worked on the light bag. He never got tired, the bastard, and he was a glutton for work, and would probably wind up middleweight champion, with a million bucks in the bank.

When Thomas came back out after his shower, his skin reddened under the eyes by Quayles’s jabs, Quayles was still at it, showing off, shadow boxing, with the hicks in the crowd in their circus clothes oh-ing and ah-ing.

Schultzy gave him the envelope with the fifty bucks in it for his two rounds and he walked quickly through the crowd and out into the glare of the searing Las Vegas afternoon. After the air-conditioned theater the heat seemed artificial and malevolent, as though the entire town were being cooked by some diabolical scientist who wanted to destroy it in the most painful way possible.

He was thirsty after the workout and went across the blazing street to one of the big hotels. The lobby was dark and cold. The expensive hookers were on patrol and the old ladies were playing the slot machines. The crap and roulette tables were in action as he passed them on his way to the bar. Everybody in the whole stinking town was loaded with money. Except him. He had lost over five hundred dollars, almost all the money he had earned, at the crap tables in the last two weeks.

He felt the envelope with Schultzy’s fifty in his pocket and fought back the urge to try the dice. He ordered a beer from the barman. His weight was okay and Schultzy wasn’t there to bawl him out. Anyway, Schultzy didn’t much care what he did any more, now that he had a contender in the stable. He wondered how much of Schultzy’s end of the purse he had to give to the gunslingers.

He drank a second beer, paid the barman, started out, stopped for a moment to watch the crap game. A guy who looked like a small-town undertaker had a pile of chips about a foot high in front of him. The dice were hot. Thomas took out the envelope and bought chips. In ten minutes he was down to ten dollars and he had sense enough to hold onto that.

He got the doorman to beg a ride for him from a guest to his hotel downtown, so he wouldn’t have to pay taxi fare. His hotel was a grubby one, with a few slot machines and one crap table. Quayles was staying at the Sands, with all the movie stars. And his wife. Who lay around the pool all day getting stoned on Planter’s Punches when she wasn’t sneaking down to Thomas’s hotel for a quick one. She had a loving nature, she said, and Quayles slept alone, in a separate room, being a serious fighter with an important bout coming up. Thomas wasn’t a serious fighter any more and there were no more important bouts for him so it didn’t make much difference what he did. The lady was active in bed and some of the afternoons were really worth the trouble.

There was a letter at the desk for him. From Teresa. He didn’t even bother to open it. He knew what was in it. Another demand for money. She was working now and making more money than he did, but that didn’t stop her. She had gone to work as a hatcheck and cigarette girl in a nightclub, wiggling her ass and showing her legs as high up as the law allowed and raking in the tips. She said she was bored just hanging around the house with the kid, with him away so much of the time and she wanted to have a career. She thought being a hatcheck girl was some sort of show business. The kid was stashed away with her sister in the Bronx and even when Thomas was in town Teresa came in at all hours, five, six in the morning, with her purse stuffed with twenty-dollar bills. God knows what she did. He didn’t care any more.

He went up to his room and lay down on his bed. That was one way to save money. He had to figure how to get from today to Friday on ten bucks. The skin under his eyes smarted where Quayles had peppered him. The air conditioning in the room was almost useless and the desert heat made him sweat.

He closed his eyes and slept uneasily, dreaming. He dreamt of France. It had been the best time of his life and he often dreamt about the moment on the shore of the Mediterranean, although it had been almost five years ago now, and the dreams were losing their intensity.

He woke, remembering the dream, sighed as the sea and the white buildings disappeared and he was surrounded once more by the cracked Las Vegas walls.

He had gone down to the Côte d’Azur after winning the fight in London. It had been an easy victory and Schultzy had gotten him another bout in Paris a month later, so there was no sense in going back to New York. Instead he had picked up one of those wild London girls. She had said she knew a great little hotel in Cannes and since Thomas was rolling in money for once and it looked as though he could beat everybody in Europe with one hand tied behind him, he had taken off for the weekend. The weekend had stretched into ten days, with frantic cables from Schultzy. Thomas had lain on the beach and eaten two great, heavy meals a day, developed a taste for vin rosé, and had put on fifteen pounds. When he finally got to Paris, he had just managed to make the weight the morning of the fight and the Frenchman had nearly killed him. For the first time in his life he had been knocked out and suddenly there were no more bouts in Europe. He had blown most of his money on the English girl, who happened to like jewelry, aside from her other attractions, and Schultzy hadn’t talked to him all the way back to New York.

The Frenchman had taken something out of him and nobody was writing that he should be considered for a shot at the title anymore. The time between bouts became greater and greater and the purses smaller and smaller. Twice he had to take a dive for walking-around money and Teresa closed him off entirely and if it hadn’t been for the kid he’d have just gotten up and left.

Lying in the heat on the wrinkled bed, he thought of all these things and remembered what his brother had told him that day at the Hotel Warwick. He wondered if Rudolph had followed his career and was saying, to his snooty sister, “I told him it would happen.”

Screw his brother.

Well, maybe on Friday night, there’d be some of the old juice in him and he’d score spectacularly. People could start hanging around him again and he’d made a comeback. Plenty of fighters—older than he—had made comebacks. Look at Jimmy Braddock, down to being a day laborer and then beating Max Baer for the heavy weight championship of the world. Schultzy just had to pick his opponents for him more carefully—keep him away from the dancers, give him somebody who came to fight. He’d have to have a talk with Schultzy. And not only about that. He had to get some money in advance, before Friday, to keep alive in this lousy town.

Two, three good wins and he could forget all this. Two, three good wins and they’d be asking for him in Paris again and he’d be down on the Côte sitting at a sidewalk café, drinking vin rosé and looking out at the masts of the boats anchored in the harbor. With real luck he might even get to rent one of them, sail around, out of reach of everybody. Maybe only two, three fights a year just to keep the bank balance comfortable.

Just thinking about it made him cheerful again and he was just about to go downstairs and put his ten bucks on the come at the crap table when the phone rang.

It was Cora, Quayles’s wife and she sounded demented, screaming and crying into the phone. “He’s found out, he’s found out,” she kept saying. “Some lousy bellboy got to him. He nearly killed me just now. I think he broke my nose, I’m going to be a cripple the rest of my life …”

“Go easy now,” Thomas said. “What has he found out?”

“You know what he found out. He’s on his way right now to …”

“Wait a minute. What did you tell him?”

“What the hell do you think I told him?” she screamed. “I told him no. Then he clouted me across the face. I’m blood all over. He doesn’t believe me. That lousy bellboy in your hotel must’ve had a telescope or something. You’d better get out of town. This minute. He’s on his way over to see you, I tell you. Christ knows what he’ll do to you. And later on, to me. Only I’m not waiting. I’m going to the airport right now. I’m not even packing a bag. And I advise you to do the same. Only stay away from me. You don’t know him. He’s a murderer. Just get on something and get out of town. Fast.”

Thomas hung up on the terrified, high-pitched babble. He looked at his one valise in a corner of the room, then stood up and went to the window and peered out through the Venetian blinds. The street was empty in the four o’clock afternoon desert glare. Thomas went over to the door and made sure it was unlocked. Then he moved the one chair to a corner. He didn’t want to get charged and sent backward over the chair in the first rush.

He sat on the bed, smiling a little. He had never run away from a fight and he wasn’t going to run away from this one. And this one might be the most enjoyable fight of his entire career. The small hotel room was no place for jabbers and dancers.

He got up and went over to the closet and took out a leather windjacket and put it on, zipping it up high and turning the collar up to protect his throat. Then he sat on the edge of the bed again, waiting placidly, hunched over a little, his hands hanging loose between his legs. He heard a car screech to a halt in front of the hotel, but he didn’t move. One minute later there were steps outside in the hall and then the door was flung open and Quayles came into the room, stopping just inside the doorway.

“Hi,” Thomas said. He stood up slowly.

Quayles closed the door behind him and turned the key in the lock.

“I know all about it, Jordache,” Quayles said.

“About what?” Thomas asked mildly, keeping his eyes on Quayles’s feet for the first hint of movement.

“About you and my wife.”

“Oh, yes,” Thomas said. “I’ve been screwing her. Did I forget to mention it?”

He was ready for the leap and almost laughed when he saw Quayles, that dandy and stylist of the ring, lead with a blind long right, a sucker’s punch if ever there was one. Because he was ready, Thomas went inside it easily, tied Quayles up, held onto him, with no referee to part them, and clubbed at Quayles’s body, with delicious, pent-up ferocity. Then, old street fighter with all the tricks, he rushed Quayles to the wall, ignoring the man’s attempt to writhe out of his grasp, stepped back just far enough to savage Quayles with an uppercut, then closed, wrestled, hit, held, used his elbows, his knee, butted Quayles’s forehead with his head, wouldn’t let him drop, but kept him up against the wall with his left hand around Quayles’s throat, and pounded at his face with one brutal right hand after another. When he stepped back, Quayles crumpled onto the blood-stained rug and lay there on his face, out cold.

There was a frantic knocking on the door and he heard Schultzy’s voice in the hall. He unlocked the door and let Schultzy in.

Schultzy took the whole thing in with one glance.

“You stupid bastard,” he said, “I saw that bird-brained wife of his and she told me. I thought I’d get here in time. You’re a great indoor fighter, aren’t you, Tommy? You can’t beat your grandmother for dough, but when it comes to fighting for nothing you’re the all-time beauty.” He knelt beside Quayles, motionless on the rug. Schultzy turned him over, examined the cut on Quayles’s forehead, ran his hand alongside Quayles’s jaw. “I think you broke his jaw. Idiots. He won’t be able to fight this Friday or a month of Fridays. The boys’re going to like that. They’re going to like it a lot. They’ve got a big investment tied up in this horse’s ass—” He prodded the inert Quayles fiercely. “They’re going to be just overjoyed you took him apart. If I was you I’d start going right now, before I get this—this husband out of the room and into a hospital. And I’d keep on going until I got to an ocean and then I’d cross the ocean and if I wanted to stay alive I wouldn’t come back for ten years. And don’t go by plane. By the time the plane comes down anywhere, they’ll be waiting for you and they won’t be waiting for you with roses in their hands.”

“What do you want me to do,” Thomas asked, “walk? I got ten bucks to my name.”

Schultzy looked worriedly down at Quayles, who was beginning to stir. He stood up. “Come on out into the hall.” He took the key out of the lock and when they were both outside, he locked the door.

“It would serve you right if they filled you full of holes,” Schultzy said. “But you’ve been with me a long time …” He looked nervously up and down the hallway. “Here,” he said, taking some bills out of his wallet. “All I got. A hundred and fifty. And take my car. It’s downstairs, with the key in the ignition. Leave it in Reno in the airport parking lot and bus East from there. I’ll tell ’em you stole the car. Don’t get in touch with your wife, whatever you do. They’ll be after her. I’ll get in touch with her and tell her you’re running and not to expect to hear from you. Don’t go in a straight line anywhere. And I’m not kidding when I tell you to get out of this country. Your life isn’t worth two cents anywhere in the United States.” He wrinkled his seamy brow, concentrating. “The safest thing is getting a job on a ship. When you get to New York go to a hotel called the Aegean. It’s on West Eighteenth Street. It’s full of Greek sailors. Ask for the manager. He’s got a long Greek name, but everybody calls him Pappy. He handles jobs for freighters that don’t fly the American flag. Tell him I sent you and I want you out of the country fast. He won’t ask questions. He owes me a favor from when I was in the Merchant Marine during the war. And don’t be a wise guy. Don’t think you can pick up a few bucks fighting anywhere, even in Europe or Japan, under another name. As of this minute you’re a sailor and nothing else. Do you hear that?”

“Yes, Schultzy,” Thomas said.

“And I never want to hear from you again. Got that?”

“Yes.” Thomas made a move toward the door of his room.

Schultzy stopped him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“My passport’s in there. I’ll be needing it.”

“Where is it?”

“In the top dresser drawer.”

“Wait here,” Schultzy said. “I’ll get it for you.” He turned the key in the lock and went into the room. A moment later he was back in the hall with the passport. “Here.” He slapped the booklet into Thomas’s hand. “And from now on try to think with your head instead of your cock. Now breeze. I got to start putting that bum together again.”

Thomas went down the steps, into the lobby, past the crap game. He didn’t say anything to the clerk, who looked at him curiously, because there was blood on his windjacket. He went out to the street. Schultzy’s car was parked right behind Quayles’s Cadillac. Thomas got in, started the motor and slowly drove toward the main highway. He didn’t want to be picked up this afternoon for a traffic violation in Las Vegas. He could wash the wind-jacket later.

Chapter 3

The date was for eleven o’clock, but Jean had phoned to say that she would be a few minutes late and Rudolph had said that was all right, he had a few calls to make, anyway. It was Saturday morning. He had been too busy to telephone his sister all week and he felt guilty about it. Since he had flown back from the funeral, he had usually managed at least two or three calls a week. He had suggested to Gretchen that she come East and stay with him in his apartment, which would mean that she would have the place to herself more often than not. Old man Calderwood refused to move the central office down to the city, so Rudolph couldn’t count on more than ten days a month in New York. But Gretchen had decided she wanted to stay in California, at least for awhile. Burke had neglected to leave a will, or at least one that anyone could find, and the lawyers were squabbling and Burke’s ex-wife was suing for the best part of the estate and trying to evict Gretchen from the house, among other unpleasant legal maneuvers.

It was eight o’clock in the morning in California, but Rudolph knew that Gretchen was an early riser and that the ringing of the phone wouldn’t awaken her. He placed the call with the operator and sat down at the desk in the small living room and tried to finish a corner of the Times crossword puzzle that had stumped him when he had tried it at breakfast.

The apartment had come furnished. It was decorated with garish solid colors and spiky metal chairs, but Rudolph had only taken it as a temporary measure and it did have a good small kitchen with a refrigerator that produced a lot of ice. He often liked to cook and eat by himself, reading at the table. That morning he had made the toast, orange juice, and coffee for himself early. Sometimes Jean would come in and fix breakfast for both of them, but she had been busy this morning. She refused to stay overnight, although she had never explained why.

The phone rang and Rudolph picked it up, but it wasn’t Gretchen. It was Calderwood’s voice, flat and twangy and old. Saturdays and Sundays didn’t mean much to Calderwood, except for the two hours on Sunday morning he spent in church. “Rudy,” Calderwood said, as usual without any polite preliminaries, “you going to be up here this evening?”

“I hadn’t planned to, Mr. Calderwood, I have some things to do here over the weekend and there’s a meeting scheduled downtown for Monday and …”

“I’d like to see you as soon as can be, Rudy.” Calderwood sounded testy. As he had grown older he had become impatient and bad tempered. He seemed to resent his increasing wealth and the men who had made it possible, as he resented the necessity of depending more and more upon dealing with financial and legal people in New York for important decisions.

“I’ll be in the office on Tuesday morning, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said. “Can’t it wait until then?”

“No, it can’t wait until then. And I don’t want to see you in the office. I want you to come to the house.” The voice on the telephone was grating and tense. “I’ll wait until tomorrow night after supper, Rudy.”

“Of course, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudy said.

The phone clicked, as Calderwood hung up, without saying good-bye.

Rudolph frowned at the phone as he put it down. He had tickets for the Giant game at the Stadium for himself and Jean Sunday afternoon and Calderwood’s summons meant he’d have to miss it. Jean had had a boy friend on the team when she went to Michigan and she knew a surprising amount about football so it was always fun to go to a game with her. Why didn’t the old man just lie down and die?

The phone rang again and this time it was Gretchen. Ever since Burke’s death, something had gone out of her voice, a sharpness, an eagerness, a quick music that had been special to her ever since she was a young girl. She sounded pleased to hear Rudolph, but dully pleased, like an invalid responding to a visit in her hospital bed. She said she was all right, that she was being kept busy going through Colin’s papers and sorting them and answering letters of condolence that still came drifting in and conferring with lawyers about the estate. She thanked him for the check he had mailed her the week before, saying that when the estate was finally settled she would pay back all the money he had sent her.

“Don’t worry about that,” Rudolph said. “Please. You don’t have to pay back anything.”

She ignored that. “I’m glad you called,” she said. “I was going to call you myself and ask for another favor.”

“What is it?” he asked, then said, “Hold on a second,” because the bell was ringing on the intercom from downstairs. He hurried over to the box and pushed the button.

“There’s a Miss Prescott in the lobby, Mr. Jordache.” It was the doorman, protecting him.

“Send her up, please,” Rudolph said, and went back to the phone. “I’m sorry, Gretchen,” he said, “what were you saying?”

“I got a letter from Billy from school yesterday,” she said, “and I don’t like the way it sounds. There’s nothing that you can grasp in it, but that’s the way he is, he never really tells you what’s bothering him, but somehow I have the feeling he’s in despair. Do you think you could find the time to go and visit him and see what’s wrong?”

Rudolph hesitated. He doubted that the boy liked him enough to confide in him and he was afraid he might do more harm than good by going to the school. “Of course I’ll go,” he said, “if you want. But don’t you think it might be better if his father went?”

“No,” Gretchen said. “He’s a bungler. If there’s a wrong word to be said, he’ll say it.”

The front door was ringing now. “Hold on again, Gretchen,” Rudolph said. “There’s somebody at the door.” He hurried over to the door and threw it open. “I’m on the phone,” he said to Jean and trotted back into the room. “Back again, Gretchen,” he said, using his sister’s name to show Jean he wasn’t talking to another lady. “I tell you what I’ll do—I’ll drive up to the school tomorrow morning and take him to lunch and see what’s up.”

“I hate to bother you,” Gretchen said. “But the letter was so—so dark.”

“It’s probably nothing. He came in second in a race or he flunked an algebra exam or something like that. You know how kids are.”

“Not Billy. I tell you, he’s in despair.” She sounded unlike herself, near tears.

“I’ll call you tomorrow night, after I see him,” Rudolph said. “Will you be home?”

“I’ll be home,” she said.

He put down the phone slowly, thinking of his sister alone, waiting for a telephone call, in the isolated house on the mountain crest, overlooking the city and the sea, going over her dead husband’s papers. He shook his head. He would worry about her tomorrow. He smiled across the room at Jean, sitting neatly on a straight-backed wooden chair, wearing red-woolen stockings and moccasins, her hair brushed and bright and pulled together low on the nape of her neck in a black-velvet bow, and falling down her back freely below the bow. Her face, as always, looked scrubbed and schoolgirlish. The slender, beloved body was lost in a floppy camel’s-hair polo coat. She was twenty-four years old, but at moments like this she seemed no more than sixteen. She had been out on a job and she had her camera equipment with her, which she had dumped carelessly on the floor next to the front door.

“You look as though I ought to offer you a glass of milk and a cookie,” he said.

“You can offer me a drink,” she said. “I’ve been on the streets since seven this morning. Not too much water.”

He went over to her and kissed her forehead. She smiled, rewarding him. Young girls, he thought, as he went into the kitchen and got a pitcher of water.

While she drank the bourbon, she checked the list of art galleries in last Sunday’s Times. When he was free on Saturdays they usually made the rounds of galleries. She worked as a free-lance photographer and many of her assignments were for art magazines and catalogue publishers.

“Put on comfortable shoes,” she said. “We’re in for a long afternoon.” She had a surprisingly low voice, with husky overtones, for such a small girl.

“Where you walk,” he said, “I shall follow.”

They were just going out the door when the phone rang again. “Let it ring,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

She stopped in the doorway. “Do you mean to say you can hear a telephone ring and not answer it?”

“I certainly can.”

“I never could. It might be something absolutely wonderful.”

“Nothing wonderful has ever happened to me over the phone. Let’s get out of here.”

“Answer it. It’ll bother you all day if you don’t.”

“No, it won’t.”

“It’ll bother me. I’ll answer it.” She started back into the room.

“All right, all right.” He pushed past her and picked up the phone.

It was his mother, calling from Whitby. From the tone in which she said, “Rudolph,” he knew the conversation was not going to be wonderful.

“Rudolph,” she said, “I don’t want to interfere with your holiday—” It was his mother’s fixed conviction that he left Whitby for New York only for unseemly, secret pleasures. “But the heating’s gone off and I’m freezing in this drafty old place—” Rudolph had bought a fine old low-ceilinged eighteenth-century farmhouse on the outskirts of town three years before, but his mother referred to it at all times as this crumbling dark hole or this drafty old place.

“Can’t Martha do anything about it?” Rudolph asked. Martha was the live-in maid who kept the house, cooked, and took care of his mother, a job for which Rudolph felt she was grossly underpaid.

“Martha!” his mother snorted. “I’m tempted to fire her on the spot.”

“Mom …”

“When I told her to go down to look at the furnace, she flatly refused.” His mother’s voice rose a half octave. “She’s afraid of cellars. She said for me to put on a sweater. If you weren’t so lenient with her, she wouldn’t be so free with her advice about putting on sweaters, I guarantee. She’s so fat, swilling down our food, she wouldn’t feel cold at the North Pole. When you get back home, if you ever do deign to come back home, I implore you to have a word with that woman.”

“I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon and I’ll talk to her,” Rudolph said. He was aware of Jean smiling maliciously at him. Her parents lived somewhere in the Midwest and she hadn’t seen them for two years. “In the meanwhile, Mom, call the office. Get Brad Knight. He’s on today. Tell him I told you to ask him to send one of our engineers.”

“He’ll think I’m an old crank.”

“He won’t think anything. Do as I say, please.”

“You have no idea how cold it is up here. The wind just howls under the windows. I don’t know why we can’t live in a decent new house like everybody else.”

This was an old song and Rudolph ignored it. When his mother had finally realized that Rudolph was making a good deal of money she had suddenly developed a gluttonous taste for luxury. Her charge account at the store made Rudolph wince every month when the bills came in.

“Tell Martha to build a fire in the living room,” Rudolph said, “and close the door and you’ll be warm in no time.”

“Tell Martha to build a fire,” his mother said. “If she’ll condescend. Will you be home in time for dinner tomorrow night?”

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “I have to see Mr. Calderwood.” It wasn’t quite a lie. He wasn’t going to dine with Calderwood, but he was going to see him. In any case, he didn’t want to have dinner with his mother.

“Calderwood, Calderwood,” his mother said. “Sometimes I think I’ll scream if I ever hear that name again.”

“I have to go now, Mom. Somebody’s waiting for me.”

He heard his mother begin to cry as he hung up. “Why can’t old ladies just lie down and die?” he said to Jean. “The Eskimos do it better. They expose them. Come on, let’s get out of here before anybody else calls.”

As they went out the door he was glad to see that Jean was leaving her camera equipment in the flat. That meant she’d have to come back with him that afternoon to pick it up. She was unpredictable in that department. Sometimes she’d come in with him when they’d been out together as though it were inconceivable that she could do anything else. Other times, without any explanation, she’d insist on getting into a taxi and going downtown alone to the apartment she shared with another girl. Then, on several occasions, she had merely appeared at his door, on the off chance that he’d be home.